Talk into vs convince to
Talking as a cause leading to containment, convincing as a cause leading to a result
This paper explores the causative constructions ‘talk NP into + ‑ing’ vs ‘convince NP to + infinitive’ by means of a collection of attested occurrences. It shows the connection between the characteristics described by Wierzbicka (1998), Gries & Stefanowitsch (2004) and Rudanko (2006) and the linguistically-signified semantic content involved in these structures. Wierzbicka’s account and the related Construction Grammar approach are shown to be wanting on both the descriptive and explanatory levels due to a distancing from the level on which a stable relation exists between meaning and linguistic form. An explanation of the distribution and semantics of the two constructions is proposed based on Langacker’s (1987) semiological principle, i.e. on the semantic content associated with each of the linguistic signs involved in these sequences.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Refining the observation of the empirical data
- 3.Explanations anyone?
- 4.Construction grammar, embodied cognition and the basic design architecture of human language
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Notes
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References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Flach, Susanne
2021.
From movement into action to manner of causation: changes in argument mapping in the into-causative.
Linguistics 59:1
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