# Usage-based Perspectives on Lexical and Constructional Semantics

Maarten Lemmens

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Maarten Lemmens. Usage-based Perspectives on Lexical and Constructional Semantics. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. 2021, 979-7-5446-6799-9. halshs-04292240

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# New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics
Usage-based Perspectives on Lexical and Constructional Semantics

认知语言学新动向
基于使用的词义和构式义研究

Maarten Lemmens

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国际认知语言学前沿课题讲座

**Series Editor:** Dingfang Shu (束定芳)

**Editorial Committee**

Rong Chen (陈融)

Dagmar Divjak

Henriëtte Hendriks

Maarten Lemmens

Zhengguang Liu (刘正光)

Hans-Joerg Schmid

Dingfang Shu (束定芳)

Wenbin Wang (王文斌)

Xu Wen (文旭)

Hui Zhang (张辉)
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## 出版說明

自20世纪70年代诞生以来,认知语言学逐步发展壮大,已成为语言学主要流派之一。

“国际认知语言学前沿课题讲座”由中国认知语言学研究会与全国高校外语院校合作,组织国际认知语言学界知名学者在各高校做学术讲座,并精选讲座内容编撰而成,研究会会长束定芳教授任主编。丛书旨在鼓励和帮助我国年轻学者学习并获取相关领域国际最新信息、最前沿研究方法和技巧,从而促进其自身的科研发展。

上海外语教育出版社从1979年成立以来,与各研究会及学术团体一直保持密切联系与合作。中国认知语言学研究会十多年来成果斐然,在我社出版了众多认知语言学领域学术精品,为国内外学者创造了学术交流的平台和机会。相信本套丛书的推出,将进一步促使年轻学者聚焦研究热点,并对语言学乃至人文学科有更深更好的理解。
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## Foreword

Since its birth in the late 1970s, cognitive linguistics has evolved into a major field of study in linguistics, with the number of practitioners, organizations and journals growing steadily over the years.

We want to bring together some of the latest research developments that embody the general trends in current cognitive linguistic studies in order to help and inspire young and emerging cognitive scholars in China learn and emulate cutting edge approaches, methods and techniques while working on studies that draw data from Chinese or explain features of Chinese grammar and usage. To this end, starting in 2012, in cooperation with foreign languages colleges in universities across China, the China Cognitive Linguistics Association (CCLA) has sponsored a series of lectures by leading scholars in different areas of cognitive linguistics. The first of these series was given by Maarten Lemmens at Hunan University in October, 2013, on qualitative and quantitative perspectives on lexical and constructional semantics. The second series was delivered by Rong Chen at Beijing Normal University in October, 2015, focusing on a cognitive account of inversions in English. The third was given by Dagmar Divjak at Shandong University of Finance and Economics in October, 2016, on her latest research topics. The fourth series was given by Hans-Joerg Schmid at Shanghai International Studies University in April, 2017, on evolutionary linguistics. The fifth and the most recent series was delivered by Henriëtte Hendriks at Hunan University in May, 2018, on cognitive and linguistic developments in children and adults expressing motion, time and person. More are expected to follow in the next few years.
In cooperation with Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, we are publishing the lecture series to make them available to a wider audience. To do this, we had the lectures transcribed first and then had the lecturers fine-tune the content and adjust the format for publishing. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the speakers for the enormous amount of time they have put into preparing the talks and for getting the lectures into book form. I would also like to thank the local organizers, particularly Professor Zhengguang Liu, of Hunan University; Professor Xuanwei Peng, of Beijing Normal University; Professor Yi Li, of Shandong University of Finance and Economics; and Professor Yinglin Ji, of Shenzhen University for organizing the lectures and for helping with the editorial processes.

Founded in 2006, China Cognitive Linguistics Association is an active academic organization that aims to create platforms and opportunities for scholars in and outside China to exchange views and to share experiences in cognitive linguistic studies. It has been sponsoring and organizing annual and bi-annual conferences, workshops, and talk series on various topics in cognitive linguistics. It has also been actively promoting publications and projects that encourage young scholars from related fields to come together and to work towards a common goal: to better understand human language and — ultimately — humanity.

Dingfang Shu

Professor, Shanghai International Studies University

President, China Cognitive Linguistics Association
Acknowledgments

This volume is the first series in a larger project entitled *New Frontier Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics*, where several cognitive linguistics scholars present various aspects of Cognitive Linguistics, through a series of 10 lectures. This is a project launched by Professor Dingfang Shu, president of the China Cognitive Linguistics Association, in collaboration with different Chinese colleagues at various universities in China. I would like to thank Professor Dingfang Shu for having invited me to participate in setting up this project. It was Professor Shu who first invited me to Shanghai, China, in 2011 and opened a new fascinating world that I hold very dear.

I reserve a warm word of thanks for Professor Zhengguang Liu for hosting the first lecture series at Hunan University in Changsha. His hospitality is beyond words and his friendship is something that I treasure very much. Professor Liu invited me a first time to Changsha in April 2013, to give a lecture at the 4th International Cognitive Conference and Workshop that he organized at Hunan University. Even then, I was impressed by his hospitality and the quality of the conference. When he invited me to come and give the first lecture series *New Frontier Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics* at Hunan University, I did not hesitate a second. I do admit that, as I was preparing these lectures, it crossed my mind that I should perhaps have hesitated a bit longer, because it has been quite some work to compile these lectures and finalize the manuscript. Now that all is finished, I am most happy and grateful for this fantastic opportunity.

I reserve a special word of thanks to Yuchen Li, who at the time was a
PhD student at Hunan University (but who has since then graduated)
for her impressive organizational talent and impeccable practical
arrangements, ranging from academic matters to personal worries
to interpreting Chinese. I thank her for her friendship which lasts
until this day. I also thank all the students who have helped with the
transcription of the lectures, which has made the writing up of this
manuscript so much easier. The text in the current volume is not a
verbatim transcription of the lectures but has been adjusted to fit the
written register of a book without the visual support of a PowerPoint
presentation.

I express my sincere thanks to Ms Jing Sun from Shanghai Foreign
Language Education Press and, in particular, to Ms Yang Miao for her
efficiency and kind help with the text editing.

It took me longer than planned to finalize this volume, as work (especially)
and life (a bit) got in the way. This has, however, allowed me to update
some of the studies that were still unfinished when the lectures were given.
While some of the studies (but not all) have been published before in some
form, it is the first time that all of these studies are presented into one
single volume. I hope that, even if these studies are quite varied, the reader
appreciates how they build a coherent whole.
# Contents

Summary ...... 1

Lecture 1 Introduction to a cognitive view on language ...... 7

1.1 Basic postulates of cognitive linguistics ...... 7

1.2 The structure of grammar ...... 17

1.3 The emergence of grammar: a usage-based view ...... 19

1.4 What is cognitive about cognitive linguistics? ...... 30

1.5 Concluding remarks ...... 37

Lecture 2 Usage-based linguistics and its methodological consequences ...... 39

2.1 Introduction ...... 39

2.2 A constructional view on linguistic knowledge ...... 42

2.3 Defining constructions ...... 51

2.4 From constructs to constructions ...... 56

2.5 From usage to grammar and back ...... 62

2.6 Concluding remarks ...... 66

Lecture 3 Lexical-paradigmatic analysis of lexical causatives (synchronic perspective) ...... 71

3.1 The lexical-paradigmatic approach ...... 71

3.2 Case study 1: The (transitive) objectless construction ...... 85

3.3 Case study 2: The causative alternation ...... 94

3.4 Concluding remarks ...... 112
Lecture 4 Lexical-paradigmatic analysis of lexical causatives (diachronic perspective) ...... 115

4.1 Introduction ...... 115

4.2 The ergativization of intransitives ...... 119

4.3 The ergativization of transitives ...... 123

4.4 Some particular paradigmatic changes ...... 124

4.5 Concluding remarks ...... 127

Lecture 5 A cognitive lexical semantic analysis of posture verbs ...... 131

5.1 Introduction ...... 131

5.2 A cognitive account of (Dutch) posture verbs ...... 133

5.3 A look at learner language ...... 150

5.4 Posture verbs in other languages ...... 154

5.5 Concluding remarks ...... 158

Lecture 6 A cognitive lexical semantic analysis of placement verbs ...... 161

6.1 Posture and placement verbs ...... 161

6.2 Aspect-causative lexicalization patterns ...... 162

6.3 Dutch placement verbs ...... 169

6.4 Concluding remarks ...... 179

Lecture 7 Grammaticalization of (Dutch) posture verbs to grammatical markers ...... 181

7.1 From spatial to progressive ...... 181

7.2 Locational progressive constructions in Dutch ...... 184

7.3 Comparison of POS and PREP progressives ...... 189

7.4 Concluding remarks ...... 200

Lecture 8 Diachronic perspectives on posture and placement verbs ...... 203

8.1 Posture verbs in Germanic languages ...... 203

8.2 The demise of posture verbs in English ...... 204

8.3 The demise of set and the rise of put ...... 219

8.4 Concluding remarks ...... 228
Lecture 9 Typological perspectives on location ...... 231

9.1 Typological perspectives on motion and location ...... 231

9.2 Cross-linguistic differences in locative expressions ...... 236

9.3 Concluding remarks ...... 252

Lecture 10 Two case studies in grammaticalization ...... 255

10.1 From particle to evaluative adjective ...... 255

10.2 Light verbs in Odia ...... 267

10.3 Concluding remarks ...... 278

Bibliography ...... 281

APPENDICES ...... 297

Appendix 1: List of texts for pilot study on English *sit* (Lecture 8) ...... 297

Appendix 2: List of texts for the rise of English *put* (Lecture 8) ...... 298

Appendix 3: Pictures used in the Oral Picture Description Experiment (Lecture 9) ...... 300
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Summary

The structure of the volume follows the original division into
10 different lectures. They fall apart in two larger blocks: the first
part (comprising Lectures 1 and 2) presents the overall theoretical
framework of cognitive, usage-based linguistics and its methodological
consequences. The remaining part (Lectures 3 to 10) presents different
case studies that I have carried out within this framework, some of these
in collaboration with colleagues. They can be grouped in four large areas
of research: (i) the study of lexical causatives in English (Lectures 3 and
4), (ii) posture and placement verbs in Dutch and English (Lectures 5, 6,
7 and 8), (iii) typological perspectives on spatial expressions (Lecture 9),
and some particular grammaticalization studies (Lecture 10).

In somewhat more detail, the contents of this book can be
summarized as follows. In Lecture 1, we present the basic tenets of a
usage-based model of language, as adopted by a range of different theories
(such as Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Goldberg's Construction
Grammar, Croft's Radical Construction Grammar, etc.) all united under
the label 'cognitive-functional theories of language' (see also Lemmens
2015, 2017a, 2019). We will show how such a model is committed to
the view that language is non-autonomous, non-universal, symbolic,
and conventional. We also clarify what is 'cognitive' about cognitive
linguistics.
Lecture 2 will continue this theoretical discussion. In the first part, we will consider a major theoretical issue, viz. the characterization of constructions or symbolic units that are the only building blocks that the model allows. Secondly, we consider the more technical aspect of how a usage-based model actually works. Finally, we consider some methodological implications of taking a cognitive, usage-based perspective on language.

Lectures 3 and 4 describe my lexical-paradigmatic approach to lexical causatives in English (first developed in Lemmens 1998a). Lecture 3 first presents this model which holds the view that the English grammar of causative verbs is governed by two general causative models, the transitive and the ergative paradigms. At the same time, we show how lexical features also play a role in explaining the syntactic alternations that lexical causatives occur in such as the causative alternation, e.g. *He bounced the ball* vs. *The ball bounced* (also called the unaccusative alternation). After presenting the general principles of the model, we will describe some case studies. The most recent one, focusing on the causative alternation, shows how corpus data can be exploited to evaluate two competing models to view syntactic alternations. As such, we not only provide some further insights into the lexical and constructional interface in the English grammar (cf. also Lemmens 1998a,b; 2005a; 2006a), but also show that the Generative and the Cognitive views may not be all that incompatible. Lecture 4 presents some diachronic case studies that illustrate how grammatical and lexical features interact in intricate ways in the domain of lexical causatives in English and their alternations. We show how individual uses of verbs may move into one paradigm while others are still situated in the other, or how a whole lexical field may shift from one causative paradigm to the other.

Lectures 5 to 9 are all related to cognitive analyses of expressions of static location. Lecture 5 presents a cognitive, lexical-semantic analysis of posture verbs in Dutch (see Lemmens 2002; Lemmens and Perrez 2010, 2012, 2018). This analysis reveals the semantic motivations that underlie
the different uses of the posture verbs, including the idiomatic uses. We will show how the notion of image schemata is important to account for these uses. Also, we consider how different encodings represent different conceptualizations of one and the same reality.

Lecture 6 considers placement verbs which in many languages of the world align with posture verbs (see Lemmens 2006b, Atintono and Lemmens 2013). We first consider Talmy’s three aspectual types and how different languages have different preferences in their lexicalization patterns. We then consider in more detail how placement verbs relate to posture verbs in the Germanic languages. Again, Dutch appears to be the language that has the most extensive use of placement verbs and as such provides an interesting case study.

Lecture 7 builds on the previous analyses of posture verbs in different languages and illustrates how in several languages these posture verbs have grammaticalized to aspectual markers. In the second part of the lecture, we will take up Dutch again for a more detailed case study and consider the (partial) grammaticalization of the Dutch posture verbs toward progressive auxiliaries (cf. Lemmens 2005b, 2015, 2017b). Our corpus-based analysis reveals subtle semantic differences between some of these ‘posture-less’ progressives and another common progressive construction in Dutch (*aan het V zijn* ‘be at the V’). In more general terms, this lines up with the general view that differences of construction reveal differences in meaning.

In Lecture 8, we present a short description of some diachronic evolutions of posture and placement verbs in the Germanic languages (see Lemmens 2006b, Lemmens and David 2006). More particularly, we will consider some of the disturbances that have arisen in the originally very neat opposition. Strikingly, English stands out, again, as being least Germanic; we suggest some hypotheses for this peculiar evolution (see Lemmens 2014, Lesuisse and Lemmens 2018).

Lecture 9 takes a larger perspective on locative expressions. Within the framework of Talmy’s (2000) typological distinction between
Satellite- and Verb-framed languages, the lecture reports on results from an on-going project on of *static* locative relationships as expressed by verbs in English, French, and Dutch (see also Lemmens 2005c; Lemmens and Perrez 2010, 2012, 2018). The data analyzed is drawn from picture descriptions where subjects were asked to talk about the location of certain entities on these pictures. As we will show, Talmy's views need to be revised in view of the fact that some Satellite-framed languages, such as Dutch (but also German and Swedish) use four basic verbs ('sit', 'lie', 'stand', and 'hang') to refer to (canonical) location. This has considerable consequences for the attention that speakers attribute to location as well as where in the sentence they express it. In addition, the results reveal that French does mention manner of location if it is salient, but also that it has a strong hook-up with attachment. Further differences seem to surface at discourse level, revealing different ways of presenting locative information. A last area that we will briefly touch upon is the use of co-verbal gesture. Exploratory analysis (still ongoing, see Lemmens and Perrez 2015, 2017) suggests that the gestures do differ across the languages, especially in shape, and that they often encode information that remains unexpressed in the verbal productions. The data also indicate that gestures are influenced by the speaker's verbal proficiency.

Finally, in Lecture 10, we discuss two small case studies on grammaticalization. The first one concerns the on-going process of grammaticalization of *OK* (and variants, such as *O.K.*, *okay*, etc.) in English, Swedish and Dutch. Our corpus analysis for English reveals that *OK* has undergone a three-step grammaticalization from its first occurrence (early 19th century) till the present day, and that this process is still continuing. Strikingly, our Dutch and Swedish corpora show that *OK*, as a loanword from English, echoes the same grammaticalization steps as those in English, but do so some decades later. We will also consider the parallel evolution of other evaluative phrases, in particular the grammaticalization of the French loanword *ça va* (litt. 'it goes') in Belgian Dutch.
The second study concerns so-called light verb constructions in Odia, an Indo-Aryan language, spoken predominantly in Odisha, an eastern state in India. These light verbs occur in asymmetric complex predicates, combining a main verb and a fully or partially bleached ‘light’ verb (‘go’, ‘give’, ‘drop’, etc.), where the main verb carries the lexical semantic information. As we will show, the light verbs affect the interpretation of the event in (usually) two ways: (i) they express *completion* of the event and (ii) *unexpectedness* or *abruptness*.

The research presented in this volume represents the large strands of research that I have been working on in the course of my career. What is common to all these strands is that they all use a cognitive usage-based perspective on language. It is therefore warranted that we open this volume with two lectures that present this theoretical model.
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## Lecture 1

# Introduction to a cognitive view on language

Many people wonder what Cognitive Linguistics actually is and how it can be distinguished from other linguistic models. In this lecture, we present its background and its basic principles and about what it means to have a cognitive perspective on language in opposition to, for instance, formalist views on language. In the last part, I briefly talk about what is ‘cognitive’ about cognitive linguistics. Lecture 2 will subsequently elaborate the usage-based nature of Cognitive Linguistics and its methodological consequences.

## 1.1 Basic postulates of cognitive linguistics

First of all, as a bit of historical background, let me start by pointing out that Cognitive Linguistics started out in the late 1970s early 1980s mostly as a reaction against generative grammar. Even the people who we consider today as the founders of Cognitive Linguistics, started out working within the framework of Chomsky’s generative grammar framework, one of the linguistics models that was dominant at the time. In order to understand that a bit better, I would like to start — and this maybe a little bit strange — with a simplified description of the basic postulates of generative linguistics, to be able to explain how Cognitive
Linguistics formulates a response to these.

What are the basic principles of generative linguistics against which Cognitive Linguistics reacted?¹ One of the claims made by generative linguistics is that language is **innate** — you are born with language. More accurately, you are born with a language faculty; this is why people talk about the ‘language gene’. If language is wired in your genetic structure, that entails that language, or at least the basic abstract principles of language, must be **universal**. That is why generative linguists and many other people are actually looking for the principles of universal grammar and see this as the central goal of linguistic theory.

One of the main arguments for saying that language is universal is straightforward: when you look at human beings across the world, you see that all human beings talk. Moreover, they talk all the time (even in their sleep!) and they talk to others, to themselves, even to animals and things. Finally, *only* humans seem to be able to talk. In other words, there must be something that we, human beings, possess that other animals do not have. Given the universal omnipresence of language it makes sense to assume that it must be something we are born with.

Another major argument for saying that language is innate is found in observing language acquisition: when children learn a language, they do so incredibly fast and, so it seems, in similar stages across the world. Children seem to go through the same kind of cognitive and linguistic development when they learn a language. This is one of the major arguments that have actually been suggested for the innateness of grammar. Language acquisition is not only fast, but it is also limited in time, in the sense that you basically learn a language within a relatively short period of time; if you learn a language after that period, it will no longer be of the same status as your mother language, but that of a second language, a foreign language. People have therefore suggested that there is a critical period, usually ranging from the age of one till the time children hit puberty, when the acquisition of the mother tongue occurs. In more technical terms, what the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)
suggests, according to Chomsky (1965), is that during this limited time
span a special language acquisition device (LAD) is active, but that this
stops when the child reaches puberty. When you learn a language after
that critical age, it will be a foreign language where acquisition proceeds
differently. As a result, it will not be like your native language.

Finally, another important argument that has been suggested in
support of the innateness of grammar is the ‘poverty of the stimulus’.
The basic idea underlying this argument is that while the linguistic
environment does matter, the linguistic stimulus you get from this
environment is ‘poor’, and this in two ways. First, it is poor in the sense
that the language that you hear around you is riddled with mistakes,
retakes, stutters, inaccuracies, half sentences, etc. Chomsky describes
the poverty of the input as ‘the degenerate quality and narrowly limited
extent of the available data’ (1965: 58). In spontaneous speech (which
is the bulk of the stimulus we are confronted with) people often do
not finish their sentences or they have false starts or repetitions as for
example in *If you, if you, if you, think about it, ...* How would you be able to
learn how to build grammatically felicitous *if*-clauses when confronted
with such hesitations? While our example is oversimplified, the argument
is clear: you must already have some abstract structure in your head that
allows you to do the language specific mapping, ignoring performance
limitations, which is what gives you your sense of grammaticality. The
second aspect to the idea of the poverty of the stimulus concerns the fact
that the linguistic input is smaller than the potential and actual output.
There is no doubt that speakers can produce sentences that nobody has
ever produced before; in other words, they produce sentences that they
never were confronted with in the input. How is it possible that you
know how to build grammatically correct sentences, or can judge the
grammaticality of sentence that others produce, if you have never heard
these before? It must be because you already have an abstract grammar
in your head and you can map the input structures that you hear onto
these abstract principles and parameters. Once you have figured out
how these mappings work, the grammar is in place and you can generate
new sentences that nobody has ever said before. That is why the model
that Chomsky developed was called *generative* grammar. In this view,
ontological development is an illusion; languages are not learned, but
they are present innately and are only triggered by linguistic input. In
other words, a child does not need to be taught language formally, but
simply needs to be exposed to adult speech and thereby discovers the
grammar effortlessly thanks to the language acquisition device (see
Tomasello 1995 for a critical review of such a view).

It follows from this that the notion of grammaticality — the capacity
to judge what is grammatical and what is not — is not something that
you learn but is something that is, in fact, already there. You map the
language structures that you hear onto the abstract system that you are
born with. This takes me to the third basic assumption (next to the
innateness and universality of grammar) of generative linguistics, viz.
that grammar is conceived of as a *formal system* that contains a unified
set of rules that actually forms the algebraic core (that is why it is called
a formal system). This core is a set of algebraic rules that do not have
any meaning on their own. Take, for instance, the idea that a sentence
(S) breaks down into a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). That
is a syntactic rule that is part of the grammar (as captured by the phrase
structure rule S → NP VP) which does not have any meaning as such.
You can manipulate these symbols without any semantic difference,
much like you would in an algebraic system. In other words, the form
of the linguistic expression and its function (or meaning) are separated.
Next to this algebraic core, there is the lexicon which contains all the
semantic units of the language as well as everything that is not predictable
from the grammar of the language. These are the units that you insert
into the rules (via lexical insertion rules) so that the structures become
meaningful units. In other words, the phrase structure trees with NPs,
VPs, and auxiliaries, determiners, and so on, provide the formal skeleton
into which the lexical items are inserted. As a result, the structures of
course become meaningful, but before that, there is no meaning assigned
to the formal pattern itself, at least not in a strict truth-conditional view
on meaning. For instance, *John ate the apple* and *The apple was eaten by John*
are paraphrases (i.e. semantically synonymous) and truth-conditionally
equivalent (if one is true, the other is also true and vice versa). In other
words, there is a separation of form and function. That does not mean
that these structures are used in the same contexts, but that aspect is not
part of the grammar as such, but rather relates to use which is said to be
taken care of in the pragmatic component. Generative grammar clearly
separates grammar and use.

This view has important consequences as to what the grammar
in your linguistic theory actually looks like. A linguistic theory should
describe (and explain) language patterns. According to formal linguists,
the model of grammar should be economical, containing the (fairly)
small set of rules that govern the grammar, and nothing more. This is
what some have called the ‘lean grammar machine’. This limited set of
rules is what allows you to generate an indefinite number of sentences.
It must be a limited set of rules, because your memory capacities are
actually limited. It would clearly surpass our memory capacity to
memorize all the sentences you hear. You *compute* sentences, you *build*
them, but you do not memorize them. That entails that in the grammar,
you only have general rules, not any idiosyncratic features that linguistic
expressions may have. The specific and the idiosyncratic are stored in the
lexicon. In other words, idioms and exceptional cases, i.e. everything that
is irregular or idiosyncratic, are stored in the lexicon (memorized).

This view leads to a dualism with respect to language acquisition,
because part of the linguistic system (the grammar) is innate and another
part (the lexicon) is learned. The following quote from Chomsky (2000)
illustrates this duality quite nicely and sums up the main points made so far:

> Language acquisition seems much like the growth of organs generally; it
> is something that happens to a child, not that the child does. And while
the environment plainly matters, *the general course of the development and the basic features of what emerges are predetermined by the initial state*. But the initial state is a common human possession. It must be, then, that in their essential properties and even down to fine detail, languages are cast to the same mold. The Martian scientist might reasonably conclude that *there is a single human language, with differences only at the margins*. [...] the diversity and complexity can be no more than superficial appearance. (Chomsky 2000: 7; my emphasis)

There are some striking elements in this quote. First of all, by saying that language learning is automatic and not something that the child does, Chomsky seems to neglect the cognitive and creative work that the child actually does, a point to which we will return later. A second critical comment with respect to this quote is that it underestimates the extent of variation that exists between different languages; in fact, the variation is so large that very few contentful language universals (of the non-conditional type) have actually been found. Finally, one is struck by Chomsky bringing in the Martian scientist in support of his claim. Even if only meant as a rhetorical device to imagine an outsider's view on language, it is too easy a way out of the theoretical issue.

When you look at traditional grammar books and textbooks in linguistics you will find such a dualistic view between grammar on the one hand and the lexicon on the other. In fact, many linguistic models adopt a modular view on language that very much lies in line with the above. That view means that the grammar of a language consists of different modules. Typically, you have a lexical module that contains the lexical knowledge; a syntactic component that contains the grammar rules; a semantic component that, for example, links the noun phrases in a transitive sentence and thematic roles; there is a phonological component which is concerned with how to pronounce (and comprehend) words and sentences; and many models incorporate a pragmatic component, specifying how language is used in context (often leading to changes in
meaning). Some linguists might even go as far as saying that pragmatics is not really part of the grammar as such, but merely related to usage, and thus typically excluded from grammatical description. In sum, basically what you have in traditional grammar (but also in generative grammar) is what Taylor (2012) has called a dictionary-and-grammar model of language: the dictionary contains everything that is irregular, that is exceptional, that is to be memorized (i.e. stored). Grammar, on the other hand, contains the rules that you use to build sentences. The rules are stored, of course, and you use these rules to generate new sentences, but you do not memorize sentences — you ‘compute’ them, that is, you know how to put words together in a sentence, and you know how to decompose a sentence. Consider a (simple) complex structure such as (a) *red ball* (the example given by Fillmore *et al.* 1988). If you know what *red* means (stored lexical knowledge), if you know what *ball* means (idem), and if you know that noun phrases can contain adjectives and nouns, and that the adjective is in a modifying relationship to the noun (grammatical knowledge), then you can figure out what the phrase (a) *red ball* means (‘a round object qualified as having a particular colour’), because you can put the different components together. There is, in other words, no need to store the phrase (in the lexicon or in the grammar) as its meaning can be computed ‘on-line’.

In summary, generative grammar and by extension, other (formal) models of grammar of linguistics, consider language to be universal and innate. It is a formal system, that is modular and quite economical. The grammar is not messy; it is a clean and neat set of rules and you do not store any exceptions — these are relegated to the lexicon which, then, by definition is more chaotic, so to speak.

Cognitive linguistics presents a view that is actually almost the opposite. In a nutshell, this view can be summarized as follows: language is non-autonomous, non-universal, symbolic and conventional. Let us briefly walk through these points.

When we say that cognitive linguistics assumes that language is
*non-autonomous*, this means that language is an integral part of human
cognition, and that, of course, means that it also links with other
cognitive capacities and cognitive experiences. As R.W. Langacker states,

Even if the blueprints for language are wired genetically into the human
organism, their elaborations into a fully specified linguistic system
during language acquisition, and their implementation in everyday
language use, are **clearly dependent on experiential factors and inextricably
bound up with psychological phenomena that are not specifically linguistic
in character.** Thus we have no valid reason to anticipate a sharp
dichotomy between linguistic ability and other aspects of cognitive
processing. [...] There is of course no question that people have the
capacity to learn a language, and that this involves innate structures and
abilities. **What is controversial is whether some of these structures and
abilities are unique to language, possibly constituting a separate modular
package with special properties not reflective or derivative of other, more
general cognitive functions.** (Langacker 1987: 13; my emphasis)

Cognitive Linguistics does not accept as an *a priori* (even if this may
eventually turn out to be true) that language is a separate module in the
brain (the language faculty). Instead, language is said to be an integral
part of our cognitive system, and so it uses structures that are cognitive,
but not necessarily exclusively linguistic, i.e. restricted to language. The
structures that you find in language will also show up elsewhere in the
cognitive system, and we will see some examples of that below (section
1.4).

Grammar is also considered **non-universal**. In Chomsky’s quote
above it was said that the differences between languages are only
peripheral, because deep down they are all the same (‘cast to the same
mold’). Cognitive linguists say that such may not be the case at all.
It is true, of course, that everybody on the planet seems to talk and
use language, but the universals that we have are more general than
just linguistic. Fact is that people have not found many real linguistic
universals — i.e. *contentful* linguistic universals (not something like ‘all languages have consonants and vowels’ which is fairly uncontroversial as well as uninteresting). It has been shown — and I will come back to that later in Lecture 9 — that even the meanings and concepts we have in our head (part of a mental language often called ‘mentalese’) may not be the same depending on the language that we speak (see also Levinson 2003). Universals exist, but they are of a different order: ‘they are universals of communication and cognition and human physiology’ (Tomasello 2003: 18). We all have comparable bodies, we all have similar cognitive capacities and systems that we are born with, and we all have the same communicative needs; these elements are surely universal, but that does not mean that the specific language features must be universal. In fact, as Levinson (2003) points out, whether or not there are linguistic or conceptual universals is fairly much an empirical question and should not be an *a priori*.

In cognitive linguistics, grammar is characterized as **symbolic**, and it is exhaustively defined as an inventory of form-meaning pairs. These are called *symbolic units* in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar; in Construction Grammar, they are called *constructions*. There is an important consequence to viewing the entire grammar as an inventory of such form-meaning pairs, viz. that everything in grammar is actually meaningful, including what would typically be called the grammar ‘rules’ (procedural rules as such do not exist in a cognitive linguistic model). If the grammar consists of symbolic units or constructions that are form-meaning pairs, then this necessarily means that grammar is non-formalist, in a sense that everything in language (every language structure) is inherently meaningful. Here are some ways in which this has been phrased in the literature.

A pivotal claim of cognitive grammar is that grammatical units are also intrinsically symbolic. I maintain, in other words, that grammatical morphemes, categories, and constructions all take the form of symbolic
units, and that nothing else is required for the description of grammatical structure. (Langacker 1991a: 16)

... everything from words to the most general syntactic and semantic rules can be represented as constructions. (Croft 2001: 17)

... [grammatical constructions] are nothing other than the patterns in which meaningful linguistic symbols are used in communication. (Tomasello 2003: 5)

In other words, if everything in the grammar is inherently meaningful, then that by definition excludes meaningless ('dummy') elements from grammatical description. This is known as Langacker's *content requirement*: '[Cognitive Grammar] rules out all arbitrary descriptive devices, i.e. those with no direct grounding in phonetic or semantic reality' (Langacker 1991a: 19). Importantly, Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar do not claim either that once you have a 'rule' (or the Cognitive Linguistic equivalent thereof, see below), the realizations of this rule could not be remembered (stored). To refer back to our earlier example: it is not because you have 'rules' that allow you to compute the meaning of *a red ball* that the phrase itself (an instantiation of those rules) cannot, or will not be, remembered. As has been shown, it often will be (a point taken up again in Lecture 2). Assuming rules and their instantiations to be mutually exclusive is what Langacker has termed the *rule/list fallacy*.

Notice that defining grammar as an inventory of symbolic units (or constructions) does away with the above-mentioned dualism in language acquisition, because we do not make a fundamental difference between the type of things that are stored in the lexicon and those that are stored in the grammar. They are not necessarily identical, but they are of the same kind, viz., they are form-meaning pairs. More examples will be given later on, but it should be clear that cognitive linguistics regards everything in the grammar, from morphemes over words and fixed phrases, to grammatical patterns all as form-meaning pairs. As such, the same basic acquisition
process holds for both general constructions ('grammatical rules') and for idiosyncratic element (of varying complexity).

The above description gives the big picture that we will elaborate more below. We will start by looking in more detail at the structure of grammar. Next, we will consider the question of how, if grammar is not innate, children can still learn language and in particular how they can learn what is grammatically correct. In other words, the crucial question here is: Where does grammaticality from, if it is not innate? The answer lies in observing the emergence of language in children's first language and what children actually *do*. In the last part, I will briefly talk about what is cognitive about cognitive linguistics.

## 1.2 The structure of grammar

Let us start with the structure of grammar. The definition of what grammar is from a cognitive linguistic perspective is given by Langacker who says that grammar is ‘a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units’ (1987: 57). Let us first break that definition down into its different parts and consider what each of these parts means; after that, we will illustrate this claim and its operationalization with more detailed examples.

Grammar is *structured* — that means that it is well-organized; more specifically, it is hierarchically organized, in that some structures are parts of other structures. In other words, it not a ‘flat’ list as you would have in a dictionary. Dictionaries as we know them are basically flat lists ordered fairly illogically; there is no ‘inherent’ cognitive logic to the alphabet (a convention). You have to memorize the alphabet in order to find a word in the dictionary. That is not the kind of organization that underlies the grammar. We will see some examples later in this lecture to show what these hierarchies look like.

Grammar is a structured *inventory*, which means that it is more than just a set of (grammar) rules. An inventory means that things are stored,
including instantiations of the rules (cf. the rule/list fallacy mentioned above). Researchers, and particularly linguists, have often underestimated the capacity of human beings to memorize. You remember more than you might believe, or even more than you like.

Grammar is **conventional**, i.e. it is learned. You are not born with grammar but learn it through the interaction with your linguistic environment, i.e. you learn it through usage. Nobody, even not a generative linguist, is going to deny that the linguistic environment is important (cf. Chomsky who also acknowledges that in the quote above). The environment does play an important role, regardless of the linguistic model that you adhere to. Cognitive linguists, however, push the idea further by claiming that it is through usage that you learn the language. Language is thus considered the product of a social process of interactions (hence, *usage-based*). Linguistic structures are shared by the members of a speech community, but the degree to which a structure has conventionalized is variable. Importantly, if it can be proven (as has been done) that language and even grammaticality can be learned from usage, then there is no more theoretical or empirical need to assume, as an (unproven) *a priori*, the existence of an innate grammar.

Finally, grammar consists of **linguistic units**. If people clap their hands after a lecture or a concert, they are clearly engaged in a meaningful (and conventional) act of communication (applauding), but that is not part of language, because it is not a linguistic unit. It is part of communication, but not linguistic. However, the boundary between what counts as linguistic or not may not always be clear. For instance, we make all kinds of noises, like ‘tss, tss, tss’ or (mock) coughing, which are meaningful, but (clearly) they are not linguistic. Yet when you say, ‘while professor Lemmens was giving his talk, he went [COUGH]’, you are inserting an actual cough that resembles the one I may have produced into your sentence, and by doing so, it functions as a linguistic element in that sentence. You can do this with any noise that people or things typically make or any gesture. Gestures are an interesting case in point,
in fact: are they linguistic or not? Clearly, they are meaningful when
used with language on particular occasions, but can they be regarded as
meaningful in and by themselves and does that suffice to consider them
linguistic? No one will deny that they are meaningful, but many linguists
will say that they are not part of linguistics 'proper' (see Müller 2014 or
Cienki 2016 for some interesting discussion on the (linguistic) status of
gestures).

Putting a ‘non-linguistic’ element (like a sound imitation or a
gesture) into a sentence, as illustrated above, gives it some linguistic
status. Clearly, it only has this status temporarily, as it is not a stored
element in the grammar (the inventory of linguistic units); in more
technical terms, Langacker says that it does not have ‘unit status’. A
single usage event does not suffice to have speakers store a new form-
meaning pairing into the grammar; only repeated usage does. A structure
will be considered a unit when it is a sufficiently entrenched structure.
Simplistically put, entrenchment refers to the fact of something being
stored in memory and being sufficiently salient such that you can access
it cognitively in fairly automated fashion. We will give some examples of
that later on.

If it is indeed true that repeated occurrence leads to storage and
entrenchment, then there are important repercussions for what your
grammar model actually looks like, as will be amply illustrated below and
in Lecture 2. Since you may be storing in the grammar (i.e. in memory)
both rules and their instantiations, the grammar may not be so neat and
clean, at least not in the sense of it being economical. If that is true, the
question rises how it is possible for children to learn the grammar and for
adults to maintain it. This is discussed next.

1.3 The emergence of grammar: a usage-based view

The non-nativist view on grammar may actually trouble more
traditionally inclined linguists, in particular because it may not be all that
clear how speakers learn the language perfectly from an environment
that is not providing them with perfect input. How could this ever work?
Basically, the gist of the story is that when you are learning a language,
your brain is doing much more work than is often assumed (as, for
example, by Chomsky in the quote given earlier). Recall that cognitive
linguistics rejects the idea that grammar is innate as well as the idea that
the language input is poor (the poverty of stimulus argument). Actually,
even though many people have pointed out that language acquisition
is fast, if you really think about it, language is one of the most difficult
things to learn in our lives; it is probably the most complicated system
you will ever have to learn, and it takes us years to acquire it. It is nothing
like, say, learning how to drive a car which will take you, a couple of weeks
or months, or eating with knife and fork or with chopsticks. Speaking a
language in a grammatically correct way takes you about seven to eight
years of practice. That is extremely long compared to the other things we
learn. Earlier we said that people generally assume that there is a critical age
after which first language acquisition stops. The idea of the critical age has
been called into question, and it has been observed that you continue to
learn language as you grow older as well, even for grammar (see, e.g. Street
and Dąbrowska 2010). The fact that lexical acquisition continues after the
critical age is uncontested and clearly not at issue here.

Then what about the poverty of the stimulus? Chouinard and Clark
(2003) cite a study by Snow and Ferguson (1977) that has revealed that
the language addressed to children by their parents, schoolteachers, or
caretakers in fact contains very few errors. Apparently, adults seem to
be quite careful when talking to children and see to it that they do not
make mistakes. Unconsciously, adults seem to be aware that the child is
learning and possibly still has some difficulty with the language, so they
adjust the language they speak to the child. In other words, the input
that the child gets from caretakers is actually quite error-free and not all
that ‘poor’ in that sense, but rather helps them to acquire the grammar
correctly.
The language input that children are exposed to is thus not as degenerate as Chomsky (1965) claims it is. In addition, one should not underestimate the creative work that the child does on that input. In contrast to Chomsky's view, we say that language learning is not something that happens to the child; it is something that the child *does* (even if unconsciously). The child does so spontaneously, because of the strong desire to communicate, which is universal. As will be detailed below, via cognitive operations of pattern-extraction, the child is actually able to build general structures (called schemas) which allow the child to build sentences that have not been heard before (i.e. that transcend the scope of the input).

Much inspirational work on this has been done by Michael Tomasello, one of the leading experts on language acquisition within a usage-based model (see Tomasello 2000, 2003). As he points out, grammar is derived from usage:

> Usage-based theories hold that the essence of language is its *symbolic* dimension, *with grammar being derivative*. [...] in contrast to generative grammar and other formal approaches, in usage-based approaches the grammatical dimension is a *product of a set of historical and ontogenetic processes* referred to collectively as *grammaticalization*. When human beings use symbols to communicate with one another, stringing them together into sequences, *patterns of use emerge and become consolidated into grammatical constructions* [...]. (Tomasello 2003: 5; my emphasis)

In the quote above, Tomasello mentions the historical and ontogenetic process during which patterns of use emerge. He says that a person's linguistic skills actually 'result from the accumulated experience with language across the totality of usage events in her life' (2000: 61–62). This clearly goes against the idea of a critical age when such accumulation is said to stop.

Tomasello explains that children learn language when they are about one year old. The reason why the child only begins to learn language at
that time is that it needs to develop cognitively and to understand what
language is all about. An important cognitive precondition for language
to emerge is the (cognitive) capacity of attention and intention-reading.
If I am pointing at a bottle, you will most likely look at that bottle. You
are targeting the bottle visually and mentally (i.e. attending to it), because
you understand that the intention of my pointing to the bottle is to draw
your attention to that object. That is in fact what language does as well.
Before a child can learn language, it must understand that, via language,
speakers want to direct the attention to some other entity, just as in the
case of pointing. Children actually point before they talk. For example, a
child might point to a ball and simultaneously say the word *ball* (or even
not say anything at all). The adult (caretaker, parent, etc.) will most likely
respond by saying, *Oh, you want to play with the ball?* or something of that
kind. What the child does with the pointing (and the word *ball*), is to
direct the hearer's attention to the ball (whether or not that is for playing
or for some other reason). Or suppose the child comes with a ball and
then points at the truck, which might be interpreted to mean 'put the ball
in the truck'. This is not (yet) language, but it is communication of the
type that immediately precedes language and that builds on constructing
a 'joint attention frame'. It is only when the child has acquired this
(cognitive) capacity, which takes about a year to develop, that language
will emerge. What is at issue here, Tomasello points out, is the cognitive
capacity of 'intention-reading', i.e. you have to be able to understand
('read') the communicative intentions of communicative actions, such as
pointing or linguistic utterances.

In other words, before you can learn language, you need to be
able to read the intentions of others and target your attention to a given
entity. Gestures and gazes are the first exponents of these cognitive
skills in children, and language will emerge in their trail not long after.
Understanding the intention of communicative actions does not happen
in isolation but is actually embedded in usage events. Often, these usage
events are structured in a certain way through repeated experience. For
example, if you go to a restaurant, you know the drill: you wait until you are seated, you get the menu, you order, you get your food, you eat your food, you pay and then you leave. That is the ‘restaurant script’. You understand the communicative intentions of individual usage events that happen in the restaurant in function of that script. It is the understanding of the bigger usage event structure which is crucial to successfully understanding communicative intentions. Of course, this is also where the cultural dimensions come in.

Returning now to children’s linguistic structures, if you look at the early grammar of children, what you see is that this grammar is not at all like that of adults. Tomasello points out that children start out by using ‘holophrases’, more or less single word-utterances (where *word* does not correspond to what adults understand as a word), such as *lemme-see* or *wantit*, which — communicatively — represent an entire adult utterance (*Let me see it* and *I want it* or *Do you want it?*). Gradually, one of the parts of these utterances will become a variable slot, e.g. *gimme X* where X represents any object (e.g. *gimme toy* or *gimme ball*); the rest (*gimme*) remains fixed. Similarly, *want X* may represent the utterance *I want X* where X can be anything and essentially of any syntactic category, e.g. *want milk*, *want eat*, *want warm*. This kind of organization (in part fixed, in part open) is responsible for what Tomasello calls the ‘pivot look’ of early child language.

As is clear from these examples, children do not (yet) operate with the same (syntactic or semantic) categories that one finds in adult grammar. Tomasello convincingly illustrates this with what he calls ‘verb islands’. When the children’s early grammar expands one observes, for example, that verbs are actually stored with their own particular set of semantic roles. Children do not yet have a notion of Agent or Patient, like adults do. They have specific roles tied to specific verbs (actions). For example, if you have a verb like *hit*, they will have *hitter*; a hitter is a person who hits and that is not the same as the person who is a *pusher* who pushes. To the child, a hitter and a pusher are two different
categories; when you think of it, this makes sense, since hitting and pushing are clearly different actions. Children do not (yet) see the similarity between the two and, unlike what one finds in adult grammar, their grammar does not contain an overarching category Agent. They only have a low-level generalization over different kinds of hitting, leading to local verb-specific roles. Only gradually (and in no small measure incited by linguistic structure) do they build more abstract generalizations (such as the notion of Agent) that neutralize over the differences between hitters, pushers, thumpers, snatchers, etc. At first, however, they use item-based utterances, with some variation, and gradually, these expand into higher level generalizations which allow full creative use.

Tomasello explicitly says that ‘children not only say what they hear, but the more they hear it, the more it seems to them that this is the only way it can be said’ (2000: 72). The latter point is crucial, and we will return to that shortly, when we talk about the learning of grammaticality. Of course, children will gradually develop their creative skills and will create sentences that nobody has ever said before. Nobody denies the creative potential of language and language users. However, it is only gradually that children begin to build more general categories, like Agent and Patient, which will lead to such creativity; in the beginning, such general categories are not part of their grammar at all.

In summary, what Tomasello says is that when you look at children's early grammar, it looks very much like an inventory of item-based constructions. In addition, what children basically do is to recycle quite a bit, as a content-based operation. This means that they do not create things out of the blue but take the things they know and modify these according to the needs at hand. There is ample evidence that children do not just create things, but recycle what they heard before, in what Tomasello (2000) calls ‘usage-based syntactic operations’, basically patchwork, resulting from (intelligent) cut-and-paste operations.

What this shows is that language, and in particular grammaticality, need
not be innate but can be learned. You are not born with grammaticality, it is something you learn. Children do this via interaction with expert users, the adults around them. These adults know how to speak the language properly; a child listens to them and imitates these adults but it does so in a clever way. What this means is that the input the child is exposed to is not only important but even crucial to learn the language, and to learn what is acceptable in the language. On top of that, the interaction with adult speakers does provide children with ‘corrective’ evidence from which they deduce what is and is not acceptable in the language.

We will only mention one study here, Chouinard and Clark (2003), which is a good eye-opener as to how children actually learn grammaticality from the input, not only by the forms they hear in this input, but also via negative evidence that the adult interaction provides them with. At the beginning of their article, Chouinard and Clark state that ‘children do not learn language in a void; they learn it in conversation’ (2003: 638). The question then is how you could learn what is grammatically correct via such conversational interaction? In other words, how can you learn grammaticality from linguistic input? Mostly, people will interpret this as looking for positive evidence, i.e. evidence that gives you information on how language is used by setting the example: the input gives you the model. However, positive evidence is not enough to learn grammaticality, or rather, to learn what is *not* grammatical in a language, since you only hear what is grammatical. To figure out what is ungrammatical, you need negative evidence, that is, explicit comments that something is not correct (e.g. *No, you can't say I swam in the pool; you should say I swam in the pool*). In language acquisition, there is very little negative evidence of this kind. This might occasionally happen, but it is not the usual reaction when incorrect language is used by children (or by anyone else for that matter). Imagine a situation where a small infant child wants milk. The child, beginning to speak, might say to her mother *want milk*; clearly, the mother is not going to say, ‘I’m sorry, dear, but I’m not going to give you any milk until
you correctly say *Could I please have some milk?* That is not how it goes: the child says, *want milk*, and the mother (obviously) gives the child some milk. While in a foreign language class, explicit negative evidence (e.g. *You can't say X in English*) may often be heard, we usually do not show this kind of behaviour when we talk to children. In addition, it has been shown that if parents make such remarks, they have very little effect on the children. (Similarly, for language teachers, telling your students 'don't say this, say that' may have little effect on their language use as well.)

The (overt) negative feed-back that we are talking about here is, however, not the only kind of negative evidence that is possible. As Chouinard and Clark point out, there is another kind of negative evidence that is provided to the child which is less disruptive, via adult reformulations. Here are some of their examples of what they mean with such reformulations.

(1) Parent: What did you do?

Child: I go to school.

Parent: You went to school with your brother? (Chouinard and Clark 2003: 639)

(2) Child (1; 11.25): Hat.

Mother: She has a hat on? (ibid.)

(3) Abe (2; 5.10): I want butter mine.

Father: OK give it here and I'll put butter on it.

Abe: I need butter on it. (Chouinard and Clark 2003: 656)

In each of these cases, the adult reformulates the child's initial utterance and by doing so presents the correct grammatical formulation. The last example is telling: the father corrects Abe's utterance and says *I'll put butter on it*, and Abe repeats and corrects to (*I need*) *butter on it*. Abe is changing his previous formulation triggered by the father's reformulation; in other words, the child reformulates his own (incorrect) utterance to the correct one given by the father. Importantly, Chouinard and Clark point out, the primary motivation for the parent (or the caretaker) for reformulation
is not to correct the child's language; it is to make sure that they have
correctly understood what the child actually wanted to say. The father
is not saying *I'll put some butter on it* to correct the child, he is telling the
child to give him the bread and explains that he is going to do something
in response to the child's request (put butter on the bread). In other
words, the motivation is not to correct the child, but to make sure that
the communicative interaction proceeds successfully. Importantly, the
interaction is not disrupted as opposed to explicit corrections, which
almost invariably do interrupt the conversation. Such non-disruptive
reformulations are, in fact, not exclusive to child-adult interaction; adults
do this all the time in everyday conversations (see Chouinard and Clark
2003 for some examples).

The effects of reformulation are quite important. First of all, it
signals an error, or minimally, a difference; the child realizes that there
is a difference between their formulation and that of the adult. Secondly,
it identifies the locus of the error; it tells the child where the error is.
Via the father's reformulation, Abe realizes that a preposition is needed
with (*butter mine* vs. *butter on it*). Thirdly, it provides a (or the) correct and
conventional form. The child knows that the adult is the linguistically
more skilled of the two (the expert), so it will follow the adult model,
provided the two forms convey the same meaning. This point is critical
for the reformulation to have any effect. The situation should be thus
that the two forms (the one used by the child and the one used by the
adult) have the same meaning, but a different form. It is then that the
child realizes that in order to express this meaning, the form used by the
adult is the one that should be used.

This is where contrast and conventionality come in. As pointed out
by Chouinard and Clark, ‘once children become aware that two forms
convey the same meaning, they will adopt the conventional one in place
of their own erroneous expression’ (2003: 643). They will only do so
if the form expresses the same meaning. The principle that Chouinard
and Clark argue underlies this process is one of the Gricean maxims
of co-operation, assumed to underlie all conversation (Grice 1989).
The principle at work is the Maxim of Manner, pertaining to how you
say what is to be said. The principle is as follows: if a given meaning
is expressed by a conventional expression, then you must use that
expression. If the adult's reformulation expresses the same meaning as
the one which the child wanted to express, then it will contrast directly
with the child's original utterance. They then have to choose between
two distinct forms expressing the same meaning; since in principle, any
difference in form signals a difference in meaning, one of the two forms
has to go. By the principle of conventionality, established forms take
priority and pre-empt any others, which incites children to opt for the
conventional adult form. If the adult change does not express the same
meaning, then that conflict does not arise.

The data from the study by Chouinard and Clark based on reformulations of children's errors and the children's reaction to them (whether they acknowledge the reformulation, reject it, or take it up) 'support the view that children monitor what adults say to them, and, in particular, attend to and respond to adult reformulations of their intended meanings' (2003: 658).

One of the principles mentioned above is that of (statistical) pre-
emption, a notion that needs to be clarified a bit further.² Let us start
with an abstract (non-linguistic) example. Suppose you want to express a
particular idea and suppose you have two expressions of saying it, A and
B. Under chance, you have a 50-50 distribution of the two expressions.
(Language doesn't really work with normal distributions, but for the
sake of argument, let's assume it does.) Suppose further that for one
particular event, you always hear A and never B. On the basis of the non-
occurrence of B, in contrast to what can be expected under chance, you
can deduce that B is not (and cannot be) the correct form to express the
idea in question.

A more linguistic, but still idealized example is the following.
Suppose you need to express in English that somebody caused somebody
else to laugh. There are basically two different (conventional) ways in
which English encodes such causative events: via a periphrastic causative,
such as in *I made him cry*, *I made him laugh*, or *I made him sing* or via a
lexical causative, such as in *I broke the vase* or *I opened the door*. A priori —
all things being equal — you have two possibilities here (periphrastic
or lexical), so the child either says *I laughed him* (meaning ‘I caused him
to laugh’) or *I made him laugh* (with the same meaning ‘I caused him to
laugh’). Both are semantically possible and find numerous counterparts
in the language. What is relevant in this context is that, despite the
plausibility of both constructions, the child will never hear *I laughed him*;
what’s more, should the child use it, the adult interlocutor might very
likely rephrase this (e.g. *oh, you made him laugh then, how did you do that?*).
This invites the child to make the inference that it is the periphrastic
construction (the one used by the adult) that is to be used. In other
words, the child is provided with input that allows (even triggers) the
inference that the expression *I laughed him* is not the conventionally
appropriate form (even if it could have been plausible). In addition,
as the children’s linguistic experience accumulates, they will discover
that this is not an isolated case, because it is not just the verb *laugh* that
has this restriction; verbs such as *cry, sneeze, giggle* or *sweat* all follow the
same logic: you cannot say *I cried/sneezed/giggled/sweated him*, you have to
say *I made him cry/sneeze/giggle/sweat*. Moreover, this similar behaviour is
semantically motivated. When you think about the events expressed by
these verbs (crying, sweating, giggle, etc.), you realize that they build a
semantically coherent group, as they all refer to body processes where
you are the only participant involved; these are processes that you do
by yourself and that cannot be directly instigated by someone else
(in contrast to, e.g. hitting someone). In other words, the intransitive
construction of the event fits this experience of an autonomous event
quite nicely. This is reminiscent of what Du Bois says: ‘Grammars code
best what speakers do most’ (Du Bois 1985: 363). Goldberg (1995) makes
a similar point introducing the Scene-Encoding hypothesis saying that
‘Constructions which correspond to basic sentence types encode as their central senses event types that are basic to human experience’ (Goldberg 1995: 39).

The above view allows us to reassess the role of the input. As said, often this is interpreted as referring exclusively to positive evidence, i.e. the linguistic forms that you actually hear. While such positive evidence is clearly crucial, what you learn is not just based on what you actually hear; you also learn from what you *do not* hear. In other words, you learn from the absence of things as much as you learn from their presence. The processes of inference described above show that it is the significant absence (something that could have been there but is not) which leads people conclude that the linguistic system does not allow it to be there. It is in this way that one should interpret Tomasello’s statement already given above: ‘children not only say what they hear, but the more they hear it, the more it seems to them that this is the only way it can be said’ (2000: 72). This is a point that we will take up again in Lecture 2.

Before moving on to the last section in this lecture, let us briefly summarize. The usage-based approach to language holds the view that language is learned from concrete usage events. Grammaticality is learned through use, via both positive evidence (the occurrence of forms) and negative evidence (the significant non-occurrence of forms). No universal linguistic structures are required, only general cognitive and communicative abilities like intention-reading, pattern-matching, and analogical reasoning, and so on. It is these cognitive principles which explain (in part) what is cognitive about cognitive linguistics, as described in the next section.

## 1.4 What is cognitive about cognitive linguistics?

As said above, cognitive linguistics views language as non-autonomous, which means that language hinges on, and interacts with, other more general cognitive capacities. The capacity for building joint
attention frames and reading the other's intentions are two capacities
that have already been mentioned above. This section gives three other
illustrations of such general cognitive capacities that show up in language
as well: (i) conceptual imagery, (ii) metaphor and metonymy, and
(iii) categorization (in particular, prototype and basic level categories). All of
these are at work in structuring the grammar.

1.4.1 Conceptual imagery

Conceptual imagery is closely related to the cognitive linguistic view meaning.³ Langacker defines meaning (or semantic structure) as ‘conceptualization tailored to the specifics of linguistic convention’ (1987: 99). Semantic analysis therefore requires the explicit characterization of conceptual structure, which in turn entails an encyclopedic view on meaning. The conceptual structure that provides the content of linguistic expressions can range from fairly simple concepts or a perceptual experience to complex knowledge clusters, cf. Langacker’s (1987, 1991a) *cognitive domains*, Lakoff’s (1987) *Idealized Cognitive Models*, or Fillmore’s *frames* (‘unified frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizations of experience’ 1985: 223). The RESTAURANT script that we mentioned earlier is a good example of such a frame.

This conceptual view on meaning is nicely illustrated by Langacker's claim that lexical and grammatical expressions incorporate conceptual imagery. This refers to the cognitive ability to conceptualize the same object or situation in different ways. We will discuss two examples here: (1) figure/ground alignment (which in Langacker's model is called profile/base distinction) and (2) level of specificity.

The notion of figure/ground alignment originally comes from Gestalt psychology. This is a basic principle of cognitive and perceptual experience by virtue of which humans perceive (or cognize) entities as standing out against others. In visual and auditory perception, you can see an object 'stand out' against its background (e.g. a white dot on a black square) or you can single out a particular instrument line in a symphonic piece of music.
A similar alignment can also be found in language. Take Langacker's (by now well-known) example sentences: *The lamp is above the table* versus *The table is under the lamp*. What these illustrate is a reversal of the figure/ground alignment, or in Langacker's terms, a different profile being imposed on the same conceptual base. The first sentence talks about the lamp and locates it vis-à-vis the table; the lamp is the figure, and the table is the ground. In the second sentence, the table is the figure that is situated vis-à-vis the lamp (ground). In technical terms, we say that the first sentence profiles the lamp, the second sentence, the lamp. The actual situation that is described may be the same (and hence, in truth-conditional semantics regarded as identical), but semantically the two sentences are different, because they impose a different profile on the same base. Given this semantic difference, the contexts of use for the two sentences are typically quite different. Such opposite profile is not restricted to pairs of reverses like the prepositions *above/under* or the verbs *buy* and *sell* (which impose a different profile (perspective) on the same commercial transaction scene). For instance, one could consider the opposition between the active and the passive voice as a figure/ground reversal. Langacker's semantic definition of nouns and verbs also draws on the idea of different profiles. Langacker argues that nouns and verbs are different semantically, because they impose a different imagery on what may be the same base, such as a KILL event in the case of *killing* (n.) vs. *kill* (v.). A verb is a relational predication that profiles a temporal sequence of interconnections between entities (a cognitive operation which Langacker calls 'sequential scanning'); nouns profile the component states of an event collectively as a *thing* and thus provide a holistic view ('summary scanning'). We will not elaborate this here (see Langacker 1991b for details), suffice it to point out that what traditionally is considered a mere formal (syntactic) variation is defined semantically in cognitive grammar, and its characterization centres around differences related to profile and base (or figure and ground), i.e. differences of conceptual imagery.

A second example of conceptual imagery concerns the level of
specificity. Speakers can choose at which level to pitch their conceptualization for a particular reality, e.g. they can say that *There is an animal on the grass*, or that *There is a dog on the grass*, or that *There is a German shepherd on the grass*. These sentences (and their resulting conceptual imagery) differ with respect to the level of specificity with which they describe (and thus conceptualize) a given reality. Strikingly, there is a tendency for people to use one particular level. For example, unless there are good reasons to the contrary, you are more likely to describe the situation given above with *There's a dog on the grass* than *There is an animal on the grass* (too general to be informative) or *There is a German shepherd on the grass* (more specific than needed). This does not only apply to nouns, but it applies to any linguistic expression. For example, when talking about your activities, you can also situate your conceptualization at varying levels of specificity, e.g. *I did something* vs. *I ran*.

### 1.4.2 Prototype categories

In an informal elicitation experiment during the lecture that formed the basis of this text, the audience was asked four questions successively where they each time had to write down as quickly as possible: (i) three colours, (ii) three pieces of fruit, (iii) a sentence with the verb *kill*, and (iv) a noun phrase with the adjective *warm*. As is typical of such elicitation experiments, the results revealed a striking convergence in the answers. For example, for the colours, most people wrote down *red, blue, green, yellow, black, white*, or *purple*. No one wrote down *light green* or *dark blue*, or *ocean green* or *scarlet*. For the elicited list of fruits, one sees a similar convergence around what we consider typical fruits: *apple, orange, banana, mango, grape, pear* or *peach*, but not, e.g. *tomato* which strictly speaking is a fruit (but, admittedly, not a typical one). Similarly, the resulting sentences with *kill* show a striking similarity in the choice of participants: a human or animal Agent kills a human or animal patient (e.g. *The cat killed the mouse*). Metaphorical uses such as *His sharp remarks killed the good atmosphere* or *My feet are killing me* are clearly less typical (but may still be very frequent). Also the syntactic construction used is the typical active transitive construction,
rather than a passive one (e.g. *The deer was killed by the hunter*). Finally, the combinations with the adjective *warm* show a high degree of convergence as well: *warm water/coffee/drink*, *warm weather/room*; less likely answers are *warm smile*, *warm feelings*, *warm voice*, or *warm colours*.

While this was just an informal experiment (a watered-down version of famous experiments by Eleanor Rosch, see Taylor 2003 for some general discussion of these experiments), it is quite striking that despite the absolute freedom to make widely divergent choices, people tend to converge on what they consider to be typical members of a given category (colours, fruits, kill-events, etc.). The explanation for this is that conceptual categories are actually prototype categories, which means that they are structured around a more salient centre. The structure of (cognitive) categories is a crucial point for cognitive linguistics, since much in language is actually revolving around categorization. Moreover, such categorization principles are not exclusive to language, which confirms the non-autonomy of the linguistic system. We will not describe prototype theory in detail here (see Taylor 2003 for an excellent introduction), but merely highlight its main ideas.

In the classical model of categorization, a category is seen as a box delineated by (absolute) criteria, called *distinctive features*. These features determine whether an entity is a member of a category or not; for example, for an entity to be considered a BIRD, it has to have wings, fly, have feathers, etc. These features are moreover binary (+ or -), there is no either-or. Similarly, membership is absolute: either you are a member of a category or not (something cannot be simultaneously be a bird and a dog). Based on findings from elicitation experiments (as well as other kinds of experiments) in the 1970s, psychologist Eleanor Rosch and her co-workers showed that this model was inaccurate: often the boundaries of categories turn out to be fuzzy (as is the case for example for colour categories) and members of a category do not all have the same status or degree of typicality (as also shown by our own informal experiment). These cognitively more salient members establish the prototype of a
category, its conceptual centre, so to speak. Its cognitive salience is what
triggers people to think about these first when pressed to list members of
the category.

What do (prototypical) birds have to do with (cognitive) linguistics?
The crucial point is that semantic (or linguistic) categories are like any
other cognitive category, and thus they also have a prototype-structure
with a central meaning (the conceptual prototype) and extensions from
that prototype via semantic relations. For example, in the semantic
category denoted by the verb *kill*, some meanings stand out more than
others: the first meaning that one typically thinks about (as illustrated by
our elicitation experiment) is that of taking away somebody's life ('to halt
the life of a human being'). The verb can, however, also be used to refer
to halt the life of an animal. This usage can be regarded as an extension
of the prototype, based on an analogy between humans and animals, i.e.
that they are both animate beings. The latter is in fact a more schematic
notion (a superordinate category) of which both humans and animals
are instantiations. In Langacker's terms, this gives rise to a schematic
network that unites the different members into one single category; for
*kill*, this can be represented as in Figure 1 below. Following Langacker's
diagrammatic conventions, the cognitive salience of the prototype is
indicated through thicker lines; the broken arrows represent semantic
extensions, a full arrow represents an instantiation relation. The analogy-
based extension to animals leads to the creation of a higher-order schema

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Extension, schematisation and instantiation in a schematic network</figcaption></figure>
that captures this analogy. By placing the two under the same heading
(here 'animate being') this schema in fact neutralizes what distinguishes
humans and animals. Once this schema is in place, the two lower-level
structures can be regarded as instantiations of that schema, which is
represented by the full downward arrows. It deserves to be pointed out
that the prototype itself is in fact a schematization over various contexts
of use where the verb refers to events that can be widely divergent in
their specifics (different methods or instruments used, different types of
Agent, etc.).

The analogy between humans and animals is still quite straightforward,
but similar analogy-based extensions are at work for uses such as *kill weeds*
or *kill bacteria* where the higher order category 'living being' neutralizes
what distinguishes humans and animals from plants or (micro-)organisms.
The more difficult it is to build such an analogy, the harder it will be to
incorporate the extended use into the category. Notice that in the case of
metaphorical extensions, the analogy is one that is defined by the metaphor.
In a sentence like *he killed the peace process* an abstract entity (peace process) is
seen as a living entity whose 'life' can be halted.

We have illustrated the prototype structure of categories here with
a (simplified) example of lexical meaning. Crucially, however, such
categorization processes and in particular the schematization processes
that underlie them are at the heart of the structure of the grammar, as will
be detailed in Lecture 2.

1.4.3 *Metaphor and metonymy*

Two semantic (and therefore conceptual) relationships that are quite
central to schematic networks of the type described above are metaphor
and metonymy. As defined in the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (see
Lakoff and Johnson 1980), metaphor builds on a (perceived) **similarity**
where one entity is said to be **understood** in terms of another. Some
examples of such conceptual metaphors are things like TIME IS SPACE,
LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS HEAT, ANGER IS HEAT IN A
CONTAINER, ARGUMENT IS WAR, CHANGE IS MOTION, etc. As pointed out, in the example *kill the peace process*, the peace process is understood as a living entity whose existence (continuation) can be halted. Metonymy, in contrast, is defined in terms of *reference*, where one entity is used to *refer* to another, usually because it is (conceptually) contiguous to it. Typical metonymies are PART FOR WHOLE (e.g. *I see some new faces*; *Can you give me a hand?*) or LOCATION FOR LOCATED (e.g. the *White House* has decided to invade Afghanistan), PRODUCER FOR PRODUCED (e.g. *I've just bought a new Ford*), and so on. These are well-known metonymies. The contiguity that underlies metonymy need not be physical (even if it often is) but can be conceptual. For example, for the metonymy POSSESSOR FOR POSSESSED (e.g. *I am over there* referring to where my car is parked) the two need not be physically contiguous.

Metaphor and metonymy are in themselves vast domains of research which we will not elaborate on any further here; we can refer to Dancygier and Sweetser (2014) for an excellent introduction. However, metaphor and metonymy will come up again in the semantic analyses that will be presented in other lectures further on in this book.

## 1.5 Concluding remarks

In this lecture, we have briefly laid out the basic assumptions underlying Cognitive Linguistics. In a nutshell, they hold that language is usage-based, i.e. learned from and shaped by usage, and that it is not independent of other cognitive capacities, such as joint attention frame, pattern-recognition, intention-reading, or categorization. Many of these issues will be further elaborated in the different empirical studies described in Lectures 3 to 10 of this book. In the next lecture, we further elaborate on the usage-based nature of Cognitive Linguistics, and how usage leads to the emergence and constant reshaping of the grammar.
Notes

1 In fact, many other models of linguistics actually take this stand, not just generative linguistics, but I am just going to focus mostly on generative linguistics here. Note, however, that many people currently still working in the generative linguistics framework may no longer hold all of these views, but some of the assumptions sketched here still linger on, even beyond the generative paradigm. For the sake of exposition, the present discussion has simplified (for both the cognitive and the non-cognitive framework) a number of theoretically complex questions. For further discussion, see also Lemmens (2019).

2 The concept of pre-emption is typically used in morphology to explain why certain word forms do not occur. For example, while English has a productive pattern to derive Agentive nouns from verbs via the -er suffix (e.g. driver, maker, builder, etc.), a form such as *stealer ('person who steals') is not felicitous. The reason is that there already exists another word *thief that expresses precisely this concept. It is thus said that the word *thief pre-empts the creation of *stealer. Pre-emption as we use it here is quite similar.

3 See also Lemmens (2015) for a more elaborate introduction to cognitive semantics.
# Usage-based linguistics and its methodological consequences

This lecture expands on what has been presented in the first lecture. In particular, we present a more detailed discussion of what the model of language looks like in the cognitive linguistics framework and why this model seems to be best suited to explain why language is the way it is. The concepts and notions described in this and the previous lecture are needed to understand my own research presented in the lectures that follow.

## 2.1 Introduction

In this lecture, we will describe the basic building blocks in a cognitive model of language. As explained in Lecture 1, Cognitive Linguistics does not see language (grammar) as modular consisting of separate components (lexicon, grammar, pragmatic component, etc.), at least not in origin. Lexicon and grammar are said to be made up of the same type of structures, symbolic units (or constructions, in the model of Construction Grammar). But what do these symbolic units or constructions actually look like? In my explanation, I will draw again on Tomasello's views as well as on those suggested by other people who have emphasized the role of the input to language learning and language structure.
I would like to start by doing a little quiz, a mini-experiment (scientifically unreliable, but very telling nonetheless). Below you see five phrases to be completed by filling in the blanks. Imagine that you yourself are doing this experiment by writing down as quickly as you can what you would write into the slots, without thinking too much about it. There is no exact answer and in fact, there is actually some variation possible.

(1) Watch your ______!

(2) I love ______.

(3) Step by ______ he came closer.

(4) What is this ______ doing in my coffee?

(5) The kids drove the teacher ______ with their constant screaming.

Let us consider some possible answers. When this experiment was done during the lecture, some (recurrent) suggestions from the audience for the first sentence, were *mouth, time, back, step*. Other possibilities are *Watch your head!, Watch your language!, Watch your money!, or Watch your children!* perhaps. But no one came up with *Watch your car!* or *Watch your life!* which are indeed possible but somehow sound odd without any contextual specification. These are not the first words you think about in the context at hand. Why is that? Why do we agree on the first set being common (*step, head, mouth, language*), possibly even the second one (*money, children, etc.*), but definitely not the third set?

For the second phrase (*I love ______*), many listeners filled out *you*, as expected. Perhaps you did too. Clearly, other many possibilities exist, e.g. *I love the sun* or you can have another pronoun like *him* or *her*. Or another full noun phrase referring to something you love, like *my wife, my partner, my cat*, etc. Or you have a verb phrase referring to activities like *I love watching TV, I love being outdoors* or something similar. Once again, we see that speakers converge and agree in their choices.

The completion of the third phrase is more constrained, as *step by step* is the only correct possibility. It is impossible to say *step by foot* or *step by leap*, although they are related nouns, referring to body parts. This is because of
the requirement that the first noun must be the same as the second noun.
Other such constructions exist, for example, *bit by bit* (but not *step by bit*), or
*day by day* and *year by year* (but not *year by day* or *day by year*).

For the fourth phrase *What is this ______ doing in my coffee?* most of the audience agreed on the word *fly*. Other responses were *insect* or *fork*. What is important in each case is that the noun refers to something that you do not want in your coffee. This is somewhat unusual, since formally, this is a mere WH-question inquiring about something being located somewhere ('What is X doing in Y?'). Yet the responses clearly refer to something being in the coffee that is not supposed to be there. More about why this is so below.

Finally, the fifth phrase, *The kids drove the teacher ______?* gave as common suggestions *mad*, *crazy*, *nuts*, or *bananas*. The adjectives *crazy* and *mad* are the most frequent ones but all of these suggestions share a reference to negative emotions and more specifically anger, frustration, or despair. You can't say, *The kid drove the teacher happy*. You drive someone *crazy*, *mad*, or *bananas*, but not *happy*; in other words, there are semantic constraints on the words that can be inserted into that slot. Adjectives like *happy* or *intelligent* or *rich* are not possible. There is a limited set of words that are used, which all refer to being crazy.¹

The general point is that for all of these cases, there is a high degree of convergence, even if there may be differences in the degrees to which the slots are open to variation (the slot in 2 is more open than the one in 3, for example). The crucial question is whether this is just an issue of how we use language (that is, related to performance or usage) or whether it tells us something about how language is actually organized? And if so, what does it tell us about the structure of language? These questions are actually the heart of Cognitive Linguistics, and in particular of the framework of Construction Grammar which has elaborated these questions to the fullest. What is presented here is inspired especially by the framework of Construction Grammar (see Goldberg 1995, 2006; Hilpert 2014).²
## 2.2 A constructional view on linguistic knowledge

The basic question that we are going to start from is whether the convergence illustrated above has something to do with the language system itself, with linguistic knowledge. The larger question is: what do you know when you know a language? The typical (simple) answer to that question is that you know the words of the language and the grammar rules, that is, how to put words together. A more elaborate answer is that you know the words and their meanings, but also their syntactic category, like verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on. You also have morphological knowledge, that is, you know how to build new words (with new meanings) like *unhappy* based on *happy*: you know that *un-* is a prefix that can be attached to adjectives like *happy* and what this means ('not happy'). Your linguistic knowledge also includes syntactic knowledge which tells you how to put words together into sentences. Further, you know how to produce the sounds of a language and you understand these as well (ignoring sound differences that are irrelevant to your language, as can be the case with sub-phonemic variation). You also have knowledge pertaining to how to use language in context; for example, you know that the question *Can you pass me the salt?* does not pertain to your physical capacities to pass the salt (the literal meaning of *can*), but that in this context, it functions (pragmatically) as a request. Also, you know that there are certain words (taboo words or vulgar words) that you should not use if you want to remain polite.

Notice that all of these types of knowledge correspond to modules that people have suggested as the basic building blocks of the grammar, i.e. lexicon, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, semantics, etc. In a typical modular approach to grammar, one module is the lexicon which contains the lexical entries, which specify the form, the pronunciation, the meaning, the part of speech (verb, adjective, etc.) of words. The syntactic module (the grammar) provides the phrase structure rules (which can
get actually very complicated) that allow you to generate sentences. In addition to these two building blocks there may be other components. Pinker's model module, for example, also has linking rules that link up semantic roles to parts of a syntactic construction. For example, in the sentence *John opened the door*, the subject NP expresses the role of the Agent, and the object, that of the Patient. Other necessary components that have been suggested are phonological procedures which allow you to generate the sounds of a language but also to interpret the sounds that others produce.

As said, Cognitive Grammar does not take such a modular view of language. The cognitive answer to the question 'What do you know when you know a language?' is quite simple; there is only one thing you know: constructions or symbolic units. Nothing more, nothing less. Goldberg says quite explicitly in her book *Constructions at Work*: 'It's constructions all the way down' (2006: 18). From the lowest level of the grammar to the highest level, everything is a form-meaning pair. The crucial question then is 'What is a construction?' Our answer will proceed in two steps: we start with a simple definition with some examples, and then give a more accurate definition and we will take it further from there.

The simplest definition is one that has been given in Lecture 1: symbolic units or constructions are form-meaning pairs that are stored. These stored form-meaning pairs range from morphemes to words to grammatical constructions. They are all constructions. (Henceforth, I will use the word *construction* rather than *symbolic unit*.) The idea of stored form-meaning pairs is fairly straightforward for words and morphemes. Words clearly must be stored in the lexicon and so are morphemes. Hardly anyone will disagree with that. We can also see that there are some idioms that have been stored in the lexicon because they are deviations from the general rule and to be memorized. Take a phrase like *kick the bucket*, a classic example. Typically, when people use this idiom, they do not refer to kicking the bucket literally, but to people dying. This interpretation is not arrived at compositionally. That is, if you know
what *bucket* means and know what *kick* means, putting these two together
will not give you the meaning of the idiom. You have to memorize that
*kick the bucket* means ‘to die’. At the same time, you also know that this
meaning may underlie a phrase like ‘he kicked the bucket’, but not ‘the
bucket was kicked’; the latter can only mean that he literally kicked the
bucket, not that he died. This constraint, too, has to be stored somehow.
Or, to take another example, if you say, *Why the long faces?* you know that
*long face* is not used literally but refers to sadness. The question actually
means ‘Why are you sad?’ (One of the Harry Potter movies actually
makes a (visual) pun on this when the passengers in a bus driving very
fast through the city literally have long faces.) Similarly, if I say *I’m all
ears* I am using an idiomatic expression that speakers have memorized
as having an unusual form (use of the plural with a singular subject)
and a special meaning (‘I’m listening’). English, like any other language,
has many such idioms which must be stored in the lexicon since their
meaning cannot be computed or their form deviates from the ‘regular’
grammar, or both form and meaning are deviant.

It is easy to see that words, morphemes, and idioms are stored form-
meaning pairs. But what about sentences? Are they constructions too?
Are they, too, memorized? Clearly, one does not want to say that speakers
memorize sentences; that would take things too far, even for a cognitive
linguist. Sentences are not necessarily stored but, as Hilpert (2014) points
out, there may actually be more idiomaticity in language than one might
think at first sight, which must imply that more is stored than one is initially
inclined to assume, even (parts of) sentences. In the next part, I will give
some examples of such idiomatic expressions which are not a fixed (and
possibly limited) set as illustrated above, but more of a semi-fixed kind. We
will illustrate this with a short excerpt from *The Guardian* (Oct. 4, 2013):³

*Homeland* returns to British screens for a third season on Sunday night after record audience numbers for the first episode in the US, with critics suggesting the show is back on form following a lacklustre second run.
At first sight, there does not seem to be any idiomaticity here. The use of *screen* could perhaps be considered (partly) idiomatic, in that it is a (regular) metonymical reference to television. But let us focus on grammatical constructions here. Consider the phrase *on Sunday night*. This prepositional phrase is a bit out of the ordinary, in that the noun phrase contains a count noun without a determiner, whereas in principle, the English grammar tells you that you should have one in that context, e.g. *on that day* not *on day*. Similarly, you say *during the night*, not *during night*. You can add an article here, *on the/that Sunday night* but then the phrase means something else. In addition, the omission of the determiner is not possibly if you leave out *Sunday*: *on night* is infelicitous. Also, it does not work with *day* as the head noun; you can only say *on Sunday night*, but not *on Sunday day*. Nevertheless, you can say *on Sunday morning*, *Sunday evening* or *at noon*. In these cases, too, you have no article. In other words, there are certain noun phrases that deviate from the ‘normal’ pattern, because they don’t have a determiner. Notice that further on in the excerpt, there is a similar case: *back on form*. It is idiosyncratic in the same way, because there again is no determiner with a count noun. Compare this to *level in back at a good level*; here you cannot leave out the article (*back at good level*). Conversely, you have similar patterns as in *be in good shape*.

If these are deviant patterns, then the question is whether they
are still generated by the grammar (compositional) or whether they are
stored as semi-idiomatic expressions. In any case, if they are not stored,
you need to provide specific grammar rules that cover these cases, since
the general noun phrase rules do not work here. For example, you
would need to have rules that specify that you cannot have a determiner
in certain contexts with nouns referring to moments of time (as in
*Sunday night* but also *in summer*). However, you cannot always omit the
determiner, e.g. *In the morning* (*in morning*), *I always drink coffee*. One
can see that the grammar becomes considerably more complicated, with
certain rules that apply to very precise contexts and only those. Clearly,
some of it is computed (grammatically transparent) but some of it must
be stored with the particular construction at hand.

Another good example is the phrase *Watch your X!* mentioned
earlier. At first sight, it seems transparent and computable: there is a verb
(in the imperative) and an object in the form of a regular NP; and the
meaning that you can compute from this is basically 'look at the thing
expressed in the object NP'. So if I say *watch your step*, I ask you to direct
your visual attention to the step you are about to take. However, usually
the phrase *Watch your X* has an additional semantic layer and means 'be
careful about X.' If I say *Watch your step!* , I basically mean 'be careful not
to trip by paying attention to where you place your foot'. While there
still is a link with visual attention (*watch*), the warning 'be careful' is not
really computable from this particular expression. It is not really fully
idiomatic (like *lend me your ears*) because it still fits a general pattern,
but at the same time, some part of the meaning cannot be predicted
from interpreting the phrases *watch your step* or *watch your mouth* literally.
Notice that the latter is more complicated because it adds a metonymy
as well: interpreting the phrase literally does not really make sense
(have you ever tried to watch your mouth?). So *watch your mouth* is not
really watch your mouth literally; it means 'watch' the language that is
coming out of your mouth which, however, is invisible. This triggers a
different (metaphorical) interpretation of *watch*. What at first sight seems
a syntactically and semantically transparent phrase turns out to be more
complicated than one may think. In addition to the semantic particularity,
there is also a formal constraint, as the range of words that you can use in
this construction is actually not all that extensive. In addition, in order for
it to have the interpretation of a warning, it must use a possessive: If you
say *watch the head*, then this is (almost) invariably interpreted literally, i.e.
you are asked to direct your gaze to as somebody else's head. In short, the
phrase *Watch your X!* is both formally and semantic deviant; it is, in other
words, partly idiomatic. If that is correct, then this partial idiomaticity
cannot not be computed, but needs to be stored.
Another example we have mentioned earlier is the phrase *step by step*. This is an example of what Jackendoff (2008) calls ‘constructional idioms’. There are two basic types of ‘N by N’ patterns: one with a temporal sequential meaning, such as for example, *day by day* or *year by year* and one which, in addition to a sequential reading, also has an incremental reading, such as *step by step* or *bit by bit*. If one says *The house is built brick by brick* or *Frame by frame, we assembled the movie*, the result (house, movie) is built incrementally via the intervals specified by the N (brick, frame).

What you see here is a semi-open construction. There is some idiomaticity with respect to the form: you always have ‘*N*₁ *by* *N*₂’ with *N*₁ identical to *N*₂. As regards its meaning, there is also some idiomaticity: if the nouns are temporal (*day*, *year*, etc.), the interpretation tends to be sequential; if they are non-temporal (*brick*, *bit*, etc.), the interpretation tends to be sequential and incremental. In other words, this is a semi-open construction because some parts are fixed (*by*), other parts are not (N). These open parts still are, however, often still constrained semantically and syntactically. Basically, what we are saying is that these formal and semantic constraints must be memorized, i.e. stored in the grammar. Notice that there are other constructions that are similar but use a different preposition, such as *day after day* or *item after item*. Even though they use a different preposition (*after*), the formal constraint that *N*₁ must be identical to *N*₂ applies here as well. Moreover, the meaning of *N*₁ *after* *N*₂ is similar even if not fully identical to that of *N*₁ *by* *N*₂. Both constructions can be regarded as instances of a more general construction *N*₁ *PREP* *N*₂. The formal constraint that *N*₁ and *N*₂ must be identical applies at this general level as well; allegedly, the sequential and/or incremental meaning is also present at this level.

The example *What's this fly doing in my coffee* is similarly an instance
of a construction which has been called the ‘What is X doing Y?’-
construction (Kay and Fillmore 1999, also discussed briefly in Tomasello
2000). Again, this is a semi-open construction; possible variants are, for
example, *What's this dog doing in my office?* or *What's this child doing with a knife?* As already indicated above, in most of these cases, the WH-question expresses surprise or unexpectedness, where the speaker evaluates the situation negatively considering X to be out of place. This is what this construction means and not interpreting it this way often gives rise to humoristic exchange, as the joke quoted in Tomasello's (2000) article. If you are in a restaurant and there is a fly in your soup, you might call the waiter or waitress and say

> You: 'Excuse me, what's this fly doing in my soup?'

> Waiter: 'Oh, I think it's the backstroke, sir.'

In his answer, the waiter is deliberately misinterpreting the construction, by answering the WH-question literally, and providing an answer of what the fly is actually doing. But clearly, this is not what the question means here: basically, the customer is expressing their negative surprise that there is a fly in the soup and it is not supposed (or desired) to be there. The negative evaluation of the 'What is X doing Y' construction is not something that is predictable from the grammar of WH-questions, but something that speakers know is tied to this particular realization of a WH-question, i.e. they have stored this as part of the meaning of the *What is X doing Y?* construction. Surely, this meaning may have started out as a contextually triggered inference, but repeated occurrence of this interpretation over sufficiently similar (but possible variant) contexts have led to this aspect to become part and parcel of the construction itself.

Plenty of other similar examples of (semi-open) constructions can be given. A nice example is illustrated by phrases such as *go and wash your hands* or *go and do your homework*. In English, the pattern *go and V* seems transparent: you take the meaning of the first verb and coordinate that with that of the second verb and build a sequence of two events. In other words, *go and wash your hands* means 'you first go (event 1) and then you wash your hands (event 2)'. Not all of the *V and V* patterns have a sequential reading, however: *sit and read* expresses simultaneous events.
Importantly, the coordinator *and* can be omitted with the former type with sequential interpretation (*go wash your hands*) but not for the latter constructions with simultaneous interpretation (*sit read*). Now, the question is whether in the case of *go (and) wash* your hands, there really is sequentiality, i.e. that you (necessarily) first go and then wash your hands? This may not be so clear. In other words, the question is whether the difference between *go (and) wash your hands* and *wash your hands* is that the former necessarily means that the addressee first goes somewhere (else) while this is not implied by the latter. The question of sequentiality becomes all the more relevant if you know that the coordinator *and* that is initially responsible for the sequential interpretation can be left out. The construction *go wash your hands* has become an even more conventionalized (grammaticized) construction, where sequentiality has been reduced. The absence of sequentiality may further be reinforced by constructions with other verbs than *go*, like *try and V* (alternative: *try V-ing*) where sequentiality does not seem to apply. In sum, while *go and V* seems a straightforward case, it is more complicated than one may think at first sight.

Or consider a question like *How come you don't like him?* Syntactically, this question does not follow the structure of a regular WH-question, as it does not have *do*-support (compare: *What don't you like about him? Where did you go for lunch?*). It is not the case that *do*-support cannot occur with *how*-questions, it clearly does, e.g. *How does it feel to be rich?* It just does not occur in this particular question; you would not say *How does it come that you don't like him?* A second formal idiosyncrasy is that the verb *come* is not inflected *How comes you don't like him?* whereas in the case of *do*-support you would need to have the inflected form (*does*). In fact, semantically, the question is not a regular WH-question either; *how come* does not inquire about manner in the same way as does *How does it feel?* or *How does it work?*. Semantically, it is the equivalent of a *why*-question: *Why don't you like him?* In other words, *how come* has an unpredictable (irregular) form (no *do*-support and no agreement) and unpredictable meaning ('why'); as such, it is idiomatic and
needs to be stored in the grammar as a unit.

We will discuss one more example that we will elaborate further. Suppose I were to say *I've been working my head off on these lectures* (which is not really a lie). There is some idiosyncrasy (idiomaticity) here. First of all, the sentence is not to be interpreted literally as my head has not really come off (as opposed to *I've been taking my glasses off*); this is a hyperbole: *working your head off* basically means that you have been working very hard. Secondly, there are constraints on the choice of body parts that can occur in this construction. You can have *head*, *tail*, *ass*, or *butt*, but *working your arm off* may not work very well, unless it concerns work that involves the arm (whereas in general there are no such specifications for the other choices, such as *working your head/butt off*). Finally, there is a formal constraint, as the use of a possessive is obligatory; you cannot say *I've been working the head off* (while very often in English you can use the definite article in such contexts of inalienable possession, e.g. *he hit himself on the head*). Interestingly, you find other patterns like *laughing* or *screaming* or *yelling one's head off*, or *lying your ass off* (internet examples).

All of the examples discussed above are illustrations of what Jackendoff (2008) has called *constructional idioms*. He defines these as '[p]ieces of syntactic structure [that] can be listed in the lexicon with associated meanings, just as individual words are, these are MEANINGFUL CONSTRUCTIONS of the language' (2008: 15). He adds that '[c]onstruction grammar makes no principled distinction between words and rules: a lexical entry is more word-like to the extent that it is fully specific, and more rule-like to the extent that it contains variables' (ibid.). In other words, if we say that constructions are stored, what is memorized is perhaps not so much the specific instance as such but rather the generalized schema, with some fixed elements and some variables (X and Y). We will refine this idea further on. Jackendoff's constructional idioms are the equivalent of what are called 'constructions' in Construction Grammar or 'symbolic units' in (Langacker's) Cognitive Grammar.
## 2.3 Defining constructions

We are now in a position to propose a more advanced definition of what a construction actually is. In her 1995 book, Adele Goldberg defines a construction as follows: ‘C is a CONSTRUCTION iff C is a form-meaning pair <Fᵢ, Sᵢ> such that some aspect of Fᵢ or some aspect of Sᵢ is not strictly predictable from C’s component parts or from other previously established constructions’ (1995: 4). In other words, a construction is a form-meaning pair where some aspect, be it in form or in meaning, is unpredictable and thus has to be stored, much like what we have illustrated above, for both the meaning and the form (or both) of a construction.

Some nice examples (in addition to the ones already mentioned above) where the form is unpredictable are mentioned in Hilpert (2014):

* by and large
* all of a sudden
* the more, the merrier
* many a N; too ADJ a N
* parents-in-law, passers-by

All of these examples are formally deviant (idiomatic). By *and large* is unusual since it coordinates a preposition and an adjective, whereas the general rule in the grammar is that the two elements in a coordination with *and* be of the same type. *All of a sudden* is unusual in form since *sudden* is an adjective (e.g. *a sudden attack*) but the form used here cannot really be explained, at least not from a synchronic perspective. It is a strange form for the grammar of present-day English. The combination of the two comparatives in *the more the merrier* is also quite deviant within the grammar of adjective comparison as is the use of the definite article *the* in this construction.⁴ The noun phrase structure *many a N* is formally marked: there is plural determiner (*many*) which is combined with
noun phrase in the singular (*a N*); the ‘normal’ structure is *many* N<sub>PL</sub>. When you think about it, this is indeed a strange construction. Complex formations like *parents-in-law* or *passers-by* are also formally unusual, in that the plural marking occurs inside the complex structure when, as a rule, plural is added as a suffix for complex nouns (e.g. *coffee machines*); for these particular cases, this is, however, not possible (*parent-in-laws*, *passer-bys*). Note that if you leave out *parents* in the former formation, the plural becomes regular again (e.g. *my in-laws*). All of these examples show some idiomaticity in form; semantically they are, however, still transparent.

What is crucial to the first definition of Goldberg is the non-predictability of the construction. Under this definition, if both form and meaning are predictable, it is not considered a construction. Rather, it will be considered an **instance** of a construction which in Construction Grammar is sometimes called a *construct*. For a sentence like *I don't like getting up in the morning*, there is nothing unpredictable in either form or meaning: if you know what the words mean (e.g. that the particle verb *get up* means 'to get out of bed') and if you know the (general) rule that the complement of the verb *like* takes the *ing*-form, you can compute what this sentence means. Or take a sentence like *Maarten sings in a mixed choir*: there is no reason to assume that this should be stored, since you can easily compute what it means. In other words, for these sentences, you can easily figure out their meaning on the basis of the meaning of the component parts and how they are combined. These sentences are thus not considered constructions, they are instances (or realizations) of constructions.

However, this is not the end of the story, which gets somewhat more complicated. The examples that we have discussed above have been identified as semi-open constructions which means that some parts are fixed but other parts are open. Yet, even for these open parts, while in principle you are as free as a bird, there often are clear constraints. We have already illustrated that with the mini-experiment above, where
speakers agree on certain choices for the open slots. This convergence can only arise if the possible choices (or their more general values) have been stored.

The mini-experiment, however, also revealed how English speakers (even non-native ones) converge on their choices for so-called open slots. This is confirmed by corpus data. If you search for the string *watch your NOUN* in COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, you get the results given in Table 1 (top 20 hits only).⁵

<table><caption>Table 1. Top 20 nouns in the string *Watch your NOUN* in COCA</caption><thead><tr><th>Rank</th><th>COLLOCATE</th><th>FREQ</th><th>ALL</th><th>%</th><th>MI</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>step</td><td>121</td><td>58310</td><td>0.21</td><td>8.66</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>back</td><td>116</td><td>570108</td><td>0.02</td><td>5.30</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>mouth</td><td>70</td><td>42448</td><td>0.16</td><td>8.32</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>language</td><td>57</td><td>60222</td><td>0.09</td><td>7.52</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>show</td><td>44</td><td>175181</td><td>0.03</td><td>5.61</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>head</td><td>31</td><td>177088</td><td>0.02</td><td>5.09</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>child</td><td>23</td><td>130138</td><td>0.02</td><td>5.10</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>tongue</td><td>21</td><td>11843</td><td>0.18</td><td>8.43</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>children</td><td>20</td><td>253859</td><td>0.01</td><td>3.94</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>wallet</td><td>18</td><td>4361</td><td>0.41</td><td>9.65</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>kids</td><td>16</td><td>111865</td><td>0.01</td><td>4.80</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>feet</td><td>13</td><td>92314</td><td>0.01</td><td>4.77</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>ass</td><td>11</td><td>7365</td><td>0.15</td><td>8.18</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>diet</td><td>11</td><td>17053</td><td>0.06</td><td>6.97</td></tr><tr><td>15</td><td>fingers</td><td>11</td><td>28884</td><td>0.04</td><td>6.21</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>money</td><td>9</td><td>188920</td><td>0.00</td><td>3.21</td></tr><tr><td>17</td><td>tone</td><td>8</td><td>17780</td><td>0.04</td><td>6.45</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>speed</td><td>8</td><td>32575</td><td>0.02</td><td>5.58</td></tr><tr><td>19</td><td>weight</td><td>8</td><td>44850</td><td>0.02</td><td>5.11</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>hands</td><td>7</td><td>100487</td><td>0.01</td><td>3.76</td></tr></tbody></table>

The corpus data corresponds fairly well to what speakers do spontaneously: the four most frequent items in the corpus (*step*, *back*, *mouth*, *language*) correspond to the words that were suggested by the
audience in the mini-experiment. There are some other ones as well,
like *head* or *child(ren)*, or variant words that all basically refer to the same
thing, such as *watch your tongue/language/words/mouth*. So, overall there is
some variation, but all are words within the same semantic domain. The
corpus data confirm not only the convergence of choices for the open
slot in the construction *Watch your X*, but also the typical meaning. The
meaning of warning ('be careful') is most common in the corpus data as
well. Mostly, the warning concerns where you are going (*watch your step*),
the language you use (*watch your language, watch your mouth*), yourself (*watch
your head, watch your ass*) or one's valuable possessions or things conceived
as such (e.g. *watch your children, watch your money*). Clearly, there still is an
experiential motivation between the meaning 'be careful' and watching,
since you are being careful by keeping an eye onto things.

As with any cognitive category, once again, there seem to be
instances of constructions that are more salient, i.e. that come to mind
first. They are more prototypical instances than others. This brings in
another factor here — frequency. In addition to analogy, which concerns
semantic and formal resemblance, frequency plays an important role in
bringing about these prototype effects. This takes us to the next point,
where we will consider frequency in more detail and the role of positive
evidence that we talked about earlier.

A study by Erman and Warren (2000) revealed that about 55% of
spoken and written language use consists of what they call ‘prefabricated
word combinations’. That is, in 55% of the cases, speakers are not being
creative; they are recycling. Obviously, it is good to recycle, but it may
be somewhat unexpected to see so much of our language use being
recycled or reused material. This actually means that there may be much
less creativity in language use than one might think, as speakers are
reproducing things that they, or others, have said before.

Another interesting study reported on in Tomasello (2000) confirms
that also children reuse more than has often been assumed. In this study,
a two-year-old child was recorded for six weeks, for one hour a day, and
six days a week (this amounts to approximately 8–10% of all the child’s utterances in that period). Their research question concerned how creative the child was in its productions. They measured this by looking at all the productions the child produced in the last hour of the recording and matching these to all the other productions the child had made before, to evaluate how much the child was actually recycling from what it had said before.

The results are quite stunning: 78% of the 455 intelligible utterances that the child produced in that last hour, it had said before in exactly the same form, 18% had been said before but with minor change (one element filled in or added on), 4% was different from before in more than one way, and only 0.5% (3 utterances) had not previously been said by the child but two of these were found in the mother’s speech. This means that of the 455 utterances that the child produced in the last hour, there was only one sentence for which no match could be found in the previously recorded data (but it is not excluded that such a match may have occurred in the non-recorded data). In short, the child is not all that creative but reuses what it knows, and adjusts that, with the appropriate ‘cut and paste’ operations, to the communicative context at hand.

Both children and adults thus reproduce what they have heard before much more than has often been assumed (especially in generative grammar where the overall focus lies on the grammar’s generative capacity and the ‘lean grammar machine’). This has important consequences for our definition of a construction. Earlier we defined a construction as non-predictable in either form or meaning (or both), but recent research on the role of frequency in language calls for an adjustment of this definition, as does Goldberg herself in her later book *Constructions at Work* (2006: 5): ‘Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist. In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient
frequency.’ It is particularly the last sentence that is relevant here: you
not only store the rules (schematic patterns), but also their instantiations
(constructs), as long as they occur sufficiently frequently. This explains
some of the convergences of our mini-experiment discussed above;
the phrase *I love you* is a particular instantiation (a construct, not a
construction in the sense of our first definition) that many members
of the audience produced and thus one that is stored despite it being
perfectly transparent and predictable (in form and meaning). The new
definition considers these stored constructs as constructions as well.
This links up with what we said in Lecture 1, where we defined the
grammar as an inventory, and said that instantiations of ‘rules’ (schematic
constructions with open slots) are stored in the grammar as well,
alongside the rules (cf. Langacker’s rule/list fallacy).

## 2.4 From constructs to constructions

While it is true that we store instantiations, and perhaps more so
than we realize, it is clearly not the case that we store everything. We only
store constructs if they occur sufficiently frequently, even if this remains
difficult to quantify. In addition, the grammar does allow a speaker to be
creative, i.e. build novel sentences that clearly have not been stored. If, as
indicated above, children at the early stage when they produce language,
operate more with stored items in a ‘cut-and-paste’ fashion, the question
is how they finally arrive at a grammar (with more general, schematic
constructions) that allows them to be creative with language. In other
words, how do children arrive at these more general constructions? The
key to this are again some general cognitive capacities, i.e. analogical
reasoning and categorization, in which token and type frequency play an
important role. Simplistically put, token frequency is the frequency of
occurrence of a given word or phrase; type frequency is the occurrence
of different words or phrases. To take a simple example, in the phrase *The
man kicked the dog*, you have a token frequency of five, as there are five
words in this sentence. However, one of these words (*the*) occurs twice;
there are thus four *different* words. This is the type frequency.

How do type and token frequency play a role in the emergence of
grammar? Basically, token frequency is the frequency of the occurrence
of exactly the same pattern. This leads to what we call the ‘entrenchment’
of a particular instance in the language, much like collocations. The
phrase *watch your step* is a good example; it occurs quite frequently and
thus has become highly entrenched. Its salience explains why it is one
of the first instances you think about when asked, as we did in the mini-
experiment. Provided it is sufficiently high, token frequency will render
specific instances of constructions salient.

Type frequency plays a different role, because it triggers the language
user to see resemblances between instances based on analogy. The human
brain is equipped with a strong capacity to see patterns; even in what may
be presented to us as chaos, our brain is inclined to find patterns. We can
illustrate this with an example that we gave in Lecture 1, concerning the
verb islands in children’s early grammar. Recall that we said that in the
early grammar of children, the notions of Agent or Patient do not yet
exist. They have specific roles tied to specific verbs (actions), such as a
hitter or a pusher. Gradually, the child will begin to see the parallelism
suggested by the linguistic form itself, since these ‘doers’ are invariably
the subject of an active sentence (*The man broke the bottle, The dog bit the child, etc.*). Based on this analogy, the child begins to build a more general
category that captures the similarity between these different actions and
neutralizes their differences; in other words, via processes of abstraction
and generalization (which are general cognitive operations), the child
will arrive at a more general category Agent, which expresses the doer
of the action. In more general terms, what children, and by extension,
all speakers, do is build generalizations on the basis of analogy between
the different instances. This generalization, based on type variation,
is what allows the speaker to create new instances. For example, the
general category Agent (linguistically realized as the subject NP of an
active sentence) allows the language user to create a new instantiation of this
category in a new communicative context, e.g. *The Martian scientist broke the
bottle*. In sum, token frequency leads to entrenchment (which accounts for
fluency of speech, for example); type frequency leads to creativity, because it
brings generalization, and from generalization you can create new instances.

In the following, we present a more elaborate (yet still simplified)
illustration of such processes of generalization (and entrenchment), using
Langacker's schematic model. The example is a semi-idiomatic phrase
that we mentioned earlier — *I've worked my head off*. Let us hypothetically
assume that this instantiation is the starting point. If the child (or any
language user) is subsequently confronted with a variant phrase *I've
worked my butt off*, the (fairly obvious) analogy in form and meaning will
give rise to the creation of a (low-level) schematic construction: *work my
<BODY PART> off*. Once that schematic construction is in place, the
two instances that it started from can be reinterpreted as instantiations of
that more schematic construction. Speakers will (obviously) encounter
further variants, for example with different possessive determiners, such
as in *You have been working your head off* which will trigger a generalization
on that slot as well, leading to the pattern <NP<sub>i</sub>> *work* <POSS<sub>i</sub>>
<BODY PART> off*. Via contextualized uses such as these, the language
user figures out the formal and semantic constraints as well. Syntactically,
the construction is constrained by the fact that the possessive pronoun
should in principle be co-referential with the subject NP; it would be
quite odd to say, e.g. *?The teacher worked the students' heads off*. (Such co-
referentiality requirement is not unique to this pattern but applies
more generally in English). Note, however, that this is not a categorical
restriction: if someone's 'Ving to a high degree' can be seen as affecting
someone else, this can be easily overruled, e.g. *Eight, nine months ago, he
traps me in the Marquee, talks my head off*. *He's going on about nothing and
everything* (COCA, Fiction corpus, 2014). Semantically, the construction
is constrained in that the BODY PART is restricted to certain body parts
(*head*, *butt* and *ass* being typical cases); other body parts can occur, as long
as they can be related to the action expressed by the verb; this is why ?work one's back off is quite odd. More importantly, all these instances share the meaning 'work very hard' which thus becomes part of the semantic structure of the schema as well. The occurrence of a phrase like *bust one's head off* leads to a (low-level) schematization of the verb, where *bust* and *work* can be seen as semantically quite close; the resulting schematization can thus be represented as <NP₁> WORK <POSS₁> <BODY PART> off, where WORK stands for any verb that is near-synonymous with *work* (such as *bust*). Expressions such as *laugh one's ass off*, *lie one's head off*, *sweat one's ass off*, *dance one's feet off*, etc. push the schematization even further to the general and open pattern <NP₁> <V> <POSS₁> <BODY PART> off. Figure 2 gives a simplified view of the resulting schematic network. Finally, further levels of schematization allow the integration of other particles, e.g. *cry one's eyes out* (not diagrammed in Figure 2).

The schematization sketched above is driven by type variation, i.e. an abstraction over different types of body parts that occur in that particular

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. A (simplified) schematic network for V one's X off</figcaption></figure>
slot (*head*, *butt*, *ass*, *feet*, etc.) or different types of actions expressed by the verb (*work*, *bust*, *laugh*, etc.). It is this schematization that allows language users to be creative, as they can use any verb that is appropriate in the communicative context at hand. For example, I could creatively exploit the schematic pattern <NP₁> <V> <POSS₁> <BODY PART> *off* by saying (with some humour, of course) *I lectured my head off in Changsha* where I use the verb *lecture* to create a (new) instance of the construction. Interestingly, the meaning of this creative use is similar to all the other patterns, *viz.* that I did the lecturing at a very intense rhythm. In other words, the hyperbolic meaning ('V very hard') is part and parcel of all the constructions in this miniature network.

While type frequency (and variation) drives schematization (and thus creativity), higher token frequency will lead to higher entrenchment. For example, the phrase *work one's head off* is most likely the instance that one will most frequently encounter; much more frequently than *bust your head off*. This will lead to a higher salience of this particular instance, as represented by the thicker line for this box in Figure 2. Similarly, the schema *WORK one's head off* (which neutralizes over *work* and *bust*) can be expected to be more frequent, and thus more entrenched, then *laugh one's head off*. In other words, even specific instances of general patterns will be stored in the grammar. Basically, the idea is that every node in the network in Figure 2 is stored in the grammar, albeit with varying degrees of salience. All of this is stored in an intelligent way, as a 'structured inventory of symbolic units'. The structure is that of a network of constructions, not that of a flat and unordered list.

The generalizations shown in the network in Figure 2 are low-level schematizations, where the generalizations remain fairly minimal; e.g. the X in *work your X off* must be a body part, not just any other noun (*work your laptop off*). The schema that links *work your head off* and *cry your eyes out*, will in contrast require much more generalization operations, leading to a schematic *V POSS X PRT* (with still the constraint that X be a body part). The semantic structure of such high-level schemas
will obviously be more abstract, as they generalize over wider range of variations. For example, the (hyperbolical) meaning of the *V POSS X PRT* schema which generalizes over *work your head off* and *cry your eyes out* would be something like ‘carry out the action expressed by V in a very intense manner with a possibly destructive result’. At yet a higher level of abstraction, these can be integrated with other types of resultative constructions, such as *I sang my throat sore*.

Another highly abstract schema that can be mentioned here is the one for ditransitive constructions, e.g. *I gave John a book* (a construction with two object NPs) — a high level schematization. These general schemas are similar to what in traditional approaches is called a grammar rule. However, unlike (most of) these approaches, cognitive linguistics postulates that these schemas have meaning. The meaning of the ditransitive can be paraphrased as ‘X causes Y to receive Z’. Other such general constructions that are often mentioned in the literature are, among others, the *CAUSED MOTION* construction as instantiated by, e.g. *I put the letter in the box* or *He pushed me through the door* whose meaning can be paraphrased as ‘X causes Y to move to Z’, or the *RESULTATIVE* construction, e.g. *She sang herself hoarse* or *He drank himself to death*. These are all higher-level schematizations that are part and parcel of the grammar that takes the form of complicated networks. We will look at some of these in Lecture 3.

The grammar of a language is thus a network of constructions of varying degree of schematicity where both specific instances and general patterns are stored. In Construction Grammar, this is often called the ‘constructicon’. This does not mean, however, that everything in language is stored. Not every single instance will be stored, but those that occur with sufficient frequency will be at least for a while. Repeated confrontation with type variation will trigger the creation of a general schema which will then be stored, repeated confrontation with the instance will lead to higher entrenchment of that particular instance. As we have said before, it is thus not the case that once you know the ‘rule’, you will forget the instantiations of that rule. Both can be present in the
linguistic system (provided again that they occur sufficiently frequently). The role of input frequency (and the possible analogical reasoning it gives rise to) thus plays an important role in the emergence and shaping of the grammar.

## 2.5 From usage to grammar and back

If usage shapes the grammar, linguists cannot afford to dismiss it, even if this has often been the case, notably within the framework of generative linguists who, in general, do not care all that much about language use (a matter of performance) but are only interested in the system (linguistic competence). Their concern is more with a coherent, and preferably economic, description of the linguistic system as such, without being too much focused on the question of whether this model is cognitively real or not, i.e. whether the model is a representation of what speakers know. Cognitive Linguistics, in contrast, is more focused on an accurate representation of speaker knowledge, i.e. the model should be cognitively real. This is also known as the cognitive commitment of Cognitive Linguistics. The cognitive view is consequently that system and usage are in constant interaction, as is clearly stated by Bybee (2006):

> While all linguists are likely to agree that grammar is the cognitive organization of language, a usage-based theorist would make the more specific proposal that *grammar is the cognitive organization of one's experience with language*. [...] certain facets of linguistic experience, such as *the frequency of use of particular instances of constructions*, have an impact on representation [...] in various ways, for example, in speakers' recognition of what is conventionalized and what is not, and even more strikingly in the nature of language change. (2006: 711; my emphasis)

Bybee's article emphasizes the role of frequency as a guiding factor in language change, and distinguishes three levels of frequency, which
each have their particular impact. First, low levels of repetition lead to conventionalization only, as in the case of prefabs and idioms. Second, higher levels of repetition can lead to the establishment of a new construction with its own categories, as is the case for the *What is X doing Y* construction or the *V one's X off* construction. Finally, extremely high frequency leads to the grammaticization of the new construction, the creation of grammatical morphemes, and changes in constituency, which she illustrates with the *be going to* future in English.

While usage shapes the grammar (which actually emerges from usage, as Tomasello points out), once the grammar is in place it will obviously constrain usage. In Bybee's words:

> Usage feeds into the creation of grammar just as much as grammar determines the shape of usage. Actual language use cannot be omitted from the study of grammar, because it constitutes a large part of the explanation for why languages have grammar and what form that grammar takes. Grammar cannot be thought of as pure abstract structure that underlies language use [...] grammar is built up from specific instances that marry lexical items with constructions. (Bybee 2006: 730)

In other words, there is a constant dynamic interaction between usage and grammar. The two are not to be separated. The view that is expressed in Bybee's quote above is quite remote from Chomsky's views quoted in Lecture 1 where grammar is predetermined by the initial state and usage merely serves to trigger the grammatical mapping.

> If this is true, then the consequence is that we must look at language use, and we must thus carefully analyze how language is used in order to understand what language looks like. Within cognitive linguistics, there is considerable attention to the analysis of large amounts of actual data (corpora), even if the theory cannot be reduced to this. Nevertheless, for any usage-based analysis, it is important to look at how language is actually used in rich contextualized usage events. The exhaustive exploration of corpora, considering frequency of use, is one method to do that.⁶
An objection that is typically levied against corpus linguistics (or
analysis of language use in general) is that while it can tell you something
about frequencies and language use, it will not allow you to decide whether
something is ungrammatical or not, as you will not find ungrammatical
sentences. In other words, how can you prove that something is
ungrammatical on the basis of corpora, since clearly it is not because
something is not attested that it cannot occur; i.e. absence of proof is not
proof of absence. The common view is that only your intuition can tell
you whether something is ungrammatical.⁷ That is not true. Corpora do
provide negative evidence, as Stefanowitsch (2006) illustrates.

Stefanowitsch talks about the ‘raw frequency fallacy’, that is,
the mistaken view that only positive evidence counts as evidence and
that frequencies in a corpus are often taken at face value, rather than
interpreted in relation to what can be expected. He uses his corpus
analysis to distinguish constructions that did not occur but could have
occurred (accidental absences) from those that did not occur and could
not have occurred because they are ungrammatical (significant absences).
An accidental absence is never excluded, since the corpus is only a
sample of the language, and it can never be excluded that a particular
instance exists but happens not to have been included in the sample (no
matter how well the sampling has been done). However, with the proper
methods one can prove that the absence is not due to sampling, but
due to the system of the language itself: its absence is explained by the
grammar not allowing it, i.e. the construction is ungrammatical.

Stefanowitsch's study concerns the ditransitive construction, or
double object construction, like *John gave Mary the book*. It is well-known
that certain verbs in English allow this construction, while others do not,
even if they are close in meaning. Stefanowitsch mentions three verbs
that in the corpus he uses (ICE-GB) do not occur in the ditransitive
construction: *explain*, *say*, and *whisper*. From a semantic point of view,
this is somewhat unexpected, given that they are close in meaning to *tell*
which does allow a ditransitive (*I will tell you a story*). Typically, such non-
occurrence is explained by resorting to the intuition that these verbs
are ungrammatical in the ditransitive. For example, you cannot say *I
explained you the problem; a to-DATIVE construction is required here: I
explained the problem to you*. It is one of the classic mistakes that learners of
English often make. However, Stefanowitsch points out that while there
are zero occurrences for these three verbs, the zeros do not have the same
weight. For example, for *say*, there are more than 3,000 occurrences in
the corpus. The total number of ditransitive constructions in the entire
corpus is about 136,000 instances. Given these two frequencies, that of
*say* and that of the ditransitive construction, you can calculate what the
expected frequency would have been for *say* to occur in that construction.
Given that both are very frequent and their meanings not incompatible,
one can expect that they occur together; more precisely, in view of these
frequencies the expected frequency, under chance, would be 44.52. The
Fischer Exact statistical test allows you to confirm that the absence in the
corpus is not due to chance (i.e. an accidental absence due to sampling)
but statistically significant (the p-value is extremely low). In other words,
there must be something in the linguistic system that is responsible for
the non-occurrence of the ditransitive. That is, the corpus frequency
provides solid evidence, based on standard statistical tests, that *say* is
significantly absent (i.e. ungrammatical) in the ditransitive construction.
On the other hand, the verb *whisper* only has five occurrences in the
corpus. Given the low frequency of the verb, the expected occurrence of
it in the ditransitive is also very low (0.07). The difference between the
observed frequency (0) and the expected frequency (0.07) is quite small,
and the Fischer Exact test confirms that it is statistically non-significant
(p=0.935; >0.05). That means that it may be accidentally absent from
the corpus; or rather, it cannot be excluded that this is due to sampling.
It might have occurred, whereas *say* could **never** have occurred; the
statistically significant distribution indicates that its absence from the
ditransitive is not a mere sampling issue. In sum, corpus frequencies can
differentiate between significant absences (those that are explained by the
system) and accidental absences.

One may wonder why one should bother about all this laborious
statistical work if intuitions lead to the same result, as would have been
the case for the non-occurrence of *say* or *explain* in the ditransitive
construction (see Lemmens 2019 for some further discussion). While
this reaction is understandable, intuition is not a scientifically reliable
basis to test hypotheses. In addition, as Stefanowitsch points out, there
is a more fundamental problem: if your theory is based on intuition, a
single counter-example would suffice to disconfirm the hypothesis. For
example, one occurrence of the ditransitive construction with *whisper* (e.g.
*she whispered him a secret*) would be enough to invalidate the claim that it
is ungrammatical. If you use a probability-driven model, as we advocate
here, you indicate that it is highly unlikely that this construction is going
to occur, but if you find one instance, the whole model does not collapse.
This one example might indicate somebody trying to be creative in a
particular context or it may be an instance of (beginning) language change.
The latter often starts within specific contexts as well, such as for example
the intransitive use of *like* as in *I like* which may very well be due to the
like-button on Facebook. Do we still need introspection? Of course, we
do. We need it to explain not *whether* something is the case but *why* this
is the case. You do not need introspection to tell you that something is
ungrammatical; you need introspection to explain why it is ungrammatical.

## 2.6 Concluding remarks

A usage-based perspective on language entails that language is learned
from usage; instances of constructions are stored together with the more
general rules (which are actually schemas). It turns out that there is more
idiosyncrasy in the grammar than what has often been assumed, and that
there are ‘constructional islands’ where one or more constructions cluster
together that have particular semantic or syntactic properties, such as the
*V one’s head off* construction and (related) variants. The constructicon is a
hierarchically structured inventory of both schemas and instantiations. As a result, speakers actually store (and reproduce) much more than is often assumed. The schematic constructions in the constructicon allow them to be creative when needed. These schematic constructions arise through type variation which triggers analogical reasoning and generalization. The larger the type variation for a particular construction, the more general the schema will have to be and the more productive it will be. In a corpus, this would for instance be reflected in a higher number of hapaxes, i.e. instantiations that occur only once. Type frequency thus plays a major role in building schematic constructions. Token frequency affects the salience of certain constructions, or instantiations of constructions; a high token frequency leads to higher entrenchment. Frequency does not explain everything, but it is a factor that cannot be ignored. While the term *usage-based* refers to the idea that grammar is learned from usage, it can be (and often is) extended to mean that one thus also must look at actual language use, and do so exhaustively, typically using large corpora.

Importantly, such corpus-based analysis is only one method in which one can go about in a usage-based model. While corpora are revealing patterns of language use and do inform us about the language system, the evidence they provide is ‘off-line’ which needs to be complemented with evidence of ‘on-line’ language use and processing, as for example provided by psycholinguistic experiments tracing language use in real time. Only through the combination of several methods will we be able to keep the cognitive commitment that underlies Cognitive Linguistics, i.e. to model the linguistic knowledge of the language user.

In the first two lectures of this book, I have tried to clarify the basic assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, often in contrast to more formal models. Our description of both has necessarily been brief and incomplete, but hopefully sufficiently clear to understand the basic assumptions underlying the theory which also provides the framework for the empirical studies presented in the following lectures.⁸ In a nutshell, Cognitive Linguistics does not, in contrast to generative or formal models of language,
separate form and function (both are present in the form-meaning pairings
that make up the grammar) nor does it separate grammar and usage which
are seen as interdependent. Clearly, formal models and cognitive models
will overlap given that their object of study is the same (language), but the
basic assumptions are radically different as are their goals. Formal models
strive for a coherent theory that explains linguistic phenomena, and thus
linguistic knowledge, without however a deep concern about whether
this is how speakers' linguistic competence is structured. Cognitive
linguistics takes the latter to be its main objective: to present a model that is
cognitively real, i.e. that represents what speakers know. Simplifying things,
one could draw a parallel with robotics. One option (which would be the
equivalent of formal models in linguistics) is to develop robots that do not
(necessarily) resemble human beings but do the work they are designed
to do and preferably even surpass humans in this work. Many modern
industries (e.g. car manufacturers) use such robots. The other option,
the equivalent of the cognitive linguistic enterprise, is to build robots that
resemble human beings, much like avatars, that walk and talk like we do,
that can have and display emotions. These two choices not only lead to
two radically different kinds of robots (which each have their strengths and
weaknesses), but also to different paths that will be followed and questions
that will be asked to arrive at that result.

Returning to language and linguistics, many intriguing questions
remain about how speakers handle complex linguistic structures and
exploit language in concrete usage events. Much more empirical work (of
various sorts) is needed to answer those questions. Independent of the
theory one adheres to, the essence of linguistics is (or should be) focused
on careful analysis of linguistic facts. It is hoped that the following lectures
present studies that do just that.

Notes

1 As the list of possible words already shows, adjectives are not the only possibility here; *nuts* and *bananas* are not adjectives. Note that one could also insert a prepositional
phrase *up the wall*. The semantic value of these nouns and such a phrase is, however, similar to that expressed by the adjectives. In fact, this could be regarded as an instance of *coercion*, where the meaning and characteristics of a given lexical item (here a noun) adjust its semantic and even syntactic properties under influence of the construction in which it occurs (see, e.g. Lauwers and Willems 2011 on coercion). To keep the current discussion transparent, we will ignore such formal variation here.

2. The following part has been inspired by a guest lecture on Construction Grammar at the university of Lille, France in 2013 by Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland); used with permission (pc).

3. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/04/homeland-returns-season-three

4. See Cappelle (2011) for a discussion of the *the X-er the Y-er* construction.

5. COCA is available at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.

6. It deserves to be pointed out that the term *usage-based* is often misinterpreted to mean ‘(corpus-based) analysis of language use’ (typically using certain tools and statistics). As should be clear from the descriptions in this and the previous lecture, this is not what ‘usage-based linguistics’ actually refers to; the term expresses the view that grammar is learned from or emerges from (contextualized) usage. Corpus-analysis is just one way of qualifying and quantifying this usage.

7. In fact, this criticism links up to the fundamental criticism to usage-based linguistics already discussed above: how do language learners learn what is ungrammatical if grammar is based on usage which does not contain ungrammatical sentences nor explicit information on ungrammaticality. Similarly, the criticism against corpus linguistics would be that you cannot prove what is ungrammatical since the corpus does not contain any (explicit) information on grammaticality.

8. For more extensive descriptions of Cognitive Linguistics, the reader is referred to, among others, Dancygier (2017), Dąbrowska and Divjak (2015), Evans et al. (2007), Geeraerts and Cuyckens (2007), Taylor (2002).
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>
# Lexical-paradigmatic analysis of lexical causatives (synchronic perspective)

The following two lectures discuss a lexical-paradigmatic analysis of English lexical causatives; this lecture takes a synchronic perspective, the next one will be about how English verbs have changed in the course of time in this respect. These two lectures represent my earliest strand of research, the major publication of which is my book published by John Benjamins (Lemmens 1998a); nevertheless, many issues remain quite relevant even to current research in Construction Grammar. In fact, in recent years, I have taken up some parts of this research again (see Lemmens 2006a), in particular with respect to the causative alternation. The last part of this lecture will present new, hitherto unpublished research, on precisely this issue.

## 3.1 The lexical-paradigmatic approach

The topic of this and the next lecture is the constructional and lexical variation with lexical causatives in English; in other words, we are concerned with the different constructions in which these verbs occur and how the constructional variation aligns with lexical differences. Lexical causatives are verbs that incorporate a causal element in their
semantic structure. Classic examples are verbs like *hit*, *punch*, *kill* or *open*. These verbs all refer to events that have been caused by someone or something, and this causal element is integrated as a part of the lexical meaning of the verb. This is different from periphrastic or analytical causatives, such as *make* or *cause* (as in *I made him cry* or *I caused the door to open*); in these constructions, there is a separate causal verb (here: *make*, *cause*) combined with another verb (*cry*, *open*) that is the event that is actually being caused. The following two lectures are not concerned with analytical causatives, but with lexical causatives.

The approach that I follow here is a *lexical-paradigmatic* approach, which fuses insights from two different models. For the lexical part, I will mostly adhere to insights from cognitive linguistics; for the paradigmatic part, I will draw on systemic grammar (Halliday 1985; Matthiesen and Halliday 2004; Davidse 1999). In more general terms, what we are going to look at is essentially the relationship between the lexicon and grammar. As you may remember from the previous lectures, in cognitive linguistics, the distinction between the two is not considered as a strict dichotomy. Rather, this is seen as a continuum ranging from lexical items on the one end, over semi-filled constructions (e.g. *V one's X off*), to highly schematic (grammatical) constructions on the other end. As explained in the previous lectures, this entails that everything in language is considered to be inherently meaningful: a difference in form (including grammatical form) also entails a difference in meaning. Such a view is quite compatible with Halliday's observation that

> A language is a system for making meanings: a semantic system, with other systems for encoding the meaning it produces. The term 'semantics' does not simply refer to the meaning of words; it is the entire system of meanings of a language, expressed by grammar as well as by vocabulary. (1985: xvii)

The fundamental question we are going to deal with in connection to
lexical causatives is what is specified in the verb and what is specified
in the construction. Much of the work on verb alternations takes a
generative perspective, some of which has been quite inspirational for
the analyses presented here. In most generative work, verb alternations
are typically seen as different sets of overt arguments to the verb as
specified in the dictionary. In the earliest model, that of transformational
generative grammar (Chomsky 1965), one construction was seen as
derived from the other (via truth-preserving transformations). For
example, for the non-causative alternation, such as illustrated by *John
broke the glass* vs. *The glass broke*, one of the constructions was said to be
derived from the other considered more basic (the underlying deep
structure). Similarly, the ditransitive construction (e.g. *John gave Mary a
book*), was considered to be derived from the *to*-dative construction (*John
gave a book to Mary*). Later this model was adjusted, and especially people
like Stephen Pinker and Beth Levin developed the ‘lexical projectionist
approaches’, where the alternations were predicted by the semantics of
the verb. In this verb-centric approach (Pinker 1989; Levin 1993; Levin
and Rappaport Hovav 2005), the set of arguments that verbs can have
(and thus also the syntactic patterns) were predicted by the meaning of
the verb, as Levin explicitly says in the introduction to her book *English
Verb Classes and Alternations*: ‘the behaviour of a verb, particularly with
respect to the expression of its arguments, is to a large extent determined
by its meaning’ (Levin 1993: 1). The grammatically relevant aspects of
the meaning of the verb, the ‘event structure’ it denotes, predicts what
kind of arguments (and thus what kind of syntactic patterns) the verb
can or cannot have; for example, *break* denotes an event that involves
a breaker and something that is broken, *give* refers to an event that
involves a giver, a thing given, and a recipient. The (different) syntactic
patterns that realize these arguments are stored with the verb in the
mental lexicon. All possible realizations of a verb’s argument structures
are specified by subcategorization frames. In other words, each verb is
stored in the lexicon with the different syntactic patterns that can occur
with this verb. The different syntactic patterns are also often referred to
as the verb's valency, a concept that goes back to Tesnière (1959). The
different valency patterns of a verb are stored in the lexical entry of that
verb.¹

In the first period of generative linguistics, verb alternations were
seen as relations that were predicted by the verb's semantics, but the
alternations were also seen as truth-conditionally equivalent. In many
cases, syntactic alternations (e.g. *John gave Mary a book* vs. *John gave a
book to Mary*) were considered as formal variants that were semantically
largely equivalent (if not identical, since truth-preserving). In cognitive-
functional linguistics, constructions exist in their own right and they
each have their own meaning and/or function. That does not mean
that there are no parallels or relationships between constructions;
Langacker explicitly says that ‘alternation[s] [are] handled by positing
two variants of the governing verb’ (1991b: 465). Langacker’s view
is actually still very much verb-centered and not so different from
Levin’s approach, apart from the idea that each construction has a
different meaning. In her constructional approach, Goldberg (2002)
makes a very strong case against a verb-centric approach, and in
particular against derivations. She insists on the fact that we should not
overemphasize alternations and should actually talk about the syntax
of argument structure constructions (ASCs), without recourse to
alternations or derivations. As she puts it, ‘it is possible to overplay the
importance of alternative forms (paraphrases)’ (Goldberg 2002: 329).
She makes a case for *surface generalizations*; these are generalizations (i.e.
schematizations) that capture the formal and semantic similarity of
different instantiations (cf. Lectures 1 and 2). Goldberg claims that ‘by
putting aside rough paraphrases and considering all instances with a
formal and semantic similarity, broader generalizations can be attained’
(idem: 335). Applied to one type of alternation, that of the causative/non-
causative, the two views can be schematically represented as in Figure 3
below.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. Alternation (1) vs. Surface generalization (2)</figcaption></figure>

The ‘alternation camp’ would emphasize the horizontal relationship between the non-causative and the causative, whereas the defenders of surface generalizations would argue more in favour of the vertical correspondences, reflecting the similarity of form. The formally intransitive constructions (*The glass broke*, *The door opened*, *The dog died*, *These books sell*) could all be argued to be similar in form and meaning, as they the subject expresses the Agent or Theme and the verb expresses the process that the Agent or Theme is doing or undergoing. On the right-hand side, you have the two participant (transitive) constructions (*John broke the glass*, *John opened the door*, *They killed the dog*, *They sell books*), involving an Agent who operates on a Patient that is affected by the process. Which model is correct? The answer is mixed: both are partially correct and both are partially wrong.

One of the problems with Goldberg’s surface generalization model is that it obliterates the systematicity of alternations, a point to which we will come back later. As I have shown in my own work, alternations are actually quite systematic, or, in our terminology, *paradigmatic*. In other words, pushing the generalization model too hard leads to a ‘lumping’ strategy, where one puts in the same basket constructions that are semantically quite different (this is particularly true, for example, for the analysis presented in Yoshimura and Taylor 2004). Insisting too much on the vertical axis in the schema above, would ignore the differences that
exist between the different constructions: while (a) *The glass broke* and
(b) *The door opened* are very similar, they are quite different from (c) *The
dog died* and (d) *These book sell*; the latter is a middle construction (also
known as ‘medio-passive construction’) which still implies some kind
of Agent that is selling the books. Interestingly, at the end of her article,
Goldberg does acknowledge that certain things may be affected by the
existence of possible alternatives: ‘the essentially structuralist observation
that the semantic interpretation of one linguistic construct tends to
be affected by the existence of possible alternatives, receives empirical
support from a number of studies’ (2002: 349).

The defenders of the alternation model, in turn, can be criticized for ignoring the semantics of the construction itself. As shown by numerous recent studies in Construction Grammar, constructions do have meaning, and speakers are well aware of these and exploit these even in novel constructions. Levin and Rappaport (1995) actually report on some such creative cases (such as *The doctor bled the patient*) but they consider these ‘spurious’ cases and not really genuine alternations. In addition, as we will show below, the verb semantics does play an important role in alternations.

The lexical-paradigmatic approach that I have adopted in my work
aims at overcoming these shortcomings, by reconciling the lexical
and constructional perspectives. The basic claim with respect to the
constructional variation is drawn from Halliday’s work in functional-
systemic grammar. His view is that the grammar of English is governed
by two causative models: the transitive and ergative model, and these are
revealed through alternations. The term *ergativity* is usually reserved for
languages that have ergative case marking which English does not have.
In order to understand why this is still relevant to English, we need to
make a short typological detour.

A language is ergative if ‘the subject of an intransitive clause is
treated in the same way as the object of a transitive clause, and differently
from the transitive subject’ (Dixon 1994: 1). In contrast, in a nominative/
accusative system, the subject of transitives and intransitives are coded alike (nominative), whereas the transitive object is marked differently (accusative). The ergative system is illustrated by Dixon's examples from Dyirbal, reproduced as examples 1 and 2; the transitive, by his examples from Latin, 3 and 4.

(1) numa
father-ABS
'Father (S) returned.'

banaga-n'u. (Dixon 1994: 10)
return-NONFUT

(2) numa
father-ABS
'Mother (A) saw father (O).'

yabu-ingu
mother-ERG
see-NONFUT

bura-n. (Dixon 1994: 10)

(3) dominus
master-NOM
'The master (S) comes.'

venit. (Dixon 1994: 9)
come-3SG-PRES

(4) dominus
master-NOM
'The master (A) hears the slave (O).'

servum
slave-ACC
hear-3SG-PRES

audit. (Dixon 1994: 9)

The subject of sentence 1 is marked absolutive with an intransitive construction, whereas in sentence 2, the subject of the transitive construction (*mother*) is marked in the ergative. In other words, the subjects are marked differently depending on whether the sentence has an object or not. In a transitive sentence, the subject who does the action is marked in the ergative. If it is the subject of an intransitive sentence, it is in the absolutive case. In most Indo-European languages, you have a nominative/accusative system, illustrated in examples 3 and 4. In these cases, the subject is each time marked the same way (nominative case), regardless of whether the verb is used transitively or intransitively; the object is marked in the accusative. When you look at the pronoun system in English you see that it is basically a nominative/accusative language. For example, in the sentence *He likes her*, the form *her* is in the accusative (the object form of *she*) and *he* is the nominative case. Dixon diagrams the relations for a nominative/accusative system and
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 4.** Dixon's representation of nominative/ergative typology</figcaption></figure>

for an absolutive/ergative system as in Figure 4.

Now, the question is how one can say that English has ergativity, given that it does not have such case marking (on nouns) and that in the few cases where it has such marking (pronouns), it is the nominative/accusative marking, which is the hallmark of the transitive system. This may seem puzzling. The point is that one should not interpret the transitive/ergative distinction as merely referring to the form (case marking) but reinterpret it semantically, Halliday suggests, as is diagrammed in Figure 5.

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 5.** Semantic reinterpretation of the transitive-ergative distinction</figcaption></figure>

Despite the nominative/accusative case marking that may occur in English (in the case of pronouns), one should see these models as a semantic model. The formal similarity of the subject marking in the intransitive and transitive constructions in the transitive model, is to be interpreted as indicating a semantic similarity, marking the central participant, called the
Agent; in the ergative model, the central participant is the Theme that is marked similarly.² While on the surface the structures may look the same, the semantic differences will be revealed through alternations, as shown in the examples below (limiting ourselves again to the causative alternation).

**causative ↔ non-causative [ergative model]**

(5) a. Riddle laughs so hard that he starts to *choke* on his salad
b. She grabbed his shirt collar and it felt like she was going to *choke* him.
c. #He was going to *choke*. (meaning: choke somebody else)

**objectless alternation (object deletion) [transitive model]**

(6) a. The soldiers *killed* numerous civilians.
b. #Numerous civilians *killed*. (with the civilians dying)
c. These are soldiers trained to *kill*.

Example 5 illustrates the causative/non-causative alternation, the hallmark of the ergative model of causation, with the verb *choke*. The a- and b-sentences show that the object of the two-participant construction (*she was going to choke him*) can become the subject of the one-participant construction (*he choked*). The c-sentence shows that you cannot omit that participant (Theme): in a sentence like *he was going to choke* the subject is necessarily interpreted as referring to the Theme (the person choking) and not to the person causing someone else to choke. (The # indicates that this may be grammatically correct but interpreted quite differently.) The constructions in example 6 are quite different: the object can be omitted (*Soldiers trained to kill*), even if semantically it has not disappeared completely, as we will detail below. As shown in the 6b, the causative alternation is not allowed: *numerous civilians killed* cannot mean that the civilians are undergoing the process; in this construction, they are interpreted as the Agent affecting someone else.

In view of the above discussion, formally similar two-participant constructions are to be distinguished paradigmatically: *John killed Mary* is a transitive construction, as indicated by the possible alternation with *John killed*, whereas *Bill broke the window* is an ergative construction,
as indicated by the possible alternation with *The window broke*. The alternations in examples 5 and 6 reveal that the transitive and ergative model have two different centers: the transitive model centers around the Agent, whereas the ergative model centers around the Theme which, in addition, is said to co-participate in the event. Figure 6, adapted from Davidse (1999), represents the different semantics of the two models.

The transitive paradigm takes the Agent as its centre. The basic building block of the transitive paradigm is thus the AGENT-PROCESS combination, which can, in some cases, be isolated in an objectless transitive construction, e.g. *Soldiers trained to kill*. In other words, the transitive system is Agent-centred and right-oriented: the event finds its starting point in the Agent, the most central participant, and in the two-participant construction it opens up to the right to include the participant onto which the Agent directs his action, the Patient. The Patient does not co-participate in the process but is construed as an inert participant wholly affected by the Agent's action. In the ergative model, the process is conceptually dependent on the Theme, the entity functioning as the subject in the non-causative construction. The PROCESS-THEME cluster is semi-autonomous vis-à-vis the instigation. In similar vein, Smith (1978: 101) talks about the 'relative independence of the activity'. Figure 6 visualizes the ergative system as a nuclear one with two processual layers, the instigated process and the instigation of the process. The arrow on the inner circle indicates that the process can be self-instigated, but possibly opens to the left, to add the Instigator.

What about the 'true' intransitive constructions, like *John died*?
These are considered to be part of the transitive model, since they,
too, are Agent-centered but cannot extend to the right to include
a Patient: *John died Mary*. This is quite different from a formally

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Transitive and ergative models</figcaption></figure>
intransitive construction like *John starved*. In that case, it is possible to add an Instigator: *Bill starved John*. One might object that in some cases, you can have an object with *die*, as in *Mary died a gruesome death*. However, this object does not express a real participant, it is a pseudo-participant as revealed by the fact that you cannot turn this sentence in the passive voice *A gruesome death was died by Mary*. This shows that it is not a transitive sentence (in the sense of Hopper and Thompson 1980) and the object does not express a true participant in the event; in this case, it is a cognate object. In some cases, this is an expression of measure, e.g. *John ran a mile* or *The door opened a crack*; again, the object does not express a participant, but the extent to which the process was carried out. This is why Halliday calls these pseudo-participants RANGE. Interesting, also in the ergative paradigm, you can have pseudo-participants, but this time (as expected) they are situated to the left (in subject position) as in *The house blew a fuse*. In this sentence, the house is not a true participant, but merely the setting in which the event took place; again, this is revealed by the impossibility of the passive voice: *A fuse was blown by the house*. Building on the notion of *effectiveness* as suggested by Hopper and Thompson (1980), Davidse (1999) makes a three-way distinction: *effective* constructions where an action is carried over to another participant, *non-effective* constructions, where there is only one participant, and *pseudo-effective* constructions which basically augments a non-effective construction with a pseudo-participant. Schematically, the situation can be represented as in Table 2.

In other words, the term *effectiveness* captures the similarity between *John killed Mary* and *John suffocated Mary*, but they are still different since you can say *Mary suffocated* but not *Mary killed* (with the understanding that she is the one affected by the event).

Table 2 does not exhaust all the constructional variations. For example, we have not mentioned the middle or medio-passive construction, as in *The mud scraped off the tent effortlessly*. As the name *medio-passive* suggests, even though this sentence is in the active voice, it has a passive interpretation:
<table><caption>Table 2. Construction types in the transitive and ergative models</caption><thead><tr><th>CONSTRUCTION</th><th>TRANSITIVE</th><th>ERGATIVE</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>EFFECTIVE</td><td>John killed Mary<br/>[AGENT-PROCESS-PATIENT]<br/>John killed<br/>[AGENT-PROCESS-(PATIENT)]</td><td>John suffocated Mary<br/>[INSTIGATOR-PROCESS-THEME]</td></tr><tr><td>NON-EFFECTIVE</td><td>Mary died<br/>[AGENT-PROCESS]</td><td>Mary suffocated.<br/>[THEME-PROCESS]</td></tr><tr><td>PSEUDO-EFFECTIVE</td><td>Mary died a gruesome death<br/>John ran a mile<br/>[AGENT-PROCESS-RANGE]</td><td>The house blew a fuse<br/>[SETTING-PROCESS-THEME]</td></tr></tbody></table>

the mud does not scrape itself off (i.e. it remains a Patient that does not do anything) but is scraped off by some Agent that remains unspecified. This is confirmed by the fact that the adverbial comment (*effortlessly*) pertaining to the effort (or, typically, the absence of it) required for the Agent to carry out the process is obligatory: you cannot say *The mud scraped of the tent*. This is different from a sentence like *The window opened only with great difficulty* where the adverbial comment can be left out (*The window opened*) as is typical for the ergative paradigm. We will not be concerned very much with the medio-passive construction here (see, however, Lemmens 1998a: 74ff for a lexical-paradigmatic view on the medio-passive construction).

A final point that can be made here is that the distinctions between the transitive and ergative models that have been illustrated above with different syntactic constructions also find their reflexes in other areas of the grammar. For example, the interpretation of past participles is different depending on whether they instantiate the ergative or the transitive model. Constructions like *dried hay* or *broken glass* for example, are ambiguous between an active interpretation (‘hay that has dried’ or ‘glass that has broken’) or a passive interpretation (‘hay that has been dried’ or ‘glass that
has been broken'). Halliday calls this the voice vagueness that is typical of
the ergative paradigm and says that such voice vagueness is even present
in the non-effective construction: a sentence like *The glass broke* is actually
neutral as to whether the process was caused by an external cause or
whether it was self-instigated. Past participles built with verbs that typically
instantiate the transitive model, do not have such ambiguity: a phrase like
*read books* or *murdered people* can only have a passive interpretation, i.e. books
that have been read or people that have been murdered. One finds similar
voice ambiguities in morphological derivations with -able: a *readable book*
non-ambiguously refers to 'a book that can be read'; however, *unbreakable*
*glass* is ambiguous between an active reading ('glass that can break') or a
passive reading ('glass that can be broken').

The presentation so far suggests that the distinction between the
transitive and ergative models is absolute. That is not the case. There
are two important nuances that should be added here. First of all, verbs
may vary in their paradigmatic behavior. For example, *open* would be
categorized as an ergative verb because it allows the causative alternation:
*John opened the door* vs. *The door opened*. However, if you have a sentence
like *John opened a can of baked beans* then it is quite unusual to say *A can of
baked beans opened* (example taken from Davidse 1999). The transitive/
ergative nature is not really a property of the verb as such, it is actually the
construction (and use of the verb in that construction) that is transitive or
ergative. Verbs do have a strong prototypical preference for one model or
the other; when we talk about a transitive or ergative verb, then these are
actually shorthand expressions for these verbs' **prototypical** constructional
behaviour. Variations in this behaviour do occur, both in synchrony and
in diachrony, as will be elaborated in the next lecture.

The second nuance to be added is that there are also degrees of
prototypicality regarding the different constructions within each paradigm.
The transitive and ergative models imply a range of constructions, but
some constructions are more common than others or have a wider
application. For example, as detailed below (section 3.2) the objectless
(transitive) construction is quite common with a verb such as *kill* (*Soldiers trained to kill*) but is less common with the verb *make* (*Craftsman trained to make*), even if not impossible (*God creates, man makes*).

The above description gives a general overview of the transitive and ergative models as it has been developed in functional-systemic grammar (see, Halliday 1985; Matthiesen and Halliday 2004; Davidse 1992, 1999). I have used this model as the grammatical backbone of my lexical-paradigmatic analysis which looks at the interaction of verbal meaning and constructional (i.e. paradigmatic) meaning. The lexical field to which I have applied the paradigmatic analysis is that of verbs of killing. The reason for choosing these verbs is that these verbs are often used in the linguistic literature as causative verbs *par excellence*. My work aims at offering a more detailed corpus-based analysis of these verbs and their constructional variability.

Inspired by Levin's verb categories, different subclasses have been distinguished. First of all, there is the subset of MURDER verbs, like *lynch*, *butcher*, *kill*, *massacre*, or *slay* which are saliently transitive verbs. Another subgroup is the SUFFOCATE verbs which can be either ergative or transitive. In other words, within the same lexical domain, some verbs like *suffocate*, instantiate the ergative model as shown by the causative alternation (e.g. *John suffocated Mary* vs. *Mary suffocated*); however, the verb *strangle* does not allow this alternation (*Mary strangled* cannot mean that Mary is the Theme suffocating) and instantiates the transitive model. As indicated, our classification is inspired by Levin's classification of English verbs, but there are some differences as well. Most importantly, she does not talk about transitivity and ergativity; as will be recalled, she works within a lexical approach, which considers that the meaning of the verb determines (or predicts) the alternations a verb can have. The paradigmatic approach by definition generalizes over different verbs.

In the remaining part of this lecture, we will present two case studies. The first one, based on Lemmens (2006a), deals with the objectless transitive construction and the second one concerns the causative alternation, a study which has hitherto not been published.
## 3.2 Case study 1: The (transitive) objectless construction

The construction that will be discussed in this study is the objectless transitive; as the term suggest, this is a construction where the object of a (syntactically transitive) verb has disappeared. Lexical causatives such as *kill*, *melt*, or *break* are often said to denote a ‘change of state’ and the affected object is obligatory, as illustrated in the following examples (the * indicates that omission is not possible in reference to the same event with the same participant configuration).

(7) John broke *(the glass). / I opened *(the door)

(8) The dog killed *(the cat). / Paul pulled *(Sally's hair).

Nevertheless, as has been observed in the literature, object omission is possible in certain contexts:

(9) a. Mary usually drinks a martini before lunch.

b. Mary drinks.

(10) a. These soldiers killed innocent citizens.

b. These soldiers are trained to kill.

So why is it that in cases like these it is possible to leave out the object, but not in the other examples given above, even if the same verb is used (e.g. *The dog killed* in the example above)? Important is that even in the cases where the object is not overtly expressed, the intuition is that the construction is still semantically transitive. As Levin points out in her book, ‘despite the lack of overt direct object in the intransitive variant, the verb in this variant is understood to have as object something that qualifies as a typical object of the verb; however, there is some discussion concerning how to best characterize this interpretation’ (1993: 33). Usually, the omitted object is indefinite and non-specific; for example, *Mary drinks* does not refer to a specific beverage that she drinks, but it is understood that she drinks alcoholic beverages (whichever they are) and
the actions of the soldiers are targeted at any human being. Importantly, the reference to affected entities remains schematic and cannot be tied to a specific event; for instance, in example 11 omission of the object is not possible, since the sentence refers to a specific event with a specific participant.

(11) A soldier shot my neighbour and I was very upset that **he killed him/*ø**

As Rice points out, ‘objects that can be omitted tend to be those whose lexical content is most probable given the meaning of the verb’ (Rice 1988: 203). She gives the following telling examples:

(12) a. Hemingway **ate**, **drank**, and **smoked** too much. (Rice 1988)

b. Scott **hammers** and **saws** like a pro. (ibid.)

c. Bill always **interrupts**. (ibid.)

d. The freedom-fighting contra rebels **kidnap**, **rape**, **torture**, and **murder**. (ibid.)

All of these examples refer to non-specific (recurring) events. For instance, in 12b the adverb *always* indicates repeated occurrence which allows object omission. In case of a specific interruption event, such omission is highly unlikely, e.g. *Bill interrupted yesterday*. The sentences with object omission refer to events that occur all the time, or repeatedly, or that fit within a certain semantic frame or scenario, as Rice observes. This is not restricted to English, but also applies for example to French, e.g.

(13) a. Robot multifonction MAGIMIX. 23 fonctions: hache menu, pile, broie, mixe, homogénéise, émulsionne, mélange, fouette, pétrit, bat, coupe, râpe fin et moyen, presse les agrumes... (Bordignon 2003)

b. Robot multifonction MAGIMIX. 23 functions: chops thinly, crushes, grinds, mixes, homogenizes, emulsifies, blends, whips, kneads, beats, cuts, shreds thin and medium, squeezes citrus fruits ...
Example 13 is also typical in yet another way, in that object omission often occurs with sentences with so-called ‘instrument subjects’ (here the multifunctional food processor). The motivation is that in these cases the focus is indeed on the different actions that the instrument in question can perform or is built to perform. Notice how the last verb in the series in 13, *presser* (‘squeeze’) does not omit its object; and also in English it feels more appropriate to preserve it. The reason is that this use of *squeeze* refers to a specific kind of squeezing and is therefore more specific in its selection of arguments (only citrus fruits) whereas the other verbs do not have such high specificity (basically their Patient can be any food that can be chopped, shredded, etc.).

In some relatively recent papers, Goldberg has also talked about object omission from a construction grammar perspective; she calls it the Deprofiled Object Construction (the *DOC construction*). Fully in line with my earlier analysis (yet independent of it), Goldberg (2001: 514) formulates the principle of Patient Omission under Low Discourse Prominence:

> Omission of the patient argument is possible when the patient argument is construed to be deemphasized in the discourse vis a vis the action. That is, omission is possible when the patient argument is not topical (or focal) in the discourse, and the action is particularly emphasized (via repetition, strong affective stance, discourse topicality, contrastive focus, etc.).

As I have emphasized in my own work as well, the function of the objectless construction is to arrive at an exclusive focus on the action of the Agent, at the expense of the Patient which remains backgrounded and non-specific. As indicated, the objectless construction does not refer to a particular event; it refers to just the action of the Agent (or Instrument) ‘in general’. Goldberg says that in some cases it is even politeness that sanctions the omission of the object, as in the following examples.

(14) a. She contributed $1000 to the Leukemia Foundation. (Goldberg 2001)
b. She contributed to the Leukemia Foundation.

(15) a. *She gave to the girl. (Goldberg 2001)

b. She gave to the Leukemia Foundation.

Omitting the object as in the b-sentences, allows you to say that she has donated without specifying how much she actually gave, which is more polite.

As Goldberg correctly observes, some verbs will more readily allow object omission than others, even when they are semantically closely related. Consider the following examples that she gives to illustrate this.

(16) a. Pat drank/#imbibed last night (Goldberg 2005)

b. Pat read/#perused last night.

c. Pat wrote/#drafted last night.

Despite the semantic similarity, the verbs *drink* and *imbibe*, *read* and *peruse*, and *write* and *draft* do not behave in the same way when it comes to tolerating object omission. Goldberg (2005) explains this as a kind of grammaticalization in the sense that for some verbs, such as *eat*, *drink*, or *sing*, the frequent occurrence in an objectless construction in generic contexts with habitual interpretation (precisely one that sanctions this construction) has led to this construction becoming a lexical option for these verbs. As a result, they could appear intransitively in less constrained contexts. In other words, the objectless uses are reinterpreted as an intransitive lexical option instead of being licensed by specific discourse constraints that motivate the objectless transitive. The idea of a usage-based grammaticalization as argued for by Goldberg provides a unified account of why for some verbs the omission of the object is indeed more common than for others.

In other cases, the semantics of the verb itself may render it more difficult to furnish a context that sanctions an omitted object. This is nicely illustrated by my corpus-based analysis of verbs of killing. Verbs such as *kill*, *murder*, *execute*, *butcher* etc. can be regarded as prototypical
causatives and it should thus be possible to devise contexts that sanction the omission of the object. However, my corpus study shows that while an objectless construction is possible with *kill* (see some examples above) it is less likely with the other verbs of the field like *murder*, *execute*, or *butcher*, except for some isolated occurrences, as in the following examples (drawn from Lemmens 2006a).

(17) a. ‘Maybe he has gone insane,’ said Justin. ‘Of course, in that case, he could have **murdered**, too, I suppose.’

b. And which grants me powers like a god’s, the power to **slay**!

c. Old enough to bleed, old enough to **butcher**.

d. The anguished serial killer turns himself in to police and says, ‘Stop me before I **kill** again.’

Possibly, for verbs such as *assassinate*, *massacre* or *murder* there is a stronger Patient-orientation. In these cases, integrating the semantics of the verb with that of the objectless construction would require greater cognitive effort, which may explain the overall low frequency of the objectless construction in the corpora consulted. The verb *kill*, in contrast, has a less specific semantic structure (not coincidentally, it is the common denominator of this lexical field) which renders it more readily available for this construction.

In sum, the objectless construction implies deprofiling of the object in the context of scenarios that focus on the (habitual) action of the Agent. In addition, it may be more frequent with some verbs rather than with others. However, one aspect that has remained undiscussed in the literature is that there is a more general constraint on the occurrence of the objectless construction, i.e. that it is restricted to the transitive paradigm. Verbs that instantiate the ergative model in principle do not allow the omission of the object. For example, with verbs like *open*, *break*, or *starve*, you can in principle never leave out the object even if you have a syntactic pattern that typically allows it. Consider the following variants of Rice’s examples given in 12 above:
(18) a. 'Hemingway broke too much.

b. Scott opens and closes {doors/ø} like a pro.

c. The freedom-fighting contra rebels kidnap, rape, torture, and ?drown (referring to drowning someone else).

In each of these sentences, object omission is not possible or highly unlikely. Why is this so? Goldberg tries to explain this by drawing further on the lexical properties of the verb. She points out, for instance, that the verb *recycle* generally does not present any problems for the objectless construction (e.g. *That man always recycles*), since '[t]he patient argument, the garbage, is in many contexts less relevant in that we often don't care what particular items are recycled' (Goldberg 2001: 512). However, the situation is quite different, she says, for *break*:

> Bubbles, TVs, breadsticks, and hearts break in very different ways and with very different consequences. The patient argument supplies much of the relevant information. Thus it is hard to imagine a context in which there is a very strong discourse emphasis on the action of breaking and relatively little on what was broken. (ibid.)

Hence, it is generally impossible to omit the object here: *That man always breaks*. While it is clear that *break* generally does not permit the objectless construction, Goldberg's lexical explanation is not entirely correct, since there is a more general explanation for this.

The reason why object omission is not possible in these sentences is that they all instantiate the ergative paradigm. As will be recalled from our earlier description, the ergative construal of an event centers around the Theme which therefore cannot be omitted. The constraint can thus be formulated as follows: if the verb allows the causative alternation (ergative), it will not easily allow the objectless construction (transitive). Again, we cannot formulate this in absolute terms, since, as indicated above, some paradigmatic variation may sometimes occur (with certain verbs).
We should thus complement Goldberg's analysis with a paradigmatic account. In order to test the paradigmatic view, I carried out a corpus study which aims at evaluating whether it is really true that typically ergative verbs such as *starve* or *break* never omit the object. For reasons of space, the discussion here will be limited to these two verbs, which are saliently ergative. Do they allow the object omission or not, and if so, in what kinds of contexts does this occur?

*Starve* is a prototypical ergative verb that allows the non-causative alternation: *The people are starving* vs. *They are starving the people*. In addition, the past-participle constructions reveal the voice ambiguity that is typical of ergative verbs (cf. above): *cash-starved* can have an active reading ('starving for cash') or a passive reading ('being starved of cash'). For *starve*, we have used three sources of corpus material: (i) the corpus material used in Lemmens 1998a, (ii) internet data retrieved via WebCorp, an interface to retrieve concordances from the Internet³, and (iii) data from the British National Corpus (BNC).

<table><caption>**Table 3. Construction types for *starve* in the three corpora**</caption><thead><tr><th>CONSTRUCTION</th><th>1998</th><th>WEBCORP</th><th>BNC</th><th>TOTAL</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>effective</strong></td><td>12<br>16.7%</td><td>13<br>13.8%</td><td>214<br>25.8%</td><td>239<br>24.0%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>non-effective</strong></td><td>39<br>54.2%</td><td>71<br>75.5%</td><td>422<br>51.0%</td><td>532<br>53.6%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>participle</strong></td><td>21<br>29.1%</td><td>10<br>10.7%</td><td>189<br>22.9%</td><td>220<br>22.1%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>objectless</strong></td><td></td><td></td><td>1<br>0.1%</td><td>1<br>0.1%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>ambiguous</strong></td><td></td><td></td><td>2<br>0.2%</td><td>2<br>0.2%</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total N</strong></td><td><strong>72</strong></td><td><strong>94</strong></td><td><strong>828</strong></td><td><strong>994</strong></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Total %</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td><td><strong>100%</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>

As shown in Table 3, there is only one example (on a total of almost 1,000 sentences) of an objectless construction which is the following:
(19) The tyrant was bored. For years he had **starved** and destroyed, tortured and killed. (BNC)

Is 19 a counterexample to our claim that ergative verbs never occur in an objectless construction? Not really. First of all, it only is a counterexample in a model that is set up in absolute terms which is not the case for a usage-based approach to language (see Lecture 2). Secondly, this particular usage of *starve*, while unusual, corresponds to the typical context in which the objectless construction occurs, i.e. that of enumerating (and thereby focusing on) a series of actions (*V* and *V*). The verb *starve* does not fit this constructional context very well, but its meaning and constructional possibilities are adjusted under the influence of the construction in which it occurs. This can be considered as an instance of coercion. This refers to the phenomenon that if a lexical item occurs in a morphosyntactic context with which it is incompatible, then that lexical item will adjust its meaning to that of the constructional context (see, e.g. Lauwers and Willems 2011 on coercion). The classical example of coercion that is being cited to illustrate this is *She sneezed the napkin off the table* where the intransitive verb *sneeze* is coerced into a transitive (caused motion) construction and its meaning changes accordingly ('move by sneezing'). Similarly, in example 19, the brutal actions of the tyrant are presented in a generic way without any reference to specific events, as is also explicitly specified by the adverbial phrase *for years*. The constructional context is actually changing the usual Theme-centered nature of the verb *starve*, aligning it with the other transitive verbs that occur in this sentence (*destroy*, *torture* and *kill*). While such coercion is possibly, the data show that this is highly unusual.

The situation with the verb *break* is actually more complicated. First of all, it is much more frequent verb than *starve* (11,000 examples in the BNC) and it is constructionally more varied. Surely, there are many examples where the ergative model is instantiated (see the next section for more details), but there are many deviating uses. Firstly, there are many occurrences of *break the law/rules/regulations* and the like or *break the*