(XVII
ICHL, Madison 2005)
Conveners
Alexander
Bergs, HHU Düsseldorf
bergs@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de
Gabriele
Diewald
Gabriele.diewald@fbls.uni-hannover.de
PAPERS
(in alphabetical order)
The
progressive construction in Dutch: recursivity of grammaticalization patterns
The
Grammaticalization of the Particle-Verb Construction
Syntax
as a Repository of Historical Relics
Construction genesis as degrammaticalisation? On doubled pronouns in Dutch
Where
did this future construction come from? The
case of Swedish komma att V
Transpositional
morphology and Construction Grammar: a diachronic perspective
Constructional
Grammaticalization in the Make-Causative
Multi-phrasal
constructions as borrowable starting points for grammaticalization
Mixed
categories and word order change
Formulaic
expressions in context: from minimal variation to language change
Bedusted,
yet not beheaded: The role of be-’s constructional semantics in its
conservation
Negative
verbal clause construction in Puyuma
Bits/?shreds
of evidence for the grammaticalization of negative and positive polarity
constructions: a Radical Construction perspective
The role of the topic-comment construction in the reanalysis of “things” in the Japanese modals -monoda and -kotoda
ABSTRACTS:
The Grammaticalization of the Particle-Verb Construction
Corrien
Blom (c.blom@let.vu.nl)
In (1) three examples of Dutch particle-verb constructions are given.
(1)
PV
main clause
a. de schoenen inlopen Jan liep zijn schoenen in.
'to break in the shoes'
'John broke in his shoes.' (lit. in-walk)
b. over de film napraten
We praatten over de film na.
'to
talk about the movie afterwards'
'We talked about the movie afterwards.' (lit.
after-talk)
c. het publiek toespreken
Jan sprak het publiek toe.
'to
address/talk to the audience'
'John addressed the audience.'(lit. to-speak)
According to most synchronic analyses, particle verbs (PVs), being syntactically separable (cf. (1)a-c), are phrases. Concerning their diachrony, PVs are generally assumed to be grammaticalizations of constructions with resultative phrases. Under these analyses, however, the characteristics of PVs given in (2) remain puzzling.
(2)
a. PVs have conventionalized
properties (e.g. particles have construction-specific meanings), but are
nevertheless productively formed.
b.
PVs have divergent argument-structural and lexical-aspectual properties:
(1)a is transitive and telic, (1)b is intransitive and atelic, and (1)c is
transitive and atelic.
In
my paper I illustrate that (2)a is accounted for by assuming PVs to be
instantiations of partly lexicalized phrasal templates; constructions. These PV
templates are part of a multiple-inheritance network, in which generalizations
are stated at different levels.
My hypothesis is that the diachrony of PVs
accounts for (2)b: I assume that various elements showing up left-adjacently to
the verb in older stages of Dutch (resultative phrases, adverbial phrases,
postpositions) have been reanalyzed together with the verb as syntactic units.
Subsequently, these syntactic units developed their own semantic and pragmatic
properties, thus grammaticalizing into productive PV patterns; PV constructions.
The different participant-licensing properties of the hypothesized particle
sources (resultative phrases, adverbial phrases, postpositions) are assumed to
account for the differences between the resulting PV constructions mentioned in
(2)b. I present historical data supporting this diachronic hypothesis and
discuss the structural and semantic changes involved in this grammaticalization
development. In particular, I show how this development led to the formation of
different PV subconstructions, which represent specific instantiations of a more
general (dominating) PV construction.
The progressive construction in Dutch: recursivity of grammaticalization
patterns
Geert Booij
(ge.booij@let.vu.nl)
One of the ways in which progressive aspect can be expressed in Dutch is the aan het Infinitive-construction, as in:
Jan
is aan het fietsen
John
is at the cycle-inf
‘John
is cycling’
This
originally locative construction of the form ‘be + PP’ has developed into a
periphrastic construction for progressive aspect. Similar constructions have
developed in a number of Germanic languages. This construction may be qualified
as a constructional idiom in which one position, the verbal infinitive, is still
an open slot whereas the choice of preposition and determiner is fixed. The
constructional idiom aan het V-inf is
also part of larger constructions such as aan het V-inf slaan ‘to start V-ing’ in which the verb slaan
‘to hit’ has acquired a purely aspectual, inchoative meaning. I will show
that Dutch features a range of such progressive constructions which support the
claim that grammaticalization of lexical items into more grammatical ones takes
place in the context of specific constructions.
The
periphrastic role of the progressive construction is clear from the fact that
present participles in Dutch can only be used in attributive, not in predicative
position:
De fietsende man
‘the cycling man’
De man *is fietsend /
is aan het fietsen ‘The man is cycling’
Since
periphrasis is usually associated with inflection, periphrasis is the phenomenon
par excellence that shows how grammaticalization is dependent on constructions.
The Dutch progressive construction is also interesting because the
variable position can not only be filled by verbs but also by particle verbs and
other varieties of separable complex verbs, as illustrated by:
Jan is zijn moeder aan
het opbellen
John
is his mother at the up-phone-inf
‘John
is calling his mother’
Particle
verbs are themselves cases of grammaticalization of syntactic constructions, and
thus this is another case of recursivity of grammaticalized constructions. Thus,
the aan het Inf-construction can be
used as a test for the construction status of certain word combinations.
Finally, I will also present phonological evidence for the grammaticalization of the progressive construction.
Syntax as a Repository of Historical Relics
Wallace Chafe (chafe@linguistics.ucsb.edu)
I assume a view of
language in which speakers begin with thoughts, which are organized into
semantic structures, which are in turn modified by historical changes to become
syntactic structures. Such changes include the creation of metaphors,
collocations, and idioms, along with processes of grammaticalization and
phonological change. I will illustrate the ways in which these processes
interact with the English sentence "That's gonna bring down the
house." Underlying this sentence is the thought of an event in which a
performance of some kind will elicit an enthusiastic response from an audience.
This event was categorized semantically as an instance of an agent performing a
specific kind of action, and it was oriented as something that would occur in
the future. Its syntactic structure resulted from successive applications of the
following historical processes: the adoption of "house" as a metaphor
for a theater audience, the establishment of "bring down" as a
familiar collocation, the creation of the idiom "bring down the house"
to express the idea of causing a theater audience to react with enthusiasm, the
use of "be ... ing" to express the progressive aspect, and
subsequently the use of "be going to" (later replaced by "be
gonna") as a way of expressing future tense. The syntax of this sentence,
and in fact of all sentences, can usefully be seen as a museum of such changes,
each serving in its own way to distance syntax from semantics and thus from the
thoughts being expressed and understood.
Construction
genesis as degrammaticalisation? On doubled pronouns in Dutch
Gunther De Vogelaer (gunther.devogelaer@ugent.be)
In
southern Dutch dialects, pronominal subjects can be doubled by another pronoun
(De Vogelaer & Neuckermans 2002), giving rise to ‘subject
doubling’-constructions such as (1).
(1)
a.
Ga-de
gullie
naar Brussel?
go.2pl-youweak
you(pl)strong
to Brussels
‘Are
you going to Brussels?’
b. Ge-gaat
gullie
naar
Brussel.
youweak-go.2pl
you(pl)strong
to Brussels
‘You
are going to Brussels.’
c. Gullie
gaat
gullie
naar Brussel.
you(pl)strong
go.2pl
you(pl)strong
to Brussels
‘You
are going to Brussels.’
Both
diachronic Middle Dutch data (Van Helten 1887; Vanacker 1963) and synchronic
dialect-geographical data (SAND) lead us to believe that constructions such as
(1a) are older than (1b) and (1c). (1a) can be considered the result of
re-analysis of the pronominal clitic ‑de as an agreement marker on
the verb, making subject doubling a typical example of grammaticalisation. Some
more recent developments, however, have caused ‑de to enter in a
complementary distribution with the weak pronoun ge (1b) and the strong
pronoun gullie (1c). The choice of a particular form is governed by
pragmatic factors (Nuyts 1995). Hence an originally morphosyntactic phenomenon
has turned into a discourse phenomenon, providing an example of what could be
described as ‘construction genesis’. In my talk, I will try to account for
the genesis of constructions such as (1b) and (1c), and discuss to what extent
these data are compatible with the supposed unidirectionality of
grammaticalisation.
References
De
Vogelaer, G. & A. Neuckermans (2002). Subject
doubling in Dutch: a dialect phenomenon in cross-linguistic perspective. In:
Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 55, 234–258.
Nuyts, J. (1995). Subjectspronomina en dubbele pronominale constructies in
het Antwerps. In: Taal & Tongval 47,
43-58.
SAND
= Barbiers, S., H. Bennis, G. De Vogelaer, M. Devos & M. van der Ham (2005).
Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects. Volume 1:
Pronouns, Agreement and Dependencies.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Vanacker,
V.F.(1963). Syntaxis van gesproken taal te Aalst en in het land van Aalst in
de XVde, de XVIde en de XVIIde eeuw. Belgisch
interuniversitair centrum voor neerlandistiek.
Van Helten, W.L. (1887). Middelnederlandsche spraakkunst. Groningen:
Wolters.
Transpositional morphology and Construction Grammar: a diachronic perspective
Mirjam Fried (mfried@princeton.edu)
One of the defining features of Construction Grammar (CxG) is its assumption that grammar consists of networks of overlapping grammatical patterns organized around shared features (formal, semantic, pragmatic, prosodic, etc.); Fillmore 1988, Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001, Fried & Östman 2004. This paper tests the conceptual and representational apparatus of CxG by tracing diachronic relationships across constructions. Specifically, I will address the mechanisms of change within a particular (morphological) construction and the role of emerging abstract constructional patterns in grammatical change.
The illustrative material is provided by a special participial form in Slavic as manifested in Old Czech (‘present active participial adjective’, PA; e.g. hledající ‘(the) one seeking’). As a particular type of a hybrid inflectional category (an internally verbal but externally nominal form within a regular verbal paradigm), the PA presents all the representational challenges that are inherent in ‘transpositional’ morphology. This concerns especially the form’s functional and categorial status, which also plays a central role in the form’s historical development: the PA underwent significant changes in its internal morphological structure, syntactic function, and syntactic behavior, moving from a richly polyfunctional and context-dependent category (cf. the ambiguity between predicative and attributive usage in ex. 1) to expressing primarily a modification function (2b) and marginally serving as an actor noun (3).
I show that the overall shift can be best captured as proceeding along two mutually reinforcing dimensions, both calling for the notion of ‘construction’ as a conventionalized association between form and function: (i) re-calibrating the relative prominence of the verbal (2a) vs. nominal (2b) morphological features within the PA form vis-à-vis its syntactic function and (ii) the simultaneous emergence of a modification construction as a general grammatical pattern; the latter developed independently of PA but contributed to the strengthening of the PA’s modificational potential in certain contexts (shown in 2b). Using the tools provided by CxG (particularly the external/internal distinction and the manipulation of the attribute-value configurations, cf. Fried & Östman 2004), I suggest ways for a systematic representation of the diachronic shifts, which involve semantic, formal, and textual factors.
Overall, the PA development illustrates how relatively complex grammatical patterns can make connections to other patterns, thus opening up paths toward reorganizing form-meaning associations along specific criteria in a motivated manner.
(1)
nebo v
duši
<
žádajúcí
zlého >
for
into soul.ACC.SG.F
desire.PA.ACC.SG.F
evil.GEN.SG.N
(...)
(i) ‘(turn your mind toward God, seek him through good life…, for the
spirit of mercywill not enter) into the souli if/when iti
desires evil things’
(2) a. uslyšel
žáčka
< dřéveřečený
verš
zpievajícieho
>
he.heard youth.ACC.SG.M aforementioned song.ACC.SG.M sing.PA.ACC.SG.M
‘(and when he again secretly entered the church on Friday,) he heard a
youth sing
b. v tom
žádajúcím
a sčastném
kostele
in that.LOC.SG.M desire.PA.LOC.SG.M and happy.LOC.SG.M church.LOC.SG.M
‘(his body was
laid to rest) in that beloved and happy church [of his]’
[chronicle]
(3) slyšechme
debs chodicieho
ale nemohli
sme
yžádného
vidieti
we.heard noise
walk.PA.GEN.SG.M
but
could.not AUX.1PL none
see
‘we heard the noise of [one] walking around but we could not see anybody’ [autobiography]
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1988. The mechanisms of ‘Construction Grammar.’ BLS 14: 35-55.
Fried, Mirjam and Jan-Ola Östman. 2004. Construction Grammar: a thumbnail sketch. In M.Fried & J-O. Östman (eds.), Construction Grammar in a cross-linguistic perspective,11-86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Where did this future
construction come from? The case of Swedish komma
att V
Martin Hilpert
This
paper is a diachronic study of the Swedish Future construction komma
att V. The construction involves the motion verb komma ‘come’, the infinitive marker att, and a non-finite verb which denotes the predicted action, as in
the following example.
(1)
Priserna för
röntgenundersökning kommer
också att öka.
prices.the for
X-ray.examination
come also
to rise
‘Prices
for X-ray examinations will also increase.’
The
construction has undergone a semantic change from ‘physical movement towards a
goal’ towards the meaning of ‘prediction’ (Heine and Kuteva 2002:78).
While there is broad agreement in the field that such a change must have
occurred, there are different theories as to how it proceeded. This paper tests
two hypotheses against historical corpus data.
Bybee
et al. (1994:270) state in their cross-linguistic survey of grammaticized future
constructions that ‘all modal and movement future sources begin with human
agents and move from the expression of the intentions of that agent to the
expression of prediction’. This predicts that the earliest examples of the
construction involve intentional human agents. The opposite is predicted by
Dahl, who compares several European future constructions that derive from verbs
of coming, finding that none of these involve the notion of intentionality:
‘At any rate, there is no evidence to suggest that the Germanic de-venitives
ever expressed intention’ (2000:322).
Drawing
on corpus data from three periods of Swedish, this study tests whether
intentionality used to be a semantic component of the komma
att V construction. Early examples of
the construction actually contain intentional subjects, albeit not in the modal
construction that evolved into the modern future construction. The Old Swedish construction
komma til at V
was a minor use of the verb that referred
to change rather than intentional movement of human agents. Thus there is evidence for
Dahl’s claim. This paper explores the semantic development of the komma att V
construction, and proposes a modified grammaticization cline (movement
→ change → future) to account for the Swedish komma att V construction, and possibly other de-venitive future
constructions.
Dahl, Ö. 2000. ‘The
grammar of future time references in European languages.’ In
Ö. Dahl (ed.) Tense and Aspect in the
Languages of Europe. EUROTYP 20-6. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 309-328.
Heine,
B. and T. Kuteva. 2002.
World lexicon of grammaticalization.
Cambridge: CUP.
Constructional Grammaticalization in the Make-Causative
Suzanne Kemmer
(kemmer@rice.edu), Martin Hilpert
Diachronic
corpus studies such as Carey (1994) and Israel (1996) provide evidence that the
grammaticalization of lexical elements proceeds along with changes in these
elements’ syntactic and semantic environments. Hence, grammaticalization and
constructional change must be viewed as closely linked.
Carey’s
(1994) study of the English Perfect demonstrates how the grammaticalization of have
into a perfect auxiliary corresponds to increasing co-occurrence with complement
predicates of specific semantic classes. Using Traugott’s (1989) idea of
localized pragmatic inferences in linguistic change, Carey argues that the
grammaticalization of have is not
solely a semantic change. Instead, conventionalization of contextual factors
within local contexts brings about new formal, constructional specifications.
Israel
(1996) tracks the development of the English
way-construction, finding not just the grammaticalization of way,
but the emergence of a constructional pattern in response to changes in the
frequencies of main verbs used in the construction. By licensing verbs of
increasingly different types, a new construction emerges that is quite different
from its source.
Kemmer
(1995, 2001) refers to such processes as constructional
grammaticalization. In this study, we investigate the make-causative
in the recent history of English. Using the Corpus of
Late Modern English Texts (CLMET), we trace the changes that the
construction has undergone in the past 300 years. Examples like She
made him do it may suggest that the primary meaning of the construction is
compulsion. However, we show that such examples appear rather late in the
history of the construction and even today are still relatively infrequent. The
construction begins as a contextually motivated extension of the resultative
construction (e.g. make it white), being increasingly used to express mental states and
processes (e.g. make him angry). This
development goes along with formal changes; whereas early usages have mostly
nominal and adjectival complements, verbal complements increasingly dominate in
modern usage. The evidence suggests that the modern
make-causative is not the general, ‘plain vanilla’ causative it seems;
in fact, it carries a specific semantic/constructional profile defined by types
of participants and types of caused events, whose characteristics have changed
over time and distinguish it from all other causative constructions in English.
Carey,
Kathleen. 1994. Pragmatics, Subjectivity, and the Grammaticalization of the English
Perfect. Doctoral dissertation, UCSD.
Israel,
Michael. 1996. The Way Constructions grow. In Adele Goldberg, ed., Conceptual
Structure, Discourse and Language. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1995. Analogy in Syntactic Change: The Rise of New
Constructions. Paper presented at ICHL 7, Manchester.
Kemmer,
Suzanne. 2001. Causative Constructions and Cognitive Models: The English Make
Causative. First Seoul International
Conference on Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics: Perspectives for the 21st
Century, 803-846. Seoul: Discourse
and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in
English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language
57: 33-65.
The
potential effects of contact on grammatical change are becoming ever clearer.
Though the literature on syntactic borrowing continues to grow, that on
morphological borrowing remains sparse. Instances of the transfer of individual
affixes are well known, yet there is relatively little discussion of the
transfer of abstract morphological structure without the substance that would
carry it. The gap is not surprising. Morphological structure is among the most
automated, tightly integrated, systematic aspects of grammar.
Nevertheless
we find some intriguing parallel structures in two genetically unrelated
languages of the Northwest Coast of North America. In both Coast Tsimshian (Tsimshianic)
and Kwak’wala (Wakashan), grammatical relations are marked not necessarily on
the predicate (classical head-marking), nor on the arguments themselves
(classical dependent-marking), but on whatever word precedes each dependent.
Coast
Tsimshian: Boas 1911a:356
Dm dzakda=sga
ġibaw=ga
haas-ga
future kill=common.absent.ergativ wolf=common.absent.absolutive
Kwak’wala
enclitics: Boas 1911b:533
Dó:x’w-aLél=e
Dzá:wadalalisa=xa
élkwa.
see-suddenly=proper.nominative
name=common.accusative
blood
‘Dzawadalalis
[nominative] saw the blood [accusative].’
The
mystery is solved once we untangle the diachronic processes that create such
morphological structure. In spontaneous connected speech in most languages,
speakers tend to express just one new idea per intonation unit or prosodic
phrase (Chafe 1994). A common device exploited to regulate the flow of
information in many languages, particularly those with predicate-initial order,
is a construction built on demonstratives. This demonstrative construction spans
two prosodic phrases separated by a pause, the first consisting of a predicate
followed by a cataphoric demonstrative, the second a larger referring
expression. The sentence ‘They got theirs from the Hudson Bay Company’, for
example, is rendered:
Hudson.Bay.Company.
Bilinguals
easily carry such rhetorical options from one language into another. The
construction involves constituents that exist in both languages: a predicate, a
demonstrative, and a referring expression. Relative frequencies of stylistic
choices are easily transferred as well. Once such stylistic tools become
frequent, normal processes of phonological fusion easily lead to structures like
those above.
References
Boas, Frans 1911a. Tsimshian. Handbook
of American Indian Languages Part.I. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin
40. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 283-422
Boas, Frans 1911b. Kwakiutl. Handbook
of American Indian Languages Part.I. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin
40. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 423-558.
Chafe, Wallace 1994. Discourse,
Consciousness, and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tatiana Nikitina
Mixed
categories are constructions which combine properties of two different
categories but have a single head. Well-known examples are nominalizations,
which have the distribution of noun phrases but often preserve certain verbal
syntactic properties. Mixed categories have been analyzed syntactically as
constructions composed of two different categories that share one head either at
the functional level (e.g., extended head theory, Bresnan 1997) or at the
structural level (e.g., lexical sharing, Wescoat 2002).
This
paper addresses the role of mixed categories and head sharing in word order
change, resulting in consistent placement of heads across different categories.
Based on an example of VO/OV variation in Niger-Congo, I suggest that
constructions with a head sharing relationship between different categories
(nominal and verbal) may show a tendency for adjacent placement of the shared
heads, which is independent of the general preference for consistent head
placement across categories.
Adopting
the nominal periphrasis hypothesis that relates the change from SVO to SOV word
order in the Kru and Mande families of Niger-Congo to the use of nominalizations
in periphrastic expression of aspectual meanings (Heine 1976; Claudi 1993), I
analyze this change as motivated by the tendency for adjacent placement of
shared heads in mixed categories (in this case, the nominal periphrastic
constructions).
The
use of the periphrastic construction in Kru resulted in a change from
head-initial to head-final ordering in infinitival VPs under the pressure from
head-final nominal structures. I suggest that this change resulted in
non-adjacent placement of shared heads at the I’ level (VP being head-final,
and I’ remaining head-initial), which has led to a change in the positioning
of finite verbs in Mande.
I
show that the analysis of this series of changes in terms of the preference for
adjacency of shared heads explains a “quirk” of the Mande syntax—S-Aux-OV
order in sentences with auxiliaries, combined with SOV in other sentences. I
argue that constructions with mixed syntactic properties may function as
triggers in the process of word order change, or channels through which
analogical changes occur, and discuss typological implications of this analysis.
Formulaic expressions in context: from
minimal variation to language change
Jan-Ola Östman
I
will briefly deal with four types of variability of formulaic expressions: (1)
the varying realizations of Wellerisms in Finland Swedish (esp. the
reinterpretation of a relative pronoun as a temporal conjunction: X,
said Y who … > X, said Y when …);
(2) the variability of certain correlative constructions in English (There’s networking, and then there’s NETworking > There’s
NETworking, and then there’s networking); (3) the variability in the
presence/absence of certain grammatical elements in block language (Screen
will not stop child from falling out windows);
and (4) the emergence of the use of the second person singular in a generic
sense in Finnish.
These constructions are either formulaic in themselves (1-2), or they
have formulaic uses, i.e. they construe a formulaic interpretation by virtue of
being used (3-4). In response to the general question of how constructions vary
and spread and, in the process, change, and how this can be captured in CxG, I
briefly deal with the causes for change in terms of linguistic contact but also
with how we can model mechanisms of change. In the four cases, the same general
mechanism is at work: a construction first takes on a new value for a given
attribute (in terms of attribute-matrices) and, with time, the newly adopted
value gives rise to a distinct new attribute. In all the four cases, however,
the changes are due to different causes; the one in (1) is largely due to
homonymy; the one in (2) is due to a shift in information structure typical in
ads; the one in (3) is an analogical extension of headlinese; and (4) is due
partly to language contact, and partly based on conversational implicatures.
A constructional approach to language change has a number of serious
implications for how to model language overall; for one, since the attributes
are not a priori tied to modules like ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’, the
attributesthemselves are the sole pegs – on different levels – that need to
be made reference to.
Bedusted,
yet not beheaded:
The
role of be-’s constructional semantics in its conservation
During
the Old English (OE) period, inseparable prefixes (IPs) gradually disappeared
(e.g. ā-, ge-, for-, tō-). This disappearance has often been attributed to the syntactic shift
from OV to VO (e.g. Traugott 1982:250) and/or to the IPs’ semantic bleaching
(cf. CHIL, I.377ff). These accounts,
however, fail to explain why be-, for instance, has remained productive
to this day (besaltified, unbesocked), whereas an IP such as tō- ‘asunder’, which has much more concrete and
specific semantics than be-, has disappeared. We suggest that considering
IPs as part of a construction (IPC), with its own constructional semantics, may
help solve this problem.
On
the basis of diachronic corpus evidence, it is argued that what seems to lie at
the basis of the different behavior/life span of IPs is their predicative vs.
non-predicative origin – a predicative IP can be paraphrased with a secondary
predicate (or particle) (e.g., hē tōbræc þā
clūsan ‘he broke the bars apart’;
niht becumeþ
‘night comes by’), whereas a
non-predicative IP needs a paraphrase with a path PP (hie berīdaþ
hine ‘they ride completely around
him = they surround him’) (cf. Blom 2004). Importantly, when during OE the
shift to VO put IPs under pressure, a predicative IPC [IP-V (DO)] could easily be replaced by a
functionally/conceptually equivalent construction with a particle, i.e., without
changing its valency or constructional semantics – this factor of language
change, termed ‘intraference’ in Croft 2000, applies more generally in
language (see also the replacement of the that-clause
with suasive verbs by the to-infinitive;
cf. Los 1999). A non-predicative IPC [IP-V DO], however, could not do so without
changing its semantics: replacing
it by a construction with a PP would lose the semantic component ‘total
affectedness’ (as Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001 and Dewell 1996 point out,
non-predicative IPs in present-day German remain productive because any
prepositional alternatives are inappropriate to convey saliency and affectedness
of their complements). Initially, then, the conservative nature of the [be-V
DO] construction lies with its specific constructional semantics, combining ‘path’
and ‘affected object’.
These original [be-V DO] constructions were then
subject to increasing generalization and host-class expansion (cf. Himmelman
2005), processes typical of grammaticalization. In the second part of the paper,
then, we will describe the following development in detail: surrounding (deverbal,
berīdan) > covering (begān ‘override’) >
affecting (deverbal/denominal, behēawan ‘beat all over’) >
furnishing (denominal/deadjectival, bispusen ‘provide with spouses’, bespectacled).
At
this point, then, the conservative nature of the [be-V DO] construction
can be attributed to the fact that its type frequency has gradually increased
and that the construction has therefore become more entrenched (cf. Bybee 2001
on the conservative effect of entrenchment).
Our analysis goes beyond pointing out general bleaching
tendencies and predicts that other OE IPs (as for instance over-) only
remained productive if their constructions originally were similar to the [be-V
DO] construction.
References
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and
Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blom, Corrien. 2004. ‘On the diachrony of complex
predicates in Dutch: predicative and non-predicative preverbs’. Journal of
Germanic Linguistics 16 (1). 1-75.
Cambridge
History of the English Language (CHIL), volume 1. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining
language change. London:
Longman.
De Smet, Hendrik. 2005. ‘A corpus of Late Modern English Texts’. To
appear in ICAME Journal.
Dewell, Robert B. 1996. ‘The separability of German über-:
A cognitive approach’. In: Dirven René and Putz Martin (eds.). The
Construal of Space in Language and Thought (Cognitive Linguistics Research,
8), 109-133. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus. 2005.‘Lexicalization: opposite or
orthogonal’. In: B. Wiemer, W. Bisang and N. Himmelmann (eds.). What
makes grammaticalization?, 21-44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Los, Bettelou. 1999. Infinitival
complementation in Old and Middle English. Den
Haag: Thesus.
Michaelis, Laura A. – Ruppenhofer,
Josef. 2001. Beyond Alternations. A
Constructional Model of the German Applicative Pattern (Stanford Monographs in Linguistics). Stanford, CA:
CSLI Publications.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. ‘From Propositional to
Textual and Expressive Meanings; Some Semantic-Pragmatic Aspects of
Grammaticalization’. In: W. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds.). Perspectives
on Historical Linguistics (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 24),
245-271. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Corpora:: The
York-Helsinki-Toronto Parsed Corpus of OE, the Penn Parsed Corpus of
Middle English, The Helsinki Corpus and the Corpus of Late Modern
English Texts (De Smet 2005)
Negative verbal clause constructions in Puyuma
Puyuma (Austronesian, Taiwan) has separate
intransitive and transitive verbal clause constructions. The verb is marked for
transitivity. Intransitive S and transitive P are in the nominative, i.e.
subject, case, whilst the A noun phrase (if any) is in the oblique case but is
crossreferenced on the verb by a genitive proclitic. Schematically:
(2) gen=TrVerb TrSubject:nom (TrAgent:obl)
(Since S and P are both marked as subject, one
might say the language is ergatively aligned, but other features belie this
epithet.) A first or second person subject appears as a nominative enclitic
attached to the verb. In this circumstance, the two constructions are:
(3) ItrVerb=nom
(4) gen=TrVerb=nom (TrAgent:obl)
In the negative intransitive construction, the
negator aDi precedes the verb, which retains its intransitive form. If
there is a nominative enclitic, it is attached to aDi:
Thus the nominative enclitic appears to be a
second-position clitic, and from these constructions one might expect to be able
to predict the negative transitive construction, but one can't. The negator aDi
precedes the verb as expected, but the verb itself has a special form found
only in negative transitive clauses and the nominative enclitic remains attached
to this verb, as in (4), not to the negator, as in (5), giving the
negative transitive construction in (6):
(6) aDi gen=NegTrVerb=nom (TrAgent:obl)
The paper shows that this puzzling constructional
disharmony is easily accounted for. The corresponding Proto Austronesian (PAn)
constructions are readily reconstructed on the basis of data from other
languages, and appear to have been in harmony with each other. The steps leading
from the PAn constructions to Puyuma can be reconstructed, and I show that (6)
reflects a PAn construction, although it is the seemingly disharmonic member of
the set in Puyuma. It has become disharmonic because of changes in (4) which
have, so to speak, left (6) stranded.
I conclude by asking why Puyuma has retained this disharmony, rather than
bringing (6) into line with the other constructions and creating the
‘expected' but non-occurring construction in (7).
Bits/?Shreds of evidence for the grammaticalization of the negative and
positive polarity constructions: a Radical Construction perspective
It
has become customary to include “constructions” as well as “lexical
items” in definitions and characterizations of grammaticalization (see e.g.,
Lehmann 1995[1982], Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994, Traugott 2003), but
“construction” has remained largely undefined in this literature. The
development of Construction Grammar in its various versions (e.g., Goldberg
1995, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Croft 2001) has provided the opportunity to refine
the relationship between constructions and grammaticalization (for some
suggestions see Croft 2001). I show how aspects of Croft’s Radical
Construction Grammar can be used to account for the development of modifier
constructions not only like kind/sort of (e.g.
Denison 2002), but also like a bit/shred
of (all derived from [NP1 [of NP2]]). Some general hypothesis about the
construction, its origins, and constraints on its development are discussed.
References
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins,
and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution
of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical
Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press.
Denison, David. 2002. Semantic
pathways with sort of, kind of, type of, and their relation to grammatical
gradience. Paper presented at Stanford University, May 2002; see also History of
the sort of construction family, ICCG2, Helsinki (http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/dd/default.html).
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions:
A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Kay,
Paul and Charles J. Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic
generalizations: The What’s X doing Y construction. Language
75:1-33.
Lehmann,
Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. München and Newcastle: LINCOM
EUROPA.
Traugott,
Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Constructions in grammaticalization. In
Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, eds., The
Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 624-627. (Blackwell Handbooks in
Linguistics.) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
The
role of the topic-comment construction in the reanalysis of “things”
In
Japanese, there exist two formal nouns for expressing the meaning
"thing" of English—namely, mono
and koto. Reference
grammars commonly explain their distinction as being governed by such opposing
semantic notions as "concrete" versus "abstract" (Martin
1975, McGloin 1989) or "tangible" versus "intangible"
(Makino and Tsutsui 1989).
Both
mono and koto function frequently as a complementizer noun in Japanese, the
common pattern being that of [complement] clause + mono / koto + copula da.
Past studies (Teramura 1981, Agetsuma 1991, Tsubone 1994, Fujii 1999)
have noted the -monoda construction’s
pragmatic effects of conveying a wide range of speaker emotive affect, such as
nostalgic reminiscences, conviction toward a natural truth, deep-seated desires,
disbelief, indirect commands, etc. In
contrast, -kotoda has less varied uses, being limited to marking mild disbelief
and indirect commands. Previous
analyses, however, have neglected to explain what specific features inherent to
-monoda (but not -kotoda)
endow the construction with such far-reaching pragmatic capabilities.
This study presents an alternative analysis to account for the discourse
modal functions of mono
and koto in Modern Japanese.
It does so by first proposing that the opposing semantics of a
"physically perceived / unrationalized" existence versus a
"cognitively conceived / rationalized" existence are the key,
definitive features distinguishing mono from koto in
instances when they are to take on a referential reading.
This is derived through an etymological examination of mono
and koto’s meanings in pre-modern
Japanese, as revealed by such terms as mononoke
(‘evil spirit’), kotomuku
(‘rationalize’), etc.
It moreover proposes that when mono
and koto are employed in the -monoda
and -kotoda constructions where they receive a non-referential reading,
the semantics signaled by the two “shifts” by way of metaphorical
inferencing from denoting an entity with a spatial orientation, to one with
temporal persistence. This
reanalysis is claimed to arise as a result of -monoda
and -kotoda’s
syntactic conformities to the topic-comment (A wa B da) construction in Japanese.
Finally, it suggests that the "incomplete" state of the
rationalization process signaled by mono's
core meaning is what imparts a highly subjective, personal "voice" to
discourse modal –monoda.