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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 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.)

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasizing the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of language, i.e., linguistic units of different granularity that combine syntax and semantics. As a first step toward assessing the compatibility of CxG with the syntactic and semantic knowledge demonstrated by state-of-the-art pretrained language models (PLMs), we present an investigation of their capability to classify and understand one of the most commonly studied constructions, the English comparative correlative (CC). We conduct experiments examining the classification accuracy of a syntactic probe on the one hand and the models' behavior in a semantic application task on the other, with BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa as the example PLMs. Our results show that all three investigated PLMs, as well as OPT, are able to recognize the structure of the CC but fail to use its meaning. While human-like performance of PLMs on many NLP tasks has been alleged, this indicates that PLMs still suffer from substantial shortcomings in central domains of linguistic knowledge.

The paper describes and analyzes (using data from the written corpus SYN v7) sentences in which the relators krom(ě) and mimo express the meanings of extension and exclusion and at the same time do not assign case to the following noun. It does not aim for the word-class classification of the mentioned relators or their insertion into a ready-made syntactic model, but rather observes in particular the form of non-standard constructions with krom(ě) and mimo as well as their semantic role, their position in relation to the second and controlling nodes, and the identity/non-identity of their form and semantic role with the form and semantic role of the second node. The paper attempts to summarize the basic properties of non-standard krom(ě)/mimo constructions with the meanings of extension and exclusion, using the apparatus of construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanica Olomucensia is the property of Palacky University in Olomouc 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 study examines two cognitive linguistics approaches to foreign language teaching. One draws on the conventionality of language use that a variety of expressions can be understood as instances of more general patterns, e.g., kick them out and eat it up as verb-object-particle, whereas the other centers on linguistic creativeness such as novel combinations or associations, e.g., chest down the ball. Noting that English verb-particle constructions (VPCs) exemplify both linguistic conventionality and creativeness, two types of instruction have been developed–namely, top-down instruction and bottom-up instruction. The top-down instruction presents VPCs as instances of conventional argument structures such as motion and resultative constructions (Goldberg, 2015), whereas the bottom-up instruction focuses on creative compositions of literal and metaphorical meanings (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The two types of instruction were provided for Korean EFL learners, and their knowledge of VPCs was measured by a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a four-week delayed posttest. Results of the immediate posttest showed that both types of instruction were effective in improving the learners' knowledge of literal and figurative VPCs. In the delayed posttest, significantly greater retention was observed for the construction-based top-down instruction. This finding highlights the importance of argument structures as super-constructions in teaching VPCs to EFL learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a review of a book on Construction Grammar (CxG) applied to the French language. The book explores the historical development of the term "construction" and its usage in linguistic theories. It consists of nine contributions organized into four sections, covering topics such as schematicity, the grammar-lexicon continuum, and the diachronic extension of CxG. The review praises the book for its multidisciplinary approach and critical examination of CxG, but suggests that more chapters in English would make it more accessible to a wider audience. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar" edited by Lotte Sommerer and Elena Smirnova is a collection of papers that explore language change within the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG). The book is divided into three parts: "The Nodes: Creation, Change and Loss," "The Links: Vertical and Horizontal Relations," and "Beyond Existing Models." The papers cover topics such as the emergence and loss of linguistic nodes, constructional competition, and the reconfiguration of constructional networks. The book offers valuable insights into how to model constructional networks and raises important questions for future research. However, it is primarily focused on English constructions and could benefit from more diverse linguistic data. [Extracted from the article]

This paper describes the way in which represented speech is introduced in ten eastern Bantu languages, and explains the different constructions used as stages of a linguistic cycle. In this cycle, verbs of speech develop into quotative markers, and eventually cease to be used to introduce direct speech. This cycle can be understood as a systematic and unidirectional series of constructional changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of Diachronic Construction Morphology (DCxM), a field that examines how the relationship between form and meaning in language evolves over time. It emphasizes the need for more research on morphological change within the constructionist approach, particularly in languages other than English and Germanic languages. The article explores the role of productivity in morphological constructions, the connection between morphological change and category change, and similarities between morphological change and change in other aspects of language structure. It also introduces the Construction Morphology framework, morphological schemas, and the significance of network relations in understanding word structure. The text includes examples from various languages and summaries of case studies on morphological change, highlighting the importance of constructional approaches in comprehending language change. [Extracted from the article]

This study investigates diachronic changes in constructional networks illustrated with examples from the Manchuric branch of Tungusic, an endangered language family spoken in Northeast Asia. Earlier studies have noted pronounced differences between this branch and the rest of the family, such as a reduction in morphological complexity and partial restructuring of the morphosyntactic system. Based on the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar, this study investigates aspects of nominal morphology, including flagging and indexing. These are especially promising for a better understanding of the evolution of Manchuric and have not often been discussed in terms of Construction Grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Faits de Langues is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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.)

In this paper, the historical development of the construction disponerse a + INF is analyzed, as a carrier of an aspectual value of imminence. Specifically, those lexical-grammatical criteria that allow observing the process of grammaticalization and constructionalization of the scheme are explored. In addition, the semantic expansion from the imminent value to the inchoative and causative value is studied. Throughout the paper, contrasts are made with the diachronic trajectory of poner(se), since this form has exerted an analogical influence on disponer(se). From a theoretical perspective, it interacts with the model of grammaticalization and with the constructions grammar applied to the historical study of verbal periphrasis. At the methodological level, the research is based on the elaboration of a database with the integral registry of the examples from CORDE, which allows projecting quantitative as well as qualitative linguistic analyzes. As a result, the grade of grammaticalization and constructionalization of the item is described, the chronology of its imminence, inchoative and causative values are explored, and the proximity of the construction with the paradigm of aspectual verbal periphrasis is reflected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explored Indonesian EFL learners' explicit knowledge, processing, and use of English periphrastic causative constructions make, have, and get. 20 English L1 speakers and 20 Indonesian intermediate level EFL learners majoring in English Language Education at an Indonesian university took part in this study. Data were collected through a cloze task, a sentence completion task, an interpretation task, and a set of open-ended questions asking learners to provide descriptions about their knowledge of the constructions. Results showed that learners did not always use the first noun strategy to identify the agent in a passive causative construction. Also, their suppliances of the causative verbs in most items did not significantly differ from L1 speakers. However, the syntactic patterns were mostly non-target-like. They demonstrated insufficient explicit knowledge that could enable them to verbalize the formal and functional aspects underlying the constructions. Pedagogical implications along with suggestions to improve instruction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relativisation, a process by which relative clauses are formed, exhibits variability in its internal structure, meaning and interpretation. One form of relativisation is that sort of relative clause in which we directly relate one concept through another concept. The present study identifies and classifies such relativisation as BE-relativisations, and shows the extent to which this sort of relativisation significantly draws on the cognitive abilities of both the speakers and the listeners. Framed within broad theoretical tools in cognitive construction grammar, the study argues that noun phrases (NPs) in BE-relativisation cognitively function as NP1 & NP2. It is shown that these NPs, though lexically independent, are cognitively interdependent for processing purposes. The study further shows that listeners often unconsciously cooperate with speakers in processing different concepts in BE-relativisation. For instance, it is shown that conceptualising NP1 the guys is conceptually the same as NP2 my students in 'The guys who were my students won the competition'. Drawing on corpus evidence from interference-driven Nigerian and syntactically developed Canadian Englishes, the study shows that BE-relativisations are essentially cognitive-driven, regardless of sociolinguistic background of the speakers/listerners. Among other observations, the study attests scarcity of BE-relativisation and a similar pattern of cognitive activation and cooperation in BE-relativisations found in both varieties of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual meaning is often ambiguous in Afrikaans because the verb is not compulsorily marked for aspect. The inchoative aspect is a grammatical aspectual meaning that highlights the moment directly before the onset, the onset itself, or the moment directly after the onset of an action or change of state. A variety of strategies can be used in Afrikaans to express the inchoative aspect, one of which being auxiliary verb constructions. Ten auxiliary verbs can occur in inchoative constructions in Afrikaans, namely: begin (‘begin’), gaan (‘go’), kom (‘come’), loop (‘walk’), raak (‘become’), sit (‘sit’), slaan (‘hit’), spring (‘jump’), steek (‘stab’) and val (‘fall’). These auxiliary verbs function as inchoative aspectual markers in two kinds of constructions: as direct linking verbs in inchoative constructions or as indirect linking verbs (either with or without progressive periphrastic constructions). All of the auxiliary verbs that can express inchoative meaning do not occur in all of the possible constructions. For instance, slaan (‘hit’) exclusively occurs as an inchoative marker in auxiliary constructions with the progressive periphrastic construction aan die (‘on the’) together with the main verb collocate brand (‘to burn’). This article, therefore, does not investigate all ten auxiliary verbs that can occur in inchoative constructions but solely focuses on the direct linking verb constructions in which gaan and loop occur as cognate inchoative auxiliaries. In this article, the Watkykjy! corpus, Taalkommissie corpus and NWU Commentary corpus are used to investigate the frequencies and usage patterns of gaan and loop as direct linking verbs in inchoative constructions. Construction Grammar (CxG) and Grammaticalisation Theory are used as theoretical frameworks to describe the similarities and differences in use of loop and gaan as direct linking verbs in inchoative constructions. CxG provides a useful theoretical framework for the identification of the constructions and descriptions of the nuances between the two constructions, should any be present. Grammaticalisation Theory provides a framework in which the main verb collocates for gaan and loop in these inchoative constructions can be used to establish the degree to which these verbs have evolved to express additional meanings or perform additional functions. The results of the corpus study indicate that these gaan and loop inchoative constructions are formally and structurally similar, but that there are semantic nuances expressed by using one rather than the other. Collostruction analyses indicate both gaan and loop retain some of their lexical meaning in certain contexts where they are used to express inchoative aspectual meaning. However, gaan can be used in a larger variety of linguistic contexts and with a larger variety of main verb collocates. Gaan is, therefore, more grammaticalised and less constricted in its uses than loop. This result was expected because gaan has grammaticalised to function as a future tense marker and modal marker expressing epistemic modality in Afrikaans, which correlate with the grammaticalisation route for verbs like gaan in other languages. Whilst it was expected that loop would be less grammaticalised than gaan because loop is not commonly considered to function as a future tense marker in Afrikaans, it is, however, noteworthy that loop seems to have evolved to denote some kind of modal meaning. The loop inchoative construction is more frequently used in imperatives, occurs with a smaller variety of main verb collocates and tends to be used in contexts where the speaker is expressing a dislike for or disapproval of the situation being expressed by the main verb, or aims to evoke a negative emotional response from the receiver of the utterance towards the situation expressed by the main verb. This is indicative of loop being more specialised for imperatives, pejoratives and cases where the speaker expresses their own dislike or disapproval, or hopes to evoke these feelings in the receiver of the utterance, towards the situation expressed by the main verb. It, therefore, seems that loop has evolved to function as a kind of deontic modal marker. This supports the fi ndings of other researchers who note that loop expresses modality in progressive constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new description of Cantonese causative–resultative constructions (CRCs), constructions with two verbal elements relevant to the cause and the effect of an event respectively. We present a constructional schema for the CRC with three argument types and without using traditional categories—such as subject, object and pseudo-passivation, present various syntactic and semantic properties, and subsume constructions such as the comparative construction and numerous particle constructions under this banner. We then argue against traditional approaches to CRCs with two lexical verbs that treat the argument structure of the CRC as composed from argument structures of individual verbs (the decompositional approach); instead, CRC arguments belong to the entire construction and have only semantic orientation-based relationships with individual verbs (the holistic approach). We show how our account can shed light on Sinitic typology and the grammaticalisation mechanism of verbal particles within CRCs, particularly the extension of result verbs into a broader range of contexts to become particles. We also argue that Cantonese CRCs challenge many assumptions of serial verb typology, which typically ignore the existence of multiple layers of constructional abstraction and assume decompositional descriptions, and urge for methodological advancements in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the historical evolution of the Spanish causative micro-constructions with the motion verbs llevar ('take') and traer ('bring') (e.g., el miedo llevó al ladrón a cometer un error, 'the fear caused the thief to make a mistake'). In order to reconstruct the historical development of these micro-constructions between the 13th and 20th centuries, all causative uses of llevar and traer were extracted from the Corpus del Diccionario Histórico. This corpus was annotated for a series of formal and semantic parameters that count as indexes of grammaticalization, and was submitted to a quantitative productivity analysis. The results point to the existence of a subschema formed of verbs of caused accompanied motion, which has semantically specialized in the expression of indirect causation. From a formal point of view, this subschema is characterized by a low level of syntactic incorporation of the causative verb and the infinitive. In addition, it is shown that the productivity of the causative micro-constructions under study is determined by semantic changes experienced by llevar and traer as full lexical verbs during the history of Spanish. The late development of the micro-construction with llevar is explained by the initial tendency of this verb to express motion events not bounded by an endpoint. From the 16th century onwards, the decline in the micro-construction with traer and the rise in the micro-construction with llevar results from the consolidation of the deictic meaning of the verb pair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notably, in her discussion of Optimality Theory in chapter 2, Francis treats constraint ranking as a general feature of the framework, regardless of whether the constraints are soft or categorical. For example, in her discussion of the definiteness constraint, Francis also addresses cases like (5), quoted from page 150 (original underlining), in which a relative clause is extraposed even though its noun phrase antecedent is definite. Nevertheless, focusing on violations of island constraints in English, Francis argues convincingly that acceptability and reading time data alone cannot adjudicate between grammar- and processing-based accounts of these phenomena. In particular, Francis seems to suggest that what might diachronically be an emerging categorical (!) constraint (against coverb stranding) can be synchronically treated as a soft constraint as long as the constraint has not generalised to all members of the lexical class. [Extracted from the article]

Hoffmann accounts for this through Construction Grammar as instances of "a limited number of fully substantive constructions" (p. 14). Alongside such borrowings by STL users, Hoffmann (pp. 14-17) also applies Construction Grammar to the grammatical patterns that emerge in pidgins and later in creoles in plantation colonies, also during phase 1. Hoffmann's contribution is a convincing one, which shows the value of infusing Schneider's Dynamic Model with insights from Construction Grammar, to elaborate the linguistic, cognitive side of the model that is otherwise stronger on the social side. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Law / Revista de Llengua i Dret is the property of Revista de Llengua i Dret 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 paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden's (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English "manner+result verbs" and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the "synthetic verb+result verb" structure, supplements Croft et al.'s (2010. Revising Talmy's typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present the Construction Grammar Conceptual Network method, developed for identifying lexical similarity and word sense discrimination in a syntactically tagged corpus, based on the cognitive linguistic assumption that coordination construction instantiates conceptual relatedness. This graph analysis method projects a semantic value onto a given coordinated syntactic dependency and constructs a second-order lexical network of lexical collocates with a high co-occurrence measure. The subsequent process of clustering and pruning the graph reveals lexical communities with high conceptual similarity, which are interpreted as associated senses of the source lexeme. We demonstrate the theory and its application to the task of identifying the conceptual structure and different meanings of nouns, adjectives and verbs using examples from different corpora, and explain the modulating effects of linguistic and graph parameters. This graph approach is based on syntactic dependency processing and can be used as a complementary method to other contemporary natural language processing resources to enrich semantic tasks such as word disambiguation, domain relatedness, sense structure, identification of synonymy, metonymy, and metaphoricity, as well as to automate comprehensive meta-reasoning about languages and identify cross/intra-cultural discourse variations of prototypical conceptualization patterns and knowledge representations. As a contribution, we provide a web-based app at http://emocnet.uniri.hr/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a renewed construction grammar analysis of linguistic constructions in a diachronic perspective. The present theory, termed Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar (AgCCxG), is informed by active inference (AIF), a process theory for the comprehension of intelligent agency. AgCCxG defends the idea that language bear traces of non-linguistic, bodily-acquired information that reflects sémiotico-biological processes of energy exchange and conservation. One of the major claims of the paper is that embodied cognition has evolved to facilitate ontogenic mental alignment among humans. This is demonstrated by the results of a corpus study in which the patterns of association between verbs, the particle UP and argument structure in Old and Middle English have been studied. The conclusion is that, similar to biological systems, the linguistic sign system displays patterns of equilibrium and non-equilibrium. In other words, while in Old English usage near equilibrium was reached through the use of a conservative set of constructional semiotic templates (attachment patterns), associated with motor modalities, Middle English displays high rates of randomness resulting in a less stable, yet distinct, system of constructional attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory), memo (< memorandum), or quake (< earthquake). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings. Each of the clippings is represented by a concordance of 100 examples in context that were gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We compare clippings and their source words both at the aggregate level and in terms of comparisons between individual clippings and their source words. The data show that clippings tend to be used in contexts that represent involved text production, which aligns with the idea that clipped words signal familiarity with their referents. It is further observed that individual clippings and their source words partly diverge in their distributional profiles, reflecting both overlap and differences with regard to their meanings. We interpret these findings against the theoretical background of Construction Grammar and specifically the Principle of No Synonymy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effectiveness of L2 instruction on the learning of English caused-motion constructions (e.g., Jane put the balls into the box, Harry swam Peter to the beach). Korean EFL high school students (N = 156) were randomly assigned to three instructional conditions and one control group. While the metalanguage group relied on explicit uses of grammar jargon, the input flood group read narrative stories in which the instances of a prototypical verb were presented with higher frequency than other verbs. The image-schema group, which adopted a balanced approach to form and meaning attention, studied the core meaning of the target construction. Mixed-effects logistic regressions on Korean-to-English translation tests revealed that the image-schema group was most effective in terms of learnability and generalizability. The benefits of image-schema-based instruction were attributed to simultaneous attention to form and meaning, which might lead to deeper processing. Image-schema-based-instruction is discussed as a viable alternative for L2 construction learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dogon pseudo-subjects are bare meteorological, temporal-environmental, and partonymic nouns of low referentiality/specificity that occur in fixed noun-verb collocations. The pseudo-subject controls the choice of verb in all cases, but it fails to behave like a true subject in linear position, in a quotative-subject construction, or in pronominal-subject agreement. The pseudo-subject is the sole nominal in these meteorological and temporal collocations, but in partonymic collocations it co-occurs with a true subject denoting the possessor-experiencer. The latter has all of the clear subject properties except controlling the choice of verb. Pseudo-subjects have some similarities with, but are distinct from, a range of typologically familiar phenomena including impersonal subjects, direct objects, possessums stranded by possessor raising, East Asian-style second subjects or post-topic subjects, incorporated nouns, and adverbial adjuncts. They can be classified as pseudo-incorporated nominals if this category is broad enough to include subject-like as well as object-like nominals. The relevant constructions are easily modelled in construction grammars, but not in arboreal syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-linguistically, very few complete sentences, as opposed to a myriad of phrases, lexicalize to become words. I here offer an account for this skewed distribution, along the lines of Construction Grammar, by analyzing a set of mono-clausal sentences in Hebrew which have indeed become – or are on the verge of becoming – words. I adopt the distinction between categorical and thetic propositions, and show that only the latter can evolve into words. A thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition, much like a verb-phrase, enables a tight semantic bonding between its components to form an 'interpretatively cohesive' unit, which may lead to semantic change. An evaluative thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition is comment-like, hence 'semantically-incomplete', and in need of a topic from prior discourse to predicate on, which may lead to a change in grammatical status. All verb-phrases meet these two criteria but only few sentences do, hence, I argue, the skewed distribution of sources from which new words evolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates all- cleft constructions in the London–Lund Corpora of spoken British English. It has two aims: an empirical and a methodological one. The empirical aim is to contribute to research on spoken discourse by analysing the form–meaning properties of all- clefts along with their pragmatic functions and their development since the 1950s drawing on insights from Cognitive Linguistics with special focus on Diachronic Construction Grammar. We show that all -clefts are used both as assertions and directives. They focalise an element that speakers find particularly relevant at the same time as they have the effect of blocking alternative perspectives and thereby contracting the discursive space for addressees. The methodological aim is to critically assess the comparability level of the diachronic corpora based on a detailed investigation of the distribution of all -clefts in the data. We show that there is a high degree of similarity between the designs of the corpora, which makes them suitable for diachronic investigations of recent change. • The pragmatic functions of all -clefts were assertions and directives. • There is evidence for increased intersubjectivity of all -clefts in llc –2. • All-clefts have a focalising and dialogically contractive function. • There is a high level of similarity between the designs of the London–Lund Corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a "scale-up challenge": How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central feature of conceptual thought, cannot easily be accounted for in PP because it is not couched in terms of classical symbol processing. I argue, using the example of language, that there is no strong reason to think that PP cannot be scaled up to higher cognition. I suggest that the tacitly assumed common-sense conception of language as Generative Grammar ("folk linguistics") and its notion of composition leads to the scale-up concerns. Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) plays the role of a cognitive computational paradigm for folk linguistics. Therefore, we do not take LOTH as facing problems with higher cognition, at least with regard to compositionality. But PP can plausibly play the role of a cognitive-computational paradigm for an alternative conception of language, namely Construction Grammar. If Construction Grammar is a plausible alternative to folk linguistics, then PP is not in a worse position than LOTH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction Grammar (Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013) has received very little attention in onomastics, let alone corpus-based approaches, as corpora are just starting to be applied to the empirical study of names (Motschenbacher 2020). This study employs Named Entity Recognition plus verbal pattern extraction in an intermodal corpus (Bernardini 2016) of EU discourse, or Eurolect (Sandrelli 2018). The methodological aim is to mine English argument-structure constructions (Goldberg 1995) with subordinate clauses introduced by that and organization names in the subject slot ([ORG + V + that + SC]). First, the personification recognition method of Dorst, Mulder, and Steen (2011) is applied to quantitatively prove the strong relationship between the extracted argument-structure constructions and personification metaphors in EU discourse. Second, the constructions and their form-meaning pairings are described, both per subcorpus and globally. Results show that, at a macro- and meso-level of schematicity, the [ORG + V + that + SC] construction transversally symbolizes personification as an understanding scheme for institutional relations, constructing organization names with semantically human verbs of belief, speech, and thought. At a microscopic level, however, some constructions occur exclusively in one of the four subcorpora (non-translated, translated, non-interpreted, and interpreted English), meaning that they could be covering specific mediating functions through their name-verb slot choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through daily exposure to the surrounding input structured in conversations, children's language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions that contain multiple cross‐modal elements subtly used together for rich communicative functions. Children demonstrate their skills to resort to multiple semiotic resources in their daily interactions and expertly use them according to their expressive needs and communicative intents. Usage‐based (Tomasello, 2003) and cognitive linguistics (Langacker, 1988) as well as construction grammar (Goldberg, 2006) have enriched our comprehension of the processes at work. Those approaches need to be combined to gesture studies (Kendon, 1988; McNeill, 1992) and multimodal approaches (Andren, 2010; Morgenstern, 2014) to fully capture the orchestration of the semiotic resources at play (Cienki, 2012; Müller, 2009). But child language development cannot be understood outside its interactional, dialogic context (Bakhtin, 1981) and without taking into account the role of expert languagers (Vygotsky, 1934) in routines or formats (Bruner, 1975). The first section thus extensively focuses on a productive combination of theoretical approaches and methods, which have been essential to understand child language development, but analyzing child language is also necessary in turn to ground socio‐cognitive and interactional approaches to language. The salient features of the variably multimodal child's development are presented in the second section. The third section illustrates longitudinal pathways into multimodal languaging thanks to detailed analyses of adult‐child interactive sequences. This article is categorized under:Cognitive Biology > Cognitive DevelopmentComputer Science and Robotics > Natural Language ProcessingLinguistics > Language AcquisitionLinguistics > Cognitive Linguistics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article reports on a multimodal corpus study of English as if constructions. The results of this study suggest that formulaic and insubordinate as if constructions are prosodically chunked as clauses, with formulaic as if constructions uttered with significantly higher pitch and insubordinate as if constructions with lower pitch when being compared with subordinate uses. In addition, insubordinate as if clauses are occasionally accompanied by frowns. It is argued that, although both constructions convey an ironic interpretation, multimodal markers of irony play only a minor role in explaining the findings. Instead, it is argued that the non-verbal features are construction-specific and can reasonably be explained as cross-modal collostructions. As such, the present article provides a description of the non-verbal features accompanying English as if clauses and provides a theoretical explanation. In doing so, some modest evidence for a multimodal Utterance Construction Grammar is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power of social media in spreading the idea of wellbeing has already been addressed by several psychologists and scholars through the analysis of the vocabulary; however, the use of the human flourishing (HF) concept in such platforms has not yet been analyzed. This study addresses such a topic by analyzing more than 600 thousand Twitter messages posted by a community of users who associate themselves with HF and comparing them to more than 400 thousand messages in other Twitter lists. The study aims to identify the HF users' interests, the richness in their vocabulary, the feelings and emotions that they share, and the grammar used in their constructions. Such an analysis was conducted through text mining computational methods, including sentiment analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and topic modeling. The results revealed that although HF users employ average vocabulary diversity, they share more positive emotions, and a greater variety of emojis. They also tended to discuss different topics, from more spiritual and health-related subjects to more practical matters related to work and success. Finally, they generally wrote from an empathetic state of mind, caring about people's day-to-day feelings and about the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to Construction Grammar, historical linguistics, and Russian linguistics through an in-depth corpus study of predicate agreement in constructions with quantified subjects. Statistical analysis of approximately 39,000 corpus examples indicates that these constructions constitute a network of constructions ("allostructions") with various preferences for singular or plural agreement. Factors pull in different directions, and we observe a relatively stable situation in the face of variation. We present an analysis of a multidimensional network of allostructions in Russian, thus contributing to our understanding of allostructional relationships in Construction Grammar. With regard to historical linguistics, language stability is an understudied field. We illustrate an interplay of divergent factors that apparently resists language change. The syntax of numerals and other quantifiers represents a notoriously complex phenomenon of the Russian language. Our study sheds new light on the contributions of factors that favor singular or plural agreement in sentences with quantified subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction Grammar (Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013) has received very little attention in onomastics, let alone corpus-based approaches, as corpora are just starting to be applied to the empirical study of names (Motschenbacher 2020). This study employs Named Entity Recognition plus verbal pattern extraction in an intermodal corpus (Bernardini 2016) of EU discourse, or Eurolect (Sandrelli 2018). The methodological aim is to mine English argument-structure constructions (Goldberg 1995) with subordinate clauses introduced by that and organization names in the subject slot ([ORG + V + that + SC]). First, the personification recognition method of Dorst, Mulder, and Steen (2011) is applied to quantitatively prove the strong relationship between the extracted argument-structure constructions and personification metaphors in EU discourse. Second, the constructions and their form-meaning pairings are described, both per subcorpus and globally. Results show that, at a macro- and meso-level of schematicity, the [ORG + V + that + SC] construction transversally symbolizes personification as an understanding scheme for institutional relations, constructing organization names with semantically human verbs of belief, speech, and thought. At a microscopic level, however, some constructions occur exclusively in one of the four subcorpora (non-translated, translated, non-interpreted, and interpreted English), meaning that they could be covering specific mediating functions through their name-verb slot choices.

This article aims to examine whether Italian has theticity and sentence-focus among its grammatically encoded categories. After the categories of theticity and sentence-focus are introduced, the concepts of grammatically encoded category and category of language use are operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics. For a functional category to qualify as a grammatically encoded category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that structurally encodes the category as its indefeasible semantics. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of the eight Italian sentential structures that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that each of the constructions has information structural uses that are incompatible with a structurally encoded theticity or sentence-focus semantics, i.e., topic-comment structure and narrow focus construal. It is argued that theticity and sentence-focus are therefore categories of language use rather than grammatically encoded categories of Italian.

The text focuses on the Czech construction whose instances include expressions such as muž s velkým M ‘a man with a capital M’ and herečka s velkým H ‘an actress with a capital A’. Theoretically, the study is couched within the framework of Construction Grammar; empirically, it is based on 3,969 examples of the construction from the SYN corpus (version 8) and on 268 questionnaires. It is shown that the construction has a conventionalized form and a semantic as well as a pragmatic (evaluative) meaning, and that it tends very strongly to be used as part of the rheme (focus) — typically as a subject complement — and in other textually prominent contexts, such as headlines. The variability of the instances of the construction is also examined, and the text goes on to consider the relevance of phenomena such as the construction investigated for linguistic theory, especially the traditional rule-based dictionary plus grammar book model.

This article aims to present the configuration of the adjective-adverb construction of qualitative meaning in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. The theoretical perspective adopted was the Usage-Based Linguistics, according to which constructions emerge from use and are organized in a structured way in a constructional network that includes different levels of abstraction (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013; GOLDBERG, 2019). The data collected from Corpus do Português and C-Oral-Brasil I underwent a quali-quantitative analysis, centered on the observation of formal, semantic, discursive-pragmatic and contextual properties of the construction [V AA]Qualit. The results of this analysis indicated that this construction presents the following tendencies: formal pattern [V AA] – the adjective occurs postposed and adjacent to an intransitive verb or to a verb in intransitive use; meaning resulting from the combination of a material-type verb to adjectives of different semantic types; pragmatic restriction of exclusive informational focus; and occurrence in more informal and prototypically oral texts.

Abstract Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has benefited quite a lot from Construction Grammar. Most of the previous SLA researches adopting a constructionist approach have been primarily engaged in issues pertinent to the relevance of construction in SLA, the process of second language (L2) construction learning, and factors affecting L2 construction learning. This paper distinguishes itself from previous research by embarking on a new direction in the constructionist approach to SLA from the perspective of the constructional network. Specifically, it deals with how constructional network works in SLA and argues that L2 constructional network bears the imprint of and is reconstructed from L2 learners’ L1 constructional network. The constructional network works in SLA in at least two ways which are manifested in the motivating function of vertical links in L2 learners’ acquisition of schematic and complex constructions and the facilitative or inhibitive effect of horizontal links in L2 construction learning. Admittedly, our description of how the constructional network works in SLA is precursory and nonexclusive, and some general and specific issues are raised for future research.

Cross-linguistic research on event typology has revealed considerable variation in the linguistic conceptualization of placement events. Previous studies on second language acquisition have primarily dealt with the semantic re-categorization of placement verbs in a second language, but placement constructions have received less attention. The present study fills this gap by examining the constructions used by Spanish learners of L2 Danish (B1 and B2 levels) and by monolingual speakers of both languages. Data were elicited by means of the PUT task consisting of oral video descriptions and then classified into six main placement construction categories based on their frequency and structure. Results from the learner group suggest learning difficulties when reconstructing the expression of placement events in L2 Danish. In contrast to L1 Danish data, learners (i) kept using their L1 Spanish basic placement construction more often, (ii) avoided semantically more complex constructions, (iii) employed fewer spatial particles, (iv) showed difficulties in selecting the L2 appropriate spatial particles for specific placement scenes, and (v) used non-caused motion constructions. These findings suggest the creation of a linguistic conceptualization pattern on the part of the learners that is different from the respective L1 and L2 monolingual patterns, thus providing further empirical support for proposals arguing that bilinguals’ multicompetence is not equivalent to those of two monolinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative analysis between contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Italian languages (IL) is presented based on the study of support constructions. These constructions are elaborated from the chunking predicate schema [&lowbar;VN&lowbar;] and presents argument selection competence. It is intended to analyze the formal constitution, the polysemic spectrum and mainly the relations of hierarchy and inheritance that identify each support constructional network, considering the most productive verbal paradigms. The analysis involves data from BP collected by Flores (2020), which involve the most mentioned support constructions in grammars of use of BP and distinct from the corpora Fala Goiana and Discurso & Gramática. The Italian data are part of the "Corpus of contemporary Italian -- Interviews" (CICE). The theoretical background comes from the Constructions Grammar (Goldberg 1995; Traugott and Trousdale 2013; Masini 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the inclusion of multimodal information in Construction Grammar (CGx). CGx is a family of theories in Cognitive Linguistics that maintains that linguistic knowledge consists fundamentally of constructions, holistic units within a lexicalgrammatical continuum, derived from usage patterns detected in communicative acts, that are constantly updated with each new communicative act. In principle, CGx represents an ideal framework for the treatment and incorporation of multimodality, since the theory does not set limits to which aspects of the communicative situation can be incorporated into these structures. If a given aspect is repeated enough and has diagnostic or predictive power, it can theoretically form part of the information included in the construction, which opens the door to the inclusion of multimodal aspects such as prosody, co-speech gestures, or even other cues such as facial expressions, body posture, and gaze direction. From this approach, the paper describes sevreal cases in which multimodal aspects such as prosody and gesturing are seen to interact and how construction grammar has modeled these cases incorporating this information. The paper ends with some challenges that multimodality poses to the current architecture of CGx. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]