16.1913, Review: Ling Theories/Syntax: Fried & Östman (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1913. Wed Jun 22 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1913, Review: Ling Theories/Syntax: Fried & Östman (2004)

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1)
Date: 21-Jun-2005
From: Lea Cyrus < lea at marley.uni-muenster.de >
Subject: Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 02:12:29
From: Lea Cyrus < lea at marley.uni-muenster.de >
Subject: Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective 
 

EDITORS: Fried, Mirjam; Östman, Jan-Ola
TITLE: Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective
SERIES: Constructional Approaches to Language 2
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-124.html


Lea Cyrus, Arbeitsbereich Linguistik, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

SYNOPSIS

The volume under review consists of five chapters which can be 
divided into two major parts: the first two chapters are an introduction 
to the construction grammar (CxG) framework, while the last three are 
in-depth studies dealing with various constructions in Czech, 
Japanese, and French.

In the first chapter (pp. 1-10), which is also an introduction to the 
collection, the two editors begin by putting CxG into a wider 
perspective and describing the way it relates to other frameworks, 
such as Case Grammar and Relational Grammar, Gestalt Grammar, 
Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Frame 
Semantics. They go on to explain how the "cross-language 
perspective" of the title is addressed in this volume. Their main 
objective is to refute the accusation that CxG is suitable only for the 
grammar of English, for which it was originally devised. This will be 
achieved by presenting three studies (chapters three to five) that 
successfully apply the CxG framework to languages other than English.

The second chapter (pp. 11-86), by far the longest in the volume, is 
devoted to a detailed description of the workings of construction 
grammar in the Fillmore/Kay tradition, in which a conceptual closeness 
to frame semantics is combined with a formal apparatus borrowed from 
HPSG. The two editors, who are also the authors of this paper, felt the 
need to include this type of overview, since to date there exists no 
published introduction to this framework (the publication date of 
Fillmore et al. (to appear) has repeatedly been postponed and is now 
scheduled for end of July 2005, and the various prepublished versions 
of the book (e.g. Fillmore and Kay, 1995) are not available to a wide 
audience). After an overview of the main ideas and key concepts of 
CxG, Fried and Östman place particular emphasis on a detailed and 
example-rich step-by-step introduction to the mechanisms of this 
framework. They introduce the characteristic box notation and explain 
how attribute-value matrices and co-indexation are used. They also 
show how CxG takes care of a wide range of phenomena, such as 
determination in noun phrases, valence representation, various cases 
of linking, as well as raising and control. The major construction types 
(lexical, phrasal, linking and ordering constructions) are introduced in 
more or less detail and, as the chapter proceeds, the examples - and 
boxes - become increasingly complex. In many ways, this introduction 
follows Fillmore and Kay's textbook manuscripts (e.g. Fillmore and 
Kay, 1995). Of course, some things have been left out, some have 
been added, and the overall organisation is different, too, but all in all 
the closeness is apparent. The main difference between the 
manuscript version and this paper is that, while the former is mostly 
based on English, the latter also shows how phenomena that occur in 
other languages can be accommodated within the CxG framework. 
Examples of this include experiential verbs in Russian, which are 
obligatorily expressed without a nominative, a family of dative 
constructions in Czech, a Czech pronoun that serves both to refer to 
the second person plural and as a polite form of address, and a 
Hungarian ordering construcion.

In Chapter 3 (pp.87-119), Mirjam Fried examines two Czech 
experiential constructions which, at first sight, differ only in the case 
they assign to the experiencer, which is dative in the more productive 
version (-> D-construction) and accusative, sometimes alternating with 
dative, in the other (-> A-construction). In what follows, Fried 
convincingly challenges the view held by more traditional grammarians 
that the accusative version is an exception to the more basic dative 
version.  A close examination of both constructions leads her to the 
conclusion that what they have in common is the semantic frame which 
she calls "localized experience" and which, through its valence, 
determines the two participants that must be realized: one with the 
semantic role 'interest' (the experiencer), the other with the 
role 'locative' (the body part where the experience is located). 
Conversely, it also determines which participants must not be realized 
and thus suppresses potential stimulus or agent arguments 
contributed by the predicate.  The two constructions differ in the type 
of head predicate they contain. The D-construction mostly integrates 
intransitive verbs of emitting light or sound, whereas the A-
construction integrates transitive verbs of direct physical contact. The 
actual morphosyntactic realization of participants then comes about 
through an interplay of regular linking patterns and constructional 
requirements: after the only argument contributed by the intransitive 
predicate in the D-construction has been suppressed, there is no 
predicate-specific argument left that could take on the experiencer 
role, so a dative of interest is introduced - a common and regular 
pheonomenon in Czech grammar. In the A-construction, however, the 
experiencer need not be added, because it is realized by a 
reinterpretation of the patient argument of the transitive verb. Like all 
Czech transitive patient arguments, this is in the accusative. The 
occasional dative-alternation can occur on the analogy of the more 
productive dative-experiencer in the D-construction. The overall 
conclusion of Fried's paper is that the regular mechanisms linking 
semantic roles and morphological cases on the predicate level can be 
overriden by constructional requirements, which leads to apparently 
exceptional case marking.

Seiko Fujii's study (Chapter 4, pp. 121-155), which is based on 15 
hours of transcribed speech, looks at the way deontic meaning, in 
particular obligation, is encoded in Japanese conditional clauses. She 
distinguishes three types of obligation-expressing conditionals. What 
the three types have in common is the form of their protasis: it consists 
of a full clause which is usually negated (something like 'If I don't do 
this...') and the conditional linker "to". They differ both in the form of 
the apodosis and in the way the obligation is encoded. In the first 
case, the apodosis consists of another full clause. Here, the obligation 
is encoded only by conversational implicatures and depends on the 
speaker and hearer's subjective negative evaluation of the situation 
referred to by the apodosis: the obligation arises from the need to 
avoid this negative situation. In the second case, the apodosis consists 
of a negative evaluative predicate only. Consequently, the negative 
evaluation of the antecedent clause and the resulting obligation is 
coded explicitly in this construction type and need not rely on 
conversational implicatures. In principle, any negative evaluative 
predicate can fill the predicate slot in this construction, but the data 
show that two predicates ("ikenai", "dame", both approximately 
mean 'bad') account for fifty percent of the cases, so this construction 
type is to a large extent conventionalized. The third construction type 
finally contains only the bare protasis, i.e. there is no apodosis. Since 
there is no second clause to help establish the deontic meaning, it 
must be the construction itself that does so. Fujii introduces the notion 
of "constructional scheme" to group together those construction types 
that share a common meaning (e.g. 'obligation').  Towards the end of 
her paper, she briefly touches upon constructional schemes 
expressing other kinds of deontic meaning (e.g. prohibition). While the 
various schemes can all be expressed by the same construction types, 
they differ in the form of the protasis and, more importantly, in their 
choice of clause linker (in Japanese, there are several ways of 
expressing condition). Since regularities can be observed both across 
construction types and across constructional schemes, Fujii sees 
these notions as well suited for structuring families of constructions.

Knud Lambrecht, in Chapter 5 (pp.157--199), examines a French 
construction which is very common in spoken language but has neither 
been discussed in major grammars of French nor included in major 
dictionaries, possibly due to its confinement to spoken discourse. The 
construction under investigation is a variant of copular subject-
predicate structures like "C'est un livre intéressant" in which the noun 
is right-detached, leaving its modifier isolated in the predicate position, 
as exemplified by "C'est intéressant, comme livre". Lambrecht refers to 
this construction as the Right-Detached "comme"-N construction 
(RDCN).  A close comparison of this construction with the related right-
topic construction (R-TOP) in which a topical argument is right-
detached but coindexed with a preverbal pronominal ("Il(i) est 
intéressant, ce livre(i)"), reveals a number of similarities, so that RDCN 
can justly be called a variety of R-TOP. However, there are also quite 
a few syntactic and semantic differences, which proves that RDCN is 
indeed a construction in its own right. Similarly, the detached 
subcomponent "comme"-N deviates semantically from otherwise 
comparable uses of "comme"-N in that it is neither role- nor domain-
specifying. One important result is that the detached constituent 
denotes "the category which is modified by the intra-clausal predicate 
adjective and of which the subject denotatum is an instance" (p. 178).  
Lambrecht then sets out to determine why and in what contexts RDCS 
is favoured over its canonical counterpart and reaches the conclusion 
that they differ in their information structure. The canonical 
construction is pragmatically ambiguous in that it does not determine 
whether it is the whole predicate NP or only the modifying adjective 
that is in focus. The RDCS construction is different in this respect: 
here, the information structure unambiguously specifies that only the 
adjective is in focus, while the denotatum of the detached noun must 
be both known and discourse-active.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

My overall impression of this book is very favourable: all contributions 
are well-crafted, provide interesting insights, and are certainly state-of-
the-art in CxG research. What is also very important: they read well. 
Even those not familiar with Czech, Japanese, or French will have no 
difficulty following the discussions. My evaluation is structured as 
follows: First, I will say a few words about the overall organization of 
the volume. I will then comment on the framework as represented in 
this collection, particularly in Chapter 2. After that, I take a look at the 
cross-linguistic perspective. Finally, I will point out a few minor 
mistakes I noticed while reading the book.

I found the overall organization of the book slightly unusual, a kind of 
hybrid between a textbook/monograph and a collection: it is an edited 
volume, but apart from the editors, there are only two contributors: 
more than half of the pages have been written by the editors 
themselves. Also, the combination of papers made me wonder what 
kind of audience the editors had in mind. While Chapter 2, the 
introduction to CxG, is written in textbook style and obviously intended 
for newcomers to the field who still need to learn the basics, the 
subsequent papers seem to be directed at readers familiar with the 
framework. As mentioned above, this chapter was included in the 
collection because there is no introductory textbook to CxG available 
yet - and it certainly is a good introduction. However, I doubt that those 
in need of such an introduction would look for it in an edited volume 
like this one, and I suspect that those who buy or borrow this book will 
have enough background to be able to do without it. Furthermore, 
once Fillmore et al.'s textbook is out, which will be very soon (unless 
there is another postponement), this chapter will lose some of its 
raison d'être and will then seem even more out of place in this type of 
collection.

I will now turn to a few matters regarding the CxG framework itself. 
Before doing so, I would like to stress that I took an immediate liking to 
this approach the moment it first came to my attention, and that, on the 
whole, I find it very convincing and promising. My comments are thus 
well-wishing and I am very much aware that many of the problems may 
well be teething troubles of a young discipline or even 
misunderstandings on my part.

The CxG approach advocated in this volume is the Fillmorean 
approach and as such naturally incorporates many features of earlier 
Fillmorean approaches, most prominently semantic roles and frame 
elements. Both are very useful in the description and explanation of 
many phenomena. However, I sometimes miss a certain awareness of 
the fact that, by incorporating these notions into a new theory, one 
does not only inherit their benefits, but also their problems. For 
instance, it has turned out to be notoriously difficult to determine the 
number and type of semantic roles and to draw clear distinctions 
between them - Fillmore himself acknowledges this (Fillmore and Kay, 
1995, p. 4-22). That this difficulty has not been overcome can be seen 
by the fact that Fried and Östman, in the lexical construction of the 
verb "to persuade" (p. 65), assign the semantic role of patient to 
the "persuasion target", wheras Fillmore and Kay chose to assign to it 
the semantic role of experiencer (Fillmore and Kay, 1995, p. 7-21).

Similarly, there is frequently some subjectivity involved when deciding 
what frame elements are necessarily part of the meaning of a given 
predicate. On p. 52, for example, one of the frame elements of WALK 
is 'Companion'. Since just about any action can be performed together 
with a companion, this can hardly be said to be necessary specifically 
for the act of walking. I first suspected that Fried and Östman's reason 
for assuming the 'Companion' as a frame element was that they need 
it for explaining the construct "She'll walk you across the street" (p. 50) 
(they argue - admittedly tentatively - that this comes about through 
unification of an intransitive verb and the Affected Object construction, 
which adds an object (patient) to the valence of WALK and links it to 
the 'Companion'). However, since they go on to say that an added 
argument need not be in the predicate's inventory of frame elements, 
this may not have been the reason after all. Whatever it is: if the 
notions of frame elements and semantic roles are to play a central part 
in the formalization mechanims, we should not forget to address the 
problematic issues this entails.

The Affected Object construction leads me to another point that I feel 
is not always given the appropriate amount of attention in some CxG 
publications and also in this volume, namely over-generation. On p. 
24, Fried and Östman state that CxG "aims to account for all of the 
grammatical sentences of the language and only those". Sometimes, 
particularly on the more general levels, constructions are introduced 
that solve the problem at hand but cause other problems elsewhere. 
Take, for example, the Affected Object construction: how is it 
accounted for that this construction does not unify with verbs like "kill" 
or "eat" or "explode"? Also, as far as I can see, nothing prevents this 
construction from licencing the ungrammatical construct "*I walked 
him". It is repeatedly argued that this approach is "markedly different" 
(p. 112, also p. 56) from Goldberg's argument structure constructions 
(Goldberg, 1995), mainly because the latter is not flexible enough to 
accommodate finer meaning distinctions, but also for some formal 
reasons. Goldberg would see the construct "She'll walk you across the 
street" as an instantiation of the "caused-motion construction" 
(Goldberg, 1995, Chapter 7), which supplies the appropriate 
arguments and imposes certain semantic constraints on its slots. 
Whether or not it is true that Goldberg's approach could not be 
adjusted to cope with the Czech phenomena presented by Fried, I 
cannot judge. However, as long as the over-generation issues 
mentioned above are not solved (or as long as I do not know how they 
are solved), I find the solution offered by Goldberg intuitively more 
convincing.

The following remarks concern the "cross-language perspective" 
announced in the title of the book. My own expectation when reading 
the title was that the book would address the question whether and 
how cross-linguistic studies could sensibly be conducted within the 
CxG framework. Since CxG is sign-based and since signs are by 
definition arbitrary and conventional and thus language-specific, this is 
a legitimate question. Östman and Fried also point out that "the 
question of universality requires serious attention" (p. 6) due to these 
basic tenets of CxG. Croft (2001), who argues for the ultimate 
language-specificity of constructions, claims that "their function in 
structuring and communicating information is not [language-specific]" 
(p. 60) and suggests that "valid cross-linguistic generalization are 
generalizations about how function is encoded in linguistic form" (p. 
363). Accordingly, one way of taking a cross-linguistic perspective in 
the CxG framework could have been to concentrate on one particular 
function and investigate its encoding in different languages.

However, the cross-language perspective in this volume is largely 
restricted to applying the CxG framework to phenomena from different 
languages. The long-term goal to find "cross-language 
generalizations" (p.8) is mentioned but the phenomena under 
investigation are from very different areas, so it seems that it was not 
really attempted to achieve parts of this goal just yet. Maybe it is too 
early to expect this kind of result from CxG: it has been characteristic 
of this framework to investigate those phenomena that are traditionally 
thought of as being on the periphery of grammar and to show that they 
can be explained with the same type of mechanisms as the rest. This 
was also done, and very expertly so, in the contributions in this book. 
But it is in the nature of these "peripheral" phenomena to be highly 
language-specific, and consequently they are not an obvious starting 
point for cross-linguistic investigations. What this book has indeed 
shown is that CxG is very suitable for describing, explaining and 
representing the linguistic phenomena of different languages that have 
little in common.

Finally, I noticed a couple of minor mistakes that must have escaped 
the editors' attention: "18b" and "18c" on p. 55 should be "17b" 
and "17c" respectively. In the gloss of example 20a on p. 67, two 
words are marked as being nominative. I do not speak Czech, but from 
the context I presume that "child" should really be marked dative. On 
p. 122, one of the instances of "encoding idioms" should be "decoding 
idioms". There is no outer box round construction type (iv) on p. 128. I 
am not sure whether this is on purpose, but since there is one round 
the corresponding constructional scheme on p. 130, I think there 
should be an outer box on p. 128, too.  In the constructional 
scheme 'obligation' on the same page, there is a Kleene star next to 
the right inner box, which does not make much sense. "Detained" on 
p. 130 should be "detailed", and "idiomatitcity" on p. 151 "idiomaticity". 
On p. 187, the PHON attribute of the adjective is assigned the 
value "unacc", but, if I am not mistaken, the correct value would 
be "acc".

REFERENCES

Croft, William (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory 
in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fillmore, Charles J. & Paul Kay (1995). Construction Grammar. 
Lecture Notes, Lingustics X-20, University of California, Berkeley.

Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay, & Laura Michaelis (to appear). 
Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). A Construction Grammar Approach to 
Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lea Cyrus is a research assistant and PhD student at the English 
Department at the University of Münster, Germany, where she teaches 
1st and 2nd year undergraduate students. Her research interests 
include descriptive grammar and bi- or multilingual treebank design.





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