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Albert GattLIN 3098 Corpus LinguisticsIn this lectureSome more on corpora and grammarConstruction Grammar as a theoretical frameworkCollostructional analysisPart 1Constructions and construction grammarSome things weve establishedGrammatical constructions (rules) enter into non-arbitrary relations with words.Collocational frameworksThe idiom principle vs the open choice principleCollexeme and colligation analysis

Both of these are about the extent to which specific syntactic frames and words attract eachother:Collocational frameworks: [a N of]: nouns tend to be quantities (number etc)Colligation: consequence tends to occur surrounded by a and of...

Some things weve establishedWe can think of grammatical constructions as falling on a continuum from complex, abstract constructions to lexical items.Constructions themselves have meaning:E.g. It-object constructionPeople find it hard to exist in a drug-free world.a stereotyped way of presenting a situation in terms of how it is evaluatedevaluation is placed after the verbThe words used in constructions are important clues to identifying their meaning and use:E.g. 98% of verbs in the it- construction are find and make

Construction grammarTheoretical framework that views syntactic rules as:Combinations of linguistic entities (words, phrases)With semantic/pragmatic properties that are not fully predictable from their parts.

Constructions are represented as complex frames, with slots for specific lexical items.They also have meanings.They restrict the classes of lexical items that can enter the construction: a word is permitted in the construction if its meaning is compatible with the construction meaning.Example: the ditransitive alternationVerbs like give can enter into two semantically similar, but syntactically quite different constructions:Ditransitive: A give X YE.g. John give Mary a bookPrepositional dative: A give Y to XE.g. John give a book to MaryDo these constructions mean slightly different things?Hypothesis:The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) John transferred a book from himself to MaryThe prepositional dative involves caused movementJohn caused a book to go to MaryExample: the ditransitive alternationHypothesis:The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) in a face to face situationThe prepositional dative involves caused movement from one location to anotherIf this hypothesis is correct, then we should observe:More verbs that have a direct transfer meaning in the ditransitive.E.g. giveMore verbs that have a caused movement meaning in the prepositional dative E.g. bringExample 2: Covariational conditionalEnglish:The Xer the YerThe more the merrierThe more I think about it the weirder it seemsNote: X/Y can be single lexemes, clauses....Maltese:Iktar ma X, iktar YIktar ma naseb, inqas nifhemMore restricted: X and Y need to be clauses (or at least verbs)Interestingly: X has a negation particle ma, but this is not interpreted negatively.Meaning/function:Specifying that there is a link between two elements or variables (X and Y).Exploring these in corporaRecent work in Corpus Linguistics has proposed Collostructional Analysis:Based on the same assumptions as Construction GrammarGrammatical structures viewed as meaningful unitsFocuses on the relationship between lexis and grammatical constructions, but is more sophisticated than collocational frameworks.Collostructional analysisUsually asks questions of the form: is X strongly attracted to Y?E.g. Is the verb give strongly attracted to the ditransitive construction?This is usually done in one of three ways:Collexeme analysisDistinctive collexeme analysisCovarying collexeme analysisPart 2Collexeme analysisBasic ideaQuestion: Given some construction G, what kinds of words can I find in slot S of G?E.g. Ditransitive: [V NP NP]What verbs can enter this construction?(I.e. Is there a special restriction on what we can find?)Given a particular construction, find all occurrences of the construction in the corpus.For the slot of interest, look at the lexical items that occur there.Compare their frequency: are there differences between the items in the likelihood with which they occur in the same construction?

Practical task 1Run a CQL search for the ditransitive construction.Specify that:You want any one of these verbs: give, bring, make, tell, askThe verb should be followed by two NPsFor our purposes, you can specify the NP pattern as something consisting of:An determinerA noun

Practical task 1After youve run your query, create a frequency list of the node forms.You will need to identify the real ditransitives from the others.Pay particular attention to the verbs.Do they form a coherent semantic class?Do you find that some verbs are more likely to occur in this construction than others?Would you say that these verbs are more attracted to this construction than others?

Based on the verb meanings, what evidence do you find for the hypothesis that the construction involves direct transfer?Some data (from Gries 2009)Strongly attracted to the ditransitive:Give, tell, send, ask, promise, earnThese seem to be strong collexemes of the ditransitive constructionLess attracted (though possible):Make, doPart 3Distinctive collexeme analysisDistinctive collexemesRather than checking if a word is associated with a specific construction, here we compare the occurrence of a word in two different (but related) constructions.

E.g. We know that give allows the dative alternation:Give X YGive Y to XAre we more likely to find it in one or the other?Practical task 2Conduct a query for the verb give:In the ditransitive construction: give + NP + NPIn the to-dative construction: give NP to NP

Look at the results. Do you see a difference in the distribution? Why is this the case?

Do the same for the verb supply.Do you notice any differences?The pointThe point of distinctive collexeme analysis is to identify the attraction between specific lexical items and constructions.

For two related constructions:If there is evidence of a strong degree of attraction between a lexical item and one of them, that suggests that the item fits the semantic restrictions of the construction very well.

But how do we explain the difference, where it exists? Its the same lexical item, why should it prefer one construction vs another?The most likely explanation seems to be that the two constructions, though similar, have different semantic properties.Part 4Covarying collexeme analysisCovarying collexeme analysisHere, we are no longer focusing on the relationship between a word and a construction, but between different words within the same construction.

This is similar to what we do with collocations, but here, were taking more grammatical information into account.The methodExample: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP]This contains a slot for an agent, a verb, a recipient and a theme

The second post-verb NP (the theme) is the entity undergoing the action.

Therefore, we would expect there to be a strong affinity between the verb and the theme.(I.e. The verb should place strong semantic restrictions on what kind of theme we can have).ExampleExample: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP]NP ask NP NP

What sort of noun would you expect in the second post-verbal NP?

What about:NP tell NP NP

Practical task 3Search for the verb ask in the ditransitive constructionCount how many times the second (theme) post-verbal NP is headed by the noun question.

Now search for the noun question as the object of any other verb in the ditransitive, i.e. a pattern of the form:Verb NP [the/a question]How many times does question occur as an object of a verb other than ask?What other verbs do you find?The pointThese examples suggest that there is a strong tendency for words to attract eachother within a specific grammatical construction

Note that this goes further than simple collocational analysis:With collocations, were looking at words that co-occur within a specific distanceWith covarying collexemes, were looking at words that co-occur in specific slots within the same construction.A final practical taskIn SketchEngine, click Word Sketch on the left menu

Word sketches give you a list of the grammatical environments in which words occur with significant frequency.

Look for the nouns question and storyLook specifically at the object_of relationWhat do you conclude about the differences between them?(Follow this up by looking at other grammatical relations within the word sketch for each word).