Arne Zeschel, Nadine Proske und Arnulf Deppermann organisieren auf der 6. Internationalen Konferenz der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kognitive Linguistik die Themensektion "Argument structure in spoken language"
Session description: Spoken language is by far the most important source of speakers’ linguistic experience – according to Biber’s (1993: 248) estimate, speakers’ input contains “roughly 90% conversation”. Spoken language is also the main arena for linguistic innovation and change. Although these properties make it highly relevant for usage-based linguistics, the construction-based study of spoken language is still rather marginal. In part, this may have to do with principled shortcomings in properly appreciating the social-‐interactional dimension of language within Cognitive Linguistics (Croft 2009) and a resultant neglect of conversation data. The major obstacle, however, would seem to be that suitably large and diversified corpora are much more difficult to obtain and more cumbersome to annotate and analyze than in the case of written language. As a result, it is not uncommon to base inferences to cognitive entrenchment properties of given constructions on the analysis of written data alone, even though the observed tendencies need not carry over to the (input-wise) much more central domain of situated interaction with its many peculiar constraints (Auer 2009). The study of argument structure marks no exception: few constructionist studies have investigated whether, in which sense and why the constructions under consideration show special characteristics in conversation (though see e.g. Imo 2007 for German). As a result, several issues that are of great interest to usage-based approaches to argument structure are as yet largely unexplored: first, for a given language, what are the dominant usage patterns of these constructions to be observed in speakers’ primary kind of input? Second, are any of the observed patterns peculiar to spoken language (Newman & Rice 2006)? Alternatively, are they associated with specific genre-/register-based distinctions (Gries 2011), possibly cutting across the written-‐spoken dichotomy? Or are they rather tied to particular sequential contexts in which they perform more finely differentiated functions, irrespective of such factors as genre/register/interaction type (Deppermann & Helmer 2013)? Finally, which functional explanations can be offered for any such findings in light of the exigencies of real-‐time spoken interaction?The panel offers a forum for discussing these and similar questions pertaining to the study of argument structure in spoken language. The case studies presented in the session pursue corpus-‐linguistic approaches to conversation data that move beyond the analysis of hand-picked individual cases, and they share an interest in a construction-based modeling of their findings. Topics addressed include: •
- Argument structure patterns foundational to naturally occurring conversation
- Preferred realisations (lexical and structural) of these patterns and their motivation
- Synchronic argument structure variation, constructional change and grammaticalisation
- Constructional associations with factors such as mode, interaction type and/or sequential context and their functional explanations
- Methodological issues in construction-‐based corpus research on spoken language
In dieser Themensektion gibt es folgende Vorträge von MitarbeiterInnen der Abteilung Pragmatik:
- Arne Zeschel & Nadine Proske: "kommen and gehen in spoken German"
The complementary perspectives on motion events afforded by verbs denoting COME and GO make them an interesting object of study for cognitive linguistic research (Fillmore 1972, Di Meola 1994). Moreover, they are common inputs to grammaticalisation processes and usually heavily polyfunctional (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994). As a result, such verbs are also highly frequent in speech: for instance, German kommen and gehen are both among the five most frequent lexical verbs in FOLK, the German national conversation corpus currently compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Deppermann & Hartung 2011).
The present paper compares salient usage patterns of these two basic verbs across different modes (written vs. spoken) and spoken interaction types (private conversation vs. institutional interaction vs. public speech). In a first step, 300 attestations per verb in each of the five (sub-‐)corpora compared (FOLK-‐private/institutional/public, DeCOW2012-‐QS, LIMAS) are coded for a broad variety of morphological, syntactic and semantic co-‐occurrence properties. Exploratory techniques are employed to identify patterns that are characteristic for different kinds of usage contexts. In a second step, selected patterns are subject to a detailed qualitative analysis within their sequential context and examined for their functional motivations.
- Julia Kaiser: "'Ich will hier weg, das muss da rein': Argumentstrukturen deutscher Modalverben in der gesprochenen Sprache"
Für die deutschen Modalverben besteht neben der charakteristischen Konstruktion mit reinem Infinitiv auch die Möglichkeit der „absoluten“ Verwendung, also mit akkusativischer Nominalphrase, Komplementsatz, Anapher oder Direktivbestimmung und ohne infinites Vollverb. Fritz (1997: 68, 74) spricht von einer „eigentümlichen Gradierung“ zwischen Grammatikalisierungstendenzen einerseits und Erhalt des Vollverbgebrauchs durch Routinisierung und Standardisierung bestimmter Verwendungen andererseits.
Die Konstruktion mit Richtungsadverbiale bildet in der gesprochenen Sprache, insbesondere in informellen Registern, ein rekurrentes, usualisiertes Äußerungsformat. Auf konzeptueller Ebene lässt sich meist ein Infinitiv mit Bewegungssemantik ergänzen, Bsp.: „Ich will in den Supermarkt [gehen/fahren]“, mit unbelebtem Subjekt auch ein Bewegungs‐/Transferverb im Infinitiv Passiv, Bsp.: „Das Spielzeug muss in den Schrank [geräumt werden]“. Bestimmte Verwendungen scheinen sogar eine eigene, nicht‐kompositionale Semantik zu tragen, d.h. die Bedeutung bzw. Funktion unterscheidet sich deutlich von einer entsprechenden Äußerung mit Bewegungsverb, Bsp.: „Ich muss einfach mal raus“ (Deppermann & Helmer 2013).
Die Datengrundlage der Untersuchung bildet eine exhaustive Recherche im Korpus FOLK. Anhand ausgewählter Beispiele soll gezeigt werden, inwiefern diese spezifische Argumentstruktur konstruktionsgrammatisch analysiert werden kann. Dabei werden im Rahmen einer interaktionslinguistisch und deskriptiv-‐statistisch angelegten Darstellung morpho-‐syntaktische, semantische, pragmatische, aber auch medial, interaktional und sequenziell relevante Faktoren berücksichtigt.
References:
- Auer, P. 2009. On-‐line syntax: Thoughts on the temporality of spoken language. Language Sciences 31, 1–13.
- Bader, M. & Dümig, S. 2013. Dissociating grammaticality and word-‐order choice: A case study on object pronouns in German. Presentation at the 5th Conference on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL 5), University of Leuven, 12-‐14 September 2013.
- Biber, D. 1993. Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing 8:4, 243–257.
- Bybee, J.L., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Croft, W. 2009. Toward a social Cognitive Linguistics. In: Evans, V. & Pourcel, S. eds. New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, 395–420. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Deppermann, A. & Hartung, M. 2011. Was gehört in ein nationales Gesprächskorpus? Kriterien, Probleme und Prioritäten der Stratifikation des „Forschungs-‐ und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch" (FOLK) am Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim). In: Felder, E., Müller, M. & Vogel, F., eds. Korpuspragmatik. Thematische Korpora als Basis diskurslinguistischer Analysen, 414–450. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
- Deppermann, A. & Helmer, H. 2013. Standard des gesprochenen Deutsch: Begriff, methodische Zugänge und Phänomene aus interaktionslinguistischer Sicht. In: Hagemann, J., Klein, W. P. & Staffeldt, S., eds. Pragmatischer Standard, 111–141. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
- Di Meola, C. 1994. Kommen und gehen. Eine kognitiv-‐linguistische Untersuchung der Polysemie deiktischer Bewegungsverben. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Fillmore, C. J. 1972. How to know whether you're coming or going. In: Hyldgaard-‐Jensen, K., ed., Linguistik 1971. Referate des 6. Linguistischen Kolloquiums 11.-14. August in Kopenhagen, 369‐379. Frankfurt: Athenäum.
- Fritz, G. & Gloning, T., eds. 1997: Untersuchungen zur semantischen Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modalverben im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Gries, S. Th. 2011. Corpus data in usage-‐based linguistics: What’s the right degree of granularity for the analysis of argument structure constructions? In: Brdar, M., Gries, S. Th. & Fuchs, M. Z. eds. Cognitive Linguistics: Convergence and Expansion, 237–256. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Heylen, K. 2005. A quantitative corpus study of German word order variation. In: Reis, M. & Kepser, S., eds. Linguistic evidence, 241–263. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Imo, W. 2007. Construction grammar und Gesprochene-‐Sprache-‐Forschung. Konstruktionen mit zehn matrixsatzfähigen Verben im gesprochenen Deutsch. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Kempen, G. & Harbusch, K. 2008. Comparing linguistic judgments and corpus frequencies as windows on grammatical competence: A study of argument linearization in German clauses. In: Steube, A., ed. The discourse potential of underspecified structures, 179–192. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Levshina, N. 2011. Doe wat je niet laten kan: A usage-‐based analysis of Dutch causative constructions. Leuven: Catholic Univeristy of Leuven dissertation.
- Newman, J. & Rice, S. 2006. Transitivity schemas of English EAT and DRINK. In: Gries, S. Th. & Stefanowitsch, A. eds, Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics. Corpus-‐based approaches to Syntax and Lexis, 225–260. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Speelman, D. & Geeraerts, D. 2009. Causes for causatives: the case of Dutch 'doen' and 'laten'. In: Sanders, T. & Sweetser, E., eds., Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition,173-204. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.