Plenary talks

Construction grammar was erected as a humble abode to give shelter to researchers fleeing transformational grammar about four decades ago (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1983; Kay 1984; Lakoff 1984). Presently, the constructionist approach to grammar is the single most popular alternative to Chomskyan linguistics, in Müller’s (2018: 1) assessment, possibly having overshadowed that former towering edifice. But how stable is construction grammar as a theory? How sound are its foundations? Do the original tenets bear the weight of what construction grammarians have been building in the course of the last forty years?

In this talk, I will inspect some of the theory’s foundational principles. Like a sprawling architectural complex, construction grammar encompasses various wings and annexes, each with its own specific design and function. My focus will be on ‘cognitive’ construction grammar (Goldberg 2003; Boas 2013), the part of the overall structure that is most visible from the outside and provides easiest access.

The basic assumptions of (cognitive) construction grammar are not easy to identify. More or less from its outset, the framework was described, with a different metaphor, as “a moving target; in fact, […] one of a set of several moving targets with the same name” (Fillmore 1988: 35). Several pillars stand out, though; some are central, while others are more ‘esthetic’. Starting with the latter, the oft-heard credo that words and ‘rules’ form a continuum (e.g., Hoffmann 2013: 307) is perhaps just a nice selling point. In practice, construction grammarians do make a distinction between fully substantive lexemes and grammatical structures with at least one open slot; besides, the brain responds differently to words and word-like items compared to syntactic assemblies. Similarly, construction grammarians – and cognitive linguists more generally – assert that linguistic cognition is inextricably linked with general cognition (Langacker 2008: 8). However, this assumption is neither essential to the theory nor clearly supported by findings from the neurosciences (Diachek et al. 2020).

In contrast, absolutely fundamental is the claim that syntactic configurations are not mere artifacts but should be the primary units of description, imbued as they are with semantic and pragmatic properties (Fillmore 1988: 36). This essentially constructionist outlook on language is sometimes given a strengthened formulation (apparently not intended by the theory’s architects; see, e.g., Fillmore and Kay 1993: Ch. 9.3–15), such that everything a speaker knows about language can be captured as form-meaning units, with nothing else besides. This bold claim has the advantage that it renders construction grammar eminently falsifiable. The downside is that construction grammar, on this strong assumption, can arguably be proven wrong (Cappelle 2024). If that is the case, a weaker tenet – “many grammatical patterns carry meaning” – still sets the theory apart from other theoretical approaches, but whether this is still a falsifiable claim depends on how we define “many”. Of course, looking for the function of forms remains a useful heuristic.

References

Boas, H. (2013). Cognitive Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 233–254.

Cappelle, B. (2024). Can Construction Grammar Be Proven Wrong? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Diachek, E., Blank, I., Siegelman, M., Affourtit, J., & Fedorenko, E. (2020). The domain-general multiple-demand (MD) network does not support core aspects of language comprehension: A large-scale fMRI investigation. Journal of Neuroscience, 40(23), 4536–4550.

Fillmore, C. J. (1985). Syntactic intrusions and the notion of grammatical construction. In M. Niepokuj, M. Van Clay, V. Nikiforidou, & D. Feder, eds., Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp.73–86.

Fillmore, C. J. (1988). The mechanisms of “Construction Grammar.” In S. Axmaker, A. Jaisser, & H. Singmaster, eds., Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 35–55.

Fillmore, C. J. & Kay, P. (1993). Construction Grammar Coursebook: Chapters 1 thru 11. Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley.

Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, C. (1983). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone.  Paper read at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA. [A published version appeared in 1988 in Language, 64(3), 501–538.]

Goldberg, A. E. (2003). Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(5), 219–224.

Hoffmann, T. (2013). Abstract phrasal and clausal constructions. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 307–328.

Kay, P. (1984). The kind of/sort of construction. In C. Brugman, M. Macaula, eds., Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 157–171.

Lakoff, G. (1984), There constructions: A case study in grammatical construction theory and prototype theory. Berkeley Cognitive Science Program Working Paper No. 18. [This research was published as an appendix in Lakoff’s 1987 book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Müller, S. (2018). A Lexicalist Account of Argument Structure: Template-Based Phrasal LFG Approaches and a Lexical HPSG Alternative. Berlin: Language Science Press.

The presentation will examine a network of grammatical structures within a specific interactional context, namely the transmission of embodied knowledge in dance classes. 

The term ‘embodied knowledge’ encompasses a range of different types of knowledge, with ‘procedural knowledge’ representing a particularly prominent example, which captures the ability to perform patterned movement sequences, such as riding a bicycle, writing on a typewriter, or dancing the tango (Fuchs, 2012). This type of knowledge is characterized by several key features, including its implicit, holistic, intermodal, and non-declarative nature. It is therefore evident that verbal transmission is an inadequate means of conveying this type of knowledge in its entirety, and that the acquisition process typically necessitates repeated bodily practice on behalf of the learners. In turn, the instructors modify their instructions in a highly sensitive manner, adapting them to the student's bodily actions and their progress in learning (Stevanovic, 2017)

The presentation will focus on the diverse morphosyntactic manifestations of directives, including declarative clauses (e.g., now you go forward), noun phrases (e.g., forward step), numbers (e.g., one, two), and non-lexical vocalizations (e.g., chack). Furthermore, the presentation will address morphological realizations (e.g., you go forward vs. I go forward) and multipartite patterns (e.g., chack-chack-I cross) will be addressed. The paper posits that each grammatical resource offers a unique functional profile within the specific context of instruction. These profiles can be distinguished along pragmatic dimensions, including the expected immediacy of an embodied response (Mondada, 2017), the skill level ascribed to the learner (Deppermann, 2018), and the degree of bodily synchronization among the participants (Ehmer, 2021).

This study employs multimodal interaction analysis (Keevallik, 2018; Stukenbrock, 2021) to examine instructions in dancing Argentine Tango given in Spanish. The findings pertaining to the distinctive functional profiles will be discussed with reference to recent discussions on modelling a ‘construction’ in construction grammar (Diessel, 2023; Lyngfelt et al., 2018). In particular, the proposition of an emerging domain-specific constructional network will be scrutinized.

References

Deppermann, A. (2018). Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 28(2). doi.org/doi:10.1111/ijal.12198

Diessel, H. (2023). The Constructicon: Taxonomies and Networks. Cambridge University Press. doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/9781009327848

Ehmer, O. (2021). Synchronization in demonstrations. Multimodal practices for instructing body knowledge. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s4), 1-18. doi.org/doi:10.1515/lingvan-2020-0038

Fuchs, T. (2012). The phenomenology of body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa, & C. Müller (Eds.), Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement (pp. 9–22). Benjamins.

Keevallik, L. (2018). What Does Embodied Interaction Tell Us About Grammar? Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 1-21. doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1413887

Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., & Ohara, K. (Eds.). (2018). Constructicography. Constructicon development across languages. Benjamins.

Mondada, L. (2017). Precision timing and timed embeddedness of imperatives in embodied courses of action: Examples from French. In M.-L. Sorjonen, L. Raevaara, & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Imperative Turns at Talk. The design of directives in action (pp. 65–101). Benjamins.

Stevanovic, M. (2017). Managing compliance in violin instruction: The case of the Finnish clitic particles -pA and -pAs in imperatives and hortatives. In M.-L. Sorjonen, L. Raevaara, & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Imperative Turns at Talk: The design of directives in action (pp. 357–380). Benjamins.

Stukenbrock, A. (2021). Multimodal Gestalts and Their Change Over Time: Is Routinization Also Grammaticalization? [Original Research]. Frontiers in Communication, 6. doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.662240

I seek to understand how our brains understand and produce language. I will discuss three things that my lab has discovered about the "language network", a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that store thousands of words and constructions and use these representations to extract meaning from word sequences (to understand or decode linguistic messages) and to convert abstract ideas into word sequences (to produce or encode messages). First, the language network is highly selective for language processing. Language areas show little neural activity when individuals solve math problems, listen to music, or reason about others’ minds. Further, some individuals with severe aphasia lose the ability to understand and produce language but can still do math, play chess, and reason about the world. Thus, language does not appear to be necessary for thinking and reasoning. Second, processing the meanings of individual words and putting words together into phrases and sentences are not spatially segregated in the language network: every region within the language network is robustly sensitive to both word meanings and linguistic structure. This finding overturns the popular idea of an abstract syntactic module but aligns with evidence from behavioral psycholinguistic work, language development, and computational modeling. And third, representations from large language models like GPT-2 predict neural responses during language processing in humans, which suggests that these language models capture something about how the human language system represents linguistic inputs.

Time permitting, I will discuss more recent and emergent research directions. These include: a) investigations of how the language system emerges during development, how it changes with experience, in aging and in populations who use language to a greater extent (like polyglots), and how it recovers from damage; b) work that aims to understand the constraints on the functional architecture of the brain, including modularity and lateralization of function, through the study of individuals with atypical brains (e.g., individuals growing up without a temporal lobe due to early stroke); c) studies of the relationship between language and social cognition; and d) work that builds on the discovery of neural-network-to-brain alignment to determine which model features produce this alignment as a route toward an eventual mechanistic-level understanding of how we interpret and produce language.

In this talk, I explore grammatical category innovation as an emergent property of a dynamic network, using the diachrony of relative clauses as my empirical case study.

The Standard Average European (SAE) relative clause type formed around interrogative pronouns, such as who painted that portrait in the person [who painted that portrait] was gifted, has the Indo-European interrogative-indefinite pronouns *k^wi/ k^wo as its source. Headed relative clauses based on interrogative pronouns are found in several Indo-European daughter languages, including varieties of Romance, Slavic, Germanic and Western Iranian, but *k^wi/ k^wo did not head relative clauses in Proto-Indo-European, which probably did not have hypotactic relative clauses at all (Clackson 2007). Although the SAE relative clause type is found in a tiny handful of non-Indo-European languages in contact with Indo-European varieties, such as Hungarian and Georgian (which is why it’s treated as a European areal phenomenon), it is by and large confined to Indo-European languages. This means that the presence of wh-words in the relative clauses of the daughter languages is the result of a recurring process of historical change, in different IE subfamilies at significantly different times. In each case, the context of reanalysis is the same construction: the conditional correlative. This is parallel evolution: recurring changes of the same kind, in the same linguistic environment, leading to the same result: the innovation of a new (inter-generationally stable) category of relative wh-word from the source *k^wi /k^wo.

The innovation of the category of relative wh-words is a directed change that’s not amenable to the usual explanations for directed change, because it’s not grammaticalization. Relative wh-words are not more grammatical than interrogative ones, nor do relative pronouns move along the cline to become clitics or affixes. Furthermore, there isn’t an obvious explanation in terms of functional pressure: there is no communicative need driving the creation of relative wh-words, and most languages do without. So why and how do speaker/hearers innovate them? Having explained the typological constraints and categorial reanalyses involved in the creation of relative wh-words, I explore the emergence of the new category in terms of acquisition and usage in a dynamic cognitive network.

There is a convergence between a latent ambiguity in the source construction, the dynamics of cognitive networks, and theories of acquisition and usage couched in terms of network theory (such as Ibbotson, Salnikov & Walker 2019) and in the broader usage-based assumptions of cognitive theories. Although mind and brain are different, because changes in activation levels in the brain occur slowly while learning can be instantaneous, the principles of Hebbian learning (‘neurons wire together if they fire together’) also apply to the symbolic network of the mind, giving rise to the ‘community structure’ of the network in which categories are induced. The theory of dynamic networks allows for a fine-grained approach to the question of how categories emerge in their environmental niches, and so it affords a constrained way to construct a model of how innovations occur (and recur in parallel evolution). It also offers an account of why linguistic structure is stable across the generations, despite the acquisition bottleneck, and despite the fact that children do not so much ‘acquire’ a grammar as make one anew on the basis of the utterances they hear.

References

Clackson, James. 2007. Indo-European linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ibbotson, Paul, Vsevolod Salnikov & Richard Walker. 2019. A dynamic network analysis of emergent grammar. First Language 39(6). 652–680. doi.org/10.1177/0142723719869562.

Construction grammarians have a reputation for being particularly fascinated by idiosyncratic, quirky, constructions on the lower and fully-specified level of the constructional network (e.g. Diessel 2019; Cappelle 2022; Ungerer & Hartmann 2023). We have even been called ‘butterfly collectors’ who love to chase exotic constructions which deviate from the canonical, default structures of the language (Hilferty 2003; Hilpert 2014; Desagulier 2017). 

This begs the question what – in a cognitive-functional, usage-based approach – is meant by ‘canonical’ vs. ‘non-canonical’ and if we want to keep up this dichotomy at all. The answer clearly depends on how these notions are defined in the first place. To decide on a construction’s quirkiness we can take into account its frequency, transparency, compositionality, idiomaticity, regularity, prototypicality, paradigmatic relations, or its extravagance, among many other features. These questions, viz. what exactly defines a constructional ‘outlaw’, become even more interesting through a diachronic lens. After all, language is constantly changing and diachronic research has long been aware that what looks like an outlaw (i.e. an exception to a regularity/a deviation from the majority pattern) is often an ‘early adopter’ of a new linguistic trend or a ‘laggard’ in the sense of being a remnant of an older language stage where the specific linguistic code was more motivated and more regular (e.g. Lass 1997; Traugott & Trousdale 2013). 

In this talk, I will then zoom in on these issues by discussing non-canonical, odd constructions in the history of English. Most of my examples will come from my own work on nominals and NPs. In particular, I will report on a study on PPs with bare location nouns (go to church; die in prison; stay in bed), but will also briefly revisit BIG MESS constructions (how big of a mess; that great a guy), NPNs (day after day; brick upon brick) and Pleonastic Conditionals (If I have to, I have to; When duty calls duty calls). Next to pragmatically enriched idiomatic meanings, these constructions are famous for their deviant word order, their lack of overt definiteness marking, or their reduplication pattern (Sommerer & Zehentner forthc; Sommerer & Baumann 2021; Sommerer 2022, 2023, in prep). 

Among other things, I will argue that being wrongfully perceived as an outlaw often happens, if a) the researcher ignores the possibility that the observed linguistic oddity is only a (one off) construct sanctioned via multiple inheritance (Sommerer 2020) or b) exclusively focuses on one constructional family or one language only, not looking for functionally similar behavior in other constructional families or languages. Ultimately, I will argue that not everything that looks like an exotic butterfly really is one. For instance, leaving out an overt determiner to background referentiality of a nominal is a frequent functional technique – not only in some PPs but also in many Light Verb Constructions (LVC) and nominal incorporations. Similarly, BIG MESS constructions apply a fronting technique which we also find elsewhere. Finally, the reduplication observable in NPNs and PCs is used in many constructions and languages to express quantification, annoyance/indifference, or prototypicality (e.g. bla bla bla; also see Gomeshi et al.’s 2004 salad salad paper). 

At the same time, I will argue that true outlaws can be identified and deserve independent constructional status as independent nodes in the network. I will discuss the cognitive and functional motivations and mechanisms (e.g. analogical thinking, frequency effects, lexical bootstrapping, extravagance, creativity) which make them develop their idiosyncrasies and even make them resist regularization or analogical levelling later. 

References 

Cappelle, Bert. 2022. Only collect? How construction grammarians also link it all up. Abralin Talk www.youtube.com/watch;

Desagulier, Guillaume.2021. Corpus Linguistics and Statistics with R Introduction to Quantitative Methods in Linguistics. Springer International Publishing. 

Diessel, Holger. 2019. The grammar network. How linguistic structure is shaped by language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Ghomeshi, J., Jackendoff, R., Rosen, N. & Russell, K. (2004). Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper). Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22 (2), 307–357. 

Hilferty, Joseph.2003. In defense of grammatical constructions. Ph.D thesis university pf Barcelona. 

Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press. 

Lass, Roger.1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge. CUP. 

Sommerer, Lotte & Baumann, Andreas. 2021. Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters: the constructional network of English NPN constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(1), 97-131. 

Sommerer, Lotte & Zehentner, Eva. forthc. go to church or die in prison: tracing V-PP combinations with bare institutional nouns in the history of English. Folia Linguistica Historica 46(1). 

Sommerer, Lotte. 2020. Why we avoid the ‘Multiple Inheritance’ Issue in Usage-based Cognitive Construction Grammar. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 34, 320-331. 

Sommerer, Lotte. 2022. ‘So great a desire’: investigating the BIG MESS construction in Early Modern English'. Journal of Historical Syntax, 6(2), 1-34. 

Sommerer, Lotte. 2023. ‘If that’s what she said, then that’s what she said’: a usage-based constructional analysis of pleonastic conditionals in English'. Corpus Pragmatics 7, 345-376. 

Sommerer, Lotte. in prep. English Noun Phrases: A Constructional Network Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Traugott, Elizabeth & Trousdale, Graeme. 2023. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: OUP. 

Ungerer, Tobias & Hartmann, Stefan. 2023. Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future. [Cambridge Elements in Construction Grammar]. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press.