In this paper we investigate the role of semantic relations in grammatical alternations.The specific alternation we look at is that between the proper name modifier construction, e.g. the Obama government, and the determiner genitive, e.g. Obama's government. Through the use of an experimental study in which participants were asked to rate the naturalness of the two constructions in 20 attested natural language contexts and provide paraphrases of the semantic relations in question, we tested when the two constructions alternate and whether either construction expresses semantic relations that block alternation. Our initial finding is that none of the relations we studied is categorically associated with only one of the constructions, but that certain relationsnotably possession and nameare far more preferentially associated with determiner genitives and proper name modifiers respectively. Despite these 'default' associations, participants nevertheless identified a range of possible interpretations for many of the examples, meaning that our study simultaneously supports the opposing theoretical views of default relations and semantic underspecification. Further, our study validates the inclusion of semantic relations in genitive alternation studies as a major factor despite the notorious difficulties in their operationalization. Animacy distinctions, although more straightforward to codify, appear to be of lesser importance.Methodologically, our study shows the value of an experimental approach as a corrective to researcher intuitions about the identification of semantic relations in context. 3
An important recent innovation in Construction Grammar (CxG) has been to assume the existence of a general underspecified construction underlying two or more alternating constructions, which themselves are considered to be formally and functionally related allostructions of the general construction. Despite this novel proposal, the meaning side of the general construction has either been neglected or couched in a single-layered view of meaning that does not adequately distinguish semantics from pragmatics. Building on state-of-the-art developments at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this article proposes an account whereby the distinction between the meaning of the general construction and the meaning of the allostructions aligns with the distinction between encoded (semantic) and inferred (pragmatic) meaning. We argue in favor of an allostructional account for two grammatical alternations which have previously been treated as an epiphenomenon of two underlying independent constructions: the German ditransitive alternation and the English genitive alternation. While demonstrating the fruitfulness of an allostructional analysis for these two new cases, we also provide critical observations about the wider applicability of allostructional analyses. In particular, we argue that an allostructional analysis proves to be trivial for Lambrechtian ‘allosentences’.
This paper discusses semantic and pragmatic aspects of possessive interpretation (PI), the process whereby semantically underspecified possessive noun phrases (NPs) such as John Smith’s house and the house of John Smith receive concrete referential interpretations (e.g. ‘the house owned by John Smith’) in context. By observing what is common to the interpretation of both constructions, I lay out the ingredients for a uniform pragmatic account of PI whilst rehashing the contextualist notion of saturation. As defined by Recanati (2004, 2010) and many others, saturation is a linguistically mandated and obligatory pragmatic process, operating to enrich the incomplete logical forms of referring expressions, including possessive NPs. I argue that present proposals which assume that saturating the possessive relation is crucial to determining the possessive referent fail to do justice to the many ways in which possessive NPs may be understood in concrete communicative situations. Supporting similar claims by Korta and Perry (2017), this suggests that saturation is more adequately defined as a communicatively optional pragmatic process. The discussion simultaneously contributes to the growing literature on pragmatic aspects of constructions as form-meaning pairings, by outlining some of the theoretical issues that arise from the division of labour between semantic and pragmatic meaning in PI.
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