Bert Cappelle

What’s pragmatics doing outside constructions?

This chapter argues against a view according to which pragmatics, as opposed to semantics, is completely outside grammar. It suggests that, on the contrary, speakers strongly associate various pragmatic aspects of information with constructions. I here give an overview of a wide range of pragmatic phenomena as they have been dealt with in Construction Grammar, a linguistic framework which, as a matter of principle, accommodates pragmatic information in the description of stored form-function units. Such information includes Gricean maxims, information structure, illocutionary force and larger discourse structure. However, Construction Grammarians have been rather vague on what kind of (presumably) pragmatic data should and should not be included in a construction and whether or not, within a given construction, pragmatics and semantics constitute separate layers of information. I demonstrate a heuristic based on cross-linguistic or intra-linguistic comparison of functionally similar constructions (e.g. Can you ... ? and Are you able to ... ?) to decide whether we should explicitly specify ‘short-circuited’ usage information (e.g. the request use of Can you ... ?) that could in principle be obtained purely on the basis of sound reasoning. I also propose that semantics and pragmatics should be treated as distinct levels of functional information in constructions.

Spread the word: MMN brain response reveals whole-form access of discontinuous particle verbs

HighlightsThe MMN distinguishes whole‐form access from combinatorial processes.The MMN indicates that discontinuous particle verbs are accessed as single lexical wholes.The cortical sources were in areas associated with lexical/semantic storage.Implications for linguistic theory extensively discussed. Abstract The status of particle verbs such as rise (…) up as either lexically stored or combinatorially assembled is an issue which so far has not been settled decisively. In this study, we use the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response to observe neurophysiological responses to discontinuous particle verbs. The MMN can be used to distinguish between whole‐form storage and combinatorial processes, as it is enhanced to stored words compared to unknown pseudowords, whereas combinatorially legal strings elicit a reduced MMN relative to ungrammatical ones. Earlier work had found larger MMNs to congruent than to incongruent verb‐particle combinations when particle and verb appeared as adjacent elements, thus suggesting whole‐form storage at least in this case. However, it is still possible that particle verbs discontinuously spread out across a sentence would elicit the combinatorial, grammar‐violation response pattern instead. Here, we tested the brain signatures of discontinuous verb‐particle combinations, orthogonally varying congruence and semantic transparency. The results show for the first time brain indices of whole‐form storage for discontinuous constituents, thus arguing in favour of access to whole‐form‐stored lexical elements in the processing of particle verbs, irrespective of their semantic opacity. Results are discussed in the context of linguistic debates about the status of particle verbs as words, lexical elements or syntactically generated combinations. The explanation of the pattern of results within a neurobiological language model is highlighted.

Stefan Thim, 2012. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History (Topics inEnglish Linguistics 78). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. xiv + 302. ISBN 978-3-11-025702-1.

‘How ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really?’ and how did this highly familiar but often ill-described construction evolve ‘from its early history up to the present’? (p. 1). Thim’s book, which may be considered less as an ambitious empirical investigation of the topic than as a competent critical survey of its literature, aims at answering these two questions. That these questions are intertwined is clear from the answers they receive in this work. First, the phrasal verb is not very special to English. While the term phrasal verb ‘is rarely ever used except with respect to English’ (p. 2), Thim points out, as many scholars have done before him, that there are close parallels to be found in other languages, most notably in the other present-day Germanic languages. For instance, the German prefix verb aufgeben ‘give up’ may occur as two separate words, with the prefix auf (a cognate of up) even obligatorily split from the verb by a Direct Object noun phrase (e.g. Sie gab ihre Arbeit auf ‘She gave up her job’). Thim further cites examples of particle verbs from Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish, as well as from Afrikaans, Faroese, Icelandic and Yiddish, to support the claim that the English verb-particle construction is certainly not an isolated language-specific phenomenon. Second, these close parallels then help Thim answer the question about the evolution of the ‘English’ phrasal verb, whose origin can be traced back at least to Proto-Germanic. In Indo-European languages more generally, Thim reminds us, prefix verbs and particle verbs have developed out of adverb-verb sequences. And in fact, in various languages belonging to genetically more distant families, particle-like verb prefixes, or ‘preverbs’, have formed out of adverbs, typically derived themselves from previously independent relational nouns. English may look special in that particles now standardly follow the verb, leaving aside exceptional structures of the type In came a strange figure (more on which below). However, in Old English, and still in early Middle English, particles could appear in both preverbal and postverbal position, depending to some extent on clause type (subordinate or main) and finiteness, rather like the separable prefixes we encounter in Continental West-Germanic languages such as present-day Dutch or German. Thim strongly rejects the widespread misconception ‘that there must have been a ‘rise’ of the phrasal verb’ (p. 145), that is, that the phrasal verb was a Middle English or later innovation which superseded an earlier pattern, one with inseparable prefixes. Rather, Thim argues, the apparent emergence of postverbal particles in English is nothing but an epiphenomenon of independent, wellestablished changes in the language system, the most important of which is the long-term shift from basic O(bject)V(erb) order in Proto-Germanic to VO order in Modern English. In Old English, the oldest order, Object – particle – Verb, was typically found in subordinate clauses and occasionally still in main clauses. When the verb started to occupy the second position in clauses (‘V2 movement’), unstressed preverbs that had fused with the verb stem moved along with it as inseparable prefixes. By contrast, preverbs carrying stress (‘particles’) remained independent and stayed behind in final position when the verb itself moved leftward. It was first the finite verb (v) which moved (O prt V v → v O prt V), causing a clausal brace with the non-finite main verb (v … V), but the latter subsequently rejoined the finite verb in a process known as exbraciation (v O prt V → v V O prt). Extraposition of especially heavy objects may have played a role in dissolving the brace and further yielded the alternative structure with the particle immediately following the verb (v V prt O).

On the status of intervening think-clauses in English long-distance dependency constructions

In each of these examples there is a dependency relation between the missing element, marked __, and the italicised word or words earlier in the sentence it is co-indexed with. In each example, the gap and its antecedent are separated by an intervening clause, hence the term ‘long-distance’ dependency. An alternative term is ‘unbounded’ dependency, which reflects the fact that the distance between the gap and its antecedent can in principle be made infinitely long by adding multiple intervening clauses, e.g. What do you think he told his wife his boss suspects he will try to do? The first two sentences in (1) are examples of a wh-dependency construction; (1a) is a wh-question, also called an open interrogative, while (1b) is a wh-relative. The third sentence is an example of a preposing construction. Standard generative grammar assumes that the antecedent in all three constructions originates in the position represented by the gap. In (1a), for example, the question word what is said to have been “extracted” out of that position, as a result of which it has come to occupy the leftmost position in what is analysed as a higher-ordered clause. In the minimalist program, where moves are kept as short as possible, long-distance dependencies arise through