11.1 Construction Grammar

11.1.1 Construction

  • Constructions are a phenomenon between purely morpho-syntactical and purely lexical patterns
  • lexico-grammatical
  • also form-meaning pairings

11.1.2 Examples

  • Ditransitive construction
  1. She gave him a happy smile. (COCA)
  2. Mail me the results.
  1. … to pressure the government into accepting …
  2. … having been tricked into thinking Shatov is a danger (BNC)
  3. There are few things worse than being bludgeoned into reading a book you hate. (BNC)

11.1.3 More than the sum of its parts

Discuss: What are the crucial meaning components of the parts in bold.

  1. I looked at the drummer, and he dropped me a sick beat.

In 48, there is an abstract sense of “transfer” of “offer” which is not part of the semantics of its component parts. The beat is now “mine” to dance or jam to. drop in this sense is used roughly for “suddenly starting music,” me is a deictic pronoun simply pointing to the speaker, and a sick beat stands for “an enjoyable, highly danceable/jammable” rhythm. The meaning of transfer can only come from the construction itself. Even if we constructed a clause with nonsense words, it is likely to feel like a transfer.

  1. He gnubgnarfed us a tiwilbemba.

It works as a ditransitive because we associate the meaning of transfer with the construction itself.

Now, consider the following example of the into causative

  1. In the end, they embarrassed me into deleting the photos

embarrass again does not necessarily cause a specific action. It is most often used to describe an internal state of mind. Likewise, into as a directional preposition does not have a meaning component of causation. We could assume a “causative” into as a sense or homonym of into. However, the issue would be that we would inflate our model of the lexicon with a new sense for every use we encounter that is not explained by the meaning components. A construction grammatical model would solve this more elegantly again. The causative meaning comes from and is learned from the construction itself. Again, we can play with those associative patterns creatively:

  1. He gnubgnarfed us into reading a tiwilbemba.