Cover not available
Article published In:
On the Interaction of Constructions with Register and Genre
Edited by Kerstin Fischer and Kiki Nikiforidou
[Constructions and Frames 7:2] 2015
► pp. 289–314

Partnership between grammatical construction and interactional frame

The stand-alone noun-modifying construction in invocatory discourse

| Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University

Building on the seminal work on grammar and frames (e.g. Fillmore 1982), in addition to recent studies that apply a construction grammar approach to the description of genres (Antonopoulou & Nikiforidou 2011; Nikiforidou 2010b; Östman 2005) and spoken discourse (Fischer 2011; Fried & Östman 2005), this paper highlights the importance of extending the analytical boundary of grammar to include interactional frames, e.g. genres and social interactions. Using as an illustrative case the stand-alone noun-modifying construction in Japanese, a grammatical construction that is genre-sensitive, this paper suggests that grammatical constructions and interactional frames are in partnership in the construction of meaning. It is argued that this partnership is mediated by the proficient language users’ knowledge, which is socially and culturally inculcated and fostered, and therefore it is important to keep the theoretical model flexible enough to acknowledge fluidity in grammatical understanding.

Keywords: stand-alone noun-modifying construction, pragmatics, invocatory discourse, genre, Japanese, interactional frames, social interactions, compatibility
Published online: 24 March 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.7.2.05mat
References
Antonopoulou, E., & Nikiforidou, K
(2011) Construction grammar and conventional discourse: A construction-based approach to discoursal incongruity. Journal of Pragmatics, 431, 2594–2609. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M
(1986) Speech genres and other late essays. Second Printing Edition. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Croft, W
(2001) Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Devitt, A.J
(1993) Generalizing about genre: New conceptions of an old concept. College Composition and Communication, 44(4), 573–586. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Emigh, W., & Herring, S.C
(2005) Collaborative authoring on the web: A genre analysis of online encyclopedias. Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai’i International Conference on System Science (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. DOI logo
Evans, N
(2007) Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (Ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations (pp. 366–431). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N
(2013) Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, C.J
(1982) Frame semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (Ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm (pp. 111–138). Seoul: Hanshin Pub.Google Scholar
(1985) Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica, 61, 222–254.Google Scholar
(2006) Frame semantics. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edition (pp. 613–620). Oxford: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008) The merging of “frames”. In R. Rossini Favretti (Ed.), Frames, corpora, and knowledge representation (pp. 1–12). Bologna: Bologna University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, K
(2011) Recipient design, alignment and interaction: The role of the addressee in so-called ‘simplified registers’. Habilitation Thesis, University of Bremen.Google Scholar
Fox, B.A., & Thompson, S.A
(1990) A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English conversation. Language, 661, 297–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fried, M
(2009) Representing contextual factors in language change. In A. Bergs & G. Diewald (Eds.), Contexts and constructions (pp. 63–94). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fried, M., & Östman, J.-O
(2005) Construction grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic particles. Journal of Pragmatics, 371, 1752–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, T
(1982) Logic vs. pragmatics, with human language as the referee: Toward an empirically visible epistemology. Journal of Pragmatics, 61, 81–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1987) Beyond foreground and background. In R. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 175–188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A.E
(1995) Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Günthner, S., & Knoblauch, H
(1995) Culturally patterned speaking practices: The analysis of communicative genres. Pragmatics, 5(1), 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, P.J
(1979) Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In T. Givón (Ed.), Syntax and semantics 12: Discourse and syntax (pp. 213–241). New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Horie, K
(n.d.). The attributive-final distinction and the manifestation of “main clause phenomena” in Japanese and Korean NMCs. Unpublished manuscript.
Horie, K., Kim, J., & Rhee, S
(2012) Stand-alone nominalizations in Japanese and Korean: Parallelism and divergences. Paper presented at the workshop on Epistemicity, evidentiality and attitudes in Asian Languages , Hong Kong.
Iwasaki, S
(2015) A multiple-grammar model of speakers’ linguistic knowledge. Cognitive Linguistics, 26(2), 161–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K
(1988) Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In J. Haiman & S.A. Thompson (Eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse (pp. 135–179). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1994) Information structure and sentence form: A theory of topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S.C
(1979) Activity types and language. Linguistics, 171, 356–399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matsumoto, Y
(1988) Semantics and pragmatics of noun‑modifying constructions in Japanese. In S. Axmaker, A. Jaisser, & H. Singmaster (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 166–175). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
(1991) Is it really a topic that is relativized? Arguments from Japanese. In L.M. Dobrin, L. Nichols, & R.M. Rodriguez (Eds.), Papers from the 27th regional meeting of the Chicago linguistic society, Part One: The general session, (pp. 388–402). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
(1997) Noun-modifying constructions in Japanese: A frame semantic approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008) Variations in Japanese honorification – deviations or a change in the making? In J. Leino (Ed.), Constructional re-organization (Constructional Approaches to Language Series 5) (pp. 89–104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2010) Interactional frames and grammatical descriptions: The case of Japanese noun-modifying constructions. Constructions and Frames, 2(2), 136–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Japanese relative clauses that stand alone. In M. Giriko, N. Nagaya, A. Takemura, & T. Vance (Eds.), Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Vol. 221. (pp. 215–230). Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Nikiforidou, K
(2010a) Viewpoint and construction grammar: The case of past + now . Language and Literature, 19(3), 265–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2010b) Discoursal categories and grammatical description: A constructional integration. Plenary presented at the ICCG6 , Prague, September 2010.
Okamoto, S
(1995) Pragmaticization of meaning in some sentence-final particles in Japanese. In M. Shibatani & S.A. Thompson (Eds.), Essays in semantics and pragmatics in honor of Charles J. Fillmore (pp. 219–246). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Östman, J. –O
(2005) Construction discourse: A prolegomenon. In J.–O. Östman & M. Fried (Eds.), Construction grammars: Cognitive grounding and theoretical extensions (pp. 121–144). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ruppenhofer, J., & Michaelis, L
(2010) A constructional account of genre-based argument omissions. Constructions and Frames, 2(2), 158–184. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Selinker, L
(1972) Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 101, 209–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swales, J.M
(1990) Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Teramura, H
(1984) Nihongo no shintakusu to imi II [Japanese syntax and meaning II]. Tokyo: Kurosio Publishing.Google Scholar
Thompson, S.A
(1971) The deep structure of relative clauses. In C.J. Fillmore & D.T. Langendoen (Eds.), Studies in linguistic semantics (pp. 79–96). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Traugott, E.C
(2011) Pragmatics and language change. In A. Keith & K. Jaszczolt (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 549–565). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tsubomoto, A
(2009) Sonzai no rensa to bubun/zentai no sukīmā: “Uchi” to “soto” no aida [Chaining of existence and part/whole schema]. In A. Tsubomoto, N. Hayase, & N. Wada (Eds.), “Uchi” to “soto” no gen- gogaku [Linguistics of “inside” and “outside”] (pp. 299–351). Tokyo: Kaitakusha.Google Scholar
Tsunoda, T
(2011) Ningyo kōbun: Nihongo kara ippan gengo-gaku e no kōken [Mer- maid constructions: Contributions from Japanese linguistics to general linguistics]. NINJAL Research Papers, 11, 53–75.Google Scholar
Hashida, Sugako
(1984) Tonari no Shibafu [The lawn next door]. Tokyo: Nihon Hoso Shuppan Kyokai. Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 10 other publications

Endo, Tomoko
2021. The Japanese benefactive -te ageru construction in family and adult interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 172 ► pp. 239 ff. DOI logo
Fischer, Kerstin & Morgan Aarestrup
2021. Relationships between construction grammar(s) and genre: Evidence from an analysis of Instagram posts. Journal of Pragmatics 183 ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo
Kaneyasu, Michiko
2019. The family of Japanese no-wa cleft construction: A register-based analysis. Lingua 217 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Kaneyasu, Michiko
2023. Formulaicity and contexts: a multimodal analysis of the Japanese utterance-finaltteyuu. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Konstantinovskaia, Natalia
2020. Russian and Japanese Women’s Real Language Practices. In The Language of Feminine Beauty in Russian and Japanese Societies, ► pp. 163 ff. DOI logo
Matsumoto, Yoshiko & Shoichi Iwasaki
2022. Multiplicity in grammar: Modes, genres and Speaker's knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 198 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Mori, Yoshiko, Atsushi Hasegawa & Junko Mori
2021. The trends and developments of L2 Japanese research in the 2010s. Language Teaching 54:1 ► pp. 90 ff. DOI logo
Nikiforidou, Kiki
2018. Genre and constructional analysis. Pragmatics & Cognition 25:3 ► pp. 543 ff. DOI logo
Nikiforidou, Kiki
2021. Grammatical variability and the grammar of genre: Constructions, conventionality, and motivation in ‘stage directions’. Journal of Pragmatics 173 ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
Vergaro, Carla
2018. A cognitive framework for understanding genre. Pragmatics & Cognition 25:3 ► pp. 430 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.