English as a basis for contrastive constructional investigations : Two case studies
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Construction Grammar (CxG), a cognitive approach, has gained considerable popularity in the anglophone sphere. It is therefore unsurprising that English is “the most widely analyzed language” in CxG (Boas 2010:3), at the expense of other languages, however, leading to “a striking absence of cross-linguistic generalizations” (Boas 2010: 2). This is inconsistent with CxG’s “aspirations toward universal applicability” (Fried 2017: 249). Addressing this issue, I present two case studies with English as a “basis” (Boas 2010: 3) for comparative CxG-based studies. The first investigates the Comparative Correlative (CC), a bi-clausal construction (The more I read, the more I know). Employing covarying-collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2005), a methodology first used in a study on English CCs (Hoffmann et al. 2019, 2020), I present a corpus study with >8,000 CC tokens from English and Spanish that shows an elaborate constructional network underlying the CC. I argue this is best explained with a CxG approach: linguistic knowledge as a network that is “baroque, involving massive redundancy and vastly rich detail” (Traugott and Trousdale 2013: 53). The second study investigates Heavy NP Shift, a word order phenomenon concerning the [V-NP-PP] pattern that is “basic” (Hawkins 1994: 20) in English and in CxG terminology is described as the CAUSEDMOTION Argument Structure Construction. Due to weight effects (Hawkins 1994), when the NP is ‘heavier’ (i.e., longer) than the PP, speakers tend to shift it, resulting in [V-PP-NP]. I present evidence in the form of grammaticality acceptability ratings obtained using the MET method (Hoffmann 2006, 2013) from 40 English and 39 Slovak speakers showing that both languages are susceptible to weight effects. The case studies demonstrate that English, because it is so well-researched, is an ideal basis for contrastive studies embedded in CxG that can, in turn, contribute to its universal aspirations. |
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