Constructional contamination: How does it work and how do we measure it?
-
Dirk Pijpops
und
Freek Van de Velde
Abstract
In this article, we introduce the effect of “constructional contamination”. In constructional contamination, a subset of the instances of a target construction deviate in their realization, due to a superficial resemblance they share with instances of a contaminating construction. We claim that this contaminating effect bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse while interpreting and producing sentences. Instead, they may rely on what has been called “shallow parsing”, i. e., chunking the utterances into large, unanalyzed exemplars that may extend across constituent borders. We propose several measures to quantify constructional contamination in corpus data. To evaluate these measures, the Dutch partitive genitive is taken under scrutiny as a target construction of constructional contamination. In this case study, it is shown that neighboring constructions play a crucial role in determining the presence or absence of the -s suffix among instances of the partitive genitive. The different measures themselves, however, are not construction-specific, and can readily be used to track constructional contamination in other case studies as well.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Hendrik De Smet and Lauren Fonteyn for insightful discussions about the nature of constructional contamination, Kris Heylen, Dirk Speelman and Eline Zenner for methodological assistance, and Judith Cappaert for participating in data coding. Additionally, we owe thanks to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions, and to the editor-in-chief, Hubert Cuyckens, as well as to the guest editors of this issue, Karolina Krawczak, Martin Hilpert and Malgorzata Fabiszak, for editorial assistance and useful advice.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Usage-based cognitive-functional linguistics: From theory to method and back again
- The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence
- The usage and spread of sentence-internal capitalization in Early New High German: A multifactorial approach
- Quantifying polysemy: Corpus methodology for prototype theory
- A cognitive-constructionist approach to Spanish creo Ø and creo yo ‘[I] think’
- A corpus-based, cross-linguistic approach to mental predicates and their complementation: Performativity and descriptivity vis-à-vis boundedness and picturability
- Why we need a token-based typology: A case study of analytic and lexical causatives in fifteen European languages
- Constructional contamination: How does it work and how do we measure it?
- Regular FoL papers
- Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study
- Intermediate information status for non-nominal constituents: Evidence from Spanish secondary predicates in adversatives
- Lower domain language shift in Taiwan: The case of Southern Min
- Book Reviews
- Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer: Sex in language: Euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors in internet forums
- Sonnenhauser, Barbara and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna: Vocative! Addressing between system and performance
- Erratum
- Erratum
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Usage-based cognitive-functional linguistics: From theory to method and back again
- The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence
- The usage and spread of sentence-internal capitalization in Early New High German: A multifactorial approach
- Quantifying polysemy: Corpus methodology for prototype theory
- A cognitive-constructionist approach to Spanish creo Ø and creo yo ‘[I] think’
- A corpus-based, cross-linguistic approach to mental predicates and their complementation: Performativity and descriptivity vis-à-vis boundedness and picturability
- Why we need a token-based typology: A case study of analytic and lexical causatives in fifteen European languages
- Constructional contamination: How does it work and how do we measure it?
- Regular FoL papers
- Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study
- Intermediate information status for non-nominal constituents: Evidence from Spanish secondary predicates in adversatives
- Lower domain language shift in Taiwan: The case of Southern Min
- Book Reviews
- Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer: Sex in language: Euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors in internet forums
- Sonnenhauser, Barbara and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna: Vocative! Addressing between system and performance
- Erratum
- Erratum
