Linking Constructions into Functional Linguistics: The role of constructions in grammar (Studies in Language Companion Series)

There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role, place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German, Irish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Yaqui, Tepehua (Totonacan), Persian, and English, and they offer new data on the role of constructions, within the RRG theory, in these languages. Further, this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function, in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions. Linking Constructions into Functional Linguistics 2 Editorial page 3 Title page 4 LCC data 5 Table of contents 6 Introduction 8 References 19 Controller-controllee relations in purposive constructions 22 1. Introduction 22 2. Defining purpose and rationale clauses 24 3. Purposive constructions within RRG revisited 28 3.1 Tendencies for the controller-controllee relations 28 3.2 The lexical manifestation of the controllee 31 3.3 Structural and inherent control relations 33 4. A constructional schema for purpose clauses 37 5. Final remarks 42 References 42 Transitivity, constructions, and the projection of argument structure in RRG 44 1. Introduction 44 2. Transitivity in English and Tepehua 46 English: Underspecified transitivity 46 Tepehua: Fully specified transitivity 48 Transitivity of borrowed forms 51 3. Accommodating argument structure 54 Dative construction 54 Verb-verb compound construction 56 4. Conclusion 60 References 60 Constructions in RRG 62 1. Introduction 62 2. Previous studies 64 2.1 Tsujimura (2005) 64 2.2 Kageyama (2007) 66 3. Intransitive mimetic verbs 67 3.1 Constructions in RRG 67 3.2 Semantics-to-syntax linking 67 4. Transitive mimetic verbs 74 4.1 Transitivity of mimetic verbs 74 4.2 The body-part + mimetic-sase construction 75 4.3 The colloquial mimetic-suru construction 78 4.4 Syntax-to-semantics linking 81 5. Conclusion 84 References 84 A constructional perspective on clefting in Persian 88 1. Introduction 89 2. A survey of cleft literature 89 3. RRG treatment of clefts in Persian 98 4. Extraposition vs. clefting 112 5. Grammatical relations in cleft constructions 117 6. Conclusion 119 Abbreviations 121 References 121 Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG) 124 0. Introduction 124 1. Theoretical and methodological considerations 126 2. Consequences for the organization of RRG 128 3. Towards a radical role and reference grammar 133 4. The activity hierarchy 138 4.1 The activity hierarchy at the lexical level 140 4.2 Activity hierarchy and constructional schemas 151 5. Conclusion and outlook 158 References 159 Constructions as grammatical objects 164 1. Introduction 164 2. The role of constructions in RRG 166 3. Viewing a construction in a construction repository 167 3.1 Construction internal architecture 168 3.2 Construction internal processing workspace 169 4. Case study: The modern irish prepositional ditransitive constructions 169 5. The factors that influence word order 174 5.1 Syntactic weight 174 5.2 Information structure 175 5.3 Animacy and definiteness of referents 176 5.4 The animacy, thematic and nominal hierarchies 176 6. The Irish prepositional ditransitive constructions 177 6.1 Characterising the ditransitive constructions of modern irish 177 6.2 The verb thug ‘give’ 179 6.3 Other three–place causative predicates 184 6.4 What about 1.person or 2.person PN themes? 188 6.5 Evidence from the topicalisation processes in Irish 189 6.6 Other clause types with clause final theme 191 7. Discussion and conclusions 191 References 197 Constructions in Role and Reference Grammar 200 1. Introduction 200 2. A brief overview of the status of constructions within RRG: The case of the resultative 202 3. An RRG enriched constructional schema for the English resultative 207 4. A family of constructions: A preliminary proposal 216 5. Concluding remarks 221 References 222 WTowards a model of constructional meaning for natural language understanding 226 1. Introduction 226 2. Role and reference grammar and the lexical-constructional model 228 3. FunGramKB 229 3.1 Thematic frames and meaning postulates 231 3.2 Lexical entries 233 3.3 Constructional schemata 234 4. Building constructional meaning in RRG with FunGramKB 239 5. Conclusions and future research 245 6. Acknowledgments 246 References 246 Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression in the Lexical Constructional Model 252 1. Introduction 253 2. What is a construction in the LCM? 254 3. Mediated compositionality 259 4. Descriptive tools 264 4.1 A typology of cognitive models 265 4.2 Argument-structure lexical and constructional templates 268 4.3 Idiomatic constructions 272 4.4 Summary 274 5. Explanatory tools 274 5.1 Constraints of subsumption 277 5.1.1 Vertical constraints 278 5.1.2 Horizontal constraints 280 5.2 Amalgamation 281 5.3 Saturation of constructional variables 282 6. Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression 283 7. Conclusion 286 References 287 Constructions in the Lexical Constructional Model 292 1. Introduction: Aims* 292 2. A brief introduction to the LCM and its history 293 3. A cognitively-oriented functionalist precursor: The lexical grammar model 294 4. Further semantic enrichment 295 5. Synthesis with cognitive/constructionist approaches: The LCM 296 6. The computational strand of the model: FunGramKB 301 7. Discussion: A possible way forward 306 References 311 From idioms to sentence structures and beyond 316 1. Introduction 317 2. Role and reference grammar: A lexical approach to linguistic structure 318 3. Constructional schemas 320 4. A lexical-constructional account of the German bekommen-passive 322 4.1 Lexical constraints for the bekommen-passive 323 4.2 Conclusion 327 5. The German bracket structure as a construction 327 5.1 The German bracket structure as a word order rule 328 5.2 The RRG word order rule for German main declarative clauses in the Semantics to Syntax linking 329 5.3 The German bracket structure as a construction 332 5.4 The bracket structure as a grammatical object 336 5.5 Conclusion 339 6. Cultural objects/memes: On Constructions that require cultural knowledge 339 6.1 Cultural objects = memes for interaction 340 6.2 Three examples 341 6.3 Conclusion 346 7. Summary and conclusion of the paper 347 References 349 Web sources 351 Index 352 Controller-controllee Relations In Purposive Constructions : A Construction-based Account / Lilián Guerrero -- Transitivity, Constructions, And The Projection Of Argument Structure In Rrg / James K. Watters -- Constructions In Rrg : A Case Study Of Mimetic Verbs In Japanese / Kiyoko Toratani -- A Constructional Perspective On Clefting In Persian : An Insight Into Differentiating Between Emphatic And Deictic In / Farhad Moezzipour -- Radical Role And Reference Grammar (rrrg) : A Sketch For Remodelling The Syntax-semantics-interface / Rolf Kailuweit -- Constructions As Grammatical Objects : A Case Study Of The Prepositional Ditransitive Construction In Modern Irish / Brian Nolan -- Constructions In Role And Reference Grammar : The Case Of The English Resultative / Rocío Jiménez-briones & Alba Luzondo-oyón -- Towards A Model Of Constructional Meaning For Natural Language Understanding / Carlos Periñán-pascual -- Meaning Construction, Meaning Interpretation And Formal Expression In The Lexical Constructional Model / Francisco José Ruiz De Mendoza Ibáñez -- Constructions In The Lexical Constructional Model / Christopher S. Butler -- From Idioms To Sentence Structures And Beyond : The Theoretical Scope Of The Concept Construction / Elke Diedrichsen -- Index. Edited By Brian Nolan, Elke Diedrichsen. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Controller-controllee relations in purposive constructions: A construction-based account / Lilián Guerrero Transitivity, constructions, and the projection of argument structure in RRG /James K. Watters Constructions in RRG: A case study of mimetic verbs in Japanese / Kiyoko Toratani A constructional perspective on clefting in Persian: An insight into differentiating between emphatic and deictic in / Farhad Moezzipour Radical Role and Reference Grammar (RRRG): A sketch for remodelling the Syntax-Semantics-Interface / Rolf Kailuweit Constructions as grammatical objects: A case study of the prepositional ditransitive construction in Modern Irish / Brian Nolan Constructions in Role and Reference Grammar: The case of the English resultative / Rocío Jiménez-Briones and Alba Luzondo Oyón Towards a model of constructional meaning for natural language understanding / Carlos Periñán-Pascual Meaning construction, meaning interpretation and formal expression in the Lexical Constructional Model / Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez Constructions in the Lexical Constructional Model / Christopher S. Butler From idioms to sentence structures and beyond: The theoretical scope of the concept "Construction" / Elke Diedrichsen. The paper will explore the theoretical scope of the concept "construction", as envisaged in Constructional approaches to grammar. Starting from the Role and Reference Grammar notion of Constructions, as represented in "Constructional Schemas", it will be argued that Constructional Schemas as representations of linguistic knowledge can be used not only for language specific constructions, but for the wide range of argument structure and sentence structure constructions as well. This will be exemplified by extensive discussions of two well known German construction types, which are the bekommen- .. There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world's languages. This book offers a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role, place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar.