Volume 22, Issue 2

Complex-transitive argument structures have received a large amount of attention from syntacticians of both formalist and cognitive-functional orientations. To account for expressions with causative resultative meanings, construction grammar has postulated a family of argument-structure constructions whose core is constituted by the Caused-Motion Construction and the Resultative Construction, exhibiting a locative complement and a predicative complement in the form of an AjP, respectively. Argument structures with NP complements, however, have been largely neglected. The present study investigates these patterns in the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) by means “collostruction analysis”. It shows that the formal distinction between AjP and NP complements corresponds to a constructional distinction hitherto unrevealed, viz. that between the Resultative Construction and another argument-structure construction, here called the “Denominative Construction”. Apart from improving existing descriptions of the network of complex-transitive argument-structure constructions, this study demonstrates that collostruction analysis can be employed in an exploratory way to discover constructions.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a protracted period of inconsistent use of tense/agreement morphemes. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether this inconsistent use could be attributed to the children's misinterpretations of particular syntactic structures in the input. In Study 1, preschool-aged children with SLI and typically developing peers heard sentences containing novel verbs preceded by auxiliary was or sentences in which the novel verb formed part of a nonfinite subject-verb sequence within a larger syntactic structure (e.g. We saw the dog relling ). The children were then tested on their use of the novel verbs in contexts that obligated use of auxiliary is . The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and more likely to produce the novel verb without is if the verb had been heard in a nonfinite subject-verb sequence. In Study 2, children with SLI and typically developing peers were tested on their comprehension of sentences such as The cow sees the horse eating . The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and were disproportionately influenced by the nonfinite subject-verb clause at the end of the sentence. We interpret these findings within the framework of construction learning.

This paper is a semantic analysis of ‘experienced action’ constructions in Umpithamu, a Paman language from Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The basic argument is that these constructions are related to the better-attested category of experiencer object constructions (e.g. Evans, Non-nominative subjects 1: 69–192, 2004), which in Umpithamu describe involuntary experience of bodily processes. Experienced action constructions extend the feature of ‘involuntary experience’ from processes within the body to actions originating outside the body, and thus provide a semantically marked alternative for standard transitive clauses. The constructions are typologically interesting because they show the need to identify different loci of experiential semantics in a construction, and they help to clarify the status of control for human Undergoers within semantic typologies of reduced transitivity.

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions ( The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball ), others may appear in only the former ( The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man ). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also important. To test these competing accounts, adults (Experiment 1) and children aged 5–6 and 9–10 (Experiment 2) were taught novel verbs designed to be construed — on the basis of their semantics — as either intransitive-only or alternating. In support of the latter claim, participants' grammaticality judgments revealed that even the youngest group respected these semantic constraints. Frequency (entrenchment) effects were observed for familiar, but not novel, verbs (Experiment 1). We interpret these findings in the light of a new theoretical account designed to yield effects of both verb semantics and entrenchment/pre-emption.

The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them as instances of the same schema. High type frequencies and diversity help to develop slots in these schemas, which allow the production and comprehension of novel utterances. In the current study we looked at both token and type frequencies in two related constructions in German child-directed speech: simple transitive and complement-clause constructions. Both constructions contain high frequency verbs, which potentially support the development of verb-specific schemas. However, only the frequent verbs in the transitive constructions occur with a variety of subject types, which also supports the development of a slot in the subject position. We then used an elicited production task to compare 4- and 5-year-old German-speaking children's productivity with simple transitive constructions and complement-clause constructions. The children were prompted to change the subjects of high and low frequency simple transitive verbs, such as essen ‘eat’ and naschen ‘nibble’, mental-state complement-taking verbs, such as denken ‘think’ and vermuten ‘presume’, and communication complement-taking verbs, such as sagen ‘say’ and berichten ‘report’. In accordance with earlier findings, children had less difficulty producing new utterances with high frequency transitive verbs than with low frequency transitive verbs. For the other verb classes, however, we found either reverse frequency effects or no frequency effects. For these verb classes, children's productivity can be determined by diversity rather than simple token frequency. We discuss how token frequency interacts with diversity, discourse function, semantic complexity, and syntactic complexity.

A foundational goal of cognitive linguistics is to explain linguistic phenomena in terms of general cognitive strategies rather than postulating an autonomous language module (Langacker 1987: 12–13). Metonymy is identified among the imaginative capacities of cognition (Langacker 1993: 30, 2009: 46–47). Whereas the majority of scholarship on metonymy has focused on lexical metonymy, this study explores the systematic presence of metonymy in word-formation. I argue that in many cases, the semantic relationships between stems, affixes, and the words they form can be analyzed in terms of metonymy, and that this analysis yields a better, more insightful classification than traditional descriptions of word-formation. I present a metonymic classification of suffixal word-formation in three languages: Russian, Czech, and Norwegian. The system of classification is designed to maximize comparison between lexical and word-formational metonymy. This comparison supports another central claim of cognitive linguistics, namely that grammar (in this case word-formation) and lexicon form a continuum (Langacker 1987: 18–19), since I show that metonymic relationships in the two domains can be described in nearly identical terms. While many metonymic relationships are shared across the lexical and grammatical domains, some are specific to only one domain, and the two domains show different preferences for source and target concepts. Furthermore, I find that the range of metonymic relationships expressed in word-formation is more diverse than what has been found in lexical metonymy. There is remarkable similarity in word-formational metonymy across the three languages, despite their typological differences, though they all show some degree of language-specific behavior as well. Although this study is limited to three Indo-European languages, the goal is to create a classification system that could be implemented (perhaps with modifications) across a wider spectrum of languages.

Most studies examining children's understanding of transitive sentences focus on the morphosyntactic properties of the construction and ignore prosody. But adults use prosody in many different ways to interpret ambiguous sentences. In two studies we investigated whether 5-year-old German children use prosody to determine participant roles in object-first (OVS) sentences with novel verbs (i.e., whether they use prosodic marking to overrule word order as a cue). Results showed that children identify participant roles better in this atypically ordered construction when sentences are realized with the marked, OVS-typical intonational pattern, especially in combination with case marking (Study 1). In a second study, we embedded these sentences into an appropriate discourse context. The results show that, even in the absence of any case marking, children understand participant roles when they are realized with the appropriate intonational pattern. These findings demonstrate that young children can use intonation to help identify participant roles in transitive sentences, at least in marked constructions such as the German object-first (OVS) construction.