Constructions and Paradigms 2021
Workshop on Grammatical Complexity and Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic Structure

10 November 2021
Room 105, Maison de Recherche, Université Paris 8, St Denis

For more details, see :
http://www.dsglynn.univ-paris8.fr/cxs-2021.html

Workshop organised by the RU TransCrit, Université Paris 8

The Grammatical Construction arguably represents one of the most important constructs for describing and explaining language. Despite its importance, linguistics struggles with questions concerning how best to operationalise the notion, its value as a heuristic for a cognitively plausible description of language processing and acquisition, but also how it can be used to represent paradigmatic grammatical relations and compositionality. This workshop examines the role of the construction and how we can answer those questions.

Contact :
Dylan Glynn <dsg.up8@gmail.com>
Leclercq Benoit <benoit.leclercq04@univ-paris8.fr>


10h00
Coffee

10h30
A quick look at the visual-perception support verb construction and its pragmatics
Bert Cappelle
Université de Lille

11h30
Can we study dialect constructions using experimental paradigms ?
A Magnitude Estimation study in Northumberland and Ulster
Cameron Morin
University of Paris

12h15
Benefactive/malefactive uses of possession in Brazilian Portuguese
Olaf Mikkelsen & Dafné Palú
Université Paris 8 & Catholic University of Portugal

13h00
Lunch Break

14h00
May and might in concessive clauses.
A case of post-modal grammaticalization ?
Benoit Leclercq
Université Paris 8

15h00
Chasing functional complexity
A story of the Polish dative reflexive construction in spontaneous interactions
Piotr Wyrolak
Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan

15h45
Coffee

16h00
Does a difference in form always entail a difference in function ?
Answers from a study of subject extraposition across levels of abstraction
Samantha Laporte
Université de Lille

Abstracts

Bert Cappelle
Université de Lille
Let’s have a quick look at the visual-perception support verb construction and its pragmatics

English uses at least two different support verbs in combination with the noun look : have and take. While the expressions have a look at something and take a look at something are treated as synonymous in many dictionaries, they can be shown to attract different optional adjectives (e.g. have a quick look vs. take an honest look) and to differ in the pragmatic functions they are used for. The aim of this talk is to report on such differences between the two expressions and to reflect on whether expressions and functions can lend themselves to some form of paradigmatic modelling.

Cameron Morin
University of Paris
Can we study dialect constructions using experimental paradigms ?
A Magnitude Estimation study in Northumberland and Ulster

Can we study dialect constructions using experimental paradigms ? A Magnitude Estimation study in Northumberland and Ulster In this presentation, I talk about work in progress on double modals, a set of dialect constructions in British and American English. Previous corpus-based work on double modals in American and British Tweets by Morin, Grieve and Desagulier suggests that double modals are grammatical constructions that might be distinguished by their social meaning at least as much, if not more than their semantic and pragmatic meaning. To examine this further, I am preparing a fieldwork protocol to measure the acceptability and meaning of double modals in Northumberland and Ulster, two regions where double modals have been attested but also have been suggested to be declining. This protocol includes two main tasks : a task involving Magnitude Estimation, which is an experimental paradigm from psychophysics which has been advocated for acceptability judgments by some syntacticians, including Construction Grammarians (Hoffmann 2014) ; and a more traditional survey-based task including Likert scales and open questions, similarly to the protocol of Smith et al.’s Scots Syntax Atlas (2019). I describe the Magnitude Estimation task in particular and conclude on the broad relevance I expect my results to provide for the distinction between dialect constructions and standard constructions in terms of social meaning.

Olaf Mikkelsen & Dafné Palú
Université Paris 8 & Catholic University of Portugal
Benefactive/malefactive uses of possession in Brazilian Portuguese
coming soon !

Benoit Leclercq
Université Paris 8
May and might in concessive clauses : A case of post-modal grammaticalization ?

The decline of certain core modals in English, including may and might, is a well-documented phenomena. It is less clear, however, whether this tendency foreshadows the loss of these modals or whether other mechanisms (e.g. semantic change, constructionalization) may also be at work. My goal is to address this question by looking at the use of may and might in concessive clauses. I will first present the results of a corpus study (COHA) aimed at pinning down the development of concessive may and might over the past 100 years. This will enable me to question the current status of the two modals and to put forward the tentative hypothesis that they are going through a process of post-modal grammaticalization and, therefore, paradigmatic shift.

Samantha Laporte
Université de Lille
Does a difference in form always entail a difference in function ?
Answers from a study of subject extraposition across levels of abstraction

This talk critically considers the vertical taxonomic relations between constructions by testing the Principle of No Synonymy, which holds that a difference in form necessarily entails a difference in function, across levels of abstraction. It does so through a corpus study of subject extraposition (e.g., it is important to, it seems that) by examining the syntactic realizations of subject extraposition and by investigating at which level(s) of formal description a difference in form also comes with a difference in function. The results show that distinct pairs of form and function, i.e. constructions, can be found at different levels of abstraction, but that these constructions also subsume formal realization patterns that do not appear to encode a difference in function, suggesting that the Principle of No Synonymy largely breaks down at low levels of formal description.

Piotr Wyrolak
Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan
Chasing functional complexity
A story of the Polish dative reflexive construction in spontaneous interactions

coming soon !