Volume 12, Issue 2 -

Non-redundant taxonomic models of construction grammar posit that only fully productive patterns qualify as constructions because they license an infinity of expressions. Redundant models claim that, despite subregularities and exceptions, partially productive patterns also count as constructions, providing the overall meanings of such patterns are not the strict sums of their parts. Because productivity is a major bone of contention between redundant and non-redundant construction grammar taxonomies, I examine the productivity of A as NP which, according to Kay (2013), is not a “construction” but merely a “pattern of coining” due to its limited type productivity. Expanding on Gries (2013), this paper explores how a combination of symmetric and asymmetric association measures can contribute to the study of the “Productivity Complex” described in Zeldes (2012). Although the productivity of A as NP is admittedly limited at its most schematic level, some partially filled subschemas such as white/black as NP or A as hell/death are arguably productive.

Welsh grammatical gender exhibits several unusual properties. This paper argues that these properties are necessarily connected. The argument is based on a series of corpus investigations using techniques from statistical natural language processing, specifically distinguishing properties that exhibit significant statistical patterns from those which can be used to make useable predictions. Specifically, it’s shown that the grammatical properties of Welsh gender are such that its unusual statistical properties follow.

The variability of subject expression has been extensively investigated across languages. We present a large-scale multivariate statistical analysis of the choice of subject expression in the 1st person singular in spontaneous Finnish conversation, with a focus on the choice between pronominal and zero subject. Spoken Finnish represents an interesting case, as the dominant type of subject expression is double marking, i. e. the combination of a pronominal subject marker (subject pronoun) and a verbal subject marker (person marking). Siewierska (1999, From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: Why objects don’t make it. Folia Linguistica 33(2). 225–251) notes that this type of marking is typologically rare. Our findings indicate that the choice of subject expression is affected by both constructional and cognitive/discourse factors, and that an important role in the choice of subject expression is played by the sequential structure of the conversation.

While much attention has been paid to the complement coercion operation in English (e.g., began a book ), the same phenomenon in Chinese is still under-researched. Our study examines twenty coercing verbs in Chinese, creating a coercion profile for each verb and conducting a cluster analysis based on the coercion profiles. The results suggest that semantically related verbs in Chinese tend to have similar coercion profiles. We also identify a diverse range of nouns that can be coerced in Chinese. Finally, it is demonstrated that generative approaches to the complement coercion operation in Chinese can be complemented by cognitive-functional approaches.

Hebrew has two constructions that are used to convey possessive relations: ordinary possession (OP) and possessive dative (PD). PD is most often used when the possessor is perceived as affected by the action or state described in the sentence. This study investigates the possibility that this tendency is gradually diminishing – in other words, that unaffected possessors in PD are in the process of becoming more acceptable. This hypothesis was evaluated in a blog corpus study, which focused on a central correlate of possessor affectedness: whether or not the possessed object was a body part (inalienability). In line with the hypothesis, inalienability had a weaker effect on the choice of construction in younger than in older bloggers. The overall proportion of PD constructions was similar across age groups. This suggests that the change is best viewed as semantic bleaching of PD rather than as a process in which PD is gaining ground at the expense of OP.

Corpus-based research into pragmatics is suffering from a distinct lack of suitably annotated corpora. This dilemma has so far generally forced researchers in corpus-based pragmatics to focus on well-known fixed expressions (e. g. discourse markers, politeness formulae, etc.) in their research, rather than being able to investigate interaction on the level of speech acts and other pragmatics-relevant features on a larger scale. This article describes a research environment that aims at remedying this problem (currently for English only) by making large-scale annotation of, and research into, speech acts and other linguistic levels possible in an efficient manner, at the same time discussing the difficulties and complexities inherent in such an endeavour. It then goes on to illustrate the efficiency of the approach, and how the resulting annotations represent an improvement over existing models in the form of a brief case study. The latter includes an illustrative discussion of the performance of the tool in annotating a subset of 100 files from the Switchboard corpus, plus a more detailed comparison of the automatically annotated version of one of the files with its original, manually annotated, version.

Fratini et al. (Fratini et al. 2014, Frequency and morphological irregularity are independent variables. Evidence from a corpus study of Spanish verbs. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10[2]. 289–314) concluded that frequency and morphological irregularity are in Spanish, unlike in English, independent variables. In this paper, I take issue with that claim. On the one hand, it is argued that the borders between regularity and irregularity are diffuse, many of the verbs they classify as irregular might, therefore, not be so. In addition, the choice of lexemes they analyzed was far from adequate. Their set of irregular verbs contained many verbs formed by adding some prefix to a more frequent irregular verb (e. g. a-venir , a-tener , con-decir , con-mover , etc.) and many highly infrequent lexemes in general, barely in use in the speech community (e. g. abnegar , ablandecer , amoblar , amodorrecer , etc.). In an alternative corpus analysis, it has been found that, when these and other shortcomings in their research are dealt with, morphological irregularity and frequency are indeed strongly correlated variables also in Spanish.