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Am Beispiel der polyfunktionalen Mehrworteinheit <was weiß ich> wird das Zusammenspiel von pragmatischer und phonetischer Ausdifferenzierung in Pragmatikalisierungsprozessen untersucht. Hierzu werden spontan-sprachliche Belege aus dem Korpus „Deutsch heute“ analysiert. Die beobachtete phonetische Variationsbreite deutet auf eine komplexe Beziehung zu den jeweiligen pragmatischen Funktionen hin.
Der vorliegende Beitrag diskutiert Implikationen für die grammatiktheoretische Grundunterscheidung von Argumenten und Modifikatoren, die mit der Erweiterung einer wortbasiert-valenzgrammatischen um eine musterbasiert-konstruktionsgrammatische Analyseperspektive einhergehen. Wird Argumenthaftigkeit nicht mehr (oder nicht mehr nur) relativ zum Verb, sondern relativ zur schematischen Argumentstrukturkonstruktion bestimmt, in der ein Verb gebraucht wird, hat sich das Problem einer Unterscheidung von Argumenten und Modifikatoren damit nicht erübrigt. Dem Problem, dass eine umfassende und trennscharfe Unterscheidung von Argumenten und Modifikatoren aus Sicht des Verbs allein nicht zweifelsfrei zu leisten ist, ist damit aber zumindest die grundsätzliche theoretische Sprengkraft genommen, dass der gesamte folgende Strukturaufbau auf einer unsicheren Anfangsunterscheidung aufsetzt. Gleichzeitig stellen sich im Rahmen des konstruktionsgrammatischen Perspektivwechsels aber neue Fragen. Welche Strukturen können Anspruch auf den Status einer eigenständigen Argumentstrukturkonstruktion erheben? Was sind ihre Bedeutungen und konstitutiven Bestandteile? Unter welchen Bedingungen können sie sowohl durch bestimmte lexikalische Füller als auch durch andere ihrerseits schematische Konstruktionen instanziiert werden? Wie können Argumentstrukturkonstruktionen sowohl mit Modifikatoren als auch mit anderen Argumentstrukturkonstruktionen kombiniert werden?
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus linguistics and grammaticality judgments, and, lastly, (5) the nature of explanations in cognitive corpus linguistics. We do not claim to resolve these issues nor to cover all possible angles; instead, we strongly encourage reactions and further discussion.
Construction-based language models assume that grammar is meaningful and learnable from experience. Focusing on five of the most elementary argument structure constructions of English, a large-scale corpus study of child-directed speech (CDS) investigates exactly which meanings/functions are associated with these patterns in CDS, and whether they are indeed specially indicated to children by their caretakers (as suggested by previous research, cf. Goldberg, Casenhiser and Sethuraman 2004). Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) is employed to uncover significantly attracted verb-construction combinations, and attracted pairs are classified semantically in order to systematise the attested usage patterns of the target constructions. The results indicate that the structure of the input may aid learners in making the right generalisations about constructional usage patterns, but such scaffolding is not strictly necessary for construction learning: not all argument structure constructions are coherently semanticised to the same extent (in the sense that they designate a single schematic event type of the kind envisioned in Goldberg’s [1995] ‘scene encoding hypothesis’), and they also differ in the extent to which individual semantic subtypes predominate in learners’ input
Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen sehen - und andersherum: zum Verhältnis von 'Mustern' und 'Regeln'
(2011)
Die Konstruktionsgrammatik setzt dem Begriff der konstruktiven Regel den des komplexen Musters entgegen, das in syntaktischen Generalisierungsprozessen analogisch erweitert wird. Der vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert eine solche musterbasierte Analyse von deutschen Konstruktionen mit lokativem Subjekt (Wiesen und Wälder wuchern vor Blumen und Kräutern) als Extension einer Reihe verwandter Konstruktionen mit kausaler und intensivierender Funktion, aus denen die lokative Variante mutmaßlich hervorgegangen ist. Die Analyse argumentiert, dass der umgebenden ,Ökologie‘ der Zielkonstruktion im sprachlichen Wissen der Sprecher eine zentrale Rolle für die Erklärung der attestierten Varianten zukommt, die in regelbasierten Zugängen als unmotivierte ,Ausnahmen‘ von allgemeinen Linkingprinzipien gelten müssen.
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
How (and when) do speakers generalise from memorised exemplars of a construction to a productive schema? The present paper presents a novel take on this issue by offering a corpus-based approach to semantic extension processes. Focusing on clusters of German ADJ N expressions involving the heavily polysemous adjective tief ‚deep’, it is shown that type frequency (a commonly used measure of productivity) needs to be relativised to distinct semantic classes within the overall usage spectrum of a given construction in order to predict the occurrence of novel types within a particular region of this spectrum. Some methodological and theoretical implications for usage-based linguistic model building are considered.
Much language-related research in cognitive robotics appeals to usage-based models of language as proposed in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology [1, 2] that emphasise the significance of learning, embodiment and general cognitive development for human language acquisition. Over and above these issues, however, what takes centre stage in these theories are social-cognitive skills of “intention-reading” that are seen as “primary in the language acquisition process” [1] – and also as difficult to incorporate into computational models of language acquisition. The present paper addresses these concerns: we describe work in progress on a series of experiments that take steps towards closing the gap between ‘solipsistic’ symbol grounding in individual robotic agents and socially framed embodied language acquisition in learners that attend to common ground [3] with changing interlocutors.
In usage-based Construction Grammar, grammatical structure is assumed to ‘sedimenl’ from concrete linguistic experience as an automatic by-product o f repeated similar categorisation judgments (a process known as schematisation). At the same time, there is functional pressure on prospective inputs to such schematisations to retain or develop specialised properties that differentiate them from their near neighbours, i.e. other stored units in the constructicon (Goldberg: 1995). Moreover, Speakers are not assumed to necessarily extract all possible generalisations from their input. Using the example o f a group of German support verb constructions, the present study outlines a corpus-linguistic approach to identifying those Schemas that really seem to be formed by Speakers, and how they can be kept apart from mere potential generalisations.
An experiment on the English caused motion construction in adult- and child-directed speech was conducted to assess in how far (i) verbal frequency biases and (ii) a register-specific preference for explicit and redundant coding influence speakers' selection of argument structure constructions during speaking. Subjects retold the contents of short cartoon video clips to adult and child interaction partners. The stimuli showed events of caused motion which suggested designations with verbs for which caused motion-complementation was either (i) uncommon/unattested, (ii) conventional or (iii) the dominant usage in a sample extracted from the BNC. The results show a significant tendency to avoid more compacted coding (using the caused motion construction instead of a possible two-clause paraphrase) in child-directed speech. At the same time, they also point to an interaction between the register-specific preference for explicitness and verbs' relative conventionality in the construction that neutralizes the effect for verbs that are highly frequent in the target environment.
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.
We taught a humanoid robot a number of different actions involving a number of different objects (e.g., touching a green object, moving a red object etc.) alongside a number of simplified linguistic labels for these behaviours (e.g., ‘touch-green’, ‘move-red’ etc.). The robot managed to learn the associations between the behaviours and their linguistic labels, and it succeeded in recognising the compositional structure of the behaviours and their associated linguistic descriptions (ACTION/VERB+OBJECT/NOUN). Moreover, it was able to generalise the learned instructions to novel, previously untrained action+object-combinations (e.g., touch-red). This corresponds to the task of learning and decomposing so-called ‘holophrases’ in early child language acquisition.
Introduction
(2008)
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.
Localism
(2017)
Localist hypothesis
(2017)
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.
Objekte der Begeisterung
(2020)
We present a construction-based approach to German prepositional object (I’O) constructions occurring with the verb begeistern ,to thrill'. Traditionally, the preposition in such structures is analysed as a meaningless object marker that is lexically selected by the governing verb and not subject to variation. Drawing on a corpus study in the German reference corpus DeReKo, we show that our target verb occurs with four different PO prepositions (für ,lor‘,« ׳? ,at', von ,front' and über ,over‘) that can be analysed as markers o f schematic argument structure constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. We show that each construction comes with its own meaning and semantically coherent predicate restrictions. We argue that purely valency-based (lexical) approaches to argument structure fail to capture these generalisations. On the other hand, purely schema-based (constructionist) approaches to argument structure face the complcmentary problem o f accommodating item-specific restrictions and exceptions to the generalisations they embody. We suggest that the necessary synthesis can be formulated within an account that recognises both generalised constructions and item-specific valency properties.
Der Beitrag untersucht das Zusammenspiel von funktionaler Spezialisierung und phonetischer Reduktion bei pragmatischen Markern aus komplexen Syntagmen. Im Fokus steht die Reduktionsform [ˈzɐmɐ], die potenziell auf die Marker <ich sag mal> oder <sagen wir (mal)> zurückgeführt werden konnte. Anhand einer Analyse ihrer phonetischen Reduktionsformen und Interaktionsfunktionen wird gezeigt, dass eine Rückführung auf <sagen wir (mal)> plausibler ist. Im Anschluss werden Realisierungen der Wortverbindung ‚sagen wir‘ als kompositioneller Matrixsatz mit Verwendungen als pragmatischer Marker verglichen. Die Befunde deuten auf einen Einfluss der Funktion der Zielstruktur auf ihre lautliche Realisierung hin, was sich als Indiz für einen unabhängigen Zeichenstatus der reanalysierten Markerverwendung interpretieren lasst.
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.
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.
In German linguistics, a traditional distinction is made between (i) prepositional objects (POs) and prepositional adverbials, and (ii), among the latter, between adverbial complements and adjuncts. As a contribution to the debate on points of contact and possible syntheses between valency-based and construction-based approaches to verb argument structure, a corpus-based constructionist account of German PO and PP adverbial verb argument structures involving the preposition vor ‘in front of’ is developed. It is argued that ‘desemanticised’ PO-uses of vor are markers of inherently meaningful verb argument structure constructions that form a transparently motivated network comprising both PO and PP adverbial patterns. Analyses are presented for five interrelated families of vor constructions within the overall network thus defined. Their meanings are shown to reflect an interplay of more concrete spatial meanings of the preposition and the lexical semantics of verbal fillers of these constructions. Once conventionalised, they are subject to regular processes of metaphorical and metonymic semantic extension that are tentatively unravelled to create an integrated semantic map of verbal vor-constructions in present day German.