Papers by Philipp Wasserscheidt
Innovative Paths of Albanology , 2023
Albanian is currently still one of the languages in Europe with the least developed corpus lingui... more Albanian is currently still one of the languages in Europe with the least developed corpus linguistic resources. This contribution gives an overview of the freely accessible resources currently available and their characteristics. It will be shown that at present it is mainly the lack of sound training corpora that hinders the development of usable corpora. The paper further focuses on the basics of linguistic annotation and, in particular, on an analysis of the tagsets available for Albanian. With MULTEXT East, Universal Dependencies, Kabashi's tagset and the tagset of the Russian Albanian National Corpus four approaches are presented and compared. The focus is on explaining the difficulties that can arise in the search for concrete technical solutions and on presenting their respective solutions. It is shown that they differ in their basic theoretical and usage-oriented orientation. Nevertheless, they are broadly compatible and translatable in terms of capturing the morphosyntactic system of Albanian. Thus, any further development should build on the widest possible integration of the existing resources as well as the linguistic community. This article therefore aims to provide an overview of the current state of corpus linguistics of Albanian and to show how progress can be made in this field.
In today's era of global knowledge and technology, interconnected networks
and global awareness, ... more In today's era of global knowledge and technology, interconnected networks
and global awareness, the internationalisation of higher education has taken
an important place. One of the most important goals in tertiary education is
to provide the most relevant education for students who will be citizens as
well as scientists and entrepreneurs of the future. Yet, internationalisation is
not an end in itself but a means to shape tomorrow's society, to train
competences that we assume will be relevant in the future.
The specific purposes and goals associated with internationalisation may
vary. For some, internationalisation of universities is a way to increase
visibility, revenue or student numbers and quality. For others,
internationalisation is primarily about giving students the skills they need for
their future working lives. Others emphasise that the goal of
internationalisation must be the strengthening of intercultural competence
and the development of global citizens. The focus here is thus on the
formation of a critical cosmopolitanism that emphasises the connectedness
of all peoples and communities.
There has been a growing awareness in recent decades that
internationalisation cannot only involve physical mobility and face-to-face
contact. This awareness is due to a number of different personal, logistical
and financial factors. Rather, higher education institutions are called upon to
develop a broader and more comprehensive internationalisation strategy that
not only encompasses student mobility, but also considers competences and
attitudes, forms of communication and hospitality, as well as different
internationalisation formats at various administrative levels.
The challenge in this field grows even more when one considers that the
European Union is on the path of deep integration and that it is therefore
desirable that local and national borders become blurred and that the citizens
of the European Union live in constant contact with each other. A vision would
be for the term
international to disappear in intra-European cooperation - and
for all cooperation within the European Union to be understood only as
domestic cooperation. Internationalisation must be a way for the university
to meet the needs of all students and staff in their everyday learning and
working lives.
The aim of this paper is to propose a new format for just such a purpose and
to outline how it can be used in university teaching.
The concept "Muslim": Discourses in Bosnian, Croatian, German and Serbian webcorpora
Suvremena lingvistika, 2022
The aim of this contribution is to examine the meaning of the word musliman or German Muslim and ... more The aim of this contribution is to examine the meaning of the word musliman or German Muslim and to answer the question whether the meaning of the words in the dictionary can be mapped by means of a classical distributional analysis and whether further meanings can be captured by this method. In addition, a simple method for a distributional semantic analysis is presented. The basis of the investigation is the assumption common in corpus-based semantics and lexicography that the meaning of words can be interpreted out of context and thus polysemy and synonymy can be recognized. The article examines four web corpora for Bosnian, German, Croatian and German. First, the syntactic structure of the context is analysed assuming that certain properties can be read from it. Specifically, adjective attributes are used to analyse properties of the keyword, coordination partners as indicators for relevant categories, verbs with the keyword as subject and accusative object as indicators for typical actions the keyword performs or is target of. In a second step, the lexemes that occur in these four contexts are categorized and the semantic dimensions of the keyword are determined.
The results suggest that the distributional method can in principle map dictionary definitions well. However, this is especially true for attribution and coordination but not for action-related characteristics. Overall, the most salient dimensions of the lexeme are that pertaining to members of a religious community, members of a regional ethnic group, and experienced or induced aggression. Here the four corpora differ considerably: While the German usage almost exclusively focuses on religion-related aspects, the other corpora also contain ethnic/regional components and the discourse of aggression. At the same time, aggression is mainly verbal in German, but physical in the other corpora. Only in the Bosnian corpus are neutral attributions for the word musliman salient.
Riječ, 2019
Narratives are one of the best researched discourse genres. This article addresses the question o... more Narratives are one of the best researched discourse genres. This article addresses the question of whether narratives can also be described as constructions in the sense of construction grammar. First, the potential status of narratives as constructions is discussed against the background of narratological research and existing work in construction grammar on other discourse genres. The morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic and interactional properties that would have to be taken into account for a constructional description are then demonstrated using an exemplary Serbian narrative. It is shown that there are features on all linguistic levels which mark the individual parts of a narrative (abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, coda) and thus also the narrative as a whole on both the
formal and the content side. On this basis, narratives can be described as clearly recognisable, structured and non-compositional linguistic schemas with an identifiable function. However, the most important characteristic of narratives - the reportability constructed interactionally in the communicative situation - cannot be captured with the help of construction grammatical methods.
Narativi su jedan od najbolje istraženih žanrova diskursa. Ovaj članak se bavi pitanjem da li se narativi mogu opisati i kao konstrukcije u kontekstu konstrukcijske gramatike. Autor, najprije, potencijalni status narativa kao konstrukcije razmatra u kontekstu naratoloških istraživanja, konstrukcijskoj gramatici i drugim žanrovima diskursa. Morfološka, leksička, sintaksička, semantička i interakcijska svojstva koja bi se morala uzeti u obzir za konstrukcijski opis se, potom, demonstriraju korišćenjem narativa srpskog jezika. Rezultati rada ukazuju na činjenicu da na svim lingvističkim nivoima postoje obilježja koja markiraju pojedine djelove narativa (apstrakt, orijentacija, komplikacija, ocjena, kod), a time i narativ u cjelini kako na formalnoj, tako i na sadržajnoj osnovi. Stoga se narativi mogu opisati kao jasno prepoznatljive, strukturirane i nekompozicione jezičke šeme sa funkcijom koja se može identifikovati. Međutim, kao najvažnija karakteristika narativa izdvaja se mogućnost izvještavanja koja se konstruiše interakcijski u okviru komunikativne situacije, te je nije moguće identifikvati uz pomoć metoda konstrukcijske gramatike.
Sind Einzelnomina-Fragen Sprechakte? Und wenn ja, welche?
Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, 2022
Are Single Noun Constructions Speech Acts?
This article deals with single nouns that are used as ... more Are Single Noun Constructions Speech Acts?
This article deals with single nouns that are used as independent
orthographic sentences in question form in contexts that are not
based on coordination (nominative sentences). Two constructions
are distinguished: the Coincidence construction (Coincidence?)
and the Reason construction (Reason?). The question addressed
here is whether these nouns are independent speech acts and, if
so, which illocutionary act they express. The analysis follows the
argumentation of Stainton who is an advocate of a non-elliptic approach and analyses comparable fragments as full-fledged speech
acts. The article examines whether the single nouns are complete
grammatical utterances, whether they have a proposition and an
illocutionary force, and whether their interpretation is direct rather
than based on implication. I use Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian
examples to show that all conditions are fulfilled except for the propositional content. Consequently, I suggest that the illocutionary
nature of the nominative sentences can be better explained with a
construction-based approach.
Govor, 2020
This paper is concerned with the development of a synchronic corpus containing Serbian spoken nar... more This paper is concerned with the development of a synchronic corpus containing Serbian spoken narratives and its use for narrative analysis. The corpus (CRONUS-Corpus for the Research On Narratives and their Use in Speech) is optimised to study the structure and use of this discourse genre. First, data sources are presented, followed by corpus creation and access. The semi-spontaneous spoken narratives were orthographically transcribed, and the corpus deeply annotated, with special emphasis on the annotation of narrative sections following Labov's approach and the annotation of argument structure constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Three case studies demonstrate how morphological and constructional annotation can be effective for the exploration of narratives.
Književni Jezik, 2020
This paper challenges the concept of matrix, base or basic language used in many descriptions and... more This paper challenges the concept of matrix, base or basic language used in many descriptions and models of insertional code-switching. It proposes an account based on Construction Grammar and usage-based principles.
At the heart of the paper is a discussion of four problematic issues of matrix-language approaches: the unitary conception of the notion of language, the generalization that syntactic frames mirror languages, the missing independent evidence for a matrix language and the narrow scope of the models that employ this term. The proposed approach of Bilingual Construction Grammar instead operates with a more complex, usage-based concept of language affiliation and places constructions in the centre of speech production. It thus avoids too coarse global predictions in favour of construction-specific predictions. This way, the matrix-language effect can be reinterpreted as by-product of constructional processing. Instead of using the term matrix language it is thus more appropriate to speak of matrix constructions.
Legal variation? A frame analysis of Croatian and Serbian in the domain of law
Mediterranean Language Review, 2020
In this paper we examine the term odredba as an example of a term from legal language. We deal wi... more In this paper we examine the term odredba as an example of a term from legal language. We deal with legal language because we are generally interested in how the knowledge structures (semantic frames) underlying and reflected in linguistic usage differ between different varieties. In doing so, we investigate the difference between experts and laymen (Fillmore 1982: 127; Busse 2012: 624) on the one hand and between different legal systems on the other. Legal language appears to be a good testing ground, because although it can have very distinctive characteristics, it works in principle with lexical units that are also used in normal colloquial language. We analyse words that are used in legal language but have a wide use in common language, i.e. words that are not only or no longer used as technical terms. Our research question is whether these lemmas have different meanings (or evoke different frames) in the respective varieties. Therefore, we are not interested in the legal concept of the words, which is dealt with in legal theory and philosophy of law (Busse et al. 2018), but in their actual linguistic use.
In this study we used a double distributional analysis of the term odredba in a Croatian and a Serbian corpus to investigate whether its semantics are comparable in both languages, i.e. whether it is the same building block used by both languages. We first conducted a context-sensitive distributional analysis in the context of adjective and genitive attributes, with the keywords as subject, object and genitive modifier and in coordination. The categorization of the context itself was done by a distributional bag-of-words analysis and refined by a qualitative frame-semantic analysis of the resulting clustering. The data indicate that the matches are very large.
However, the results are surprisingly clear, especially against the background of the corpora used and the clustering method, neither of which provide ideal conditions. They allow hardly any other conclusion than that odredba is the same – or almost the same – building block in Serbian and Croatian. Thus, so far, there seems to be no significant variation between the meaning of odredba in the Croatian and the Serbian corpus.
We also showed, that this method of double clustering can be used to provide a complex semantic analysis of an expression, which can be easily integrated into the concept and data structures of FrameNet. This detailed analysis, which demonstrates the use of odredba in no less than 12 different frames, can now serve as a basis for comparing odredba or other terms from the frame network in other varieties such as the legal language.
Sovpadenie? Frame manipulation with bare nouns.
Russian Linguistics, 2019
The paper deals with the use of bare nouns in a non-coordination-based context. In the first part... more The paper deals with the use of bare nouns in a non-coordination-based context. In the first part, the communicational function of the bare noun construction is analysed as part of a more general use of bare nouns for labelling evoked semantic frames. The specific subset of bare nouns depends on one or more propositions in the left context and provides a speculative categorisation that is usually associated with a negative attitude. Although the negative attitude is not generally confirmed, the bare nouns serve to frame an event in a way that renders it unimportant, illogical, untrue, or similar. A very common extension of this construction is the use of the bare nouns slučajnost’ and sovpadenie, which insinuate a causal connection between intuitively unrelated events by employing the function of the bare noun construction. In the second part, the status of the bare noun construction as potential ellipsis is discussed. I conclude that a non-propositional account as part of a discourse or action pattern (Handlungsmuster) is the most appropriate explanation.
Ukrains'ke movoznavstvo
The article provides an overview of Construction Grammar. First, a general survey of the basic pr... more The article provides an overview of Construction Grammar. First, a general survey of the basic principles and major strands of the grammatical theory is given. The main assumptions include the recognition that all linguistic knowledge is of the same type as knowledge in general and follows the same principles such as categorization, abstraction and generalization.
In the second part, the presentation focuses on two important elements of construction grammar research: the concept of the construction as complex sign and the abandoning of the distinction between lexicon and grammar.
Using examples from Ukrainian, the different relationships between constructions of different complexity and schematicity in the so-called constructicon – the common space of both lexical and grammatical knowledge – are described. It is shown, how abstract constructions offer slots for other elements and how these are constrained regarding form and meaning. In addition, the status of constructions as complex signs is assessed from the perspective of semantics and compositionality. It is highlighted that Construction Grammar rejects the assumption of compositionality and rather conceptualizes meaning as determined by the construction itself. At the same time, semantics is understood in an encyclopaedic sense, which renders the description of constructions highly detailed and language-specific.
Applied Linguistics Review, 2019
The use of named languages is still prevalent in current contact linguistics research. In this pa... more The use of named languages is still prevalent in current contact linguistics research. In this paper, I argue that this cannot explain many contact situations and types of language knowledge. I propose a usage-based account of language instead which does not take linguistic systems for granted but construes them based on the single linguistic unit. A language is seen as a radially organized network of constructions, which are interlinked through co-use, which employ the same inventory of linguistic forms and which are appropriate in the same socio-pragmatic circumstances.
This paper challenges the concept of matrix, base or basic language used in many descriptions and... more This paper challenges the concept of matrix, base or basic language used in many descriptions and models of insertional code-switching. It proposes an account based on construction grammar and usage-based principles.
At the heart of the study is a discussion of four problematic issues of matrix-language approaches: the unitary conception of the notion of language, the generalization that syntactic frames mirror languages, the missing independent evidence for a matrix language and the narrow scope of the models that employ this term. The proposed approach of Bilingual Construction Grammar (BCxG) instead operates with a more complex, usage-based concept of language affiliation and places constructions in the centre of speech production.
The paper presents the results of a case study that compares the predictions of matrix-language approaches and Bilingual Construction Grammar on insertional code-switching within a Serbian-Hungarian bilingual corpus. The data indicate that BCxG predicts code-switching better than matrix-language approaches.
The article focuses on single noun non-coordinate ellipsis. Two subcases are introduced: the coff... more The article focuses on single noun non-coordinate ellipsis. Two subcases are introduced: the coffee-construction and the coincidence-construction. Starting from a syntactical analysis, it is shown that there is positive as well as negative evidence for an ellipsis account vs. a direct interpretation account. A direct interpretation approach is favoured given the highly different distributional behaviour of the elliptic constructions in comparison to their syntactically complete counterparts. However, it is argued that in both types of ellipsis context is the crucial element that cannot be accounted for with a direct interpretation approach. The article thus proposes an approach with focuses on semantic frames and cultural routines. The coffee-construction is analysed as part of a cultural scripts, which predefines setting, roles and behaviour. The coincidence-construction is proposed to function as element that both evokes semantic frames and locates a previously described situation within this radial structure. The most salient use of the coincidence-construction indirectly insinuates the connectedness of two situations or actions within a proposed frame.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden im Rahmen der Bilingual Construction Grammar (BCxG) zwei bilingual... more Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden im Rahmen der Bilingual Construction Grammar (BCxG) zwei bilinguale Strategien vorgestellt, Analogie und Imitation. Anhand von Beispielen von Deutschlernenden mit slawischer Muttersprache wird zunächst gezeigt, dass ein phrasaler oder konstruktionsbezogener Ansatz für verdeckte Sprachkontaktphänomene sinnvoll ist. Es wird vorgeschlagen, dass sprachlicher Transfer einer Problemlösung entspricht, die fehlendes Wissen von Sprecherinnen in der Zielsprache kompensieren soll. Ausgehend vom zentralen Begriff der Konstruktion als grundlegender, komplexer Wissensstruktur führt die BCxG verschiedene Lösungsstrategien ein; zwei dieser Strategien werden mit den aus der Lernforschung bekannten Strategien Analogie und Imitation identifiziert. Sprachkontakt wird damit konsequent als Lernprozess dargestellt. Des Weiteren werden Faktoren für die Verwendung von Analogien und Imitationen vorgestellt, die sich an den Erkenntnissen der Transfer-sowie der Sprachkontaktforschung orientieren.
Wasserscheidt, Philipp (accepted): Construction Grammar and Code-Mixing. To appear in: Robinson, Justyna; Reif, Monika (Hrsg.): Cognition, culture and codes: Current perspectives on multilingualism. Berlin.
In research on bilingualism it is often assumed that linguistic structures can be shared across l... more In research on bilingualism it is often assumed that linguistic structures can be shared across languages. The emphasis on generalisation and categorisation in construction grammar also seems to imply that speakers can develop cross-linguistic representations. This contribution argues that generalisations can occur only on the semantic level. Data from typologically distinct languages shows that generalisations over form are not likely to play a role in language processing. It is further argued that neither syntactical nor grammatical form is needed in order to explain syntactic transfer.
Nach dem Aufbrechen der weltweiten Systemkonfrontation, deren Wirkung in fast jeder Konfliktstruk... more Nach dem Aufbrechen der weltweiten Systemkonfrontation, deren Wirkung in fast jeder Konfliktstruktur zu spüren war, sind inter-ethnische Konflikte auch in Europa wieder zum vorherrschenden Muster gesellschaftlicher Auseinandersetzung geworden (Seewann 1992: 23). In Südosteuropa sehen sich mit ihrer Identität kämpfende Nationalstaaten immer wieder mit der eigenen Multiethnizität konfrontiert und erlebten in den letzten Jahren die Schwierigkeiten, die daraus erwachsen. Das Lösungsspektrum reichte oft über Marginalisierung der Minderheiten in einer ethnozentristischen Politik nicht hinaus (Romaine: 23). Minderheiten wiederum werden im europäischen Diskurs seit langem in sprachliche Kategorien gegossen. Sprache als Kulturträger par excellence ist auch ein Grundpfeiler der zögerlichen Minderheitenpolitik der Europäischen Union. Mit der Osterweiterung steht diese in der hoffnungsvollen Rolle des Mediators. Denn nachdem die europäischen Staaten in den letzten 200 Jahren dem nationalstaatlichen Monolingualismus verfallen waren, bietet erst die Europäische Union wieder die Perspektive, Vielsprachigkeit als kulturellen Reichtum zu verstehen (Krumm: 9f.). Der Zuwachs zur EU hat diese Vielfalt noch potenziert: In den neuen Mitgliedsstaaten wurden fast doppelt so viele Minderheitengruppen gezählt wie in den alten zusammengenommen (vgl. Euromosaic II) und bilden in mehr als der Hälfte der Staaten einen Anteil von über 10%. Daher setzt sich inzwischen die Einsicht durch, dass Minderheiten ein Problem der Gemeinschaft sind und "für nationale Minderheiten [...] der Erhalt und die Weiterentwicklung der Sprache die notwendige Basis [ist], um ihre Kultur, Tradition und Identität zu bewahren" (Erster Bericht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2000: 4, zit. nach Elle: 7). Ein möglicher Weg dahin ist die Verlagerung des politischen Zentrums weg von den Einzelstaaten zur Europäischen Union hin, die als EU der Nationen und Regionen vor allem letzteren wieder mehr Gewicht verleiht. Die europäischen Regionen, die weitaus älter sind, als die sie inkorporierenden Nationalstaaten, bieten in ihrer Überschaubarkeit die Chance zur Entmarginalisierung auch der regionalen Minderheiten. Die Unterstützung von
Drafts by Philipp Wasserscheidt
MULTEXT-East specifications for Albanian
The paper presents a proposal for Albanian specifications for the MULTEXT-East language resources... more The paper presents a proposal for Albanian specifications for the MULTEXT-East language resources, a multilingual dataset for language engineering research. Al-banian has been one of the few languages in Central and Eastern Europe not cov-ered by the MULTEXT-East project. The specifications cover all parts of speech and some additional categories. These categories are assigned attributes which, in the case of parts of speech, correspond to classical morphological categories. To-gether with the attribute values, i.e. the values of the morphological categories, the specifications cover all inflectional paradigms of Albanian. We present specific features of the Albanian tagset and discuss some difficulties that Albanian poses to the concept of the orthographic word underlying the MULTEXT-East recommen-dations.
Das hier vorgestellte Modell trägt den Arbeitstitel "C-Model", d.h. Constructionist Model. Das Mo... more Das hier vorgestellte Modell trägt den Arbeitstitel "C-Model", d.h. Constructionist Model. Das Modell ist in seiner Anlage ein Produktionsmodell, welches einen Teil des Sprachproduktionsprozesses modellieren möchte. Dieser Teilprozess ist die Grammatische Enkodierung. In diesem Teilprozess wird eine geplante Message in eine Morphemfolge kodiert, welche bereits alle Merkmale besitzt, um als eine akzeptable natürlichsprachige Äußerung wahrgenommen zu werden. Auf dieser Ebene gibt es jedoch noch keine Informationen über die phonologische/phonetische Form dieser Morphemkette. Dies ist Teil der anschließenden phonologischen Enkodierung. Ziel des Modells ist es unter anderem, die sogenannten strukturellen Ausprägungen von Kontaktphänomenen zu erklären. Dennoch steht die Äußerungsproduktion im Zentrum, da ein Sprecher weder Strukturen (noch Sprachen) produziert, sonder immer nur konkrete sprachliche Äußerungen. Diese Äußerungen bestehen aus kleineren sprachlichen Einheiten. Die Natur dieser Einheiten ist durchaus umstritten. Für das C-Modell werden die sprachtheoretischen Annahmen der Konstruktionsgrammatik übernommen (daher der Name). Die wichtigsten sprachlichen Einheiten sind also Konstruktionen. Das Modell behandelt als Produktionsmodell konsequenterweise ausschließlich synchrone online-Prozesse und geht nicht auf Prozesse der Grammatikalisierung oder Konventionalisierung ein. Entlehnungen werden als Ergebnis eines Konventionalisierungsprozesses betrachtet. Daher geht das Modell nicht auf das Problem der Entlehnungen ein und auch nicht auf Mischsprachen. Das Modell ist für die gleichzeitige oder nachzeitige Verarbeitung zweier Sprachen konzipiert. Einsprachige Äußerungen (sofern es solche überhaupt gibt) und mehrsprachige Äußerungen sollten denselben Prozessen folgen, jedoch wird hier darüber keine Aussage gemacht.
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Papers by Philipp Wasserscheidt
and global awareness, the internationalisation of higher education has taken
an important place. One of the most important goals in tertiary education is
to provide the most relevant education for students who will be citizens as
well as scientists and entrepreneurs of the future. Yet, internationalisation is
not an end in itself but a means to shape tomorrow's society, to train
competences that we assume will be relevant in the future.
The specific purposes and goals associated with internationalisation may
vary. For some, internationalisation of universities is a way to increase
visibility, revenue or student numbers and quality. For others,
internationalisation is primarily about giving students the skills they need for
their future working lives. Others emphasise that the goal of
internationalisation must be the strengthening of intercultural competence
and the development of global citizens. The focus here is thus on the
formation of a critical cosmopolitanism that emphasises the connectedness
of all peoples and communities.
There has been a growing awareness in recent decades that
internationalisation cannot only involve physical mobility and face-to-face
contact. This awareness is due to a number of different personal, logistical
and financial factors. Rather, higher education institutions are called upon to
develop a broader and more comprehensive internationalisation strategy that
not only encompasses student mobility, but also considers competences and
attitudes, forms of communication and hospitality, as well as different
internationalisation formats at various administrative levels.
The challenge in this field grows even more when one considers that the
European Union is on the path of deep integration and that it is therefore
desirable that local and national borders become blurred and that the citizens
of the European Union live in constant contact with each other. A vision would
be for the term
international to disappear in intra-European cooperation - and
for all cooperation within the European Union to be understood only as
domestic cooperation. Internationalisation must be a way for the university
to meet the needs of all students and staff in their everyday learning and
working lives.
The aim of this paper is to propose a new format for just such a purpose and
to outline how it can be used in university teaching.
The results suggest that the distributional method can in principle map dictionary definitions well. However, this is especially true for attribution and coordination but not for action-related characteristics. Overall, the most salient dimensions of the lexeme are that pertaining to members of a religious community, members of a regional ethnic group, and experienced or induced aggression. Here the four corpora differ considerably: While the German usage almost exclusively focuses on religion-related aspects, the other corpora also contain ethnic/regional components and the discourse of aggression. At the same time, aggression is mainly verbal in German, but physical in the other corpora. Only in the Bosnian corpus are neutral attributions for the word musliman salient.
formal and the content side. On this basis, narratives can be described as clearly recognisable, structured and non-compositional linguistic schemas with an identifiable function. However, the most important characteristic of narratives - the reportability constructed interactionally in the communicative situation - cannot be captured with the help of construction grammatical methods.
Narativi su jedan od najbolje istraženih žanrova diskursa. Ovaj članak se bavi pitanjem da li se narativi mogu opisati i kao konstrukcije u kontekstu konstrukcijske gramatike. Autor, najprije, potencijalni status narativa kao konstrukcije razmatra u kontekstu naratoloških istraživanja, konstrukcijskoj gramatici i drugim žanrovima diskursa. Morfološka, leksička, sintaksička, semantička i interakcijska svojstva koja bi se morala uzeti u obzir za konstrukcijski opis se, potom, demonstriraju korišćenjem narativa srpskog jezika. Rezultati rada ukazuju na činjenicu da na svim lingvističkim nivoima postoje obilježja koja markiraju pojedine djelove narativa (apstrakt, orijentacija, komplikacija, ocjena, kod), a time i narativ u cjelini kako na formalnoj, tako i na sadržajnoj osnovi. Stoga se narativi mogu opisati kao jasno prepoznatljive, strukturirane i nekompozicione jezičke šeme sa funkcijom koja se može identifikovati. Međutim, kao najvažnija karakteristika narativa izdvaja se mogućnost izvještavanja koja se konstruiše interakcijski u okviru komunikativne situacije, te je nije moguće identifikvati uz pomoć metoda konstrukcijske gramatike.
This article deals with single nouns that are used as independent
orthographic sentences in question form in contexts that are not
based on coordination (nominative sentences). Two constructions
are distinguished: the Coincidence construction (Coincidence?)
and the Reason construction (Reason?). The question addressed
here is whether these nouns are independent speech acts and, if
so, which illocutionary act they express. The analysis follows the
argumentation of Stainton who is an advocate of a non-elliptic approach and analyses comparable fragments as full-fledged speech
acts. The article examines whether the single nouns are complete
grammatical utterances, whether they have a proposition and an
illocutionary force, and whether their interpretation is direct rather
than based on implication. I use Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian
examples to show that all conditions are fulfilled except for the propositional content. Consequently, I suggest that the illocutionary
nature of the nominative sentences can be better explained with a
construction-based approach.
At the heart of the paper is a discussion of four problematic issues of matrix-language approaches: the unitary conception of the notion of language, the generalization that syntactic frames mirror languages, the missing independent evidence for a matrix language and the narrow scope of the models that employ this term. The proposed approach of Bilingual Construction Grammar instead operates with a more complex, usage-based concept of language affiliation and places constructions in the centre of speech production. It thus avoids too coarse global predictions in favour of construction-specific predictions. This way, the matrix-language effect can be reinterpreted as by-product of constructional processing. Instead of using the term matrix language it is thus more appropriate to speak of matrix constructions.
In this study we used a double distributional analysis of the term odredba in a Croatian and a Serbian corpus to investigate whether its semantics are comparable in both languages, i.e. whether it is the same building block used by both languages. We first conducted a context-sensitive distributional analysis in the context of adjective and genitive attributes, with the keywords as subject, object and genitive modifier and in coordination. The categorization of the context itself was done by a distributional bag-of-words analysis and refined by a qualitative frame-semantic analysis of the resulting clustering. The data indicate that the matches are very large.
However, the results are surprisingly clear, especially against the background of the corpora used and the clustering method, neither of which provide ideal conditions. They allow hardly any other conclusion than that odredba is the same – or almost the same – building block in Serbian and Croatian. Thus, so far, there seems to be no significant variation between the meaning of odredba in the Croatian and the Serbian corpus.
We also showed, that this method of double clustering can be used to provide a complex semantic analysis of an expression, which can be easily integrated into the concept and data structures of FrameNet. This detailed analysis, which demonstrates the use of odredba in no less than 12 different frames, can now serve as a basis for comparing odredba or other terms from the frame network in other varieties such as the legal language.
In the second part, the presentation focuses on two important elements of construction grammar research: the concept of the construction as complex sign and the abandoning of the distinction between lexicon and grammar.
Using examples from Ukrainian, the different relationships between constructions of different complexity and schematicity in the so-called constructicon – the common space of both lexical and grammatical knowledge – are described. It is shown, how abstract constructions offer slots for other elements and how these are constrained regarding form and meaning. In addition, the status of constructions as complex signs is assessed from the perspective of semantics and compositionality. It is highlighted that Construction Grammar rejects the assumption of compositionality and rather conceptualizes meaning as determined by the construction itself. At the same time, semantics is understood in an encyclopaedic sense, which renders the description of constructions highly detailed and language-specific.
At the heart of the study is a discussion of four problematic issues of matrix-language approaches: the unitary conception of the notion of language, the generalization that syntactic frames mirror languages, the missing independent evidence for a matrix language and the narrow scope of the models that employ this term. The proposed approach of Bilingual Construction Grammar (BCxG) instead operates with a more complex, usage-based concept of language affiliation and places constructions in the centre of speech production.
The paper presents the results of a case study that compares the predictions of matrix-language approaches and Bilingual Construction Grammar on insertional code-switching within a Serbian-Hungarian bilingual corpus. The data indicate that BCxG predicts code-switching better than matrix-language approaches.
Drafts by Philipp Wasserscheidt