from *pour one's heart out*, for instance, nor is *turn up one's nose (at something)* one idiom and *turn one's nose up (at something)* another, unrelated one. My proposal in [8] is to acknowledge 'allo-structions': structurally different manifestations of a single construction that remains underspecified with respect to, for instance, exact word order. That single construction may be lexically specific (e.g. the idiom with *pour, out* and *one's heart*) or more schematic (e.g. the transitive verb-particle construction).

In [9], I provide a more worked-out constructionist account of the particle placement alternation, integrating the many contextual and discursive factors that play a role in the preferred choice of one ordering over another. Strong lexical preferences notwithstanding – for instance, speakers prefer to say *blow off steam*, not *blow steam off*, and also *eat your heart out*, not *eat out your heart* – the two orderings are in principle possible when the object NP has moderate weight (e.g. *stick out your tongue / stick your tongue out*). An NP has moderate weight when it is neither an unstressed pronoun (e.g. *I don't want to turn down 'em*) nor a sequence of, say, five words or over, or a shorter one that is structurally complex due to clausal material (e.g. ??I don't want to turn people I love down). The further factors, then, that interact with the alternation include discourse-familiarity with the direct object NP, the elements that the speaker wishes to focus on, the previous occurrence of one ordering or the other (i.e. syntactic priming), register and regional variation (spoken discourse has more instances of the ‘split’ ordering than written discourse, and so does British English compared to American English). One factor that deserves more attention, I claim, is the general familiarity of the referent of the direct object NP and of the situation. For instance, *put the kettle on* is a highly routine action in England, closely tied to the cultural practice of drinking tea and socializing. One hardly ever encounters the alternative *put on the kettle*. (Of course, this familiarity-influenced ordering may have crystalized into a lexical preference.) In [9] I further attempt to model these various factors as constraints within a network that may simultaneously motivate one constructional choice more strongly than another.

In [10], I revisit the alternation, wondering whether it jeopardizes a bedrock principle of linguistic theory: Lexical Integrity. This is a principle that forbids words from being disrupted and reordered by syntactic rules. Doesn't the fact that a particle verb like *freak out* can be separated (e.g. *It freaked my parents out*) or that a particle can sometimes be preposed (e.g. *Along came a surprise, changing everything*) constitute serious counterevidence to the Lexical Integrity Principle? I argue that while a verb-particle can be a word we should not necessarily see it as a word in *all* its manifestations.

My argumentation is therefore not, as some have claimed, that particle verbs are never
words. A good argument for their (possible) wordhood is based on the Dutch progressive *aan het*
construction, which accepts both morphologically simple verbs and separable complex verbs, but
(at least in the standard variety) not syntactic combinations, even lexicalized ones. Compare (3a-
c), which all mean 'They were killing him'. (*Doden* is a simple verb, *ombrengen*, lit. 'bring around',
a particle verb, and *om zeep brengen*, lit. 'bring to soap', a combination with a verb and a PP.)

(3) a. Ze waren hem aan het **doden**.
b. Ze waren hem aan het **ombrengen**.
c. *Ze waren hem aan het **om zeep brengen**.

[10] lists further examples from German and English in which particle verbs behave like simple verbs and unlike phrasal combinations. The point is that in cases where the particle is separated from the verbal part, as in (4a), and where the parts are, additionally, permutated, as in (4b), the two elements are not a *word* anymore.
(4) a. Ik vind dat ze hem **om** hadden moeten kunnen **brengen**. ('I think they should have been able to kill him.')
b. Ze brachten hem diezelfde nacht met een sluwe list **om**. 'They killed him that same night with a cunning trick.'

I admit that it is hard to escape a semblance of circularity, as it looks as though what I maintain is that in examples such as (4a-b), the particle and the base verb do not form a word, as words cannot be separated, which is a rule that holds firm even in cases like (4a-b), where what looks like a counterexample is in fact not a word, as words cannot be separated, etc.

Accepting that there may be a mother node that is underspecified for single-word or multi-word status is a way to save Lexical Integrity, however. On the whole, words are different from phrases and these two levels of language rarely mix, in that one can find words inside phrases but typically not phrases inside words. Phrasal compounds do exist (e.g. [N [new car] smell], [N [generative grammar] proposal]), but this morphological pattern is not fully productive and can best be described at a medium level of generality, involving head nouns that fall into certain classes, one class being something like 'concept', with members such as assumption, constraint, principle, rule, theory, thesis. With most other nouns as head, the first member in a compound noun is usually not a phrase. Compare these compounds containing food as head:

(5) a. baby food
b. ??fussy baby food

The sequence in (5b) is fine, of course, if the meaning is 'baby food that is fussy to use', but then it's not a phrasal compound, just an adjective + (compound) noun combination. Even though verb-particle combinations would seem to undermine a sharp boundary between morphology and syntax, I argue that the distinction remains a valid one to make.

## 2. A constructional menagerie

My interest in constructions extends beyond verb-particle constructions. Throughout the years, I've explored a diverse range of linguistic structures. The second part of my portfolio features a compilation of publications that examine various constructions, presented in pairs – a curated assembly resembling a compact Noah's ark of constructional variety.

### 2.1 Two classic scalar constructions

One of the constructions that are frequently mentioned in introductions to Construction Grammar is the correlative comparative construction. It is also sometimes referred to as the 'covariational conditional construction'. In [11], I point out that though a simple conditional paraphrase is often possible (as in the case of (6a)), it isn't always (as (6b) demonstrates):
(6) a. The faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there. (≈ 'If we drive faster, we'll get there sooner.')

b. The more fish I ate, the more I discovered that the breading was undercooked – yuck! (≈ 'If I ate more fish, ...')

A more sophisticated conditional analysis is possible, whereby (6a), for instance, is understood as 'For any two scenarios, s1 and s2, if we drive faster in s1 than in s2, then we'll get there sooner in s1 than in s2'.

Previous research has pointed out that tense forms used for counterfactual conditionals are disallowed (cf. (7a)), but I demonstrate that if the context itself is counterfactual, these tense forms are possible after all (cf. (7b)):

(7) a. *The faster we drove now, the sooner we'd get there.

b. If we had a car, then I guess it's true that the faster we drove, the sooner we'd get there.

This is expected if we understand that the correlative comparative construction correlates two *factual* differences within some possible world. This possible world is usually reality but it could also be a counterfactual world. In (7b), the *if*-clause sets up a counterfactual world within which it's then possible to talk about 'factual' differences.

With respect to modal verbs of root necessity, I also observe in [11] that while (8a) is possible, the closely related comparative correlative in (8b) makes little sense:

(8) a. If you want to lose weight, you'll need to eat less.

b. #The more weight you want to lose, the less you'll need to eat.

The second clause in (8b) suggests that, as your desire to lose weight increases, there will be less of a need for you to eat, which may be *one* of the possible interpretations of (8a), but certainly not the most salient one. This suggests that the comparative phrase (*the*) less doesn't simply 'originate' within the clause. Indeed, there can be instances of the construction with what is called an 'exophrastic' comparative phrase, one that seems to be 'pre-installed' and has scope over the entire situation, as in (9):

(9) The more I learn, the more I don't know anything. (≈ '..., the more {it's the case that / I realize that} I don't know anything.')

I furthermore observe in [11] that the comparative correlation construction merely expresses a positive or negative correlation, but it doesn't specify whether or not that correlation is linear. The example in (6a) above illustrates this point nicely. *The faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there* correctly states that drive time is shorter with faster speeds. For a distance of fifty kilometres, driving at an average speed of 100 km/h instead of at 50 km/h will reduce the drive time by thirty minutes. Increasing the average driving speed by another 50 km/h (to a reckless 150 km/h) will only gain you an extra ten minutes off the drive time (Figure 3). No matter how fast one drives, one can never reach one's destination "in no time", literally.
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. *The faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there:* the comparative correlative doesn't by itself indicate that the correlation is not a linear one.</figcaption></figure>

Another famous construction I have dealt with, this time with Edwige Dugas and Vera Tobin, is the *let alone* construction, which again involves scalar semantics. This construction has been claimed to involve an entailment relation from the first proposition to the second (expressed by the fragment clause after *let alone*), as in (10a). In [12], we focus on the largely overlooked use as in (10b), which one prominent grammarian dismissed as an error, resulting from internalizing "the wrong meaning" of the construction:

(10) a. I don't have one child, let alone six (...)
b. (...) we don't have ten children, let alone one (...)

We argue that the use in (10b) is not erratic or illogical. It is in fact quite common, exhibits the original use of *let alone*, and is motivated by the wish to cancel, by way of afterthought, a possible implicature from the first proposition – in (10b), not having ten children still leaves room for the possibility that one has *some* children, even up to nine.

The two uses differ with respect to which part of the construction has most relevance. This is clear from considering the contexts of the two examples above, which are both attested ones. The sentence in (10a) occurs in a context about a mother bringing up six children, so the second proposition is relevant to that (while the first part is most informative). The sentence in (10b) appears as part of a reply to an interlocutor asking, provocatively, "Where's the father of your ten children?", so here the first proposition of the construction answers directly to that (and the second is more informative). Beyond this important difference, the canonical and the after-thought use are connected by the shared pragmatic information that the first clause could suffice
on its own in the context and that second clause is portrayed as not being worthy of too much attention (its proposition being either entailed or merely relating to an unwanted implicature).

## 2.2 Modal verb constructions

Implicatures can also play an important role in the use of modal verbs. In [13], Ilse Depraetere and I demonstrate that modals may appear in certain fairly conventional sequences that come with a pre-packaged pragmatic implicature. Consider (11):

> (11) Not if I can help it.

Semantically, this fragment clause just means that the situation referred to will not come to friction if the speaker has the means or opportunity to intervene. Pragmatically, the speaker is understood as asserting their intent to actively avoid or thwart the situation in question. The phrase carries a sense of agency and resolve, underscoring the speaker's willingness to take action to avert the potential outcome. The sentence comes close to meaning, 'Not if I can help it, and help it I will'. Using this kind of *not*-fragment without that pledge interpretation is inappropriate, something which can then be exploited for comic purposes, as when someone utters (11) merely to express an open conditional: *Not if I can help it. And help it I might*. (This is only appropriate if the juxtaposed sentence is meant as an understatement.)

In [13], we thus adduce several pieces of evidence that interpretations of clauses with modals – in this paper, *can*, *can’t* and *could* – can be ‘short-circuited’ by the construction that these clauses instantiate. One further case is *How can we VP?*, which is often used to express self-reproach and to exhort oneself to do otherwise (e.g., *How can we believe this crap?*, *How can we remain silent in the face of...?*). It is not always just pragmatic information that is short-circuited. Modals are notoriously ambiguous (e.g., *can* can express ability, opportunity, narrow-scope permission, wide-scope situation permissibility, etc.) and standard formulations can have the effect of narrowing down the range of meanings to just one. Thus, when someone responds with *I can’t complain* to a question like *How are you?*, it indicates that they are doing reasonably well or things are going fine. This phrase suggests that while there might be minor issues or inconveniences, the person doesn’t consider them significant enough to complain about. We all know it’s a way of expressing a neutral or content state without delving into the details of any potential concerns. The modal *can’t* here is understood to express lack of ‘situation permissibility’: things are such that the situation of me complaining about them wouldn’t be permissible. Both this conventional communication of the semantic situation permissibility meaning and this pragmatic signalling of a zen-like state of mind are humorously subverted when someone replies *I can’t complain* while anxiously pointing to a sign “No Complaining”, as in an episode of The Simpsons.

In [14], Ilse Depraetere, Mégane Lesuisse and I consider similar conventionalized sequences around the modal verbs of necessity *should, must, have to* and *need to*. We extract from the British National Corpus combinations of each of these modals with strongly collocating neighbouring words to their left or their right, and for these bigrams, we again extract sequences with a strongly collocating neighbouring word to their left or right, and so on, until neighbouring words fall below a set cut-off level for collocational strength. We thus identify over 500 lexical n-grams where each word has a strong tie to the next. Of these n-grams, some are not specific to any of the
four modals (e.g. we {should/must/have to/need to} get), some appear with two or three but not all four modals (e.g. care {should/must} be taken), and some appear with just one of the four modals (e.g. no reason why you should).

Based on these shared or unique lexical environments, we cluster the modal verbs (*should* is most different from the other three, among which *have to* and *need to* form the closest pair). We then identify by hand n-grams with interesting semantic and pragmatic properties, such as *why should(n't)* (used in rhetorical questions), *perhaps you should* (to mitigate obligation), *must surely* (to intensify one's conviction that something is the case) and *may {have to/need to}* (to express a contingent necessity).

## 2.3 Existential constructions

Speakers often have the choice to express the existence, presence or availability of something by means of a 'locative existential' (e.g. *There is a gluten-free option in this recipe*) or by means of a 'possessive existential' (e.g. *This recipe has a gluten-free option*). In [15], Fayssal Tayalati, Vassil Mostrov and I explore how language users rate each of these two constructions, as well as some other constructions, for various French nouns that denote human properties, such as *courage*, as well as for their English equivalents. How acceptable do speakers find, for instance, *Il y a un courage étonnant chez Emma / There is a surprising courage in Emma* (assuming that the French preposition *chez* can be rendered at all satisfactorily with the English preposition *in*)? What are their acceptability judgements for *Emma a un courage étonnant / Emma has a surprising courage*? And how do they rate *Emma est d'un courage étonnant / Emma is of a surprising courage*, where a human property noun is presented in one of the other constructions (the 'genitive of quality')?

In total, we collect acceptability ratings for 24 nouns across 6 different constructions from 108 speakers (72 for French and 36 for English). We apply a Principal Component Analysis to visualize the suitability of different kinds in nouns in different constructions. The results confirm the validity of previously established subclasses for these nouns (some of them merged here for the sake of simplicity):

(i) nouns used for directed feelings or psychological states (e.g. *amour/love, tristesse/sadness*).

(ii) nouns used for behavioural traits (e.g. *gentillesse/kindness, prudence/carefulness*)

(iii) nouns related to a person's dimensions, nature or physical appearance (e.g. *poids (normal) / (normal) weight, tempérament (colérique) / (fiery) temperament, beauté (rare) / (rare) beauty*)

In general, it is nouns from the first group that are judged to be most acceptable in the locative existential, while nouns from the third group are judged least acceptable in it. Nouns from the second group elicit in-between judgements. This pattern holds for both the French and the English nouns. Here are some examples for English, with a noun from each broad class, together with the average acceptability score (from 1 to 5):
(12) a. There is an intense anger in Isabella. [av. rating of 4.52]
b. There is a remarkable carefulness in Olivia. [av. rating of 4.00]
c. There is a fiery temperament in Sarah. [av. rating of 3.22]

The acceptability of these nouns in this existential construction is strongly correlated with their acceptability in a sentence frame that presents the property as being of a certain (limited) duration:

(13) a. Isabella's anger didn't last long. [av. rating of 4.8]
b. Olivia's carefulness didn't last long. [av. rating of 3.25]
c. Sarah's temperament didn't last long. [av. rating of 2.33]

Somewhat surprisingly, the possessive existential (e.g. *Isabella has an intense anger*) shows a moderately positive correlation with the locative existential for the English nouns, and is neither positively nor negatively correlated with the latter for the French ones. All in all, though, the French nouns receive fairly similar acceptability ratings as their English equivalents across the constructions investigated (Figure 4).

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Biplot generated from a PCA (Principal Component Analysis) of acceptability ratings for 12 French and 12 English human property nouns across six constructional environments. The plot displays</figcaption></figure>
the relationships between variables and observations in a reduced-dimensional space, with the two principal components (PC1 and PC2) capturing the maximum variance in the data. The position of the nouns in the plot is influenced by their acceptability in each of the six environments considered together. Closeness of constructions (labels in red) indicates that these receive similar ratings. The two superimposed nouns near the label 'GO_INTO' (for She went into a state of __) are tristesse and kindness.

In [16], I investigate locative and *exist* existentials within a special sequence of clauses, as in (14):

(14) Hannah Montana does not exist. Her name is Miley Cyrus.

There is an apparent contradiction here: if an entity is first said not to have any existence, it might seem pointless to proceed with saying what the name of that non-existent entity is. This incoherence is reminiscent of metalinguistic negation, as in (15):

(15) A: Did you like it?
B: I didn't like it. I LOVED it!

I defend, however, that the negation in (14), unlike the negation in (15), is of the ordinary descriptive kind. There is nothing echoic about the verb *exist* – (14) could be uttered after the interlocutor saying *Guess who I saw at the airport? Hannah Montana!* – and the negation is simply meant to deny the existence of Hannah Montana, on the grounds that this name doesn't appear anywhere on a list of real-life celebrities. Language users sometimes (pretend to) argue that when words, as labels for entities, have no official existence in atlases, registers of people, or dictionaries – in what I call “worlds of words” – then the actual places, people or other phenomena that these names or words are labels for have no rightful existence either.

The kind of clause sequence used in (14) is frequently used for rhetorical reasons to argue that the use of a term is politically incorrect or sprouts from what the speaker considers a misguided conception of reality:

(16) a. There is no such thing as non-consensual sex. It's called rape. Period.
b. There's no such thing as "long Covid". It's called vaccine side effects.

I suspect we will be seeing this multi-clause template a lot in the currently raging culture wars.

## 2.4 Privative constructions

Adjectives such as *fake*, *false* and *fictitious* are called 'privative' in that they 'rob' or 'deprive' an entity from membership to the class of things denoted by the noun. They differ from ordinary adjectives, which narrow down the set of the things denoted by the bare noun to a smaller subset. Thus, a *red ball* is a ball that is, moreover, red. A privative adjective puts an entity in a set that doesn't even intersect with the set of things denoted by a noun: *fake gold* isn't even gold to begin with.
At least, that is the theory. A *fake story*, for instance, is still really a story, a *fake document* is still, in fact, a document, and a *fake handbag* is still a fully functioning handbag. If we look at the 100 most common *fake* + noun combinations, only half of them are clearly privative in the sense just described. With Pascal Denis and Mikaela Keller, I argue in [17] that the privativity or not of *fake* depends to a non-negligible extent on the noun with which it combines. Thus, When the term fake is paired with a noun, its interpretation often varies based on whether that noun pertains to conveying verbal or visual information (like *story*, *news* or *video*), to a purposeful natural or human-made object (such as *blood*, *gun*, or *medicine*), or to an occurrence (like *burglary*, *death*, or *wedding*), among other possibilities. We use distributional semantics, an approach that represents similarities between words based on their shared co-occurrences with other words in a large corpus, to show that nouns for which we provide similar semantic annotations of their combination with *fake* cluster together (Figure 5).

<figure><img src="image_32.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. Two-dimensional network representation of the distributional similarities of nouns frequently combining with *fake*. Different colours represent different hand-annotated interpretations for a *fake* + noun combination.</figcaption></figure>

Nouns with which *fake* is privative (those in yellowish-orange hues) tend to have similar distributions: note for example the closeness of *kidnapping*, *burglary* and *robbery* at the left of the graph, and of *eyelashes*, *mustache* and *beard* towards the bottom. Nouns with which *fake* is non-privative
(in blue hues) also tend to have similar co-occurrences with other words: observe, for example, the cluster of *image*, *picture* and *photos*, or of *email*, *message*, *letter* and *telegram*.

Our research underscores the context-dependence of word meanings. Speakers also have to bring to bear their knowledge of the world and of the wider discourse context (a *fake gun* talked about in the context of a robbery is understood differently from a *fake gun* at an antique arms fair). A cognitive-linguistic approach, including frame semantics, is well equipped to face these facts about *fake*.

In [18], co-authored with Robert Daugs and Stefan Hartmann, morphological constructions with a privative prefix are also approached with a combination of large-corpus distributional semantic methods and more qualitative, anecdotal observations. The prefixes in question are *near*(-), *pseudo*(-) and *quasi*(-), as in *near-perfect*, *pseudoscientist* and *quasi-religious*. On the basis of the adjectival and nominal bases that each of these prefixes combines with, we observe a slight preference of *near-* for bases with negative semantic prosody (e.g. *near-apocalyptic*, *near-collapse*, *near-disaster*, *near-fatal*), a tendency of *quasi-* to occur with bases from the legal-administrative domain, in the broadest sense (e.g. *quasi-diplomatic*, *quasi-government*, *quasi-judicial*, *quasi-private*, *quasi-public*), where it is approximative but not in any evaluative way, and of *pseudo-* to appear in either non-evaluative technical terms (e.g. *pseudoword*, *pseudo-random*) or in combinations where it has a pejorative interpretation (e.g. *pseudo-religious*, *pseudo-intellectual*). We use the term ‘distapproximation’ for the latter use, to capture the sense of ‘falling short’ of a norm.

## 2.5 Fragments

In [19], I revisit fragments starting with *not*, an example of which was given in (11) above, repeated here.

(17) Not if I can help it. (=11)

Technically speaking, such as sentence can be seen as the result of a syntactic operation known as ‘stripping’, also known as ‘bare argument ellipsis’ (a misnomer, as what is left after the assumed deletion operation is not an argument but an adjunct). Just looking at the syntactic operations supposedly rendering possible fragment clauses misses the point that these fragments are sentence patterns in their own right, and that speakers of the language know their unique usage properties. I noted in Section 2.2 that the interpretation of this utterance is short-circuited: *can* here expresses opportunity and the speaker is understood as making a vow not to let the situation denoted by a relevant context proposition happen. In [19] I look at this preceding context and find that the negation in such *not*-fragments may either negate a positive proposition or strengthen an already negative one, depending on who uttered the previous clause (the interlocutor or the speaker herself) :

(18) a. A: Those bullies will steal my lunch money.
   B: Not if I can help it.

b. Those bullies won't steal your lunch money. Not if I can help it.
The *not*-fragment as used in (18b) exhibits what I term ‘negative expansion’ and again illustrates the need to broaden the scope of our linguistic analysis and go beyond the boundaries of the single sentence. (A previous example was the bi-clausal pattern [X *does not exist*. Its name is Y], and variants such as [*There’s no such thing as* X. It’s called Y], discussed in Section 2.3.)

In [20], a text submitted for publication, I take a more radically discourse-oriented approach to fragments and imperatives, determining their actual position within a paragraph and within the whole text. For this, I use editorial articles from the weekly newspaper *The Economist*, scanned from the first word to the last in search of fragments and imperatives. Considering these two constructions together makes sense because (subject-less) imperatives, like fragments, are shorter than their canonical counterparts and because many fragments, like imperatives, are sentences without a truth value (e.g. *Good luck with that!* , And now for something completely similar ). I find that fragments and imperatives, probably because they stand out from ordinary sentences, have a tendency to occupy conspicuous positions (Figure 6).

<figure><img src="image_33.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Distribution of fragments and imperatives within a text (X-axis) and within a paragraph (Y-axis) in a sample of 66 editorials from *The Economist* (close to 0 = at the start; 1 = at the end). Note that the middle field is relatively sparsely populated, suggesting that fragments and imperatives in polished journalistic prose occupy conspicuous positions.</figcaption></figure>

At the level of the paragraph, fragments and imperatives often occur as the first or the last sen-
tence. Within a text, they have a higher-than-chance likelihood of appearing in the last paragraph
or, interestingly, in the second paragraph, after a first paragraph which presents received opinion,
or another view that the reader is meant to first go along with, before the second paragraph then
abruptly shows this view as wrong. The imperative or fragment we find here is then, for example,
a hope-crashing or belief-busting *Well, think again, Don't count on it, Fat chance* or *Not anymore*. I
refer to this set-up, involving two paragraphs, as the 'viewpoint-correcting construction'.
A number of recurrent fragment types in journalistic prose is also identified: *Better (not) to* VP, *Why* VP? and *No/Little wonder* + content-clause. While it could have been possible, perhaps, to identify such fragment clause constructions automatically, I find that doing so by hand gives the researcher a sense of control and ‘proximity’ that one often has to let go when relying on more decontextualized corpus output.

3. A note on future research and type of supervising

I aim to push ahead in four interconnected research directions:

(i) constructional pragmatics

(ii) constructionist treatments of ‘movement’ phenomena

(iii) the nature and status of constructions in grammar

(iv) the representation of grammar in popular culture

3.1 Constructional pragmatics

It is clear that linguistic units can be packed with pragmatic meaning, that is, meaning that is
impossible to capture in truth-conditional terms. The pragmatics of constructions should there-
fore be placed high on the agenda.

A short-term goal will be to explore **evaluative morphological phenomena**. The method for this will be to hand-identify items that exemplify morphological patterns and that are used for expressive purposes. One such pattern is clipping, such as *bud* (from *buddy*), *chute* (from *parachute*), *nukes* (from *nuclear arms*), *prole* (from *proletarian*), *rep* (from *reputation*), *Midge* (from the surname *Midgley*) or *rube* (from the name *Reuben*, referring to an unsophisticated, inexperienced person). By virtue of their informality and suggested familiarity with a topic, these signal the speaker's or writer's brazenness.

Morphological patterns may be typical of certain usage situations, so that when they are
used in other situations than their usual ones, they will be understood as expressing irony or
mockery. This is the case with the diminutive -y's, as in *mommy and daddy's sweetest baby rabbit*,
which when not uttered by a parent can sarcastically indicate someone favoured through nepo-
tism.

In some cases, it is clear that a morphological rule has been bent, as in the redundant and
strictly unacceptable superlative suffix added to *Spartan* in (19):
(19) Or maybe they just wanted our children to be the strongest, toughest, most Spartanest badasses this side of Planet America.<fnref n="2" />

Such extravagant morphology (Eitelmann and Haumann 2022) is not easy to demarcate from
ordinary cases of making use of productive schemas. It is not immediately clear whether, for
instance, the second synthetic compound ending in -ing in (20) is out-of-bounds:

(20) He was put in charge of a mock spelling bee, a run-of-the-mill hand-shaking and baby-kissing type photo-op that was about to go horribly wrong.

Kiss and *baby* fairly rarely combine to form a synthetic compound. An adept writer may know this fact and use *baby-kissing* anyway to make this form stand out. Moreover, by turning the two items into a single word, the kind of situation referred to is reified as a habitual activity. In using this slightly unusual construct, the writer appears to send a wink to the reader, insinuating that there is a shared understanding that for numerous politicians, the kissing of a random baby is something that is simply done as a standard campaign ritual.

Students can be asked to make an overview of known evaluative and expressive mor-
phological constructions, starting with Bauer, Lieber and Plag's (2013) reference work, and to
scan authentic texts (cf. footnote 2) for examples in the wild, checking whether there are any pre-
viously undocumented cases.

Pragmatics should also be explored in the domain of syntax. One small-scale future re-
search topic concerns the role of **frame-semantic knowledge** in the well-known **particle place-ment alternation**. This alternation is often discussed in terms of information-structural prefer-
ences: discourse-old and light object NPs (and definitely unstressed pronouns) precede the par-
ticle, while new and long ones tend to follow the particle. However, if one compares the two
placement options and, keeping the form of the direct object NP as constant as possible (for in-
stance, by specifying that it start with a possessive determiner in both cases), then one may get
rather different kinds of nouns. In the discontinuous ordering (V-NP-Prt), the head of the NP is
typically a body part noun or another noun that involves inalienable possession, nouns that one
doesn't find that often in the joined ordering (V-Prt-NP). This may have to do with the fact (as
mentioned in Section 1.4) that the discontinuous ordering is typically chosen for 'familiar' things
(not necessarily previously mentioned ones). The research I reported on in [9] (pp. 202–204) was
rudimentary and could be refined, as follows:<fnref n="3" />

(i) making sure the NP is of comparable length in both orderings

(ii) coding the retrieved examples with respect to whether they're figurative or not

<footnote n="2">² https://www.cracked.com/article_18364_6-insanely awesomethings-1900s-thought-wed-have-by-now.html, last accessed 12 August 2023. All morphological examples mentioned in this section are taken from articles that appeared on the humour website Cracked.com, which I believe may be a fruitful source of examples of evaluative morphology.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ These are suggestions I recently pitched to a colleague, who was looking for an MA thesis project on par-
ticle verbs.</footnote>
(iii) checking whether the noun was mentioned as such in the immediately preceding context

(iv) finding a way of deciding whether the noun head is otherwise 'evoked' by the preceding context (i.e. whether it belongs to the same frame).

For step (iv), using lexical databases such as FrameNet or WordNet might be useful. Consider the following example (warning: not for sensitive readers):

(21) Shocking video shows cops forcing man to cut his dog's head off.<fnref n="4" />

The object NP of the particle verb is a three-word complex NP, so its use in the discontinuous allostruction is perhaps rather disfavoured. However, *head* is evoked by *dog*, which is itself evoked by *man* (a dog being *man's best friend*, as the common phrase goes), and while cutting off a vital body part of a pet is anything but a familiar action, the direct object NP is accessible via lexical and conceptual links. It would be nice to find support for a hypothesis first formulated by Bolinger (1971: 55–57) and then supported only anecdotally in [9].

## 3.2 Constructionist treatments of ‘movement’ phenomena

Construction Grammarians often use corpus-linguistic methods to record patterns of usage. The downside is that what is patently *not* possible in language can go unnoticed and, accordingly, unaccounted for. It is important that linguists working in this framework also try to make inroads into terrain that has been more intensely studied by generative linguists. A useful project, to which students can contribute, is to take as research object some of the classic asterisked examples in the generative literature and to attempt to provide a more constructionist, usage-based explanation of them. One well-known area is **island violations**. Take the following sentences, uttered by Moe Szyslak, the bartender from The Simpsons:

(22) Sounds like you're having a rough Christmas. You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society.

The second sentence is distinctly odd, something which the scriptwriters will have been aware of. (The Simpsons, as we have noted in [13] is peppered with intentional violations of linguistic conventions.) What would have been less jarring is this:

<footnote n="4">⁴ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1585724/Shocking-video-shows-cops-forcing-man-cut-dogs-head-off.html, last accessed 13 August 2023.</footnote>
(23) Sounds like you're having a rough Christmas. You know what I blame this on? The breakdown of society.

Since Ross (1967), most syntacticians would argue that the reason why (22) is awkward is that, as a general rule, one cannot move anything out of a noun phrase, which is considered an ‘island’ for extraction. This view may be wrong, or at least, the rule is often violated without any awkwardness ensuing. Frame-semantic knowledge appears to play a role in extraction, in that it’s easier to extract from an NP whose head belongs to the frame of the verb than from an NP with a non-evoked head (Chaves and King 2019): compare *Who did you read a book about* __? and *Who did you drop a book about* __? The real reason why (22) sounds so awkward is that Homer Simpson, the addressee, couldn’t just expect that his miserableness is being attributed by Moe to the breakdown of *anything*. Homer may be familiar with Moe’s bitter disposition, but the idea of anything breaking down was not part of the conversational common ground. Consider the following sentence, which has the exact same structure as Moe’s original sentence (see Chaves and King (2019: 725) for a similar example):

(24) You know who I did it at the request of? The State Department.

This was uttered a few years ago on Fox News by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, who was accused of being involved in prying into the dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine. In this case, the idea that Giuliani's foreign phone calls were prompted by *someone* is part of the conversational background. While extraction from backgrounded constituents is in principle not possible (see Goldberg 2013 and Liu et al. 2022 for general discussion), what may help here is that *at the request of* is a lexicalized, complex preposition, synonymous with *for* (for the role of close synonymy in extraction, see Van Valin 2005: 289).

Students could be involved in annotating corpus output of specific queries targeting such sentences, such as "{who/which/that} + (pro)noun + verb + prep (+ det) + noun + prep + sentence boundary": is the sequence prep + (det) + noun + prep a conventional complex preposition or not? To answer this question, corpus evidence should again be adduced. This may seem to undermine the above claim that we should open our eyes to phenomena that are *not* attested at all. The point is that we should open ourselves to remarkably unacceptable sequences – somethingativists were good at pointing out. In trying to explain why these are unacceptable, corpus evidence certainly *can* be useful.

## 3.3 The nature and status of constructions in grammar

While working on the *document de synthèse* as well as the short monograph under revision, included in this *habilitation* dossier, it has become clear that the notion of construction, so central to the theory Construction Grammar, may need to be revised and redefined. In a recent survey among close to two hundred Construction Grammarians (Boas, Leino and Lyngfelt to appear), more than three quarters of the respondents agreed, somewhat or even strongly, with the claim that constructions are cognitively real. It may therefore be rather daring to abandon the conception of *construction* as some sort of mental schema and simplify it as a **conventional schema**, fol-
lowing Haspelmath’s (2023) recent proposal. At the same time, this move would have the ad-
vantage of letting corpus data decide whether a sequence is a construction or not (or, better, let-
ting corpus data to what *degree* a construction candidate is conventionalized; cf. Ungerer (2023)).

Despite the widely accepted lexicon-grammar continuum (another tenet of Construction Grammar), many (perhaps most) Construction Grammarians in practice adopt a distinction between lexical items and syntactic constructions. For example, Fried and Östman (2004: 22) write that “linguistic expressions often reflect the effect of interaction between constructional patterns and the words that fit in them: words, whether heads or dependents, contribute specific semantic properties to any larger construction they occur in, but a construction may also modify some of those properties, as well as add features of its own.” This goes against the widely-held view that coercion is one-directional, with lexical items adapting to the larger constructions, but even the notion of coercion as such also presupposes a distinction between lexical items and constructions. Likewise, the English constructi-con developed by Thomas Herbst, Thomas Hoffmann and Peter Uhrig presents the two in separate lists, seemingly suggesting that lexical items are *not* constructions by themselves.<fnref n="5" /> This constructi-con contains six constructions that have the same form, including the *They-are-willing-to-pay* construction, the *He-was-brave-to-say* construction and the *She-was-surprised-to-hear* construction. Apart from hosting different classes of adjectives, they have a lot in common (and the latter two are even described in semantically equal terms: “Evaluation of an ÆFFECTOR in the light of an ACTION they have carried out”), although to *to*-infinitive part is given the semantic role of “ACTION” with *brave* (and *foolish, right, etc.* ) and of “CAUSE” with *surprised* (and *happy, proud, etc.*). This example of six syntactically identical constructions could be argued to suggest there are **pure-form templates** that individual constructions may inherit from.

I aim to test the proposal that there are forms without meaning (see the ‘crucial test’ for
Construction Grammar, proposed in Document 2 of this dossier). Students can be invited to test
this experimentally, by letting participants judge nonsensical sentences that contain not just
pseudowords but also employ sentence or complementation patterns that are not available (at
least not in English):

(25) a. It was him really zonky to spongle that again.
b. It was really zonky to spongle that again him.

(26) a. The plam was choffing her the druke some broaves.
b. The plam was her the druke some broaves choffing.

(27) a. It was miggy of you that you could freep.
b. It was miggy that you could freep of you.

In each pair, (a) is expected to be deemed less ill-formed than (b). This could be because partici-
pants cannot help interpreting the sentences (in which case meaning is invoked after all) but it

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://constructicon.de/, last accessed 15 August 2023.</footnote>
could also be because they simply rely on intuitions of what could be a possible form even as they
struggle to make sense of the sentence. Follow-up questions could gauge this.

3.4 The representation of grammar in popular culture

A line of research that I’m enthusiastic about is finding out what the general populace is expected to know about grammatical terms and concepts. One indirect way of finding this out is by running searches for grammar terms, for instance those of the parts of speech, in the Corpus of American Soap Operas (100 million words), the TV Corpus (325 million words) and the Movie Corpus (250 million words) available via *english-corpora.org*. Studying their use in conversation (albeit scripted) can give us good insights into stereotypical attitudes towards them and check whether characters have a correct or incorrect conception of them. In the latter case, it should of course be further checked whether the misconception is intentional or not. This kind of research is useful to have an idea of the ‘common ground’ between grammarians and the general non-initiated reader, something which is useful for anyone teaching linguistic analysis to beginners.

In the following exchange from a 2005 drama/fantasy/mystery series makes a correct gen-
eral claim about adverbs, namely that they can’t modify a noun, but, apparently without any
humour intended, imparts this ‘wisdom’ that must have been picked up at school in a context
that in fact reveals absence of mastery of even basic sentence analysis:

(28) Paige: This isn’t a game, ok? This is real, deadly real.
Billie: You can’t use an adverb with a noun.
(TV Corpus, *Charmed*, episode Malice in Wonderland)

Table 2 gives an overview of some relevant search terms in the above-mentioned corpora. To-
gether, they yield some 4000 instances, which forms a decent-size database for several qualitative
MA research projects and even a doctoral thesis.

<table><caption>Table 2. Occurrences of *grammar* and grammar-related terms in some corpora of informal language use.</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th></th>
      <th>Soap</th>
      <th>TV</th>
      <th>Movie</th>
      <th>Totals</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>grammar (excluding grammar school)</td>
      <td>16</td>
      <td>450</td>
      <td>321</td>
      <td>787</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>grammatical</td>
      <td>0</td>
      <td>69</td>
      <td>27</td>
      <td>96</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>linguistics</td>
      <td>109</td>
      <td>109</td>
      <td>109</td>
      <td>327</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>linguistic</td>
      <td>125</td>
      <td>125</td>
      <td>125</td>
      <td>375</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>noun</td>
      <td>16</td>
      <td>212</td>
      <td>154</td>
      <td>382</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>pronoun</td>
      <td>15</td>
      <td>191</td>
      <td>70</td>
      <td>276</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>verb</td>
      <td>36</td>
      <td>413</td>
      <td>272</td>
      <td>721</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>adjective</td>
      <td>46</td>
      <td>296</td>
      <td>176</td>
      <td>518</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>adverb</td>
      <td>3</td>
      <td>50</td>
      <td>34</td>
      <td>87</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>adverbial</td>
      <td>1</td>
      <td>1</td>
      <td>3</td>
      <td>5</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>preposition</td>
      <td>8</td>
      <td>77</td>
      <td>40</td>
      <td>125</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>conjunction (excluding in conjunction with, but needs further noise removal)</td>
      <td>6</td>
      <td>120</td>
      <td>72</td>
      <td>198</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
<table><tr><td>interjection</td><td>1</td><td>28</td><td>6</td><td>35</td></tr><tr><td>infinitive</td><td>3</td><td>41</td><td>35</td><td>79</td></tr><tr><td>participle</td><td>6</td><td>37</td><td>11</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Grand totals</td><td>391</td><td>2219</td><td>1455</td><td>4065</td></tr></table>

A careful examination of the uses of grammar terms, including *grammar* and *linguistics* themselves, is bound to confirm existing hypotheses, for instance that one's grammar is generally thought of as something that needs to be improved, or speaking of participles, that they shouldn't dangle, that infinitives are things to never split, and prepositions are words never to end a sentence with. But even when the casual remarks are not of the prescriptive kind, they may reveal rather one-sided, incomplete profiles of grammar items, for instance that adjectives and adverbs are purely meant to embellish sentences that would be fine without them. The aim of this avenue of research is to provide a fruitful confrontation between, on the one hand, yet to be fully charted popular views about grammar and its basic ingredients and, on the other, grammar as a science, whose task, in part, is to engage with those views.

## References

- Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber et Ingo Plag. 2013. *The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology*. New York : Oxford University Press.

- Boas, Hans C., Jaakko Leino et Benjamin Lyngfelt. A paraître. Introduction: Issues of the theme. *Construction and Frames* [numéro spécial sur l'état actuel et le futur de la Grammaire de Construction].

- Chaves, Rui P. et Adriana King. 2019. A usage-based account of subextraction effects. *Cognitive Linguistics* 30(4), 719–750.

- Eitelmann, Matthias et Dagmar Haumann. 2022. Extravagance in morphology. In : Matthias Eitelmann et Dagmar Haumann (dir.), *Extravagant Morphology: Studies in Rule-Bending, Pattern-Extending and Theory-Challenging Morphology*, 1–18. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

- Fried, Mirjam et Jan-Ola Östman. 2004. Construction Grammar: A thumbnail sketch. In : Mirjam Fried et Jan-Ola Östman (dir.), *Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective*. Amsterdam : John Benjamins, 11–86.

- Goldberg, Adele E. 2013. Backgrounded constituents cannot be extracted. In : Jon Sprouse et Norbert Hornstein (dir.), *Experimental Syntax and Island Effects*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 221–238.

- Haspelmath, Martin. 2023. On what a construction is. *Constructions*, 15(1). DOI : 10.24338/cons-539.

- Liu, Yington, Elodie Winckel, Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth et Edward Gibson. 2022. Structural, functional, and processing perspectives on linguistic island effects. *Annual Review of Linguistics* 8(1): 495–525.

- Ross, John Robert. 1967. *Constraints on Variables in Syntax*. Thèse de doctorat. Cambridge, MA : MIT.
Ungerer, Tobias, 2023. A gradient notion of constructionhood. *Constructions* 15(1). doi
10.24338/cons-543.

Van Valin, Robert D. 2005. *Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface*. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.