Usage-based Perspective Research Articles

Hortatives, imperatives, and the directive speech-act continuum: A usage-based approach to the Korean -ca hortative construction

This paper revisits the hortative and its relationship with the imperative in a typological context by conducting a case study of the particle -ca in Korean from a usage-based perspective. It argues that the hortative and the imperative are functionally adjacent but clearly distinct categories on a directive speech-act continuum. Using data of modern spoken Korean from the 21st Century Sejong Corpus, we provide empirical evidence of four sub-functions of -ca, which differ by the performer of the focal action: (i) the cohortative has a first person plural subject (i.e., the speaker and the addressee(s)); (ii) the polite/accordant imperative has a second person subject (i.e., the addressee(s)); (iii) the speaker hortative has a first person subject (i.e., the speaker); and (iv) the exhortative has a third person subject. The analysis of the data shows that although the degree of directivity can vary, the core function of -ca remains the same across these sub-functions: to request participation in a joint activity of the speaker and the addressee. Cases of functional ambiguity, where -ca might fulfill more than one of the four sub-functions, are direct evidence that directive speech acts form a continuum ranging from hortative to imperative.

The Korean hortative construction revisited

Abstract This paper revisits the hortative -ca construction in Korean from a usage-based perspective, examining its functions in natural interactional spoken data The examination of the actual occurrence of -ca reveals its various functions: -ca indicates that the performer of the focal-event encoded in the utterance may be 1st person plural subject, i.e., the speaker and other interlocutors; 2nd person, i.e., the addressee(s); 1st person, i.e., the speaker; and 3rd person. Our findings provide direct evidence for the different degrees of prototypicality among these functions, which are reflected in their different frequency counts. Furthermore, this study proposes two novel functions of ca, the accordant imperative (to demand that the addressee agree with the speaker that the addressee perform the focal-event) and the speaker hortative (to ask the addressee to perform an action so that the speaker him-/herself can perform the focal-event).

A usage-based approach to productive use of inflectional patterns and level of lemma sophistication in adult heritage speakers’ performance

AbstractAdopting a usage-based perspective, the present study assesses the mental lexicon of Turkish heritage speakers in the UK (HSs,n = 31) regarding the productive use of formulaic inflectional suffix templates and the level of sophistication of the lemmas produced in free speech. We additionally explore input-related predictors of this performance by comparing HS performance to that of a group of previous generation immigrant bilinguals (IBs,n = 61), who are representative input providers, and of a group of monolinguals (n = 44). The results show that overall, both the HSs and IBs diverge from the monolinguals in that they use nominal suffix sequences less productively and rely on less sophisticated nominal lemmas. Their verbal productivity performance, however, remains intact. We argue that altered input results in a performance which diverges from that of the monolinguals but converges on the immigrant variety. The individual variability is partly explained by the amount of L1 passive exposure, indicating that the HSs are not sensitive only to the changes in the input available to them but also to the amount of it. These findings provide new insights into the line of research that describes HSs as incomplete due to their L1-divergent skills in comparison to a monolingual baseline.

Lexically specific vs. productive constructions in L2 Finnish

ABSTRACTIt is assumed from a usage-based perspective that learner language constructions emerge from natural language use in social interaction through exemplar learning. In L1, young learners have been shown to develop their constructions from lexically specific, formulaic expressions into more productive, abstract schemas. A similar developmental path has been shown for L2 development, with some exceptions. The aim of the current study is to explore to what extent the default assumption holds for L2 learning. The development of two constructions was traced in four adults learning L2 Finnish. Free-response data, collected weekly over a period of 9 months, were used to investigate the productivity of the constructions. The results show that, contrary to the traditional assumption, L2 learners do not start off with only lexically specific expressions, but that both lexically specific and more productive constructions are used from the beginning. Our results therefore suggest that, for educated adult L2 learners, the schema formation can happen rather quickly and even without the repetition of a specific lexical sequence.

Frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction – evidence from experimental and corpus data

Abstract This paper investigates frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction by German learners of English from a usage-based perspective by presenting findings from two experimental studies and a complementary corpus study. It was examined if and to what extent the frequency of the verb in the catenative verb construction affects the choice of the target-like complement type and if the catenative verb construction with a to-infinitive complement, which is highly frequent in English, is more accurately acquired and entrenched than the less frequent variant with an -ing complement. In all three studies, the more frequent construction with a to-infinitive yielded higher numbers of target-like complement choices. Furthermore, it was shown that the verb’s faithfulness to the construction made a significant prediction of a target-like complement preference. It is argued that a higher faithfulness promotes a target-like entrenchment of the construction and motivates a taxonomic generalisation across related exemplars. Furthermore, the results provide support for the idea that the mental representation of language is comprised of item-specific as well as more abstract schema knowledge, where frequency determines the specificity with which the construction is entrenched.

Implementation of Elementary School English Teaching Under Usage-Based Perspectives on Language Acquisition

Implementation of Elementary School English Teaching Under Usage-Based Perspectives on Language Acquisition

The preposition under and its noun collocates in the under-NOUN pattern: A quantitative corpus-based investigation

This paper adopts a usage-based perspective on grammatical structure (Goldberg 2006, 2013) and the attraction-reliance measure (Schmidt 2000; Schmid & Küchenhoff 2013) to gauge the reciprocal interaction between a noun and the preposition under in the under-NOUN pattern: in other words, to determine strongly attracted nouns of this preposition. On the basis of the data extracted from the academic part of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this paper seeks to show that there are nouns that are more strongly attracted to the preposition under than others and that the co-occurrences of particular nouns with this preposition are more significant than others. In addition, the results of the analysis seem to suggest that the mutual associations between particular nouns and this preposition depend upon different senses of under and are therefore motivated by conceptual metaphors, metonymies, and/or image schemas.

사용기반 접근법(Usage-based approach)에서 바라본 영화영어

사용기반 접근법(Usage-based approach)에서 바라본 영화영어

A usage-based perspective on public discourse: Towards a critical cognitive linguistics

Abstract Linguists are traditionally reluctant to contribute to public discussions around language, especially where politics is involved. With the exception of George Lakoff, this has also been true of cognitive linguists in particular. Only recently have some members of the cognitive linguistics community more actively participated in such discussions. In particular, Elisabeth Wehling and myself have, independently of each other, contributed to linguistic debates surrounding the linguistic representation of refugees in Germany during the so-called European refugee crisis beginning in 2015. In this paper, I take a closer look at these contributions and evaluate them in terms of their empirical foundations. Based on this evaluation, I then briefly discuss the goals of, and preconditions to a more systematic approach to a usage-based public commentary on (political) language.

Usage patterns in the development of Hebrew grammatical subjects

The grammatical subject is a multi-faceted linguistic notion embedded in morphology, syntax and discourse-pragmatics. In Hebrew, grammatical subjects are associated with two distinct word orders, differing along grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic axes. The study examines the growth and proliferation of Hebrew grammatical subjects in the spontaneous speech of preschool children in a Usage-Based perspective, taking into account inflectional, syntactic and semantic properties of the clause side by side with discursive information. The corpus used for this study consisted of the recordings of 54 children in six age groups from two to eight years, engaged in triadic peer talk. Subject, predicate morphology and word order were coded, and utterances were coded according to their conversational roles. Using cluster analysis, each age group was found to have a characteristic usage pattern of subjects with associated syntactic, semantic and discursive properties, underscoring the acquisition and development of grammatical subjects in Hebrew. The usage patterns emerging from the current corpus are taken as a manifestation of the Discourse Profile Constructions notion: probabilistic form-function correlations consisting of multiple sources of formal and functional information, pairing a usage pattern of clauses with a unified construal and discourse function. Three Discourse Profile Constructions emerged from the data: joint action planning, conversational narrative, and conversational presentation. Each of these was associated with a different patterning of lexical or pronominal subjects coupled with predicates with specific temporal features and different word order. These findings suggest that gaining command of the subject category is linked to communicative functions in development.

Phonological schematicity in multilingual constructions: A diasystematic perspective on lexical form

This article discusses the role of intra-word phonological schematicity in multilingual constructicons from a Diasystematic Construction Grammar perspective. It argues that, in particular with communities that use two or more typologically similar and/or closely related languages, many lexical elements (e.g. cognates) exhibit regular sound correspondences that can be analysed as consisting of different types of phonological schemas. In this view, there is a division of labour between schematic constructions that specify the words' referential meaning and others that specify their belonging to one of the “languages”, with language-specificity defined as a pragmatic property of constructions. The focus is on the question whether generalizations at this level of schematicity and abstraction are cognitively real and what can count as evidence for their existence from a usage-based perspective.

Structure-based or dynamic usage‑based instruction

This classroom study aims to explore the instructional effects of structure-based (SB) or dynamic usage-based (DUB) instruction with free response, communicative writing tasks after three years of L2-French instruction on linguistic complexity measures in (morpho)syntax and lexicon. We investigated data from forty-three young high school beginner learners of L2-French after three years of instruction with similar amounts of L2 exposure. The SB treatment included a traditional focus on explicit grammar; the DUB group was taught using the Accelerated Integrated Method, a highly communicative, meaningfocused method without explicit instruction, but with a great deal of exposure and repetition to induce frequency effects. Results after three years show that DUB instruction leads to more linguistic complexity in terms of various (morpho)syntactic and some lexical measures (multi-word sequences coverage). On other lexical measures (such as Guiraud index and average word length), no differences were found. The results are discussed using insights from the dynamic usage-based perspective.

Second language English listeners’ relative processing of coherence-based and frequency-based formulas: A corpus-based study

Abstract This study investigated L2 English listeners’ processing of formulas, in terms of the impact of two different factors inherent in these formulas. One was the formulas’ level of coherence and the other was the formulas’ level of frequency. High-coherence formulas are considered to have specialized meanings, while high-frequency formulas are considered to be less specialized in meaning, commonly being composed of relatively simple words that often co-occur in speech. In previous research, in an academic context, Ellis, Simpson-Vlach and Maynard (2008. Formulaic language in native and second-language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 41. 375–396. doi:10.1002/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00137.x) had found that a high level of coherence was the main factor facilitating L1 users’ receptive processing of formulas, while a high level of frequency was the main factor facilitating advanced L2 users’ receptive processing of formulas. Ellis, Simpson-Vlach and Maynard (2008. Formulaic language in native and second-language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 41. 375–396. doi:10.1002/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00137.x), from a usage-based perspective, attributed these differences mainly to the greater length of time the L1 users had spent in learning formulas. Consequently, the current study investigated whether these processing differences between the two user groups in an academic context (seen as a possible developmental trend) would be apparent between proficient and less-proficient L2 listeners in a relatively less-challenging, general English environment. The study was considered important for possibly signaling the types of aural receptive formulas to foreground by L2 general English instructors and materials designers. The research examined two groups of L2 learners, one advanced and the other intermediate level, while they listened to four texts. A paused transcription technique elicited the listeners’ identification of targeted segments from the texts, many of which were classified through corpus analysis as containing more/less-coherent formulas or more/less-frequent formulas. Examination of how these formula types were processed by both proficiency groups, however, did not find major differences between the groups in their processing of the different formula types, and thus little evidence of a possible formula developmental trend.

The Hebrew dative: Usage patterns as discourse profile constructions

AbstractThe dative in Hebrew poses a problem for a unified characterization as no single criterion seems to guides its interpretation. The present paper approaches this problem from a usage-based perspective, suggesting a multifactorial account of dative functions in Hebrew. Analyzing a corpus of Hebrew dative clauses with multivariate statistical tools I reveal the usage patterns associated with each dative function, showing that traditional descriptions of dative functions are not reflected in usage. Working within a Usage-Based perspective, in which the meaning of a word is its use in language, I argue that Hebrew has only four distinct dative usage patterns, termedDiscourse Profile Constructions: conventional correspondences between a multifactorial usage pattern and a unified conceptualization of the world. The four Discourse Profile Constructions are: (i) the Extended Transitive Discourse Profile Construction, (ii) the Human Endpoint Discourse Profile Construction, (iii) the Extended Intransitive Discourse Profile Construction, and (iv), the Evaluative Reference point Discourse Profile Construction. By revealing such correspondences between usage patterns and conceptualizations, the present paper (i) broadens the Construction Grammar notion of Argument Structure Construction, and (ii), suggests an innovative account for the notion of usage as a factor in the conventional pairing between form and function.

A Corpus-based Linguistic Analysis of Latin Frequentative Verbs

Considering that Latin frequentative verbs have transparent morphological structure (the supine stem of the base verb concatenated with the frequentative -itare suffix and regular first conjugation inflectional endings), one would assume that the meaning of each such verb is related in a predictable way to that of its corresponding base verb, and that all members of the frequentative class share semantic entailments. However, frequentative verbs resist a uniform semantic analysis and can mean something entirely unpredictable from the sum of their parts, and traditional and contemporary definitions of frequentatives ignore the degree of idiomaticity between frequentative form and function and are based on limited corpus data. This paper provides a synchronic, corpus-based linguistic analysis of frequentative verbs in comparison to their base forms from both derivational (source-oriented) and usage-based (product-oriented) perspectives in order to explore the nature of the Latin frequentative. The paper concludes that a usage-based, product-oriented treatment of the data provides a more straightforward characterization of Latin frequentative verbs, highlighting the interconnectedness of morphology, syntax, and semantics.

A three-fold approach to the imperative's usage in English and Dutch

The English imperative and its Dutch counterpart have seldom been studied and compared from a quantitative, usage-based perspective. This article fills the gap by examining what three different approaches to spoken corpus data can reveal about the construction in the two languages and evaluates their usefulness. The collostructional approach shows that, contrary to the traditional view of the imperative, it is not typically used to obtain concrete results. Distinctive collexeme analysis in particular also suggests that the English imperative is somewhat more open to non-agentive verbs. The discourse contexts in which imperatives occur are taken into account more by the speech act approach, in a holistic manner. The English imperative is found to serve so-called non-willful and expressive directive purposes more often than the Dutch one. The parametric approach, developed within cognitive linguistics and systematically applied for the first time here, considers features such as power and cost separately. It suggests that the higher degree of overall force exertion in Dutch is mainly due to differences in the extent to which the speaker desires the proposed event to be realized and to which it is to their own benefit. The results are argued to illustrate the complementary nature of the three approaches and to have important implications for a better understanding of the imperative in general and in the two languages.

Divergent theories, converging evidence: The constructional semantics of competing future constructions

Abstract This paper investigates the alternation between two competing German future constructions, the werden + Infinitive construction and the futurate present, from a usage-based perspective. Two lines of evidence are combined: On the one hand, a pilot corpus study indicates that werden + Infinitive is more likely to be used for referring to distant-future events than to near-future events. However, syntactic factors seem to be at least as decisive as semantic ones for speakers’ choice between the two constructions. On the other hand, an experimental study taps into language users’ interpretation of sentences framed in one of the two constructions. It can be shown that the grammatical framing does not significantly affect participants’ estimates of the temporal distance of the events to which the stimuli sentences refer. This suggests that the meaning differences between the two constructions be more nuanced, e.g. pertaining to discourse-pragmatic functions.

The on-line emergence of Hebrew insubordinateshe- (‘that/which/who’) clauses

AbstractThis study examines the on-line emergence of insubordinate clauses in Hebrew conversation as constrained by local interactional contingencies, questioning traditional notions of grammatical ‘subordination’ and contributing to conceptions of grammar as a locally sensitive, temporally unfolding resource for social interaction. The clauses examined are syntactically unintegrated (unembedded in any matrix clause), or loosely-integrated (cannot be viewed unambiguously as constituting a relative, complement, or adverbial clause), yet they all begin withshe- – the general ‘subordinating conjunction’ in traditional Modern Hebrew grammar. All 102 insubordinateshe- clauses found throughout a 5.5 hour audio-recorded corpus were classified according to their discourse function: modal, elaborative, or evaluative/epistemic. Leaving aside the modal type, the remaining insubordinateshe- clauses (N = 70, 69%) are shown to emerge on-line while speakers are busy performing a variety of tasks and responding to local interactional contingencies. In all of these casesshe- functions as a generic ‘wildcard’ tying back to immediately prior discourse and projecting an elaboration/evaluation of it, in either same- or other-speaker talk. The findings concerning insubordinate clauses suggest a usage-based perspective also on canonical subordinate clauses, positioning canonical and syntactically unintegrated clauses at two ends of a continuum.

Constructing a Second Language Sociolinguistic Repertoire: A Sociocultural Usage-based Perspective

Abstract This article discusses a sociocultural usage-based perspective on the development of sociolinguistic competence. Previous research has focused on learners’ acquisition and use of alternative ways of ‘saying the same thing’ (i.e. native-like variation) in relation to study abroad, contact with native speakers, and pedagogy. Missing from the literature are studies examining the developmental trajectories of individual learners from a qualitative perspective. This article takes a first step in this direction by documenting the specific lexicogrammatical constructions deployed by one learner of French, Leon, over the course of a 6-week stylistic variation intervention. The findings show that his sociolinguistic repertoire emerged from a single multiword expression, which in combination with Leon’s application of new metalinguistic knowledge and mediation from a teacher expanded to become a more productive schematic template. The research suggests that future work on L2 sociolinguistic development would do well to focus on qualitative accounts of individual developmental trajectories, emphasizing the specific lexicogrammatical constructions learners appropriate, to understand how L2 sociolinguistic repertoires are constructed across time.

A multivariate analysis of the partitive genitive in Dutch. Bringing quantitative data into a theoretical discussion

Abstract This article takes a usage-based perspective on the partitive genitive construction in Dutch (iets moois, ‘something beautiful’), which has previously drawn scholarly attention from a theoretical perspective, due to the challenges it presents to Dutch nominal morphosyntax. We will argue that a good understanding of the construction at issue cannot circumvent the enormous variation in the expression of the genitive marker. Within the wide variation space, regular patterns can be discerned, which we uncovered by using mixed-effects logistic regression. This approach allows us to assess the precise contribution of internal factors (e.g. length of the adjective, or the type of quantifier) and external factors (e.g. regional variety, or register), as well as their interactions. This article has three objectives then: first, it wants to contribute to the description of Dutch syntax, second it aspires to advance methodological standards in grammatical investigation, and third, it makes a theoretical plea for a usage-based perspective, with full recognition of variation.