sont pas liées à la définition du terme *construction* » (Haspelmath
2023 : 11 ; traduction de l'anglais).

Il y a une tendance croissante, même – ou surtout – parmi les
Grammairiens de Construction, à modéliser les informations linguis-
tiques sous forme de nœuds dans des réseaux (par exemple, Diessel
2019, 2023, Schmid 2020, Hilpert et Flach, Trousdale 2023), sans que
ces nœuds soient considérés comme des constructions au sens « tradi-
tionnel » de la Grammaire de Construction, c'est-à-dire des unités de
forme-fonction stockées (en d'autres termes, des symboles ou des
signes). Les constructions semblent ne plus être des unités denses con-
tenant des informations phonologiques, morphosyntaxiques, séman-
tiques et, le cas échéant, prosodiques, pragmatiques, discursives et
liées à la variété régionale ou sociolinguistique. Au lieu de cela, elles
sont décomposées et les différentes informations sont reliées par des
liens d'association. Bien sûr, nous pouvons encore identifier des
« constructions » dans ce réseau lorsque qu'une forme est connectée,
via un lien d'association symbolique, à un sens particulier. Ainsi, les
constructions en viennent à être de nouveau des épiphénomènes : elles
n'existent que lorsque nous connectons les points, de manière simi-
laire à la reconnaissance d'une constellation comme la Grande Ourse
dans le ciel nocturne.

Dans une telle conception du langage basée sur les réseaux, où
les constructions ne sont plus des unités de base, il peut ne pas tou-
jours y avoir de liens symboliques entre un nœud de forme et un nœud
de sens. À cet égard, il est révélateur que Diessel (2023), dans son ré-
cent livre sur le constructi-con, évoque le concept de schémas, dont il
dit :

« Un schéma est un modèle conceptuel avec des propriétés ho-
listiques qui peut combiner une structure particulière avec un
sens (comme dans le cas des constructions schématiques), mais
un schéma peut également représenter un pattern purement
formel ou purement sémantique. » (Diessel 2023 : 13 ; traduction de l'anglais)

Tous les schémas, en d'autres termes, ne sont pas nécessairement porteurs de sens. Les schémas régissant l'ordre des mots (indiquant que, par exemple, en anglais, un verbe vient généralement avant ses compléments) semblent en être un exemple. Il peut également exister des significations schématiques qui existent indépendamment de toute forme linguistique les portant. Bien qu'il ne soit peut-être pas entièrement clair ce que Diessel entend ici par un pattern purement sémantique, des candidats probables pourraient être des significations de force illocutoire pragmatique générale telles que « demande », « instruction » ou « invitation » qui peuvent être héritées par tellement de formulations différentes, avec tellement de structures et d'éléments lexicaux différents, que ces fonctions sont le plus commodément présentées comme étant « à l'extérieur » des constructions qui les partagent (Cappelle et Fagundes Travassos 2022).

Tout cela signifie que nous devons soit abandonner, à l'instar de Haspelmath, l'exigence que les constructions contiennent, par définition, du sens, soit considérer encore que toutes les constructions ont un sens intrinsèque, mais, en suivant l'exemple de Diessel, renoncer à l'affirmation constructionniste selon laquelle toute notre connaissance du langage peut être assimilée à notre connaissance des constructions et des liens entre elles.

Un véritable progrès dans notre domaine de recherche ne peut être réalisé que si nous sommes ouverts à la possibilité que nous nous soyons trompés concernant certaines affirmations. Notre théorie de la grammaire est loin d'être achevée. Elle est encore en construction. Cela n'est rien de moins qu'excitant.
Conclusion et quelques réflexions méthodologiques
finales : Prenez votre temps

Dans ce document de synthèse, j’ai plaidé en faveur d’une vision con-
structionniste de la connaissance grammaticale. Les locuteurs d’une
langue connaissent des constructions, qui peuvent aider à atteindre le
sens désiré d’un mot. Les mots, en effet, peuvent avoir des significa-
tions spécifiques aux constructions.

De plus, j’ai défendu l’idée que les constructions sont liées non
seulement verticalement (du général au plus spécifique), mais aussi
horizontalement (lorsqu’elles ont des sens approximativement simi-
laires relevant d’un seul nœud plus général). Cela ne nous oblige pas
à accepter une équivalence totale, car les « alloconstructions » peuvent
avoir différentes propriétés liées à la structure informationnelle. La
sous-spécification du nœud mère, ou du « constructème », nous per-
met de préserver le principe de l’intégrité lexicale.

Le travail du praticien de la Grammaire de Construction est loin
d'être achevé. J'ai identifié certaines zones où davantage de travail
doit être accompli. La pragmatique des constructions doit être prise
au sérieux, et le travail dans ce domaine nécessite une plus grande
clarté terminologique et sophistication. Plus controversé peut-être, il
en va de même pour la syntaxe, et il se peut qu'il faille reconnaître que
toute la syntaxe n'est pas porteuse de sens. Cela nous oblige, à son
tour, à réfléchir plus clairement au statut des constructions et à se de-
mander si, si nous exigeons qu'elles soient significatives, nous ne de-
vrons pas abandonner l'idée que l'ensemble de notre connaissance
grammaticale est basée sur les constructions.

Je voudrais offrir, enfin, quelques réflexions sur la manière de
procéder méthodologiquement. Les linguistes sont choyés de nos
jours avec des corpus incroyablement vastes, dont certains, comme
nous l'avons noté en passant dans ce document, dépassent le nombre
de mots prononcés par une seule personne de plusieurs ordres de
grandeur. Nous avons la possibilité de découvrir des schémas d'utili-
sation en quelques clics. Dans cette note finale, je voudrais soutenir
que tirer parti de la puissance des données massives peut certaine-
ment être utile, mais que la recherche basée sur les corpus de ce type,
désoir mais rendue possible, n'est pas la seule voie à suivre.

Pour commencer par un domaine où les grands corpus peuvent
être utiles, je pense que la Grammaire de Construction basée sur
l'usage a un rôle essentiel à jouer dans l'explication des phénomènes
syntaxiques qui ont été intensément étudiés par la linguistique géné-
rative. Un tel phénomène, pour donner un exemple concret, est la
subextraction, une sorte de dépendance à longue distance entre un
constituant interrogatif ou un pronom relatif (qui pourrait être zéro)
et un « trou » situé à l'intérieur d'un constituant inséré dans un autre.
Nous pouvons utiliser un grand corpus pour 'extraire' des exemples
de la vie réelle, plutôt que de réfléchir à des exemples artificiels cons-
truits comme Which actress did you see a picture of?, et examiner les ré-
sultats du corpus pour identifier des tendances précédemment négli-
gées ou mal comprises.

Il s'avère que de nombreux exemples peuvent être trouvés où
le syntagme nominal à partir duquel un autre est extrait fait partie
d'une construction de verbe support ou d'une autre unité phraséolo-
gique, telle que *express an interest in, want no part of, et like the sound of.*
Jusqu'à présent, des facteurs peu explorés dans l'acceptabilité de la
subextraction sont les relations de quasi-synonymie entre les verbes
support et les verbes simples (bien que pour un commentaire à ce su-
jet, voir Van Valin 2005 : 289) et la confusion des limites des consti-
tuants (mais voir Bach et Horn 1976, Chomsky 1977). Considérez les
exemples suivants, attestés dans le corpus, ainsi que les exemples
construits en contraste, qui sont inacceptables (ou moins acceptables)
bien qu'ils présentent une structure superficiellement similaire :
(54) a. What aircraft was the first that you've taken a picture of? (enTenTen21)

b. ??What aircraft was the first that you've shaken a polaroid of?

(55) a. Sounds like you're assuming something you don't know the first thing about. (enTenTen21)

b. ?Looks like you're consuming something you (don't) know the horror stories about.

Dans (54a), *take a picture of* est synonyme du verbe *photograph*, et la complète naturalité de *What aircraft was the first that you've photographed?* peut aider à rendre la subextraction acceptable. Aucun verbe simple n'est synonyme de *shake a polaroid of*, c'est probablement pourquoi la subextraction dans (54b) est considérablement moins acceptable. Dans (55a), *the first thing* est grossièrement synonyme de *anything* ou, avec une certaine perte d'intensité, de *much*. Un tel quantificateur peut, en stricte terminologie, être analysé comme la tête d'un GN (par exemple, [*Much about the civilization* is still unknown), mais il est souvent détaché de sa branche droite (par exemple, [*Much* is still unknown [*about the civilization*]). Encore une fois, cela pourrait jouer un rôle dans l'acceptabilité de cette phrase. Dans (55b), *the horror stories* n'a pas de synonyme pronominal et ne serait pas détaché de sa branche droite (par exemple, **[The horror stories] are well known [*about this food*]). Cela peut rendre plus difficile l'extraction du complément de *about*.

L'étude sur la subextraction de Chaves et King (2019) est, à ma connaissance, une exception dans l'utilisation de données de corpus (provenant de COCA), en plus d'une plus grande dépendance aux données d'acceptabilité. L'utilisation d'un des corpus enTenTen augmenterait la quantité de données réalistes. Une requête de recherche
assez ciblée donne 24 330 chaînes issues d'enTenTen21.<fnref n="47" /> On pourrait
envisager de tester les hypothèses évoquées ci-dessus en comparant
un sous-ensemble des chaînes les plus fréquentes avec un sous-en-
semble de chaînes hapax. Le problème, cependant, est qu'un corpus
est plutôt mal adapté pour découvrir des impossibilités.<fnref n="48" /> À l'excep-
tion de quelques rares erreurs de performance véritables, les corpus
ne contiennent tout simplement pas de phrases marquées d'un asté-
risque. Même les occurrences uniques sont toujours motivées par un
certain besoin communicatif. Les exemples en (56a-c) sont des hapax
legomena récupérés par la requête de recherche. Malgré la rareté des
chaînes pertinentes, ces exemples semblent beaucoup plus naturels
que (54b) et (55b) ci-dessus.

(56) a. ... pave the way for him to become prime minister, something that Gautam has long expressed a desire for.

b. However, we believe it's something we have built a
tremendous expertise in.

c. Back in the early 2000's, there was a show on Com-
edy Central that we didn't miss an episode of.

Remarquez qu'il est facile de fournir de courtes paraphrases approximatives pour les propositions relatives de manière à ce qu'il n'y ait plus d'extraction d'un GN à l'intérieur d'un GN :

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Voici la requête, formulée en CQL : [lemma="something" | lemma="someone" | lemma="person" | lemma="that" | lemma="which" | lemma = "who"] [lemma="which" | lemma="that" | lemma="who"]? [tag="N.*" | tag="PP.?"] [tag="V.*"]? [tag="RB.?"]? [tag="VV.*"] [tag="DT"] [tag="J.*"]? [tag="N.*"] [tag="IN"] [lemma="."] 
 within <s/>. Un certain bruit est présent dans les résultats, comme (*Think about the*) *person you are buying a gift for* ou (*We must ... care about the other living species*) *that we share this planet with*.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Bien sûr, un grand corpus peut nous fournir des indications indirectes sur des chaînes non grammaticales, lorsqu’il s’avère qu’il n’y a aucune occurrence du tout de chaînes qui pourraient raisonnablement être attendues.</footnote>
(57) a. ... something that Gautam has long openly desired.

b. ... it's something we are very good at.

c. ... a show on Comedy Central that we watched every day.

Ainsi, comme mentionné précédemment, cette facilité de paraphrase pourrait expliquer pourquoi les cas de subextraction liés sont faciles à traiter. Des exemples du type en (54b) et (55b) n'ont peut-être tout simplement aucune chance d'apparaître dans un corpus, même très volumineux.

Une requête de recherche dans un corpus, aussi bien formulée soit-elle, peut souffrir d'un manque de « précision » (en récupérant trop de bruit) ou d'une trop faible « rappel » (en manquant des exemples pertinents). De plus, les résultats de recherche d'un grand corpus peuvent facilement être accablants, même s'il est généralement possible de prendre des échantillons plus petits et représentatifs. Il est souvent fructueux d'utiliser un « corpus » plus petit – en réalité, un seul texte suffisamment long – et de l'utiliser pour ses recherches (généralement préliminaires). Laporte (2022) a récemment parcouru le premier livre de Harry Potter (Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers, en version originale) pour y relever manuellement toutes les occurrences de la construction de mouvement causé. Cela a donné plus de cinq cents exemples, qui ont été annotés en ce qui concerne les verbes utilisés et les sens de la construction postulés dans la littérature. De plus, les utilisations métaphoriques parmi les exemples récupérés ont été soumises à une analyse plus qualitative.

Je suis très enclin à ce genre de méthode plus lente. À des fins de recherche personnelle, j'ai parfois adopté une approche similaire. Par exemple, pour la recherche rapportée dans Cappelle (2011b), j'ai collecté manuellement des exemples de constructions de longue distance assez extrêmes que l'on peut trouver dans le roman *Freedom* de Jonathan Franzen. Certains d'entre eux sont donnés ici :
(58) a. (...) he developed an encyclopedic familiarity with the urban music [that [his parents were at pains [to protect his preteen ears [from __ ]]]].

b. (...) tangled bed sheets [that [it was interesting and somehow not unpleasant [to think [that Eliza had been vigorously erased [in __ ]]]]]].

c. (...) you've been kinder to me [than [I ever thought [I deserved [to have someone [be __ ]]]]].

d. (...) his own rooms were still full of Patty's traces, [which [she'd given him [no instructions [for [deal-ing [with __ ]]]]]].

e. (...) making exactly those coffee drinks [Ø [she'd once ridiculed [the idea [of [making __ ]]]]].

(Jonathan Franzen, 2010. *Freedom*. Londres : Fourth Estate, pp. 9, 103, 462, 474, 510)

Il est très difficile de récupérer de tels exemples automatiquement à partir d'un corpus avec une ou plusieurs requêtes. Les collecter dans l'œuvre d'un auteur dont on remarque rapidement, dès que l'on commence à lire son travail, qu'il utilise souvent ces constructions, peut être un bon point de départ pour une analyse, qui peut (et peut-être devrait) toujours être complétée par des requêtes de corpus plus ci-blées. Dans d'autres études, j'ai utilisé *Le petit prince* d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry et sa traduction en anglais (Cappelle and Loock 2017) ainsi que *The Witches* de Roald Dahl et ses traductions en néerlandais et en français (Cappelle 2020b).

Dans Cappelle (soumis), j'ai examiné des éditoriaux de *The Economist*, qui ont été analysés manuellement à la recherche d'impéra-tifs et de fragments, deux constructions que l'on n'attendrait pas im-médiatement dans une prose formelle et soigneusement éditée. En considérant l'ensemble du texte, j'ai pu identifier une utilisation de
fragments et d'impératifs qui relie le premier et le deuxième paragraphe dans ce que l'on pourrait appeler la « construction de correction de point de vue », certaines instances pouvant être informellement représentées comme suit :

(59) Premier paragraphe [opinion acceptée ou une situation qui suscite l'espoir du lecteur à propos de quelque chose]

{Think again. / Don't count on it. / Fat chance. / Not anymore.} Suite du deuxième paragraphe [raisons pour lesquelles il est erroné de penser ce que le paragraphe 1 suggérait]

Trop souvent dans la recherche en grammaire, la phrase est traitée comme l'unité d'analyse la plus importante. Le contexte discursif peut être réduit, par exemple, à une série de mots fournie par l'interface de recherche de corpus ou à un certain nombre de métadonnées (genre, variété régionale, etc.) qui peuvent jouer un rôle dans la préférence ou la répulsion pour une option linguistique particulière dans un cas de variation. Nous ne devrions pas seulement faire référence au niveau discursif, mais l'adopter pleinement.

L'utilisation de grands corpus pour se concentrer sur un ou deux modèles d'intérêt est une approche valable. Cependant, il vient un moment où nous devons évaluer si les constructions que nous avons collectivement identifiées sont suffisantes pour rendre compte de n'importe quelle phrase ordinaire que nous rencontrons. Boas (soumis) propose une méthodologie, représentée sous forme de diagramme, qui peut guider les chercheurs dans l'élaboration d'un constructi-con, étape par étape. Il s'appuie sur la définition bien connue de Goldberg (1995 : 4), qui exige que les candidats à la construction aient quelque chose d'idiomatique s'ils doivent être inclus dans le constructi-con. La proposition consiste à parcourir un texte, une phrase à la fois, et à vérifier si chaque phrase ainsi rencontrée est autorisée par
les constructions déjà présentes dans le référentiel. Si une phrase ne
peut pas être expliquée, le chercheur doit introduire une nouvelle
construction. La description initiale de cette construction doit être
complétée par des annotations d'exemples supplémentaires récupérés
à partir d'un corpus plus large. En collaboration avec des collègues,
Boas invite quelques-uns des principaux Grammairiens de Construc-
tion à entreprendre une analyse complète de toutes les constructions
au sein d'une seule phrase, en tenant compte de leurs interactions
(Boas, Leino and Lyngfelt, à paraître b).

Boas and Cappelle (2024), adoptant une perspective plus péda-
gogique, entreprennent également une analyse constructionnelle com-
plète de la seule phrase d'ouverture du premier livre de la série Harry
Potter mentionné ci-dessus :

(60) Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were
proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you
very much.

(J. K. Rowling. 1997. *Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone*. Londres : Bloomsbury, p. 7)

Plusieurs dizaines de constructions sont combinées pour former cette
seule phrase. Certaines d'entre elles sont familières car elles appartien-
nent à la grammaire « de base », comme la construction [GN BE GAdj
[to GV]], où le sujet (le GN) ressent quelque chose (un sentiment de
satisfaction, d'accomplissement ou un autre type d'émotion exprimé
dans le GAdj) à propos de s'engager dans l'action décrite par le GV –
ou par la proposition infinitive, si l'on préfère la désigner ainsi.<fnref n="49" />, <fnref n="50" />

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ L'analyse du VP est possible si *to* est traité comme un auxiliaire, comme le font certains linguistes. Voir par exemple Kim et Michaelis (2020 : 36).</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ La constitution interne de la construction n’est pas si simple. D’une part, la partie *to + GV* peut être détachée du GAdj (par exemple, *We are very proud, *standing here today, to be able to announce a significant milestone in our journey*), ce qui suggère qu’elle reste en dehors du GAdj. D’autre part, nous ne pouvons pas remplacer le GAdj, sans</footnote>
D'autres constructions n'ont probablement pas encore été décrites, comme la construction [N<sub>nom</sub>; personne, of N<sub>nom_adresse</sub> (numéro + rue)]N<sub>propre</sub>; personne, qui lie une personne (ou des personnes) à une adresse (partielle). La manière dont une adresse telle que *number four Privet Drive* est exactement formée est probablement aussi un nouveau territoire constructi-cographique.

L'utilisation de *thank you very much* à la fin de la phrase (60) né-cessite également – conformément à ce qui a été défendu dans le pré-sent document – une grande quantité de description pragmatique, en tenant compte de l'attitude dismissive ou défensive des référents du sujet par rapport à une revendication implicite contraire. De plus, cette utilisation de *thank you very much* peut recevoir un contour prosodique légèrement différent (notamment, avec une intonation complètement montante) par rapport à son utilisation plus canonique, lorsqu'elle ex-prime véritablement de la gratitude. Cela est à prévoir si elle est dotée d'une entrée constructionnelle différente et si les constructions peu-vent être associées à leurs propres propriétés prosodiques (cf. Lacheret et Legallois 2013). Notre message est que les étudiants en apprentis-sage de l'utilisation de la langue devraient être sensibilisés à de telles routines communicatives avec des aspects syntaxiques, sémantiques, pragmatiques et, en effet, prosodiques uniques. Les activités en classe peuvent démontrer, de manière simplifiée, le travail des linguistes professionnels alors qu'ils examinent un petit ensemble d'exemples de corpus.

Loin de moi, en effet, l'idée de m'opposer vigoureusement à
l'appui des corpus. En utilisant une méthode guidée par le corpus,
Cappelle et Depraetere (2016b), Cappelle, Depraetere et Lesuisse

<footnote>la partie *to + GV*, par une proforme (par exemple, *Our rivals are proud to report stable performance but we are so to report double-digit growth*), ni préposer la partie *to + GV* dans une phrase (par exemple, *To announce our new business we are very proud*), ce qui semble suggérer que la séquence *to + GVP* fait en réalité partie du GAdj, après tout. (La forme de la construction serait alors plus convenablement représentée comme [GN *BE* [GAdj Adj [to GV]]].)</footnote>
(2019) et Leclercq (2022) identifient des patterns qui contiennent des
verbes modaux et qui présentent une force collocationnelle inhabituel-
lement élevée d'un mot à l'autre, tels que You must be joking, ...no rea-
son why you should... et I can't tell you how..., qui se qualifient comme
des constructions avec des interprétations court-circuitées (cf. Section
3.1). Les corpus peuvent être automatiquement explorés à la recherche
de n-grammes intéressants, c'est-à-dire des séquences fréquemment
répétées de mots, de parties du discours ou de combinaisons de ceux-
ci souvent répétées (cf. Wible et Tsao 2010, Forsberg et al. 2014, Cap-
pelle et Grabar 2016, Dunn 2017). Legallois et ses collègues extraient
des n-grammes qui ne sont ni totalement lexicaux ni totalement sché-
matiques à partir de corpus de genres spécifiques : romans sentimen-
taux, romans policiers et romans plus « sérieux ». Certains de ces
n-grammes sont des clichés ou des « motifs » qui caractérisent ces
genres. Dans les romans sentimentaux français, par exemple, l'une de
ces séquences récurrentes, parmi de nombreuses autres identifiées par
Legallois, Charnois et Poibeau (2016), comprend un nom propre, le
verbe sentir, un déterminant possessif et un nom commun, et enfin un
infinitif réfléchi. Ce motif spécifique est utilisé pour signifier que
l'émotion du référent du sujet se manifeste par un certain effet physio-
logique qu'il ou elle (le plus souvent elle) ressent. Voici des exemples
cités par les auteurs :

(61) a. Kara sentit son coeur se serrer tandis que Declan caressait les cheveux de Safia.

b. Katrina sentit ses joues s'empourprer.

c. Natalie sentit ses épaules s'affaisser.

(Legallois, Charnois et Poibeau 2016: 111)

Les romans policiers ont leurs propres motifs typiques. L’un d’entre
eux est la proposition fragmentaire *pas de* + nom, utilisée lorsque l’un
des personnages souhaite vérifier si la côte est libre. Voici quelques
exemples :

(62) a. En pleine nuit, pas de lumières, il n'avait aucune chance d'être vu.

b. A priori, pas de traquenard.

c. Il n'y a personne, ses volets sont baissés, pas de voilure.

(Legallois et Koch 2020 : 41)

Comme l'observent Legallois et Koch (2020 : 41), la syntaxe réduite de ce motif représente la proposition fragmentaire comme appartenant au discours intérieur du personnage. On pourrait dire qu'elle appartient à ce que Hirose (2015) appelle le niveau privé de « construction de la situation » (situation construal) de l'utilisation de la langue, plutôt qu'au niveau plus communicatif de « rapport de la situation » (situation report).

Lorsque nous recherchons des motifs typiques ou des schémas
précédemment manqués, nous pouvons laisser un script informatique
(par exemple, Legallois et De Sacy 2021) faire une grande partie du
travail lourd. Cependant, il revient finalement au chercheur en chair
et en os de séparer le bon grain de l'ivraie et de fournir une interpré-
tation linguistiquement intéressante de ce qui est apparu en surface.

Complémentairement aux méthodes guidées par le corpus, je
crois qu'il y a également du mérite dans l'approche où l'on lit simple-
ment un texte, souligne ou met en évidence d'intéressants mots, ex-
pressions ou phrases dans leur contexte, les déplace vers une collec-
tion de curiosités et fournit des commentaires sur chacun d'entre eux
individuellement. Cette méthode qui semble peu systématique est ce
que l'on peut appeler la « linguistique lente ». Elle a longtemps été
pratiquée, semble avoir perdu en popularité avec le virage quantitatif
de la linguistique, mais elle est en train de faire son retour. Les « ordi-
nary working grammarians » (pour utiliser à nouveau cette épithète
de Fillmore (1970) qui adoptent une approche mesurée et réfléchie peuvent alors être appelés, de manière anagrammatique, des « slow OWLs ».

Heidi Harley, de l'Université de l'Arizona, a rassemblé des blagues linguistiques tirées des Simpson, dont beaucoup révèlent des conventions linguistiques dont nous n'aurions pas été conscients sans leurs distorsions délibérées.<fnref n="51" /> Feu James McCawley a également rassemblé des exemples intrigants tirés de livres, journaux, films, émissions de télévision, etc., de 1986 à 1996, et a distribué ses collections année après année lors des réunions annuelles de la Chicago Linguistic Society. À la fin, il les a appelés son « Cirque des Puces Linguistiques ». Le document de sa collection de 1986 (archivé dans Wilbur 1996) comprend une courte section intitulée « Miscellaneous constructions », contenant les quatre exemples suivants :

(63) "What's a light doing on up there?" (Nightfall: Hands off)
"What's a piano doing up here?" (Twilight Zone, 11 Dec 1986)

"It's my favorite station in the whole world, let alone
Chicago" (Michael Palin, WXRT commercial; cf. "... in
Chicago")

"You know who he should talk to is Gordon" (SNL, 13 Dec 1986)

Est-ce une coïncidence que, même pas deux ans plus tard, un article fondateur de la Grammaire de Construction ait été publié sur l'une de ces constructions diverses, la construction *let alone* (Fillmore, Kay et

<footnote n="51">51 http://heidiharley.com/beyond-beyond-beyond-beyond-beyond-embiggens-and-cromulent/, dernière consultation le 30 août 2023.</footnote>
O'Connor 1988) ?<fnref n="52" /> Et est-ce que le document de McCawley aurait pu susciter un autre classique, la construction *What's X doing Y?* (Kay et Fillmore 1999), qui est apparu une bonne décennie plus tard ?

Personnellement, j'adorerais assister à des réunions linguis-
tiques où les statistiques sont abordées de manière mesurée et
éclairante, où une place centrale peut encore être accordée aux décou-
vertes fortuites, et où chacun partage l'émerveillement pour la gram-
maire et l'agrammaire.

<footnote n="52">⁵² C'est probable le cas, mais d'un autre côté, les deux documents ne sont peut-être pas complètement sans lien. McCawley aura probablement distribué sa collection d'exemples de 1986 l'année suivante, en 1987. Les réunions de la CLS ont généralement lieu à la fin d'avril ou au début de mai. L'article de Fillmore, Kay et O'Connor a été soumis pour la première fois le 28 mai 1987. Il est donc plus plausible que McCawley, mentionné parmi les personnes remerciées en note de bas de page dans l'article, ait été inspiré par les idées en circulation parmi les auteurs lorsqu'il a enregistré sa phrase avec *let alone*, et qu'il en ait peut-être parlé avec eux lors de la discussion de leur première ébauche. (La note de bas de page 13 du document concerne les phrases positives avec *let alone*.) Il pourrait donc y avoir eu une influence mutuelle, comme c'est souvent le cas.</footnote>
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First document (English version)

Research trajectory and thematic justification: summary
text
# Table of contents

Preface ....................................................................................................................i

## Chapter 1

Knowledge of language is knowledge of constructions..................................1

1.1 Are complements lexically or constructionally governed? .........1

1.2 Construction-dependent interpretation: the case of a West
Flemish discourse particle................................................................17

1.3 What's up with verb particles? Aspects of aspect, and more
evidence for construction-specific meaning ....................................29

## Chapter 2

Knowledge of language is also knowledge of constructional relations:
enter allostructions ....................................................................................41

2.1 A bridge between constructions and a bridge between theories
....................................................................................................................42

2.2 A way to save Lexical Integrity? ....................................................55

2.3 The role of information structure in constructions....................65

## Chapter 3

Towards knowing what constructions *are* ....................................................71

3.1 Being clear on 'pragmatics' and on 'context' ....................................74

3.2 Giving syntax its due ....................................................................79

3.3 Accepting either that not all constructions are meaningful or
that the grammar network has other stuff ....................................86

Conclusion and some final reflections on method: *Easy does it* ..............91

References................................................................................................................103
# Preface

This document traces my development as a researcher. It reads some-
what like an autobiography, telling the story of what piqued my inter-
est when I was a young doctoral student to what troubles me as I have
become a mid-career linguist. It is also an attempt to summarize my
research activities and to demonstrate that they exhibit some thematic
coherence. I aim to show three things: first, that I have been convinced
from the outset of my career that language users have stored gram-
matical constructions that can impregnate words with meaning; sec-
ond, that I soon realized that some constructions may have different
forms that, given their semantic similarity, are linked in speakers' cog-
nition; and third, that I am increasingly aware of linguists' incomplete
understanding of what constructions really are and what their place
in grammar is.

I refer to *grammar* here not just as the mental linguistic system
that a speaker relies on when they produce and process utterances but
also the scientific discipline that has such a system as its object of
study. My overarching goal is to suggest that, while construction
grammarians have, to my mind, laid the groundwork for a successful
grammatical theory, it is too early for them to claim that their theoret-
ical edifice is complete. Construction Grammar is still a construction
site.

For the past ten years or so, I have tried to find and define the
thread that runs through my research publications. Stored away in a
folder on my computer are several outline documents, the first from
2014, testifying to previous unsuccessful endeavours to find a com-
mon denominator. As the years went by, the number of topics I
worked on increased, due to opportunities to collaborate and other
fairly normal circumstances but also because so much about language
is irresistibly interesting. This made it only harder to formulate what
exactly my research was really about. It then became tempting to think
of a specific theme that would unite at least some of my research. One
such topic was ‘linguistic paradoxes’. Another was negation in con-
structions.

The former topic would have enabled me to discuss, for in-
stance, the perceived problem of *partial productivity*, which is that there
are general rules whose output speakers need to memorize, implying
that those general rules are not really that general after all. The theme
of paradoxes would also have given me the opportunity to analyse the
seeming theoretical contortions required to make sense of the notion
of *conventionalized pragmatics*, which treats the kinds of meanings that
are context-dependent and hence eminently flexible as, in fact, fixed.
And it would have enabled me to discuss, among some further appar-
ent paradoxes, the seemingly irreconcilable alternative behaviours of
phrasal verbs as single words and as word combinations.

Presenting my research in terms of paradoxes, though, ended
up feeling too much like a straightjacket. Choosing this angle also had
the perverse effect of requiring even more additional research if I
wanted to give the necessary substance to a theme that had philosoph-
ical pretentions. As for the theme of negation, this was not satisfactory
either. While it would have allowed me to discuss negative existentials
(which are also a kind of paradox), *not*-fragments, and privative adjec-
tive such as *fake* and *artificial*, the coherence it was meant to create felt
again, well, artificial. This topic would also have left out large portions
of my research.

The framing of my research in this document is, in comparison,
more natural than what I attempted to do with those previous pro-
posals. I should have listened much earlier to a Belgian colleague of
mine who suggested, quite simply, *constructions* as a topic. Even so,
some strands of my research have still been excluded from this sum-
mary. In particular, I have not provided a synthesis of my papers on
corpus-based translation studies (e.g. Cappelle and Loock 2013, 2017, De Clercq et al. 2021). A discussion of them didn't quite fit the narrative arc, to the extent that there is one. Besides, I have recently had the opportunity to summarize the typological research I carried out into motion (and motion-like events), based on translation corpora, in Cappelle (2021a).

The field of research on which I would like to become a research supervisor will be highlighted in this document: constructional pragmatics, syntax in Construction Grammar, and the further development of the theory itself. In terms of methodologies, I have in my research been quite eclectic and opportunistic, making use of, mainly, corpus linguistics, but also psycholinguistic and neurolinguistics experimenting and elicitation via questionnaires. I here want to argue for the need of careful reflection, qualitative methods, slow observation and even introspection as complementary ways of gaining insight into language phenomena and their implications for our theory of grammar.

This summary text is accompanied by three documents that together form the scientific dossier submitted to obtain the academic degree of Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR).

The second document is a short monograph set to be published in the series Cambridge Elements in Construction Grammar. In this work, I explore the question of whether this popular approach is a falsifiable theory. I challenge some of its fundamental tenets, particularly the issue of meaningfulness in syntax. This dossier includes the original manuscript as it was submitted, which contains sections that the editors suggested should be shortened or removed. Additionally, I present a fully revised version, in which I have taken into account these and other suggestions for modification.

The third document is a collection of publications, twenty in total, that showcase my work on constructions. It is divided into two
parts. The first part deals with verb-particle constructions, which I de-
voted my doctoral thesis to and which, also after my doctorate, have
remained a recurring topic of investigation. The second part is a
presentation of what is termed there a ‘constructional menagerie’: a
varied assortment of different kinds of constructions. Each type is rep-
resented by two publications. This collection is bookended by two
publications that are yet to appear at the time of submitting this dos-
sier. The first, a bibliographical article, has been accepted for publica-
tion but the last is still under review. It has nonetheless been included
as it demonstrates the kind of ‘slow linguistic’ research I am advocat-
ing.

The fourth and final document is a brief survey of the main
ideas set forth in these collected publications. The document also con-
tains a note about my future research orientations, which provide
some illustrations of how to meet the challenges identified in Chapter
3 of the present document. To these, a further concrete research pro-
posal is mentioned, concerning the representation of grammar and
grammar terms in non-technical discourse, namely in movie and TV
dialogues.

Writing and compiling these documents has taken a considera-
ble amount of time, time afforded to me in the form of a sabbatical
granted by the University of Lille, with support from the heads of my
department and my research lab. I am very grateful to those who have
given me the opportunity to work towards this degree. My colleagues
from the English department have had to make do without me for a
full academic year. I thank them all dearly for accommodating to my
aim to obtain an HDR. As this project required continued dedication,
I hardly went to any conferences or other research meetings during
my sabbatical. The few colleagues I did meet during this time have
given me intellectually stimulating moments but also managed to take
my mind off my research activities. At the risk of not mentioning some
who also deserve to be thanked here, I am singling out Hans Boas,
Israel de la Fuente, Ilse Depraetere, Francisco Gonzálvez-García, Sa-
mantha Laporte, Benoît Leclercq, Yusuke Minami, Naoaki Wada and
Alexander Ziem.

When I ventured into obtaining the French *Habilitation*, its exact
requirements appeared shrouded in mystery, as if protected by
France's last remaining medieval guild – no matter its relatively recent
introduction (as late as 1984). It has been most helpful, therefore, to be
able to fall back on a concise *vademecum* issued by Université Paris Sor-
bonne Nouvelle, to get at least a rough idea of the desired contents
and length of the diverse documents to be included.

I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of the jury,
Professors Hans Boas, Agnès Celle, Ilse Depraetere and Peter Lau-
wers, for taking the time to read and evaluate this dossier, a duty
which I hope they derive some satisfaction from. I wish to express spe-
cial thanks to Professors Celle and Lauwers for accepting to act as rap-
porteurs.

Heartfelt thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Dominique Le-
gallois, who has been very generous with his time and wisdom. My
*garant*'s invaluable insider's knowledge was useful in navigating the
pitfalls any non-initiated would be bound to stumble into. His unwa-
vering encouragement bolstered me throughout the entire process.
Even during holidays, the materials I sent to him were promptly re-
turned with feedback that was always constructive and stimulating,
gentle and insightful, to the point and served in just the right amounts.
His knowledgeability of both Continental and Anglo-American
schools of thought, past and modern ones, proved to be exactly what
I needed to maintain or gain a sense of perspective.

During the time I spent on the HDR – and this includes all the
years during which I wrote the publications collected in the research
portfolio – I have been indulged and supported by my family and in-
laws, who cheered me on at ground control. Ella and Juul, my smart
and funny children, have been my solid rocket boosters. But I
wouldn't have made it this far without the enduring help and love of
my wife, Steffie, the hidden figure that deserves so much recognition.
*An important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis is that it be*
*“falsifiable”.*

Biologist Ed Devlin on a Hampden Sidney College course webpage
# Chapter 1

## Knowledge of language is knowledge of constructions

There is now a large research community in linguistics that share a fundamental idea: what speakers of a language know about that language can be captured as *constructions*. Constructions, in the sense understood by Construction Grammarians, are powerful units, as they both provide formal stability and guide interpretation. This chapter illustrates this with three examples, dating from the time I wrote my doctoral thesis. Only one of them actually relates to the topic of my thesis, particle verbs (Section 1.3). The two others are the ‘mandative’ subjunctive in English (Section 1.1) and constructions with the dialogic particle *dè* in West-Flemish (Section 1.2).

### 1.1 Are complements lexically or constructionally governed?

In the autumn of 1997, I started working as a doctoral researcher at the Kortrijk campus of the K.U. Leuven, within the Descriptive English Grammar research project headed by Renaat Declerck. The aim of the project was to produce a multivolume grammar of contemporary English, essentially an update of the large grammars that had appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, such as those written by Jesper-sen (1909–1949), Kruisinga (1909–1932) and Poutsma (1914–1926). The topic of my Ph.D. was loosely defined. It was suggested by him that I
look into verb complementation, in particular the contrast between in-
finitives and -ing forms after verbs. My supervisor had already written
a comprehensive descriptive student grammar (Declerck 1991) and
my initial role in the project, on which I could then also write a doc-
toral thesis, was to find out whether and how presentation of the facts
in this grammar could be improved for his new, bigger grammar.

My supervisor's grammar for students – really also a reference
grammar – contained a long list of verbs, spanning several pages, with
an indication of the kind of complements they take (Declerck 1991:
469–72). Some verbs were marked to take the infinitive only, some
were marked to also allow the -ing form, without a difference in mean-
ing or use, and still others were marked to take either the infinitive or
the -ing form but with a difference in meaning in use. And there were
also lists of verbs, more or less clustered semantically, that only take
the -ing form (Declerck 1991: 503–6). To make this a bit more concrete,
here are some examples of each of these types of verbs:

(1) Verbs that only allow the infinitive:

a. *dare*, e.g. *She didn't dare to ask for a raise*.

b. *long*, e.g. *I long to see you again soon*.

(2) Verbs that allow both the infinitive and the -ing form,
without any difference in meaning:<fnref n="1" />

a. *endure*, e.g. I can't endure to watch this movie anymore,
but I'll endure sitting through it if it means spending time
with you.

<footnote n="1">¹ There may still be differences in frequency between the two options, something not indicated in the lists in Declerck's (1991) grammar, nor in for example Quirk et al's (1985: 1187) reference grammar. I can't remember whether exploring such usage differences was part of my brief, but this would have been an obvious aspect of a doctoral study on this topic.</footnote>
b. *intend*, e.g. I intend to apply for the job and intend impressing the interviewer with my skills and experience.

(3) Verbs that allow both the infinitive and the -ing form, but with a difference in meaning:

a. *start*, e.g. She started to cry when she heard the news. (unintentional situation) vs. She started writing a diary to keep track of her thoughts and feelings. (intentional, habitual activity)

b. *hate*, e.g. I hate to break it to you, but you didn't get the job. (used to refer to a specific occurrence of an unpleasant situation in the present or the future) vs. I hate waiting in long lines at the grocery store. (used to express that one doesn't find a particular kind of situation pleasurable)

(4) Verbs that only take the -ing form (with indication of their type of meaning):

a. *quit* (a verb implying that the situation is discontinued), e.g. She quit drinking soda and switched to water instead.

b. *endorse* (a verb expressing that one supports the idea expressed by the complement), e.g. They endorse promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

I embarked on a research journey into this area of grammar with great vigour but soon felt overwhelmed by the vast literature on the topic. Verb complementation in English had been studied extensively and my feeling was that all valuable observations had already been made before I could absorb myself into the subject. My research shifted away from infinitives vs. -ing forms towards particle verbs via a link I will divulge later in this chapter (Section 1.3). From my starting years as a researcher I recovered a working document I had started to compile, titled *Verb complementation in English: A concise but labelled and annotated*
*bibliography* (Cappelle 1999a). It was very concise indeed, and especially incomplete, consisting of only a good dozen publications by authors, focussing on those with a last name from A to F, but the sometimes extensive notes made up for its shortness.<fnref n="2" />

I consider the time spent reading some of the literature on complementation far from wasted. It was highly formative for my thinking about basic grammatical questions, such as these:

(i) Should we treat main verbs as idiosyncratic lexical items that automatically, blindly and arbitrarily trigger a constructional choice?

(ii) Do certain main verbs that require a specific type of complement share common meaning aspects, thereby providing greater motivation or justification for the use of that particular complement?

(iii) Are different types of complements themselves meaningful, so that their use leads to an interpretation even if the main verb is not directly conducive to it?

It seemed to me that each of these questions could be answered in the positive, even though that was logically impossible. As for (i), I realized that there was at least *some* degree of lexical arbitrariness in the grammar. Declerck's (1991) grammar suggested this when it stated that "[t]he gerund is the rule after the following (semantically unrelated) verbs", before listing over seventy verbs, including *celebrate*, *face*, *imply*, *postpone*, *recall* and *suggest*, which indeed have nothing obvious in common other than that they all take an *-ing* form (Declerck's

<footnote n="2">² Even so, the document is not fit for public eyes. In retrospect, the labelling mentioned in the document title seems hopelessly pretentious. I had devised a sort of Michelin star system, where works included received no star, one star ("good"), two stars ("clever and insightful") and three stars ("paragon of linguistic ability"). Fortunately, I have recently had the opportunity to write a more extensive and publishable annotated bibliographical article about the topic my Ph.D. thesis eventually centred on (Cappelle forthcoming).</footnote>
1991: 505). Moreover, it was noted in that grammar that for some verbs that are followed by the -ing form, there exist some semantically very similar verbs that take the infinitive. Thus, while we have an -ing form in *Sarah enjoyed baking cookies for her friends*, we have an infinitive in *Sarah liked to play the piano in her spare time*; and while we might say *Lisa accepted attending the meeting*, we would say *Lisa agreed to participate in the charity fundraiser*. At the same time, with respect to (ii), the grammar's effort to also identify at least *some* semantically coherent clusters of main verbs taking a particular complement didn't seem completely fruitless. In addition, and relevant to (iii), the different complements, too, were characterized as being semantically somewhat distinct: "Although it is impossible to give strict rules predicting these constructions, we can say that a gerund usually refers to a situation in a general way, while an infinitive usually refers to the possible future actualisation of a situation" (Declerck 1991: 503).

The questions I was grappling with transcended the choice of an infinitive versus an -ing form. My annotated bibliography includes Dixon's (1991) work that proposed a revised conception of English grammar "on semantic principles". I appear to have been struck at the time by how he treated the mapping of semantic roles onto the syntactic functions (intransitive Subject, transitive Subject, Direct Object or Oblique) and made some notes on the following asymmetry (Dixon 1991: 86):

(5) a. Mary sent a present to the doctor.

b. Mary sent the doctor a present.

(6) a. Mary sent John to the doctor.

b. *Mary sent the doctor John.*

I now understand that (6b) sounds odd for more than one reason. In terms of information packaging, *John* may be too short, too simple and
perhaps too hearer-familiar to appear at the end. However, the sen-
tence doesn't get any better if we replace *John* by the longer NP *her sick
husband*. More to the point, (6b) is ungrammatical because in (6a-b),
the verb *send* is used as a "motion verb", not a "giving verb" – and *the
doctor* is then a destination NP, which is, as Dixon (1991: 86-7) puts it,
"not saliently affected by the activity, and is thus not a candidate for
the [Direct Object] slot." Dixon (1991: 87) adds between brackets that
"[(6b)] could only be used if John were sent to the doctor as something
like a present, as in *Mary sent the doctor a slave/a new assistant.*" As a
researcher starting my career in the late nineteen nineties, I apparently
had already absorbed Adele Goldberg's proposals on argument struc-
ture constructions (Goldberg 1995, 1997), because I took issue with
Dixon's view that *send* in (6a-b) is used as a different verb. I'm quoting
here from my annotation: "In Goldberg's terms, we could more ele-
gantly state that the verb *send* is used here in different constructions:
in [(5b)-(6b)] it elaborates the ditransitive construction, whereas in
[(5a)-(6a)] it occurs in the caused-motion construction" (Cappelle
1999a: 5).<fnref n="3" />

I would like to cite some more from this document, as it re-
veals my early affiliation with constructionist thinking, some 25 years
ago:

"By not recognising the importance of constructions, Dixon's classification of verb types (p. 88 ff.) is not altogether sound. In fact, he only lists verbs which elaborate – in Goldberg's (1997, p. 386) sense – the meaning of the construction. He seems to overlook the possibility of, for instance, *AFFECT* verbs occurring in the *GIVING* frame:

<footnote n="3">³ I notice that I had the numbering wrong in the working document, where I referred to (5a-b) as instances of the ditransitive construction and to (6a-b) as instances of the caused-motion construction. This is corrected here.</footnote>
Amy kicked Paul the ball. (Goldberg 1997, p. 387)

And not only can Primary-A verbs [ones with NPs in Subject and Object positions] sometimes swap frames, it is also possible for Primary-A verb to occur in Primary-B patterns [where the Subject and Object positions can alternatively be filled with a clause]. The verb *tap*, for instance, typically has an NP in its object slot, but one could think of situations (e.g. in the world of telegraphy) where it is used in the *SPEAKING* construction, with a clause as complement:

> The radio operator nervously tapped that his ship was in distress.

Actually, Dixon does realise that some Primary-A verbs can have other than concrete NPs as object, but then, he says, those verbs “have secondary, metaphorical meanings” (p. 94). This is not the case in [ii], where *tapping* retains its literal meaning of ‘lightly striking’ (in this case the key of a telegraph).” (Cappelle 1999a: 6)

So, with respect to question (iii) above, I clearly had countenanced the use of a constructions that contribute meaning over and above the meaning of the main lexical item in it, in this case, the verb taking a particular complement.

In my partial bibliography, I had also included a paper by Achard (1996) that deals purely with sentential complementation. As is well known, in French, some verbs are followed by an indicative complement and others by a subjunctive one:
(7) a. Je sais qu'il est parti. (IND)

b. Je veux qu'il parte. (SUBJ)

(both a- and b-example: Achard 1996: 569)

Achard rejects a lexical approach whereby the type of sentential com-
plement is uniquely conditioned by the main verb. Instead, he favours
a “semantic” analysis whereby the kinds of complements are them-
selves meaningful units. He does not seem to go as far, though, as ad-
vocating a view by which the complement imposes its meaning on the
higher clause: “The presence of a certain type of complement follow-
ing a specific verb is thus not due solely to a property of the latter, but
is imputable to *the necessary semantic compatibility* between the matrix
verb and the complement structure” (Achard 1996: 569, emphasis
mine – B.C.).

I would soon explore this issue for the present subjunctive in
English, even after having definitively left clausal complementation as
a thesis topic. The research project within which I was doing my Ph.D.
had been side-tracked a little with an out-of-series volume on condi-
tionals that my supervisor had written with his full-time collaborator
(Declerck and Reed 2001), but now steamed ahead again with the
multi-volume grammar, focussing its attention on tense, aspect, mo-
dality and voice: everything that can be expressed by the verb's inflec-
tions and auxiliaries. Renaat Declerck was churning out draft chap-
ters, especially on mood, which had also played a major role in the
conditionals book (given sentences such as *If I were you, I'd follow my
gut instinct*). As, by 2001, I had become a full-time collaborator on the
project. My task was to write draft documents, too, based on what
available grammars had to say about, for instance, the imperative, and
provide examples, mainly extracted from the Cobuild corpus, to back
up, and where needed, complement the grammatical descriptions. As
for the subjunctive, I took issue with the commonly voiced idea that
the subjunctive (of both the 'present' and 'past' type) survives mainly
in a few remnant expressions such as *God save the King, Far be it from
me to..., Suffice it to say that...* (examples of the present subjunctive,
which is morphologically indistinguishable from the infinitive) or *If it
were at all possible, ...* (where we have an instance of the past subjunc-
tive, which only exists for the verb *be* and has the form *were*, whatever
the person and number of the subject). The demise of the subjunctive
had been predicted for a long time. Already in 1860, G. P. March (cited
in Aarts, Chalker and Weiner 2014: 398): "The subjunctive is evidently
passing out of use, and there is good reason to suppose that it will
soon become obsolete altogether." Fowler (1926: 574), author of an in
its time authoritative usage guide, didn't mourn the subjunctive's pre-
sumed moribund state and rebuked people who were trying to keep
it alive in prose:

"(...) subjunctives met with today, outside the few truly living uses, are either deliberate revivals by poets for legitimate enough archaic effect, or antiquated survivals as in pretentious journalism, infecting their context with dullness, or new arrivals possible only in an age to which the grammar of the subjunctive is not natural but artificial." (Fowler 1926: 574)

I had reasons to doubt that the subjunctive was unnatural and in a co-
authored paper, I argued that the subjunctive is, in fact, in perfect
shape (Cappelle, Declerck and Reed 2002). This is definitely the case
for the present subjunctive.

One reason that the (present) subjunctive can be argued to be
doing well is that it has many more tokens in actual, common, even
very informal usage than one might think on the basis of the remnant
expressions such as the ones quoted earlier and other archaic-sound-
ing ones like it, such as *Mother be praised, Heaven preserve us from that
or Be it so resolved that....* Indeed, if we can agree – and pardon the
expressions that are about to follow – that *God damn it* is a subjunctive
utterance (as it has the same form as (*God*) *bless you*), then so are its
shortened versions – *goddamnit*, *Goddamn*, *Goddam*, *damn it*, *damnit*,
*dammit*, *damn* – and so are then also the ruder but extremely frequently
used expressions *fuck it*, *fuck that*, *fuck this*, *fuck you*, the productive
schema *fuck* NP as well as the single-word utterance *fuck*. This may
seem like reading too much morphosyntactic form into a pattern that
is not necessarily felt to be equivalent to *God bless America*, but in terms
of speech acts, a curse (*malediction*) is essentially just the opposite of a
wish (*benediction*), to which it is thus closely related. The upshot of
this analogy-based analysis is that probably not a single second goes
by without the present subjunctive being employed somewhere in an
informal conversation.

A second reason why the death bell shouldn't toll just yet for
the present subjunctive is that it appears to hold its ground rather well
in one particular construction, known as the mandative subjunctive.
This is the use of the subjunctive after verbs (and corresponding
nouns) such as *demand*, *insist/-ence*, *request*, *recommend/-ation* and ad-
jectives such as *essential*, *necessary* and *important*. Some examples are
given in (8):

(8) a. They demanded that Mr Xi step down.

b. It is crucial that she be notified immediately.

According to Waller (2017) and other researchers cited by him, the
subjunctive in such mandative subclauses has picked up, or at least
has remained stable in American English since the early twentieth cen-
tury. In British English, where modal verbs, and of these, particularly
*should*, were predominant in this context in the first half of the twenti-
eth century, the indicative and, likely under the influence of American
English, the subjunctive have together become more common alternatives than modals in this sentence pattern.<fnref n="4" />

What interested me more than the changes in frequency of use was the occurrence of present subjunctives in a mandative subclause that is not triggered by any of the well-known lexical items listed in grammars and publications on the matter. The motto to this document, repeated here as (9), is a case in point:

(9) An important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis is that it be “falsifiable”.<fnref n="5" />

In Cappelle, Declerck and Reed (2002: 203), several more examples were given of such a subjunctive complement that could be seen as ‘mandative’ even though the matrix does not explicitly present the propositional contents of the complement as a command or requirement. Note, by the way, that *important* in (9) is just a modifier to the noun *characteristic* and is thus not itself the subjunctive-licensing element (as in *It is crucial/essential/important/necessary/vital/... that...*). In the English enTenTen20 corpus, with material from the web, I more recently did a search for the sequence “that it/there be”, which yielded close to 60,000 hits. (The whole corpus contains a good 43 billion words, and this sequence has then a normalized frequency of 1.38 hits per million words.) In a random sample of 100 occurrences, a similar example occurred as in (10):

<footnote n="4">⁴ In many cases, we have no way of deciding whether the speaker intended to use a subjunctive or an indicative, as with other subjects than third person singular ones, these two inflectional forms are non-distinct. For instance, in *I request that they arrive on time for the appointment*, we simply cannot tell whether this corresponds to ... *that he arrive on time* or to ...*that he arrives on time....*</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ http://people.hsc.edu/faculty-staff/edevlin/edsweb01/courses/genetics/labmanual/lab.htm, last accessed 24 May 2023.</footnote>
(10) They claim that one of the hallmarks of good planning is that it be “flexible and responsive to changing circumstances and values.”<fnref n="6" />

Hallmark is like *characteristic* in that it lacks a clear sense of obligation. It is rather the present subjunctive complement that allows us to see the matrix clause, which talks about a recurrent, central property of something, indirectly also portrays that property as a *vital* ingredient, a *conditio sine qua non*. Something that is normal is also *norm-al*. In Cappelle, Declerck and Reed (2002: 203), the conclusion that could be drawn from such sentences is no finite list of lexical items that license the subjunctive. Rather, the only requirement in the use of the mandative subjunctive seems to be that the introductory matrix clause is one that is compatible with the subjunctive-containing *that*-clause, which states what should be effected or what should be the case (cf. again Achard 1996: 569, quoted above).

We should therefore reject the view that a present subjunctive is just an inflectional form (similar to the infinitive) which doesn't carry any meaning itself and which is (always) selected by a lexical item in the matrix clause that is marked as taking the subjunctive (cf. Figure 1).

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Lexical government of the mandative subjunctive.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="6">⁶ https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/devita-v-county-napa-31657, last accessed 24 May 2023.</footnote>
Of course, most lexical accounts do not treat the selection of a kind of complement such as the subjunctive as completely arbitrary and recognize instead that lexical items triggering a particular complement fall into semantically coherent classes (cf. Figure 2).

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Government of the mandative subjunctive by semantic verb class.</figcaption></figure>

This has been standard practice, in fact, in grammatical descriptions of the classical languages, where for instance the subjunctive mood in Latin ('coniunctivus') is said to occur after volition verbs ('verba volendi'), verbs of fear ('verba timendi'), and so on. Not just for verbs but also for nouns and adjectives, semantic classes can and have been distinguished. Even so, a semantics-class-based account is not tenable either, as we have seen that the subjunctive can appear in contexts where the verb, noun or adjective on which the subjunctive seems to depend does not belong to any such semantically defined class (e.g. *characteristic*, *hallmark*). An alternative, therefore, is to recognize a present subjunctive construction, in which the subjunctive complement clause itself is associated with meaning (cf. Figure 3).
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. Mandative subjunctive constructions.</figcaption></figure>

In Construction Grammar (Lakoff 1987, Fillmore 1988, Goldberg 1995), constructions are seen as form-meaning pairings that capture regularities in language usage. In the simplified representation of the mandative subjunctive construction in Figure 3, the syntactic structure is not kept separate from the semantic specification. However, a more 'standard' Construction-Grammar representation could easily be provided. The syntactic(-cum-semantic) representation in Figure 3 has been flattened to avoid the view that it is the higher clause, and the higher clause only, that licenses the subjunctive. Instead, the mandative subjunctive should be seen as a kind of syntactic Gestalt (something experienced holistically). The complement clause and the rest of the phrase are semantically compatible (indicated in Figure 3 by a double-headed arrow). While the complement clause is associated with meaning, it cannot occur without an introducing expression of volition or necessity. However, since the complement clause is itself meaningful, it can occasionally 'coerce' (i.e., force, constrain, shift) the meaning of the introductory expression (cf. Figure 4). When that part of the phrase merely expresses that the propositional contents of the complement clause is a characteristic of something, this will be understood as a necessary property, as a criterion that should be met to acknowledge an entity as an instance of that thing:
(11) It is a characteristic of causality that it be an external relation, that is, one which does not enter into the nature of the particular entity (...).<fnref n="7" />

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Constructional effect: semantic coercion.</figcaption></figure>

That there is such a thing as a mandative subjunctive construction can
only be a fully convincing analysis if we can adduce solid evidence for
it. It could be objected that the sentences in (9) and (10), which I claim
call for such a constructionist analysis, still contain adjectives typically
associated with the subjunctive (*important, good*). As pointed out, these
adjectives are not used predicatively (*It is Adj that...*) and hence are
not themselves the subjunctive-triggering items. Yet, they could still
help in interpreting the introductory expression as relating to neces-
sity. The example in (11), though, should take away any doubt that the
matrix clause can get a strengthened meaning by the very use of a sub-
junctive as a complement. This sentence can be paraphrased more or
less as: 'To recognize a relation as one of causality, it should be an ex-
ternal relation etc.'

Admittedly, such sentences are rare. If the possible use of
nouns such as *characteristic* or *feature*, even without a modifying adjec-
tive, in the first part of the mandative subjunctive construction belongs
to the conventions of the English language, not every speaker of Eng-
lish may be aware of it. In other words, not all competent language

<footnote n="7">⁷ http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~davidt/Naturalizing.html, last accessed 25 May 2023.</footnote>
users may have a mentally stored representation of the abstract sub-
junctive construction represented in Figure 3, let alone accept a coer-
cion effect induced by the subclause, as shown in Figure 4. While I
have rejected a purely lexical or semantic-class-based analysis, a con-
structionist approach would accept the existence of lower-level gener-
alizations, as well as commonly used individual items that are often
found in the first part of the subjunctive construction. This means that
the question raised in the title of this section – are complements gov-
erned lexically or constructionally? – suggests a false dichotomy. On a
constructionist account, the verbs *demand*, *insist* and *request* would be
lexically stored together with a subjunctive complement, while the
subjunctive after less commonly used volition verbs such as *appeal* or
*ordain* could be licensed by a schema containing a semantic class. Fi-
nally, a subjunctive after a verb that is less readily seen as one of voli-
tion, such as *protest* or *reiterate* (e.g. (12a-b)), would then be sanctioned
either by the yet more schematic subjunctive construction (as in Figure
3) or by a semantic-class-based construction (a modified version of
what is shown in Figure 2); in either case, these verbs would then be
coerced into expressing volition (cf. Figure 5).

(12) a. She protested that she be paid her outstanding salary.<fnref n="8" />

b. Clara also reiterated that he keep silent while she spoke.<fnref n="9" />

<footnote n="8">⁸ https://www.nairaland.com/7264544/wafcon-2022-nigeria-squad-still/1, last accessed 25 May 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_in_Atlanta, last accessed 25 May 2023.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. Semantic coercion, possibly by a construction of intermediate schematicity.</figcaption></figure>

To conclude this section, I have tried to demonstrate why I have been convinced, for more than twenty years, that constructions play a role in language description. The advantage of a constructionist account is that it allows for semantic coercion. This refers to the process by which a construction affects the interpretation of its constituent words or phrases, pushing them towards a specific reading that is different from their inherent or prototypical meaning (see, e.g., Michaelis 2004, Legallois 2009, Lauwers and Willems 2011, Leclercq 2023). We have also seen that lexical and constructional licensing are mechanisms that can co-exist in a constructionist framework.

## 1.2 Construction-dependent interpretation: the case of a West Flemish discourse particle

The example of the mandative subjunctive construction, discussed in the previous section, carries an implication not yet emphasized there. If a construction can impose a particular meaning or interpretation on a lexical item that would typically have a different meaning in other environments, then that means that words can have a construction-specific meaning. I explored this major constructionist insight in Cap-
pelle (2000, 2003), a detailed reply to Haegeman's (1984, 1993) treat-
ment of a West-Flemish dialogic particle, *dè*.<fnref n="10" /> Haegeman proposes a
unitary meaning of this particle (somewhat infelicitously called an in-
terjection by her). Adopting a Relevance-Theoretic framework (Sper-
ber and Wilson 1995[1986]), she captures the functioning of *dè* (written
as *da* in her analyses) as follows:

... the function of utterance-final *da* in questions is not to con-
tribute to the proposition expressed by the utterance. Rather *da*
is associated with an utterance whose propositional content is
independently becoming manifest in the questioner's external
environment and the role of *da* is to signal to the hearer that this
proposition contradicts a proposition which was manifest in
the questioner's cognitive environment. ... Appropriate an-
swers to *da* questions will aim to resolve the contradiction ...
(Haegeman 1993: 127)

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ West Flemish is an indigenous regional language spoken in West Flanders, Belgium, as well as in parts of the Netherlands (Zeelandic Flanders) and France (French Flanders, an area in the northernmost part of France that skirts the city of Dunkirk and includes the towns Cassel and Hazebrouck). It is also spoken in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, where many people born in West Flanders have come to live over the last few decades. West Flemish belongs to the Low Franconian group and is most closely related to Dutch, of which it is viewed as a dialect. As such, it is not taught in schools and lacks a codified written form. It has unique pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar compared to standard Dutch (Debrabandere 1999, Devos et Vandekerckhove 2005, Haegeman 2009, Haegeman et Lohndal 2010). While its vitality is considered low – indeed, it is identified as an endangered language (Ethnologue, s.v. West Flemish) – West Flemish, which has preserved several phonological, lexical and syntactic features of Middle Dutch, is remarkably resilient (Decaluwé et al. 2021, Verhaege 2021). It owes some popularity to its use in TV series set in West Flanders (subtitled in standard Dutch), and in music, from chanson to schlager music, funky pop, hip-hop and even drill rap.</footnote>
Dè is thus a marker of mirativity, expressing the speaker's surprise at what is becoming clear in the speech situation. For a collection of papers on the nature of surprise and on its linguistic encoding, see Celle and Lansari (2017). The papers in that volume agree upon the idea that the notion of surprise relates to forming a cognitive, epistemic judgment and is not to be mistaken for a mere physical response of being startled. Dè is most likely related to Dutch *dan* 'then', which should be seen not as an adverb of time but as one expressing that the proposition underlying the clause is a conclusion based on some evidence. A typical example of *dè* is given in (13):

(13) nè zie' j' 'ieër ook dè
MIR be[PRS.2SG] you[NOM.2SG] here too MIR
'Oh, you're here too!'

This resembles an example from !Xun that Aikhenvald (2012: 448) cites in a study dedicated to mirativity in a range of languages. Signalling surprise at someone's unexpected presence is probably a common use for mirative markers. The structure of this sentence, given the use of inversion and the rising intonation (not indicated), is indubitably that of a yes/no-question. Yet, the questioner can obviously see for themselves that the addressee is present in the location where the exchange is hapting, so the question is not meant to seek confirmation for that. Instead, what the questioner wants to indicate is that the interlocutor's presence is surprising, that is, clashes with the questioner's expectations. The question is then meant to ask for some sort of explanation for the addressee's unexpected presence. That is why I call it a *dialogic* particle.

Note that there is another mirative marker (*nè*) at the start of the utterance in (13). Debrabandere (1999, s.v. *nè*), mentions that this word might be a shortening of *nèm* 'take', and is in that sense comparable to French *tiens*, which can also mark surprise. Rendering *nè* with 'oh' in
the free translation is not meant to suggest that this marker is a cogni-
tively unfiltered eruption of raw emotion, which, incidentally, I don’t
think *oh* ever is. For all its spontaneity, to the extent that it expresses
some degree of perplexity or stupefaction, *oh* is also a marker of mira-
tivity, and hence involves some assessment of there being a mismatch
between a new proposition and one’s expectations. Translating by
‘well well’ would be an alternative but might make West Flemish *nè*
out as a little too obviously ironic.

What this brief discussion of translation alternatives reveals is
that certain expressive elements need not (only) be used to truthfully
reflect the speaker's emotional condition but can (also) be employed
to serve a mimetic function – the rounding of the lips in uttering *oh*
could be reminiscent of sucking in air in surprise. Indeed, Celle et al.
(2017: 240) seem to consider the interjection *oh* as a word that expresses
a fairly impulsive, unrestrained emotion response. It is still a lexical
item, though, so not quite the same as the purely physical reaction
whereby one inhales air when being taken aback. The authors rightly
point out that an utterance such as *I'm surprised* is, compared to an
interjection like *oh*, is an expression – as well as a description and even
explanation – of an emotional reaction and thus something cognitively
more self-conscious.<fnref n="11" /> In the case of *well well*, there is potentially the
function of the speaker putting herself on stage, as it were, with a
feigned or exaggerated display of being taken aback by emotions of
surprise and disbelief. The phrase is often used to convey that speaker

<footnote n="11">¹¹ An interjection such as *ouch* is also closer to the raw sensation of physical pain than a propositional expression like *That hurt!*, as it mimics the wide opening of one’s mouth when one cries out in pain. Even so, like *oh*, the interjection *ouch* is a lexical item, and is to some extent arbitrary, differing from interjections with a similar function in other languages. As Kleiber (2015) argues for *aïe*, the French equivalent of *ouch*, this word has both an indexical function (signalling, through intonation and intensity, the speaker’s pain) and a symbolic function (given that, as a linguistic sign, it is used to *talk about* being in pain, a sensation that is not highly individual, as everyone in the linguistic community can relate to it). It is thanks to its partly symbolic nature that we can use it to express empathy with someone else presumed to feel pain, as in *Aïe, ça doit faire mal !*, ‘Ouch, that must hurt!’.</footnote>
is not genuinely surprised or not caught off guard by the situation and
might even have anticipated it ('Ha! You're not fooling me!'). See Le-
gallois and François (2012) for a discussion of these multiple types of
expressiveness – emotional, 'mimesic' (linked to linguistic immediacy
or 'presentification', as if one can see things unfold before one's eyes)
and 'ethical' (relating especially to extravagant ways of getting oneself
noticed as a speaker and, thus, promoting oneself socially).

Haegeman (1993) claims that *dè* invariantly expresses surprise
at a proposition (P) for which the speaker is receiving evidence in the
situational context. This is also the case, according to her, in *Wh*- ques-
tions:

"*Wh*-questions with *da* are only used if the questioner has some
evidence for what the answer will be ... The use of *da* indicates
that on the basis of the external evidence presented to him the
questioner suspects that P, once completed, will be incompati-
ble with assumptions manifest in his prior cognitive environ-
ment. He in some sense suggests 'I cannot believe it' and indi-
cates that he cannot or will not accept the completed P in the
given context." (Haegeman 1993: 123).

In my reply (Cappelle 2002: 14–15), I raised the objection that it is far
from always the case that the speaker can arrive themselves at the
completed proposition on the basis of independent evidence (some-
thing previously said or something perceived). This, I claimed, is too
strict a requirement. I do not think my objection stemmed from a too
narrow reading of the above-quoted passage from Haegeman, as the
idea of available evidence is supported by the examples she offered and discussed (Haegeman 1993: 123–4).<fnref n="12" />

Suppose (to give one of here examples) that as a speaker of West Flemish you see someone unloading a shopping bag, producing four pots of caviar. Based on the knowledge that caviar is very expensive, that your interlocutor isn't particularly rich and that caviar is only bought by rich people, your question Wat 'è' j' gekocht dè? 'Oh, what did you buy?!' would then invite your interlocutor not just to answer Kavioar (thereby completing P). Rather, by adding dè, your interlocutor will get the hint that they should offer some auxiliary assumptions so that you can integrate the completed P into the set of your background assumptions. For instance, your interlocutor might explain that there was a special offer that nobody could have resisted or that they had won a thousand euros in the lottery. Alternatively, they could cancel the completed P, by saying for instance that a Russian friend brought the pots of caviar for them, or that the shopping is not for themselves but for the upstairs neighbour. Another example Haegeman gives is where someone asks the interlocutor, Wat 'è' j' doar an dè? 'Oh, what are you wearing?!' Again, the questioner can see for themselves which clothes the addressee is wearing. By adding dè, the questioner highlights that the choice of clothing is unexpected and invites the addressee to offer some explanation for it.

Sometimes, there is only rather indirect evidence for the completed proposition. Consider the following exchange:<fnref n="13" />

(14) A: 'k gon gon-slaapn
I go[PRS.1SG] go-sleep
'I'm off to bed.'

<footnote n="12">¹² One could argue that her use of "suspect" leaves room for doubt, but note that the formulation is such that the questioner does not suspect what the value will be for X but that the value (arrived at independently) will clash with their expectations.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ For the remarkable doubling of *gon* in A's utterance, see Haegeman (1990).</footnote>
B: 'oe loat' is 't ol dè
how late be[PRS.3SG] it already MIR
'Oh, what time is it?!' [I didn't realize it was getting
that late.]

Here, speaker B may have no evidence yet, at the time of asking the question, of the exact time, but B may nonetheless suspect, in line with Haegeman's (1993) description of *dè*'s function, that the answer will confirm that it is quite a bit later than what B had been assuming before A announced that it was, as far as A is concerned, time to go to bed. In other words, *dè* here marks surprise at the fact that the time, whatever it is, is bound to be later than presumed before A's utterance (which serves as evidence for the lateness).

In a few of the authentic examples I had collected for my paper on *dè*, however, the person asking a *Wh*-question has not even a vague idea of the value to be given to the variable encoded by the *Wh*-word. A quite commonly used exemplar of *Wh*-questions with *dè* is (14):

(15) wo' go' j' no' toe
where go[PRS.2SG] you[NOM.2SG] to.PREP to.POST
dè
MIR
'Oh, where are you going to?!' [I didn't expect you were
going anywhere']

This question can be asked if the questioner has no idea of the destination that the addressee is going to. It is therefore a genuine question for information. But in addition, by virtue of *dè*, it expresses surprise that the addressee is apparently going somewhere in the first place, which is an unexpected fact the questioner is confronted with. The questioner had expected the addressee to stay in their present location for at least a little longer.
The examples in (14) and (15) demonstrate that the item *dè* carries a slightly different functional meaning depending on the type of sentence it appears in. In yes/no-questions, *dè* signals a clash between the proposition which underlies the question (and which is assumed to be true) and the questioner's expectations. In *Wh*-questions, *dè* indicates surprise on the part of the speaker and the element of surprise can stem from the value assigned to the open variable based on situational evidence (as in the caviar example), or it can arise from the presupposed part of the question itself (as in the 'Oh, where are you going to?!' example).<fnref n="14" />

What's more, there are further sentence types that contain *dè*, each of which comes with its own interpretation. The yes/no-questions and *Wh*-questions discussed above end with rising intonation (so *dè* has a high pitch), but (16) is a *Wh*-question with a falling intonation. This type of question typically contains the adverb *weeëre* 'again'.

(16) 'oe was da' weeëre **dè** die
how be[PST.3SG] DEM.DIST again DP DEM.DIST.F
klucht
joke
'How did that joke go again?'

In this kind of sentence, no surprise is expressed at all. The gloss **DIM** is therefore inappropriate, and a more generic gloss, **DP**, which simply stands for 'discourse particle', is provided here. In a *Wh*-question with *dè* and with falling intonation, the questioner is digging into their own memory for a piece of stored knowledge that they are struggling to

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ It should be noted that, for some speakers of West-Flemish (my bike repairer being one of them), *dè* in questions (with rising intonation) does not always express surprise (cf. Cappelle 2002: 29). I am ignoring this weakened use here.</footnote>
retrieve in the speech situation. This sentence type, while clearly dif-
ferent, still has functional aspects in common with the two patterns
previously mentioned: the questioner is inviting the addressee to re-
spond to their utterance, which is itself a response (but in this case, to
a temporary failure of one's memory, not explicitly to something the
interlocutor said or did). In this type, the invitation can be concretized
as: 'Help me in searching for the answer to the question'. Indeed, other
typical instantiations of this pattern involve searches for names, places
or words or expressions, e.g. 'Oe noemt ie weeëre dè? 'What's his name
again?', Woar was da' weeëre dè? 'Where was that again?', 'Oe zeggen ze
da' weeëre dè? 'How does one put that again?'). The appeal for help
may just be ostensible, as when the questioner, by using this construc-
tion, is just buying time to retrieve a temporarily forgotten name or
expression.

Still other sentence types can combine with *dè*, such as declara-
tives and certain formulaic utterances used for backchannelling (e.g.
Gow, j' 'è' nog chance g'hèd dè 'Right, so, you've been lucky'; Allez dè!
'Oh my!'), imperatives (e.g. Zeg 'et e' ki' dè broeëre 'Right, mate, tell me
[what you want]') and elliptical responses (e.g. A: Jeanine was e' snelle
— B. En 'eur zuster dè! 'A: Jeanine was a pretty one — B: 'And then
what to say of her sister!'). In the last two types, there is again no sur-
prise. The impression ones gets even more clearly is that *dè* has no
fixed, unitary meaning at all. Rather, its precise interpretation must be
considered in combination with the specific sentence type hosting it.

This is not to say that there are no partial similarities between
any two sentence types containing *dè*. What we are confronted with is
something like *family resemblance* in Wittgenstein's (2009[1953]: 36)
sense, a useful concept to understand the relationships between vari-
ous members of the 'category' made up of sentences with *dè*. Accord-
ing to Wittgenstein, traditional definitions based on shared essential
characteristics or properties may not be sufficient to capture the com-
plex nature of certain categories. Instead, Wittgenstein suggests that
members of a category can exhibit a network of overlapping similarities or resemblances, akin to a family where different members share certain traits but not all. Family resemblance highlights the complex and interconnected nature of categories, challenging the idea that they can always be neatly defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Table 1 illustrates, much like in Wittgenstein's example of the concept of *games*, that there is no single defining feature that applies to all sentences with *dè* (like surprise), but rather a range of similarities that may be present in different sentence types.<fnref n="15" /> Some sentence types may share certain traits while lacking others, yet they can still be considered part of the broader category of *dè* sentences due to the network of resemblances and connections.

In Cappelle (2003), I did not explicitly present the different sentence types with *dè* as forming a family resemblance category. However, the underlying insight was implicitly present in the analysis.

"Dè can be associated with a cluster of semantic and usage properties, each sentence type selecting one or several of them, sometimes with small but significant modifications. Which properties a sentence type is characterized by cannot be predicted straightforwardly." (Cappelle 2003: 37; translated from the original Dutch)

The main insight of my study was that the interpretation of *dè* should be considered not in isolation but in combination with the sentence type in which it is used: "the different sentence types with *dè* are, each of them, different *constructions*, in the sense that they have specific properties that cannot be deduced from their component parts (cf.

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Line five in the table concerns the ability to paraphrase with 'It sounds like ...' or 'It appears as if ...'.</footnote>
Goldberg 1995: 4)" (Cappelle 2003: 31; translated from the original
Dutch).

The existence of construction-specific meanings of a lexical item
was further explored in my research on particles, to which I now turn.
<table><caption>Table 1. Discursive and interpretational properties of different sentence-types with West Flemish *dè*. An unbracketed tick means that the property in question is always present; a bracketed tick means that the property *may* be present. A tick straddling two lines means that either of the two properties concerned is present.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Yes/no-question</th><th>Wh-question with rising intonation</th><th>Wh-question with falling intonation</th><th>Declarative sentence</th><th>Allez</th><th>Imperative sentence</th><th>Ellipsis</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>reacts to an utterance</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td></td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td></td><td>✓</td></tr><tr><td>reacts to a perception</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>reacts to a lacuna in one's memory</td><td></td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>complete P becomes independently manifest</td><td>✓</td><td>(✓)</td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>(complete or incomplete) P is an inference</td><td>✓</td><td>(✓)</td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>expresses surprise</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>elicits an easy answer or simple action</td><td></td><td></td><td>(✓)</td><td></td><td></td><td>✓</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>elicits an explanation</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>elicits approval</td><td>(✓)</td><td></td><td></td><td>(✓)</td><td>(✓)</td><td></td><td>(✓)</td></tr><tr><td>gives rise to a scalar interpretation</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>✓</td></tr></tbody></table>
1.3 What's up with verb particles? Aspects of aspect, and
more evidence for construction-specific meaning

This chapter began with some discussion of verb complementation,
meant to be the topic of my doctoral dissertation. How did it shift to
verb particles? I must admit I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when
I decided to investigate particles, but an early paper of mine from 1999
can be seen as a bridge (Cappelle 1999b). One class of verbs taking -
ing forms and infinitives, with individual preferences or constraints,
are so-called aspectual verbs (*begin*, *start*, *continue*, *go on*, *stop*, *cease*, *fin-
ish* and the like). I had read Brinton's (1988) monograph on aspectual
verbs and verb particles, both of which form broad 'aspectual systems'
of English. My curiosity had been raised by the seeming synonymy of
*keep* V-ing and *keep on* V-ing, as dictionaries presented things. For in-
stance, *Collins COBUILD English Dictionary* writes:

"If you **keep** doing something, you do it repeatedly or continue to do it. (...) *I keep forgetting it's December... I turned back after a while, but he kept walking...* (...) **Keep on** means the same as **keep**. Did he give up or keep on trying?... *My wife keeps on saying I work too hard.*" (Cobuild 1995 s.v. *keep*)

Elsewhere in the literature, it has been mentioned that *on* is added “for emphasis”. However, as Goddard (1998: 166) rightly points out, such a qualification is often imprecise and impracticable. In my research using the Cobuild corpus, I came across passages where the two expressions (with and without *on*) were used interchangeably.

(17) "I just **kept** fighting," said Rubin, who saved nine match points against Novotna in Paris. It reached the stage where I **kept on** saying 'one more game and it will be
over'. But the match just **kept on** going and going. I told
myself to **keep** fighting and that's what I did." (example
from Cobuild corpus, cited in Cappelle 1999b: 291)

One difference between *keep* and *keep on* is based on syntax. I argued that *keep* has grammaticalized into an auxiliary-like verb (without NICE properties, though), while *keep on* is still more of a lexical verb, as appears from the possibility to use *keep on*, but not *keep*, as an autonomous verb, that is, without being followed by any other verb, illustrated in (18a-b), both taken from the lyrics of songs.<fnref n="16" />

(18) a. We just keep on keeping on (Curtis Mayfield, *Keep On Keeping On*)

b. And you've just gotta keep on keeping on (First Aid Kit, *My Silver Lining*)

Looking into a aspectual verbs, a particular set of verbs that take non-
finite complements, thus familiarized me with the role played by a
particular particle, *on*, which belongs to a small set that express dura-
tivity or continuation: apart from *on*, there is also *about/around, along*
and *away*:

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ The expression *keep on keeping on* has some currency beyond pop songs (even though Wikipedia lists 17 songs with that title): in the 43-billion-word enTenTen20 corpus, there are some 3,600 occurrences of it (roughly 83 hits per billion words). For *keep keeping on* there are still 83 hits in the corpus (almost 2 per billion words). I found only eight occurrences in the corpus of *keep (on) keeping*, a couple of which seem to involve the irrelevant use of *keeping* in the sense of ‘not selling (a collector’s item)’. So, the use of *keep* as a main verb (meaning ‘continue’) is very infrequent, to the point of being considered ungrammatical, and is also not attested in the OED.</footnote>
(19) a. *battle on, carry on, dream on, go on, hold on, plough/plow on, press on, soldier on, walk on*

b. *clap along, dance along, hum along, play along, read along, sing along*

c. *dilly-dally about/around, fanny about/around, laze about/around, mess about/around, muck about/around, piddle about/around, potter about/around*

d. *chat away, purr away, simmer away; grind away, read away, slog away, scrub away, chip away, chisel away, nibble away, whittle away*

My research now started being focused on such particles, in particular
on their aspectual and argument-structural effects, which were even-
tually discussed in detail in my doctoral dissertation (Cappelle 2005a:
343–457). While they can all be described as *atelic* (i.e., not tending to-
wards any inherent endpoint of a situation), these different particles
add different shades of meaning. Particle verbs like those in (19a) con-
vey a sense of continuation or persistence. The particle *on* implies the
idea of not giving up or pushing (metaphorically) forward despite
challenges or obstacles. In (19b), the particle *along* implies a sense of
synchrony or alignment with the ongoing action. It suggests actively
participating or joining in while maintaining a consistent pace or
rhythm with the main activity. The use of *about* or *around* in particle
verbs like those in (19c) suggests engaging in aimless or unproductive
activity, often with a sense of wasting time or being idle. It implies a
lack of focus or purpose in one’s actions, as if one is occupied with
trivial or unimportant matters. The particle *away* adds a sense of con-
tinuous or prolonged activity, often with a pleasant or relaxed conno-
tation, as in the first three combinations in (19d). It suggests that the
action may continue for an extended period, without a specific end-
point in mind. In the other combinations in (19d), the particle conveys
a slightly different nuance. Here, *away* implies a focused, determined,
or persistent effort or progress towards a specific goal or objective,
typically to reduce or eliminate something, often with small, repetitive
actions. The verb phrase in which such a combination occurs is none-
theless atelic, as appears from the impossibility to add *in X time*. There
is often an *on-PP* or *at-PP* here describing on which the activity is di-
rected, as in (20):

(20) a. I worked away for hours on my research paper.

b. I chipped away at the rock until it formed a smooth
sculpture.

Particle verbs of the kinds in (19a-d) prove wrong the frequently en-
countered claim that particles in English typically have the effect of
"perfectivizing" or "telicizing" the situation. The example typically
given in the literature concerns the difference between *drink* and *drink
up* or *eat* and *eat up*. A collection of quotes to this effect is given in Cap-
pelle and Chauvin (2010: 251–2). This well-known contrast has even
penetrated into the non-linguistic literature, where it is mixed up with
different (or imagined) meaning contrasts:

"Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived."

(J. M. Coetzee. 1999. *Disgrace*. London: Secker & Warburg, p. 71)

I suspect that the oft-mentioned contrastive pair represented by *drink* (or *eat*) and *drink up* (or *eat up*) has given rise to the wrong idea that *up* is *always* a telicizing particle – it is not, sadly, in *The Earth is warming up*, for instance, where the meaning is that the Earth's temperature is rising. The even more misguided idea that *all* particles are telicizing has also firmly taken root. Here are just two illustrations of this assumption:
"Like all particles, *up* appears to require a delimited interpretation." (Keyser and Roeper 1992: 113)

"The class of verb particles have the semantic property of imposing delimitedness on the event described by a verb phrase or sentence." (Tenny 1994: 148)

In Cappelle (2007) I provided a concise overview of the argument-structural effects of different kinds of particles. I had come to the conclusion that depending on whether the particle is used in a spatial or non-spatial combination (i.e. with the particle expressing a trajectory in physical space or not) and on whether the particle is telic or atelic, it can or cannot alter the verb's own valency. In a spatial atelic combination (i.e. when there is a trajectory in space but no inherent endpoint), the particle typically 'respects' the valency of the verb. Thus, *walk around* is intransitive, just like *walk* itself, and *push the pram along* is transitive, in keeping with the fact that *push* has a transitive use. The example in (21) is therefore exceptional.

(21) My daughter wanted to go to the pool with just me to play elaborate games with incomprehensible rules that changed as quickly as she could speak, and always ended with me **swimming her around** on my back, a game called "water pony."<fnref n="17" />

A combination with a spatial telic particle can be seen as a constructional template that has its own argument structure, independently of the verb's valency pattern. There are several constructional templates.

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ https://literarymama.com/articles/departments/2008/08/voice-writers-art, last accessed 3 June 2023.</footnote>
One is the well-known caused-motion construction. For instance, *The dog barked the postman away* conveys the idea that the dog's barking was intense or forceful enough to cause the postman to retreat or leave. The NP *the postman* is a direct object, but not of the verb *bark* itself (cp. *The dog barked the postman*). It is the direct object of the whole construction. Another template is intransitive and could be seen as a spatial subtype of the larger class of intransitive resultatives (which also include examples like *The pond froze solid*). Here, too, the particle seemingly has the effect of altering the verb's valency in cases like *The paint had rubbed off*, which implies that the paint was previously present on a surface but has now been partially or completely removed through rubbing or friction. Without the particle It is not possible to use *rub* with this so-called Theme (i.e. displaced object) argument as subject NP. Again, it is not the particle as such that enables this possibility. Rather, it is the construction in which the particle appears as the resultative argument.

In non-spatial atelic combinations, the presence of a particle does not affect the verb's valency. In such combinations, verbs simply cannot have a direct object argument with them (e.g. *I was reading (*magazines) away all afternoon*). Obligatorily transitive verbs are therefore not accepted. Compare:

(22) a. After a wonderful bath in the huge pool, sauna and **relaxing around** a bit, we decided to take the earlier bus to the airport so would not need to hurry.<fnref n="18" />

b. *The bored kids were **destroying around** a bit in the old factory.

(Example 21a) shows that the impossibility of (21b) cannot be due to the fact that a Latinate verb is used.) In non-spatial telic combinations, finally, the direct object NP is typically also an argument of the verb

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ http://metro-nomad.blogspot.com/2013/, last accessed 3 June 2023.</footnote>
(e.g. *I watched the film (through) without falling asleep*). Occasionally we find cases where a non-spatial, atelic verb-particle combination is transitive while the verb itself isn't. One such case is *talk the plan* *(through)*. All in all, though, this use is not that common and some verbs can retain their valency in this particular construction (with *through* expressing complete non-spatial 'traversal' of something). For instance, *listen* is a prepositional verb: we can say *listen to the whole song* but not *listen the whole song*. When we use the particle *through*, to suggest that the song was listened to from the beginning to the end, we can retain this PP and do not have to use an NP (though we can): *I listened (to) the whole song through*.<fnref n="19" /> Table 2 summarizes these observations.

<table><caption>Table 2. Change in verbal valency depending on the type of particle in a verb-particle construction.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>atelic</th><th>telic</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>spatial</th><td>exceptional change</td><td>frequent change</td></tr><tr><th>non-spatial</th><td>no change</td><td>occasional change</td></tr></tbody></table>

The four cases shown here do not exhaust all the possibilities. Particles can also be found with idiosyncratic meanings that lack an obviously spatial interpretation but that are not necessarily telic or atelic. One such use is that of *down* in the following combinations, listed by McIntyre (2002: 97):

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ In Cappelle (2007), I treated the possibility to change the verb's valency in non-spatial combinations with a telic particle as exceptional. I have meanwhile come to believe that it is probably a little more common than I thought it was. I cannot base this on any quantitative assessment, however.</footnote>
(23) *brush down, clean down, dust down, hose down, rub down, sand down, scour down, scrub down, soap down, sponge down, spray down, swab down, wash down, wipe down*

*Down* in such combinations doesn't mean 'in the direction of the ground'. Yet, it is far from meaningless. As McIntyre (2002: 97) writes:

> "Indeed, often a [particle verb] taken in isolation will look like an idiom, especially if the particle has no clearly spatial meaning, but studying the full range of [particle verbs] with the particle reveals regularities. [(23)] shows that this use of *down* occurs with many verbs of surface treatment, where it consistently specifies that the action is performed on a substantial part of the entity appearing as object, and where the base verb meaning is preserved exactly." (McIntyre 2002: 97)

My research on particles, and my general conception of grammar, has been inspired and informed a great deal by this and other insightful discussions made by Andrew McIntyre. While not a Construction Grammarian, he wrote that, with respect to particle verbs like those in (23) and others where the particle makes a particular stable semantic contribution, "we may say that the particle is an intransitive preposition with a 'construction-specific' meaning, a meaning which is idiosyncratically confined to the [particle verb] construction" (McIntyre 2002: 98).<fnref n="20" />

I have also been highly influenced by what Ray Jackendoff wrote about verb-particle constructions in a book chapter from the same collected volume (Jackendoff 2002). In this chapter, he extended

<footnote n="20">²⁰ I do not want to draw the attention too much here on the view, going back to at least Jespersen (1924: 88–89), that verbal particles can be assigned to the word class of prepositions, if we allow those, like verbs, to be either transitive or intransitive (or both). See Cappele (2005b) for discussion.</footnote>
earlier work (Jackendoff 1997) on "constructional idioms" and treated
the verb-particle construction as consisting of various sub-construc-
tions. Some of those sub-constructions are really low-level, such as the
individual 'phrasal verbs' that we find in dictionaries or in lists for
foreign language learners, who may need to learn, for instance, that
*take off* means 'to leave suddenly' or 'to become successful suddenly'
or that *figure out* means 'to understand (a situation) or solve (a prob-
lem)'. Somewhat more general, semi-productive schemas can also tie
together individual combinations in which the particle has a similar
meaning. For instance, *black out*, *chill out*, *conk out*, *pass out*, *space out*,
*veg out*, *zonk out*, *zone out*, etc., are particle verbs that depict various
states of consciousness, relaxation, or mental disengagement. The par-
ticle in them has a construction-specific meaning, with 'construction'
here understood as a still low-level node in a taxonomic network. Un-
like what McIntyre (2002) wrote about the expressions dealing with
surface treatment in (23), the base verbs in such a schema do not nec-
essarily preserve their own meaning, and they are not even all verbs
to begin with.

Jackendoff, who is again not a Construction Grammarian *stricto sensu*, did acknowledge that this theory would handle certain aspects of the grammar of verb-particle constructions particularly well (Jackendoff 2002: 84). For instance, it would be natural in this theory to allow for the presence of a direct object NP not licensed by the verb in, for instance, the pattern [VP V NP [Prt *away*]], as in *dancin' the night away*, whose meaning Jackendoff (2002: 84) represents as '*waste* [Time NP] *heedlessly V-ing*'.

The chapter Jackendoff (2002) wrote on particle verbs had an-
other trait in common with Construction Grammar, not highlighted
by him. He implicitly adopted a lexicon-grammar continuum in ac-
knowledging the existence of V-Prt idioms that have to be listed and
a more general pattern where the particle encodes a directional mean-
ing and alternates with a full prepositional phrase, as well as several
further constructions with an open slot for the verb but a filled-in par-
ticle and object NP, such as V *one's head/butt off* or V *one's heart out*,
which also form a family within the whole network (see also Lemmens
2015: 101–2). This conception of the verb-particle phenomenon, nei-
ther as a list of lexical items to be learned by heart nor as one single
maximally general argument-structure construction, seemed to me to
resonate with what soon became something of a norm in Construction
Grammar circles. For instance, Traugott (2008) distinguished so-called
“micro-”, “meso-” and “macro-constructions”, and while it is not clear
what the basis is for assigning a particular construction to one of these
tiers, the terminology reflected the idea that constructions are some-
how situated on a cline of specificity or abstraction (to name the two
opposite ends of the continuum). In a somewhat similar vein, Boas
(2003a) had previously argued against the exclusive adoption of just a
few broad ‘Goldbergian’ argument-structure constructions (the
ditransitive construction, the resultative construction, etc.) and thus
for the complementary recognition of several lower-level verb con-
structions, “mini-constructions” as he called them, whereby different
senses of a verb – simply put, different configurations of the elements
involved in the semantic frame it evokes – find different syntactic re-
alizations.

The family of constructional schemas V *one's head/butt off* and V *one's heart out*, mentioned above, is one that I studied more extensively, for instance in Cappelle (2013), where I looked at its degree of productivity and compared it to a Dutch construction with similar excessive-event semantics but with a different argument structure, involving a reflexive object and an NP expressing something (usually nasty) one gets, as a matter of speaking, by carrying out the activity:
(24) a. She exercises her butt off (...).<fnref n="21" />

b. ze (...) fitness-t zich een ongeluk<fnref n="22" />
she fitness-PRS.3SG REFL an accident
‘She exercises excessively.’

While (24a) is superficially non-distinguishable from an ordinary resultative with a path resultative phrase (cp. again *The dog barked the postman away*), it has a very different meaning. Crucially, it is not telic, unlike a true path resultative (Jackendoff 1997: 551). Indeed, if one combined it with an *in X time* adjunct (e.g. *I have exercised my butt off in less than three weeks*), it would trigger a literal reading, whereby excess fat from the subject referent’s buttocks is literally removed from the body by doing fitness exercises.

I used the formal contrast between (24a) and (24b) to set up an argument for the claim that the excessive-activity semantics of sentences like (24a) cannot arise simply by means of ‘pragmatic’ reasoning (Cappelle 2013: 259–61, 2017: 131–33). A language so closely related to English as Dutch – a language which by the way also has an ordinary resultative construction – wouldn’t come up with a very different ‘solution’ to the same expressive need if the excessive interpretation use of V *one’s head/butt off* and V *one’s heart out* were simply hyperbolic uses of the resultative that are expected to arise but are not needed to be stored in our linguistic memory. Therefore, I argued, these patterns have to be considered constructions in their own right, with their own syntactic constraints (the particle cannot precede the object, which it otherwise can), its own semantic properties (excess, intensity, vigour) and hence also its unexpected aspectual characteristics (atelicity), its own productivity (while the ‘ordinary’ resultative isn’t that productive, these patterns are much more so) and its own

<footnote n="21">²¹ https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/i-have-a-bbl-lipo-360-scheduled-and-he-said-he%E2%80%99s-going-to-leave-me.4572071/page-6, last accessed 5 June 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² https://www.dailybase.nl/ladies/yaslen-clemente-zet-instagram-en-ons-in-vuur-en-vlam/, last accessed 5 June 2023.</footnote>
‘stylistic’ value (there is some extra emotionality involved on the part of the user). In short, these somewhat special patterns are excellent examples to prove what I have been convinced of: our knowledge of language involves knowledge of constructions.

However, during my doctoral studies, a question began to arise concerning the extent to which constructions comprehensively *and exhaustively* constitute our knowledge of grammar. How that question came up and how I explored it is the topic of the next chapter.
Chapter 2

Knowledge of language is also knowledge of con-
structional relations: enter allostructions

Constructions are not just units that exist in isolation. It has long been
recognized in Construction Grammar that there are links between
them. Early on, the emphasis lay on vertical links between construc-
tions, between higher and lower nodes in a taxonomical network. I
believe my research has been instrumental in stressing the need to also
recognize horizontal links between constructional alternatives, such
as between verb – particle – NP (e.g. *send in the FBI*) and verb – NP –
particle (e.g. *send the FBI in*). This has brought Construction Grammar
again closer to derivational theories, although, for good reasons, the
theory doesn't buy into the view that one alternative lies at the basis
of another. (Section 2.1).

Two horizontally linked ‘sister’ constructions can have a
‘mother’ node above them that remains underspecified for its precise
form and status: it can merely contain the ingredients of the construc-
tion but leave word order free and say nothing about whether the
combination is a morphological or a syntactic unit. This view helps us
maintain a bedrock principle, which would otherwise come under se-
rious stress: Lexical Integrity (Section 2.2).

Just because we recognize that two constructions are each
other’s alternatives doesn’t mean we should accept that they are func-
tionally fully equivalent. Information-structural principles, such as
‘Given before New Information’ or ‘Focus Last’, interact with the al-
ternatives to yield ordering preferences. One more elusive factor play-
ing a role in the well-known particle placement alternation involves
the more general, almost encyclopaedic, familiarity of an entity or sit-
uation (Section 2.3).
## 2.1 A bridge between constructions and a bridge between theories

In the previous chapter, I mentioned my theoretical indebtedness to McIntyre and to Jackendoff. Each of them authored a paper, discussed before, in a collected volume that they were also co-editors of (Dehé et al. 2002) and that I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to also publish a paper in (Cappelle 2002). That paper was on the preposing of particles in English, illustrated in (25):

(25) a. Off you go!

b. Along came a bright idea, illuminating the path to a creative solution.

In that paper I was mainly interested in some descriptive grammatical properties of this pattern, showing for instance that preposed *off* is the only focused element in the clause and is often used with a pronominal subject (as in (25a)) while preposed *along* tends to combine with a full NP after the verb, which together with *along* constitutes a second focal constituent.

Despite the term 'preposing', which evokes a kind of transformation, my paper devoted to such patterns with particles in sentence-initial position did not make the claim that these sentence structures were the result of a derivational process. The term *preposing* is to be seen as just a useful one to capture in what sense the form of these patterns differ from what can be seen as the more canonical pattern, where the particle follows the verb. As is well known, when the particle follows the verb and there is a direct object, there are in principle *two* normal orderings:
(26) a. She took off her jacket before entering the room.
b. She took her jacket off before entering the room.

(27) a. He brought along his guitar to the party.
b. He brought his guitar along to the party.

In the case of these examples, it is not at all clear which of the two alternatives represents the most standard, canonical order. One might argue that the verb and the particle form a lexical item and that therefore the ordering in (26a) and (27a), where the verb and the particle are in adjacent positions, is the most natural ordering. How their togetherness can be disrupted, in (26b) and (27b), then needs some special explanation.

This is how Chomsky (1957), in his *Syntactic Structures*, looked at the grammatical problem posed by particle verbs, which, a little intriguingly, he referred to as “constructions”.<fnref n="23" /> Chomsky simply introduced a rewriting rule, given here in (28):

$$ (28) \qquad V \rightarrow V_1 + Prt $$
(Chomsky 1957: 75)

> "We shall naturally find that a great many words or morphemes of a single grammatical category are described semantically in partially similar terms, e.g. verbs in terms of subject and object, etc. This is not surprising; it means that the syntactic devices available in the language are being used fairly systematically. We have seen, however, that [t]o generalize from this fairly systematic use and to assign 'structural meanings' to grammatical categories or constructions just as 'lexical meanings' are assigned to words or morphemes, is a step of very questionable validity." (Chomsky 1957: 104)

<footnote n="23">²³ Chomsky’s use of *construction* is different, though, from how most Construction Grammarians understand this term. For Chomsky, it seems wrong to assume that constructions, as schemas abstracting over recurring configurations in which we find lexical items, carry meaning. See, for instance, this remark in Chomsky (1957: 104):</footnote>
Sentences like *The police brought in the criminal* can be formed with this rule, and with some rules already in the grammar (such as $S \to NP + VP$ and some further phrase-structure rules).

Chomsky then also introduced a transformational rule, which applies optionally when there is a full NP as direct object, and which separates the particle from its verb, so that the above-mentioned string can be turned into the string *The police brought the criminal in*. A similar transformational rule was needed, according to Chomsky, which applies obligatorily when the direct object is a pronoun, thus converting *The police brought in him* into *The police brought him in*.

Alternatively, one might suggest that the pattern with the particle following the direct object NP is more basic. Some linguists have taken the view, more specifically, that in a sentence such as *Vincent cut his ear off*, the part *his ear off* forms a so-called ‘small clause’, with the NP functioning as a kind of subject and the particle acting as a non-verbal predicate (e.g. Kayne 1984). Indeed, we can (albeit somewhat clumsily) paraphrase such a sentence as follows: ‘Vincent did some cutting, with as a result that his ear was off’. Yet other scholars have considered the V – NP – Prt ordering to be the basic one, but only for semantically transparent combinations, as this kind of paraphrase doesn’t work with idiomatic combinations (e.g. Aarts 1989): *The milkman dropped off the milk* cannot be paraphrased as ‘The milkman dropped the milk, so now the milk is off’.

Chomsky’s (1957), Kayne’s (1984) and Aarts’s (1989) treatments have been superseded in the generative-linguistic literature by a wide number of analyses that became ever more elaborate, in tandem with growing complexity of the theoretical apparatus, which accrued for instance ever more functional nodes within an extended VP-shell. There still is no consensus among generative grammarians about whether or not the verb and the particle form a word-level unit, what its basic word order is and how the particle in English, but also in
many other Germanic languages, can occupy different positions. For overviews of the various proposals, as well as references to their proponents, see Haiden 2006, Elenbaas 2007, Dehé 2015, McIntyre 2015, Toivonen 2020, Cappelle to appear. To the non-initiated – at the time of my doctoral research, this group included myself and to a large extent it still does today – such discussions can easily appear overly technical, arcane and lacking in intuitive appeal.

One rather extreme example of what looked to me unnecessary complication is to be found in a publication by Kayne (1998: 136) on different kinds of movement. Kayne proposed an underlying structure in which the particle appears after the direct object NP (e.g. *John invited no strangers in*), in keeping with his small-clause analysis mentioned above. This NP being a negative constituent, however, undergoes movement, for reasons that need not concern us here. The output of this operation is not a grammatical string (*John no strangers invited in*). It needs to undergo a further operation, VP preposing, which then results in a sentence with the ‘joined’ verb-particle ordering (*John invited in no strangers*). Along the way, two traces (indicated by ‘t’) have been introduced, left behind by the moved constituents (see Figure 6).
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Generative-linguistic derivation of a sentence with joined V-Prt ordering, based on Kayne (1998: 136).</figcaption></figure>

Starting from the same underlying structure, it's also possible to apply what Kayne calls 'particle preposing' first. (His use of this term is different from mine, which it will be remembered was used to describe the appearance of a particle at the very beginning of a clause, as in (25a-b).) Kayne's particle preposing leads to the intermediate, ungrammatical structure *John in invited no strangers. Applying negative phrase preposing and then VP preposing as before yields the sentence with the 'split' V-Prt ordering (see Figure 7).<fnref n="24" /> Now, observe that the outcome of these various successive movement operations result in a sentence that differs in nothing, apart from the presence of various inaudible traces, from the sentence we set out from!

<footnote n="24">²⁴ For this figure, I use coloured boxes, which should help to see what moves from where to where. In Cappelle (2005: 39) I added extensive labelled bracketing to Kayne's (1998) surface structure, based on Dehé's (2002: 30–2) discussion of Kayne's analysis, which made explicit the small-clause structure. Unfortunately, I ended up providing one opening bracket too few (or one closing bracket too many). I hope, however, one could be forgiven for losing track.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7. Generative-linguistic derivation of a sentence with split V-Prt ordering, based on Kayne (1998: 136).</figcaption></figure>

Except for linguists buying into a syntactic theory which derivations are an inherent part of, such a transformation of a structure into itself might appear whimsical at best and pointless at worst.

There are, of course, syntactic theories that are non-derivational and mono-stratal, that is, without any underlying levels, so ‘what you see is what you get’. As transformations have no place in such theories, the emphasis is then on describing the actual available patterns in their own terms. Regarding familiar argument-structure alternations, including the locative alternation (see, e.g., Pinker 1989, Levin 1993: 50–3, Boas 2003b, Iwata 2008, Beavers 2017), Goldberg (2002) proposed that we should move beyond considering the applicative variant (e.g., *I sprinkled the salad with olive oil*) as a simple transformation of the caused-motion variant (e.g., *I sprinkled olive oil on the salad*). Instead, she argued that each pattern should be described as a separate and independent construction, “on its own terms, without relying on explicit or implicit reference to a possible alternative paraphrase” (Goldberg 2002: 329). With respect to the joined and the split ordering of transitive particle verbs, Gries (2003: 141) dismissed a
transformationally based link between these two patterns, stating firmly that “each construction constitutes a category in its own right” and that “the two constructions do *not* form a single category since ... we find more differences than similarities between the two constructions”. It is true that the two patterns differ from each other in important ways, most notably in terms of information structure (see Section 1.3 in this chapter). Nevertheless, I wondered if something might not be lost if we treated each alternant as a construction *sui generis* that had no connectedness.

In Cappelle (2004) I voiced this concern for the first time. I pointed out there were transitive verb-particle idioms with a lexically specific direct object NP. These often occur in either pattern, and even if they sometimes exhibit a preference for one pattern rather than the other, this variation makes the claim that the two orderings constitute different, unlinked constructions difficult to uphold. One such idiom is used in the sentences in (29), one which carried a meaning that precisely reflected my view:

(29) a. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.

b. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Neither of the two alternatives is massively more common than the other. A search in the enTenTen21 corpus yields 926 occurrences for the joined and 2.091 occurrences for the split ordering. Rounding to two decimal places, SketchEngine's search interface informs us that the former occurs 0.02 times and the latter 0.03 times per million words – hardly the kind of stark quantitative difference that would warrant singling out the split ordering as “the correct version” of the expression (as ChatGPT does, when asked). If we treated the joined and the split verb-particle pattern as two separate constructions, each with their own meaning and function, then we would be forced to say that *throw out the baby with the bath water* is a common, conventionalized
and probably mentally stored instantiation of one construction and
that *throw the baby out with the bath water* is a (somewhat more) com-
mon and conventionalized instantiation of another construction, also
likely committed to speaker’s linguistic memory. At the risk of making
this a little more explicit than is necessary, my aim here is to drive
home a rather crucial point: the consequence would be that speakers
of English have *two different* stored idioms that share the same lexical
items and are virtually identical in form and that have the exact same
meaning.<fnref n="25" /> Given that *the baby* does not refer to any actual baby, it
seems fruitless to invoke any information-structural differences (on
which, see Section 2.3): in neither variant is *the baby* a hearer-familiar
entity, for instance, in the same way it might be in *Let’s take the baby for
a walk in the park*.<fnref n="26" />

Construction Grammar attempted to ban alternations, as these
reeked of a commitment to transformational syntax, but in Cappelle
(2004) I argued that by eliminating from the theory something that
was perceived as negative (because psychologically implausible and
just making sense under very specific theoretical assumptions), we
were at a risk of getting rid of something valuable, namely the idea

<footnote n="25"><sup>25</sup> We can leave aside the objection that there might also be a possibility that one group of speakers of English have stored only *throw out the baby with the bath water* and another group of speakers have stored only *throw the baby out with the bath water*. If that were the case, further complications would arise pertaining to how communication across members of these distinct groups is possible, and a solution would consist in linking the joined and split verb-particle construction at a more general level than that of these two stored idioms. This connectedness is what I argue for anyway.</footnote>

<footnote n="26"><sup>26</sup> This said, language users can always try to make sense of the idiom by analysing it as a compositional combination and identify *the baby* to anything brought up in the previous discourse. If we replace *the baby* by *that baby*, thus making more obvious the referential link to something mentioned previously, there are only two instances of the joined ordering compared to nine of the split ordering in the enTenTen21 corpus. With *this baby*, we find no instances of the joined ordering but still five of the split orderings in the same corpus. This is consistent with the general information-structural principle according to which the early positioning of given and accessible information units is favoured.</footnote>
that speakers perceive the relatedness between two constructions that look similar and host large numbers of idioms that would otherwise have two different entries in our mental lexicon. In Cappelle (2004), I formulated the following conclusion:

"The fact that some V-Prt idioms with a fixed object NP allow two different orderings (Prt – NP and NP – Prt) suggests that the particle placement alternation itself is cognitively real. For example, as to the expression with the baby being thrown out with [the] bath water, it would be very unlikely that speakers store the two structural variants completely separately, without realizing that these entries are linked by semantic similarity, if not complete identity. Using one ordering rather than the other does not impart a radically different meaning to this expression—a speaker may merely diverge from convention by choosing the less frequent ordering.

The occurrence of this ordering variation in combinations whose meaning is laid down by convention suggests the need to posit links in the lexicon between the variants. Abstracting away from such individual links, we can also plausibly assume the following schematic correspondence as being an integral part of speakers' linguistic knowledge (...):

$[VP V Prt NP] \leftrightarrow [VP V NP PrtP]$

(Cappelle 2004: s.p.)

The case I was making here was for the recognition of a horizontal link between constructions, without treating one, as in generative linguistics, as underlying the other.

Three comments about the above quote may be useful. First, apart from *throw {out} the baby {out} with the bath water*, there are several
other such idioms that can appear in either ordering, though sometimes one ordering is more frequent than the other. To name but a few, there is also *make {up} one's mind {up}*, *take {away} somebody's breath {away}* and *turn {back} the clock {back}*.

Second, the split variant contains the symbol 'PrtP', which stands for 'particle phrase' (Cappelle 2008). This is a phrasal category headed by a particle – it is, in other words, a 'maximal projection', to use terminology from generative grammar (specifically, X-bar theory). There could be further elements before and/or after the particle, as in (30):

(30) Nutrients continuously cycle through the ocean as phytoplankton sink to the ocean floor, but in regions where deep water upwells, it brings these nutrients [back *up* to the surface].

The use of a full particle phrase is restricted to the split ordering.<fnref n="27" /> Specifying this in this variant itself is in line with Gries’s (2003) view that the two constructions are indeed different. However, they are not *so* different as to form fully independent units. Active and passive sentences, too, are different constructions, but it is precisely their relatedness that allows language users to see that, for instance, *Mistakes were made... by me* (Bart Simpson in *The Simpsons*, season 10, episode 3) is an alternative way of saying *I made mistakes*. The utterer here first uses a famous instance of the short passive, which has been used by many politicians and public figures to distance themselves from any respon-

<footnote n="27">²⁷ The rare instances where the direct object NP follows a PrtP involve heavy-NP shift. My using this term is again not meant to hint at a real derivational process. Rather, there may be such a thing as a heavy NP construction that licenses the appearance of long and complex noun phrases in a position following an oblique object or any other complement that usually follows a direct object NP.</footnote>
sibility, but this strategic effect is then lost completely when Bart Simpson mentions himself in the added *by-PP*, as the agent now receives extra attention by appearing in final (hence focal) position. Resulting humor apart, this example should be taken as some evidence that, while actives and passives are different in information structure (besides differing also in morpho-syntax), they can be seen as alternative ways of conveying certain propositional content. This does not require us to treat the passive as a transformed version of the active. See Cappelle et al. (2021: 272–3) for a similar argument, based on a humorously inappropriate cleft construction, which I would claim is also related to, without being derived from, the canonical declarative sentence.

Thirdly, looking back to my earliest thoughts on the horizontal connectedness between constructions, I am reminded that my first and sole concern was to rehabilitate alternations, not to see the two alternatives, additionally, as daughters of a higher, more schematic mother node. It was in a paper that appeared a few years later that I argued that the two alternatives be treated as what I called ‘allostructions’ (Cappelle 2006), a coinage which is my modest claim to fame in Construction Grammar. Just like allophones (e.g. an aspirated [pʰ] in *pot* and a non-aspirated [p] in *spot*) are concrete realizations of a single more abstract unit (the phoneme /p/) and just like allomorphs (e.g. *in-* in *insane*, *il-* in *illegal*, *im-* in *impossible* and *ir-* in *irregular*) can be grouped under a single slightly more schematic morpheme, the suggestion was that allostructions are “variant structural realizations of a construction that is left partially underspecified” (Cappelle 2006: 18). It was Perek (2012) and not myself who first used the term *constructeme* for such a more schematic mother node.

Some discussion has erupted recently over whether horizontally linked ‘sister’ constructions need a mother. Audring (2019) argues that allostructions can be recognized in some cases without positing a mother schema above them and she suggests that for the particle placement alternation, just the horizontal relation (both between the level of the two schematic patterns and between individually
stored transitive combinations) suffices. Hoffmann (2020a) finds it
problematic that we cannot empirically decide between sisters-only
connections and triangular constellations where two sisters are also
connected via a shared mother. Ungerer (in press) argues that these
two kinds of analyses are notational variants. See Ungerer and Hart-
mann (2023: 34–5) for some discussion. My own views on the matter
are being exposed in Cappelle (in preparation). I defend the view that
the two allostructions are part of a tightly-knit family, which makes
the absence of a mother node highly unlikely. Not only do they share
countless specific idioms, but also various higher-order patterns, for
instance argument-structure constructions with a benefactive argu-
ment (e.g. *give me* {back} *my CDs* {back}) or a predicative argument (e.g.
*turn* {on} *the radio* {on} *loud*). The more constructions there are that in-
teract with both allostructions, the more absurd it gets *not* to have a
mother node as a ‘hub’ that holds the network together. (It would al-
most be like not having a general concept ‘car’ apart from the concepts
‘front-wheel-drive car’ and ‘back-wheel-drive car’.)

In any case, it cannot be denied that horizontal links between
constructions are now fully recognized as playing an important in cog-
nition (e.g. Goldberg 2013, Diessel 2019, Jackendoff and Audring
2020). At a lower level of generality, where we find phraseological
units, speakers also appear to perceive the semantic similarity of two
alternative formulations, which is why these alternatives can end up
being intertwined, producing what Legallois (2013) calls ‘syntactic
blends’. One example he gives are ‘wrong’ but common utterances in
French like *la manifestation s’annonce pour être exceptionnelle* (‘the
demonstration is shaping up to be exceptional’), which fuses the more
established pattern ‘*s annoncer (comme) + AdjP* and the interfering ex-
pression ‘*être parti pour + Infinitive.*”

Horizontal links complement other links that Goldberg (1995)
had in fact already proposed. Bold claims to the effect that “it’s con-
structions all the way down” (Goldberg 2003 : 223) never meant that
constructions were *all* that is need to capture our knowledge of gram-
mar. The clause preceding the famous aphorism just quoted stated
that "that the *network* of constructions captures our knowledge of lan-
guage *in toto*" (ibid.; emphasis of *network* mine – B.C.). There is no net-
work without links between constructions but links previously
acknowledged were vertical, taxonomical 'inheritance' links, such as
between general types and more specific subtypes (instance links) or
between a construction with a basic meaning and constructions with
extended meanings (metaphor and polysemy links, which can also be
thought of as mother-daughter links because the construction with the
basic meaning transfers at least some of its formal but also semantic
properties to the semantically related subtypes, cf. Diessel (2023: 7-
8)).<fnref n="28" />

Horizontal links between constructions also form a bridge be-
tween different theoretical approaches. In the early incarnations of
generative linguistics, central importance was given to "transfor-
mations" or "derivations" (Chomsky 1957, Harris 1957) and even in

<footnote n="28">²⁸ In Cappelle et al. (2021 : 292), however, polysemous constructions are linked hor-
izontally. The idea is that just like different forms on the same taxonomical plane can
express roughly the same meaning (in the case of allostructions), we should also
allow for the possibility that two (or more) different meanings can be conveyed by
a single form, without any of the these meaning being perceived as ‘basic’ and pass-
ing down some of its properties to the other(s). For instance, in the case of the adjec-
tive *smart*, neither of the meanings ‘clever, intelligent’ or ‘stylish, fashionable’ is the
source of the other, as these meanings both derive from the older meaning ‘quick to
act and respond, prompt, lively’. There is a military usage that connects this older
meaning with the ‘fashionable’ sense: being vigilant and brisk required both a sharp-
ness of mind and a disciplined demeanour, which in the army is accompanied by a
well-groomed and tidy appearance (OED, s.v. smart, *adj.*, II, 12). The subsenses of
‘clever’ and ‘fashionable’ are more strongly entrenched than the common mother
sense of ‘quick to (re)act’ (which isn’t one of the senses listed in the *Longman Diction-
ary of Contemporary English*, for instance). As the lexical construction with the latter,
basic meaning is only weakly represented in the network, the two more familiar
meanings, if we want to see them as part of a network, need to be linked horizon-
tally.</footnote>
current treatments of the theory, for instance in Radford’s (2023) re-
cent textbook, transformational operations such as A-bar movement
(e.g. [What big teeth]i you have ti!), A movement (e.g. [No harm]i was done
ti) and head movement (e.g. [Have]i you ti ordered yet?) still have their
place in the canon of central concepts in generative grammar, even
since Minimalism. By banning derivations, Construction Grammar
made it impossible to relate grammatical constructions, except if they
stood in a vertical inheritance relationship. Allostructions enable us to
capture the intuition shared by language speakers that two different
grammatical structures can convey a similar meaning.<fnref n="29" />

## 2.2 A way to save Lexical Integrity?

The concept of allostructions have been applied to a variety of mainly
syntactic phenomena in a variety of languages, including those mak-
ing up the dative alternation in English and German (Perek 2012, 2015,
Zehentner 2019, Willems, De Cuypere and De Vaere 2019), quantified
subject constructions in Russian (Nesset and Janda 2023) and ‘poten-
tial complement constructions’ in Min Chinese (Zhou 2020). My own
use of the term also referred to two alternants in what I considered a
syntactic alternation. Recall their labelling as ‘VP’ in Cappelle (2004):

$$ (31) \quad [VP V Prt NP] \leftrightarrow [VP V NP PrtP] $$

It would gradually become clear to me that the alternation posed a
theoretical paradox, in the sense that it forces us to reconcile two prop-
erties of linguistic units that normally cannot be met simultaneously.

<footnote n="29">²⁹ See Zehentner (2023) for a discussion of the concept and open questions.</footnote>
In the 'joined' ordering, the verb and the particle form a word to-
gether, as I will argue further below. In the 'split' ordering, the verb
and the particle are two words occurring as independent syntactic cat-
egories, as should be clear from the fact that the particle is the head of
its very own phrasal category. But if this is so, then it's not possible for
the verb and the particle to form a word together. Indeed, the constit-
uent parts of a word – its morphemes – cannot also, *at the same time*, be
words in syntax. This follows from what is known as the Opacity Prin-
ciple, according to which “[t]he internal structure at one stratum [e.g.
morphology – B.C.] is invisible to processes at another [e.g. syntax –
B.C.]” (Mohanan 1981: 23). This principle is also referred to as the ato-
micity thesis, which states that “*words are opaque to all sentence-level op-
erations or descriptions*” (Williams and Di Sciullo 1987: 55; italics theirs).
The principle of opacity/atomicity itself underlies a better-known
principle, that of Lexical Integrity (Lapointe 1980, see also Andersen
1994: 84, Bresnan and Mchombo 1995: 181):

"The Lexical Integrity Principle says that syntactic rules cannot
move material into or out of lexical items, or modify their struc-
ture. What this means is that syntactic rules are blind to the in-
ternal structure of words." (Mohanan 1981: 24)

This principle is largely correct. For instance, while we can modify an
adjective in syntax (e.g. *She looked very happy*) we can't do so when that
adjective is the base of a noun (e.g. *[very happy]-ness). Similarly, while
we can move material out of a noun phrase with relative ease (e.g. *A
masochist is [a person]*, if I'm not mixing up terms, [who gets a kick out of
experiencing pain]), moving a morpheme out of a word is generally not
possible (e.g. *He likes to be a [hit-], given that he's a masochist, [-ee], not a
hitter*). Reordering clauses is possible, within certain limits (e.g. *I like
that one most* can be turned into *That one I like most*), but changing the
structure of a word is not an option (e.g. *unhappiness* can't be turned
into, say, *happy-un-ness*).
What, now, could be a reason to claim that the verb and the particle are, or can be, the constituents of a word? There are two strands of evidence, one neuroscientific and another more introspective. For now, the latter kind of evidence is somewhat more convincing.

Let us start with the brain imaging evidence, obtained by observing the kinds of neurological processes that unfold as test subjects hear a verb-particle combination. A post-doctoral research grant (2005–2008) allowed me to spend some of my research time at the University of Cambridge. This stay gave me the opportunity to collaborate with Friedemann Pulvermüller and Yury Shtyrov, who at the time worked at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Cambridge, UK). Verb-particle combinations proved an interesting case to find out whether what look and sound like two words, such as *heat* and *up*, are processed by the brain as a single lexeme – a unit stored as a whole – when they are presented together. Using a research methodology known as an oddball experiment, we measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) at the moment when a person hears *up* after *heat* compared to after *cool* (Cappelle, Shtyrov and Pulvermüller 2010). In what follows, I will briefly explain the nature of this brain signal and the kind of experiment used to exploit it.

The MMN is an event-related potential (ERP) – a kind of brain wave, just like the N400 or the P600 – that is observed as a negative deflection (a sudden downward spike) in the brain's electrical activity recorded from the scalp using electroencephalography (EEG) or other brain imaging techniques. It occurs rapidly in response to an unexpected or deviant stimulus within a sequence of otherwise repetitive stimuli. The MMN reflects the brain's automatic detection and processing of changes or deviations from the expected auditory input. The deviant stimulus might be an ‘oddball’ sound that differs from the standard stimulus in pitch or loudness. The MMN is thought to reflect the brain's pre-attentive processes that detect changes in sensory in-
formation, even without conscious awareness (Näätänen 1992). Indeed, best results are obtained if participants during the experiment can watch a muted film of their choice, so that their attention is being directed away from the long, monotonous series of stimuli they hear through earpieces.

MMN experiments have been conducted not just on repeated sequences of random sounds and deviations from them. The MMN has been observed also to other sudden changes in a repetitive stream of acoustic stimuli, such as the appearance of a different word in a series of identical known words, the appearance of a known word in a series of nonsense words (or vice versa), and so on. For instance, Shtyrov and Pulvermüller (2002) presented participants with three sequences of standard stimuli, with different deviant stimuli inserted into them:

(32) a. /taip taip taip taip taı̯t taip taip .../

b. /baip baip baip baip baı̯t baip baip .../

c. /paip paip paip paip paı̯t paip paip .../

The MMN is measured at the arrival of the deviating /t/-sound at the end of /taı̯t/, /bait/ and /paı̯t/. In all three cases, a MMN can be observed here, as the brain detects a change in the stream of repeated stimuli. However, in the first two cases, the MMN will be significantly stronger than in the third case. Speakers have stored in their lexicon the words *tight* and *bite*, but not *pite*, and with the former two items, the brain shows increased activation. The /t/-sound thus apparently triggers a lexical recognition effect given the preceding contexts (/taı/ and /bai/). This larger brain activity, in other words, reflects the activation of a lexical item in memory (Pulvermüller, Garagnani and Wennekers 2014, Tomasello et al. 2017). Encountering a stored word activates a strongly connected, distributed memory circuits of neurons. So, when we hear a word we know, a large cell assembly lights up, one spanning different regions of our brain, including areas that
include semantic properties grounded in our experience. By contrast,
hearing an unfamiliar pseudo-word only activates a much smaller
phonemic and acoustic neural network.

Hearing a common word like *tree*, for instance, activates visual
and motor brain areas, because we may picture a tree and involuntar-
ily imagine climbing or hugging one. In addition, auditory and artic-
ulatory areas are stimulated, as we hear the word and also co-activate
our tongue and lip muscles, without audibly uttering the word our-
selves (Fadiga et al. 2002). These different areas of activation lend sup-
port to the idea that words in the brain are really Saussurean signs,
where aspects related to their form (what it sounds like and how it is
pronounced) are intricately connected with embodied aspects of its
concept, involving our sensory and motor experiences (see Figure 7).<fnref n="30" />

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Such links between words and actions co-exist with links between perceived ob-
jects and their ‘affordances’, as psychologists refer to the potential actions or uses
that an object or environment offers to an individual (Gibson 1979). As Buxbaum
and Coslett (2001: 558), for instance, put it, “the actions appropriate to an object are
intrinsic to its representation and derived from its perceptual properties”. This idea
was already formulated in the 1930s by the French philosopher and psychologist
Pierre Janet (1859–1947): “When we perceive a chair, we begin the act of sitting
down, because without the initiation of the act of sitting down, the object would not
be perceived as a chair” (Janet 2003[1936]: 67; translated from French). The same idea
lies at the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomenology of perception.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

Figure 7. Lexical items are stored in the brain as tightly con-
nected assemblies of neurons spanning visual and motor areas
(which correspond to the ‘concept’ side of a Saussurean sign) as well
as auditory and articulatory areas (which correspond to the sign’s
‘form’ side).<fnref n="31" /> The left part of the figure is borrowed from Tomasello
et al. (2017: 113); the black-and-white figures of linguistic signs on
the right are taken, with some modification in the top figure, from De
Saussure (1916[1971]: 99). Dotted lines connecting figures on the left
and right have been added.

In Construction Grammar, the construction often used to be seen as an
updated version of the Saussurean sign – a unit of form and function.
However, each side of the sign harbours several aspects. These days,

<footnote n="31">³¹ As the editors write, “This term ‘acoustic image’ may seem too narrow, as alongside the representation of the sounds of a word, there is also that of its articulation, the muscular image of the phonatory act” (De Saussure 1916[1971]: 98, fn. 1; translated from French).</footnote>
therefore, Goldberg has relaxed the symbolic (hence binary) definition
of constructions, in favour of a much more multifaceted conception:

"[C]onstructions are understood to be emergent clusters of lossy memory traces that are aligned within our high- (hyper!) dimensional conceptual space on the basis of shared form, function, and contextual dimensions." (Goldberg 2019: 7)<fnref n="32" />

Interestingly, while our brain shows increased activity as soon as we
hear the suffix of a known inflected or derived form, it has comparably
reduced activity when we encounter a verb form that forms a correct
syntactic combination with a preceding pronoun, in terms of person-
number agreement. So, when German-speaking participants hear the
‘deviant’ stimulus *heit*, a nominalizing suffix, after several instances of
*sicher* ‘certain’ presented as a standard stimulus, their brain will pro-
duce a higher MMN than when they hear that same suffix after a se-
quence of repeated occurrences of *sauber* ‘clean’ (Hanna and Pulver-
müller 2014). *Sicherheit* is an existing noun, but not *Säuberheit*.
(*Sauberkeit* is.)

When, by contrast, a speaker of French hears *crions* ‘cry’ after
*nous*, the MMN will be *lower* than when the same verb form is pre-
sented after *il* (Pulvermüller 2010). (Perhaps needlessly to point out,
*nous crions* is grammatically correct, not *il crions*.) A reduced MMN is
also found when the second word of a combination is semantically
appropriate given the preceding one: after occurrences of *eat*, hearing
the word *jam* will be produce a lower MMN than after occurrences of

<footnote n="32">³² The first part of this definition underscores the allegiance of Construction Gram-
mar with exemplar theory. This theory suggests that we store specific instances in
memory and use them as anchor points when categorizing or recognizing new in-
stances (for references and discussion of this link, see Diessel 2023: 11–3). Not all
fine-grained details of those stored instances are retained, which is why Goldberg
describes them as “lossy”.</footnote>
kick. This neurolinguistic observation is problematic for Construction Grammar, but it opens up perspectives for research into whether combinations are put together morphologically or syntactically. What is troublesome for the theory is that, if stored words and stored multi-word phrases are of essentially the same nature (i.e. they're all 'signs', 'symbols', or, in the Construction Grammar sense, 'constructions'), the brain should react to all legal combinations (compared to illegal ones) in a similar way, irrespective of whether they are morphological or syntactic in nature. This doesn't appear to be the case, which means that there is a boundary between words and phrases after all (Pulvermüller, Cappelle et Shtyrov 2013). On the other hand, it is precisely this difference in brain response between known words and acceptable phrases that we can make use of to find out about the status of verb-particle combinations.

In Cappelle, Shtyrov and Pulvermüller (2010), presenting *up* as an occasional stimulus after repeated occurrences of *rise* or *heat* produced a higher MMN than after repeated occurrences of *fall* or *cool*. Likewise, when *down* was heard after *fall* or *cool*, the MMN was higher than after *rise* or *heat*. This higher MMN suggests that commonly used verb-particle combinations are processed as lexical units. The findings are consistent with a view in which verb-particle combinations are morphological units and do not sit well with an analysis of verb-particle combinations as syntactically constructed strings.

However, it has been objected that the findings may be interpreted as merely showing that verb-particle combinations are lexically stored combinations, not that they are truly words (Booij 2012: 332, Goldberg 2016: 119-120, Müller 2020: 662). I agree that the neuroscientific findings are open to multiple interpretations (particle verbs are morphological lexical items / particle verbs are phrasal lexical items). There is nonetheless ground for claiming that they are, or at least *can* be, have the status of word-level lexical items. The argumentation hinges on the observation that they can appear with relative
ease in positions available to single-word items, not or hardly to combinations whose structural description is indubitably that of a syntactic phrase (such as a verb plus an adverb, a verb plus a prepositional phrase, or a verb with a direct object NP). Consider the following environments, where the (a)-example contains an ordinary verb, the (b)-example a verb-particle combination and the (c)-example, which is excluded or only very marginally acceptable, a phrasal combination:

(33) a. "Never again," **erupted** his boss.

b. "Never again," **roared out** his boss.

c. ??"Never again," **loudly yelled** his boss.

(34) a. I'm the habitual trash **remover**.

b. I'm the habitual trash **taker-outer**.

c. *I'm the habitual trash **putter-on-the-curb**.

(35) a. Let's **drink** the night away.

b. ?Let's **booze up** the night away.

c. *Let's **drink beer** the night away.

(36) a. Our rocket **obliterated** the shit out of that tank.

b. Our rocket **blew up** the shit out of that tank.

c. *Our rocket **blasted to pieces** the shit out of that tank.

Based on such differences, it can be concluded that a verb-particle combination is really a word in at least some grammatical environments, such as quotative inversion (33a-c) and nominalization (34a-c).<fnref n="33" /> The behaviour of verb-particle combinations in these constructions had already been adduced by McIntyre (2013) as evidence for a

<footnote n="33">³³ In the latter construction, the suffix is often reduplicated, appearing on both the verb and the particle (Cappelle 2010, Lensch 2018).</footnote>
complex-verb analysis. To these constructions, I added in Cappelle (2022) two more constructions that host verb-particle combinations, just like single words: the time-*away* construction (35a-c), mentioned in Chapter 2, Section 2.3 and an informal argument-structure construction with a taboo word and *out of* (36a-c), described by, among others, Haïk (2012), Perek (2016) and Hoffmann (2020b).

The two variants related as allostructions of the particle placement alternation are therefore as follows: a compound verb with a direct object NP (left) and a verb with two sisters, one of which being a particle phrase (right):

$$ (37) \quad [VP [V V Prt] NP] \leftrightarrow [VP V NP PrtP] $$

An alternation that allows a word to be split up would seem to presents a serious challenge to the Lexical Integrity Principle (Cappelle, Shtyrov and Pulvermüller 2010: 198). However, I now realize that this is as small of a problem as the possibility to say both *She's a truck driver* (using a compound) and *She drives big trucks* (using the same lexical material in a verb phrase). No linguist would seriously claim that the word *truck driver* is split up or rearranged when the verb *drive* and the noun *truck* appear in a syntactic arrangement.

Likewise, there is no need to claim that in, say, *The sun heated the room up*, the word *heat up* appears in a disrupted form, as we are not dealing with *heat up* as a *word* then. All we can say is that *heat up* is a lexical item (a lexeme) whose structure remains underspecified until it appears *either* as a word *or* sometimes as syntactically combined elements. There is no paradox as long as we refrain from saying that a verb-particle combination is *basically* a word whose morphemes can also be manipulated by syntax.

Also, as long as we view the link between two allostructions as an *alternation* and not as a *derivation* turning a compound into a phrasal combination, we can uphold Lexical Integrity. When I set out to write
my paper on the Lexical Integrity principle (Cappelle 2022), my aim
was to show that this principle was obviously wrong, given English
verb-particle constructions (and also given numerous exceptions to
the “no phrase constraint”, which forbids phrases to be used inside
words – and whose very name is clearly self-defeating). However, I
ended up changing my mind completely, arguing instead that the
principle in fact does apply rather generally in English. It is this prin-
ciple that prevents, as a *general rule*, the addition of an adjective to a
noun in noun-noun compounds. That is why *She’s a big truck driver*
will not be understood as ‘She’s a driver of big trucks’ and why *She’s
a truck skilled driver* is simply ungrammatical. There are no serious
cracks in the Lexical Integrity principle.

## 2.3 The role of information structure in constructions

The two allostructions of the particle placement alternation are not
used completely interchangeably. As Gries (2003) demonstrated, var-
ious factors play a role in the choice of one ordering over the other.
The most obvious factors have to do with the information structure of
the constituents. We saw above, in Section 2.1, that ‘split’ ordering is
the only one available when the direct object NP is an unstressed pro-
noun (compare: *I messed up it* vs. *I messed it up*). This fact need not be
considered an unmotivated grammatical constraint: unstressed pro-
nouns are light constituents and refer to old information. Light, dis-
course-old elements are known to be placed early and cliticize onto
verbs (cf. French *M’as-tu vu ?* ‘Have you seen me?’).

Apart from discourse-familiarity of a constituent, there is also
focus as an important information-structural factor. When the particle
is focused, it has to be put after the direct object NP:
(38) Person A: "Let's see what I could do to make my TikTok dance easy to imitate. So here, I'm holding both of my arms in front of me. Now, what's next? Should I put my arms up?" (cp. *Should I put up my arms?)

Person B: "No, you should bring your arms down." (cp.
*No, you should bring down your arms.)

In this exchange, it would be ungrammatical to put the particle before
the direct object NP. In Cappelle (2009a), I argued that this ordering
would in fact violate three constraints: (i) the focus of a clause should
preferentially come last, (ii) a discourse-old direct object NP should be
put left-most in the post-verbal field, and (iii), given that the particle
here acts as a predicate in what comes close to a 'small clause' (see
Section 2.1), when aligning a 'subject' (i.e. the NP *my/your arms*) and
its 'predicate' (i.e. *up* or *down*), the subject should be put first. By con-
trast, when the direct object NP is focused on, it can more easily be put
in non-final position, as there's only constraint (namely Focus Last)
being violated then:

(39) Not only did she switch {on} the television {on}, but she
switched {on} all the lights {on} as well.

A third and more elusive information-structural factor (if it *is* an infor-
mation-structural one at all) has to do with whether an event partici-
pant or a situation is somehow expected. “Expected” here is not to be
confused with discourse-familiar (cf. the first factor mentioned above).
The referent of the direct object NP can be said to be expected when it
refers to a very familiar event participant appearing in a common, eve-
ryday activity. The situation expressed by the clause can itself also be
treated as expected then. It is a little-known fact, observed by Bolinger
(1971: 55–7), that the ordering with the particle at the end is preferred
in such cases (e.g. *drop the kids off*, *put the dishes away*, *bring the groceries in*, *take the trash out*). The reason is probably that there is then just one
main accent (on the syllable of the noun that receives primary stress),
which lends the whole VP a relaxed intonation contour, in keeping
with the contents. A great example I found and commented on in Cap-
pelle (2009a: 170–1) is given here:

(40) Something happened the other day that made me feel uneasy. Yet I shouldn't have felt that way! My wife had left for work and **I was hanging the washing out** to dry. A neighbour from down the way was in his backyard doing the same. 'Good day for drying', he called. 'Let's hope the rain stays away.' I had to think about what made me uneasy. Then it hit me. **Two men hanging out the washing!** When I was a kid that would never have happened. That was women's work, after all!<fnref n="34" />

The author here uses different word orderings with the same lexical
items and in doing so manages to convey subtly different meanings.
The discontinuous ordering (*hanging... out*) is first chosen to represent
the situation as a normal (hence expected) household routine. Revert-
ing to the joined ordering is then meant to draw attention to the ex-
traordinary nature of the situation. In this ordering, almost every
word gets some accentuation (*Twó mén hánging óut the wáshing*). This
extra prosodic emphasis matches well with the aim of emphasizing
the unusualness of this event (at least from a traditional, no-longer-to-
be-upheld view on a division of labour between genders).

A speaker's choice of word order can thus be governed by the
discourse-familiarity and focus status of the constituents (verb, NP
and particle, in any combination) and be driven by the wish to convey
other nuances in meaning which one might call 'pragmatic'. Many
other factors can exert an influence and it could become an almost
philosophical question whether, once we know all the factors, there is

<footnote n="34">³⁴ https://parenting.fortotalidiots.com/49945.php, last accessed 5 July 2023.</footnote>