Empirical Evidence:
Converging Approaches to Constructional Meaning

Organisatoren: Dylan Glynn, Dagmar Divjak

Kontakt-Email: dylan.glynn AT arts.kuleuven.be, d.divjak AT sheffield.ac.uk

This theme session brings together the various empirical approaches to the study of syntactic meaning. Cognitive Linguistics has recently witnessed a new and healthy concern for empirical methodology. Using such methods, important inroads have been made in the study of near-synonymy, syntactic alternation, syntactic variation, and lexical licensing. However, the use and meaning of constructions themselves represents relatively uncharted territory in empirical cognitive research. Drawing on the insights of the analytical models proposed in Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987) and Construction Grammar (Lakoff 1987), the theme session brings together empirical methods to examine this question.

In Cognitive Linguistics, technically any form-meaning pair may be treated as a construction. However the schematic structures of the morphosyntactic level have traditionally posed problems for the study of their meaning. For one, there is the abstractness of the semantics typically associated with constructions at the clause level. Next, the use/meaning of such constructions is entwined with both 'grammatical' concerns and the lexical semantics of the verbs with which they combine. It is precisely this multifactorial nature of the phenomenon that makes it an ideal test-case for empirical research - experimental, elicited, and corpus-driven - which claims to excel at tackling such linguistic phenomena. Taking on board the corpus-based work on construction/lexeme attraction (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003 and subsequent publications) as well as the study of constructional alternations (de Heylen 2006, Tummers & al. 2005 inter alia), the next step is to focus more squarely on the use and meaning of the constructions themselves.

Empirical methods, and methodology generally, are one of the most important concerns for any descriptive science and the recent blossoming of research in this respect in Cognitive Linguistics can be seen as a maturing of the field. A range of recent anthologies on the issue, including Gries & Stefanowitsch (2006), Stefanowitsch & Gries (2006), Gonzalez-Marquez & al. (2007), Andor & Pelyvas (forthc.), Newman & Rice (forthc.), and Glynn & Fischer (in preparation), can be seen as testimony to the importance attached to this issue. Despite the advances in this regard, how the different methods and the results they produce inform each other remains largely ill-understood. Although this question of how elicited, experimental, and found data relate has been addressed in the work of Schönefeld (1999, 2001), Gries & al. (2005, in press), Goldberg (2006), Arppe & Järvikivi (in press), Gilquin (in press), Divjak (forthc.), and Wiechmann (subm.), it warrants further investigation. It is in this light that this theme session seeks to bring to the fore the importance of comparing and combining the results gleaned from different empirical methods in a relatively unexplored domain, the meaning of constructions.

References

Andor, J. & P. Pelyvas, P. eds. Forthcoming. Empirical Cognitive Studies in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Elsevier: Oxford.

Arppe, A. & Järvikivi, J. In press.Every method counts - Combining corpus-based and experimental evidence in the study of synonymy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

Divjak, D. Forthcoming. On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability. PALC 2007. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gilquin, G. In press. ‘What You Think Ain’t What You Get: Highly polysemous verbs in mind and language’. Gram to Mind. Grammar as Cognition. J.-R. Lapaire (ed.). Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.

Glynn, D. & Fischer, K. eds. In prepararion. Usage-Based Cognitive Semantics. Corpus-Driven methods for the study of meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Goldberg, A. 2006. Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: OUP.

Gonzalez-Marquez, M. Mittelberg, I. Coulson, S., & Spivey, M. eds. 2007. Methods in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gries, St. Th., Hampe, B. & Schönefeld, D. In press. Converging evidence II: more on the association of verbs and constructions. Experimental and empirical methods in the study of conceptual structure, discourse, and language. J. Newman & S. Rice (eds.). Stanford: CSLI.

- 2005. Converging evidence: bringing together experimental and corpus data on the association of verbs and constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16: 635-76.

Gries, St. Th. & Stefanowitsch, 2006. Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Heylen, K. 2005. A Quantitative Corpus Study of German Word Order Variation. Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives. S. Kepser & M. Reis (eds), 241-264. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. What categories reveal about the mind. London: University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Newman, J. & Rice, S. eds. Forthcoming. Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive Linguistics. Stanford: CSLI.

Schönefeld, D. 1999. Corpus Linguistics and Cognitivism. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4: 131-171.

- 2001. Where Lexicon and Syntax meet. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Stefanowitsch, A. & St. Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8: 209-43.

- eds. 2006. Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tummers, J. Speelman, D. & Geeraerts, D. 2005. Inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: A usage-based account of the adjectival inflection. Perspectives on Variation. Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, N. Delbecque, J. v. d. Auwera, & D. Geeraerts (ed.). 93-110. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wiechmann, D. Submitted.The computation of collostruction strength and sentence processing: testing measures of association as expressions of lexical bias. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

Programm

Sprecher	Titel	Abstract
Dagmar Divjak (University of Sheffield)	What DO acceptability ratings reflect? Evidence from Polish that-clauses	(pdf)
Dylan Glynn (University of Leuven)	Multivariate Construction Grammar. A Quantitative Approach to Constructional Semantics	(pdf)
Hans-Jörg Schmid (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)	Looking behind the scenes of collostructional analysis	(pdf)
Stefanie Wulff & Stefan Th. Gries (University of California, Santa Barbara)	To- vs. ing-complementation: corpus- and psycholinguistic evidence on their meaning and distribution	(pdf)
Mirjam Fried (Princeton University)	Discourse connectives and constructional meaning: a corpus-based study	(pdf)
Elena Tribushinina (University of Leiden)	Questioning the axioms: a constructionist approach to adjectival scalarity	(pdf)
Svetlana Sokolova (Universitetet i Tromsø)	Constructional Profiles: a Tool for Revealing the Semantics of Russian Natural Perfectives	(pdf)
Daniel Wiechmann (University of Jena)	On the Computation of Collostruction Strength. Testing Measures of Association as Expressions of Lexical Bias.	(pdf)