Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions

Kay, Paul

doi:10.1002/9780470756959.ch30

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…*That's impossible, it's certain. Kay (2004) emphasized how relevant and important contextual considerations are in the production and understanding of the let alone construction inter alia. A presupposed scalar model which features unilateral entailment exists in both interlocutors' knowledge.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Lambrecht (2001) incorporated information structure and prosody into the analysis of cleft constructions; Kay (2004) presented various ways in which pragmatic information can be directly associated with the form of grammatical constructions; Goldberg and Van der Auwera (2012) provided an in-depth account of the is to construction with regard to its pragmatic functions and implications. Despite the above-mentioned studies and many more, much of how Construction Grammar incorporates pragmatic considerations of contextual factors into its descriptions of speakers' linguistic knowledge remains to be worked out.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A usage-based study of the just me construction

Bai

2014

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association

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A usage-based study of the just me constructionAbstract: A number of recent studies have emphasized the need for Construction Grammar to address the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of grammatical constructions. Much of how Construction Grammar incorporates pragmatic considerations of contextual factors into its descriptions of speakers' linguistic knowledge remains to be worked out. In order to take a step towards that goal, this corpus-based study presents the just me construction and analyzes it from compositional, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The study first delivers an in-depth description of the constrained and conventionalized composition of the construction. Then it proposes that the intricate semantic content is the result of formal and conceptual blending of the alternative question construction and the truncated it-cleft construction. Third, the pragmatic aspects of the just me construction are analyzed in terms of its hedging function, possible response patterns, and the conventionalized nature of its non-compositional meaning. All contribute to the recognition of the just me construction as a symbolic unit in the grammar of English. In conclusion, after a summary of the points made in previous sections, the insights gleaned from the present case study will be used to reflect in more general terms on the role of pragmatic considerations of contextual factors in Construction Grammar.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A usage-based study of the just me construction

Bai

2014

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association

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“…The students were pleased by their respective scores vs. #The three best students received the three respective highest scores). For more on respective, different, and the same see, Carlson (1987), Kay (1989Kay ( , 2004, Keenan (1992) and Barker (2007), among others.…”

Section: P R E V I O U S a C C O U N T Smentioning

confidence: 96%

Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings

Chaves

2012

J. Ling.

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So-called respectively readings have posed serious challenges for theories of syntax and semantics. Sentences likeGeorge and Martha respectively denounced and were denounced by the governor(McCawley 1998) show that although the conjoined verbal expressions share the same syntactic subject, they do not predicate that subject in the same way; George (not Martha) denounced the governor, and Martha (but not George) was denounced by the governor. Postal (1998: 160–163) and Gawron & Kehler (2004: 193–194) show that this phenomenon poses problems for contemporary theories of grammar and argue that it is particularly acute for theories where subcategorization and predication are linked via unification. As these authors note, the problem is even more severe in respectively readings involving filler–gap constructions. In this paper I argue that the severity of these problems has been overstated and that the data do not entail any special dissociation between predication, subcategorization, or extraction. In this paper I propose an account which is fully compatible with unification-based theories of grammar. Gawron & Kehler (2004) propose an account of respectively phenomena which covers a remarkably wide range of cases. That approach relies on aRespfoperator, which it stipulated to be optionally overt. However, I argue that this analysis is problematic because there are significant semantic differences between respectively readings with and without an overt realization of ‘respectively’. Rather, the data suggest that respectively readings may be special cases of more general phenomena which happen to create interpretations that are compatible with the semantics of the adverbrespectively. This explains why respectively readings can arise without the adverb, and does not require us to posit a disconnect between predication and subcategorization. In fact, a sentence with a respectively reading will not differ in syntactic or semantic structure from sentences without such a reading.

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“…Stefanowitsch 2003;Boogaart 2009;De Haan 2012;Boogaart & Fortuin 2016) might suggest that the integration of pragmatics in modal constructions is problematic, it is certainly possible to include pragmatic information in a modal construction's representation. After all, constructions can come with pragmatic specifications (for surveys, see Kay 2004;Nikiforidou 2009; the introduction in Bergs & Diewald 2009;Lee-Goldman 2011;Cappelle 2017; introduction to this issue). What is typical of the pragmatic value of a modal construction is that it can be 'short-circuited', to use Morgan's (1977) imagery of how pragmatic aspects of our understanding of an utterance can be conventionally associated with specific expressions.…”

Section: Introduction: Modal Constructions Lexically Restricted Satumentioning

confidence: 99%

The necessity modalshave to,must,need to, andshould

Cappelle

Depraetere

Lesuisse

2019

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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).

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Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions

Cited by 26 publications

References 18 publications

A usage-based study of the just me construction

A usage-based study of the just me construction

Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings

The necessity modalshave to,must,need to, andshould

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