Volume 57, Issue 1

The aim of the paper is to consider the pragmatic effects of the Polish ( Proszę ) ‘request 1 SG. NON-PAST. ’ + V INF construction in different contexts. The specific research problem is how these effects are related to the conceptual make-up of the construction. The framework for the analysis is the theory of cognitive grammar (cf. e. g. Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008, 2009). The analysis starts with an account of the conceptual make-up of the construction. Then, its selected uses are considered, with emphasis on the pragmatic effects in the relevant contexts. The study offers a qualitative analysis of two kinds of data: a sample of hand-picked utterances and a corpus of utterances extracted from the National Corpus of Polish (NCP). The claim made in the study is that the construction profiles a process figuring in a directive scenario in the role of the process the speaker wishes the hearer to engage in. At the same time, it involves defocusing of the trajector of the profiled process, identified with the hearer. The construction’s pragmatic effects in specific contexts are claimed to follow from how this trajector defocusing is put in correspondence with specific aspects of the actual ground.

The aim of this study is to examine the usage of adjunct-based prepositional passives of intransitive verbs. The occurrence of this highly atypical construction, referred to as the pseudo-passive, is motivated by a variety of factors related to its individual components as well as the discourse context. The pseudo-passive is first characterized in terms of its most characteristic verbs and prepositions. Then three main types of the construction are distinguished on the basis of their subject semantics and discourse function, which correlate with specific syntactic and semantic features observed in the data. The study relies on statistical tools for the analysis of the corpus data: collostructional analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and logistic regression.

This paper analyses a number of constructions with a reflexive marker on the verb and a dative argument, using the framework of Construction Grammar. In these constructions the predication is ascribed in various modes to the experiencer argument. We focus on these constructions in the South Slavic languages in which they have a wide distribution, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). The following basic types are identified: Emotional processes and states, Accidental, Perception/Cognition and Stative Reflexive-Dative Construction (SRDC). The specific clusters of features in each one are due to the inheritance properties from a reflexive construction, indicating a valence reduction, in combination with the features of affectedness and lack of control, characteristic of a dative argument. This results in varied but multiply linked patterns that create a complex network of constructions. The study aims at defining the relations between these constructions and in particular at determining the place of SRDC in this network.

The paper discusses two Polish exclamative constructions as instances of the Abstract Exclamative Construction (AEC) proposed by Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996). It is argued that while the Co-za Exclamative Construction is motivated straightforwardly by the identifying Co-za Question Construction as well as AEC, the Ale Exclamative Construction involves not only AEC but also a more complex process called “incoordination”, whereby a second coordinate clause with its coordinating conjunction ale becomes an autonomous monoclausal construction. The process involves a change in the information structure and in illocutionary force, which becomes increasingly expressive. In addition, it is accompanied by a shift of the sentence stress from the focal element in the second coordinate clause to the initial Ale .

The focus of the present study is the relation between metaphor and aspect: are certain grammatical forms more prone to be used metaphorically? We approach this issue through a puzzling case of Russian aspectual triplets. The study is based on the distributions of the unprefixed imperfective verb gruzit’ (IPFV1) ‘load’, its perfective counterparts (PFVs) and prefixed secondary imperfectives (IPFV2s) with the prefixes na- , za- , and po- . The data collected from the Russian National Corpus offers support for the Telicity Hypothesis according to which IPFV2s become more “oriented towards a result” due to the presence of a prefix. We show that, although characterized by similar semantics, all verbs in a triplet have different distributions among constructions and metaphorical patterns. The difference is particularly noticeable in metaphorical contexts, where IPFV2s have a higher frequency of metaphorical uses. The prefix seems to play a more crucial role than aspect as metaphorical patterns of IPFV2s are more similar to the patterns attested for the perfective counterparts. Based on this study, we can assume that the resultative state more often serves as a source for conventional verbal metaphors than the process itself, which results in IPFV2s being more often used metaphorically than IPFV1.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that English spatial particles which have grammaticalised into telic aspectualisers are not devoid of the image schematic content, which motivates their use in specific contexts. Because aspectual meaning, including telicity, is compositional in nature, which means that it frequently results from the interaction of several linguistic features, it is vital to single out those predicates in which the telicity effect can be attributed solely to the particle, not any other elements of the construction. This can be implemented by adopting the scalar approach, which shows that telicity is entailed by the particle exclusively in a predicate containing an incremental theme verb. Accordingly, the incremental theme verb burn and its five telic particles ( up , down , out , off and away ) constitute the subject of investigation. The analysis demonstrates that each particle encodes telicity in terms of reaching the GOAL in the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema. Conceptual differences in encoding the termination of the burning process result from topological properties of the path construed by each particle under study.

In English, the internal constituency of an event is obligatorily expressed by means of non-progressive versus progressive aspect. It is also represented linguistically by means of lexical aspect, and thus verb semantics. The two types of distinctions are shown to lie at two different levels of schematicity in the Integrated Model of Aspect (IMA, Kokorniak 2018). Although particles constitute only an additional tool in aspectual profiling in English, they are very productive at the level of lexical aspect in profiling minor aspectual differences that main verb semantics and inflection cannot reflect. The particles that the verb think can be combined with include out , over , through and up . Monolingual learners’ dictionaries suggest that think out, think over and think through can be used interchangeably. Their definitions indicate that in all three cases the particles designate a careful and thorough mental process. The study presents an aspectual contour of think and the particles that the verb can be combined with, and displays that each particle constitutes an elaboration of the mental path in a slightly different way. Their semantic contribution to the aspectual verb profile is shown and located in the IMA continuum, while corpus examples depict their use.