Article published in:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 371–382

Cognitive reality of constructions as a theoretical and methodological challenge in historical linguistics

| University of Zurich
This squib discusses empirical challenges incurred by assuming cognitive reality as a defining feature of constructions and the constructional network, as done in most usage-based, cognitive construction grammar approaches. Specifically, it zooms in on the methodological challenges in identifying cognitively plausible constructions in historical data, in particular when taking a highly exploratory, bottom-up approach with very little pre-selection or pre-analysis. I illustrate this issue with the example of a current project on PPs in the history of English, and the various functions these have in combination with verbs (from prototypical adjuncts to complements). I argue that the constraints of historical data make it necessary to find different, new ways to determine which abstractions and distinctions are likely to have been represented in minds of historical language users, and to furthermore identify changes in constructional networks over time.
Keywords: diachronic construction grammar, historical linguistics, cognitive reality, prepositional phrases, adjuncts, complements
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cognitive reality of constructions: Theory and method
    • 2.1Constructions and networks as cognitively real
    • 2.2Challenges and possible approaches to identifying constructions (and networks)
  • 3.Cognitive reality of constructions as a challenge for exploratory diachronic investigations: PPs in the history of English
    • 3.1PEAS: English prepositional phrases and their history
    • 3.2Challenges and approaches to identifying PP-constructions in the history of English
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00060.zeh
References
Bergen, Benjamin, and Nancy Chang
2013 “Embodied Construction Grammar.” In The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann, and Graeme Trousdale, 168–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bergs, Alexander
2021 “Complements and Adjuncts.” In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ed. by Bas Aarts, April McMahon, and Lars Hinrichs. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Blumenthal-Dramé, Alice
2012 Entrenchment in Usage-Based Theories. What Corpus Data Do and Do not Reveal about the Mind. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Budts, Sara, and Peter Petré
2020 “Putting Connections Centre Stage in Diachronic Construction Grammar.” In Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar, ed. by Lotte Sommerer, and Elena Smirnova, 318–351. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Claridge, Claudia
2000 Multi-Word Verbs in Early Modern English. A Corpus-Based Study. Amsterdam: Rodopi. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dąbrowska, Ewa
2004 Language, Mind, and Brain: Some psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
De Cuypere, Ludovic
2015 “The Old English to-Dative Construction.” English Language and Linguistics 19 (1): 1–26. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, Holger
2019 The Grammar Network. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Divjak, Dagmar, and Stefan Gries
2006 “Ways of Trying in Russian: Clustering Behavioral Profiles.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 21: 23–60. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Glynn, Dylan
2014 “Correspondence Analysis: Exploring Data and Identifying Patterns.” In Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy, ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Justyna Robinson, 443–485. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren
2020 “What about Grammar? Using BERT Embeddings to Explore Functional-Semantic Shifts of Semi-Lexical and Grammatical Constructions.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR 2020), 257–268.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele
2006 Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2019 Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan
2013 “Data in Construction Grammar.” In The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann, and Graeme Trousdale, 168–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin
2014 Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin, and Susanne Flach
2020 “Disentangling Modal Meanings with Distributional Semantics.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: fqaa014. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin, and Florent Perek
2015 “Meaning Change in a Petri Dish: Constructions, Semantic Vector Spaces, and Motion Charts.” Linguistics Vanguard 11: 339–350. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Thomas
2007 “Complements versus Adjuncts? A Construction Grammar Account of English Prepositional Phrases.” Occasional Papers in Language and Linguistics 31: 92–119.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Thomas, and Graeme Trousdale
2013 “Construction Grammar: Introduction.”. In The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann, and Graeme Trousdale, 1–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, and Eva Zehentner
forthc. “Prepositions in Early Modern English Argument Structure.” In Proceedings of the 20th ICEHL. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kay, Paul
2005 “Argument Structure Constructions and the Argument-Adjunct Distinction.” In Grammatical Constructions: Back to the roots, ed. by Mirjam Fried, and Hans Boas, 71–98. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor, and Beatrice Santorini
2000 The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, second edition, release 4.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Lauren Delfs
2004 The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, first edition, release 3.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani
2016 The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, second edition, release 1.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George
1990 “The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on Image-Schemas?” Cognitive Linguistics 1 (1): 39–74. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Levshina, Natalia, and Kris Heylen
2014 “A Radically Data-Driven Construction Grammar: Experiments with Dutch Causative Constructions.” In Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar, ed. by Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman, and Gijsbert Rutten, 17–46. Berlin: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lieven, Elena, and Michael Tomasello
2008 “Children’s First Language Acquisition from a Usage-Based Perspective.” In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, ed. by Peter Robinson, and Nick Ellis, 168–196. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
Madabushi, Harish Tayyar, Laurence Romain, Dagmar Divjak, and Petar Milin
2020 “CxGBERT: BERT meets Construction Grammar.” Preprint.Google Scholar
Percillier, Michael
2020 “Allostructions, Homostructions or a Constructional Family?: Changes in the Network of Secondary Predicate Constructions in Middle English.” In Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar, ed. by Lotte Sommerer, and Elena Smirnova, 214–242. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Perek, Florent
2015 Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and Corpus-Based Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony: A case study.” Linguistics 54 (1): 149–188. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Stefan Grondelaers, and Freek Van de Velde
2018 “Why and How We Need to Incorporate the Multi-Level Nature of the Constructicon into Corpus Research.” Paper presented at ICCG10.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Sommerer, Lotte, and Andreas Baumann
2021 “Of Absent Mothers, Strong Sisters and Peculiar Daughters: The Constructional Network of English NPN Constructions”. Cognitive Linguistics 32(1): 97–131. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol
2013 “Collostructional analysis.” In The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann, and Graeme Trousdale. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael
2003 Constructing a language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
2015 Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English: Preposition Placement 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zehentner, Eva, and Elizabeth Traugott
2020 “Constructional Networks and the Development of Benefactive Ditransitives in English.” In Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar, ed. by Lotte Sommerer, and Elena Smirnova, 168–211. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar