Allostructions revisited

Abstract

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’.

Old English V-initial andþa-VS main clauses

“…Next, there is the presentational construction, where the subject is indefinite: both V1 and þa-VS were used in this context. Another example are the two quotation formulas with cweþan and andswarian, which are used in Bede for exactly the same set of functions, while in other texts they have a different pragmatic specialisation (V1 for quoting single statements and þa-VS for reporting dialogues), but their basic (semantic) meaning is the same, which is the way in which allostructions are interpreted by De Vaere et al (2020). Thus, in order to understand this fragment of the OE language network it is necessary to conduct a separate analysis of AElfrician and non-AElfrician texts.…”

Epistemological challenges in the study of alternating constructions

“…( 4) (Perek, 2015), the dative alternation in Middle English (Zehentner, 2016(Zehentner, , 2018, the English genitive alternation, e.g. ( 3) (De Vaere et al, 2020) and the German ditransitive alternation, e.g. ( 5) (De Vaere et al, 2018.…”

“…We thank an anymous reviewer for providing us with this example.6 It is important to note that we use the terminological pair 'semantics-pragmatics' here only to refer to the distinction between grammatically encoded and inferred meaning, and not the distinction between types of meaning on the basis of the criterion of truthconditionality. These two different ways of carving up the broad spectrum of linguistic meaning are not co-extensive, but on the contrary orthogonal to each other, cf Ariel (2010),De Vaere et al (2020). for a discussion.T.Belligh, K. Willems / Lingua 280 (2022) 103425…”

Constructional network at work in second language acquisition

“…All allostructions encode a common event frame, and consequently convey a highly similar propositional meaning (Perek, 2015). But they manifest distinct ways of conceptualization for the event and profile or obscure different elements in the event frame in different syntactic positions, which results in their formal variation and pragmatic division (De Vaere et al, 2020;Perek, 2015).…”