Usage-based Perspective Research Articles

Syntactic modification at early stages of L2 German writing development: A longitudinal learner corpus study

This study explores ab initio development of syntactic complexity in a longitudinal corpus of learner German writing from a Dynamic Usage-Based perspective. It contributes to the research on L2 writing complexity by focusing on beginning learners of an L2 other than English (German) and on fine-grained measures of syntactic complexity, operationally defined here as syntactic modification.The results show that not only ubiquitous global measures of syntactic complexity but also more specific measures, namely frequencies of syntactic modifiers, can serve as developmental indices at beginning L2 proficiency levels. The learners in this study modified their writing from the very onset of language study and the overall size and range of the modification system did not significantly change over four semesters. However, its composition changed continuously and reflected non-linear waxing and waning of different modifier categories. The study confirmed some results from previous cross-sectional research showing that interlanguage development is characterized by a decrease in cognitively easier (e.g., uninflected) categories and an increase in cognitively more difficult (e.g., inflected and clausal) categories. The high variability that was found along with uniform group trends demonstrates the necessity of simultaneous investigations of linguistic development in groups and individuals.

A usage-based approach to early-discourse pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers wa and ga.

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers wa and ga from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) was coded and analyzed. Findings showed that the four children initially used wa as a wh-question marker. They then gradually shifted its use to convey the proposition of given information. In contrast, the use of ga varied among the children. One child used ga with dynamic verbs in the past tense to report events he witnessed/experienced, while the other three children used it with a particular stative predicate in the present tense, expressing their subjective feeling toward referents. Findings were explained by the frequency of input to which the children had been exposed.

Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and language evolution research

In this paper we argue that we can gain important insights on the evolution of language and cognition by integrating evolutionary linguistics and the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. In Cognitive Linguistics, language is seen as tightly integrated with cognition as a whole. Construction Grammar and usage-based approaches are closely related to the Cognitive-Linguistic paradigm. Construction Grammar proposes that knowledge of language can be defined as the knowledge of form-meaning pairings of different degrees of schematicity and complexity, whereas usage-based approaches stress that language acquisition and processing are based on instances of actual language usage. As we demonstrate in this paper, concepts from Cognitive Linguistics, construction grammar, and usage-based approaches can help in elucidating the cognitive and interactional factors involved in language evolution. The paper will focus on two main areas: In evolutionary linguistics, language is seen as a complex adaptive system whose structure emerges out of the interaction of three other complex adaptive systems at three different timescales: ontogeny, glossogeny, and phylogeny. Cognitive Linguistics can help in specifying common cognitive factors and processes that play a role on all three of these timescales. Secondly, a Cognitive-Linguistic and constructionist, usage-based perspective can shed light on the cognitive factors underlying the origin of the division of labour between contentful (“lexical”) and procedural (“grammatical”) constructions in language structure. In a Cognitive-Linguistic perspective, this development can be related to the trade-off between the cognitive factors of learnability and expressivity .

Let’s go look at usage

AbstractThe English go-VERB construction as in I go get the paper every morning is said to be subject to the BARE STEM CONDITION, which states that neither verb can bear inflection (thus resulting in the ungrammaticality of *she went see/saw a doctor). Studies that address the constraint attribute it to underlying formal parameters, without paying attention to functional properties and/or usage events. The fact that we find occasional violations of the constraint in large amounts of data raises the question of the systematicity of this data and how to account for it. Arguing from a usage-based perspective, this paper assumes that the entrenched schema of go-VERB is hortatory (e.g., commands, advice, invitations), which make inflectional variants increasingly unlikely for semanticfunctional reasons. But where exceptions do occur, they are assumed to occur in contexts predicted by the construction’s semantics. These assumptions are borne out by data from a large corpus of web data. Potential counterexamples are tested for systematicity vs. random noise in (web) data using collostructional analysis and simple correlation measurements. The central arguments are thus (i) that the BARE STEM CONDITION is better conceived of as the result of go- VERB’s constructional semantics, and (ii) that rare exceptions can be framed in terms of likelihood of occurrence and distance from the licensing schema.

First language development: a usage-based perspective on past and current research.

I first outline three major developments in child language research over the past forty years: the use of computational modelling to reveal the structure of information in the input; the focus on quantifying productivity and abstraction; and developments in the explanation of systematic errors. Next, I turn to what I consider to be major outstanding issues: how the network of constructions builds up and the relationship between social and cognitive development and language learning. Finally, I briefly consider a number of other areas of importance to a psychologically realistic understanding of children's language development.

What does it mean to explain language change? Usage-based perspectives on causal and intentional approaches to linguistic diachrony, or: On S- curves, invisible hands, and speaker creativity

The question how language change should be explained has been intensely debated in linguistic research, and causal and intentional – or in Coseriu’s terms, final – approaches have been proposed as the two basic options that are possible here (cf. Coseriu 1958). I will therefore start by critically reviewing the legitimacy and potential of conceiving language change in causal terms. In a next step I will turn to intentional explanations, which have been proposed as the second fundamental type of approach, and then investigate whether the controversy about causal vs. intentional explanations of language change can be resolved by assuming different mechanisms and types of explanation for the stages of innovation and propagation respectively, as proposed by Keller and Croft. In these reflections key assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically of usage-based approaches to language and language change (Barlow/Kemmer 2000), will serve as a constant guideline, as they provide helpful criteria to judge the adequacy of explanations that have been previously proposed. Finally I will discuss the perspectives offered by usage-based approaches for explaining language change by outlining fundamental motors of change as well as their interplay in cognition and communication.

Re(de)fining grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective Discursive ambiguity in innovation scenarios

AbstractThe article explores the possibilities of re(de)fining grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective. Since definitions of grammaticalization remain controversial and current approaches differ in various important respects, some terminological clarification seems necessary. I will show that in spite of their close relation to usage-based approaches to language and language change, current approaches to grammaticalization and related phenomena do not consistently follow a usagebased perspective when defining the basic theoretical concepts and analyzing individual changes. I argue that a usage-based approach may propose new answers to controversial issues in grammaticalization research and suggest new pathways of analysis, focusing on the micro-steps of evolution. Finally, I present a case study of the French indefinite pronoun on which shows that innovations may occur and be diffused in distinct pragmatic settings. The notion of discursive ambiguity provides a detailed description of these potential innovation scenarios. In this sense, the study illustrates the potential of fine-grained analyses of the micro-events within grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective.

Constructing a schema: Word-class changing morphology in a usage-based perspective

AbstractThis paper discusses how collostructional analysis can be applied to the study of word-formation patterns. Drawing on a diachronic corpus study of German ung-nominalization and Infinitival Nominalization using the GerManC Corpus, it is shown that a cross-tabulation analysis comparing the frequencies of word-formation products to those of their respective bases can give valuable clues to the input language users rely on when abstracting a schema (i.e., a word-formation construction) from a quite heterogeneous array of instantiations.

English as a lingua franca through a usage-based perspective: merging the social and the cognitive in language use

The focus on English as a lingua franca (ELF) has changed from one on form to one on function, with the interest shifting from the observed regularities of the code to multiple ELF uses in intercultural contexts. This article criticises both form- and function-oriented views on ELF for relegating an unprecedented linguistic phenomenon to the narrow confines of surface-level grammatical descriptions or pragmatically oriented strategic competencies. It offers instead a usage-based perspective which takes grammar as the cognitive (re-)organisation of the language user's experience with English in sociocultural contexts of intercultural communication. ELF interactants use the language to mediate cognition, with recurring commonalities in forms and functions leading to transitions from variation to variety through grammaticalisation processes. The emerging variety is unique because, unlike native language competence, it rests primarily on an explicit knowledge of English operationalised through controlled processes of cognition subserving its use. Nevertheless, the possibility exists for explicit knowledge to become implicit in time, with contextually guided ‘usage events’ bringing about the gradual mapping of sociocognition onto the grammar of an emerging variety of English, namely, ELF.

Number problems in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children

The present study focuses on the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in number in spoken French. We compare production and comprehension of singular and plural verb forms in French monolingual and French-Swedish bilingual children (n = 58) aged five to ten. Overall, the results demonstrate that subject–verb agreement in number is a challenge to all French-speaking children, be it monolingual or bilingual, due to its heterogeneous, partial and lexically restricted nature. Furthermore, in production, bilingual children omit plural verb forms significantly more often than monolinguals. However, in comprehension, they pattern with their monolingual peers. The data also illustrate an asymmetric pattern: Plural verb forms are more easily comprehended than produced whereas singular verb forms are more easily produced than comprehended. The reasons for this asymmetry are discussed from a usage-based perspective, focusing on the frequency of verb forms and agreement patterns in the French input.

Syntactic change in an immigrant language: from non-finite to finite subordinate clauses in Turkish

While Turkish immigrants in Western Europe orient themselves to the norms of Standard Turkish, their Turkish is constantly being influenced by the European language they also speak. As a result of language contact, slowly but surely, new varieties of Turkish seem to be evolving, exhibiting loss of certain features and/or borrowing of words and structures taken from European languages. In this article, the focus is on Immigrant Turkish in the Netherlands, particularly on how it forms subordinate clauses. We compare data from the Netherlands and Turkey, with the data coming from two sources: spontaneous conversation and a sentence recall task. The main finding that both data sources converge on is that Dutch Turkish speakers clearly prefer to use finite subordinate clauses, especially in reported speech structures, and that this is a clear influence from Dutch. In Turkey, subordination is predominantly non-finite. The findings are interpreted in a usage-based perspective on contact-induced change.

Adult second language acquisition

This review article selects and elaborates on the important issues of adult second language acquisition research in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The fundamental question of whether adult second language acquisition and child first language acquisition are similar or different is addressed throughout the article. The issues of a critical period for acquisition, the importance of the linguistic input, and processing are discussed. Generative as well as usage-based perspectives are considered. Future research concerns and promising areas of investigation are proposed.

Using Theory of Mind

AbstractThe ability to flexibly predict others' behaviors has been ascribed to a theory of mind (ToM) system. Most research has focused on formal conceptual definitions of such a system, and the question of whom to credit with a ToM. In this article, I suggest shifting perspective from formal definitions to a usage‐based approach. This approach views action within human interaction as central to the emergence and continuous development of the ability to flexibly predict others' behaviors. Addressing the current debate about whether infants have a ToM, I illustrate how infants use flexible action expectations to interact with others appropriately. I also discuss the continuous development of ToM and its natural structure from a usage‐based perspective.

De imperatief in de verleden tijd

This article deals with the cross-linguistically rare phenomenon of past tense imperatives and, more precisely, with the past perfect imperative in Dutch. With this construction, the speaker typically conveys the undesirability of a state of affairs that cannot be changed anymore and reprimands the addressee. The article examines the two functional accounts that have been proposed in the literature. Proeme (1984) provides a definition of the imperative that is so broad that no a priori restrictions of verb types, aspect and tense can be assumed. It is argued that his starting point is debatable from a usage-based perspective and that his account cannot explain the construction’s standard interpretation, the dubious acceptability of other interpretations and its scarcity in the world’s languages. Duinhoven (1995) regards the past perfect imperative as the outcome of the interaction of the counterfactual conditional inversion construction and the (conditional) imperative construction. His fairly idiosyncratic account is evaluated positively in the light of construction grammar and the typological literature on directive strategies and insubordination. The assumed processes of analogy and conventionalization are argued to be at odds with the construction’s infrequency in corpora, though.

Verbal Compounding in English: A Challenge for Usage-Based Models of Word-Formation?

Usage-based models of grammar claim that, in a nutshell, speakers glean their tacit knowledge about language from their linguistic experience in communicative exchanges. Verbal compounding can be considered a challenge to usage-based models: on the one hand, genuine verbal compounding is generally regarded as not being a productive pattern for the formation of new English words; on the other hand, complex lexemes which could very well be the result of such a process, but were created by means of back-formation or conversion, e.g. to dry-clean, to babysit or to house-train, exist in non-negligible quantities. From a usage-based perspective, then, the question arises as to why speakers of English apparently do not have a productive schema for the creation of genuine verbal compounds at their disposal, even though they are confronted with linguistic input that seems to suggest, at least on the surface, that verbal compounding is indeed a productive process. Given that speakers with no training in linguistics are unlikely to be aware of the formation history of existing verbal compounds, what is the nature of the tacit knowledge they do seem to have that generally prevents them from creating new genuine verbal compounds and from judging them as acceptable when they come across them? This is the question addressed in the present paper. We offer findings from a systematic dictionary-cum-corpus analysis and from an acceptability and comprehension task which strongly suggest that hearers actually do not process novel genuine verbal compounds as compounds, but rely on different processing strategies instead, trying to take recourse to possible base nouns or adjectives and interpreting meanings on the basis of analogies to similar lexical items in the network. A check for the nameworthiness of the concepts denoted by the verbal compounds also seems to be involved. The paper concludes with a set of models representing the processing of different types of genuine verbal compounds and verbal pseudo-compounds, and showing that the ways in which these forms are processed are not conducive to the formation of a productive schema.

Copy Raising Construction in English: A Usage-based Perspective

In accounting for the so-called copy raising (CR) in English, the movement perspective has assumed that the embedded subject of the CR verb`s sentential complement is raised to the matrix subject, leaving behind its pronominal copy. This kind of movement-based analysis raises both empirical and analytical issues, when considering variations in the pronominal copy constraint. This paper investigates the actual uses of the construction, using online-available corpora. Based on this corpus search, we classify two different types of copy raising predicates (genuine and perception), and discuss their grammatical properties in detail. We suggest that the simple copying rule couched upon movement operations is not enough to capture great variations in the uses of the construction, and show that interpretive constraints, e.g., perceptual characterization condition, play an important role in licensing the construction.

Effects of Input Properties, Vocabulary Size, and L1 on the Development of Third Person Singular –s in Child L2 English

This study was designed to investigate the development of third‐person singular (3SG) –s in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage‐based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2‐year period. Assessing the contribution of a wide range of predictors, we show that word frequency, allomorph, lexicon size, inflectional properties of the first language (L1), and months of exposure to English all have impact on English L2 children's use of 3SG –s in obligatory contexts. This study enhances both our understanding of the development of 3SG –s and of child L2 acquisition. The outcomes support a usage‐based approach to learning inflection and emphasize the importance of a multifactorial analysis of language development.

Complement clauses in spoken German and English: Syntax, deixis and discourse-pragmatics

This article examines features of spoken German and English complement dass/that-clauses. It focuses on clauses with and without a complementiser, correlative constructions and unintegrated complement clauses, as well as a related English copular construction. Differences between the languages are discussed in terms of the role of the complementiser in relation to word order, assertional vs presuppositional clauses, epistemic main clauses, deixis and discourse function. While German and English have a similar set of possible complement clauses, they are shown to differ in terms of what is typical in spoken language. The article underlines the need to examine spoken language structures in use on their own terms and further confirms that complementation by a finite-clause is not a unitary phenomenon within each language. The analysis is carried out from a usage-based perspective of language which works with the concept of constructions and sees a close relationship between lexis and grammar. The article also has implications for typological work on complementation in spoken language.

I think and other complement-taking mental predicates: A case of and for constructional grammaticalization

This article provides a critical assessment of previous claims that complement-taking mental predicates (CTMPs) like I think, I suppose , etc. are instances of grammaticalization. In so doing, it calls attention to the main problems one encounters when applying commonly agreed-upon grammaticalization criteria to CTMPs. It is demonstrated that the syntactic mobility of CTMPs is crucial to their decategorialization while being at odds with the parameter of positional fixation. In addition, CTMPs' ability to occur both in adverb-like, parenthetical positions, and in verb-like, clause-initial position, suggests that their decategorialization is incomplete. The possibility to reactivate productive verbal properties in expressions that display a high degree of formulaicity is explained in terms of grammatical persistence. Another challenge facing the grammaticalization of CTMPs is the existence of variation in terms of tense, aspect and modality. The aforementioned obstacles are documented by present-day spoken British English corpus data. It is argued that, rather than regarding them as pragmaticalized or lexicalized as has alternatively been suggested, CTMPs should be approached from the usage-based perspective of constructional grammaticalization, which is concerned with the grammaticalization of schematic constructions that are part of a wider taxonomy rather than being isolated sequences.

Input frequencies in processing of verbal morphology in L1 and L2: Evidence from Russian

In this study we take a usage-based perspective on the analysis of data from the acquisition of verbal morphology by Norwegian adult learners of L2 Russian, as compared to children acquiring Russian as an L1. According to the usage-based theories, language learning is input-driven and frequency of occurrence of grammatical structures and lexical items in the input plays a key role in this process. We have analysed to what extent the acquisition and processing of Russian verbal morphology by children and adult L2 learners is dependent on the input factors, in particular on type and token frequencies. Our analysis of the L2 input based on the written material used in the instruction shows a different distribution of frequencies as compared to the target language at large. The results of the tests that elicited present tense forms of verbs belonging to four different inflectional classes (-AJ-, -A-, -I-, and -OVA-) have demonstrated that for both Russian children and L2 learners type frequency appears to be an important factor, influencing both correct stem recognition and generalisations. The results have also demonstrated token frequency effects. For L2 learners we observed also effects of formal instruction and greater reliance on morphological cues. In spite of the fact that L2 learners did not match completely any of the child groups, there are many similarities between L1 and L2 morphological processing, the main one being the role of frequency.