CxG Lecture One

1. CxG Lecture One LSA Presession Construction Grammar

2. General Plan • Day 1: Fillmore • some grammatical phenomena • Day 2: Fillmore and Kay • stock-taking • a bit of formalism • Day 3: Kay • argument structure constructions

3. The grammarian’s job is to figure out what it is that enables speakers of a language to do what they do with their language. • In particular, the job requires sussing out how much of this ability is accounted for in terms of their • knowledge of the language itself, rather than • knowledge about the world, or • knowledge of conventions about communicating with language.

4. The difference isn’t always obvious • Here’s an example of something that (I think) everybody “knows”. • Guess what’s going on in a department tenure hearing when one of the colleagues begins his contribution with these words: • It’s true that she’s very popular with the students

5. True … but … • It's true that Barak closed a huge gap in • the kibbutz district within a few weeks, • it's true that he received the support of • most Arabs and Druze, and • it's true that he has the wind in his sails • but this won't last forever. • ynet.news.com 5/29/2007

6. Anna Wierzbicka* has noticed from corpus evidence that clauses that begin with It is true that P are almost always followed by the word “but” - which means, of course, that “P” is conceded in an argument in which the winning point (in the speaker’s presentation) is going to be what follows the “but”. • What kind of fact is that? • The same is NOT true for sentences that begin with It is a fact that … • *2006, English: meaning and culture. Oxford U. P.

7. Wierzbicka is convinced that this has to do with the MEANING of true as opposed to the meaning of a fact. • Simple Gricean explanations don’t quickly come to mind that would make use of what we know about the meanings of true and a fact. • Maybe It’s true that … is a conventional “sentence-stem” dedicated to introducing points to be conceded in an argument. • That would make it a construction, wouldn’t it?

8. Web-as-Corpusa two-edged sword • How nice it was, not too many years ago, to be able to say something about English, and be believed. There was a time when I confidently defined (be) friends with and its alternate (be) good friends with as a closed expression. But now there’s the internet, and it has become easy to check up on such claims. Maybe it’s possible for any noun of (potential) reciprocal relation.

9. Some google results, June 29 207 • after is/was/am: • friends with: 1,024,000 • cousins with: 3,026 • brothers with: 3,072 • colleagues with: 273 (“Harry Potter’s mother is siblings with Voldemort”)

10. Construction Grammar 1987 • Twenty years ago this summer - at an LSA summer Institute - at Stanford University - Paul Kay and I, and George Lakoff, gave a two-or-three-hour presentation on construction grammar. • In those days constructions, in the Kay/Fillmore version, were represented as “boxes in boxes” (equivalent to PS representations with node labels of unlimited complexity). All information was written inside the boxes.

11. External and Internal Properties external properties int. props. int. props. lexical form lexical form

12. Determination cat n max + num sg cat det def - num sing lex a cat n max - num sg lex hat

13. Modification cat n max - num sg cat a lex green cat n max - num sg lex hat

14. Genitive cat det def + num ( ) cat n max + lex Joe cat clitic lex ‘s

15. These simplified examples make it seem that the linguistic properties of a phrase can be adequately expressed as a pile of features. That’s wrong, but my presentation won’t be able to convey the more complicated truth.

16. switch to Sign-based Constr. Gram. • Now suppose the “external information” included the phonological & morpholexical information as well.

17. Key notions of a sign-based CxG • sign • construct • construction

18. Signs, Constructs, Constructions • A sign is a linguistic product with all of its grammatical properties: phonological, formal, syntactic, semantic, and contextual. • how is it pronounced • what morphological or lexical forms make it up • what properties determine its combinatory affordances • what does it mean and/or how does it participate in the integration of the meaning of the structures around it • what conventions are there on how it can be used, who can say it, etc. • We can still allow ourselves to say that the sign is a form-meaning pair, having in mind the first three, above, as matters of form, the last two as meaning.

19. Signs, Constructs, Constructions • Some signs are simple, some are complex. Constructions dictate how more complex signs are made up of simpler signs. • A construct is a fully specified sign paired with the list of (fully specified) signs which enter into its “creation”. • A construct can be represented as a simple tree, the “mother” being the complex sign, the “daughters” being the components whose assembly is “licensed” by a construction.

20. Constructs and Constructions • Obviously, not every construct is licensed by its own private construction. The grammarian has to find the simplest grammar - the smallest set of constructions (and associated principles) that jointly license all of the well-formed constructs in the language.

21. my hat

22. The phrase my hat is made up of two parts, my and hat, and something makes it possible to put those two signs together to make the more complex sign. • The sign my hat can be used as a full-fledged NP, hence as the argument of a verb (the wind blew my hat into the mud), as the object of a preposition (it fell into my hat), etc. • Neither my nor hat, alone, has such abilities.

23. my hat M my D1 hat D2 • The construct: • D1: possessive pronoun, first person singular • D2: singular, count noun, non-maximal • M: singular NP; can be an argument in other constructs

24. The fact that my hat is a full (maximal) NP is accounted for by the construction (“Determination”); • the fact that it is singular is determined by a principle which projects certain properties of a “head” daughter to the mother; • the fact that its semantics involves (any of a large number of) possessive relationships between ‘me’ and that hat is related to the use of a genitive with a noun that does not require a genitive determiner to satisfy an argument requirement.

25. my hat M • What about D2? Surely not just the noun hat? • Right. Can be any noun. (sort of) • Just a simple noun?. • No. Noun can be modified. (my green hat) my D1 hat D2

26. green hat M • The construction that licenses green hat assigns to the mother the same property that makes hat alone “incomplete”. Neither hat nor green hat can serve as an argument, needing anchoring by some kind of determiner. • A modifying adjective - of this kind - attributes something to a neighboring noun concept, and so it can be said to “select” that kind of entity. green D1 hat D2

27. my green hat M • D2’s semantics constructs a self-standing concept corresponding to green hat, an instance ofintersective modification, possible because green is a simple adjective and hat is a simple noun. • The role of my (or other genitives) in this context adds the notion of someone’s “possession” of the hat. my D1 green hat D2

28. the committee’s collapse we try a different noun one that has a valence

29. the collapse of the committee M • The noun collapse, unlike hat, is an argument-taking noun, its valent being the entity that experiences the collapse. This element can be expressed in a Complementation construction as a sister of the noun, marked with the preposition of. D2 is the result of such a construction. collapse of the committee D2 the D1

30. collapse of the committee M of the committee D2 collapse D1

31. the committee’s collapse M But if the single valent of collapse is not realized inside the noun-headed phrase, it can be expressed as a genitive determiner. Here the “possessor” stands for the entity that participates in the collapse event. • the buiding’s collapse, • my collapse, • *my collapse of the building the committee’s D1 collapse D2

32. my boss M • Some nouns evoke frames within which the noun itself identifies one term in a relation, and the genitive identifies the other term of that relation. • The locally missing argument can be satisfied by a possessive modifier within an NP construct. • Examples: my boss, your wife, their friend, etc. my D1 boss D2

33. my favorite hat now we try another adjective

34. my favorite hat M • Sometimes, even if the noun itself is not relational, an adjective of a certain kind can turn it into one. So to speak. The adjective favorite creates a relationship between a possessor and a possessed; the phrase favorite hat is not an independently understandable nominal category, the way green hat is; it has to be somebody’sfavorite hat. my D1 favorite hat D2

35. The function of my favorite X is not merely to pick out the most beloved of the “my Xes”; the ordinary “possessive” relations might not be appropriate at all: • my favorite color • her favorite composer • My favorite color is not the most beloved of what could be called “my colors”; her favorite composer is not the most preferred of “her composers”.

36. Summing up • M acquires property not in D1 or D2 • determination, genitive • D1 “selects” D2’s type • some determiners, adjectives • M acquires properties from head D • number in nominals • Possessive determiners can satisfy argument requirements in a non-maximal nominal • case 1: inherent in noun • case 2: created by adjective • Otherwise possessives permit a large range of interpretations

37. Core vs. non-core • The phenomena that we’ve looked at so far are facts that every grammar has something to say about and every grammarian has thought about. There are so many alternative ways of accounting for all of the relevant facts that whole communities of scholars could be devoted to just such problems. • But then they would miss some of the intriguing problems that construction grammarians delight in.

38. Some of these “non-core” constructions are much more “contained” than the problems of determination, modification, predication, complementation, and argument satisfaction, and that makes them seem trivial, and sometimes gets the people who delight in them referred to as the butterfly collectors of linguistics. • And others of the non-core constructions are a bit vague and hard to pin down. Let’s look.

39. Thepoor are with us always. the adjective poor “used as a noun”

40. Dictionaries often indicate that the adjective poor can be “used as a noun”, offering examples like these. • The gap between the rich and the poor has widened. • The poor are with us always. • The whole phrase is an NP, to be sure, but the word poor here isn’t actually a “noun”. • Some communities are divided between the very rich and the very poor.

41. the poor M • D1 has to be “the”. • D2 has to be an adjective capable of identifying a class of humans. We get the poor, the rich, the idle, the young, the old, the lame, the living, the dead, etc. • M’s syntax is maximal NP, M’s semantics specifies • human • generic • plural the D1 poor D2

42. Observations • It’s possible for the M of a construct to be of a different syntactic category from its head daughter. • Other cases? PP as adjective? • he’s been very out of sorts lately

43. I’ll be far away next week.

44. next week • Observations. • next week is a temporal adverb phrase • week is a count noun and ordinarily should take an article • the phrase the next week, with the article in place, is a normal production, not requiring a separate construction • next week is deictically anchored; • the next week is anaphorically anchored

45. next week M • D1 is a single word; its lex is chosen from the closed set this / next / last; this is not an otherwise recognized word class • D2 is a single word; its lex is chosen from week, month, year, century, but notday • D2 can be extended to some other words, semester, season next D1 week D2

46. next week M • M’s semantics appeal to the notion of calendar unit: • this week is ‘in the week including now’; • next month is ‘in the month following the month including now’; • last year is ‘in the year preceding the year including now’. • I said this pattern doesn’t apply to ‘day’, but consider this: next D1 week D2

47. tomorrow M • Suppletion? If we allow the M to have a p.o.s. category distinct from its head (“the poor”), can we allow the M to have morpholexical form distinct from that of its Ds? • this day = today • next day = tomorrow • last day = yesterday next D1 day D2

48. Observations • In principle, a sign-based theory - as opposed to the WSYWIG version of older construction grammars - ought to be able to have “mothers” with forms that are not obviously derivable from their components. • Such a possibility should be strongly constrained: but THAT would require getting a theory of families of constructions, such as the this-next-last family, AND it would require an account of how the pre-emption a.k.a. blocking is guaranteed. • Other possibilities: • gooder = better, goodest = best • badder = worse, baddest = worst

49. I’ll be back next Wednesday.

50. next Wednesday • The this-last-next modifiers can also be applied to cycle-member-names • next June • this Friday • last summer • and the semantics locates the mentioned cycle-member within the deictically anchored next-larger unit within which it “cycles” • next June = ‘the June of next year’ • this Friday = ‘the Friday of this week’ • last summer = ‘the summer of last year’