29.3293, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Oyón, Sobrino, Ibáñez (2017)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3293. Tue Aug 28 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 29.3293, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Syntax: Oyón, Sobrino, Ibáñez (2017)
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Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 16:41:00
From: Ryan Lepic [rlepic at uchicago.edu]
Subject: Constructing Families of Constructions
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EDITOR: Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
EDITOR: Alba Luzondo Oyón
EDITOR: Paula Pérez Sobrino
TITLE: Constructing Families of Constructions
SUBTITLE: Analytical perspectives and theoretical challenges
SERIES TITLE: Human Cognitive Processing 58
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017
REVIEWER: Ryan Lepic, University of Chicago
SUMMARY
In her contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, Goldberg
(2013:15-16) identifies five assumptions that characterize constructionist
approaches to linguistic analysis: (1) ''Phrasal constructions, like
traditional lexical items, are learned pairings of form and function''; (2)
''Grammar does not involve any transformational or derivational component'';
(3) ''Phrasal constructions, words, and partially filled words (aka morphemes)
are related in a network''; (4) Cross-linguistic generalizations ''are
explained by domain-general cognitive processes or by the functions of the
constructions involved''; and (5) ''Knowledge of language includes both items
and generalizations, at varying degrees of specificity''. Taken together,
Goldberg's items 1, 3, and 5 frame linguistic knowledge as emergent
generalizations within a network of learned phrasal and lexical items. This
highly structured network of constructions subsumes the traditional lexicon
and grammar, and so it is sometimes referred to as the ''constructicon''
(Fillmore 1988).
Since the 1980s, analyses in constructionist frameworks have contributed to
our understanding of linguistic constructions as diverse and complex pairings
of function and form. However, construction grammarians have traditionally
devoted less attention to the network structure of ''families'' of related
constructions in the constructicon. Accordingly, in ''Constructing Families of
Constructions: Analytical Perspectives and Theoretical Challenges'', editors
Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Alba Luzondo Oyón, and Paula Pérez
Sobrino bring together ten chapters to address this gap. The chapters are
developed from papers that were presented at the ''3rd International
Conference on Meaning Construction, Meaning Interpretation: Applications and
Implications'' at the University of La Rioja, Spain in July 2013. Here I
provide a brief summary of each of the ten contributions, before providing a
general evaluation of the volume:
''The role of verbs and verb classes in identifying German
search-constructions'' by Kristel Proost (Ch1) identifies a
previously-unexplored family of 20 related argument-structure patterns that
code ''prospective possession'' with the phrasal structure [NP V PP] in
German. Drawing on examples from the Deutsches Referenkorpus, the author
analyzes these argument-structure patterns as belonging to four subfamilies:
(i) search-constructions referring to concrete actions, (e.g. ''Künstler
suchen nach Ateliers''/''Artists are looking for ateliers''); (ii)
search-constructions referring to mental actions (e.g., ''Er grübelt nach
einem Motiv''/''He is brooding to find a motive''); (iii) search-constructions
referring to linguistic actions (e.g., ''Vorsitzender Theo Ferdinand
telefonierte schon mittags nach weiteren Sonnenschirmen''/''Already at lunch
time, chairman Theo Ferdinand phoned for additional sunshades.''); and (iv)
search-constructions referring to attitudes (e.g., ''Rund um den Erdball
dürsten Milliarden von Menschen nach Fernsehsport''/''All around the globe,
billions of people thirst for television sports'').
''Embodied motivations for abstract in and on constructions'' by Marlene
Johansson Falck (Ch2) analyzes several in- and on-constructions in English as
construals of relationships involving containers and surfaces, respectively.
Analyzing 1000 random realizations of in/on-constructions from the British
National Corpus, the author demonstrates that both construction types can be
analyzed into several conceptual categories that are grounded in body-world
knowledge. In-constructions are shown to fall into 10 conceptual categories,
including construing an event, action, or process as something that something
else is located in (e.g. ''Some drugs are useful agents in the treatment of
disease in man and animals but some may also produce undesirable effects'').
On-constructions are found to fall into 14 conceptual categories, including
someone doing something on the basis of something else (e.g. ''The right to
abortion on psychological or social grounds had not been included in a more
restrictive earlier draft'').
''’Doing Tsukahara’ and ‘the Epley’ in a cross-linguistic perspective'' by
Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar (Ch3) analyzes eponymous verb constructions,
in which a (light) verb and NP denote a metonymic action, in Croatian,
English, German, and Hungarian. The authors conclude that eponymous verb
constructions are shaped in part by the structural facts of a language,
including the use of light verbs, morphosyntactic gender, and tolerance for
complex mytonymy. Drawing primarily on eponymous medical and sports terms as
attested in internet search results, the authors demonstrate that English
eponymous verb constructions (e.g. ''With that hint and my careful practice, I
could easily do the Hallpike. So I did the Hallpike on the other side
and...''), may present a somewhat exceptional case. In the other three
languages surveyed, the verb or NP tend to be heavier (e.g., Croatian
''Dijagnoza se potvrđuje izvođenjem testa Dix Hallpike''/''The diagnosis can
be confirmed by performing the Dix-Hallpike test''; German ''... wird das
Lagerungsmanöver nach Dix-Hallpike durchgeführt''/''the Dix-Hallpike maneuver
is executed''; and Hungarian ''A Dix-Hallpike manövert elvileg megcsinálta az
ügyeletes''/''The Dix-Hallpike maneuver was basically done by the doctor on
duty''). These tendencies are accounted for in a factorial typology of four
micro-constructions that cross light and heavy verbs and NPs.
''The role of inferencing in the interpretation of two expressive speech act
constructions'' by Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg (Ch4) focuses on
two illocutionary constructions in English, ''That NP should VP'' (e.g. ''That
it should come to this!'') and ''Wh-x do you think CL-x'' (e.g. What do you
think you are doing?''). Appealing to examples attested in the Corpus of
Contemporary English and the corpus of Global Web-Based English, the authors
evaluate propositional and illocutionary speech acts from a constructionist
perspective. They demonstrate that constructions such as ''That all your
friends should be so sympathetic'' and ''What do you think you are – some kind
of New Age theologian?'' conventionally code idiomatic expressive senses that
overshadow, yet are inferentially derivable from, a more transparent source
sense. Moreover, this trajectory can be explained through conceptual and
pragmatic analysis, leading the authors conclude that ''the theoretical
apparatus of cognitive linguists must be enriched by an inferential
component'' (p.130).
''Exploring inter-constructional relations in the constructicon: A view from
Contrastive (Cognitive) Construction Grammar'' by Francisco Gonzálvez-García
(Ch5) considers relations within and across three construction types, (i) the
reflexive subjective-transitive construction (e.g. ''I consider myself
Cervantes, the poet), (ii) the self-descriptive transitive construction (e.g.
''James found himself a virtual prisoner''), and (iii) the WXDY construction
(e.g. ''What's this fly doing in my soup?''), in English and in Spanish. The
majority of data are extracted from the British National Corpus and from the
Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. Providing a detailed analysis of
several construction types, and consistent with the constructionist approach,
the author argues that the unifying factor uniting these various construction
types, cross-linguistically, is their shared pragmatic function, namely, to
encode characterizations of temporary states. The final analysis, with
cross-constructional morphosyntactic properties of interest and examples from
both languages, is helpfully summarized in Table 1 and in Figure 1 (p.166).
''Revisiting the English resultative family of constructions: A unifying
account'' by María Sandra Peña Cervel (Ch6) seeks to unify Goldberg and
Jackendoff (2004) and Luzondo (2014)'s competing analyses of the structure of
the English family of resultative constructions. The author considers familiar
examples from the literature as well as new data from the Corpus of
Contemporary American English and from Google Books, to develop a more unified
taxonomy. The revised classification of the family of resultative
constructions in English draws initial distinctions between motion (e.g., ''He
froze to death'') and non-motion (e.g., ''The pond froze solid'')
resultatives, and secondarily between transitives (e.g., ''Bill rolled the
ball down the hill'') and intransitives (e.g., ''The ball rolled down the
hill''). The result also enriches Goldberg and Jackendoff's original taxonomy
with construction types that have been identified since 2004.
''The family of German dative constructions'' by Sabine de Knop and Fabio
Mollica (Ch7) considers two alternative analyses of the German dative. Drawing
on examples collected from everyday speech and the Digitales Wörterbuch der
Deutschen Sprache, the authors first identify two types of dative: the
valency-dependent dative object (e.g., ''Max gibt seiner Schwester[dative] ein
Buch''/''Max gives his sister[dative] a book''), and the free dative (e.g.,
''Ihr[dative] ist die Aufgabe zu schwer''/''The task is too difficult for
her[dative]''). They demonstrate that projectionist frameworks such as Valency
Grammar do not account for the second class of free datives neatly, but that
the constructionist account, augmented with insights from projectionist
accounts, provides a unified analysis of both dative types. The authors
ultimately analyze dative constructions into two broad functional types:
benefactive/recipient-constructions (e.g., ''Das Kind hilft der alten
Dame[dative]''/''The child helps the old lady[dative]'') and
experiencer-constructions (e.g., ''Ihm[dative] gefallen interessante
Bücher''/''He[dative] likes interesting books'').
''Motivation behind the extended senses of the Polish ditransitive
construction'' by Joanna Paszenda (Ch8) identifies the cognitive motivations
for ditransitive expressions in Polish, as attested in the National Corpus of
Polish. Drawing on Goldberg's analyses of the ditransitive as a radial network
of related constructions, the author proposes that the central prototype of
the ditransitive network in Polish encodes caused events of transfer (e.g.,
''Podarowal Ewie ksiażki''/''He gave Eve a book''). From this central
prototype are several metonymic extensions regarding the action (relating to
causality, transfer, communication, preparation, attitude), as well as several
metaphoric extensions regarding the object (encoding a message, a feeling, an
intention, a mental state, an outcome), and related changes in perspective
(including antonymy and negation). Accordingly, this in-depth,
multidimensional analysis complements Goldberg's original radial model.
''The English conative as a family of constructions: Towards a usage-based
approach'' by Pilar Guerrero Medina (Ch9) argues for a family-resemblance
account of at-constructions in English. Drawing on examples from the Corpus of
Contemporary English and the British National Corpus, the author proposes that
at-constructions in English include at least three sub-types: the allative
at-construction (e.g., ''With an uncoordinated reflex, I kicked at the thing,
knocking it a few meters away''), the ablative at-construction (e.g., ''I was
so nervous, so I sat by Reef, stroking him and talking to him while my dad cut
at the net binding him''), and the directional at-construction (e.g., ''They
all looked disdainfully at the boy's father''). This family-resemblance
analysis considers the contributions of verbal semantics and constructional
semantics in order to provide a complete account of relationships between
verbal alternations.
The final contribution, ''Multimodal constructional resemblance: The case of
English circular motion constructions'' by Elisabeth Zima (Ch10) demonstrates
that verbal motion constructions are often combined with recurrent gestures,
arguing that a speaker's knowledge of when and how to coordinate speech and
gesture must be accounted for as part of linguistic knowledge, if the
usage-based perspective is to be taken seriously. The author analyzes 5
circular motion constructions in English: [V in circles], [circle], [orbit],
[spin around], and [rotate]. A total of 881 instantiations of these motion
constructions are analyzed from the NewsScape Library of Television News
Broadcasts, 63% of which are found to be accompanied by circular motion
gestures. Despite variations in form among these recurrent gestures, these
results demonstrate that a very common way to talk about motion events
involving a circular motion is to use a circular motion gesture. Thus, the
constructicon ''must be taken to be essentially multimodal.'' (p.332)
EVALUATION
''Constructing Families of Constructions: Analytical Perspectives and
Theoretical Challenges'' (CFC) is a diverse volume that should be of interest
to cognitive linguists, construction grammarians, functional typologists, and
corpus linguists. The volume opens with an introduction written by the
editors, followed by the main content chapters. As references helpfully appear
at the end of each chapter, the volume ends with a comprehensive subject
index. CFC is the 58th volume in the long-running series ''Human Cognitive
Processing: Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use'', which John
Benjamins has published for over 20 years. The quality of volume is consistent
with the high standards that one expects from Benjamins. However, there are a
number of small typographical errors throughout the volume, particularly
noticeable when authors comment, for example, on the decision to reproduce a
table for reference or to use italics to mark a feature of interest, these
decisions not having been implemented in the final version. Thankfully, these
small errors do not hinder understanding in any consequential way.
The editors' stated goal for the volume is that it ''moves away from a
compartmentalized view of constructions with the aim of providing readers with
a more holistic perspective of grammar as based on interconnected
configurations'' (p.3). This goal is achieved in that each of the ten
contributions provides an example of how a particular construction of interest
can be related to other constructions on the basis of shared aspects of
function, shared aspects of form, or a more abstract analysis of family
resemblance among function-form pairings.
One small issue that I have with CFC is that the division of the ten chapters
into two main parts is more puzzling than enlightening. Ch1-5 are presented
together as Part 1: ''Analytical perspectives on grammatical constructions'',
and Ch6-10 form Part 2: ''From applications to theory and back''. However,
nearly every chapter does both of these things, providing an analytical
perspective on the notion of a grammatical construction and navigating the
relationship between theory and analysis, and so the two-part division strikes
me as somewhat arbitrary. I would have preferred groupings that reflect the
content of the chapters in more closely, especially given the overlap in
phenomena and sensibilities across many chapters. For example, several
chapters speak to the structure and nature of the relationships among members
of a constructional family (Ch3, Ch5, Ch6, Ch8), others to the mapping of
semantic functions to morphosyntactic form (Ch1, Ch2, Ch7, Ch9), or to the
apparatus and scope of construction grammar (Ch4 and Ch10). Because the
contributions fit together well as a single volume, many alternative groupings
would also have been possible. However, there is no accounting for taste when
it comes to organization and classification, and the arrangement of the
chapters in two main sections does not detract from the overall high quality
of the volume.
One of CFC's particular strengths is its empirical breadth. Though several
contributions analyze morphosyntactic constructions in English, a handful of
languages other than English are analyzed: Croatian (Ch3), German (Ch1, Ch3,
Ch7), Hungarian (Ch3), Polish (Ch8), and Spanish (Ch5). The majority of
contributions also draw on corpus data, rather than invented or elicited
examples. It bodes well for linguistics as a science that the study of
languages other than English and the analysis of linguistic phenomena as they
are actually used are becoming increasingly standard. Given its focus on
languages other than English, and on the use of data from a number of
different corpora, this volume may also be of interest to linguists for more
practical or pedagogical purposes. For example, instructors looking for
templates for advanced undergraduate class projects, or for items to seed
discussion in graduate seminars on linguistic methodology, would be well
served by using the chapters of the volume as examples.
In closing, it is interesting to note that construction grammarians consider
constructions to be gestalts, organized wholes that exceed the sum of their
parts. Much like the constructions being studied, CFC exceeds the sum of its
parts, while also encompassing a number of independently meaningful
contributions. Though the volume will be of significant interest to
construction grammarians, as it examines families of constructions that have
traditionally been underexplored in the theory of Construction Grammar, the
diversity of topics and methodologies across the ten chapters will make this
volume appealing to a much broader audience, as well.
REFERENCES
Fillmore, Charles J. (1988). The mechanisms of ''Construction Grammar''.
Berkeley Linguistic Society 14, 35-55.
Goldberg, Adele. E. (2013). Constructionist Approaches. In T. Hoffmann & G.
Trousdale (Eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 15-31). Oxford & New York:
Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E. & Jackendoff, Ray. (2004). The English resultative as a
family of constructions. Language 80(3), 532-568.
Luzondo, Alba. (2014). Constraining factors on the family of resultative
constructions. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12(1), 30-63.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Ryan Lepic is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of
Psychology at the University of Chicago. His research interests include
morphological theory, language variation and change, and multimodal language
use. His PhD is from the Department of Linguistics at the University of
California, San Diego, 2015.
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