Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Assignment 4

Distributed: November 5, 2008

Due: November 18, 2008

Instructions:

Please provide thoughtful yet succinct answers to the following questions. Feel free to discuss the problem with your classmates, especially if you are not a native speaker of English. But write up your discussion notes and answers independently. [You only need to submit your answers.] Remember to put the names of the people you worked with [and your own name] on your homework. Double-space all work and use a font size no smaller than 12. Your entire homework should not be much longer than three or four pages.

1. Some new constructions [6 points]

The following sets of sentences each evidence a particular grammatical construction. Your task is to describe this construction. You don't have to use any particular notation, though if you'd like to use something like the format we've been implicitly using in class, you may. You do not have to perform a complete grammatical analysis for each sentence - just for the one construction in common among all the utterances in each set. Make sure that for each of these constructions you identify the following things if relevant:

i. the construction [give it an apt name]

ii. constructional constituents [a.k.a. slots]

iii. constraints on these constituents [like their form, meaning, or that they have to be a particular word or other construction]

iv. the meaning contributed by this construction [stated in terms of constituents, if applicable]

v. the form of this construction [including word order, prosody, or anything else not contributed by its constituents]

To figure out some of these constraints, you might have to work with some additional sentences using the same constructions. If you're not a native speaker of English, and potentially even if you are, it will be impossible for you to do this without consulting with [other] native English speakers.

1. [a] What's this fly doing in my soup?

[b] Could you please tell me what that scratch is doing in the living room table?

[c] What am I doing working on this assignment the day before it's due?

2. [a] You have to hand it to him; those unwashed leeks really make the soup taste earthy.

[b] I have to hand it to the comedian - I didn't even see the punchline coming.

3. [a] Just because we live in Hawai`i doesn't mean we surf everyday.

[b] Yet, just because some people cannot distinguish between serious and hypothetical risks hardly means that we should spend all our time talking down to health consumers.

[c] The school board said that just because there are 150 years of scientific evidence for evolution, that does not prove that we are related to monkeys.

2. Some old constructions [4 points]

Sometimes, different constructions can produce the same set of words, but with different meanings. We saw an example of this with the John kicked the bucket example in class. For each of the following sets of sentences, identify the two constructions that make the critical difference between the two interpretations of each sentence. [Hint: there may be one interpretation that's preferred with the punctuation I've given you - look beyond this.] Make sure for each construction [that is, a total of four constructions, two for each set] to do the same things as in part I; namely, identify:

i the construction [give it an apt name]

ii constructional constituents [a.k.a. slots]

iii constraints on these constituents [like their form, meaning, or that they have to be a particular word or other construction]

iv the meaning contributed by this construction [stated in terms of constituents, if applicable]

v the form of this construction [including word order, prosody, or anything else not contributed by its constituents]

1. [a] When Bob approaches the girls don't pay attention to him.

[b] If John starts drinking your beers disappear fast.

2. [a] Visiting relatives can be a pain.

[b] Flying planes used to be dangerous.