Cognitive Linguistics Croft & Cruse 10

1. Cognitive LinguisticsCroft & Cruse 10 An overview of construction grammars (part 1, through 10.2.1)

2. 10.1.1 Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction • Constructions are pairings of form and meaning – symbolic units • Even the most general syntactic constructions have general rules of semantic interpretation. • Meaning (= semantic structure) includes all conventionalized aspects of a construction’s function, including discourse and pragmatic functions • The link to meaning is internal to a construction, syntactic structures are NOT independent of semantic structures, these are symbolic links

3. 10.1.1 Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction, cont’d. • Elements: parts of syntactic structure • Components: parts of semantic structure • Unit: a symbolic part (element + component) of a construction • Semantic relations: between components • Syntactic relations: between elements

4. 10.1.1 Grammatical representation: the anatomy of a construction, cont’d. • Two questions arise from construction grammar: • 1) What is the status of the categories of the syntactic elements in construction grammar? • 2) What sorts of syntactic relations are posited?

5. 10.1.2 The organization of constructional knowledge • Each construction is a node in a taxonomic network of constructions (remember radial categories? This is similar, except that it accommodates various levels of abstraction.) • A given construction may have multiple parents. I didn’t sleep instantiates both Intransitive Verb and Negative constructions

6. 10.1.2 The organization of constructional knowledge, cont’d. • A construction typically provides only partial specification of the structure of an utterance • Two more questions arise: • 3) What sorts of relations are found between constructions? • 4) How is information stored in the construction taxonomy?

7. 10.2 Some current theories of construction grammar • Different versions of the theory focus on different issues: • Construction Grammar (Fillmore/Kay) – syntactic relations and inheritance • Lakoff/Goldberg – categorization relations between constructions • Cognitive Grammar (Langacker) – semantic categories and relations • Radical Construction Grammar (Croft) – syntactic categories and universals • We will ask questions 1)-4) concerning each version of the theory

8. 10.2.1 Construction Grammar • Similar to formalism of HPSG • Uniform representation of all grammatical properties, formal and functional, as features with values, gathered in sets called feature structures Charles Fillmore Paul Kay

9. 10.2.1 Construction Grammar, cont’d. • Q&A: • 1) What is the status of the categories of the syntactic elements in construction grammar? • Reductionist model of syntactic structure made up of primitive atomic units • 2) What sorts of syntactic relations are posited? • Roles and relations (all are predicate-argument relations)

10. 10.2.1 Construction Grammar, cont’d. • Q&A: • 3) What sorts of relations are found between constructions? • 4) How is information stored in the construction taxonomy? • (Answer to both:) Construction grammar is a complete inheritance model, in which information is represented only once, at the most schematic level, and a construction inherits the feature structures of its parent constructions