Volume 26, Issue 3 -

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir , the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e., which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses ( sentirse ) and the other uses ( sentir ). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception.

The present paper reports on an investigation into an English un -participle pattern that is called unpassive, or is described as an adjectival passive. The main characteristic of the pattern is an (adjectival) past participle prefixed by un -, which is used as a predicative complement to a verb. Besides the different terms used for the pattern, there is also some indeterminacy with respect to its particular form. All of the descriptions focus on the verb be , but mention is also made of go and remain . That is, the specifications of the pattern’s formal side differ to some extent. To provide information on this issue and to get hold of potential (verb-related) differences in the pattern’s function, we conducted an empirical analysis from a usage-based construction grammar perspective. Our focus is on the form-function interplay of the pattern in order to gain information about its constructional status and its exact formal and semantic make-up. The database selected for this study is the BNC, from which all occurrences of ‘verb plus un -participle’ were extracted. The data were submitted to collexeme and covarying collexeme analyses to identify the spectrum of meanings/functions associated with these forms, and distinctive collexeme analyses were carried out to see whether the un -participles found pattern differently with the individual verbs. The results indicate that, on closer examination, the un -participle construction does not represent a homogeneous category, but must be seen as a schematic template of related, though different, usage events that may have expanded analogously from a prototype construction. On the basis of our analyses and informed by findings from developmental studies, we suggest that the related constructions form a network.

How do speakers know when they can use language creatively and when they cannot? Prior research indicates that higher frequency verbs are more resistant to overgeneralization than lower frequency verbs with similar meaning and argument structure constraints. This result has been interpreted as evidence for conservatism via entrenchment , which proposes that people prefer to use verbs in ways they have heard before, with the strength of dispreference for novel uses increasing with overall verb frequency. This paper investigates whether verb frequency is actually always relevant in judging the acceptability of novel sentences or whether it only matters when there is a readily available alternative way to express the intended message with the chosen verb, as is predicted by statistical preemption . Two experiments are reported in which participants rated novel uses of high and low frequency verbs in argument structure constructions in which those verbs do not normally appear. Separate norming studies were used to divide the sentences into those with and without an agreed-upon preferred alternative phrasing which would compete with the novel use for acceptability. Experiment 2 controls for construction type: all target stimuli are instances of the caused-motion construction. In both experiments, we replicate the stronger dispreference for a novel use with a high frequency verb relative to its lower frequency counterpart, but only for those sentences for which there exists a competing alternative phrasing. When there is no consensus about a preferred way to phrase a sentence, verb frequency is not a predictive factor in sentences’ ratings. We interpret this to mean that while speakers prefer familiar formulations to novel ones, they are willing to extend verbs creatively if there is no readily available alternative way to express the intended meaning.

Ever since the first studies introducing collostructional analysis in general and collexeme analysis in particular, these methods have been widely used for the analysis of constructions’ semantic and functional characteristics. However, the more recent past has seen two publications, Bybee (2010) and Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013), which criticized several aspects of these methods. This paper briefly recaps my response to Bybee (2010) (published as Gries 2012) as a prelude to its main contribution, viz a rebuttal of various claims and problems of Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013).

This is a reply to a commentary by Stefan Gries on a paper published by us in this journal in 2013. We focus on explaining the inadequacy of p-values of the Fisher Exact test as a measure of lexicogrammatical attraction and on the cognitive underpinnings of collostructional analysis. In addition, we touch more briefly on further issues, including the marginal conditioning of the Fisher Exact test and the idea of infinite strength of attraction between constructions and lexemes. We conclude with recommendations for a gold standard for applications of collostructional analysis using odds ratio, reliance and attraction scores.