Grammatical variability and the grammar of genre: Constructions, conventionality, and motivation in ‘stage directions’

Abstract

Low-frequency grammatical constructions as well as marked, unexpected interpretations of more productive ones are often associated with specific contexts, including socio-culturally defined genres. In the present work, I investigate the post-posed subject construction in stage directions, which features unique morpho-syntax in the grammar of English, and the context-specific, conventional interpretation of the present tense in the same genre. While both of these patterns exhibit idiosyncratic features that warrant constructional status, they are shown to relate systematically to other constructions in the language. Such formal and functional motivation can be captured in terms of constructional inheritance and genre-sensitive coercion, i.e. coercion that takes into account the functional requirements of specific genres. Constructional frameworks thus emerge as fully capable to account for the “periphery” of linguistic structures in a way that accommodates both their idiosyncratic and their regular (inherited) components, and provide a principled way of modeling speakers' knowledge of variable grammar.