Language-specific Constructions Research Articles

The syntax of something: Evaluative affordances ofnogetin Danish construction grammar

AbstractThis paper explores ‘the evaluativenogetconstruction’ in Danish. The construction consists ofnoget‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g.Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies onsomething, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance ofnoget‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative directions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

Periphrastic causative constructions in Baltic

Periphrastic causatives in Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian are discussed to differentiate shared and language-specific constructions. It is shown that factitive constructions evolved independently, while the permissive ones are partly shared. One of the possible reasons for this is that the Baltic languages had a productive category of morphological factitive causatives and periphrastic factitives were less salient in the past. In contrast, permissive causation could not be expressed by morphological means and, as a result, permissive constructions reflect some common innovations. The permissives based on the predicate ‘give’ are a Baltic or even a Balto-Slavic development areally shared with the Finnic languages. Latvian and Lithuanian share two roots *lḗid- ‘release’ and *vḗl- ‘want’, which gave rise to permissive constructions, but their root ablaut or inflectional stems differ and reflect independent morphological developments. Of note is that Baltic *lḗid- is a cognate of Germanic *lēt-, which is also used in permissive constructions (German lassen, English let, etc.) and is not found in Slavic. Only Latvian has fully developed permissive use of ļaut. Baltic periphrastic factitive constructions share some common paths of semantic shifts, but the verbs employed are unrelated and these developments are probably relatively late and individual.

Variability abstractions for lifted analyses

Family-based (lifted) static analysis for “highly configurable programs” (program families) is capable of analyzing all variants at once without generating any of them explicitly. It takes as input only the common code base, which encodes all variants of a program family, and produces precise analysis results corresponding to all variants. However, the computational cost of the lifted analysis still depends inherently on the number of variants, which is in the worst case exponential in the number of statically configurable options (features). For a large number of features, the lifted analysis may be too costly or even infeasible. In this work, we introduce variability abstractions defined as Galois connections, which simplify variability away from program families based on # ifdef -s. Then, we use abstract interpretation as a formal method for the calculational-based derivation of abstracted lifted analyses, which are sound by construction. Our approach for abstracting lifted analysis is orthogonal to the particular program analysis chosen as a client. While a single program analysis operates on program states and depends on language-specific constructs, the lifted analysis assumes that a single program analysis already exists and lifts its results to all variants of the analyzed program family. Variability abstractions aim to reduce this variability-specific component of the lifted analysis, which handles variability and # ifdef -s. Furthermore, given the “orthogonality” of variability abstractions to the rest of the analysis (its language-specific component), we can implement abstractions as a preprocessor. In particular, given an abstraction we define a syntactic transformation, which translates any program family into an abstracted version of it, such that the analysis of the abstracted program family coincides with the corresponding abstracted analysis of the original program family. We have implemented the proposed approach, and we evaluate its practicality on three Java benchmarks. The evaluation shows that abstractions yield significant performance gains, especially for families with higher variability.

Comparative concepts and language-specific categories: Theory and practice

AbstractWhat are comparative concepts and how are they related to language-specific categories used in language description? Three general categories of comparative concepts are defined here: purely functional comparative concepts and two types of hybrid formal-functional concepts, constructions and strategies. The two hybrid types provide more explicit and precise definitions of common typological practice. However a terminological issue is that Western grammatical terms are frequently used to describe strategies which are not universal rather than constructions which are. Language-specific categories appear to be radically different from comparative concepts because the former are defined distributionally whereas the latter are defined in universal functional and formal terms. But language-specific constructions have functions, that is, they are instances of constructions in the comparative sense and their form is an instantiation of a strategy. Typology forms generalizations across language-specific constructions in both their form and their function. Finally, a major issue is the confusion of terminological choices for language-specific categories. Four rules of thumb for useful labeling of language-specific categories, largely following best descriptive practice, are offered.