Abstract
The formulation of Goldberg’s oft-quoted Principle of No Synonymy is one of the factors responsible for a shift away in attention from alternations as postulated in the generative transformational tradition towards a view that regards the so-called alternatives as conveying different meanings and thus not being real alternatives. The rejection of the generativist position, in which one variant was regarded as primary and the other as derived from the primary variant, is of course justified and necessary in a cognitive linguistic approach, but it will be argued in this paper that the Principle of No Synonymy – if regarded as a dogma – is misleading in that it bears the risk of missing important generalisations across different patterns of the same verb. Furthermore, it will be argued that both linguistic variation and pre-emption are not perfectly compatible with the Principle of No Synonymy.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Do Constructions make a Difference? Introduction to a Special Issue of ZAA on Aspects of Construction Grammar
- Contrastive Collostructional Analysis: Causative Constructions in English and French
- Cognitive Sociolinguistic Aspects of Football Chants: The Role of Social and Physical Context in Usage-based Construction Grammar
- Syntax from and for Discourse: Adverbial Clauses as Item-Specific Constructions in Spontaneous Spoken English
- Why the Principle of No Synonymy is Overrated
- Book Reviews
- Sprachwissenschaft – Fremdsprachendidaktik: Neue Impulse
- English in Post-Revolutionary Iran: From Indigenization to Internationalization
- A Middle English Medical Remedy Book. Edited from Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 185
- English Historical Linguistics 2010
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Do Constructions make a Difference? Introduction to a Special Issue of ZAA on Aspects of Construction Grammar
- Contrastive Collostructional Analysis: Causative Constructions in English and French
- Cognitive Sociolinguistic Aspects of Football Chants: The Role of Social and Physical Context in Usage-based Construction Grammar
- Syntax from and for Discourse: Adverbial Clauses as Item-Specific Constructions in Spontaneous Spoken English
- Why the Principle of No Synonymy is Overrated
- Book Reviews
- Sprachwissenschaft – Fremdsprachendidaktik: Neue Impulse
- English in Post-Revolutionary Iran: From Indigenization to Internationalization
- A Middle English Medical Remedy Book. Edited from Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 185
- English Historical Linguistics 2010