Constructional Approaches to English Grammar

2008-08-27

This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work.The research here is ...

Author: Graeme Trousdale

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

ISBN: 9783110199178

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 316

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This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.
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Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar

2010

The papers in this volume provide a contrastive application of Construction Grammar.

Author: Hans Christian Boas

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9789027204325

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 244

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The papers in this volume provide a contrastive application of Construction Grammar. By referencing a well-described constructional phenomenon in English, each paper provides a solid foundation for describing and analyzing its constructional counterpart in another language. This approach shows that the semantic description (including discourse-pragmatic and functioanl factors) of an English construction can be regarded as a first step towards a "tertium comparationis" that can be employed for comparing and contrasting the formal properties of constructional counterparts in other languages. Thus, the meaning pole of constructions should be regarded as the primary basis for comparisons of constructions across languages - the form pole is only secondary. This volume shows that constructions are viable descriptive and analytical tools for cross-linguistic comparisons that make it possible to capture both language-specific (idiosyncratic) properties as well as cross-linguistic generalizations.
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Corpus based Approaches to Construction Grammar

2016-09-08

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically ...

Author: Jiyoung Yoon

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

ISBN: 9789027266606

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 268

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This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch, old English, Italian, and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches, some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots, and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.
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The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar

2013-02-22

Journal of Linguistics 43: 683–94. . (2008). “Word Grammar and Construction Grammar,” in Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional Approaches to English Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, ...

Author: Thomas Hoffmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780199376636

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page:

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The last decade has seen a rise in popularity in construction-based approaches to grammar. The various approaches within the rubric 'construction grammar' all see language as a network of constructions-pairings of form and meaning. Construction Grammar, as a kind of cognitive linguistics, differs significantly from mainstream generative grammar as espoused by Chomsky and his followers. Advocates of Construction Grammar see it as a psychologically plausible theory of human language. As such, it is capable of providing a principled account of language acquisition, language variation and language change. Research in Construction Grammar also includes multidisciplinary cognitive studies in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to Construction Grammar. Divided into five sections, the book will be an invaluable resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a comprehensive account of current work on Construction Grammar, its theoretical foundations, and its applications to and relationship with other kinds of linguistic enquiry.
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Germanic Future Constructions

2008

The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.

Author: Martin Hilpert

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9789027218292

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 205

View: 325

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This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data, constructions such as English be going to or German werden are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as write or speak differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as rain or increase. The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time, this is seen as a sign of semantic change.
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Locative Alternation

2008

The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts.

Author: Seizi Iwata

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9027218285

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 231

View: 219

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The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand, it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other, it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions, and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar, the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.
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Constructional Approaches to Syntactic Structures in German

2018-07-09

Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. Borsley, Robert D. 2004. An approach to English comparative correlatives. In Stephan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on ...

Author: Hans C. Boas

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110457155

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 461

View: 757

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This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.
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Construction Grammar in a Cross Language Perspective

2004-12-23

This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980’s by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates.

Author: Mirjam Fried

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9789027294968

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 209

View: 844

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This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980’s by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates. It also provides a succinct account of the historical and intellectual background of the model and shows how Construction Grammar can easily be applied to typologically very different languages and to a variety of language-specific phenomena. All of the contributors to the volume came out of the Fillmorean school at UC-Berkeley and have worked consistently on applying and further developing the model in various domains of linguistic analysis.The 'Thumbnail sketch' by Fried & Östman is the only extensive introduction published so far to Fillmorean Construction Grammar.
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Grammatical Constructions

2005-12-14

This volume brings into focus the conceptual roots of the notion ‘grammatical construction’ as the theoretical entity that constitutes the backbone of Construction Grammar, a unique grammatical model in which grammatical constructions ...

Author: Mirjam Fried

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

ISBN: 9789027294074

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 246

View: 377

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This volume brings into focus the conceptual roots of the notion ‘grammatical construction’ as the theoretical entity that constitutes the backbone of Construction Grammar, a unique grammatical model in which grammatical constructions have the status of elementary building blocks of human language. By exploring the analytic potential and applicability of this notion, the contributions illustrate some of the fundamental concerns of constructional research. These include issues of sentence structure in a model that rejects the autonomy of syntax; the contribution of Frame Semantics in establishing the relationship between syntactic patterning and the lexical meaning of verbs; and the challenge of capturing the dynamic and variable nature of grammatical structure in a systematic way. All the authors share a commitment to studying grammar in its use, which gives the book a rich empirical dimension that draws on authentic data from typologically diverse languages.
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Constructional Change in English

2013-02-28

Constructional Approaches to English Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Israel, Michael. 1996. The way constructions grow. Pages 217—230 of: Goldberg, Adele (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language.

Author: Martin Hilpert

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781107013483

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 233

View: 435

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Is construction grammar a useful framework for the study of language change? Hilpert combines the current linguistic theory of construction grammar with advanced corpus-based methodology in order to study language change in a new way. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change.
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