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BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

9th International Conference on Construction Grammar

Book of Abstracts

October 0509, 2016, Juiz de Fora, Brazil

CONTENTS

Plenary Lectures

Trees, Assemblies, Chains, and Windows

Ronald Langacker (University of California, San Diego)

From Construction Grammar to embodied construction practice

Sabine De Knop (Université SaintLouis)

(Construction) Grammar does not Suffice for NLU

Jerome Feldman (International Computer Science Institute)

Subtle implicit language facts emerge from the functions of constructions

Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)

Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar

Martin Hilpert (Université de Neuchâtel)

General Session

“On means auf”: the semantics of English and German prepositional complements in contrast

Peter Uhrig (FAU ErlangenNürnberg)

Arne Zeschel (IDS Mannheim)

What the ... ? The emotion of question augmentatives

Michael Ellsworth (ICSI/UC Berkeley)

Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of The ConcessiveComparative Construction "(até que) para X, Y"

Gabriela da Silva Pires (UFJF)

Luiz Fernando Matos Rocha (UFJF)

(Re)production in performance: a Construction Grammar analysis of Baltic folk songs.

Gintaras Dautartas (Vilnius University)

1

A Constructicon for Russian

Daria Barylnikova (School of Linguistics, NRUHSE, Moscow)

Francis M. Tyers (HSLfakultehta UiT Norgga árktalaš universtehta, Tromsø)

Ekaterina Rakhilina (School of Linguistics, NRUHSE, Moscow)

A constructiconbased approach to teaching Swedish as a second language

Camilla Håkansson (University of Gothenburg)

Benjamin Lyngfelt (University of Gothenburg)

Joel Olofsson (University of Gothenburg)

Julia Prentice (University of Gothenburg)

A usagebased approach to the spray/load alternation

Naoki Otani (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

Adding Constraints to the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon

Ludmila Meireles Lage (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Tiago Timponi Torrent (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Ely Matos (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Be My Guest – Polysemy in FrameNet resources

Karin Friberg Heppin (University of Gothenburg)

Dana Danélls (University of Gothenburg)

Building a scalar model for Finnish verbs of remaining and their polarity

Gaïdig Dubois (University of Helsinki)

Constructicon and syntax – on relations between constructions and constructs


Construction Grammar and Derivational Morphology: the case of Suffixal Quantifying Constructions of Portuguese

Igor de Oliveira Costa (Federal Institute of North Minas Gerais)

2

Neusa Salim Miranda (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Designing a constructicon of English

Thomas Herbst (FriedrichAlexanderUniversität ErlangenNürnberg)

Information structure and the pragmatics of three verbal negation constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Luis Filipe Lima e Silva (UFMG)

Heliana Mello (UFMG)

Nice and Adj/Adv Construction in Imperative

Kiyono Fujinaga (The University of Tokyo/State University of New York at Buffalo)

One constructicon or two? Causedmotion construction in FrenchGerman bilingual children

Katharina Scholtz (LudwigMaximiliansUniversity Munich)

Nikolas Koch (LudwigMaximiliansUniversity Munich)

Prosody and constructional meaning: data on spoken Brazilian Portuguese


Giulia Bossaglia (UFMG)

The dynamics of patterns and constructions

Peter Petré (University of Antwerp)

Frame Relevance: a measure for distinguishing between arguments and adjuncts

Jaakko Leino (University of Helsinki)

Markus Hamunen (University of Helsinki)

Seppo Kittilä (University of Helsinki)

Jouni Rostila (University of Helsinki)

Frame evoking nonlexical elements: Wordinternal, framebearing morphological elements in a polysynthetic language – a few examples in Greenlandic (EskimoAleut).

3

Judithe Denbæk (Ilisimatusarfik – The University of Greenland)

Cognitive Construals underlying grammatical aspects and modalities in Dravidian Languages

Vigneshwaran Muralidaran (IIITH)

Ganesh Katrapati (IIITH)

Multiple source constructions in language change: a case study

Daniel McColm (University of Edinburgh)

Constructions in Functional Discourse Grammar

Elnora ten Wolde (University of Vienna)

Fact constructions across languages


The Future (interpretation) of the Finnish Progressive Construction

Heidi Niva (University of Helsinki)

Mixed Inheritance in Possessive Constructions

Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS)

On the Construcitonalization of [NP1+Vi+le (了)+NP2] in Mandarin Chinese

LI Yanzhi (Zhejiang University)

Pseudocoordination in Mainland Scandinavian. The gå ‘go/walk’ and VP construction in the history of Swedish

Peter Andersson (University of Gothenburg)

Kristian Blensenius (University of Gothenburg)

Argument Structure Constructions and Metaphor in Null Instantiation Patterns

Oana A. David (University of California, Merced)

Paradigms on the level of phrases within a constructional network: Idiosyncratic use of indefinite articles in Norwegian nominals with the word slags

Oda Røste Odden (University of Oslo)

4

The relation between motion verbs and motion constructions – lexicogrammatical attraction and productivity


Comparing constructicons across languages: Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish counterparts to the construction entries in the FrameNet English Constructicon

Adrieli Bonjour Laviola da Silva (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)



Linnéa Bäckström (University of Gothenburg)

Quasigrammatical constructions: lexical expression of grammatical meanings


Alexander Letuchiy (School of Linguistics, NRUHSE, Moscow)

Vladimir Plungian (Vinogradov Institute for Russian Language, Moscow)

Definiteness and finite clause complements: The Finnish complementation construction, referentiality, and the similarity of different presuppositions


Pragmatics and construction choice in cognitive sociolinguistics: contrastive negation in English

Olli O. Silvennoinen (University of Helsinki)

Semiauxiliaries in French from a Frames and Constructions diachronic perspective

Myriam Bouveret (University of Rouen)

Reconstructing Constructionalization: The Story of Topics in Sirva

Don Daniels (Australian National University)

Grammar and image: how language modulates grammar and grammar modulates image

Antônio Suárez Abreu (UNESPAr)

5

Sarah Barbieri Vieira (UNESA/UNESPAr)

Constructions are not predictable but motivated: Evidence from the Spanish completive reflexive

Wojciech Lewandowski (University of Copenhagen)

Parallel texts in crosslinguistic constructional research: the case of CircumBaltic presuppositional comitatives

Natalia Perkova (Stockholm University)

Pivot constructions as mitigated echolalia by Brazilian children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Aline Bisotti Dornelas (UFJF)


The acceptability of ba+subjectoriented resultative constructions in Chinese

Shuo Yu (Lancaster University)

Phrasal Verbs: a lexicongrammar teaching perspective



From syntactic tests to constructional diagnostics of the role of argument structure constructions

Johan Pedersen (University of Copenhagen)

ThreeMinute Madness Session

A study on the use of arguments in nominalizations as instances of grammatical metaphors finished in TION in academic texts of native

Giovana Perini Frizera de Morais Loureiro (UFMG)

A constructional case study regarding the legitimacy of continuous tenses in Albanian

Edmond Cane (Interuniversity Center of Albanian Studies)

Foregrounding and Backgrounding in biblical narrative

Lívia Miranda de Lima Santos (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

6

Discrepancies between the passive construction in Brazilian Portuguese and English: evidence from analysis of spoken corpora

Mara Passos Guimarães (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

Ricardo Augusto de Souza (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

Word Profile Automatic Tracking Through the Prism of Construction Grammars and Distributionalism

Emmanuel Cartier (Université Paris 13 Sorbonne Paris Cité, LIPN – RCLN CNRS UMR 7030)

From discourse to syntax: a quantitative look into the strategies of subject indetermination in Brazilian Portuguese and in English

Rodrigo Garcia Rosa (University of São Paulo)

Machine Translation for Entity Nouns in a QualiaEnriched DomainSpecific FrameNet

Alexandre Diniz da Costa (UFJF)

Constructional Tolerance in the Brazilian Portuguese CausedMotion Construction Syntax

Fernanda da Silva Ribeiro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

"Se pá” constructions in Brazilian Portuguese: a preliminary Construction Grammar approach

Tainara Duro Agostini (UFSCar)

Flávia B.M.HirataVale (UFSCar)

Linguistic and Computational Modeling of the Active Transitive, Ergative and Split Object Constructions

Vânia Gomes de Almeida (UFJF)

A Cognitive Analysis Of The Deictic Expression Here (Aqui) In Interviews And In Comic Strips

Hayat Passos Ferraz Pinheiro (UESB)

Type noun constructions in North Scandinavian: Kinda, what’s the reason that we sorta start to use all kinds of type nouns to indicate uncertainty and that typa thing?

7


Theme Sessions

Computational Semantics with Frames and Constructions

Miriam R. L. Petruck (International Computer Science Institute)

Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University)

OmniGraph: Semantic Frame Representation and Graph Kernel Learning

Boyi Xie (Columbia University)

Rebecca J. Passonneau (Columbia University)

Vector space for semantic roles: distances and semantic maps

Olga Lyashevskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS)

Egor Kashkin (Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS)

Unsupervised Induction of Shallow Semantic Representations with FeatureRich Models

Diego Marcheggiani (University of Amsterdam)

Ehsan Khoddam (University of Amsterdam)

Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam)

A computationallyaided frame and constructionbased analysis of motion metaphors in corpora

Elise Stickles (Stanford University)

Ellen K. Dodge (International Computer Science Institute)

Protoproperties of Definiteness and Grammatical Constructions

ChuCheng Lin (JHU)

Archna Bhatia (IHMC)

CARMA: Constructional Analysis using Relations among Multiple Attribute Value Matrices

Tiago Torrent (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)


8

Adrieli Silva (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Ludmila Meireles (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Alexandre Diniz (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Vânia Almeida (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Tatiane Tavares (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Improving Frame Semantic Parsing via Dependency Path Embeddings

Michael Roth (University of Edinburgh)

Poster Presentations

Embodied Construction Grammar Meaning Representation of Frames and Constructions: Caused_motion



Framebased resolution of coreference for a highly inflected language

Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Magdalena Zawisławska (Institute of Polish Language, University of Warsaw)

A retrieval approach to construction detection

Anna Ehrlemark (University of Gothenburg)

Richard Johansson (Chalmers University of Technology)

Disambiguating Semantic Roles in Swedish Compounds with Swedish FrameNet and SALDO

Karin Hedberg (University of Gothenburg)

Richard Johansson (University of Gothenburg)

Distributional embeddings and diachronic construction grammar

Sara Budts (University of Antwerp)

Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp)


9

Grammatical Framework for implementing multilingual frames and constructions

Normunds Grūzītis (University of Latvia, IMCS)

Dana Dannélls (University of Gothenburg)

Aarne Ranta (University of Gothenburg)

Francis M. Tyers (UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta)

Constructionalization and Constructional Changes

Maria Luiza Braga (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Maria da Conceição Paiva (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

The development of a complex conditional conjunction: the case of (en) (el) caso (de) que in Spanish

Anton Granvik (Goteborgs Universitet)

Constructional changes: a diachronic study of the prepositional phrase por causa de

Bruno Araújo de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Maria da Conceição de Paiva (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Binominal Constructions in Portuguese

Karen Sampaio Braga Alonso (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Variable particle positioning in English transitive phrasal verbs

Manuela Correa de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Brazilian Portuguese Clefts: A Case of Constructionalization?

Maria Luiza Braga (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/CNPq)

André Felipe Cunha Vieira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Capes/Galaic Language Institute)

Diego Leite de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Constructionalization and constructional changes: The case of [xque]conect

Maria Maura Cezario (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/CNPq)

Monique dos Santos (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

10

Constructions of terminative aspect in Brazilian Portuguese

Rubens Loiola (UESPI/UFRJ)

Constructional changes: a diachronic study of porém, contudo and todavia

Simone Silva de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

On the evolution of constructions: a Brazilian Portuguese case study on [pegar] and [(a)garrar]

Sueli Coelho (UFMG)

Thaís Cristófaro Silva (UFMG, CNPq, FAPEMIG)

Grammaticalization and verb constructions in varieties of portuguese: intralinguistic tendencies?

The development of [SÓ QUE X] in Portuguese language from the perspective of grammatical constructionalization

Patrícia F.da Cunha Lacerda (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

Constructions, Usage and Intersubjectivity

Lílian Ferrari (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Negotiating “subjectivities” in interaction: concessive constructions and mental spaces settings

André V. Lopes Coneglian (Mackenzie Presbyterian University)

Cognitive Alignment and Generic Uses of You and We in Interaction

Helen de Andrade Abreu (UFRJ / CAPES)

Present tense and epistemic proximity in journalistic headlines

Caroline Soares da Silva (UFRJ)

Temporal backshifting and intersubjectivity in Brazilian Portuguese conditionals

Paloma Bruna Silva de Almeida (UFRJ)

(Inter)subjectivity as a conceptual device within the epistemic complementation clause network

Sandra A. Faria

11

(Inter)Subjectivity and Epistemic Constructions: a cognitive corpusbased study of Brazilian Portuguese

Luciana Beatriz Ávila (Universidade Federal de Viçosa)

Fictive interaction as grammatical construction: pairing between prosody and meaning in Brazilian Portuguese


Pablo Arantes (UFSCar)

Frequency effects and the impact of Christianity in the emergence of the reportative meaning of Latin secundum NP (‘according to’ NP) via extended intersubjectivity

Caterina Guardamagna (University of Liverpool)

Semantic and pragmatic properties of ditransitive construction in Brazilian Portuguese

Maria Angélica Furtado da Cunha (UFRN)

Intersubjectivity and constructionalization of [Locative+Verb] connectors in Portuguese

Mariangela Rios de Oliveira (UFF)

Information structure and constructional productivity: the case of Brazilian Portuguese adverbial adjective

Victor Virgínio (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Diogo Pinheiro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Constructions and frameshifting in short jokes

Elyssa Soares Marinho (UFRJ)

Multimodal metaphoric constructions in verbalgestural compounds

Maíra Avelar (UESB)

FrameBased Accounts of Specialist Languages

Pamela Faber (University of Granada)

Marcin Grygiel (University of Rzeszów)

The framebased representation of SNOMED Clinical Terms®

12

MariaCornelia Wermuth (KU Leuven)

Frame to frame relations and specialized corpus in the development of semantic frames for the tourism domain

Maucha Andrade Gamonal (University Juiz de Fora, UC Berkeley)

Combining Frame Semantics and distributional semantics to discover frames within the field of the environment

Daphnée Azoulay (Université de Montréal)

MarieClaude L’Homme (Université de Montréal)

Multidimensionality in FrameBased Terminology

Pilar LeónAraúz (University of Granada)

Exploring the Conventional Frame Constraint in metaphorical verb meanings from the environmental science domain

José Manuel Ureña GómezMoreno (University of CastillaLa Mancha)

Multimodality in FrameBased Terminology

Arianne Reimerink (University of Granada)

Participant and argument roles in Construction Grammar vs. semantic categories and semantic roles in Framebased Terminology

Miriam Buendía Castro (University of CastillaLa Mancha)

Hyperversatility as a problem for framebased conceptual modeling

Antonio San Martín (Maynooth University)

The emergence of the FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT frame as a result of cognitive mechanisms

Paulina Potęga (University of Rzeszów)


The function of interactional frames in the production and perception of oral poetry


A framebased multilingual knowledge base for sports and tourism – m.knob

13

Ely Matos (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

Tiago Torrent (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

Maucha Gamonal (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

Simone Peron (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

Alexandre Diniz (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

Collocational networks and morphosyntactic patterns in specialized corpora

Beatriz Sánchez Cárdenas (University of Granada)

Carlos Ramisch (University of AixMarseille)

The Saussurean sign revisited: Accounting for formmeaning mismatches in Construction Grammar

Nikos Koutsoukos (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Kristel Van Goethem (F.R.S.FNRS & Université Catholique de Louvain)

Hendrik De Smet (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

A quantitative measure of constructional contamination through superficial resemblance

Dirk Pijpops (QLVL, University of Leuven)

Freek Van de Velde (QLVL, University of Leuven)

On how fullverb inversion lifts restrictions on the use of the simple tenses in English

Astrid De Wit (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Disentangling formmeaning mismatches of light verbs: an image schematic approach

Ferran Suñer Université catholique de Louvain

V1 and V2 Coordination, Multiple Inheritance, and Polysemy

Soteria Svorou (San José State University)

Overgeneralization of modal verbs in child language as a result of non conventional formmeaning mapping

Sara Jonkers (Université Catholique de Louvain)

14

What’s in a word? – Itemspecific and general knowledge in linguistic theory


New verbs of communication in English and German from a constructionist and a valency angle

Adele Goldberg (Princeton)

Thomas Herbst (FAU ErlangenNürnberg)

Temporal (event) frame shaped interchangeably in idiosyncratic verb and tense element


Telicity and verb meaning in the choice of Transitive or Intransitive motion constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Aparecida de Araújo Oliveira (UFV)

The Particle out in the Multiword Verb Come Out

Edelvais Brígida Caldeira Barbosa (UFMG)

Metaphorical extensions of over: a study on functionalcognitive linguistics

Raquel Rossini Martins Cardoso (UFMG)

International FrameNet Workshop

Introducing OpenWordnetPT: an open Portuguese wordnet for reasoning

Alexandre Rademaker (IBM Research)

Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications)

Livy Real (IBM Research)

Fabricio Chalub (IBM Research)

Claudia Freitas (PUCRio)

Extracting common and complex knowledge from text

Michael Roth (Saarland University)

Framesemantic parsing using FrameNetderived Embodied Construction Grammar constructions

Ellen Dodge (International Computer Science Institute)

15

Sean Trott (University of California, San Diego)

Luca Gilardi (International Computer Science Institute)

Oana David (University of California, Merced)

Integrating FrameNet and MetaNet

Miriam R L Petruck (ICSI)

Ellen K Dodge (ICSI)

The Special Problem of Spatial Language: Representing Space in FrameNet


Swedish FrameNet – framing of a different shade

Karin Friberg Heppin (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Lars Borin (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Malin Ahlberg (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Dana Dannélls (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Markus Forsberg (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Maria Toporowska Gronostaj

Richard Johansson (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg)

Dimitrios Kokkinakis (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

LeifJöran Olsson (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

Jonatan Uppström (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

FrameNet development for Latvian


Guntis Bārzdiņš (National information agency LETA)

Progress in Chinese FrameNet

Qinghua Chai (Shanxi University in China)

Ru Li (Shanxi University in China)

16

Hongyan Zhao (Shanxi University in China)

Russian FrameBank now linked to FrameNet

Olga Lyashevskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS, Moscow)

A flexible tool for an enriched FrameNet: the FrameNet Brasil Webtool 2.0



Force Dynamics in FrameNet

Hannah E. Phinney (International Computer Science Institute)

The Swedish Constructicon – current status and future prospects


Towards Greater Collaboration in FrameNet Development

Collin Baker (ICSI)

17

Plenary Lectures

18

Trees, Assemblies, Chains, and Windows

Ronald Langacker (University of California, San Diego)

[email protected] For describing grammatical organization, metaphors based on a variety of source domains—including trees, networks, chains, paths, and windows—all appear to have some validity. In Cognitive Grammar they pertain to facets of assemblies, where semantic and phonological structures are connected by relations of symbolization, composition, and categorization. Assemblies have a temporal dimension; consisting in sequenced processing activity that runs concurrently on different time scales, they involve both seriality and hierarchy. In their hierarchical aspect, they are comparable to constituency trees, and in their connections, to dependency trees. Assembly elements, which can be characterized at any level of specificity, are connected in both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. A person’s linguistic ability comprises a vast assembly of conventional units, a portion of which are activated as part of the transient assembly constituting a particular expression. Lexicon and grammar effect the implementation of semantic functions—affective, interactive, descriptive, and discursive—which emerge with varying degrees of salience depending on their symbolization by segmental, prosodic, and other means. Assemblies thus make possible a unified approach to processing, structure, function, and use.

19

mailto:[email protected]

From Construction Grammar to embodied construction practice

Sabine De Knop (Université SaintLouis) [email protected]

In recent years, foreign language pedagogy has recognized the need to focus (i) on larger meaningful sequences of words (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992; Wray 2002; Ellis & Cadierno 2009; Gonzalez Rey 2013) and (ii) further on communicative goals (Nunan 1991; Widdowson 1992; Savignon 2000). Difficulties in the learning process of a foreign language result from the conceptual and constructional differences between expressions in the native and foreign language. Teaching materials often propose a lexical approach with an unstructured set of constructed examples. In Goldberg’s (1995 & 2006) Construction Grammar (CxG) larger meaningful sequences are constructions, i.e. entrenched formmeaning mappings resulting from generalization and schematization. The Construction Grammar model has a number of assets for foreign language teaching (FLT) and learning (FLL).

1. With the postulate of meaningful schematic templates, CxG makes it possible to establish a structured inventory of abstract constructions with prototypical exemplars and inheritance links between the constructions’ instantiations. This will be illustrated with the inventory of German constructions with the preposition bis (‘up to’, ‘until’).

2. The L2templates must then be practiced so that they can become entrenched. CxG focuses on noncompositional sequences of words which are similar to chunks. A methodology based on chunking (Ellis 2009: 147) fosters a “cognitive restructuring in the mind of bilinguals” (Athanasopoulos 2009: 92) or a “rethinking for speaking” (Robinson and Ellis 2008; Ellis and Cadierno 2009: 125).

3. But to be proficient in a foreign language also means to use new words in constructions. Learners can be asked to extend the use of new lexical units as slotfillers into constructional patterns. This will be exemplified with the use of German posture and placement verbs in the caused motion and the corresponding intransitive construction (see Ellis and Ferreira 2009).

4. Because CxG offers a more holistic approach, it allows to describe similar constructions in different domains, either literal or phraseological, like for instance with ditransitive phraseologisms (De Knop & Mollica 2016).

But having learned a vast number of constructional templates of a language does not automatically imply that the learner can produce L2constructions and their instantiations in a creative way. Therefore, the CxG model must be enriched with further insights from Cognitive Linguistics which claims that conceptual categories and their linguistic expressions are the result of embodied processes (Lakoff 1987).

20


The talk will make some suggestions for interactive activities which can foster ‘embodied teaching and learning’.

Keywords: Applications of Construction Grammar. Foreign Language Teaching. Foreign Language Learning. Construction Practice. Embodiment. German Preposition bis . German Placement Verbs. Ditransitive Phraseologisms.

References

Athanasopoulos, Panos (2009). Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals: The case of Greek blues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12: 1, 8395.

De Knop, Sabine & Mollica, Fabio (2016). A constructionbased analysis of German ditransitive phraseologisms for language pedagogy. In De Knop, Sabine & Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (eds.), Applied Construction Grammar, 5388. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Ellis, Nick (2009). Optimizing the input: Frequency and sampling in usagebased and formfocused learning. Handbook of Language Teaching 139158.

Ellis, Nick & Cadierno, Teresa (2009). Constructing a Second Language. Introduction to the special section. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7: 11139.

Ellis, Nick C. & FerreiraJunior, Fernando (2009). Construction learning as a function of frequency, frequency distribution, and function. The Modern Language Journal 93: 3, 370385.

Goldberg, Adele (1995). Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Goldberg, Adele (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

González Rey, Maria Isabel (2013). Presentation: Phraseodidactics, an applied field of Phraseology. In González Rey, Maria Isabel (Ed.), Phraseodidactic Studies on German as a Foreign Language / Phraseodidaktische Studien zu Deutsch als Fremdsprache , 710. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac.

Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nattinger, James R. & DeCarrico, Jeanette S. (1992). Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Nunan, David (1991). Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum. Tesol Quarterly 25: 2, 279–295.

Robinson, Peter & Ellis, Nick (2008). Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. London: Routledge.

Savignon, Sandra J. (2000). Communicative language teaching. In Byram, Michael (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning, 125–129. London: Routledge.

Widdowson, Henry G. (1992). ELT and EL Teacher. ELT Journal 46:4, 333339.

Wray, Alison (2002). Formulaic Language and the Lexicon . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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(Construction) Grammar does not Suffice for NLU

Jerome Feldman (International Computer Science Institute)

[email protected]

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a manifest goal for applied linguistics, but its theoretical importance is not as obvious. Integrated formmeaning pairs comprise the crux of Construction Grammar, but what is meaning? Decades of work at ICSI/UCB has established that embodied semantics (ECG) is necessary, but we also know that it is not sufficient. Language is inherently contextual and underspecified. An isolated grammar theory or program can only provide schematic analyses (SemSpecs in ECG) that are inadequate for full NLU. The talk will describe our current work on building and testing NLU systems for particular domains, prototypically autonomous systems like robots or cars. This involves an ECG based analyzer that is largely taskindependent and we assume that the context involves some application with a welldefined interface (API). A complete NLU product involves several additional components for defining and carrying out the NLU requirements of the domain. All of these components have universal “core” realizations plus mechanisms for extension. As a general principle, we suggest that NLU can be divided into broad considerations and those that are inherently contextual.

References

Bryant, J. (2008). BestFit Constructional Analysis . PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley. Eppe, M., S. Trott and J. Feldman. (2016). Exploiting Deep Semantics and Compositionality of Natural Language for HumanRobot Interaction. In arXiv:1604.06721 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) .

Eppe,M., S. Trott, V. Raghuram, J. Feldman and A. Janin. (2016). ApplicationIndependent and IntegrationFriendly Natural Language Understanding. In Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence (GCAI 2016), EPiC Series in Computing .

Feldman, J. (2006). From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language . MIT Press.

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Feldman, J., J. Bryant and E. Dodge. (2009). A Neural Theory of Language and Embodied Construction Grammar. In The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (pp.38–111), Oxford University Press.

Feldman, J. (2010). Embodied Language, Bestfit Analysis, and Formal Compositionality, Physics of Life Reviews , Vol. 7, #4, 385410.

Feldman, J. (2016). Actionability and Simulation: No Representation without Communication. Front. Psychol. 7:1204, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01204.

Trott, S., M. Eppe and J. Feldman. (2016). Communicating Intentions in HumanRobot Interaction. In: International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN 2016).

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Subtle implicit language facts emerge from the functions of constructions

Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)

[email protected]

Much has been written about the unlikelihood of innate, syntaxspecific, universal knowledge of language (Universal Grammar) on the grounds that it is biologically implausible, unresponsive to crosslinguistic facts, theoretically inelegant, and implausible and unnecessary from the perspective of language acquisition. While relevant, much of this discussion fails to address the sorts of facts that generative linguists often take as evidence in favor of the Universal Grammar Hypothesis: subtle, intricate, knowledge about language that speakers implicitly know without being taught. This paper revisits a few oftencited such cases and argues that, although the facts are sometimes even more complex and subtle than is generally appreciated, appeals to Universal Grammar fail to explain the phenomena. Instead, such facts are strongly motivated by the functions of the constructions involved. The following specific cases are discussed: a) the distribution and interpretation of anaphoric one, b) constraints on longdistance dependencies, c) subjectauxiliary inversion, and d) crosslinguistic linking generalizations between semantics and syntax.

Keywords: Anaphoric One. Longdistance Dependencies. Syntax. Information Structure. Universal Grammar Hypothesis (UGH).

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Three open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar

Martin Hilpert (Université de Neuchâtel)

[email protected]

Over the past few years, Construction Grammar has become an increasingly more popular theoretical framework for the analysis of language change (see for instance Noël 2007, Traugott and Trousdale 2013, De Smet 2013, Hilpert 2013, Petré 2014, Barðdal et al. 2015, Torrent 2015, Heine et al. 2016, amongst many others). In this talk, I will try to take stock of what has been done so far, identify common threads and recurring issues in the existing research, and, more importantly, point to questions that are currently unresolved and that, in my view, deserve the attention of future research efforts. One such question concerns the status of constructions as mental representations of linguistic structure. Construction Grammar aims to describe speakers’ knowledge of language, and there have been exciting advances in usagebased constructional approaches that have linked frequencies from corpus data to the notion of entrenchment and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. Despite these advances, it is clear that historical corpora give us only a very rough idea of language use in the past. It is therefore an open question how confidently we can make statements about the linguistic knowledge of earlier generations of speakers, and whether this is actually the main goal of diachronic Construction Grammar. A second interesting issue is the phenomenon that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) call constructionalization, i.e. the creation of a new node in the speaker’s mental network of constructions. With historical corpus data, it is of course possible to detect novelties in language use and to determine approximate dates for their emergence and spread. However, the concept of constructionalization itself could be criticized for evoking the Sorites paradox, i.e. the question how many grains of sand it takes to make a heap. Just after how many constructional changes exactly do we have a construction that counts as a new node? The term, as defined, asks us to think of a discrete threshold. Whether such a threshold exists is an open question. The third question that I would like to address does not just concern diachronic Construction Grammar, but the field as a whole. It appears to be a largely unquestioned consensus that linguistic knowledge is to be modeled as an associative network in which there are nodes, i.e. constructions, and links between those constructions. Recently, Schmid (2016) has argued for a view in which knowledge of language exclusively takes the format of associations, which effectively reduces constructions to links between form and meaning. This proposal

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is not primarily motivated by theoretical parsimony, but rather by the aim of describing linguistic knowledge in inherently dynamic terms. It is clear that this idea has profound implications for the constructional study of language change, some of which I will try to explore. It is clear that I cannot promise final, or even preliminary answers to these questions. It might even turn out that they are the wrong questions to ask in the first place. What I hope to do though is to start a discussion that will stimulate new and exciting research in diachronic Construction Grammar.

Keywords: Diachronic Construction Grammar. Constructionalization. Diachronic Corpora. Mental Representations. Networks. Nodes. Connections.

References

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Elena Smirnova, Spike Gildea, and Lotte Sommerer (eds.) (2015). Diachronic Construction Grammar . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

De Smet, Hendrik. (2013). Spreading patterns: Diffusional change in the English system of complementation . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Bernd, Heiko Narrog and Haiping Long. (2016). Constructional change vs. grammaticalization: From compounding to derivation. Studies in Language , 40/1, 137175. Hilpert, Martin. (2013). Constructional change in English: Developments in allomorphy, wordformation and syntax . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noël, Dirk. (2007). Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory. Functions of Language 14, 177202. Petré, Peter. (2014). Constructions and environments: Copular, Passive and related Constructions in Old and Middle English . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmid, HansJörg (ed.) (2016). Entrenchment and the psychology of language learning: how we reorganize and adapt linguistic knowledge . Boston: APA and Walter de Gruyter.

Torrent, Tiago. (2015). On the relation between inheritance and change: The Constructional Convergence and the Construction Network Reconfiguration Hypotheses. In Barðdal, Johanna et al. (eds.), Diachronic Construction Grammar . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Graeme Trousdale. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

27

General Session

28

“On means auf ”: the semantics of English and German prepositional complements in contrast


[email protected]

Arne Zeschel (IDS Mannheim)

zeschel@idsmannheim.de

In the longstanding debate on the grammatical status of prepositional verb complements with lexically selected heads (such as German basieren + PP.auf, English base + PP.on ), different attempts have been made to motivate verbs’ restrictions to particular prepositions semantically (cf. e.g. Lerot 1982 for German). Since it is impossible to isolate a fixed common core meaning for the prepositions occurring in such structures, they are commonly regarded as ‘desemanticised’ (cf. Breindl 1989). From a cognitivelinguistic perspective, however, the observation that there is no single abstract and invariant semantic core feature that is inherent in all conventional V+PP complementation structures with a given preposition does not entail that the choice of the preposition is arbitrary. Instead, in a usagebased model, we would expect to find a number of different clusters of such grammaticalised V+PP combinations that are connected to different more concrete senses of the respective preposition through motivated semantic links. Furthermore, wherever a semantic subcluster of such networks spawns local analogical extensions of the pattern to similar predicates, there is evidence for its status as a partially productive grammatical construction (with a particular semantics). Motivation, however, is not the same as predictability, and the same semantic source potential may of course produce different conventional extensions in different languages. The present paper compares two such networks on the example of prepositional complements with English on and German auf , a pair well suited for these purposes. In a first step, we extracted all verbs occurring with an 1

on dependent/auf prepositional object in parsed versions of the BNC and the taz corpus and conducted a simple collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) in the modified version of Poisl (in prep.) for these verbs in the two target constructions. A comparison of the 20 most strongly attracted verbs in both languages pointed to an interesting difference between English and German: many

1 Both words are core prepositions whose local senses denote a basic spatial configuration; in the bilingual PONS dictionary, they are primarily translated by their respective counterpart; both are among the seven most frequent prepositions in English and German, respectively (IDS 2014; Leech et al. 2001).

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of the top attracted auf verbs in German (e.g. verzichten, warten, reagieren ) do not have conventional V+PP.on equivalents in English, but most of the top V+PP.on collexemes in English (e.g. base, rely, concentrate ) do have auf equivalents in German. Second, we extracted all verbs with an on complement from the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst & Uhrig 2009) and all verbs listed with auf complements in the German valency dictionary EVALBU (cf. Kubczak 2009). Apart from the aforementioned differences, a comparison of these two lists also pointed to a number of close correspondences like (1), with semantic transparency decreasing from (a) to (c) in both languages: (1) a . basieren auf base on

b. wetten auf – bet on c. bestehen auf – insist on

The paper investigates similarities and differences in the way in which the common spatial source meaning ‘ON’ has been extended in the two languages and seeks to identify pockets of productive use of the identified clusters in the two web corpora DECOW and ENCOW (Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012).

Keywords: Prepositional complements. Verb complementation. Valency. Semantic motivation.

References

Breindl, E. (1989). Präpositionalobjekte und Präpositionalobjektsätze im Deutschen (Vol. 220). Walter de Gruyter.

Herbst, T., & Uhrig, P. (2009). Erlangen Valency Pattern Bank–a corpusbased research tool for work on valency and argument structure constructions. Website.

Institut für Deutsche Sprache (2014). Korpusbasierte Wortformenliste DeReWo, DeReKo2014IIMainArchiveSTT.100000, http://www.idsmannheim.de/derewo, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Programmbereich Korpuslinguistik, Mannheim, Deutschland.

Kubczak, J. (2009). Hier wird Ihnen geholfen! Das elektronische Valenzwörterbuch deutscher Verben: EVALBU.

Leech, G., Rayson, P., & Wilson, A. (2001). Word frequencies in written and spoken English: based on the British National Corpus.

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http://www.patternbank.fau.de/

http://www.ids-mannheim.de/derewo

Lerot, J. (1982). Die verbregierten Präpositionen in Präpositionalobjekten.Satzglieder im Deutschen: Vorschläge zur syntaktischen, semantischen und pragmatischen Fundierung, 261291.

Proisl, T. (2012). Automatically exploring lexical tendencies in English. InCorpus Linguistics and Variation in English (pp. 143154). Brill.

Schäfer, R., & Bildhauer, F. (2012). Building Large Corpora from the Web Using a New Efficient Tool Chain. In LREC (pp. 486493).

Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International journal of corpus linguistics , 8 (2), 209243.

31

What the ... ? The emotion of question augmentatives


[email protected]

The semantics and pragmatics of question augmentatives in English, such elements as the hell , in God’s name , etc., in examples like (1), have so far received an inconsistent and inadequate analysis. Based on contrasts like (2ab) and (3ab), it is assumed that phrases such as the hell are similar to negative polarity items (den Dikken & Giannakidou 2002) or they are claimed to require a distinction between “open” and “closed” questions (Ginzburg & Sag 2002: 229230). While (2b) and (3b) seem quite ungrammatical, there are also attested, previously unnoticed examples such as (45) that are entirely parallel to (2b) and (3b) and unobjectionable. What the hell, then, accounts for the difference?

(1) What in God's name are you doing?!

(2) a. I know who would buy that book. (= den Dikken & Giannakidou 2002 ex. 5) b. *I know who the hell would buy that book.

(3) a. I don’t know what in the world they were talking about. (= Ginzburg & Sag 2000 ex. 54) b. *I know what in the world they were talking about.

(4) I know who the hell I am! (http://www.moviequotes.com/movie/SavetheLastDance2000.aspx? pg=3&tt=194775)

(5) Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies (http://www.theonion.com/articles/lastamericanwhoknewwhatthefuckhewas doing,26268/)

On the basis of webexamples like (45), and an examination of all question augmentatives in the BNC from a cognitive, functionalist, and constructional point of view, I argue that the distribution follows from previously undescribed semantics and pragmatics of the augmentatives. One general type of augmentatives (e.g., the hell ) depicts the speaker’s strong emotion about (potential) answers to the question. A subtype of augmentatives (e.g., in God’s name ) can only depict speaker confusion, presupposing an open question and excluding sentences like (3b).

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http://www.moviequotes.com/movie/Save-the-Last-Dance-2000.aspx?pg=3&tt=194775

http://www.moviequotes.com/movie/Save-the-Last-Dance-2000.aspx?pg=3&tt=194775

http://www.theonion.com/articles/last-american-who-knew-what-the-fuck-he-was-doing%2C26268/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/last-american-who-knew-what-the-fuck-he-was-doing%2C26268/

The more general type may occur when answers are known, though such examples are very rare (< 0.01% of augmentatives). This arises from a conspiracy of functional factors: Open questions easily cooccur with confusion at not knowing an answer. Thus augmentatives are inherently interpretable with mainclause questions (1) and indirect questions in negative context (3a). Indirect questions with known answers inherently cannot provide a confusionofnotknowing reading, so they require a separate, highly emotional context to license them. (2b), though unattested, would be much more acceptable in the context of realizing to whom a thief may have sold your book. This work exemplifies how the deeper meaning of constructions can explain constructional distribution when the (more usual) simplified semantics cannot.

Keywords: Questions. Functionalism. Corpus linguistics. Emotions.

References

den Dikken, M. & A. Giannakidou (2002). From hell to polarity. Linguistic Inquiry 33:1. 31–61.

Ginzburg, J. & I. Sag. (2000). Interrogative Investigations . The Form, Meaning and Use of English Interrogatives . Stanford: CSLI.

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Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of The ConcessiveComparative Construction "(até que) para X, Y"

Gabriela da Silva Pires (UFJF)

[email protected]

Luiz Fernando Matos Rocha (UFJF) [email protected]

This work is based on the theory of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995; 2006; Fillmore, LeeGoldman & Rhomieux, 2012) and aims at investigating some semantic and pragmatic aspects of the grammatical construction we call a Concessive Comparative Construction (CCC), schematized as “(ATÉ QUE) PARA X, Y” and instantiated in Brazilian Portuguese as: “pra alguém que não sabe cantar ele já ganhou muito dinheiro ” (abril.com.br), and also as “Até que para um jogador de basquete ele dança bem ” (blogspot.com.br). In the proposed linguistic scheme, “X” represents a category member that triggers a semantic frame (Fillmore, 1982), and is instantiated as an Indefinite Nominal Phrase; “Y” stands for a contrary comment that consolidates the concessive meaning of the construction, signaling that the situations described are in disagreement against shared expectation. In order to support the semanticpragmatic addressing of this study, there is also the contribution from Appraisal approach (Martin & White, 2005), which aims at studying how the linguistic resources cooperate with interlocutors to provide evaluation. In order to reinforce a usagebased approach, we proceeded to Web search in three websites: “abril.com.br”, “br.answers.yahoo.com” and “blogspot.com.br” extensions, using the following search expressions: “(até que ) para/pra alguém ”, “(até que ) para/pra quem ”, “(até que ) para/pra um ”, and “(até que ) para/pra uma ”. After preliminary analysis, 404 valid occurrences were obtained. So far, our analysis have signaled that the CCC acts strongly in the semanticpragmatic level, as a linguistic resource of judgment, also serving as an instrument of subtle criticism and disapproval.

Keywords: Construction Grammar. Concessivity. Appraisal.

References

Fillmore, C. (1982). “Frame Semantics”. In: Linguistics in the morning calm. Selected papers from SICOL1981 . Seoul, Korea: Hanshin Publishing Company.

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Fillmore, C., LeeGoldman, R., & Rhomieux, R. (2012). “The FrameNet Constructicon”. In: BOAS, H., & SAG, I. (Eds). Signbased construction grammar . Stanford: CSLI Publications. Goldberg, A. (1995). Construction : A construction grammar approach to argument structure. The University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press on Demand.

Martin, J., & White, P. (2005). The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

35

(Re)production in performance: a Construction Grammar analysis of Baltic folk songs.


[email protected]

The similarities between Construction Grammar and Oralformulaic theory have held scholarly attention for the past few years, which led to the development of an interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Oral Poetics (Pagán Cánovas & Antović (forthcoming)). The idea that any utterance is composed of learned form and meaning/function pairings is the main premise both for Construction Grammar in general (Goldberg 2006) and oralformulaic theory (Lord 1971). This presentation will focus on two interconnected issues regarding the application of Construction Grammar to oral poetry. First, most of the aforesaid attention was focused on oral epics only, while oral lyric poetry was left in the periphery, even though scholars have struggled with applying oralformulaic theory to lyric poetry in the past (VikisFreibergs & Freibergs 1978; Taft 2006). Second, composition in performance is the principle of oral poetic art, when the text is assembled from learned constructions during performance. However, after taking into consideration the traditions of lyric poetry, one may doubt whether the process of poetic text production is as straightforward as it may seem. Thus the aim of this presentation is to shed new light on oral poetry in general by applying the insights of Cognitive Oral Poetics and Construction Grammar to the analysis of Baltic folk songs, and to argue that the poetic performance is a twomode process. The mode can change from productive , when the performer creates new unique texts using learned constructions, to reproductive , when the performer uses identical combinations and patterns of constructions (i.e. macroconstructions ) each time they perform. The insights of this analysis can contribute to the understanding of both the mechanics of poetic composition and the nature of more obscure linguistic phaenomena, such as quoting or imitation.

Keywords: Composition in performance. Cognitive oral poetics. Constructionbased approach. Oral lyric poetry.

References

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lord, A. B. (1971). The Singer of Tales . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pagán Cánovas, C. & Antović, M. (Forthcoming). Construction grammar and oral formulaic theory. In C. Pagán Cánovas and M. Antović (eds.) Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Taft, M. (2006). The Blues Lyric Formula . London: Routledge.

VikisFreibergs, V. & Freibergs, I. (1978). Formulaic Analysis of the Computer Accessible Corpus of Latvian SunSongs. Computers and the Humanities , 12 , 329 339.

37

A Constructicon for Russian

Daria Barylnikova (School of Linguistics, NRUHSE, Moscow)

[email protected]

Francis M. Tyers (HSLfakultehta UiT Norgga árktalaš universtehta, Tromsø)

[email protected]


[email protected]

1. Introduction

This abstract describes the project to create a constructicon for Russian. A constructicon is a database of form — meaning correspondences for noncompositional linguistic units, which exhibit lexical or syntactic variation. The project is a collaboration between UiT Norgga árktalaš universtehta in Tromsö and the School of Linguistics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The shortterm goal is to collect and describe at least five hundred constructions in Russian. To be useful for learners, constructions are identified from a number of sources: equivalent constructions in the Swedish constructicon (Lyngfelt et al., 2014), textbooks for L2 learners of Russian, and children’s books. The constructicon is hosted at Språkbanken at the Gothenburg University and uses the same technology as the Swedish constructicon. Each constructicon entry has a semantically annotated definition, and a list of semanticallyannotated example sentences from corpora. The construction elements are also described syntactically. Longerterm goals are to produce a classification of constructions in Russian and to facilitate the automatic identification and extraction of new constructions. We propose a list of constructions that are widely used in spoken and written Russian. Each of them is chosen with respect to one main criterion: the meaning of the construction elements brought together should be noncompositional. It means that each element of the construction cannot be taken literally and together the meaning is not perfectly transparent. Such constructions are usually characterised in terms of the additional semantics that a construction develops in some context. For example, in Russian there are two prepositions изза izza and благодаря blagodarja that have the same meaning in the dictionary (‘due to’, ‘because of something’) and learners mostly struggle with understanding the difference between them. However, they differ in the grammatical form they require for a dependent nominal (genitive versus dative) as well as in the possible usage context. In the constructicon each of those construction would have its one profile that describes the general meaning in simple terms, so the learners are able to grasp both the semantic and morphosyntactic restrictions. Furthermore it is added with relevant examples from Russian National Corpus (http:// www.ruscorpora.ru).

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2 Prior work

There have been a number of projects on constructicons for different languages: the Berkeley FrameNet constructicon (Fillmore, 2008) for English, the Brazilian Portuguese constructicon (Lage, 2013) and the Japanese constructicon (Ohara, 2015). There is also a constructicon for Swedish (Lyngfelt et al., 2014). Keywords: Constructicon. Construction grammar. Russian. Corpus linguistics.

References

Fillmore, C. J. (2008). Border conflicts: FrameNet meets construction grammar. In Proceedings of the XIII EURALEX International Congress (Barcelona, 1519 July 2008) (pp. 4968). Lage, L. M. (2013). Frames e construções: a relevância de um constructicon para o português brasileiro. Gatilho , 16. Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., Bäckström, L., Forsberg, M., Olsson, L. J., Prentice, J., ... & Uppström, J. (2012). Ett svenskt konstruktikon. Utgångspunkter och preliminära ramar.(Forskningsrapporter från Institutionen för svenska språket 2012 (2).) Göteborg . Ohara, K. H. (2015). Constructicon building as a practical implementation of construction grammar and frame semantics: Japanese framenet. In: 13th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference .

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A constructiconbased approach to teaching Swedish as a second language

Camilla Håkansson (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]


[email protected]


[email protected]

Julia Prentice (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

One problem with applying a constructionist approach to language teaching is the lack of teaching material and descriptive resources. Language descriptions typically come in grammars and dictionaries, and linguistic data in textbooks are presented accordingly (Loenheim et al. in press). Hence, teachers venturing into the area between general rules and fixed phrases are often left more or less on their own. The development of constructicon resources (e.g. Fillmore et al. 2012), i.e. collections of construction descriptions, may to some extent fill the descriptive gap (cf. Littlemore 2009:173), and this is one of the purposes behind the Swedish constructicon (SweCcn), with a particular focus on L2 relevance. SweCcn is a freely available, online database, currently covering around 400 Swedish constructions. Although not specifically designed for L2 pedagogy, it offers some support material for pedagogic application, including sample exercises. This material is developed in collaboration with active teachers. Some constructiconbased exercises have been tested in Swedish courses for non native speakers. These exercises focus on pattern recognition (cf. Holme 2010, Wee 2007), in line with a usagebased approach to language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello 2003, Ellis & Wulff 2015). In our presentation we will report on teachers’ experiences from applying this material to L2 teaching and discuss how the insights gained can benefit future development of SweCcn, in particular as regards pedagogic application.

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Keywords: Constructicon. Pattern recognition. L2 teachin., Swedish as a second language. References Ellis, Nick C. & Stefanie Wulff (2015). Usagebased approaches in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd ed.). London/New York: Routledge, 75–93.

Fillmore, Charles J., Russell LeeGoldman & Russell Rhomieux (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (eds.), SignBased Construction Grammar . Stanford: CSLI, 309–372.

Holme, R. (2010). A construction grammar for the classroom. IRAL. 48 (4), 355–377.

Littlemore, J. (2009). Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Second Language Learning . New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Loenheim, Lisa, Benjamin Lyngfelt, Joel Olofsson, Julia Prentice & Sofia Tingsell (2016). Constructicography meets (second) language education. On constructions in teaching aids and the usefulness of a Swedish constructicon. In S. de Knop &

G. Gilquin (eds.), Applied Construction Grammar . Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 327–355.

Svenskt konstruktikon [‘Swedish constructicon’, SweCcn]. <www.sprakbanken.se/konstruktikon>

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language . A usagebased theory of language acquisition . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Wee, L. 2007. Construction Grammar and English language teaching. Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching . 3 (121), 20–32.

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http://www.sprakbanken.se/konstruktikon

A usagebased approach to the spray /load alternation

Naoki Otani (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

[email protected]

This paper aims to discuss the spray load alternation from a usagebased perspective. The verbs spray and load can occur in two alternate syntactic patterns as in (1) and (2).

(1a) He sprayed paint onto the wall. (1b) He loaded the hay on the truck. (2a) He sprayed the wall with paint. (2b) He loaded the truck with the hay. As shown in (1) and (2), the syntactic patterns (i.e. the spray /load constructions) take LOCATION (e.g. wall , truck ) and THEME (e.g. paint , hay ) as their arguments, one appearing as an object and the other as a prepositional complement. Previous literature argued that the syntactic patterns in (1) and (2) convey different constructional meanings; the with variant is associated with the “holistic effect” while the on /onto variant is associated with the “partitive effect.” (Levin 1993) The LOCATION of the with variant is understood to be affected completely by the action while that of the on /onto variant does not necessarily have to receive such an interpretation (e.g. Fillmore 1968; Levin 1993; Goldberg 1995). However, these studies did not explicitly discuss what kind of discourse information these syntactic patterns convey. To test whether these constructions convey discourse information, or, viewed from another perspective, whether discourse factors motivate the spray /load alternation, I carried out a quantitative analysis on the British National Corpus (BNC ) as follows: First, I extracted all the examples of the verbs spray and load from the BNC (790 and 2589, respectively), then manually selected all instances of the spray load constructions (147 and 161, respectively), and coded five features: (i) prepositions, (ii) definiteness of the object noun, (iii) word class of the object noun, (iv) definiteness of the complement noun, and (v) word class of the complement noun. I then investigated the spray /load alternation by considering definiteness and semantic roles of the object and complement nouns in the both syntactic patterns.

(3a) on/onto variant of spray (36 ex.) NP spray THEME on/onto LOC def. 7 (2) def. 22 (1) ind. 29 ind. 14

(3b) with variant of spray (111 ex.) NP spray LOC with THEME def. 85 (28) def. 17 (2) ind. 26 ind. 94

(4a) on/onto variant of load (66 ex.) NP load THEME onto LOC def. 42 (12) def. 36 (2)

(4b) with variant of load (95 ex.) NP load LOC with THEME def. 74 (21) def. 20 (1)

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ind. 24 ind. 30 ind. 21 ind. 75

The numbers in parentheses show the frequency of definite pronouns. The results revealed that, regardless of the semantic roles, pronouns and definite noun phrases tend to appear in the object position, while indefinite noun phrases tend to appear in the complement position of the preposition (p < .05). Moreover, LOCATION (e.g. wall ) has a higher degree of definiteness than THEME (e.g. paint ), and is more likely to appear in the object position. These results suggest that the spray /load alternation is motivated not only by the part/whole construal of the situation but also by discourse factors. That is, discourse factors motivate the spray load alternation in that old information is likely to appear in the object position and new information in the complement position regardless of the semantic roles. We can therefore conclude that the selection between the two syntactic patterns depends at least partly on the type of topic mentioned in the previous discourse. Though this study only focused on spray /load constructions, it implies the possibility that other constructions may, in a similar way, not only express different situations but also their different statuses in discourse.

Keywords: Spray /load Constructions. Usagebased Model. Information Structure Constructions. Corpus Studies. Frame Semantics.

References

Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for case. In E. Bach and R. T. Harms (eds.) Universals in Linguistic Theory (pp. 188). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame Semantics. Linguistic in the Moring Calm (pp. 111137).Seoul: Hanahin Publishing Co.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gries, S. Th. and A. Stefanowitsch. (2004). Extending collostructional analysis: A corpusbased perspective on ‘alternations.’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9 (1): 97129.

Hilpert, M. (2014). Construction grammar and its application to English . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Adding Constraints to the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon

Ludmila Meireles Lage (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]


[email protected]


[email protected]

FrameNet Brasil has been developing, in parallel with the network of frames defined for Brazilian Portuguese, a repertoire of constructions, the BP Constructicon. In this resource, each construction is defined in terms of its constituent parts, the Construct Elements (CEs) (Fillmore, LeeGoldman & Rhomieux 2012). Additionally, constructions are related to one another, via Inheritance (Kay & Fillmore 1999), and to the frames they evoke, via the Evoking relation. In the first, every CE in the mother construction must correspond to an equivalent or more specific CE in the daughter construction, in the latter, a CE may correspond to one or more Frame Elements in the frame evoked by the construction. Although the two relations described above summarize important aspects of a given construction, they do not account for (i) the formal properties of each CE, (ii) semantic constraints on the lexical item filling a given slot of the construction, and (iii) word order. To computationally address these issues, a Constraint Editor (Figure 1) was added to the BP Constructicon.

Figure 1: The Constraint Editor

This tool allows the system to store four kinds of constraints:

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1. The CE>Construction constraint records the information that a CE of a given construction is a construction of its own. In Figure 1, such a constraint shows that the Predicate CE in the Subject_Predicate construction in Brazilian Portuguese is a VP.

2. The CE>Frame constraint limits the lexical material occupying a given slot of a construction to the lexical units evoking a given frame.

3. The CE>Frame Family is a less restricted type of the second constraint and indicates that the lexical material occupying a given slot may come from a given frame in the FrameNet Brasil database and also from all the frames inheriting from it.

4. The CE>CE_before constraint models word order, and records the information that a given CE must appear before another in a construction.

The implementation of Constraints enriches the BP Constructicon network of relations and helps in its integration to the FrameNet Brasil Lexicon.

Keywords: Construction Gramma.; Frame Semantics. Constructicon. FrameNet. Constraints.

References

Fillmore, C. J.; LeeGoldman, R. R. & Rhomieux, R. The FrameNet Constructicon. In Hans C. Boas & Ivan A. Sag (eds.). SignBased Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 309372.

Kay, P. & Fillmore, C. J. (1999). Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The what’s X doing Y construction. Language 75, 134.

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Be My Guest – Polysemy in FrameNet resources

Karin Friberg Heppin (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Dana Danélls (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

In the FrameNet formalism lexical units (LUs) are pairings of words and semantic frames. If a word evokes more than one frame it is represented as different LUs with different senses. While there often is a straightforward relation between senses and frames, a methodological approach for systematically dealing with polysemy is needed. We suggest elaboration of Guest LUs, explicit linking of frames, and linking between LUs and host frames, a Guest LU being an LU evoking a second host frame. The interpretation of Guest LUs depends on both primary and host frames. Example sentences may be annotated in host frames. We have encountered three case types where lexicon entries potentially evoke multiple frames and where we may employ Guest LUs: evoking frames in hyponomy relations, evoking frames in regular polysemy relations, and underspecified lexicon entries. Least problematic is the case of hyponymy, as the existing FrameNet relation ‘inheritance’ may be elaborated. However, regarding regular polysemy clearly declared functional links are called for. The regular polysemy relation pertains to all LUs (with varying probability) in certain frames, in other frames to subsets of LUs. For example, all LUs in People_by_vocation may be Guest LUs in Appellations (titles used before a person’s name, e.g. ‘General Abas Khan’). Linking the frame as a whole minimizes arbitrariness. The LU ‘general’ is in fact listed in the frame Member_of_military and would inherit from People_by_vocation before appearing as Guest LU in Appellations. The regular polysemy category includes verbs with construction shift in object position. A verb such as ‘load’ may evoke both the Placing and Filling frames, for example: ‘loading hay’ vs. ‘loading a wagon’. However, declaring separate lexicon entries is not always motivated. Polysemy due to construction shift applies to many, but not all, LUs in concerned pairs of frames. This calls for linking between specific LUs and the frames in question. The third category includes words with several meaning potentials, often used underspecified, e.g. institutions such as ‘school’. Different meaning potentials are put in focus by collocates which create context, evoking a variety of frames such as

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Institutions, Education_teaching, or Buildings. Forcing a choice of frame for an underspecified word would not represent an intended vague meaning. We suggest listing LUs in the most general frame, creating links between LUs and relevant frames and perhaps inviting guest Frame Elements. Keywords: Polysemy. FrameNet. Guest LU. Frame semantics.

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Building a scalar model for Finnish verbs of remaining and their polarity

Gaïdig Dubois (University of Helsinki) [email protected]

Finnish traditionally distinguishes between two verbs of remaining, i.e. denoting the continuation of a spatial or more abstract relationship: the verb jäädä (‘to remain, stay), which governs a locative argument in a directional case, and its static near synonym pysyä (‘to stay, remain’). The verb jäädä is idiosyncratic in that it requires its locative argument to be marked with a directional local case, implicating motion (or change). This contradiction of nonmotion with (a path of) motion has received attention both in Finnish and international linguistic literature (e.g. Huumo, 2007; Fong, 2003). While until now the focal point has been on the aspectual properties of the verbs, the present paper examines jäädä and pysyä from a constructional perspective focusing on describing how the dynamics of the verbs influence their polar behavior. In other word, we propose a model as to why jäädä seems to select more easily negatively polarized lexical items as locative argument, while pysyä favors positive polarity items. According to Huumo (2007, p. 87), the dynamic meaning of jäädä is based on the contrast between a projected course of events (whereby the entity acted upon by the subject should leave its current location) and the actual scenario (which the same entity fictively steps into while rejecting the projected course of events). We argue that it is precisely this contrast between projection and reality that gives to jäädä an inclination to negativity (e.g. jäädä toiseksi /suppeaksi /kesken ’to remain second/ limited/incomplete’), and vice versa the absence of contrast that enables pysyä to appear in more positively oriented contexts (e.g. pysyä ykkösenä/terveenä/ rauhallisena ’to stay first/healthy/calm’). We show that this twoway tendency actually reveals a subtler and more systematic logic in the functioning of the two verbs: their polar behavior is not quite a matter of inflexible polarization on a negative to positive semantic continuum. Rather, it can be analyzed in terms of positioning on a scale of failed expectation vs. met expectations , generating the observed tendencies of polarized item selection. Keywords: Verb dynamics. Polarity. Remaining. Finnish. References Fong, V. (2003). Resultatives and depictives in Finnish. In D. Nelson & S. Manninen (Eds.), Generative approaches to Finnic and Saami linguistics (pp. 201–233). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

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Huumo, T. (2007). Force dynamics, fictive dynamicity and the Finnish verbs of ‘remaining’. Folia Linguistica, 41 (1–2), 73–98.

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Constructicon and syntax – on relations between constructions and constructs


[email protected]

The notion of language – or lexicogrammar – as a network of constructions may be traced back to the following quote by Fillmore:

The grammar of a language can be seen as a repertory of constructions, plus a set of principles which govern the nesting and superimposition of constructions into or upon one another (Fillmore 1988: 37).

This "repertory of constructions" was later dubbed a constructicon (by Jurafsky 1991) and is typically assumed to be an inheritance network. Although the idea is a general feature in constructionist theory, the internal structure of the network remains vastly understudied – especially regarding the network as a whole. The second part of the quote concerns an equally central yet even less explored topic than the structure of the constructicon: how constructs (instances of constructions) are combined to form utterances. Here the standard assumption is combination by unification, but that can only be part of the story. In order to account for, e.g., coercion and other mismatch phenomena we clearly need something more. These two understudied aspects of constructionist theory, the overall network structure and the combinatory mechanisms, are closely interrelated as two sides of the general task of establishing a construction grammar , in the sense of a coherent constructionbased linguistic system, as opposed to just a set or list of constructions. It is my impression that neither of the two can be satisfactorily handled without also addressing the other. This is partly because many of the central nodes in the network, such as general phrasal constructions, are essentially patterns for combining constructs into larger units, partly because construction descriptions, in order to be compatible, have to be designed with their combinatory properties in mind. My talk will address the complex problem of handling both these aspects of relations between constructions (and constructs) from the viewpoint of constructicon development – in particular that of the Swedish Constructicon project (SweCcn). SweCcn is a database of Swedish construction descriptions, in other words an attempt at a practical application of the theoretical notion of constructicon (Lyngfelt et al. to appear, Sköldberg et al. 2013, cf. Fillmore et al. 2012). It is a resource under development and currently in the process of evolving from a construction dictionary to a construction network.

Keywords: Constructicon. Unification. Network.

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References

Fillmore, C. J. (1988). The mechanisms of ‘Construction Grammar’. Berkeley Linguistic Society 14, 35–55.

Fillmore, C. J., R. LeeGoldman & R. Rhomieux (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (eds.), SignBased Construction Grammar (pp. 309–372). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Jurafsky, D. (1991). An Online Computational Model of Human Sentence Interpretation: A Theory of the Representation and Use of Linguistic Knowledge . Doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.

Lyngfelt, B., L. Bäckström, L. Borin, A. Ehrlemark & R. Rydstedt (to appear). Constructicography at work: Theory meets practice in the Swedish Constructicon. In B. Lyngfelt, T. T. Torrent, L. Borin & K. H. Ohara (eds.), Constructicography: Constructicon development across languages .

Sköldberg, E., B. Lyngfelt, L. Bäckström, L. Borin, M. Forsberg, L.J. Olsson, J. Prentice,

R. Rydstedt, S. Tingsell & J. Uppström (2013). "Between Grammars and Dictionaries: a Swedish Constructicon." Proceedings of eLex 2013, 310327.

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Construction Grammar and Derivational Morphology: the case of Suffixal Quantifying Constructions of Portuguese

Igor de Oliveira Costa (Federal Institute of North Minas Gerais)

[email protected]

Neusa Salim Miranda (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

This paper analyzes a node of the vast network of Suffixal Quantifying Constructions – [XNQ.Sfx] –, recognized as a morphological strategy of evocation of the notion of collectivity in Portuguese, as illustrated in the following examples:

(1) Para onde vai essa dinheirada toda? To where go.PRES this [money.Q.SFX] all (Where is this great amount of money spent?)

(2) A mosquitada tá indo pra cima sem dó! DEF.ART [fly.Q.SFX] be.PRES go.GER to top without mercy (Lots of mosquitos are attacking us without mercy.)

(3) Você é muito criança, vê se you be.PRES very child see.PRES PERS.PRO cresce e tira essas bonecaiada. grow up.PRES and take off.PRES these [doll.Q.SFX.] (You’re so immature, grow up and throw all these dolls away.)

This study supports a broader theoretical object, the proposition for a constructionist approach to derivational morphology (Miranda 2013, Rhodes 1992). Cognitive Construction Grammar (Boas 2013, Goldberg 1995, 2006) provides the most relevant theoretical apparatus to this study. The Cognitive Linguistics premise of claiming the centrality of experience in the creation of language grants another crucial support to this analysis, which is the proposition of convergence between the constructionist approach and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, 1985, Rupenhofer et al. 2010). Given the importance of the use in the theoretical and analytical model adopted, a corpusbased approach (Fillmore 2008, McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006) was the methodology chosen. The constructions are established by the COLLECTION image schema (Clausner and Croft 1999). Formally, they are characterized by the fusion of a quantifiable core – a count (examples 2 and 3) or a mass noun (example 1), called constructional element X – to a quantifier suffix (in the cases studied, ada

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arada and aiada), and, in semantic terms, by the evocation of the Quantity frame. Thus, in the examples, the suffixes ada, arada and aiada which are fused, respectively, to "dinheiro" (money), "mosquito" (mosquito) and "boneca" (doll), imply the idea of the great amount of these elements. Such constructions still evoke an evaluation of the cognitive scene by evoking the frame Desirability. Thus, besides quantifying the element X, such constructions indicate whether the large quantity of X is positive (desirable) or negative (undesirable). In the examples, all the instances of the Suffixal Quantifying Constructions point to a negative evaluation of the scene. The analysis points out, moreover, to the consistency of a constructionist approach for derivational morphology, to the linguistic richness of the constructional patterns under investigation, and portrays how morphology compress complex scenes in short utterances.

Keywords: Cognitive Construction Grammar. Frame Semantics. Quantifier Constructions. Derivational Morphology. Suffixation.

References

Boas, H. C. (2013). Cognitive Construction Grammar. In Hoffmann, T. and G. Trousdale (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 233252.

Clausner, T. C. and W. Croft. (1999). Domains and image schemas. Cognitive Linguistics 10(1), 131.

Fillmore, C. (2008). “Corpus Linguistics” or “Computeraided Armchair Linguistics”. In Fontenelle, T. Practical Lexicography . Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 105122.

Fillmore, C. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6(2), 222254.

Fillmore, C. (1982). Frame Semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (eds.). Linguistics in the Morning Calm: Selected Papers from SICOL1981 . Seoul: Hanshin. pp. 111137.

Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Construction: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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McEnery, T., R. Xiao and Y. Tono. (2006). Corpus Linguistics: The basics. In . CorpusBased Language Studies: An advanced resource book . London/New York: Routledge. pp. 0311.

Miranda, N. S. (2013). Construções Superlativas Morfológicas do Português . Research Project of PostGraduation Program in Linguistics, Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

Rhodes, R. A. (1992). What is a Morpheme? A View from Construction Grammar . Paper presented at Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v18i1.1602.

Ruppenhofer, J. et al. (2010). FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice . Sep., 14th, 2010 version. Available at: <http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/> Access in oct., 20th, 2010.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v18i1.1602



http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/

http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Designing a constructicon of English

Thomas Herbst (FriedrichAlexanderUniversität ErlangenNürnberg)

[email protected]

Constructionist approaches to language offer a convincing framework for a wide range of lexicogrammatical phenomena and an account of how various constructions can be learnt. Although this makes the model very attractive for foreign language learning (Ellis 2003, De Knop & Gilquin 2016), relatively little work has been done to show which form a descriptive construction grammar of English could take. From a constructionist point of view it is relatively obvious that such a descriptive constructicon should not mirror the traditional distinction between lexicon and grammar. This talk will outline some aspects of a project designed to provide – in the long run – a unified descriptive constructicon of the English language. This talk will mainly focus on two aspects: (1) collocation and (2) valency and argument structure constructions. Since both the meaning of constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and the associations between individual words (Sinclair 2004, Dąbrowska 2014) have been shown to be an important part of speakers’ knowledge of language, they should also be accounted for in a descriptive reference tool. A first step would be to establish links between the (itemspecific or low level) valency constructions (Herbst 2014) in the entries of specific lexical units and entries for generalized argument structure constructions (whenever this is possible). Providing entries for argument structure constructions such as the ditransitive or causedmotion constructions adds an interesting dimension to traditional valency descriptions in capturing the generalizations that can be made for a pattern across the individual verbs occurring in it. This also involves the theoretical issue of to what extent argument structure constructions involving the same participant roles should be treated as allostructions (Cappelle 2006, Herbst & Uhrig 2009, Herbst 2014, Perek 2015) of one constructeme or not. In any case, such a descriptive constructicon would then also cover creative language use of the She sneezed the foam off the cappuccino type, but still provide essential itemspecific information in showing the established valency patterns for individual verbs (Faulhaber 2011, Herbst 2014). The second step towards a refinement of traditional valency descriptions consists in specifying in more detail the lexical fillers of particular slots in the constructions of particular verbs. The obvious method to be employed here is collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003), on the basis of which the collexemes most strongly attracted to particular valency constructions could be specified in the entries.

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A constructicon designed along these lines would provide advanced learners of the language with a much more reliable reference tool for language production. At the same time, implementing such a constructicon promises new insights into the nature of generalization as well as into the descriptive power of constructionist approaches. Keywords: Argument structure construction. Collocation. Collexeme analysis. Constructicon. Valency.

References

Cappelle, B. (2006). Particle placement and the case for" allostructions".Constructions, 128.

Dąbrowska, E. (2014). Words that go together: Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations. The Mental Lexicon , 9 (3), 401418.

De Knop, Sabine & Gaëtanelle Gilquin (eds.). Applied Construction Grammar. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Ellis, N. C. (2003). Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure. The handbook of second language acquisition , 14 , 63.

Faulhaber, Susen. (2011). Verb Valency Patterns: A Challenge for SemanticsBased Acounts . Berlin & New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure . Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Goldberg, Adele E. (2006). Constructions at Work . Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Herbst, Thomas. 2014. The valency approach to argument structure constructions. In Thomas Herbst, HansJörg Schmid & Susen Faulhaber (eds.), Constructions, Collocations, Patterns , 159207. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

Herbst, Thomas & Peter Uhrig. (2009). The Erlangen Valency Patternbank. http://www.patternbank.unierlangen.de.

Perek, Florent. (2015). Argument Structure in UsageBased Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Sinclair, John. (2004). Trust the Text. London & New York: Routledge.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8 (2), 209243.

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http://www.patternbank.uni-erlangen.de/

http://www.patternbank.uni-erlangen.de/

Information structure and the pragmatics of three verbal negation constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Luis Filipe Lima e Silva (UFMG)

[email protected]


[email protected]

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) verbal negation system features three constructions which convey the same semantic value, namely:

(1) NEGV : com certeza es nũ vão participar /uai> // “For sure they will not participate”

(2) NEGVNEG: eu nũ quero não // “I don’t want it”

(3) VNEG: <ganhou não> // “She didn’t get it”

The NonSynonym Principle, proposed by Goldberg (1995), establishes that if two constructions are syntactically distinct and semantically synonymous, they should present some pragmatic difference. Taking this Principle into account, it is feasible to hypothesize that the usage difference found for the three verbal negation forms above are pragmatically motivated. Given that the semantics of verbal negation is the same for the three constructions, i.e., an operator reverses the truth value of a predication – the difference in usage needs to be investigated before it can be attributed to stylistics. This paper presents the analysis of verbal negation in BP stemming from spontaneous speech corpus data, investigated through the lenses of information structuring. The data for this study were provided by the CORALBRASIL (RASO & MELLO, 2012), a BP spontaneous speech reference corpus. The corpus is segmented following principles from the Language into Act Theory [LAcT] (CRESTI, 2000). This theory establishes the utterance as the proper unit of analysis for speech given that it is necessary for a speech act to be accomplished. Prosody is taken to be responsible for assigning informational values to tone units in an utterance, which comprise both textual units (illocutionary and nonillocutionary units) and dialogic units (discourse regulator units). The data analysis revealed that BP verbal negation constructions are distributed according to restrictions brought about by the illocutionary value of the information unit in which they occur. Thus, the occurrence of double and postverbal negation

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forms is restricted to illocutionary units, whereas preverbal negation presents free distribution and can occur in both illocutionary and other textual units. The results were statistically analyzed and support the NonSynonym Principle.

Keywords: Verbal Negation. Pragmatics. Illocution. Spontaneous speech corpus.

References Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . University of Chicago Press.

Cresti, E. (2000). Corpus di italiano parlato: Introduzione (Vol. 1). Accademia della Crusca.

RASO, T., & MELLO, H. (2012). CORALBRASIL I: corpus de referência do Português Brasileiro falado informal. A general presentation. Speech and Corpora , 16.

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Nice and Adj/Adv Construction in Imperative

Kiyono Fujinaga (The University of Tokyo/State University of New York at Buffalo)

[email protected]

Using the British National Corpus, this study aims to demonstrate constructions with open slots that show great productivity on their own, taking up the English nice and adj/adv construction, specifically occurring in imperative constructions e.g. “try to come down nice and straight” or similar contexts e.g. “Right, erm let’s have another boy, Stuart, nice and loud”. The study shows that nice and adj/adv pairings assure interactional functions of imperative constructions serving at the interpersonal level of discourse (Schiffrin, 1987). For instance, speakers can mitigate their illocutionary force by using nice and adj/adv so that they do not sound imposing to the addressee e.g. <at storytelling workshop> “(Teacher): I must have everybody sitting on their bottoms all alone please. And try not to touch anybody else during the story. Alright? Now this story is about a boy who lives with his mother. I don’t know when this story starare you ready boys? (Boy A): No. (Boy B): Yeah. (Teacher): Can you sit nice and still please, on your bottoms, without touching anybody next to you”. Though analysis of corpus data, Stefanowitsch & Gries (2003) argues that “one major function of the imperative seems to be the organization of spoken or written discourse” (ibid.: 234). Indeed, the data in this study also confirms the typical verbs used in imperative construction/context were “advice” or “instruction” kinds and the adj/adv pairings appeared when speakers were giving instructions. Also, 237 tokens of nice and adj/adv constructions in the data tended to occur more as predicatively (120 tokens), as resutatively (30 tokens), and as adverbially (26 tokens) compared to attributively (6 tokens). This might be correlated to the nature of English adjectives, that academic contexts prefer the predicative use to the attributive use (Bieber et al., 1999) as the data demonstrated that nice and adj/adv pairings are indeed used most in conversation or in dialog in fictions. The syntactic judgment of whether nice and adj/adv pairing appear as resultative or adverbial is sometimes difficult e.g., Things settled nice and quietly. This study acknowledges such difficult cases by considering the nice and adj/adv pairings to work both at the ideational and interpersonal levels simultaneously (Schiffrin, 1987; Halliday & Mattiessen, 2014).

Keywords: Idioms. Interpersonal. Imperative. Discourse. BNC.

References

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Biber, D. et al. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English . Harlow: Longman, New York: Longman.

Halliday, M.A.K. & Mattiessen, C.M.I.M. (2014). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International journal of corpus linguistics , 8 (2), 209243.

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One constructicon or two? Causedmotion construction in FrenchGerman bilingual children

Katharina Scholtz (LudwigMaximiliansUniversity Munich)

[email protected]

Nikolas Koch (LudwigMaximiliansUniversity Munich)

[email protected]

In CCxG it is assumed that linguistic knowledge is represented in the form of a network of constructions which are said to be languagespecific. These assumptions raise interesting questions regarding the acquisition of translationequivalent constructions by bilingual children, especially when typologically different languages are learned. Targetting the verbalization of motion events, the study aims to investigate the acquisition process of the causedmotion construction bilingual FrenchGerman children. According to Talmy’s wellknown dichotomy, French and German differ typologically in terms of this construction. The main research question is how bilingual children deal with the challenge of having to learn two sets of formally non equivalent constructions for encoding one type of experience. Answers to this question can have interesting implications for the question of whether the constructicons of bilinguals are interwoven or largely separate. If bilingual children use constructions in both languages comparable to monolingual children, this could indicate that the networks are largely separate. Reversely, crosslinguistic transfer would indicate some degree of interweaving. We compared data from FrenchGerman bilinguals (4, 8 years, n=10/group) with a monolingual German and French control group. Participants had to describe object displacements (e.g. putting a lid on a pan) (following Hickmann & Hendriks 2006). First results suggest that bilinguals tend to use the causedmotion construction slightly differently than their monolingual peers. Even though the most observed construction in German includes verb, object and object directional (VOL), bilinguals also tend to apply the typical French verbobject construction (VO) to German in an idiosyncratic way. In French, participants mostly used the VOconstruction. The verb either underwent a valence reduction (e.g. Tu mets le manteau , ‘you put the coat’) or contained an old Latin prefix (enlever ‘away + take’). Regarding the developmental perspective, our data shows only little change in French where additional information is increasingly expressed outside of the main verb (VOL) in both monolinguals and bilinguals.

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We suggest that from the age of four on, bilinguals have languagespecific representations of the caused motion construction. If crosslinguistic generalizations are made, they seem to concern the semantic level only, but this has to be investigated further.

Keywords: Construction Grammar. Causedmotion construction. Bilingualism. Language acquisition.

References Hickmann, M. & Hendriks, H. (2006): Static and dynamic location in French and in English. First language 26 (1), 103135.

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Prosody and constructional meaning: data on spoken Brazilian Portuguese


[email protected]

Giulia Bossaglia (UFMG)

[email protected] In this paper we discuss data from the spontaneous speech corpus CORALBRASIL (Raso & Mello 2012) with the primary objective to show the role played by pragmatics, via prosody, in speech. We show that constructions that might seem similar in their syntactic and semantic make up will display dependence properties, springing from their information structure, which is defined by several prosodic parameters, their distribution in a given utterance, besides their function. Our analysis departs from the Language into Act Theory (LAcT; Cresti 2000; Moneglia & Raso 2014), a corpusdriven theory which analyzes speech placing emphasis on its prosodic dimension. Through prosodic criteria, LAcT shows that the reference unit for speech is the utterance, understood as the smallest linguistic unit interpretable as prosodically and pragmatically autonomous, i.e. as a speech act (Austin 1962). Utterances can also be segmented in tonal subunits, which convey specific Information Units (IUs). The Comment is the only necessary unit as it carries the illocutionary force that renders the utterance pragmatically autonomous. Besides it, textual IUs make up the semantic and syntactic content of the utterance. Within L AcT, spoken syntax is studied with emphasis on its interface with information structure, i.e. the way information is packaged across IUs, which are conceived as syntactic/semantic islands. Therefore, proper subordination and coordination structures are given by locality conditions within the same IU/island (linearized syntax : Cresti 2014; see [1]), while syntactic structures performed across more than one IU are to be analyzed in light of the pragmatic/informational relationship holding between the IUs involved (patterned constructions, see [2]): [1] tô achando que eu vou fazer ela com um metro //=COM= I’m thinking that I’m going to make it one meter long //=COM= [2] acho que com um metro e vinte /=TOP= ela fica boa //=COM= I think that with one meter and twenty /=TOP= it will be fine //=COM=

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Superficially, [1] and [2] can be taken as instances of the same headsubordinate construction. However, by listening the two utterances, it emerges that in [2] prosody conveys a TopicComment pattern, in which the TOP unit defines the domain of application of the illocution conveyed by the COM, entrenched in the pragmatic aboutness relationship held between these two IUs. Our data from the CORAL BRASIL corpus corroborate the hypothesis that the prosodic/informational configuration of the utterance is an important dimension in distinguishing form and meaning pairs (Goldberg 1995, 2006) in spoken language. Keywords: Spontaneous speech. Spoken syntax. Prosodyinformation structure interface.

References

Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cresti, E. (2000). Corpus di italiano parlato: Introduzione (Vol. 1). Florence: Accademia della Crusca.

Cresti, E. (2014). Syntactic properties of spontaneous speech in the Language into Act Theory. Raso, T.& Mello, H. ( Eds.), Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies (pp.365410). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University.

Moneglia, M. & Raso, T. (2014). Notes on Language into Act Theory. Raso, T. & Mello, H. (Eds.), Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies (pp.468495). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Raso, T. & Mello, H. (Eds.). (2012). CoralBrasil I: corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.

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The dynamics of patterns and constructions


[email protected]

This paper addresses the fundamental question if and why constructions, conventionalized formmeaning pairings, should have a privileged status among patterns in modelling our knowledge of a language. Constructionist approaches regard constructions as the basic unit of our language knowledge. They range from morphemes to words to schematic patterns such as the ditransitive (he gave Mary a book ). Yet an even broader cognitive entity exists, that of the pattern, a perceived similarity between more than one instance of something. Patterns are broader in including similarities purely based on form or meaning. In construction grammar, semantic or formal similarities are treated as (horizontal or vertical) links between constructions rather than constructions in their own right. This is why Traugott & Trousdale (2013) restrict the definition of a historically new construction to the emergence of a new formmeaning pair. De Smet (2012), however, argues that the actualization of a new construction proceeds gradually, and provides evidence for the similaritybased organization in grammar, where an item’s use can be subject to multiple, potentially conflicting generalizations. These generalizations take as their input any kind of similarity between instances, not just formmeaning pairings. Yet cumulatively they seem to lead to what is usually called a ‘new construction’. While not generally seen as conflicting, I will argue that reconciling these views has more theoretical ramifications than so far recognized. I will do so by means of an exhaustive extraction from EEBO of 17th century usage of be going to INF’s, and its early development from a motion verb towards a future auxiliary. According to Traugott (2015: 6) actualization of the new future construction occurs in the 18th century with raising structures like there is going to be such a calm among us , whose lack of an independent subject for be going clearly show its auxiliary status. However, during the 17th century a number of transitional changes already appear. One such change is the appearance of fronted objects, as in (1):

(1)What I am going to say is very important.

In 99.5% of such cases motion is lacking. Other instances where motion is also no longer present date from as early as the early 17th century. Theoretically, speakers may already have neoanalyzed the original construction at this point, but why then, does it take so long for raising to appear? What does this mean from a cognitive point of view? I will argue that this transitional stage may

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actually be broken down into the emergence of a number of ‘patterns’ (for lack of a better term) which become already semiindependent from their source construction, without, however, clearly constituting a new construction. An example is the apptern be going to SPEECH VERB, which explodes in productivity (both token and typewise) between ca. 16301640, shedding its original motion context (I am going to the king to tell him what I really think ) along the way. When looking at be going to INF collectively, this abrupt emergence of something new is less visible, because other clusters behave slightly differently, providing an overall rather gradual development of more schematic syntactic and semantic characteristics, leading up to final auxiliary status. Theoretically, the evidence suggests that cognitive schemas (both patterns and ‘traditional’ constructions) show different behavior at different levels of abstractness. In this respect, constructions may be viewed as clusters of even smaller schemas (patterns, or perhaps also constructions, depending on one’s definition), with their own properties emerging out of this quality of being clustered.

Keywords: Grammaticalization. Cognitive schemas. Productivity. References

De Smet, Hendrik. (2012). The course of actualization. Language, 88 (3), 601633. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and

Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (2015). Toward a coherent account of Grammatical Construcionalization. In Jóhanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and Spike Gildea Diachronic Construction Grammar (Constructional Approaches to Language 18), 5180. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Frame Relevance: a measure for distinguishing between arguments and adjuncts


[email protected]

Markus Hamunen (University of Helsinki)

[email protected]


[email protected]

Jouni Rostila (University of Helsinki)

[email protected]

Circumstantials, i.e. expressions conveying “circumstantial meanings” (i.e. time, place, manner, etc.), tend to be syntactically optional, i.e. adjuncts rather than arguments. However, this is not always the case: quite typical circumstantials may also be core arguments of the verb. Most obvious cases are expressions of location such as The power switch is located at the back of the machine, where the expression of location at the back of the machine is obligatory: without it the sentence would be incomplete both syntactically and semantically. Overall, while the distinction between arguments and adjuncts is related to such semantic categories as time and place, it cannot be reduced to those categories. To further explicate the semantic grounds of the argument–adjuct distinction, we will introduce the notion of frame relevance . It appears that circumstantial meanings become arguments, rather than adjuncts, to the extent that they are relevant with regard to the event or semantic frame described by the sentence. For example, the relevance of the expression of place at the bar is obviously different for the event types being, dancing, and thinking in John [was ~ danced ~ thought of Mary] at the bar, and this also has a strong effect on its syntactic status. It also appears that there are not only “obligatory”, i.e. argumentlike expressions and “optional”, i.e. adjunctlike expressions in the traditional valencydriven sense, but also intermediate ones. In different traditions, strikingly similar suggestions have been made to the effect that some arguments are brought into the sentence by the verb’s valency, while others are added by other mechanisms which augment the valency. Essentially, the verb contributes to the overall frame expressed by the sentence, but its contribution is complemented by other elements, and arguments

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may be participants required—or made relevant—by either the verb or other elements.

Claiming that the argument–adjunct distinction does not exist would be too strong a conclusion, however. The distinction is not only intuitively correct but also justifiable: the great majority of modifiers of the verb are fairly indisputably either arguments or adjuncts. The more disputable grey area between the clearcut cases has, time and again, proven difficult to explicate, but the relative relevance of the participants to the overall frame offers a useful, cognitively oriented and theoretically anchored way to make sense of the borderline cases.

Keywords: Arguments. Adjuncts. Adverbials.

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Frame evoking nonlexical elements: Wordinternal, framebearing morphological elements in a polysynthetic language – a few examples in Greenlandic (EskimoAleut).

Judithe Denbæk (Ilisimatusarfik – The University of Greenland)

[email protected]

The title might seem nonsensical for some, since Frame Semantics is developed with an analytic language in mind and therefore lexical oriented in nature. A word in Greenlandic, however, can in some instances translate into a whole sentence in a language such as English. Even at the morphological level, some affixes are hard to translate to single words in English. Additionally, the polysynthetic nature of this language means, that certain (not all) syntactic relations are to be found between free words as modifiers and verbinternal heads that are either verbal or noun stems – a process termed incorporation or inderivation. The inderivation of a verbal stem results in clauselike syntactic units. One important consequence of a frame semantic approach to this type of language – obviously – is that frame evoking elements are to be found as bound morphemes, either as stems or affixes. The paper presents a few Greenlandic examples, herein frame elements from Fillmore’s classical example of the commercial event. Research on application of Frame Semantics in Greenlandic is in its infancy, and this particular paper should be viewed as a pilot project.

Keywords: Greenlandic. Polysynthetic language. Wordinternal framebearing elements.

References

Fillmore, Charles J. (1982). Frame semantics. IN: Linguistics in the Morning Calm . Hanshin, Seoul. Linguistics Society of Korea, 111138.

Fillmore, Charles J. & Baker, Colin (2009). A Frames Approach to Semantic Analysis. IN: Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis .

Fortescue, Michael D. (1980). Affix Ordering in West Greenlandic Derivational Processes. IN: International Journal of American Linguistics , 46(4). The University of Chicago Press, 259278.

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Kawaletz, Lea & Ingo Plag (2015). Predicting the semantics of English nominalizations: A framebased analysis of –ment suffixation. IN: Laurie Bauer, Pavol Štekauer & Lívia Körtvélyessy (eds.), Semantics of Complex Words . Dordrecht: Springer, 289319.

Langgård, Karen (2003). Inderivation in Westgreenlandic. IN: Ole Nedergaard Thomsen & Michael Herslund (eds.), Complex predicates and incorporation. A functional perspective . (Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague Vol. XXXII). Copenhagen: Reitzel, 67119.

Plag, Ingo (2004). Syntactic category information and the semantics of derivational morphological rules. IN: Folia Linguistica 38(34), 193225.

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Cognitive Construals underlying grammatical aspects and modalities in Dravidian Languages

Vigneshwaran Muralidaran (IIITH)

[email protected]

Ganesh Katrapati (IIITH)

[email protected]

A curious morphosyntactic phenomenon observed in Dravidian languages is the presence of alleged tense markers in all nonfinite inflections of verbs (Raghavachari Amritavalli & KA Jayaseelan, 2005, R Amritavalli, 2014). Related to this feature are the following facts: In complex sentences of Dravidian languages, events are not expressed by connecting multiple finite clauses through subordinate conjunctions, but by a series of nonfinite verbs with one finite verb at the end, being head final languages (Steever, Sanford B, 1988 & 2015, KA Jayaseelan 2004); Finite clauses cannot be coordinated; Relative clauses are nonfinite (KA Jayaseelan 2014, McFadden, Thomas & Sandhya Sundaresan. 2014). Consistent with the above syntactic peculiarities, grammatical aspects and modalities are expressed as MainAux verb sequence ’V1V2V3....’ with nonfinite inflections on every verb except the last verb which is finite. Again, the same tense markers figure in this sequence as well. Look at the below examples.

(1) rAman vandu iruppAn Raman comePSTCONJ AUX1FUT3.M.SG ‘Raman would have come’

(2) rAman vara kUDum Raman comeINF AUX1FUT.3.NH.SG ‘Raman may come’

It can be observed from example 1 that the verbal stem ‘vA(come)’ inflects as ‘vandu’ which is a nonfinite conjunctive inflection that shows past morpheme ‘nd’. In example 2, the same stem ‘vA(come)’ inflects as ‘vara’ with an infinitive nflection that shows a nonpast bare stem ’var’. A sequence without these nonfinite inflections produces ungrammatical sentences ’*rAman vA irukkiRAn’ or ’*rAman vA kUDum’. In formal analyses, it is considered that this is just a grammatical scheme (E Annamalai). We suggest that there are four construction schemas behind VerbVerb interactions in discourse and that grammatical aspects, modalities are just special cases of these construals.

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The discourse continuance construed from the inception state of an already manifest process verb P1 to another process P2 gives rise to grammatical aspect. Conversely, discourse continuance construed to the inception state of a yetto manifest process P1 from another process verb P2 gives rise to modalities. Evidence for this comes from the scope of negation and the syntactic constraints therein. For example, the example 1 can be negated felicitously in two ways ’rAman vandu irukka mATTan’ (Raman would not have come) and ’rAman varAmal irundu iruppAn’(Raman would have been in a state of having not come)’ but ‘*rAman varAmal iruppAn’ is an infelicitous negation of example 1. Through linguistic evidences we show that the nonfinite participial inflections have systematic mappings to discourse construals which reveals that auxiliary verbs are not just syntactic heads but also semantic heads.

Keywords: Construals. Grammatical Aspects. Modalities. Dravidian Languages. References

E. Annamalai. The variable relation of verbs in sequence in tamil.

KA Jayaseelan. (2004). The serial verb construction in malayalam . In Clause structure in South Asian languages 67–91. Springer Netherlands.

KA Jayaseelan. (2014). Coordination, relativization and finiteness in Dravidian . Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32(1):191–211.

McFadden, Thomas & Sandhya Sundaresan. (2014). Finiteness in south asian languages: an introduction . Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32(1): 1–27.

R Amritavalli. (2014). Separating tense and finiteness: anchoring in Dravidian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 32(1): 283306.

Raghavachari Amritavalli & KA Jayaseelan. (2005). Finiteness and negation in Dravidian. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax 178–220.

Raghavachari Amritavalli & Karattuparambil A Jayaseelan. (2004). The genesis of syntactic categories and parametric variation. Proceedings of the 4th Asian GLOW in Seoul. 19:1941.

Steever, Sanford B. (1988). The serial verb formation in the Dravidian languages . (Volume 4) Motilal Banarsidass Publications.

Steever, Sanford B. (2015). The Dravidian Languages . Routledge

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Multiple source constructions in language change: a case study

Daniel McColm (University of Edinburgh)

[email protected]

The possibility of multiple source constructions in language change has been underexplored in prior literature (Van De Velde, De Smet & Ghesquière, 2013: 473), despite examples of multiple source constructions abounding in phonology, lexical semantics, and syntax (Van De Velde, De Smet & Ghesquière, 2013). This paper examines the role of multiple sources in the hostclass expansion of postverbal arguments in the wayconstruction. Data from a number of corpora (OED, CLMETEV, COHA and COCA) were used in this investigation. The data were coded for a number of features including verb type, choice of postverbal argument and choice of subject. The present study supports Traugott & Trousdale’s (2013) conclusion that the wayconstruction originated from multiple sources that were distinct in their argument structure: a transitive construction involving way as the head of the direct object NP, and an unergative construction. This paper also builds on Traugott & Trousdale’s (2013) findings, showing that the changes affecting the wayconstruction today are also the product of multiple source constructions. Novel sentences such as He drank his way to death arise as a result of a blend of wayconstruction and semantically similar fake reflexive resultative construction (He drank himself to death). This finding builds on Traugott & Trousdale (2013), who focused primarily on the inception of the wayconstruction and its diachronic precursors. This paper shows that multiple source constructions are a salient phenomenon in language change, and provide a convincing account of the development of the wayconstruction from its inception to the present day.

Keywords: Multiple source constructions. Way construction.

References

Traugott, E. & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van De Velde, F., De Smet, H., & Ghesquière, L. (2013). On multiple source constructions in language change. On Multiple Source Constructions In Language Change , 37 (3), 473489. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.37.3.01int.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.37.3.01int

Constructions in Functional Discourse Grammar

Elnora ten Wolde (University of Vienna)

[email protected] Many language models, both generative and functional, have integrated some form of constructions into their framework; this paper will expand on this work and examine the role of constructions in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). Exemplified by the historical development of a family of of binominal constructions, this talk will address the questions of how constructions might be understood in the FDG model, where they would be situated in the overall framework, and what are the benefits of incorporating them into FDG. FDG is a functional theory in the sense that it is based on the assumption that function triggers form (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008: 13). This view is reflected in the topdown organization of the model: taking a speaker’s communicative intentions as input, a cognitive process of formulation occurs which translates these intentions into two functional representations (one containing pragmatic, the other semantic information); in turn, these representations form the input for a process of encoding, which determines the morphosyntactic and phonological form of the utterance (e.g. Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008: 39). The representations on the four levels use a set of primitives which include frames (for formulation operations) and templates (for encoding operations). Frames and templates are the languagespecific tools offered to the speaker for structuring their communicative intention; they are not fixed form meaning pairs, i.e. they are not constructions. FDG, nonetheless, does not exclude the presence of constructionlike compositions in the language model. Keizer (to appear 2016), in an analysis of idioms, adopts the Goldberg 1995 definition of constructions and argues for the existence of ComPIFs (Combination of Partially Instantiated Frames and Templates), which consist of frames and templates that contain open and blocked slots and which together are stored in the lexicon. This solution accounts for semifixed and formulaic utterances such as idioms, but the question remains as to what extent ComPIFs include simply noncompositional formulations. This question will be explored by means of a discussion of the historical development of the evaluative binominal noun phrase (EBNP; that idiot of a doctor ), which exhibits such noncanonical behavior, e.g. irregular premodification (1), lexical selection (2), and syntactic restrictions such as determiner choice and placement (3 ab). (1) A hungrylooking mere wisp of a fellow [COHA] (2) *a teacher of a husband (Keizer 2007: 86) (3) a. your jerk of a/*the brother b. Your brother is a jerk. (Aarts 1998: 131)

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Discussing the historical development of the EBNP’s of binominal family and addressing issues such as iconicity, transparency, noncompositionality, and the link between form and meaning, this paper will delineate the difference between frames/ templates and constructions and map out the role constructions play in the language model. It will further argue that integrating constructions into the FDG framework allows FDG to account for noncanonical behavior within the grammar; reciprocally, FDG’s formal framework can account for syntactic variation of pragmatically and semantically related constructs without resorting to positing a new micro construction. Keywords: Construction Grammar. Functional Discourse Grammar. Of binominals. Theoretical linguistics. References Aarts, B. (1998). English binominal noun phrases. Transactions of the Philological Society, 96, 117158.

Hengeveld, K., Mackenzie, J. L. (2008). Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologicallybased theory of language structure . Oxford: OUP.

Keizer, E. (2007). The English noun phrase: The nature of linguistic categorization. Cambridge: CUP.

Keizer, M.E. (to appear 2016). Idiomatic expressions in Functional Discourse Grammar. In Inge Genee & Evelien Keizer, The Lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar . Special issue of Linguistics 54(5).

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Fact constructions across languages


[email protected]

Evidentiality refers to the source of information the speaker has for his/her statement. For example, a statement such as ’John is running in the park’ can be based on the speaker’s own visual observation, or the speaker may have hearsay evidence for his/her claim. Numerous studies have discussed evidentiality in and across languages and shown that languages tend to mark certain evidence types explicitly including sensory evidence, inference, assumption and hearsay (see, e.g., Aikhenvald 2004). In this paper, an evidence type that has received much less attention in studies of evidentiality, namely facts, will be discussed (see, however, e.g. Loughnane 2009 and Plungian 2010 for notes on facts). Fact constructions are in this paper defined as constructions that code pieces of information that meet the following criteria:

1. Facts are parts of the speaker’s established world view; the speaker has absolute subjective certainty about their truth value.

2. The speaker can refer to a fact without any kind of external (sensory, hearsay, inferential, assumptive) evidence.

3. The original source of information does not need to be specified, and the differences between different sources of information have been neutralized.

According to the definition above ‘two plus two is four’ is a typical fact, but ‘John is walking in the park’ is not, because we need some kind of external evidence for the latter statement. Moreover, the truth value of the first statement is not timedependent, while the second statement holds only for a certain period of time, which also renders concrete evidence necessary. The speaker can be absolutely certain of both these statesofaffairs, but only the first of them can be considered as a genuine fact. It should also be noted that for the linguistic coding of facts it is relevant that the speaker believes something to be a fact regardless of its nonlinguistic facthood. For example, ‘Sydney is the capital of Australia’ may be a fact to the speaker (and s/he therefore codes it accordingly), even though this is not a fact non linguistically. In addition to discussing the semantics of facts, I will also propose constructional typology of fact coding based on the element languages use for their coding (the element used is usually the most direct evidential of the given language). First, languages may code facts by a dedicated factual evidential, as in Wutun (Erika Sandman, p.c.). Second, there are languages that code facts by an egoevidential

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(used for referring to events caused volitionally by the speaker him/herself), which is attested, e.g., in Okspamin (Loghnane 2009: 254f). Third, visual/direct evidentials may appear in factual constructions, as in, e.g., ShipiboKonibo (Valenzuela 2003: 35). And finally, languages may leave facts formally noncoded, which is the case in, e.g., Finnish. In the last three types, the factual reading is clearly constructional, because the factual reading of a clause is a clear combination of meaning and form, neither alone suffices. The linguistic coding of facts manifests both their special nature and their common features with other evidence types. The focus seems to be on the common features, but the first type underlines the peculiarity of facts in according them distinct formal coding. Type 2, in turn, stresses the personal nature of facts in treating them formally in the same way as egoevidence. In Type 3, the feature in common is the high degree of reliability; it is very hard to deny a fact or something we have actually seen. This also applies to Type 4, because zero coding occurs for all types of direct evidence in Finnish. Moreover, Type 4 also emphasizes the peculiar nature of facts; no existing evidential is compatible with the semantics of facts, because of which evidentials may not appear in fact constructions.

Keywords: Evidentiality. Facts. Linguistic typology. References

Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2004). Evidentiality . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Loughnane, R. (2009). A grammar of Oksapmin. Doctoral dissertation, University of Melbourne.

Plungian, V. (2010). Types of verbal evidentiality marking: an overview. In G. Diewald & E. Smirnova (eds.), The Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages (15 58). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Valenzuela, Pilar. (2003). Evidentiality in ShipiboKonibo,with a comparative overview of the category in Panoan. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), Studies in evidentiality (3362). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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The Future (interpretation) of the Finnish Progressive Construction

Heidi Niva (University of Helsinki)

[email protected]

Finnish has a conventionalized construction of the form copula + MAinfinitive inessive . The construction is known as the Progressive Construction, and typically expresses progressive aspect:

(1) Pekka on parhaillaan syömässä Pekka COP right now eatMAINF INE 'Pekka is eating/ having lunch at the moment'

The construction has a range of polysemous meanings besides simple progressivity. Depending on its context, coexisting syntactic elements and verb semantics, it can also express, for example, locativity or refer to future events. Progressive constructions across languages tend to interact with verbal aspect: If the verb is punctual or telic, the construction implies not progessivity but rather an immediate or a near future event. However, while the emphasis of the research concerning the futurate implications of OLLA + VmAssA has been mainly on aspect, it seems that the use of OLLA + VmAssA is currently going through a change that involves more variables than merely aspect. As a key role in the development of the novel quasiprogressive OLLA + VmAssA construction appears to be the language users' intentions:

(2) Olen lentämässä todennäköisesti Chileen COP flyMAINF INE probably to Chile 'I will fly to Chile, probably'

The quasiprogressive OLLA + VmAssA differs from its genuinely progressive 'vanilla' cousin in various contexts. For example, the quasiprogressive OLLA + V mAssA does not necessarily require a telic verb in order to get a futurate reading. Another such context is negation, which alters the temporal interpretation of the quasiprogressive OLLA + VmAssA. In an affirmative clause the QuasiProgressive orientates towards the future event, but in a negative clause the temporal location of the forthcoming action becomes less important, since the future with the events in question ceases to exist. Negation focuses the attention on the present intention, which is valid already at the moment of speech:

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(3) Edestakaista lentoa en ole ostamassa, roundtrip flight NEG COP buyMAINF INE [sillä en ole tulossa takaisin ainakaan vuoteen, enkä tiedä mistä ] 'I'll not buy a round trip, since I'll not come back in a year and don't know from where that might be'

Also, negation influences the default aspectual interpretation of the construction: When an imperfective verb appears in the quasiprogressive OLLA + VmAssA construction, it seems more likely to do so in a negative clause than in an affirmative clause:

(4) Siis ei kukaan varmaan leppäkerttua oo syömässä thus NEG no one probably ladybug COP eatMAINF INE [mut oisko se eettisesti sallittavaa? ] 'I guess no one will eat a lady bug, but would it be ethically acceptable?'

The effect of negation on temporal interpretation and verb semantic preferences in the Finnish QuasiProgressive Construction show how constructional change, epistemicity and interaction are linked to each other in an inseparable manner.

Keywords: Progressive aspect. Future reference. Polysemy.

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Mixed Inheritance in Possessive Constructions

Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS)

[email protected]

The paper offers an historical scenario for the emergence of an unusual agreement construction from the perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar (Barðdal et al. 2015). In a number of languages, a possessor that is NPinternal (at least descriptively) can trigger agreement on the verb, and there is no independent evidence that it assumes an argument status. This pattern is illustrated by Tzeltal (from Shklovsky 2012; glosses modified).

1. lah kil [snah Pedro] PFV ERG1see POSS3house Pedro ‘I saw [Pedro’s house].’

2. lah kil be [snah Pedro]

PFV ERG1seeABS3 POSS3house Pedro ‘I saw [Pedro’s house].’

(1) exemplifies a regular internal possessive construction. In (2) the possessor (‘Pedro’) is NPinternal too, as can be shown by various syntactic tests, but triggers 3rd person agreement on ‘see’, i.e. is syntactically reflected at the clause level. This violates usual assumptions about agreement locality. I propose that at least in some languages the mixed behaviour of constructions like (2) arises because they inherit the properties of two contributing constructions which served as their historical source: constituency is inherited from the regular internal possessor construction (1), while the agreement pattern is inherited from the structures with a clauselevel goal/beneficiary/maleficiary that triggers the same type of agreement, as in (3):

3. lah smakbe ti’nahe’ PFV ERG3closeABS3 doorCL

‘She closed the door for/on him.’ On this proposal, (2) emerged from (3) through a reanalysis of constituent structure along the following lines: ‘she closed [the door] [for him] > she closed [[his] [door]]’. The prerequisite for this kind of reanalysis is known to be ambiguity (Campbell & Harris 1995). If the beneficiary in (3) was allowed to be coreferential with the assumed possessor of the object, in at least some of its tokens (i.e. ‘she closed [hisi door] [for himi]’), this could in time form the semantic basis for actual

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reanalysis. Another driving force for this change was the analogy with other constructions and redeployment of old constructional pieces for new purposes. In this particular instance, the new construction (2) was assimilated to the class of regular internal possessive constructions like (1) in terms of constituency relations, which in its turn led to the realignment of grammatical functions from a (selected or nonselected) argument to a nonargument. The scenario outlined above is supported by the following three arguments:

(i) From a crosslinguistic perspective, constructions like (2) show remarkable parallelism to (3) in terms of the encoding of their basic components, to the extent that they may be structurally ambiguous (cf. Meakings & Nordlinger 2014). (ii) Different stages of the proposed historical process are attested across languages. For instance, in Santali (Neukom 2000, 2001) and Chimane (Ritchie 2015) the argument is not fully eliminated from clausal syntax but instead gets reduced to an optional cliticlike element that doubles the internal possessor. This situation appears to represent the intermediate stage of constructionalization: ‘she closed [hisi door] [for himi]’. (iii) A parallel development is observed in languages which do not show the same type of agreement but still exhibit possessorgoal/beneficiary syncretism. Thus for Germanic and Slavic it is widely accepted (Draye 1996; Dahl 2007; Lødrup 2009; Eckhoff 2012, among others) that internal possessors marked by the dative case or a dativelike preposition are a fairly recent development: they emerged when the clauselevel goal/beneficiary was reanalysed as the possessor. In a similar way to Santali and Chimane, intermediate stages of this process are also attested.

This analysis explains the emergence of an unusual pattern of agreement and offers a direct parallel to the reanalysis scenario proposed for more familiar languages with dative internal possessors. On a more general note, it supports the idea that grammatical constructions with mixed properties can arise as the consequence of borrowing by partial analogy from other constructions at different levels of representation (cf. Ackerman & Nikolaeva 2013; Barðdal et al. 2015). Keywords: Diachronic Construction Grammar. Possessive constructions. Agreement. Analogy.

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On the Construcitonalization of [NP1+Vi+le (了)+NP2] in Mandarin Chinese

LI Yanzhi (Zhejiang University)

[email protected] In Mandarin Chinese, there exists a type of noncanonical constructions in the configuration of [NP1 + Vi + NP2], where the verbs are usually used intransitively, such as 来(lái „come‟), 跑(păo „run‟), 走(zŏu „walk‟), 死(sĭ „die ‟), etc. Consider the examples below:

(1) 刚吃了一半，舅父来了客人。

Gāng chīle yībàn jiùfù lái le kèrén

Just eatASP one half uncle comeASP guest

„Just in the middle of dinner, my uncle has a guest/guests coming.‟

(2) 有的人走了一身汗。

Yŏuxiē rén zŏule yī shēn hàn

some people walkASP one body sweat

„Some people sweated all over their bodies because of walking.‟

(3) 他从小死了父亲。

Tā cóngxiăo sĭle fùqīn

He since small dieASP father

„His father died when he was young.‟

(4) 监狱跑了几个死刑犯。

jiānyù

păole jĭgè sĭxíngfàn

prison runASP several prisoners under sentence of death

„Several prisoners under sentence of death escaped from the prison.‟

Take (1) and (3) for example. Interpretively, (1) could be construed as “my uncle‟s guest is coming” and (3) means “his father died”. In these cases, 客人(kèrén

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‘ guest‟) and 父亲 (fùqin „father‟), the agents of the actions expressed by the respective verb, are realized as the syntactic argument of the whole construction, namely the object of the construction, but not the verb. Additionally, this kind of configuration expresses a distinctively inferred meaning. For instance, (1)(2) have the sense of „obtain/acquire something‟, whereas (3)(4) have the sense of „lose someone or something‟. That is to say, the [NP1+ Vi + NP2] construction manifests a high degree of hidden complexity in the sense that its formation is possibly driven by the principle of economy (Zipf 1949) and its interpretation would involve pragmatic inferences (Bisang 2009, 2014, 2015). In this paper, we will diachronically investigate the token frequency and type frequency of these constructions at issue from the perspective of construction grammar and constructionalization, with a particular focus on three crucial factors, namely schematicity, productivity and compositionality (cf. Goldberg 1995, 2006; Traugott & Trousdale 2013). Based on our statistics, the construction illustrated above has been found to be highly productive in Mandarin Chinese, and there are various synchronic semantic changes of preverbal and postverbal NPs in the usages as well (cf. Zuo 2007). Based on our study, it has thus been proposed that (1) from the constructional perspective, the [NP1+Vi+ NP2] expressions are characterized by high productivity, high schematicity and low compositionality; (2) From an interpretive perspective, the [NP1+Vi+ NP2] construction manifests a high degree of hidden complexity; (3) from a diachronic evolutionary perspective, the noncanonical structure have gone through the process of grammatical constructionalization. Keywords: Intransitive verbs. Inheritance. Productivity. Constructionalization. Hidden complexity.

References

Bergs, A. & Diewald, G. 2008. Constructions and Language Change . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bisang, W. 2009. On the evolution of complexity—Sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia. In G. Sampson, D. Gil & P. Trudgill (Eds.). Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable , 34−49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bisang, W. 2014. Overt and hidden complexity—Two types of complexity and their implications. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 50 (2):127−143.

Goldberg, A. E. 2006. Constructions at Work . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Traugott, E. C. & Trousdale, G. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trousdale, G. 2013. Multiple inheritance and constructional change. Studies in Language 37(3): 491514. Zuo, Shuangju. 2007. An Investigation of the object commanding ability of Lai (来) and Qu (去). Chinese Linguistics 4: 7178.

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Pseudocoordination in Mainland Scandinavian. The gå ‘go/walk’ and VP construction in the history of Swedish

Peter Andersson (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Kristian Blensenius (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Mainland Scandinavian Pseudocoordinations (MSPC) are complexpredicate constructions involving two verbs or verb phrases combined with a conjunction (Swedish och, Danish and Norwegian og). Unlike canonical coordination, a pseudocoordination is typically interpreted as depicting a single event. An example from Swedish such as Peter sitter och läser can be literally translated into ‘Peter sits and reads’ but a more idiomatic translation would be ‘Peter is reading’, i.e. the first verb seems to mainly add a temporal (aspectual) meaning to the construction as a whole. Studies of MSPCs are often syntactically oriented, discussing e.g. whether MSPCs are coordination or subordination structures, or both (e.g. Josefsson 1991,Wiklund 2007, Bjerre & Bjerre 2007). The coordinationvs.subordination issue is also debated in diachronic oriented work of Swedish from the early 20th century: Are they the result of a confusion between the infinitival marker att ‘to’ and the conjunction och, both of which are typically pronounced as å [ɔ]? (Norwegian og 'and' and å 'to' are also homophonous, and so may Danish og ‘and’ and at ‘to’ be.) Beckman (1916:132) argues that an example like gå ut och gå (lit. go out and walk) probably originated in the construction gå ut att gå (lit. go out to walkINF). This assumption is questioned by Persson (1918:445), who instead assumes canonical verbal coordination to be the original construction. There is still disagreement on the coordinationvs.subordination issue, but it is interesting to note that the go construction indeed has subordination counterparts in Modern Swedish (c1526– 1870), for example, the expression gick att bese slottet 'went to inspect the castle' in Almqvist’s novel Jaktslottet (c1830). Given this, more empirical evidence is needed to reveal the relation between coordination and subordination constructions during time. As part of an ongoing study of MSPCs, we present the preliminary results of a diachronic study of the construction [gå och VP] (lit. walk and VP) ‘go Ving’ in Swedish. Using corpusbased methods such as diachronic collostructional analysis we shed some new light to the coordinationvs.subordination issue as well as to the functional status of different subconstructions including the gå ‘walk’ type over

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time. Preliminary results give reason to doubt the hypothesis that MSPCs originate from subordinating constructions. Moreover, our study shows the importance of analysing the semantics of both conjuncts rather than assuming that the meaning of MSPCs is the result of the syntactic configuration of the first verb (Josefsson 2014).

Keywords: Verbal Pseudocoordination. Coordination vs. subordination. Mainland Scandinavian. Collostructional analysis.

References

Beckman, N. (1916). Svensk språklära. För den högre elementarundervisningen . 9 ed. Stockholm: Bonnier.

Bjerre, A. & Bjerre, T. (2007). Hybrid phrases: the Danish sidder og phrase. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Typed Feature Structure Grammars , pp. 39–46.

Josefsson, G. (1991). Pseudocoordination – a VP + VP coordination. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax, 47, pp. 130–156.

Josefsson, G. (2014). Pseudocoordination in Swedish with gå ‘go’ and the “surprise effect”. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax , 93.

Persson, P. (1918). Syntaktiska anmärkningar. In: Studier tillegnade Esaias Tegnér den 13 januari 1918 . Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups, pp. 444–454.

Wiklund, A.L. (2007). The syntax of tenselessness: Tense/mood/aspectagreeing infinitivals. Studies in generative grammar , 92, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Argument Structure Constructions and Metaphor in Null Instantiation Patterns

Oana A. David (University of California, Merced)

[email protected]

Null or implicit arguments (Bhatt & Pancheva 2006) have received attention regarding their interpretation once omitted. In a sentence like I understand ø[Content], the ‘content understood’ is definite null instantiated (DNI), i.e., it is obligatorily retrievable from context. In contrast, a verb like eat gets an indefinite reading (INI), e.g., Who was eating ø[Ingestibles] in here? The referent can remain unidentified. Grammatical and informationstructural explanations have been explored for NI (Fillmore 1986, Goldberg 2005, Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005), while questions remain about the lexical semantics of NI (Resnik 1996, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998). In the latter approach, as well as in recent frame semantic approaches (e.g. Ruppenhofer and Michaelis 2010) there is always a tendency to place the burden of the null instantiation licensing power on the head lexeme, or on the conceptual frame evoked by the head lexeme. Complementing these studies, in this paper we explore possible generalizations that can be made in particular about DNIlicensing contexts (e.g., understand , arrive ) by focusing on the role of the grammatical constructions within which these verbs are embedded when NI occurs. Empirical support comes from a close investigation of annotated FrameNet sentences from an analysis of NI of frame roles that would manifest as transitive verb complements and as obliques if instantiated. We analyzed all verb annotations for DNI/INI in the FrameNet database for English (DNI n=1514, INI n=1481 across 507 frames). We tagged each item by the highlevel semantics a specific frame evokes (e.g. Motion for Transporting, Bringing, Arriving), and also by highlevel semantics of the omitted frame element. In this way, we take a novel step towards categorizing frame elements as an inheritance network and away from a long, undifferentiated list of frame elements. The main observation is that many instances of DNI seem to have in common a failure to instantiate the frame element constituting the ground in a figureground relation, whether this relation is concretely or metaphorically construed. That is, in the sentences in (1)(4), all of the omitted roles are construed constructionally as the ground.

(1) We arrived in Boston. / We arrived. (goal of motion)

(2) That shirt matches your pants./ That shirt matches. (attentional ground)

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(3) He won the race. / He won. (event as ground)

(4) We must conform to the norm./ We must conform. ( n o r m s a s g r o u n d , metaphoric)

As (4) shows, sometimes the construal of the ground is metaphoric. Regardless of which specific FE is omitted in each case, we see that the FEs are prone to omission by virtue of being construed constructionally as the ground, and hence that FE can be left uninstantiated yet conceptually active and contextually retrievable. Metaphoric figureground relations are established by the argument structure construction, such as the toPP construction in (4), since all constructions have image schematic meanings grounded in concrete experiential scenes (as explored in Sullivan 2007, 2013). In this paper, further exploration of metaphor effects in grammatical constructions reveals at least two ways in which metaphor plays a role in argument (non)realization. In one way, the metaphor is triggered by the lexical head (5) as well as the construction (not literal arriving; the atPP construction metaphorically captures translative motion). The other consists of instances in which the lexical head is not metaphoric but the construction is, as in (6) (literal grieving; metaphoric over PP), usually by virtue of a core frame element being expressed with a spatial preposition.

(5) They arrived at the right conclusion. / #They arrived.

(6) He grieved over his wife’s death. / He grieved. We see that when the second type of metaphor occurs (6), NI is indeed licensed for the overPP, as would be the case for the locative ground in physical motion. On the other hand, NI is not licensed when the lexical head is additionally metaphoric (5).

A key insight provided in this work is that before we can make generalizations with respect to null instantiation we must empirically explore the possible syntactic instantiation of the omitted element, so we can anticipate what the range of argument structure constructions would have been had the element been instantiated. Only then are the effects of metaphor revealed.

Keywords: Null instantiation. Argument realization. Metaphor. References

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Bhatt, R. M., & Pancheva, R. (2006). Implicit arguments. In M. Everaert, H. C. van Riemsdijk, R. Goedemans, & B. Hollebrandse (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax 2 (pp. 558–584). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Fillmore, C. J. (1986). Pragmatically controlled zero anaphora. In K. Nikiforidou, M. VanClay, M. Niepokuj, & D. Feder (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 95–107). Berkeley, CA.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lambrecht, K., & Lemoine, K. (2005). Definite null objects in (spoken) French: A constructiongrammar account. In M. Fried & H. C. Boas (Eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots (pp. 13–55). John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Resnik, P. (1996). Selectional constraints: An informationtheoretic model and its computational realization. Cognition, 61(12), 127–159.

Rappaport Hovav, M., & Levin, B. (1998). Building verb meanings. In M. Butt & W. Geuder (Eds.), The projection of arguments: Lexical and compositional factors (pp. 97–134). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Ruppenhofer, J. K., & Michaelis, L. A. (2010). A constructional account of genre based argument omissions. Constructions and Frames, 2(2), 158–184.

Sullivan, K. S. (2007). Grammar in Metaphor: A Construction Grammar Account of Metaphoric Language. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Sullivan, K. S. (2013). Frames and Constructions in Metaphoric Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

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Paradigms on the level of phrases within a constructional network: Idiosyncratic use of indefinite articles in Norwegian nominals with

the word slags


[email protected]

The Norwegian word slags is historically the word slag (kind/type) with a genitive case suffix s. Today, the word occurs in a lot of different constructions with varying semanticpragmatic contribution and a number of morphosyntactic idiosyncrasies. I have investigated the use of indefinite articles in the 11.881 occurrences of slags nominals with indefinite articles in a Norwegian corpus. The pattern emerging from the data is to the best of my knowledge unique in Norwegian. I will show how the pattern may be accounted for within a constructional network based approach – and crucially how the notion of paradigm would benefit the account of this phenomenon, and generally how paradigms on the level of phrases follow naturally from common assumptions central to cognitive construction grammar. When the noun following slags is singular, the indefinite article agrees in gender with this following noun:

(i)

en slags gutt et slags menneske

INDF.SG.ART.M kind boy(M) INDF.SG.ART.N kind human_being(N)

‘A kind of boy’ ‘a kind of human being’

But when the noun following slags is plural, the indefinite article is virtually invariably masculine: (ii)

en slags gutter en slags mennesker

INDF.SG.ART.M kind boy(M)PL INDF.SG.ART.M kind human_being(N)PL

‘A kind of boys’ ‘A kind of human beings’

A restricted group of words can occur between the indefinite article and slags . In order to account for both the idiosyncratic and the compositional aspects, slags should be seen as part of a half schematic nominal construction. The account would benefit from seeing the schemas for the slags phrases with singular nouns (i) and plural nouns (ii) as part of a paradigm on the level of phrases. Paradigm schemas are assumed within central constructional theories of grammar – especially

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scrutinised within Construction Morphology. However, the notion of paradigm has not received as much attention above the traditional wordlevel, despite the assumption within cognitive constructional grammar that the distinction between words and syntax is of a gradual kind, and hence that some of the concepts useful within morphology sometimes will be suitable above wordlevel. The idiosyncratic shift in use of indefinite article between schema (i) and (ii) could be accounted for in the same way as irregular inflection – while the paradigmatic relation between the two schemas would prevent their shared polysemy and collocational restrictions to appear isolated and random.

Keywords: Paradigm. Network. Type nouns.

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The relation between motion verbs and motion constructions – lexicogrammatical attraction and productivity


[email protected] A verb such as the Swedish manner of motion verb springa ‘run’ can be constructed in many different ways. Consider the following examples in (1) where the verb occur in two constructions that are used to describe translocative motion scenes in Swedish (e.g. Olofsson 2014):

(1) a. Jag sprang iväg till bussen 1SG runPST off to busDEF ‘I ran off to the bus’

b. Jag sprang till bussen 1SG runPST to busDEF ‘I ran to the bus’

In (1a) the verb is combined with the directional adverb iväg ‘off’ and a prepositional phrase denoting the GOAL of the motion. Hence this construction can be called [VERB iväg PP]. (1b) is an instantiation of a somewhat similar construction that can be called [VERBPP]. The two constructions can extensively be used with springa to denote similar scenes. Let’s consider älga ‘to moose’ in the following examples, which is another manner of motion verb in Swedish, with the meaning ‘moving with big strides’:

(2) a. Jag älgade iväg till posten 1SG moosePST off to post.officeDEF ‘I moosed off to the post office’ b. ?Jag älgade till posten 1SG moosePST to post.officeDEF ‘I moosed to the post office’

The examples in (2) instantiate the same pair of constructions as in (1). Even though springa ‘run’ and älga ‘moose’ are semantically similar in the sense that they both denote some kind of self motion, the latter does not really fit with the [VERBPP] construction. In my presentation, I will approach this problem with two possible explanations. The first takes the perspective of statistical attraction between a verb and argument structure construction (e.g. Stefanowitch 2013; Schmid & Küchenhoff 2013), such as the ones in (12). I will show a corpus investigation of 40 verbs, of which most

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are known motion verbs in Swedish, and their occurrence in the two motion constructions illustrated in (12). The frequency data will be discussed in relation to semantic differences between the investigated verbs. By dividing the verbs into finegrained semantic groups, I investigate how much of the relation between the verbs and the constructions that depends on the semantic compatibilities (fit) and how much it depends on frequency of use. The second explanation concerns productivity, that is, the possibility of using the constructions with novel verbs (cf Barðdal 2008; Bybee 2013). For instance, in the above corpus investigation, the [VERBiväg PP] is considered more productive than [VERBPP], based on type frequency and the amount of rare verbs that occur in them. Accordingly, a verb such as älga , which is relatively new in Swedish, is more likely to occur in the [VERBiväg PP] construction. Keywords: Motion verbs. Motion constructions. Productivity. Lexicogrammatical attraction. Swedish.

References

Barðdal, J. (2008). Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic (Vol. 8). John Benjamins Publishing.

Bybee, J. (2013). Usagebased theory and exemplar representation. In Thomas Hoffman and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Olofsson, J. (2014). Argument structure constructions and syntactic productivity The case of Swedish motion constructions. Constructions, 1, 7.

Schmid, H. J., & Küchenhoff, H. (2013). Collostructíonal analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings. Cognitive Linguistics, 24(3), 531577.

Stefanowitsch, A. (2013). Collostructional analysis. In Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

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Comparing constructicons across languages: Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish counterparts to the construction entries

in the FrameNet English Constructicon

Adrieli Bonjour Laviola da Silva (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]


[email protected]


[email protected]

Linnéa Bäckström (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Constructicons, in the sense of descriptive online resources, are now being constructed for several languages, including English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish (and plans for German). These are all developed in close collaboration, with mutual compatibility in mind. Hence, there is now an excellent opportunity to also venture into interlingual constructicon development, linking construction descriptions across languages. Interlingual constructicon application requires contrastive analyses. There are previous studies comparing the entries in the FrameNet English constructicon to Swedish (Bäckström et al. 2014) and Brazilian Portuguese (Laviola da Silva 2015), respectively, albeit with slightly different methodology. Building on those works, we have conducted a trilingual comparison between English, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish, again using the English constructicon as a starting point. The comparison is strictly unidirectional in the sense that English is invariably the source language, which means that Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese are only compared indirectly. The FrameNet English constructicon (Fillmore et al. 2012) comprises 75 construction entries, in varying stages of completeness. For all but a few of these source constructions, we have explored to what extent there are equivalent target constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish. This work consists on the one hand of establishing corresponding constructions (or the lack thereof) in the target languages, and on the other hand of distinguishing formal and functional differences between the source and target constructions. We will present the results

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of this comparison and discuss the implications for future development of interlingual constructicography. Keywords: Constructicon. Contrastive. Interlingual. Constructicography. References

Bäckström, L., B. Lyngfelt & E. Sköldberg (2014). Towards Interlingual Constructicography. On correspondence between constructicon resources for English and Swedish. Constructions and Frames 6:1, 9–32.

Boas, H. C. (ed.) (2009). Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications . Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Boas, H. C. (ed.) (2010). Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fillmore, C. J., R. LeeGoldman & R. Rhomieux (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (eds.), SignBased Construction Grammar (pp. 309–372). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Laviola da Silva, A. B. (2015). Frames e Construções em Contraste: uma análise comparativa portuguêsinglês no tangente à implementação de constructicons. MA Thesis, Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

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Quasigrammatical constructions: lexical expression of grammatical meanings


[email protected]

Alexander Letuchiy (School of Linguistics, NRUHSE, Moscow)

[email protected]

Vladimir Plungian (Vinogradov Institute for Russian Language, Moscow)

plungian@ilingran.ru

The paper is concerned with some instances of ‘quasigrammatical’ constructions in Russian. By this term we mean constructions with a meaning typical for grammatical markers. The list of Russian construction of repeatedness includes, for instance, (1) bez konca ‘constantly’, lit. ‘without end’; (2) na každom šagu ‘very often’, lit. ‘on every step’; (3) to i delo ‘very often’, lit. ‘that’s the matter’; (4) vremja ot vremeni ‘sometimes’, lit. ‘from time to time’; (5) netnet da i ’sometimes’, lit. ‘no, no, but’. These constructions are in some respects isomorphic to grammatical markers of situational plurality (see Dahl 1985, Shluinskij 2006). It allows classification into the same subzones: habitual, iterative, distributive. The iterative function is fulfilled by the majority of our markers: na každom šagu, to i delo , vremja ot vremeni , netnet da i . The iterative / habitual polysemy, frequent in the world’s languages, is also observed in this zone. The construction netnet da i can have a habitual meaning, denoting a participant’s property.

(7) Netnet da i popreknet: ran’še ty menja bol’ še ljubil Ø often reproachsg.nom before you.nom I.acc more lovepstsg.m ‘She sometimes reproached him: “You used to love me more.”’.

In (7), the fact that the subject reproached his husband is described as her consistent property, and not just a repetition of events. Diachronic sources of frequency constructions are different from those of grammatical markers of frequency. It is well known that imperfective markers (markers of nonfinished action) often develop into frequency markers. In the domain of constructions, the diachronic scenario occurs in the version “situation,

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occurring for a long time – repeated situation”: the unit bez konca got the frequency meaning in this way. Another scenario of evolution is more significant for the domain of grammatical localization than for aspectual markers: namely, the “space – time” transition. The construction na každom šagu made its way from locative contexts (plurality of locations) to frequency descriptions (plurality of situations). As well as grammatical markers, quasigrammatical constructions differ from each other in their semantics and distribution. However, the differential features are not the same. The main of them are:

1) Degree of frequency: vremja ot vremeni and netnet da i denote less frequent events than to i delo, bez konca or na každom šagu.

2) Fixed / nonfixed interval between the iterations: with vremja ot vremeni , the interval can be almost the same, while netnet da i conceptualize the repetition as chaotic, with no fixed interval.

3) Agentivity: netnet da i and to i delo , but not the other constructions, are incompatible with contexts where the speaker is an agent and controls the situation.

To sum up, Russian frequency constructions fulfill in some respects the function of frequency markers, which the Russian grammatical system lacks. They have restricted combinability with predicates, but the features regulating it are others than with grammatical markers. Keywords: Russian. Iterative. Habitual. Grammatical constructions. References Dahl Ö. (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell. Shluinsky, Andrei B. K tipologii predikatnoi množestvennosti: organizacija semantičeskoi zony. Voprosy jazykoznanija 1, 2006. 4675.

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Definiteness and finite clause complements: The Finnish complementation construction, referentiality, and the similarity of

different presuppositions


[email protected]

Finnish, like most other languages, has a standard variety complementation construction whereby a finite clause serves as the complement of a verb of communication or cognition. The Finnish complementation construction consists of a matrix clause with a complementtaking predicate, and (typically) an että clause as its complement.

(1) Ajattelen että ulkona paistaa aurinko. think1SG that outside shine3SG sun ’I think [that ~ about the fact] that the sun is shining outside’

The construction is a typical complementation construction in that it has three main elements: subject (quoted speaker), verb (a complementtaking verb of speech, cognition, emotion, or the like), and the finite clause complement. However, there is variation in the exact type of the complement, and this corresponds to systematically different interpretations. Notably, the complement clause may be accompanied by a determinative pronoun se ‘it’ or the adverb niin ‘so’. The pronoun forces a referential interpretation to the complement (Ajattelen sitä, että ‘I think of the fact that’), whereas the adverb forces a nonreferential, mannerlike interpretation (Ajattelen niin, että ‘I think [so, in such a way] that’). The definiteness of the pronoun se imposes an existential presupposition on its referent. In the complementation construction, the presupposition may be interpreted as concerning the utterance expressed by the että clause, which means that the complement is presented as something uttered previously (in the same discourse). On the other hand, the presupposition may also be interpreted as concerning the proposition expressed by the että clause, in which case it effectively corresponds to a factive presupposition: requiring that a stateofaffairs “exists” means, for all intents and purposes, that a clause expressing it is “true”. These presuppositional interpretations are ruled out by the adverb niin , and a bare että clause without either element is ambiguous in this respect. Other complement types show further variation in this respect. The paper shows, first, that the Finnish complementation construction involves a fundamental duality of sentential complements. This duality is linked to the semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntactic properties of the complement. It will

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further be argued that while this duality is exceptionally visible in the Finnish construction, it is also found in other languages. As a byproduct, the paper will suggest ways of formalizing variation in attribute–value matrixes and dealing with presuppositions in terms of constructions and frames. Keywords: Complementation. Presuppositions. Referentiality.

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Pragmatics and construction choice in cognitive sociolinguistics: contrastive negation in English

Olli O. Silvennoinen (University of Helsinki)

[email protected]

One of the central concerns of cognitive linguistics is why there are many ways of saying almost the same thing when language is hypothesised to avoid synonymy (Goldberg 1995). In recent years, construction grammarians and cognitive sociolinguists have utilised multivariate statistics to uncover the interactions between factors that explain linguistic variation (Gries 2013). We now know, for instance, that the variation between s genitive and of genitive in English is based on not only the animacy of the possessor but also its sibilancy, the length of the elements as well as the genitive constructions used previously in the discourse (e.g., Szmrecsanyi 2010). My study aims to broaden the focus of such analyses by considering the case of contrastive negation (CN) in English, using data from the British National Corpus (BNC). CN refers to constructions in which one element is negated and an affirmative one is presented as its alternative (e.g., McCawley 1991), as exemplified in (1) and (2):

(1) Within the Tory Party, what ultimately matters is not how many friends you have, but rather the power and strength of your enemies.

(2) They, not just their managers, should be involved in the design or purchasing process, and consulted about their tasks.

CN differs from the previous targets of multivariate analyses in two respects. First, since the negation is redundant from a truthconditional point of view, the construction has a pragmatic rather than a semantic motivation. This leads to the expectation that pragmatics affects the choice of the construction, which has been suggested for metalinguistic uses of contrastive negation in Malay/Indonesian (Kroeger 2014), for instance. Second, the family of CN constructions is large, which makes it an interesting test case for the ‘no synonymy’ hypothesis. In my paper, I shall analyse CN with respect to constructional synonymy using multinomial logistic regression, considering both intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors. Intralinguistic factors to be examined include the length of the constituents, their partofspeech and their informationstructural properties. Extralinguistic factors include mode and register.

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Keywords: Cognitive sociolinguistics. Contrastive negation. Corpus linguistics. Linguistic variation. Multivariate statistics.

References

Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gries, Stefan Th. (2013). Sources of variability relevant to the cognitive sociolinguist, and corpus as well as psycholinguistic methods and notions to handle them. Journal of Pragmatics, 52 , 5–16.

Kroeger, Paul. (2014). External negation in Malay/Indonesian. Language, 90 (1), 137– 184.

McCawley, James D. (1991). Contrastive Negation and Metalinguistic Negation. CLS, 27 (2), 189–206.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. (2010). The English genitive alternation in a cognitive sociolinguistics perspective. In Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman (Eds.), Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (pp. 139–166). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Semiauxiliaries in French from a Frames and Constructions diachronic perspective

Myriam Bouveret (University of Rouen)

[email protected]

The question of auxiliarity has been discussed in French lately at the 17th century whereas, semiauxiliaries appeared earlier in the written text as soon as the 12th century. They spread during the 14th15th centuries and increased noticeably during the Renaissance period (16th17th century) as proved in the data brought by the present study. Nevertherless, the limit between the notions of auxiliarity, and semiauxiliarity is not easy to draw (Lamiroy 1999). Besides the commonly accepted auxiliaries be and have since early grammars (Grévisse and Goose 2011), other auxiliaries such as devoir (‘must’, ‘may’, ‘have to’) , falloir (‘must’, ‘have to’), vouloir (‘want’), pouvoir (‘may’, ‘can’), aller (‘go’), venir (‘come’), faire (‘make’) expressing mood, aspect, temporality or causation are also frequently even if less commonly found in the texts during our five delimited diachronic periods, Old French, Middle French, Renaissance, Classical and Modern French. Those verbs, as retrieved in our data, are attested in a cline between a plain lexical meaning towards a more grammaticalized meaning (sometimes called « vector » verbs) . The next question arises then about the delimitation of the number of semiauxiliaries. Does the set include for example verbs like commencer à (‘start with’) cesser de (‘stop’), partir (‘leave’), continuer de (‘continue’), tarder à (‘take time to’) all denoting an aspectual phase, once combined with an infinitive ? The frontier is therefore vague between Lexicon and Grammar (Gosselin 2012) and the phenomena is more efficiently described in diachrony as a VerbtoTAM Chain [Verbe plein > AUX1 > …. AUXn > Affixe ] (Hopper & Traugott 2003) expressing the evolution from Lexicon to Grammar, and as well Morphology. We study in the present research a sample of seven French semiauxiliaries devoir, falloir, vouloir, pouvoir, aller, venir, faire based on diachronic data retrieved from Frantext (Base textuelle FRANTEXT (INALF/ATILFCNRS) from the 12th century (La Chanson de Roland , Anonyme, 1100) to nowadays. We propose an analysis using a Frames and Constructions approach. The analysis questions the diachronic evolution of the semiauxiliaries constructions as a category and their grammaticalization by analogy (Traugott and Trousdale 2013). This grammatical motivation is combined with a semantic dynamicity of profiling in terms of Frames (Goldberg 2010, Gosselin 2012). We include in our data the less commonly discussed French verb donner (‘give’) as a semiauxiliary of causation.

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Keywords: Constructions. Diachrony. Frames. French. SemiAuxiliaries. References Bybee J. L., Perkins R. and Pagliuca W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world . University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg A. E. (2010). “Verbs, Constructions and Semantic Frames”, in M. Rappaport Hovav, E. Doron & I. Sichel (eds), Lexical Semantics, Syntax, and Event Structure , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3958.

Gosselin L. (2010). Les modalités en français. La validation des représentations , Amsterdam/New York : Rodopi.

Gosselin L. (2012). « Les relations entre périphrases aspectuelles et conjugaisons en français », Communication orale, Université de Rouen, mars 2015.

Grevisse et Goose. (2011) (reed.), Le bon Usage , De BoeckDuculot

Hopper P. and ClausTraugott E. (2003). Grammaticalization , Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Kronning, H. (1996). Modalité, cognition et polysémie: sémantique du verbe modal ‘devoir’. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Uppsala.

Lamiroy B.. (1999). « Les auxiliaires : délimitation, grammaticalisaiton et analyse », in Langages . Edition A. Colin, Volume 23, 3345.

Liere A. (2011). Entre lexique et grammaire : les périiphrases verbales du Francais . Thèse de doctorat en Sciences du Langage, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale.

MarcelloNizia C. (2011). Grammaticalisation et changement linguistique , De Boeck, collection Champ linguistique.

Sweetser E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics, Oxford University Press.

Traugott, E. C. & . Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 304 p. (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics; no. 6).

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Reconstructing Constructionalization: The Story of Topics in Sirva

Don Daniels (Australian National University)

[email protected]

The idea that syntactic reconstruction is possible in a constructional framework is gaining support (Barðdal 2013; Barðdal et al. 2015), as is the idea that the phenomenon of grammaticalization is best analyzed in such a framework (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). This paper combines these two notions in analyzing a development in Sirva, a TransNew Guinea language of the Sogeram group spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. Sirva possesses a subordination construction that is known as a GENERALIZED NOUN MODIFYING CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION, or GNMCC. Such constructions were first described for Japanese by Matsumoto (1988, 1997) and have since been described for other languages, primarily in Asia (Comrie 1998). They consist of a clause modifying a head noun attributively with the distinction that the head noun is not an argument of the subordinate clause. (This feature distinguishes them from relative clauses.). Sirva GNMCCs follow the head noun as shown in (1), where the GNMCC bira urubɨ sa ‘they went’ modifies the head noun udukɨ b ‘path’. The GNMCC also requires a postposed subordinating morpheme, in this case the pragmatic middle demonstrative kudu .

(1) Udukɨ b [bira urubɨ sa ] kudu sigudɨ i … path 3PL goPLFAR.PST3 MIDPRAG disappear3SG.DS ‘The path they had gone on disappeared and …’

This construction is not found in any of the nine other Sogeram languages, so I argue that it is a Sirva innovation. The question then becomes, how did it emerge? There has been, to my knowledge, no investigation into the diachronic processes by which GNMCCs are created. I argue that the Sirva GNMCC was created by constructionalizing the combination of two separate constructions: topicalization and sentence nominalization. Both of these constructions can be reconstructed to ProtoSogeram, as I demonstrate by reconstructing the morphology associated with them: ProtoSogeram topics were marked by one of two cases on the demonstrative (*n or *Ø), and clause chains were nominalized by a postposed demonstrative. I then argue that, in Sirva, nominalized clause chains containing topicfronted nouns were reanalyzed as GNMCCs in which the topicfronted noun acted as head noun. In other words, the subordinate clause in (1) would have, at the ProtoSogeram

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stage, been udukɨ b bira urubɨ sa ‘the path, they walked (on it)’. Because of the semantic properties of the clause chain nominalization construction, the reanalysis I propose involved minimal semantic change. Moreover, the structural properties of clause chain nominalization and topicfronting allowed for a gradual change in the constituency of the head noun. I then show that reanalysis is complete based on the determinertaking properties of nouns modified by GNMCCs: while topicfronted nouns can take a variety of determiners in modern Sirva, nouns modified by GNMCCs cannot. If information structure truly “forms the bridge between grammar and use” (Leino 2013: 333), then understanding its diachronic behavior is essential to a complete understanding of the diachronic behavior of constructions. This paper combines recent insights in diachronic Construction Grammar to provide a detailed account of the changes that affected a topicalization construction in ProtoSogeram. It also provides typologists with a valuable case study of the emergence of a GNMCC, a construction that is still understudied cross linguistically.

Keywords: Grammatical reconstruction. Constructionalization. Information structure. Subordination. Papuan languages.

References Barðdal, J. (2013). Constructionbased historicalcomparative reconstruction. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 438–457). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barðdal, J., Smirnova, E., Sommerer, L., & Gildea, S. (Eds.). (2015). Diachronic Construction Grammar . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Comrie, B. (1998). Attributive clauses in Asian languages: Towards an areal typology. In W. Boeder, C. Schroeder, K. H. Wagner, & W. Wildgen (Eds.), Sprache in Raum und Zeit, In memoriam Johannes Bechert (Vol. Band 2: Beiträge zur empirischen Sprachwissenschaft, pp. 51–60). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Leino, J. (2013). Information structure. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 329–344). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matsumoto, Y. (1988). Semantics and pragmatics of nounmodifying constructions in Japanese. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 166–175).

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Matsumoto, Y. (1997). NounModifying Constructions in Japanese: A Frame Semantic Approach . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Grammar and image: how language modulates grammar and grammar modulates image


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[email protected]

Assuming that human languages are complex adaptive systems (cf. BYBEE, 2010), we can postulate that there are universal attractors that apply at them world wide, as corporification, image schemas, constructions, economy, iconicity and sociability. Such attractors, however, function in each particular language from its typology and historical factors, let us not forget the random factor. An example of the typological attractor is the satellite framing principle (cf. TALMY, 2000, v. 2) that shapes the movement constructions in English, as get in , get out , unlike Portuguese, whose typological attractor is the verb framing principle , as entrar e sair . This work aims to show the relationship imagegrammarimage, exemplified in Portuguese. Our hypothesis is that image acts as a factor that modulates the grammar, only from the cognitive viewpoint; and grammar acts as a factor that modulates image, from the interdiscursive functional viewpoint. Examples of the former situation are equative sentences; in with there is normally no need of formal agreement between subject and predicative, as in O problema (masc, sing) são as altas (fem, pl) do dólar , but image leads to that agreement, as in Maria e Helena (fem, pl)

são professoras (fem.pl). Another example appears in sentences whose preferential agreement of the verb and predicative occurs with the modifier of the quantifier subject head motivated by gender image, in sentences as: A maioria dos homens estão preocupados . The canonical version, with agreement with the head, A maioria dos homens está preocupada , is minimally. This image attractor also interferes with texts produced by people with little knowledge of grammatical rules as seen in the text of a posthumous message as A família de João da Silva, ainda sensibilizados, expressam os mais profundos agradecimentos , or in a blog comment: No Parque Villa Lobos ficam um montão de noia se jogando na frente dos carro s. In the second situation, grammar modulates image – as advocates Bergen (2012:1080), when he says: “Which perspective you adopt is important, because it will radically affect your embodied simulations of an event.” This happens in sentences like: Muitos de nós sabiam do esquema de propina / Muitos de nós sabíamos do esquema de propina . In the first example, the speaker is not included

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in the knowledge of the bribery and, in the second, she is included. The same occurs in the case of verb agreement with compound subject as in: Chegaram o senador e o governador / Chegou o senador e o governador . In the first sentence, the speaker delivers the addressee simulation in long shot that both agents appear simultaneously. In the second, she delivers simulation in two turns, when the senator’s image appears in a first turn and the governor in a second turn. This phenomenon of image simulation choice also occurs in anaphoric cohesion involving “blending”, compressing the plural in the singular (cf. TURNER, 2014:18), as in O elefante asiático tende a desaparecer . In a second sentence, the speaker can maintain the compression, continuing to offer the addressee the image simulation of an elephant in the singular (Ele vem sendo caçado impiedosamente ), or decompressing, using the plural (Eles vêm sendo caçados impiedosamente ).

Keywords: Image. Grammar. Attractors. Discourse.

References

Bybee, J.. (2010). Language, usage and cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bergen, B. K.. (2012). Louder than words: the new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics . Massachusetts: MIT Press, vol. 2.

Turner, M.. (2014). The origin of ideas : blending, creativity and the human spark . Ox ford: Oxford University Press.

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Constructions are not predictable but motivated: Evidence from the Spanish completive reflexive

Wojciech Lewandowski (University of Copenhagen)

[email protected]

Many generative researchers seem to have the idea that constructionist approaches involve lists of wholly idiosyncratic constructions. On the other hand, there is the largely unspoken idea that constructions are not needed in verbframed languages (Talmy 1991), such as Spanish. In this talk, we provide evidence from the Spanish completive construction that both these statements are in fact far from the truth. The Spanish morpheme se covers a broad range of grammatical functions, several of which are illustrated in (1) – (4). The goal of the present paper is to demonstrate how one of the most unusual uses of se , that of a completive marker as in (1), is related to and thus motivated by , other more common and widely discussed cases, such as those in (2)(4). While the use of se as a completive marker may at first appear to be unrelated and idiomatic to the other uses, we argue that its appearance is no accident, as se is related in both form and meaning to its function as a reflexive pronoun. In this way, we demonstrate that a constructionist account of the completive se construction does not involve a construction formed sui generis . Rather, as is commonly the case, the nonprototypical use arises as a minimal extension of other, well established uses (Goldberg 1995). Together, the totality of uses of Spanish se forms a rich tapestry, in which each use is linked closely to multiple other uses.

(1) El niño se comió una manzana. (Completive) the child SE.3sg ate.3sg an apple ‘The child ate up an apple’

(2) a. Juan se peinó. (DO reflexive) John SE.3sg combed.3sg ‘John combed himself’

b. Juan se peinó la barba. (IO reflexive) John SE.3sg combed.3sg the beard ‘John combed his beard’

(3) El barco se hundió. (Middle/Anticausative) the boat SE.3sg sank.3sg ‘The boat sank’

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(4) Se cosen camisas. (Passive) SE.3pl sew.3pl shirts ‘Shirts are sewed’

While many researchers consider se and its cognates as a single atomic category (e.g., a pronoun (López García 1998) or an affix (Monachesi 2005)), we argue that this morpheme should be analyzed as a network of senses (Wittgenstein 1955; Maldonado 2008), ranging from the prototypical reflexive pronoun, as in (2), to more grammaticalized functions, which reflect different stages of diachronic evolution (Mutz 2012). On the other hand, we show that previous approaches concerned specifically with the completive function of se consider only those data that reflect the internal needs of the specific theoretical framework (e.g., Nishida 1994; Zagona 1996; Basilico 2010). More concretely, it is usually claimed that completive se converts consumption verbs into accomplishments (Vendler 1957). However, it covers, in fact, a range of different meanings (e.g., “traversing a path”, “spending money”, etc.), some of which are not accomplishments (e.g., “possessing complete knowledge of something”). We propose to capture this fact by recognizing that the completive construction forms a network of senses in which the central “complete consumption” meaning, broadly discussed in previous scholarly work, gives rise to more peripheral manifestations. This approach allows us, on the one hand, to provide a complete analysis of the completive reflexive and, on the other, to treat the semi idiomatic unselected object constructions (e.g., jugarse el dinero ‘gamble the money away’; lit. “seplay the money”) which otherwise would have to be listed as “lexical orphans”, as belonging to a structured inventory of se constructions. In short, our empirical data serve as an illustration of the fact that (i) verbframed languages do require constructions and (ii) certain uses cannot be fully predicted from other uses of a construction, but new uses rarely appear sui generis . We provide further crosslinguistic evidence from Slavic and Germanic in order to strengthen the claim that the completive construction, while motivated, is indeed not predictable from general syntactic, semantic, pragmatic or processing factors.

Keywords: Spanish. Reflexive. Completive construction. Motivation. References Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Monachesi, P. (2005). The verbal complex in Romance, A case study in grammatical interfaces. Oxford University Press.

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Nishida, C. (1994). The Spanish reflexive clitic se as an aspectual class marker. Linguistics 32(3). 425458.

Wittgenstein, L. (1955). Philosophical investigations . London: Blackwell.

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Parallel texts in crosslinguistic constructional research: the case of CircumBaltic presuppositional comitatives

Natalia Perkova (Stockholm University)

[email protected]

In my talk, I’m going to discuss some noncanonical comitative constructions, which I propose to call presuppositional comitatives. These constructions are formally distinguished from basic comitative constructions, that is the most neutral, salient and frequent comitative strategy, in at least in some languages, cf. (12):

Finnish

(1) a. hän tuli koirineen / koiran kanssa he come:PST dogCOMP.3 / dogGEN COM ‘He came with his dog.’ (Stolz et al. 2006: 61)

b. menen poikien mukaan go1SG boyPLGEN PCOM ‘I go along with the boys.’ (op. cit.: 350)

In constructions like (1b), one of the coparticipants is pragmatically marked, being the part of the presuppositional content: markers of presuppositional comitatives function as presupposition triggers. In (2), the referent of the comitative NP is a woman who took the key of the room where the body of her late husband was kept. She was about to go to there, but first she asked her brother not to join her. The assertion concerns the brother who didn’t go with his sister, while the presupposition, concerning her going to the room, stands under negation:

Estonian

(2) Ta ütles, ärgu tulgu ma temaga kaasa. she said NEG go:JUSS I.NOM she:COM PCOM ‘She said that I shouldn’t follow her, [because she wanted to stay alone beside the deceased].’ (Jaan Kross. Keisri hull)

The analysis is based on several parallel texts translated into 8 major CircumBaltic languages and is conducted in line with the ideas of Construction Grammar. These languages are particularly relevant for the discussion of presuppositional comitatives, as most of them have developed formal patterns

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restricted for this domain. Latvian is very interesting in this aspect, as the pattern it uses points at convergence with the Finnic languages. The constructional analysis makes it possible to focus not only on the productive use of particular constructions, but also on their idiomatic instances. More particularly, markers of presuppositional comitatives tend to occur in contexts of ’taking along’, characterised by a rather idiomatic component of accompanied motion. This semantics can be attributed to various syntactic patterns for the languages in the sample, and relations between these patterns can be captured in inheritance networks. The comparative perspective also allows to single out very languagespecific collocations with particular markers in contrast to those ones which are likely to get a presuppositional comitative marking in most languages. The results show that languages with highly dedicated markers of presuppositional comitatives exhibit a very high degree of similarity with each other. In other languages, several constructions quite neatly subdivide the domain in focus, depending mostly on a syntactic pattern and verb semantics.

Keywords: Comitatives. Presupposition triggers. CircumBaltic languages. Parallel texts.

References

Stolz, T., Stroh, C. & Urdze, A. 2006. On Comitatives and Related Categories. A Typological Study with Special Focus on the Languages of Europe. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Pivot constructions as mitigated echolalia by Brazilian children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Aline Bisotti Dornelas (UFJF)

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[email protected]

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects cognition, social behavior and communication. Language performance is always a hard issue to work in ASD condition. Echolalia consists on the repetition of the exact words of a prior speech (Kanner 1943). It may be immediate, right after the production of the speech; or delayed, a period of time after the production of the prior speech. Both immediate and delayed echolalia can be mitigated, that is to say, blended to a new information (Wetherby 1986). Most of autistic echolalic speech is functional (Rydell and Mirenda 1991). Autistic children use their tendency of repetition as a communicative strategy in order to deal with their difficulties in structure grammar and discourse. This study is part of a larger research on the typology and development of functional echolalia as communicative strategy in therapy sessions by Brazilian children with ASD. This specific part counts on a corpus formed with four therapy sessions (around 40 minutes each) of four boys with severe autism (7, 9, 11 and 12 years old). Among the findings, it is interesting to highlight some occurrences of mitigated echolalia that seems to behave in the language of autistic children as pivot constructions or item based constructions (Tomasello 2006). These constructions consist of the use of linguistic expressions based on experiential scenes with multiple word combination possibilities, such as “Where is the X?”, “More X!” or “X gone”. Typically developing children start using such schemas around 18 months of age. In our study, all four children used pivot constructions as functional echolalia. One example, from the 7 year old boy, is when he repeated the immediate speech of the therapist “Toma a espada X” (Take the X sword; where X is any color name) in a game in which he should say the color name of the plastic swords. According to the color of the sword presented by the therapist, the child changed the X in order to name the color or ask the sword. In around 10 hours of recordings we found 92 occurrences of functional echolalia. Out of these, 27 are pivot constructions. This is still an incipient study. It should be replied with a larger number of children, with different ages and level of autism.

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Keywords: Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Echolalia. Pivot Schemas.

References Kanner, L. (1943). Autistic disturbance of afective contact. Nervous Child, 2, 217–250

Rydell, P., & Mirenda, P. (1991). Te efects of two levels of linguistic constraint on echolaliaand generative language production in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 19(2), 271–281.

Tomasello, M. (2006). Construction grammar for kids. Constructions, 11(1), 1–23.

Wetherby, A. (1986). Ontogeny of communicative functions in autism. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 16(3), 295–316.

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The acceptability of ba+subjectoriented resultative constructions in Chinese

Shuo Yu (Lancaster University)

[email protected]

Within the framework of Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg 1995), the Chinese resultative construction , a formmeaning pair exemplified by (1), below, is formed as verb+result XP (e.g. Shi 2008), with the result XP referring to change of state or location of an NP caused by the action denoted by the verb.

(1) ta zouleile he walktiredASP He walked and as a result he was tired.

Chinese resultatives can be classified as subjectoriented and objectoriented based on the distinction proposed by Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2001), with the two differing in whether the result XP is predicated of the subject (see (1)) or object, as in (2), below.

(2) ta caganle toufa she wipedrytASP hair She wiped her hair dry.

The ba construction is a special expression in Chinese, which is viewed as NP1+ba +NP2+V formally, e.g. (3), and often analyzed in terms of high transitivity in semantics (Hopper & Thompson 1980).

(3) wo ba na ge pingguo chile I ba that CL apple eatASP’ I ate that apple.

The acceptability of ba +resultative has so far received little scholarly attention. Ba +resultatives are not always well accepted by native speakers, especially ba +subjectoriented resultatives. For instance, subjectoriented, NP1 ba Vmingbai ‘NP1 V so that NP1 understands’ is acceptable, NP1 ba Vdong ‘NP1 V so that NP1

understands’ is marginally acceptable, whereas NP1 ba Vni ‘NP1 V so that NP1 is tired of something’ is unacceptable. To test the acceptability of ba+ subjectoriented resultatives in Chinese, I carried out a questionnaire survey among 71 Chinese college students with the technique of magnitude estimation (see Bard et al. 1996), which could detect small differences in acceptability. The results suggest that the acceptability of ba +subjectoriented resultative depends on the degree of transitivity

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of the sentence. In general, patterns with the interpretation of the subject making efforts to achieve something thoroughly are acceptable. The cognitive explanation I propose is that volitionality of the agent and a high degree of affectedness of the postba NP are compatible with the high transitivity function of ba .

Keywords: Chinese resultative construction. The ba construction. Transitivity. Magnitude estimation. References Bard, E.G., Robertson, D. & Sorace, A. (1996). Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability. Language 72 (1), 3268.

Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Hopper, P. J. and Thompson, S. A. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language, 56 (2). 251299.

Rappaport Hovav, M. and Levin, B. (2001). An Event Structure Account of English Resultatives. Language 77 (4), 766797.

Shi, C. (2008). The Syntax and Semantics of Chinese VerbResultative Constructions . Beijing: Peking University Press.

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Phrasal Verbs: a lexicongrammar teaching perspective


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[email protected]

Widely spread in various English texts and contexts, phrasal verbs are different enough from verbs in many natural languages to pose a significant teaching/learning challenge. “Perhaps the most challenging dimension is in the meaning, for while there is some semantic systematicity, there is still some idiomaticity to cause difficulties to ESL/EFL students” (CelceMurcia & LarsenFreeman, 1999:436). According to Construction Grammar approaches, multiword sequences are extended from ‘irregular’ idiomatic expressions to ‘regular’ constructions since grammar exhibits the same sorts of phenomena as other linguistic units, such as words, in which there is a conventional meaning associated with them. That is why constructions can be taken from a lexicongrammar perspective of the language. According to Bybee (2010: 37) “When two or more words are often used together, they develop a sequential relation [...] The strength of the sequential relations is determined by the frequency with which the two words appear together.” Therefore, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there is a lexicongrammar basis to teach phrasal verbs since their creation involves the projection of concrete literal meaning (collocation) into abstract metaphorical meaning (chunk). A collocation is a sequence of words whose meaning, unlike an idiom, is compositional but forms a unit in some way (Cruse, 2006). A chunk, on the other hand, is a sequence of words which are often used together and, therefore, develop a sequential relation. The main experience that triggers chunking is repetition. Therefore, analyzing the sentences

Soon the freezing weather will break up the soil. It breaks up my afternoons from changing diapers and mopping the floor.

we notice that the same word sequence break (verb) + up (adverb) assumes different meanings derived from the sentence as a whole: in the former, it is possible to retrieve the meaning of the verb and the adverb as a collocation, being the meaning of the unit (break + up) to cause to divide into smaller pieces; whereas

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in the latter, the meaning of the phrasal verb break up, to interrupt the continuity of something (discontinuity), is much more metaphorical and semantically opaque. My statement is that teaching students that there is a previous step (collocation) to the creation of phrasal verbs (chunking), their idiomaticity will be elicited by their underlying semantic systematicity.

Keywords: Phrasal Verbs. Collocations. Chunks. Lexicongrammar.

References

Bybee, J.. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

CelceMurcia, M., LarsenFreeman, D.. (1999). The Grammar Book: an ESL/EFL teacher’s course. Boston: Heinle/Cengage Learning.

Cruse, A.. (2006). A Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburg: Edingburg University Press.

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From syntactic tests to constructional diagnostics of the role of argument structure constructions

Johan Pedersen (University of Copenhagen)

[email protected]

This paper reports from a study of the Spanish transitive directional motion construction and closely related constructional variants such as the periphrastic passive and the pronominal accusative variant:

(1) Pedro cruzó la calle (Transitive directional motion construction)

’Pedro crossed the street’

(2) La calle fue cruzada por Pedro (Constructional variant: the periphrastic passive)

’the street was crossed by Pedro’

(3) Pedro la cruzó (Constructional variant: the pronominal accusative variant)

‘Pedro ACC crossed’

Taking into account that Spanish sentence meaning in general is highly verb constrained, the study analyzes whether and how these constructional variants are constrained by the verb. The analysis aims to shed light on the role of argument structure constructions in Spanish (cf. Goldberg 1995, 2006; Pedersen 2014, forthcoming). In constructionist approaches to grammar, the corresponding syntactic operations, i.e., the passive transformation and the accusative marker substitution, are not per se part of grammatical representation (e.g., Goldberg 2006; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013); neither do they determine the object as a universal grammatical category (e.g., Croft 2001; Pedersen 2005). However, data on the (verb constrained?) availability of these constructional variants are useful diagnostics that may contribute to our understanding of the interrelated role of verbal versus schematic encoding of the sentence. I examined the availability of the constructional variants by focusing on the highest ranked collexemes of the transitive directional motion construction (top 20 verbs). The corpus data on the constructional variants were extracted from CORPES XXI, 215 million words (Real Academia Española). Both constructional shifts from the transitive motion construction – the periphrastic passive as well as the pronominal accusative variant – could be significantly observed in the corpus. However, only when the verb profiles a transitive meaning (e.g., cruzar (algo) ‘to cross (something)’) that matches the transitive construction (see (1)) the periphrastic passive as well as the pronominal accusative variant could

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be observed (see (2) and (3)). In cases of verbconstruction incongruity – i.e., intransitive verb profiles combined with the transitive construction (see (4)) – only the pronominal accusative variant occurred (see (6)):

(4) Pedro bajó las escaleras

’Pedro went down the stairs’,

(5) *Las escaleras fueron bajadas por Pedro

‘The stairs were went down by Pedro’

(6) Pedro las bajó

’Pedro ACC went down’.

The data suggest that the shift of the transitive construction has to be congruent with the meaning frame provided by the verbal predication. I discuss the implications that these results have for our understanding of the role of the verb and the schematic argument structure construction in Spanish.

Keywords: Verbframed language. Lexical constraints. Constructional variants. Argument structure constructions.

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ThreeMinute Madness Session

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A study on the use of arguments in nominalizations as instances of grammatical metaphors finished in TION in academic texts of

native

Giovana Perini Frizera de Morais Loureiro (UFMG)

[email protected]

The purpose of this research is to identify whether nominalizations take the arguments mandatory to the original verb in the academic discourse of English natives. From the perspective of SFL, ideational metaphors, such as nominalizations, are lexically dense, and therefore frequent in formal texts (Haliday & Matthiessen, 2004). As proposed by Camacho (2007, and Dik, 1997), our initial assumption was that the arguments would be present through anaphora or cataphora. The first phase of the research involved listing the most common TION nominalizations in academic writing, using the corpus Coca, and from the first five occurrences were randomly collected ten concordance lines. The final phase involved analyzing the presence, or not, of the verb arguments in the nominalization process. It was noticed that the nominalizations have their arguments present in the context but not with the same structure, and its most common realization is the retake via anaphora.

Keywords: Nominalizations. Academic. Arguments. SFL. Corpus.

References

Camacho, R. G. (2005). A função textual dos nomes deverbais. Estudos Linguísticos, São José do Rio Preto, v. 24, n. 1, p. 183188.

Camacho, R. G. (2007). Valência do nome deverbal e nominalidade prototípica. DELTA, São Paulo, v. 23, n. 2.

Dik, S.C. (1997). The Theory of Functional Grammar. Berlin.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar, 3rd edn, rev. C. Matthiessen. London: Edward Arnold.

Thompson, G. (1996). Introducing Functional Grammar. Abingdon: Routledge.

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A constructional case study regarding the legitimacy of continuous tenses in Albanian


[email protected]

To this date, Albanian grammarians accept no continuous tenses in the tense framework, although it has been long debated. The tense category is generally regarded as a functionassigning main, with rules governing the appropriate use. Instances of actual tenses in progressive event frame, although involving a distinct form, have been related to the use of tenses. Alternatively, constructional and structuralist approaches provide a reliable settlement. Albanian establishes a progressive event frame through i) the “po” frame alternative: [formant “po” + present/imperfect ] and ii) the participle frame alternative [is/was/has been/will be + participle ]. In this paper, the content is checked through the distributional analysis, the oppositions so established, and relying on the basic cognitive and constructional tenets. For the “po” frame alternative, there is reliable data for consistent linguistic continuous/noncontinuous opposition, with an obvious pairing of idiosyncratic form with idiosyncratic progressive frame content. Being analytical, the said frame has spread to the synthetic tenses only (present and imperfect). The participle frame alternative has been reported synonymic but at a lower usage rate in present and imperfect tenses. It is the only progressive frame alternative to blend with future tense, but it fails to show in perfect, as contrasted to corresponding English situations. By and large, the participle frame alternative has not been able to establish within the Albanian tense framework due to several factors. The main disadvantage relates to the fact that such frame is competed by the “po” frame in present and imperfect, due to its closer similarity of the noncontinuous counterparts. This counts in terms of entrenchment, and consequently relates to the frequency of usage. In addition, the participle frame alternative is heavier in other domains, with significant distributions of the participle frame combining with verbs other than “be” in contexts referring to adverbiallike circumstances of the event frame. The same for the other component of this frame, the verb “be”, which is found in many more distributions and domain. Both facts undermine the chances for a blending or fusion, adding to the fact of the less frequent usage of this very loose construction. Usagerelated factors seem to have negatively affected a solid and broad establishment of continuous tenses in Albanian. Albanian presents the instance of a halfway constructionalization in the tense system – compared to English. Further structural implications are that the lack of perfect continuous contributes to a

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dimmer establishment of perfect as event resultative frame, further aggravated by the fact that, due to the presence of imperfect, as well as factors relating to usage or speakers, Albanians have been using perfect interchangeably for the past. The state of a less consolidated continuous structure may also relate to the high degree of negligence in usage. The “po” frame alternative is often neglected, encouraged by the fact that the progressive event frame is contributed by other frames in the discourse – in the corresponding English situations, this would be ungrammatical.

Keywords: Continuous tenses. Constructions. Frames. Prototypes. Constructionalization.

References

Agalliu, F. (1968, No. 2). Vëzhgime mbi kuptimet e disa trajtave kohore. Studime Filologjike , pp. 129135

Celiku, M. (1984). Trajtat e përcjellores në gjuhën e sotme letrare shqipe, . Studime Filologjike, Akademia e Shkencave, Instituti i Gjuhësisë dhe Letërsisë, Tiranë , fv. 173186.

Croft, W. (1999). Some contributions of typology to cognitive linguistics, and vice versa. Cognitive linguistics: foundations, scope and methodology, , fv. 6193.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford University Press on Demand

Demiraj, Shaban . (1972). Kuptimet Kryesore te Koheve te Menyres Deftore. Në I. i. Letersise, Ceshtje te Fonetikes dhe te Gramatikes se Shqipes se Sotme (fv. 254274). Tirane: Universiteti Shteteror i Tiranes.

Demiraj, S. (1971). Gramatika e gjuhës së sotme shqipe, Morfologjia III. Tirane: Akademia e Shkencave.

Fillmore, C. (1975). An alternative to checklist theories of meaning. Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 123–131.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and conceptualization (Vol. 14). Walter de Gruyter

Minsky, M. (1995). A framework for representing knowledge . Në A. A. Intelligence, In Computation & intelligence (fv. pp. 163189).

Petruck, M. R. (1996). Frame semantics. Handbook of pragmatics, 113.

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Foregrounding and Backgrounding in biblical narrative

Lívia Miranda de Lima Santos (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

[email protected]

The theoretical framework of this research lies on the notions of foregrounding and backgrounding as proposed by functionalcognitive studies (GIVÓN, 1979; HOPPER; THOMPSON, 1980). The focus of the study is the use of these elements in biblical narrative, available in two versions in the Portuguese language: Almeida Corrigida e Revisada Fiel (ACF), 1994, and Nova Versão Internacional (NVI), 2003. More specifically, the objective of the study is to examine the grammatical pattern for foregrounding and backgrounding structures in the two versions under investigation. To do that, an analysis of the verbs was carried, focusing mainly on the interplay between aspect, tense and modality. The results have highlighted that the role of facilitation strategies was significantly more present in one of the versions than in the other. This finding was associated with a particular pattern of interplay between the two different discursive plans analyzed. Finally, these results reinforced the significance of facilitation strategies in biblical narrative, which have been put to use via functionalcognitive principals.

Keywords: Discursive plans. Foregrounding. Backgrounding. Narrative.

References Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press. Hopper, P.; Thompson, S. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language . 56 , 251299.

Azevedo, A. M. T. (1995). Tempo, Modo e Aspecto verbal na estruturação do discurso narrativo. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem , 3 (2), 179195.

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Discrepancies between the passive construction in Brazilian Portuguese and English: evidence from analysis of spoken

corpora

Mara Passos Guimarães (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

[email protected]

Ricardo Augusto de Souza (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

[email protected]

A transformational view of the passive construction does not account for all its possibilities. In this study, we propose a constructional view of the passive, in which it is considered an independent theoretical entity. Although the passive is syntactically identical in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English, this construction cannot be considered equivalent in both languages due to the presence of alternatives in BP to reach the semanticpragmatic effects that are only reached in English through the passive. Considering the passive as a construction in the Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), we carried out an analysis of spoken corpora in both BP and English, in which we were able to attest a distributional difference of the passive between these two languages irrespective of its syntactic and functional congruity. We argue that the discrepancy observed in the construction frequency stems from the fact that passive retrieves different constructional representations in BP and English.

Keywords: Passive Construction. Construction Grammar. Corpus Analysis. References Chierchia, G. (2004). A semantics for unaccusative and its syntactic consequences. In: Alexiadou, A.; Anagnostopolous, E.; Everaert, M. (orgs.). The Unaccusativity Puzzle – Explorations of the LexiconSyntax Interface. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Cambrussi, M. F. (2009). Alternância Causativa de Verbos Inergativos no Português Brasileiro. Ph.D. Dissertation – Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis.

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Cyrino, S. M. L. (2007). Construções com se e promoção de argumento no português brasileiro uma investigação diacrônica. Revista da ABRALIN, 6(2), 85 116.

Davison, A. (1980). Peculiar passives. Language, 56(1), 4266.

Duarte, Y. (1990). As passivas no português e no inglês: uma análise funcional. D.E.L.T.A., 6(2), 139167.

Du Bois, J. W.; Chafe, W. L.; Meyer, C.; Thompson, S. A.; Englebretson, R.; Martey, N. (20002005). Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Parts 14. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.

Ellis, N. C. (2003). Constructions, Chunking and Connectionism: The Emergence of Second Language Structure. In: Dowty, C. J.; Long, M. H. (Eds.). The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 63103.

Gabriel, R. (2003). Mecanismos cognitivos envolvidos na aquisição e processamento de construções passivas. Caderno de Estudos Linguísticos, Campinas, 45, 8998.

Givon, T. (1990). Syntax: A FunctionalTypological Introduction, vol. II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work – The Nature of Generalizations in Language. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Haegeman, L.; Guéron, J. (1999). English Grammar – A Generative Perspective.

Malden, MA.: Blackwell.

Hawad, H. F. (2004). A Voz Verbal e o Fluxo Informacional do Texto. D.E.L.T.A., 20(1), 97121.

Juffs, A. (2000). An overview of the second language acquisition of the links between verb semantics and morphosyntax. In: Archibald, J. (Ed.). Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Blackwells, 187227.

Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

MacKay, A.P.M.G. (2000). Atividade verbal: processo de diferença e integração entre fala e escrita. São Paulo: Plexus.

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Oliveira, C. S.; Souza, R. A. (2012). Uma exploração da aprendizibilidade da construção resultativa do inglês por bilíngues do par linguístico português do Brasil e inglês. Confluência Revista do Instituto de Língua Portuguesa, 43, 252260.

Raso, T.; Mello, H. (2012). COralBrasil I. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.

Said Ali, M. (2008). O pronome “se”. In: Said Ali, M. Dificuldades da Língua Portuguesa – 7ª ed. Rio de Janeiro: ABL, 101119.

Santos, D. (2014). Podemos contar com as contas? In: Aluísio, S.; Tagnin, S. (eds.). New Language Technologies and Linguistic Research: A Twoway Road. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 194213.

Souza, R. A., & Mello, H. R. (2007). Realização argumental na língua do aprendiz de línguas estrangeirasPossibilidades de exploração da interface entre semântica e sintaxe. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem, 8.

Tseng, J. (2007). English Prepositional Passive Constructions. In: Muller, S. (Ed.). Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on HeadDriven Phrase Structure Grammar, Stanford Department of Linguistics and CSLI’s LinGO Lab. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 271286.

Van Riemdsijk, H.; Williams, E. (1986). Introduction to the Theory of Grammar. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.

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http://www.revel.inf.br/files/artigos/revel_8_realizacao_argumental_na_lingua_do_aprendiz_de_linguas.pdf

Word Profile Automatic Tracking Through the Prism of Construction Grammars and Distributionalism

Emmanuel Cartier (Université Paris 13 Sorbonne Paris Cité, LIPN – RCLN CNRS UMR 7030)

[email protected]paris13.fr

This talk will detail the first steps to automatically track semantic change of already entrenched formmeaning pairs in contemporary French. These experimentations are part of Neoveille, an ongoing collaborative project funded by the Sorbonne Paris Cité University whose main goal is to track contemporary formal and semantic neologisms in seven languages (French, Greek, Polish, Czech, Brasilian Portuguese, Russian and Chinese). Tracking semantic change implies knowing the existing meaning of words and then track the changes occurring to this configuration. We here focus on the first step. Sophisticated linguisticallymotivated models have been proposed to describe meaning. Among others, the MeaningText Theory is certainely the most detailed, whereas the Frame Semantics Theory has given rise to some resources. But they result in description of small parts of the lexicon, as they both rely on assumptions that requires linguistic and human expertise, and thus cannot be applied on a large scale. Two computationalaware models have been proposed to approach meaning, both being based on the distributional hypothesis : the first assumption relies on counting sequences repetition and is summarized by the wellknown formula that « we can know the meaning of a word by the company it keeps » (Firth, 1957) ; the second one is based on (Harris, 1970 ; 1988) assumption : « ...if we consider words or morphemes A and B to be more different in meaning than A and C, then we will often find that the distributions of A and B are more different than the distributions of A and C. In other words, difference of meaning correlates with difference of distribution. (Harris, 1970, p.786) ». A third derived assumption linked to the distributionnal theory is that linguistic phenomena are a matter of scale, there is no discrete distinctions, even if we can identify distributional classes. The first approach aims at describing a word meaning through its combinatorial profile, ie the most prototypical and frequent collocates or collostructions that a base form has in corpus. It has been studied for at least twenty years, leading to a wealth of frequency calculus to overcome the biases of the absolute frequency. Important notions have emerged : collocation, collostruction and even word profile or sketch (Kilgariff, 2004, 2014). The second approach aims at clustering words on the basis of a common distribution from a representative corpus. It results in highlighting similarity , a notion

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covering several classical semantic relations (synonymy, hyponymyhyperonymy, antonymy, analogy). The Construction Grammar paradigm is also mostly usagebased and propose a framework complementing the distributional model. The most important assumptions reside in the definition of the formmeaning pair as occurring at various levels, and the refusal of classical intermediary levels between form and meaning. Constructions are characterized by three parameters : size (from atomic to complex), phonological specificity (from substantive to schematic) and type of concepts (from contentful to procedural) (Traugott and Trousdale, 2013). The formmeaning pairs change through time is called entrenchment (Langacker, 1987), and is caused by several factors (Schmid, 2016) that affect their schematicity, productivity and compositionality. In the experiment described in this talk, we will apply the distributional assumptions (relative frequency, similarity distributions) and try to derive automatically form meaning profiles in the CG terms. This experiment is based on a largescale morphosyntaxically annotated French corpus (Wikipedia ). On this corpus, we apply a Frequent Patterns calculation (Van Gompel et al., 2016) complemented by a state oftheart vector space model (Mikolov et al., 2013), giving rise to promising results on several French verbs : we do not only identify formmeaning typical constructions, but also cluster words in the argumental positions. We analyze the results, focusing on several discursive constraints to be dealt with to effectively derive word profiles. We draw some perspectives for the work. Results will be made available on the Neoveille website.

Keywords: Semantic Change. Combinatorial Profile. Semantic Similarity. Schematicity. Word Profile.

References

Firth J.R. (1957). Papers in Linguistics 19341951. London: Oxford University Press. Harris Z. (1988) Language and Information. New York: Columbia University Press, ix, 120 pp.

Harris Z. (1970) Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics. Dordrecht/ Holland: D. Reidel.

Kilgarriff A., Baisa V., Bušta J, Jakubíček M., Kovář J., Michelfeit J., Rychlý P., Suchomel V. (2014): The Sketch Engine: ten years on. In Lexicography 1(1): 7–36.

Kilgarriff A., Rychly P., Smrz P., Tugwell D. (2004) The Sketch Engine. Proc EURALEX, Lorient, France; pp. 105–116.

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Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. I: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mikolov T., Yih W. Zweig G. (2013) Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space Word Representations, Proceedings of NAACLHLT 2013, pages 746–751, Atlanta, Georgia, 9–14 June 2013.

Schmid H.G. (2016), Entrenchment, memory and automaticity. The psychology of linguistic knowledge and language learning. Boston: APA and Walter de Gruyter.

Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2003). Collostructions: investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209 243.

Traugott E.C. and Trousdale G. (2013) Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: O.U.P.

van Gompel, M. & van den Bosch, A., (2016). Efficient ngram, Skipgram and Flexgram Modelling with Colibri Core. Journal of Open Research Software. 4(1).

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From discourse to syntax: a quantitative look into the strategies of subject indetermination in Brazilian Portuguese and in English

Rodrigo Garcia Rosa (University of São Paulo)

[email protected]

From a discursive standpoint, pragmatic factors such as the speaker’s communicative intentions are sometimes believed to be the driving force for different grammatical constructions to occur, that is, speakers can make use of different syntactic strategies to codify their intentions linguistically. This discursive view is in line with most usagebased approaches in cognitive linguistics for which language is believed to operate on two complementing functions, namely, the symbolic and the communicative functions (Evans and Green, 2006). In Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995), more specifically, this mismatch between apparently different layers of linguistic analysis is theoretically captured by the Principle of No Synonymy (Corollary B) according to which, two or more syntactically distinct and pragmatically synonymous constructions must not be semantically synonymous. We believe the principle proposed by Goldberg can be invoked to account for the syntactic constructions below. Brazilian Portuguese

(1) a. Uma caixa foi deixada na recepção para você. (Passive Construction) b. Alguém deixou uma caixa na recepção para você. (Active with a generic pronoun) c. Deixaram uma caixa na recepção para você. (Indeterminate Subject Constr.)

English (2) a. A box has been left at the reception for you. (Passive Construction)

b. Someone has left a box at the reception for you. (Active with a generic pronoun)

When imbued with the intention of omitting the identity of the subject, speakers of both languages may resort to the syntactic strategies above (and possibly others), but if the principle invoked previously is to be considered, some natural questions are posed: 1) How do constructions differ from one another in semantic terms? 2) Which are the speakers’ preferred strategies in both languages frequencywise? In light of the data briefly discussed above and the questions raised, this paper, which is part of an ongoing PhD research project, aims to provide a quantitative account of the strategies of subject indetermination both in Brazilian Portuguese and in English in two representative corpora, The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008) and Davies and Ferreira’s (2006) Corpus of

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Portuguese . The frequency descriptions are meant to display speakers’ preferred strategies of subject indetermination in both languages paving the way for a more robust explanatory account of the reasons why speakers of these two languages use different strategies for the same pragmatic intention.

Keywords: Subject. Indetermination. Quantitative Analysis. Brazilian Portuguese. References

Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Davies, M., Ferreira, M. (2006). Corpus do Português: 45 million words, 1300s 1900s. Available online at http://www.corpusdoportugues.org.

Evans, V., Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics: an introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/


http://www.corpusdoportugues.org/


Machine Translation for Entity Nouns in a QualiaEnriched DomainSpecific FrameNet

Alexandre Diniz da Costa (UFJF)

[email protected]

In 2014, FrameNet Brasil developed a framebased trilingual electronic dictionary (C14/FNBr) for the World Cup, covering the domains of Tourism and the World Cup (TORRENT et al. , 2014),. As attested by PeronCorrea (2014), the dictionary worked well for the suggestion of accurate translation equivalents of verbs and eventive nouns due to the relevant information provided by the valence descriptions of these types of lexical units. Nevertheless, one limitation was detected for entity nouns (people, places, objects etc.). Due to FrameNet methodology, their valence patterns are not informative enough for the automatic assignment of translation equivalents. In 2016, FrameNet Brasil has been developing m.Knob (Multilingual Knowledge Base). This new application for the Summer Olympic Games will recommend places and activities for the tourists and translate words or sentences (En, Es, Pt) in the domains of Tourism and the Olympic Games. Given such a context, our work aims to:

(i) incorporate Qualia roles (Formal, Telic, Agentive, Constitutive) proposed by Pustejovksy (1995) for the ontological organization of the lexicon and as an additional semantic lexical component;

(ii) establish a policy for the incorporation of Qualia Structure into the FrameNet Brasil Database;

(iii) discuss whether the application generates better translation equivalents than a regular statisticsbased algorithm.

Given this framework, our hypothesis is that this Qualiaenhanced basedframe application will be capable of differentiating entity nouns evoking one same frame.

Keywords: FrameNet. Machine translation. Entity nouns. Qualia structure. Ontologies. References

PeronCorrea, S. R. (2014). Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: frames secundários em unidades lexicais evocadoras da experiência turística em português e em espanhol. 147 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Linguística) – Programa de Pós Graduação em Linguística, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora MG, 2014.

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Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Torrent, T. T., Salomão, M. M., Campos, F. C. A., Braga, R. M. M., Matos, E. E.,

Gamonal, M. A., Gonçalves, J. A., Souza, B. C. P., Gomes, D. S., Peron, S. R. (2014). Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: a frame based trilingual electronic dictionary for the Football World Cup. In Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations (pp. 10– 14). ICCL, Dublin, Ireland.

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Constructional Tolerance in the Brazilian Portuguese CausedMotion Construction Syntax

Fernanda da Silva Ribeiro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

The present work focuses on the CausedMotion Construction (CMC), whose study is located in the theoretical approach of Construction Grammar. In her 1995 book, Adele Goldberg defines the CMC structurally as [SUJ [V OBJ OBL]], in which V designates a nonstative verb, and OBL, meaning “oblique”, denotes a directional prepositional phrase. The semantic reading of the construction is “X causes Y to move Z”: the agent (X) is responsible for making an object (Y) move to a certain direction (Z). Examples of Goldberg (1995) include: Joe kicked the dog into the bathroom and Pat loaded hay onto the truck . In addition to these examples, which contain prototypically transitive verbs, the English CMC also allows in its syntax prototypically intransitive verbs, as can be seen in the following author’s examples: They laughed the poor guy out of the room and Frank sneezed the tissue off the table . The causedmotion interpretation is possible since the constructional environment provides the verbs “laugh” and “sneeze” with and OBJ and an OBL. Hence, such argument roles are defined by the construction as a whole, differently from the participant roles, which consist of the verb arguments. Besides, the CMC is linked to a polysemy network, according to the Principle of Maximized Motivation, which permits different semantic readings of the construction within the same syntactic structure: a) “X causes Y to move Z”; b) “Conditions of satisfaction imply X cause Y to move Z”; c) “X permits Y to move Z”; d) “X prevents Y to move Z” and e) “X helps Y to move Z”. Beyond the polysemous links, the construction networks also consider the CMC within a network that involves metaphorical links with the Ditransitive Construction and the Resultative Construction, for instance. In view of this, the goal of the present study is to show how the CMC proposed by Goldberg (1995) might be described in the light of Brazilian Portuguese. The fact that there have not existed works aimed at discussing such argument structure construction in the language so far justifies this study. The search of data in the Brazilian Corpus of Linguateca (http://www.linguateca.pt/acesso/corpus.php?corpus=CBRAS), which contains around one billion words, has shown a great quantity of examples of CMC. A preliminary analysis of the data revealed that, although it matches the syntactic structure posited by Goldberg (1995), the Portuguese CMC appears to take part of a construction network exemplified, preferably, by metaphorical links (ex.: Nazismo leva polêmica a festival de Roterdã , in English “Nazism takes polemic to festival in

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http://www.linguateca.pt/acesso/corpus.php?corpus=CBRAS)

Roterdã.”). In this sense, through this research, one intends to present the behavior of Brazilian Portuguese CMC, offering, then, other possibilities of study in this area.

Keywords: CausedMotion construction. Metaphor. Constructional tolerance. Brazilian Portuguese.

References

Croft, W. and Cruise, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Perek, F. and Hilpert, M. (2014). Constructional tolerance: crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of nonconventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames : 266304.

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"Se pá” constructions in Brazilian Portuguese: a preliminary Construction Grammar approach

Tainara Duro Agostini (UFSCar)

[email protected]

Flávia B.M.HirataVale (UFSCar)

[email protected]

The aim of this work is to analyze the “se pá” construction in its conditional and modal meanings. This Brazilian Portuguese construction, which is mostly used by young people in certain regions of the country, constitutes a challenge for traditional approaches of language, since it may be characterized as an adverb, a conditional construction and a discursive marker, as in the following examples:

(1) Se pá eu vou. (Lit.) Maybe I’ll go

In (1) the construction “se pá” express a doubt, and it can be understood as an adverb, referring to a hypothetical scenario. The position of construction is not fixed and normally there is not a pause.

(2) Se pá, esse foi meu maior combo (até agora) em AC. (Lit.) If possible this was my best score until now in AC

In (2), “se pá” means “if you doubt”, “if it is possible” and there is a syntactic distribution which is very similar to that of the canonical conditional construction, especially regarding the pause.

(3) Meu irmão ta fazendo 24 anos hoje e vai comemorar na One, porém não vou ir se pá. (Lit.) My brother is turning 24 today and he’ll celebrate at the One, but I am not going to go maybe

In (3), “se pá” has only an epistemic, modal meaning, and could be seen as a discursive marker, since it expresses the speaker’s subjective appreciation of the mentioned content. Taking this categorical vagueness into account, one intends to analyze the “se pá” construction according to the theoretical premises of Construction Grammar, once it considers that there isn’t a division between grammar and lexicon. Each grammatical, lexical or syntactic construction has a semanticpragmatic interpretation, as part of its description. In this sense, one may say that the “se pá” construction has some aspects that contribute to its understanding as marker of

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hypotheticality, conditionality and modality. Following Dancygier (1998, 2013) and Dancygier and Sweetser (2005), it is possible to assume that “se pá” expresses “non assertiveness”, as a conditional construction, even though it does not establishes a causal relation with the context. In order to offer an extent characterization of the “se pá” construction, the contexts of use of this construction will be analyzed, considering, among others, the following criteria: position, verbal correlations, the presence of other modal markers, etc. Keywords: Conditional constructions. Categorization. Subjectivity. References

Dancygier, B. (1998). Conditionals and Prediction. Time, knowledge and causation in conditional constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dancygier, B., E. Sweetser (2005). Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Linguistic and Computational Modeling of the Active Transitive, Ergative and Split Object Constructions

Vânia Gomes de Almeida (UFJF)

[email protected]

This work presents the theoretical and methodological discussions involved in the linguistic and computational modeling of three “coregrammar” constructions in FrameNet Brasil’s Constructicon: the Active Transitive, Ergative and Split Object Constructions. We present the results of a computational task centered on differentiating constructs licensed by those constructions, and discuss the implications of this work for the development of Constructicons. Our proposal is justified by the lack of studies that integrate language descriptions with cognitively plausible computational models of grammar, which enable approaching issues that go beyond the representation of formal aspects of language. In this sense, this work falls within the framework of Computational Linguistics, which, according to Dias da Silva (1996), involves the three stages: linguistic, representational and implementational. The first stage covers the linguistic analyses of the phenomena being studied. For the constructions under analysis, this stage has already been proposed by Sampaio (2010), Ferreira (2009), Castillo (2010) and Perini (2010). The second stage is concerned with translating the linguistic analyses into a machine readable formalism, which is the core of the work being proposed here. Finally, in the last stage, a computational system is implemented based on the formalism provided by the representational stage. The results of this last stage will also be discussed.

Keywords: Construction Grammar. Frame Semantics. LinguisticComputational Analysis. Split Object.

References

Castilho, Ataliba T. de. (2010). Nova Gramática do Português Brasileiro. São Paulo: Editora Contexto.

DiasdaSilva, B. C. (1996). A face tecnológica dos estudos da linguagem: O processamento automático das línguas naturais. Araraquara, 1996. Tese de Doutorado em Letras Faculdade de Ciências e Letras, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Araraquara.

Ferreira, M. (2009). A Construção de Ação Rotineira no Português do Brasil. In MIRANDA, N. S.; SALOMÃO, M. M. M. Construções do Português do Brasil da gramática ao discurso. Belo Horizonte: UFMG.

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Perini, Mário A. (2010) Gramática do português brasileiro. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial.

Sampaio, T. F. (2010). A Família de Construções de Argumento Cindido no Português do Brasil. Tese de Doutorado em Linguística. Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora.

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A Cognitive Analysis Of The Deictic Expression Here (Aqui) In Interviews And In Comic Strips

Hayat Passos Ferraz Pinheiro (UESB)

[email protected]

The initial aim of the research is to compare the more and the less prototypical uses of the deictic expression here (aqui) in oral genre interview and in written genre comic strip. Hence, we propose discussion about key issues like: i) how the use of the deictic expression here (aqui) occurs in the records that make up the corpus Discourse & Grammar (Discurso & Gramática) and the corpus All Mafalda – from the first to the last strip (Toda Mafalda – da primeira à última tira) ii) the importance of the more prototypical and less prototypical uses of the deictic expression aqui (here) in both genres (interview and comic strip) and also iii) which cognitive aspects organize the use of deictic expression here in the analyzed corpora. This research is based on a cognitive approach. We use the Conceptual Metaphor and the Idealized Cognitive Model theories. To briefly summarize, bearing in mind the importance of deictic expressions categorization for the linguistic system and, therefore, the prototypical phenomena that the use of these deictic expressions create, we have assumed the following research question: Can we observe more prototypical and less prototypical uses of the deictic expression aqui (here) in oral genre (interview) and, also, in written genre (comic strip)? To find answers to that question, we hypothesize, a priori: 1) The prototypical and less prototypical uses of the deictic expression here could be observed in both genre (interview and comic strip); 2) The less prototypical uses of the deictic expression aqui (here) is more frequent in the oral genre; 3) the deictic categorization depends on the linguistic and cognitive procedures that reflect the way in which the individual interacts and interprets the reality around him/her. Keywords: Deixis. Here (aqui). Cognitive approach. References Benveniste, E. (1988) O aparelho formal da enunciação. In Problemas de Lingüística Geral II. Campinas: Pontes. Cavalcante, M. M. (2000) Expressões indiciais em contextos de uso: por uma caracterização dos dêiticos discursivos. Recife: UFPE. (doctoral dissertation).

Ferrari, L. (2011). Introdução à linguística cognitiva. São Paulo: Contexto.. MARCUSCHI, L. A. (2008) Produção de texto, análise de gêneros e compreensão. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial.

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Quino, J. L. (2003).Toda Mafalda – da primeira à última tira. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.

Rios de Oliveira, M., & Votre, S. (1995). Corpus Discurso & Gramática–A Língua Falada e Escrita na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

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Type noun constructions in North Scandinavian: Kinda, what’s the reason that we sorta start to use all kinds of type nouns to

indicate uncertainty and that typa thing?


[email protected]

Much has been written about type noun constructions in English, i.e. constructions with sort/kind/type of (e.g. Brems, 2011; Denison, 2002). In certain contexts the type nouns have developed new functions as qualifying modifiers, approximators, parts of complex determiners, hedges and discourse markers. The English type nouns are far from the only nouns originally denoting a category that have developed new functions. Mihatsch (2010) has investigated a number of type nouns in different Romance languages, and found that they have developed a lot of the same functions and properties as sort/kind/type of in English – mainly via two different pathways of change. Also in Scandinavian we find some interesting type nouns that have developed new functions similar to those found in English and the Romance languages. My PhD project aims to describe the morphosyntactic properties and semanticpragmatic functions of type noun constructions in Norwegian and Swedish. The focus is on slags (kindGEN), sorts (sortGEN) and typ(e) (type). The use of the two type nouns with the remnants of a genitive suffix (slags/sorts ) is quite distinct from that of typ(e), but they all have a varied use consistent with the layering expected as a result of grammaticalisation. Corpus investigations of the use and development of these words will add to the description of Norwegian and Swedish as well as to the growing literature on these intriguing type noun constructions. Data from yet another group of type nouns may shed light on the striking similarities and how they came about. Motivation behind the similar development may be found in inherent properties of type nouns; they may occur frequently in certain triggering contexts – or maybe our conceptualisation of categories is causative. It is natural to consider influence between constructions, both within the same language and crosslinguistically. The development and use of the different North Scandinavian type noun constructions will be compared both with each other as well as to the descriptions of other European type noun constructions in the quest for telling patterns.

Keywords: Type Nouns. Grammaticalisation. Constructional Change.

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References Brems, L. (2011). Layering of size and type noun constructions in English (Vol. 74). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Denison, D. (2002). History of the sort of construction family . Paper presented at the ICCG2, Helsinki.

Mihatsch, W. (2010). "Wird man von hustensaft wie so ne art bekifft?": Approximationsmarker in romanischen Sprachen (Vol. Bd. 75). Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann.

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Theme Sessions

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Computational Semantics with Frames and Constructions


Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University) The goal of this theme session is to bring together (frame) semanticists, (construction) grammarians, and computational linguists interested in advancing the role(s) of frames and constructions in computational semantics — or conversely, advancing the role of computational approaches in the characterization of frames and constructions. We seek contributions that address the following question broadly construed: How does the work inform the understanding of computing the meaning of a frame or construction ? We seek computational work involving semantic frames (Fillmore 2012, inter alia ) and/or grammatical constructions , i.e. formmeaning pairings (Fillmore et al. 2012). We are especially interested in novel approaches to familiar natural language processing techniques and tasks. Submissions should use theoretical or empirical methods to address questions such as: How do frames/constructions figure into computational models of human processing, production, and acquisition of language? How can natural language processing systems exploit frames and constructions for semantic interpretation and other tasks? Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

semantic role labeling semantic parsing with frames and/or constructions models of language acquisition & change lexicon/grammar induction with frames and/or constructions selectional preferences disambiguation of semantic relations (e.g. in compounds or other multiwords) events, temporal structure, causality script/narrative induction & reasoning multiword expressions & idioms construction detection/disambiguation/parsing computational construction grammar formalisms (e.g. Embodied Construction

Grammar, Fluid Construction Grammar, SignBased Construction Grammar, HPSG)

grounded semantics (e.g. vision, space & time, actions/robotics, neuroscience)

frames or constructions in semantic similarity, paraphrasing, entailment, generation, discourse processing, translation, sentiment analysis, and other applications

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This theme session is specifically designed for work that involves algorithms, formalisms, or systems, not (exclusively) data resources or annotation schemes.

Keywords: Computational Semantics. Frame Semantics. Construction Grammar. Frames. Constructions.

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OmniGraph: Semantic Frame Representation and Graph Kernel Learning

Boyi Xie (Columbia University)

[email protected]

Rebecca J. Passonneau (Columbia University)

[email protected] NLP classification tasks such as sentiment and opinion mining (Shaikh et al., 2007; Kim & Hovy, 2006), or textforecasting (Yogatama & Smith, 2014; Thomas et al., 2006), demonstrate the benefits of semantic role labeling and dependency parsing to machine learn predictive models. Little of this work, however, relies on Fillmorean semantic frames, due to a need for better ways to exploit relational features. We present OmniGraph, a novel representation that encodes a sentence's semantic frame parse, syntactic dependency relations, and lexical items in a single graph. For machine learning, we use graph kernels that extract graphneighborhood features from OmniGraphs, and we demonstrate OmniGraph learning on two prediction tasks. Consider the following sentence from financial news that describes a scenario where a company executive makes a positive statement about the company’s capabilities: “The accreditation renewal also underscores the quality of our work with Humana members, customers, clients, payors and health care providers by confirming our compliance with national standards for PBM services,” said William Fleming, vice president of Humana Pharmacy Solutions. A single, complex OmniGraph feature is derived from a parse with four semantic frames that represent a statement (say) from a company leader (vice president) about the importance (underscore) of its capabilities (quality). The feature is predictive across market sectors, in sentences with distinct vocabulary and structure. OmniGraphs are constructed automatically from parsed sentences. Grid search is used during SVM training to select parameters for a graph kernel, such as the maximum node neighborhood size to construct subgraph features. In experiments for sentiment classification and stock price prediction, OmniGraph soundly beats benchmarks based on bagofwords, syntactic dependencies, and semantic trees. Keywords: Semantic Frame. Graph Representation. Graph Kernel Learning.

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References

Kim, S., & Hovy, E. (2006). Extracting opinions, opinion holders, and topics expressed in online news media text. Proceedings of the Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text SST '06.

Shaikh, M. A., Prendinger, H., & Mitsuru, I. (2007). Assessing Sentiment of Text by Semantic Dependency and Contextual Valence Analysis. Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 191202.

Thomas, M., Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2006). Get out the vote: Determining Support or Opposition from Congressional FloorDebate Transcripts. Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP '06.

Yogatama, D., & Smith, N. A. (2014). Linguistic Structured Sparsity in Text Categorization. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).

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Vector space for semantic roles: distances and semantic maps

Olga Lyashevskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS)

[email protected]

Egor Kashkin (Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS)

[email protected]

The concept of distance between semantic roles is important both for computational linguistics and in theoretical respect. In semantic role labeling (SRL), the distances can be useful enhancements for probabilistic algorithms and for flexible assessment of SRL errors (Lyashevskaya & Kashkin, 2014). In theoretical domain, clustering semantic roles contributes to the research on how morphosyntax and lexical semantics interact, what semantic oppositions are more significant in grammar and how languages share the universal semantic space formed by the whole set of roles, cf. the approach of Construction Grammar in (Fillmore & Kay, 1992; Goldberg, 1995). Hartmann et al. (2014) propose a method for semantic role clustering and visualization using data on role coexpression in the typologically balanced sample of valency patterns (ValPal project, see Malchukov & Comrie, 2015; Cysouw, 2014). In Hartmann et al.’s approach, each dimension in the vector space corresponds to a particular valency form in a particular language, and vectors represent microroles specific for individual verbs (e. g. Hearer, Fearer, Hitter, Hittee, etc.). The more often any two microroles coincide in their morphosyntactic encoding, the more similar their vectors are and the closer the microroles are on the semantic map that visualizes the results via multidimensional scaling. Our research is based on the Russian FrameBank, an open access database which includes a network of frames and semantic roles, a dictionary of Russian predicateargument constructions and constructional idioms, and a corpus of constructional uses tagged with a FrameNetlike annotation scheme (www.framebank.ru; Lyashevskaya, 2010; Lyashevskaya & Kashkin, 2015). First, we build a vector space model taking as dimensions the tuples <verb: form of the construction element>. Unlike Hartmann et al.’s approach, we rely not on microroles specific for each verb, but on 91 mesoroles correlating with the semantic classes of verbs and forming a hierarchy (e. g. the roles of the Experiencer domain include Subject of Perception for ‘hear’, ‘see’, ‘observe’, Subject of Psychological state for ‘love’, ‘like’, ‘be afraid’, Subject of Mental state for ‘think’, ‘know’, ‘consider’, see (Kashkin & Lyashevskaya, 2013) for details).

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Second, we cluster FrameBank microroles according to the form of the second argument of a verb and induce the inventory of languagespecific mesoroles automatically. Further, we compare our results against the manually created inventories of semantic roles for Russian (Apresjan, 1992; Paducheva, 2004; Apresjan et al., 2010; Kashkin & Lyashevskaya, 2013). Our study shows that the automatically constructed semantic maps visualize the main semantic oppositions quite adequately. It includes the clusters of Agentlike, Patientlike, Addresseelike and Sourcelike roles. Interestingly, the role of Theme is between Agent and Patient on the map, since it is attributed both to Agentlike slots (e.g. the subject of posture verbs) and to Patientlike slots (e.g. the relatively unaffected object of verbs such as ‘to hold’ or ‘to weigh’). At the same time, the semantic map demonstrates certain deviations from the existing manual inventories, which raises a discussion on the criteria for classifying roles and on evaluation of manually created role lists. The main divergence springs up in those cases in which two roles a) have much in common in their semantic definitions, b) often cooccur in the same construction and c) are not involved into conversive pairs (like ‘buy’and ‘sell’). Thus, the role of CounterAgent (‘John is fighting with Peter’) is defined as a secondary Agent of a situation and therefore treated as a close one to Agent in (Apresjan et al., 2010; Kashkin, Lyashevskaya, 2013). However the automatic classification has placed it not to the cluster of Agentive roles, but closer to Patient like and Themelike roles like Content of Thought (‘to think of X’) or Patient of a social situation (‘to dismiss X’), stemming from the morphosyntactic encoding as oblique typical of these roles. bstract text starts here...

Keywords: Semantic Roles. Semantic Role Clustering. Valency Patterns. Predicateargument Constructions. Mesoroles. Microroles. Russian Verbs. ValPal. FrameBank. References Apresjan, Ju. D. (1992). Lexical Semantics: User's Guide to Contemporary Russian Vocabulary. Karoma Pub.

Apresjan, Ju., Boguslavskij, I., Iomdin, L., & Sannikov, V. (2010). Teoreticheskie problemy russkogo sintaksisa: vzaimodejstvie grammatiki i slovarja [The theoretical issues of Russian syntax: interaction between grammar and lexicon]. Moscow.

Cysouw, M. (2014). Inducing semantic roles. In Luraghi, S., & Narrog, H. (Eds.) Perspectives on Semantic Roles (pp. 2368). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Fillmore, Ch., & Kay, P. (1992). Construction Grammar course book. Berkeley: University of California.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: a Construction Grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hartmann, I., Haspelmath, M., & Cysouw, M. (2014). Identifying semantic role clusters and alignment types via microrole coexpression tendencies. Studies in Language, 38(3) , 463484.

Kashkin, E., & Lyashevskaya, O. (2013). Semantic roles and construction network in FrameBank. In Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies. Proceedings of Dialog2013. Vol. 1 (pp. 297311). Moscow.

Lyashevskaya, O. (2010). Bank of Russian Constructions and Valencies. In Proceedings of LREC'10, La Valletta, Malta (pp. 1802‒1805).

Lyashevskaya O., & Kashkin, E. (2014). Evaluation of framesemantic role labeling in a casemarking language. In Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies. Proceedings of Dialog2014. Vol. 131 (pp. 362378). Moscow.

Lyashevskaya O., & Kashkin, E. (2015). FrameBank: a database of Russian lexical constructions. CCIS 542: Proceedings of AIST 2015. (pp. 350360).

Malchukov, A., & Comrie, B. (Eds.). (2015). Valency Classes in the World's Languages. Vol. 1 . Mouton de Gruyter.

Paducheva, E. V. (2004). Dinamicheskie modeli v semantike leksiki [Dynamic patterns in lexical semantics] . Moscow.

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Unsupervised Induction of Shallow Semantic Representations with FeatureRich Models

Diego Marcheggiani (University of Amsterdam)

[email protected]

Ehsan Khoddam (University of Amsterdam)

[email protected]

Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam)

[email protected]

Most current statistical approaches to semantic role labeling, framesemantic parsing and, to a larger degree, relation extraction are supervised, requiring large quantities of human annotated data to estimate model parameters. However, such resources are expensive to create and only available for a small number of languages and domains. The scarcity of annotated data has motivated the research into unsupervised learning of semantic representations (e.g., roles [1, 2, 7]), frames [6, 4] or clusters of binary relations [3, 8]). The existing methods have a number of serious shortcomings. First, they make very strong assumptions, for example, assuming that arguments are conditionally independent of each other given the predicate. Second, unlike stateof theart supervised methods, they rely on a very simplistic set of features of a sentence. These factors lead to models being insufficiently expressive to capture syntaxsemantics interface, inadequate handling of language ambiguity and, overall, introduces a restrictive upper bound on their performance. Moreover, these approaches are especially problematic for languages with freer word order than English, where richer features are necessary to account for interactions between surface realizations, syntax and semantics. We introduce a new approach to unsupervised estimation of featurerich semantic role labeling models which aims to address aforementioned issues. Our model consists of two components: (1) an encoding component: a semantic analyser (e.g, a semantic role labeler or a relation extractor) which predicts a semantic representation given a rich set of syntactic and lexical features; (2) a reconstruction component: a tensor factorization model which relies on the semantic representation to predict argument fillers. When the components are estimated jointly to minimize errors in argument re construction, the induced semantic representations largely correspond to those defined in annotated

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resources, even though the annotation has not been exploited in learning the model. Our method performs on par with most accurate role induction methods on English and German, even though, unlike these previous approaches, we do not incorporate any prior linguistic knowledge about the languages [5]. Moreover, on a relation discovery benchmark, it substantially outperforms stateof theart generative models [8] (e.g., RelLDA [9]).

Keywords: Unsupervised Induction. Relation Extraction. Frame Semantic Parsing. Semantic Role Labeling.

References [1] Grenager, T., & Manning, C. D. (2006, July). Unsupervised discovery of a statistical verb lexicon. In Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 18). Association for Computational Linguistics. [2] Lang, J., & Lapata, M. (2010, June). Unsupervised induction of semantic roles. In Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 939947). Association for Computational Linguistics. [3] Lin, D., & Pantel, P. (2001). Discovery of inference rules for questionanswering. Natural Language Engineering , 7 (04), 343360.

[4] O'Connor, B. (2013). Learning frames from text with an unsupervised latent variable model. arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.7382 .

[5] Titov, I., & Khoddam, E. (2015). Unsupervised induction of semantic roles within a reconstructionerror minimization framework. n NAACL

[6] Titov, I., & Klementiev, A. (2011, June). A Bayesian model for unsupervised semantic parsing. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language TechnologiesVolume 1 (pp. 14451455). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[7] Titov, I., & Klementiev, A. (2012, April). A Bayesian approach to unsupervised semantic role induction. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 1222). Association for Computational Linguistics.

[8] Marcheggiani, D., & Titov, I. (2016). Discretestate variational autoencoders for joint discovery and factorization of relations. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics , 4 , 231244.

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[9] Yao, L., Haghighi, A., Riedel, S., & McCallum, A. (2011, July). Structured relation discovery using generative models. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 14561466). Association for Computational Linguistics.

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A computationallyaided frame and constructionbased analysis of motion metaphors in corpora

Elise Stickles (Stanford University)

[email protected]


[email protected] In this talk we present a case study on motionrelated metaphors that demonstrates the viability of the MetaNet computational metaphor identification system (Dodge et al., 2015) in a corpus based analysis of the expression of conceptual metaphor. This computationallyimplemented system relies on framebased formal representations of conceptual metaphors, along with a comprehensive set of constructional patterns that are used to linguistically express these metaphors. The constructional patterns employed here reflect the different syntactic structures in which the metaphorevoking Target and Source lexemes are reliably linked to certain grammatical slots (Croft 2002; Sullivan 2013). Using these patterns, the system identifies candidate metaphoric expressions and the frame(s) they evoke, and searches within the MetaNet networks to determine how the candidate Source and Target frames are related to one another. These relations aid the assessment of the likelihood that a given expression is metaphoric or not. For our case study, we used the MetaNet system to search the COCA corpus (Davies, 2008) for candidate expressions in which the potential source lexeme evokes one of the 32 MetaNet frames that are related to translational motion. These include frames such as SelfPropelled Motion, Downward Motion, Motion Out Of A Location, Forced Motion, and Rotation. This corpus search yielded 3,080 expressions. The system annotates each example with several kinds of information, including the frame evoked by the source lemma, and the constructional pattern which expresses the metaphor, as illustrated in the table below. In (a), the system finds the constructional pattern in which the verb expresses the Source lexeme (enter ), in the Verb(Source) Direct Object (Target) constructional pattern.

Example Sentence Source Frame Constructional Pattern

a. entering a new millennium Moving into a Bounded Region

Verb(Source) Direct Object(Target)

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b. many terraces fell into disrepair

Downward Motion Verb(Source) prep Object

c. swayed by these numbers Forced Motion Verb(Source) by Object(Target)

d. Netscape rose that day Upward Motion Subject(Target) Verb(Source)

e. Following Clifford, there are only different paths to modernity

Guided Motion Verb(Source) Direct Object(Target)

This rich annotation supports many different types of linguistic analysis. By comparing the relative use frequencies of Source lexemes within the metaphoric data to their overall relative frequencies in COCA, we can measure how likely it is that a lexeme will be used in metaphoric contexts; for example, run is more frequent overall, but walk is more likely to be used metaphorically. We can extend this approach by comparing relative frequencies of frames; here, we find Directional Motion and Caused Motion frames are the most common in the metaphoric data, indicating an emphasis on Path and Causation in metaphoric motion in English. We can also use this method to discover patterns and generalizations at the constructional level: here, the VerbDirect Object pattern is far more common than SubjectVerb. This process also enables more detailed investigation of individual constructions associated with frequentlyoccurring data such as the Following X , Y construction in (e).

Keywords: Corpus Linguistics. Frame Semantics. Metaphor. Metaphoric Constructions. MetaNet.

References

Croft, W. (1993). The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and metonymies. Cognitive Linguistics 4 (4), 33570.

Davies, M. (2008) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990present . (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/).

Dodge, E., Hong, J., & Stickles, E. (2015). Metanet: Deep semantic analysis. In E. Shutova, B. B. Klebanov, & P. Lichtenstein (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Metaphor in NLP (pp. 4049). NAACL HLT 2015.

Sullivan, K. S. (2013). Frames and constructions in metaphoric language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

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http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/)

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/)

Protoproperties of Definiteness and Grammatical Constructions

ChuCheng Lin (JHU)

[email protected]

Archna Bhatia (IHMC)

[email protected]

Languages employ various grammatical constructions to express a combination of semantic, pragmatic and discourse properties. According to various approaches to grammaticalization, e.g. Hopper & Traugott (2003), grammar develops over time in such a way that each grammatical construction has some prototypical communicative functions, but may also have many nonprototypical communicative functions. Thus, in this paper, we explore if a propertybased approach to definiteness may instead be more useful than a categorial one, such as Bhatia et al (2014a,b). Similar to the approach taken in Reisinger et al (2015), we propose and study the protoproperties of definiteness using neural networks as described below. Reisinger et al's approach is inspired by Dowty's (1991) seminal work on thematic protoroles. For an instance of such properties from Dowty's work, a ProtoPatient often has properties: (a) it changes state (but might not), and (b) often it is causally affected by another participant. A similar example in the context of definiteness is that a ProtoDefinite NP can have the following properties: (a) its referent is identifiable in the context where it is used, (b) it has been mentioned earlier in the discourse (though not always, i.e. all definite NPs are not mentioned earlier), (c) its referent is physically present (though not always), (e) it has a unique reference, e.g. ``the sun'' (at least in the context of Earth), though not always, etc. We formulate questions corresponding to these properties, e.g. ``How likely or unlikely is it that the argument was physically present?'' in ``Give me the chocolate chip cookie.'' The annotators are presented with sentences with highlighted arguments and propertybased questions to which they provide their judgements on a scale from 1 to 5. Besides capturing the prototypical and peripheral properties corresponding to definiteness, this approach has another advantage compared with Bhatia et al's (2014b) treehierarchy: providing judgements for these properties should be less taxing for the annotators than browsing through the tree hierarchy and annotating the exact categories. We study the effect of these protoproperties on construction types. In contrast to structured annotations, the propertybased annotations can be projected into the vector space and integrate easily into standard neural architectures such as Le & Mikolov (2015),. We propose a method to train a semantic embedding encoder

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using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with property annotations from multiple sources in a multitask learning setting. Finally, we test whether the trained encoder produces embeddings that satisfy the Semantic Maps hypothesis.

Keywords: Definite NPs. Definiteness. Communicative Functions. Recurrent Neural Networks. Protoproperties.

References

Bhatia, A., Simons, M., Levin, L., Tsvetkov, Y. and Dyer, C. (2014a). A Unified Annotation Scheme for the Semantic/Pragmatic Components of Definiteness. Proceedings of the 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2631.

Bhatia, A., Lin, CC., Schneider, N., Tsvetkov, Y., AlRaisi, F.T., Roostapour, L., Bender, J., Kumar, A., Levin, L., Simons, M. and Dyer, C. (2014b). Automatic Classification of Communicative Functions of Definiteness. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, 1059 1070.

Dowty, D. (1991). Thematic protoroles and argument selection. Language, 67(3), 547619.

Hopper, P. and Traugott, E.C. (2003). Grammaticalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Le, Q. and Mikolov, T. (2014). Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning, 11881196.

Reisinger, D., Rudinger, R., Ferraro, F., Harman, C., Rawlins, K. and Durme, B.V. (2015). Semantic ProtoRoles. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3, 475488.

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CARMA: Constructional Analysis using Relations among Multiple Attribute Value Matrices

Tiago Torrent (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]


[email protected]

Adrieli Silva (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

Ludmila Meireles (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

Alexandre Diniz (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

Vânia Almeida (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

Tatiane Tavares (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

This paper presents CARMA – Constructional Analyzer using Relations among Multiple AttributeValue Matrices –, a syntacticsemantic parser for Brazilian Portuguese, which uses the spread activation of Semantic Frames and Grammatical Constructions in the FrameNet Brasil database. The basic infrastructure for CARMA is presented, followed by a survey of the main parsers available for Brazilian Portuguese. Also, a comparison between CARMA and another syntacticsemantic parser developed for English, the ECG Analyzer (Bryant 2008), is provided. Finally, the paper reports on a parsing experiment (Almeida 2016) in which the system must provide a syntacticsemantic specification for 30 sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: ten instances of the Active Transitive Construction – exemplified in (1), ten of the Ergative Construction – (2) – and ten of the Split Object Construction (Sampaio 2010), an argument structure construction

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whose syntax is identical to the Active Transitive Construction, but whose semantics is a combination of the Undergoing and Partwhole frames – (3).

(1) Maria quebrou a noz. Maria break.PAST.3SG the walnut Maria cracked the walnut. (2) O vaso quebrou. The vase break.PAST.3SG The vase broke [apart]. (3) Meu celular quebrou a tela. My cellphone break.PAST.3SG the screen The screen in my cellphone broke.

Results of this experiment are compared to a gold standard extracted from the judgment of the same set of sentences by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. CARMA limitations are also presented and future developments are discussed. Keywords: Constructional parsing. FrameNet. Spread activation.

References

Almeida, V. G. (2016). Identificação Automática de Construções de Estrutura Argumental: um experimento a partir da modelagem linguísticocomputacional das construções Transitiva Direta Ativa, Ergativa e de Argumento Cindido. M.A. Thesis in Linguistics, Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

Bryant, J. (2008). BestFit Constructional Analysis. PhD. Dissertation in Linguistics, UC Berkeley.

Sampaio, T. F. (2010). A Família de Construções de Argumento Cindido no Português do Brasil. PhD. Dissertation in Linguistics. Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

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Improving Frame Semantic Parsing via Dependency Path Embeddings

Michael Roth (University of Edinburgh)

[email protected]

In this work, we adapt the dependencypath embedding model by Roth and Lapata (2016) to the task of framesemantic parsing (Das et al., 2014). The goal of this task is to map a text to meaning representations following Fillmore’s theory of frame semantics (Fillmore, 1976). Such representations can then be used for textual analyses (Fillmore and Baker, 2010) as well as for language processing applications such as question answering (Shen and Lapata, 2007) and texttoscene generation (Coyne et al., 2012). Whereas previous approaches to framesemantic parsing extensively rely on a range of simple and handselected higher level features (cf. Das et al., 2014; Roth and Lapata, 2015), we here propose a compositional model that jointly learns useful feature combinations and incremental representations of syntactic dependency paths. The main idea underlying this work is that syntactic and semantic relations expressed within a sentence can be represented in a joint dependency graph (Fillmore et al., 2004). Adopting this view, dependency relationships should provide reliable cues for the semantic relationships that hold between a target word evoking a frame and the frame element fillers realized within the same sentence. We implement this intuition in the form of a neural network model that learns from annotated data how to identify and classify frame element fillers based on syntactic dependency paths. To do so, a lexicalized dependency path is first decomposed into a sequence of individual items (words, partofspeech tags, dependency relations) and the representation for the full sequence is then learned through composition in a long shortterm memory network (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997). For a detailed description of the model architecture, we refer the interested reader to Roth and Lapata (2016), whose model we adopt. A detailed description of indicator features, which are used to supplement dependency path representations, is given in Das et al. (2014). We demonstrate the usefulness of our framesemantic parsing model in an experimental evaluation on a standard data set based on FrameNet release 1.5 (Ruppenhofer et al., 2012). We make use of the same data splits and scorer as used in previous work and directly compare our results to those reported in the literature, including WSABIE (Hermann et al., 2014), the global inference model by Täckström et al. (2015), and Framat (Roth and Lapata, 2015). For preprocessing, we apply a publicly available morphosyntactic analyser (Bohnet and Nivre, 2012) and a stateof theart dependency parser (Kiperwasser and Goldberg, 2016). To

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ensure comparability, we report results with gold frames and frames preidentified by the WSABIE model.

Table 1: Comparison of framesemantic parsing results with predicted frames and gold frames

Predicted Frames Gold Frames

Precision Recall F1 Precision Recall F1

Täckström 75.4 65.8 70.3 SEMAFOR 78.4 73.1 75.7

Hermann 74.3 66.0 69.9 Framat 80.4 73.0 76.5

This work 72.2 68.0 70.0 This work 81.7 76.6 79.0 The results, summarized in Table 1, indicate that our model achieves a recall of up to 76.6%, higher than any previously reported result. In terms of precision and F1 score, our model performs onpar with other recent approaches from the literature. Keywords: Neural Networks, Frame Semantics, Semantic Role Labeling References

Bohnet, B., & Nivre, J. (2012, July). A transitionbased system for joint partofspeech tagging and labeled nonprojective dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the 2012 Joint conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (pp. 14551465). Jeju Island, Korea

Coyne, B., Klapheke, A., Rouhizadeh, M., Sproat, R., & Bauer, D. (2012, December). Annotation tools and knowledge representation for a texttoscene system. In Proceedings of 24th International conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 679 694). Mumbai, India.

Das, D., Chen, D., Martins, A. F. T., Schneider, N., & Smith, N. A. (2014). FrameSemantic Parsing. Computational Linguistics, 40 (1), 956.

Fillmore, C. J. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech (Vol. 280, pp. 2032).

Fillmore, C. J., & Baker, C. (2010). A frames approach to semantic analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Fillmore, C. J., Ruppenhofer, J., & Baker, C. F. (2004). FrameNet and representing the link between semantic and syntactic relations. Frontiers in Linguistics, Language and Linguistics Monograph Series B(1), 1959.

Hermann, K. M., Das, D., Weston, J., & Ganchev, K. (2014, June). Semantic frame identification with distributed word representations. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 14481458). Baltimore, Maryland.

Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997, November). Long shortterm memory. Neural Computation, 9 (8), 17351780. doi: 10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735

Kiperwasser, E., & Goldberg, Y. (2016). Simple and accurate dependency parsing using bidirectional LSTM feature representations. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 4, 313327.

Roth, M., & Lapata, M. (2015). Contextaware framesemantic role labeling. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 3, 449460.

Roth, M., & Lapata, M. (2016, August). Neural semantic role labelling with dependency path embeddings. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (volume 1: Long papers) (pp. 11921202). Berlin, Germany.

Ruppenhofer, J., LeeGoldman, R., Sporleder, C., & Morante, R. (2012). Beyond sentence level semantic role labeling: linking argument structures in discourse. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47 (3), 695721. doi: 10.1007/s1057901292014

Shen, D., & Lapata, M. (2007, June). Using semantic roles to improve question answering. In Proceedings of the 2007 Joint conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (pp. 1221). Prague, Czech Republic.

Täckström, O., Ganchev, K., & Das, D. (2015). Efficient inference and structured learning for semantic role labeling. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3. 2941.

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Poster Presentations

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Embodied Construction Grammar Meaning Representation of Frames and Constructions: Caused_motion


[email protected]


[email protected]

This paper offers an Embodied Construction Grammar (Chang and Bergen 2005, Feldman et al. 2010) representation and analysis of metaphorical caused motion, extending previous work on the semantic representation of literal caused motion (Dodge and Petruck 2014). Specifically, the present work exploits frame information as recorded in FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) and constructional patterns, as developed in MetaNet (Dodge et al. 2014) in service of automatic metaphor detection, based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The work provides a computationally tractable representation of meaning, and demonstrates the necessity of an integrated resource that combines frames, constructions, and Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) representations for automatic metaphor identification. Consider the metaphoric use of push .v in example (1), below, where rain is conceptualized as the agent of the caused motion, and the doldrums instantiates the goal of that motion.

1. The endless rain pushed her into the doldrums. 2. Bruno pushed the stroller into the hallway.

The verb push evokes a Cause_motion frame, which FrameNet (FN) defines as (REF). A framebased analysis of the literal use identifies the frame elements (FEs) that (2) instantiates. FN’s lexical entry for push .v includes the valence descriptions that constitute a set of constructions welcoming the verb (Ellsworth et al. 2014). Formalization of such constructions in ECG provides a computational means for identifying FEs from FN’s informal descriptions. While (1) and (2) share a syntactic pattern, only a representation of the respective meanings will differentiate the two, resulting in two constructions. The metaphorical use (1) requires identifying the source and target domains of the metaphor as well as the mappings between them. Additionally, determining whether the role fillers meet the semantic type constraints of the metaphorical construction is crucial. Specifically, the ECG constructional unification demands type consistency when fillers bind to semantic roles (i.e. FEs). Metaphor Research tends to focus on particular constructions, e.g. Copular Construction (TIME IS MONEY), and verbbased constructions, e.g. Verb Object Construction (PUSH LEGISLATION). However, many construction types figure in

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the linguistic expression of conceptual metaphor. As such, the present examination of the Caused_motion construction fills a gap in the literature. Instead of only considering a restricted set of constructions. The present work demonstrates that the mechanisms of Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, as formalized in ECG offer a means of studying the underlying commonalities in conceptual structure that a variety of constructional patterns express. Rather than developing models and systems that identify and analyze either literal language or metaphorical language, the current work suggests that the optimal computational system is one that facilitates work on both types of language using a common meaning representation, i.e. Embodied Construction Grammar. Keywords: Meaning Representation. Conceptual Structure. Frames. Constructions. Embodied Construction Grammar. References Bergen, B.K. and N. Chang. (2005). Embodied Construction Grammar in simulation based language understanding, In JO. Östman and M. Fried (eds.), Construction Grammar(s): Cognitive and CrossLanguage Dimensions . Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins, pp. 147190.

Dodge, E. K. and M. R, L. Petruck. (2014). Representing Caused Motion in Embodied Construction Grammar, In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Semantic Parsing . Baltimore: ACL, 3944.

Ellsworth, M., J. Ruppenhofer, and A. Ziem. (2014). FrameNet as a Repository of Constructions, Paper presented at ICCG8, Osnabruck.

J. Feldman, E. Dodge, J. Bryant. (2010). Embodied Construction Grammar. In B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111158.

Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. (1980) Metaphors We Live By . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ruppenhofer, J., M. Ellsworth, M. R. L. Petruck, C. R. Johnson, C. F. Baker, and J. Scheffczyk. (2016). FrameNet: Theory and Practice . Web Publication: www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet/book/book.html. Berkeley: ICSI.

Stickles, E. and E. K. Dodge. (2016) Literal vs. figurative language use affects the frequency of syntactic patterns, Paper at the 90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, D.C.

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http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet/book/book.html

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet/book/book.html

Framebased resolution of coreference for a highly inflected language

Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

[email protected]

Magdalena Zawisławska (Institute of Polish Language, University of Warsaw)

[email protected]

The aim of the paper is to present a framebased resolution of nominal phrase coreference in Polish, a morphologically rich language. As part of a larger project about Polish coreference, the current work proposes a unified, computable theory of Polish nominal coreference, verifying the theory through corpus analysis, implementing, and evaluating a prototype of a computationallinguistic resolution model that goes beyond the current state of the art for Polish. Corpusbased verification of the coreference theory is carried out over an existing coreference related resource – the Polish Coreference Corpus composed of the texts from the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al., 2012) currently annotated with nominal coreference relations only. We are using existing tools for sample distribution and managing annotation process. The annotation procedure is based on the frame semantics by Fillmore. Annotation of the coreference relation is regarded as difficult in its general setting and is additionally hindered by the exceptionally rich morphology of Polish and lack of articles which makes it difficult to distinguish definite and indefinite objects. Furthermore, Polish verbs contain information about person, number and grammatical gender, therefore we often use zerosubject sentences, e.g.

Nominacja Tadeusza Matusiaka wywołała poruszenie. subst:nom subst:gen subst:gen verb:fin subst:acc The nomination of Tadeusz Matusiak caused a stir.

Na początku tej kadencji samorządu prep subst:loc adj:gen subst:gen subst:gen In the beginning of this term of the municipal government

Ø został prezydentem Łodzi. Kiedy w ubiegłym zero ver:fin subst:inst subst:gen adv prep:loc adj:loc (he) became the mayor of Łódź. When in last

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roku Ø nie otrzymał wotum zaufania, subst:loc zero neg verb:fin subst:gen subst:gen year (he) didn’t get the vote of confidence,

Ø podał się do dymis ji. zero ver:fin:refl prep:gen (to) subst:gen (he) handed in – (his) resignation.

Another problem is that phrases referring to the same object can differ in grammatical gender, e.g. one of the coreference chains looks as follows: katastrofa budowlana (nf) [construction disaster], zdarzenie (nn) [event], wypadek (nm) [accident]. Considering all those problems, it is obvious that traditional rules of simple grammatical resolution of coreference must be adjusted for Polish. The formal approach needs taking into account much broader semantic and pragmatic information. The method that offers such approach is the semantics of understanding by Fillmore (1982). This methodology is explored by Ziem (2014) who emphasizes the fundamental role of frames in the reference: “a linguistic expression refers to a cognitive unit by evoking a frame which then opens a potential reference area […] Evocation of a frame corresponds to the cognitive act of referentialization. Frames— as units in the ‘projected world’—serve as projection areas for referentiality” (Ziem 2014: 251). Keywords: Coreference. Frame semantics. Bridging. Discourse. References

Fillmore, Ch. J. (1982). Frame semantics. In: Linguistics in the Morning Calm, 111–137. Seoul, South Korea: Hanshin Publishing Co.

Przepiórkowski, A., Bańko, M., Górski, R. L. & LewandowskaTomaszczyk, B. (2012). Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw.

Ziem, A. (2014). Frames of understanding in text and discourse: Theoretical foundations and descriptive applications. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, Philadelphia.

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A retrieval approach to construction detection

Anna Ehrlemark (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Richard Johansson (Chalmers University of Technology)

[email protected]

Finding authentic examples of grammatical constructions is central in constructionist approaches to linguistics, language processing, and second language learning. Of special interest are partially schematic constructions: templatic patterns that exhibit lexical as well as syntactic properties, which are too specific to be referred to grammatical rules, but too general to be attributed to specific lexical units (Fillmore et al., 2012). Such complex constructions are difficult to detect computationally, since they cannot be distinguished from unrelated constructions by surface form alone. Guided by theoretical insights from Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics on the intimate relation between language form and meaning, we experiment with using lexicalsemantic features to sift out occurrences of specific constructions from corpora. A major impediment to a wide adoption of constructionbased approaches in natural language processing is probably the lack of resources of a nontrivial size. Before we can attempt to analyze language automatically based on a constructionist theory, it will be necessary to list, describe, and exemplify the constructions that are present in a language. Efforts to build inventories of this kind – constructicons – are underway for a number of languages, including Swedish (Lyngfelt et al., 2012). The emerging practice of constructicon development, or constructicography, may in short be characterized as a combination of construction grammar and lexicography (Backstrom et al., 2014). A crucial requirement for constructicon building is access to corpus search tools allowing constructicographers to search for occurrences of constructions: either for finding prototypical examples (Gries, 2003), or for computing statistics such as word–construction cooccurrence (Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003). In this paper we cast the task of construction detection as an information retrieval (IR) problem. This is fruitful in constructionbased research and constructicography for a number of reasons. First, while a partially schematic construction can have a surface form that is easy to describe as a structural pattern, its semantics can be hard to capture as a clearcut binary decision, which makes it natural to rerank corpus hits according to a semanticsbased scoring function. Also, the IR perspective is natural in terms of interaction: a user can pose queries, rank and

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rerank repeatedly according to different functions defined on the fly, to get a comprehensive overview of the various uses of a construction in a corpus. To facilitate research in this area, we built a benchmark collection by annotating the occurrences of six constructions from the Swedish Constructicon in a Swedish corpus. Furthermore, we implemented a simple and flexible retrieval system for finding construction occurrences, in which the user specifies a ranking function using lexicalsemantic similarities. We investigate different measures: similarities based on handcrafted lexicons (Swedish framenet (Friberg Heppin & Toporowska Gronostaj, 2012) and Swedish lexical semantic lexicon SALDO (Borin et al., 2013)) and distributional similarity computed from corpora. The system was evaluated using standard IR metrics on the new benchmark, and we saw that lexicalsemantical rerankers improve significantly over a purely surface oriented system, but must be carefully tailored for each individual construction. Keywords: Construction detection. Corpus Linguistics. Constructicography. Lexical Semantics. Information Retrieval. References

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Lonngren, L. (2013). SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47(4), 1191–1211.

Backstrom, L., Lyngfelt, B., & Skoldberg, E. (2014). Towards interlingual constructicography. on correspondence between constructicon resources for english and swedish. Constructions and Frames, 6(1), 9–33.

Fillmore, C. J., LeeGoldman, R., & Rhomieux, R. (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (Eds.), SignBased Construction Grammar (pp. 309–372). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Friberg Heppin, K. & Toporowska Gronostaj, M. (2012). The rocky road towards a Swedish FrameNet – creating SweFN. In Proceedings of the Eighth conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012) (pp. 256–261). Istanbul, Turkey.

Gries, S. (2003). Towards a corpusbased identification of prototypical instances of constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 1–27.

Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Prentice, J., Rydstedt, R., Skoldberg, E., & Tingsell, S. (2012). Adding a constructicon to the Swedish resource network of Språkbanken. In 11th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS) Proceedings.

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Stefanowitsch, A. & Gries, S. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209–243.

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Disambiguating Semantic Roles in Swedish Compounds with Swedish FrameNet and SALDO

Karin Hedberg (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Richard Johansson (University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

The compounding of words in Swedish is recursive and productive, and it has been claimed that compounds make up around one tenth of nonstop words in news text (Hedlund, 2002), making them a highly relevant NLP topic. Beyond the issues of segmentation – Swedish compounds are written together – and word sense disambiguation, SRL (semantic role labeling/disambiguation) is required in order to make out how the items of a compound relate semantically to one another. Compared to SRL at the sentence level (Gildea & Jurafsky 2002, Johansson et al., 2012, inter alia), compounds have no intrastructural or prepositional information. For instance: while a leather bag, läderväska, is a bag made of leather, a school bag, skolväska, is not interpreted as a bag made of schools, but as a bag whose use is to take to school. Therefore, the problem at hand is mainly one of semantic grouping. The current work describes a Frame Semantics approach to semantic role disambiguation in Swedish compounds. In FrameNet terms (Baker et al., 1998, Ruppenhofer et al., 2006), this means that we consider each (rightheaded) compound as fitting into the following structure: FE+LU (frame element i.e. semantic role + lexical unit of a certain frame) (Heppin & Petruck, 2014). The task at hand is thus: given the frame that the suffix belongs to, predict the FE of the prefix. In the leather/school bag examples above, the frame Containers is given for the suffix, and the FEs to be predicted for the prefix are Material and Use, respectively. In a preliminary experiment, we consider all of the annotated sentences of the Swedish FrameNet (Borin et al., 2010a, 2010b), extracting features using frame information, partofspeech, different levels of semantic closeness by Brown clustering (Brown et al., 1992), the Synlex synonym lexicon (Kann & Rosell 2005), and the SALDO (Swedish associative lexicon) graph (Borin et al. 2008, 2013). We then train a Scikitlearn support vector machine (Pedregosa et al., 2011) on these features. In order to prepare compounds to test our classifier on, we extract non

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lexicalised compounds from a literary corpus and a web forum corpus from the Swedish Language Bank, Språkbanken , and set up an annotation interface 2

through which we segment each compound and assign it a frame. Due to the sparsity of annotated sentences per frame in the Swedish FrameNet, we see only a slight improvement over baseline, which has frame as its only feature. This warrants our second experiment, for which we prepare a new dataset of annotated compounds. In this round, we consider only the five most common frames from the literary corpus: Containers, Clothing, Furniture, Food and People_by_vocation. Using an optimised feature set including POS, Brown clusters of different granularity, the synonym lexicon, a SALDO feature relating to the FE, frame information and a parent frame feature, we see a 10fold crossvalidation average classification accuracy of 0.63, compared to an average 0.38 baseline in the development set of 960 items. Using the same feature set, a classifier is retrained and evaluated on an unseen set of 100 items, returning an accuracy score of 0.57 against a 0.33 baseline. While more annotated sentence data would be desirable, we conclude from our results that the Swedish FrameNet and SALDO in combination with semantic clustering act as a good structure for building a SRL system for Swedish compounds. Keywords: Swedish compounds. SRL, semantic clustering. FrameNet. SALDO. References

Baker, C. F., Fillmore, C. J., & Lowe, J. B. (1998). The Berkeley FrameNet Project. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics Volume 1, ACL ’98 (pp. 86–90). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Lönngren, L. (2008). Saldo 1.0 (svenskt associationslexikon version 2). Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg.

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Lönngren, L. (2013). SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47(4), 1191–1211.

Brown, P. F., Desouza, P. V., Mercer, R. L., Pietra, V. J. D., & Lai, J. C. (1992). Classbased ngram models of natural language. Computational linguistics, 18(4), 467–479.

2 https://spraakbanken.gu.se/ 177

https://spraakbanken.gu.se/

Dannélls, D., Heppin, K. F., & Ehrlemark, A. (2014). Using language technology resources and tools to construct Swedish FrameNet. In Workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resources for Language Processing (pp. 8–17).

Friberg, K. (2007). Decomposing Swedish compounds using memorybased learning. In Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (Nodalida’07) (pp. 224–230).

Gildea, D. & Jurafsky, D. (2002). Automatic labeling of semantic roles. Computational linguistics, 28(3), 245–288.

Hedlund, T. (2002). Compounds in dictionarybased crosslanguage information retrieval. Information Research, 7(2), 7–2.

Heppin, K. F. & Petruck, M. R. (2014). Encoding of Compounds in Swedish FrameNet. EACL 2014, (pp. 67–71).

Johansson, R., Friberg Heppin, K., & Kokkinakis, D. (2012). Semantic Role Labeling with the Swedish FrameNet. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12); Istanbul, Turkey; May 2325 (pp. 3697–3700).

Kann, V. & Rosell, M. (2005). Free construction of a free Swedish dictionary of synonyms. In Proceedings of the 15th NODALIDA conference, Joensuu 2005 (pp. 105–110).: Citeseer.

Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M., Prettenhofer, P., Weiss, R., Dubourg, V., Vanderplas, J., Passos, A., Cournapeau, D., Brucher, M., Perrot, M., & Duchesnay, E. (2011). Scikitlearn: Machine Learning in Python. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12, 2825–2830.

Ruppenhofer, J., Ellsworth, M., Petruck, M. R., Johnson, C. R., & Scheffczyk, J. (2006). FrameNet II: Extended theory and practice.

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Distributional embeddings and diachronic construction grammar

Sara Budts (University of Antwerp)

[email protected]

Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp)

[email protected]


[email protected] We propose a distributional approach from the field of representation learning for the unsupervised differentiation of closely related syntactic constructions and their development and interaction over time, with the formation of periphrastic do as a test case. Most constructionist computational approaches (e.g. Pollard & Sag 1994, Steels 2011) remain topdown in key respects, using design templates, or being trained on gold standards. Unsupervised neural networks may provide more unbiased insight into constructionist models of cognition. Recently they have been successfully applied to a myriad of modelling tasks, including POStagging or machine translation (De Mulder et al. 2015). Their relevance to theoretical variational linguistics, however, has been little explored (Manning 2015). The English verb do provides an excellent case to investigate the extent to which individual speakers economize their mental grammars by reinterpreting local patterns as belonging to more widely applicable grammatical rules. Until the end of the 15th century, do mostly behaved as a main verb meaning ‘do, make’. From the early 16th century onwards the verb was used increasingly more often as an auxiliary verb mainly in questions and negative statements (2). As the other modal auxiliaries (will, shall, must, can, may) had acquired their auxiliary status earlier on, around 1500, their closely timed developments must have been of significance to the development of periphrastic do, ‘but the nature of the connection is less clear’ (Warner 1993: 198).

(1) I already did my homework. (2) a. “Do you love me?” vs. “Love you me?” – “I do not love you” vs. “I love you not.”

Artificial neural networks compress collocational information into multidimensional word vectors (‘embeddings’). At the lexical level, they have been used to unearth implicit similarity relations (e.g. difficult, hard, tough), but also more complex analogical relations (Mikolov et al. 2013). While traditional embeddings are typebased, representations generated by a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM;

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Hochreiter & Schmidhuber 1997) network are capable of learning representations of individual tokensincontext, taking the sentence instead of the type as basic unit. We propose a LSTMbased approach to explore the relation of periphrastic do to the other auxiliaries. First, all corpus sentences are turned into vector representations. Next, the representations of sentences containing do or another auxiliary are clustered in order to group them by syntactic environment. Movements of those clusters will reveal the trajectory of do as its gradually shifts towards the other modal auxiliaries. From a theoretical perspective, distributed representations provide an excellent means to test the cognitive claim that generalizations emerge out of and are finetuned by usage rather than being fixed universal categories, such as do’s 16thcentury transition from full verb to auxiliary. Keywords: Representation learning. Periphrastic do. Long Short Term Memory. References

De Mulder, W., Bethard, S., & Moens, M.F. (2015). A survey of the application of recurrent neural networks to statistical language modeling. Computer Speech and Language, 30, 6198.

Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber J. (1997). Long shortterm memory. Neural computation 9(8), 1735 1780.

Manning, C.D. (2015). Computational linguistics and deep learning. Computational linguistics 41(4), 701707.

Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G.S., & Dean, J. (2013). Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Advances in neural information processing systems 26, 31113119.

Pollard, C., & Sag I. (1994). Headdriven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Steels, L. (2011). Design patterns in fluid construction grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Warner, A. (1993). English Auxiliaries. Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Grammatical Framework for implementing multilingual frames and constructions

Normunds Grūzītis (University of Latvia, IMCS) [email protected]

Dana Dannélls (University of Gothenburg) [email protected]

Aarne Ranta (University of Gothenburg) [email protected]

Francis M. Tyers (UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta) [email protected]

Several approaches to Construction Grammar have been proposed, as well as various annotation schemas and grammar models are used for Frame Semantics resources of different languages. We propose Grammatical Framework, GF (Ranta, 2004), as a unified formalism and a toolkit for implementing both computational frame semantic grammars and computational construction grammars, allowing for seamless combination of both perspectives. We show that such grammars, as well as lexicons, can be extracted systematically and, thus, largely automatically from the existing semiformal framenets and constructicons by extending the existing GF resource grammar library, RGL (Ranta, 2009). Moreover, we propose GF as a framework for implementing multilingual frame semantic and construction grammars, currently testing our approach on English and Swedish (Grūzītis & Dannélls, 2015;; Grūzītis et al., 2015), as well as Russian. GF is characterized by its twolevel approach to natural language representation. One level, the abstract syntax, accounts for the languageindependent aspects, and the other level, the concrete syntax, accounts for the languagespecific aspects. The same abstract syntax can be equipped with many concrete syntaxes – reversible mappings from abstract syntax trees to feature structures and strings – making the grammar multilingual. GF RGL currently supports 30 languages, all implementing the same abstract syntax. The builtin support for multilingual grammars has a great potential for implementing, unifying and interlinking frames and constructions of different languages, which, in turn, would be particularly beneficial for the use in machine translation, secondlanguage learning and crosslingual information extraction and summarization, involving semantic parsing and natural language generation.

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Our approach leverages FrameNetannotated corpora to automatically extract a set of shared crosslingual semanticosyntactic valence patterns. The implementation of the grammar and lexicon is supported by the design of FrameNet, providing an interlingual frame semantic API over the interlingual syntactic API already provided by GF RGL. The evaluation of the currently acquired English and Swedish FrameNet grammars and lexicons shows the feasibility of the approach. As a side result, we suggest a unified method for comparing and mapping semantic and syntactic valence patterns and lexical units across framenets. The systematic conversion also helps to debug and improve the consistency of the original FrameNet and Constructicon resources. The major advantage is that languagedependent clauselevel specifications to a large extent are hidden by the frame semantic API, making the potential application grammars more robust and flexible. Regarding constructions, our work has so far resulted in languagespecific grammars. A future task is to take this approach from the monolingual construction grammar to a multilingual one. Apart from direct mappings (where possible), this would require considering the links to FrameNet, as far as we deal with constructions with a referential meaning. The GF construction grammar and frame semantic grammar approaches are complementary to each other, and integrating them would be mutually beneficial. Keywords: Grammatical Framework. FrameNet. Constructicon. References Grūzītis, N., & Dannélls, D. (2015). A multilingual FrameNetbased grammar and lexicon for Controlled Natural Language. Language Resources and Evaluation (in press).

Grūzītis, N., Dannélls, D., Lyngfelt, B., & Ranta, A. (2015). Formalising the Swedish constructicon in Grammatical Framework. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks.

Ranta, A. (2004). Grammatical Framework, a typetheoretical grammar formalism. Functional Programming, 14(2).

Ranta, A. (2009). The GF Resource Grammar Library. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2(2).

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Constructionalization and Constructional Changes

Maria Luiza Braga (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Maria da Conceição Paiva (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

This theme session discusses case studies of constructionalization and/or constructional changes of linguistic phenomena. We adopt a constructionalist approach to language change and conceptualize language as a network of constructions and links among them. The concept of network is not limited to the lexicon and is dynamic, which is crucial in explaining linguistic changes. Constructions are characterized as symbolic pairings of form and meaning and are analyzed according to their size, their degrees of phonological specificity and their types of concept, dimensions which are conceived as being gradient. This means that they can be atomic, complex or intermediate on the level of size; substantive, schematic or intermediate, on the dimension of phonological specificity; and contentful, procedural or intermediate on the dimension of type concept. Three factors are relevant to the analyses to be presented in this Theme Session: schematicity, productivity and compositionality. Schematicity can be discussed int terms of slots and their filling ; produtivity, according to Bybee (2010) , has to do with frequency, type frequency and token frequency. Traugott and Trousdale quote Barodal (2008) who says that productivity “pertains to (partial) schemas and concerns i) their extensibility , the extent to which they sanction other less schematic contructions, and ii) the extent to which they are constrained” (2013: 17). Compositionality correlates to the transparency of the link between form and meaning. Traugott and Trousdale maintain that in many cases change results in reduced compositionality (op. cit.). Some of the papers in this Theme Sessions focus on cases of constructionalization, whereas others on constructionals changes and in this regard it is interesting to distinguish these two different types of linguistic changes. According to Traugott and Trousdale (2013), Constructionalization is the creation of formnewmeaningnew (combinations of) signs. It forms new type nodes, which have new syntax or morphology and new coded meaning in the linguistic network of a population of speakers (2013: 22). Constructional change is a change affecting one internal dimension of a construction. It does not involve a new node (2013:26). In analyzing their phenomena, we are aware of the potential effects of the linguistic change on the reconfiguration of the network and of the fact that change occurs when an innovation first introduced by an individual is replicated in a community. Keywords: Constructionalization. Constructional Changes. Network.

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The development of a complex conditional conjunction: the case of (en) (el) caso (de) que in Spanish

Anton Granvik (Goteborgs Universitet)

[email protected]

This paper focuses on the development of the conditional conjunction (en) (el) caso (de) que ‘in the case that’ in Spanish. What is interesting about this complex conjunction is not only the diachronic rise of a new conditional meaning related to a particular form (i.e. the creation of a new construction), but the fact that this construction does not have one particular form, but rather exhibits continuous formal variation. This variation can be seen in the existence of several forms for expressing the same conceptfunction (Glynn, 2014). On the one hand, there is the full form, en el caso de que ‘in the caso (of) that’, including the initial preposition en ‘in’, the determiner el , and the preposition de ‘of’ before the conjunctive element que ; on the other, there is the plain form caso que . As examples (1) and (2) show, both “forms” have the same conceptfunction of relating two propositions, one of which imposes a condition on the other one:

(1) Y bueno, todo aquello tendría su razón en el caso de que Matilde continuara esperando. ‘And, well, all of this would have its motive in the case that Matilde were still waiting’ (2) Pretendía, caso que le contestaran … preguntar a Antolinares, el paradero de Titil ‘He would, if they answered him, ask Antonilares for the whereabouts of Titil’ (Examples from Davies (2002) Corpus del español )

In between these two formally extreme variants, there are four more: en el caso que, en caso de que, en caso que and caso de que , since the three elements en, el and de can all be either present or absent. The aim of this paper is to account for the development of the conditional meaning of caso in what I will call the Conditional Caso Construction, taking into consideration the formal variation. Building on data extracted from the 100 million word diachronic Corpus del español (Davies 2002), I will argue that, although the development of the Conditional Caso Construction could be seen as simply a case of grammaticalization and lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005), in order to account for the formal variation it is better to approach this development in constructional terms (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). The idea is that the Construction Grammar view on language as a hierarchically structured inventory of more and less schematic vs. specific constructions

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provides a more appropriate tool for incorporating syntactic variation phenomena into grammatical description. Keywords: Spanish Caso. Conditional Conjunction. Constructional Change. References Brinton, L., & Traugott, E.C. (2005). Lexicalization and Language Change . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, M. (2002). Corpus del Español . 100 million words, 1200s to 1900s. Available online at http://www.corpusdelespanol.org.

Glynn, D. (2014). Polysemy and synonymy: Corpus method and cognitive theory. In D. Glynn & J. Robinson (Eds), Corpus Methods for Semantics , (p. 7–38), Amsterdam & Philadelphia:John Benjamins.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional change . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/



Constructional changes: a diachronic study of the prepositional phrase por causa de

Bruno Araújo de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) [email protected]

Maria da Conceição de Paiva (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) paiva@clubinternet.fr

This study focuses on the trajectory of the prepositional phrase por causa de , present in Portuguese since the archaic period for expressing causal relationship. We take as a starting point Bybee’s proposal (2010), according to which new grammatical constructions originate from a frequent instance of a constructional pattern that might become an exemplar. Once formed, the construction tends to undergo changes in its form or meaning and may expand and gain in productivity owing to its high degree of schematicity (Bybee, 2010, 2015; Traugott & Trousdale, 2013). Our hypothesis is, therefore, that construction por causa de is a type of a more general scheme existing in the language. To verify this assumption, we analyzed its occurrence in a sample consisting of nonliterary texts representative of three different periods of Portuguese, namely archaic, classical and modern periods, as suggested by Mattos e Silva (1994) and Castro (2013), in order to seek empirical evidences on processes or mechanisms that have led to its emergence as well as the constructional changes it has undergone over time. The analysis allows us to show that construction por causa de is effectively a specific type of a constructional pattern which can be schematically represented by [POR + NP + DE + X] already fairly frequent in the archaic period. Until the early of the 16th century, the exemplar construction type of this schema was per razon de . As por causa de increases its frequency of occurrence, per razon de becomes less frequent, indicating a competition between the two types which is subsequently resolved with the disappearance of per razon de. In contrast, through a process of chunking, por causa de gains autonomy and becomes the exemplar type of the category of causal PP. In its initial occurrences, this causal construction is closely associated with communicative contexts in which a situation is evaluated by the speaker as negative and binds to a particular state of affairs: the material processes (Halliday, 1985). Gradually, the use of this causal construction is expanded to other processes such as the mental and relational. This morphosyntactic expansion is accompanied by a specialization of por causa de for the expression of causal relation in the content domain (Sweetser, 1990). Keywords: Por causa de. Causal Construction. Diachrony.

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References

Bybee, J. (2015). Language change . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Castro, I. (2013). Formação da língua portuguesa. In: RAPOSO, E. B. P. et al (Eds.), Gramática do português v. 1( pp.716), Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar . London: Edward Arnold.

Sweetser. E. From etimology to Pragmatics . Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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Binominal Constructions in Portuguese

Karen Sampaio Braga Alonso (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

Roberto de Freitas Junior (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

The aim of this research is to describe the binominal construction a/one N1 of N2, in Brazilian Portuguese: its quantitative or qualitative functions. It studies the topic from a diachronic perspective, considering that binominal qualitative constructions precede historically quantitative ones. Instances such as um monte de Lisboa (a hill of Lisbon) and um monte de crianças (a lot of children) are the focus of this study, and are described under a usagebased linguistic viewpoint (Bybee, 2010, Traugott & Trousdale, 2013)). Looking at these instances, we see that a single superficial form (um monte de N2) is related to, at least, two different meanings. This research relies on an empirical analysis, so data are obtained by assessing their occurrences and contexts of use attested in a corpus of Old Portuguese. The main hypothesis considered in this work is that nonprototypical usages of qualitative constructions undergo microchanges at different timepoints, and, consequently, a new (quantitative) construction arises. Thus, what we intend here is to describe how these changes occurs, whereas language change involves a gradual change over the centuries. From the observation of the historical data, we could postulate some of these microchanges that could lead to the formation of a new construction (constructionalization): (a) expansion of nonprototypical nouns instantiating N2; (b) expansion of metaphorical usages for the sense of monte; (c) restriction of intervening element on the right of N1 – we believe that over time there is a greater restriction of elements involved, and in particular, between the word monte (hill) and the preposition de (of). This aspect would be a consequence of a gradual entrenchment of this syntagmatic sequence; (d) reduction of the kind of element that can specify N1; (e) increasing in token frequency of N2 plural and the association of this construction to the quantitative sense; (f) gradual disassociation between the form monte and the sense of ‘hill’; (g) change of syntactic head of the construction. Some of these microchanges could be observed from a preliminary corpus analysis, although the occurrences of binominal structures are not too much frequent in the corpus. Keywords: Usagebased linguistics. Binominal Constructions. Constructionalization. Constructional changes.

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References Alonso, K. S. B. (2010). Construções binominais quantitativas e construção de modificação de grau: Uma abordagem baseada no uso. (Doctoral dissertation). UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro.Bybee, J. Language, usage and cognition.(2010). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cezário, M. M., & Furtado, M. A. (Eds) (2013). Linguística Centrada no Uso: uma homenagem a Mário Martelotta . Rio de Janeiro: MauadX, 2013.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction grammar : Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Golberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind. Chicago:The University Chicago Press.

Martelotta, M. E. (2011). Mudança Linguística: Uma abordagem baseada no uso . Rio de Janeiro: Cortez.

Morais Silva, A. (1813). Dicionário da Lingua Portuguesa Recompilado. Lisboa: Typographia Lacérdina.

Santos, C. P. M. (2014).Gramática e cognição: um estudo de construções binominais. (Master´s thesis).UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro.

Talmy, L. Grammatical construal: the relation of grammar to cognition (2006). In: D. Geeraerts, (Ed), Cognitive linguistics : Basic readings . Berlim/Nova York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Traugott.E. C. (2008). Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English. In: R. Eckardt; G. Jäger & T. Veenstra, (Eds.), Variation, selection, developmentprobing the evolutionary model of language change ( pp. 219250), Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Traugott, E., & Trousdale, G. (2013).Construcionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: University Press.

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Variable particle positioning in English transitive phrasal verbs

Manuela Correa de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) [email protected]

A phrasal verb is a construction consisted of a verb and a particle which, together, convey a meaning often different from the one transmitted by the verb alone. Many are the times when there is particle placement alternation regarding transitive phrasal verbs (TPVs). Thus particles may be placed continuously <V+ P + NP > or discontinuously <V+ P+ NP> in relation to the verb, such as turn off the computer and turn the computer off , respectively. In the present work, I investigate the variable position of the particle in English TPVs focusing on the motivations for the alternative placement of constituents aiming to tackle this matter. Taking into account Bybee’s claim that high token frequency is generally related to the chunking of sequences (Bybee, 2010), my hypothesis is that some phrasal verbs have gone through a process of chunking which resulted in indissoluble constructions subject to loss of compositionality and analyzability. With a view to support this claim, I verify the recurrence of TPVs in written and spoken discourses in a sample collected from BNC (British National Corpus). A preliminary examination of the constructions shows that, at least for particles out and off , there is an important difference concerning the variation between <V+ P+ NP> and < V+ P+ NP>: while the particle out is almost categorically adjacent to the verb (90% of the occurrences), the particle off allows significant variation (adjacency in 58% of the cases). This partial result reveals an apparent preference for the continuous order in respect to the use of out whereas the discontinuous order is preferable when off is the particle used. Considering that meanings are not always predictable from elements of the constructions individually, what has been supported in this work is that certain constructions must be stored due to their noncompositional value. This is a suitable explanation for the construction take of a dress to contrast with put on a dress instead of *take on a dress (Goldberg, 2016), for instance, which shows that particles ought to be considered as part of constructions and not only verb complements. Keywords: Construction. Phrasal verbs. Particles. Reference Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldberg, A. (2016). Tuning in to the verbparticle construction in English. In: L. Nash, & P. Samvelian, (Eds). Approaches to Complex Predicates . Leiden: Brill.

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Brazilian Portuguese Clefts: A Case of Constructionalization?

Maria Luiza Braga (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/CNPq) [email protected]

André Felipe Cunha Vieira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Capes/Galaic Language Institute)

[email protected]

Diego Leite de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) [email protected]

Cleft constructions in Brazilian Portuguese can be considered as nodes in a network, which are grouped into two subschemas, according to the presence of a relative pronoun or a WH element. In this presentation, we focus on the SER QUE Constructions and its relations to the Canonical Cleft Constructions and QUE Constructions. These constructions are exemplified and described below: (1) SER QUE Constructions Focused constituent – é que – sentence without focused constituent Não sei se vai ter [juízo] ou não. Só Deus é que sabe, não é? only God be.3S WH know3S, not be.3S? ‘I don’t know whether she will become [a girl of good judgment] it or not. It’s only God who knows, isn’t it?’ (2) QUE Constructions Focused constituent – é que – sentence without focused constituent Eu fiz a massa, eles que enrolaram. 3MP WH rollPST.PL ‘...then I made gnocchi and...I mean, I made the dough, they were the ones who rolled it.’ (3) Canonical Cleft Constructions Be focused constituent – que – sentence without focused constituent Minhas sobrinhas todas estão estudando, se formando e é I isso que a mulher tem que fazer. and be.3S this WH the woman have.3S that to do ‘I think what they really have to do is study, all my nieces are studying, graduating, and this is what the woman has to do.’ Nowadays, these constructions present the highest token frequency; the diferences among them are not categorical, but statistical. In the network SER QUE and QUE Constructions are closer to each other and more distant from the Canonical Cleft Constructions, according to a number of linguistic variables: semantic features offocused referents, type of focus and syntactic function of the focused constituents.

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The abovementioned constructions were attested as early as the 18th century and, since then, have gone through some changes in different degrees, which might be reflected in the dimensions of schematicity, productivity and compositionality (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). In the early 18th century, SER QUE Constructions could be inflected for tense, but have gradually lost this property. Nowadays, SER QUE is processed as a chunk (Bybee 2010), being used almost categorically as “é que”, and it seems to be gradually losing compositionality. These properties do not apply to the two other types of clefts: the morphosyntactic marks of focus of Canonical Cleft Constructions are not contiguous, and the QUE Constructions do not contain the verb ser. In this presentation, we will discuss the way the changes in these constructions affect their schematicity, productivity and compositionality, from a diachronic perspective. Texts in Portuguese, from the 13th century to the 20th century, will be analyzed. They have been taken from the corpora PROJETO CORPUS DO PORTUGUÊS, PROJETO PARA HISTÓRIA DO PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIRO and AMOSTRA CENSO from the Programa de Estudos sobre o Uso da Língua. Keywords: Canonical Cleft Constructions. Ser Que Constructions. Que Constructions. Productivity. Composicionality. References

Bybee, J. (2010). Language Usage and Cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Traugott, E. C. & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Constructionalization and constructional changes: The case of

[xque]conect

Maria Maura Cezario (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/CNPq)

[email protected]

Monique dos Santos (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

This paper aims to present and analyse, from the perspective of the principles of UsageBased Linguistics, the construction [Xque] conect through a diachronic approach of the Portuguese language. It focuses on the constructions uma vez que, assim que and já que in texts of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The model used to explain the formation of these constructions follows the fundamentals of constructional changes and constructionalization as developed by Traugott and Trousdale (2013) and Traugott (2012). Furthermore, based on historical analysis of the constructions [Xque] conect, we establish not only the way in which the constructional network was structured in Portuguese language, but also how the distribution of the studied constructions was set. This explanation brings together the main assumptions of the Grammaticalization Model and the Construction Grammar in order to deal with the linguistic dynamism and their constant renewal, along with the change of language network, seen here as a set of nodes (i.e, pairings of form and function) connected. The data were examined according to the parameters of schematicity, productivity and compositionality. Data were collected from the Portuguese Corpus, particularly from texts between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and electronically available by the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa and the Project Tycho Brahe. Therefore, we analyzed a sample of texts: ditties from the Middle Age (several authors); Orto do Esposo (unknown author); and Cartas: informações, fragmentos históricos sermões of Priest José de Anchieta. Before the comparison of such texts, we realize that, before the fifteenth century, we did not find uma vez que been used as a connector, but there were contexts that might have triggered the formation of construction. During this period we witnessed a temporal expression (uma vez) in the main clause and a relative pronoun (que) in the subordinate clause. Therefore, as the temporal expression and as the relative pronoun do not constitute a unit of form and meaning, we say that they are two separate constructions, once they were in two different sentences.

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However, with the increasing in token frequency, the value expressed by these constructions (temporal phrase and connector que) has changed, acquiring a single connector value, and after several change processes a new construction has emerged, a new chunk. In this case, we can prove that there was a constructionalization. Based on preliminary results, we ascertained that this process of constructionalization was effective from the seventeenth century.Then, given the changes undergone during the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, we also noticed the creation of a new node in the language and a new redistribution of nodes and links in the network of [Xque] conect. Keywords: Formation of Connectives. Constructionalization. Constructional Change. Constructional Network.

References Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional change . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Traugott, E. C. (2014). Toward a coherent account of grammatical constructionalization. Cognitive Linguistic Studies , 1 (19), pp. 321.

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Constructions of terminative aspect in Brazilian Portuguese

Rubens Loiola (UESPI/UFRJ)

[email protected]

This work discusses issues concerning aspect category, more accurately, the terminative aspect in Brazilian Portuguese. This kind of aspect manifests more intensely in [acabar de + inf. ] and [terminar de + inf .] constructions. In such constructions acabar and terminar lose part of its semantic properties and gain grammatical properties, becoming semiauxiliaries or auxiliaries. Apparently there is no one syntactic or semantic property that distinguishes the constructions formed by acabar and terminar . Then, we can ask in what extent they are distinct constructions and if there are restrictions imposed by V2. To answer this question, we analyse some properties of V2, such as dynamicity and telicity, as well the frequency of the two constructions in oral and written date collected from Corpus of Portuguese (Davies and Ferreira, 2006). The analysis follows the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995; Langacker, 1991, 2008, 2013) and principles of constructional changes as proposed by Bybee (2010, 2015) and Traugott and Trousdale (2013). A central assumption of these model is the principle of no synonymy, i.e, that two syntactically distinct constructions must be semantically or pragmatically distinct (Goldberg, 1995). Based on this principle, and on considerations about linguistic changes and the competition of grammatical forms (Bybee, 2015), I claim that the [terminar de + inf] and [acabar de + inf.] can be considered two distinct constructions even if there are contexts in which they can alternate to express terminative aspect. The analysis allows us to show that both constructions are used predominantly with V2 that codifies dynamic process that requires agentive subjects. Nevertheless, acabar de and terminar de allow combinations with dynamic processes and non agentive subjects. The expression of terminative aspect is done preferably by [acabar de + inf.]. Nevertheless, the data show increasing use of [terminar de + infinitive]. The higher frequency of this construction both in oral and written speech allow us to show empirical evidences for the action of a mechanism of chunking in the domain of terminative aspect. Keywords: Constructions. Terminative Aspect. Change. References Bybee, J. Language, usage and cognition (2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bybee, J. (2015). Language change . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, M., & Ferreira, M. (2006). Corpus do Português: 45 million words , 1300s 1900s. Retrieved from http://www.corpusdoportugues.org.


Langacker, R. (1991). Concept, image and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Langacker. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, R. (2013). Essentials of cognitive grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Constructional changes: a diachronic study of porém, contudo and todavia

Simone Silva de Oliveira (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected] This study investigates the historical development of the Portuguese constructions porém (but, however…), contudo (but, however…) and todavia (however, nevertheless…) very commonly used to indicate adversative relationship in discourse. It is based on the theoretical framework of the UsageBased Linguistics as well as the approach used to explain the formation of constructions is Constructionalization and Constructional Changes, as presented by Traugott and Trousdale (2013) who view grammar in its entirety as consisting of formmeaning pairings. Porém has its etymological origin in porende, which in turn has its origin in the Latin preposition por with ende, in the explanatoryconclusive sense. The construction contudo was formed from the juxtaposition of the preposition cum and the indefinite pronoun tudo (all) from the Latin item totu, which, according to Barretto,1999, apud Silva, 2011, p. 1, meant “all people, animals or things”. The form todavia was formed, in Latin, from the junction of the indefinite pronoun tota with the noun via (path), expressing the sense of “through all the way”. Thus, before being reanalised as conjunctions, these items used to exhibit other morphosyntatic configurations , as shown : por ende (Prep + N) > porém (Conj.); toda via (Det + N) > todavia (Conj.); con todo (Prep + Pro) > contudo (Conj.). Close examinations of data from historical corpora revealed that, gradually, the new constructions, driven by pragmatic factors, began to be used in contexts where they could not be used previously once they did not express the notion of cause, and started to express the notion of opposition ideas. Occurrences of porém with the value of opposition were found already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With increasing frequency of use, through repetition, the value expressed by this construction has changed and after several change processes, a new construction has emerged. In this case, it can be said there was a construcionalization. Based on preliminary results, it can be noticed that this process of constructionalization is effectively concluded from the sixteenth century. Besides, during this time, we also noted the inclusion of the microconstructions todavia and contudo within the network in the subsequent centuries, creating new nodes and links in the network of adversative schema. The data were examined according to the parameters of schematicity, productivity and compositionality. Different texts of the thirteenth century to the twentyfirst century were analyzed, separated by various textual genres: legal codes, notarial documents, chronicles, biographies, official and personal letters as well as journalistic texts. To compose the diachronic corpus, the

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data were taken from the following corpora: CIPM (Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval), Tycho Brahe (Historical Corpus of Portuguese), and PHPBRJ Para uma história do português brasileiro.

Keywords: Conjunctions. Constructionalization. Constructional Changes. Usage Based Linguistics. References Barreto,T. (1999). Gramaticalização das conjunções na história do português.(Doctoral dissertation). Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia.

Silva, T. M. A gramaticalização do juntivo contudo na história do português. Revista Odisseia – PPgEL. Rio Grande do Norte / UFRN, no. 7/ dez. 2011. ISSN 1983 2435.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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On the evolution of constructions: a Brazilian Portuguese case study on [pegar] and [(a)garrar]

Sueli Coelho (UFMG)

[email protected]

Thaís Cristófaro Silva (UFMG, CNPq, FAPEMIG)

[email protected]

This paper intends to discuss the evolution of constructions such as [V1pegar+ PREP(a) + V2infinitive] and [V1(a)garrar + PREP(a) + V2infinitive] in Brazilian Portuguese (Coelho & Drumond, 2015). The theoretical foundation is based on Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995). The data come from the Corpus do Português (Davies & Ferreira, 2006: http://www.corpusdoportugues.org). It will be suggested that synchronic properties of these constructions are better understood as part of their historical development. Examples of the examined constructions are: 1) [V1pegar+ PREP(a) + V2infinitive], (Com o término do namoro, o rapaz pegou a fumar ) and 2) [V1(a)garrar + PREP(a) + V2infinitive] (Com o término do namoro, o rapaz garrou a fumar ). The concrete meaning of both verbs is related to reaching and holding an object. Their abstract meaning in the construction share the inceptive aspect that reflects how an action started and developed. What we would like to consider in this paper is how the similar semantic properties of the verbs [V1pegar] and [V1(a)garrar] developed different pragmatic trajectories. Although both constructions express the inceptive aspect of [V2infinitive], they differ with regards of the nature of the event from its start: the event expressed by [V2] is stronger for [V1(a)garrar] than to [V1pegar]. In order to account for the fact that the semantic properties of both [V1] are similar regarding their inceptive aspect, but that the resulting meaning of the constructions are quite different, we consider the principle of No Synonymy: “If two constructions are syntactically distinct they must be semantically or pragmatically distinct” (Goldberg 1995: 67). We will suggest that each of the two analyzed constructions with [V1pegar] and [V1(a)garrar] developed through distinct semantic pathways – although keeping similarities in meaning – which, eventually lead to distinct pragmatic trajectories. The specific development of each construction can be captured by corpora evaluation that indicates the distinct periods in which each [V1] entered BP, as well as the differences in frequency effects for each [V1] which, we claim, contribute to promote their different trajectories. We thus suggest that the historical development of the examined constructions can express their relationship between semantic and pragmatic factors that promote the specificity of each construction synchronically.

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Keywords: Aspectual Construction. Inceptive Aspect. Semantic and Pragmatic Properties. Principle of no Synonymy. References Coelho, S. & Drumond, G. S. P. (2015). As construções aspectuais V1 (A)garrar + prep A + V2 infinitivo e V1 pegar + prep A + V2 infinitivo na língua portuguesa: um caso de variação linguística? Revista Signótica 27, pp. 287306).

Davies,M., & Ferreira, M. (2006). Corpus do Português: 45 million words , 1300s 1900s. Available on http://www.corpusdoportugues.org.


Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Grammaticalization and verb constructions in varieties of portuguese: intralinguistic tendencies?

Cristina dos Santos Carvalho (UNEB/UFRJ)

[email protected] According to Bybee (2010:28), new constructions are specific exemplars of more general existing constructions that take on new pragmatic implications, meanings, or forms due to their use in particular contexts. With regard to grammaticalization, “not only do new constructions arise out of existing constructions, but also a further step is taken in that a lexical item within this construction takes on grammatical status” (Bybee, 2010:30). Traugott and Trousdale (2013: 32) quote Lehmann (2004:183), who says that, as a process, grammaticalization has been broadly defined as “the creation of grammatical categories” such as tense, aspect, modality, mood, connectives etc. Among these categories, here I will focus on modality and, more specifically, on epistemic modality, concept that concerns the degree of knowledge or belief of the speaker in what is said. In other words, speakers can express their degree of certainty in its truth, their confidence or doubt, using lexical, intonational or grammatical devices (Fitneva, 2001). For example, in Portuguese, epistemic modality can be signaled by verb constructions in first person singular, such as eu acho que, eu penso que (‘I think that’), introducing complement clauses. Following the statement from Bybee (2010:5) that, “at times, specific instances of constructions (with particular lexical items included in them) take on behavior different from the general construction”, I argue that, although eu acho que and eu penso que exhibit the same structural pattern, they show differences in behavior: although both are used as opinion marker, the former is more frequent and therefore more productive than the latter. Furthermore, eu acho que is used as doubt marker, behaving as an epistemic adverb (Galvão, 1999; Freitag, 2003); this change illustrates grammaticalization and it includes decategorialization (Hopper, 1991), decrease in compositionality and tendency for reduction to acho, among others aspects. In the present work, I investigate verb constructions in first person singular expressing epistemic modality (such as eu acho/penso que) in Brazilian, European, Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese in order to observe whether there are convergences and therefore intralinguistic tendencies concerning the grammaticalization. Then, I examine data of spoken Portuguese from Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (CRPC). Adopting a usagebased approach to language, I assume that language structure is created as language is used and grammaticalization occurs during language use (Bybee, 2003, 2010; Traugott; Trousdale, 2013, among others).

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Keywords: Constructionalization. Grammaticalization. Epistemic Modality. Varieties of Portuguese. Intralinguistic Tendencies. References Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition . Cambridge: Cambridge University. Bybee, J. (2003) Mechanisms of change in grammaticization: the role of frequency. In: B. D Joseph & R. D. Janda (Eds.) The Handbook of Historical Linguistic s (pp. 602623), Oxford: Blackwell.

Fitneva, S. A. (2001). Epistemic marking and reliability judgments: evidence from Bulgarian. Journal of Pragmatics , 33, pp 401 420.

Freitag, R. M. K. (2003). Gramaticalização e variação de acho (que) e parece (que) na fala de Florianópolis . (Master´s thesis), Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina.

Galvão, V. C. C. (1999). O achar no português do Brasil: um caso de gramaticalização. (Master´s thesis), Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo.

Hopper, P. (1991). On some principles of grammaticization. In: TRAUGOTT, E. C.; Heine, B. (Eds.). Approaches to grammaticalization . V. 1 (pp. 1735), Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Traugott, E. C.; Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The development of [SÓ QUE X] in Portuguese language from the perspective of grammatical constructionalization

Patrícia F.da Cunha Lacerda (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)

[email protected]

Assuming the constructional approach to language change (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013), this work investigates the development of [SÓ QUE X] in Portuguese language from the perspective of the grammatical constructionalization. Once "só que" involves a counter expectation – as defined by Heine et al. (1991) – and is related to a pragmatic presupposition cancellalrion – as considered by Longhin Thomazi (2004), we intend to achieve the following objectives: (a) to describe the microconstructions with “só que” from the formmeaning pairing; (b) to analyze the constructionalization of “só que” based on acontinuum of (inter)subjectification; and (c) to identify the schematic level – scheme, subschema, microconstruction and construct (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013) – that is related to [SÓ QUE X]. In order to meet the proposed objectives, we are based on a panchronic data analysis that considers corpora from the 13th century to the 21th century. The diachronic data were collected from “CIPM – Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval” and from the corpus of “Tycho Brahe” project. And the synchronic data were collected from Brazilian magazines, blogs and social networks. Considering a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the identified occurrences, the results demonstrate that [SÓ QUE X], as a schema, is productive in the language because it has an extensive number of microconstructional patterns and, more specifically, we observe the development of two recent subschemas in which the slot represented by X in [SÓ QUE X] can be filled with a negative element – like “não” (not), “nunca” (never) and “jamais” (never) – in a negative evaluation, or it can be filled with a positive element – like “sim” (yes) and “claro” (sure) – in a positive evaluation, instantiating the constructions patterns “só que não”, “só que nunca”, “só que jamais”, “só que sim” and “só que claro”.

Keywords: Constructional Approach. Grammatical constructionalization. Schematic levels. Counterexpectation. Construction [SÓ QUE X]. References

Heine, B., Claudi, U. & Hünnemeyer, F. (1991). Grammaticalization : a conceptual framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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LonghinThomazi, S. (2004). A gramaticalização da perífrase conjuncional “só que”. Estudos Linguísticos , 33, pp. 232237.

Traugott, E. C. & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Constructions, Usage and Intersubjectivity

Lílian Ferrari (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

This theme session reflects current trends in cognitive linguistics and usagebased approaches to language, centering on the relations between grammatical constructions, usage and intersubjectivity. Recent studies have shown the existence of a wide range of constructions marking intersubjectivity, from lowerlevel constructions, such as negation markers and personal pronouns, to syntacticlevel constructions, such as conditionals and complementation constructions (Verhagen 2005; Zlatev et. al. 2015). Beyond textual data, gesture and various multimodal combinations (e.g. comics) have also been studied as constructions which play intersubjective functions in usage events (Sweetser 2007, Steen and Turner, 2013). According to usagebased models, structure emerges when chunks of speech are identified by repeated occurrence and get entrenched in the speaker’s mind as units of language (Langacker, 1988, 1999; Kemmer & Barlow 1999; Tomasello 1999, 2003; Bybee 2006, 2010). Drawing on this body of research, this theme section aims at taking a step further and investigating how frequency of use and communicative needs are intertwined in shaping constructions. In this vein, it is claimed that even if frequency can be seen as a shaping factor, it may well not be a determining cause, but the effect of interactional needs, such as intersubjective alignment (Verhagen, 2005). Given that intersubjectivity, defined as mutual management of cognitive states, has been shown to be a basic component of human cognition (Tomasello, 1999), it should be expected that it is also a basic component of grammar. Following this line of reasoning, this theme session will focus on different kinds of constructions, exploring the relations between frequency of use, degree of entrenchment and intersubjectivity.

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Negotiating “subjectivities” in interaction: concessive constructions and mental spaces settings

André V. Lopes Coneglian (Mackenzie Presbyterian University)

The basic assumption in Mental Spaces Theory (henceforth, MST) is that mental spaces are set up, evoked and negotiated as discourse unfolds. More recent work on MST has treated content, epistemic, speech act and metalinguistic domains in terms of a network of mental spaces that are freely and automatically available in any communicative exchange, and that subjectivity may be measured as an upward projection in the mental spaces network (Sanders et al, 2009; Ferrari & Sweetser, 2012). In ongoing interaction, however, speakers may produce utterances that do not fit into any of these spaces readily available in the network; therefore other types of spaces are set up to fulfill cognitive and communicative purposes, one of them being the metaspatial space. The category of metaspatial space has been previously analyzed in the context of conditional constructions (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2005), in which the protasis sets up a background mental space to the spacenegotiation process. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to extend insights about the space network configuration of metaspatial constructions, considering its insertion in the mental spaces network activated in ongoing interaction; (ii) to do so using a semantic frame work that reflects what is known about the cognitive and functional organization of linguistic structure. The linguistic territory of analysis is precisely the one of concessive adverbial clauses, specifically the ones headed by the conjunction SE BEM QUE (literally, “if well that”), in Brazilian Portuguese (01).

(01) [...] então dizem que a galinha de capoeira é a galinha mais gostosa que tem né? já ouvi dizer demais isso e que a galinha de granja não tem gosto de nada SE BEM QUE eu acho que eu só como galinha de granja ultimamente que eu – não sei onde que tem terreiro pra eu ir atrás de galinha. [...] (CDP:19Or:Br:LF:Recf)

[...] they say that freerange chicken is tastier right? I have heard this many times – and that barn chicken have no taste at all – THOUGH I think I have only eaten barn chicken lately because I don’t know where I could go to get freerange chicken [...]

It is typical in discourse interaction for more than one category of mental space to be active, that is, content, epistemic and speech act spaces are coactivated and simultaneously negotiated and it is in these cases, of coactivation and simultaneous negotiation that metaspatial constructions come into play.

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Therefore, these constructions display, at the discourse level, a high degree of interactional and intersubjective features. The interactional and intersubjective nature of the concessive clause in example (01) arises because the speaker foresees a possible conclusion the hear might reach given the discourse content. Concessive constructions are dialogic in nature, that is, part of their semantic structure is the negotiation of different mental spaces (Verhagen 2005) and construction with se bem que fall into the category of “strong” concessives (Hermodson, 1994), because their function in discourse is the one of conveying the speaker’s objection to some asserted or assumed presupposition. In this sense, there is a simultaneous activation of speech act and epistemic spaces, since it is being negotiated both speaker’s and hearer’s reasoning processes and the interactive situation itself. In example (01), the epistemic space correspond to the assumed conclusion the hearer would get to given what the speaker has just mentioned in the previous discourse, and the speech act space is activated when the speaker, relying on the inference from the epistemic space, objects to such a conclusion. Ultimately, this paper addresses issues of how mental spaces are managed and negotiated as discourse unfold and of what are the grammatical constructions that allow speaker and hearer to keep track of such negotiation. It argues that, if subjectivity is indeed measured by an upward projection in the mental spaces network (as shown in Ferrari and Sweetser, 2012), then metaspatial constructions are more subjective than content, epistemic and speech act constructions not only because metaspatial space is farther from the base space, but also because metaspatial spaces comprise all other spaces activated in the network.

Keywords: Mental Spaces. Concessive Construction. Metaspatial Space. Intersubjectivity. Interaction.

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Cognitive Alignment and Generic Uses of You and We in Interaction

Helen de Andrade Abreu (UFRJ / CAPES)

[email protected]

The study of the use of personal pronouns, as deictic terms or in other forms, help shed some light to the understanding of human cognition. In a previous research (Andrade and Ferrari, 2014), we demonstrated that there are different uses for the personal deictic terms we and you , and that these uses are each created through a specific process of blending (Fauconnier 1994, 1997 and Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and form a radial category (Rosch 1973, Lakoff 1987). In the center of the category is the prototypical use of the deictic term, and at the furthermost position in the category is their generic use. The aims of our current research are: a) to further investigate the different kinds of we and you ; b) to refine the explanation of how the process of blending occurs in the creation of the radial category; c) to further investigate the cognitive processes involved in the Speaker’s choice between using the generic we , you or they . The focus of this presentation is on the generic uses of we and you , in opposition to they , according to our findings so far. The generic you has been investigated by some authors like Bolinger (1979), Lansing (1989) and, using a Cognitive Approach, Talmy (1988), Rubba (1996) and Marmaridou (2000). However, these authors did not contrast the uses of the generic you and the generic we . Our view of the generic you takes as its basis what these authors found and tries to deepen our understanding of the term. We shall proceed to demonstrate that there are cognitive strategies involved in the choice between one term or the other. We use in our analysis, apart from the concepts mentioned above, the concepts of Mental Spaces (Fauconnier 1994, 1997) and Basic Communicative Space Network , as seen in Sanders, Sanders e Sweetser (2009) to explain that the Speaker’s cognitive strategies involve different levels of subjectivity, as seen in Ferrari e Sweetser (2012). The data used is comprised of spoken English, from the COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English). Keywords: Deixis, Mental Spaces. Blending. Subjectivity. Basic Communicative Space Network. References Andrade, H. e Ferrari, L. (2013). Aspectos genéricos da dêixis: o caso dos pronomes “you” e “we” em inglês. In: Revista Philologus , ano 19, no 55, Rio de Janeiro: CIFEFIL, jan./abr. 2013 – suplemento.

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Bolinger, D. (1979). To Catch a Metaphor: You As Norm. American Speech 54: 194 209.

Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990present . Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental Spaces . Cambrigde: Cambrigde University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thoughts and Language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. Turner, M. (2002). The way we think : conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Ferrari, L. e Sweetser, E. (2012). Subjectivity and upwards projection in mental space structure. In Viewpoint in language: a multimodal perspective . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 177197.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things : what categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lansing, Jeff. (1989) Impersonal you . Manuscript, University of California, San Diego.

Marmaridou, S.S.A. (2000). Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition . Amsterdan/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Rosch, E. (1973). On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In Smith, C. S. (1975). T. Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Pp. xii+ 308. Journal of Child Language , 2 (02), 303318.

Rubba, J. (1996). Alternate grounds in the interpretation of deitic expressions. In:

Spaces, worlds & grammar . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. p. 227261.

Talmy, L. (1988). The relation of grammar to cognition. In Brygida RudzkaOstyn, ed., Topics in Cognitive Linguistics , 165205. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Present tense and epistemic proximity in journalistic headlines

Caroline Soares da Silva (UFRJ)

[email protected]

This paper focuses on the use of the present tense in online newspapers headlines that highlight events occurred in recent past. The analysis is based on data extracted from journalistic corpus composed of headlines found in the Brazilian newspapers O Globo, Jornal do Brasil (JB), Folha de São Paulo and Estadão. The hypothesis that guides the research is that the choice of present tense signals epistemic proximity to the event, related to the presentation of news as factual. The theoretical framework of the research is based on Mental Spaces Theory (Fauconnier, 1994, 1997) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991). It is claimed that the combination of these approaches can explain relevant aspects of the relationship between language and cognition in the context of online journalism. In the present stage of the research, we argue that: (a) the process of constructing mental spaces, relying on discourse primitives such as Base, Viewpoint, Focus and Event, can shed light on the epistemic use of present tense; (b) mental spaces configurations prompted by present tense journalistic headlines can be related to the process of subjectification which involves the insertion of perspective or attitude of the subject in conceptualising content. Keywords: Epistemic Time. Mental Spaces. Subjetification. References

Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language . Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in thought and language . Cambridge University Press.

Ferrari, L. (2011). Introdução à linguística cognitiva . Editora Contexto.

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford university press.

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, Theoretical Prerequisites, vol. 2, Descriptive Application.

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Temporal backshifting and intersubjectivity in Brazilian Portuguese conditionals

Paloma Bruna Silva de Almeida (UFRJ)

[email protected]

This work takes a Cognitive Linguistics perspective on Brazilian Portuguese conditional constructions. We focus on conditionals which may alternate between the future of the subjunctive and the present of the indicative, in the protasis, and between the present and the future of the indicative, in the apodosis. Based on mental spaces theory (Fauconnier, 1994, 1997; Fauconnier and Sweetser, 1996) and on mental spaces work on conditionals (Sweetser, 1990; Dancygier, 1992, 1993, Dancygier & Sweetser, 2005), the research relied on recent contributions on subjectivity and intersubjectivity (Langacker, 1990, Traugott and Dasher, 2005), and its developments based on the notion of Base Communicative Space Network (BCSN) (Sanders, Sanders e Sweetser, 2009; Ferrari e Sweetser, 2012). The analysis relied on written corpus data, which includes journalistic texts from the newspaper “Folha de São Paulo” (1994 – 1995) and literary texts. The main claim is that the conditionals under investigation reflect the speaker s subjective or intersubjective perspective associated to upwards projection in the BCSN prompted by temporal backshift. Following this line of reasoning, this theme session will focus on different kinds of constructions, exploring the relations between frequency of use, degree of entrenchment and intersubjectivity.

Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics. Conditionals. Mental Spaces. (Inter)subjectivity. Temporal Backshift. References

Dancygier, B. (1998). Conditionals and prediction, volume 87 of Cmabridge Studies in Linguistics.

Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E. (2005). Mental spaces in grammar: Conditional constructions (Vol. 108). Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language . Cambridge University Press.

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Fauconnier, G., & Sweetser, E. (1996). Spaces, worlds, and grammar . University of Chicago Press.

Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in thought and language . Cambridge University Press.

Ferrari, L. V. (2001). Construções gramaticais e a gramática das construções condicionais. Scripta (PUCMG), PUC Minas , 5 (9), 143150.

Ferrari, L. (2000). Os parâmetros básicos da condicionalidade na visão cognitivista. Veredas, Juiz de Fora , 4 (6), 2130.

Ferrari, L., & Sweetser, E. (2012). Subjectivity and upwards projection in mental space structure. Viewpoint in language: a multimodal perspective .

Sanders, T., Sanders, J., & Sweetser, E. (2009). Causality, cognition and communication: a mental space analysis of subjectivity in causal connectives. Causal categories in discourse and cognition , 1959.

Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure (Vol. 54). Cambridge University Press.

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(Inter)subjectivity as a conceptual device within the epistemic complementation clause network

Sandra A. Faria

[email protected]

This work is aimed at discussing the notion of intersubjectivity (Langacker, 1987, 1990, 2008; Traugott & Dasher, 2005; Verhagen, 2005; and Nuyts, 2001) as a conceptual device for linking epistemic complex sentences in English, herein the ones represented by the [SN VEpist [Ø S]] and [SN VEpist [that S]] argument structures. Previous research (FARIA, 2010; FARIA and FERRARI, 2012, FARIA, 2014) have drawn on Goldberg s principles of language organization, namely the Principle of NonSynonymy which claims that “If two constructions are syntactically distinct and S(emantically)synonymous, then they must not be P(ragmatically)Synonymous” (Goldberg, 1995:67). Within this perspective, [SN VEpist [Ø S]] constructions have been argued to signal (inter)subjectivity in that they imply the speaker s commitment to the speech event described in the embedded clause in a procedure of alignment of perspectives activated in the discourse flow. [SN VEpist [that S]] constructions, on the other hand, have been found to signal a nonalignment procedure between activated, presumed or shared perspectives. Apart from that, [SN VEpist [that S]] constructions have been shown to cooccur with other (inter)subjective constructions, such as pseudoclefts, conditional clauses, questions and negative sentences, again in a procedure of nonalignment of perspectives. According to Goldberg s general properties of inheritance, a given construction is an instance of another construction “iff one construction is a more fully specified version of the other” (Goldberg, 1995:79), implying they are mutually motivated. With basis on real corpus data of occurrences of both [SN VEpist [that S]] and [SN VEpist [Ø S]] argument structures, specific syntactic constructions cooccurring with the [SN VEpist [that S]] construction are argued to share an instance link by virtue of discourse and, in a broader view, (inter)subjectivity is claimed to be a surface mechanism of attention to the addressee (Traugott & Dasher, 2005) as well as an implicit device for conceptualizing the speaker s point of view (Langacker, 1987, 1990, 2008; Verhagen, 2005; e Nuyts, 2001) as distinct from the others activated in discourse, conveying a nonalignment procedure towards the perspective available in the discourse flow. Data showed that such constructions convey (inter)subjectivity both in explicit and implicit terms, thus allowing the notion to be viewed as a device linking such constructions in a conceptual network. Key words: (Inter)subjectivity. Epistemic Complementation Clauses. Perspective.

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(Inter)Subjectivity and Epistemic Constructions: a cognitive corpusbased study of Brazilian Portuguese

Luciana Beatriz Ávila (Universidade Federal de Viçosa)

[email protected] For the purpose of this paper, we discuss the category of modality from the perspective of actual language use, assuming that it is a semantic category that can be used in different ways, including intersubjectivity. Much as it happens with other linguistic categories, modality can actually be taken to project from the semantic level to the pragmatic level of language structuring. In order to tackle with this myriad of uses, the present proposal aims to analyze epistemic constructions of the type [X acha que Y]([X thinks that Y]), [X acha Y] ([X thinks Y]) and [Y X acha] ([Y X think]) of a Brazilian Portuguese (BP) oral corpus. The question we will address here, based on the Nuyt’s notion of intersubjectivity, is: what are, if any, the semantic and pragmatic differences between them? Methodologically, we utilized a sample of 20 texts of the CORALBRASIL (RASO; MELLO, 2012), a spontaneous speech BP corpus, the fifth branch of the CORALROM (CRESTI; MONEGLIA, 2005), a comparable corpus representative of the four main European Romance languages. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we observed that the most frequent cognition verb is ‘achar’ (‘think’/’guess’) responsible for 93,18% of a total of 130 occurrences. Semantically, the construction [X acha que Y] [X thinks that] points out to the degree of commitment of the conceptualizer towards the uttered proposition, an introduction of an opinion, [X acha Y] [X thinks Y] is an evaluation of the conceptualizer; in a parenthetical position [Y X acha] [Y X thinks], the construction signals the attenuation of a previously uttered assertion. In the pragmatic and discursive levels, we could deduce distinct things: (a) the verbs function as agreement/disagreement markers; (b) they also serve as a way of mitigating sociocultural asymmetries; (c) when we have a combination with other modal indexes, they could operate in argumentative processes; (d) in some interrupted utterances, they seem to integrate a strategy of negotiation of turntaking between the interaction participants. Finally, these constructions pose the challenge of their ambiguous modal and evidential status. Keywords: Epistemic Constructions. (Inter)subjectivity. Spontaneous Speech Corpus. Brazilian Portuguese. References

Cresti, E. & Moneglia, M. (Eds.). (2005). CORALROM : Integrated reference corpora for spoken romance languages. AmsterdamPhiladelphia: John Benjamins.

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Nuyts, J. (2001). Epistemic modality, Language and Conceptualization : a cognitive pragmatic perspective. AmsterdamPhiladelphia: John Benjamins.

Raso, T. & Mello, H. (Eds.). (2012). CORALBRASIL I : Corpus de referência do português brasileiro falado informal e DVD multimedia. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, v. 1.

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Fictive interaction as grammatical construction: pairing between prosody and meaning in Brazilian Portuguese


[email protected]

Pablo Arantes (UFSCar)

[email protected]

This paper has as starting point the classical notion of grammatical construction as a pairing between form and meaning (Langacker 1987; Goldberg 1995), in which a syntactic template is paired with conventionalized semantic and pragmatic content. Besides, it claims that prosodic profiles can also provide more evidence in favor of the holistic pairing of grammatical construction in terms of based usage approaches and its empirical basis. This work deals with prosodic features in constituents structured by the conversation frame, that is, involving fictive interaction (Pascual 2014), which means the use of the conversation as a frame to structure mental, discursive, and linguistic processes. It investigates how prosodic aspects contribute to the recognition of a fictive reading as a nongenuine instance of direct speech in a Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech corpus. The construction in question is “(eu) falei + clause” (‘I said’ + clause), which can be interpreted either fictively or factively. In the fictive reading, this kind of fictive interaction is a discursive type of fictivity through which conceptualizers impose their subjective and evaluative perspective on firstperson direct speech, by evoking an evaluation frame; in the factive reading, it evokes a speech communication frame. PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink 2013) was used to analyze recorded examples of this construction. The results show that instances with a factive reading have greater fundamental frequency (F0) mean, standard deviation, and range than fictive ones. Factive contours are shifted towards higher values by roughly 2 semitones compared to the fictive ones. This phenomenon integrates intersubjectivity as a fundamental dimension of linguistic meaning as well as grammar. The examples discussed have to do with the human cognitive capacity to understand others as mental agents like oneself, and thus to take other peoples’ points of view and coordinate these distinct perspectives. Keywords: Fictive Interaction. Grammatical Construction. Prosody. Spontaneous Speech Corpus. Brazilian Portuguese.

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References Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1987) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar . Volume I, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Pascual, E. (2014). Fictive interaction: The conversation frame in thought, language, and discourse . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Paul Boersma & David Weenink (2013): Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.51, retrieved 2 June 2013 from http://www.praat.org/.

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http://www.praat.org/



Frequency effects and the impact of Christianity in the emergence of the reportative meaning of Latin secundum NP (‘according to’

NP) via extended intersubjectivity

Caterina Guardamagna (University of Liverpool)

The secundum NP construction develops (inter)subjective meanings from objective (i.e. representational/referential) functions, as shown through the 6M word prose component of the diachronic Latin Library corpus (800 years). This talk focuses on the reportative meaning (70 occurrences over 890 instances of secundum NP in my sample), exemplified in (1).

(1) Credo… in unum Dominum Iesum Christum… qui… resurrexit… secundum Scripturas. ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, our (lit. the only) Lord, who rose <from the dead> according to the Scriptures.’ (NicenoConstantinopolitan Creed, 381)

This paper has two aims. Firstly, it aims at describing the emergence of the reportative meaning and its implications for the hypothesis of unidirectionality in the development of (inter)subjective expressions. Secondly, it shows how frequency of usage interacts with sociocultural factors (and the new communicative needs connected with cultural changes) in shaping the evolution of secundum NP and the emergence of the reportative meaning. My analysis of (inter)subjectivity relies on Tantucci’s (2013: 217) notions of immediate/extended intersubjectivity, elaborated on the basis of Nuyts (2001: 393). Extended intersubjectivity indicates information “being shared between the assessor and a wider group of people, possibly, but not necessarily, including the hearer” (Nuyts 2014: 58), whereas immediate intersubjectivity captures facets of the relation between speaker and hearer, and it is similar to Traugott’s intersubjectivity (1989, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2010, 2014). Subjectivity is understood here not only as encoding the speaker’s attitudes (as reflected, for instance, in epistemic modality) but also as encoding the speaker’s access to evidence for uttering a statement, therefore encompassing also evidentiality. My research shows that the reportative evidentiality meaning of secundum NP emerged out of the meaning of conformity through an intermediate stage expressing extended intersubjectivity i.e. via interpersonal evidentiality. The crucial context for this development is provided by religious treaties referring to the Bible both as a repository of shared knowledge among Christians and the source of information regarding specific claims. I argue that it is a pragmatic reinterpretation of the writer’s intention on behalf of the reader that makes the semantic shift possible. Furthermore, Christianity introduced the new communicative need consisting in marking the distinction between the word of the Lord and the word of

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his prophets and the evangelists. Therefore, I argue that the advent of Christianity played a key role in the emergence of new meanings. My case study lends support to the existence of semantic/pragmatic paths whereby (extended) intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity as suggested also in Ghesquière et al. (2014: 129 ff.) and Cornillie (2008: 56). This development challenges the idea that there is a unidirectional development from subjective to intersubjective functions, as claimed by many scholars. Quantitative data shed further light on the constructional change leading up to the development of the new secundum NP reportative construction. Specifically, while the secundum NP constructional network develops new (inter)subjective constructions, old spatiotemporal meanings (and other referential meanings associated with them) become obsolescent and eventually disappear. The appearance of reportative meanings coincides with a sharp increase in the frequency and productivity of the conformity construction from which it originates. Furthermore, secundum NP increases its scope to encompass the whole S instead of constituents below the clause only (chiefly the VP), which is in line with a wealth of research on the development of speakeroriented adverbials from referentoriented manner adverbials. Keywords: Intersubjectivity. Evidentiality. Frequency. Culture. Unidirectionality. References

Cornillie, B. (2008). On the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectivity of evidential (semi)auxiliaries in Spanish. In E. Seoane & M.J. LópezCouso (Eds.), Theoretiacl and Empirical issues in Grammaticalization (pp. 5576). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Ghesquière, L., Brems, L. & Van de Velde, F. (2014). “Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification: Typology and Operationalization.” In L. Brems et al. (Eds.), Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse (pp. 129155). Anmsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Nuyts J. (2001) Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions.Journal of Pragmatics 33, 383400.

Nuyts, J. (2014) Notions of (inter)subjectivity. In L. Brems et al. (Eds.) Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse (pp. 5377). Anmsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Tantucci, V. (2013). Interpersonal evidentiality: The Mandarin Vguo construction and other evidential systems beyond the ‘source of information’. Journal of Pragmatics 57, 210230.

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Traugott, E. C. (1999). The rhetoric of counterexpectation in semantic change: A study in subjectification. In A. Blank & P. Koch (Eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition (pp. 177 197). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Traugott, E.C. (1989). On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: an example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65, 3155.

Traugott, E.C. (1995). Subjectification in grammaticalization. In D. Stein & S. Wright (Eds.),

Subjectivity and Subjectivisation (pp. 3154). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traugott, E.C. (2003). From subjectification to intersubjectification. In R. Hickey (Ed.) Motives for Language Change (pp. 124139). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Traugott, E.C. (2010). Revisiting subjectification and intersubjectification. In K. Davidse & L. Vandelanotte (Eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization (pp. 29 70). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Traugott, E.C. (2014). Intersubjectification and clause periphery. In L. Brems et al. (Eds.), Intersubjectivity and Intersubjectification in Grammar and Discourse (pp. 729). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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Semantic and pragmatic properties of ditransitive construction in Brazilian Portuguese

Maria Angélica Furtado da Cunha (UFRN)

[email protected]

The ditransitive construction in English is described as a formmeaning pair with the central meaning “agent causes recipient to receive patient”, coded as S V O1 O2 (GOLDBERG, 1995; TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013). In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the ditransitive construction has the same basic meaning as in English and Spanish, that is, the meaning of transfer associated to verbs of offering, whose prototype is dar . However, while in English O1 – the recipient of verbal action – is coded as a SP in the slot immediately after the verb and before O2, in BP the recipient is preferably coded before the direct object (DO), as a pronoun in pre or post verbal position or as a prepositional phrase (PP) in post verbal position. So, if we consider the position of the indirect object (IO) in relation to DO, we have two different syntactic patterns associated to the same central meaning: in one, the IO comes before the DO, in the other the DO comes before the IO. This way, there are two different structures coding the same functional domain, i.e., the expression of the meaning of an event of transfer. On investigating argument structure constructions in English, Goldberg (1995) formulates the Principle of No Synonymy of Grammatical Forms, which states that if two constructions are syntactically distinct, they must be semantically or pragmatically distinct. This paper focus on the ditransitive construction and the patterns that instantiate it in Brazilian Portuguese. It aims at demonstrating that, although the ditransitive construction in Brazilian Portuguese can be instantiated by two syntactic patterns, which express the same content, they differ in discoursepragmatic terms. In this sense, these patterns are not two different constructions, but different possibilities of instantiating the same construction. The analysis follows the theoretical and methodological principles of both Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso and Construction Grammar. In terms of methodology, the investigation joins quantitative and qualitative elements in the investigation of the ditransitive construction. The database for the study is the Corpus Discurso & Gramática. The analysis of the data has proved that the ordering of the ditransitive construction arguments points to different construals of the referential event. Pragmatic, semantic and grammatical elements motivate the preference for the ordering of the indirect object before the direct object in these clauses.

Keywords: Ditransitive Construction. Arguments. Motivations.

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References

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Intersubjectivity and constructionalization of [Locative+Verb] connectors in Portuguese

Mariangela Rios de Oliveira (UFF)

[email protected]

According to the constructional grammar approach, processes of language change are usage based and always emerge from the interaction of speakers, who negotiate new meanings in the course of interaction. As Traugott and Trousdale (2013) proposed language should be considered as a network of pairs of form and meaning which presents various degrees of instability, and leads to the process of linguistic change. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the constructional grammar approach, we will present one of our research topics. We are referring to the textual connective construction formed by locative pronoun (Loc) and verb (V), hereafter referred to as LocVconec. The LocVconec is a highly integrated kind of semanticsyntactic pairing, in which the loss of compositionality, corresponding to the dissipation of properties of the categories of their subparts Loc and V, is offset by a gain in schematicity, such as advocated in Oliveira and Rocha (2011) and Rocha (2016). We classify the LocVconec as acomplex, schematic and procedural construction which is more advanced in the cline of linguistic change when compared to lexical connectors. We assume that this class is a channel for procedural and abstract content, in the establishment of logicaltextual relations. These uses have their selection and frequency motivated by pragmaticdiscursive factors, and can be illustrated by the following examples of contemporary Portuguese:

(1) Deve fazer umas quadrinhas novas... Porque não faz? Fiz já. Pode recitar? Pois não.

Diga lá. [“Tell us”]; Lá vai: [There you go]: Ai, Filomena, Se eu fosse como tu, Punha uma máscara Na cara do Dudu. (19:Fic:Br:Barreto:Urbana)

(2) Conheci, mais e de súbito, que essas confissões de autores são coisa perigosa: se se diz pouco, parece simplicidade afetada e insincera; se se diz um tanto mais, parece fatuidade e pedanteria. Quis fugir à resposta; mas estava preso pela promessa. Palavra de tabaréu não torna atrás...Aí vai, pois. [Here it is, then]. (19: Fic: Br: Rio: Time)

In (1) and (2), the constructs lá vai e aí vai [there you go and here it is] instantiate LocVconec. Those are highly entrenched uses, in which the traces of the original categories of their subparts wane, in order to form a semanticsyntactic whole, which acts in the articulation of ampler textual portions, connecting them. Keywords: Constructionalization. Portuguese Language. Connectors.

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References

ROCHA, R. A. (2016) .O esquema VLocconect: mudanças construcionais e construcionalização. Tese (Doutorado em Estudos de Linguagem) Universidade Federal Fluminense.

de Oliveira, M. R., & Rocha, R. A. (2012). As expressões «daqui vem» e «daí vem» como instanciações da construção LOC+ SV no português contemporâneo. Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos , 16 (2), 155176.

Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes (Vol. 6). Oxford University Press.

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Information structure and constructional productivity: the case of Brazilian Portuguese adverbial adjective

Victor Virgínio (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

Diogo Pinheiro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

[email protected]

In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), verbal modification can be realized either by canonical adverbs (e.g., “falar claramente”, lit. ‘speak clearly’) or socalled “adverbial adjectives” (AAs), which lack the adverbial suffix mente ‘ly’ (e.g., “falar claro”, lit. ‘speak clear’). The latter usage is nonetheless heavily constrained: while most canonical adverbs are freely accepted as verbal modifiers, the same is not true for AAs (e.g. “??criticar sutil”, lit. ‘criticize subtle’). In this talk, we address this problem from the point of view of UsageBased Construction Grammar. Firstly, we suggest that two different constructions should be posited in order to account for verbal modification in BP: the Canonical Adverb Construction (CAC) and the Adverbial Adjective Construction (AAC). After that, we address the issue of the partial productivity of the latter. In particular, we raise the following question: under which conditions can a suffixless adverb be inserted into the AAC? Two hypotheses are developed: (i) the AAC, but not the CAC, requires the adverb to be the most informative element in the utterance – what we call its primary focus ; (ii) particularly frequent sequences of verb + AA become autonomous from the more general AAC. To evaluate these hypotheses, an acceptability judgment experiment was conducted. In the experimental group, participants rated sentences containing AAs in four conditions, based on a combination of frequency (null vs. high) and focus (primary vs. nonprimary). In the control group, the same task was carried out with sentences containing canonical adverbs. Ordinal logistic regression provided partial confirmation for the hypotheses: on the one hand, the odds to obtain higher acceptability values were significantly higher for sentences with primaryfocus AAs in comparison to nonprimaryfocus AAs (p=0,000), whereas the same didn’t hold for canonical adverbs (p=0,214); on the other hand, no significant interaction effect was found between focus and frequency (p=0,158). Keywords: Constructional Productivity. Adverbial Adjective. Information Structure.

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Constructions and frameshifting in short jokes

Elyssa Soares Marinho (UFRJ)

[email protected]

The human mind is able to build meaning through unconscious, complex and mysterious operations that appear in the investigation of language created and played by humans. Fauconnier & Turner (2002) argue that what is behind the form is not just something already set and ready, thus the imaginative abilities and operations produce our understanding of the simplest meanings the human mind convey. Given this conception and taking the imaginative and creative aspect of the mind, this paper has as object of study short jokes, that are puzzling questions or short anecdotes said to provoke laughter. From the theory of Conceptual Blending (FAUCONIER & TURNER, 2002) and FrameShifting (COULSON, 2001), we sought to investigate the linguistic elements that activate the comic effect and build cognitively the meaning of a short joke. The short jokes analyzed showed that the constructions provide clues that lead the listener / reader to activate the process of Conceptual Blending in the interpretation of humor and also a shift of frames. In order to produce laughter we need to reorganize the frames given by the linguistics elements of the anecdotes what demonstrates the flexibility of humor meaning construction. This study presents the first results of a PhD project that aims to contribute both to the Cognitive Research as to the investigation of the humorous discourse, demonstrating how the associations between form and meaning of the constructions can be the key to understand the humor. Keywords: Conceptual Blending. FrameShifting. Short Jokes. References

Coulson, S. (2001). Semantic leaps: Frameshifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction . Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: A New Theory of How Ideas Happen.

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Multimodal metaphoric constructions in verbalgestural compounds

Maíra Avelar (UESB)

[email protected]

In this research, we approach the interrelation between speech and gestures in the construction of multimodal metaphors From a theoretical point of view, we consider that the continuity relation between perception and action established by the embodiment theories (Johnson 1981, Rohrer 2007) can also be applied to the gestures production and use in interactional contexts, as well as to the multimodal relation between gestures and speech (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008). Based on the mirrorneuron system theory (Arbib 2006) that establishes the close and dynamic coupling between oral – speech production and articulation – and manual actions, we intend to analyze the coordination of actions that integrate vocal and gestural patterns. From a methodological point of view, we have selected two videos with 3 minutes’ length from legislative sessions unfolded by the socalled “Deputy Pastors” Marco Feliciano and Eduardo Cunha, both members of the Evangelical Bench in the Brazilin House of Representatives. Starting from de notion of gesture excursion (Kendon 2004, Müller, 2014), we describe the gesture strokes, and after that, we analyze the speech cooccurrence to identify which multimodal metaphors are most recurrent in this argumentative context, and, more generally, their relevance in the coordination between speech and gestures. Partial results showed that two of the three possibilities of interrelation between speech and gestures (Cienki & Müller, 2008) could be found: i) it is possible to find the same source and the same target in different modalities. In these cases, the gesture embodies the verbal metaphoric expression sourcedomain, indicating that the metaphoricity of that expression was activated or was on the foreground of the speaker’s attention; (ii) it is also possible to find different sources and the same targetdomain in different modalities. In these cases, we find a gestural metaphoric expression, with a target that is verbalized in a nonmetaphorical way. Furthermore, the gesture strokes can be mostly associated with some pragmatic functions, mainly to the emphasis or the dismissal given to certain ideas or values that are related to what is – or isn’t – considered as the “true family” in the analyzed discourses.

Keywords: Multimodal Metaphors. Gesture Strokes. Political Discourse.

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References

Arbib, M. (2006). The Mirror System Hypothesis on the linkage of action and languages. In: Acton to language via mirror meuron system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13.

Hostetter, A. B., & Alibali, M. W. (2008). Visible embodiment: Gestures as simulated action. Psychonomic bulletin & review , 15 (3), 495514.

Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding . Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Müller, C. (2014). Gestures as “deliberate expressive movements”. In: Seyfeddinipur,

M. & M. Gullberg (eds.) From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance: essays in honor of Adam Kendon . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 127151

Müller, C. & Cienki, A. (2009) Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use of spoken language. In: Forceville, C.; UriosAparisi, E. Multimodal Metaphors. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 297328.

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FrameBased Accounts of Specialist Languages

Pamela Faber (University of Granada)


We propose a theme session at the 9th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG9) that addresses the problem of how specialist languages, or their fragments, can be represented and modeled by means of the framebased apparatus. The concept of ‘specialist languages’ is quite disputable in itself and worthy of academic discussion. Opting for a more aligned methodology, we aim at bringing these polarized views closer together. This should result in finding a more satisfying compromise on how to define specialist languages and related phenomena. In addition, by proposing the session, we hope to encourage studies carried out on specialist languages that, in our opinion, constitute an interesting and relatively underexplored testing ground that is potentially capable of producing many new theoretical as well as practical insights to Frame Semantics and its methodology. Specialist languages (e.g. language of law, language of business, language of aviation, language of football, language of journalism, etc.) can be perceived as highly conventionalized, semi natural and not fully autonomous communication codes limited to specific, predominantly formal, situations. A large number of them can be best characterized by subject matter and semantic content, but the most important distinctive element in their makeup seems to be the frame of context in which they are embedded. Specialist languages can be thought of as representations of microrealities which integrate specific linguistic expressions, expert knowledge, special practices and particular sociocultural settings. All of these elements seem to be amenable to framebased modeling in the form of dynamic scenarios with their interactional properties. A cognitive frame refers to events, perceived as schematized ‘scenes’ or ‘situations’, and has a form of a scenario containing typical roles played by participants, objects manipulated by them and background factors in which the events are anchored. It schematizes connections between experience and language and contains links to more elaborate knowledge structures. As a result, frames have the advantage of making explicit both the potential semantic and syntactic behavior of specialist language units. Frames are typically activated and indexed by words (or specialist terminology) associated with them. By means of frames, a languageuser interprets her/his environment, formulates her/his own messages, understands the messages of others, and accumulates or creates an internal model of her/his world (Fillmore

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1976: 23).Thus, framebased approaches, more than other accounts, allow for the dynamicity, inherent to specialist languages, to be taken into consideration and are able to explain any specialist language in terms of an ongoing process rather than to represent it as a readymade product. There have been a number of influential applications of Fillmore’s Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1976, 1982, 1985; Fillmore & Atkins 1992) and previous framebased models to the study of specialist languages, specialized discourse, specialized terminology, specialized knowledge and ontology (e.g. Fillmore and Atkins 1992, Kralingen 1995, 1997; Faber 2012, 2014; Faber and LeónAraúz 2014; Diederich 2015). For example, in Faber’s FrameBased Terminology approach certain aspects of Frames Semantics are used to structure specialized domains and create nonlanguagespecific representations. Such configurations form the conceptual meaning underlying specialized texts in different languages, and thus facilitate specialized knowledge acquisition. One of the basic premises of this approach is that the description of specialized domains is based on the events that generally take place in them, and can be represented accordingly (Grinev & Klepalchenko 1999). Each knowledge area thus has its own event template. The aim of the proposed theme session is to discuss a possible contribution of framebased methodology to the study of specialist languages. We will be especially interested in examples of how frames are used to model specialist texts, discourses, terminology, knowledge, advertisements, practices, procedures, behavior, decisionmaking processes and reasoning. Presentations showing possible theoretical implications and potential problems with the application of framebased accounts to the study of specialist languages are also highly encouraged.

Keywords: Specialized discourse. Terminology. Knowledge representation. Frame

semantics.

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The framebased representation of SNOMED Clinical Terms®

MariaCornelia Wermuth (KU Leuven)

[email protected]

The present study focuses on the usability of frames for the analysis and representation of specialized language units based on SNOMED Clinical Terms. This multilingual clinical terminology is designed for healthcare professionals and consists of codes, terms, synonyms and definitions for the computerbased coding, retrieval, and analysis of data in clinical documentation and reporting. The terminology is based on the ontological principles developed by Terminology Science and represents a static ontology based on kind_of or part_of relations. The original (American) English edition has been translated into different languages using a conceptbased approach. SNOMED Clinical Terms are in principle not contextualized, which causes translation problems regarding contextdependent and complex terms presupposing terminological domain knowledge and a good understanding of the hierarchical position of concepts within the concept system and the interconceptual (non hierarchical) relationships. The aim of the present contribution is to discuss in greater detail the potentials of a framebased methodology for the dynamic representation and definition of SNOMED Clinical Terms in order to support and optimize the translation process. Our approach is inspired by the frame conception as elaborated by Fillmore (1976, 1982 and 1985) and Fillmore and Atkins (1992), and based on terminological frame models developed for representational and heuristic purposes in the domains of healthcare (Martin 1998) and environment (LeónAraúz et al. 2012). Starting from the assertion that specialized knowledge units are not isolated entities, but embedded in concrete dynamic situations and events (Faber 2012, LeónAraúz et al. 2012), we assume that the conceptual meaning of the clinical terms under investigation is strongly affected by contextual elements and should therefore be defined in relation to the overall semantic event frame in which they are used. The proposed model is supposed (1) to reflect the conceptual organization of the specialized language units under investigation; (2) to elucidate the multidimensionality of the underlying concepts; (3) to provide semantic, syntactic, and combinatory information using multilingual corpora (medical documentation in English, French and Dutch). By means of corpus samples taken from domains with national or cultural variations we will illustrate the usefulness of a framebased representation for consistent definitions and other issues relevant to the translation of clinical terminology such as concept equivalence, false friends, and terminological variation.

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Keywords: Frame semantics. Framebased Terminology. Definitory frames. Interlingual translation.

References

Faber, P., & Rodriguez, C. (2012). Terminology and specialized language. In P. Faber (Ed.), A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language . Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 931.

Fillmore, C. J. (2006). Frame semantics. Cognitive linguistics: Basic readings , 34 , 373400.

Fillmore, C. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech , 280 , 2032.

Fillmore, C. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica , 6 (2), 222254.

Fillmore, C., & Atkins, B. (1992). Towards a framebased lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbours. In A. Lehrer, & E. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, Fields, and Contrast: New Essays in semantics and Lexical Organization . Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 75102.

Leon Arauz, P., Faber, P., & Montero Martinez, S. (2012). Specialized language semantics. In P. Faber, A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language . Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 95175.

Martin, W. (1998). Frames as Definition Models for Terms. In A. Munteanu (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth Inforterm Symposium: Terminology, Work and Knowledge Transfer . Vienna: Termnet, 189221.

Martin, W. (1994). Knowledge Representation Schemata and Dictionary Definitions. (K. Carlon, K. Davidse, & B. RudzkaOstyn, Eds.) Pperspectives on English: Studies in honour of Professor E. Vorlat , 237256.

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Frame to frame relations and specialized corpus in the development of semantic frames for the tourism domain

Maucha Andrade Gamonal (University Juiz de Fora, UC Berkeley)

[email protected]

The purpose of this work is to present the semantic frames created for the tourism domain in the World Cup dictionary (Gamonal, 2013). The World Cup Dictionary is an initiative 1 of FrameNet Brazil whichproposed the development of a trilingual electronic dictionary English, Portuguese, Spanish – for World Cup, Soccer, and Tourism domains. It is structured with frame semantics (FILLMORE, 1982,1985; PETRUCK, 1996) and FrameNet methodology (FILLMORE ET AL., 2003, 2003a; RUPPENHOFER ET AL., 2010). The tourism experience is described using FrameNet methodology applied to tourism corpus in Brazil Portuguese. Frame to frame relations provided by FrameNet were largely utlized this study. Other frame to frame relations not described in FrameNet methodology will also be discussed in this presentation. Two questions that guided the development of this work will be presented: i) how do the tourism frames utilized in the World Cup Dictionary contribute to the field of multilingual lexical resources? ii) is it possible to use frames as an interlingual representation? The paper concludes: i) frames in the tourist domain are modeled in the same way by different cultures; ii) FrameNet methodology needs to adapt to the specificities imposed by multilingual lexicography, but due to the transcultural domains as tourism frames can be used as interlingua representation.

Keywords: Specialized domain corpus. Frame to frame relations. Frame semantics. Framenet Brazil.

References

Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame semantics. Linguistics in the morning calm , ed. by The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Co.

Fillmore, C. J. Johnson, C.; Petruck, M. (2003). Background to FrameNet. In: International Journal of Lexicography. Oxford University Press, v. 16 no 3, 235250.

Gamonal, M. A. (2013). Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: diretrizes para a constituição de um dicionário eletrônico trilíngue a partir da análise de frames da experiência turística . M. A. Dissertation in Linguistics. Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora.

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Petruck, M. R. L. (1996). Frame Semantics. In: Verschueren, J. OSTMAN, J. & Blommaert, J. (Eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Ruppenhofer, J; Ellsworth, M; Petruck, M.; Christopher R. Jonhson; and Scheffczyk. J. (2010). FrameNet II : Extended theory and practice. Berkeley, California: International Computer Science Institute.

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Combining Frame Semantics and distributional semantics to discover frames within the field of the environment

Daphnée Azoulay (Université de Montréal)

[email protected]

MarieClaude L’Homme (Université de Montréal)

[email protected]

This presentation explores the potential of distributional semantics to help us discover frames semiautomatically in a specialized subject field, more specifically the environment, based on the assumption that lexical units that share semantic similarities tend to appear in similar linguistic contexts (Harris 1954). Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) is a particularly attractive model for the representation of specialized fields of knowledge as it connects the conceptual and linguistic levels. It also allows us to describe the predicative units that evoke its concepts and which are rarely included in traditional terminology banks (L’Homme 2015). Distributional semantic representations have been claimed to be a form of abstraction of the human cognitive structures and have been used to describe psychological phenomena (Miller & Charles 1991). In a similar way, Frame Semantics relates linguistic units to cognitive structures that offer a basis for interpreting them (Fillmore & Baker 2009). By their empirical nature and their cognitive claims, distributional semantics and Frame Semantics seem to converge and therefore we would like to verify if they could be used complementarily. Because terminologists rarely possess the background that is necessary to describe the concepts of a specialized field, they must adopt a bottomup approach by analyzing linguistic units within a corpus (L’Homme 2015). The work is mostly done manually and is often based on a relatively small corpus that might not contain all the data necessary to capture the entire set of lexicosemantic properties of terms. Recently, BernierColborne and L’Homme (2015) have reported promising results in gathering lexical units that evoke the same frame using a distributional semantic method. In this talk, we will present a method for discovering frames in the field of the environment, using a specialized corpus of about 25 million words. The method consists in automatically compiling large specialized corpora from the Web and employing distributional models to capture sets of semanticallyrelated terms. Our aim is to define frames based on empirical data as it appears in texts and propose a prior automatic analysis that will later be enriched by terminologists. In addition to

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assessing the validity of this method for discovering frames, we will also assess the impact of corpus size on the quality of the results.

Keywords: FrameSemantics. Distributional semantics. Specialized corpus. Environment. References

BernierColborne, G. & L’Homme, M.C. (2015). Using a distributional neighbourhood graph to enrich semantic frames in the field of the environment. In Proceedings of TIA, Granada, Spain.

Fillmore, C. J. & Baker, C. (2009). A frames approach to semantic analysis. In Heine, Bernd and Heiko Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. pp.313339. Oxford University Press.

Harris, Z. S. (1954). Distributional structure. Word, 10(2–3): 146–162.

L’Homme, M.C. (2015). Découverte de cadres sémantiques dans le domaine de l’environnement : le cas de l’influence objective. In Terminàlia 12, pp. 2940.

Miller, G.A. & Charles, W. G. (1991). Contextual correlates of semantic similarity. Language and Cognitive Processes, 6:1, 128.

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Multidimensionality in FrameBased Terminology

Pilar LeónAraúz (University of Granada)

[email protected]

FrameBased Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2012, 2015) is a cognitive approach to Terminology inspired by the notion of frame as “any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the whole structure in which it fits” (Fillmore, 1982). However, the knowledge structure in which concepts fit is rather dynamic, even in specialized domains. One of the main reasons for this is multidimensionality, a widely known phenomenon in Terminology (Bowker 1997, Kageura 1997, Rogers 2004), which occurs when a concept can be seen from different viewpoints and can be classified in more than one way. According to Bowker (1997), major challenges for terminologists are the following: (1) to discover patterns of multidimensionality; (2) to understand its motivation; (3) to decide on the relevance of dimensions; (4) to find a way of representing it in terminological resources. This paper will cover these four issues by analysing multidimensionality through corpusbased methods and by showing how it can be represented in EcoLexicon, the practical application of FBT. In real texts, concepts are often categorized according to multiple hypernyms. In the following examples, the concepts GROIN, FOREST and BACTERIUM are linked to various hypernyms through different knowledge patterns codifying hyponymy (such as , or other, e.g., is a type of , etc.).

a. …intercepted by a headland or a manmade structure such as a groin b. …in the vicinity of a groin or other coastal structure c. A forest is a type of ecosystem d. …exhaustible (e.g. minerals) and a renewable resource (e.g. forest) e. …on bacteria, the most studied type of microorganism f. …maximum amount of a pollutant, such as bacteria…

Thus, the study of hyponymic structures in the corpus reveals significant patterns of multidimensionality. The examples above show that multidimensionality is triggered by different facets, such as origin and location (a, b), part and function (c, d), and type and agent (e, f). However, not all cases have the same motivations or implications. Sometimes concepts are viewed as a type of one hypernym to the exclusion of the other, which affects the way in which the concept relates to others and the frame in which it should be inserted. Thus, different types of multidimensionality pose different representational challenges in terminological resources.

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Keywords: Framebased terminology. Multidimensionality. Hyponymy. Specialized knowledge dynamics.

References

Bowker, L. (1997). “Multidimensional Classification of Concepts and Terms.” In Handbook of Terminology Management: Basic Aspects of Terminology Management , ed. by Sue Ellen Wright, and Gerhard Budin, 133–143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Faber, P. (2015). Frames as a framework for terminology. In Handbook of Terminology , edited by Kockaert, H.J. & Steurs, F., 1:1433. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Faber, P. (2012). A cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language . Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Kageura, K. (1997). “Multifaceted/Multidimensional Concept Systems.” In Handbook of Terminology Management: Basic Aspects of Terminology Management , ed. by Sue Ellen Wright, and Gerhard Budin, 119–132. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rogers, M. (2004). “Multidimensionality in Concepts Systems: a Bilingual Textual Perspective.” Terminology 10 (2): 215–240.

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Exploring the Conventional Frame Constraint in metaphorical verb meanings from the environmental science domain

José Manuel Ureña GómezMoreno (University of CastillaLa Mancha)

[email protected]

Goldberg (2010: 39) argues that the only constraint on the combination of subevents designated by a single verb is that the events combined must constitute a coherent semantic frame. This is known as the Conventional Frame Constraint (CFC). This paper extends the CFC to the analysis of the domainspecific meanings of metaphorical verbs in the specialised field of environmental science. In line with Goldberg (2010), the study shows that: (i) a verb term can specify both manner and result; (ii) the profiled event of a single verb term need not necessarily be causally related to the background frame event. Context (1) shows that the metaphorical verb cement designates the action and result of algae bringing together coral skeletons into a single solid structure. Following Goldberg (2010: 46), this is a result verb because it involves a scalar change (an ordering relation from separate materials to a single mass). At the same time, this is a manner verb involving a nonscalar relation (ibid. ) since the specialised meaning of the verb implies the manner in which discrete items (coral skeletons) are bound together into a unified structure: by means of specific physicochemical interactions of microalgae with calcareous materials.

(1) [C]oral reefs are mostly constructed by scleractinian corals, whose skeletons constitute the calcareous framework of the reef and the coralline algae cementing it. (Titlyanov and Titlyanova, 2002. Russian Journal of Marine Biology , 28(1), S1–S15) (2) Scleractinian corals build skeletons of aragonite, a polymorph of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), and rely on carbonate ions for calcification. (Drenkard et al., 2013. Coral Reefs , 32, 727–735)

In addition, the verb cement involves a temporal sequence of two non causally related subevents. As context (2) explains, the first event consists in coral organisms building and taking on the shape of calcareous skeletons. As context (1) shows, once the individual skeletons have been built, microalgae cement them into a unified framework. This is the second subevent, an independently describable phenomenon that does not overlap with the first one (Goldberg 2010: 42). The specialised language verb cement presupposes an action/event A (skeleton construction) and a subsequent action/event B (binding skeletons together) that is not caused by A.

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The only constraint on the combined subevents designated by cement is that the meaning of this verb must evoke an established semantic frame where the two events reside (the CFC). The semantic frame of a verb typically contains a profiled event, which in this case is cementation itself, and a background event, which is coral skeleton construction. The semantic frame that includes the two subevents entails “a single culturally recognised unit that is familiar and relevant to those who use the word” (Goldberg 2010: 4950). By virtue of this unit, the two events are allowed to combine in the domainspecific verb cement . The unit constitutes a specialist cultural frame, where the metaphorical meaning of cement is shared by a community of speakers (i.e. biologists and environmental scientists) and understood in connection with the meaning of coral skeleton construction . Keywords: Conventional Frame Constraint. Verb term meaning. Metaphor. Marine biology. References

Goldberg, A. (2010). Verbs, constructions and semantic frames. In M. Rappaport Hovav, E. Doron, and I. Sichel (eds). Syntax, Lexical Semantics and Event Structure . Oxford University Press (39–58).

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Multimodality in FrameBased Terminology

Arianne Reimerink (University of Granada)

[email protected]

FrameBased Terminology (FBT) advocates a multimodal conceptual description in which the structured information in terminographic definitions meshes with the visual information in images for a better understanding of complex and dynamic concept systems (Faber 2009). FBT categorizes images in terms of their most salient functions (Anglin et al. 2004) and in terms of their relationship with the realworld entity that they represent. Until recently, the typology of images was based on three criteria: iconicity, abstraction and dynamism as ways of referring to and representing specific attributes of specialized concepts (Prieto Velasco 2008). In this paper guidelines are provided for a more detailed description of morphological features of images and how to combine these with the conceptual propositions in EcoLexicon (Reimerink et al. 2016). The proposal is based on concept types, image type, morphological features or visual knowledge patterns (VKPs), such as labels, arrows, colours, etc. and their effect on the functional nature of each image type. Currently, images are stored in EcoLexicon in association with concept entries according to the semantic content of their definitions, but they are not described or annotated according to the parameters that guided their selection. In this new proposal, images will be described more systematically and stored in a separate repository. In this way, images can be linked to more than one concept entry. In the future, the systematic annotation of images might allow for automatic allocation. Keywords: Multimodality. FrameBased Terminology. Visual knowledge patterns. Knowledge representation. References

Anglin, G., H. Vaez, and K. Cunningham. (2004). Visual representations and learning: the role of static and animated graphics. Ed. D. Jonassen. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Faber, P. (2009). The cognitive shift in terminology and specialized translation. MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 1: 107134.

Prieto Velasco, J.A. (2008). Información gráfica y grados de especialidad en el discurso científicotécnico: un estudio de corpus. PhD Thesis. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain.

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Reimerink, A., P. LeónAraúz, and P. Faber (2016). Image selection and annotation for an environmental knowledge base. Language Resources and Evaluation, 50: 1 32.

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Participant and argument roles in Construction Grammar vs. semantic categories and semantic roles in Framebased

Terminology

Miriam Buendía Castro (University of CastillaLa Mancha)

[email protected]

In the 20th century, most linguistic theories envisaged the subcategorization of verbs from a syntactic perspective (Chomsky 1957). However, over the years, semantics has gradually acquired a more important role within linguistics to the extent that today almost all modern linguistic theories highlight a direct relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. As such, sentence structure is generally studied in light of word meaning as well as situational context. Consequently, any approach to argument structure should take into account the constructions that underlie meaning. This study explains how Framebased Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2009, 2011, 2012) envisages argument structure in the specialized domain of the environment. As shall be seen, the way that FBT describes and represents construction meaning is similar to that of Construction Grammar. More specifically, Goldberg (1995, 2006) describes the semantics of constructions in terms of both participant roles , i.e. roles associated with the verb. These can be general roles such as AGENT, CAUSE, RECIPIENT, EXPERIENCER, INSTRUMENT, PATIENT, THEME, LOCATION, SOURCE, GOAL (Goldberg 1995: 57) or argument roles , i.e. roles supplied by the construction, which are thus more specific. For example, the verb ‘hand’ is associated with three participant roles: HANDER, HANDEE and HANDED (Goldberg 1995: 51). FBT, however, describes argument structure in terms of semantic categories and semantic roles . Semantic categories are generalizations for a set of terms that are assumed to share a similar semantic and syntactic behavior. In this sense, arguments belonging to a semantic category not only have a common nuclear meaning but also similar syntactic projections (Buendía, Montero & Faber 2014: 75). In this regard, semantic categories could be analogous to argument roles, though argument roles are more specific. In this sense, the semantic categories identified for the specialized field of natural disasters were the following: NATURAL DISASTER, ATMOSPHERIC AGENT, WATER AGENT, ATMOSPHERIC CONDITION, MATERIAL ENTITY, AREA, CONSTRUCTION, ENERGY, HUMAN BEING, LANDFORM, WATER COURSE, DEATH, DAMAGE, LOSS OF LIFE/PROPERTY, PLANT, and EXPLOSIVE (Buendía, Montero & Faber 2014: 75). In contrast, semantic roles are envisaged as general roles of the type AGENT, NATURAL FORCE, DESTINATION, EXPERIENCER, FREQUENCY, GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION, MANNER, PATH,

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PATIENT, SITUATION/EXPERIENCE, ORIGIN, THEME, TIME, and RESULT. In addition, in the same way as participant roles and argument roles can be fused (Goldberg 1995: 50), it is our assertion that semantic categories and semantic roles can be merged as well. Our study focuses on the causative motion construction within the EXTREME EVENT (in its sense of natural disaster). The results show that this way of describing and representing verb meaning facilitates knowledge acquisition. Keywords: Construction Grammar. Framebased Terminology. Semantic categories. Semantic roles. References

Buendía Castro, M., S. Montero Martínez & P. Faber (2014). Verb collocations and phraseology in EcoLexicon. In K. Kuiper (ed.) Yearbook of Phraseology. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 5794.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures . The Hague: Janua Linguarum 4.

Faber, P. (2009). The Cognitive Shift in Terminology and Specialized Translation.

MonTI. Monografías De Traducción e Interpretación , 1(1), 107–134.

Faber, P. (2011). The Dynamics of Specialized Knowledge Representation: Simulational Reconstruction or the Perceptionaction Interface. Terminology , 17(1), 9–29.

Faber, P. ed. (2012). A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language . Berlin. Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language . Oxford University Press on Demand.

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Hyperversatility as a problem for framebased conceptual modeling

Antonio San Martín (Maynooth University)

[email protected]

Frames in several different forms have been applied both in general language resources (e.g. FrameNet) and in specialized language resources (EcoLexicon, Kicktionary, DiCoEnviro, etc.). It has been proved that frames, as a conceptual modeling tool, are an efficient way of characterizing processes and their participants (Faber 2012). Nonetheless, their usefulness for the modeling of entities is less evident. In fact, FrameNet developers admit that their resource is not usable as an ontology of things (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010, 7). The situation of framebased specialized resources is similar to that of FrameNet. However, some of them combine frames with other kinds of conceptual representations to represent entity concepts. The main cause of the incompatibility of framebased representations with entity concepts is what we have coined as hyperversatility (San Martín 2016, 294). Hyperversatility is a property of certain concepts in relation to a given expert domain. A concept is considered hyperversatile when it participates in a wide range of frames in a single domain. For example, OXYGEN is a hyperversatile concept in most of its domains of activation given that it is the most abundant chemical element on Earth. Since it is highly reactive, it participates in an unwieldy number of processes. However, hyperversatility is not absolute, and a concept’s degree of hyperversatility is intimately linked to the size of a specialized domain. A concept that is hyperversatile in a given domain tends to be less hyperversatile with respect to its subdomains. For instance, OXYGEN in BIOLOGY is more hyperversatile than in BOTANY . We have also detected a special kind of hyperversatility that we have called superordinate hyperversatility . This hyperversatility is due to the fact that the concept has many subordinate concepts and each subordinate participates in different frames, which makes the superordinate concept hyperversatile. This causes them to behave as a superordinatelevel concept in the domain in question. For instance, ENZYME is a conceptual category that encompasses proteins that act as catalysts in biochemical reactions. Given that each enzyme is specific to a kind of reaction or set of reactions, ENZYME does not participate in any specific frame per se and remains rather generic despite the fact that it is restricted to one

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specialized domain. This is the case in AGRONOMY , given that plants and the soil contain an enormous variety of enzymes with very different functions. This paper will present the notion of hyperversatility of entity concepts as a problem for framebased conceptual modeling in terminological resources. We will discuss its main implications for framebased accounts of specialized language and we will concentrate on its repercussions for the crafting of framebased terminological definitions. Keywords: Hyperversatility. Framebased terminology. Terminological definition. Conceptual modeling. References

Faber, P. (2012). A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language. Edited by Pamela Faber. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.


San Martín, A. (2016). La representación de la variación contextual mediante definiciones terminológicas flexibles. PhD Thesis. University of Granada.

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The emergence of the FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT frame as a result of cognitive mechanisms

Paulina Potęga (University of Rzeszów)

[email protected]


[email protected]

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT is a specialist area of human activity. This highly specialized form of professional activity finds its reflection in language, knowledge, practice – all of which can be perceived as framebased. In the presentation, we will claim that the frame of FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, in any kind of linguistic approach, cannot be reduced to a fixed set of terms because of its dynamic and multidisciplinary character (Fillmore 1976, Fillmore and Baker 2009). The frame can be perceived from a number of different perspectives and its description is relative to a chosen point of reference. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the frame is reflected in the fact that it emerges as a conceptual blending of other frames such as MANAGEMENT and FINANCE (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Grygiel 2004). In an attempt to describe the organization of the FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT frame, we have identified a number of subframes whose conceptual structures resembles PATHS or procedural sequences – steps taken by a manager to accomplish financial objectives of an organization. These include ESTIMATING THE REQUIREMENT OF FUNDS, DETERMINING THE CAPITAL STRUCTURE, MAINTAINING PROPER CASH FLOW, PROFIT MAXIMALIZATION, MINIMALIZATION OF CAPITAL COST, INVESTMENT PLANNING. On the other hand, however, these subframes seem to be related to one hyperframe – FUTURE – whose character is more general, not specialized and refers to a universal experience. Management and financial planning are always futureoriented. They involve forecasting, designing strategies, developing visions, risk taking, formulating estimates within short and long periods of time. In all of the frames and their linguistic correlates, we can observe context dependence, crisscrossing, overlap and blending within both semantic (semasiological) as well as conceptual (onomasiological) content (Geeraerts 1997). This shows that conceptual structures, like lexical units, are dynamic, flexible and hardly ever objective, but nevertheless they can be claimed to develop in an organized way. In the talk we will show examples of how cognitive mechanisms proposed within the cognitive linguistics paradigm – such as conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff and Núñez 2000), conceptual blending

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(Fauconnier and Turner 2002), DISTANCE model (Grygiel 2013) – contribute to the emergence of the FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT frame. Keywords: Financial management. Cognitive mechanisms. Frame semantics. Conceptual structure. References

Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Fillmore, Ch. (1976). ‘Frame semantics and the nature of words’. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , 280, 2032.

Fillmore, Ch. and C. Baker (2009). ‘A frame approach to semantic analysis’. In Bernd Heine and Heiko Harrog (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 313339.

Geeraerts, D. (1997). Diachronic Prototype Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grygiel, M. (2004). ‘Semantic change as a process of conceptual blending’. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 2, 285304.

Grygiel, M. (2013). The Semantics of Affirmation: Serbian, Other Slavic Languages and English in Cognitive Analysis. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo UR.

Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. and R.E. Núñez (2000). Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.

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The function of interactional frames in the production and perception of oral poetry


[email protected]

The performance of oral poetic text is an interaction between the addressee/audience and performer, which requires a specialized knowledge system. The inventory of constructions and the frames they unify with, available in poetic discourse can differ radically from those in other discourse genres. Formulas, poetic metaphors, and contextual references cannot be properly perceived without understanding the whole poetic tradition (Foley 1991). Therefore, the language of oral poetry can be treated and analysed as a type of specialist language, specific to every culture, as well as every linguistic and microcultural community. The similarities between Construction Grammar and Oralformulaic theory have held scholarly attention for the past few years, which led to the development of an interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Oral Poetics (Pagán Cánovas & Antović (forthcoming)). Among other theoretical concepts, these two theories share the principle of representing meaning structures as conventional scenarios (Lord 1971; Fillmore 1982; Fillmore 1984). However the detailed mechanics of the archi structures governing traditionspecific frames and constructions have yet to be accounted for. Thus the aim of this paper is to elaborate the fundamental principles and structures which model the poetic discourse in terms of discourse genrespecific interactional frames (Fillmore 1982) by analysing both narrative (VīķisFreibergs 1989; Folley 1991) and nonnarrative (VīķisFreibergs 1997; Taft 2006) oral poetry. The elements of these interactional frames appear to include not only performer/audience involvement or speech events (moves ), but the sequence of diegetic events and their participants as well. Keywords: Frame semantics. Interactional frames. Composition in performance. Cognitive oral poetics. Poetic discourse. References

Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame Semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, edited by Linguistic Society of Korea, 111137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.

Fillmore, C. J. (1984). Frames and the semantics of understanding. In Quaderni di Semantica, 6, 222–254.

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Foley, J. M. (1991). Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lord, A. B. (1971). The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pagán C., C. & Antović, M. (Forthcoming) Construction grammar and oral formulaic theory. In C. Pagán Cánovas and M. Antović (eds.) Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Taft, M. (2006). The Blues Lyric Formula. London: Routledge.

VīķisFreibergs, V. (1989). The Boyar's beautiful daughters: A structural analysis of stanza sequence in Latvian folk songs. In V. VīķisFreibergs (Ed.), Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs, 312341. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen's University Press.

VikisFreibergs, V. (1997). Sink or Swim: On Associative Structuring in Longer Latvian Folksongs. Oral Tradition , 12 , 279307.

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A framebased multilingual knowledge base for sports and tourism – m.knob

Ely Matos (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

[email protected]

Tiago Torrent (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

[email protected]

Maucha Gamonal (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

[email protected]

Simone Peron (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

[email protected]

Alexandre Diniz (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil)

[email protected]

People attending major international sports events, such as the Summer Olympics, share interests on both sports and tourism. Nevertheless, those people do not share one common language. This is a context of controlled domain, offering a great opportunity to test Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches for the development of multilingual communication technologies. This paper presents m.knob (Multilingual Knowledge Base), a FrameNetbased web app combining a domainspecific multilingual electronic dictionary, an automatic translator and a knowledge retrieval engine, covering three different languages: Brazilian Portuguese, English and Spanish. FrameNet has three different functions in m.knob:

1. Frames are used for modeling human knowledge about tourism and sports. Both events and entities related to these two domains are modeled in the database. To properly account for the relations between entities and the events they participate in, Qualia Relations such as telic and agentive (Pustejovski 1998) are added to the typical FrameNet relations inheritance, perspective, precedes and subframe (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010).

2. Lexical Units in the database provide the system with a tool for disambiguating and interpreting user’s queries in a recommending system

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(Torrent et al. 2014). When the user types a question in the system, it searches the input text for lexical units evoking frames in the database. If a given item evokes two or more frames, the algorithm uses the network of frame and qualia relations to provide the bestfit word sense for the context of the question.

3. Valence patterns associated to Lexical Units add additional semantic and syntactic features to the analyses carried out by a hybrid machine translation algorithm.

The application links frames to domain ontologies and Linked Open Data to improve coverage. Moreover, natural language is used to access geolocation data and gamification elements enrich the user experience. The advantages and limitations of use FrameNetbased data on machine translation and knowledge retrieval tasks are discussed. Keywords: Multilingual framebase resources. Recommending system. Machine translation. References

Pustejovsky, J. (1998). The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press.


Torrent, T., Salomão, M. M., Campos, F., Braga, R. M., Matos, E. E., Gamonal, M., Gomes, D., Souza, B. & Peron, S. (2014). Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: a framebased trilingual electronic dictionary for the Football World Cup. In COLING (Demos) (pp. 1014).

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Collocational networks and morphosyntactic patterns in specialized corpora

Beatriz Sánchez Cárdenas (University of Granada)

[email protected]

Carlos Ramisch (University of AixMarseille)

[email protected]mrs.fr

A recent trend in Terminology concerns the enhancement of terminological entries with phraseological information, such as multiword expressions (MWEs). In terms of Firth (1957), MWEs can be defined as “habitual recurrent word combinations” that “lie in a fuzzy zone between the lexicon and the syntax of a language” (Ramisch 2014). They are omnipresent in general language, but they are also highly common in specialized languages and they present a great interest for terminologist given their many applications: multilingual resources, automatic translation, monolingual written text tools, and speech assistance software. In order to develop these tools it is first necessary, however, to define strategies to identify, extract, evaluate and classify MWEs. Framebased Terminology offers a sound theoretical background for this purpose. Defining the structure and linguistic properties of each frame involves knowing the verbs related to each MWE. Given that verbs carry most of the semantic load of the sentence, they are essential to define the semantic structure of each frame. According to FrameBased Terminology Theory, verbs can be classified into a set of lexical domains (Faber & Mairal 1999, Faber 2012). Each one of these domains is divided into various semantic frames (Sánchez Cárdenas 2010, Buendía Castro 2013). Thus, the identification of MWEs and the verbs associated to them in the corpora is crucial to define the structure of Frames and its frame elements (Fillmore et al 2003). The automatic extraction from the corpora of MWEs requires the implementation of Corpus Query System strategies enabling the extraction of different types of MWEs. This is not an easy endeavour since it implies discriminating between MWEs and free word association collocates. A very common technique consists on looking for morphosyntactic patterns that are meaningful to a given specialized domain. For instance, one of the Frames activated in the specialized domain of “Wastewater Treatment” is “Recycling”. Our analysis of a French corpora in this domain shows that the frame element [CONTAINER] is often lexicalized in this Frame by compound nouns sharing a morphosyntactic pattern (noun, preposition, noun, noun, preposition, article, noun,

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adjective) such as: réserves d’eau à l’échelle mondiale , station de relevage pour les eaux vannes , réservoirs de stockage pour les eaux noires . This research explores and evaluates different techniques for the automatic identification and extraction from the corpora of MWEs and verbs associated to them that are relevant to the definition of Frames. The ultimate goal of this work is to use this linguistic information to build up the Frames that participate in specialized domains.

Keywords: Framebased terminology. Multiword expressions. Corpus analysis strategies. References Buendía Castro, M. (2013). Phraseology in Specialized Language and its Representation in Environmental Knowledge Resources . PhD Thesis. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain.

Cárdenas, B. S. (2010). Paramètres linguistiques pour la conception d'un dictionnaire électronique bilingue (françaisespagnol) destiné à la traduction: le cas des verbes de comptage (Doctoral dissertation).

Faber, P. (2012). A cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language . Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Fillmore, C. J., Johnson, C. R., & Petruck, M. R. (2003). Background to framenet.

International journal of lexicography , 16 (3), 235250.

Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in linguistics, 19341951 . Oxford University Press. Ramisch, C. (2014). Multiword Expressions Acquisition . Springer.

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The Saussurean sign revisited: Accounting for formmeaning mismatches in Construction Grammar

Nikos Koutsoukos (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Kristel Van Goethem (F.R.S.FNRS & Université Catholique de Louvain)

Hendrik De Smet (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

F. de Saussure (1916/1995) defined the linguistic sign as an association of ‘signifier’ (signifiant, i.e. ‘l’image acoustique’) and ‘signified’ (signifié, i.e. an abstract concept). The language as a whole he envisaged as a system of functional oppositions holding between signs. Since then it has often been tacitly assumed that there exists a symmetry in the relation between the signifier and the signified of any given sign, the socalled oneFormoneMeaning Principle. However, it should not be taken for granted that all linguistic signs display this symmetric relation. Beard (1998) dubbed this the Correspondence Fallacy. Formmeaning mismatches (or asymmetries) are omnipresent in language (Francis & Michaelis 2002). Three types of formmeaning mismatch can be distinguished: Mismatch type 1: Many forms correspond to one function/meaning: Welldescribed examples of this mismatch usually include synonymous lexemes (such as redouter, craindre, avoir peur ‘to be afraid of’), for which Saussure (1916/1995: 160) already claimed that they “n’ont de valeur propre que par leur opposition”. This mismatch is related to the notion of ‘competition’ between the linguistic signs, in line with the structuralist concept of language as “un système où tout se tient”. A similar type of mismatch can sometimes be observed within a single (morphological or syntactic) construction, e.g. in the form of multiple exponence in inflectional morphology (Harris 2009), affix pleonasm in derivational morphology (see Lehmann 2005) or redundancy in syntax (see for example Croft (2000: 136) on paratactic negation). Mismatch type 2: One form corresponds to many functions/meanings: Evident examples of this category are polysemous/polyfunctional affixes, lexemes or syntactic constructions. For example, English toinfinitives have been analyzed as polysemous by Wierzbicka (1988). More recently, Colleman & De Clerck (2011) have analyzed the English ditransitive construction as polysemous. This type of mismatch also applies to conversion, in which one form is used to express different functions (e.g. the bridge/ to bridge) (e.g. Valera 2014). Mismatch type 3: The meaning of the syntagm cannot be derived from its signs: In morphology this type of mismatch applies for instance to exocentric compounds: in Italian portalettere ‘lit. carryletters, postman’ or French tirebouchon ‘lit. pullcork, cork screw’, the agentive or instrumental meaning cannot be derived from the

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meaning of the formal constituents of the compound. In syntax, unexpected functions of verbs or nouns are hard to account for when adopting a wordlevel analysis, e.g. transitivity of the verb sneeze in She sneezed the napkin off the table (Goldberg 1995) or the mass noun interpretation of cat in There’s cat all over the place (Michaelis 2003). Bazell (2004 [1949]) argued that these phenomena have not been sufficiently addressed in the structuralist tradition. One century after the first publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916), this workshop aims to revisit the nature of the linguistic sign and more specifically formmeaning mismatches from a constructional perspective. In the framework of Construction Grammar, the Saussurean sign as a conventionalized formmeaning mapping has been extended and has become known as a ‘construction’ (among others, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). While the Saussurian sign primarily correlates with the wordlevel (1916/1995: 99), constructions encompass any meaningful regularity in language, so that linguistic structure is composed of “constructions all the way down” (Goldberg 2006: 18). An important argument for a constructional account of formmeaning mismatches is the fact that constructions may have ‘holistic properties’, not derivable from the properties of their constituents and/or structure (cf. Booij 2010). To accommodate mismatches, it may be useful to recognize the complexity of the relations within the constructional network and the possibility of multiple inheritance (De Smet et al. 2013), as well as to accept that rather than onetoone relationships between form and meaning, manytomany mappings are the norm in language (Van de Velde 2014). Keywords: Linguistic Sign. FormMeaning Mismatch. Structuralism. Construction Grammar.

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A quantitative measure of constructional contamination through superficial resemblance

Dirk Pijpops (QLVL, University of Leuven)

[email protected]

Freek Van de Velde (QLVL, University of Leuven)

[email protected]

The construction, as a successor to the Saussurian sign, is usually envisaged as a discrete formmeaning pairing, with its meaning founded on formal oppositions to other constructions (de Saussure 1916; Goldberg 2006). In actual language use however, these oppositions may come under threat by superficial resemblances between constructions. (1) and (2) are corpus examples of two constructions that are structurally and etymologically unrelated and express different meanings. In (1), the adverb verkeerd (‘wrongly’) modifies the verb geïnterpreteerd (‘interpreted’). In (2), iets (‘something’) and verkeerd (‘wrong’) together form a noun phrase in a partitive genitive construction (Hoeksema 1998; Broekhuis and Strang 1996). In Dutch, partitive genitives may appear both with and without an s ending on the adjective (cf. (2) and (3), Pijpops and Van de Velde 2014). Conversely, adverbs as in (1) cannot receive this s ending. This means that only the superficial strings of (1) and (2) look alike, not the underlying syntactic structure. In fact, other instances of these constructions may look very different from one another. Still, we will quantitatively show that the realization of the s ending in partitive genitives is affected by the frequent occurrence of constructions as in (1).

(1) dat iets verkeerd geïnterpreteerd wordt? (ConDiv) that something wrongly interpreted gets? ‘that something gets wrongly interpreted?’ (2) in begin van de week iets verkeerd gegeten, vandaar (ConDiv) in beginning of the week something wrong∅ eaten hence ‘I had eaten something wrong at the start of the weak, that’s why. (3) Ik had iets verkeerds gegeten en ik werd beroerd. (ConDiv) I had something wrongs eaten and I became ill ‘I had eaten something wrong and I became ill.’

Data were drawn from the ConDiv corpus of written Dutch (Grondelaers et al. 2000) and were analyzed primarily by means of logistic regression. It turned out that the effect described above even outperforms typically cited regional differences as a

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predictor of s presence (van der Horst 2008: 1624–1625; Booij 2010: 224; Broekhuis 2013: 426). We claim that this contaminating influence is a result of chunking. That is, instead of analyzing utterances to the bone in interpretation, and building them from scratch in production, language users can make use of shortcuts by storing and accessing unanalyzed wholes (Dąbrowska 2012; Ferreira, Bailey and Ferraro 2002; Ferreira and Patson 2007). This then may cause the processing of instances like (1) and (2) to cross paths, resulting in constructional contamination.

Keywords: Constructional contamination. Chunking. Processing. Logistic regression. Partitive genitive.

References

Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2010. Broekhuis, Hans. 2013. Syntax of Dutch: Adjectives and Adjective Phrases.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Broekhuis, Hans and Anke Strang. 1996. De partitieve genitiefconstructie [The partitive genitive construction]. Nederlandse taalkunde 1(3). 221–238.

Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2012. Different Speakers, Different Grammars: Individual Differences in Native Language Attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2(3). 219–253.

Ferreira, Fernanda, Karl Bailey and Vittoria Ferraro. 2002. Goodenough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11(1). 11–15. doi:10.1111/14678721.00158.

Ferreira, Fernanda and Nikole Patson. 2007. The “good enough” approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass 1. 71–83.

Goldberg, Adele Eva. 2006. Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grondelaers, Stefan, Katrien Deygers, Hilde Van Aken, Vicky Van den Heede and Dirk Speelman. 2000. Het CONDIVcorpus geschreven Nederlands. Nederlandse Taalkunde 5(4). 356–363.

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Hoeksema, Jack. 1998. Adjectivale inflectie op s: geen geval van transpositie [Adjectival inflection on s: not a case of transposition]. Morfologiedagen 1996 [Morphology Days 1996], 46–72. Amsterdam: P. J. MeertensInstituut.

Pijpops, Dirk and Freek Van de Velde. 2014. A multivariate analysis of the partitive genitive in Dutch. Bringing quantitative data into a theoretical discussion. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Published online, ahead of print.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916/1989. Cours de linguistique générale. (Ed.) Rudolf Engler. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

van der Horst, Joop. 2008. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse syntaxis. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven.

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On how fullverb inversion lifts restrictions on the use of the simple tenses in English

Astrid De Wit (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

[email protected]

In most contexts, it is impossible in English to use the simple tenses to report ongoing events: (1) is ungrammatical, and (2) is normally given a sequential reading rather than an incidental one: (1) *My cat comes out of the room right now. (2) When my cat walked out of the room, I gave him some food. Notably, this restriction does not hold in the context of the construction known as full verb inversion, as in Here comes my bus or Out of the room came the cat, which is characterized by the sentenceinitial placement of a locative/directional adverbial or of presentational (t)here and the postposition of nonpronominal subjects. In fact, my corpus data show that the use of the progressive is typically ungrammatical in these contexts. Thus, when they are embedded in the higherorder fullverb inversion construction, the simple tenses seem to undergo some semantic expansion. In this presentation, I will argue that there are good semantic motivations for this mismatch between the simple tenses (with their standard constraints) and the use of these tenses in fullverb inversion, since the latter conveys a meaning of inevitability which ties in with the perfective meaning of the simple tenses and thus lifts their standard restrictions. Other (presenttime) contexts in which the simple present can be used to report ongoing events include, a.o., states, performatives, and sports broadcasting. These contexts have in common that they involve situations that can be viewed in their entirety (i.e. perfectively) at reference time, and the same holds for events in fullverb inversion. Fullverb inversion has been analyzed as conveying some ‘deictic effect’ (Drubig 1988): it anchors the conceptualizer’s vantage point with respect to the location specified by the preposed constituent. Thus, in (3), the speaker’s perspective is anchored within the room that the cat is walking into: (3) He opens the bedroom door and in walks the cat. Consequently, the speaker can note the presence, absence or (dis)appearance of a figure in this location, but since this location also fixes her viewpoint, she cannot step out of it and zoom in on the process leading to the reported presence, absence or (dis)appearance. Thus, she can only adopt a perfective perspective, and progressive construals are excluded. This association of fullverb inversion with complete events leads to a sense of inevitability, as illustrated in corpus examples such as There goes my bus or Boom! Along comes the Internet.

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Keywords: English simple present. Fullverb inversion. Aspect.

References

Drubig, HansBernard. 1988. On the discourse function of subjectverb inversion. In Josef Klegraf & Dietrich Nehls (eds.), Essays on the English language and applied linguistics on the occasion of Gerhard Nickel's 60th birthday, 83–95. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.

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Disentangling formmeaning mismatches of light verbs: an image schematic approach

Ferran Suñer Université catholique de Louvain

[email protected]

Verbs used in so called light verb constructions (e.g. Germ. Der Botschafter hält eine Rede, Engl. The ambassador gives a speech) are traditionally described as empty, delexicalized and apparently not related to their use as full verbs (e.g. Germ. Ich halte die Tasche, Engl. I hold the bag). In contrast to this view, the cognitive linguistic perspective on light verbs suggests that they are conceptually motivated and do contribute to the meaning of the construction (Tucker, 2014; GradečakErdeljić, 2009). In this regard, it is assumed that the meanings expressed by light verbs and their full verb equivalents are strongly related to each other, as both can be considered different profiles of the same imageschematic conceptual base. In this sense, full and light verbs focus attention on different aspects of the same conceptual base resulting in specific imageschematic characteristics and in doing so better adapt to the meaning of the respective constructions (e.g. path focus, endpoint focus, etc., cf. Oakley, 2007). Even though they are semantically related, the meanings expressed by full and light verbs differ in their degree of abstractness: Whereas full verbs typically express material and/or physical processes, light verbs often express mental processes, which are a metaphorical extension of the prototypical meaning of the full verb and, in some cases, license the use of specific lexicogrammatical patterns (cf. Tucker, 2014). For example, in the sentence die Schüler bringen den Lehrer in Verlegenheit (Engl. the pupils put the teacher on the spot) the physical features of the image schemata ENERGY TRANSFER, PATH GOAL and CONTAINER are metaphorically mapped onto the abstract domain of psychosocial relations: an agent (die Schüler) transfers energy to a patient (der Lehrer) who then enters a container (in Verlegenheit) through a fictive movement (cf. Roche & Suñer, 2016). In contrast to the prototypical use of the full verb as a ditransitive verb, the light verb requires a prepositional object to encode the goal of the fictive movement caused by the agent. Thus, applying image schema theory to the analysis of light verbs provides a cognitively plausible explanation of the different meanings expressed by full and light verbs as well as their lexicogrammatical patterns (cf. Oakley, 2007). The proposed paper lays out the fundamentals of an imageschematic approach, which sets out to analyze the semantic contribution of light verbs to their respective constructions and, thus, help to disentangle the formmeaning mismatches between full and light verbs. Furthermore, the paper discusses the potential of the image

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schematic approach for language teaching purposes on the basis of preliminary results of a smallscale intervention study. The results show that the image schematic approach offers an intriguing venue for making the conceptual motivation of light verb constructions more transparent. Keywords: Light verb construction. Image schemata. Formmeaning mismatches. References

GradečakErdeljić, T. (2009). Iconicity of the verbal expression— The case of “light” verbs in English. In M. Brdar, M. Omazić, & V. Pavičić (Eds.), Cognitive Approaches to English: Fundamental, Methodological, Interdisciplinary and Applied Aspects (pp. 326). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Oakley, T. (2007). Image schemas. In D. Geeraerts, & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 214235). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Roche, J., & Suñer, F. (2016). Metaphors and Grammar Teaching. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 4. (in press)

Tucker, G. (2014). Giving it my best shot: Towards a coherent functional analysis of metaphoricallyderived processes with particular attention to the ‘light verb’ expressions. In M. A. Gómez González, F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, & F. GonzálvezGarcía (Eds.), Theory and Practice in FunctionalCognitive Space. (Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 68) (pp. 33–52). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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V1 and V2 Coordination, Multiple Inheritance, and Polysemy

Soteria Svorou (San José State University)

[email protected]

Data from three Modern Greek corpora (Hellenic National Corpus, Corpus of Modern Greek, and Corpus of Greek Texts) on posture verb kaθοme ‘I sit’ and motion verbs pijeno ‘I go’ and erxome ‘I come’ used as V1 in the syntactic context of V1 and V2 show patterns in which the verbs are interpreted schematically, deviating from their lexical semantics. In (1), the prolonged state of the subject’s believing is accentuated; in (2), some intentionality of becoming crippled is attibuted to the undergoer subject himself; and in (3), the result state of the undergoer subject’s turning white is stressed.

(1) …esi, morfomenos anθropos kaθese ke pistevis afta… you educated man sit.IMPFV.PRES.2SG and believe.IMPFV.PRES.2SG these ‘… you, an educated man, (sit and) believe these …’ (HNC)

(2) … o arian pije ke sakateftike sta prokrimatika...

ART A. go.PFV.PST.3SG and become.crippled.PFV.PST.3SG inART qualifiers ‘…Arian (went and) became crippled in the qualifiers…’ (HNC)

(3) … o ðiefθindis, irθe ke asprise apo ton eγoismo tu… ART principal come.PFV.PST.3SG and whiten.PFV.PST.3SG from ART egotism 3POSS ‘…the principal (came and) turned white because of his ego…(HNC)

In crosslinguistic and/or corpus studies (Heine & Kuteva 2002; Newman & Rice 2004, 2008; Lemmens 2005; Hilpert & Koops 2009; Viberg 2013; Bybee 2015), similar schematic uses of posture and motion verbs are analyzed as sources of aspectual grammatical markers or auxiliaries, or as loci of ‘pseudocoordination’ constructions. This paper argues that, in an interpretive model, to account for the constructionalization of posture and motion verbs but also for their more prototypical uses, we need to go beyond lexical polysemy and consider the ecology of an abstracted higher order coordination construction V1 ke V2, which then sanctions a network of lower level constructions. The type of lower level construction (sequential, simultaneous, [type of] pseudocoordination) results from multiple interactions among (i) the type of V1 (posture, motion), (ii) the frame type (FrameNet) of V2, and interactions with (iii) aspectual morphological constructions

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(perfective / imperfective) and other correlating contextual factors, such as (iv) shared tense, (v) a shared subject, and (vi) existence of valenceaffecting locative prepositional phrases. The ‘prolonged’ interpretation of (1), for example, results from interaction of V1 kaθοme ‘I sit’ with the Present Imperfective morphological construction, the lack of a locative PP, and the Trust frame of V2. A different V2 frame, e.g., Ingestion (‘eat’), which experientially readily correlates with sitting, results in interpreting V1 in a Posture frame. Keywords: Coordination. Constructional polysemy. Constructionalization. Posture. Motion. References

Bybee, J. (2015). Language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. (2002). World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hilpert, M. & Koops, Ch. (2009). A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates: The case of Swedish pseudocoordination with sitta ‘sit’. In T. Givon and M. Shibatani (Eds.) Syntactic complexity: diachrony, acquisition, neurocognition, evolution (145162). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lemmens, M. (2005). Aspectual posture verb constructions in Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17(3), 183217.

Newman, J. & Rice, S. (2004). Pattern of usage of sit, stand, and lie: A cognitively inspired exploration in corpus linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics 15(3), 351396.

Newman, J. and Sally R. (2008). Asymmetry in English multiverb sequences: A corpus based approach. In B. LewandowskaTomaszczyk (ed.) Asymmetric Events: An interpretation (322). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Viberg, Å. (2013). Posture verbs: A multiligual contrastive study. Languages in Contrast 13(2), 139169.

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Overgeneralization of modal verbs in child language as a result of non conventional formmeaning mapping

Sara Jonkers (Université Catholique de Louvain)

[email protected]

A typical characteristic of child language is overgeneralization; children use specific forms with more meanings and/or functions than the ones that are possible in adult language (see e.g., Clark, 1979). Modal verbs seem particularly interesting in this respect, as they have many different meanings in child speech, which are not all possible in adult language. For example, the Dutch modal verb moeten (‘must’) has a broad variety of modal meanings in adult language, such as necessity, obligation, etc. but in child language, it expresses also nonadult meanings, for example possibility, ongoingness, future etc. (see Jonkers, 2014). This overgeneralization of particular modal verb forms over different modal meanings in child language can be seen as a formmeaning mismatch. However, these formmeaning asymmetries can also be explained by the fact that not all modal nuances are already acquired by children. The too general interpretation of modal verbs in child language might hence indicate that only some semantic features of modal verbs are acquired, and others are not fully analyzed yet (see e.g., Clark 1991). In the case of the modal verb moeten (‘must’), children might interpret this verb as expressing a general notion of ‘nonfactuality’, without further specifications (see Jonkers, 2014). Modal verbs in child language can hence still be interpreted as formmeaning pairs, but on a different level than in adult language. These nonconventional formmeaning pairs can be seen as a result of analogyfinding processes of children to deal with input variety (see e.g., Clark & Kelly, 2006; Goldberg 2006; Tomasello, 2003). The subtle semantic contrasts of modal meanings in adult language makes acquiring them challenging, which leads to the construction of a basic, general meaning to account for all occurrences, neglecting the polysemy in adult language. Consequently, overgeneralization of modal verbs in child language could be analyzed as form meaning mapping in which not all semantic features are already elaborated. Keywords: Formmeaning mapping. Child language. Modal verbs. References

Clark, E. (1979). Building a vocabulary: Words for objects, actions, and relations. In

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P. Fletcher & M. Carman (Eds.), Language acquisition. Studies in first language development (pp. 149160). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, E., & Kelly, B. (2006). Constructions and acquisition. In E. Clark & B. Kelly (Eds.), Constructions in acquisition (pp. 114). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jonkers, S. (2014). Modal verbs in Dutch first language acquisition. Louvainla Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usagebased theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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What’s in a word? – Itemspecific and general knowledge in linguistic theory


It is commonplace for linguistic theories to assume that there is general knowledge and that there is itemspecific knowledge in language. Traditionally, the grammar is the locus of the general (often released) knowledge whereas the lexicon is where the itemspecific information is stored (e.g. Sweet 1899/1964, Bloomfield 1933/1935, Quirk et al. 1985, Pinker 1999). Challenges to such a dichotomy, which also was a primary tenet of generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1965, 1981), came from several camps:

– Corpus linguistics with researchers such as Sinclair, whose Idiom Principle2 (Sinclair 1991) and whose take on lexical items (Sinclair 1998) dissolve the boundaries between lexis and grammar. – Psycholinguistic studies on various aspects (e.g. Bybee 1995, 2007, 2010), including language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello 2003, Lieven/Behrens/Speares/Tomasello 2003), that produce evidence against a view of language use that combines atomic lexicon entries with the help of abstract rules. – Cognitive approaches to grammar, for instance Cognitive Grammar (e.g. Langacker 1987, 1999), where “[l]exicon, morphology, and syntax form a gradation claimed to be fully describable as assemblies of symbolic structures” with “degrees of schematicity” (Langacker 1999: 122), or Construction Grammar (e.g. Fillmore/Kay/O’Connor 1988, Goldberg 1995, 2006), where the distinction between lexicon and grammar is also given up.

Although the distinction between lexicon and grammar is given up in constructionist approaches, most researchers agree that our stored knowledge forms a continuum between concrete items, such as words and their properties (e.g. grammatical gender in German or French), and more abstract linguistic units, such as Argument Structure Constructions in the sense of Goldberg, or even constituent ordering according to weight and information structure. What is controversial for grammarians is the extent to which storage of itemspecific information takes place and is responsible for language use. Thus a valency grammarian may treat him in She baked him a cake. as an optional complement of bake while a Goldbergian constructionist would prefer an analysis in which him is supplied by the construction and not by the argument list of the verb. There are, however, further questions related to the storage of linguistic knowledge. One pertains to the fact that during language acquisition the constructicon is a set

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of many “construction sites” with the stored knowledge being constantly updated, rearranged and reinterpreted. What exactly this means for the form in which we store these items has not been fully understood yet. Holistic processing is a domaingeneral cognitive process, which is fully compatible with her view that memory for language is similar to memory for other things (e.g. events, sequences, motor activity). Keywords: Itemspecificity. Generalizations. Constructicon. Storage.

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New verbs of communication in English and German from a constructionist and a valency angle

Adele Goldberg (Princeton)

[email protected]

Thomas Herbst (FAU ErlangenNürnberg)

[email protected]

Constructionist theories assume that speakers' knowledge of language consists of itemspecific facts and generalizations. What is less clear, perhaps, is the precise relation and possible interaction between them. The talk will focus on the balance between generalized argument structure constructions, which can be seen as mental representations that exist independently of the verbs that occur in them, and the knowledge of itemrelated valency constructions, which speakers associate with a particular verb. We shall argue that both types of knowledge are needed to explain both linguistic creativity (Jeannie blinks Tony down from an experimental aircraft) and restrictions of the She explained me the problem type. We will present corpus data on the syntactic patterns in which new verbs of communication (such as email or mailen ) can be found in English and in German – both from the perspectives of general argument structure constructions and itemrelated valency constructions. The central issue will be to investigate whether these verbs occur in all the argument structure constructions of a language in which you would expect them to occur on semantic grounds or whether their syntactic behavior should be seen in terms of analogy to particular verbs with similar meanings. Keywords: Argument structure constructions. Generalization. Itemspecificity. Valency.

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Temporal (event) frame shaped interchangeably in idiosyncratic verb and tense element


[email protected]

From the CG angle, each tense can be regarded as a pairing of idiosyncratic content and form. Rather than a list of meanings (Fillmore 1975), there is shaping of an idiosyncratic content for each tense in terms of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs). The continuous tenseexempt verbs (the duratives and the instantevent frame ones), that cannot be associated with continuous tenses, in situations when the rest of verbs are generally so used, relates neither to a rulebased mechanism within the verb’s specifications, nor to the allegedly polisemantic identity of the tenses. Instead, such exemption may be examined within the particular verbs’ semantic content. The scene and frame approaches can provide a reliable account of such structuring and processing. For the duratives (verbs like: be, have, like, prefer, contain, etc.), it results that the progressive event frame is provided for by the verb’ semantic content, as a component of the verb’s frame, just like for the rest of verbs is generally contributed by the Continuous Tense. Empirically speaking, the duratives have a coherent behaviour with speakers never failing to establish progressive event frame in the absence of a continuous tense. This coherence in behaviour is extended to all continuous tenses in English and Albanian. In specific cases when continuous tense is used, it results in overmarkedness, because of the crossmapping and doubling of the progressive event frame provided by both, the tense frame and the verb’s semantic frame. Another group of verbs not associated with continuous tenses, contain an instantevent frame as part of their semantic frame, which cannot combine freely with a continuous tense frame – there is conflict or mismatch. There is i) a usagebased pattern of combining and matching the noncontinuous tenses with the instant event frame and the progressive event frame verbs, ii) specific patterns of their combining with continuous tenses, resulting in different meaning construction; and iii) the same account holds for the common use pattern of the rest of the verbs, sheltering neither instant event nor progressive event frame as part of their content, freely combining with the continuous and the noncontinuous tenses. Further, contrasting the Albanian and English mapping of duratives and instant frame verbs, reveals significant typological differences that point at different usagebased structuring across languages. Some Albanian verbs which correspond

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to instantframe verbs in English (see, hear, understand ) and duratives in English (like, prefer ) are associated with continuous tenses. The different shaping of the semantic content of the said verbs, makes it acceptable in Albanian and unacceptable in English, for linguistic situations like: I am not understanding this; I am liking it; Are you hearing a noise? Different mapping of the continuous tenseexempt verbs can be observed through Albanian dialects too. Regarding the question of itemspecific versus general knowledge, the evidence in this paper argues in favor of fuzzy boundaries between the two.

Keywords: Temporal frame. Usagebased structuring. Crossdomain mapping. Typological distinctions. References Akademia e Shkencave (1976). Fonetika dhe gramatika e gjuhës së sotme letrare shqipe. Tiranë

Clausner, Timothy C., and William Croft. "Productivity and schematicity in metaphors." Cognitive science 21.3 (1997): 247282.

Croft, W. (1999). Some contributions of typology to cognitive linguistics, and vice versa. . Cognitive linguistics: foundations, scope and methodology, , fv. 6193.Demiraj, Shaban . (1972). Kuptimet Kryesore te Koheve te Menyres Deftore. Në I. i. Letersise, Ceshtje te Fonetikes dhe te Gramatikes se Shqipes se Sotme (fv. 254274). Tirane: Universiteti Shteteror i Tiranes.

Demiraj, S. (1971). Gramatika e gjuhës së sotme shqipe, Morfologjia III. Tirane: Akademia e Shkencave. Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fillmore, C. (1975). An alternative to checklist theories of meaning. Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 123–131.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff G. & Johnson M. (1980). Metaphors we live by,. London & Chicago: the University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things; what categories revyal about mind, . London & Chicago: the University of Chicago Press.

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Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume 1, Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: : Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. Grammar and conceptualization . Vol. 14. Walter de Gruyter, 1999.

Levin, Beth (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levin, Beth. "Semantics and pragmatics of argument alternations."Linguistics 1 (2015).

Minsky, M. (1995). A framework for representing knowledge . Në A. A. Intelligence, In Computation & intelligence (fv. pp. 163189)

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Telicity and verb meaning in the choice of Transitive or Intransitive motion constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Aparecida de Araújo Oliveira (UFV)

[email protected]

In Portuguese, many motion verbs encode the path followed by the Figure, rather than the Manner of the motion (Talmy, 2000). However, differently from this author, we do not address this issue in terms of language typology, but in terms of specific verbs in a language and the way they differ regarding the constructions which they instantiate. Our aim is to demonstrate how verb meaning affects the choice of a construction and, more specifically, to identify which elements of a verb meaning are relevant for this purpose. In the expression of motion events in Portuguese, the path can be further elaborated as a prepositional phrase, or else, as a noun phrase in the direct object position. In this presentation, we first examine motion verbs such as ir (to go), vir (to come), entrar (to enter), sair (to exit), chegar (to arrive), and fugir (to escape), that occur in intransitive motion constructions, for instance, in A terra vai para o fundo do rio (The land goes to the bottom of the river). We then analyze verbs such as dobrar (to turn / to go around) and escalar (to climb) in transitive motion constructions, for instance, in O carro dobrou a esquina (The car went around the corner). We see dobrar in the second example as a result pathofmotion verb, in the sense that it incorporates a telic schematic interpretation of the Ground, which is further elaborated as the direct object. Telicity is often related to the final state of an event, or a result, or the end of a path. It is also among the most salient properties of transitivity (Hopper & Thompson, 1980). However, the key element favoring a transitive construction with these verbs seems to be a schematic bounded path, equating with the Ground, which is completely encoded by the verb, and not only the final portion of this path. Following Tenny (1992), we consider that these path objects behave like patient objects in the sense that they measure a property of the event. Keywords: Motion verbs. Aspect. Transitive motion construction. Intransitive motion construction. References

Hopper, P. J., & Thompson, S. A. (1980). Transitivity in language and discourse. Language, 56 (2), 251299.

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Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics: typology and process in concept structuring (Vol. II). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tenny, C. (1992). The aspectual interface hypothesis. In I. A. Sag; & A. Szabolcsi (Eds.), Lexical matters . Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

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The Particle out in the Multiword Verb Come Out

Edelvais Brígida Caldeira Barbosa (UFMG)

[email protected]

The present study takes into account that multiword verbs are highly motivated by our bodily experiences as opposed to the traditional view, which considers these structures an arbitrary combination of a verb and (a) particle(s). This being the case, the aim of this work is to analyze the particle OUT in the multiword verb COME OUT, so as to verify how this particle contributes to the meanings of this multiword verb in the different contexts it is used. In order to do so, empirical data was collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and a ten per cent random selection (5.800 lines of concordances) of all the occurrences of COME OUT was created by the software R. This multiword verb has been chosen due to the fact that it was the most frequent in the Corpus containing the particle OUT. A qualitative analysis has been carried out and the findings contrasted to those suggested by Lindner (1981), who proposed three subschemas for OUT: ‘removal’, ‘expansion’ and ‘departure’. The notion of ‘image schema’ has been extended beyond that proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1987) and also comprises the notion of ‘spatial primitives’ and ‘schematic integrations’ (Mandler and Cánovas, 2014). Besides the concept of ‘image schema’, this study also investigated in what way the several meanings of the preposition OUT expanded from the spatial to the abstract domain, taking into account the theory of ‘primary metaphor’ (Grady, 1997), as well as applying the concepts of ‘Trajector’ and ‘Landmark’. Based on this theoretical framework, the research questions that guided this study were: in what way do the concrete and abstract meanings of OUT correspond to the CONTAINER schema and how does this particle contribute to the meaning of the multiword verb as a whole in the instances to be analyzed?; how does the subschema of ‘removal’, proposed by Lindner (1981), relate to the findings in empirical data?; is there any relationship between the preverbal schematic structures and the metaphorical language found in empirical data? The results suggest a strong relationship between the containment schema and the linguistic structures observed, not only in the concrete, but also in the abstract domains. However, the notion of CONTAINER as a ‘bounded region’ does not seem compatible with the contexts analyzed for the particle OUT in the multiword verb COME OUT. The empirical data points to an alignment between the first schemas (preverbal) and the formation of metaphorical structures resulting from these schemas.

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Keywords: Multiword verbs. Cognitive Linguistics. English Syntax. Prepositions. References

Ferrari, L. (2011). Introdução à Linguística Cognitiva. São Paulo: Editora Contexto.

Grady, J. E. (1997). Foundations of meaning: primary metaphors and primary scenes. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Mandler, J. M. & Cánovas, C. P. (2014). On defining image schemas. Language and Cognition, 6, pp 510532.

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Metaphorical extensions of over : a study on functionalcognitive linguistics

Raquel Rossini Martins Cardoso (UFMG)

[email protected]

Under the light of Cognitive Linguistics alongside Functionalism, this study aimed at analyzing the metaphorical extensions of the particle over in the multiword verb take over . The concept of basic domains underlying the conceptual potential of a given structure pointed out by Langacker (1986) was the starting point of this study. Furthermore, it relies on the concepts of image schemas and metaphorical extensions of over in the multiword verb take over , discussing the theory on such concepts proposed by Kovács (2011), and Tyler & Evans (2001). Therefore, the semantic influence of the particle over not only in concrete uses – likely to have a spatial sense – but also in abstract ones – which were expected to be metaphorical – was the primary concern of the study. Unarguably, there has been considerable discussion on the issue of metaphor alongside metaphorical extensions underlying verb particles. However divergent perspectives presented by cognitive linguists may be, one might note a relative consensus on the fact that Cognitive Linguistics bridges the gap between meaning and cognitive processes. As pointed out by Ferrari 2010, one aspect that may distinguish Cognitive Linguistics from other theoretical approaches is the emphasis placed on metaphor. Therefore, it is a foregone conclusion that the present study, based on such insights, may not focus on the distinction between lexicon and grammar, emphasizing, instead, the “symbolic structures” formed by “lexicon, morphology and syntax” (Langacker 1987). The analysis of uses of take over was carried out by means of empirical data collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English – COCA from the written domains as follows: magazine, newspaper, fiction and academic. Thus, all the occurrences of such verb were copied and transcribed onto an Excel spreadsheet for further random selection of a 10% subset of 14,246 occurrences, using the R software. The concepts of trajectory (TR) and landmark (LM) were regarded as the major categories to determine the metaphorical extensions analyzed – those concepts were of paramount importance in the analysis, once the relationship between them was taken into account when the metaphorical extensions identified were analyzed. The results prove that there is a correlation between the senses of take over in the occurrences analyzed and the five senses – concrete or metaphorical – identified by Kovács (2011). Moreover, the results of this study may also enrich the pedagogical tools for teaching particles in English as a Foreign Language (EFL).

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Keywords: Functionalcognitive linguistics. Metaphorical extensions. Over. References Ferrari, L. (2010). Modelos de gramática em Linguística Cognitiva: princípios convergentes e perspectivas complementares. Cadernos de Letras da UFF – Dossiê: Letras e cognição , 41, 149165.

Kovács, E. (2011). The Traditional vs. Cognitive Approach to English Phrasal Verbs . Retrieved from http://www.unimiskolc.hu/~philos/2011_tom_XVI_1/141.pdf

Langacker, R. W. (1986). An introduction to cognitive grammar. Cognitive science , 10 (1), 140

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford university press.

Tyler, A. & Evans, V. (2001). Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Pedagogical Grammar: The Case of Over . Retrieved from http://www.vyvevans.net/over77.4.pdf.

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http://www.uni-miskolc.hu/%7Ephilos/2011_tom_XVI_1/141.pdf

http://www.uni-miskolc.hu/%7Ephilos/2011_tom_XVI_1/141.pdf

http://www.vyvevans.net/over77.4.pdf

http://www.vyvevans.net/over77.4.pdf

International FrameNet Workshop

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Introducing OpenWordnetPT: an open Portuguese wordnet for reasoning

Alexandre Rademaker (IBM Research) [email protected]

Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications) [email protected]

Livy Real (IBM Research) [email protected]

Fabricio Chalub (IBM Research) [email protected]

Claudia Freitas (PUCRio) [email protected]

Semantic relations are a key aspect when developing computer programs capable of handling language – they establish (labeled) associations between words and can be integrated into lexicalsemantic knowledge bases. Available since the beginning of the 1990s, Princeton’s WordNet [8], henceforth PWN, is a paradigmatic lexical resource. Originally created for English, its model is now a “de facto” standard, due to its wide use in applications and its adaptation to different languages. For Portuguese, the first resource of this kind, WordNet.PT was announced in 2001 but, unlike PWN, was never free to use. A few alternatives were created, some of which we compared in [7]. But if those alternatives proved themselves useful for some tasks, they were not enough to enable all of the standard uses of a wordnet in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including similarity computation or word sense disambiguation. This talk introduces our project OpenWordNetPT [6]. abbreviated to OpenWNPT, OpenWordNetPT is a wordnet for Portuguese originally developed as a syntactic projection of the Universal WordNet (UNW) of Weikum and de Melo. Its longterm goal is to serve as the main lexicon for a NLP system, focused on logical reasoning and based on a logical representation of knowledge. The process of creating OpenWNPT uses machine learning techniques to build relations between graphs representing lexical information from versions in multiple languages of Wikipedia entries and open electronic dictionaries. One of the features of the resource is that it incorporates different kinds of quality data, already produced and made available for Portuguese, independent of the variant, Brazilian or European.

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OpenWNPT has been improved constantly since 2011 through linguistically motivated additions, either manually or from evidence in large corpora. This is the case for the lexicon of nominalizations, tightly integrated with the OpenWNPT [9], the review of the coverage of the verbs [5], the mapping of some nominalizations to Princeton’s Morpholinks [3] and the work with gentilics, a particular class of relational adjectives [12]. OpenWNPT is available in RDF/OWL following and expanding, when necessary, the original mappings. Both the OpenWNPT data and schema of the RDF model are freely available for download. The philosophy of OpenWNPT is to keep a close connection with PWN, but try to fix the biggest mistakes created by the automated translation methods, through language skills and tools. A consequence of this close connection to other languages is the ability to minimize the impact of lexicographical decisions on splitting/grouping the senses in a synset. While such decisions are, to a great extent, arbitrary, the practical criterion of following the multilingual alignment behaves as a pragmatic and practical guiding solution. OpenWNPT’s extent of coverage is constantly monitored from its homepage http://wnpt.brlcloud.com/wn/. OpenWNPT currently has 43,925 synsets, of which 32,696 correspond to nouns, 4,675 to verbs, 5,575 to adjectives and 979 to adverbs. Besides being available for download, the data can be retrieved via a SPARQL endpoint and can be consulted and compared with other wordnets both through the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMWN) interface and its own interface. OpenWNPT’s quality of coverage is difficult to measure, but OpenWNPT was chosen by the developers of the Open MultiLingual WordNet OMWW [2], Freeling [10], BabelNet and Google Translate, as the representative Portuguese wordnet in those projects, due to its comprehensive coverage of the language and its accuracy. Lexical resources are much more useful when they are aligned with other such resources and openly shared on the web. Since no resource is truly complete and different theoretical basis lead to different strengths, both in terms of coverage and of accuracy, one of the main points of the Linguistic Linked Open Data movement [4] is that we should be able to connect our resources via mappings that make the most of their complementarity. As they say

‘Open Data’ has become very important in a wide range of fields. However, for linguistics, much data is still published in proprietary, closed formats and is not made available on the web. We propose the use of linked data principles to enable language resources to be published and interlinked openly on the web [...] Furthermore, we argue that modeling and publishing language resources as linked data offers crucial advantages as compared to existing formalisms. In particular, it is explained how this can enhance the interoperability and the integration of linguistic resources. Further benefits of this approach include unambiguous identifiability of elements of linguistic description, the creation of dynamic, but unambiguous links between different resources, the possibility to query across distributed resources, and the availability of a mature technological infrastructure.

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We would like to follow this model, which already connects Princeton WordNet to (English) FrameNet [1], for Portuguese resources as well. Thus we would like to pursue a project of aligning the FrameNetBR [13] to OpenWordNetPT. Preliminary conversations indicate that we should, perhaps, consider first the alignment in the restricted domain of “Tourism”. OpenWordNetPT has no domains as such, but some of our corpus work [11] is concerned with historical figures in Brazilian recent history, so locations and geographical and historical events are important for us and FrameNetBR has already produced much on this domain. The recently launched http://www.ufjf.br/framenetbr/mknob/ has already a multilingual repository of knowledge that we would like to compare to the knowledge we obtain via our mappings to SUMO. Since m.knob is already connected to BabelNet, which is related to OpenWordNetPT via the OpenMultilingualWordNet, we expect to see how BabelNet deals with our data, as well as to learn how to improve the quality of our data, using BabelNet’s other resources, such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. A different proposed application that we envisage is to create and develop ‘frames’ for historical characters in the DHBB. This seems an ideal application of FrameNet and we would like to see how much of the semantic content of the our favorite DHBB corpus can be covered with a small collection of frames for being born, graduating, becoming a politician, legislating, etc. Filling up gaps in our resource that do exist in Wikipedia, DBpedia and others will be useful, but further in the future we would like to join forces with FrameNetBR to come up with a sizeable collection of multiword expressions (mwes) in Portuguese. WordNets are not particularly good at multiword expressions and there is a general awareness that mwes tend to depend on the domain of discourse, so this could be an ideal followup to the project of creating and assigning frames to the DHBB entries. Keywords: Wordnet. Reasoning. NLP. References

Collin F. Baker, Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. The Berkeley FrameNet project. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL1998), Montreal, Canada, June 1998. ACL.

Francis Bond and Ryan Foster. Linking and extending an open multilingual wordnet. In Proceedings of 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1352–1362, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013. ACL Press.

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Fabricio Chalub, Livy Real, Alexandre Rademaker, and Valeria de Paiva. Semantic links for portuguese. In 10th Edition of its Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Portoroz, Slovenia, May 2016.

Christian Chiarcos, John McCrae, Philipp Cimiano, and Christiane Fellbaum. Towards open data for linguistics: Linguistic linked data. In A. Oltramari, P. Vossen, L. Qin, and E. Hovy, editors, New Trends of Research in Ontologies and Lexical Resources, Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, pages 7–25. SpringerVerlag, 2013.

Valeria de Paiva, Fabricio Chalub, Livy Real, and Alexandre Rademaker. Making virtue of necessity: a verb lexicon. In PROPOR – International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese, Tomar, Portugal, 2016.

Valeria de Paiva, Alexandre Rademaker, and Gerard de Melo. OpenWordNetPT: An Open Brazilian WordNet for Reasoning. In Proceedings of 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING (Demo Paper), 2012.

Valeria de Paiva, Livy Real, Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira, Alexandre Rademaker, Cláudia Freitas, and Alberto Simões. An overview of portuguese wordnets. In Global Wordnet Conference 2016, Bucharest, Romenia, January 2016.

Christiane Fellbaum, editor. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (Language, Speech, and Communication). The MIT Press, 1998.

Cláudia Freitas, Valeria de Paiva, Alexandre Rademaker, Gerard de Melo, Livy Real, and Anne de Araujo Correia da Silva. Extending a lexicon of portuguese nominalizations with data from corpora. In Jorge Baptista, Nuno Mamede, Sara Candeias, Ivandré Paraboni, Thiago A. S. Pardo, and Maria das Grac as Volpe Nunes, editors, Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, 11th International Conference, PROPOR 2014, São Carlos, Brazil, October 2014. Springer.

Lluís Padró and Evgeny Stanilovsky. Freeling 3.0: Towards wider multilinguality. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012. ELRA.

Valeria De Paiva, Dario Oliveira, Suemi Higuchi, Alexandre Rademaker, and Gerard De Melo. Exploratory information extraction from a historical dictionary. In IEEE 10th International Conference on eScience (eScience), volume 2, pages 11–18. IEEE, October 2014.

Livy Real, Valeria de Paiva, Fabricio Chalub, and Alexandre Rademaker. Gentle with gentilics. In Joint Second Workshop on Language and Ontologies (LangOnto2)

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and Terminology and Knowledge Structures (TermiKS) (colocated with LREC 2016), Slovenia, May 2016.

Tiago Torrent, Maria Margarida M. Salomão, Fernanda C. A. Campos, Regina M. M. Braga, Ely E. S. Matos, Maucha A. Gamonal, Julia A. Gon calves, Bruno C. P. Souza, Daniela S. Gomes, and Simone R. Peron. Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: a framebased trilingual electronic dictionary for the Football World Cup. In Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 10–14, Dublin, Ireland, August 2014. ACL.

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Extracting common and complex knowledge from text

Michael Roth (Saarland University)

[email protected]sb.de

This abstract discusses parts of a project that involves the use of FrameNet for extracting common and complex knowledge from text. The goal of this project is to develop a model of text understanding that identifies rolelevel semantic information in individual sentences while simultaneously taking into account and reasoning over previously extracted information and information that is given in the broader discourse context. The role of FrameNet in the described project is to provide initial structures of representation that define how concepts in prototypical situations are related to one another in terms of semantic frames. 1 With the FrameNet frame inventory as a 3

starting point, the project aims to extract frame instantiations from text, to aggregate statistics over them, and to use such statistics in order to create new frames (e.g. frames about ‘research’). In context of this project, two types of new frames are of particular interest. The first type are inherited frames , which are subtypes of existing frames, potentially represent a more specific meaning, and are as such interpretable as bits of common knowledge (e.g. that ‘scientists’ write ‘papers’ [as a special case of the Text_creation frame]). Such subtypes might be identified automatically based on significant counts of members of specific semantic categories cooccurring as fillers of frame elements. Statistics over patterns of instantiated (existing and new inherited) frames may then be used to discover new superframes , which combine multiple frames in order to represent complex schemata (e.g. ‘conducting a research project’). This project is motivated by the success and impact of semantic role labelling methods in previous approaches to extracting events and relations from text (Riedel et al., 2009; Etzioni et al., 2011; inter alia), as well as recent work on inducing liberal event schema (Huang et al., 2016). A current drawback of fully automatic approaches is that they come at the risk of inducing event types and event schema that are incoherent or incomplete. To eliminate or at least reduce this risk, one idea of the planned proposal will be to ground the learning process in an application scenario in which taskspecific labels can be used as supervision and guide the training towards a favourable outcome. For example, largescale data collections over natural language inferences (Bowman et al., 2015) may be used to ensure that new inherited frames consistently entail an existing more general frame.

3 1 Terminology following Framenet II: Extended Theory and Practice (Ruppenhofer et al., 2010). 287

With the goal of extracting common and complex knowledge, the recently released corpus of short stories (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016) may provide a suitable means to guide and evaluate the process of discovering frames that stand in causalor temporal relationships and hence form parts of meaningful superframes. Superframes induced from said corpus could be particularly useful for the purpose of the proposed project as the stories are based on commonsense knowledge and, accordingly, facilitate the learning of superframes that represent such knowledge to the same extent.

Keywords: FrameNet. Information Extraction. Knowledge Base Construction.

References Bowman, S. R., Angeli, G., Potts, C., & Manning, C. D. (2015). A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 632–642). Lisbon, Portugal.

Etzioni, O., Fader, A., Christensen, J., Soderland, S., & Mausam. (2011). Open information extraction: The second generation. In T. Walsh (Ed.), Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 3–10).

Huang, L., Cassidy, T., Feng, X., Ji, H., Voss, C. R., Han, J., & Sil, A. (2016). Liberal event extraction and event schema induction. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 258–268). Berlin, Germany.

Mostafazadeh, N., Chambers, N., He, X., Parikh, D., Batra, D., Vanderwende, L., Allen, J. (2016, June). A corpus and cloze evaluation for deeper understanding of commonsense stories. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (pp. 839–849). San Diego, California.

Riedel, S., Chun, H.W., Takagi, T., & Tsujii, J. (2009). A markov logic approach to biomolecular event extraction. In Proceedings of the BioNLP 2009 Workshop companion volume for shared task (pp. 41–49). Boulder, Colorado.

Ruppenhofer, J., Ellsworth, M., Petruck, M. R. L., Johnson, C. R., & Scheffczyk, J. (2010). FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice (Technical Report). International Computer Science Institute.

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Framesemantic parsing using FrameNetderived Embodied Construction Grammar constructions

Ellen Dodge (International Computer Science Institute)

[email protected]

Sean Trott (University of California, San Diego)

[email protected]

Luca Gilardi (International Computer Science Institute)

[email protected]

Oana David (University of California, Merced)

[email protected]

In this paper, we show how the valence patterns annotated in FrameNet (FN) (Fillmore 2012, Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) can be (semi) automatically converted into Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) (Feldman et al. 2010, Bergen and Chang 2005) constructions, and then be used to computationally produce framebased semantic parses of text input. By integrating FNderived constructions with existing ECG grammars, the ECG constructional analyzer (Bryant, 2008) is able to produce richer and more cohesive semantic parses than can be provided by alternative framesemantic NLP methods, such as semantic role labelers like SEMAFOR (Das et al. 2010). In addition, the method used to generate constructions from FN valence patterns provides a means to use FN annotation data to build a formalized and computationallyimplemented constructicon, in the form of ECG constructions. The process of defining ECG constructions based on FN data involves several steps. First, using a custombuilt Pythonbased computational tool, we convert FN data from XML format into a searchable database of frames, their lexical units, and their annotations. As we demonstrate, this tool can be used for many different kinds of exploration of FN data. Second, we use this same tool to investigate the valence patterns for the lexical units in a given frame, or set of related frames. The objective at this stage is to identify generalizations over individual valence patterns, thereby creating productive constructions that do not overfit the data. As we discuss, such generalizations can be defined along different dimensions and granularities of comparison. For instance, generalizing over the valence patterns of all the lexical units in a frame creates fewer, more general constructions than if constructions are

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defined for each lexical unit. Generalizing over a set of semantically related frames (e.g. a set of motionrelated frames) produces still more general constructions. We have been developing various heuristics and procedures to facilitate this generalization process. For a given set of generalizations, our computational tool produces formalized ECG constructions that can then be integrated with an existing ECG grammar. In many cases, the existing ECG grammar will already contain constructions that can account for many of the valence patterns associated with a given frame or frames; in such cases, we can use these tools to identify constructional or semantic ‘gaps’ in the existing ECG grammar. As we successively examine the valence patterns associated with additional FN frames, we are able to define additional constructions that increase the overall coverage of the grammar. Moreover, by using the resulting grammars to parse sentence examples, we are able to iteratively evaluate and further refine our heuristics and procedures.

Keywords: Construction grammar. Embodied Construction Grammar. Frame semantics. Natural Language Understanding. Semantic parsing.

References

Bergen, B. and Chang, N. (2005). Embodied Construction Grammar in simulation based language understanding. In J.O. Östman and M. Fried (Eds.), Construction Grammar(s): Cognitive and CrossLanguage Dimensions . Johns Benjamins.

Bryant, J. (2008). BestFit Constructional Analysis. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

Das, D., Schneider, N., Chen, D. and N. A. Smith. (2010) Probabilistic frame semantic parsing. In Proc. of NAACLHLT.

Feldman, J., Dodge, E., Bryant J. Embodied Construction Grammar. (2010). In B. Heine and N. Heiko (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis . New York: Oxford University Press.

Fillmore, C. J. (2012). Encounters with Language. Computational Linguistics . 38.4: 701718.

Ruppenhofer, J., Ellsworth, M., Petruck, M. . Johnson, C, and Scheffczyk, J. (2010). FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice (Web Publication).

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http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nchang/pubs/ecg.pdf

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nchang/pubs/ecg.pdf

Integrating FrameNet and MetaNet

Miriam R L Petruck (ICSI)

[email protected]

Ellen K Dodge (ICSI)

[email protected]

Abbend and Rappoport (2013) emphasized the importance of semantic annotation for semantic tasks for natural language processing (NLP) applications. Related work (e.g. Shen and M. Lapata 2007, Sinha 2008, Søgaard et al. 2015) corroborates the value of that approach. At a minimum, the development of resources that include semantic information for NLP tasks, such as semantic parsing or question answering, requires linguistic annotation of natural language text. Both FrameNet (Fillmore 2012, Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) and MetaNet (Dodge et al. 2015) provide semantically annotated text.

This paper offers an annotation scheme for a tobecreated resource that would integrate two existing framebased resources via a new knowledge base, i.e. FrameNet (framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu) and MetaNet (metanet.icsi.berkeley.edu), both of which provide very rich semantic information. Given the need to account for both literal and metaphoric language, this work motivates and illustrates the integrated annotation, also suggesting a means of evaluating the results. The integrated annotation will support a deeper framebased semantic analysis of language use than currently feasible, by including metaphorical language, thus also approaching true language understanding.

Keywords: Annotation. Frame Semantics. Construction Grammar. FrameNet. MetaNet.

References

O. Abbend & U. Rappoport (2013). UCCA: A semanticsbased grammatical annotation scheme. Proceedings of the 10 th International Conference on Computational Semantics , pp. 112.

E. Dodge, J. Hong, & E. Stickles. (2015). MetaNet: Deep semantic automatic metaphor analysis. In Proceedings of The 3 rd Workshop on Metaphor in NLP , pp. 4049.

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C. J. Fillmore. (2012). Encounters with Language. Computational Linguistics . 38.4: 701718.

J. Ruppenhofer, M. Ellsworth, M. R. L. Petruck, C. R. Johnson, C. F. Baker, and J. Scheffczyk. 2016. Web Publication. FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice .

Shen and M. Lapata. (2007). Using semantic roles to improve question answering. Proceedings of EMNLPCoNLL , Prague: ACL, pp. 1221.

S. Sinha (2008). Answering Questions about Complex Events . Technical Report: UCB/EECS2008175. University of California, Berkeley.

A. Søgaard, B. Plank, & H. Martinez. (2015). Using frame semantics for knowledge extraction from Twitter. In Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Artificial Intelligence , Austin: AAAI, pp. 24472452.

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The Special Problem of Spatial Language: Representing Space in FrameNet


[email protected]

The meaning of lexical units in FrameNet has, practically by definition, been primarily represented via the connection each lexical unit has to a particular frame, rather than a featural representation or some other wordbyword approach. However, our FrameNet project has recently been attempting to improve the modeling of spatial language, bringing it more in line with cognitive linguistic analyses (Brugman 1988, Talmy 2000). Our previous approach assigned all prepositions to a single frame Locative_relation. This frame had two major frame elements, Figure, for the entity or situation being located, and Ground, for the entity or situation whose location is presented as more known (1).

(1) Today , however , [fires broke outFIGURE] NEAR [AthensGROUND] .

This approach did not distinguish between different image schemas (2ab), between motion or stasis profiles (3ab), or between the different means of establishing orientation axes (see below).

(2) a. Down ON your knees , you godless vermin !

b. I was IN Stinson Beach when the quake rolled through town .

(3) a. The robin was AT the back door .

b. Hall is to return TO Washington on April 22 .

While the different image schemas and motion vs. stasis have been cleanly representable as different frames (2a in Spatial_contact, 2b in Interior_profile_relation, 3a in Spatial_co location, 3b in Goal), the orientation problem was considerably thornier. In the course of this effort, we have had to introduce a significant number of new semantic types that are applied in a crosscutting way to lexical units, and even more unusually, are applied in pairs to lexical units to fully specify their type. The problem is that not only do LUs differ in

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which axis they specially refer to, if any (near, up, down, left, right, north, south ), but there are also differences between lexical units in what strategies they invite for establishing these axes (examples constructed for clarity).

(4) Edna was standing IN FRONT OF the car .

(5) Edna was standing AT THE FRONT OF the car .

Although both of these refer to a FRONT axis, they are subtly different. For example, if the car were backing up, (5) does not represent a dangerous situation, since the axis is established only by the conventional orientation of the Ground, but (4) is ambiguous, allowing either a situation identical to (5) or the situation where Edna is about to be run over! We have introduced a system that distinguishes between “flexible” LUs like (5) and rigidly “landmark based” LUs like (4). Our approach has the advantage of cleanly representing lexical differences that are crucial in understanding spatial LUs in context without requiring the creation of a large number of frames.

Keywords: Spatial Language. Image Schemas. Semantic Representation.

References

Brugman, C. (1988). The Story of Over: Polysemy, Semantics, and the Structure of the Lexicon. New York/London: Garland.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Swedish FrameNet – framing of a different shade

Karin Friberg Heppin (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Lars Borin (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Malin Ahlberg (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Dana Dannélls (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Markus Forsberg (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Maria Toporowska Gronostaj

[email protected]

Richard Johansson (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

Dimitrios Kokkinakis (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

LeifJöran Olsson (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

leif[email protected]

Jonatan Uppström (Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg)

[email protected]

295







Painting the picture

Even though Swedish FrameNet (SweFN) rests solidly on the original FrameNet (FN), as do framenets of other languages, it differs in being built as an integrated part of a linguistic macroresource. The SweFN++ project (Borin et al., 2010)1 was 4

launched with the objective to create an opensource integrated lexical resource for Swedish language technology (LT). Four goals were set:

(1) build SweFN covering 50,000 lexical units (LUs), on the principles of FN; (2) integrate existing free lexical resources; (3) develop methodology and workflow maximizing use of LT and minimizing human effort; and (4) use the SweFN++ resource in concrete LT applications.

Being part of this largescale project has set color to SweFN. Painting the picture Already at first glance it is obvious that the setting is different. SweFN is not built utilizing the ICSI FrameNet software (Ruppenhofer et al., 2002), as are most other framenets. In order to achieve the SweFN++ macroresource a different solution was needed, resulting in the development of the open lexical infrastructure Karp (Borin et al., 2013b) providing support to integrate, create and curate lexical resources. Karp offers search and editing functionalities to 26 such resources, uniquely organized around and interlinked to identifiers of the pivot SALDO lexicon (Borin et al., 2013a). Karp is developed in parallel with Korp, an open corpus infrastructure (Borin et al., 2012). Karp features a SweFN editor which allows an expansion approach integrating data from other resources: extracting frames and frame information from FN, selecting LUs from SALDO, and extracting example sentences from Korp. Karp supports adding information on annotation of compounds, domain, and other information. In September 2016 Swedish FrameNet contained nearly 40,000 LUs evoking close to 1,200 frames, and is thereby the world’s largest framenet in terms of LUs.2 5

SweFN has internal analysis of compounds, unique to SweFN. Also unique are around 50 new frames describing nominal concepts, more finegrained equivalents of frames in FN, and frames created due to linguistic or cultural differences (Friberg Heppin and Toporowska Gronostaj, 2014).

4 1 SweFN++ has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (2011–2013; dnr 20106013) and by the University of Gothenburg through a strategic research grant to the Centre for Language Technology (2009–2015). 5 2 The number of frames is on a par with FN, while SweFN has fewer annotated examples. The current project state may be viewed at <https://spraakbanken.gu.se/swefn>.

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The art in use

SweFN has been utilized in a semantic role labeling application using annotated sentences to extract semantic roles of given predicates within given frames by identifying the span of the semantic arguments and assigning semantic roles to the argument spans (Johansson et al., 2012). A major benefit of constructing SweFN on the basis of FN is the ability to build multilingual applications. This is demonstrated in the automatic development of a semantic grammar of valence patterns shared between the two resources,3 and 6

also in multilingual natural language generation applications for tourist phrases and artwork descriptions (Dannélls and Gruzitis, 2014). The online language learning platform Lärka uses SweFN for training semantic roles (Pilán and Volodina, 2014).4 Having the structure of FN, as well as language 7

specific solutions, SweFN is excellent in language teaching, systematically demonstrating similarities and differences between languages (Friberg Heppin and Friberg, 2012). Applications in the medical domain is yet another area where frame semantics in medical event extraction showed promising results. As a case study we have demonstrated that the theory of frame semantics to automatically identify and extract e.g. detailed medication information from medical texts (Kokkinakis, 2012) is a promising direction for further research in the domain and an effective method for the extracion of structured data from texts in narrative form.

Preliminary experiments have investigated using SweFN frames rather than words as search keys in information retrieval (Friberg Heppin, 2013).

Keywords: Swedish FrameNet. Computational linguistic resources. Macroresource. Language technology.

References

Borin, L., Dannélls, D., Forsberg, M., Toporowska Gronostaj, M., and Kokkinakis,D. 2010. Swedish FrameNet++. In Proceedings of the Swedish Language Technology Conference 2010 , Linköping.

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., and Roxendal, J. 2012. Korp the corpus infrastructure of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of LREC 2012 , Istanbul. ELRA.

6 3 <http://remu.grammaticalframework.org/framenet/>

7 4 <https://spraakbanken.gu.se/larka/>

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http://remu.grammaticalframework.org/framenet/

http://remu.grammaticalframework.org/framenet/

Borin, L., Forsberg. M., and Lönngren, L. (2013a). SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang. Language Resources and Evaluation 47(4): 1191–1211.

Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Olsson, LJ., Olsson, O., and Uppström, J. (2013b). The lexical editing system of Karp. In Proceedings of the eLex 2913 Conference , pages 503– 516, Tallin.

Dannélls, D. and Gruzitis, N. (2014). Controlled natural language generation from a multilingual FrameNetbased grammar. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2014) , volume 8625 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 155–166, Berlin. Springer.

Friberg Heppin, K. and Friberg, H. (2012). Using FrameNet in communicative language teaching. In Proceedings of the XV EURALEX International Congress , Oslo.

Friberg Heppin, K. and Toporowska Gronostaj, M. (2014). Exploiting FrameNet for Swedish: Mismatch? Constructions and Frames, 6(1): 52–72.

Friberg Heppin, K. (2013). Search using semantic framenet frames as variables. In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval (ESAIR 2013), held at CIKM 2013 in San Francisco, pages 25–28.

Johansson, R., Friberg Heppin, K., and Kokkinakis, D. (2012). Semantic role labeling with the Swedish FrameNet. In Proceedings of LREC2012 , pages 3697–3700, Istanbul: ELRA.

Kokkinakis D. (2012). Initial Experiments of Medication Event Extraction Using Frame Semantics. Proceedings of Scandinavian Conference on Health Informatics (SHI 2012) . Linköping, Sweden.

Pilán, I. and Volodina, E. (2014). Reusing Swedish FrameNet for training semantic roles. In Proceedings of LREC 2014 , pages 1359–1363, Reykjavik: ELRA.

Ruppenhofer, J., Baker, C.F., and Fillmore, C.J. (2002). The FrameNet Database and Software Tools. In Proceedings of the European Association for Lexicography , pages 371–377, Copenhagen.

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https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/fnbibliography?page=6&f%5Bauthor%5D=169



FrameNet development for Latvian


[email protected]

Guntis Bārzdiņš (National information agency LETA)

[email protected]

Latvian is a Baltic language, one of the official languages of European Union, having around two million speakers. Latvian is typically classified as an underresourced language, but the situation is rapidly changing in several directions of NLP, including natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG). First, an applicationspecific Latvian FrameNet was created in 2014 in order to facilitate the semiautomatic information extraction process for the media monitoring needs, particularly for populating and updating profiles of public persons and organizations. The corpus contains nearly 5000 sentences which are annotated using a subset of 26 slightly adjusted FrameNet frames: Being_born , Being_ employed , Change_of_leadership , Earnings_and_losses , Education_teaching , Employment_end , Hiring , Personal_relationship , Residence , Win_prize , etc. The FrameNet annotations are added to manually verified syntactic dependency trees. A stateoftheart semantic parser trained on this corpus performs at 53.5% F1score in the frame target recognition task and 61% F1score in the frame element recognition task (Bārzdiņš et al., 2014). Second, we have submitted a project proposal for the creation of a multilayer sembank for Latvian in order to foster the research and innovation in NLU and NLG. In the proposed sembank of 10,000 sentences, FrameNet annotations, in parallel to PropBank annotations, would be added on top of Universal Dependencies (UD). Both PropBank and FrameNet annotations, in turn, would serve as the basis for the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) layer. While the existing AMR sembank for English is based on PropBank, the integration with FrameNet is recognized as a future task (Banarescu et al., 2013). Such a multilayer corpus would facilitate the research in this direction. A multilingually oriented sembank is also particularly important for ‘small’ languages like Latvian to facilitate the development of cross lingual applications. If the proposal is successful, the creation of the Latvian sembank will start in 2017. Third, the integration of AMR and FrameNet would facilitate not only NLU but also multilingual NLG. In the latter case, we see Grammatical Framework, GF (Ranta, 2011), as a complementary technology at all layers of the proposed sembank: see Grūzītis & Dannélls (2016) for the GFFrameNet relationship, Grūzītis & Bārzdiņš

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(2016) for the GFAMR relationship, Kolachina & Ranta (2016) for the GFUD relationship, Grūzītis et al. (2016) for the GFConstructicon relationship. GF is a formalism and a framework for implementing multilingual computational grammars. It has a great potential for implementing, unifying and interlinking semantic frames of different languages. Similarly to FrameNet, GF is characterized by its twolevel approach to natural language representation: the abstract syntax defines the languageindependent structure while concrete syntaxes define the languagespecific syntactic and lexical realization.

Keywords: Latvian. FrameNet. AMR. Sembank. Grammatical Framework.

References

Banarescu, L., Bonial, C., Cai, S., Georgescu, M., Griffitt, K., Hermjakob, U., Knight, K., Koehn, P., Palmer, M. & Schneider, N. (2013). Abstract Meaning Representation for Sembanking. Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse.

Bārzdiņš, G., Goško, D., Rituma, L. & Paikens, P. (2014). Using C5.0 and exhaustive search for boosting framesemantic parsing accuracy. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).

Grūzītis, N. & Bārzdiņš, G. (2016). The role of CNL and AMR in scalable abstractive summarization for multilingual media monitoring. Controlled Natural Language, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9767.

Grūzītis, N., Dannélls, D., Ranta, A. & Tyers, F.M. (2016). Grammatical Framework for implementing multilingual frames and constructions. ICCG9 theme session on Computational Semantics with Frames and Constructions.

Grūzītis, N. & Dannélls, D. (2016). A multilingual FrameNetbased grammar and lexicon for Controlled Natural Language. Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation (in press).

Kolachina, P. & Ranta, A. (2016). From Abstract Syntax to Universal Dependencies. Journal of Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (in press).

Ranta, A. (2011). Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars. CSLI, Stanford.

300

Progress in Chinese FrameNet

Qinghua Chai (Shanxi University in China)

[email protected]

Ru Li (Shanxi University in China)

[email protected]

Hongyan Zhao (Shanxi University in China)

[email protected]

The Chinese FrameNet(CFN) project is built by mainly following the pattern of FrameNet at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley,CA. Its aim is to build CFN database so as to serve the needs of Chinese information processing by making use of frame semantics. Currently, the work of CFN project includes (a) research on building CFN database, (b) research on automatically frame semantic parsing (FSP) at the sentence level, (c) research on automatically FSP at the discourse level, and (d) research on the application of FSP based on CFN database. This report will present the status quo of the CFN research from the following several aspects: (a) the introduction of CFN team members, (b) the workflow and the latest progress in building CFN database, (c) the latest progress in automatically FSP at the sentence level such as target word recognition of a given sentence, frame disambiguation, and frame element labeling, (d) the latest progress in automatically FSP at the discourse level like the generation of the semantic structure of discourses, the identification of the relations between discourses, and the identification and resolution of Definite Null Instantiation(DNI) of the core frame elements, (e) the relevant platforms concerning CFN , (f)the application of FSP in QA, text entailment, and sentence similarity computation, (g)challenges to posed by the language differences building in CFN database, and (h)grants supporting the project.

Keywords: Mandatory. List 35 keywords.

References

Li, R., Liu, H., & Li, S. (2010). Chinese Frame Identification using TCRF Model. COLING 2010, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Posters Volume, 2327 August 2010, Beijing, China (pp.674682).

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国英, 娜,李茹,王智 ,柴清 .基于框架的篇章构生成和篇章关系 [J].中文信息学. (2015),29(6):98109.

Lv,G.,Y., Su,N., Wang,Z.Q., Chai,Q.,H.(2015).Framebased discourse structure construction and relation recognition for chinese sentence. Journal Of Chinese Information Processing, 29,98109. 李茹,王智 ,李双 ,梁吉 ,Collin Baker.基于框架分析的句子相似度算[J]. 算机研究

与展.(2013), 50(8):17281736

Li,R., Wang,Z.,Q., Li,S.,H., Liang,J.,Y., Collin,B. (2013).Chinese sentence similarity computing based on frame semantic parsing.Journal of Computer Research and Development,50,17281736. Li,R., Wu,J., & Wang,Z.,Q.(2015). Implicit role linking on chinese discourse: exploiting explicit roles and frametoframe relations.Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing(pp.12631271).

石佼,李茹,王智 . 框架核心分析[J].中文信息学 , (2014), 28(6): 4855 .

Shi,J., Li,R., Wang,Z.Q.(2014). Chinese core frame semantic analysis. Journal Of Chinese Information Processing, 28, 4855 .

王智 , 李茹, 梁吉 , 旭 , 武娟, 娜. 基于篇章框架分析的理解答研究[J]. 算机学, (2016), 39(4):795807.

Wang, Z.,Q., Li,R., Liang,J.,Y. , Collin,B.(2016) Research on question answering for reading comprehension based on chinese discourse frame semantic parsing. Chinese Journal Of Computers,39,795807.

Wang,Z.,Q.,Liang,J.,Y.,Li,R.,Qian,Y.,H.(2016).An approach to coldstart link prediction:establishing connections between nontopological and topological information, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 10.1109/TKDE.2016.2597823.

Wang, S., Li, R., Wang, R., Wang, Z., & Zhang, X.(2013) . Sxucfncore: sts models integrating framenet parsing information. Proceedings of the Main Conference and the Shared Task(Vol. 1,pp.74–79).

王智 ,李茹,阴志洲,刘海静,李双 .基于依存特征的框架角色自注 [J].中文信息学 , (2013), 27(2): 3440.

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Wang,Z.,Q., Li,R., Yin,Z.,Z., Liu,H.J., Li,S.H. (2013).Automatic labeling of chinese frame semantic roles based on dependency features. Journal Of Chinese Information Processing, 27, 3440.

燕, 刘 , 李茹,等. 多特征文本涵研究[J]. 中文信息学 . (2014), 28(2):109115.

Zhao,H.Y., Liu.,P., Li,R., Wang,Z.Q.(2014). Recognizing textual entailment based on the multifeatures. Journal Of Chinese Information Processing, 28,109115.

303

Russian FrameBank now linked to FrameNet

Olga Lyashevskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language RAS, Moscow)

[email protected] The Linked Data component of the Russian FrameBank (Lyashevskaya 2010, Lyashevskaya and Kashkin 2015) is a project in progress which will allow NLP users to make crosslanguage processing and enrich data for parsing with the help of FrameNet Linked Data resources available. The most traditional understanding of Linked Lexical Resources involves, firstly, parallel resources developed for different languages under the same scheme, such as the Berkeley FrameNet (Fillmore 2008) and a family of its partner projects for German, Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, etc. (Boas 2009). Secondly, the Linked Resources are seen as “integrated lexical resources that combine several resources” (Hartmann et al. 2016) which are developed within one language and present data linked on the semantic role level, the sense level, etc.; cf. SemLink (Bonial et al., 2013), Unified Verb Index (Loper et al., 2007), among others. Linking the Russian FrameBank to FrameNet, we propose a crosslanguage resource where the data are matched on the frame level. The Russian FrameBank is an open access database which consists of the dictionary of lexical constructions and the corpus of samples of their uses randomly taken from the Russian National Corpus (RNC). At present the dictionary provides data for ca. 8000 target verbs, adjectives, and nouns, and the corpus part includes ca. 50000 annotated examples. The most recent subproject within the FrameBank project is a network of frames which pursues three main objectives:

* specify synsets linking verb senses (and thus making contribution to the verbal part of YARN, «Yet Another Russian wordNet»); * set up a network of frames generalizing verb senses (mostly “isa”, “causative of”, and “inchoative of” links, and occasionally “subframe of”, “perspective of”, and “precedes”); * map the frames of FrameBank to the frames of the Berkeley FrameNet.

The work with Russian data is performed manually bottomup, the micro level being the lexemespecific word senses, and the toplevel being the coarsegrained semantic classes of the RNC, such as Motion, Perception, etc. The most challenging for annotators is getting the right level of granularity while grouping lexemespecific microframes into lowerlevel frames. The FrameNet frame network is a good landmark in this case. The annotators are asked to find cognates in

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English, specify their frame in FrameNet and check whether there is no child frames relevant for the microframe in question. However, this solution is not always as simple as it might appear. FrameNet is known for uneven granularity in different parts of the net. For example, the best matching FN frame for the Russian verb guljat' ‘go for a walk’ is Self_motion, which is too general and does not capture such relevant features as ‘health care’, ‘leisure’, and emotional connotation. The verb deržat ' in one of its meaning corresponds to hold which belongs to the frame Manipulation. Since this frame has no closer child frames, this verb would group together with verbs like vyžat ' ‘squeeze’, massirovat' ‘massage’, and trogat' ‘touch’. While mapping frames in FrameBank to FrameNet frames, annotators are asked to mark a status of their matches as “ExactMatch”, “TooGeneral”, “TooSpecific”, and “WeakMatch”, along with suggestion on what might be more relevant lowlevel frame. Additional considerations for mapping FrameBank frames to FN frames involve the criteria of semantic roles consistency and formal pattern consistency. The list of semantic roles in FrameBank currently includes ca. 100 entities which can be considered a medium level of role granularity. If any two Russian verbs in the same frame are tagged with different roles for the same slot, this is a reason to split the frame. The formal (dis)similary of lexical constructions is a much weaker criterion, however, this argument often affects the decisions annotators make (Lyashevskaya & Kashkin 2016). In this way, both sides of lexical constructions are of use when mapping FrameBank frames to FN frames. Keywords: Russian FrameBank. FrameNet. Linked data. Frames. Semantic roles. Valency patterns. Predicateargument constructions. Russian verbs.

References

Boas, H. C. (Ed.). (2009). Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications . Mouton de Gruyter.

Bonial, C., Stowe, K., & Palmer, M. (2013). Renewing and revising SemLink. In The GenLex Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics . Pisa, Italy, 23rd September 2013.

Fillmore, C. J. (2008). Border conflicts: FrameNet meets Construction Grammar. In

Proceedings of EURALEX 2008 . 1519 July 2008. Barcelona, Spain.

Loper, E., Yi, S., & Palmer, M. (2007). Combining lexical resources: mapping between PropBank and VerbNet. In Proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Computational Semantics , 1012 January 2007, Tilburg, the Netherlands.

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Lyashevskaya, O., & Kashkin, E. (2015). FrameBank: a database of Russian lexical constructions. Communications in Computer and Information Science 542, 337348. Lyashevskaya, O., & Kashkin, E. (2016). Welcome to the club: Designing the inventory of semantic roles for adjectives. In Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies. Proceedings of International Conference “Dialog” , vol. 15 (22) (pp. 440454). Moscow.

Hartmann, S., EckleKohler, J., & Gurevych, I. (2016). Generating Training Data for Semantic Role Labeling based on Label Transfer from Linked Lexical Resources. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 4, 197–213.

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A flexible tool for an enriched FrameNet: the FrameNet Brasil Webtool 2.0


[email protected]


[email protected]

The WebTool 2.0 is an annotation and database management application developed by FrameNet Brasil, which can be accessed using any web browser, without the need to install any additional software. The WebTool uses a relational database compatible with the key concepts and structures in the Berkeley FrameNet data releases, so as to maintain compatibility with the FrameNet standards. Nevertheless, several additions were made to the software to enhance data consistency and integrity, facilitate the creation of new relations, and reduce the number of auxiliary tables. The resulting model allows not only for the implementation of the current FrameNet structure, but also for its expansion and integration to other data models, through the generalization of all data elements in the model as Entities. That is, frames, frame elements, lexical units, semantic types etc. are seen as entities that can be related among each other. These relations are agnostic in regards to the type of related entities and are seen as parts of the model itself, not as a computational aspect of the relational database. In terms of the General User Interface (GUI), the WebTool supports multilinguality using a data structure called Entry. The information about an entity, such as its name and description, is presented at the GUI indirectly through languagespecific entries. Additionally, an authentication and authorization mechanism allows for the creation of different profiles, anchored in the different levels of proficiency of the annotators. Finally, a shallow notion of Domain is implement so as to allow researchers to choose only the entities in the database that are relevant to the project – domain – they work in. Currently, the WebTool offers three annotation modules: lexicographic, constructional and full text. Import and export tools allow the inclusion of corpora for annotation and the automatic inclusion of lexemes and wordforms. The use of D3 javascript library (Bostock, Ogievetsky & Heer 2011) provides graphic visualization of the relations. The main advances achieved so far include:

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1. the implementation of the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon (Torrent et al 2014) in the database and its integration with the network of frames; 2. the alignment of lexical units with ontological categories, such as Google Places; 3. the inclusion of qualia relations between FrameNet entities (Lenci 2001).

The WebTool is a work in progress and new functions are being developed. Those include the creation of views for specific applications – such as crowdsourced annotation –, the integration of a semantic parser for semiautomatic annotation, the visualization of FrameNet Brasil data in mobile devices, and the generation of customized statistics from the database. Keywords: Webbased Annotation Tool. FrameNet. Multilinguality. Qualia. Ontology.

References Bostock, M., Ogievetsky, V. & Heer, J. (2011). D³ datadriven documents. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics , 17(12), 23012309.

Lenci, A. (2001). Building an ontology for the lexicon: Semantic types and word meaning. In OntologyBased Interpretation of Noun Phrases: Proceedings of the First International OntoQuery Workshop , University of Southern Denmark (pp. 103120).

Torrent, T. T., Lage, L. M., Sampaio, T. F., Tavares, T. S. & Matos, E. E. S. (2014). Revisiting border conflicts between FrameNet and Construction Grammar: Annotation policies for the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon. Constructions and Frames , 6(1), 34 51.

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Force Dynamics in FrameNet

Hannah E. Phinney (International Computer Science Institute)

[email protected]

The goal of this paper is to report on new work in FrameNet (framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu) that addresses the complex phenomenon of force dynamics (Talmy 2000). FrameNet has recently added several new frames for characterizing basic physical force dynamic concepts, including Level_of_force_exertion, Level_of_force_resistance, and Dynamism. Target lexical units (LUs) in these frames extend the grammatical categories that Talmy considered most force dynamic – closedclass forms such as modals and prepositions – to openclass forms like adjectives and nouns (e.g. forceful.a, strong.a, weakness.n, durability.n ). Below, example (1) shows the Frame Semantics analysis (e.g. Fillmore 2012) for the LU powerful.a in the Level_of_force_exertion frame, which FrameNet defines as “An Exerter, Action, or Force is capable of exerting or does exert a physical force at a level specified by the target”. The core frame elements in this frame are EXERTER, ACTION, and FORCE (all three in a Core set), where the EXERTER “can or does exert a force of the level specified by the target”.

1. With its POWERFUL [arms EXERTER] it threw the android over its shoulder.

The three new frames are linked in the FrameNet hierarchy of frames via frame toframe relations (e.g. Inheritance, Using, and See also), as seen in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Metaphor has been duly treated across the force dynamic frames as well, with consistent tagging of metaphorical sentences, and frame descriptions that include detailed explanations of the productive metaphors that they cover. Example (2) illustrates a metaphortagged sentence for the LU strong.a in the Level_of_force_exertion frame.

2. In recent years [the influence of the United States EXERTER] has been [much DEGREE] [STRONGER DEGREE] [than that of Britain DEGREE].

Furthermore, FrameNet has created a frametoframe Metaphor relation with the intention of linking metaphorical force dynamic frames such as Suasion and Manipulate_into_doing to the literal, physical ones. The latest research provides a more integrated account of force dynamics in the FrameNet database, and recognizes the role of force dynamic phenomena in the characterization of semantic structure in the lexicon more generally.

Keywords: Force dynamics. FrameNet. Frametoframe relations. Metaphor.

References

Fillmore, C. J., LeeGoldman, R. R., & Rhodes, R. (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (Eds.), Signbased Construction Grammar (pp. 309 372). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

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Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics: Vol. I. Conceptual structuring systems (pp. 409470). Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

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The Swedish Constructicon – current status and future prospects


[email protected]

The Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn) is a freely available online repository of Swedish construction descriptions. It is designed as a multipurpose resource for linguistics, language technology, and language education, with a special priority to account for constructions of relevance for L2 development. The constructicon is integrated in the resource infrastructure of Språkbanken (the Swedish Language Bank), including the Swedish FrameNet, and also closely connected to constructicon projects for other languages. At the time of writing, SweCcn contains around 400 construction entries and almost 50 semantic role entries. Current and near future priorities are application to L2 teaching, on the one hand, and multilingual constructicon development, on the other. The expansion of the SweCcn database to cover more constructions is likely to slow down, at least temporarily, as our funding period is now approaching its end. At a somewhat slower pace, the internal development of the database will focus more on relations between constructions and the establishment of a construction network, a constructicon proper. Keywords: Constructicon. Språkbanken. Swedish.

References

Bäckström, L., B. Lyngfelt & E. Sköldberg (2014). Towards Interlingual Constructicography. On correspondence between constructicon resources for English and Swedish. Constructions and Frames 6:1, 9–32.

Lyngfelt, B., L. Bäckström, L. Borin, A. Ehrlemark & R. Rydstedt (to appear). Constructicography at work: Theory meets practice in the Swedish Constructicon. In B. Lyngfelt, T. T. Torrent, L. Borin & K. H. Ohara (eds.), Constructicography: Constructicon development across languages .

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Sköldberg, E., B. Lyngfelt, L. Bäckström, L. Borin, M. Forsberg, L.J. Olsson, J. Prentice, R. Rydstedt, S. Tingsell & J. Uppström (2013). Between Grammars and Dictionaries: a Swedish Constructicon. Proceedings of eLex 2013, 310327.

Swedish Constructicon . <https://spraakbanken.gu.se/konstruktikon/>

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Towards Greater Collaboration in FrameNet Development

Collin Baker (ICSI)

[email protected]

Collaboration was always an important part of Charles Fillmore's conception of how FrameNet would be developed. He hoped that his colleagues and former students around the world, and their students and colleagues in turn, would be interested and involved with FrameNet, both using it as a resource and contributing to its development by suggesting additions and corrections to frames, frame elements and annotations. The FrameNet team at ICSI has received hundreds of such contributions over the years, from suggested corrections of individual annotated sentences, to published articles suggesting additions and improvements in the overall structure of the database and the direction of FN development (Ovchinnikova et al .2011, Osswalt et al. 2014). We have been able to make some of the suggested changes in the FN database, but have also been seeking ways to involve many more people from the community of interest around FrameNet in this process. One obvious direction is to work more closely with the groups that are creating FrameNets for languages other than English (Boas 2009); we have taken the first steps to align the databases created by these groups and are seeking funding to create and release an aligned multilingual FrameNet database, and to improve collaboration among the various language groups, in order to better represent both commonalities and languagespecific differences among them.

We are also exploring methods for incorporating a wider variety of contributions into the FrameNet project. In some cases, an appropriate methodology might be similar to Wikipedia, where everyone is free to make contributions by uploading and editing data, but there is an accepted way to adjudicate disagreements and maintain community standards of accuracy and clarity. This might be the best way to incorporate contributions from linguists and students of linguistics, lexicography, translation studies, etc. In other cases, particularly for more computationally oriented research and NLP applications, moderate precision and high recall may be better than high precision and low recall, suggesting that FrameNet could include different categories of data, of varying degrees of accuracy, for different uses. This might mean directly including automatically or semi automatically extracted lexical units, crowdsourced annotation, etc. in the FrameNet database, with indications as to its provenance and reliability. This could also include systematic links from the FrameNet database to other lexical humancurated lexical resources, as in SemLink (Bonial et al . 2013) or more automatically produced resources, as in UBY (Gurevych et al. 2012). ultimately forming part of the Linked Linguistic Open Data

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initiative. The developers of FrameNetbased software such as frame semantic role labelers (Das et al. 2010) and the NLTK toolkit for FrameNet will also play a key role in these efforts. I will discuss the current status of and future plans for these approaches to FrameNet development.

References

Boas, H. C. (Ed.) 2009. Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications . Mouton de Gruyter.

Bonial, C.; Stowe, K. & Palmer, M. 2013. Renewing and Revising SemLink. In Proceedings of the GenLex Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (GenLex13).

Das, D.; Schneider, N.; Chen, D. & Smith, N. A. 2010. Probabilistic FrameSemantic Parsing

Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technologies Conference.

Gurevych, I.; EckleKohler, J.; Hartmann, S.; Matuschek, M.; Meyer, C. M. & Wirth, C. 2012. UBYA LargeScale Unified LexicalSemantic Resource Based on LMF. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012). Association for Computational Linguistics. 580590

Ovchinnikova, E.; Montazeri, N.; Alexandrov, T.; Hobbs, J. R.; McCord, M. C. & MulkarMehta, R. 2011. Abductive Reasoning with a Large Knowledge Base for Discourse Processing. In Proceedings of IWCS 2011. Curran Associates. 225234

Osswald, R. & Van Valin, Jr., R. D. 2014. FrameNet, Frame Structure, and the SyntaxSemantics Interface. In Gamerschlag, T.; Gerland, D.; Osswald, R. & Petersen, W. (Eds.) Frames and Concept Types: Applications in Language and Philosophy . Springer, 94, 125156

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