Résultat de la recherche
Corpus linguistics meets historical linguistics and construction grammar: how far have we come, and where do we go from here?
This paper aims to give an overview of corpus-based research that investigates processes of language change from the theoretical perspective of Construction Grammar. Starting in the early 2000s, a dynamic community of researchers has come together in order to contribute to this effort. Among the different lines of work that have characterized this enterprise, this paper discusses the respective roles of qualitative approaches, diachronic collostructional analysis, multivariate techniques, distributional semantic models, and analyses of network structure. The paper tries to contextualize these approaches and to offer pointers for future research.
New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity. Gender and internal factors in the development of ‑ity and ‑ness, 1600–1800.
We study the productivity of the suffixes ‑ness and ‑ity in seventeenth‑ and eighteenth-century letters in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. We analyze the role of gender and five internal factors: etymology, the word class of the base, branching structure, semantics, and occurrence in possessive constructions. We develop statistical and visual methods that facilitate diachronic comparisons within factors and between competing suffixes; our basic measure is the proportion of types of interest out of all relevant types, and we utilize permutation testing to assess the statistical significance of our findings. Our results support and refine the earlier finding of a male-led increase in the productivity of ‑ity and provide new information on the interplay of gender and internal factors.
Ten Lectures On Diachronic Construction Grammar
In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.
Usage-Based Approaches to Germanic Languages
The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.
You don't get to see that every day: On the development of permissive get
A case of constructional contamination in English: Modified noun phrases influence adverb placement in the passive
This paper discusses a case of what Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016) call constructional contamination. Specifically, we investigate the influence of English modified noun phrases on variation in adverb placement in the passive. On the basis of data from the COCA, we argue that highly frequent nominal expressions such as sexually transmitted disease influence adverb placement in the passive, which offers speakers a choice between adverb-initial order (The disease was sexually transmitted) and adverb-final order (The disease was transmitted sexually). Our results thus corroborate findings from Dutch corpora (Pijpops and Van de Velde 2016) and suggest that constructional contamination is a phenomenon that can be observed across different languages. We further discuss the role of constructional contamination for analogy and contrast.
The road ahead for Construction Grammar
What does the future hold for Construction Grammar? What are the most promising future avenues for research on constructions? This paper addresses the development of Construction Grammar as a theory of language through the perspective of six recent PhD dissertations that explore constructional meaning, the architecture of the constructional network, and the role of language change in a constructional theory of language. The goal of this paper is to establish connections between these ideas, and to spell out how different questions concerning Frame Semantics, distributional semantic methods, priming, nodes and connections, individual differences, and constructional change all contribute to a picture that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
Meaning differences between English clippings and their source words: A corpus-based study
This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory), memo (< memorandum), or quake (< earthquake). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings. Each of the clippings is represented by a concordance of 100 examples in context that were gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We compare clippings and their source words both at the aggregate level and in terms of comparisons between individual clippings and their source words. The data show that clippings tend to be used in contexts that represent involved text production, which aligns with the idea that clipped words signal familiarity with their referents. It is further observed that individual clippings and their source words partly diverge in their distributional profiles, reflecting both overlap and differences with regard to their meanings. We interpret these findings against the theoretical background of Construction Grammar and specifically the Principle of No Synonymy.
Disentangling modal meanings with distributional semantics
This paper investigates the collocational behavior of English modal auxiliaries such as may and might with the aim of finding corpus-based measures that distinguish between different modal expressions and that allow insights into why speakers may choose one over another in a given context. The analysis uses token-based semantic vector space modeling (Heylen et al. 2015, Hilpert and Correia Saavedra 2017) in order to determine whether different modal auxiliaries can be distinguished in terms of their collocational profiles. The analysis further examines whether different senses of the same auxiliary exhibit divergent collocational preferences. The results indicate that near-synonymous pairs of modal expressions, such as may and might or must and have to, differ in their distributional characteristics. Also different senses of the same modal expression, such as deontic and epistemic uses of may, can be distinguished on the basis of distributional information. We discuss these results against the background of previous empirical findings (Hilpert 2016, Flach in press) and theoretical issues such as degrees of grammaticalization (Correia Saavedra 2019) and the avoidance of synonymy (Bolinger 1968).