Volume 19, Issue 3

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determine which constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the compatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions involved. The relative “island” status of the following sentence complement constructions are investigated: “bridge” verb complements, manner-of-speaking verb complements and factive verb complements. Questionnaire data is reported that demonstrates a strong correlation between acceptability judgments and a negation test used to operationalize the notion of “backgroundedness”. Semantic similarity of the main verbs involved to think or say (the two verbs that are found most frequently in long-distance extraction from complement clauses) did not account for any variance; this finding undermines an account which might predict acceptability by analogy to a fixed formula involving think or say . While the standard subjacency account also does not predict the results, the findings strongly support the idea that constructions act as islands to wh-extraction to the degree that they are backgrounded in discourse.

Attested questions with long-distance dependencies (e.g., What do you think you're doing?) tend to be quite stereotypical: the matrix clause usually consists of a WH word, the auxiliary do or did , the pronoun you , and the verb think or say , with no other elements; and they virtually never contain more than one subordinate clause. This has lead some researchers in the usage-based framework (Dąbrowska 2004; Verhagen 2005) to hypothesise that speakers' knowledge about such constructions is best explained in terms of relatively specific, low level templates rather than general rules that apply “across the board”. The research reported here was designed to test this hypothesis and alternative hypotheses derived from rule-based theories.

Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.

Recent research in sentence comprehension suggests that lexically specific information plays a key role in on-line syntactic ambiguity resolution. On the basis of an analysis of the local NP/S-ambiguity, the present study offers a corpus-based approach to sentence processing that supports this view. However, it is proposed that the relevant information used to recover the syntactic structure of an incoming string of words is not retrieved from individual verbs but from a more fine-grained level of form-meaning pairings that distinguishes different verb senses. The investigation proceeds in two steps: First, verb-general and sense-specific preferences for nominal and sentential complementation are induced from corpus data and compared using odds ratios as a measure of association. Second, correlation analyses are performed that relate the computed coeffcients of association to reading time latencies from a recent self-paced moving window experiment (Hare et al. 2003). The results corroborate the view that individual verb senses, rather than individual verbs, guide initial parsing decisions.

Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the effect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. The iconicity principle predicts that the linear ordering of main and subordinate clauses mirrors the sequential ordering of the events they describe. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written English, the paper shows that, although temporal clauses exhibit a general tendency to follow the main clause, there is a clear correlation between clause order and iconicity: temporal clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses of posteriority. In addition to the iconicity principle, there are other factors such as length, complexity, and pragmatic import that may affect the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. Using logistic regression analysis, the paper investigates the effects of the various factors on the linear structuring of complex sentences.

This paper combines quantitative corpus data and experimental evidence to address the question whether speech perception is influenced by knowledge of grammatical constructions and, more specifically, knowledge of preferred collocation patterns of these constructions. Lexical identification tasks are devised in which subjects are presented with synthesized, phonetically ambiguous stimuli. The results suggest that knowledge of constructions and collocations influences speech perception, thus providing evidence for a usage-based, non-modular view of grammar.

The alleged absence of negative evidence in the linguistic input has played a major role both in linguistic theorizing and in discussions about linguistic methodology. I argue that, given a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of frequency, negative evidence can be inferred from the positive evidence in the linguistic input. Using an extension of collostructional analysis, I show how the corpus linguist, and, by analogy, the language learner, can discriminate between combinations of linguistic items that are accidentally absent from a given corpus and combinations whose absence is statistically significant. I also show that this kind of negative corpus evidence correlates with degrees of acceptability in judgment tasks. I propose a conceptualization of such negative evidence as negative entrenchment in a usage-based model.