Karolina Krawczak

Usage-based cognitive-functional linguistics: From theory to method and back again

This special issue grew out of a theme session organized at the Societas Linguistica Europaea conference in Poznań in 2014. The focus of this session was on the interface between linguistic theories and methods and, more specifically, on how current empirical methods, especially those employed in usagebased linguistics, should inform and, ultimately, advance linguistic theory. With this underlying question, the present collection brings together corpus-based research in areas such as construction grammar (Hennemann; Krawczak et al.; Pijpops and Van de Velde), historical linguistics (Barteld et al.), semantics (Glynn), and typology (Levshina). It also includes a survey article addressing the cognitive plausibility of statistical classification modeling applied to observational and experimental data (Klavan and Divjak) and arguing for the need to combine the two in order to refine explanatory models. The empirical turn in linguistics is well documented (Geeraerts 2006; Stefanowitsch 2008; Fischer 2010; Glynn 2014b). Within Cognitive-Functional linguistics alone, there has been a substantial increase in the use of corpusbased quantitative methods, covering multiple domains. Morpho-syntactic phenomena have been addressed by Wulff (2003), Gries et al. (2005), Goldberg (2006), Hilpert (2008a, 2008b, 2013), Levshina (2012), Krawczak and Glynn (2015), and many others. Quantitative research in semantics can be exemplified by the work of Geeraerts et al. (1994), Schmid (2000), Gries (2006), Divjak and Gries (2006), Glynn (2009, 2014a), Divjak (2010), Fabiszak et al. (2014), and Krawczak (2014). Among sociolinguistic explorations in Cognitive Linguistics that employ quantitative methods, we could mention Szmrecsanyi (2005), Heylen et al. (2008), and

A corpus-based, cross-linguistic approach to mental predicates and their complementation: Performativity and descriptivity vis-à-vis boundedness and picturability

Abstract This corpus-based study investigates the complementation patterns of mental predicates in a cross-linguistic context. More precisely, it examines five equivalent mental verbs from English, German, and Polish and analyzes whether their complements are cognitively construed in different ways in first-person uses of those verbs as opposed to third-person uses. Two types of complementation are considered: we contrast nominal complements with clausal complements. Based on the results of prior studies into Polish myśleć ‘think’ and wierzyć ‘believe’, we hypothesize that first-person singular occurrences of mental predicates will be more readily associated with clausal complements designating non-bounded and non-picturable objects. Conversely, third-person uses of the verbs are expected to be linked to nominal complements that denote bounded and picturable objects. The hypotheses are tested with bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques. Our results have both descriptive and theoretical implications. Descriptively, we aim to identify the differences in construing the complement of mental predicates, depending on the grammatical person of the syntactic subject. Theoretically, we provide empirical evidence that is relevant for the long-recognized distinction between performativity and descriptivity of mental verbs.