The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 54 pptx

Semantic similarity is also the governing principle underlying the semantic map model, used in typology and in Radical Construction Grammar Croft 2003: 133–39; van der Auwera and Nuyts,

and partially productive past-tense schema, but the alleged source forms, the present-tense forms, are phonologically so varied that no single rule can systematically derive the past-tense forms from the present-tense forms The existence of product-oriented schemas argues against rules linking one form to another and supports the view that schemas are formed as taxonomic hierarchies over semantically similar forms Hypothesis 4: Strength of connection between word forms, and thus

forces influencing their phonological shape (among other things), is a function of similarity Similarity is measurable

by comparing words to each other in both meaning and form; similarity in meaning is much stronger than similarity

in form

It was noted in section 4 that the taxonomic hierarchy is really a taxonomic web: a construction has multiple parents The taxonomic web would be a far more complex organization of constructions than a taxonomic hierarchy While one cannot deny the existence of the taxonomic web, it is certainly the case in morphology at least that some word forms are ‘‘closer’’ to each other than to other related word forms; this is the basis for the intuitive organization of forms into paradigms in traditional mor-phology Bybee (1985) argues that the principle governing closeness is essentially semantic similarity, although formal similarity also plays a reinforcing role More often, one finds analogical reformation of a paradigm so as to bring formal similarity into line with semantic similarity (i.e., paradigmatic iconicity; Croft 2003)

In principle, all four hypotheses should be supported in syntax as well as morphology, if the construction grammar model is valid Research on the usage-based model in syntax has only begun at this point, although there is significant research in language acquisition and language change in the usage-based model, as will be seen below (see also Bybee this volume, chapter 36; Tomasello, this volume, chapter 41)

Bybee and Thompson (1997) present evidence for the role of token frequency of constructions (defined as token frequency of the substantive elements in the con-struction) in grammatical organization They observe that the syntax of the English auxiliaries is conservative in that they invert with the subject in questions and precede the negator All verbs had this possibility in Middle English, but it was lost

in Modern English Bybee and Thompson argue that the token frequency of the auxiliaries was high enough that the Subject Inversion and Postposed Negation constructions survived with auxiliaries when it was lost with other verbs Bybee and Thompson also note that the French Subjunctive Verb construction is disappearing from the spoken language but survives in the highly frequent main clause verb falloir ‘have to’ and/or in the most frequent complement verbs

Cruse and I argue that product-oriented syntactic schemas exist (Croft and Cruse 2004: 313–18) For example, the English Polarity Question and Declarative Nega-tion construcNega-tions have syntactic schemas, [Aux Sbj ?] and [Sbj Aux-n’t ], that are more coherent than the input schemas, which may have zero, one, or more auxiliary verbs Other product-oriented schemas include the English Declarative,

which requires an overt subject even when one is semantically lacking (It’s raining) or

is extraposed (It seems that it’s never sunny in Manchester); the so-called Extraction constructions such as the relative clause, information, and It-cleft constructions, in which the ‘‘extracted’’ element is initial no matter what position it occurs in in the simple declarative; and the Japanese Passive, in which the passive subject is initial and the verb takes the passive -(r)are suffix, no matter what position the subject occurs in

in the active construction

Finally, there is evidence that constructions are organized in terms of semantic similarity For example, the historical shift of the English negative adjectival im-perative from Be not cruel! to Don’t be cruel! makes the negative adjectival imper-ative syntactically more similar to the semantically more similar negimper-ative verbal imperative Don’t jump! than the semantically more distant negative adjectival de-clarative She isn’t cruel (Croft and Cruse 2004: 320–31) Semantic similarity is also the governing principle underlying the semantic map model, used in typology and

in Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2003: 133–39; van der Auwera and Nuyts, this volume, chapter 40) The semantic map model maps the function of con-structions in a conceptual space such that the functions of a single construction form a connected region in the conceptual space If this principle is followed

in cross-linguistic comparison, ideally one can construct a conceptual space such that the semantic maps of any language’s constructions will form a connected region in the conceptual space If so, then the conceptual space is structured in terms of the semantic similarity of functions as encoded in linguistic forms across languages The organization of conceptual space allows one to arrange construc-tions in terms of semantic similarity; the usage-based model predicts that this arrangement will be reflected in the formal syntactic similarity of these construc-tions to some degree

The usage-based model allows construction grammar to accommodate dy-namic aspects of language: not simply language use, as discussed above, but also language acquisition and language change

Research on the acquisition of syntax by Tomasello, Lieven, Pine, and others offers evidence for a usage-based, inductive model of the acquisition of syntax Evidence from very detailed longitudinal studies of early language development demonstrates that children are in fact extremely conservative language learners (Braine 1976 is an early important study along these lines; for more recent studies, see Tomasello 2000, 2003; this volume, chapter 41) Children’s earliest multiword utterances demonstrate that children use verbs and other predicates in only one construction at a time (Tomasello 1992; Lieven, Pine, and Baldwin 1997; Pine and Lieven 1997; Tomasello et al 1997; Pine, Lieven, and Rowland 1998)

The main exception to this highly specific acquisition process is that children

do substitute different object names in a single participant role in a construction from early on Tomasello (1992) proposed the Verb Island Hypothesis, namely that verbs and other predicates form ‘‘islands’’ of a single verb plus a single construc-tion, before joining together the ‘‘islands’’ into a construction network such as that illustrated in (12) above

In other words, children do not utilize schematic categories such as [Verb] or schematic constructions such as the Transitive construction [Sbj Verb Obj] in their early acquisition, whether these schematic structures are innate or not In-stead, children begin with very low level generalizations based around a single predicate and a single construction in which that predicate occurs and only later in acquisition learn more schematic categories and constructions

Although children substitute object names or ‘‘nouns’’ early in acquisition,

it does not appear that this implies that children acquire a schematic [Noun] or [Determiner Noun]NP category early on Pine and Lieven (1997) found that at the earliest stage of learning nouns and determiners, children also proceed in a piecemeal fashion In their study, Pine and Lieven found that although children use

a variety of nouns with both a and the, the nouns they use with a and the nouns they use with the overlap very little at first Instead, it appeared that children learned nouns with one determiner or that the determiner use was associated with larger structures in which the noun and determiner occur, such as [in the X] or [That’s a X] Other studies indicate that children begin with ‘‘islands’’ other than verbs (Pine, Lieven, and Rowland 1998), that acquisition of verbal inflections is piecemeal and sensitive to frequency (Rubino and Pine 1998, on Brazilian Portuguese; Gathercole, Sebastia´n, and Soto 1999 found the same in the acquisition of Spanish, but mor-phological complexity also played a role)

These and other language acquisition studies suggest that a careful, detailed examination of the actual course of development of children’s language acquisi-tion conforms to the predicacquisi-tions of the usage-based model Children begin with very narrow construction types, even specific to individual verbs and nouns, and gradually build more schematic grammatical constructions over time The rate of learning and generalization is influenced by the relative frequency of the con-structions in the caregivers’ input The order of acquisition is also sensitive to the semantic distance between constructions

Similar results are found in the detailed examinations of the paths of syntactic change As many historical linguists have observed in detailed studies, the birth and growth of a construction proceeds in an incremental fashion, not terribly unlike the expansion from ‘‘islands’’ of highly specific constructions as in child language acquisition

One example of a syntactic change, cast in a cognitive linguistic framework, is Israel’s analysis of the development of the way construction, illustrated in (44) (1996: 218):

(44) a Rasselas dug his way out of the Happy Valley

b The wounded soldiers limped their way across the field

c ?Convulsed with laughter, she giggled her way up the stairs

All of the way-construction examples given in (44) use a possessed direct object way and require a complement describing the path of motion Example (44a) describes

a means of achieving the motion along the path; (44b) describes a manner of motion along the path; and example (44c) describes an incidental activity of the

subject as she travels along the path The way-construction is also syntactically and semantically idiosyncratic: the verbs in the way-construction are normally intran-sitive, and their meaning does not normally entail motion

Using data from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford University Press Corpus of Contemporary English, Israel argues that the modern way-construction grew gradually from two different, more narrowly used way-constructions, the Means and Manner constructions (a third source, the acquisition or continued possession of a path, shrank rather than expanded, although it remains in certain common instances such as find one’s way; Israel 1996: 221, note 3) The Manner construction began as a special case of the Middle English [go one’s Path] con-struction and was originally found with only the most common general motion verbs, no more than sixteen verbs before 1700 (Israel 1996: 221) The Means way-construction does not emerge until around 1650 and begins with verbs describing path clearing (cut, furrow out), road building (pave, smooth) and forcible motion (force out, Israel 1996: 223) In the nineteenth century, the Means and Manner way-constructions appear to merge At the same time that the class of verbs in the way-construction is expanding, the overall syntactic form of the construction becomes narrower, eventually prohibiting other nouns than way and requiring an obligatory path expression (Israel 1996: 221, 226)

This (common) pattern in syntactic change illustrates how a new construction emerges from an often highly specific instance of an existing construction schema and then expands in its own direction A usage-based model can account for this pattern in that it allows for the entrenchment of specific instances of construction schemas, which function as ‘‘islands’’ from which a new construction expands, establishing and generalizing a new construction schema with its own syntactic and semantic peculiarities

7 P r o s p e c t s f o r t h e F u t u r e

Construction grammar is a flourishing area of grammatical theorizing, as evidenced

by the range of construction grammar theories that have been proposed On the other hand, construction grammar is also a relatively new area, and a number of aspects of constructing a model of grammatical representation need further devel-opment Some of these aspects have been alluded to in the course of this presentation Any model of grammatical representation that aspires to be psychologically plausible, as construction grammar aspires to be, must also include a model of utterance comprehension and production and of grammatical acquisition and change (see also this volume, chapters 41 and 49)

Utterance comprehension involves the categorization of the utterance as an instance of the various constructions that make it up and the construction of

a proper semantic interpretation of the utterance Ideally, comprehension should

be modeled by an interactive activation network model, to reflect priming and other effects that have been documented in psycholinguistic experiments Utterance production is a more difficult task Construction Grammar employs

a unification model (see section 5.1) for utterance production (and comprehen-sion) But other construction grammar models allow for the novel construal of words and phrases in sentences (see Verhagen, this volume, chapter 3), which the feature-matching unification algorithm would fail to model Construction gram-mars of course represent construction knowledge schematically, to a greater or lesser degree A model of utterance production would have to specify when all that must be instantiated is in fact properly instantiated for an utterance to be produced Language acquisition research in a construction-based framework has made major progress in understanding the earliest stages of syntactic development An important question which is now attracting more attention is the later develop-ment of highly schematic constructions from the more substantive structures that children begin with Historical linguistic research, both philological and socio-linguistic, has been usage-based since long before the usage-based model evolved; but relatively few studies have taken a construction grammar approach to syntactic change

Finally, as noted in the last section, an important desideratum for most con-struction grammars is the role of the usage-based model in syntactic representation Many fundamental questions remain to be addressed: How many tokens is enough

to entrench a linguistic unit? How many types are enough to give rise to some degree

of productivity? What is the role of timing of exposure in facilitating entrenchment? How similar do tokens/types have to be to facilitate entrenchment of a grammatical schema? How does one measure grammatical and semantic similarity in order to compare its effect to that of token/type frequency? Substantive answers to these questions will greatly advance the grammatical theory of Cognitive Linguistics

N O T E S

1 This analysis is very similar to the rule-to-rule hypothesis of Montague Grammar (Dowty, Wall, and Peters 1981)—that for every syntactic rule, there must be an associ-ated semantic interpretation rule—adopted by Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et al 1985) and its lineal descendant, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1993) The rule-to-rule hypothesis can be recast as the construction grammar generalization that every construction has associated with it a meaning and a mapping from form to meaning.

2 Other theories share some, though not all, of construction grammar’s basic prin-ciples Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag 1987, 1993), Se-miotic Grammar (MacGregor 1997), and Word Grammar (Hudson 1984; this volume, chapter 19) share construction grammar’s representation of grammatical units as symbolic

units and organize grammatical knowledge into a taxonomic network However, these theories are not explicitly construction-based, although HPSG and Fillmore and Kay’s (1993) version of construction grammar have converged in many respects—for example, both use attribute-value matrices combining syntactic and semantic information, both use inheritance in grammatical organization, and both use unification for combining con-structions into sentences (see section 5.1) Word Grammar explicitly denies the existence of constructions as complex symbolic units: ‘‘In Construction Grammar a construction constitutes a phrase whose parts are also either words or phrases; in Word Grammar the only units are words’’ (Holmes and Hudson 2005: 252).

3 More recently, Lakoff and colleagues have developed Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen and Chang 2005) Embodied Construction Grammar is distinguished

by its linking of semantic representations of constructions to simulations of perceptual-motor routines in the mind The syntactic model of Embodied Construction Grammar

is largely unchanged compared to the versions of Construction Grammar described in this and the preceding sections.

4 Many contemporary syntactic theories treat categories as bundles of features, so that, for example, the category Adjective is defined as [þN, þV] (Haegeman 1994: 146) The decomposition of categories into features performs a further reduction, so that the atomic elements are features instead of categories However, for our purposes, we may assume that the primitive elements are categories Note that in the case of the examples given here, Construction Grammar has atomic feature values for Noun and Verb ([cat n], [cat v]) and Subject and Object ([gf subj], [gf obj]).

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W O R D G R A M M A R

r i c h a r d h u d s o n

1 L a n g u a g e a s

a C o n c e p t u a l N e t w o r k

Word Grammar (Hudson 1984, 1990, 2007) is a theory of language which touches

on almost all aspects of synchronic linguistics and unifies them all through a single very general claim (Hudson 1984: 1):

The Network Postulate:

Language is a conceptual network

This claim is hardly contentious in Cognitive Linguistics, where it is often taken for granted that language as a whole is a network in contrast with the more traditional view of language as a grammar plus a dictionary—a list of rules or principles and a list of lexical items However, it is particularly central to Word Grammar, in which each of the main traditional areas of language is a subnetwork within the total network of language

Most obviously, ‘‘the lexicon’’ is a network of:

a Forms

b Meanings

c Lexemes

(The scare-quotes round ‘‘the lexicon’’ anticipate section 8, which argues that the lexicon is not an identifiable part of the total language.) This is a network rather than a simple list because the elements among the parts are in a many-to-many relation There are lexemes which have more than one meaning (polysemy); there are meanings which are shared by more than one lexeme (synonymy); and there are lexemes which have more than one form (inherent variability)