28.670, Review: English; Applied Ling; Ling Theories; Socioling; Syntax: Hilpert, Östman (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-670. Fri Feb 03 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.670, Review: English; Applied Ling; Ling Theories; Socioling; Syntax: Hilpert, Östman (2016)

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Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2017 11:49:25
From: Víctor Valdivia [vvaldivia at gwu.edu]
Subject: Constructions across Grammars

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1689.html

EDITOR: Martin  Hilpert
EDITOR: Jan-Ola  Östman
TITLE: Constructions across Grammars
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 82
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Víctor Valdivia, George Washington University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

Summary

Construction Grammar represents one of the most holistic and innovative
linguistic models in recent decades due to its conception of constructions as
form-meaning pairings, whole units of different sorts that include different
type of information, both linguistic and extra linguistic. Unfortunately, most
research using Construction Grammar has focused on phenomena from single
languages, mainly English. “Constructions across Grammars”, edited by Martin
Hilpert and Jan-Ola Östman, moves aways from such a tendency, and thus
contributes to the theory of construction grammar across languages, by
presenting six articles that focus on languages other than English, but also
on phenomena from different situations of language contact and on multilingual
contexts. A summary of said collaboration, in the order in which they appear,
is included with its evaluation in what follows.

Evaluation

In “On the borrowability of subject pronoun constructions in Turkish-Dutch
contact”, the first article of the book, Seza Doğruöz, compares the occurrence
of subject pronouns in Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) and
Turkish spoken in Turkey (TR-Turkish). From a usage-based perspective, the
author examines the role of Dutch-Turkish contact in the emergence of
unconventional constructions in NL-Turkish. Even though no significant
quantitative differences arise in terms of frequency between the two varieties
of the language, a qualitative analysis reveals that NL-Turkish speakers often
copy Dutch constructions as chunks, thus causing innovative appearances of
subject pronouns. The qualitative analysis shows as well that NL-Turkish
unconventional constructions can be classified into two main groups: fixed
constructions and partially schematic constructions.

For the first group, Doğruöz identifies at least two constructions: ‘I don’t
know’ and ‘as far as I know’. In both cases, the unconventional use of subject
pronouns in NL-Turkish results from translating lexically fixed constructions
from Dutch, a non pro-drop language, into Turkish, a pro-drop language.
Furthermore, because the translated expressions include a subject pronoun even
in contexts in which TR-Turkish speakers consider it unnecessary, the new
constructions may function as fillers and evidential markers. The second group
refers to syntactic schemas which normally do not include a subject pronoun,
or which do not even exist in TR-Turkish. The author identifies four
constructions illustrating these phenomena: subordinate constructions, left
dislocations, ‘do you mean’, and the ‘yes/no’ question constructions. 

Dutch influence on NL-Turkish subordinate constructions causes the occurrence
of subject pronouns in cases of coreferentiality; for TR-Turkish, such
unnecessary repetition of the pronoun conveys a contrastive meaning. Doğruöz
hypothesizes that the inclusion of a subject pronoun in NL-Turkish copies
Dutch schematic constructions; for instance, [als S V] ‘when S V’ and [dat S
V] ‘that S V’. Left dislocations in NL-Turkish arise from the partial schema
[NP dat/die V] ‘SNP that/those V’, which is very common in Dutch, but does not
exist in TR-Turkish. Like the Dutch construction it copies, the novel
NL-Turkish one introduces the topic of the following clause, in which the
subject is, precisely, the referent of the left dislocation. Finally, the
NL-Turkish ‘yes/no’ question construction also deviates from the norm by
including a subject pronoun in non-contrastive contexts. 

The paper provides clear and convincing arguments for the development of
unconventional constructions in NL-Turkish, as well as its importance for the
theory of construction grammar across languages. Furthermore, consulting a
panel of TR-Turkish speakers to confirm the conventionality or
unconventionality of the constructions minimizes the subjectivity of a
qualitative analysis. As well, the section on Turks and Turkish in the
Netherlands provides the reader with a clear overview of what factors
interplay, and how, in the maintenance of NL-Turkish. Unfortunately, as
mentioned by Doğruöz herself, results and conclusions are based on a low
number of tokens, which makes difficult to anticipate whether the
unconventional constructions discussed in the paper represent the beginning of
a syntactic and pragmatic change or whether they illustrate a merely sporadic
phenomenon.

In “On the universality of frames: Evidence from English-to-Japanese
translation”, Yoko Hasegawa, Russell Lee-Goldman and Charles Fillmore use the
concept of frame and the annotation system as developed in the Berkeley
FrameNet project to analyze a series of English-to-Japanese translations of
scientific passages. In addition to testing the applicability of the project
and the universality of frames, the authors seek to answer the question of
whether or not said frames can be used to assess the accuracy of translation.
In the introduction to the paper, the authors describe FrameNet, define frame,
explain how frames are arranged in a hierarchy, and provide examples of how to
label them in the project. Although brief, the overview of the concepts is
clear enough for those unfamiliar with the project. Essential as well to
understand the paper’s goals and implications is the overview of typological
differences in framing causal events, and how said differences often requires
the use of rhetorical strategies in the translated version. This section also
demonstrates how identifying and describing frames represents a more objective
and systematic strategy to translation, thus providing an argument for the
advantages of using this approach over other ones.

Sections 3 and 4 of the paper are based on the analysis and discussion of
three source-and-translation pairs of examples; rather than working against
the paper’s goal, focusing in just a few cases results in an in-depth
examination of each example; for instance, the authors show how the same
passage can be described using different frames, and how such description
relates to the Japanese translations. Furthermore, by addressing three types
of scenarios -a highly accurate one in terms of frame structure and meaning,
one in which an absent frame does not seem to affect the meaning of the
translation, and one in which a missing frame does affect the meaning of the
translation- the authors demonstrate both the utility and limitations of using
frames as a tool for assessing translations’ accuracy and, implicitly, their
role in a general theory of translation. Moreover, even though the authors do
not mention anything on the topic, understanding what lexical relations each
particular language establishes within each frame is an essential step towards
the development of accurate automatic translation applications.

In “Phonological elements and Diasystematic Construction Grammar”, Steffen
Höder argues for the inclusion of phonology within the approaches of
Construction Grammar (CxG), in general, and of Diasystematic Construction
Grammar (DCxG), in particular. According to the author, phonological elements
are typically seen as lacking motivation, which disqualifies them as
constructions as understood by common definitions of the term (e.g. Goldberg
1995, 2006). On the contrary, Höder considers that features such as stress
(e.g. initial vs final), presence or absence suprasegmental units (e.g. Danish
stød), and tonal contours carry essential information for a construction’s
form. Furthermore, Höder argues that in situations of language contact,
speakers often interpret phonological elements somehow equivalent in different
languages as instances of more schematic constructions; that is to say,
similar language-specific features may constitute the basis for
diaconstructions emerging from that particular linguistic situation. For
instance, although Standard German /haʊs/ and Low German /hus/ differ in their
specific realizations, they both can be seen as instances of the schema /h_s/.
As convincing as the general idea of diaconstructions are, the fact that the
author just compares items from Standard German and Low German may seem
problematic to some scholars, particularly those studying phenomena involving
contact of languages with different phonological elements.

In “Clause combining across grammars: A contrastive analysis of L1 and L2
construal of discourse organization”, Bracha Nir compares and analyzes usage
of bi-clausal constructions in written personal narratives by three groups of
high school and university students: native Hebrew speakers writing in Hebrew
(H1H), native English speakers writing in English (E1E) and native Hebrew
speakers writing in English (H1E). Following Berman’s and Slobin’s (1994)
notion of syntactic packaging, Nir seeks to demonstrate that a) rhetorical
constraints related to Hebrew constructions impact the usage of equivalent
constructions when writing in a second language, namely English; and b) that
said impact reflects the understanding, or lack of, of pragmatic constraints.
Results show that although H1E speakers successfully avoid using prevalent H1H
constructions when writing in English, such as linear adverbial modification,
they do have problems following other English constraints such as those
related to non-finite clause combinations. Findings of this sort not only
illustrate how complex issues of second language acquisition are, particularly
when dealing with macro-level organization of events, but also provide
evidence regarding the reason that morpho-syntactic phenomena cannot be
completely understood without taking into account discourse features. Even
though the author does not mention what the research implies for the field of
second language acquisition, it is clear that understanding how constraints
from L1 affect L2 will help the development of teaching and assessments tools,
particularly in advanced stages of the acquisition process in which students
often reach a plateau due to the lack of strategies addressing how cultural
and pragmatic aspects interplay with grammatical structures.

In “Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the
acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions”, Florence Perek and
Martin Hilpert test the typological distinction between “constructionally
tolerant” languages and “valency-driven languages”, according to which certain
languages allow speakers some freedom to use a lexical item in
non-conventional syntactic constructions, while other ones are less open to
such syntactic innovations. In particular, the authors hypothesize that
speakers of a tolerant language, e.g. English, will judge the grammaticality
of an utterance produced in a second language more favorably than speakers of
a less constructionally tolerant language, e.g. French. Broadly speaking,
results from a grammaticality judgment task administered to speakers of the
above mentioned languages support the hypothesis; however, they also make
evident that the type of language per se is not the only, nor the predominant,
feature driving constructional tolerance: factors such as the particular
construction being judged and the existence of a similar one in the judge’s
first language also have an important effect. In terms of methodology, it is
worth mentioning that the authors correctly anticipate, and act accordingly, a
factor that may affect the accuracy of the results: the interplay between
speakers’ level of proficiency and their judgement of an utterance’s
grammaticality. Taking into account such issues when factoring the scores in
which the analysis is based eliminates skewed results, and allows for the
study to be replicated.

In “Constructions do not cross languages: On cross-linguistic generalizations
of constructions” , the last study included in the book, Philipp Wasserscheidt
contends against a frequent assumption on bilingualism according to which
constructions can cross from one language into another. Based on data from
typologically distinct languages, the author argues that although
cross-linguistic generalization may be possible according to construction
grammar, it can only occur on the semantic level; thus, when speakers
code-switch or seem to calque structures from another language, they do so
based not on language-specific constructions, but rather on abstractions of
them. The author hypothesizes that if cross-linguistic constructions were
real, bilingual speakers would be able to choose what language to use in the
realization of syntactic constituents. To prove such is not the case, he first
illustrates his point with an array of constructions from a variety of
bilingual situations, and then he focuses on prepositional phrases from the
literature on bilingualism. His analysis show that the language of the
preposition and the language of the case marker are the same in most cases;
when both elements correspond to different languages, the marking of the noun
does not correspond to the preposition. That is to say, when uttering specific
elements, speakers are not transferring features from one language to another.
Generally speaking, the author presents a strong argument and choose adequate
examples to support it; nevertheless, given the relevance of the claim, fifty
instances from various bilingual situations may not be sufficient: more data
from a particular bilingual community and from different constructions may
provide a better insight into what cross-linguistic transfer is and how it
works.

In conclusion, by focusing on phenomena occurring in multilingual contexts,
the studies included in Constructions across Grammars not only contribute to
Construction Grammar and linguistics in general; they also help to fill a gap
often observed in linguistic models: how general models and approaches apply
to situations of bilingualism and language contact. Certainly, scholars
interested in the topics and phenomena addressed in this book are looking
forward to the continuation of this endeavor started by Martin Hilpert and
Jan-Ola Östman. Finally, in terms of edition, it would be useful if the
contributions had followed the same criteria when presenting examples and
their glosses: while some authors clearly indicate what particular element the
reader needs to pay attention to (e.g. making the text bold) others do not do
so. Certainly, the latter does not cause misunderstanding of  the  particular
utterance, but readers unfamiliar with the language will appreciate the help
when examining the example.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Professor of Spanish at the George Washington University. My research
interests include functional syntax, particularly in situations of language
contact.





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