33.1464, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Syntax: Coussé, Andersson, Olofsson (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1464. Mon Apr 25 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1464, Review: Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Syntax: Coussé, Andersson, Olofsson (2018)

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Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:32:04
From: Víctor Parra-Guinaldo [egeria381 at gmail.com]
Subject: Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2361.html

EDITOR: Evie  Coussé
EDITOR: Peter  Andersson
EDITOR: Joel  Olofsson
TITLE: Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar
SERIES TITLE: Constructional Approaches to Language 21
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Víctor Parra-Guinaldo, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahad University

SUMMARY

“Grammaticalization Meets Construction Grammar”, edited by Evie Coussé, Peter
Andersson, and Joel Olofsson, constitutes one of several volumes within the
series “Constructional Approaches to Language” published by John Benjamins
Publishing Company, a platform for the discussion of different constructional
models. The volume is arranged into four sections with two or three papers
each. The opening section lays out the theoretical groundwork and raises
issues germane to the approach, followed by the contributors, who in the
following sections investigate a variety of constructions at the verb, noun,
and sentence levels, respectively.

The editors of this volume offer an introduction not only to this first
section, “Theoretical Issues”, but also to the volume itself. In their opening
chapter, “Grammaticalization meets construction grammar. Opportunities,
challenges and potential incompatibilities”, the authors define construction
grammar vis-à-vis grammaticalization and lay the ground for issues related to
the interaction between the two approaches to linguistic research, such as the
contribution of construction grammar to grammaticalization phenomena and vice
versa, and the kind of construction grammar used for the study of
grammaticalization. The chapter ends with an overview of the contributions to
this volume.

As the title of his contribution, “Three open questions in diachronic
construction grammar”, clearly indicates, Martin Hilpert urges researchers in
the fairly new field of Diachronic Construction Grammar to reflect on certain
important theoretical aspects that have not yet been clearly spelt out. In
particular, he raises three questions: 1) To what extent can the researcher
make statements about the linguistic knowledge of speakers from earlier
generations based on the analysis of constructions and should this theoretical
approach be the main goal of the program? 2) How should the emergence of a new
node be described in the constructional network and how many constructional
changes are needed for a new node to be effected? and 3) Given the generally
accepted premise across constructional and usage-based approaches that
linguistic knowledge is an associative network of links between constructions,
what is the exact role of the nodes within the overall architecture of the
constructional network?

In their chapter, “Grammaticalization cut short: A diachronic constructional
view on English posture verbs”, Mégane Lesuisse and Maarten Lemmens analyze
the historical development of the three English cardinal posture verbs ‘sit’,
‘stand’, and ‘lie’. To this end, the authors assess the productivity of these
constructions by means of frequency measures so as to determine their degree
of grammaticalization. The specific frequency patterns found by Lesuisse and
Lemmens in historical dictionaries and corpora of the Modern English period
(1500-1920) reveal that posture verbs occurred in locative and copula
constructions in earlier periods of the English language, but at some point in
history their “grammaticalization was cut short”. The authors, following
Newman’s (2009) hypothesis, conclude that, contrary to their equivalents in
other Germanic languages, the three cardinal posture verbs in English do not
fully grammaticalize into locative, progressive, or habitual markers or into
copulas due to their innovative use expressing dynamic events in later stages.
Meanwhile, the qualitative side of Lesuisse and Lemmen’s analysis shows that
some uses of these posture verbs in English grammaticalized further, creating
“islands’”.

In “Pseudocoordination in Norwegian: Degrees of grammaticalization and
constructional variants”, Torodd Kinn explores constructional variants of the
Norwegian pseudocoordination [VP1 og ‘and’ VP2], such as sitte og lese ‘be
reading’ (literary: ‘sit and read’), and the extent to which VP1
grammaticalizes. The study is based on a collostructional analysis of
synchronic language data extracted from a large corpus of present-day written
Norwegian Bokmål, which is lemmatized and tagged for parts-of-speech and
inflection. Contrary to claims in the past that pseudocoordination allows only
a limited number of VP1s, Kinn shows that a closer examination of
atelic-motion schemas reveals that the VP1 paradigm is in fact quite robust,
with some VP1s being more central than others. He also finds a correlation
between a reduced internal argument structure (scarcity or absence of
constituents between VP1 and the coordinator og) and the semantic bleaching of
VP1s. Consequently, the facilitation relation between VP1 and VP2 is blurred,
strengthening the single-event reading of the construction as VP2 becomes the
only true lexical verb and VP1 becomes more functional.

Enghels and Comer’s contribution, “Evaluating grammaticalization and
constructional accounts: The development of the inchoative construction with
put verbs in Spanish”, traces the historical development of the Spanish verbs
poner and meter ‘put’ into inchoative auxiliaries. The literature thus far
describes the changes by means of grammaticalization, but Enghels and Comer
employ a constructional approach to explore the structural variants of the
construction [NP1 Vrefl PREP INF] in order to determine the emergence of a
general constructional schema. In other words, rather than analyzing the
development of individual lexical items, they focus on the development of
syntactic patterns that may lead to a more general schematic construction. The
data analyzed (all instances of poner and meter as inchoative auxiliary verbs)
come from two corpora, CORDE (Corpus Diacrónico del Español) and CORPES XXI
(Corpus of the 21st century). The authors measure productivity, variation of
the prepositional slot, and any intervening adverbials. Their results show
that this construction becomes more widely used over time, therefore
broadening its semantic types and effecting a higher degree of schematicity;
furthermore, its preposition slot is reduced to the preposition ‘a’ and
intervening adverbials are less frequent.

Neel and Hartman, in “Reduction or expansion? A bit of both: A case study on
the development of German degree modifiers”, hypothesize a schema which
abstracts a series of micro-constructions operating among each other
paradigmatically.  Each of these micro-constructions is essentially a host
class of the type [ein small unit X] consisting of the determiner ‘ein’, a
substantive grammaticalizing element, and an open slot (a lexical item). The
most common examples of this type of quantifier/degree-modifier are “ein
biβchen” (a bit) and “ein wenig” (a little), but the schema serves as a model
for new modifiers such as “ein Funken” (a spark) and “eine Idee” (an idea).
Based on the qualitative analysis of data from the German Text Archive and the
historical archive of the German Reference Corpus, Neels and Hartman argue
that the two older micro-constructions, “ein Funken” and “eine Idee”, may have
contributed to the formation of a new schema, allowing for other modifiers to
join in, such as “ein Funken” and “eine Idee”.

In “Type of frequency, productivity and schematicity in the evolution of the
Latin secundum NP construction”, Guardamagna adopts a constructional approach
to investigate the grammaticalization of the Latin prepositional construction
[secundum NP] ‘according to NP’. Guardamagna analyzes data from the Latin
Library Corpus, which covers four periods, from Classical to Early Medieval
Latin, and argues that there is a correlation between productivity, measured
in terms of frequency, and constructional changes, which manifest themselves
through the extensibility of the schema. During the period under
investigation, the construction shows significant expansion not only at the
syntactic level but also within the host class. Finally, following Barðal’s
(2008) model of productivity, Guardarrama further claims that this host class
exhibits signs of “cultural changes in the transition from Paganism to
Christianity”, thus highlighting the role of social context as a motivator for
change.

“The development of the conditional caso construction in Spanish”, written by
Anton Granvik, is the first of three papers making up the last section in this
volume, “Constructions at sentence level”. This paper focuses on a new complex
conjunction in Spanish, in particular, the development of the abstract noun
‘caso’ into a conditional marker, namely (en) (el) caso (de) + [subordinator]
que. Granvik analyzes data extracted from the Corpus Diacrónico del Español or
CORDE. The data consist of random cases of the “Conditional Caso Construction”
or “CCCxn”, as he calls it, from a period that extends from the 13th to the
20th century. From his investigation of CCCXn, Granvik concludes that both
Grammaticalization and Constructionalization aptly account for the development
of this construction in a complementary fashion, but whereas the former
provides insight into its unidirectional change, the latter takes into
consideration the formal variation of the construction by relating it to more
abstract constructional schemas. The author, following Cappelle’s (2006)
model, adds that CCCxn is partially schematic in that it contains several sub-
or allostructions.

In “Constructionalization areas: The case of negation in Manchu”, Andreas
Hölzl tests the possibility of constructionalization areas, based on Heine &
Kuteva’s (2010) concept of grammaticalization areas, defined as “a group of
geographically contiguous languages that have undergone the same
grammaticalization process as a result of language contact” (p. 97). In this
case, Hölzl investigates the negative existential cycle in a number of 
Tungusic and Mongolic languages, in particular the Tungusic and Mongolian
languages. He presents and describes a variety of constructions to illustrate
the interlingual constructional network between these two languages. These
constructions point to the development of a new standard negative
construction, whereby a negative existential develops into a standard negator
carrying a more procedural meaning. Hölzl proposes that the need for emphatic
negation may be the motivator for the shared construction, arguing for the
development of a network of constructions.

“A radical construction grammar approach to construction split in the
diachrony of the spatial particles of Ancient Greek: Some theoretical
preliminaries” concludes this last section of the volume. In this paper,
Emmanuel Karlsson, analyzes the diachrony of spatial particles, such as epi
‘on’ and kata ‘down’, from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to Ancient Greek, and
argues that these constructions “have been pulling apart continuously out of a
single construction since PIE,” making up for a construction splitting via
“multidirectional grammaticalization processes.” Karlsson accounts for a more
gradual understanding of grammaticalization through the application of a
Radical Construction Grammar  model (Croft, 2001), where pragmatic concepts
such as utterance cues play an important role in the gradual development of
these constructions.

EVALUATION

A little over a decade ago, Noël (2007) raised the question of whether
grammaticalization could be considered the historical locus of construction
grammar, given the important role of constructions in grammaticalization
theory, or whether construction grammar would develop a historical discipline
in its own right. The present volume provides a long-awaited answer to such a
fair theoretical question. Martin Hilpert’s meta-theoretical reflection aims
to stimulate further discussion and the ensuing articles share this common
goal by discussing empirical cases of grammaticalization that put Hilpert’s
theoretical questions to the test. All constructions studied in this volume
are of the semi-schematic type, which is particularly relevant to the
grammaticalization/construction grammar interface. The authors are to be
commended for bringing to light detailed and well-argued studies. Their
analyses are of interest to advanced students and scholars of both
grammaticalization and construction grammar. More than a criticism, my wish is
that some room had been dedicated to emphasizing the importance of
constructions in diachronic syntax so as to appease perceived problems of a
constructional perspective with the study of diachronic syntax (i.e.,
syntactic reconstruction). This volume is a useful contribution to the
discussion of construction grammar in the context of grammaticalization and a
necessary step in the direction of diachronic construction grammar (DCxG)
research.

REFERENCES

Noël, Dirk. 2007. Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization
theory. “Functions of Language” 14. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.14.2.04noe


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Víctor Parra-Guinaldo is Assistant Professor in the Core Curriculum
Program at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahad University, in KSA. He received both his
MA and PhD from Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, in Linguistics and
Applied Linguistics and a Diploma of Higher Education from the University of
Central Lancashire in England. He is recipient of a Teaching Excellence Award
while at ASU. His research interests lie in several areas: English as a Lingua
Franca and L2 Teaching and Learning; Pedagogical Practices; and Applied
Linguistics. He has delivered papers at numerous prestigious conferences both
nationally and internationally and his ongoing pursuits have led to an active
publication agenda.





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