Approaching German syntax from a constructionist perspective

Boas, Hans C.; Ziem, Alexander

doi:10.1515/9783110457155-001

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 58 publications

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“…Langacker 1987; Fillmore et al . 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Michaelis & Ruppenhofer 2001; Croft & Cruse 2004; Hilpert 2014; Boas & Ziem 2018). Still, there have been a number of laudable attempts to straddle the gap between CA and cognitively oriented grammatical models of language (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactivewhat-xconstruction in spoken dialogue

Pöldvere¹,

Paradis²

2019

English Language and Linguistics

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In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactive what-x construction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactive what-x construction features the interrogative what directly followed by a phrasal or clausal complement x. Moreover, what forms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactive what-x construction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactivewhat-xconstruction in spoken dialogue

Pöldvere¹,

Paradis²

2019

English Language and Linguistics

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Chapter 7. Constructing a constructicon for German

Boas

Ziem

2018

Constructional Approaches to Language

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A constructional account of the modal particle ‘ja’ in Texas German

Boas

2018

Constructional Approaches to Language

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The last decade has seen the expansion of systematic study of spoken language within Construction Grammar (Fried & Östman 2005, Östman 2006, Günthner 2006, Imo 2007). While most studies have only noted that a specific syntactic pattern may have different manifestations in spoken language and in 'standard' grammar, the emphasis in these studies has been on the domain of the sentence/ utterance as the appropriate context of analysis (e.g. Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005). To overcome this bias, this paper presents a case study of a constructional representation and analysis of a regular patterning in natural discourse, namely the modal particle ja in Texas German, a critically endangered dialect (see Boas 2009, Boas & Pierce 2011).

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Approaching German syntax from a constructionist perspective

Abstract: Over the last decade or so, Construction Grammar (CxG) has evolved into an influential paradigm in linguistic research. CxG subsumes a family of related constructional approaches to language including Cognitive Construction Grammar (

Cited by 5 publications

References 58 publications

‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactivewhat-xconstruction in spoken dialogue

‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactivewhat-xconstruction in spoken dialogue

Chapter 7. Constructing a constructicon for German

A constructional account of the modal particle ‘ja’ in Texas German

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