Force Dynamics in Unexpected Places

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.

Political manifestos state the objectives of political parties through diverse linguistic strategies. These linguistic strategies are paramount in the expression of varied intentions found in manifestos. Therefore, the research paper explored the use of modal and lexical verbs employed by politicians in conveying their political manifestos. The paper highlighted the use of modals to state various intentions, possibilities, promises, obligations and predictions. Data was collected through the 2015 and 2019 on-line manifestos of People Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC). The researchers also drew insights from the Systemic Functional Linguistics by analyzing the data functionally and structurally using the SPCA/MHQ formulas in Systematic Functional Linguistics. It was discovered that the political parties employed diverse modal auxiliary verbs to state their intentions, promises, obligations and possibilities. The findings also portrayed that the lexical verbs were utilized to state different resolutions and to make salient assertions. Therefore, the researchers discovered that the modal verbs had several semantic functions in the manifestos. It was concluded that, manifesto portrayed various types of claims, predictions, intentions, volitions, possibilities and obligations. They were employed by political parties to show political commitment and will.

Kearns (1988) has previously proposed two types of Light Verb Constructions in English: True Light Verb Constructions and Vague Action Verb Constructions. This paper claims that the Korean Light Verb Construction without an accusative marker corresponds to the True Light Verb Construction in English, while the Korean Light Verb Construction with an accusative marker corresponds to the Vague Action Verb Construction in English. Joh (2017) has claimed that, for the former, we can apply the Type Coercion mechanism, while, for the latter, a Co-compositional process takes place. Extending this analysis, this paper claims that the two types of Korean Light Verb Constructions can be explained by the two different generative mechanisms. One of the biggest advantages of this paper is that it finds that the two types of Light Verb Construction observed in Korean is not an isolated phenomenon but provides clear and concrete evidence to the claim that there are two different types of Light Verb Constructions in natural languages by showing that they can be morphologically evidenced.

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.

This study attempted to determine the effectiveness of test messaging items for certain language skills. It sought to find out what skills can be measured by text messaging test items, to determine the efficiency of text messaging items for testing certain language skills, and the effectiveness of the testing instruments in assessing certain language performance. The research employed written text analysis. A sample test composed of three sets of text messages in three forms, Filipino text, Taglish text, and English text messages were made. A short paragraph in Filipino, Taglish, and English were transcribed into text messages by senior Education students who are majoring in English. After comparisons, they came up with the best text translation of the items. The test items were administered to freshmen Education students of the Southern Luzon State University. The subjects were asked to transcribe the messages in complete sentences. Results reveal that text messaging test items measure the respondents' competencies in reading comprehension, grammatical structures, phonetic ability, and usage. Based from the computed mean for different skills, the study revealed that the students have high level of comprehension in three languages used, high level of ability in grammatical structure in Filipino and average level of ability in grammatical construction in English; high level of ability in phonetics in Filipino and English based from their spelling of words; and high level of ability in correct usage based from their sentence construction.

In this paper we investigate the constructions that are used to encode reciprocal situations in English, based on responses to the 64 reciprocals videoclips developed for the Reciprocals Across Languages project (Evans et al. 2004). This work complements the extensive body of previous research on English reciprocals by focusing on spoken data. While our data supports the traditional view of each other as the primary and most common reciprocal construction in English, we find a greater degree of variation in construction types than this traditional view might suggest. Furthermore, we show that each other does not have the same degree of acceptability with all reciprocal situation types.

The acquisition of grammatical and lexical structures was studied in a sample of 10 young German-speaking children with cochlear implants (mean implantation age 2 years 3 months). Spontaneous speech samples were collected covering the first 18 months after first tune-up. At the end of this period, 8 children were able to produce two- or multi-word utterances. Furthermore, 8 children had acquired plural inflections on nouns, and 5 children had acquired a substantial portion of verb inflectional morphology. Children did less well acquiring case-marked articles, forms of the copula and modal verbs. Articles were acquired better when they functioned as pronouns. Children had good vocabularies (type/token ratios ≥0.25), and all but one child started language with a preference for content words as opposed to function words.

This paper reports a case study on a family of American English constructions that will be called the family ofapproximate comparisonconstructions. This family has three members, all of which follow the syntactic patternabout as X as YwithXbeing an adjective, but which allow three related functions: literal comparison, simile and irony. Two cognitive frameworks concern themselves with irony, the cognitive modelling approach and viewpoint approach, and the paper will show that, while the ironic approximate comparison construction calls central assumptions of the cognitive modelling approach to question, the viewpoint account can be refined to handle these cases. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of irony. The paper provides a corpus-based analysis on theYslot as well as collostructional analyses on the adjectivalXslot in the family ofapproximate comparisonconstructions. The results thereof suggest that the ironicapproximate comparisonconstruction, in comparison to its literal counterpart, prefers adjectives that convey positively connotated, nuanced attitudes and is formally less variable in theYslot. The preference for particular adjectives lends further support to the assumption that hearers understand the construction as ironic or literal before speakers complete their utterance. Given that, it is argued that the ironicapproximate comparisonconstruction communicates an inherent viewpoint.

Verbal constructions of personification (i.e. nonhuman subject + predicate verb primarily used for human beings only) can be considered a key linguistic realization of personification. Although as grammatical metaphors they are rather invisible, the verb’s selection restrictions have a crucial role in expressing conceptual personification. In other words, the nominal form of personification as cross-domain mapping (e.g. WIND IS A THIEF ) is often realized via verb + argument structures (e.g. the wind grabbed the papers out of my hand). In a previous study, the domains of MOVEMENT , CONTROL and MENTAL ACT proved to be the most frequent conceptual categories of verbal personifications in a corpus of 20 th -century Hungarian poems. However, despite these initial findings, we have relatively little knowledge about what are the typical verbal components of personifications in Hungarian on a more general level. The present paper aims to extend the scope of personification research, adopting corpus linguistic methodology to explore the semantic domains of verbal personification in Hungarian. In a collostructional analysis, I investigate the significant verbal collexemes of noun + verb personifications in the huTenTen12 corpus, using three categories of nominal keywords: animals (dog, horse, fish), plants (tree, fruit, flower) and inanimate natural phenomena (water, air, fire). The study hypothesises that verbs of MENTAL ACT will dominate the first category, MOVEMENT and CONTROL will be prominent among the verbal collexemes of nouns denoting personified natural phenomena, while the semantic domains of verbal personifications will be more heterogeneous in the realm of plants.

A principled model of mood selection in Old English (OE) has long proved elusive. We analyse the distribution of the indicative and subjunctive in the OE Bede in light of the Latin original, the syntactic construction, and a semantic model of modality which classifies clauses according to whether the situation is represented as holding in the actual world or in a possible world. The choice of mood in the Latin and OE Bede differs enough to rule out slavish imitation. In certain clauses, such as result and purpose clauses, the construction type, modality, and grammatical mood all match; however, in other clauses, such as concessives, the OE subjunctive is systematically used whether the situation is represented as actual or possible. Where the grammatical mood of OE forms is ambiguous, modal verbs are often seemingly used as a substitute for the subjunctive. Our results show that while the choice of mood in the OE Bede largely correlates with the syntactic construction, the subjunctive is close to being semantically redundant. This growing redundancy may have been one of the factors in the diminishing role of inflectional mood in the later history of English.

The article describes semantics and pragmatics of reflexive constructions. Common notes on the semantics of reflexivity are given. Reflexivity reflects specific subject-object relationships demonstrated in explicitly and implicitly reflexive constructions. Implicit reflexivity is discussed of a relatively small class of verbs in English. It is stated that the full referent identity of an anaphora pronoun and personal antecedent in the position of the subject is not obligatory. Different standpoints on the nature of reflexivity are distinguished. The existence of a special type of referential identity of a reflexive anaphora and an antecedent word is substantiated, when one and the same referent is interpreted by these linguistic units in a different way carrying out different semantic and syntactic functions in a sentence. Moreover, an antecedent and an anaphora turn out to be united at the level of the semantic structure. In the syntactic structure, the anaphora and an antecedent word prove to be referentially non-identical. Using psycholinguistic analysis, reflexive constructions in English are divided into introspective and descriptive. The strangeness of reflexivity is in the use of a reflexive pronoun, conditioned by an aspectual-temporal form of a verb.

This study endeavors to undertake a comparative analysis of aspect in English and Moroccan Arabic, hereafter referred to as MA, adopting a cognitive linguistic approach, with special attention to the categorization of different situation types as proposed by Radden and Dirven (2007). It also aims to highlight the aspect areas that may challenge Moroccan EFL learners when acquiring this English grammatical construction. The study reveals that aspect is treated differently in English and MA. English aspect hinges on the viewing frame adopted. Therefore, the shift from one viewing frame to another results in the change from one situation type to another. By contrast, in MA, the perfective use calls for the adoption of a maximal viewing frame. However, the imperfective use calls for two interpretations: the event can be seen with either a maximal or a restricted viewing frame. In the absence of elements that co-determine the aspect in MA, general context is the only indication of the appropriate interpretation. The differences in the aspectual systems of English and MA may lead to difficulties in language acquisition. MA learners attempting to learn English, and vice versa, may face challenges in learning both the grammatical structure and its associated meanings.

Japanese has borrowed lexical items from European languages for centuries, mostly for historical and cultural reasons. Phonological analyses concerning the process of importing words from various languages are numerous. Syllabic structures of Western languages usually differ from those in Japanese and this difference manifests itself mainly in the lack of many consonant groups in the latter. In this paper, a number of examples will be provided so as to show how consonant clusters from donor languages undergo decomposition in Japanese loanwords from European languages, also referred to as gairaigo. The phonological model of Complexity Scales and Licensing is employed here with a view to demonstrating precisely why the process of cluster disintegration usually happens, which enforces epenthetic vowels, and why it is at times inhibited.

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.

This paper argues that the motivation for structure in creole formation comes from the innate architecture of language competence and production. In this architecture, the lexical and the grammatical subsystems of language are related, but supported differently. At the level of the mental lexicon, abstract entries (lemmas) underlie morphemes, but lemmas project content morphemes differently than grammatical morphemes. While the abstract frames that grammatical morphemes will fill are present at this level (referred to in lemmas supporting content morphemes) the grammatical morphemes are not salient until the level of the Formulator. The Formulator assembles surface-level constituents based on directions it receives from lemmas. This view of abstract configurations in language supports the claim that there are two initial targets in creole formation. These targets are: (1) input from substrates as a target for the grammatical (morphosyntactic) frame of utterances, and (2) superstrate input as another target for most of the content morphemes that appear in the creole as lexical elements or that are reconfigured to fill requirements of the grammatical frame. Thus, the overall claim is that the initial form of a creole is constrained by universally-present blueprinting of how linguistic elements are related and how they become available.