2.1 Definition and exemplification of constructions
In this section we discuss the status of constructions and develop a proposal by Lars Heltoft that the concept of a paradigm should be extended to the analysis of construc-tions. If constructions are part of grammar, we should clarify to what extent they are organised according to principles already known from morphological (and topologi-cal) parts of grammar.26
We put forward and defend the following definition: A construction is a com-plex sign with an internal syntax and a semantic coding. Its grammatical status is defined by its position in a paradigm, and as in morphology and in topology, we say that a paradigm has both a domain and a frame. The domain of a constructional paradigm is the syntagmatic context in which the paradigmatic relations between two or more constructions apply; the frame is the common semantic denominator for the paradigm (its conceptual zone, ‘Begriffszone’ in Hjelmslev’s sense (1935–37, 1972; see further Heltoft 1996, Christensen 2007). As an example of a domain, take the transitive syntactic pattern satisfied by a set of two place verbs in Danish, see (1a)–(1b). Telicity in Danish will serve as an example of a frame or common seman-tic denominator. In all paradigms, language specific expression is linked to language specific content.
(1) a. Peter skød Frederik ‘Peter shot Frederick’
b. Peter skød på Frederik ‘Peter shot at Frederick’
The Danish verb skyde ‘to shoot’ can be construed in different ways: It can follow a simple transitive pattern with a direct object (1a) or a prepositional pattern with the
26. The view that constructions are paradigmatically organised lies behind Hansen and Heltoft (2011) and is carried out in part in that work, see further Hansen and Heltoft (2005), Heltoft (2008).
Chapter 3. Constructions 73
preposition på ‘at’, (1b). The difference between these constructions can be described in terms of telicity, as the direct construction denotes an action and the prepositional construction an activity (Durst-Andersen & Herslund 1996). Actions are activi-ties leading to completion, i.e. to a new state. Atelic constructions simply denote an activity and are neutral with respect to the question of completion. Thus, the atelic construction (1b) denotes an activity without including a result of this activity. This means that completion is substantially possible but not relevant for this linguistic option. Thus, the following sentence is grammatical: Peter skød på Frederik, men ramte ham først i tredie forsøg ‘Peter shot at Frederick, but he didn’t hit him until the third try’.
Parallel to morphological and topological paradigms, a domain must be identi-fied, namely a syntagmatic context in which the paradigmatic contrast applies. The syntagmatic condition of the present paradigm is transitivity, that is a verbal stem and its A2 (argument 2). The syntagmatic position in which the contrast applies is in square brackets: [A2].
The paradigmatic contrast is between zero and a preposition (in the unmarked case: på ‘at’). The zero option results in the direct object and the simple transitive sen-tence (1a). The choice of a preposition results in the prepositional object (1b).
Again, the content dimension of the paradigm is called its frame, compare Chapter 1, Table 1 with its explication of this notion. The frame of the present para-digm is ‘telicity’.
Table 1. The paradigmatic structure of telicity illustrated by (1a–b) Domain: V + [A2]
Frame: Telicity
Expression Content
zero + NP telic
prep + NP atelic
The paradigmatic opposition of content from (1a) to (1b) is caused neither by the verb skyde, which is identical in the two examples, nor by the number of arguments, which is also identical, but only by the change of construction, from simple to prepo-sitional. Notice that the opposition here is not a case of plain compositional syntax, since this function of på is not found outside this context and the meaning of (1b) is not local.
Thus, these constructions are paradigmatically organised. The alternation between a simple construction and a prepositional one with på is very common in Danish.
Thus we find the verb skrive ‘to write’ showing a similar alternation between the direct
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construction designating an action (2a) and the prepositional construction designat-ing an atelic activity (2b):
(2) a. Peter skrev romanen ‘Peter wrote the novel’
b. Peter skrev på romanen ‘Peter was writing the novel’
Other verbs showing this alternation pattern are bygge ‘to build’, kommentere ‘to com-ment’, male ‘to paint’, skubbe ‘to push’, sy ‘to sew’. Indeed, this alternation is so produc-tive in Modern Danish, that we even find it in modern loans. The new Danish verb brainstorme, in British English brainstorm as in ‘to brainstorm on a topic’, is integrated into this alternation. Speakers test different prepositions (3a–b), very frequently the preposition på ‘at’ (3a). The following examples are all from google.dk.
(3) a. vi brainstormer på egne og andres ideer we b. 27 on our own and others’ ideas ‘we are brainstorming on our own and others’ ideas’
b. vi forsøgte at brainstorme over emnet we tried to b. on the topic ‘we tried to brainstorm on the topic’
The transitive opposition is found, too, although less frequently (3c):
c. lederen beder deltagerne om at “brainstorme”
the chairman asks the participants to b.
et emne a topic
‘the chairman asks the participants to brainstorm a topic’
What is interesting here is that this new Danish coinage is integrated into the exist-ing system of paradigmatic oppositions between the atelic prepositional construction and the telic direct object construction. In the case of (3c), the verbal construction denotes a complete action including an accomplished state of result. In contrast, we have a prepositional construction denoting an atelic activity with no denotation of a result achieved (3a), just like the meaning expressed by (1b). The examples quoted so far thus show that the constructions illustrated by examples (1a), (2a), (3c), and (1b), (2b), (3a) are paradigmatically organised, and the examples quoted in (3) illustrate the productivity of the paradigm.
The synchronic reality of constructional paradigms is also obvious from the fact that they may also be adopted by existing transitive verbs. This is illustrated by the
27. In (3) the verb is abbreviated as b. in the glosses.
Chapter 3. Constructions 75
Danish verb kommentere, ‘to comment’, traditionally found only in a direct object con-struction (3d), but which has become increasingly popular amongst Danish politicians in its atelic use (3e).28
d. Peter kommenterer sagen
‘Peter makes his comments on the case’
e. Peter kommenterer på sagen
‘Peter is making some comments on the case’
The existence of a constructional paradigmatic relation does not depend on the num-ber of verbs instantiating the frame of the paradigm but on the presence of an opposi-tion between complex signs. By definiopposi-tion, paradigmatically organised construcopposi-tions share a syntagmatic domain and belong to a common semantic frame. Thus, con-structions that form paradigms will have a systematic relationship between content and expression, to be studied through applications of Hjelmslev’s commutation test (1943: 66–67, cf. Siertsema 1955: 166ff.). This is one important point of difference between our view and that of Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg 1995) and Radi-cal Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). See further Chapter 7. For a comment on the difference between paradigmatic structure and diachronic layering as used by Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott, see Chapter 4, Section 3.
So far, we have defined and illustrated the following notions of our definition of constructions: complex sign, paradigmatic relation, syntagmatic domain and seman-tic frame. The examples (1)–(3) show that such alternations should be described as part of grammar and not of the lexicon in the form of valency patterns of individual predicates.29 Remember that the verb stem does not signify the telicity contrast and the difference in the type of arguments in (1)–(3). Consequently, it is necessary to dis-tinguish between two levels of analysis: the level of lexicon, including the description of valency patterns for individual verbs, and the level of constructions. We consider the opposition between (1a) and (1b) to be a ‘minimal pair’ for establishing a construc-tion. In the following subsection we illustrate one further point, namely the language specificity of constructions.
28. The popularity of (3e) may have been favoured by its English equivalent which is, however, always prepositional, and which, accordingly, differs from the Danish verb as it does not have a paradigmatic relation to a direct transitive construction.
29. A clear distinction between valency and non-lexical, compositional dependency struc-tures is found in Eisenberg (1989, 2006), a main source of inspiration for Hansen and Heltoft (2011), who distinguish between lexical government (valency) and categorial government (abstract, but language specific dependency relations). Constructions are not lexical units, but compositional ones (further Hansen & Heltoft 2005; Heltoft 2008).
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2.2 Constructions are language specific
According to our definition constructions link language specific expression to lan-guage specific content. This is not meant to exclude the possibility that other lanlan-guages can have similar constructions, see (4a–c) below; it means that it need not be so, as illustrated in (4d–e) below.
As appears from the translations of (1a) and (1b), the opposition in Danish between a telic action and an atelic activity is also found in English. Examples from Goldberg (1995: 4, 63) are provided in (4a–c):
(4) a. Sam kicked at Bill b. Ethel struck at Fred c. Ethel shot at Fred
We saw that this construction is paradigmatically organised and productive in Dan-ish. This is, however, not the case in all languages, for instance not in French. The opposition between a telic action and an atelic activity is expressed in French by dif-ferent verbs, (4d–e) by abattre vs. tirer sur. Consequently, for French we cannot pos-tulate the existence of a paradigmatic organisation of this opposition corresponding to (1a–b).
d. Pierre a abattu Frédéric d’un coup de fusil ‘Peter shot Frederick’ (completed action, telic) e. Pierre a tiré sur Frédéric
‘Peter fired a shot/several shots at Frederick’
(atelic activity)
Let us consider another pair of well-known alternating constructions, labelled ergative alternations, illustrated in Table 2 and by the examples in (5).30
In morphologically ergative languages, the intransitive subject and the transitive object are marked by the same case form, the absolutive, whereas the transitive sub-ject has the marked ergative case. Danish (and English) express an ergative pattern by way of purely syntactic construction. An intransitive, inergative construction is found in (5a):
(5) a. grenen knækkede ‘the branch broke’
30. This extension of the morphologically defined concept of ergativity is from Halliday (1996).
Chapter 3. Constructions 77
The example (5a) conveys a change of the state of the referent (X) referred to by the subject argument A1. This subject has the semantic role of Inagent, Incausative.31 The transitive, ergative construction (5b) presents the situation differently:
b. Peter knækkede grenen ‘Peter broke the branch’
Table 2. The ergative alternation Domain: V + [A1 (+A2)]
Frame: Causal relation affecting Ax
Expression Content of A1 Content of A2
NP1 Inagent, Incausative
Ax
NP1 + NP2 Agent, Cause
Ay Inagent, Incausative
Ax
Table 2 reads as follows: The domain of this constructional paradigm is a basic predication involving only one argument. The semantic frame identifies this argument as referring to referent x and describes the referent as affected by a causal relation. The argument Ax is treated in two different ways, namely as the subject argument A1 in the intransitive option, and as the direct object A2 in the transitive option. This construc-tional paradigm including a neutral verb stem is, in fact, an ergative system: At the level of content syntax it is constructionally ergative; at the level of expression syntax it is morphologically and topologically transitive.
In other words: this is an alternation between an intransitive and a transitive pat-tern32 with a corresponding change of content: incausative (‘inergative’) process and causative (‘ergative’) action. This alternation is a constructional paradigm, since both a common semantic frame and a syntagmatic domain can be identified. One further example is (5c–d):
c. brødet bagte ‘the bread baked’
d. Marie bagte brødet ‘Mary baked the bread’
31. The labelling of semantic roles is not at stake. We prefer the labels Causative vs Incaus-ative (from Hansen & Heltoft 2011), because we consider grammaticalised semantic roles to be specific to constructions, not universal lexical properties.
32. This way of presenting the link between the two constructions is not intended as a deri-vational link. In (5), the inergative constructions are not to be considered as primary to the ergative constructions nor vice versa.
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The verb is neutral with respect to this alternation. Just as in the telic/atelic-alternation illustrated by (1a) and (1b), this paradigmatic difference is not determined by the verb stem, which remains unchanged in both situations: bag-, nor by the unchanged incausative argument (X): brødet,‘the bread’. Instead, it depends on the choice of con-struction: if transitive, there is a subject indicating the cause of the activity, if intransi-tive, no external cause is mentioned of the activity or process.
The ergative alternation is found with a series of verbs, for instance: bøje ‘bend’, brænde ‘burn’, dreje ‘turn’, koge ‘cook, boil’, stege ‘fry’, smelte ‘melt’. It is productive, since loan verbs adopt it, for example: eskalere ‘escalate’, see (5e–f):
e. krisen eskalerede ‘the crisis escalated’
f. de eskalerede krisen ‘they escalated the crisis’
This case, then, is comparable to the one presented in (1a–1b), as we have a language specific paradigmatic relation belonging to a common semantic frame. On the other hand, the ergative alternation is found only with certain verbs and not e.g. with the verb skyde ‘shoot’.
The ergative alternation is found not only in Danish and English but also in French, see (5g) and (5i) – intransitive constructions – and (5h) and (5j) – transi-tive constructions. The French construction is very frequent according to Boons et al.
(1976: 90). It should be noted, however, that the alternation is not found with the same set of verbs in the different languages. Accordingly, even between such closely related languages as Danish, English and French, constructions are not organised in the same way, so there is no straightforward claim that constructions are structured according to universal cognitive principles; rather, we should constantly include language spe-cific semantic differences, however subtle.33
g. la branche a cassé ‘the branch broke’
h. Pierre a cassé la branche ‘Peter broke the branch’
i. le riz cuit, la salade égoutte …
‘the rice is cooking’, ‘the salad is straining’
j. je cuis le riz, j’égoutte la salade …
‘I am cooking the rice’, ‘I am straining the salad’.
33. Croft (2001: 134) also insists upon the language specificity of constructions. For a different view, see Goldberg (1995: 5). This point will be discussed further in Chapter 7.
Chapter 3. Constructions 79
Let us return to examples (5c–d) with the Danish verb bage ‘to bake’, presented below as (6a–b). This verb fits into a set of different constructions, a situation which in a lexi-calist analysis would have resulted in several different lexical readings. Let us consider a number of these constructions of which some exist in English as well, discussed by Taylor (1998: 188–191).
(6) a. brødet bagte
‘the bread was baking’
b. Marie bagte brødet ‘Mary baked the bread’
c. Marie bagte sig et brød ‘Mary baked herself a loaf’
d. Marie bagte ‘Mary was baking’
First, we shall simply list them without indicating their paradigmatic organisation.
They can be described approximately as follows:
– the incausative (a one-argument construction): the subject designates a referent that is described as the patient of the activity or the process (6a).
– the causative (a two-argument transitive construction): the subject designates a referent that is the cause of the activity or the process (6b).
– the free indirect object construction (6c) (a three-argument construction): the indirect object designates its potential referent as a recipient or benefactor, and the direct object designates the entity affected or produced by the action. In Mod-ern Danish this construction is generally restricted to reflexive indirect objects, in contrast to English: Mary baked Sally a cake has no productive modern Danish parallel, see further Sections 2.4.4 and 3.2.2.
– the agentive construction without expression of the direct object views the action as non-specific or generic (6d).
Many verbal stems enter a large number of constructions, even more than the four illustrated in (6). In such cases34 the lexicalist would need to multiply the number of lexical entries.35
34. We will discuss these and more constructions of the verb bage in subsection 2.4.
35. See Taylor (1998: 189) for a critical account of different traditional analyses of double object-constructions and good arguments in favour of a constructional view. A discussion of the disadvantages of a lexical description of these patterns as opposed to the constructional account proposed here is found in Chapter 7.
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We would prefer to distinguish between different lexical verbs only in the case of genuine differences of content, as in the well-known case of the Modern French hom-onym verbs voler to be discussed later (Section 3.3.1.). Our point is that it is neither useful nor instructive to multiply the number of different lexical entries and thus com-plicate the structure of the lexicon in cases where a simpler analysis exists. The simpler analysis is the constructional one, implying that the difference between the examples studied so far is a difference of construction.
Such constructional sets must be analysed with respect to their paradigmatic organisation. In the following, the transitive construction S-V-O will serve as an illus-tration, being a default construction related to many other constructions, yet language specific. In Section 2.4.6. we sum up our results concerning paradigmatic oppositions by illustrating the default position of transitivity in Danish.
2.3 The transitive construction S-V-O
The transitive construction, labelled S-V-O for ease of exposition, forms oppositions to a number of more specific constructions. It thus enters a set of different paradigms as illustrated earlier in Section 2, for instance (1a) Peter skød Frederik, ‘Peter shot Fredrick’
and (5b) Peter knækkede grenen ‘Peter broke the branch’. S-V-O allows a great variety of verbal stems. This is clearly the case in English, where the S-V-O-construction is found not only in prototypical cases with verbs having an animate agent provoking a change of state in a patient like (7a),36 but also in cases where no such relation between the arguments can be found, like (7b).
(7) a. Peter killed Frederick b. Peter saw Frederick
English extends the transitive pattern to verbs that differ considerably with respect to the content, understood here as the nature of the relation expressed between the two arguments, as appears from (7c) and (7d):
c. The hotel forbids dogs d. The tent sleeps six
The same observation holds, although to a lesser extent, for e.g. Danish and French.
The examples below illustrate in (7e–f) a sort of “reversed” relation, i.e. the subject being the patient, whereas we have no agent at all in the examples.
36. Prototypical in the sense of Hopper and Thompson (1980).
Chapter 3. Constructions 81
e. Pierre a égaré sa montre ‘Peter has lost his watch’
f. Pierre a reçu un coup mortel ‘Peter has received a mortal blow’
The more or less extended use of the SVO construction is, however, language spe-cific, so that some languages are less restrictive than others. English is particular in this respect, as this pattern is found more extensively than in related languages.
Thus, the equivalents of (7c-d) are found neither in German nor French, see (7g–j).
According to Taylor (1998:187–188), who provides the examples (7c–d) and (7g–h), in general English permits a much wider range of non prototypical transitives than German.
g. *Das Hotel verbietet Hunde h. *Das Zelt schläft sechs i. *L’hôtel défend les chiens j. *La tente dort six
According to Tomasello (1998: xviii), the SVO construction in English has been extended to verbs that do not conform to those originally used in this pattern. Thus in English the SVO construction has become more abstract during the development of English than e.g. its German and French counterparts.
The cases discussed so far clearly show that the content of constructions can be very abstract, and specifically that the SVO construction does not directly associ-ate with the prototypical pattern of transitivity proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Neither can we associate semantic roles directly with e.g. the functions of sub-ject or obsub-ject.37 Semantic roles are ascribed through the integration of this construc-tion in specific paradigms.
2.4 Overview of paradigmatic oppositions between constructions
In this subsection we will sum up the main paradigmatic oppositions between the constructions in Danish mentioned so far and draw a map of their paradig-matic relations. We shall restrict ourselves to active constructions and make only
In this subsection we will sum up the main paradigmatic oppositions between the constructions in Danish mentioned so far and draw a map of their paradig-matic relations. We shall restrict ourselves to active constructions and make only