Research Questions

General Research Themes (GRTs) and General Research Questions (GRQs)

The research conducted in the RTG focusses on four broad themes, each comprising several related general research questions, as outlined below. The first three themes correspond to the most salient dimensions of constructional space (size/complexity and abstractness in the case of GRT1, connectivity, i.e. links between constructions, for GRT2, and entrenchment for GRT3), while the last theme (GRT4) situates constructions in the broader context of language use, variation and change. The overall design is such that each doctoral project will address at least two of the general research questions, and each of the GRQs should be addressed by at least two research projects. While the first phase of the project (2022-2025) focussed on the concept of construction (GRT1, esp. CON1 and CON2), the main emphasis in the current phase (2025-2028) will be on entrenchment (GRT3). 

Although CxG researchers share the view that linguistic knowledge is represented in a (possibly multimodal) mental constructicon (Beckner et al. 2009), there exist different conceptions of constructions (Croft 2012, Diessel 2019, Goldberg 2019, see also Lasch 2016 and Imo 2011). Furthermore, there is disagreement about the most relevant level of abstraction for language use (Boas 2003; Goldberg 2006;  Hampe & Schönefeld 2006; Herbst 2011, 2014) and the theoretical implications of synchronic and diachronic variation for CxG (Dąbrowska 2012a, 2020; Huber 2017; Goldberg & Herbst 2021). The RTG will examine the various positions critically in the light of empirical research and develop a more precise understanding of the term construction, as well as reproducible criteria for identifying constructions.

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)? 

CON2: To what extent is constructional knowledge determined by the specific items occurring in them (collo-profiles) and how can we measure and operationalize the degree of lexical specificity vs. productivity of construction slots? 

CON3: Do all native speakers of a language share the same constructions? If not, 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? 

CON4: To what extent can constructions (and their constituents) identified in one language be equated with superficially similar constructions in another language?

The idea of a network of constructions is central to CxG theory (Beckner et al. 2009, Lasch & Ziem 2014, Diessel 2019, Goldberg 2019, Sommerer and Smirnova 2020). Constructions can theoretically be conceived as linked on the basis of (partially) shared form and/or meaning and/or contexts of usage and/or collo-profiles (i.e. overlap in the items that occur in open slots of the construction). In addition to traditional structuralist and cognitive models of semantics and computational research methods, it is mainly the new neurolinguistic methods of investigation available at FAU that are extremely promising in this respect.

NET1: What kind of empirical evidence can we provide to establish the claim that constructions are connected in a cognitive network? How can computational methods help reveal the network character of constructional space in the sense of shared form/meaning/usage contexts/collo-profiles?

NET2: To what extent is the linguistic concept of inheritance links (polysemy, subpart, metaphorical extension, instance) psychologically real?

NET3: In multilingual speakers, are different languages represented in separate language-specific networks or in one multilingual network?

The basic assumption of CxG models is that constructions get entrenched through repeated usage events which leave “lossy memory traces” in the brain (Goldberg 2019: 7; see also Bybee 2010). However, despite a considerable amount of research on entrenchment, many issues still remain open. Thus, the RTG will investigate the factors that contribute to entrenchment (i.e. dimensions like frequency, salience, dispersion, age of acquisition etc.: e.g. Behrens & Pfänder 2016 and other work from RTG 1624: Frequency effects in language; Dąbrowska 2008a, 2008b, Divjak and Cardwell-Harris 2015, Hilpert and Diessel 2017, Schmid 2017, 2020), the role of items in the learning and storage of constructions (Casenhiser & Goldberg 2005, Herbst 2016) and the role that entrenched L1-constructions play in the learning of a second/foreign language (MacWhinney 2017, Uhrig et al. 2022). A strong emphasis will be put on further exploring the multifactorial complexity of entrenchment on the basis of empirical data from different research areas (corpora, behavioural experiments, neurolinguistic measurements).

ENT1: How do factors such as frequency, salience, dispersion and age of acquisition influence entrenchment? 

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?

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?

This theme will investigate how factors such as the speaker’s communicative intentions, the situation, the medium, the social status of the interlocutors, an individual speaker’s repertoire of constructions, etc. affect the choice of specific constructions in language use, and how these factors lead to language change at the community level. These issues will be investigated in the context of existing sociolinguistic research and cognitive theories (Geeraerts, Kristiansen and Peirsman 2010, Geraerts and Kristiansen 2015, Hollmann 2013, Kristiansen and Dirven 2008, Pütz, Robinson and Reif 2014).

USE1: What factors influence speakers’ choices from a range of competing constructions (e.g. communicative intentions, situational context, speaker-hearer relations, monologue vs. dialogue, medium)? 

USE2: To what extent do the factors determining the choice of construction differ between speakers with respect to their individual backgrounds and personalities (socioeconomic status, dialect, general cognitive abilities, ability to accommodate to other people or cultures, multilingualism, extroversion)? 

USE3: How are constructions combined in the process of formulating an utterance and what role do co-occurrence, overlap and blending play in this process?

USE4: How do the factors mentioned in USE1 and USE2 result in language change at the community level at different timescales?

The Research Constructicon

An important integrative component of research data management and documentation in the RTG will be a multilingual research constructicon (RCnn), i.e. a semantic representation model and a central database that connects the corpus data, experimental results, lexicographic descriptions and (links to) publications generated by the various research projects. The RCnn will provide a common representation for all individual constructions covered in the different projects and languages. This innovative approach to linguistic research documentation will require the development of a rich, descriptively adequate and extensible format for such entries and for the links between them as well as a user-friendly access structure.While the primary responsibility for the development of the formal and technical framework of the RCnn rests with a postdoctoral researchers appointed specifically for this purpose, all members of the RTG are expected to contribute to it.

References

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Behrens, H. & S. Pfänder (eds.). 2016. Experience Counts: Frequency Effects in Language. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

Boas, H.C. 2003. A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 

Bybee, J. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Casenhiser, D. & A.E. Goldberg. 2005. Fast Mapping of a Phrasal Form and Meaning. Developmental Science 8, 500–508.

Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Dąbrowska, E. 2008a. The Effects of Frequency and Neighbourhood Density on Adult Native Speakers’ Productivity with Polish Case Inflections: An Empirical Test of Usage-Based Approaches to Morphology. Journal of Memory and Language 58, 931–951.

Dąbrowska, E. 2008b. Questions with Long-Distance Dependencies: A Usage-Based Perspective. Cognitive Linguistics 19(3), 391–425. 

Dąbrowska, E. 2012a. Different Speakers, Different Grammars: Individual Differences in Native Language Attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2, 219–253. 

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

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Divjak, D. & C. Cardwell-Harris. 2015. Frequency and Entrenchment. In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, E. Dąbrowska & D. Divjak (eds.), 53–75. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Geeraerts, D. & G. Kristiansen. 2015. Variationist Linguistics. In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, E. Dąbrowska & D. Divjak (eds.), 366–389. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Goldberg, A.E. 2019. Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Herbst, T. 2014. Idiosyncrasies and Generalizations: Argument Structure, Semantic Roles and the Valency Realization Principle. In Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kognitive Linguistik, M. Hilpert & S. Flach (eds.), 253–289. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 

Herbst, T. 2016. Foreign Language Learning is Construction Learning: Principles of Pedagogic Construction Grammar. In Applied Construction Grammar, S. De Knop & G. Gilquin (eds.), 21–51. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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MacWhinney, B. 2017. Entrenchment in Second-Language Learning. In Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge, H.-J. Schmid (ed.), 343–366. De Gruyter Mouton. 

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

Sommerer, L. & E. Smirnova. 2020. Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Uhrig P., S. Faulhaber., E. Dąbrowska & T. Herbst. 2022. L2-Words that Go Together: More on Collocation and Learner Language. In Directions for Pedagogical Construction Grammar, H.C. Boas (ed.). DOI: 10.1515/9783110746723-004