Volume 63, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Constructions - Aspects of construction grammar / Issue Editors: Susen Faulhaber and Thomas Herbst

This paper offers a contrastive collostructional analysis of English and French periphrastic causative constructions with make/faire in academic writing. Using data from the British National Corpus (for English) and from Scientext (for French), it investigates the interaction between the constructions and their non-finite verb slot. The (simple and distinctive) collexemes strongly attracted to the make and/or faire causative constructions are grouped into semantic classes, which are compared and help identify the typical meaning(s) of each construction. It appears that the English construction particularly attracts non-volitional verbs describing mental processes and (stimulus subject) perception, while the French construction preferentially attracts verbs of (dis)appearance and verbs expressing a change of state or location. These results contribute to situating the two constructions differently on the conceptual map of causation.

Usage-based approaches to language stress that a speaker’s mental grammar arises from and is shaped by language use and that the resulting mental representations include rich contextual linguistic and non-linguistic information. Yet, despite the fact that sociolinguistic research has pointed out the great importance of social and physical context factors as well as individual styles that speakers draw on to create their linguistic identities in authentic language use, usage-based Construction Grammar approaches have so far not paid enough attention to these phenomena. While the growing field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has already tried to incorporate a wide variety of sociolinguistic phenomena into their cognitive analyses, most Construction Grammar approaches usually only include sociolinguistic parameters (such as text type, register or dialect) as independent variables in their analyses. In this paper, I argue that such an approach ignores recent sociolinguistic insights into the active stylization of individuals by dynamic linguistic acts of identity. In this paper, I will show the importance of these insights by focussing on English football chants. First, I will illustrate how football chants can be analysed as linguistic constructions that are constrained by complex social and physical context factors. In a next step, I will then argue that the complex social and physical context constraints as well as the potential to function as linguistic acts of identity are not only relevant for these types of constructions, but also need to be taken into account in usage-based Construction Grammar analysis in general.

This paper seeks to contribute to a usage- and construction-based approach to the complex sentence. Studying temporal adverbial clauses with before , after , until and once in spontaneous spoken English, it diverges from previous work [Diessel, Holger (2008). “The Iconicity of Sequence. A Multifactorial Analysis of Clause Order in Complex Sentences.” Cognitive Linguistics 19.3, 465–490.] by focussing especially on the functions and usage characteristics of configurations that are highly marked, i.e. on complex sentences in which the respective adverbial clause precedes its matrix and expresses an event-sequence in a non-iconic ordering ( before, until ). The paper is inspired by two longstanding claims from functionalist syntax and discourse analysis, viz. that discourse should be the starting point for any study of syntax and that initial adverbial clauses present constructions in their own right. It reports the first results of a corpus study (based on the BNC files with spontaneous spoken language) which substantiate the latter claim and also discusses some of the wider implications of these results for construction-based models of the complex sentence.

The formulation of Goldberg’s oft-quoted Principle of No Synonymy is one of the factors responsible for a shift away in attention from alternations as postulated in the generative transformational tradition towards a view that regards the so-called alternatives as conveying different meanings and thus not being real alternatives. The rejection of the generativist position, in which one variant was regarded as primary and the other as derived from the primary variant, is of course justified and necessary in a cognitive linguistic approach, but it will be argued in this paper that the Principle of No Synonymy – if regarded as a dogma – is misleading in that it bears the risk of missing important generalisations across different patterns of the same verb. Furthermore, it will be argued that both linguistic variation and pre-emption are not perfectly compatible with the Principle of No Synonymy.