Concessive conditionals as a family of constructions

This squib sketches an approach to concessive conditionals (CCs) from the perspective of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). It brings earlier functional-typological work on CCs to bear on language-particular constructionist analyses of CCs, using the notions of ‘family (of constructions)’ and ‘prototype’ as a bridge. After suggesting how these notions can be applied to CCs under a functional-typological approach, the structure of the CC sub-constructicon in German is discussed, and directions for future research are offered to round the squib off.

Maximizing the explanatory power of constructions in cognitive construction grammar(s)

This squib suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.

Sensing the (media) city

This article, originally delivered at the 16th international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (University of Dundee, November 2019), seeks to engage with the ‘emotive’, ‘sensorial’ and ‘affective turn’, as defined by authors in the humanities, social and cultural studies in order to consider the emotional responses to the mediated experiences of place and to inquire into how individuals and collectives react to a changing sensory environment. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that blends historical, cultural and mediated dimensions of urban spaces and places while maintaining a focus on the kind of locative/interactive art which is less concerned with representation and more with radical construction, social engagement and communication. The purpose is to try and provide an answer to the question: what does ‘sensing the city’ exactly entail when the city’s form, as Baudelaire memorably put it, ‘changes faster than the human heart?’

The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives: evidence from phonology

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail.

Antipassive constructions: Correlations of form and function across languages

This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar. Based on function, this study identifies constructions in 70 languages from 25 language families and four geographical macro areas. Iconically motivated correlations were found between functions and the morphosyntactic strategies they employ. The results of this study suggest that constructions indicating the lower individuation of patients and constructions indicating the lower affectedness of patients, previously grouped together as ‘antipassive’, should be considered two separate construction types. This is based on their separate functions, the distinct morphosyntactic strategies used to encode them across languages, and differences in productivity with regard to semantic classes of verbs.