Albert Gatt LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics

In this lecture Some more on corpora and grammar Construction Grammar as a theoretical framework Collostructional analysis

Part 1 Constructions and construction grammar

Some things we’ve established Grammatical constructions (“rules”) enter into non-arbitrary relations with words. Collocational frameworks The “idiom” principle vs the “open choice” principle Collexeme and colligation analysis Both of these are about the extent to which specific syntactic frames and words “attract” eachother: Collocational frameworks: [a N of]: nouns tend to be quantities (number etc) Colligation: consequence tends to occur surrounded by a and of...

Some things we’ve established We can think of grammatical constructions as falling on a continuum from complex, abstract constructions to lexical items. Constructions themselves have meaning: E.g. It-object construction People find it hard to exist in a drug-free world. a stereotyped way of presenting a situation in terms of how it is evaluated evaluation is placed after the verb The words used in constructions are important clues to identifying their meaning and use: E.g. 98% of verbs in the it- construction are find and make

Construction grammar Theoretical framework that views syntactic “rules” as: Combinations of linguistic entities (words, phrases) With semantic/pragmatic properties that are not fully predictable from their parts. Constructions are represented as complex frames, with slots for specific lexical items. They also have meanings. They restrict the classes of lexical items that can enter the construction: a word is permitted in the construction if its meaning is compatible with the construction meaning.

Example: the ditransitive alternation Verbs like give can enter into two semantically similar, but syntactically quite different constructions: Ditransitive: A give X Y E.g. John give Mary a book Prepositional dative: A give Y to X E.g. John give a book to Mary Do these constructions mean slightly different things? Hypothesis: The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) “John transferred a book from himself to Mary” The prepositional dative involves caused movement “John caused a book to go to Mary”

Example: the ditransitive alternation Hypothesis: The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) in a face to face situation The prepositional dative involves caused movement from one location to another If this hypothesis is correct, then we should observe: More verbs that have a “direct transfer” meaning in the ditransitive. E.g. give More verbs that have a “caused movement” meaning in the prepositional dative E.g. bring

Example 2: Covariational conditional English: The Xer the Yer “The more the merrier” “The more I think about it the weirder it seems” Note: X/Y can be single lexemes, clauses.... Maltese: Iktar ma X, iktar Y Iktar ma na ħ seb, inqas nifhem More restricted: X and Y need to be clauses (or at least verbs) Interestingly: X has a negation particle “ma”, but this is not interpreted negatively. Meaning/function: Specifying that there is a link between two elements or variables (X and Y).

Exploring these in corpora Recent work in Corpus Linguistics has proposed Collostructional Analysis: Based on the same assumptions as Construction Grammar Grammatical structures viewed as meaningful units Focuses on the relationship between lexis and grammatical constructions, but is more sophisticated than collocational frameworks.

Collostructional analysis Usually asks questions of the form: is X strongly attracted to Y? E.g. Is the verb give strongly attracted to the ditransitive construction? This is usually done in one of three ways: Collexeme analysis Distinctive collexeme analysis Covarying collexeme analysis

Part 2 Collexeme analysis

Basic idea Question: Given some construction G, what kinds of words can I find in slot S of G? E.g. Ditransitive: [V NP NP] What verbs can enter this construction? (I.e. Is there a special restriction on what we can find?) Given a particular construction, find all occurrences of the construction in the corpus. For the slot of interest, look at the lexical items that occur there. Compare their frequency: are there differences between the items in the likelihood with which they occur in the same construction?

Practical task 1 Run a CQL search for the ditransitive construction. Specify that: You want any one of these verbs: give, bring, make, tell, ask The verb should be followed by two NPs For our purposes, you can specify the NP pattern as something consisting of: An determiner A noun

Practical task 1 After you’ve run your query, create a frequency list of the node forms. You will need to identify the “real” ditransitives from the others. Pay particular attention to the verbs. Do they form a coherent semantic class? Do you find that some verbs are more likely to occur in this construction than others? Would you say that these verbs are more “attracted” to this construction than others? Based on the verb meanings, what evidence do you find for the hypothesis that the construction involves direct transfer?

Some data (from Gries 2009) Strongly attracted to the ditransitive: Give, tell, send, ask, promise, earn These seem to be strong “collexemes” of the ditransitive construction Less attracted (though possible): Make, do

Part 3 Distinctive collexeme analysis

Distinctive collexemes Rather than checking if a word is associated with a specific construction, here we compare the occurrence of a word in two different (but related) constructions. E.g. We know that give allows the dative alternation: Give X Y Give Y to X Are we more likely to find it in one or the other?

Practical task 2 Conduct a query for the verb give: In the ditransitive construction: give + NP + NP In the to-dative construction: give NP to NP Look at the results. Do you see a difference in the distribution? Why is this the case? Do the same for the verb supply. Do you notice any differences?

The point The point of distinctive collexeme analysis is to identify the “attraction” between specific lexical items and constructions. For two related constructions: If there is evidence of a strong degree of attraction between a lexical item and one of them, that suggests that the item “fits” the semantic restrictions of the construction very well. But how do we explain the difference, where it exists? It’s the same lexical item, why should it “prefer” one construction vs another? The most likely explanation seems to be that the two constructions, though similar, have different semantic properties.

Part 4 Covarying collexeme analysis

Here, we are no longer focusing on the relationship between a word and a construction, but between different words within the same construction. This is similar to what we do with collocations, but here, we’re taking more grammatical information into account.

The method Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP] This contains a slot for an agent, a verb, a recipient and a theme The second post-verb NP (the theme) is the entity undergoing the action. Therefore, we would expect there to be a strong affinity between the verb and the theme. (I.e. The verb should place strong semantic restrictions on what kind of theme we can have).

Example Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP] NP ask NP NP What sort of noun would you expect in the second post- verbal NP? What about: NP tell NP NP

Practical task 3 Search for the verb ask in the ditransitive construction Count how many times the second (theme) post-verbal NP is headed by the noun question. Now search for the noun question as the object of any other verb in the ditransitive, i.e. a pattern of the form: Verb NP [the/a question] How many times does question occur as an object of a verb other than ask? What other verbs do you find?

The point These examples suggest that there is a strong tendency for words to “attract” eachother within a specific grammatical construction Note that this goes further than simple collocational analysis: With collocations, we’re looking at words that co-occur within a specific distance With covarying collexemes, we’re looking at words that co- occur in specific slots within the same construction.

A final practical task In SketchEngine, click Word Sketch on the left menu Word sketches give you a list of the grammatical environments in which words occur with significant frequency. Look for the nouns question and story Look specifically at the object_of relation What do you conclude about the differences between them? (Follow this up by looking at other grammatical relations within the word sketch for each word).