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Recent cognitive-linguistic approaches view grammar as a mental network of stored knowledge. The present study investigates to what extent psycholinguistic evidence from structural priming can inform one of the crucial linking mechanisms in this network: similarity relations between formally and/or functionally related constructions. Structural priming occurs when processing a multi-word unit affects speakers' subsequent processing of the same or a similar construction. Focusing on a range of English argument structure constructions, it is shown that priming can help address theoretical claims about the structure of the grammatical network, and that the network-based view in turn motivates reinterpretations of previous priming results as well as novel extensions of the paradigm. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and outlines the goals of the investigation. It is proposed that structural priming can provide a rich source of evidence for cognitive-linguistic models of the grammatical network, but that the ways in which the two research areas can inform each other have not yet been sufficiently explored. Chapter 2 outlines the central role of similarity relations in cognitive-linguistic network models, combining elements from Construction Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, Word Grammar and other related frameworks. Different types of similarity relations between argument structure constructions are illustrated with detailed linguistic analyses, including functionally similar (alternating) constructions (e.g., the double-object and the to-dative construction) and formally similar constructions (e.g., the resultative and the depictive construction). It is shown that previous theoretical accounts raise questions about the nature and degree of these similarities, which can be addressed with the help of the priming evidence provided in the later chapters. Moreover, the discussion provides an overview of corpus-based and experimental methods that can be used to investigate constructional similarities. Chapter 3 describes how structural priming can be used to study similarity relations in the grammatical network via their implicit effects on speakers' processing. Evidence is provided that priming is sensitive to both formal and functional similarities between constructions. Based on an overview of production and comprehension priming methods, it is argued that different methods are needed to study different types of similarity relations. In addition, the discussion outlines three relevant distinctions for the interpretation of structural priming effects: the difference between within-construction and cross-constructional priming; between symmetric and asymmetric priming; and between facilitatory and inhibitory priming. Chapter 4 reinterprets previous structural priming findings about alternating constructions in the context of a cognitive-linguistic network model of grammar. First, based on within-construction priming effects between instances of the same construction, it is suggested that speakers' grammatical networks comprise both abstract argument structure constructions and verb-specific representations. Second, it is shown that the evidence for cross-constructional priming between members of the same alternation (e.g., the double-object and the to-dative construction) is weaker than previously assumed, casting doubt on the central role that alternations play in some grammatical theories. Third, varying degrees of cross-constructional priming are observed between members of different alternations (e.g., the dative and the benefactive constructions) and related to previous theoretical claims about their respective similarities. Chapter 5 reports novel comprehension experiments that extend structural priming to previously understudied non-alternating argument structure constructions. In two experiments, a variant of self-paced reading known as the 'maze task' is used to investigate priming between the resultative and the object-oriented depictive construction. The results indicate that depictives facilitate both depictive targets (within-construction priming) and resultative targets (cross-constructional priming), but that resultatives do not give rise to priming. Frequency-related and other possible explanations for the asymmetric effects are provided. The discussion then addresses another recent experiment that tests priming between the caused-motion and the resultative construction. The observed symmetric priming effects do not support previous claims about an asymmetric metaphorical relation between the constructions. Moreover, an explanation is offered for the occurrence of inhibitory priming in the experiment, which has seldom been observed in structural priming. Finally, Chapter 6 summarises the key findings of the study and outlines three implications that merit further investigation. These concern the source ambiguity of priming effects, the use of priming for investigating other types of network relations, and a novel view of 'constructionhood' as a gradient rather than a categorical property. Together, the discussions and remaining questions illustrate that cognitive-linguistic theory and structural priming research complement each other in their efforts to uncover the structure of the grammatical network.

This research explores the interplay between subjectivity and epistemic modality, by focusing on a small group of expressions in French, namely je pense 'I think', je crois 'I believe' and je trouve 'I find'. It draws on more than six hours of conversation. Firstly, I adopt a constructionist approach (Hoffmann & Trousdale, 2013) and describe the three expressions as interrelated constructions, where the subject clitic je 'I' and the stance verb are no longer processed as separate items. Despite their similarities, the constructions nonetheless have distinct behaviours and are not always substitutable. Je pense and je crois can be used either as epistemic or subjective markers, insofar as each element of the constructions contributes a component of meaning. By contrast, je trouve can only be used as a subjective marker. Because je crois is never used as a subjective marker in my database, I argue that it forms a contrastive pair with je pense as an epistemic marker, while je trouve forms a contrastive pair with je pense as a subjective marker. In the first pair, my data suggest that je crois tends to be used when the speaker has knowledge of the state of affairs at hand, while je pense indicates an assumption from the speaker. In the second pair, je trouve operates a subjective strengthening, while je pense has an attenuative effect, due to the epistemic component of meaning it encodes. Secondly, I show that the multiple functions that je pense, je crois and je trouve may fulfil in interaction are evidence for their status as discourse markers. These interactional functions can be divided into two. Firstly, the constructions may perform discourse-organisational functions, when they are used to demarcate units of speech. Secondly, they may be used to soften a potential or actual face threat, thus fulfilling interpersonal functions. Nevertheless, these interactional functions are concomitant to their semantic meaning, while discourse markers are usually described as non-propositional items. I therefore propose that the three constructions can more appropriately be viewed as peripheral members rather than prototypical members of the category of discourse markers. Finally, as clause-final parentheticals, they predominantly appear as mitigation strategies. Prosodic aspects are also investigated, and suggest that the three constructions may constitute independent prosodic units, as is observed with discourse markers.

This thesis applies the construction grammar framework to a corpus-based study of the development of post-verbal ge in Chinese. Ge in Mandarin Chinese is widely considered as a general classifier (Li and Thompson 1981, Zhu 1982, Lü 1984). As a classifier, the main function of ge is to categorize the entity denoted by the following noun and enable numeral attachment. Thus, ge is typically preceded by numerals and followed by referential nouns. In a post-verbal position, when the numeral before ge is yi ‘one’, the numeral tends to be omitted. The ‘bare ge’ in post-verbal position is found co-occurring with non-referential nouns and non-nominal elements, such as predicative adjectives and verb phrases. The function of the post-verbal ge with these atypical collocations has attracted much attention in Chinese linguistic research (Zhang, 2003; Lü, 1984; Biq, 2004). One of the features of the previous research is that the researchers focus on a sub-set of post-verbal ge variations and try to provide a generalized claim about all instances of post-verbal ge used in Mandarin. Another feature is that the research focus is on ge alone and little attention has been paid to its co-texts and contexts of use. In addition, very little work has been done on the emergence of the mysterious function of post-verbal ge or the internal links between ge as a classifier and this new function. The main task of this thesis is to identify the semantic and syntactic properties of the post-verbal ge with atypical collocations and to explore how ge developed these properties in the post-verbal position. Within a construction grammar framework, the post-verbal ge with this special function and its co-texts are identified as a construction with a telic and bounded aspectual meaning. This [V ge X] construction of telic and bounded aspectual meaning is different from the classifier construction in terms of morpho-syntactic features as well as semantic and pragmatic properties. With the constructional approach, this research shows that the unit to which changes apply is not ge alone but the [V ge X] construction and the morpho-syntactic and semantic relations between these three elements have changed over time. Furthermore, the investigation into the mechanism of these changes also reveals that the development of micro-constructions of the [V ge X] construction of telic and bounded aspectual meaning occurred in a constructional network, which links different constructions with the [V ge X] schema.

This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Ambel [wgo], an endangered Austronesian (South Halmahera-West New Guinea) language. Ambel is spoken by approximately 1600 people on Waigeo, the largest island in the Raja Ampat archipelago (West Papua province, Indonesia). This grammar is based on naturalistic and elicited data, collected by the author from native speakers of Ambel. Ambel is a head-marking language, with basic SV/AVO constituent order. There are 14 native consonant phonemes and five vowel phonemes. Ambel has a tone system, in which /H/ syllables contrast with toneless syllables. Neither stress nor vowel length are contrastive. In verbal clauses, the subject of the clause is marked on the verb. This system makes a four-way number distinction (singular, dual, paucal, and plural), an animacy distinction in the third person, and a clusivity distinction in the non-singular first person. The Ambel noun phrase is mainly head-initial. There are five distinct morphosyntactic possessive constructions, the choice of which is primarily determined by a lexical specification on the possessed noun. Some nouns (including most body parts and some kin terms) are possessed in one of three constructions in which the person, number, and animacy of the possessor is marked directly on the possessed noun, while most other nouns are possessed in one of two constructions in which the possessor is marked on a prenominal possessive classifier. Within the clause, all negation particles and most aspect and mode particles are clause-final. There is no passive construction. Ambel has a rich system of spatial deixis, in which six different classes of deictic words (such as demonstratives, deictic prepositions, and deictic nouns) are derived from one of four demonstrative roots or 28 directional stems. Verb serialisation is used to express, among other things, purposive motion and changes of state. This thesis is the first major description and documentation of the Ambel language. As such, it will be of considerable interest to typologists and historical linguists, as well as others interested in the languages, cultures, and history of New Guinea. All of the data on which this grammar is based have been archived with both the Endangered Languages Archive, and the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation at Universitas Papua in Manokwari. The data will thus be available to future generations, including the Ambel community themselves.

The motivation for this study is two-pronged. A number of studies on modality or conditionals have put forward the claim that conditionality, and conditionals, have a special relationship with modality. However, this claim has not been empirically investigated, or established quantitatively, nor has the nature of this relationship been examined. Furthermore, although existing classifications of conditionals take account of modal marking, they do not do so consistently, nor do they take account of all modality types. This study, therefore, examines the relation of conditionals to modality using the written BNC, and develops two complementary metrics for the extent of modal marking (modal load): modal density and modalisation spread. It establishes the modal load in a random sample of if-conditionals, and compares it to that of written English, as well as other conditionals, and a number of non-conditional bi-partite constructions. The examination also compares the modal load in different types of if-conditionals, and their two parts (protasis and apodosis), and motivates the development of a typology of ifconditionals. Finally, the study examines the modal nature of if-conditionals in light of two current theories, Lexical Grammar and Construction Grammar. The analysis confirms, and provides a quantitative measure of, the connection between conditionals and modality. It also supports a two-dimensional classification of if-conditionals which takes into account the interaction of the modal function of the conditional and the nature of link holding between its two parts, while providing frequency information on the types established. The analysis also indicates that there is a correlation between types of conditionals and modal load patterns in their respective protases and apodoses. In light of the above, the study proposes a conception of conditional constructions as environments of indeterminacy, drawing on mental space theory and quantum mechanics, and proposes an expansion of the notion of construction family.

The characterization of the Markan disciples has been and continues to be the object of much scholarly reflection and speculation. For many, the Markan author's presentation of Jesus' disciples holds a key, if not the key, to unlocking the purpose and function of the gospel as a whole. Commentators differ as to whether the Markan disciples ultimately serve a pedagogical or polemical function, yet they are generally agreed that the disciples in Mark come off rather badly, especially when compared to their literary counterparts in Matthew, Luke, and John. This narrative-critical study considers the characterization of the Markan disciples within the Sea Crossing movement (Mark 4:1-8:30). While commentators have, on the whole, interpreted the disciples' negative characterization in this movement in terms of lack of faith and/or incomprehension, neither of these, nor a combination of the two, fully accounts for the severity of language leveled against the disciples by the narrator (6:52) and Jesus (8:17-18). Taking as its starting point an argument by Jeffrey B. Gibson (1986) that the harshness of Jesus' rebuke in Mark 8:14-21 is occasioned not by the disciples' lack of faith or incomprehension but by their active resistance to his Gentile mission, this investigation uncovers additional examples of the disciples' resistance to Gentile mission, offering a better account of their negative portrayal within the Sea Crossing movement and helping explain many of their other failures. In short, this study argues that in Mark 4:1-8:26, the disciples are characterized as resistant to Jesus' Gentile mission and to their participation in that mission, the chief consequence being that they are rendered incapable of recognizing Jesus' vocational identity as Israel's Messiah (Thesis A). This leads to a secondary thesis, namely, that in Mark 8:27-30, Peter's recognition of Jesus' messianic identity indicates that the disciples have finally come to accept Jesus' Gentile mission and their participation in it (Thesis B). Chapter One: Introduction: offers a selective review of scholarly treatments of the Markan disciples, which shows that few scholars attribute resistance, let alone purposeful resistance, to the disciples. Chapter Two: The Rhetoric of Repetition: introduces the methodological tools, concepts, and perspectives employed in the study. It includes a section on narrative criticism, which focuses upon the story-as-discoursed and the implied author and reader, and a section on Construction Grammar, a branch of cognitive linguistics founded by Charles Fillmore and further developed by Paul Danove, which focuses upon semantic and narrative frames and case frame analysis. Chapter Three: The Sea Crossing Movement, Mark 4:1-8:30: addresses the question of Markan structure and argues that Mark 4:1-8:30 comprises a single, unified, narrative movement, whose action and plot is oriented to the Sea of Galilee and whose most distinctive feature is the network of sea crossings that transport Jesus and his disciples back and forth between Jewish and Gentile geopolitical spaces. Following William Freedman, Chapter Four: The Literary Motif: introduces two criteria (frequency and avoidability) for determining objectively what constitutes a literary motif and provides the methodological basis and starting point for the analyses performed in chapters five and six. Chapter Five: The Sea Crossing Motif: establishes and then carries out a lengthy narrative analysis of the Sea Crossing motif, which is oriented around Mark's use of ‎θάλασσα (thalassa) and πλοῖον (ploion), and Chapter Six: The Loaves Motif: does the same for The Loaves motif, oriented around Mark's use of ἄρτος (artos). Finally, Chapter Seven: The Narrative Logic of the Disciples (In)comprehension: draws together all narrative, linguistic, and exegetical insights of the previous chapters and offers a single coherent reading of the Sea Crossing movement that establishes Theses A and B.

This dissertation examines cults of personality from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Focusing on the cults of Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy (in power 1922-1943) and Nicolae Ceauşescu of communist Romania (in power 1965-1989), it offers a novel framework for understanding and accounting for longstanding observations regarding such cults’ expressly communicative nature (see e.g. Wedeen 1999; Leese 2007; Márquez 2020; Postoutenko 2022) grounded in an adaptation of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006, 2019; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). At its core, Construction Grammar views the entirety of language to be made up of constructions, which are understood as “conventionalized pairings of form and function” that are stored and organized in an interrelated, hierarchical, mental ‘constructional’ network (Goldberg 2006: 1). Although originally devised specifically with human language in mind, Construction Grammar has recently been applied to broader swaths of communication and semiosis beyond language ‘proper’ such as co-speech gesture, image-text configurations, and other patterns that highlight the frequently multimodal nature of human interaction (see e.g. Steen & Turner 2013; Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017a; Hoffmann 2017b, 2021; Zima & Bergs 2017a,b; Turner 2020, 2022). Aligning itself with such recent extensions, this dissertation considers cultic production (e.g. various conceptually-structured and materially-manifested representations of both Mussolini and Ceauşescu) to constitute cultic constructions that, although operating across communicative modalities, nevertheless often take shape visually in the form of images. To this end, this study explores the possibility of expanding the constructionist enterprise to include not only linguistic or multimodal but also specifically visual constructions into its theoretical apparatus.Within the present approach, such constructions are taken as the basis for all cultic semiosis and communicativity, which are here analyzed and accounted for across a range of artifacts relating to Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults – referred to here as ‘cult constructs’ – that encompass many different ‘kinds’ of cult production: official, regime-sanctioned or -produced constructs (e.g. monuments, official photographs, portraits, posters, etc.), unofficial, subversive constructs (e.g. jokes, caricatures, parodies, and ironies at the leaders’ expense), and also constructs that evince the ‘afterlives’ of both leaders’ cults (i.e. representations that appear today or have appeared in recent years, long after both cults have ceased to dominate public discourse). In this way, and in line with fundamental Construction Grammar principles, it presents a usage-based approach to cult structuration, organization, and manifestation in which cultic communication emerges dynamically both ‘from above’ and ‘from below,’ as well as in their interaction and even once the cult itself has ceased to officially ‘operate.’ Various themes central to cult communicativity are explored across this dissertation’s seven chapters. The first two chapters serve as introductions and overviews, with Chapter 1 addressing cults of personality and their communicative dimensions (as well as providing an introduction to the study as a whole) and Chapter 2 supplying a concise overview of key terms, theories, and ideas from cognitive linguistics that are deployed throughout the subsequent chapters. Chapters 3-5 then present cognitive-linguistic and constructionist analyses of particularly salient aspects of Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults, including the emergence of the multifaceted, polysemous image of both leaders within their respective cult networks (Chapter 3), the pivotal role that conceptual metonymy plays in their cults’ structuration (Chapter 4), and the peculiar manipulation and appropriation of past, present, and future time into both of their cults (Chapter 5). Throughout these chapters, various cultic constructions are posited and explained based on a range of presented (predominantly) visual data, which are often discussed and compared between the two cult contexts in question. While each of the cult constructs analyzed in Chapters 3-5 constitutes a representation of Mussolini or Ceauşescu largely disseminated ‘from above,’ Chapter 6 then highlights the dialogic nature of cult communicativity and analyzes the subversive reappropriation and redeployment of these representations ‘from below’ as instances of creative conceptual transference based in particular cultic constructions (e.g. Mussolini’s Caesarian pretensions, Ceauşescu’s so-called Epocă de Aur ‘golden age’). These redeployments are taken as evidence that, even if one might not ‘believe’ in the content of a particular cultic representation (e.g. Mussolini’s exceptional virility or Ceauşescu’s avowed ordinariness), they are still entrenched in individuals’ minds and socially conventionalized by virtue of their frequent dissemination-cum-exposure so as to (come to) constitute particular, cult-specific constructions. Such reproductions, it is argued, in taking a semantically adulating form and recasting (or, in the present framework, reblending) it as a subversive one (while still largely maintaining that same form), demonstrate the remarkable constructional polysemy that characterizes the semantic structure of personality cults as a form of what I refer to as multimodal-yet-hypervisual ‘authoritative discourse’ (Bakhtin 1994). Chapter 7 then concludes with a consideration of the two cults’ afterlives both in the immediate aftermaths of their respective leaders’ falls from power and in their continued vitality in the present day, opening up questions each into cultic communication, emergence, and evolution, into methods for researching visual and multimodal communication within cognitive linguistics at large, and into the nature of possible ‘visual constructions’ and what they might entail. Finally, it should be noted that this project in its totality presents a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to the study not only of personality cult phenomena, production, and communication but also of broader forms of visual and multimodal semiosis. That is, while the principal framework of examination is supplied by cognitive linguistics (and related disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy), this dissertation and its approach also draw heavily on findings and theories from anthropology, visual culture, political science, literary theory, and history. Consequently, alongside hallmark cognitive-linguistic theories such as Construction Grammar, Frame Semantics (see e.g. Fillmore 1982, 1985), Conceptual Blending Theory (see e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Turner 2014), and Conceptual Metonymy Theory (see e.g. Kövecses & Radden 1998; Barcelona, Pannain & Blanco-Carrión 2018), several other important contributions to language, communication, and semiotics such as performativity (Austin 1962), citationality (Derrida 1988), and Bakhtin’s aforementioned ‘authoritative discourse’ – and many studies that have followed in their wakes – are brought in to enrich, complement, and nuance the ‘cognitive-universal’ side of things (e.g. perception, memory, salience, usage and frequency effects, semantic frames, conceptual entrenchment, etc.) with the ‘culture-specific’ side (e.g. historical or ideological particularities, political and societal structures, various [visual-]cultural considerations, questions of media and reproduction, etc.). It is argued throughout that this kind of blended theoretical approach is essential for capturing the full potential and extent of personality cult communicativity.

The goal of my Master’s Report is to gain a better understanding of how the semantics of the frames are realized syntactically by applying the theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar to parallel texts. The report seeks answers to the following research questions. First, do the English and German translations of the same source text evoke “maximally comparable frames” (Čulo 2013: 142)? Second, to what degree is the assignment of semantic frames realized with different morpho-syntactic constructions? Chapter 1 introduces the topic of the report and the research questions. In Chapter 2, I review prior research on multilingual lexical databases using semantic frames, text analysis and translations through semantic frames and constructions, FrameNet, and the Berkeley constructicon (a repository of grammatical constructions). In Chapter 3, I introduce my methodology for annotation and analysis as well as my data. In addition to the phrase type construction layers and the frame layers developed by Ziem et al. (2014), my annotations consist of the lemma layer, part of speech layer, and layers for other grammatical/schematic constructions including word order construction, tense constructions, number constructions, subject-predicate agreement constructions, and subject-auxiliary-inversion constructions. The data in my Master’s Report consists of five pairs of English and German sentences translated from the French source Le Petit Prince. In Chapter 4, I provide annotations of each of the five sentences from the English translation and the German translation, using annotations I created with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. After I provide the annotation of the first English sentence, I provide a prose description followed by the annotation of the German translation and its prose description. Then, I discuss similarities and differences in how the semantic frames are evoked by different LUs and to what degree the realizations of constructions diverge between the two sentences. Chapter 5 summarizes my results and discusses future research on the topic.

Recent English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research has started to document the general characteristics of academic writing by international scholars from different linguistic (similectal) and disciplinary backgrounds, as well as the complex patterns of variation that shape these characteristics. However, not only is this line of research in its infancy, studies are also generally small-scale, resulting in a limited understanding of the complexities of ELF academic writing. Adopting a Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, this study aims to comprehensively examine the distinctive constructions, here defined as multi-word sequences with discourse-functional properties in three corpora of academic writing from 50 disciplines in the social and natural sciences. These corpora are: (1) an unedited ELF corpus of 140 texts by non-native scholars from nine different similects (L1s) in the social and natural sciences; (2) an edited ELF corpus that matches the similects and disciplines in the unedited ELF corpus; and (3) an edited English as a Native Language (ENL) corpus that matches the disciplines in the ELF corpora. A range of corpus analytic methods were used to identify distinctive constructions around key function words. The target constructions were first analyzed in terms of forms and functions across corpora. Then, similectal and disciplinary variation in the use of these constructions were investigated via robust multivariate statistical tests. The findings support previous research in that ELF writers use conventional features of academic writing such as nominals, and passives more often than ENL writers. Their use of constructions including low-frequency prepositions with nominal complements, predicative adjectives, and determiners, however, show remarkable disciplinary and similectal variation. As a result, conventionality and simplification are argued to be two important “universals” of ELF, that is, general features across different disciplines and similects, regarding high-frequency constructions. However, the high degree of similectal and disciplinary variation in the use of the low-frequency constructions points to the complexity inherent in ELF as the only “universal” characterizing their usage. Implications of the study for future research on the diversity of written scientific communication and pedagogy are discussed in light of the findings.

The expression What are you waiting for? elicits two different meanings, either a request for information or a hortatory command. When the ground carries one of three triggers the hortatory meaning is achieved. These triggers are: conditional sentence, imperative sentence, and situational sentence. Each of these triggers sets up a mental space carrying an activity that can be acted upon. The emergent property of conceptual integration between the present speech act and the future mental space is a mental space carrying concepts of start and stop. The progressive construction is profiled by the blended mental space evoking a hortatory meaning. Therefore, the hortatory meaning of this expression is to stop waiting and start doing. This thesis presents a construction grammar analysis of What are you waiting for? as a special interest star case of the Wh+Progressive construction. To that end, the Wh+Progressive construction is presented in the analysis and triggers that prompt the hortatory meaning are delineated.

In this dissertation, I seek to better understand the nature of the relationship between meanings expressed in gesture and those expressed in speech. This research focuses on the use of cyclic gestures in English. Cyclic gestures are manual co-speech gestures that are characterized by a circular movement of the hand or arm. Despite cyclic gestures being commonplace in many types of spoken discourse, no previous studies to date have specifically explored the functions these gestures serve in English. Broadly, this dissertation addresses two questions: (1) What functions do cyclic gestures serve in interaction in English, and (2) how are cyclic gestures integrated with other meaningful units in multimodal expressions? Using data collected from television talk shows, I examine the functional-semantic properties of spoken language expressions that accompany cyclic gestures and identify properties of meaning that repeatedly align with the expression of the gestures. I also explore relationships between fine-grained formal properties of cyclic gestural expressions and functional-semantic properties of the co-expressed speech. The results of the study find a number of significant relationships between gesture forms and spoken language meanings. For example, when cyclic gestures were expressed with spoken constructions serving an evaluative function, they were significantly associated with bimanual asynchronous rotations and finger spreading (p < .001) with a moderately strong effect size (φc = 0.26). Drawing on the patterns identified in the analysis of the data, I analyze cyclic gestures as component symbolic structures that profile schematic processes. I argue that formal properties that accompany cyclic movement gestures (e.g., handshapes and locations of the hands in space) have the potential to be meaningful. Data from English suggest that cyclic gestures can integrate simultaneously with other symbolic structures in gesture to form complex gestural expressions (i.e., symbolic assemblies). Extending theoretical tools from the framework of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991), I explore how the schematic meaning of cyclic gestures is instantiated in specific complex gestural expressions and how those gestural constructions interact with symbolic structures in speech. This work challenges traditional assumptions about the nature of gesture meaning, which treats gestures as simplex, holistic structures. Instead, the findings of this research suggest that gestures are best analyzed as constructions.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpus studies utilizing phraseological, frequency, and association strength approaches to phraseological unit identification have shown how the use of phraseological units varies across proficiency levels and develops over time. However, these methods suffer from several limitations, such as a reliance on native speaker intuition, a limited focus on contiguous word sequences, and a neglect of part of speech information in association strength calculation. This study seeks to address these limitations by defining lexical collocations as constructions (henceforth “collconstructions”) within the framework of Construction Grammar and investigating their cross-sectional variation and longitudinal development in two corpora of L2 writing. The cross-sectional corpus consisted of beginner and intermediate EFL learner texts assessed for overall writing proficiency, while the longitudinal corpus contained freewrites produced by ESL learners over the course of one year. Contiguous and non-contiguous adjective-noun, verb-noun, and adverb-adjective collconstruction tokens were extracted from each learner text in the two learner corpora. Each learner text was assessed for multiple constructional and collostructional indices of collconstruction production. Constructional indices included type frequencies, token frequencies, and normalized entropy scores for each collconstruction category. Collostructional indices consisted of proportion scores for different categories of adjective-noun, adverb-adjective, and verb-noun collconstruction types and tokens based on covarying collexeme scores calculated using frequency information from an academic reference corpus. Variation across proficiency levels was evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis consisted of examining variation in the production of specific functional collconstruction subcategories from a Usage-based Second Language Acquisition perspective. The quantitative analysis consisted of the calculation of an ordinal logistic regression in order to determine whether any indices of collconstruction production were predictive of L2 writing quality. Longitudinal development at the group level was investigated through the use of linear mixed effects models. Development for individual learners was examined from a Dynamic Systems Theory perspective that focuses on the role of variability in language development as well as interconnected development for multiple indices of collconstruction production. This study has important implications for future research on L2 phraseology research and second language acquisition research as well as phraseology pedagogy.

Pure synonymy is a myth. This is true in the lexicon of a language as well as its grammar. As such, why do grammars of Dutch label the following two forms below as synonymous? Unsplit: Daarmee heb ik een probleem. Therewith have I a problem. Split: Daar heb ik een probleem mee. There have I a problem with. "I have a problem with that."Calling these two forms above "the same" is an oversimplification. In my dissertation, Itest for difference in meaning between the forms and the motivation to choose one form over the other. To accomplish this goal, Iuse a corpus-based approach integrated with tests from Construction Grammar. We analyze these data in R (a statistics computing language) and Excel. This dissertation includes four tests, all complete. Preliminary findings underline a difference in meaning and provide motivation for the two forms. This is significant, as the current state of research suggests no real difference or meaning. Only one study, Honselaar (1994), discusses any possible variation in meaning. Additionally, emerging studies in linguistics frequently utilize larger data sets. This dissertation supports the shift toward more quantifiable data coupled with trained qualitative analysis. The quantifiable tests show a meaning difference, questioning the traditional analysis. Unsplit forms exhibit a shift in discourse, and split show continuation thereof. Regarding motivation for the two forms, the data show clauses with verbs of low use frequency tend to be unsplit, suggesting that higher frequency verbs are more likely to occur with split forms. Frequency tends to be understood and decoded quicker (Fenk-Oczlon, 2001), and thus the listener/reader is generally able to parse the second half of the pronominal adverb, namely the preposition, before its utterance. This suggests that it would be easier to continue forward in the discourse if the form is split. These findings underline the growing need for further development of corpus-based linguistics studies. They welcome the movement of linguistics toward more empirical approaches to language.

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role.

Voice is one of the most complex grammatical phenomena expressed in human language. Broadly, voice is concerned with how the functional relations between participants in a clause are mapped onto grammatical roles in different ways. While voice has been widely studied (e.g., Fox & Hopper 1994, Givón 1994), specifically the passive voice (e.g., Haspelmath 1990, Givón 1994, Shibatani 1988, Croft 2001 chapter 8), the antipassive voice has not been studied in such detail. There has been work on the definition and typology of antipassive constructions and their morphology (Foley & Van Valin 1984:168-181, Givón 1994, Dixon & Aikhenvald 1997, Brus 1992, Cooreman 1994, Janic 2013), but none of these studies have looked at antipassives from a purely functional perspective. This study investigates the antipassive within the framework of the typologically-grounded Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). My work on the antipassive is based on a functional, as opposed to a structural or combined structural-functional definition: a two-participant event in which the patient is of lower topicality than in the corresponding basic voice construction in the language. Thus, unlike those in previous studies, this definition does not require that the verb in the antipassive construction carry any additional morphology. Constructions fitting this functional definition were examined in 70 languages, spanning over 25 different language families and four geographical macro areas. Some of the syntactic strategies found correspond to previously identified constructions: Indefinite Null Instantiation (INI) in construction grammar (Fillmore 1986) and the Conative Alternation (Levin 1993). Many antipassive constructions code additional functions; some of which pattern with syntactic coding. Correlations between the syntactic strategy and the functional characteristics of the patient were found. It was found that omission of the patient without the option of including it (INI) and incorporation of the patient into the verb occurred exclusively with non-individuated patients; expression of the patient as an oblique with a zero-coded verb (the Conative Alternation) occurred exclusively with less-affected patients. Cross-linguistically, these strategies tend to pattern with certain semantic classes of verbs.

Drawing on data from verbs of Change (alter, transform) and Theft (steal, shoplift), my dissertation investigates and compares verb classes along a variety of dimensions. A common assumption in research on verbal syntax and semantics states that verbs with similar meanings exhibit similar syntactic behavior (Fillmore 1967, Levin 1993). For example, many Change verbs can occur in transitive constructions with into PPs (The witch {changed/turned/transformed} the prince into a frog). This systematicity has led scholars to propose verb classes, such as Change verbs, which are predictive of a verb’s syntactic behavior. However, recent research (Boas 2008, Faulhaber 2011) has challenged this assumption on the basis of data in which semantically similar verbs differ in their grammatical behavior (The prince {turned/??changed/*transformed} red). The introductory chapters review research on verb classification and argument realization, revealing that cognitive and usage-based theories such as Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar are most useful for addressing the three major goals of the dissertation. The first goal is to account for both regularity and differences in verb classes. After assessing the precise meanings and valency behavior of individual Change verbs, I develop a method for formulating verb classes and lexical entries at various levels of granularity to account for both shared and unpredictable behavior of individual verbs. The next major goal is to determine whether verb classes exhibit similar meanings and constructional behavior across languages, which I address by comparing the semantics and valency constructions found for English Change verbs with those of German Change verbs. Finally, I compare the Change verb analysis to a similar analysis of Theft verbs in order to determine whether the semantic domain and relative semantic richness of verb classes influences the degree of language-specific and cross-linguistic uniformity of verb classes.

This dissertation is a study of metaphor in usage: metaphor in language, metaphor in gesture, and how they interact. Gesture provides a route to study both the cognition associated with language and the domain-generality of cognitive processes. While English speakers may be producing metaphoric manner verbs due to the lexicalization patterns of their language, are they necessarily thinking in terms of metaphoric manner? This is difficult to judge when looking at language alone. To answer this question, we turn to metaphoric gesture.Metaphoric gestures, in which the gesture represents the source domain of a conceptual metaphor, are well-known but under-studied (Cienki and Müller, 2008b). Iconic gestures conveying information about a motion event are known to interact with the syntactic and semantic structure of speech; speakers of languages that express manner of motion in the verb gesture differently than speakers of languages that primarily express path of motion in the verb. Metaphoric usages of motion in language – prices falling, hopes rising, time flying – also interact with the grammatical patterns of language. However, we know little about how metaphoric motion in gesture interacts with grammar. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on metaphor in language. In Chapter 2 I propose to represent metaphors as a complex network of frames, mappings, and bindings as implemented in the MetaNet Metaphor Repository (Dodge et al., 2015). This advances the representation of conceptual metaphors to a level that interfaces more accurately with representations of frames and constructions in FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2006) and Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen and Chang, 2005). In turn, this enables the detailed analysis of metaphors and metaphor systems, as exemplified by the Location Event Structure Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) case study in Chapter 3. This corpus-based study is one of the first to make use of the MetaNet method for large-scale automatic metaphor identification and annotation. This approach reveals not only how the metaphor system is evoked in language, but further illustrates the conceptual structure of the metaphor. I demonstrate that although English, as a satellite-framed language, privileges manner in its lexicalization of motion events, metaphoric English motion backgrounds manner and foregrounds path. The foregrounding of path information in linguistic realization of metaphoric motion runs counter to the privileging of manner in English lexicalization patterns. This finding lays the groundwork for the investigation of the same metaphor system in gesture.In Part Two, I focus on metaphor in co-speech gesture. I investigate metaphoric motion-evoking metaphoric gestures using two complementary approaches. Chapter 4 uses a corpus approach; I analyze a parallel corpus of video gesture data in which speakers use a motion verb either literally or metaphorically in their speech while producing a co-expressive representational gesture. To analyze the corpora, I develop a set of annotation guidelines and then demonstrate the benefits of taking an image-schematic approach to gesture analysis. I argue that the image schema is the most appropriate level of structure in analyzing the form and meaning of metaphoric gestures. Results of this image schema analysis suggest that, reflecting the English language data in Chapter 3, these metaphoric gestures emphasize path and do not represent the manner of motion.Chapter 5 is the first study to take an experimental approach to metaphoric gesture that uses non-metaphoric stimuli. Participants were given short stories about state change, such as prices decreasing or grades improving, to read and re-tell to a friend; half of the stimuli contained metaphoric language and half did not. Results from this study demonstrated the viability of this methodology in eliciting both metaphoric speech and gesture, and supported those of Chapter 4. I find that speakers are more likely produce metaphoric gestures if they are also producing metaphoric language – even if the gesture evokes a different metaphor than the speech does.I unify my analyses of metaphoric motion in speech and gesture in a multi-modal Embodied Construction Grammar analysis of both co-expressive and complementary metaphoric co-speech gestures. I represent both the meaning and form of the gesture and the meaning and form of the speech including frame structure, argument structure, and metaphoric structure. This analysis provides the first formal representation of a multi-modal utterance in a construction grammar and an innovative approach to the unification of the construction of multi-modal meaning.

This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We develop these connections into an integrated whole, opening up the way for a research program in the new field of “cognitive oral poetics”, and relating it to a number of very topical questions in present-day cognitive science (creativity, language acquisition, multimodality). The conclusion vouches for a closer collaboration of literary theorists, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the establishment of cognitive oral poetics.

This study deals with the historical development of Mandarin minimizers through examining their synchronic distribution. The main source of Mandarin minimizers, a distinct class of negative polarity items (NPIs), is ‘one’-phrases which are composed of the numeral ‘one’, a unit word, and a noun. The development of ‘one’-phrases as minimizers from Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Early Mandarin, to Modern Mandarin makes strong links among important linguistic issues such as NPI licensing, word order, numeral-classifier phrases, and focus constructions.The diachronic development of the ‘one’-phrases as minimizers is analyzed from a constructional approach. The present study shows that the unit of these diachronic changes is the whole ‘one’-phrase construction instead of merely the lexical items. This constructional approach reflects both compositionality and non-compositionality of Mandarin ‘one’-phrases as minimizers at different stages of development. Each component of the ‘one’-phrases contributes its semantics to the whole construction, while the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic relations among the three elements have changed over time. The various functions of the ‘one’-phrases, including as a numeral phrase, a modifier phrase, and a referential phrase, are the result of ‘one’-phrases being associated with extant constructions in Mandarin Chinese, forming a constructional network. The hierarchical network accounts for how ‘one’-phrases have developed their polysemous model.Results of corpus/text analyses show that, in general, Mandarin minimizers have gradually developed the tendency of appearing in a preverbal object position. However, when Mandarin existential construction is involved, they tend to stay in the postverbal position. I argue that the distribution of minimizers has been shaped by the information structure of VO and OV word orders. The skewed distribution of minimizers in different construals reflects how focus is structured in Mandarin. The Mandarin OV construction has an obligatory preverbal object focus, while the existential construction profiles the postverbal object. When ‘one’-phrases under negation appear in the OV construction, they must be interpreted as minimizers. This combination guarantees a scalar reading, which provides the environment for the additive particle 也 yě and the exhaustive operator 都 dōu to develop their scalar interpretation. It also accounts for why minimizers in the Modern Mandarin OV construction require the accompanying scalar particles.The requirement of focus-sensitive scalar particles for ‘one’-phrases as minimizers is also observed in other numeral classifier languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Malay. A typological comparison of these languages shows that focus is a crucial condition for licensing ‘one’-phrases as minimizers. Moreover, the ordering of the components of ‘one’-phrases combined with the position of the focus-sensitive particles results in different scopes of focus-imposed minimizers. The difference in scope determines how scalar inferences of the minimizer in question are structured. The inferences from minimizers can be construed by either a type or a quantity contrast. This analysis shows that the scalar particles associated with minimizers in these languages come from the same source, an additive particle, which is associated with alternatives for scalar inferences. To summarize, the constructional account employed in this study provides a quantitative treatment of how language change originates in language use with particular attention paid to numeral phrases, word order, focus, and negation. The development of ‘one’-phrases as minimizers exemplifies the incremental process of diachronic changes within a construction network. The analysis of ‘one’-phrases as minimizers provides an answer to why they are crosslinguistically recognized as strong NPIs by integrating focal construals, referentiality of numeral phrases, and scalarity.

Latin authors of the classical period used sub rarely and purposefully in a temporal construction like a polarity item with the dichotomous nouns nox and lux to convey the relative quantity of atmospheric light at dusk and dawn, implying a scale at its minimum value within an absolute frame of reference. This construction comes out of the spatial semantics of sub as “under” through a manipulation of metaphor, directional mappings from vertical to horizontal axes, and up-down and center-periphery image schemata. Beginning with the embodied experience of the sky as “above”, projections onto topological features such a mountains allows for negative and inceptive uses of sub for pragmatic scalar construal and implicature.

I examine the evolution of constructions involved in the emergence of be about to, used to indicate an immediate future event. Using three corpora from different time periods going as far back as the Old English period, I take synchronic snapshots of the gradual change in constructions leading up to the present day usage of be about to. The selected corpora parallel Disney's (2009) account of the grammaticalization of be going to for the purpose of comparison. It is found that the emergence of be about to is a complex story involving the development of multiple constructions through time. These findings demonstrate the value of examining language change in a construction grammar framework. While it is helpful to understand that constructions, not just words, undergo grammaticalization, one should also recognize that the emergence of a new construction always involves an interaction between several different constructions. Consequently, determining where the grammaticalization process begins is a complicated endeavor that requires thorough examination the complexities of the older constructions from which a new construction emerges.

We examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during comprehension of the English Causative. The main goal was to examine ERP responses to grammatical violations that reflect a mismatch between the verb and the sentence structure. The second goal was to compare effects among native English speakers (NES) and native Spanish speakers learning English as a second language (ESL). We expected group differences to reflect different neurolinguistic processes, particularly for sentences that are well-formed in English, but not in Spanish. The English Causative is a grammatical construction that is syntactically ditransitive ('SubjNP–V–ObjNP–PP') and means '[someone]–[CAUSED-by-doing-X]–[something]–[change-of-state]'. An example is the sentence, Jack sent his sister to the store, which implies that Jack (SubjNP) caused his sister (ObjNP) to undergo a change of location (PP) by sending her (V). Importantly, only certain verbs are permitted within this construction: In English, ditransitive verbs (e.g., send), are allowed, as are alternating unaccusatives, such as walk (Jack walked his sister to the store). Non-alternating unaccusatives, such as arrive, are disallowed, even when the sentence has a meaningful interpretation (*Jack arrived his sister to the store). To comprehend these structures as they unfold in time, a language-user must therefore reconcile word- and clause-level constraints and dynamically update his or her understanding throughout the sentence. In the present study we asked nine NES and eight ESL participants to view a series of sentences, presented one phrase at a time, while we recorded their EEG. Each sentence was intransitive ('SubjNP–V' ), transitive ('SubjNP–V–ObjNP'), or ditransitive ('SubjNP–V–PP'), and was followed by a response probe. The task was to say whether each sentence was acceptable. Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) and processed to create ERPs. We had four predictions. First, we predicted that the ObjNP following an intransitive verb would elicit a P600 effect, reflecting a syntactic violation (e.g., *Jack walked/arrived his sister). Second, for non-alternating (arrive-type) verbs, we predicted that a subsequent PP (e.g., *Jack arrived his sister to the store) would elicit a P600 effect, whereas Alternating (walk-type) verbs would elicit a minimal or no P600. Third, we expected that ESL partiticpants, like NES participants, would show an P600 effect to the ObjNP for sentences containing intransitives. However, in contrast with English, we predicted that the final PP would elicit an error-related response among ESL participants for walk-type verbs, as well as for arrive-type verbs. Study results partly confirmed our predictions. The two groups showed similar patterns of acceptability, although ESL participants were slower overall. As predicted, the ObjNP elicited a P600 effect for arrive-type verbs for NES participants. Interestingly, ESL participants exhibited N400 rather than P600 effects to the ObjNP. Further, in response to the PP, both groups exhibited N400 effects to arrive-type verbs, without a subsequent P600 effect. In summary, although their behavioral patterns did not differ, ERPs revealed group differences in verb–construction mismatches at different points in the sentence. The pattern of N400 and P600 responses was partly unexpected. We consider implications for syntax-semantic interactions, integration of word- and clause-level information, second-language learning, and functional correlates of N400 and P600 effects.

This paper examines two English polyverbal constructions, COME to V2 and GET to V2, as exemplified in Examples 1 and 2, respectively. (1) the senator came to know thousands of his constituents (2) Little Johnny got to eat ice cream after every little league game. Previous studies considered these types of constructions (though come and get as used here have not been sufficiently studied) as belonging to a special class of complement constructions, in which the infinitive is regarded as instantiating a separate, subordinate predication from that of the “matrix” or leftward finite verb. These constructions, however, exhibit systematic deviation from the various criteria proposed in previous research. This study uses the American National Corpus to investigate the statistical propensities of the target phenomena via lexico-syntactic (collostructional analysis) and morpho-syntactic (binary logistic regression) features, as captured through the lens of construction grammar.

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the coordination/subordination distinction for the purposes of clause linkage typology has received much attention, the nature of the semantic distinctions has received comparatively little. In this dissertation, I investigate polysemous connectives--connectives that express a range of related semantic and pragmatic uses. I argue that adequate comparisons require categories such as cause and sequence to be defined relative to a finely articulated semantic-pragmatic framework able to capture both event-structural as well as discourse-structural distinctions. The argument is based on a detailed analysis of four polysemous connectives in Korean, -ese, -unikka, -taka, and -myense, which cover a wide range of meanings, from temporal relations such as sequence and simultaneity, to causal, conditional, and concessive relations.The proposed semantic-pragmatic framework is developed through the analysis and comparison of Korean -ese and -unikka, which have been considered similar in both having sequential and causal meanings, but are nonetheless used very differently. For instance, causal -unikka is generally more flexible than causal -ese in the kinds of causal relations it can express, which include epistemic or speech act causal relations. However, -ese rather than -unikka is preferred for expressing causal links between successive real-world events. Independent analyses of each connective's entire polysemy network show that while -ese's different meanings arise from multiple ways of conceptualizing two events as a single complex event, -unikka's meanings stem from different aspects of the relationship between a subjective viewpoint and the content that is observed. Facilities for modeling both of these areas of meaning are combined into an integrated framework. The resulting analyses, in addition to expanding empirical coverage, explain why these connectives, with apparently similar meanings, are used in very different ways.This framework is then applied to the comparative analysis of Korean -taka and -myense, which are typically used to express interruptive and simultaneous relations between events, respectively. The connective -taka also has successive, cotemporal, and causal uses, as well as a predictive conditional use, while -myense also has cotemporal, additive, and concessive uses. Differences in volitionality are observed to be crucial to the semantic characterization of the two connectives. The full range of facilities integrated into the framework is shown to be needed to account for the factors that condition both connectives' various senses and behaviors. For example, both connectives allow past tense to be marked in their dependent clauses. However, -taka with past tense marking expresses succession rather than interruption, while -myense with past tense marking expresses concession rather than simultaneity. Other issues include the greater flexibility of interpretation afforded by both connectives' nonvolitional uses, conditional -taka's ability to make only undesirable predictions, and the connectives' violable subject identity constraints.The final chapter examines the syntax of these Korean connective constructions from the perspective of a multivariate approach to clause linkage typology. The connectives -ese, -unikka, -taka, and -myense, differentiated by their various meanings, are assessed according to 13 independent variables. A number of variables examine the ways in which the constructions limit the scope of markers in the main clause that indicate illocutionary force, tense and status, or negation. There are also variables that capture properties of the dependent clause, such as whether it allows for the marking of illocutionary force, or whether the dependent clause allows question words or for a constituent to be extracted. The investigation reveals a number of trends with respect to the syntactic correlates of sense distinctions. Certain sense distinctions, such as differences in aspectual alignment and volitionality, do not yield differences in syntax. However, there are other distinctions, such as the difference between content relations and grounding relations, that seem to correlate with significant differences. The dissertation concludes with discussion on the methodological implications of the study for a cross-linguistic typology.

Traditional associations between syntax and grammar include the notions of anaphora, deixis, ellipsis, speech acts, and information structure. However, there exist numerous other layers of communicative organization, including the structure of conversation and turn-taking, quasi-ritualized interactions, and genre and register. Long recognized as analytically important categories in the fields of Conversation Analysis, contrastive pragmatics, Interactional Sociolinguistics, and others, they have been largely ignored in linguistic and especially syntactic theory. This study aims to begin an integration of formal and social/interactional approaches to linguistics from the perspective of a flexible and precise grammatical framework: Sign-based Construction Grammar.Through a series of close studies of grammatical constructions in English and Japanese, it is shown that grammatical structure and the interactional contexts in which language is used have a far closer and more integrated relationship than is usually assumed. I introduce the script as a way to capture the fact that not only can language reflect context, but context can exert a significance force on speakers' linguistic choices. The case studies proceed from relatively low-level contextual features to higher levels of organization, showing at each point the necessity to recognize grammatical constructions sensitive to that level of interaction.Chapter 1 introduces the question of the syntax-context interface. Chapters 2 and 3 present a syntactic representation for lexically- and constructionally-licensed argument omission (null instantiation). Aside from contextual features normally associated with ellipsis, it is seen that to fully account for argument omission it is necessary to incorporate into grammatical constructions references to a fine-grained categorization of speech acts and attitudinal and epistemic stances. Chapters 4 and 5 show that broader regions of conversational context are crucial to licensing constructions. Chapter 4 examines means of providing identification in situations where there is no visual contact (on the phone, at the front door). Chapter 5 illustrates the existence of Japanese and English constructions which function to project future linguistic actions. Chapter 6 extends the framework to consideration of persistent contextual features, namely kinship relations, and how these determine or influence linguistic choices in referring to other family members. Chapter 7 concludes and discusses directions for future work.

The study investigates how Turkish speakers of English use the auxiliary verb constructions regarding tense, aspect and voice. Also, the theme of the study brings together Construction Grammar and second language acquisition (SLA) studies. In this context, the study investigates if there were similarities or differences between the produced constructions of native speakers and Turkish speakers of English. In addition to this, the constructions produced by the Turkish speakers of English were also analyzed in terms of appropriateness, and any ill-formed constructions were scrutinized in detail to understand if deviations occurred because of negative transfer of Turkish grammar. For the purpose of the study, a particularly designed questionnaire was implemented to 34 Turkish speakers of English and 11 native speakers of American English. During the analysis, the obtained results were analyzed in a combined analysis section and in a qualitative analysis section. The analysis of the data showed that Turkish speakers of English used the passive voice constructions and perfect aspect constructions less than the native speakers, and they used the progressive aspect constructions more than the native speakers. However, the tense preferences of the native speakers and Turkish speakers of English were similar. Also, in terms of transfer theory, especially the qualitative analysis of deviations pointed out the signs of negative transfer in the interlanguage of Turkish speakers of English.

Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a non-polysemy-based analysis of various verb `alternations' (Levin 1993). In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument realization patterns are analyzed as resulting from composition of the same verb meaning with different meaningful argument structure constructions. This compositional analysis raises some important semantic questions: Which specific elements of verb and argument structure construction meanings motivate their composition? And what is the precise nature of the meaning that results from this composition? I argue that to answer these questions, it is essential that we look more closely at the underlying conceptual systems utilized by these constructions. In this dissertation, I examine a set of simple single clause sentence examples which describe a variety of basic experiences involving motion, change of location, action, force, causation, and affectedness. One key assumption that the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) makes about language understanding concerns simulation semantics, the idea that the neural circuitry we use to understand descriptions of experiences is closely similar to that which is activated by the experiences themselves (Feldman 2006). Accordingly, I use linguistic, neuroscientific, and other forms of evidence to define a lattice of interconnected schemas that represent schematic structures and interrelations associated with the types of experiences described in these examples, and use these schemas in the meaning representations of the verb and argument structure constructions instantiated in these examples. In addition, the grammar described in this dissertation includes various word-level, phrasal and clause-level constructions, along with schemas to represent their meanings, all of which are represented using the Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) formalism (Bergen and Chang 2005, Feldman et al. 2010). Significantly, use of this formalism has made it possible to utilize many of the schemas and constructions in this grammar in a computational implementation of a compositional constructional analysis of sentence meaning. This implementation, called the Constructional Analyzer (Bryant 2008) determines the best-fitting interpretation of an utterance in context based on a consideration of syntactic, semantic, and contextually-specified constraints. The composed meanings of the constructions instantiated in this best fit interpretation serve as a semantic specification for the simulation of the event described by the utterance (simulation is not carried out as part of this implementation). Through simulation, the relatively schematic meanings specified by the constructions instantiated in a given utterance give rise to a much richer and fuller understanding of that utterance, via activation of additional conceptual structure related to an understander's experiences, beliefs, etc.The schemas and constructions that comprise the grammar discussed in this dissertation have many complex interrelations. One important benefit of using the ECG formalism is that computational implementations facilitate the development of an internally consistent, wide-coverage, complex grammar. In this respect, it is similar to other unification grammars, such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994) and LFG (Dalrymple 2001). However, unlike these other grammars, ECG has a deep commitment to embodied semantics, and is consistent with the NTL theoretical framework. Moreover, as the schemas and constructions presented in this dissertation illustrate, this formalism makes possible the integrated expression of several important cognitive linguistic insights, including those related to recurrent schematic conceptual structure such as: (1) image schemas (Johnson 1987, Lakoff 1987) and frames (Fillmore 1982); (2) basic patterns of cognitive organization such as prototypes (Rosch 1975, 1978) and radial categories of A-S constructions (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995), and; (3) different attention-related phenomena such as perspective and profiling (Talmy 1996; Langacker 1987, 1991). Together, the different elements described above enable the development of a grammar that supports compositional constructional analyses of a range of different sentence examples that instantiate various combinations of different verb and argument structure constructions. Significantly, these analyses capture the sometimes subtle similarities and differences in the event conceptualizations described by these examples. Moreover, this compositional account of sentence meaning also provides a compositional account of semantic roles that enable us to recognize a variety of cross-cutting generalizations that can be made about these roles.

The acquisition and the felicitous use of discourse-pragmatic devices is an important milestone for L2 learners. This study utilises Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase, and Kawaguchi, 2005) as the language development framework to investigate the acquisition of English passive constructions by Mandarin L1 learners of English L2. The study aims to investigate the development of various English passive constructions in the interlanguage of Mandarin L1 learners of English L2. The hypotheses are that learners at lower stages of development will use only the active construction, and that passive constructions will be more effortful for learners to process due to the greater processing loads involved in the required argument grammatical function mapping. Furthermore, it is hypothesised that learners' development of various constructions under the passive voice category will proceed in a sequential fashion.