The idea of isomorphism of form and meaning has played an important role in functionalist theories of syntax and morphology. However, there have been few studies that test this hypothesis empirically on quantitative data. This study aims to fill this gap by testing the predictions made by… read more
This paper addresses an under-investigated issue of the structure of constructional
meaning, presenting an innovative corpus-based bottom-up approach,
which represents the semantic similarities between exemplars of a construction
with the help of Multidimensional Scaling. The study explores the… read more
This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a… read more
This study investigates how ten European languages from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic groups divide the semantic space of giving. The study is based on exemplars of events of giving extracted from two very different parallel corpora: Bible translations and film subtitles. This probabilistic… read more
This chapter is a multivariate corpus-based study of two near-synonymous periphrastic causatives with doen and laten in Dutch. Using multiple logistic regression and classification trees, the study explores the conceptual differences between the constructions. The results support the existing… read more
In the constructionist view, the grammar of a language is represented by constructions organized in taxonomic networks. This paper addresses the question of how one should account for the differences and similarities in the organization of such networks in different varieties of a language. In… read more