Bert Cappelle is a lecturer of English linguistics at the University of Lille. He has published a range of journal articles and book chapters, mainly on verb-particle constructions in English. In addition, he has collaborated on research projects in the core grammar areas of tense, aspect and modality. His longer-standing research interests include the linguistic representation of motion and change of state, and the tension between convention and innovation in language use. Address: UFR Angellier Université Lille 3 Domaine universitaire du "Pont de Bois" rue du Barreau BP 60149 59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex FRANCE
Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive ... more Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves as a cautionary note against complacency and dogmatism. It emphasizes the enduring importance of falsifiability as a criterion for scientific hypotheses and theories. Can every postulated construction, in principle, be empirically demonstrated not to exist? As a case study, the author examines the schematic English transitive verb-particle construction, which defies experimental verification. He argues that we can still reject its non-existence using sound linguistic reasoning. But beyond individual constructions, what could be a crucial test for Construction Grammar itself, one that would falsify it as a theory? In making a proposal for such a test, designed to prove that speakers also exhibit pure-form knowledge, this Element contributes to ongoing discussions about Construction Grammar's theoretical foundations.
Depraetere, I., B. Cappelle, M. Hilpert, L. De Cuypere, M. Dehouck, P. Denis, S. Flach, N. Grabar, C. Grandin, T. Hamon, C. Hufeld, B. Leclercq, H.-J. Schmid. Models of Modals: From Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics to Machine Learning. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2023
Modal verbs in English communicate delicate shades of meaning, there being a large range of verbs... more Modal verbs in English communicate delicate shades of meaning, there being a large range of verbs both on the necessity side (must, have to, should, ought to, need, need to) and the possibility side (can, may, could, might, be able to). They therefore constitute excellent test ground to apply and compare different methodologies that can lay bare the factors that drive the speaker’s choice of modal verb. This book is not merely concerned with a purely grammatical description of the use of modal verbs, but aims at advancing our understanding of lexical and grammatical units in general and of linguistic methodologies to explore these. It thus involves a genuine effort to compare, assess and combine a variety of approaches. It complements the leading descriptive qualitative work on modal verbs by testing a diverse range of quantitative methods, while not ignoring qualitative issues pertaining to the semantics-pragmatics interface. Starting from a critical assessment of what constitutes the meaning of modal verbs, different types of empirical studies (usage-based, data-driven and experimental), drawing considerably on the same data sets, shows how method triangulation can contribute to an enhanced understanding. Due attention is also given to individual variation as well as the degree to which modals can predict L2 proficiency level.
Verb-particle constructions, such as English "look out" or "sober up," combine an open-class word... more Verb-particle constructions, such as English "look out" or "sober up," combine an open-class word functioning as a verb and a closed-class word whose primary meaning is locative or directional. Students of English grammar know such combinations by the familiar but often more broadly employed term “phrasal verbs,” while for other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, linguists also use the term “complex verbs”, “compound verbs”, “prefix verbs” or, reflecting that these objects can be split up by other material, “separable (complex) verbs” (versus “inseparable (complex) verbs”). Thus, German "das Licht einschalten" ‘to switch on the light’ can occur separated, as in "ich schaltete das Licht an" ‘I switched the light on’ – a structure that also exists in English. Another term found in the literature is “particle verbs”, which, like “complex/ compound/ prefix/ separable verbs”, betrays the linguist’s conviction that particle and verb potentially, or even basically, form a morphologically complex word rather than a phrase. However, the analysis of particle verbs as single words is under much debate. The term “verb-particle constructions” is non-committal, as “constructions” can be recognized to exist at the level of both word formation and phrasal syntax. In the abbreviation “VPC”, used throughout this article, the C can moreover refer conveniently either to a construction seen as a morphological or syntactic template or to a concrete combination of a specific verb and a specific particle. The precise status of particles remains hard to pin down. They are not ordinary affixes – at least, whoever treats them thus must be able to account for their ability to be separated from the verb. Particles share certain properties with traditionally defined prepositions, with which they may be homophonous (such as "off" in "fall off a cliff"), but they differ from them in not taking a noun phrase complement with which they form a prepositional phrase. Even so, the particle and the preceding direct object noun phrase (e.g. "das Licht an") actually have been analyzed as making up a constituent, a “small clause”. While VPCs are a very common phenomenon in Germanic languages, they are not confined to this one language family. In recent decades, several studies have appeared on VPCs in Romance languages, especially in Italian and its regional varieties. There are also descriptions of VPCs in Uralic languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, and in certain Northern Australian languages, such as Warlpiri. VPCs have been at the center of scholars’ attention in a number of research domains, including theoretical linguistics of various types, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and applied linguistics. This bibliography, which covers a wide range of languages, aims to be of interest to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and active in many different fields.
Cappelle, Bert, Robert Daugs, Stefan Hartmann. 2023. The English privative prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi-: Approximation and ‘disproximation’. Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation 7(1), 52-75. ⟨10.21248/zwjw.2023.1.35⟩, 2023
The English prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi- are privative, in that whatever essential property... more The English prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi- are privative, in that whatever essential property their morphological base expresses is not strictly possessed by an entity characterized as near-/pseudo-/quasi-X. However, we claim this meaning is not precise enough and hypothesize that near- and quasi- are approximative in meaning, whereas pseudo-is 'disproximative', expressing the idea of 'falling short' of a standard. Distributional-semantic findings partially support this, as near- shares more bases with quasi- than it does with pseudo-. Near- is most productive, presenting a default choice, while pseudo- is least productive. We also observe a specific tendency of near- to select bases with negative semantic prosody (near-deadly, near-fatal), of quasi- to combine, without any evaluative meaning, with legal-administrative bases (quasi-diplomatic, quasi-governmental), and of pseudo- with terms from the scientific domain. Further qualitative observations about these prefixes are made.
Cappelle, Bert. 2021. Not-fragments and negative expansion. Constructions and Frames, 13(1), 55-81.
paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such frag... more paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely 'stripping', it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be called 'negative expansion'. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
We argue that a contrastive approach in the classroom can be useful not just to gain a better ins... more We argue that a contrastive approach in the classroom can be useful not just to gain a better insight into the L2 schemas that partially map onto learners' L1schemas in the context of L2 acquisition, but also to bring latent knowledge about the L1 to students' awareness, in the context of translation training.
This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morp... more This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morphology and syntax are distinct components of grammar. In the forty-odd years since its original formulation, this principle has repeatedly come under fire. Phrasal compounds ([[Lexical Integrity] NP Principle] N being an example!) are often adduced as counterevidence, but I here argue that phrases generally don't appear inside compounds and that the principle therefore cannot be so easily discarded. The claim that parts of words cannot be syntactically manipulated has remained relatively unchallenged, which is another reason to uphold some aspects of Lexical Integrity. The separability of particle verbs, though, presents a well-known potential problem. I address recent voices that particle verbs, despite neuroscientific evidence of their lexical status, are not words, maintaining they can be items with word status, given for example their occurrence in the [V the N taboo-word out of NP] construction. A constructionist approach to alternation issues offers a solution to the separability issue, which consists in having schematic particle verb constructions whose grammatical status (and not just word order) is underspecified. As words, particle verbs stay together; as phrases, their parts can separate. To salvage the Lexical (or, better, Morphological) Integrity of words, this paper proposes a principle-a construction-that is a generalization emerging from how we use words.
This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. ... more This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic languages), French (like other Romance languages) is quite constrained in its use of Manner-of-motion verbs. French also lacks true particles – Path satellites without a Ground that can be syntactically detached from the verb. Drawing on some of my previous research, I briefly discuss two simple but apparently sufficiently efficient corpus-based translation studies that reveal that these differences show up when we compare English texts originally written in English with English texts translated from French vs. English texts translated from German (or other Germanic languages). A third, more recent, study contrasts a single English novel with its French and Dutch translations, focusing on expressions of visual motion. Here, too, some of the basic encoding preferences (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed) that these languages exhibit for actual motion appear to apply, by and large, for visual motion. This paper also lists some precursors of Talmy, one of whom is famously linked with the linguistic relativity hypothesis. It is suggested that French, because of its typological nature, may not urge its speakers to convey much detail (neither of Manner nor of Path) in the encoding of motion. It remains an open question, one that goes beyond the purview of corpus linguistics, whether this stylistic difference is matched with a deeper cognitive one.
Bert Cappelle is associate professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He is the... more Bert Cappelle is associate professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He is the author of several articles dealing with linguistic phenomena analyzed in the light of usage-based cognitive Construction Grammar. He defends the idea that a speaker's grammar is constructed gradually. Dr Cappelle has contributed to the study of variation in a socio-constructionist perspective. The concept of allostruction, proposed by him, has been a pillar for the development of research that follows this perspective. We formulated ten questions for the scientist that can assist in the debate, in Brazil, of works related to Construction Grammar.
This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lex... more This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lexically fixed and constructional idioms, including Not if I can help it, Not as long as I. .. and, as a more distant member, Not in a million years. I argue that in these expressions, not is technically a negative proform referring to a contextually salient proposition and that, at least across conversational turns, it reverses the polarity of that clause. However, attempts to reconstruct Not on my watch as a full clause (e.g. This will not happen on my watch) do not do justice to the fact that this phrase is felt to be a single unit, as is witnessed, moreover, by its capacity to trigger subject-auxiliary inversion (e.g. Not on my watch will you be harmed). Functionally, not on my watch and its close relatives do not just emphatically deny a proposition but many of them are also used as a pledge not to let something happen.
This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed ... more This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed to humans, such as beauté/beauty, prudence/carefulness and colère/anger. Previous research showed that while some of these nouns are licensed in both locative existentials (e.g., There's an intense anger in Isabella) and possessive existentials (e.g., Isabella has an intense anger), not all such nouns appear in each of these existential constructions to the same degree of acceptability. These prior findings only partially confirmed the hypothesis that a noun's occurrence in these two types of existentials depends on its degree of conceptual autonomy with respect to the location/possessor. Moreover, what remains unclear is how these and other patterns correlate among themselves depending on how easily they host such nouns. We here use speaker ratings of these nouns in different constructional environments. A principal component analysis suggests that the main dimension underlying native speakers' ratings of these abstract nouns in six different patterns is temporal limitability. This gradable distinction, strongly correlated with the locative existential, holds for both the French and English data and outweighs any French-English contrastive differences in how acceptable human property nouns are considered to be in the patterns studied.
When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receiv... more When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing have to, must, need to and/or should. These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears that have to and need to cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments (e.g., you may have/need to…, expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while should has the largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical Why shouldn't I…?, used as a defiant self-exhortation).
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages 9–42, 2018
Fake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called 'privative' adjective, one which, in... more Fake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called 'privative' adjective, one which, in other words, allows the proposition that '(a) fake x is not (an) x'. This study tests the hypothesis that the contexts of an adjective-noun combination are more different from the contexts of the noun when the adjective is such a 'privative' one than when it is an ordinary (subsective) one. We here use 'embeddings', that is, dense vector representations based on word co-occurrences in a large corpus, which in our study is the entire English Wikipedia as it was in 2013. Comparing the cosine distance between the adjective-noun bigram and single noun embeddings across two sets of adjectives, privative and ordinary ones, we fail to find a noticeable difference. However, we contest that fake is an across-the-board privative adjective, since a fake article, for instance, is most definitely still an article. We extend a recent proposal involving the noun's qualia roles (how an entity is made, what it consists of, what it is used for, etc.) and propose several interpretational types of fake-noun combinations, some but not all of which are privative. These interpretations, which we assign manually to the 100 most frequent fake-noun combinations in the Wikipedia corpus, depend to a large extent on the meaning of the noun, as combinations with similar interpretations tend to involve nouns that are linked in a distributions-based network. When we restrict our focus to the privative uses of fake only, we do detect a slightly enlarged difference between fake + noun bigram and noun distributions compared to the previously obtained average difference between adjective + noun bigram and noun distributions. This result contrasts with negative or even opposite findings reported in the literature.
In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, ... more In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and textual features from both student and professional translation corpora that consist of many different translations by several translators in two different genres (fiction, news) and in two translation directions (English to French and French to Dutch). The numerical information gathered from these corpora is exploratively analysed with Principal Component Analysis, which enables us to identify stable, language-independent linguistic and textual indicators of student translations compared to translations produced by professionals. The differences between these types of translation are subsequently tested by means of ANOVA. The results clearly indicate that the proposed methodology is indeed capable of distinguishing between student and professional translations. It is claimed that this deviant behaviour indicates an overall lower translation quality in student translations: student translations tend to score lower at the acceptability level, that is, they deviate significantly from target-language norms and conventions. In addition, the proposed methodology is capable of assessing the acceptability of an individual student's translation – a smaller linguistic distance between a given student translation and the norm set by the professional translations correlates with higher quality. The methodology is also able to provide objective and concrete feedback about the divergent linguistic dimensions in their text.
This study provided ERP and anatomical evidence that particle verbs are processed as whole forms,... more This study provided ERP and anatomical evidence that particle verbs are processed as whole forms, even when they are discontinuous and in permuted order, rather than combinatorially mediated.
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.
In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation c... more In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation can be fruitfully integrated within a constructionist approach. We discuss in detail a number of cases from the Simpsons where a modal verb, as part of a longer expression, has a short-circuited interpretation, that is, where it is conventionally associated with a context-specific modal semantic value and, in some cases, with added pragmatic information. Short-circuitedness is evidenced by the humorous effect that is obtained when a character wilfully or unknowingly ignores standard aspects of interpretation of such a modal verb construction.
Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive ... more Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves as a cautionary note against complacency and dogmatism. It emphasizes the enduring importance of falsifiability as a criterion for scientific hypotheses and theories. Can every postulated construction, in principle, be empirically demonstrated not to exist? As a case study, the author examines the schematic English transitive verb-particle construction, which defies experimental verification. He argues that we can still reject its non-existence using sound linguistic reasoning. But beyond individual constructions, what could be a crucial test for Construction Grammar itself, one that would falsify it as a theory? In making a proposal for such a test, designed to prove that speakers also exhibit pure-form knowledge, this Element contributes to ongoing discussions about Construction Grammar's theoretical foundations.
Depraetere, I., B. Cappelle, M. Hilpert, L. De Cuypere, M. Dehouck, P. Denis, S. Flach, N. Grabar, C. Grandin, T. Hamon, C. Hufeld, B. Leclercq, H.-J. Schmid. Models of Modals: From Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics to Machine Learning. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2023
Modal verbs in English communicate delicate shades of meaning, there being a large range of verbs... more Modal verbs in English communicate delicate shades of meaning, there being a large range of verbs both on the necessity side (must, have to, should, ought to, need, need to) and the possibility side (can, may, could, might, be able to). They therefore constitute excellent test ground to apply and compare different methodologies that can lay bare the factors that drive the speaker’s choice of modal verb. This book is not merely concerned with a purely grammatical description of the use of modal verbs, but aims at advancing our understanding of lexical and grammatical units in general and of linguistic methodologies to explore these. It thus involves a genuine effort to compare, assess and combine a variety of approaches. It complements the leading descriptive qualitative work on modal verbs by testing a diverse range of quantitative methods, while not ignoring qualitative issues pertaining to the semantics-pragmatics interface. Starting from a critical assessment of what constitutes the meaning of modal verbs, different types of empirical studies (usage-based, data-driven and experimental), drawing considerably on the same data sets, shows how method triangulation can contribute to an enhanced understanding. Due attention is also given to individual variation as well as the degree to which modals can predict L2 proficiency level.
Verb-particle constructions, such as English "look out" or "sober up," combine an open-class word... more Verb-particle constructions, such as English "look out" or "sober up," combine an open-class word functioning as a verb and a closed-class word whose primary meaning is locative or directional. Students of English grammar know such combinations by the familiar but often more broadly employed term “phrasal verbs,” while for other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, linguists also use the term “complex verbs”, “compound verbs”, “prefix verbs” or, reflecting that these objects can be split up by other material, “separable (complex) verbs” (versus “inseparable (complex) verbs”). Thus, German "das Licht einschalten" ‘to switch on the light’ can occur separated, as in "ich schaltete das Licht an" ‘I switched the light on’ – a structure that also exists in English. Another term found in the literature is “particle verbs”, which, like “complex/ compound/ prefix/ separable verbs”, betrays the linguist’s conviction that particle and verb potentially, or even basically, form a morphologically complex word rather than a phrase. However, the analysis of particle verbs as single words is under much debate. The term “verb-particle constructions” is non-committal, as “constructions” can be recognized to exist at the level of both word formation and phrasal syntax. In the abbreviation “VPC”, used throughout this article, the C can moreover refer conveniently either to a construction seen as a morphological or syntactic template or to a concrete combination of a specific verb and a specific particle. The precise status of particles remains hard to pin down. They are not ordinary affixes – at least, whoever treats them thus must be able to account for their ability to be separated from the verb. Particles share certain properties with traditionally defined prepositions, with which they may be homophonous (such as "off" in "fall off a cliff"), but they differ from them in not taking a noun phrase complement with which they form a prepositional phrase. Even so, the particle and the preceding direct object noun phrase (e.g. "das Licht an") actually have been analyzed as making up a constituent, a “small clause”. While VPCs are a very common phenomenon in Germanic languages, they are not confined to this one language family. In recent decades, several studies have appeared on VPCs in Romance languages, especially in Italian and its regional varieties. There are also descriptions of VPCs in Uralic languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, and in certain Northern Australian languages, such as Warlpiri. VPCs have been at the center of scholars’ attention in a number of research domains, including theoretical linguistics of various types, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and applied linguistics. This bibliography, which covers a wide range of languages, aims to be of interest to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and active in many different fields.
Cappelle, Bert, Robert Daugs, Stefan Hartmann. 2023. The English privative prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi-: Approximation and ‘disproximation’. Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation 7(1), 52-75. ⟨10.21248/zwjw.2023.1.35⟩, 2023
The English prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi- are privative, in that whatever essential property... more The English prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi- are privative, in that whatever essential property their morphological base expresses is not strictly possessed by an entity characterized as near-/pseudo-/quasi-X. However, we claim this meaning is not precise enough and hypothesize that near- and quasi- are approximative in meaning, whereas pseudo-is 'disproximative', expressing the idea of 'falling short' of a standard. Distributional-semantic findings partially support this, as near- shares more bases with quasi- than it does with pseudo-. Near- is most productive, presenting a default choice, while pseudo- is least productive. We also observe a specific tendency of near- to select bases with negative semantic prosody (near-deadly, near-fatal), of quasi- to combine, without any evaluative meaning, with legal-administrative bases (quasi-diplomatic, quasi-governmental), and of pseudo- with terms from the scientific domain. Further qualitative observations about these prefixes are made.
Cappelle, Bert. 2021. Not-fragments and negative expansion. Constructions and Frames, 13(1), 55-81.
paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such frag... more paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely 'stripping', it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be called 'negative expansion'. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
We argue that a contrastive approach in the classroom can be useful not just to gain a better ins... more We argue that a contrastive approach in the classroom can be useful not just to gain a better insight into the L2 schemas that partially map onto learners' L1schemas in the context of L2 acquisition, but also to bring latent knowledge about the L1 to students' awareness, in the context of translation training.
This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morp... more This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morphology and syntax are distinct components of grammar. In the forty-odd years since its original formulation, this principle has repeatedly come under fire. Phrasal compounds ([[Lexical Integrity] NP Principle] N being an example!) are often adduced as counterevidence, but I here argue that phrases generally don't appear inside compounds and that the principle therefore cannot be so easily discarded. The claim that parts of words cannot be syntactically manipulated has remained relatively unchallenged, which is another reason to uphold some aspects of Lexical Integrity. The separability of particle verbs, though, presents a well-known potential problem. I address recent voices that particle verbs, despite neuroscientific evidence of their lexical status, are not words, maintaining they can be items with word status, given for example their occurrence in the [V the N taboo-word out of NP] construction. A constructionist approach to alternation issues offers a solution to the separability issue, which consists in having schematic particle verb constructions whose grammatical status (and not just word order) is underspecified. As words, particle verbs stay together; as phrases, their parts can separate. To salvage the Lexical (or, better, Morphological) Integrity of words, this paper proposes a principle-a construction-that is a generalization emerging from how we use words.
This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. ... more This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic languages), French (like other Romance languages) is quite constrained in its use of Manner-of-motion verbs. French also lacks true particles – Path satellites without a Ground that can be syntactically detached from the verb. Drawing on some of my previous research, I briefly discuss two simple but apparently sufficiently efficient corpus-based translation studies that reveal that these differences show up when we compare English texts originally written in English with English texts translated from French vs. English texts translated from German (or other Germanic languages). A third, more recent, study contrasts a single English novel with its French and Dutch translations, focusing on expressions of visual motion. Here, too, some of the basic encoding preferences (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed) that these languages exhibit for actual motion appear to apply, by and large, for visual motion. This paper also lists some precursors of Talmy, one of whom is famously linked with the linguistic relativity hypothesis. It is suggested that French, because of its typological nature, may not urge its speakers to convey much detail (neither of Manner nor of Path) in the encoding of motion. It remains an open question, one that goes beyond the purview of corpus linguistics, whether this stylistic difference is matched with a deeper cognitive one.
Bert Cappelle is associate professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He is the... more Bert Cappelle is associate professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He is the author of several articles dealing with linguistic phenomena analyzed in the light of usage-based cognitive Construction Grammar. He defends the idea that a speaker's grammar is constructed gradually. Dr Cappelle has contributed to the study of variation in a socio-constructionist perspective. The concept of allostruction, proposed by him, has been a pillar for the development of research that follows this perspective. We formulated ten questions for the scientist that can assist in the debate, in Brazil, of works related to Construction Grammar.
This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lex... more This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lexically fixed and constructional idioms, including Not if I can help it, Not as long as I. .. and, as a more distant member, Not in a million years. I argue that in these expressions, not is technically a negative proform referring to a contextually salient proposition and that, at least across conversational turns, it reverses the polarity of that clause. However, attempts to reconstruct Not on my watch as a full clause (e.g. This will not happen on my watch) do not do justice to the fact that this phrase is felt to be a single unit, as is witnessed, moreover, by its capacity to trigger subject-auxiliary inversion (e.g. Not on my watch will you be harmed). Functionally, not on my watch and its close relatives do not just emphatically deny a proposition but many of them are also used as a pledge not to let something happen.
This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed ... more This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed to humans, such as beauté/beauty, prudence/carefulness and colère/anger. Previous research showed that while some of these nouns are licensed in both locative existentials (e.g., There's an intense anger in Isabella) and possessive existentials (e.g., Isabella has an intense anger), not all such nouns appear in each of these existential constructions to the same degree of acceptability. These prior findings only partially confirmed the hypothesis that a noun's occurrence in these two types of existentials depends on its degree of conceptual autonomy with respect to the location/possessor. Moreover, what remains unclear is how these and other patterns correlate among themselves depending on how easily they host such nouns. We here use speaker ratings of these nouns in different constructional environments. A principal component analysis suggests that the main dimension underlying native speakers' ratings of these abstract nouns in six different patterns is temporal limitability. This gradable distinction, strongly correlated with the locative existential, holds for both the French and English data and outweighs any French-English contrastive differences in how acceptable human property nouns are considered to be in the patterns studied.
When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receiv... more When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing have to, must, need to and/or should. These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears that have to and need to cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments (e.g., you may have/need to…, expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while should has the largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical Why shouldn't I…?, used as a defiant self-exhortation).
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages 9–42, 2018
Fake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called 'privative' adjective, one which, in... more Fake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called 'privative' adjective, one which, in other words, allows the proposition that '(a) fake x is not (an) x'. This study tests the hypothesis that the contexts of an adjective-noun combination are more different from the contexts of the noun when the adjective is such a 'privative' one than when it is an ordinary (subsective) one. We here use 'embeddings', that is, dense vector representations based on word co-occurrences in a large corpus, which in our study is the entire English Wikipedia as it was in 2013. Comparing the cosine distance between the adjective-noun bigram and single noun embeddings across two sets of adjectives, privative and ordinary ones, we fail to find a noticeable difference. However, we contest that fake is an across-the-board privative adjective, since a fake article, for instance, is most definitely still an article. We extend a recent proposal involving the noun's qualia roles (how an entity is made, what it consists of, what it is used for, etc.) and propose several interpretational types of fake-noun combinations, some but not all of which are privative. These interpretations, which we assign manually to the 100 most frequent fake-noun combinations in the Wikipedia corpus, depend to a large extent on the meaning of the noun, as combinations with similar interpretations tend to involve nouns that are linked in a distributions-based network. When we restrict our focus to the privative uses of fake only, we do detect a slightly enlarged difference between fake + noun bigram and noun distributions compared to the previously obtained average difference between adjective + noun bigram and noun distributions. This result contrasts with negative or even opposite findings reported in the literature.
In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, ... more In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and textual features from both student and professional translation corpora that consist of many different translations by several translators in two different genres (fiction, news) and in two translation directions (English to French and French to Dutch). The numerical information gathered from these corpora is exploratively analysed with Principal Component Analysis, which enables us to identify stable, language-independent linguistic and textual indicators of student translations compared to translations produced by professionals. The differences between these types of translation are subsequently tested by means of ANOVA. The results clearly indicate that the proposed methodology is indeed capable of distinguishing between student and professional translations. It is claimed that this deviant behaviour indicates an overall lower translation quality in student translations: student translations tend to score lower at the acceptability level, that is, they deviate significantly from target-language norms and conventions. In addition, the proposed methodology is capable of assessing the acceptability of an individual student's translation – a smaller linguistic distance between a given student translation and the norm set by the professional translations correlates with higher quality. The methodology is also able to provide objective and concrete feedback about the divergent linguistic dimensions in their text.
This study provided ERP and anatomical evidence that particle verbs are processed as whole forms,... more This study provided ERP and anatomical evidence that particle verbs are processed as whole forms, even when they are discontinuous and in permuted order, rather than combinatorially mediated.
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.
In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation c... more In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation can be fruitfully integrated within a constructionist approach. We discuss in detail a number of cases from the Simpsons where a modal verb, as part of a longer expression, has a short-circuited interpretation, that is, where it is conventionally associated with a context-specific modal semantic value and, in some cases, with added pragmatic information. Short-circuitedness is evidenced by the humorous effect that is obtained when a character wilfully or unknowingly ignores standard aspects of interpretation of such a modal verb construction.
We here revisit the 'let alone' construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put... more We here revisit the 'let alone' construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put Construction Grammar on the map. Our focus is on a seemingly aberrant use where the first conjunct does not entail the restored second conjunct, as in 'I don't have ten children, let alone one'. We argue that this use should not be considered as a highly exceptional speech error or as evidence that some speakers wrongly assume that the first proposition is the entailed one. First, a systematic examination of 'let alone' examples extracted from the BNC and COCA shows that it is not exceedingly rare, as does a growing collection of authentic examples we have collected over the years. Second, it constitutes a usage type in its own right, whereby the first proposition has most contextual relevance and the second conjunct is represented by the speaker as an apophasis-like afterthought. There are transitional cases between the two types (canonical and afterthought), where both conjuncts have considerable relevance. For contemporary speakers, the afterthought use may require extraction of a general pattern with bleached semantics and pragmatics, possibly re-filled in with specific information.
Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Words also exist in a world: On the pattern ‘X’ does not exist; it’s called ‘Y’. In: Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena (eds.), Existential Constructions across Languages. Forms, Meanings and Functions. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 325-345., 2023
sequences of the type 'X' does not exist-its correct name is ' Y' use descriptive negation in the... more sequences of the type 'X' does not exist-its correct name is ' Y' use descriptive negation in the first clause but also have something literally contradictory about them that is reminiscent of metalinguistic negation. I argue that the negative existential in such clause sequences exhibits a use-mention mix without blending descriptive and metalinguistic negation. The apparent contradiction can be resolved by acknowledging that words are not abstract labels lacking any substantial existence but also have a concrete reality in a 'world of words'. Speakers often use the clause sequence studied here as a rhetorical device to point out that other speakers, for whom a word has currency, have a flawed view of the non-linguistic world.
Cappelle, Bert, Pâmela Fagundes Travassos. 2022. Taking a look at the support verb construction V a look: A demonstration of methodology. Marcia dos Santos Machado Vieira. Predicar: Uma Rede de Perspectivas Metodológicas, Blucher Open Access, pp. 57-91., 2022
The first aim of this chapter is to get a grasp of the have/take a look support verb construction... more The first aim of this chapter is to get a grasp of the have/take a look support verb construction in English. A support verb construction is one where a general-purpose verb (a ‘light verb’), which is mainly restricted to carrying tense and aspect information, combines with a noun phrase whose head is semantically richer than the verb; together, the verb and the noun phrase express a certain action. Our second and no less important aim is to demonstrate how we can map a relatively small area of lexico-grammar like this one by using a widely available corpus tool: the corpus interface created by Mark Davies. We thereby hope to give students and linguists new to corpus linguistics a glimpse of how much can be achieved with relatively little import of tool-external processing of the data – although we will also give a practical introduction to some of the many things the statistical tool R has to offer. Finally, we will attempt to integrate our empirical findings with some theoretical reflection about how lexico-grammatical knowledge is organized.
Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance langu... more Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance language than if the source language is a Germanic one? This chapter sets out to answer that question. In a subcorpus of English fictional texts translated from Romance languages, up, out and down, which represent phrasal verb use rather well, are indeed underused when compared with non-translated English fiction from the British NationalCorpus, while no significant difference is to be found for this set of items between non-translated English and English translated from Germanic languages. This finding is strong evidence for source-language interference, as Romance languages on the whole do not have close equivalents to phrasal verbs, while Germanic languages do. This effect appears stronger than any source-language-independent translation universal that could in principle have played a role, such as normalization (exaggerated use of phrasal verbs, which are typical of the English language) or levelling-out (avoidance of phrasal verbs, which are generally felt to be rather colloquial).A comparison of French prefixed verbs with morphologically simplex ones in Le Petit Prince further shows that the former are more likely to be translated by phrasal verbs than the latter, again supporting source-language influence, as phrasal verbs resemble prefixed verbs in being composed of a verb and an added element. Our study thus stresses the relevance of taking into account typological differences (and similarities) between source and target language in translation studies.
Cappelle, Bert. 2020. Looking into visual motion expressions in Dutch, English and French: How languages stick to well-trodden typological paths. Yo Matsumoto and Kazuhiro Kawachi (eds.) Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions (pp. 235-279). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
This study investigates visual motion expressions in Dutch, English, and French. As a translation... more This study investigates visual motion expressions in Dutch, English, and French. As a translation corpus, I use Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Witches, which abounds in staring and peeping events, and its Dutch and French translations. Based on the hypothesis that languages’ constructional repertoires for physical motion are exploited for visual motion, one can predict, correctly, that Dutch uses its syntactically wide variety of path complement types in the domain of visual motion. It is tempting to assume that French, lacking looking verbs expressing path, would lose its generally verb-framed nature in visual motion descriptions. However, French appears to preserve some of its typological identity, by using causative path verbs such as lever ‘raise’ combined with an object meaning ‘one’s eyes/gaze’. In keeping with its verb-framed nature, French uses fewer visual path complements than Dutch and English, but it does have, and frequently uses, manner-of-vision expressions.
Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance langu... more Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance language than if the source language is a Germanic one? This chapter sets out to answer that question. In a subcorpus of English fictional texts translated from Romance languages, up, out and down, which represent phrasal verb use rather well, are indeed underused when compared with non-translated English fiction from the British National Corpus, while no significant difference is to be found for this set of items between non-translated English and English translated from Germanic languages. This finding is strong evidence for source-language interference, as Romance languages on the whole do not have close equivalents to phrasal verbs, while Germanic languages do. This effect appears stronger than any source-language-independent translation universal that could in principle have played a role, such as normalization (exaggerated use of phrasal verbs, which are typical of the English language) or levelling-out (avoidance of phrasal verbs, which are generally felt to be rather colloquial). A comparison of French prefixed verbs with morphologically simplex ones in Le Petit Prince further shows that the former are more likely to be translated by phrasal verbs than the latter, again supporting source-language influence, as phrasal verbs resemble prefixed verbs in being composed of a verb and an added element. Our study thus stresses the relevance of taking into account typological differences (and similarities) between source and target language in translation studies.
This chapter argues against a view according to which pragmatics, as opposed to semantics, is com... more 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.
In this chapter, it is shown how we can develop a new type of learner’s or student’s grammar base... more In this chapter, it is shown how we can develop a new type of learner’s or student’s grammar based on n-grams (sequences of 2 or 3, 4, etc. items) automatically extracted from a large cor-pus, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The notion of n-gram and its primary role in statistical language modelling is first discussed. The part-of-speech (POS) tag-ging provided for lexical n-grams in COCA is then demonstrated to be useful for the identifica-tion of frequent structural strings in the corpus. We propose using the hundred most frequent POS-based 5-grams as the content around which an ‘n-grammar’ of English can be constructed. We counter some obvious objections to this approach (e.g. that these patterns only scratch the surface, or that they display much overlap among them) and describe extra features for this grammar, relating to the patterns’ productivity, corpus dispersion, functional description and practice potential.
Taal is bij uitstek een middel om anderen ervan te overtuigen dat onze beweringen zinvol zijn, on... more Taal is bij uitstek een middel om anderen ervan te overtuigen dat onze beweringen zinvol zijn, onze acties gerechtvaardigd. Vandaar de neiging van talen om bestaande bijwoorden te rekruteren als partikels die hun nut bewijzen bij het argumenteren. Zoiets is gebeurd met tenslotte en met het Engelse after all, die oorspronkelijk tijdsaanduidend waren ('ten laatste') maar ondertussen vooral optreden in uitingen die dienen ter verantwoording van onze woorden of daden – denk aan 'want hij is tenslotte onze baas' of 'I'm only human after all'. En zo verliep het ook met nu eenmaal: 'Taal dient nu eenmaal om te argumenteren'.
Er zijn van die soepele woorden in onze taal. Een daarvan is kwestie. In de Dikke Van Dale, net a... more Er zijn van die soepele woorden in onze taal. Een daarvan is kwestie. In de Dikke Van Dale, net als in andere woordenboeken, wordt kwestie vermeld als een zelfstandig naamwoord, maar in de omgangstaal heeft kwestie ook gebruiksvormen die doen denken aan andere woordsoorten.
De Belgische atleten deden het afgelopen zomer niet slecht in Rio. Ze behaalden twee gouden en ev... more De Belgische atleten deden het afgelopen zomer niet slecht in Rio. Ze behaalden twee gouden en evenveel zilveren en bronzen medailles. Het was al van de Olympische Spelen in Atlanta geleden, twintig jaar ervoor, dat België nog eens zulke resultaten had neergezet. Deze verwezenlijkingen zijn allereerst op het conto van de atleten zelf te schrijven, maar toch, 'winnen doe je nooit alleen'. Zo staat het op de officiële website van het Belgisch Olympisch en Interfederaal Comité, het BOIC, dat goed begrepen heeft dat je een land maar kunt enthousiasmeren voor de Olympische Spelen als je een sterk merk in huis haalt: Team Belgium.
Bert Cappelle. 2016. Beter dan verwachte resultaten. Over Taal 55(4), 12-13.
[Lead of article in lieu of abstract] Nu het geld op spaarboekjes bijna niets meer opbrengt, gaan... more [Lead of article in lieu of abstract] Nu het geld op spaarboekjes bijna niets meer opbrengt, gaan sommigen op zoek naar alterna-tieve vormen van beleggen. Dan lonken de aandelenmarkten, met hun naar verluidt historisch bewezen mooie rendementen voor al wie beschikt over een buffertje spaarcenten en een dosis koelbloedigheid. Maar is de beurs wel iets voor een logisch denkende taalkundige? Misschien wel niet, want al die nieuwsflashes over 'beter dan verwachte' of 'slechter dan verwachte' be-drijfsresultaten leiden af. Niet alleen van het te verrichten taalkundig onderzoek – ja, dat dus ook – maar, door hun vorm, vooral van de berichtgeving zelf.
Bert Cappelle and Roland Noske. 2016. Vind jij dit kunnen? Over Taal 55(3), 12-13.
[Intro in lieu of abstract] 'Ik vind dat niet kunnen – razend populaire frase in gesproken en ges... more [Intro in lieu of abstract] 'Ik vind dat niet kunnen – razend populaire frase in gesproken en geschreven pers, maar vertel mij nu eens, Sjapelle, in termen van zinsconstructie: moet ik dat vinden kunnen?' Op deze retorische vraag gesteld door een vriend, Pieter Leenknegt, antwoordde de hier alfabetisch als eerste gerangschikte auteur: 'Ik vind dat eveneens redelijk aanzetten tot kotsen'. De coauteur, gedomicilieerd in Amsterdam, gebruikt die constructie naar eigen zeggen al minstens veertig jaar. Met z'n tweeën een bijdrage schrijven over een constructie waarover we nogal grondig van mening verschillen, komt dat wel goed? Straks wordt ons gedeelde kantoor misschien wel te klein voor ons beiden.
Bert Cappelle. 2016. West-Vlaams voor vluchtelingen, met 5 grammaticaregels ter inburgering. Over Taal 55(2), 12-13.
Het West-Vlaams wordt in Unesco's atlas van bedreigde talen in de wereld als kwetsbaar bestempeld... more Het West-Vlaams wordt in Unesco's atlas van bedreigde talen in de wereld als kwetsbaar bestempeld. Er zijn wel nog anderhalf miljoen sprekers, maar met de recente instroom van vluchtelingen in onze kustprovincie kan je geen risico nemen. Van de gouverneur mogen we illegalen geen voedsel bedelen omdat dit alleen maar nog meer vluchtelingen aantrekt, als betrof het meeuwen op het strand. Maar kunnen we ze geen lessen West-Vlaams geven? Want al willen de meeste vluchtelingen West-Vlaanderen snel verlaten om de levensgevaarlijke oversteek naar Engeland te wagen, sommigen zijn misschien hier om te blijven.
Bert Cappelle. 2016. Vaste slapers en vroege boekers: bijvoeglijke naamwoorden zijn soms bijwoordelijk. Over Taal 55(1), 12-13.
Je hebt van die mensen die hun acht uurtjes slaap niet laten onderbreken door welk straatlawaai, ... more Je hebt van die mensen die hun acht uurtjes slaap niet laten onderbreken door welk straatlawaai, nachtelijk onweer of bedpartnergewoel dan ook en die 's morgens door het alarmsignaal van hun wekker heen plegen te ronken. Zulke mensen noemen we vaste slapers. Maar dat zijn geen slapers die vast zijn, wel mensen die niet gauw wakker worden, die dus vast slapen. Vroege boekers zijn ook geen boekers die vroeg zijn – het woord boeker staat zelfs niet in de Dikke Van Dale. Het zijn mensen die hun vakantieverblijf of transportticket vroeg boeken. Sommige bijvoeglijke naamwoorden hebben dus een bijwoordelijke interpretatie.
This article shows how the Flemish celebrity psychiatrist Dirk De Wachter makes the most of rules... more This article shows how the Flemish celebrity psychiatrist Dirk De Wachter makes the most of rules of Dutch word formation and recategorization, especially to create stative nouns.
Negative existence is special. Just because Western European languages lack a dedicated general c... more Negative existence is special. Just because Western European languages lack a dedicated general construction for it, this doesn't mean that negative existential sentences in Dutch, English, French or German behave just like positive ones or that there aren't any negative existential sentences without a positive counterpart -- there isn't a shadow of a doubt about that.
When we want to talk about an entity moving along a path in a particular way, the language we spe... more When we want to talk about an entity moving along a path in a particular way, the language we speak nudges us into certain encoding choices. Speakers of Dutch or English often rely on a particle to express information related to the path of motion. Speakers of French or Spanish typically express this information in the verb root itself. Wide attention has been given to Leonard Talmy’s (1972, 1985, 1991, 2000) work on such differences in ‘lexicalisation patterns’ between languages. While Talmy is credited with the familiar typological distinction between ‘satellite-framed’ and ‘verb-framed’ languages across the world, we should not ignore Strohmeyer (1910), Sapir and Swadesh (1932), Bergh (1940, 1948), Malblanc (1944), Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and Tesnière (1959) as precursors to systematic comparisons of motion expressions in some Germanic and Romance languages. It is especially surprising that Sapir's work is hardly ever mentioned.
In this talk, I will first argue that English and French are not as perfectly satellite-framed and verb-framed, respectively, as these languages are often assumed to be. In line with the view that French prefixed verbs (e.g. re·venir) may represent a satellite-framed encoding strategy (cf., inter alia, Pourcel and Kopecka 2006), such verbs in a French source text trigger a particle verb as translation more readily than do non-prefixed French source verbs, as reported in Cappelle and Loock (2017). Nonetheless, one cannot deny that French and English, given their general typological nature, differ in the basic structures they put at speakers’ disposal to express change of location or change of state. As the same study reveals, a clear trace of this difference is found in the much lower number of particle verbs in English texts translated from French compared to English texts translated from German.
English texts translated from a Romance language also contain fewer manner-of-motion verbs than English texts translated from another Germanic language (Cappelle 2012). This finding weakens Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s (in press: 1) generalization that “[a]cross languages, clauses containing descriptions of similar events are likely to include the same conceptual components (...)” . These authors acknowledge, though, that manner information is often omitted in motion event descriptions where path is lexicalized in the verb. I will demonstrate that translations into a single source language can show the impact of different source languages’ typological natures – and, in the words of Slobin (1996), of their concomitant different ‘rhetorical styles’.
Finally, I will suggest some steps towards using corpora to explore the expression of visual motion events, which involve ‘fictive’ or actual movement of the gaze from the eyes to a perceived object or from one object to another. In a forthcoming paper (Cappelle to appear 2019), I show that when expressing such events, speakers of Dutch, English and French largely hold on to the encoding habits they exhibit for expressing the movement of concrete entities, despite French lacking verbs that conflate the act of looking with path of looking (Matsumoto 2001, Slobin 2009).
Our aim is to provide a meaning-based account of the there/have alternation. To this end, we will... more Our aim is to provide a meaning-based account of the there/have alternation. To this end, we will examine three possible scenarios: (i) the one in which only the locative existential is possible (e.g. There's a man in your garden / *Your garden has a man), (ii) the one in which only the possessive existential is possible (e.g. *There's a round shape in our coffee table / Our coffee table has a round shape), and (iii) the one in which the two constructions alternate (e.g. There's an electric engine in this car / This car has an electric engine). Our approach is largely qualitative, based on web-(at)tested examples from a small sample of languages varying in relatedness (±Germanic; ±Indo-European): English (there vs. have), Dutch (er vs. hebben), French (il y a vs. avoir) and Standard Arabic (ṯammata vs. (kāna) ladā). Our guiding hypothesis is that the choice between the locative and the possessive existential is closely linked with the conceptual autonomy of the existential theme (i.e. what is posited to exist) relative to its location or the whole it is a part of.
Bert Cappelle, Edwige Dugas, Maarten Lemmens and Vera Tobin. 2014. An afterthought on let alone. Handout of a paper presented at the Eighth International Construction Grammar Conference (ICCG-8), University of Osnabrück, 3-6 September 2014.
We here revisit the let alone construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put C... more We here revisit the let alone construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put Construction Grammar on the map. Our focus is on a seemingly aberrant use where the first conjunct does not entail the restored second conjunct, as in I don’t have ten children, let alone one. We argue that this use should not be considered as a highly exceptional speech error or as evidence that some speakers wrongly assume that the first proposition is the entailed one. First, a systematic examination of let alone examples extracted from the BNC and COCA shows that it is not exceedingly rare, as does a growing collection of authentic examples we have collected over the years. Second, it constitutes a usage type in its own right, whereby the first proposition has most contextual relevance and the second conjunct is represented by the speaker as an apophasis-like afterthought. For contemporary speakers, the afterthought use may require extraction of a general pattern with bleached semantics and pragmatics, possibly re-filled in with specific information.
Our use of expressions such as apparent paradox, false teeth, fake orgasm and the like seems to i... more Our use of expressions such as apparent paradox, false teeth, fake orgasm and the like seems to imply that there are objects which are and are not a certain thing. It will be argued that this apparent paradox paradox is only an apparent one. Drawing on insights from mental space theory, polyphony, conversational pragmatics and frame semantics, I will adopt and adapt a recent proposal of how best to deal with privative adjectives like fake, false and fictitious. A central notion in my account is that of perspective-taking, which may help us to solve a wide range of puzzling phenomena, including the problem of negative existentials, as in “Unicorns do not exist”, where we predicate the non-existence of something but in doing so presuppose its existence, and possibly even the most fiendish of all paradoxes, the Liar paradox: “This statement is not true” – if what this sentence says about itself is true, it is not a true statement; but if it is not true, it is a true statement after all.
Here is a simplistic view of constructions which cannot be attributed to any particular scholar b... more Here is a simplistic view of constructions which cannot be attributed to any particular scholar but which is implicit in much work in linguistics and therefore deserves to be identified as such: Constructions are units linking form with meaning. The meaning of a construction can be called its semantics. While one may more broadly speak of a construction’s ‘function’ instead of its meaning, constructional semantics is to be distinguished from pragmatics. This latter notion necessarily falls outside of a construction, given that it deals with how the context in which the construction happens to be used may also contribute to its meaning, perhaps better called its ‘interpretation’. This view is problematic, because some constructions have pragmatic content built into them. In this paper, I will therefore attempt to provide a more satisfactory view of constructions. The approach taken here is qualitative and theoretical. The chapter does not focus on one particular empirical phenomenon but surveys a range of pragmatic areas (inferences based on Gricean maxims, information structure, etc.), with the aim of examining if, and how, different pragmatic tiers of information could be integrated into a description of constructions. In particular, I will examine how pragmatics can be handled by a theory of form-function linking known as Construction Grammar. A major question to be resolved is how much pragmatic information speakers have to store in their long-term memory and how much they can just figure out. Interpretations which are in principle computable may nonetheless be ‘short-circuited’. A familiar example is the request interpretation of Can you X? But how can we know whether language users, when hearing such a pattern, draw on a stored interpretation rather than compute that interpretation afresh on each encounter? We will see that as ‘ordinary’ linguists, we can often circumvent psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic experiments designed to probe speakers’ memorized pragmatic knowledge, by applying some simple cross- and intralinguistic heuristics.
Distinctions in English grammar: offered to …, 2010
Ga onmiddellijk naar paginanavigatie. As of July 1st 2010, only records submitted with full text ... more Ga onmiddellijk naar paginanavigatie. As of July 1st 2010, only records submitted with full text will be accepted in the academic bibliography. more info. Error: You do not have the rights to download this document. Paginanavigatie. ...
L’apprentissage de la deuxième langue (L2) est un processus progressif dans lequel l’apprenant am... more L’apprentissage de la deuxième langue (L2) est un processus progressif dans lequel l’apprenant améliore sa maîtrise au fur et à mesure de l’apprentissage. L’analyse de productions d’apprenants intéresse les chercheurs et les enseignants car cela permet d’avoir une meilleure idée des difficultés et les facilités d’apprentissage et de faire des programmes didactiques plus adaptés. Cela peut également donner des indications sur les difficultés cognitives à maîtriser les notions grammaticales abstraites dans une nouvelle langue. Nous proposons de travailler sur un corpus de productions langagières d’apprenants d’anglais provenant de différents pays et donc ayant différentes langues maternelles (L1). Notre objectif consiste à catégoriser ces productions langagières selon six niveaux de langue (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2). Nous utilisons différents ensembles de descripteurs, y compris les verbes et expressions modaux. Nous obtenons des résultats intéressants pour cette catégorisation multicla...
The aim of this presentation is to discuss the linguistic features of machine-translated texts in... more The aim of this presentation is to discuss the linguistic features of machine-translated texts in comparison with original texts in order to uncover what has been called “machine translationese” (e.g. Daems et al. 2017). Using a corpus-based statistical approach, namely, the Principal Component Analysis technique, 4 MT systems have been investigated for English to French translations of press texts: 1 Statistical MT (SMT) and 3 Neural MT (NMT) systems, namely DeepL, Google Translate, and the European Commission’s eTranslation MT tool, in both its SMT and NMT versions. In particular, to complement a previous study on language-specific features (e.g. derived adverbs, existential constructions, coordinator et, preposition avec, see Loock 2018), a series of language-independent linguistic features were extracted for each text, ranging from superficial text characteristics such as the average word and sentence length, to frequencies of closed-class lexical categories and measures of lexi...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Mar 1, 2015
Our aim is to provide a meaning-based account of the there/have alternation. To this end, we will... more Our aim is to provide a meaning-based account of the there/have alternation. To this end, we will examine three possible scenarios: (i) the one in which only the locative existential is possible (e.g. There's a man in your garden / *Your garden has a man), (ii) the one in which only the possessive existential is possible (e.g. *There's a round shape in our coffee table / Our coffee table has a round shape), and (iii) the one in which the two constructions alternate (e.g. There's an electric engine in this car / This car has an electric engine). Our approach is largely qualitative, based on web-(at)tested examples from a small sample of languages varying in relatedness (±Germanic; ±Indo-European): English (there vs. have), Dutch (er vs. hebben), French (il y a vs. avoir) and Standard Arabic (ṯammata vs. (kāna) ladā). Our guiding hypothesis is that the choice between the locative and the possessive existential is closely linked with the conceptual autonomy of the existential theme (i.e. what is posited to exist) relative to its location or the whole it is a part of.
Dutch and French share a construction in which an element X occurs in a reduplicative coordinatio... more Dutch and French share a construction in which an element X occurs in a reduplicative coordination pattern: [X maar dan ook X] (lit. 'X but then also X') in Dutch and [X mais alors X] (lit. 'X but then X') in French (for Dutch, see Hoeksema (2001) and Cappelle (2012)). In both languages, this pattern can be used to put emphasis on X: (1) wij hebben alles maar dan ook alles gedaan om die mensen goed te begeleiden (... ) (CGN, shortened) 'lit. We have done everything but then also everything to guide these people appropriately' (2) je ne comprends pas les Wallons mais alors pas-du-tout (Valibel, shortened) 'lit. I do not understand the Walloons but then really not' Since these patterns combine a fixed sequence (maar dan ook / mais alors) with a variable element X (a (universal) quantifier, a degree adverb, an adjective, etc.) and since their emphatic meaning is not (entirely) predictable from their components, they seem to act like constructional idioms...
Super mais alors super interessant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an emphatic mea... more Super mais alors super interessant! Reduplicative coordination constructions with an emphatic meaning in (spoken) French and Dutch French and Dutch share a construction in which an element X occurs in a reduplicative coordination pattern: [X mais alors X] (lit. 'X but then X') in French and [X maar dan ook X] (lit. 'X but then also X') in Dutch (for Dutch, see Hoeksema (2001) and Cappelle (2012)). In both languages, this pattern can be used to put emphasis on X: (1) je ne comprends pas les la W/ les Wallons mais alors pas-du-tout (Valibel) 'I do not understand the Walloons but then really not ' (2) wij hebben alles maar dan ook alles gedaan om die mensen goed te begeleiden (... ) (CGN, shortened) 'We have done everything but then also everything to guide these people appropriately' Since these patterns combine a fixed sequence (mais alors / maar dan ook) with a variable element X (a (universal) quantifier, a degree adverb, an adjective, etc.) and sinc...
This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed ... more This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed to humans, such as beauty, carefulness and anger. Previous research showed that some but not all of these nouns are licensed in both locative existentials (e.g., There’s an intense anger in Isabella) and possessive existentials (e.g., Isabella has an intense anger). What remains unclear is how these and other patterns correlate among themselves depending on how easily they host such nouns. We here use speaker ratings of these nouns in different constructional environments. A principal component analysis suggests that the main dimension underlying native speakers’ ratings of these abstract nouns in six different patterns is temporal limitability. This gradable distinction, strongly correlated with the locative existential, holds for both the French and English data and outweighs any French-English contrastive differences in how acceptable human property nouns are considered to be in the patterns studied.
This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such... more This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely ‘stripping’, it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be called ‘negative expansion’. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
The English modals should and ought to seem to be largely interchangeable(Palmer 1990; cf. simi... more The English modals should and ought to seem to be largely interchangeable(Palmer 1990; cf. similar sentiments in Coates 1983: 69; Quirk et al. 1985: 227; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 186). Some proposals for possible distinctions have nonetheless been made, ...
This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. ... more This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic languages), French (like other Romance languages) is quite constrained in its use of Manner-of-motion verbs. French also lacks true particles – Path satellites without a Ground that can be syntactically detached from the verb. Drawing on some of my previous research, I briefly discuss two simple but apparently sufficiently efficient corpus -based translation studies that reveal that these differences show up when we compare English texts originally written in English with English texts translated from French vs. English texts translated from German (or other Germanic languages). A third, more recent, study contrasts a single English novel with...
Nu het geld op spaarboekjes bijna niets meer opbrengt, gaan sommigen op zoek naar alterna-tieve v... more Nu het geld op spaarboekjes bijna niets meer opbrengt, gaan sommigen op zoek naar alterna-tieve vormen van beleggen. Dan lonken de aandelenmarkten, met hun naar verluidt historisch bewezen mooie rendementen voor al wie beschikt over een buffertje spaarcenten en een dosis koelbloedigheid. Maar is de beurs wel iets voor een logisch denkende taalkundige? Misschien wel niet, want al die nieuwsflashes over 'beter dan verwachte' of 'slechter dan verwachte' be-drijfsresultaten leiden af. Niet alleen van het te verrichten taalkundig onderzoek – ja, dat dus ook – maar, door hun vorm, vooral van de berichtgeving zelf.
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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.
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.
In this talk, I will first argue that English and French are not as perfectly satellite-framed and verb-framed, respectively, as these languages are often assumed to be. In line with the view that French prefixed verbs (e.g. re·venir) may represent a satellite-framed encoding strategy (cf., inter alia, Pourcel and Kopecka 2006), such verbs in a French source text trigger a particle verb as translation more readily than do non-prefixed French source verbs, as reported in Cappelle and Loock (2017). Nonetheless, one cannot deny that French and English, given their general typological nature, differ in the basic structures they put at speakers’ disposal to express change of location or change of state. As the same study reveals, a clear trace of this difference is found in the much lower number of particle verbs in English texts translated from French compared to English texts translated from German.
English texts translated from a Romance language also contain fewer manner-of-motion verbs than English texts translated from another Germanic language (Cappelle 2012). This finding weakens Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s (in press: 1) generalization that “[a]cross languages, clauses containing descriptions of similar events are likely to include the same conceptual components (...)” . These authors acknowledge, though, that manner information is often omitted in motion event descriptions where path is lexicalized in the verb. I will demonstrate that translations into a single source language can show the impact of different source languages’ typological natures – and, in the words of Slobin (1996), of their concomitant different ‘rhetorical styles’.
Finally, I will suggest some steps towards using corpora to explore the expression of visual motion events, which involve ‘fictive’ or actual movement of the gaze from the eyes to a perceived object or from one object to another. In a forthcoming paper (Cappelle to appear 2019), I show that when expressing such events, speakers of Dutch, English and French largely hold on to the encoding habits they exhibit for expressing the movement of concrete entities, despite French lacking verbs that conflate the act of looking with path of looking (Matsumoto 2001, Slobin 2009).
which is implicit in much work in linguistics and therefore deserves to be identified as such:
Constructions are units linking form with meaning. The meaning of a construction can be called
its semantics. While one may more broadly speak of a construction’s ‘function’ instead of its
meaning, constructional semantics is to be distinguished from pragmatics. This latter notion
necessarily falls outside of a construction, given that it deals with how the context in which the
construction happens to be used may also contribute to its meaning, perhaps better called its
‘interpretation’.
This view is problematic, because some constructions have pragmatic content built into them. In this
paper, I will therefore attempt to provide a more satisfactory view of constructions. The approach
taken here is qualitative and theoretical. The chapter does not focus on one particular empirical
phenomenon but surveys a range of pragmatic areas (inferences based on Gricean maxims,
information structure, etc.), with the aim of examining if, and how, different pragmatic tiers of
information could be integrated into a description of constructions. In particular, I will examine how
pragmatics can be handled by a theory of form-function linking known as Construction Grammar.
A major question to be resolved is how much pragmatic information speakers have to store in their
long-term memory and how much they can just figure out. Interpretations which are in principle
computable may nonetheless be ‘short-circuited’. A familiar example is the request interpretation of
Can you X? But how can we know whether language users, when hearing such a pattern, draw on a
stored interpretation rather than compute that interpretation afresh on each encounter? We will see
that as ‘ordinary’ linguists, we can often circumvent psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic experiments
designed to probe speakers’ memorized pragmatic knowledge, by applying some simple cross- and
intralinguistic heuristics.