Projects 2025

This project will investigate how speakers use the constructional resources of their language to express specific meanings. The research will be based on the Erlangen Referential Communication Corpus, which contains transcripts of recordings of the speech produced during a referential communication task in which participants had to communicate about photographs of arrays of objects which were most identical but differed in a few details (similar to the “spot the difference” puzzles often found in newspapers). Participants could see each other and communicate freely but could not see their partners’ photograph. The task is designed to be challenging, in that some of the objects depicted are unfamiliar and/or occur in unusual orientations or positions. The corpus contains transcripts of speech produced by native speakers of Spanish and English from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds as well as L2 learners of these languages. The data is unique in that it contains spontaneous (i.e. unplanned) speech in a situation where we (the researchers) know what message the speakers are trying to communicate and can investigate what constructions they use to communicate this message. In addition to transcripts of conversations, the corpus also contains data about the participants’ socioeconomic status, reading habits and performance on theory of mind tasks.

The project will address research questions USE1 (What factors influence speakers’ choices from a range of competing constructions?) and USE2 (To what extent do the factors determining the choice of construction differ between speakers with respect to their individual backgrounds and personalities — in particular, socioeconomic status, language experience and general cognitive abilities). In addition, the project will investigate the linguistic strategies that speakers use to communicate that the referents described do not correspond to the canonical meanings of the words they use (e.g. a red like monster thingy to mean something like ‘a red object that looks a bit like a monster but is not really a monster’). Some of these strategies that speakers use in such situations are clearly conventionalized and hence can be described as constructions; some are clearly idiosyncratic, and some are somewhere in between. Thus, the analysis of such expressions is relevant to research question CON1 (How do we identify constructions: what are their defining criteria; are they better seen as discrete units, prototypes, attractors in constructional space, or nodes in a network of cognitive associations?).

Although we can identify argument structure constructions with three arguments such as a ditransitive construction (She called him a taxi), a object attribute construction (She called him a fool) and a caused motion construction (She sent him home) in all three languages, we must not assume these constructions to be totally equivalent in Dutch, English and German. In particular, the fact German tends to express the difference between slots of the ditransitive and the object attribute cxns by case and has different word order in main and subordinate clauses means that although we may see the German ditransitive cxn as in some way corresponding to the Dutch and the English ones, there are important differences with respect to form.

The aim of this dissertation is twofold:

(i) to provide an in-depth analysis as a number of “corresponding” constructions in German and English (and possibly Dutch or another Germanic language) including a corpus-based collo-profile for the verb slots of the constructions, and

(ii) to explore in neurolinguistic terms whether the processing of the respective constructions in three closely related languages shows significant differences regarding the activation of different areas of the brain.

From the start, the study of idioms has played a crucial role in the development of Construction Grammar (e.g., Croft and Cruse 2004, Fillmore et al. 1988). However, as yet only a few studies have compared constructions with a relatively high degree of idiomaticity in different languages (e.g., Abel 2003, Apresjan 2014, Senaldi & Titone 2022, see also Gries and Wulff (2005) for a more general study of constructions in foreign language learners). In the first phase of this project, the scarcity of research on cross-linguistic comparisons of idioms was addressed by a) carrying out a crosslinguistic corpus analysis (e.g., Granger 2002) to identify idioms in English, Persian and German that are similar either in terms of semantic correspondence (e.g., English to carry coals to Newcastle, German Eulen nach Athen tragen ‘to carry owls to Athens’ and Persian zireh be kermoon bordan ‘to carry caraway to Kerman’ in Persian, which are all used to refer to a pointless action), formal correspondence (e.g., German das ist ein hartes Brot ‘this is a hard bread’ used to refer to a difficult task, and Persian nan-e kasi ra ajor kardan ‘to turn one’s bread into a brick’ which means to cause financial harm to someone), or both (e.g. English the calm before storm, German die Ruhe vor dem Sturm and Persian aramehe-e ghabl az tufan, which are all used to refer to a quiet period before a period of great activitly or difficulty), b) conducting experiments examining to what extent the cross-linguistic understanding of idioms is affected by semantic and/or formal correspondence between idioms in an L2 and a learner’s L1 and c) conducting additional experiments examining whether decomposable and non-decomposable idioms may differ in terms of their mental representation as it has, for example, been suggested by Abel (2003). The first phase of this project addressed GRQ CON4 (To what extent can constructions (and their constituents) identified in one language be equated with superficially similar constructions in another language?), CON1 (How do we identify constructions?) as well as ENT1 (How do factors such as frequency, salience, dispersion and age of acquisition influence entrenchment?).

The results of the analyses and experiments described above will form the basis of the research carried out in the second phase. The major goal of this phase is to examine how the acquisition of idiomatic constructions will develop in L1 and L2 leaners and how learners’ representations of idioms may change over time. In particular, by comparing the results obtained for different age groups of L1 and L2 learners, groups of learners differing in terms of L2 competence or for idiomatic expressions differing in terms of familiarity and contexts of use, the possible effects of different factors that have generally been claimed to affect the processing and entrenchment of constructions will be examined with regard to the specific role they play in the processing of L1 and L2 idiomatic expressions (for the possible contribution of different factors to the processing and entrenchment of constructions and/or idiomatic expressions, see, e.g., Abel 2003, Apresjan 2014, Divjak and Cardwell-Harris 2015, Steinkrauss and Schmid 2016, Wasserscheidt 2014). In addition, the second phase of the project will examine the conceptual representations underlying idiomatic constructions in L1 and L2 learners. According to Abel (2003) and Sprenger et al. (2006), the conceptual representation of an idiom is represented at the general cognitive level and is nonlinguistic. For example, according to Sprenger et al. (2006), the nonlinguistic representation of the expression to hit the sack could correspond to the image of someone hitting a sack and thus reflect the individual lexical items in the idiom or to the image of someone sleeping in a bed and thus reflect the unitary conceptual representation of the idiom. According to researchers working in the field of language teaching, using pictures or visualizations possibly reflecting speakers’ conceptual representations of grammatical constructions can assist learners in better understanding the exact meaning of these constructions (e.g., Niemeier 2017). We will use eye tracking experiments and/or picture selection tasks to examine what the conceptual representations of L1 and L2 learners differing in terms of age, L1 and L2 competence and learning context (naturalistic or instructed) look like (e.g. Senaldi & Titone 2022): Does the idiom to hit the sack indeed trigger the picture of a person sleeping in a bed or the picture of a person hitting a sack as suggested by the literal meaning of the idiom and its individual components? This part of the project will further explore GRQ ENT1 (How do factors such as frequency, salience, dispersion and age of acquisition influence entrenchment?) and it will address GRQ ENT2 (What role do collo-profiles (i.e. lexical units frequently used in a construction) play in the learning of constructions and their mental representation?) Insights gained, for example, about conceptual representations of grammatical constructions and their possible visualizations will also make a contribution towards applying Construction Grammar to foreign language teaching (De Knop and Gilquin 2016, Herbst 2016, Niemeier, 2017, Erfurt & De Knop 2019, see also Piske , Herbst & Uhrig 2014). 

If time permits, we will also conduct ERP studies to examine the neural correlates of L1 and L2 idiomatic constructions in L1 and L2 speakers, which would allow us to address ENT3 (To what extent do measures of neural activity during language processing coincide with the results of behavioural and corpus data and how does this expand our understanding of how constructions are stored and processed in speakers’ brains?.

References

Abel, B. (2003). English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: A dual representation approach. Second Language Research 19(4), 329-358.

Apresjan, V. (2014). Syntactic idioms across languages: Corpus evidence from Russian and English. Russian Linguistics38, 187-203.

Croft, W., and Cruse, A. D. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. 

De Knop, S., and Gilquin, G. eds. (2016). Applied Construction Grammar. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Divjak, D., and Cardwell-Harris, C. (2015). “Frequency and entrenchment,” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, eds. E. Dabrowska and D. Divjak (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), 53-75.

Erfurt, J., and De Knop. S. eds. (2019). Konstruktionsgrammatik und Mehrsprachigkeit. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 94. Duisburg: Universitätsverlag Rhein-Ruhr.

Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., and O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language 64(3), 501-538.

Granger, S. (2002). “A bird’s-eye view of learner corpus research,” in Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching, eds. S. Granger, J. Hung, and S. Petch-Tyson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 2-33.

Gries, S. Th., and Wulff, S. (2005). Do foreign language learners also have constructions? Evidence from priming, sorting and corpora. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3, 182-200.

Herbst, T. (2016). “Foreign language learning is Construction learning: Principles of Pedagogic Construction Grammar,” in Applied Construction Grammar, eds. S. De Knop  and G. Gaëtanelle (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton), 21–51.

Niemeier, S. (2017). Task-Based Grammar Teaching of English. Where Cognitive Grammar and Task-Based Language Teaching meet. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.

Piske, T., Uhrig, P., and Herbst, T. eds. (2013). ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 61.3, Special Issue: Aspects of L1 and L2 Interaction.

Senaldi, M.S. and Titone, D.A. (2022). Less direct, more analytical: Eye-movement measures of L2 idiom reading. Languages 7(2), 91.

Sprenger, A. S., Levelt, W. J. M., and Kempen, G. (2006). Lexical access during the production of idiomatic phrases. Memory and Language 54, 161-184.

Steinkrauss, R. and Schmid, M. (2016). “Entrenchment and language attrition,” in Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language: How we Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge, ed. H.-J. Schmid (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), 367-384.Wasserscheidt, P. (2014). Constructions do not cross languages: On cross-linguistic generalizations of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2), p. 305-337.

The project aims to contribute to diachronic construction grammar. The focus is on the development of constructions with verbs that had a genitive object in Middle High German. The genitive objects are replaced by prepositional objects, accusative or dative objects in New High German. We assume that the substitution by prepositional objects or accusative or dative objects is not random. All objects are described as parts of argument structure patterns (Engelberg et al. 2015) that are considered to be complex signs, “big words” (Dąbrowska 2000: 84) or form-meaning pairings (Goldberg 2006: 5). In this context, prepositional objects are not meaningless either (Höllein 2019, Hilpert 2009). The approach is contrary to many valence-theoretical and other grammar models. 

For the diachronic research, verbs are selected that are constructed with a genitive object in Middle High German (e.g. sich einer Sache [gen.] erinnern ‘remember something’, sich einer Sache [gen.] freuen ‘be happy about something’). From Middle High German to Modern German, many genitive objects are lost. The project is concerned with modeling the process by which new argument structure patterns emerge through the replacement of genitive objects. The substitution by prepositional objects is emphasized, without excluding the substitution by complements in the accusative and dative case. 

The focus is on following questions: 

• Which verbs with a genitive object have changed since Middle High German due to constructional change and are now part of new argument structure patterns with a prepositional, accusative or dative object? 
• Why are some verbs in Modern High German constructed with a prepositional object and others with an accusative or dative object? 
• How much variation is there and how can it be explained? 
• Which verbs with a genitive object have been lost and replaced by new verbs that are part of a new construction (sich vlîzen eines dinges [gen.] vs. sich um etwas [prep. complement] bemühen ‘try to get something‘)? 
• What correlations can be established between verbs with certain semantics and certain prepositions as heads of prepositional objects (e.g. sich an etwas erinnern vs. sich über etwas freuen, sich auf etwas freuen)? 

The project will involve analysing data from historical language corpora of German such as the following: Deutsch Diachron Digital (DDD) Mittelhochdeutsch, Frühneuhochdeutsch, Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank, GerManC, Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) and DWDS. The research addresses research questions CON2 (To what extent is constructional knowledge determined by the specific items occurring in them, i.e. collo-profiles) and CON3 (How do individual constructicons differ, and what are the implications of these differences for Construction Grammar as a model for language as a shared system?)

References:

Dąbrowska, Ewa (2000): From Formula to Schema. The acquisition of English Questions. Cognitive Linguistics 11/1-2: 83–102. 

Engelberg, Stefan, Meike Meliss, Kristel Proost & Edeltraud Winkler (Hrsg., 2015): Argumentstruktur zwischen Valenz und Konstruktion (Studien zur deutschen Sprache 68). Tübingen: Narr, Francke, Attempto. 

Goldberg, Adele (2006): Constructions at Work, The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hilpert, Martin (2009): The german mit-Predicative Construction and ist frames. Constructions and Frames 1(1), 29–55.

Höllein, Dagobert (2019): Präpositonalobjekt vs. Adverbial. Die semantischen Rollen der Präpositionalobjekte (Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen 82). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. 

The concept of constructional space is apt to capture and formally analyze (at least) three issues in the verbal syntax of Arabic and Semitic in general: (a) valency (typically expressed by a system of diatheses/binyanim) expressing voice, intensity, reflexivity, interaction, and other qualities on the one hand (cf., e.g., Retsö 1989 and preposition governing (i.e. verbs governing prepositions resulting in a spectrum of meanings depending on the preposition chosen) on the other hand; and (b) phrasal verbs in Arabic and Semitic in general.

Indeed, the combination of verbs and prepositions (as expressing valency) on the one hand, and the internal composition of phrasal verbs in Semitic on the other hand, often represents an exocentric scenario, i.e. the meaning of the whole verb phrase cannot be automatically be deduced from the meaning of the constituents; rather, one can speak of “constructions” in these cases in a meaningful way (for the theoretical groundwork, cf., e.g., Langacker 1987). In Arabic and Semitic, this question has never been systematically analyzed. Therefore, the topic is a meaningful subproject within the overall application. The clear delineation of the relevant exocentric constructions thus addresses GRQ’s “CON1” (“How do we identify construction …”) and “CON2” (“To what extent is constructional knowledge determined by the specific items …”). What is more the GRQ’s “USE1” (“What factors influence speakers’ choices …” and “USE2” (“To what extent do the factors …”) are of high relevance especially in the realms of dialect, accommodation to other peoples and cultures, and multilingualism.

The first phase of the subproject will be devoted to point (a): A superficial look at an Arabic-European lexicon reveals various and seemingly contradicting meanings for the verb daʕā ‘to call’, namely ‘to pray’ and ‘to curse’. A closer look shows that these meaning depend on the prepositions governed by the core verb, li ‘for’ and ʕalā ‘upon, against’, respectively. Diachronically, daʕʿā li means ‘to invoke God on s.o.’s behalf’, and daʕā ʕalā ‘to invoke God against s.o.’, resulting in the contradictory semantics. Synchronically, however, speakers (usually) are not aware of this background. Rather, they use the combination of core verb and preposition as an exocentric construction. This type of exocentric constructions permeates the whole verbal system of Semitic and still awaits a systematic investigation. Certain prepositions in this context have undergone grammaticalization (cf., e.g., Rubin 2005). By and large, the same holds true for the meaning of derived diatheses (binyanim) in Semitic and the relationship between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive uses of one and the same verb in different constructions. While the meaning of derived diatheses is predictable in some cases, this is not the case in host of cases, which, again, can be better captured in terms of exocentric constructions used a morpho-syntactic building blocks. Experiencer constructions also play an important role in this context (cf., e.g., Retsö 1987 and Edzard 2016). Mechanisms of analogy and “parallel architecture” (Jackendorf and Audring 2020) also have to be taken into consideration.

The second phase of the subproject will be devoted to point (b): Another important type of construction (morpho-syntactic building block) in Semitic are phrasal verbs. There is a host of constructions in Arabic and Semitic, among them constructions with an inner object (paronomasy, figura etymologica; cf., e.g., Edzard to appear) that make an analysis in terms of construction grammar highly attractive. What is more, there exist constructions, notably in Ethio-Semitic, that typically consist of an invariable element (ideophone, onomatopoetic element, noun, or otherwise, sometimes with an opaque meaning) and a grammaticalized (semantically bleached) verb with the original meaning ‘to say’ or ‘to do’. In Amharic, the relevant verbs are ʔalä ‘to say’ and ʔadärrägä ‘to do’. Examples include k’uʧʧ’ ʔalä ‘to sit’, zɨmm ʔalä ‘to be quiet’, k’uʧʧ’ ʔadärrägä ‘to put down’, and täsfa ʔadärrägä ‘to hope’. The semantics of zɨmm ʔalä ‘to be quiet’ (lit. “to say zɨmm“) perfectly illustrates the relevance of the concept of construction.European languages/language varieties that build on Semitic material likewise feature comparable constructions: Yiddish displays a number of phrasal verbs containing Semitic elements. Masculine singular present tense forms of active Semitic verbs are followed by the auxiliary זײַן (zayn ‘to be’), e.g., maskim zeyn ‘to agree’ (“to be agreeing”), while present tenses of passive Semitic verbs are followed by the auxiliary ווערן (vern ‘to become’), e.g., nelam vern ‘to disappear’ (“to become disappear”). The reflexive particle זיך (zikh ‘oneself’) is added, when reflexive Hebrew verbs are used. Several other auxiliary verbs are occasionally used as well. Comparable constructions exist in Ladino as well, e.g., ser meshabéah ‘to praise’.

References

Edzard, L. (2016). Experiencer Constructions and the Resultative Function of Impersonal Verbs in Ethio-Semitic.” In R. Meyer & L. Edzard (eds.). Time in Languages of the Horn of Africa. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 138–156.

Edzard, L. (to appear). “Loan translation or independent emergence: the figura etymologica in Semitic and Yiddish”, in: Aaron Hornkohl, Magdalen Connolly, Eleanor Coghill, Ben Outhwaite. Nadia Vodro, and Janet C.E. Watson (eds.). Interconnected Traditions: Semitic languages, literatures, cultures. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers

Jackendorf, Ray & Jenny Audring (2020): The Texture of the Lexicon. Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Retsö, J. (1987). Copula and double pronominal objects in some Semitic languages. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 137/2, 219–245.

Retsö, J. (1989). Diathesis in the Semitic Languages. A Comparative Morphological Study. Leiden: Brill.

Rubin, A. (2005). Studies in Semitic Grammaticalization. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns.

In situations of language shift, for example in diasporic contexts, speakers’ linguistic constructions are often simultaneously influenced by language attrition and contact (Sasse 1992). Typically, a minority language, often with low prestige, is gradually abandoned as speakers shift to the majority language, which eventually becomes the socially dominant language of the community as well as the psycholinguistically dominant language of individuals. It is often argued that these processes lead to the emergence of “semi-speakers,” individuals who are no longer fully fluent in their heritage language, and whose language production deviates from that of native speakers. The linguistic effects of these processes are generally described as a mix of interference from the “new” language and a “simplification or impoverishment of the L1” (Schmid/Köpke 2009:209). Simplification and impoverishment are often viewed quantitatively, as a reduction in grammatical categories and morphology, resulting in the perception of the recessive language as a “reduced” version of the dominant one. According to Thomason (1995:19-20), “[T]hese speakers replace vanishing ethnic-language structure with nothing. […] all subsystems will probably show significant impoverishment.” Sometimes, however, it has been argued that speakers compensate for the gaps in their competence by using structures from the dominant language (Dressler/de Cilia 2006: 2261). Consequently, it is frequently noted that recessive languages, especially in diasporic settings, exhibit a combination of traits arising from both interference and attrition.

However, this perspective entails two theoretical issues:

1. Monolingual bias: Although speakers of recessive languages are inherently bilingual, the state of the recessive language is evaluated against a monolingual standard. This may obscure the complex ways in which they utilize their linguistic repertoire.

2. Typological bias: Diasporic attrition studies have predominantly focused on languages with relatively complex morphology (e.g., Spanish in various attrition settings in the USA). In contrast, isolating languages that do not heavily rely on morphological marking are notably understudied in attrition contexts.

A Construction Grammar (CxG) approach appears to be promising for overcoming these biases. Recent frameworks, such as Diasystematic Construction Grammar (Höder 2012) and Bilingual Construction Grammar (Wasserscheidt 2015), suggest a continuum of multilingual linguistic resources that can be modelled within a unified framework. In this view, language-specificity is part of the pragmatic meaning of a construction, rather than an inherent characteristic of linguistic components. This perspective allows for modelling so-called “simplification” as a dynamic change, resulting from the activation of a complex linguistic repertoire, whereby new forms of unification and licensing arise that are not observed in monolingual speakers. By adopting constructions, rather than languages, as the fundamental unit of analysis, we can gain a deeper understanding of the processes involved in language attrition.

To address the typological bias, Haitian Creole in Hispanophone diasporic contexts is chosen as a case study. While Haitian Creole is a typical Creole language, virtually devoid of grammatical markers, prior studies (Jansen 2013, Barzen 2022, Jansen 2023) reveal a trend among heritage speakers in the Dominican Republic and Cuba to incorporate Spanish morphology (interpreted as partially filled constructions with lexical slots) in Creole discourse. Utilizing corpora developed in previous research projects with heritage speakers of Haitian Creole in the Dominican Republic, this project will examine specific constructions that render Haitian Creole in these diasporic contexts ostensibly more “complex,” challenging previous findings on language attrition as simplification and loss. Particular focus will be given to constructions involving prepositions, as they diverge significantly from canonical Haitian Creole in diasporic settings. For instance, different functions of the generic preposition nan are expressed by various Spanish prepositions (e.g., en, a, hacia), and Spanish prepositions (especially de) can be found in multiword units that are constructed asyndetically in Creole. Additionally, the Spanish preposition a is used for differential object marking, which does not normally exist in Haitian Creole.

References

Barzen, Jessica Stefanie (2022): Das Samaná-Kreyòl in der Dominikanischen Republik. Eine korpusbasierte Studie zum Sprachkontakt zwischen einer Migrationsvarietät des Haiti-Kreols und dem Spanischen. Hamburg: Buske.

Höder, Steffen. 2012. “Multilingual constructions: a diasystematic approach to common structures”. In: Kurt Braunmüller & Christoph Gabriel (eds.). Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies (Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 13), 241–257. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jansen, Silke (2013): “Language maintenance and language loss in marginalized communities: the case of the bateyes in the Dominican Republic”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 21, 77-100.

Jansen, Silke (2023): « Le repertoire linguistique de la tumba francesa entre Saint-Domingue, Cuba et Haïti ». Études Créoles 41, 1-24.

Schmid, Monika S./Köpke, Barbara. 2019. “Introduction”. In: Schmid, Monika/Köpke, Barbara/Cherciov, Mirela (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition. Oxford, 1-5.

Thomason, Sara G. „Language mixture: Ordinary Processes, Extraordinary Results“. In: Silvia-Corvalán, Carmen (ed.). Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism. Washington, D.C:, 15-34.

Wasserscheidt, Philipp. 2014. “Constructions do not cross Languages. On cross-linguistic generalizations of constructions”. Constructions and Frames 6(2), 305-337.

The network of constructions (constructicon) at the community level and those at the individual level are to be systematically distinguished. No speaker speaks exactly alike (e.g., Bloomfield 1933: 45) and generalizations people make over input can differ substantially (e.g., Dąbrowska 2012). The relation between the two can be understood by considering language as a complex adaptive system (e.g., Ritt 2004; Beckner et al. 2009; Schmid 2020; Van Trijp 2024), in which individuals are non-static agents (Anthonissen 2021: 4) that encage with the community through usage events. For historical linguistics, this perspective raises the question ‘in which ways do the constructicons of individual speakers reflect changing restrictions in abstract schematic constructions at the communal level, and vice versa’ (CON3)? The will be tackled by analyzing full-verb inversion in Early Modern English (Bækken 2000).

(1) And happy were they that cou’d hold out, till they got to the Sea-port Towns (WDVS 38, 12 in Bækken 2000: 395)

The project is corpus-based and compares the development of inversion in the Early English Books Online (V3) (EEBO) and in the Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA)-corpus (Petré et al. 2019). The EEBO corpus is used as comparative basis of the development of inversion, against which the changes of its use in the life-span data from 50 different authors in the period 1623—1757 is evaluated.

In Present-Day English, inversion is a relatively infrequently used strategy, consisting of several sub-types, and is more or less explicitly understood in relation to other patterns, i.e., can be viewed as a constructional network based on similarity and contrast (Chen 2003; Birner 2016; Duffley 2018). Birner (2016), for example,  argues that simple inversion is an alloform of both pre-posing and post-posing constructions, and can be used when the preposed constituent denotes information that is at least as familiar as the postposed constituent (Birner 1994). As such, it contrastively related to the long-passive, which shares this information structure but is sequentially associated with transitive verbs and not with intransitives and copulas (Birner 2016). This contrast is a rather recent development, as transitive verbs could occur with simple inversion in EModE (2), though intransitives of appearance and existence were already dominant (3) (Bækken 2000: 412).

(2) but grete gayne made there they of prusse (CXBE 108, 21 in Bækken 2000: 396)

(3) and in her sleep appeared an angel (MNN 661, 6 in Bækken 2000: 411)

Furthermore, the filler-slot relations of inversion changes over time, as the range of slot-fillers that can occur in inversion narrows in Early Modern English, but at the same time its association with negative adverbs spreads (Nevalainen 1997; Bækken 2000). How did all these relations change and what evidence is there in corpus data to support this (NET1)? To what extent is the support for such changing relations reflected in the output of individual speakers throughout their lifetime (NET2)?

References

Anthonissen, Lynn. 2021. Individuality in language change. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110725841.

Bækken, Bjørg. 2000. Inversion in Early Modern English. English Studies 81(5). 393–421. https://doi.org/10.1076/0013-838X(200009)81:5;1-8:FT393.

Beckner, Clay, Richard Blythe, Joan Bybee, Morten H. Christiansen, William Croft, Nick C. Ellis, John Holland, Jinyun Ke, Diane Larsen‐Freeman & Tom Schoenemann. 2009. Language is a complex adaptive system: position paper. Language Learning. Wiley 59(1). 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00533.x.

Birner, Betty. 1994. Information status and word order: An analysis of English inversion. Language 70(2). 233. https://doi.org/10.2307/415828.

Birner, Betty. 2016. English inversions as constructional alloforms. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 1. 19. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v1i0.3718.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. 1984th edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Chen, Rong. 2003. English inversion: A ground-before-figure construction. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2012. Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2(3). 219–253. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.2.3.01dab.

Duffley, Patrick. 2018. The cognitive structure of full-verb inversion and existential structures in English. Cognitive Semantics 4(2). 184–229. https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-00402002.

Nevalainen, Terttu. 1997. Recycling inversion: The case of initial adverbs and negators in Early Modern English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 31. 203–214.

Petré, Peter, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas, Emma-Louise Silva, William Standing & Odile A.O. Strik. 2019. Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA), release 1.0. Online. https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/mind-bending-grammars/emma-corpus/.

Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish sounds and linguistic evolution. A Darwinian approach to language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Trijp, Remi. 2024. Nostalgia for the future of Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames 16(2). 311–345. https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.23013.van.

Literacy has a profound influence on the development of speakers’ grammatical skills (Dąbrowska 2018, Dąbrowska et al. 2022, Montag and MacDonald 2015, for a review see Dąbrowska 2020). Exposure to language in the written medium affords more experience with complex structures (e.g. passives, relative clauses) as well as less prototypical instances of constructions, which, in contrast to spoken language, remain freely accessible and can be processed without time pressure. Repeated exposure to different instantiations of a given pattern via print can thus lead to greater entrenchment of an abstract constructional schema. According to the ‘training wheels’ hypothesis (Dąbrowska 2020), sufficiently entrenched structures may, in the long run, make their way into oral language. A possible corollary to this is that, in the absence of well-established schemata, illiterate and low-literate adults, similar to young (pre-literate) children, are expected to rely predominantly on lexically specific templates, hence facing processing difficulties when presented with non-prototypical (based on their low distributional frequency in naturalistic data) variants of constructions (e.g. English and German object relative clauses typically contain inanimate head NPs and pronominal subjects, Brandt and Kidd 2011, Kidd et al. 2007, Reali and Christiansen 2007), indicating a usage-based continuity between child and adult processing.

Detection of these kinds of distributional regularities in the input (e.g. associations between syntactic patterns and lexical elements) for discovering patterns and forming generalizations proceeds through experience-dependent statistical learning (SL) mechanisms (Braine and Brooks 1995, Divjak and Milin, 2020, Goldberg 1995, Jost and Christiansen 2017). One route via which literacy acquisition and experience may influence language skills is by amplifying the output of SL mechanisms, which in turn aids the processing and learning of subsequent input. There is indeed evidence that literacy experience alters the way speakers process visual and auditory (linguistic) stimuli (Dehaene et al. 2010, Favier et al. 2021, Lupyan et al. 2020). Another route for this literacy acquisition effect may be through enhancing speakers’ metalinguistic awareness (e.g. Dąbrowska 2018, Roehr-Brackin 2024). However, the extent to which these literacy effects are similar for children and adults is largely unknown.

The proposed project aims to explore the relationship between literacy acquisition and the processing of constructions of varying schematicity (e.g. actives, passives, datives, subject and object relatives) by children (pre-literate, literate, and more advanced literate children) and adults (semi-literates and late literates attending adult literacy classes, and high literates) native speakers of a particular language (possibly Spanish due to links with literacy schools, but to be agreed with the supervisors). Combining corpus and experimental methods, the following research questions (RQs) will be addressed: 1) what are the distributional patterns of use of the target constructions (types of verbs and NPs) by native speakers as observed in linguistic corpora, 2) whether the usage-based regularities found in the corpora are reflected in speakers’ processing patterns (e.g. acceptability ratings), 3) how and to what extent literacy acquisition affects the entrenchment of abstract grammatical patterns, 4) whether the degree of entrenchment is influenced by the age of literacy acquisition (childhood vs adulthood), and 5) whether variation in speakers’ language skills can be explained by individual differences in statistical learning and metalinguistic ability. 

The first phase of the project will involve a corpus analysis with a twofold objective: i) extracting instances of the target constructions in order to identify the distributional regularities underlying their use and designing test items for the experimental tasks, following a procedure similar to that described in Kidd et al. (2007) and Reali and Christiansen (2007) for relative clauses, and ii) identifying high- and low-frequency syllable bigrams and trigrams from participants’ native language that will be used to create the linguistic stimuli for the auditory SL tasks (Stärk et al. 2023). 

In the second phase of the project, hypotheses based on the data obtained from the corpus analysis will be tested using offline and online experimental tasks, specifically 1) an acceptability rating task in which participants are asked to rate grammatical sentences that differ in their prototypicality (e.g. That is the toy that you bought at the market today vs. This is the boy that the girl teased at school yesterday; sentences were taken from Kidd et al. 2007) and ungrammatical sentences (e.g. *The boy said Helen something) for acceptability, followed by 2) an elicited imitation task where speakers will have to listen to and repeat a series of sentences containing prototypical and non-prototypical variants of the target constructions (see Dąbrowska et al. 2009 for a similar approach). Finally, 3) an eye-tracking (visual world) experiment will be used to study the online time course of sentence processing. To examine the role of the age of literacy acquisition on language processing and the suggestion made above that literacy enhances the entrenchment of abstract grammatical patterns and facilitates the processing of less prototypical constructions, three groups of children aged between 5 and 9 years, and three groups of adults (see also above) will participate in all three experiments. Tests assessing speakers’ auditory and visual SL skills, metalinguistic awareness, and other possible confounding factors (non-verbal analogical reasoning, working memory, and receptive vocabulary) will be also administered. The data collection process will be spread over multiple sessions to minimize participant fatigue and ensure high-quality data. This part of the project will allow shedding light on GRQs ENT1 (how do factors such as frequency and age of acquisition influence entrenchment?) ENT2 (what role do collo-profiles play in the learning of constructions and their mental representation?), CON2 (to what extent is constructional knowledge determined by collo-profiles and how can we measure and operationalize the degree of lexical specificity vs. productivity of construction slots?), and CON3 (do all native speakers of a language share the same constructions? If not, how do individual constructicons differ?).

If time permits, an ERP study with a sub-sample of the adult participants will also be conducted to explore potential individual differences in the N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native language sentence processing across groups as well as within-subjects. This will contribute towards the GRQ ENT3 (To what extent do measures of neural activity during language processing coincide with the results of behavioral and corpus data and how does this expand our understanding of how constructions are stored and processed in speakers’ brains?).

References

Braine, M.D.S. & P.J. Brooks. 1995. Verb argument structure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs, M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (eds.), 352–376. Erlbaum.

Brandt, S. & E. Kidd. 2011. Relative clause acquisition and representation: evidence from spontaneous speech, sentence repetition, and comprehension. In Converging evidence: methodological and theoretical issues for linguistic research, D. Schönefeld (ed.), 273–292. John Benjamins.

Dąbrowska, E. 2018. Experience, Aptitude and Individual Differences in Native Language Ultimate Attainment. Cognition178, 222–235.

Dąbrowska, E. 2020. Language as a Phenomenon of the Third Kind. Cognitive Linguistics 31, 213–229.

Dąbrowska, E., E. Pascual & B.M. Gómez-Estern. 2022. Literacy improves the comprehension of object relatives. Cognition 224, 104958.

Dąbrowska, E., C. Rowland & A. Theakston. 2009. The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies. Cognitive Linguistics 20, 571–597.

Dehaene, S., F. Pegado, L.W. Braga, P. Ventura, G.N. Filho, A. Jobert, G. Dehaene-Lambertz, R. Kolinsky, J. Morais & L. Cohen.  2010. How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science 330(6009), 1359–1364.

Divjak, D. & P. Milin. 2020. Exploring and exploiting uncertainty: Statistical learning ability affects how we learn to process language along multiple dimensions of experience. Cognitive Science 44(5), e12835.

Favier, S., A.S. Meyer & F. Huettig. 2021. Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150(10), 2167.

Goldberg, A.E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. The University of Chicago Press.

Jost, E. & M.H. Christiansen. 2017. Statistical learning as a domain-general mechanism of entrenchment. In Entrenchment and the psychology of language learning: How we reorganize and adapt linguistic knowledge. H.-J. Schmid (ed.), 227–244. Walter de Gruyter.

Kidd, E., S. Brandt, E. Lieven & M. Tomasello. 2007. Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children’s processing of relative clauses. Language and cognitive processes 22(6), 860897.

Lupyan, G., R.A. Rahman, L. Boroditsky & A. Clark. (2020). Effects of language on visual perception. Trends in cognitive sciences 24(11), 930–944.

Montag, J.L. & M.C. MacDonald. 2015. Text exposure predicts spoken production of complex sentences in 8-and 12-year-old children and adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144(2), 447.

Reali, F. & M.H. Christiansen, 2007. Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of memory and language 57(1), 1–23.

Details coming soon

With the introduction of comparative concepts by Croft (2022) and the development of the corresponding MoCCA framework (Lorenzi et al. 2024), we now have at our disposal a set of tools designed specifically for the alignment of constructicons in different languages.

The aim of this PhD project is to explore to what extent the connection of two constructicons works, viz. the English-language CASA ConstruCtiCon (Herbst et al. 2022-) and the German-language FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen(https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de). Beyond the straightforward differences in coverage, the project will determine whether there are systematic gaps in the comparative concepts, whether the comparative concepts can be used to not only show correspondences but also contrasts between the entries, whether the system is workable in practice. This project’s deliverables comprise a PhD thesis, a linking file from the CASA ConstruCtiCon to the MoCCA database, and a linking file with a small subset of links from the FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen (for illustration purposes).

References

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen, <https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de>

Herbst, Thomas, Thomas Hoffmann & Peter Uhrig. 2022-. The CASA ConstruCtiCon. <https://constructicon.de>

Lorenzi, Arthur, Peter Ljunglöf, Ben Lyngfelt, Tiago Timponi Torrent, William Croft, Alexander Ziem, Nina Böbel, Linnéa Bäckström, Peter Uhrig & Ely E. Matos. 2024. MoCCA: A Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL – ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 93–98, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.

Details coming soon

General remark: This project outline refers to general research theme 3 of the ‘Graduiertenkolleg’ [GK]: Entrenchment and mental representation [ENT].

Frequency effects play a prominent role as a design principle of language structures. A well-kown example is Zipf’s law (Zipf 1949), which establishes a connection between rank and frequency. More specifically, there is also a link between frequency and morphological change. Lieberman et al. (2007) have shown that there is a negative correlation between the regularization rate of irregular verbs and their logarithmically scaled frequency class (see Carroll et al. 2012 on German).

Frequency plays a role in cognitive representations and processes, e.g. entrenchment (Schmid 2020), yet its precise influence remain poorly understood as it is often used rather naïvely and without reference to plausible alternative hypotheses (Gries 2022). This is problematic insofar as frequency often shows collinearity with other factors, such as the dispersion of the corresponding form(s) within a corpus; the same applies to perceptual-psychological and information-theoretical effects: How salient are the linguistic units under consideration (e.g. word forms)? How predictable are they?

An open question in this context is the exact relationship between token and type frequency. Psycholinguistic experiments (e.g. Clahsen et al. 1997: 227 on German) have shown that with strong verbs of approximately the same (token) frequency, rare participle forms (e.g. geglitten ‘glided’) are recognized significantly slower than frequent ones (e.g. gelogen ‘lied’) in a lexical discrimination task.

On the basis of dialectal data from Continental West Germanic dialects (German, Dutch, Frisian), morphological frequency effects shall be systematically investigated, combining quantitative (e.g. information-theoretical approaches) on the one hand and qualitative, morphology-theoretical approaches on the other. Dialects are more ‘natural’ than standard languages in that they were mainly confined to the spoken modality (Weiß 2001), thus allowing a more direct grasp on frequency effects (see e.g. Ruoff’s 1990 famous dictionary). Fine-scaled variation as it surfaces with such varieties also allows for a more nuanced picture of frequency effects across different systems. Thus, we have to chance to conduct “a kind of micro- study in depth of data that are heterogeneous enough to be cohesive, but also heterogeneous enough to be interesting and revealing” (Moulton 1968: 461).

Interaction of type and token frequencies can be seen in irregularization processes in the verbal and nominal domain. For instance, the class of so-called ‘short verbs’ in Germanic languages shows a remarkable balance between shortness (~ productive economy) and distinctiveness (~ perceptive economy), with e.g. paradigm position (e.g. INF, 3SG) and phonological aspects as influencing factors (Nübling 2000). In the case of morphophonological alternations such as umlaut, the relationship between base and umlaut vowel can become abritrarized under high frequency, resulting in category-specific differences, e.g. between verbal, nominal, and adjectival domain (Schallert 2024a, b). This raises the information-theoretical question of the predictability (entropy) of such forms.¹

Frequency effects in morphology: qualitative and quantitative aspects Two main types of data sources shall be used as empirical base of the investigation: (1) grammatical descriptions of local dialects, which are comprehensibly available for the whole area of investigation. (2) Corpus data, as accessible via the Datenbank Gesprochenes Deutsch [DGD] ‘Database of Spoken German’² or the corpus underlying the Morphological Atlas of Dutch Dialects [MAND] (De Schutter et al. 2005-2008).³ In collaboration with other projects of the GK, also psycholinguistical experiments could be conducted.

References

Carroll, Ryan, Ragnar Scare & Joseph Salmons. 2012. Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs. In: Journal of Historical Linguistics 2(2): 153–172.

Clahsen, Harald, Sonja Eisenbeiß & Ingrid Sonnenstuhl-Henning (1997): Morphological Structure and the Processing of Inflected Words. In: Theoretical Linguistics 23(3): 201–249.

Gries, Stefan Th. 2022. On, or against?, (just) frequency. In: Boas, Hans C. (ed.): Directions for Pedagogical Construction Grammar: Learning and Teaching (with) Constructions: 47–71. (= Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] 49). Berlin, Boston (MA): De Gruyter Mouton.

Lieberman, Erez, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang & Martin Nowak. 2007. Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language. In: Nature 449: 713–716.

Moulton, William G. 1968. Structural Dialectology. In: Language 44(3): 451–466.

Nübling, Damaris. 2000. Prinzipien der Irregularisierung: Eine kontrastive Analyse von zehn Verben in zehn germanischen Sprachen. (= Linguistische Arbeiten 415). Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Ruoff, Arno. 1990. Häufigkeitswörterbuch gesprochener Sprache. (= Idiomatica 8). Tübingen: Niemeyer. 2nd edn.

Schallert, Oliver. 2024a. Number fission from a formal and functional perspective. In: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 43(1): 115–145.

—2024b. Wir treiben’s bunt und immer bünter: Neues zum Steigerungsumlaut. Manuscript FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The Dynamics of the Linguistic System: Usage, Conventionalization, and Entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Schutter, Georges [et al.]. 2005–2008. Morphological Atlas of Dutch Dialects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [2 Vols.].

Sims, Andrea D. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. (= Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weiß, Helmut. 2001. On Two Types of Natural Languages. Some Consequences for Linguistics. In: Theoretical Linguistics 27(1): 87–103.

Zipf, George K. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge (MA): Addison-Wesley.

¹ This question can be stated as follows: How can we ‘predict the inflectional exponent of a paradigm cell, given knowledge of the inflectional exponent of another paradigm cell’ (Sims 2015: 278). Mathematically, we are dealing with the conditional entropy of an exponent y in cell Y, given an exponent x in cell X, i.e. H(Y|X) = ∑_{x∈X, y∈Y} p(x, y) log₂ (p(x)/p(x, y)).

² https://dgd.ids-mannheim.de/dgd/pragdb.dgd_extern.welcome (last accessed: 5 December, 2024).

³ https://projecten.meertens.knaw.nl/mand/GTRPdataperitem.html (last accessed: 5 December, 2024).

In many Romance languages can be found structures in which two fully fledged verbs – the first verb being a “motion verb” – cooccur in an apparently coordinated structure, but do not express two different (subsequent) state of affairs, as it seems to be the case e.g. in Old Italian:

1. Entonces los críticos vienen y dicen justificadamente, “Oye, esto no es cierto.” (esTenTen23)
2. O Pedro vai e conta tudo a María. (Ross 2021, 103, ex. 79)
3. Non può essere che un assessore se ne esce e dice la sua da solo. (www.ilrestodelcarlino.it)
4. Ils ne peuvent pas arriver et dire « on ne veut pas de noirs et d’arabes dans nos quartiers, on ne veut pas de hip-hop », c’est impossible ça. (frTenTen23)
5. «Va e pianamente gli apri […]» La fante […] andò e sì gli aperse […]. (Boccaccio, Decameron)

Depending on the language studied and the theoretical framework, such structures are labelled under very different names: they are referred to as multi-verb constructions (cf. Jaque et al. 2018) or as ‘<V-and-V> construction’ (cf. Colaço/Gonçalves 2017) or as ‘go-and-Verb construction’ (cf. Stefanowitsch 1999). For the time being, these structures will be summarised here under the generic term “pseudo-coordination”, which is widely used in both Hispanic (cf. Bravo 2020) and typological research (cf. Ross 2021) and has the advantage of emphasising the monoclausal character of the construction.

The pseudo-coordinated structures exemplified above exist in numerous languages, not only Indo-European languages (cf. Coseriu 1966 with a research overview covering 24 languages and now Ross 2021) and are therefore particularly suitable for a comparative linguistic analysis. While a certain amount of research has been done on Spanish (cf. Bravo 2020, Grutschus 2024, Jaque et al. 2018), on Portuguese as well as on certain diatopic varieties of Italian (in particular, Southern Italy; cf. the contributions in Giusti et al. 2022), a contrastive perspective on (some of) the Romance languages seems to be still missing (but cf. however some tentative empirical explorations in Grutschus/Fesenmeier, ms.). Furthermore, a CxG approach (cf. e.g. Kinn 2018 for Norwegian) seems particularly suitable for carrying out such a comparative analysis (both diachronically and synchronically), as it should allow for identifying differences and similarities across Romance languages with regard to productivity, the degree of constructionalisation (cf. the pronominal verb uscirsene in 3), and the semantic ‘added value’ of the construction in comparison to the use of the ‘simple’ verb.

References

esTenTen23/frTenTen23 = https://www.sketchengine.eu/documentation/tenten-corpora.

Bravo, A. (2020): “On pseudo-coordination in Spanish”, Borealis 9/1, 125-180.

Colaço, M./Gonçalves, A. (2017): “<V-and-V> constructions in Portuguese: The case of <ir-and-V>”, in: Kato, M. A./Ordóñez, F. (eds.). The Morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 135-156.

Coseriu, E. (1966):  “‘Tomo y me voy’: ein Problem vergleichender europäischer Syntax”, Vox Romanica 25, 13-55.

Giusti, G./Di Caro, V. N./Ross, D. (eds.) (2022): Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Grutschus, A. (2024): “Va y dice & Co.: Motion verbs as quotatives”, in: Pfadenhauer, K./Wiesinger, E. (eds.). Romance motion verbs in language change. Grammar, lexicon, discourse. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 287-310.

Grutschus, A./Fesenmeier, L. (ms.): Pseudo-coordination in language comparison.

Jaque, M. et al. (2018) : “Es llegar y llevar: construcciones multiverbales de verbo finito coordinadas en español”, Lenguas modernas 52, 163-186.

Kinn, T. (2018): “Pseudocoordination in Norwegian: Degrees of grammaticalization and constructional variants”, in: Coussé, E./Andersson, P./Olofsson, J. (eds.): Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Ross, D. (2021): Pseudocoordination, Serial Verb Constructions and Multi-Verb Predicates: the Relationship between Form and Structure. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois (Ph.D. thesis).

Stefanowitsch, A. (1999): “The Go-and–Verb Construction in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Image-Schema Blending and the Construal of Events”, in: Nordquist, D./Berkenfield, C. (eds.): Proceedings of the Second Annual High Desert Linguistics Society Conference. Albuquerque: High Desert Linguistics Society, 123-134.