Dialect syntax in Construction Grammar

Abstract

This squib focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it examines the ways in which constructionist approaches to language can bring about an improved theoretical understanding of Double Modals (DMs) in dialects of English. DMs have proved to be a long-lasting, notorious puzzle in formal linguistics, and have not received any general solution today, with much analysis devoted to their constituent structure and their postulated layers of derivation, especially in generative models of language. Usage-based strands of Construction Grammar (CxG) appear to naturally overcome such problems, while conveying a more cognitively and socially realistic picture of such dialect variants. Secondly, and more importantly, we argue that such an improved, constructional understanding of DMs can also contribute to advances in the modeling of dialect syntax in CxG, both theoretically and methodologically. In particular, DMs constitute an interesting case of relatively rare and restricted syntactic constructions in the dialects they appear in, and they are likely to exhibit different rates of entrenchment and network schematicity cross-dialectally. Moreover, the empirical challenges surrounding the measurement of DM usage invite us to refine the methodological concept of triangulation, by sketching a two-step approach with a data-driven study of new types of corpora on the one hand, and a hypothesis-driven experimental account of acceptability in relevant geographical locations on the other.

Double modals in contemporary British and Irish speech

“…Multimo does not include any entries that have been tagged with the locations Wales, Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. Morin et al (2020) and Morin (2021a) point out that double modals can be found in corpora collected from UK web texts and suggest looking for the feature in social media texts from Britain.…”

“…Although double modals have been widely studied in the past seventy years, questions remain as to their syntactic behavior, semantics and history, as well as to the pragmatic contexts that favor their use, the inventory of possible double modal types and their geographic distribution in different English varieties. Double modals are of theoretical interest as they represent micro-syntactic variation that may shed light on the status of the verbal phrase: although several proposals have been made as to the constituency relations and phrase structure of double modal constructions (Boertien 1986;Battistella 1995;Hasty 2012; see also Morin et al 2020 for a discussion of double modals from the perspective of Construction Grammar), their ultimate status has not yet been conclusively resolved, and the semantic status of some double modals remains unclear. Pragmatically, most double modal types have been proposed to be restricted to specific contexts: they are used for 'the negotiation of a speaker's wants or needs' in polite, cautious conversation in order to mitigate face-threatening situations (Mishoe & Montgomery 1994: 12; see also Montgomery 1998;Schneider 2005;Hasty 2015).…”

A social turn for Construction Grammar: double modals on British Twitter

“…In the prominent CL framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), however, interest in sociolinguistic variation has been more limited (Morin et al 2020). In earlier work, a few researchers expressed awareness of something akin to the Sociosemiotic Commitment, including Goldberg (2013: 16), who wrote that in CxG 'the role of social cognition [is] viewed as essential to accounts of learning and meaning'.…”