Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 20: Construction Grammar

October 30, 2008

Constructions

The basic units of language are form-meaning pairings, known as constructions or symbols

· They can be defined (as in Goldberg's paper) as any form-meaning pairing that is not predictable on the basis of either component parts or other constructions in the language.

· This means that if they have both form and meaning, then words and morphemes, as well as idioms and patterns of phrase structure are defined as constructions, and thus are stored in the constructicon.

Consider a simple sentence Bob kicked the bucket. On the literal interpretation, the scenario described is as follows. An animate entity Bob engaged in the past in an act of kicking an object, a bucket.

Ignoring the definite article the, we might have something like the following set of constructions:

Bob construction

subtype of Noun form

/bab/

meaning

BOB

Bucket construction

subtype of Noun

form

/b√kIt/

meaning

BUCKET

Kick construction

subtype of Verb

form

/kIk/

meaning

KICK

Past-tense-/t/ construction

constructional

Verb

form

Verb + /t/

meaning

EVENT PAST-TENSE

Active transitive construction

constructional

1 (= Noun), 2 (= Verb), 3 (=Noun)

form

1 > 2 > 3

1 and 2 agree

meaning

1 performs 2 on 3

In another, idiomatic, interpretation of this sentence, Bob died. This uses a different construction:

Kick-the-bucket construction

constructional

Theme (= Noun), Kick, The, Bucket

form

Theme > The > Bucket

meaning

THEME DIES

This is a construction because it pairs form and meaning – if you didn't know the construction, you wouldn't have a clue what the sentence means. And it's not predictable from its parts.

Other constructions

Fixed forms:

· There you have it.

· Bob's your uncle.

· How do you do?

· That's why.

· So here's the thing.

Clausal constructions:

· WXDY What's that fly doing in my soup?

· The Xer the Yer The longer I listen to you, the dumber I get.

· Just because X doesn't mean Y: Just because you have more degrees than me doesn't mean I have to listen to you.

· Caused-motion: The forward shot the ball into the goal.

· Ditransitive: The president sent his mother a picture.

Properties of a constructional approach

Aligns the representation of language with the uses people put language to - conveying meaning through form or determining meaning from form.

Treating the basic units of language as form-meaning pairings lets meaning explain form properties

· E.g. We sent the package to the border/President. but We sent the President/??border the package.

· "Meaning" here can include referential semantics, discourse function, social meaning, etc.

Can account for the full range of grammatical phenomena, rather than just a privileged core

· Does so in a unified manner - all grammatical knowledge is constructional

· Chomskian grammar routinely draws borders around what universal grammar is, and thus. what is a potential object of study

Is better able to account for subtle aspects of how we conceive of the world or states of affairs

• The difference between The lamp is over the table and The table is under the lamp
• Or The path runs from the house down to the lake and The path runs from the lake up to the house.

Does not posit any hidden, underlying structure for which there is no positive evidence - WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)

Is learnable by general cognitive mechanisms, and therefore does not require reference to unmotivated innate mechanisms

• Storing these pairings between form and meaning
• Generalizing over them - which produces constructional constituents, (construction roles)
• Combining them in new ways

And finally, makes concrete predictions about language use – production, perception, and learning that we can test!