Usage-based Perspective Research Articles

English verb-argument construction profiles in a specialized academic corpus: Variation by genre and discipline

This study investigates genre and discipline effects on the frequency and contingency profiles of English Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs), with implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy. Specifically, 11 VACs that have featured prominently in recent analyses of general domain English usage in the British National Corpus are examined in a specialized corpus of 400 research articles. Analysis includes normalized frequency, type-token ratio, frequency rank, and delta P as a measure of verb-construction association strength, with the results analyzed across disciplines and in comparison to previous analyses on general domain English corpora. A clear consistency was found in the frequency and frequency ranks of VACs across the specialized and general corpora, which points towards the importance and meaningful nature of abstract constructions. At the same time, variation in the verb-construction contingency profiles also highlights the importance of genre and community. Findings are discussed within usage-based perspectives, with careful attention to the implications for English for Specific Purposes pedagogy.

Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations

Abstract One essential feature of voice alternation is that active and passive clauses centred around a given verb express the same meaning: the “meaning-preserving” hypothesis. One effect of the alternation is the different linking of grammatical relations and semantic roles, which affects the identity of the subject. This paper investigates the meaning-preserving hypothesis in voice alternation in Indonesian from a quantitative usage-based perspective by combining corpus-based data with sentence-production experiment data. It analysed Indonesian caused forward/backward motion verbs and the distribution of their (non-)metaphoric senses in active and passive. The findings demonstrate the frequency effects and sense-sensitivity of voice alternation, such that a given voice type of a verb is strongly associated with certain senses. This finding provides initial support for a previous study on voice alternation in an Austronesian language, predicting that the verb’s semantic properties may condition the statistical bias of the verb towards a particular voice. Some convergence between experimental and corpus findings indicates that participants demonstrate some representation of the strong association between a given voice form of the verb and the sense predominantly expressed in that form, highlighting the notion of item-specific representations of linguistic knowledge as found in construction grammar.

Crosslinguistic Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The core idea of corpus-based typology is to take languages as populations of utterances and to systematically investigate text production across languages in this sense. From a usage-based perspective, investigations of variation and preferences of use are at the core of understanding the distribution of conventionalized structures and their diachronic development across languages. Specific findings of corpus-based typological studies pertain to universals of text production, for example, in prosodic partitioning; to cognitive biases constraining diverse patterns of use, for example, in constituent order; and to correlations of diverse patterns of use with language-specific structures and conventions. We also consider remaining challenges for corpus-based typology, in particular the development of crosslinguistically more representative corpora that include spoken (or signed) texts, and its vast potential in the future.

Evidencialidade/mediatividade, modalidade epistémica e (inter)subjetividade

Evidentiality or, following the French linguistic tradition, “mediativity” is a complex and controversial category, with an already extensive body of literature devoted to other languages and a few studies focusing on Portuguese. As a conceptual category, abstracting away from its linguistic means of expression, which is to some extent present in languages such as Portuguese that lack a specific grammatical system for its codification, evidentiality/mediativity raises two main issues which are yet to be addressed: the first question concerns the definition of its status as a grammatical, semantic or discursive category and of its conceptual basis, traditionally characterized as referring to the source of information for the propositional content of the utterance, while the second touches upon its demarcation with respect to the conceptual category of epistemic modality. The aim of this study is to provide an answer to both questions from a cognitive-functional, usage-based perspective, on the basis of two grammaticalized evidential/mediative markers of Portuguese, namely the compound form of the future and the verb parecer ‘seem’ followed by a non-finite verb or a finite clause. We sustain the view that evidentiality provides an indication about the source and reliability of the information, and that reliability does not necessarily involve degrees of epistemic speaker commitment or degrees of (un)certainty. While the reportative evidential uses of the compound form of the future in Modern European Portuguese, typical of news reports, and of parecer provide evidence for the relative independence of evidentiality in relation to epistemic modality, the inferential evidential uses of the compound future and of parecer reveal a close link, and even a partial overlap, between evidentiality and epistemic modality. Both reportative and inferential uses of these evidential markers contribute to the speaker’s epistemic control in the discourse and speaker’s intersubjective alignment. While the inferential uses of the compound future and of parecer stemmed from diachronic cognitive and pragmatic-discursive processes of subjectification, the reportative uses of these evidential markers resulted from diachronic cognitive and pragmatic-discursive processes of intersubjectification.

Intense Turkish-Dutch bilingualism leads to intense Turkish-Dutch mixing

Abstract Codeswitching in the Turkish migration settings in Western Europe has been studied almost since the beginning of the labor migration that formed these communities. The patterns of codeswitching have gradually become more complex, which is demonstrated with reference to data from the Netherlands. Initially it was limited to the insertion of Dutch words into Turkish utterances, largely needed to fill lexical gaps. Gradually, as a new generation grew up with Dutch education, living most of their lives in a Dutch social environment, codeswitching patterns grew in complexity, with an increase in alternation between Dutch and Turkish utterances. Often, these and other patterns are attested in the speech of the same people at the same time, within a single conversation: they represent a bilingual speech style. The most recent investigations into Turkish-Dutch codeswitching show how this increasing intensity of bilingualism in the community has led to increasing integration of the languages in everyday in-group bilingual speech. Of all switches, a relatively small percentage is taken up by the insertion of content words into either language; yet, codeswitching is not always straightforward alternation between Turkish and Dutch utterances. Instead, utterances often contain chunks from both languages. This phenomenon will be illustrated in this article and explained through a usage-based perspective that privileges a processing-based over a structuralist account, but crucially ties this account to an understanding of the social motivations that make this kind of bilingual speech possible, or even desired.

“Can,” “Could,” or “May” in Chinese? A Usage-based Perspective Gleaned from Diachronic Corpus Analysis

“Can,” “Could,” or “May” in Chinese? A Usage-based Perspective Gleaned from Diachronic Corpus Analysis

Priming of Frames and Slots in Bilingual Children's Code-Mixing: A Usage-Based Approach.

This article investigates the role of direct input in the code-mixing of three bilingual children aged 2–4 years acquiring English as one language, and either German, Polish, or Finnish as the other. From a usage-based perspective, it is assumed that early children’s utterances are item-based and that they contain many lexically fixed patterns. To account for such patterns, the traceback method has been developed to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances are constructed on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. We apply this method to the code-mixed utterances, suggesting that much of the code-mixing occurs within frame-and-slot patterns, such as Was ist X? as in Was ist breakfast muesli? “What is breakfast muesli?” We further analyzed each code-mixed utterance in terms of priming. Our findings suggest that much of the early code-mixing is based on concrete lexically fixed patterns which are subject to input occurring in immediately prior speech, either the child’s own or that of her caregivers.

La gènesi dels somatismes: accions humanes fossilitzades

Somatic idioms – those including a part of the body – have been traditionally studied from a synchronic perspective, yielding different explanations for their semantic value. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the diachronic origin of idiomatic meaning, by illustrating the process of phraseologization from a historical, usage-based perspective. As the first step, we will reflect on the general nature of phraseological meaning, and then on the semantic particularities of somatic idioms. Secondly, we will carryout a corpus-based diachronic analysis of the Catalan idiom tapar-se el nas (to hold one’s nose) within the framework of the Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change. The different stages of the process will be exemplified and discussed. As a result, a new notion of somatic idioms as frozen human actions will be presented.

Figurative language in multilingual students’ L2 Swedish – a usage-based perspective

Abstract The aim of the current paper is to reinterpret some results of two previous studies on the mastery of figurative expressions from the perspective of usage-based linguistics. The reanalysis aims to shed more light on the learning and use of figurative language by multilingual students by exploring the complex interplay of linguistic creativity, expressivity, and conventionality in figurative expressions. The reinterpretation shows that many of the examples that were previously categorized as novel figurative expressions used in students’ writing, can be analyzed as instances of regular patterns, i.e. constructions, with certain lexical idiosyncrasies. Modifications of conventionalized figurative expressions are discussed and reinterpreted in terms of strength of entrenchment of links between form and meaning within certain constructions or links between constructions and conventionalized pragmatic information in the multilinguals’ mental construction. Implications for the treatment of Swedish figurative expressions in the second language class room are, in line with previous research, that focusing on regularity might reduce unpredictability, often seen as the core difficulty in the learning of such expressions in an L2. The paper also offers some directions for further investigation of the socio-cognitive processes involved in the learning of figurative language in an additional language.

The role of relevance for scalar diversity: a usage-based approach

abstractScalar inferences occur when a weaker statement like It’s warm is used when a stronger one like It’s hot could have been used instead, resulting in the inference that whoever produced the weaker statement believes that the stronger statement does not hold. The rate at which this inference is drawn varies across scalar words, a result termed ‘scalar diversity’. Here, we study scalar diversity in adjectival scalar words from a usage-based perspective. We introduce novel operationalisations of several previously observed predictors of scalar diversity using computational tools based on usage data, allowing us to move away from existing judgment-based methods. In addition, we show in two experiments that, above and beyond these previously observed predictors, scalar diversity is predicted in part by the relevance of the scalar inference at hand. We introduce a corpus-based measure of relevance based on the idea that scalar inferences that are more relevant are more likely to occur in scalar constructions that draw an explicit contrast between scalar words (e.g., It’s warm but not hot). We conclude that usage has an important role to play in the establishment of common ground, a requirement for pragmatic inferencing.

Directional Idioms in English and Welsh: A Usage-Based Perspective on Language Contact

Abstract The English verb-particle construction or phrasal verb (pv) has undergone dramatic semantic extensions from the expression of literal motion events (the ball rolled down the hill) – a pattern known as satellite-framing – to idiomatic figurative uses (the company will roll out a new plan) where selection of the particle is motivated by Conceptual Metaphors. Over the course of its long contact with English, Welsh – also satellite-framed with literal motion events – has extended the use of its verb-particle construction to replicate even highly idiomatic English pv s. Through a case study of ten metaphorical uses of up and its Welsh equivalent, we argue that this dramatic contact outcome points to the convergence by bilingual speakers on a single set of Conceptual Metaphors motivating the pv combinations. A residual Celtic possessive construction (lit. she rose on her sitting ‘she sat up’) competes with English-like pv s to express change of bodily posture.

Usage-Based Contact Linguistics: Effects of Frequency and Similarity in Language Contact

Abstract The influence of usage frequency, and particularly of linguistic similarity on human linguistic behavior and linguistic change in situations of language contact are well documented in contact linguistics literature. However, a theoretical framework capable of unifying the various explanations, which are usually couched in either structuralist, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic parlance, is still lacking. In this introductory article we argue that a usage-based approach to language organization and linguistic behavior suits this purpose well and that the study of language contact phenomena will benefit from the adoption of this theoretical perspective. The article sketches an outline of usage-based linguistics, proposes ways to analyze language contact phenomena in this framework, and summarizes the major findings of the individual contributions to the special issue, which not only demonstrate that contact phenomena are usefully studied from the usage-based perspective, but document that taking a usage-based approach reveals new aspects of old phenomena.

Epistemic constructions in L2 Norwegian: a usage-based longitudinal study of formulaic and productive patterns

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the development of epistemic verb–argument constructions in L2 Norwegian in four learners from a usage-based perspective. Usage-based theories hold that language learning is a gradual process of schematization. Recent research has pointed out that adult L2 learning may start out from both lexically specific and productive patterns, but also that formulaic language and semi-fixed patterns can persist for a long time in an L2. The aim of the present study is to trace how the schematization process unfolds in dense longitudinal data collected from learners in their second semester of intense Norwegian language studies, and to explore the interaction between formulaic and productive patterns in this period of language learning. The analyses show that the learners in general employ a limited repertoire of epistemic verbs, mainlytro‘think’ andvite‘know’. The level of productivity oftroandviteconstructions varies across the learners: while one learner shows increasingly productive use of constructions with both verbs, other learners rely on semi-fixed construction patterns. A general conclusion is thus that formulaic and semi-fixed patterns are not restricted to initial phases of L2 learning and should be an object of attention at all levels of L2 competence.

Input Issues in the Development of L2 French Morphosyntax

The aim of this article is to discuss the role of input characteristics in the development of French verb morphology. From a usage-based perspective, several cognitive and linguistic factors contribute to the ease or difficulty of processing input in L2 acquisition. This article concentrates on frequency, salience, and form–function association, factors that might influence what aspects of input are available to the learners’ attention. A presentation of French verb morphology from this perspective shows how these factors can contribute to the use of the regular -er verb paradigm as a default. A review of empirical studies confirms the influence of input characteristics. The results suggest that the dominant pattern of regular verbs and the scarcity of salient clues from irregular verbs contribute to the specificity of L2 French development. The conclusion addresses the question of enriching L2 classroom input with irregular verbs. Such an input could facilitate the perception of form–function association, and thus, contribute to a more efficient development of French verb morphology. The article concludes by suggesting other ways of studying the influence of input as well as avenues for future research.

The traceback method and the early constructicon: theoretical and methodological considerations

Abstract Usage-based approaches assume that children’s early utterances are item-based. This has been demonstrated in a number of studies using the traceback method. In this approach, a small amount of “target utterances” from a child language corpus is “traced back” to earlier utterances. Drawing on a case study of German, this paper provides a critical evaluation of the method from a usage-based perspective. In particular, we check how factors inherent to corpus data as well as methodological choices influence the results of traceback studies. To this end, we present four case studies in which we change thresholds and the composition of the main corpus, use a cross-corpus approach tracing one child’s utterances back to another child’s corpus, and reverse and randomize the target utterances. Overall, the results show that the method can provide interesting insights—particularly regarding different pathways of language acquisition—but they also show the limitations of the method.

Connective frequencies in child-directed texts

Abstract Starting from a usage-based perspective of language acquisition, the present study investigates the occurrence of connectives in BasiLex, an 11.5 million word corpus of texts Dutch children encounter during the primary school years (grades 1–6). Specifically, we investigate how connective frequencies change across grades, how these changes reflect the theorized orders of connective acquisition in the work of Bloom et al. (1980) and Evers-Vermeul & Sanders (2009), and we make a comparison with the frequencies of connectives in the adult written language corpus Celex. Briefly summarized, our findings show that the numbers of connectives increase sharply after grade 1 and then more steadily across grades 2 to 6; we see some reflection of the connective acquisition theory of Evers-Vermeul & Sanders in the connective frequencies in texts offered to children; and we see some remarkable similarities between connective frequencies in the adult corpus Celex as compared to connective frequencies in grade 1 and grade 6 texts in BasiLex. Our findings suggest that the written input offered to children harmonizes with theoretical approaches that emphasize the incremental growth of word knowledge in children as a function of exposure.

A construção relacional polissêmica do tipo SN1 de SN2 no português brasileiro

Este estudo se dedica à descrição da construção relacional do tipo SN1 de SN2 em termos de sua natureza polissêmica, isto é, da possibilidade de se associar a diferentes sentidos que estariam relacionados, como finalidade, parte-todo e identificação, entre outros. Defendemos aqui que os sentidos veiculados por essa construção podem ser associados a um modelo cognitivo de ponto de referência, conforme proposto por Langacker (1991, 2003). Nossa análise está orientada pelo enquadre teórico da Linguística Baseada no Uso, por entendermos que a gramática de uma língua é modelada via processos cognitivos de domínio geral e ancorada na experiência do falante.

A Usage-Based Perspective on Spanish Variable Clitic Placement

This study provides a usage-based analysis of Spanish Variable Clitic Placement (VCP). A variationist analysis of VCP in spoken Argentine Spanish indicates that VCP grammar is constrained by lexical (finite verb) and semantic (animacy) factors. Considering the finite effect, the study focuses on usage-based accounts for the gradience attested across finite verb constructions. Grammaticalized meaning and increased frequency tend to account for VCP in general. However, one [tener que + infinitive] construction is found exceptional in that it favors enclisis despite its grammaticalized meaning of obligation and its high frequency of use. Data from a larger corpus indicate that the [tener que + infinitive] construction lacks unithood, signaling great analyzability of its component elements. Through an exemplar analysis, the [haber que ‘must’ + infinitive] construction that categorically takes enclisis and which is strongly linked to [tenerque + infinitive] diachronically, semantically, and structurally emerges as a likely analogical model for VCP with tener que, pushing tener que towards enclisis. This study not only illustrates how usage-based linguistics can capture VCP more generally, but also how this framework provides powerful tools to discover the constraints on VCP in naturalistic use in order to account for individual construction behavior.

Variable motion event encoding within languages and language types: a usage-based perspective

AbstractSpeakers of the world’s languages differ in the ways they talk about directed motion. Speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-languages; e.g., English) typically conflate Path and Manner in a single clause (e.g., run out), whereas speakers of verb-framed languages (V-languages; e.g., Spanish) tend to convey Path and Manner in two different clauses (e.g., salir corriendo ‘exit running’). Herein, we ask whether speakers also show systematic variability within particular languages and language types in their directed motion descriptions. We examine this question by comparing oral narratives of adult native speakers of one V-language (Spanish) and two S-languages (German, Polish) (N = 15), where each subject provided a simultaneous description of an ongoing animated video depicting self- (e.g., jump into the river) and caused-motion (e.g., throw a stone into the river) events. Our results showed strong evidence for both intra-typological and language-internal variability, especially in the extent to which the Manner component is encoded. Overall, the locus of Path encoding (e.g., verb, prefix, particle) and the conceptual structure of motion events (i.e., self-motion, caused-motion) were two key factors that influenced the speakers’ choice of lexicalization pattern. We discuss the implications of our findings, which (i) suggest a more nuanced typology of motion events that expands the binary distinction between V- vs. S-languages – in line with earlier work on intra-typological variability, and (ii) highlight the relevance of such a nuanced typology for motion cognition.

Dynamic Usage-based Principles in the Development of L2 Finnish Evaluative Constructions

AbstractThis study investigates the formal verbalizations of evaluation used by four beginning L2 learners of Finnish from a dynamic usage-based perspective. Longitudinal data collected weekly were used to investigate what kind of constructions learners use to express evaluation and how these interact and develop over time. The results show that when a new construction is acquired in the L2, another related construction might regress. The results also point to increased variability in the construction during a phase of rapid development and reduced variability in the phases of regression or slower progress. These findings add to our understanding of a developing L2 as a system in which changes in one aspect have the potential to bring about changes in interconnected aspects. The variability patterns found in the learners’ developmental trajectories add to the growing body of research that proposes variability as meaningful in the learning process.