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Despite their diversity and complexity in structure and meaning, little research has been conducted into the systematic presentation of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in English learners' dictionaries (ELDs). To fill in the gap, this paper focused on the treatment of V N ADJ ASCs in the \"Big Five\" online ELDs against usage data. First a list of 40 target verbs was obtained using two measures of contingency (i.e., faithfulness and collostruction strength) through collostructional analysis of V N ADJ ASCs in the British National Corpus, and then the related ASCs regarding their macro- and micro-structural presentation in selected dictionaries were examined. It was found that most ELDs attach importance to ASCs, notably LDOCE, which assigns many of them the status of phrases. Nevertheless, the treatment of ASCs in current ELDs is inadequate. First, the inclusion of ASCs in most ELDs is far from sufficient. Second, in some cases, there is a mismatch between a valency pattern illustration and an illustrative example. Last but not least, most ELDs are not consistent with respect to their policy of listing and encoding ASCs, and assigning them the status of phrases. We proposed, in the framework of the usage-based construction grammar, some suggestions for optimizing the treatment of ASCs.

Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has become increasingly popular in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years. In CxG, the basic units of linguistic analysis are constructions: arbitrary and conventional form-meaning pairings, reminiscent of Saussure’s linguistic sign, but applied to levels of linguistic analysis beyond the lexicon. A large body of research has provided ample evidence in support of CxG. However, the theory remains unknown to many colleagues outside the Anglosphere. In this paper, I highlight a particularly interesting strand of CxG that is referred to as ‘usage-based’, an approach that assumes constructions are learned based on input frequency, that is, through repeated exposure to and use of a linguistic structure (hence usage-based). The main aim of this paper is thus to demonstrate how corpus data can be analyzed to find evidence for ‘entrenchment’ of linguistic structures and thus, the existence of constructions. I will illustrate this procedure by applying so-called covarying-collexeme analyses to data from the Slovak National Corpus (SNC) and the Slovak Web 2011 corpus from which I extracted 785 tokens of the so-called Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g. Čím viac čítam, tým viac rozumiem).

This article reports on the quantitative corpus-based investigation into the form-function interplay of the English detached adjectival construction with an explicit subject. Taking Usage-based Construction Grammar as its theoretical framework, this paper investigates the patterns of attraction of lexical items that appear in the main slots of the grammatical construction. The data obtained substantiate the constructional status of the construction and determine its semantic and functional specification in present-day English.

Despite their diversity and complexity in structure and meaning, little research has been conducted into the systematic presentation of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in English learners' dictionaries (ELDs). To fill in the gap, this paper focused on the treatment of V N ADJ ASCs in the \"Big Five\" online ELDs against usage data. First a list of 40 target verbs was obtained using two measures of contingency (i.e., faithfulness and collostruction strength) through collostructional analysis of V N ADJ ASCs in the British National Corpus, and then the related ASCs regarding their macro- and micro-structural presentation in selected dictionaries were examined. It was found that most ELDs attach importance to ASCs, notably LDOCE, which assigns many of them the status of phrases. Nevertheless, the treatment of ASCs in current ELDs is inadequate. First, the inclusion of ASCs in most ELDs is far from sufficient. Second, in some cases, there is a mismatch between a valency pattern illustration and an illustrative example. Last but not least, most ELDs are not consistent with respect to their policy of listing and encoding ASCs, and assigning them the status of phrases. We proposed, in the framework of the usage-based construction grammar, some suggestions for optimizing the treatment of ASCs.

This paper contributes to the development of collostructional analysis by taking up one of the long-standing issues in collostructional analysis, viz. the assessment and interpretation of the collexeme lists created. It uses the DWDS corpus documenting 20th century written German to study two modalverb constructions which contain either vermögen or bekommen as the first verb plus an infinitive. When expressing ‘possibility’/‘capability’, these constructions compete with the ubiquitous and strongly grammaticalized könnenconstruction. To compare their constructional semantics, the paper combines collostructional analyses with a close investigation of the verbal meanings characterizing their V slots. To classify the collexemes occurring in these slots comprehensively, the semantic information provided about each V collexeme by “GermaNet” is utilized in three different ways: A manual, context-sensitive classification of the top collexemes into the 15 generic verb classes provided by GermaNet is followed by cluster analyses over the semantic-relatedness values given out by the SemRel tool of GermaNet for the pairwise comparison of all possible collexeme combinations. This is complemented by a network analysis identifying collexemes that are salient or “central”, i.e. located on the largest number of “shortest paths” connecting any two collexemes. The implications of the results for the functional differential between the two constructions as well as the methodology itself are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the study of constituent order in ditransitive constructions by means of a variationist analysis based on spoken Spanish from Madrid. We analyze the variable position of objects in ditransitive clauses. We identify two variants: (1) Verb-Direct Object-Indirect Object and (2) Verb-Indirect Object-Direct Object. We include in the envelope of variation ditransitive constructions in which the DO is expressed by a noun phrase (sometimes preceded by the marker a) and the IO is expressed by means of a prepositional phrase preceded by a ‘to’. The percentage of V-IO-DO constructions in our data is 33%. The results of our statistical analyses show that V-IO-DO is significantly conditioned by the following linguistic factors: grammatical person of the IO, type of DO, and verb type. Unlike previous studies, we find that information flow factors do not have a significant effect on this word order variation. Considering its recurrent usage patterns in the discourse, we identify the verb decir ‘to say’ and the constructions it occurs in as the likely source and spread of the V-IO-DO order.

Approaches to creativity commonly distinguish between F-creativity (rule-compliant use) and E-creativity (rule-breaking use). This dichotomy in part stems from a focus on grammatical constructions (‘nodes’) at the relative expense of their connections (‘links’). We approach creativity and productivity from a link-based perspective in Usage-Based Construction Grammar, and assume that productivity pertains to a unit’s inventory of links, while creativity pertains to the creation and maintenance of links. These assumptions are showcased using the into -causative ( He talked me into going , They scared us into working harder ). The construction is productive because it hosts a large inventory of verbal slot-fillers ( talk , scare ). Conversely, these slot-fillers themselves are creative because they can establish and maintain links with a construction that is not their primary host. This property is not linear: we assume that the slot-fillers’ ability to occur in unusual constructional environments reflects their general ‘creative potential’ to form and maintain (new) links within the network. In data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), we find weak, but consistent correlations between verbs’ association with the into -causative and (i) their semantic and syntactic compatibility with the construction, and, crucially, (ii) their general flexibility and ability to establish and maintain links.

Construction grammar is an approach to language that posits that units and structures in language can be exhaustively described as pairings between form and meaning. These pairings are called constructions and can have different degrees of abstraction, i.e. they span the entire range from very concrete (armadillo, avocado) to very abstract constructions such as the ditransitive construction (I gave her a book). This approach has been applied to a wide variety of different areas of research in linguistics, such as how new constructions emerge and change historically. It has also been applied to investigate the evolutionary emergence of modern fully fledged language, i.e. the question of how systems of constructions can arise out of prelinguistic communication. In this paper, we review the contribution of usage-based construction grammar approaches to language change and language evolution to the questions of (i) the structure and nature of prehistoric languages and (ii) how constructions in prehistoric languages emerged out of non-linguistic or protolinguistic communication. In particular, we discuss the possibilities of using constructions as the main unit of analysis both in reconstructing predecessors of existing languages (protolanguages) and in formulating theories of how a potential predecessor of human language in general (protolanguage) must have looked like. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.

This study investigates how visual context influences second language (L2) long-term structural priming for the Chinese ba construction. The experiment consisted of a baseline phase, an exposure phase, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. L2 Chinese learners (N = 120) were assigned to 1 of 4 groups for the exposure manipulation. The 3 experimental groups were exposed to simultaneous text and audio stimuli using the ba construction, accompanied by different visual contexts: a TV episode for the video group, isolated pictures for the picture group, and no nonlinguistic context for the text group. The picture and the video groups showed a greater increase in production of the ba construction from the baseline to the immediate posttest than the text group, but only the video group continued producing higher rates of the ba construction in the delayed posttest after a 3-day interval. The production of the ba construction remained unchanged for the control group throughout the experiment. We conclude that visual context enhances L2 structural priming and that the continuous video context can support long-term priming effects. This is the first study to directly compare the magnitude of L2 long-term structural priming in different visual contexts, shedding light on the mechanism by which context facilitates L2 learning.

Theories of grammatical development differ in how much abstract knowledge they attribute to young children. Here, we report a series of experiments using a computational model to evaluate the explanatory power of child grammars based not on abstract rules but on concrete words and phrases and some local abstractions associated with these words and phrases. We use a Bayesian procedure to extract such item-based grammars from transcriptions of 28+ h of each of two children's speech at 2 and 3 years of age. We then use these grammars to parse all of the unique multiword utterances from transcriptions of separate recordings of these same children at each of the two ages. We found that at 2 years of age such a model had good coverage and predictive fit, with the children showing radically limited productivity. Furthermore, adding expert-annotated parts of speech to the induction procedure had little effect on coverage, with the exception of the category of noun. At age 3, the children's productivity sharply increased and the addition of a verb and a noun category markedly improved the model's performance.