Volume 24, Issue 1

This paper provides a unified account of English subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). It argues that SAIs, as have been called in the literature, belong to two semantically distinctive constructions. The first is the Auxiliary Subject Construction (ASC), one that merely reverses the subject and auxiliary order, without the fronting of another unit. It functions to mark non-indicative moods. The second SAI construction is the X Auxiliary Subject Construction (XASC), in which the auxiliary-subject (AS) order is accompanied by the fronting of a unit from its original, post-subject position in the canonical, SV order sentence. The XASC serves a different purpose from the ASC, i.e., to focus the fronted unit. As such, it shares both structural and functional affinity with full-verb inversion (Chen 2003), which is referred to hereafter as the X Verb Subject Construction (XVSC) for sake of consistency. The second purpose of this study is to address the issue of invertability of the subject auxiliary/verb order. Drawing on Deane (1992), I propose an Invertability Hypothesis , which applies to both the XASC and the XVSC. On this hypothesis, invertability depends on the strength of the linkage between the fronted unit and the auxiliary/verb that exists in the canonical sentence. The stronger the link, the more likely the order of the subject and the auxiliary/verb will be inversed once the unit is fronted. With this analysis – one that is decidedly different from previous accounts (e.g. Goldberg 2006) – I intend to demonstrate that the functional/cognitive approach to language is indeed capable of handling a complex construction such as inversion, the generalization of which generative linguists believe can only be stated formally (Newmeyer 1998; Borsley and Newmeyer 2009; Lidz and Williams 2009).

This paper argues that two properties of the linguistic structure of an utterance influence and partially determine whether the utterance has a metaphoric meaning that results in a stable interpretation: (i) degree of metaphoricity and (ii) degree of metaphoric saturation. A majority of metaphoric utterances in a corpus study (66%) were unsaturated, low metaphoricity utterances that behave as expected by Max Black and the cognitive linguistics paradigm. However, a significant minority (34%) of the metaphoric utterances were saturated or high metaphoricity utterances that behave partially as expected by Donald Davidson and others working in his tradition. This suggests that the direct and indirect interpretation views of metaphor are not incompatible but apply to different sub-groups of metaphoric utterances. The paper then constructs a model of metaphoric meaning that makes falsifiable predictions about the interpretations of metaphoric utterances in order to provide further evidence that unsaturated, low metaphoricity utterances have stable interpretations. This research provides both converging evidence for the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor and also a framework for limiting its scope to most, but not all, metaphoric utterances.

Via a corpus-based collocation analysis and a forced-choice questionnaire examination, this study investigates the use of two sets of near-synonymous nouns: authority/power/right and duty/obligation/responsibility . The corpus analysis reveals the prototypical meanings of the nouns in each set and the semantic and usage pattern differences among the synonymous nouns. Also, the corpus analysis and the results of the forced-choice study jointly show that the level of lexical salience and the language users' construal are two key factors in the use of synonymous nouns. Due to entrenchment effects, speakers/writers typically use a synonymous noun with the highest salience in a given semantic context unless the speaker/writer's construal operations result in a decision to use a different noun whose prototypical meaning fits the context better. It is also found that the selection of a non-salient noun in a given context typically signifies a difference in meaning. Furthermore, the meanings of synonymous nouns and the internal semantic structure of a synonymous-noun set seem to show a certain degree of fluidity, influenced by the competition of lexical salience and language users' construal. The study has also demonstrated the effectiveness of combining corpus-based analysis and elicited data examination in the study of synonyms.

Rhythmic stress is assigned automatically in everyday speech. Usually, it is produced without conscious planning of which syllables have to be stressed. However, the ‘grammaticalisation’ of rhythmic patterns is the result of language processing. It is the outcome of a selective process which is proposed to lead to a preference or dispreference for specific rhythmic structures. In the languages of the world, judging by the typological data available, some rhythmic patterns seem to be completely avoided – even if this means an increase of complexity within a stress system. Focussing on asymmetries in binary stress systems, it is suggested in this paper that processing limitations in speech production motivate stress patterns. It is also demonstrated that the domain of the prosodic word is insufficient for a motivation of these asymmetries. Since one-word sentences are not the rule, but the exception, asymmetries find their motivation on the level of the sentence.

Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive ( I was writing a book ) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect ( I had written a book ). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspect are in fact thinking about the same events differently is lacking. We used co-speech gesture as a means to investigate what speakers' event representations are like when they produce progressive versus non-progressive utterances. We found that progressive event descriptions were accompanied by longer-lasting and more complex gestures, but only when participants described events originally presented to them in the progressive. This evidence suggests that people are actually construing events differently when they use different grammatical aspects, but that the aspect originally used to encode the events plays a role as well.

This paper examines previous analyses of the x's way construction, focusing on the readings attributed to it within the Construction Grammar framework and constraints on the types of verbs allowed in the construction. It questions some of the characterizations of the construction and offers an alternative view that accounts for uses of the construction that have not been considered before. Specifically, it will demonstrate that metaphoric uses, particularly those with obtainment readings, reveal interesting properties of the construction that define how it assembles motion events and paths in these events. These will be shown to follow constraints of differing rigidity. While motion events can involve disparate subevents blended together, paths do not allow any integration of incongruous elements. The construction follows universal principles which govern how complex event schemas can be blended out of simpler schemas in linguistic constructions. More generally, as a closed-class form, not only does the construction conform to event-schema protocol, but its meaning associated with a motion event is a spare reading typical of a closed-class form. Thus the present analysis attempts to reconcile its constructionist approach to the way construction with the traditional division into closed- and open-class forms.