Volume 20, Issue 1

Both English and Dutch feature a variety of verbs of possessional transfer which display the phenomenon of dative alternation. They can either be used in a double object construction with unmarked NP theme and recipient objects or in a so-called “prepositional dative” construction in which only the theme is encoded as a bare NP object and the recipient is marked by a preposition. Within this context of dative alternation, this study zooms in on the English prepositional dative construction with to and the Dutch prepositional dative construction with aan (cognate with English on , German an ). Existing analyses of these constructions hold widely different views on the semantic import of the prepositions used: some authors take the preposition to bring an element of ‘caused motion’ to the semantics of the construction, while others treat it as a grammaticalized marker of recipient function. We shall argue for an intermediate position: while the constructions with to and aan are not limited to events which involve an actual spatial transfer but cover a wide variety of ‘caused possession’ events, they are nevertheless subject to a number of constraints which can be traced back to the spatial semantics of English to and Dutch aan . These semantic constraints will be illustrated by means of corpus-based observations on the behaviour of a number of English and Dutch verbs in the respective dative alternations.

The article presents a cognitive linguistic study of fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect and the case marking of the predicate adjective (PA) in Finnish copulative clauses. The term fictive dynamicity refers to the dynamic construal of a static situation, a classic example being fictive motion as illustrated by The highway goes from Tartu to Tallinn , where a static situation is referred to by a motion verb and directional locative adpositions. The term nominal aspect refers to the aspectual meaning of the sentence that is based on an incremental participation of a nominal referent. For instance in She was mowing the lawn the activity proceeds gradually along the referent of the object and reaches its endpoint when the whole referent has been affected. In the Finnish copulative construction, fictive dynamicity manifests itself as incremental scanning of the subject referent and as distributive attribution of a quality (indicated by the PA) to its components. The received view in Finnish linguistics assumes that the PA is in the nominative if the subject is a singular count noun, and in the partitive if the subject is a mass noun or a plural. Semantically, the nominative PA attributes a quality to the referent of the subject holistically, whereas the partitive attributes it in a distributive way to the (conceived) components of the referent. I show that this distributive meaning often gives rise to the incremental conceptualization of the subject and results in dynamic nominal aspect. The data discussed consist of copulative clauses with different kinds of subjects (mass, count, plural). The article also includes a comparison between the PA and other relevant uses of the partitive case, including objects and existential subjects. Special attention is paid to copulative clauses with an action noun subject and the complicated interaction of the verbal and nominal features of the action noun in the aspectual meaning of the sentence.

Comparisons between spoken and sign languages have always been difficult to make, given the linear nature of spoken language grammar versus the spatial, three-dimensional nature of sign language. A better understanding of the role that spatially expressed information plays in shaping the information structure of both spoken and sign languages holds the promise of providing an additional tool to better assess typological differences crosslinguistically and crossmodally. We analyze the use of spatial mapping in the expression of motion events in the narratives of English, Spanish, and ASL, which have been categorized as typologically different in how they express certain kinds of information lexically, syntactically, and in discourse structure. We examine whether the observed differences will remain constant or whether they will disappear once the contribution of spatial mapping to their information structure is considered.

This paper provides a concise overview of Constructions at Work (Goldberg 2006). The book aims to investigate the relevant levels of generalization in adult language, how and why generalizations are learned by children, and how to account for cross-linguistic generalizations.

We question whether Adele Goldberg fulfills her self-declared goal in “Constructions at Work”, i.e. to develop a usage-based theory that “can produce an open-ended number of novel utterances based on a finite amount of input”. We point out converging trends in computational linguistics that suggest formalizations of Construction Grammar. In particular, we go into recent developments in Data-Oriented Parsing, such as U-DOP and LFG-DOP, that produce an unlimited number of new utterances based on a finite number of stored form-meaning pairs.

English Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI, hereafter) has been considered by many linguists to be a prime example of a formal generalization that does not allow a characterization in functional or semantic terms. However, Adele Goldberg's target article argues that the internal syntactic form of SAI can indeed by characterized in such terms. We provide a considerable amount of evidence that Goldberg is unsuccessful in her attempt to mount a counter-challenge to the idea that SAI represents a significant purely formal generalization in the grammar of English.

This review discusses several kinds of linguistic generalizations that pose a challenge for the constructionist approach to linguistic generalizations advocated by Adele Goldberg. It is difficult to see, for example, how such an account can explain the wide-ranging linguistic phenomena governed by structural properties, such as c-command, or semantic properties, such as downward entailment. We also argue against Goldberg's rejection of formal semantics in favour of an account of meaning based primarily on information structure and discourse function.

Goldberg's Constructions at work makes an important contribution to the understanding of syntax by developing analyses for specific grammatical constructions from a usage-based constructional perspective and critically comparing generative analyses to them. It is argued here that some of the analyses that Goldberg offers may still be problematic (although they are superior to the generative alternatives), and in other cases, Goldberg can strengthen her defense of constructional analyses by offering a sharper critique of the generative alternatives.

Goldberg overstates the differences between Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar. The former does not claim that a clause invariably inherits its profile from the verb; it has merely been suggested that the latter's preference for monosemy may have been pushed too far. The matter can only be addressed given a specific definition of what is meant in saying that a verb “has” a certain sense. Also, the schematic meanings proposed in Cognitive Grammar for basic grammatical notions do not imply a “reductionist” or “essentialist” view based on classical categorization. Instead they complement the characterization of these notions as “metageneralizations over construction-specific categories”, which otherwise begs the question of why the distributional patterns supporting such generalizations should be observed in the first place.

Constructions at Work provides many new empirical observations and sound criticisms of other work. These fail, however, to support Goldberg's two main arguments. They do not undermine the need for innate linguistic structure; nor do they decide for Construction Grammar in particular.

In commenting on Goldberg's article and book (Goldberg 2006), I concentrate on three points: (1) the importance of general learning mechanisms for language acquisition; (2) the relationship between form and function in learning and in the adult system; and (3) the combination of constructions.

This paper provides responses to the points raised in this volume in an effort to evaluate, clarify and extend some of the arguments in Constructions at Work .