Open Access

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

Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.

This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature.

This article investigates the use of überhaupt and sowieso in German and Dutch. These two words are frequently classified as particles, if only because of their pragmatic functions. The frequent use of particles is considered a specific trait common to German and Dutch, and the description of their semantics and pragmatics is notoriously difficult. It is unclear whether both particles have the same meaning in Dutch (where they are loanwords) and German, whether they can fulfil the same syntactic functions and to what extent the (semantic and pragmatic) functions of überhaupt und sowieso overlap. There has already been linguistic research on überhaupt and sowieso by Fisseni (2009) using the world-wide web and by Bruijnen and Sudhoff (2013) using the EUROPARL corpus. In the present study we critically evaluated the corpus study, integrating information on original utterance language and discussing the adequacy of this corpus. Moreover, we conducted an experimental survey collecting subjective-intuitive judgements in three dimensions, thus gathering more data on sparse and informal constructions. By using these complementary methods, we obtain a more nuanced picture of the use of überhaupt and sowieso in both languages: On the one hand, the data show where the use of both words is more similar and on the other hand, differences between the languages can also be discerned.