English comparative modals and their complements

Within the framework of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar (as in Lakoff 1987; Langacker 2000; Goldberg 1995; and Fried and Östman 2004), it is claimed in this paper that the semantics of psuche (psyche) is motivated by cognitive, cultural, and constructional parameters of meaning. More specifically, it is argued that psyche, as the immaterial nature of a human being, and the seat of emotions and feelings in particular, is understood in terms of image-based metaphors, a cultural model of the self, and a cultural narrative of existence. It is also argued that the frequent occurrence of psyche in a number of collocations and idioms motivates and constrains constructional meaning. At the same time, constructions motivate extended senses of this word, thereby contributing to its polysemy and ultimately to semantic change. The evidence presented within this framework argues against a fixed borderline between lexical and constructional meaning. This view, long and tacitly adopted in lexicographic practice by necessity, is gaining further support within current research in the framework of lexicography (Fillmore 2008; Hanks 2008), corpus linguistics (Fellbaum 2007), lexical semantics (Taylor et al. 2003), language change (Bybee 2006a), and construction grammar (Boas 2008).

The General classifier 个 [ge] is normally located between a numeral and a noun. In a post-verbal position, ge is found to be used in some unusual positions, e.g. in compound verbs or between the verb and an adjective. Ge in this [V ge X] pattern has attracted much attention in Chinese linguistic research (Zhang, 2003; Lu, 1984; Biq, 2004). Most of the research focuses on the properties of ge, but the discussion about the [V ge X] pattern as a whole is limited. The main task of this research is to argue that the post-verbal ge and its context form a construction with a telic and bounded aspectual meaning within the framework of Construction Grammar. In addition, the omission of numeral - [yi] (one) in post-verbal NPs triggers the emergence of this construction.

The article discusses the development of the Hebrew polysemous construction bɛsɛdɛr (the prefixed preposition bɛ ‘in’ + the noun sɛdɛr ‘order’). An analysis within the framework of Construction Grammar (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013) as well as tendencies of (inter)subjectification (Traugott, 2010, 2012) suggest that the construction developed through fusion and host-class expansion from an objective meaning of concrete and abstract order into an adverb, and later into a fully substantive lexical construction conveying subjective positive evaluation and to an intersubjectified discourse function expressing agreement and approval. The article further supports the proposal that both processes of grammatical and lexical constructionalization are evident in the constructionalization of beseder. Moreover, the analysis suggests that the different meanings which developed are interrelated, as they all derive from the original concept of order and organization, which at some point began to be desirable and appreciated, leading eventually to the development of discourse functions of approval and consent.

Within the framework of Construction Grammar, the author develops an analytical tool to map semantic regularities in semantic spaces. This is illustrated with the study of the semantic spaces of the Persian “light verb”xordæn “to eat”. The light verb’s semantic space is populated by “notional islands” where groups of light verb constructions, expressing similar notions, combine the light verb with a restricted, but large, class of preverbs. The analysis shows that each notional island possesses linguistic and cognitive properties that allow intuitive disambiguation. It provides new results about meaning construction, productivity, and compositionality, and the basis of crosslinguistic investigations for processes of verb formation as they have evolved in different languages.

This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing , using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), offers a more systematic account for the authentic properties of two subtypes of the CPC. We further argue that this raising vs. control contrast is not arbitrary but arises from the two senses of the verb need , which exhibits a particularly strong statistical association with the CPC.

Discussion NotePhrasal or lexical constructions?* Stefan Müller 1. Introduction Since the 1990s, more and more linguistic articles have been published in the framework of construction grammar. Some influential publications are Goldberg 1995, Fillmore 1999, and Kay & Fillmore 1999. Although Kay and Fillmore (1999:19) make it clear that Constructions are not necessarily phrasal, most of the authors suggest phrasal Constructions.1 This is especially apparent in construction grammar-inspired studies in the framework of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG; see for instance Sag 1997, Ginzburg & Sag 2001, Borsley 2004, Haugereid 2004). In what follows I show that the difference between phrasal approaches and lexical approaches is not as great as is sometimes claimed, although selecting one approach over the other may nevertheless have serious consequences. This discussion focuses on resultative constructions, a phenomenon for which both phrasal and lexical analyses have been suggested. A considerable number of different Constructions must be postulated to account for all of the patterns that may arise from the reordering of constituents or the realization of the resultative construction in connection with valence-changing processes. It is shown that adjuncts, predicate complexes, and derivational morphology pose considerable problems for the phrasal approach, while they are unproblematic for lexical rule-based approaches. An example of the resultative construction is given in 1. The resultative construction consists of a verb that denotes some event and a secondary predicate that provides information about the result of the event. In 1, the secondary predicate predicates over an NP that is not an argument of the verb. There are other patterns of resultative constructions, but they are not discussed here since they are irrelevant to the issue under discussion (see for instance Simpson 1983 and Rothstein 1985). (1) They drank the pub dry. [End Page 850] Such constructions have been analyzed as small clauses (see for instance Hoekstra 1988, den Dikken 1995), as complex predicates where drank and dry form a constituent at some level of representation (Dowty 1979:Ch. 4.7 for English; Neeleman & Weermann 1993, Neeleman 1995 for English and Dutch; Müller 2002:Ch. 5 for German), or as phrasal constructions (Goldberg 1995, Jackendoff 1997, Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004). In the following, I mainly discuss the question of how the combination of the verb with the NP the pub and the predicate dry is licensed. Proponents of (phrasal) construction grammar suggest either a phrasal Construction that licenses subject, verb, object, and secondary predicate as in 2a or a phrasal Construction that licenses verb, object, and secondary predicate as in 2b. (2) a. [SUBJ [V OBJ OBL]] (Goldberg 1995:192) b. VP → V NP AP/PP (Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004) The lexicon-oriented approaches, by contrast, do not assume special phrase structure rules for resultative constructions, but rather additional lexical items that license the elements present in resultative constructions (see Simpson 1983, Wunderlich 1992:45, Verspoor 1997, Wechsler 1997, Wechsler & Noh 2001, and Müller 2002 for analyses of English, German, and Korean resultative constructions). Approaches like Goldberg's face certain problems when interaction with other phenomena (e.g. passive, middle) is considered. In the following, I transfer Goldberg's analysis to German and show that further problems arise since German has a much freer constituent order than English and allows interaction with derivational morphology. The problems that already exist in the analysis of English are thus much more apparent. I deal with interactions between resultative constructions and syntax (§2) and morphology (§5). While there are several phenomena for which it is unclear what a phrasal analysis might look like, it is clear that a large number of phrasal Constructions is needed to account for the patterns that can be analyzed. Proponents of construction grammar argue that this is not a problem since the regularities are captured in an inheritance hierarchy and such inheritance hierarchies can be computed automatically from the set of Constructions that are stated by the grammar writer. I show in §3 that the algorithm that was suggested by Kay (2002:§7.1) does not work and that attempts to fix it lead to unwanted consequences. I then discuss examples from Yucatec Maya that show that passives cannot be analyzed with reference to...

Based on the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), this paper investigates the development of the German future construction werden + Infinitive as well as constructions that are often seen as its predecessors and/or competitors. The paper focuses on the construction werden + Present Participle but also takes modal verb constructions with mögen, müssen, sollen, and wollen into account. A semantic analysis of the dependent verbs occurring in the constructions with regard to their aspectual characteristics reveals that werden + Infinitive and werden + Present Participle undergo parallel developments that can be seen as context expansion from a grammaticalization-theoretical perspective. The modal verb constructions, by contrast, remain stable with regard to the aspectual semantics of their dependent verbs. Furthermore, it is argued that, following recent theoretical approaches from diachronic Construction Grammar, the complex relationship between werden + Infinitive and werden + Participle can be modelled as ›attraction‹ or contamination between different constructions.

Descriptions of modal verbs in learner grammars often evoke quite abstract semantic categories (focusing on dynamic, deontic and epistemic modality) in generalized usage contexts. Yet, in concrete utterances, modal verbs not only serve highly specific pragmatic and discourse-structural functions, but can also be shown to occur in (quasi-)formulaic sequences with specific lexical elements. These more idiosyncratic functional and formal properties are often insufficiently addressed in learner grammars. The article demonstrates, on the basis of two case studies, how insights and methods from Construction Grammar can help to improve the presentation of this topic. More specifically, it elaborates on the key determinants of L2 construction learning (involving frequency, proto-typicality and form-function mapping, among others) and illustrates what statistical techniques such as collostructional analysis and conditional inference trees can reveal about the intricacies involved in learning modal verb constructions.

From the start of cognitive linguistics, in the 1980s, researchers working within this framework have given ample attention to mood and modality. This is understandable since these categories crucially involve speaker attitude and perspective and cognitive linguistics has always concerned itself with the ways in which language users present a subjective construal of reality. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of how mood and modality are analyzed within different strands of cognitive linguistics, ranging from the models of force dynamics and Mental Spaces to Cognitive Grammar. Specific topics discussed include the polysemy of modal verbs, the analysis of tense as modality, and the highly detailed account of modal verbs offered by Langacker in terms of “grounding” and “subjectivity”. The emerging framework of construction grammar focuses on the linguistic contexts, that is constructions, in which modal forms are used, regarding these as constraints on polysemy.

Phrasal structures form the backbone of any sentence, and they provide key information about, respectively, the constituent structure of a sentence and how its meanings are to be used in achieving a communicative purpose. In addition, languages typically feature several other systems that express meaning through grammatical rather than lexical means. Examples are a tense-aspect system, which expresses information about the timing and temporal structure of events, a mood-modality system, which concerns the epistemic status and opinion of the facts reported in a sentence and a determination system,which provides information about the access status of the referent of nominal phrases.This chapter shows how such grammatical meanings are approached within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar through a concrete example of the Russian aspect system.KeywordsLexical EntryJohn BenjaminLinguistic StructureClass IndivImperfective AspectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper examines previous analyses of the x's way construction, focusing on the readings attributed to it within the Construction Grammar framework and constraints on the types of verbs allowed in the construction. It questions some of the characterizations of the construction and offers an alternative view that accounts for uses of the construction that have not been considered before. Specifically, it will demonstrate that metaphoric uses, particularly those with obtainment readings, reveal interesting properties of the construction that define how it assembles motion events and paths in these events. These will be shown to follow constraints of differing rigidity. While motion events can involve disparate subevents blended together, paths do not allow any integration of incongruous elements. The construction follows universal principles which govern how complex event schemas can be blended out of simpler schemas in linguistic constructions. More generally, as a closed-class form, not only does the construction conform to event-schema protocol, but its meaning associated with a motion event is a spare reading typical of a closed-class form. Thus the present analysis attempts to reconcile its constructionist approach to the way construction with the traditional division into closed- and open-class forms.

This paper is an investigation into the properties of the negation jangan in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. The analysis shows that the negation jangan can negate verbs functioning as predicate in a sentence. It follows both transitive and intransitive verbs. The constituent that fills the position in the subject is defined by the voice of the sentence. If it is in the active voice, the subject is the second person pronoun. On the other hand, if the word jangan negates passive voice, the subject is not restricted. It is possible in Indonesian sentence to have double negation because the negative adverb jangan can negatea negation tidak. It also follows adjectives, adverbs, nouns and clauses. Thenegation jangan also has a different grammatical construction when it precedesthe preposition sampai. The subject following jangan sampai is not restricted asthe subject following jangan sampai is in active voice. The word jangan can befronted to modify the whole clause.

Recent studies have shown that integrating constructional information can improve the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in natural language understanding.However, exploration into leveraging constructional information to enhance generative language models for natural language generation has been limited.Additionally, probing studies indicate that PLMs primarily grasp the syntactic structure of constructions but struggle to capture their semantics.In this work, we encode constructions as inductive biases to explicitly embed constructional semantics and guide the generation process.We begin by presenting a construction grammar induction framework designed to automatically identify constructions from corpora.Subsequently, we propose the Construction-Enhanced Language Model (CoELM).It introduces a construction-guided language modeling approach that employs a dynamic sequence reassembly strategy during pre-training.Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of CoELM across various benchmarks.

The Dutch anaphoric possessive construction (APC), as exemplified by Tom zijn fiets ‘Tom his bike’, shows a peculiar mix of regularity and idiosyncracy. The article provides a theory-neutral description of its properties and quantitative information about its use in two treebanks, one of spoken Dutch (CGN) and one of written Dutch (Lassy Small). It argues that the APC has a right branching structure and models it in the framework of Constructional Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The latter’s organization of constructions in terms of a finegrained hierarchy of phrase types is shown to provide the means to capture both what the APC has in common with other possessive constructions and what is idiosyncratic of it.

Previous research has suggested that languages differ in terms of how much prominence is given to the agent. Namely, English prefers to give prominence to a human agent, whereas Japanese prefers to suppress the human agent and express events as if they happen spontaneously (e.g., Ikegami 1981). By using a Japanese novel and its English translation as a parallel corpus, this paper shows quantitatively that Japanese uses more intransitive constructions than English. Using Hopper & Thompson’s (1980) parameters to measure semantic transitivity, this paper also shows that the difference in intransitive constructions was only observed in low semantic transitivity events, whereas both languages exhibit similar trends for high semantic transitivity events. An analysis under the framework of Construction Grammar suggests that the Japanese intransitive construction covers a space in a semantic map which would be occupied by the transitive and adjectival constructions in English.