27.159, Calls: Ling Theories, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax/Brazil

Fri Jan 8 17:22:25 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-159. Fri Jan 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.159, Calls: Ling Theories, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax/Brazil

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Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2016 12:22:12
From: Kristel Van Goethem [kristel.vangoethem at uclouvain.be]
Subject: Form-meaning mismatches in Construction Grammar

Full Title: Form-meaning mismatches in Construction Grammar 

Date: 05-Oct-2016 - 07-Oct-2016
Location: Juiz de Fora - Minas Gerais, Brazil 
Contact Person: Kristel Van Goethem
Meeting Email: kristel.vangoethem at uclouvain.be

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 20-Jan-2016 

Meeting Description:

F. de Saussure (1916) defined the linguistic sign as an association of
''signifier'' and ''signified''. Since then it has often been tacitly assumed
that there exists a symmetry in the relation between the signifier and the
signified of any given sign (Beard 1998). However, form-meaning mismatches are
omnipresent in language:

- Many forms corresponding to one function/meaning 
Well-described examples of this mismatch usually include synonymous lexemes or
constructions. A similar type of mismatch has recently been observed within a
single construction, e.g. in the form of multiple exponence in inflectional
morphology (Harris 2009) or redundancy in syntax (Croft 2000, on paratactic
negation). 

- One form corresponding to many functions/meanings 
Evident examples of this category are polysemous/polyfunctional items.
Recently, Colleman & De Clerck (2011) analyzed the English ditransitive
construction as polysemous. This type of mismatch also applies to conversion
in which the same form expresses different functions (Valera 2014). 

- The meaning of the syntagm cannot be derived from its signs
This type of mismatch applies for instance to exocentric compounds: in Italian
portalettere ‘lit. carry-letters, postman’, the agentive meaning cannot be
derived from the formal constituents. In syntax, unexpected functions of verbs
or nouns are hard to account for when adopting a word-level analysis, e.g.
transitivity of the verb sneeze in She sneezed the napkin off the table
(Goldberg 1995).

One century after Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916), this
workshop aims to revisit the nature of the linguistic sign and form-meaning
mismatches from a constructional perspective. In the framework of Construction
Grammar, the notion of the Saussurean sign as a conventionalized form-meaning
mapping has become known as a ''construction'' (among others, Hoffmann &
Trousdale 2013) and the knowledge of language consists of ''constructions all
the way down'' (Goldberg 2006: 18). Arguments for a constructional account of
form-meaning mismatches are the facts that constructions may have ‘holistic
properties’ (Booij 2010) and can be interconnected in a complex network (De
Smet et al. 2013). 

References:

Beard, R. (1998). Derivation. In A. Spencer and A. Zwicky (Eds), Handbook of
morphology (pp. 44-65). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Booij, G. (2010). Construction Morphology. Oxford: OUP.
Colleman, T. & B. De Clerck. 2011. Constructional semantics on the move: On
semantic specialization in the English double object construction. Cognitive
Linguistics 22: 183-209.
De Smet, H., L. Ghesquière & F. Van de Velde (eds.). (2013). On multiple
source constructions in language change. Amsterdam: John Benjanmins.
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in
language. Oxford: OUP.
Harris, A. (2009). Exuberant exponence in Batsbi. Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 27(2), 267-303.
Hoffmann, T. & Trousdale, G. (Eds) (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Construction
Grammar. Oxford: OUP.
Saussure, F. de. (1916/1995). Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par C.
Bailly & A. Séchehaye. Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages. 
Valera, S. (2014). Conversion. In: R. Lieber & P. Stekauer (Eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Derivational Morphology (pp. 154-168). New York: OUP.

Call for Abstracts:

If you are interested in participating in our workshop entitled ''The
Saussurean sign revisited: Accounting for form-meaning mismatches in
Construction Grammar'', please send us a title and short description of your
topic by 20 January 2016, so we can submit our proposal (including a
provisional list of participants and titles) to the ICCG9 conference
organizers. If our proposal is accepted, participants will be invited to
submit a full abstract by 1 March 2016. 

Convenors: Nikos Koutsoukos, Kristel Van Goethem & Hendrik De Smet
Discussant: Martin Hilpert

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