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.
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).
Construction Grammar - theoretical reflections and empirical applications
You don't get to see that every day: On the development of permissive get
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.
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.