Anatol Stefanowitsch

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute of English Language and Literature

In the domain of motion event encoding, many of the world’s languages fall into one of two types: verb-framed (the path is encoded in the verb) or satellite-framed (the path is encoded outside the verb in a prefix, particle or adverbial while the verb contains information about the manner of movement). A number of studies have investigated the lang...

Um allgemeingültige Aussagen über interimsprachliche Varietäten und Zweitsprach erwerbsverläufe treffen zu können, sind ergänzend zu explorativen Datenerhebungen und qualitativen Auswertungen existierender Korpora auch korpuslinguistische Methoden im engeren Sinne notwendig, denn nur so können die Häufigkeit oder die Wahrscheinlichkeit des Auftrete...

In this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associated more stereotypically female adjectives with g...

The interlanguage of L2 learners is shaped by various factors, perhaps most noticeably transfer from the L1 to the L2 and overgeneralization in the L2. Transfer has traditionally been treated as an all-or-nothing phenomenon by focusing on L2 structures that either have or do not have an equivalent in the L1. Only recently, researchers working in us...

Academic English was traditionally treated as a monolithic register with respect to grammar, but recent research has shown that there is considerable variation across modes, dialects, research traditions and disciplines. We apply two quantitative corpus-linguistic methods (keyword analysis and a variant using PoS-grams instead of words) to investig...

Languages with grammatical gender typically have affixes, sometimes called motion affixes , for converting grammatically masculine, semantically male human nouns into grammatically feminine, semantically female ones (e.g. German -in , as in Professor “male professor”, Professorin “female professor”). It it widely assumed that the English suffix -es...

So-called “politically correct” language is often equated with the avoidance of taboo words, both in public lay discourse and in some linguistic work. In this German-language article, I show that politically-correct language is aimed at the avoidance of slurs. Slurs share with taboo words the fact that they carry an expressive presupposition, but t...

Collocational relationships between words and grammatical structures (whether in the form of grammar patterns or collostructions) have become an established dimension of semantic description over the past thirty years, but the precise nature of the dimensions of meaning reflected in such relationships remains to be determined. This paper suggests f...

The phrase Sprache ist der Schlüssel zur Integration (“language is the key to integration”) is found frequently in the discourse around immigration in the German-speaking countries. Based on a corpus-linguistic analysis of this phrase, this paper proposes the existence of a particular type of constructional idiom I refer to as ‘paradigmatic pattern...

In this paper, we discuss collocational changes for the words migrant and immigrant in the British press over the course of the “Referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union”. We show the emergence of a completely novel collocation, skilled/unskilled migrant , and discuss how it can be analyzed as a ‘paradigmatic pattern’ tha...

In this paper, we illustrate the usefulness of the family of methods collectively known as Collostructional Analysis for phraseological research. Investigating two patterns, [too ADJ to V] and [ADJ enough to V], we show how a technique originally developed for the investigation of words and constructions can be fruitfully applied to issues pertinen...

FREE DOWNLOAD: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/148 – Abstract: Corpora are widely used in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as...

In internetgestützten Medien ist eine Reihe von medienspezifischen Kommunikationspraktiken entstanden - vom Flaming und Trolling aus der Frühzeit des Internet bis zum für die Sozialen Medien charakteristischen Shitstorm. In diesem Beitrag befasse ich mich anhand einer Fallstudie eines von mir als „personalisiert“ bezeichneten Shitstorms gegen die S...

Linguists are traditionally reluctant to contribute to public discussions around language, especially where politics is involved. With the exception of George Lakoff, this has also been true of cognitive linguists in particular. Only recently have some members of the cognitive linguistics community more actively participated in such discussions. In...

There is widespread agreement that the so-called ‘Brexit’ – the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union – is a fundamentally populist project. However, the language of the public face of this project, Prime Minister Theresa May, has not, so far, been studied with respect to populist speech patterns. This paper presents a series of...

There is a goal bias in the description of motion events: adverbials specifying goals are preferred over adverbials specifying source. Two broad explanations have been suggested to account for this: first, a general cognitive bias towards the aims of human actions, and second, the higher information value of goal adverbials in conceptualizing a mot...

Corpora are widely used in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as th...

This is the table of contents (missing from the draft version, sorry).

Associations between words and grammatical patterns have been studied under various labels. Such studies have consistently shown that grammatical structures are typically associated with an above-chance frequency with sets of lexical items that are often functionally or semantically motivated. The stability of such associations across text types is...

English Abstract: The combining form -gate, which is frequently used to refer to scandals along a continuum from grand political affairs to trivial tabloidesque incidents, is rather special among onomastic word-formation elements, both in English and German. Despite its atypically high productivity it has not received detailed attention in the onom...

This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as 'distinctive-collexeme analysis' , identifies lexemes that exhibit a str...

In the cognitive linguistic literature, sentences like Nixon bombed Hanoi have long been explained in terms of metonymy, either 'referential' (i.e. the NP Nixon metonymically refers to the bomber pilots controlled by President Nixon), or 'predicative' (i.e. the verb bomb metonymically refer to the ordering of the bombing). More recently, it has bee...

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000)

Valency grammars and construction grammars appear to analyze argument structure in fundamentally different ways: the former treat argument structure(s) as a property of individual lexical items, the latter as a set of complex linguistic items existing independently of the specific verbs they occur with. In this paper, I argue that both approaches a...

The seeming absence of negative evidence in the input that children receive during language acquisition has long been regarded as a serious problem for non-nativist linguistic theories. Among the solutions that have been suggested for this problem, preemption by competing structures is doubtless the most intensively researched and widely accepted....

Cognitive linguistics is on its way to becoming a cognitive science, but a number of problems remain. e relationship between cognitive linguistics and the core cognitive sciences (psychology and neurology) must be clarified: cognitive linguists can selectively import models and methods from these disciplines as a foundation for their linguistic the...

While cognitive linguistics represents a radical departure from mainstream frameworks in terms of its theoretical foundations, it largely remained non-empirical initially, in that most of its practitioners continued to rely on introspective data or eclectically collected authentic examples. A first empirical turn occurred in the mid-1990s, when res...

It has often been claimed that the distribution of the s-genitive and the of-genitive is determined by considerations of information structure, more specifically by linear precedence preferences related to animacy, givenness, or syntactic weight. This paper shows that such claims are untenable on empirical as well as theoretical grounds. First, cor...

Theories of grammar typically have some way of accommodating fixed or semi-fixed idiomatic expressions in addition to expressions derived compositionally by general abstract rules. Construction Grammar differs from most other theories in that it takes such idiomatic expressions as a model for the grammar of natural languages as a whole. Linguistic...

In this chapter, we will address the issue as to whether there are differences in metaphor usage between men and women and between members of different political parties, and if so, whether these differences can be related to general differences in cognitive preferences.

Research on grammatical structure, including construction-based research, is sometimes criticized for not paying sufficient attention to variational dimensions such as register, channel, etc. Our recent research on construc- tions, which is based on a set of quantitative corpus methods that we refer to as collostructional analysis, is theoretically...

The papers in this volume deal with the issue of how corpus data relate to the questions that cognitive linguists have typically investigated with respect to conceptual mappings. The authors in this volume investigate a wide range of issues- the coherence and function of particular metaphorical models, the interaction of form and meaning, the ident...

In this paper, I propose and demonstrate a corpus-based approach to the investigation of metaphorical target domains based on retrieving representative lexical items from the target domain and identifying the metaphorical expressions associated with them. I show that this approach is superior in terms of data coverage compared to the traditional me...

The alleged absence of negative evidence in the linguistic input has played a major role both in linguistic theorizing and in discussions about linguistic methodology. I argue that, given a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of frequency, negative evidence can be inferred from the positive evidence in the linguistic input. Using an extension...

In my response to Sampson's Grammar without grammaticality, I will focus on two issues. First, I will develop an extended interpretation of Sampson's ‘Norwegian’ example, essentially following Sampson in arguing that there is no clear-cut distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical structures in any given language, but that, instead, there ar...

In this chapter, I argue that information about properties that are metaphorically projected between semantic domains is accessible in the form of collocational overlap between lexical items representing these domains. This shows that the statistical properties of natural language can guide human language users (and potentially any language-process...

In his discussion note, Hilpert outlines an intriguing and very promising application of distinctive collexeme analysis to diachronic data. He tracks lexical associations of the English shall-future from Early Modern English to Present-Day English, showing how shifts in these associations can be related to the semantic development of the constructi...

It is probably fair to say that over the past fifteen years, corpus-based methods have established themselves as the major empirical paradigm in linguistics. They have been insightfully applied to research issues pertaining to all levels of linguistic structure (although there is a certain dominance of studies dealing with lexis and grammar) and to...

This paper presents a corpus-based approach to investigating the function of metaphor, specifically to the question whether the use of metaphorical language is motivated primarily by stylistic considerations or by cognitive principles. The paper focuses on concepts that can be expressed alternatively by a literal or a metaphorical linguistic expres...

Adopting the perspective of construction grammar and related frameworks, this paper introduces a corpus-based method for investigating correlations between lexical items occurring in two different slots of a grammatical construction. On the basis of three case studies dealing with the into-causa- tive, English possessive constructions, and the way-...

There is a long-standing tradition in Chomskyan generative grammar of rejecting the relevance of corpus studies. A variety of arguments are put forth to justify this rejection, most importantly, that corpora are necessarily “finite and somewhat accidental” while the set of grammatical utterances is “presumably infinite” (Chomsky 1957: 15), and that...

This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as `distinctive-collexeme analysis', identifies lexemes that exhibit a stro...

This paper investigates the claim that there is a goal bias in the encoding of motion events, i.e. that there are restrictions on the distribution of path-PPs expressing the source or trajectory of a motion event that do not hold for path-PPs expressing the goal (for example, that goal-PPs are more likely than other path-PPs to occur as the only lo...

This paper introduces an extension of collocational analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating the interaction of lexemes and the grammatical constructions associated with them. The method is framed in a construction-based approach to language, i.e. it assumes that grammar consists of signs (f...

0. Introduction This paper describes analytic causative constructions in Akawaio, a Cariban language of the Pemon subgroup spoken by approx. 9000 speakers in the Mazaruni district of Guyana. 1 Akawaio has no productive causative morphology. Causation is almost always expressed analytically. This makes Akawaio is one of the few Cariban languages for...

It has often been claimed that the distribution of the s-genitive and the of-genitive is determined by considerations of information structure, more specifically by linear precedence preferences related to animacy, givenness, or syntactic weight. This paper shows that such claims are untenable on empirical as well as theoretical grounds. First, cor...

this paper we extend a `single-slot' methodology developed in Stefanowitschand Gries (2003) to the investigation of potential interactionsbetween two slots and apply it to the into-causative. We show that suchinteractions exist, i.e. that cause and result predicates `covary' systematically.We then consider two factors influencing this covariation:...

This paper introduces an extension of distinctive-collocate analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating pairs of semantically similar grammatical constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as 'distinctive-collexeme analysis', identifies lexemes that exhibit a stro...

In this paper, I propose and demonstrate a corpus-based approach to the investigation of metaphorical target domains based on retrieving representative lexical items from the target domain and indentifying the metaphorical expressions associated with them. I show that this approach is superior in terms of data coverage compared to the traditional m...