A Complementary Study Of Lexicalist Approaches And Constructionist Approaches

This book presents a complementary study of lexicalist approaches and constructionist approaches in linguistics. Specific topics discussed include different versions of semantic roles, predicate decomposition, event structures, argument realizations, and cognitive construction grammars. For decades, the relationship between certain concepts and constructions along with related issues of verb-construction associations have been perennially taxing for both lexicalist and constructionist approaches alike. Indeed, in Chinese, unmatched verb-construction associations and the much richer alternate realizations pose very difficult problems. Based on a comparative study, the authors make an attempt to account for the possible correspondence between the delicacy of argument setting and the principles of their realization. They also account for the integration of construction with verbs in terms of their coherent conceptual content. The resultant newly developed model throws new light on these thorny Chinese problems. The book will appeal to scholars and students studying cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, computational linguistics, and also natural language processing. The book also brings up some new analysis of Chinese data for both researchers and learners of Modern Chinese.

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch, old English, Italian, and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches, some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots, and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

The papers in this volume provide a contrastive application of Construction Grammar. By referencing a well-described constructional phenomenon in English, each paper provides a solid foundation for describing and analyzing its constructional counterpart in another language. This approach shows that the semantic description (including discourse-pragmatic and functioanl factors) of an English construction can be regarded as a first step towards a "tertium comparationis" that can be employed for comparing and contrasting the formal properties of constructional counterparts in other languages. Thus, the meaning pole of constructions should be regarded as the primary basis for comparisons of constructions across languages - the form pole is only secondary. This volume shows that constructions are viable descriptive and analytical tools for cross-linguistic comparisons that make it possible to capture both language-specific (idiosyncratic) properties as well as cross-linguistic generalizations.

Despite its importance for language and cognition, the theoretical concept of pattern has received little attention in linguistics so far. The articles in this volume demonstrate the multifariousness of linguistic patterns in lexicology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pragmatics, construction grammar, phonology and language acquisition and develop new perspectives on pattern as a linguistic concept.

This book examines the nature of the interface between word meaning and syntax, one of the most controversial and elusive issues in contemporary linguistics. It approaches the interface from both sides of the relation, and surveys a range of views on the mapping between them, with an emphasis on lexical approaches to argument structure. Stephen Wechsler begins by analysing the fundamental problem of word meaning, with discussions of vagueness and polysemy, complemented with a look at the roles of world knowledge and normative aspects of word meaning. He then surveys the argument-taking properties of verbs and other predicators, and presents key theories of lexical semantic structure. Later chapters provide a description of formal theories and frameworks for capturing the mapping from word meaning to syntactic structure, as well as arguments in favour of a lexicalist approach to argument structure. The book will interest scholars of theoretical linguistics, particularly in the fields of syntax and lexical semantics, as well as those interested in psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

This volume embarks on an exploration of the processual and dynamic character of grammatical constructions in emergence, both from an ‘emergent’ and an ‘emerging’ perspective. ‘Emerging’ constructions develop out of their discourse contexts. Talking of emerging constructions is compatible with a view of grammar as a stable system of rules and structures which may ‘emerge’ (i.e., come into existence) out of a pool of previously unordered elements. ‘Emergent’ constructions on the contrary are due to the on-line production of grammar in time. The term ‘emergent’ emphasises the fact that a grammatical structure is always temporary and ephemeral. In both senses, grammar is modelled as a highly adaptive resource for interaction. On the basis of empirical studies on spoken English, German, Hebrew, Swedish and French, the volume addresses the following questions: How can what initially appears to be construction x end up being construction y in on-line syntax? What are the local interactional needs which such processes respond to in the process of their emergence? Does the on-line (re-)modelling of a construction concern its syntactic or semantic side ‐ or both? And finally: Should emergent grammatical structures as they unfold in real time be seen as stages in the emerging of grammar?

The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand, it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other, it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions, and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar, the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts are closely and even-handedly evaluated against the empirical data. The result is an evidence-based review of the central issues in language acquisition research that will constitute a valuable resource for students, teachers, course-builders and researchers alike.