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1
Gries, Stefan Th, and Anatol Stefanowitsch. "Extending collostructional analysis." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, no. 1 (April 29, 2004): 97–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.06gri.
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This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as `distinctive-collexeme analysis', identifies lexemes that exhibit a strong preference for one member of the pair as opposed to the other, and thus makes it possible to identify subtle distributional differences between the members of such a pair. The method can be applied in the context of what is sometimes referred to as `grammatical alternation' (e.g. the dative alternation), but it can also be applied to other choices provided by the grammar (such as the two future tense constructions in English). The method has two main applications. First, it can reveal subtle differences between seemingly synonymous constructions, many of which are difficult to identify on the basis of more traditional approaches. Second, it can be used to investigate the very notion of `alternation'; we show that many alternations are much more restricted than has hitherto been assumed, and thus confirm the claims of recent, non-derivational views of grammar.
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Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. "Making sense of collostructional analysis." Constructions and Frames 5, no. 2 (December 31, 2013): 119–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cf.5.2.01gil.
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This paper looks at the ways of refining the technique of collostructional analysis, and more precisely multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, by taking word senses into account. It presents the main results of a sense-based multiple distinctive collexeme analysis of the non-finite verb slot of English periphrastic causative constructions and shows how these results compare with those of a lemma-based analysis of the same data. The study reveals that the different senses of a verb tend to be attracted to different constructions and that integrating sense into the analysis not only makes the interpretation of the data more straightforward and more reliable, but also provides information that would otherwise have to be obtained by means of other techniques.
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V. Zhukovska, V. "SEMANTICS OF GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION: CORPUS AND QUANTITATIVE ASPECT." Studia Philologica, no. 2 (2019): 28–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.28925/2311-2425.2019.13.4.
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Recently, much research in linguistics has become increasingly interested in the use of new methods and tools to analyze authentic linguistic data provided by text corpora. One of the most reliable corpus-based methods is the collostruction analysis, developed by A. Stefanowitsch and S. Th. Gries. Through statistical corpus analysis, this method examines semantics of grammatical construction by measuring the degree of mutual association/ repulsion between a construction and lexical items flling its main slot. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of applying the collostructional analysis to study semantics of one type of the English unaugmented detached construction with explicit subject, a non-fnite construction of a binary structure consisting of a (pro)nominal subject and Participle I as a predicate, as in [ВКЕС [Subj cheeks][Pred burning suddenly]]. Using R statistical software and the script for the collostructional analysis on empirical data drawn from the BNC-BYU corpus, we identify verbs, which reveal signifcant attraction to the predicate slot. The semantic analysis of the most strongly attracted verbs allows determining the semantic verb classes most closely associated with the given construction. It appears that the construction particularly attracts verbs involving the body, verbs of emission, verbs of motion, verbs of existence, touch verbs, and verbs of perception. These verbs belong to the aspectual classes of state and process. The analysis proves that the semantics of the construction [ВКЕС with-less[Subj general noun][Verb Participle І]] sets restrictions on flling its predicate slot with only those verbs whose arguments are compatible with the semantic roles defned by the construction. In its prototypical meaning the analyzed detached construction verbalizes a scenario in which Agent (the subject of the matrix clause) has a Partitive (the subject of the construction) in State/ Process (expressed by the predicate of the construction — Participle I). The evidence from the study suggests that the collostructional analysis substantially advances our understanding of grammatical constructions and their meaning. Clearly, these are only preliminary fndings and further studies regarding collostructional semantics of other types of English detached constructions with explicit subject would be worthwhile.
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Mukherjee, Joybrato, and Stefan Th Gries. "Collostructional nativisation in New Englishes." English World-Wide 30, no. 1 (February 17, 2009): 27–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.30.1.03muk.
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The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show, inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.
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Tošić Lojanica, Tiana. "EXPLORING PRESENT ABILITY: A COLLOSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH." Nasledje Kragujevac 18, no. 48 (2021): 105–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.46793/naskg2148.105tl.
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The paper investigates two constructions commonly thought to be semantically equivalent, S can V and S be able to V. Both modal can and semi-modal be able to are used to express ability that could be described as either mental or acquired accomplishment, pertaining to past or present. The difference between them is typically denoted as general ability or that someone managed to do something on a particular occasion. If not limited by the main verb (e.g. there is a constraint against can after another modal verb), can and be able to are mostly interchangeable. Starting from the premise that every construction carries meaning which is dependent on the meaning of lexical elements occurring in that construction, the aim is to shed light on the usage of the two verb constructions and the degree of their interchangeability by examining their complements. To compare and contrast the two constructions, we rely on a corpus-based and quantitative method of collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), or specifically on distinctive collexeme analysis which allows us to determine if the V slot in the construction is preferred by or restricted to particular lexemes. As S can V and S be able to V are highly attested in the corpus, the research is restricted only to their meaning of the present ability
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Orrequia-Barea, Aroa. "A Study of Direct Speech Complementation with Embedding Verbs: Collostructional Analysis." Grove - Working Papers on English Studies 27 (December 14, 2020): 83–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.17561/grove.v27.a6.
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Non-relational verbs, as opposed to relational ones, cannot replace their complement clause with a complex nominal, meaning that they do not denote a proposition, as the Relational Analysis states. However, direct speech seems to be a proper replacement for the complement clause in the non-relational verb cases. This paper deals with the analysis of some of the most representative taxonomies of embedding verbs using the British National Corpus, to check whether they can occur with direct speech complements; the collostructional analysis, which is a technique of statistical significance; and the programming language R to do it in a computational and automatic way. Thus, the collostructional method will measure the strength between the embedding verbs and their corresponding complement clauses in the direct speech form.
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Küchenhoff, Helmut, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. "Reply to “More (old and new) misunderstandings of collostructional analysis: On Schmid & Küchenhoff” by Stefan Th. Gries." Cognitive Linguistics 26, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 537–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2015-0053.
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AbstractThis 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.
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Stefanowitsch, Anatol. "The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6, no. 1 (November 1, 2018): 143–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2018-0007.
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Abstract There is a goal bias in the description of motion events: adverbials specifying goals are preferred over adverbials specifying source. Two broad explanations have been suggested to account for this: first, a general cognitive bias towards the aims of human actions, and second, the higher information value of goal adverbials in conceptualizing a motion event in its entirety. The second explanation predicts that the goal bias should be verb-specific. In particular, verbs whose lexical semantics focus on trajectories or sources of motion events (such as stroll and escape respectively), should not display a goal bias but instead prefer adverbials corresponding to this focus. Stefanowitsch and Rohde (2004) present case studies of ten English motion verbs that confirm this prediction. The current study takes up this research and complements it with a collostructional analysis over a large sample of 248 English motion verbs. The study shows, first, that goal adverbials dominate among strongly-associated pairs of motion verbs and prepositions in the English Intransitive Motion Construction, confirming a general goal bias for this construction; and second, that while goal adverbials are significantly associated with generic motion verbs as well as motion verbs specifying trajectories, trajectory adverbials and goal adverbials are significantly associated with trajectory- and goal-oriented verbs respectively, adding largescale quantitative confirmation to the previous study.
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Pavlović, Vladan. "Too early to say: The English too ADJ to V construction and models of cross-cultural communications styles." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 25, no. 3 (October 14, 2020): 297–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19044.pav.
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Abstract This paper studies the English too ADJ to V construction. It starts with a (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis (as one of the subtypes of collostructional analysis) of the ADJ-V pairs appearing in the given construction in three regional varieties of English (American, British and Indian English) based on the GloWbE corpus. This analysis establishes the most distinctive and most strongly repelled ADJ-V pairs in the respective varieties. These results are then interpreted from the perspective of three models of inter-cultural and cross-cultural communication styles. The paper demonstrates that the most distinctive and the most repelled ADJ-V pairs do differ across the three varieties and that this may reflect subtle differences in the underlying cultural conceptualizations. The paper also introduces the notion of ‘(multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis of co-varying collexemes’, as an extension of the existing notion of the given type of collostructional analysis.
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Gries, Stefan Th. "More (old and new) misunderstandings of collostructional analysis: On Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013)." Cognitive Linguistics 26, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 505–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0092.
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AbstractEver 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).
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Deshors, Sandra C. "Zooming in on Verbs in the Progressive: A Collostructional and Correspondence Analysis Approach." Journal of English Linguistics 45, no. 3 (August 16, 2017): 260–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424217717589.
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Quantitative corpus-linguistic approaches that are compatible with cognitive-constructional theories of language are on the increase in variationist English studies, but remain rare when it comes to study of the progressive aspect. The purpose of this study is therefore to road-test a two-step methodological approach in the investigation of over 6000 progressive constructions in five comparable corpora: the British, US, India, and Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), in addition to the recently released Corpus of Dutch English. Because the latter corpus followed the ICE design, it provides a valuable opportunity to investigate an as yet virtually unexplored population of non-native English users across seven different genres. First, successive covarying collexeme analyses were conducted of the variables verb and variety and then semantic domain and variety. The results confirmed several previous findings about, among other things, the strong association of progressive knowing with Indian English. Next, the results were fed into a correspondence analysis to explore, for the first time, the interactions between three variables in the use of progressive marking, semantic domain, variety and genre, revealing complex interplay between them. Ultimately, by contributing to the stock of methodological approaches used in variationist studies of the progressive aspect, the study provides a first step towards the development of detailed constructional profiles of the progressive across English varieties.
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Dekalo, Volodymyr. "Zur Entwicklung der modalenverstehen-Konstruktion: Ein Konservierungseffekt im Zuge der Auxiliarisierung." Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 48, no. 1 (May 27, 2020): 101–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zgl-2020-0003.
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AbstractThe present paper deals with item- and feature-based changes of the modal semi-schematic construction with verstehen in written German during the 20th century. To understand this development, the century is divided into four equal periods. Applying a simple collexeme analysis for each time span, the study ascertains which lexical verbs appear as typical items in a schematic slot constituting its collostructional profile. Comparing the distributional behavior manually in a pairwise fashion, the analysis reveals that solely three verbs, namely machen, umgehen and meistern, stay constantly highly attracted within the top collexemes of the verstehen-construction during the 20th century. Using a dependency-based semantic space model, the study demonstrates that the collostructional profile of the fourth period differs considerably from the previous time span. Utilizing random forest of conditional inference trees, changes in terms of usage features of the modal construction are pinpointed. As a result, its grammaticality degree has not increased demonstrating solely minor changes in temporal functionality as well as in realization of subject forms.
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Schmid, Hans-Jörg, and Helmut Küchenhoff. "Collostructional analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings." Cognitive Linguistics 24, no. 3 (July 26, 2013): 531–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2013-0018.
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AbstractCollostructional analysis is a corpus-based quantitative method of measuring the mutual attraction of lexemes and constructions (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) which has gained considerable popularity among corpus linguists and especially cognitive linguists with a statistical bent. For many less statistically minded linguists, it has proven rather difficult to evaluate the theoretical background assumptions and cognitive underpinnings of collostructional analysis and to compare them to alternative ways of modelling lexicogrammatical attraction phenomena. This paper aims to spell out these premises and foundations in terms comprehensible to a wider audience. It begins with a concise survey of how collostructional analysis works and then reports on a number of practical, theoretical and statistical issues of which both practitioners of the method and those who try to appreciate results of its application should be aware. With these issues in mind we then discuss alternative ways of calculating and interpreting lexicogrammatical attraction. The advantages and disadvantages of the different methods are discussed, also against the background of the results of studies that have tried to evaluate the measures by means of external evidence from psycholinguistic experiments. Finally, cognitive underpinnings of lexicogrammatical associations and implications for the different approaches are discussed. It is argued that at present we lack adequate knowledge about the ways in which discourse frequencies affect entrenchment. We conclude that the complexities of the relation between corpus frequencies and degrees of entrenchment are still rather poorly understood, and make suggestions for future work.
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Römer, Ute. "The inseparability of lexis and grammar." Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7 (November 16, 2009): 140–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arcl.7.06rom.
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This paper focuses on the interface of lexis and grammar and provides corpus evidence for the inseparability of two areas that have traditionally been kept apart, both in language teaching and in linguistic analysis and description. The paper will first give an overview of a number of influential research strands and model-building attempts in this area (Pattern Grammar and Collostructional Analysis, among others) and then explore the use of a selected lexical-grammatical pattern, the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is essential for EFL learners to come to grips with connotations, attested example) in corpora of expert and apprentice academic writing.
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Lauwers, Peter. "Comment dissocier des locutions prépositives quasi-synonymiques? Essai d’analyse collostructionnelle." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 55, no. 1 (March 2010): 55–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100001377.
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AbstractThe aim of this paper is threefold: descriptive, methodological and theoretical. It offers a distinctive collexeme analysis of two pairs of near-synonymous complex prepositions (sous le coup de SN/sous le choc de SN; sous l’emprise de SN/sous l’empire de SN), completed by a qualitative analysis. The analysis of the statistically significant co-occurrents suggests that sous le coup de has a more abstract and general meaning than sous le choc de, while the semantics of the second pair are less differentiated. The analysis touches upon several methodological issues; thus, examination of the problem addressed allows for assessment of the method. It also shows that the collostructional analysis offers an interesting contribution to the debate on the existence of a constructional semantics by identifying repelled collexemes that may yield coercion effects.
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Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya. "LINGUISTIK KORPUS KUANTITATIF DAN KAJIAN SEMANTIK LEKSIKAL SINONIM EMOSI BAHASA INDONESIA." Linguistik Indonesia 38, no. 2 (August 30, 2020): 123–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.26499/li.v38i2.155.
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This paper demonstrates the application of Multiple Distinctive Collexeme Analysis (MDCA) to study nuances and similarity between HAPPINESS near-synonyms in Indonesian. MDCA, as a variant of a family of quantitative corpus linguistic method called Collostructional Analysis, is proposed as a usage-based operationalisation for a classic theoretical construct in cognitive linguistic approach to emotion semantics, namely the idea of “related concepts” associated with the meaning of an emotion. Using MDCA, I expanded the idea of “related concepts” to investigate the semantics of more than one, near-synonymous, emotion on the basis of the synonyms’ distinctive collocates. I argue that MDCA (i) provides empirical basis for such a theoretical idea as “related concepts” and (ii) helps enrich semantic characterisation of a given emotion word in comparison to its synonyms, highlighting how they may differ or converge semantically.
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Gries, Stefan Th. "Frequencies, probabilities, and association measures in usage-/exemplar-based linguistics." Theory and data in cognitive linguistics 36, no. 3 (November 30, 2012): 477–510. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.36.3.02gri.
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In the last few years, a particular quantitative approach to the syntax-lexis interface has been developed: collostructional analysis (CA). This approach is an application of association measures to co-occurrence data from corpora, from a usage-based/cognitive-linguistic perspective. In spite of some popularity, this approach has come under criticism in Bybee (2010), who criticizes the method for several perceived shortcomings and advocates the use of raw frequencies/percentages instead. This paper has two main objectives. The first is to refute Bybee’s criticism on theoretical and empirical grounds; the second and further-reaching one is to outline, on the basis of what frequency data really look like, a cline of analytical approaches and, ultimately, a new perspective on the notion of construction based on this cline.
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Lauwers, Peter, Margot Van den Heede, and Els Tobback. "Se (re) trouver dans tous ses états ... attributifs : sens et constructions." Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 135, no. 1 (March 4, 2019): 29–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zrp-2019-0002.
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Abstract This paper offers a corpus study of two reflexive (semi-)copular verbs, viz. se trouver and se retrouver, which at first sight appear to be mere morphological variants. In a first stage, the study is devoted to the comparison of the reflexive copular construction with the object complement construction of trouver and retrouver. We show the observed differences between both constructions may be explained by a process of grammaticalization, which has attained a further stage in the case of the reflexive constructions which even admit semi-auxiliary uses. Next, we conduct a contrastive analysis of the syntax and the semantics (partially based on a collostructional analysis) of the copular constructions of se trouver and se retrouver. The analysis not only allows to describe the different meaning effects produced by the verbs, it also shows the close links with the locative uses. Moreover, it accounts for the role the morpheme « re- » plays in the reinforcement of the nuance of unexpectedness, and hence, of the detrimental inference.
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Granvik, Anton. "Accounting for syntactic variation in diachrony." Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation 31 (December 31, 2017): 243–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00010.gra.
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AbstractThis paper addresses the early variation in what has been called the [prep_que] variable in Spanish nominal complement clauses, i.e. the alternation betweende queandquein examples such asenseñal (de) quelo estimo, Zulema, este anillo ofrezco(CORDE) ‘as a sign that I appreciate You, Zulema, I offer this ring’. By applying several subsequent quantitative analyses on corpus instances of the sequences Nde queand Nque, the locus of variation is restricted to such an extent that the variation can largely be accounted for. A collostructional analysis identifies 31 central nouns of the Nde quecomplement clause construction. A diachronic cluster analysis delimits the temporal dimension of the variation to the 16th and 17th centuries. A distinctive collexeme analysis identifies nine nouns which are used in both constructional formats to a comparable degree:causa‘cause’,duda‘doubt’,esperanza‘hope’,fe‘faith’,opinión‘opinion’,recelo‘fear’,señal‘sign(al)’,sospecha‘suspicion’, andtemor‘fear’. Detailed contextual analysis of the use of these nine nouns by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression reveals that the use of the nouns with a determiner is correlated with thede quevariant, and the use of the nouns as part of complex predicates, as intener sospecha‘have suspicion’, is associated with thequevariant of the complement clause.
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Anthonissen, Lynn, and Tanja Mortelmans. "German modals in second language acquisition: A constructionist approach." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 4, no. 1 (November 1, 2016): 9–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2016-0004.
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Abstract Descriptions of modal verbs in learner grammars often evoke quite abstract semantic categories (focusing on dynamic, deontic and epistemic modality) in generalized usage contexts. Yet, in concrete utterances, modal verbs not only serve highly specific pragmatic and discourse-structural functions, but can also be shown to occur in (quasi-)formulaic sequences with specific lexical elements. These more idiosyncratic functional and formal properties are often insufficiently addressed in learner grammars. The article demonstrates, on the basis of two case studies, how insights and methods from Construction Grammar can help to improve the presentation of this topic. More specifically, it elaborates on the key determinants of L2 construction learning (involving frequency, proto-typicality and form-function mapping, among others) and illustrates what statistical techniques such as collostructional analysis and conditional inference trees can reveal about the intricacies involved in learning modal verb constructions.
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Romain, Laurence. "Measuring the alternation strength of causative verbs." Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation 31 (December 31, 2017): 219–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00009.rom.
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Abstract This paper presents a method for quantitative and qualitative analyses of the causative alternation in English, where verbs may alternate between a transitive (causative) construction (Santa crinkled his eyes) and an intransitive (non-causative) construction (His eyes crinkled).1 The aim of this paper is to present a method designed to measure the alternation strength of causative verbs, i.e. the extent to which they alternate between the two constructions. One of the central elements this paper investigates is the Theme, i.e. the participant that is in subject position in the intransitive construction and object position in the transitive construction. A distinctive collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) shows that certain verbs are significantly attracted to one of either two constructions while others are equivalently distributed in the two constructions. However, after careful analysis it appears that very few Themes actually overlap between the two constructions (Lemmens forthcoming) which indicates that each construction seems to be rather restrictive regarding which Themes they recruit. The low degree of alternation of the Themes leads us to ask ourselves the extent to which the alternation is part of a speaker’s knowledge of their language.
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Sahoo, Kalyanamalini, and Maarten Lemmens. "Degrees of mirativity." Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15, no. 2 (December 8, 2017): 343–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.03sah.
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Abstract This paper studies degrees of mirativity as grammaticalised in the Indo-Aryan language Odia by four light verb constructions, asymmetric complex predicates combining a lexical verb with a (partially) bleached light verb. As such, these light verb constructions can be considered non-parasitic expressions of mirativity. The present paper adds a number of important new insights to the discussion of mirativity. Firstly, we show that mirativity is a complex category which, next to the prototypical notion of surprise, also comprises the notion of “unsupposedness”. Secondly, we demonstrate that the four constructions vary in the degree of mirativity they express. These differences can be related to features of transitivity, such as volitionality or control and affectedness (as contextually realised by the process size, impact, force, or scope). This hypothesis is confirmed by two corpus studies: a collostructional analysis (based on verb types) and a comparison of contexts for constructional minimal pairs.
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Perek, Florent, and Martin Hilpert. "A distributional semantic approach to the periodization of change in the productivity of constructions." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 490–520. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16128.per.
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Abstract This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic corpus data, combining variability-based neighbour clustering, which offers objective and reproducible criteria for periodization, and distributional semantics as a representation of lexical meaning. This method partitions the history of a grammatical construction according to qualitative stages of productivity corresponding to different semantic sets of lexical items attested in it. Two case studies are presented. The first case study on the hell-construction (“Verb the hell out of NP”) shows that the semantic development of a construction does not always match that of its quantitative aspects, like token or type frequency. The second case study on the way-construction compares the results of the present method with those of collostructional analysis. It is shown that the former measures semantic changes and their chronology with greater precision. In sum, this method offers a promising approach to exploring semantic variation in the lexical fillers of constructions and to modelling constructional change.
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Deshors, Sandra C., and Paula Rautionaho. "The progressive versus non-progressive alternation." English World-Wide 39, no. 3 (November 2, 2018): 309–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.00016.des.
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Abstract This corpus-based study focuses on the alternation between progressive and non-progressive constructions in native and non-native varieties. We adopt a quantitative-qualitative approach starting with a collostructional analysis of the two constructions to assess association strengths between lexical verbs, semantic domains and Aktionsart categories on the one hand, and progressive and non-progressive constructions on the other hand. We then explore the constructions semantically and qualitatively. Overall, associations between the two constructions and Achievements and Accomplishments on the one hand, and semantic domains other than Activity or Existence on the other, do not unanimously influence writers’ constructional choices. Further, there may not be one single core meaning of the progressive, but rather a complex of meanings activated by the use of the progressive construction. Ultimately, we paint a multifaceted picture of the meanings of the progressive and show the benefit of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore constructional semantics across Englishes.
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Granvik, Anton, and Susanna Taimitarha. "Topic-marking prepositions in Swedish: A corpus-based analysis of adpositional synonymy." Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37, no. 2 (October 2014): 257–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0332586514000201.
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This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen ‘the agreement of the state regarding the financing’. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other.
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Chen, Ying, and Zhuo Jing-Schmidt. "The Mandarin LVS construction: Verb lexical semantics and grammatical aspect." Cognitive Linguistics 25, no. 1 (February 1, 2014): 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2013-0029.
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AbstractTwo empirical studies – a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis – were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category of the LVS construction. Although most exemplars fall into a few major lexical semantic clusters, there are more low-frequency marginal exemplars than previously recognized, reinforcing the constructional schema in an essentially radial category. In addition to the lexical semantic regularity of the verb slot, both studies showed the existence of high-frequency tokens with prototype status. As far as grammatical aspect is concerned, the converging evidence indicates that the LVS category is compatible not only with the durative aspect, but also with the perfective as well as the resultative and directional lexical aspect. The attraction of grammatical aspect to the verb of LVS is graded rather than absolute, with some mutual selection patterns more typical than others. The two grammatical aspects as marked by the durative -zhe and the perfective -le are non-interchangeable.
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STREET, JAMES A., and EWA DĄBROWSKA. "Lexically specific knowledge and individual differences in adult native speakers’ processing of the English passive." Applied Psycholinguistics 35, no. 1 (November 22, 2012): 97–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716412000367.
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ABSTRACTThis article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an online task that compared processing and comprehension of active and passive sentences containing verbs strongly associated with the passive and active constructions, as determined by collostructional analysis. As predicted by usage-based accounts, participants’ performance was influenced by frequency (both groups processed actives faster than passives; the low academic attainment participants also made significantly more errors on passive sentences) and lexical specificity (i.e., processing of passives was slower with verbs strongly associated with the active). Contra to proposals made by Dąbrowska and Street (2006), the results suggest that all participants have verb-specific as well as verb-general representations, but that the latter are not as entrenched in the participants with low academic attainment, resulting in less reliable performance. The results also show no evidence of a speed–accuracy trade-off, making alternative accounts of the results (e.g., those of two-stage processing models, such as Townsend & Bever, 2001) problematic.
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Lehmann, Claudia. "About as boring as flossing sharks: Cognitive accounts of irony and the family of approximate comparison constructions in American English." Cognitive Linguistics 32, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 133–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0018.
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Abstract This paper reports a case study on a family of American English constructions that will be called the family of approximate comparison constructions. This family has three members, all of which follow the syntactic pattern about as X as Y with X being an adjective, but which allow three related functions: literal comparison, simile and irony. Two cognitive frameworks concern themselves with irony, the cognitive modelling approach and viewpoint approach, and the paper will show that, while the ironic approximate comparison construction calls central assumptions of the cognitive modelling approach to question, the viewpoint account can be refined to handle these cases. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of irony. The paper provides a corpus-based analysis on the Y slot as well as collostructional analyses on the adjectival X slot in the family of approximate comparison constructions. The results thereof suggest that the ironic approximate comparison construction, in comparison to its literal counterpart, prefers adjectives that convey positively connotated, nuanced attitudes and is formally less variable in the Y slot. The preference for particular adjectives lends further support to the assumption that hearers understand the construction as ironic or literal before speakers complete their utterance. Given that, it is argued that the ironic approximate comparison construction communicates an inherent viewpoint.
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Wulff, Stefanie, and Ute Römer. "Becoming a proficient academic writer: shifting lexical preferences in the use of the progressive." Corpora 4, no. 2 (November 2009): 115–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/e1749503209000276.
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Recent corpus studies have shown that learners of English are aware of systematic associations between verbs and their preferred argument structures to an extent that is similar to that of a native speaker of English (e.g., Gries and Wulff, 2005 ). Given evidence for similarly systematic associations in native speaker data at the lexis–morphology interface (e.g., Römer, 2005a ), the question arises whether, and to what extent, learners of English are also sensitive to lexical dependencies at the level of morphology, and how their verb-aspect associations compare with those of native speakers. In order to address this question, this study focusses on the potential associations between verbs and progressive aspect in German learners' academic writing. On the basis of the German component of the International Corpus of Learner English and the Cologne–Hanover Advanced Learner Corpus, learners' significantly preferred verb-aspect pairs are identified using an adaptation of collostructional analysis ( Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003 ). The results are complemented with corresponding analyses of a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers on the one hand and published research articles from the Hyland Corpus on the other hand. The findings indicate that upper-intermediate and advanced German learners of English exhibit clear lexical preferences in the use of progressives. Furthermore, comparative analyses suggest that verb-aspect preferences shift as a function of writers' mastery of text type-specific conventions rather than language proficiency at large.
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Sommerer, Lotte, and Andreas Baumann. "Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters: The constructional network of English NPN constructions." Cognitive Linguistics 32, no. 1 (January 27, 2021): 97–131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0013.
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Abstract This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics and extension potential (i.e., modification, complementation) is investigated (e.g., by conducting collostructional analysis). In terms of theoretical modeling, the paper takes a Usage-based, Cognitive Construction Grammar approach (UCCxG) and sketches the constructional network of this constructional family, postulating various constructional templates on different levels of specificity – among others – the existence of the following subtypes [CNsg,time i after CNsg,time i]Cx (e.g., day after day, night after night), [CNsg,measurement i by CNsg,measurement i]Cx (e.g., inch by inch, step by step) or [CNsg,bodypart i to CNsg,bodypart i]Cx (e.g., skin to skin, shoulder to shoulder). We show how these templates are vertically and horizontally connected to each other. Ultimately, we argue that in a usage-based model which strives for cognitive plausibility it is not always feasible to postulate the entrenchment of an abstract overarching schema (i.e., a ‘mothernode’) like [CNi P CNi]Cx or even [N P N]Cx high up in the network. It is unlikely that speakers abstract such a general schema in a bottom-up acquisition process for this family. Rather, the NPN group is a constructional family characterized by many sister ties and by the absence of mother nodes from which information can be inherited.
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Gries, Stefan Th. "15 years of collostructions." Constructions in Applied Linguistics 24, no. 3 (August 27, 2019): 385–412. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00011.gri.
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Abstract This paper discusses a variety of potential shortcomings of most of the most widely-used association measures as used in collocation research and collostructional analyses. To address these shortcomings, I then discuss a research program called tupleization, an approach that does away with the usual kinds of information conflation by keeping relevant corpus-linguistic dimensions of information – e.g. frequency, association/contingency, dispersion, entropy, etc. – separate and analyzing them in a multidimensional way; I conclude with pointers towards how these dimensions could, if deemed absolutely necessary, be conflated for the simplest kinds of of rankings as well as strategies for future research.
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Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Stefan Th Gries. "Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8, no. 2 (December 31, 2003): 209–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03ste.
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This paper introduces an extension of collocational analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating the interaction of lexemes and the grammatical constructions associated with them. The method is framed in a construction-based approach to language, i.e. it assumes that grammar consists of signs (form-meaning pairs) and is thus not fundamentally different from the lexicon. The method is applied to linguistic expressions at various levels of abstraction (words, semi-fixed phrases, argument structures, tense, aspect and mood). The method has two main applications: first, to increase the adequacy of grammatical description by providing an objective way of identifying the meaning of a grammatical construction and determining the degree to which particular slots in it prefer or are restricted to a particular set of lexemes; second, to provide data for linguistic theory-building.
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Tang, Xuri, and Gaixiang Liu. "Solving contradictions in semantic prosody analysis with prosody concord." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23, no. 4 (December 27, 2018): 437–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17057.liu.
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Abstract Using collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas like alleviate and cure yield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named ‘prosody concord’. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmas budge, credibility, cause and alleviate show that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis.
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Praet, Wout Van. "Aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copular clauses." English Text Construction 12, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 196–234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/etc.00027.pra.
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Abstract This paper investigates the use of aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copulars. To examine attractions of aspectual and modal meanings to the VPs in the copular constructions, I carry out collostructional analyses (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). These attractions are interpreted with respect to (i) the lexicogrammatically coded meaning of the copular clauses and (ii) the pragmatic mechanisms that they trigger (e.g. (non-)exhaustiveness implicature), and (iii) the discursive functions they serve in specific contexts of use. It is crucial that this study takes into account specificational copulars with indefinite vs definite variable NPs, which carry an implicature of non-exhaustiveness vs exhaustiveness respectively. I will argue that the felicity of specific aspectual construals is related to the meanings coded at level (i), while the attraction of modal verbs is related to all three levels.
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Deshors, Sandra C. "Does the passé composé influence L2 learners’ use of English past tenses?" International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 4, no. 1 (May 31, 2018): 23–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17007.des.
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Abstract This study explores the uses of the present perfect (PP) and simple past (SP) by French learners of English and assesses how those uses differ from those in native English and those of the passé composé (PC) in native French which, semantically, overlaps with PP and SP. Methodologically, the study is based on over 3,000 contextualized occurrences of PP, SP and PC, and includes cluster and collostructional analyses. Overall, relatively native-like form-function mappings in interlanguage emerge from the analyses, suggesting that, semantically, advanced learners have integrated the uses of past tenses and that the influence of the PC is relatively weak. Further, at an upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency level, learners have integrated the fine-grained contextual information characteristic of the use of English past tenses. Ultimately, the study shows how different methodological designs can lead to varying conclusions on the (non-)nativelike usage patterns of PP in interlanguage.
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Tang, Xuri. "How metaphoremes emerge." Review of Cognitive Linguistics 19, no. 1 (April 28, 2021): 80–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00077.tan.
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Abstract According to the dynamic view of metaphor, the complexities of metaphorical expressions are emergent products of language use. However, this view lacks an explicit mechanism to account for the process. This paper puts forward a model named single-scope integration network with entrenchment (SINE), and uses if-then rules in the model to explain the temporal order and regularities that the metaphoremes of a metaphor should follow in their emergence. The validity of the model is tested in the case studies of Chinese verb metaphors, which reveal four if-then rules that govern the metaphoreme emergence of Chinese verb metaphors. These if-then rules are obtained via the analysis of the occurrence order of metaphoremes by performing DepCluster, a machine learning tool for collostruction generation, over a large-scale diachronic corpus. The case studies demonstrate that the proposed model is applicable to Chinese verb metaphors.
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Pedersen, Johan. "Verb-based vs. schema-based constructions and their variability: On the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction in a contrastive perspective." Linguistics 57, no. 3 (May 27, 2019): 473–530. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0007.
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AbstractIn comparison to English, Spanish constructions of argument structure are highly verb-constrained (e.g., Goldberg, Adele E. 2006.Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2003. Motion events and the lexicon: A case study of Hindi.Lingua113(2). 123–160):Pedro bajó/*bailó a la playa‘Pedro went down/danced to the beach’. In some cases, the dominant role of the verbal meaning combines with a mismatching construction (e.g., an intransitive verb in a transitive construction:Pedro bajó las escaleras‘Pedro went down the stairs’). To account for this evidence from a usage-based point of view, this study examines the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction combining verb lexeme analysis with collexeme corpus analysis (Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction beween words and constructions.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics8(2). 209–243). The analysis shows that in spite of frequent verb-construction mismatches, core components of the verbal meaning correlate closely with the usage of the verb in the transitive construction. The same patterns were not observed in comparable English constructions. Conceptualized in a constructionist framework, this study suggests that verb framing and learned constructional patterns have different roles in the encoding of argument structure in the two languages. This contrastive analysis has a broader application: to other construction types, to other semantic domains, and to other languages. It is argued that compared to the typological distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages (Talmy, Leonard. 2000.Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), the proposed framework is better suited to account for the crosslinguistic differences and the intra-linguistic variation.
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Dekalo, Volodymyr, and Beate Hampe. "Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 5, no. 1 (December 20, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2017-0011.
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AbstractThis paper contributes to the development of collostructional analysis by taking up one of the long-standing issues in collostructional analysis, viz. the assessment and interpretation of the collexeme lists created. It uses the DWDS corpus documenting 20th century written German to study two modalverb constructions which contain either vermögen or bekommen as the first verb plus an infinitive. When expressing ‘possibility’/‘capability’, these constructions compete with the ubiquitous and strongly grammaticalized könnenconstruction. To compare their constructional semantics, the paper combines collostructional analyses with a close investigation of the verbal meanings characterizing their V
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Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. "Contrastive Collostructional Analysis: Causative Constructions in English and French." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63, no. 3 (January 1, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2015-0022.
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Hartmann, Stefan. "Constructing a schema: Word-class changing morphology in a usage-based perspective." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2014-0014.
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AbstractThis paper discusses how collostructional analysis can be applied to the study of word-formation patterns. Drawing on a diachronic corpus study of German ung-nominalization and Infinitival Nominalization using the GerManC Corpus, it is shown that a cross-tabulation analysis comparing the frequencies of word-formation products to those of their respective bases can give valuable clues to the input language users rely on when abstracting a schema (i.e., a word-formation construction) from a quite heterogeneous array of instantiations.
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RAUTIONAHO, PAULA, and ROBERT FUCHS. "Recent change in stative progressives: a collostructional investigation of British English in 1994 and 2014." English Language and Linguistics, February 7, 2020, 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s136067431900042x.
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The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.
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Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. "The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2014-0005.
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AbstractThis paper investigates the use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking foreign learners of English, using spoken and written learner corpus data and comparing them against similar data representing native English. It adopts a constructional approach, which distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb ‘superconstruction’, the intermediate level of the structural patterns [V Prt], [V Prt OBJ] and [V OBJ Prt], and the lower level of lexically specified phrasal verbs. The approach is also collostructional in that it seeks to bring to light lexical associations at the constructional level. The results show that the difficulties that learners are known to have with phrasal verbs are mainly situated at the level of the superconstruction; at the lower levels of analysis (especially the intermediate one), on the other hand, learners seem to have largely internalised the main features of the constructions. More generally, the paper highlights the benefits of combining Construction Grammar and learner corpus research to gain insights into the L2 construction.
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FLACH, SUSANNE. "Beyond modal idioms and modal harmony: a corpus-based analysis of gradient idiomaticity in mod + adv collocations." English Language and Linguistics, August 7, 2020, 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674320000301.
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How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms such had/’d better, would/’d rather or might (as) well are seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly, will probably) or not (could also, might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv) is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types of mod + adv is a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.
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Chen, Alvin Cheng-Hsien. "Words, constructions and corpora: Network representations of constructional semantics for Mandarin space particles." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, August 21, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2020-0012.
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AbstractIn this study, we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of network science in exploring the emergence of constructional semantics from the connectedness and relationships between linguistic units. With Mandarin locative constructions (MLCs) as a case study, we extracted constructional tokens from a representative corpus, including their respective space particles (SPs) and the head nouns of the landmarks (LMs), which constitute the nodes of the network. We computed edges based on the lexical similarities of word embeddings learned from large text corpora and the SP-LM contingency from collostructional analysis. We address three issues: (1) For each LM, how prototypical is it of the meaning of the SP? (2) For each SP, how semantically cohesive are its LM exemplars? (3) What are the emerging semantic fields from the constructional network of MLCs? We address these questions by examining the quantitative properties of the network at three levels: microscopic (i.e., node centrality and local clustering coefficient), mesoscopic (i.e., community) and macroscopic properties (i.e., small-worldness and scale-free). Our network analyses bring to the foreground the importance of repeated language experiences in the shaping and entrenchment of linguistic knowledge.
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Zeschel, Arne. "Constructional ‘scene encoding’ and acquisition: Mothers’ use of argument structure constructions in English child-directed speech." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2013-0008.
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AbstractConstruction-based language models assume that grammar is meaningful and learnable from experience. Focusing on five of the most elementary argument structure constructions of English, a large-scale corpus study of child-directed speech (CDS) investigates exactly which meanings/functions are associated with these patterns in CDS, and whether they are indeed specially indicated to children by their caretakers (as suggested by previous research, cf. Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman 2004). Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) is employed to uncover significantly attracted verb-construction combinations, and attracted pairs are classified semantically in order to systematise the attested usage patterns of the target constructions. The results indicate that the structure of the input may aid learners in making the right generalisations about constructional usage patterns, but such scaffolding is not strictly necessary for construction learning: not all argument structure constructions are coherently semanticised to the same extent (in the sense that they designate a single schematic event type of the kind envisioned in Goldberg’s [1995] ‘scene encoding hypothesis’), and they also differ in the extent to which individual semantic subtypes predominate in learners’ input
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Flach, Susanne. "Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 5, no. 1 (December 20, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2017-0010.
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AbstractThis article addresses the morphological constraint on the ‘formulaic frame’ be-sure-and-v (Be sure and wear flowers in your hair!), whose idiomatic reading disappears in inflected uses (*She was sure and wore flower in her hair). This constraint also applies to certain verbal patterns (go/come-v, try-and-v) and is at least probabilistic for others (wait and see, go-and-v). A recent usagebased approach suggests that the so-called Bare Stem Condition follows from the semantics of the affected patterns, which are schematically non-assertive and thus functionally inappropriate for use in inflected, assertive environments. The same can be shown to apply to hortative be-sure-and-v, suggesting that the morphological behaviour of both verbal and adjectival pseudo-coordination have the same underlying functional-semantic constraint motivation. Supporting evidence comes from the status of be-sure-and-v relative to instantiations of the pattern: rather than being an idiosyncratic, isolated idiom, be-sure-and-v is a subtype of a moderately productive be-adj-and-v construction (be honest and admit, be patient and wait). Be-adj-and-v shows many of the characteristics of other pseudo-coordinated constructions, including the combination of semantically coherent slots fillers (flexible-adapt, glad-rejoice) and the asymmetric framing of single events. Methodologically, the article showcases how Collostructional Analyses can be used as diagnostic tools to identify (sub)types and slot-filler consistency in a bottom-up fashion, separating schema instantiations from syntagmatic ‘noise’ (i.e., the compositional adjectival predicate, My raspberries are ripe and taste delicious). Thus, the method identifies (and confirms) be-sure-and-v as the morphological, semantic, and statistical prototype of the more general schema.
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Flach, Susanne. "Let’s go look at usage." Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 3, no. 1 (January 27, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2015-0013.
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AbstractThe English go-VERB construction as in I go get the paper every morning is said to be subject to the BARE STEM CONDITION, which states that neither verb can bear inflection (thus resulting in the ungrammaticality of *she went see/saw a doctor). Studies that address the constraint attribute it to underlying formal parameters, without paying attention to functional properties and/or usage events. The fact that we find occasional violations of the constraint in large amounts of data raises the question of the systematicity of this data and how to account for it. Arguing from a usage-based perspective, this paper assumes that the entrenched schema of go-VERB is hortatory (e.g., commands, advice, invitations), which make inflectional variants increasingly unlikely for semanticfunctional reasons. But where exceptions do occur, they are assumed to occur in contexts predicted by the construction’s semantics. These assumptions are borne out by data from a large corpus of web data. Potential counterexamples are tested for systematicity vs. random noise in (web) data using collostructional analysis and simple correlation measurements. The central arguments are thus (i) that the BARE STEM CONDITION is better conceived of as the result of go- VERB’s constructional semantics, and (ii) that rare exceptions can be framed in terms of likelihood of occurrence and distance from the licensing schema.
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Jach, Daniel. "Revisiting German two-way prepositions." Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, September 9, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2021-2029.
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Abstract German two-way prepositions have long troubled grammar writing. Unlike most other German prepositions, they occur with both accusative and dative case. Their case is difficult to predict and has been attributed to different underlying meaning construals. Recent exploratory corpus studies propose that, in addition, their case depends on multiple co-occurring contextual variables. Following this approach, this study uses multivariate regression and collostructional analysis to investigate what determines the case of two-way prepositions in a large sample of authentic language use. Based on the results, this study then attempts to provide a usage-based description of the case of two-way prepositions. Contrary to expectations, none of the proposed variables had much influence on case, suggesting that the effects observed in the literature only hold for specific contexts. Instead, the results indicated associations of accusative and dative with individual prepositions and specific lexical items in the context. Framed in terms of usage-based construction grammar, this is interpreted as item-specific constructional prototypes that emerge from typical usage patterns and, once established, determine case based on form-meaning overlap with the current context of use. In line with recent usage-based research on grammar, a first attempt is made to describe case as part of a network of associative links between constructions and lexical items.
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Hampe, Beate. "Discovering constructions by means of collostruction analysis: The English Denominative Construction." Cognitive Linguistics 22, no. 2 (January 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2011.009.
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Tang, Xuri. "Lexeme-based collexeme analysis with DepCluster." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 13, no. 1 (January 1, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2015-0007.
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AbstractThis paper introduces a tool for lexeme-based collexeme analysis. The tool uses cluster analysis to generate the typical constructions of a given lexeme and computes the collostruction strength of the constructions. These two functions enable the tool to facilitate efficient studies of lexeme–construction interactions in large-scale data. As a case study, the paper examines the lexeme “cause”. It shows that the tool provides strong statistical evidence that confirms earlier findings about the negative semantic prosody of the lexeme. In addition, the collexeme analyses with the tool show that the lexeme is typically used in attitudinal constructions. The case study demonstrates that the tool can enhance the efficiency, comprehensiveness and granularity in lexeme-based collexeme analysis.