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In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.
Speakers’ linguistic experience is for the most part experience with language as used in conversational interaction. Though highly relevant for usage-based linguistics, the study of such data is as yet often left to other frameworks such as conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001). On the basis of a case study of salient usage patterns of the two German motion verbs kommen and gehen in spontaneous conversation, the present paper argues for a methodological integration of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods with qualitative conversation analytic approaches to further the usage-based study of conversational interaction.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web based corpus linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP prototype currently developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern-based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web-based corpus-linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP-prototype currently developed at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
Localist hypothesis
(2017)
Localism
(2017)
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Introduction
(2008)
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.