35.1647, Review: Constructionist Approaches: Ungerer and Hartmann (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1647. Tue Jun 04 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1647, Review: Constructionist Approaches: Ungerer and Hartmann (2023)

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Date: 04-Jun-2024
From: Frane Malenica [fmalenica at unizd.hr]
Subject: Syntax: Ungerer and Hartmann (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.3570

AUTHOR: Tobias Ungerer
AUTHOR: Stefan Hartmann
TITLE: Constructionist Approaches
SUBTITLE: Past, Present, Future
SERIES TITLE: Elements in Construction Grammar
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Frane Malenica

SUMMARY

The book Constructionist Approaches: Past, Present, Future (Ungerer
and Hartmann 2023) provides an overview of origins of constructionist
approaches and the main research areas and topics within this field,
focusing primarily on recent developments in the field and the ongoing
discussions that are yet to be resolved. Like all works in the
Cambridge Elements collection, this is a concise and highly focused
book, packed with information relevant for newcomers and more
experienced researchers in the field alike. It consists of six
chapters: a brief introduction, followed by four chapters providing
the major outline of the field – emergence of the constructionist
approaches; different theoretical “flavours” of Construction Grammar,
the construc-i-con as a network of constructions, the most recent
research trends, and finally the concluding chapter with an overview
of perspectives and challenges for future research.

The introductory chapter gives a quick tour of the field, outlining
the context in which the constructionist approaches appeared and the
theoretical tradition against which these approaches are compared. It
lists the core assumptions of these approaches, namely the
lexicon-syntax continuum, the organization of constructions into a
taxonomic network called the construct-i-con, the rejection of the
“deep structure” representations and focus on “surface structure”
phenomena, and the rejection of Universal Grammar as the backbone of
human languages in favour of domain-general cognitive capabilities.

The second chapter outlines the field of CxG and the term
“construction”, starting from Fillmore’s work on “deep cases”
(Fillmore (1968), to the seminal studies in Lakoff (1987), Fillmore et
al. (1988), and the evolution of the term from Goldberg’s first work
(1995) to her subsequently revised definitions (2006 & 2019). It
illustrates the main problems of the term – which units should be
treated as constructions (this issue is also raised by Booij 2010 for
morphemes), what degree of formal/contextual similarity is enough for
a form-meaning pairing to be regarded as a construction, number of
exposures to an exemplar necessary for the speakers to store it under
the same abstract construction, and whether individual morphologically
simple lexical items should be treated as constructions.

In the third chapter, the authors explore the variety of different
constructionist approaches, focusing on six major strands of CxG –
Berkley CxG, Sign-Based CxG, Fluid CxG, Embodied CxG, Cognitive CxG,
Radical CxG. The authors provide a neat and informative summary of
similarities and differences between the variants, with specific
reference to their formalization, research foci, typical methodology
and major references.

The fourth chapter is concerned with the theoretical means of
modelling the architecture of language through different types of
constructional networks and the cognitive underpinnings of models and
units within them and the challenges they are faced with. CxG as a
theoretical framework strives to provide a description of language in
the human mind supported by empirical data, which has multiple
applications in different language-related contexts, making the issues
discussed in this chapter highly relevant for the linguistic debate.

The fifth chapter provides an overview of three topics that have
become prominent research foci in CxG recently, namely, linguistic
creativity, multimodality and individual differences. The discussion
of the first aspect discusses two facets of linguistic creativity –
cases where children and adult speakers of a particular language
extend existing rules to new cases (F-Creativity according to Sampson
2016), and cases of “bending” the rules to extend less productive
patterns (E-Creativity acc. to Sampson 2016). The second topic
includes new trends in CxG research, which encompass diverse topics
such as sign languages and gestures (Lepic and Occhino 2018),
multimodal constructions (Zima 2014), and Internet memes (Bülow et al.
2018, Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017), whereas the third topic is not
as concerned with the object of linguistic analysis but its manner.
Specifically, the authors underline the importance of taking into
account the synchronic differences between individual speakers’
construct-i-cons and the diachronic changes of individual speakers’
construct-i-cons in the research.

The conclusion provides a brief and succinct summary of the chapters
and lists the questions and challenges that are yet to be resolved the
CxG approaches.

EVALUATION

While this book seemingly offers nothing revolutionary or
ground-breaking and “merely” recaps most of the theoretical and
empirical research that has been done in the theoretical paradigm of
Construction Grammar,  it is nonetheless an excellent resource for
beginners and more experienced scholars alike. It provides a good
overview of the theoretical underpinnings of CxG approaches, the
motivation for their emergence, different theoretical assumptions and
mechanisms used in the field, the main theoretical issues and
empirical foci and future avenues of research. The discussion on each
of these aspects is somewhat limited, which is understandable given
the format of the Cambridge Elements publications, but it still
provides enough substance and suggestions for making further research
endeavors in this domain.  In fact, the brevity of this publication
could and should be seen as its upside, as a more digestible format is
more likely to attract new scholars into this domain.

One of the potential drawbacks of the book is that constructionist
(CxG) approaches are almost exclusively defined as the antithesis of
generative/Chomskyan/Universal Grammar  (henceforth UG) approaches,
and not as an independent theoretical paradigm. This, of course, is
not a peculiarity of this publication, as this stance has been present
in the work of other scholars in the field since Goldberg’s (1995)
work and has practically become a “traditional” way of defining CxG
approaches (this view is also present in Fillmore et al. 1988 although
somewhat less explicitly). While the historical link with the UG
approaches is unquestionable, perhaps it would be better for the
development of the field to start defining the constructionist
approaches as a theoretical program in its own right, not as a sort of
null hypothesis of UG. This way of defining the CxG approaches as the
antithesis to the “traditional” generative/Chomskyan/UG approaches is
also problematic as it implies the use of the term, which enforces a
false dichotomy between UG and CxG approaches with little to no
competing theories in between; this obviously is not the state of
things (a similar comment was also raised by Geoffrey Sampson in his
review of Diaz-Campos & Balasch 2023).

On the other hand, if we accept the comparison with the UG approaches
as the standard way of defining CxG approaches, it seems to me that it
would be more beneficial for this publication (and other CxG-oriented
publications) to compare the theoretical mechanisms in constructionist
approaches to similar ones in the UG-oriented approaches.
Specifically, in §3.1 Formalization, the authors describe the manner
in which the features and attributes of construction nodes (syntactic
category, valence, thematic roles, etc.) are joined together to create
higher-order mother nodes. Given how this mechanism seems to perform a
similar task as the Merge operation in Minimalist approaches (Chomsky
1995), i.e. ‘fuse elements A & B to get C’, I believe a comparison
between the two operations and the potential comparative benefits of
each (or at least the CxG mechanisms) would certainly be of use for
all scholars working in this paradigm. Unfortunately, nothing of the
sort is provided in this publication, which is hardly surprising given
its condensed format, but I am hopeful that comparisons between
paradigms such as this might appear in the future publications in the
field.

All things considered, while this publication offers no
paradigm-changing discoveries, it is nonetheless a very useful
resource and a worthy piece of writing. One of the main aims of
introductory-level publications is to attract and ease new potential
scholars into the field by delineating and describing the main
concepts and showing the pathways and methods for further research.
With this book, I believe the authors have struck the right balance of
scientific relevance and user-friendliness to achieve this aim.

REFERENCES

Booij, G. (2010). Construction Morphology (3rd ed.). Oxford University
Press.
Bülow, L., Merten, M.-L., & Johann, M. (2018). Internet-Memes als
Zugang zu multimodalen Konstruktionen. Zeitschrift Für Angewandte
Linguistik, 2018(69), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfal-2018-0015
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist program. The MIT Press.
Dancygier, B., & Vandelanotte, L. (2017). Internet memes as multimodal
constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 28(3), 565–598.
https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2017-0074
Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The Case for Case. In E. Bach & R. T. Harms
(Eds.), Universals in Linguistic Theory. (pp. 1–25). Holt, Rinehart
and Winston. http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~syntax-circle/syntax
-group/spr08/fillmore.pdf
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity and
Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone.
Language, 64(3), Article 3.
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach
to argument structure. University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of
generalization in language. Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, A. E. (2019). Explain me this: Creativity, competition, and
the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories
reveal about the mind (paperback ed., [Nachdr.]). The Univ. of Chicago
Press.
Lepic, R., & Occhino, C. (2018). A Construction Morphology Approach to
Sign Language Analysis. In G. Booij (Ed.), The Construction of Words
(Vol. 4, pp. 141–172). Springer International Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_6
Sampson, G. (2016). Two ideas of creativity. In M. Hinton (Ed.),
Evidence, Experiment and Argument in Linguistics and Philosophy of
Language. (pp. 15–26). Peter Lang.
Zima, E. (n.d.). Gibt es multimodale Konstruktionen? Eine Studie zu
[V(motion) in circles] und [all the way from X PREP Y].
Gesprächsforschung, 15, 1–48.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Frane Malenica is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English
Studies, University of Zadar. He obtained his PhD in 2021 at the
University of Zagreb and his main research interests revolve around
morphology and syntax of English, with particular emphasis on
formation of compounds and corpus linguistic and experimental
data-collection methods



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