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The paper gives a detailed description of the "A egy N" construction in Hungarian based on a thorough investigation of carefully collected corpus data. Utterances containing this construction express a speaker-related (mostly derogatory, but sometimes appreciative) value judgement. The morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic characteristics of the construction are presented. Furthermore, some formally and pragmatically similar constructions are also discussed and some misleading pieces of information in the earlier literature are debunked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alustath is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article aims at providing an inventory of Old English verbs of depriving that is motivated not only by the shared meaning components but also by grammatical behaviour. The theoretical basis of this work combines the framework of verb classes and alternations and Role and Reference Grammar. The main conclusion is that the verbs āniman, bedǣlan, beniman, berēafian, berȳpan, bescierian and (ge)rēafian are the best candidates for class membership, considering the constructions and the morpho-syntactic alternations on which they are found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the syntax and semantics of Old English Try verbs within the framework of verb classes and alternations and the theory of Role and Reference Grammar. The analysis focuses on class membership and includes meaning components and argument realization (linking in simplex and complex constructions and alternations). The inventory of verbs under analysis comprises (ge)cneordlǣcan, (ge)fandian, fundian, hīgian, onginnan and (ge)tilian. The main conclusion is that the class of Old English Try verbs is syntactically and semantically consistent, even though evidence for the nominalisation alternation has been found for hīgian only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to provide an inventory of Old English verbs belonging to the class of learning on the grounds of their common semantic components and shared grammatical behavior. The framework of verb classes and alternations and Role and Reference Grammar provide the theoretical basis for this study. Both textual and lexicographical sources have been used to select the data for the analysis of the linking between semantics and syntax with these verbs. The main conclusion of the article is that, considering the constructions and alternations in which they are found in Old English, the verbs (ge)frignan, (ge)leornian, ofācsian, and onfindan are the best candidates for membership of the class of verbs of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the construction mira que + clause and analyzes the discursive functions it develops when it is fixed. Using a macrosyntactic methodology and based on the fundamentals of construction grammar, the article describes the distribution and behavior of this construction and the procedural contents it develops. In some contexts, mira que acts as intensifier of a valuation word. In others it is combined with gerunds, participles or nouns with negative content. It appears in these cases as a suspended statement. In combination with other sentences it may introduce a justifying argument or a concessive anti-oriented meaning. The distributional context predetermines the argumentative orientation of the construction and makes it work as a discursive element more linked to the procedural dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a case study of grammatical constructions and how their function in a single language (Russian) can be captured through semantic and syntactic classification. Since 2016 an on-going joint project of UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow has been collecting and analyzing multiword grammatical constructions of Russian. The main product is the Russian Constructicon (https://site.uit.no/russian-constructicon/), which, with over two thousand two hundred constructions (and more being continuously added), is arguably the largest openly available constructicon resource for any language. The combination of this large size with depth of analysis, containing both syntactic and semantic tags, makes it possible to view the interrelation of constructions as families and to discover trends in their behavior. Our annotation includes 53 semantic tags of varying frequency, with three tags that are by far more frequent than all the rest, accounting for 30% of the entire inventory of the Russian Constructicon. These three semantic types are Assessment, Attitude, and Intensity, all of which convey a speaker's evaluation of a topic, in contrast to most of the other tags (such as Time, Manner, and Comparison). Assessment and Attitude constructions are investigated in greater detail in this article. Secondary semantic tags reveal that negative evaluation among these two semantic types is more than twice as frequent as positive evaluation. Examples of negative evaluations are: for Assessment VP tak sebe , as in Na pianino ja igraju tak sebe "I play the piano so-so [lit. thus self]"; for Attitude s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo (NP-Gen) , as in S menja xvatit "I'm fed up [lit. from me enough]." In terms of syntax, the most frequent syntactic types of constructions in the Russian Constructicon are clausal constructions [constituting an independent clause like s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo (NP-Gen) ] and constructions with the anchor in the role of adverbial modifier (like VP tak sebe). Our semantic and syntactic classification of this large body of Russian constructions makes it possible to postulate patterns of grammatical constructions constituting a radial category with central and peripheral types. Classification of large numbers of constructions reveals systematic relations that structure the grammar of a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the syntax and semantics of Old English End verbs on the basis of the framework of verb classes and alternations and the theory of Role and Reference Grammar. The analysis focuses on class membership and includes meaning components and argument realisation--linking in simplex and complex constructions and alternations. The inventory of verbs under analysis comprises ablinnan, ætstandan, blinnan, for(e)sacan, geblinnan, linnan, ofersittan, oflinnan, oðstillan and (ge)trucian. The main conclusion is that the morphologically related verbs ablinnan and blinnan are the strongest candidates for End verbs, given the syntactic constructions and morphosyntactic alternations in which they are found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present paper reports the results of two corpus studies of multi-word verbs in the context of Cognitive Construction Grammar . The main claim of the constructionist approach adopted in this paper is that the meaning of specific multi-word verbs (MWVs), that is, combinations of a verb proper and a particle (spatial adverb, preposition, or both), overlaps the meaning of the argument structure construction in which it appears, thereby facilitating the positing of motivated categories. This theoretical claim is supported by the results of a two-staged corpus study. The first part of the study uses the affordances of the online interface of the 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that the identified MWVs in the corpus are skewed toward motional usages in spoken registers. The list of frequent MWVs provides the data for the second study. In this case, the results confirm the hypothesis that MWVs overlap specific argument structure constructions following distinct attachment patterns. This finding also suggests that argument structure constructions are high-order constructions that interface thought and language at a deep cognitive level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a description of the alternations in which the location argument participates in English and accounts for its various realizations from the point of view of Role and Reference Grammar. The analysis of the multiple alternating behaviour of the location argument in various transitive and intransitive alternations in English is mostly related to marked macrorole assignment typically to undergoer, such as in He loaded the truck with hay--as compared with the kernel construction He loaded hay on the truck--but also to actor as, for instance, in the location subject alternation, in which the location argument occupies the subject position, e.g., The bag carries all your belongings, a construction which implies the loss of one of the arguments in the kernel structure, You can carry all your belongings in the bag. Additionally, the syntactic behaviour of location arguments in marked constructions very often conveys a change of Aktionsart ascription with respect to the kernel construction, as in the swarm alternation in which the predicate in the kernel construction is analysed as an activity, e.g., Bees swarmed in the garden, whereas in the marked construction it changes to a state, The garden is swarming with bees. This investigation also provides an analysis of the with-phrase that is often encoded in the marked constructions where the location argument is codified as a core argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One anaphora (e.g., this is a good one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and ' one-replacement' has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one ( a- one) as a form of syntactic replacement allows us to take a fresh look at various uses of the word one. In the present work, we investigate its use as a cardinal number (1- one) in order to better understand its anaphoric use. Like all cardinal numbers, 1- one can only quantify an individuated entity and provides an indefinite reading by default. Owing to unique combinatoric properties, cardinal numbers defy consistent classification as determiners, quantifiers, adjectives, or nouns. Once the semantics and distribution of cardinal numbers, including 1- one, are appreciated, many properties of a- one follow with minimal stipulation. We claim that 1- one and a- one are distinct but very closely related lexemes. When 1- one appears without a noun (e.g., Take one), it is nearly indistinguishable from a- one (e.g., take one)-the only differences being interpretive (1- one foregrounds its cardinality while a- one does not) and prosodic (presence versus absence of primary accent). While we ultimately argue that a family of constructions is required to describe the full range of syntactic contexts in which one appears, the proposed network accounts for properties of a- one by allowing it to inherit most of its syntactic and interpretive constraints from its historical predecessor, 1- one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Applied Linguistics is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Several grammatical models have shown a growing interest for the development of the conditions necessary to satisfy the so-called criterion of computational adequacy. Within Role and Reference Grammar (RRG [Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997; Van Valin, 2005; Pavey, 2010]), there have been some works seeking to implement the model in different computational environments (Diedrichsen, 2011, 2013; Guest, 2009; Nolan & Periñán-Pascual, 2014; Salem et al., 2008). In this scenario, the works of Van Valin & Mairal (2014), Periñán-Pascual (2013) and Periñán- Pascual & Arcas (2014) have set up the guidelines to devise a parsing system called ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing TExt Meaning via an Interlingua- Based System) for the computational treatment of the syntax and semantics of sentences. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the development of ARTEMIS focusing specifically on the design of the rules necessary for the effective computational parsing of unmarked simple clauses following the format of the Layered Structure of the Clause as described in RRG. Such rules should yield, as a result for every sentence, a parsed tree following the format of grammatical analyses in RRG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usage-based models of language have proposed a dynamic, organized system based on analogy, or the recognition of similarity. The potential role of analogy between similar forms or constructions, however, is not often discussed. If we aim to illustrate grammaticalization and other diachronic processes not through one construction at a time -- but by quantitatively assessing the relationship between constructions -- we may better address the role of analogy as a mechanism of change. This quantitative, diachronic, corpus-based examination of language-internal constructional analogy is based on four forms in Spanish: altamente 'highly', enormemente 'enormously', extraordinariamente 'extraordinarily', and extremadamente 'extremely'. These forms all occur in at least two basic constructions, in which they function as modifiers of verbs and as modifiers of modifiers. Analogical "transference" of paths of change between forms is proposed as a cross-linguistic language-internal process. Not only do forms compete with each other, but they also may borrow the path another has taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key issues in the study of idiom are the metaphorical status of idioms (whether or not underlying metaphors are active in the on-line processing of figurative idiomatic expressions) and the compositional status of idioms (whether or not the overall meaning of such expressions is analyzable from internal elements). This study addresses these questions from the perspective of emergent metaphor theory (Sanford, 2012, 2013), arguing that key properties of such expressions − idiosyncrasy of both form and meaning, the potential for idiom to be manipulated in discourse, and diachronic patterns in changes of idiomatic meaning − follow from the status of metaphorical idioms as highly entrenched instances of both conceptual and syntactic mappings. In the case of both types of schema, the interaction of type and token frequency effects predict the metaphoricity and analyzability of idioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sketches a continuum between lexicon and syntax, with concrete examples from two typologically different languages, Finnish and English. While Finnish is a morphologically rich and relatively transparent synthetic language, full of inflectional and derivational morphology and compounding, English is clearly more analytical making use of particles, prepositions, and other free grammatical morphemes. The contrastive idiom analyses of these two languages offer us a glimpse into the multiplicity involved in idiomaticity and into the cooperation of the lexical and syntactic principles of language that takes place in the production of fixed, conventional, multiword utterances and through their ubiquity also in some phenomena that are involved in grammaticalization. On the basis of the discussion presented in this paper, it can be concluded that rather than forming a single continuum, the rich spectrum of lexical and syntactic constructions of these two languages can be thought of as forming a continuum of continua, where idioms reside at a culmination point, since they can be regarded as both lexical units and syntactic constructions at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic complexity is usually approached in terms of markedness and branching structure, and psycholinguistic complexity in terms of frequency, sequential probability, and working memory load. However, predictions made on these bases appear to be inadequate to explain many patterns seen in aphasic speech. Psycholinguistic analyses of aphasic errors provide an empirical basis for describing lexical, morphological, and syntactic contributions to language complexity. We compare the predictions made by existing descriptions of complexity to aphasic error data as reported in cross-linguistic studies. A construction-based approach may be able to unify the patterns seen across lexicon, morphology and syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is often presented as a verbal illusion. According to the standard view, this sentence, which seems perfectly acceptable at first sight, is in fact logically incorrect. It is usually assumed that sentences such as these are produced as the result of negation overload, but get a coherent interpretation because of shallow processing, and because of pragmatic factors, which overrule semantics and syntax. In this paper it is argued that this analysis is incorrect and that No head injury is too trivial to be ignored can be seen as an instance of the negative ‘No X is too Z to Y' construction, which is a sub-construction of the abstract ‘No X is too Y to Z' construction. This negative construction can be seen as a conventionalized construction (form-meaning unit) that has a transparent (i.e. linguistically analyzable) syntactic structure that can be linked to and motivated by other constructions. It is shown that the occurrence of negative ‘No X is too Z to Y' construction has to do with the rhetorical function of the infinitival verb in these sentences, and the need to express particular information by a form-meaning element. This study stresses the importance of the rhetorical dimension of constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper demonstrates that dependency-based syntax is in a strong position to produce principled and economical accounts of the syntax of constructs. The difficulty that constituency-based syntax has in this regard is that very many constructs fail to qualify as constituents. The point is evident with the box diagrams and attribute value matrices (AVMs) that some construction grammars (CxGs) use to formalize constructions; these schemata often represent fragments rather than constituents. In dependency-based syntax in contrast, constructions are catenae, whereby a catena is a chain of words linked together by dependencies. The catena is a novel but well-defined unit of syntax associated with dependency grammar (DG). The constructs of CxGs are more amenable to analyses in terms of the catenae of dependency-based syntax than to analyses in terms of the constituents of constituency-based syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the principal difference between a construction-based and a valency-based syntax, and argues that constructions, like morphological distinctions, are organized in paradigms. It is generally assumed that verb-argument relations were relatively loose in Old Russian. Unlike in Modern Russian, which has a fully developed valency system where the verb determines the number of arguments and their (case) forms, many Old Russian verbs combined with more than one case form or even allowed for distinctly different syntactic constructions. Examples of A2 (argument 2) variation in Old Russian are considered, and it is argued that the syntactic system of Old Russian can be interpreted as construction-based rather than valency-based. It is shown that the concept of construction is a prerequisite for making sense of the case forms filling the argument slots in Old Russian, and tentative examples of construction paradigms are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase-structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus-based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar-based and rule-based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item-based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goldberg's Constructions at work makes an important contribution to the understanding of syntax by developing analyses for specific grammatical constructions from a usage-based constructional perspective and critically comparing generative analyses to them. It is argued here that some of the analyses that Goldberg offers may still be problematic (although they are superior to the generative alternatives), and in other cases, Goldberg can strengthen her defense of constructional analyses by offering a sharper critique of the generative alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Allen [Allen, M. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. Brain and Language, 95, 255–264.] reports a single patient, WBN, who, during spoken language comprehension, is still able to access some of the syntactic properties of verbs despite being unable to access some of their semantic properties. Allen claims that these findings challenge linguistic theories which assume that much of the syntactic behavior of verbs can be predicted from their meanings. I argue, however, that this conclusion is not supported by the data for two reasons: first, Allen focuses on aspects of verb syntax that are not claimed to be influenced by verb semantics; and second, he ignores aspects of verb syntax that are claimed to be influenced by verb semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Within the context of the Lexical Constructional Model, which provides a comprehensive account of the relationship between syntax and all facets on meaning construction, this paper is concerned with one of the major representational modules of the model, viz. a lexical template. It is claimed that a lexical template consists of a semantic specification plus a logical structure. The logical structure formalism is constructed on the basis of Aktionsart distinctions proposed in Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1997; Van Valin, 2005). Aktionsart regularities are captured by the external variables of the template, specified in Roman characters, and by a set of high-level elements of structure that function as semantic primitives. Lexical templates also contain internal variables, marked with Arabic numerals, and formally expressed in terms of a catalogue of lexical functions. These variables capture world-knowledge elements that relate in a way specific to the predicate defined by the lexical template. In order to test the viability of lexical templates, a detailed analysis of a set of verbs within the lexical domain of cognition is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex relationship between the meaning of predicates and the morphosyntactic expression of their arguments, as manifested in the swarm-class alternations in Czech. One way of getting at the nature of the alternations is to take a frame-semantic approach, which allows us to introduce the notion of scene as an important factor in linking relationships. It is proposed that linking patterns are organized in a network of generalized scene types, each of which represents a particular role configuration structured in such a way that one of its roles can be singled out as the vantage point from which that event type is conventionally presented in a particular diathesis; the analysis argues for the notion of viewpoint as an event-structuring concept (distinct from discourse-based topicness) that is directly reflected in certain conventionalized linking patterns. The results of the investigation show that what may appear to be hard-to-predict variations in subject selection can be treated as instances of regular linking relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04–2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI pattern, as evidenced by the accelerating growth curves. However, there was much semantic variability among the 10 indirect objects, and most had no semantically similar antecedents in the same construction. The results indicate that facilitation of learning of early syntax is most probably not mediated by semantic similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers’ utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers’ utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item-based phrases such as Are you …, I’ll …, It’s …, Let’s …, What did …. The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item-based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item-based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother’s frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item-based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]