Search

Previous research on loan word accommodation has shown that English‑origin verbs in Present‑day Dutch and French‑origin verbs in Late Middle English are subject to usage biases. In both language‑contact settings, loan verbs are disproportionally frequent in non‑finite and morphologically unmarked forms as compared to native verbs. The present study demonstrates that accommodation biases are also found in loan adjectives. Concretely, loan adjectives are more prevalent in predicative than in attributive syntactic position as compared to native adjectives (predicative bias), and they are more prevalent in uninflected than in inflected forms (markedness bias). The predicative bias is found to rank stronger than the markedness bias, which is consistent with the findings for verbs. Additionally, biases are more pronounced in the French‑Middle English than in the English‑Dutch contact setting. The findings indicate that direct insertion of loan-words, despite being the cross-linguistically most frequent strategy for loan word integration, is not free of obstacles, possibly due to processing costs specifically associated with loan words.

In this talk we expand on five main topics to assess whether French words in Middle English should be classified as borrowings or code-switches, or rather in between.

ispartof: Journal of Historical Syntax vol:5 pages:1-24 status: published

In the English Secondary Predicate Construction (SPC), a predicative relation between a noun phrase (NP) and a “secondary predicate” (XP) is established by a main verb (He findsVerb herNP attractiveXP). While the syntactic nature of this construction has received ample attention from a synchronic perspective, this study aims to shed light on the diachronic developments of the SPC. First, using data from the YorkToronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and the Penn corpora, a classification is proposed of the verbs occurring in the SPC. Based on this semantic classification, the development of the SPC is then traced from Old English to Late Modern English in terms of frequency and productivity. It is argued that, while the various classes of SPC-taking verbs often show opposite developments, these lowerlevel incongruities are resolved at a higher schematic level, as the SPC as a whole underwent a process of internalization. These findings underscore the importance of lower-level developments in the diachronic behavior of schematic constructions and consequently contribute to the literature on constructional change. ispartof: Journal of English Linguistics vol:47 issue:1 pages:3-28 status: published

The English expression far from, denoting spatial or metaphorical distance, has developed into an adverbial downtoner (De Smet, 2012). In this corpus-based study, our first purpose is to analyze to which degree the Dutch counterparts of the English [far from X] construction, that is [ver van X] and [verre van X] have also developed into downtoners. We show that synchronically ver van mostly has a spatial or metaphorical meaning, while verre van is generally used as an adverbial downtoner. As a second objective, we explore the diachronic pathways taken by both constructions and argue that the category change undergone by [verre van X] is part of a true constructionalization process, while [ver van X] has been affected by minor constructional changes only.

This special issue includes a collection of papers which analyze asymmetries and mismatches within the framework of Construction Grammar.

Since the early days of grammatical description, the relation between form and meaning in linguistic units and the nature of the linguistic primes have been hotly debated issues. F. de Saussure (1916/1995) defined the linguistic sign (i.e. an association of signifiant (form) and signifié (meaning)) as the corner-stone of linguistic theory. Since then it has often been tacitly assumed that there exists symmetry in the relation between the form and the meaning of any given sign, which has been formulated as the Compositionality Principle (Hoeksema 2000). It should not be taken for granted however that all linguistic signs display this symmetric relation. Form-meaning mismatches (or asymmetries) are omnipresent in language (Francis & Michaelis 2002). Three types of form-meaning mismatch can be distinguished: Mismatch type 1: Many forms correspond to one function/meaning Well-described examples of this mismatch usually include synonymous lexemes (such as redouter, craindre, avoir peur ‘to be afraid of’), for which Saussure (1916/1995: 160) already claimed that they “n’ont de valeur propre que par leur opposition”. This mismatch is related to the notion of ‘competition’ between the linguistic signs, in line with the structuralist concept of language as “un système où tout se tient”. A similar type of mismatch can sometimes be observed within a single (morphological or syntactic) construction, e.g. in the form of multiple exponence in inflectional morphology (Harris 2009), affix pleonasm in derivational morphology (see Lehmann 2005) or redundancy in syntax (see, for example, Croft 2000: 136, on paratactic negation). Mismatch type 2: One form corresponds to many functions/meanings Evident examples of this category are polysemous/polyfunctional affixes, lexemes or syntactic constructions. For example, English to-infinitives have been analyzed as polysemous by Wierzbicka (1988). More recently, Colleman & De Clerck (2011) have analyzed the English ditransitive construction as polysemous. This type of mismatch also applies to conversion, in which one form is used to express different functions (e.g. the bridge/ to bridge) (e.g. Valera 2014). Mismatch type 3: The meaning of the syntagm cannot be derived from its signs In morphology, this type of mismatch applies, for instance, to exocentric compounds: in Italian portalettere ‘lit. carry-letters, postman’ or French tire-bouchon ‘lit. pull-cork, cork screw’, the agentive or instrumental meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the formal constituents of the compound. In syntax, unexpected functions of verbs or nouns are hard to account for when adopting a word-level analysis, e.g. transitivity of the verb sneeze in She sneezed the napkin off the table (Goldberg 1995) or the mass noun interpretation of cat in There’s cat all over the place (Michaelis 2003). An interesting question that we have to answer is how to account for these cases of form-meaning asymmetries. In the framework of Construction Grammar, the Saussurean sign has been extended to what is generally known as a ‘construction’ (among others, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). While the Saussurean sign primarily correlates with the word-level (Saussure 1916/1995: 99), constructions encompass any meaningful regularity in language, so that linguistic structure is composed of “constructions all the way down” (Goldberg 2006: 18). One century after the first publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916), this workshop aims to revisit the nature of the linguistic sign from a constructional perspective and to show that a constructionist view of the sign can gracefully integrate phenomena of form-meaning mismatches which have been neglected in other theories. Important arguments for this view may come from the fact that constructions have ‘holistic properties’ (cf. Booij 2010). The complexity of the relations within the constructional network and the possibility of multiple inheritance (De Smet et al. 2013) as well as the possibility of having many-to-many mappings between form and meaning in constructional networks (Van de Velde 2014) may also help to accommodate mismatches. Keywords: linguistic sign, form-meaning mismatch, Construction Grammar References Booij, G. (2010). Construction Morphology. Oxford: OUP. Colleman, T. & B. De Clerck. (2011). Constructional semantics on the move: On semantic specialization in the English double object construction. Cognitive Linguistics, 22: 183-209. Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. London: Longman. De Smet, H., L. Ghesquière & F. Van de Velde (Eds). (2013). On multiple source constructions in language change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Francis, E.J. & L.A. Michaelis (Eds) (2002). Mismatch: Form-function incongruity and the architecture of grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.¬ Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: OUP. Harris, A. (2009). Exuberant exponence in Batsbi. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 27(2), 267-303. Hoeksema, J. (2000). Compositionality of meaning. In: G. Booij, C. Lehmann & J. Mugdan (Eds. in collaboration with Wolfgang Kesselheim and Stavros Skopeteas), Morphologie. Morphology. 1. Halbband/Volume 1 (pp. 851-857). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hoffmann, T. & G. Trousdale (2013). Construction Grammar: Introduction. In: T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 1-12). Oxford: OUP. Lehmann, C. (2005). Pleonasm and hypercharacterisation. In: G. E. Booij & J. van Marle (Eds), Yearbook of morphology 2005 (pp. 119–154). Dordrecht: Springer. Michaelis, L. A. (2003). Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: H. Cuyckens, R. Dirven & J.R. Taylor (Eds), Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics (pp. 163-209). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Saussure, F. de. (1916/1995). Cours de linguistique générale. Published by C. Bally & A. Séchehaye. Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages. Valera, S. (2014). Conversion. In: R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (pp. 154-168). New York: OUP. Van de Velde, F. (2014). Degeneracy: The maintenance of constructional networks. In: R. Boogaart, T. Colleman & G. Rutten (Eds), Extending the scope of Construction Grammar (pp. 141-180). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Wierzbicka, A. (1988). The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

ispartof: From variation to iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer pages:105-119 ispartof: pages:105-119 status: published

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. Linguistic variation between individuals must be linked to how linguistic material is mentally represented. Therefore, by examining individual variation, light can be shed on the nature of mental representation itself. This paper presents an individual differences study of semi-opaque derivations (e.g. ruthless) to establish whether their representations are mentally associated to those of fully segmentable forms with the same suffix (e.g. sightless). This way, a prediction of connectionist and exemplar models of morphology is tested, namely that to language users semi-opaque forms are likely to retain some degree of internal complexity, despite the fact that they are not segmentable. Using corpus data, it is demonstrated that individuals who rely more heavily on the segmentable forms are also more likely to use the semi-opaque forms. This pattern in the variation across individuals indicates that semi-opaque derivations are not represented independently of the derivational paradigm from which they historically derive. ispartof: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics vol:21 issue:2 pages:250-271 status: published