Download lin3098-grammar2

LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics
Albert Gatt
In this lecture
 Some more on corpora and grammar
 Construction Grammar as a theoretical framework
 Collostructional analysis
Part 1
Constructions and construction grammar
Some things we’ve established
 Grammatical constructions (“rules”) enter into non-arbitrary
relations with words.
 Collocational frameworks
 The “idiom” principle vs the “open choice” principle
 Collexeme and colligation analysis
 Both of these are about the extent to which specific syntactic
frames and words “attract” eachother:
 Collocational frameworks: [a N of]: nouns tend to be quantities
(number etc)
 Colligation: consequence tends to occur surrounded by a and of
 ...
Some things we’ve established
 We can think of grammatical constructions as falling on a
continuum from complex, abstract constructions to lexical
items.
 Constructions themselves have meaning:
 E.g. It-object construction
 People find it hard to exist in a drug-free world.
 a stereotyped way of presenting a situation in terms of how it is
evaluated
 evaluation is placed after the verb
 The words used in constructions are important clues to
identifying their meaning and use:
 E.g. 98% of verbs in the it- construction are find and make
Construction grammar
 Theoretical framework that views syntactic “rules” as:
 Combinations of linguistic entities (words, phrases)
 With semantic/pragmatic properties that are not fully
predictable from their parts.
 Constructions are represented as complex frames, with slots
for specific lexical items.
 They also have meanings.
 They restrict the classes of lexical items that can enter the
construction: a word is permitted in the construction if its
meaning is compatible with the construction meaning.
Example: the ditransitive alternation
 Verbs like give can enter into two semantically similar, but
syntactically quite different constructions:
 Ditransitive: A give X Y
 E.g. John give Mary a book
 Prepositional dative: A giveY to X
 E.g. John give a book to Mary
 Do these constructions mean slightly different things?
 Hypothesis:
 The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including
metaphorical transfer)
 “John transferred a book from himself to Mary”
 The prepositional dative involves caused movement
 “John caused a book to go to Mary”
Example: the ditransitive alternation
 Hypothesis:
 The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including
metaphorical transfer) in a face to face situation
 The prepositional dative involves caused movement from
one location to another
 If this hypothesis is correct, then we should observe:
 More verbs that have a “direct transfer” meaning in the
ditransitive.
 E.g. give
 More verbs that have a “caused movement” meaning in the
prepositional dative
 E.g. bring
Example 2: Covariational conditional
 English:




The Xer theYer
“The more the merrier”
“The more I think about it the weirder it seems”
Note: X/Y can be single lexemes, clauses....
 Maltese:




Iktar ma X, iktarY
Iktar ma naħseb, inqas nifhem
More restricted: X and Y need to be clauses (or at least verbs)
Interestingly: X has a negation particle “ma”, but this is not
interpreted negatively.
 Meaning/function:
 Specifying that there is a link between two elements or variables (X
and Y).
Exploring these in corpora
 Recent work in Corpus Linguistics has proposed
Collostructional Analysis:
 Based on the same assumptions as Construction Grammar
 Grammatical structures viewed as meaningful units
 Focuses on the relationship between lexis and grammatical
constructions, but is more sophisticated than collocational
frameworks.
Collostructional analysis
 Usually asks questions of the form: is X strongly attracted to
Y?
 E.g. Is the verb give strongly attracted to the ditransitive
construction?
 This is usually done in one of three ways:
 Collexeme analysis
 Distinctive collexeme analysis
 Covarying collexeme analysis
Part 2
Collexeme analysis
Basic idea
 Question: Given some construction G, what kinds of words
can I find in slot S of G?
 E.g. Ditransitive: [V NP NP]
 What verbs can enter this construction?
 (I.e. Is there a special restriction on what we can find?)
 Given a particular construction, find all occurrences of the
construction in the corpus.
 For the slot of interest, look at the lexical items that occur
there.
 Compare their frequency: are there differences between the
items in the likelihood with which they occur in the same
construction?
Practical task 1
 Run a CQL search for the ditransitive construction.
 Specify that:
 You want any one of these verbs: give, bring, make, tell, ask
 The verb should be followed by two NPs
 For our purposes, you can specify the NP pattern as something
consisting of:
 An determiner
 A noun
Practical task 1
 After you’ve run your query, create a frequency list of the node
forms.
 You will need to identify the “real” ditransitives from the others.
 Pay particular attention to the verbs.
 Do they form a coherent semantic class?
 Do you find that some verbs are more likely to occur in this
construction than others?
 Would you say that these verbs are more “attracted” to this
construction than others?
 Based on the verb meanings, what evidence do you find for the
hypothesis that the construction involves direct transfer?
Some data (from Gries 2009)
 Strongly attracted to the ditransitive:
 Give, tell, send, ask, promise, earn
 These seem to be strong “collexemes” of the ditransitive
construction
 Less attracted (though possible):
 Make, do
Part 3
Distinctive collexeme analysis
Distinctive collexemes
 Rather than checking if a word is associated with a specific
construction, here we compare the occurrence of a word in
two different (but related) constructions.
 E.g. We know that give allows the dative alternation:
 Give XY
 GiveY to X
 Are we more likely to find it in one or the other?
Practical task 2
 Conduct a query for the verb give:
 In the ditransitive construction: give + NP + NP
 In the to-dative construction: give NP to NP
 Look at the results. Do you see a difference in the
distribution? Why is this the case?
 Do the same for the verb supply.
 Do you notice any differences?
The point
 The point of distinctive collexeme analysis is to identify the
“attraction” between specific lexical items and constructions.
 For two related constructions:
 If there is evidence of a strong degree of attraction between a lexical
item and one of them, that suggests that the item “fits” the semantic
restrictions of the construction very well.
 But how do we explain the difference, where it exists?
 It’s the same lexical item, why should it “prefer” one construction vs
another?
 The most likely explanation seems to be that the two constructions,
though similar, have different semantic properties.
Part 4
Covarying collexeme analysis
Covarying collexeme analysis
 Here, we are no longer focusing on the relationship between
a word and a construction, but between different words
within the same construction.
 This is similar to what we do with collocations, but here,
we’re taking more grammatical information into account.
The method
 Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP]
 This contains a slot for an agent, a verb, a recipient and a theme
 The second post-verb NP (the theme) is the entity
undergoing the action.
 Therefore, we would expect there to be a strong affinity
between the verb and the theme.
 (I.e. The verb should place strong semantic restrictions on what
kind of theme we can have).
Example
 Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP]
 NP ask NP NP
 What sort of noun would you expect in the second post-
verbal NP?
 What about:
 NP tell NP NP
Practical task 3
 Search for the verb ask in the ditransitive construction
 Count how many times the second (theme) post-verbal NP is
headed by the noun question.
 Now search for the noun question as the object of any other
verb in the ditransitive, i.e. a pattern of the form:
 Verb NP [the/a question]
 How many times does question occur as an object of a verb other
than ask?
 What other verbs do you find?
The point
 These examples suggest that there is a strong tendency for
words to “attract” eachother within a specific
grammatical construction
 Note that this goes further than simple collocational analysis:
 With collocations, we’re looking at words that co-occur within
a specific distance
 With covarying collexemes, we’re looking at words that cooccur in specific slots within the same construction.
A final practical task
 In SketchEngine, click Word Sketch on the left menu
 Word sketches give you a list of the grammatical
environments in which words occur with significant
frequency.
 Look for the nouns question and story
 Look specifically at the object_of relation
 What do you conclude about the differences between them?
 (Follow this up by looking at other grammatical relations within
the word sketch for each word).