Papers by Susanne Flach
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2018
Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis 43 Natalia Levshina Anybody ... more Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis 43 Natalia Levshina Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door 71 Stefan Hartmann Divergent theories, converging evidence: The constructional semantics of competing future constructions 91 Beate Hampe and Stefan Th. Gries Syntax from and for discourse II: More on complex sentences as meso-constructions 115 Anatol Stefanowitsch The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach 143 Hans-Jörg Schmid Unifying entrenched tokens and schematized types as routinized commonalities of linguistic experience 167 Hubert Cuyckens Reconciling older and newer approaches to grammaticalization 183
Cognitive Linguistics
A tight connection between competence and performance is a central tenet of the usage-based model... more A tight connection between competence and performance is a central tenet of the usage-based model. Methodologically, however, corpus frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability – a phenomenon known as the “frequency/acceptability mismatch”. This article argues that the mismatch arises from a “methodological mismatch”, when simple frequency measures are mapped onto complex grammatical units. To illustrate, we discuss the results of acceptability judgments of go/come- v. The construction is subject to a formal constraint (Go see the doctor! vs. *He goes sees the doctor), which results from its mandative semantics (directives, commissives). While a formal model makes no prediction with regard to gradient acceptability of bare (“grammatical”) go/come-v, the usage-based view assumes that acceptability is a function of compatibility with an abstract schema. The experimental ratings are compared with a number of corpus-derived measures: while acceptability is largely independent of (raw...
English Language and Linguistics
How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? ... more How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms such had/’d better, would/’d rather or might (as) well are seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly, will probably) or not (could also, might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv) is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types of mod + adv is a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the sco...
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association
This article addresses the morphological constraint on the ‘formulaic frame’ be-sure-and-v (Be su... more This article addresses the morphological constraint on the ‘formulaic frame’ be-sure-and-v (Be sure and wear flowers in your hair!), whose idiomatic reading disappears in inflected uses (*She was sure and wore flower in her hair). This constraint also applies to certain verbal patterns (go/come-v, try-and-v) and is at least probabilistic for others (wait and see, go-and-v). A recent usagebased approach suggests that the so-called Bare Stem Condition follows from the semantics of the affected patterns, which are schematically non-assertive and thus functionally inappropriate for use in inflected, assertive environments. The same can be shown to apply to hortative be-sure-and-v, suggesting that the morphological behaviour of both verbal and adjectival pseudo-coordination have the same underlying functional-semantic constraint motivation. Supporting evidence comes from the status of be-sure-and-v relative to instantiations of the pattern: rather than being an idiosyncratic, isolated id...
Diachronica. International Journal for Historical Linguistics
In this paper we propose an alternative scenario for the grammaticalization of passive constructi... more In this paper we propose an alternative scenario for the grammaticalization of passive constructions in German and English. According to the received view, the development starts with the frequent combinations of copula verbs with past participles, which then increasingly gain in frequency during the grammaticalization process. In contrast to the received view, we argue that marginal – i.e., atypical and infrequent – constellations of constructions play an important role in the grammaticalization process. These constellations are ambiguous in their interpretation, and consequently have an inherent potential to trigger semantic reinterpretation and syntactic reanalysis. The alternative scenario is more consistent with theoretical considerations and the patterns in corpus data of German and English between 1050 and 1350. Our paper supports the hypothesis that the grammaticalization of the passive in German started from constellations of the become copula with past participles of ateli...
Zusammenfassung: Das praxonymbildende Konfix -gate zur Benennung von Skandalen nimmt sowohl im De... more Zusammenfassung: Das praxonymbildende Konfix -gate zur Benennung von Skandalen nimmt sowohl im Deutschen als auch im Englischen einen Sonderstatus ein: Es ist in beiden Sprachen eines der wenigen onymischen Wortbildungselemente und hat eine hohe Produktivität. Dennoch wurde das Konfix bislang in der Onomastik nicht, in der Wortbildung nur unsystematisch erforscht und diskutiert. Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass -gate nach der politisch brisanten Watergate-Affäre in den 1970er Jahren zunächst für größere politische Skandale, heute jedoch überwiegend zur Benennung trivialer und medial aufgebauschter Skandale verwendet wird (Eierlikör-Gate, Watsch'n-Gate), gehen wir in diesem Beitrag linguistischen Fragen dieser Trivialisierung nach. Dazu fokussiert unsere korpusbasierte Analyse auf die diachrone Entwicklung der verwendeten Erstglieder (Onyme vs. Appellative), sowie die Korrelation dieser Benennungsstrategien mit unterschiedlichen Skandaltypen (politisch, gesellschaftlich, boulevardesk) und diskutiert Parallelen und Divergenzen zwischen beiden Sprachen. Als Konfix mit besonders hoher Onymizität weist -gate Vorteile gegenüber weniger onymischen Konkurrenzbezeichnungen (-affäre/-skandal) auf, da auch Ereignisnamen mit appellativischen Erstgliedern eindeutig als Praxonyme erkennbar sind. Appellativische Erstglieder sind wiederum besonders geeignet für triviale Skandale. Direkte Folge der Trivialisierung ist ein deutlicher Typenanstieg bei niedriger Tokenfrequenz. Die semantischen Entwicklungen sind in beiden Sprachen zu beobachten, verlaufen im Deutschen allerdings sichtbar zeitlich verzögert. Die Hauptunterschiede liegen in der deutlicheren Trivialisierung von -gate im Deutschen einerseits, sowie einer weniger ausgeprägten Korrelation von Appellativen und Trivialität im Englischen andererseits; letzteres kann darauf zurückgeführt werden, dass Appellative im Englischen vor allem in den 1990er der Unterscheidung zwischen einer Vielzahl an politischen Skandalen dienten. Insgesamt lassen sich so an -gate relevante Fragestellungen sowohl der Onomastik, als auch der Wortbildungs-und Lehnwortforschung diskutieren.
The English go-VERB construction as in I go get the paper every morning is said to be subject to ... more The English go-VERB construction as in I go get the paper every morning is said to be subject to the BARE STEM CONDITION, which states that neither verb can bear inflection (thus resulting in the ungrammaticality of *she went see/saw a doctor). Studies that address the constraint attribute it to underlying formal parameters, without paying attention to functional properties and/or usage events. The fact that we find occasional violations of the constraint in large amounts of data raises the question of the systematicity of this data and how to account for it. Arguing from a usage-based perspective, this paper assumes that the entrenched schema of go-VERB is hortatory (e.g., commands, advice, invitations), which make inflectional variants increasingly unlikely for semantic-functional reasons. But where exceptions do occur, they are assumed to occur in contexts predicted by the construction’s semantics. These assumptions are borne out by data from a large corpus of web data. Potential counterexamples are tested for systematicity vs. random noise in (web) data using collostructional analysis and simple correlation measurements. The central arguments are thus (i) that the BARE STEM CONDITION is better conceived of as the result of go-VERB’s constructional semantics, and (ii) that rare exceptions can be framed in terms of likelihood of occurrence and distance from the licensing schema.
Books by Susanne Flach
The two English serial verb constructions, go-VERB and come-VERB, are subject to a peculiar morph... more The two English serial verb constructions, go-VERB and come-VERB, are subject to a peculiar morphological restriction, called the Bare Stem Condition. The constraint states that neither the verb in V1 nor its directly adjacent dependent verb in V2 can (or does) occur with (overt) inflection (<i>Go see a doctor!</i>, They invited him to come visit them, but *She goes sees a doctor, *They were going playing golf). The constraint is near-unique to English; it is non-predictable from other rules or patterns of English grammar and without any obvious systemic motivation. Due to its apparent arbitrariness, the constraint has mainly been approached from formal and parametric perspectives.
By contrast, the current approach takes a usage-based view and argues that the constraint is functionally conditioned by the constructions' semantics and the make-up of the English morphological paradigm. On the one hand, the constructions show a notable preference for directive-commissive functions (orders, commands, invitations, recommendations, suggestions, etc.), arguing that go/come-VERB have a hortative schema core. On the other hand, such non-assertive propositions in English are encoded using bare verb forms (imperatives, infinitival complements). The skew towards bare form, albeit motivated, is thus seen as an (historical) accident, which is contemporarily highly conventionalized and entrenched.
Methodologically, the approach suggests a syntactic co-location approach (“You shall know a construction by the company it keeps”), inferring constructional semantics by distributional preferences of co-occurrence with leftward syntactic units (e.g., imperatives, (semi)modals, let's-constructions, speech act verbs). The usage of go/come-VERB is investigated in four case studies of constraint violation, network relations (viz. go/come-and-VERB), diachronic development, and schema acquisition. The evidence suggests that an explanatory attempt of a seemingly arbitrary formal constraint is possible without recourse to innate linguistic knowledge.
Conference Presentations by Susanne Flach
In this paper, we call into question both the applicability and the usefulness of the notion of o... more In this paper, we call into question both the applicability and the usefulness of the notion of obligatoriness by arguing that the use of the progressive is far more systematic in earlier stages of English. Differences in usage patterns are slighter than often assumed; and where they occur, they can be attributed to changes in either individual (lexical) items or changes in constructional semantics. To this end, this talk will take a corpus-driven, collostructional approach to Early and Late Modern English data, by looking at changes in association patterns between lexis and constructions. These patterns of course change (and so does the construction), but the results does not readily lend support to the non-obligatory vs. obligatory dichotomy. Rather, we argue that there is much more to be gained in terms of identifying explanatory factors by taking a bottom-up approach and avoiding the notion of obligatoriness altogether.
Stiefkinder der Onomastik, 15.-17. September 2014.
International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) 18 14–17 July 2014, KU Leuven
Theme Section “Web Data as a Challenge for Theoretical Linguistics and Corpus Design”
36. Jahres... more Theme Section “Web Data as a Challenge for Theoretical Linguistics and Corpus Design”
36. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) 5–7 March 2014
Theme Section “Language & Text“
Digital Humanities Australasia 2014: Expanding Horizons, 18–21 M... more Theme Section “Language & Text“
Digital Humanities Australasia 2014: Expanding Horizons, 18–21 March 2014
Book Reviews by Susanne Flach
Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft, 2014
Die öffentliche Diskussion um Sprache ist in Deutschland durch einen weitgehend laienhaften, norm... more Die öffentliche Diskussion um Sprache ist in Deutschland durch einen weitgehend laienhaften, normativen und sprachkonservativen Diskurs besetzt, der Sprache ohne wissenschaftliche Reflexion oder analytische Tiefe anhand der Kategorien "richtig" und "falsch" bewertet. Sprachliche Variation und Veränderungen der Sprache oder der Sprachgemeinschaft nimmt er als Zeichen des (meist auch kulturellen) Verfalls wahr. Dies gilt nicht nur dort, wo er tatsächlich von Laiinnen und Laien geführt wirdauch Linguistinnen und Linguisten, die sich in die öffentliche Diskussion einschalten, bedienen häufig einen sprachkritischen Diskurs, bei dem Bezüge zum sprachwissenschaftlichen Stand der Forschung randständig (z. B. Trabant 2008) oder gar nicht (z. B. Hinrichs 2013) vorkommen.
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften (Hg.... more Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften (Hg.). 2013. Reichtum und Armut der deutschen Sprache. Erster Bericht zur Lage der deutschen Sprache. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. 233 S.
Talks by Susanne Flach
Modal & adverb collocations
Uploads
Papers by Susanne Flach
Books by Susanne Flach
By contrast, the current approach takes a usage-based view and argues that the constraint is functionally conditioned by the constructions' semantics and the make-up of the English morphological paradigm. On the one hand, the constructions show a notable preference for directive-commissive functions (orders, commands, invitations, recommendations, suggestions, etc.), arguing that go/come-VERB have a hortative schema core. On the other hand, such non-assertive propositions in English are encoded using bare verb forms (imperatives, infinitival complements). The skew towards bare form, albeit motivated, is thus seen as an (historical) accident, which is contemporarily highly conventionalized and entrenched.
Methodologically, the approach suggests a syntactic co-location approach (“You shall know a construction by the company it keeps”), inferring constructional semantics by distributional preferences of co-occurrence with leftward syntactic units (e.g., imperatives, (semi)modals, let's-constructions, speech act verbs). The usage of go/come-VERB is investigated in four case studies of constraint violation, network relations (viz. go/come-and-VERB), diachronic development, and schema acquisition. The evidence suggests that an explanatory attempt of a seemingly arbitrary formal constraint is possible without recourse to innate linguistic knowledge.
Conference Presentations by Susanne Flach
36. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) 5–7 March 2014
Digital Humanities Australasia 2014: Expanding Horizons, 18–21 March 2014
Book Reviews by Susanne Flach
Talks by Susanne Flach
By contrast, the current approach takes a usage-based view and argues that the constraint is functionally conditioned by the constructions' semantics and the make-up of the English morphological paradigm. On the one hand, the constructions show a notable preference for directive-commissive functions (orders, commands, invitations, recommendations, suggestions, etc.), arguing that go/come-VERB have a hortative schema core. On the other hand, such non-assertive propositions in English are encoded using bare verb forms (imperatives, infinitival complements). The skew towards bare form, albeit motivated, is thus seen as an (historical) accident, which is contemporarily highly conventionalized and entrenched.
Methodologically, the approach suggests a syntactic co-location approach (“You shall know a construction by the company it keeps”), inferring constructional semantics by distributional preferences of co-occurrence with leftward syntactic units (e.g., imperatives, (semi)modals, let's-constructions, speech act verbs). The usage of go/come-VERB is investigated in four case studies of constraint violation, network relations (viz. go/come-and-VERB), diachronic development, and schema acquisition. The evidence suggests that an explanatory attempt of a seemingly arbitrary formal constraint is possible without recourse to innate linguistic knowledge.
36. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) 5–7 March 2014
Digital Humanities Australasia 2014: Expanding Horizons, 18–21 March 2014