Bert Cappelle

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• PhD (K.U.Leuven)
• Professor (Associate) at University of Lille

This article explains why constructions have played a central role in recent linguistic theorizing and explores some of the controversies surrounding them.

Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves as a cautionary note against complacency and dogmatism. It emphasizes the enduring importance of...

The so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, based on the assumption that morphology and syntax are distinct components of grammar, has repeatedly come under fire in the forty-odd years since its original formulation. Phrasal compounds ([[Lexical Integrity]NP Principle]N being an example!), are often adduced as counterevidence, but I here argue that...

This chapter argues against a view according to which pragmatics, as opposed to semantics, is completely outside grammar. It suggests that, on the contrary, speakers strongly associate various pragmatic aspects of information with constructions. I here give an overview of a wide range of pragmatic phenomena as they have been dealt with in Construct...

In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation can be fruitfully integrated within a constructionist approach. We discuss in detail a number of cases from the Simpsons where a modal verb, as part of a longer expression, has a short-circuited interpretation , that is, where it is conventionally associ...

This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist . Fragments (e.g. What to do? ) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example ) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-t...

In this synthesis document (available in French and English), I retrace my journey in construction grammar, a linguistic theory that models our knowledge of language through form-function units. Captivated early on by the idea that schematic patterns convey meaning, much like words do, I introduced the concept of ‘allostructions’—linking alternatin...

Verb-particle constructions, such as English "look out" or "sober up," combine an open-class word functioning as a verb and a closed-class word whose primary meaning is locative or directional. Students of English grammar know such combinations by the familiar but often more broadly employed term “phrasal verbs,” while for other Germanic languages...

A Zip file containing publications related to verb-particle constructions in other fields than 'core' syntax, morphology and semantics. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate....

A Zip file containing publications related to the paradox posed by verb-particle constructions in theoretical linguistics. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio...

A Zip file containing publications related to verb-particle constructions in Uralic languages. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374548297_Verb-Particle_Co...

A Zip file containing publications related to verb-particle constructions in Romance languages. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374548297_Verb-Particle_C...

A Zip file containing publications related to verb-particle constructions in Germanic languages. Publications are not ordered by specific Germanic language. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https...

A Zip file containing publications providing general overview of research on verb-particle constructions. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374548297_Verb-...

A Zip file containing publications related to grammar issues that often come up in the discussion of verb-particle constructions. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/pub...

A Zip file containing publications related to verb-particle constructions in other than Germanic, Romance or Uralic languages. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/public...

A Zip file containing bibliographies related to verb-particle constructions. Supplementary file to this publication: Cappelle, Bert. 2023. Verb-particle constructions. In: Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374548297_Verb-Particle_Constructions

Clause sequences of the type ‘X’ does not exist – its correct name is ‘Y’ use descriptive negation in the first clause but also have something literally contradictory about them that is reminiscent of metalinguistic negation. I argue that the negative existential in such clause sequences exhibits a use-mention mix without blending descriptive and m...

This volume applies different approaches to an area of English linguistics that is particularly challenging, that of the meaning of English modals. Our aim is to arrive at a better and richer understanding by combining insights from methods and theories among which there has as yet not been much interaction. In the course of doing so, we test their...

The English privative prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi: Approximation and 'disproximation' Abstract: The English prefixes near-, pseudo- and quasi- are privative, in that whatever essential property their morphological base expresses is not strictly possessed by an entity characterized as near-/pseudo-/quasi-X. However, we claim this meaning is no...

The first aim of this chapter is to get a grasp of the have/take a look support verb construction in English. A support verb construction is one where a general-purpose verb (a ‘light verb’), which is mainly restricted to carrying tense and aspect information, combines with a noun phrase whose head is semantically richer than the verb; together, th...

We argue that a contrastive approach in the classroom can be useful not just to gain a better insight into the L2 schemas that partially map onto learners' L1 schemas in the context of L2 acquisition, but also to bring latent knowledge about the L1 to students' awareness, in the context of translation training.

This spreadsheet allows you to enter categorical data into a table. It will produce a chi-square value, a p-value, an effect size (association strength) statistic (or for a 1x2 'table', a z*-score with associated p-value), one or more odds ratios, as well as natural-language interpretations and a summary report that you can simply copy and paste in...

This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development, and to ill...

Entrevista com Bert Cappelle.

This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely ‘stripping’, it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful con...

This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic lang...

This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic lang...

Bert Cappelle is associate professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He is the author of several articles dealing with linguistic phenomena analyzed in the light of usage-based cognitive Construction Grammar. He defends the idea that a speaker’s grammar is constructed gradually. Dr Cappelle has contributed to the study of variati...

This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lexically fixed and constructional idioms, including Not if I can help it, Not as long as I … and, as a more distant member, Not in a million years. I argue that in these expressions, not is technically a negative proform referring to a contextually salien...

This study investigates visual motion expressions in Dutch, English, and French. As a translation corpus, I use Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Witches, which abounds in staring and peeping events, and its Dutch and French translations. Based on the hypothesis that languages’ constructional repertoires for physical motion are exploited for visual...

Bergs and Kompa (Creativity within and outside the linguistic system. Cognitive Semiotics 13. 1, 2020) discuss creativity in language, which they see as largely rule-bound, as opposed to ‘true,’ rule-breaking creativity in the arts. However, the distinction between intra- and extra-system creativity is not always easy to make. Languages have evolve...

This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed to humans, such as beauty, carefulness and anger. Previous research showed that some but not all of these nouns are licensed in both locative existentials (e.g., There’s an intense anger in Isabella) and possessive existentials (e.g., Isabella has an in...

When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly...

When we want to talk about an entity moving along a path in a particular way, the language we speak nudges us into certain encoding choices. Speakers of Dutch or English often rely on a particle to express information related to the path of motion. Speakers of French or Spanish typically express this information in the verb root itself. Wide attent...

Fake is often considered the textbook example of a so-called ‘privative’ adjective, one which, in other words, allows the proposition that ‘(a) fake x is not (an) x’. This study tests the hypothesis that the contexts of an adjectivenoun combination are more different from the contexts of the noun when the adjective is such a ‘privative’ one than wh...

The status of particle verbs such as rise (…) up as either lexically stored or combinatorially assembled is an issue which so far has not been settled decisively. In this study, we use the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response to observe neurophysiological responses to discontinuous particle verbs. The MMN can be used to distinguish between whol...

Thomas Hoffmann's article proposes a cognitively viable theoretical framework for explaining how constructions can emerge in the history of a language. The case which Hoffmann discusses is the coming into being of the comparative correlative construction of the type The smaller a car is, the easier it is to park in late Old English and early Middle...

Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance language than if the source language is a Germanic one? This chapter sets out to answer that question. In a subcorpus of English fictional texts translated from Romance languages, up, out and down, which represent phrasal verb use rather well, are indeed und...

Are phrasal verbs less numerous in English translations if the source language is a Romance language than if the source language is a Germanic one? This chapter sets out to answer that question. In a subcorpus of English fictional texts translated from Romance languages, up, out and down, which represent phrasal verb use rather well, are indeed und...

In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and te...

Introduction to the special issue

In his contribution to this issue, Martin Hilpert documents a shift over time in the collocational preferences of the modal auxiliary may. Hilpert’s paper is interesting beyond the empirical tools he brings to bear on this topic, as he also pleads for another shift, a theoretical one. In his treatment of may’s changing collocates, Hilpert (this iss...

We here revisit the let alone construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put Construction Grammar on the map. Our focus is on a seemingly aberrant use where the first conjunct does not entail the restored second conjunct, as in I don’t have ten children, let alone one. We argue that this use should not be considered as a highly e...

Er zijn van die woordjes die lustig over andere woorden heen lijken te kunnen wippen. Neem nu het voorzetsel op: Ze sprong op de tafel. Ze sprong de tafel op. Deze zinnen zijn allebei mogelijk in het Nederlands. In de eerste zin noemen we op met recht een voorzetsel, want het staat voor de tafel, waarmee het een zinsdeel vormt. In de tweede zin noe...

Google hits for “sneezed the napkin off the table” run into the thousands. The sequence of words has become common good, to the extent that we see it quoted with a range of different subjects (Adele(!), Alex, Bob, Donna, Frank, Fred, Jack, Joan, Joe, John, Mary, Paul, Pat, Rachel, Sally, Sue, Tom, I, He, She, The baby…) and often without reference...

We examine the possible impact of frequency differences between a construction in L1 and its equivalent in L2 on translations. Our case is that of existential there in English and existential il y a in French. Using corpus evidence, we first confirm previous claims that existential there is used more freely in English than existential il y a is in...

This paper reports on a corpus-based method used to compare translated and non-translated English texts, more specifically with respect to how extensively they use verbs expressing manner of motion. On the basis of the well-known typological distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, it is hypothesized that English translations...

exposé donné lors d'une réunion de "Grammaire de construction", projet partenarial du labo STL et de la Maison Européene des Sciences Humaines et Sociales

Séance "constructions verbales en anglais", labo STL