30.1364, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax: Kaunisto, Höglund, Rickman (2018)

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Subject: 30.1364, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax: Kaunisto, Höglund, Rickman (2018)

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Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2019 21:51:05
From: Lucia Busso [lucia.busso90 at gmail.com]
Subject: Changing Structures

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2442.html

EDITOR: Mark  Kaunisto
EDITOR: Mikko  Höglund
EDITOR: Paul  Rickman
TITLE: Changing Structures
SUBTITLE: Studies in constructions and complementation
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 195
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Lucia Busso, Università di Pisa

SUMMARY

The volume “Changing Structures. Studies in constructions and
complementation”, edited by Mark Kaunisto (University of Tampere), Mikko
Höglund (Stockholm University) and Paul Rickman (University of Tampere) is the
final product of a symposium held at the University of Tampere in October
2015, on the occasion of the retirement of professor Juhani Rudanko.
Accordingly, most authors who contributed to the volume were either his
students, or were in some way associated with him throughout their careers.  

The volume includes a collection of eleven research articles, authored by
scholars in different stages of their career, which all share the principal
theme of the book, namely studies on complementation (mainly - but not
exclusively - of verb complementation) and other constructions. All the
contributions are therefore situated in an area of investigation which bridges
across lexico-grammar, syntax, and semantics. 

The vast majority of the contributions for this volume employ data from
already existent large electronic corpora – BNC, COCA, COHA, GloWbE, NOW – but
a few studies gather data from newly ad-hoc compiled corpora, representing
regional varieties of English.

Even though the use of corpora for the investigation of language phenomena is
clearly a characteristic trait of the contributions to this volume, a rather
wide variety of approaches can be found in terms of both theoretical and
methodological perspectives; the subject is analysed from a gamut of
theoretical frameworks and using varying methodologies. Additionally,
different types of linguistic patterns, such as adjectives, matrix verbs or
syntactic constructions, are examined in their variation and evolution.

Given the range of different perspectives, the volume is structured around
three main themes that tie the different chapters together; each part
comprises contributions that share the same main focus and/or methodological
approach. The distinction is not clear-cut, since some aspects of the
different thematic nodes can be found in other chapters too.

Such themes are: 

the semantic and functional description of different types of complementation
patterns;

the investigation into the distribution of complementation patterns by means
of corpus studies (both from a diachronic and synchronic point of view); 

the study of variation of usage and innovative patterns in English as a Second
Language (henceforth: ESL) contexts and in languages other than English. 

The studies that approach the first theme – i.e. the study of complementation
patterns are mainly focused on verb complementation patterns. The type of
verbal structures that are analysed are the following:

matrix verb + finite/non-finite clausal complement; the subject is shared by
matrix and lower-level verb (e.g.: ‘propose + that-clause/to-inf/-ing clause’)

matrix verb + NP + non-finite clause; the object NP is the subject of the verb
in the complement non-finite clause (e.g.: ‘let/allow + NP + to-inf’)

matrix verb (+ NP) + preposition + non-finite clause (e.g.: ‘hold off (from)
-ing’)

matrix verb (+ preposition) + NP (e.g.: verbs taking either a direct or
prepositional object)

As for non-verbal complement-taking forms,  adjectives and nouns are also
addressed in this volume (e.g.: ‘ashamed + to-inf/ -ing clause, omission of
complementizer markers such as ‘that’ with nouns).

The second major theme is a methodological rather than content one: the use of
large electronic corpora for the study of complementation patterns. The breath
of corpora used is indeed impressive, as 13 corpora, both well-established and
ad hoc-compiled, are used in the present contributions. Clearly, the corpora
vary considerably with regard to size, generality and scope. 

The third and last thematic area of the book, the complementation patterns of
regional varieties of English, are part of the (relatively) new and growing
interest to World Englishes. The contributions in this thematic domain all
share the purpose of contributing with empirical data to the theoretical
models such as the three-circle model (Inner, Outer, and Expanding variety) by
Kachru (1985), or the Five-Phase model of the evolution of different regional
varieties by Schneider (2003, 2007). The difference between “colonial lag” –
i.e. retention of old forms of British English – and “colonial lead” – i.e.
the autonomous innovation of the regional variety – is also addressed (for
reference, see Görlach, 2007; Hundt 2009; Montgomery 2001).

Accordingly to this thematic subdivisions, the volume has been structured into
three chapters, which strive to group together contributions with the same
focus or the same methodological approach. The subdivision is of course not
entirely clear-cut, as many studies can be “cross-classified” across the three
thematic sections.

The three parts in which the volume is structured are as follows:

“Semantic descriptions of constructions”. The first section of the book groups
together three contributions that focus on the semantic content of the
constructions under investigation. The three discuss the theoretical
frameworks of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006) and Cognitive
Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2008). The first paper, “Talk into vs convince
to: Talking as a cause leading to containment, convincing as a cause leading
to a result” is by Patrick Duffley. It discusses the causative constructions
‘talk NP into -ing’ and ‘convince NP to + inf’. It mainly discusses the
Construction Grammar approach, and strives to demonstrate that the structures
themselves should not be considered constructions in Goldberg (1995)’s sense
of the term, but that the main verbs found in the structures are predictable
based on the other components of the structure. The second paper is by Thomas
Egan. In his contribution called “Passive permissives: Being let and allowed”
the author examines the verbs ‘let’ and ‘allow’ and their occurrence in the
passive construction; analysing data from the BNC, COCA and COHA, Egan
discusses the different behaviour of the verbs under investigation in force
dynamics terms: ‘let’ typically encodes a semantic feature of ‘non-imposition’
which would generally be uninformative in the passive form, whereas ‘allow’
encodes a ‘barrier removal’ feature, which is informative in both active and
passive constructions. The third and last paper of this section is by Jouni
Rostila: “Goldberg’s Rely On construction: Overreliance on generalization?”.
This paper too refers to the general framework of Construction Grammar,
although in a less critical perspective than Duffley’s contribution. The
author considers the proposal of Goldberg (2014) on the so-called ‘Rely-On’
construction to be too broad a generalization, and proposes a more refined
account of such a construction. His account is deeply influenced by
contrastive observations on similar constructions in German.

“Variation and change in complementation patterns”.  In the second section of
the volume five corpus-based contributions are presented. All of them share –
besides the same method – an interest in complementation patterns in distinct
varieties of English (i.e. New Zealand English, British English). The first
paper, by Paul Rickman and Mark Kaunisto, addresses “Aspects of the use of the
transitive into -ing pattern in New Zealand English”. The authors address the
construction ‘V NP into -ing’ by comparing data from a new compiled corpus of
New Zealand newspapers to American English. Their results indicate not only
that the pattern is highly productive in contemporary New Zealand English (as
it is with American English), but also that New Zealand English hosts specific
localized innovations in the matrix verbs allowed by the pattern. The second
contribution, “Complementation of ‘ashamed’ – diachrony and determinants of
variation”, by Mikko Höglund, is an example of a study which focuses on the
complementation pattern of an adjective, rather than on verbal
complementation. It looks at the various complements of the adjective
‘ashamed’ during the last two centuries, employing both the COCA (Corpus of
Contemporary American English) and the COHA (Corpus of Historical American
English). The author finds that – in accordance with what is predicted by the
Great Complement Shift – the ‘to-infinitive’ complement has been subjected to
a decline in frequency. Furthermore, the ‘-ing’ complement is not used very
frequently overall, but some contexts such as negation or copula in the
complement clause are shown to attract such complements. The following
contribution is authored by Veera Saarimäki, and is called “Sentential
complementation of ‘propose’ in recent British English”. The paper is focused
on control theory (Haegeman, 1991), and under this light the author examines
the diachronic changes of the matrix verb ‘propose’ in the last two centuries,
using the Corpus of Late Modern English and the BNC (British National Corpus).
The results are – differently from the previous paper – not in line with the
Great Complement Shift, as the ‘to + infinitive’ increased, and ‘-ing’ clauses
decreased their frequency over the investigated period of time. Günter
Rohdenburg is the author of the following article, “The use of optional
complement markers in present-day English: The role of passivization and other
complexity factors”. The study focuses on various optional markers (such as
‘that’, ‘to’, ‘from’) and accounts for the distribution of the rival variants
with/without markers in terms of the Complexity Principle, which correlates
processing complexity and grammatical explicitness. Passivization is
investigated in-depth. The last contribution is called “Patterns of direct
transitivization and differences between British and American English”, and is
authored by Marcus Callies. The paper takes into consideration a number of
major English varieties, in which different verbs display a tendency to take
direct complements rather than prepositional ones (“They protested [against]
the idea”). In particular, in this article the author focuses on three verbs –
‘graduate’, ‘impact’ and ‘shop’ – and on their alternations with/without
prepositional object.

“The Emergence of new Patterns” is the third and conclusive section of the
volume. It groups together three contributions which all focus on innovations
in complementation patterns. The contributions additionally all share an
interest in minor varieties of English, or contexts of ESL or EFL (English as
a Second / Foreign Language). The first contribution by Sebastian Hoffmann
focuses – like the article by Callies – on particle verb usage. In his paper
“I would like to request for your attention: On the diachrony of prepositional
verbs in Singapore English”, the author examines prepositional verbs in
Singaporean English. Data is gathered by an ad-hoc compiled 158-million words
corpus of a Singaporean newspaper from 1951 to 2011. Results appear to
contrast the ones by Callies. That is, transitive verbs tend to take
prepositional objects in Singaporean English (“discuss [about] something”).
The author explains the innovative patterns as the results of processes of
innovation and analogy in the ESL context of Singapore. Peter Slomanson is the
author of the second contribution, “The development of infinitival
complementation with or without language contact”. In this paper, the author
offers a parallelism between the evolution of an infinitival complementation
in rural Sri Lankan Malay and in Old English. Similarly, in fact, the author
traces the origin of the complementation pattern in a finite dative marked
complementation phrase. The last contribution of the section is “Anglicising
Finnish complementation? Examining the ‘rakastan puhua’ (‘I love to speak’)
structure in present-day Finnish”, by Pertti Hietaranta. The paper discusses
an innovative pattern of contemporary Finnish: from the traditional form
‘rakastan puhumista’ (I love speaking), the form ‘rakastan puhua’ (‘I love to
speak’) has nowadays become more common . This syntactic change – the author
argues – comes from English, with the influence of many sociological and
ideological factors.

EVALUATION

The present book presents a contribution to the study of variation and change
in the use of linguistic constructions; it successfully gives a rather broad
overview of  the field of complementation, in terms of both theoretical
perspectives and empirical approaches employed. However, a clear preference
for either diachronic or synchronic corpus-based studies can be observed.

‘Changing Structures’ brings together eleven contributions from different
authors, which all examine the emergence, variation, and function of different
patterns not only for main varieties of English (British and American), but
also for less-studied ones (such as New Zealand English) and for varieties of
English as a second or foreign language (Singaporean English). Additionally,
different languages from different linguistic families are also considered in
the volume (German, Sri Lankan Malay, Finnish). 

The volume presents itself as a well-organized, coherent collection of papers
that tackle different aspects of complementation patterns. The introduction is
extremely clear and informative, and the thematic and methodological
subdivision works well in presenting the reader with a ‘red thread’ through
the contributions and the chapters. The different perspectives taken in the
book are also helpful in giving a broader overview of the issue under
investigation. Conflicting evidence and opinions about the same topic or
linguistic theory are also provided; specifically, the papers by Hoglund and
Saarimäki present conflicting results with regard to the Great Complement
Shift. The former article provides findings which are perfectly in line with
the theory, whereas the latter finds results which appear to contradict the
Great Complement Shift. The papers by Callies and Hoffmann too show
conflicting results with regard to universal language trends: while the former
author finds – in this and in preceding works – that a number of English verbs
in major varieties tend to occur with direct objects rather than prepositional
ones, the latter demonstrate that Singaporean English displays an inverse
tendency to add prepositional objects to verbs which are generally transitive
in major varieties of English. 

Also conflicting perspectives on the theoretical framework of Construction
Grammar are present in the volume: in the first section of the book, the
papers by Duffley and Rostila both comment on the framework and discuss its
central and crucial tenets. However, the former paper takes a rather critical
perspective on the theoretical framework as a whole, whereas the latter one
moves a more specific criticism to the particular structure of Goldberg
(2014)’s “Rely On” construction, but adopts the same framework to refine
Goldberg’s analysis. The presentation of conflicting and contradicting
findings and theoretical perspectives is in our opinion extremely beneficial
for the reader, who is hence presented with different points of view that give
a more complete and broader glance on the issue under investigation.

Much potential future research is suggested by the present contributions,
which overall succeed in presenting convincing and well-argued evidence for
different phenomena in complementation. However, the quality of the
contributions is not uniform. The vast majority of the articles included are
indeed extremely well organized and present considerable data and results,
with very clear and fine-grained analyses. Nonetheless, a number of papers
present with a few inconsistencies in either theoretical or methodological
aspects, that render them generally less convincing in the claims they put
forward. 

In the first Section, Duffley deals with the criticism rather frequently found
in the literature to Construction Grammar approaches of “reification of
constructional meaning”. However, even though the author strives to
demonstrate that a construction grammar approach is not necessary in dealing
with complementation patterns, the author implicitly treats the structures
under investigation as abstract constructions in the sense of Goldberg’s
construction grammar, that is as abstract grammatical patterns which are
intrinsically paired with a general semantic content, which emerges from their
parts. Overall, the critique on constructionist approaches does not seem to
have sufficient empirical ground for the claims the author wishes to make. 

In the third section, the papers by Peter Slomanson and Petti Hietranta both
present very interesting ideas and data on Sri Lankan Malay and Finnish; the
structure of the papers however does not result in a coherent and
well-structured ensemble – perhaps due to space limitations.

On the methodological side, a number of authors presented data that they did
not fully justify or explain. For example, Rickman and Kaunisto’s paper on New
Zealand English employs data taken from an ad-hoc diachronic corpus of New
Zealand newspapers. However, the authors do not explain why they have decided
to choose specifically those newspapers, nor the specific period of time for
the analysis. Additionally, Rohdenburg’s paper addresses the change in
complementation pattern of three English matrix verbs, but does not provide
the reader with the rationale behind the choice of such specific verbs. A
motivated and well-explained choice of the data employed, the specifics of the
methods and of the type of analysis performed is extremely important to
provide the reader with information about the necessary research choices that
were made by the authors. A lack of this kind of explanation, we feel,
undermines the value of the paper itself. 

Notwithstanding the rather minor issues that were just pointed out, the
overall work presents as a coherent and well-structured contribution to the
study of complementation, especially for those readers who have an interest in
corpus-based methodologies and analyses.

REFERENCES

Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago press.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work. The Nature of Generalization
in Language. Oxford: Oxford University press

Goldberg, Adele E. 2014. “Fitting a slim dime between verb template and
argument semantic structure construction approaches”. Theoretical Linguistic
40 (1-2): 113- 135.

Haegeman, Liliane.1991. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism:
the English language in the outer circle. English in the world: teaching and
learning the language and the literature, Randolph Quirk & H.G. Widdowson
(eds), 11-30. Cambridge: CUP.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical
prerequisites. Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: descriptive
application. Volume 2. Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford
University Press.

Montgomery, Michael. 2001. British and Irish antecedents. Cambridge History of
the English language, vol. VI: English in North America, John Alego (ed.),
86-153.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. The dynamics of New Englishes: from identity
construction to dialect birth. Language 79 (2), 233-381.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world.
Cambridge: CUP.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I have just completed my PhD in linguistics at the Univeristy of Pisa, where I
also obtained my MA in Theoretical and Applied Lingusitics in 2015. My
research interests lie in Usage Based theory of language, Psycholinguistics,
Sociolinguistics and Construction Grammar. My PhD project deals with valency
coercion in Italian, which I analyze from a Construction Grammar perspective,
using both computational and psycholinguistic methodologies.





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