Martin Hilpert

University of Neuchâtel | UniNE · Institut de langue et littérature anglaises (ILLAN)

This volume illustrates new trends in corpus linguistics and shows how corpus approaches can be used to investigate new datasets and emerging areas in linguistics and related fields. It addresses innovative research questions, for example how prosodic analyses can increase the accuracy of syntactic segmentation, how tolerant English language teache...

This article analyzes the semantic headedness of English blends with distributional semantics methods. The semantic head of a blend is the source word that transfers its semantic information to the blend as a whole. For example, a sitcom is a kind of comedy. But is FedEx a kind of express, and is wi-fi a kind of fidelity? We use corpus data and tok...

What does the future hold for Construction Grammar? What are the most promising future avenues for research on constructions? This paper addresses the development of Construction Grammar as a theory of language through the perspective of six recent PhD dissertations that explore constructional meaning, the architecture of the constructional network...

The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic metho...

This paper aims to give an overview of corpus-based research that investigates processes of language change from the theoretical perspective of Construction Grammar. Starting in the early 2000s, a dynamic community of researchers has come together in order to contribute to this effort. Among the different lines of work that have characterized this...

This paper investigates English clippings such as prof (< professor), delish (< delicious), or condo (< condominium). Clipping is highly variable, but a growing body of evidence suggests that clipping variability follows predictable tendencies (Lappe 2007; Berg 2011; Arndt-Lappe 2018; Hilpert et al. 2021). As yet, however, experimental work on clip...

This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory ), memo (< memorandum ), or quake (< earthquake ). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings...

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...

This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar ( Coussé et al. 2018 ). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verb get that express a permitted action, as in The prisoners always get to make one phone call . Different views exist on the contexts in which permissive get emerge...

This paper addresses the morphological word formation process that is known as clipping. In English, that process yields shortened word forms such as lab (< laboratory), exam (< examination), or gator (< alligator). It is frequently argued (Davy 2000, Durkin 2009, Haspelmath & Sims 2010, Don 2014) that clipping is highly variable and that it is dif...

When speakers communicate, they signal to their interlocutors what their utterance is about, what parts of it constitute new and given information, and what part of it may be surprising or unexpected. The part of grammar that lets speakers do this is called information structure. Aspects such as word order, prosody, pronominality, and definiteness...

Apresentação à Gragoatá 52.

This paper addresses constructional change in a dialogical construction that is illustrated by utterances such as sarcastic much? , which typically serve the purpose of an interactional challenge. Drawing on web-based corpus data, we argue that this construction is currently undergoing a process of change that expands its range of possible uses. Sp...

This article investigates the collocational behavior of English modal auxiliaries such as may and might with the aim of finding corpus-based measures that distinguish between different modal expressions and that allow insights into why speakers may choose one over another in a given context. The analysis uses token-based semantic vector space model...

This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume’s expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine...

This handbook provides an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. Following an introduction from the editors, the volume’s expert contributors explore a range of core topics in English grammar, beginning with issues in grammar writing and methodology. Chapters in part II then examine...

Cambridge Core - English Historical Linguistics - edited by Laurel J. Brinton

A growing number of studies on language change adopt Construction Grammar as a theoretical framework so that there is now a developing field of Diachronic Construction Grammar. As is typical of any emerging linguistic theory, many aspects of Diachronic Construction Grammar are still not clarified explicitly, or they are understood in different ways...

Dieser Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie sich der Begriff der Produktivität konstruktionsgrammatisch fassen lässt und zu welchen neuen Einsichten ein solches Verständnis von Produktivität führt. Zu diesem Zweck werden einige Aspekte von Produktivität diskutiert und auf das konstruktionsgrammatische Konzept eines Netzwerks von sprachlichen Mustern be...

This paper describes a method to automatically identify stages of language change in diachronic corpus data, combining variability-based neighbour clustering, which offers objective and reproducible criteria for periodization, and distributional semantics as a representation of lexical meaning. This method partitions the history of a grammatical co...

Grammatical elements such as determiners, conjunctions or pronouns are very evenly dispersed across natural language data. By contrast, the uses of lexical elements have a stronger tendency to occur in bursts that are interspersed by long lulls. This paper considers two alternative explanations for this difference. First, it could be hypothesised t...

Recent analyses of written text types have discovered significant frequency increases of colloquial or conversational elements, such as contractions, personal pronouns, questions or the progressive. This trend is often referred to as colloquialization. This paper presents a new perspective on colloquialization, with a special focus on the discourse...

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acqui...

In their contribution to this special issue, De Smet & Van de Velde suggest that the analysability of a morphologically complex word is an indicator of how easily that word is primed by elements that are formed by the same word formation process. To illustrate, hearing or reading the words roughly , equally and luckily within a short span of time s...

This paper presents token-based semantic vector spaces as a tool that can be applied in corpus-linguistic analyses such as word sense comparisons, comparisons of synonymous lexical items, and matching of concordance lines with a given text. We demonstrate how token-based semantic vector spaces are created, and we illustrate the kinds of result that...

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims...

This corpus-based study investigates the complementation patterns of mental predicates in a cross-linguistic context. More precisely, it examines five equivalent mental verbs from English, German, and Polish and analyzes whether their complements are cognitively construed in different ways in first-person uses of those verbs as opposed to third-per...

This paper discusses how modal auxiliaries fit into a constructional view of language and how this view allows us to think in new ways about diachronic meaning change in modal auxiliaries. These issues will be illustrated on the basis of a diachronic corpus-based study of the modal auxiliary may, specifically focusing on changes in its collocationa...

Until recently, theoretical linguists have paid little attention to the frequency of linguistic elements in grammar and grammatical development. It is a standard assumption of (most) grammatical theories that the study of grammar (or competence) must be separated from the study of language use (or performance). However, this view of language has be...

This paper addresses the recent history of noun-participle compounding in English. This word formation process is illustrated by forms such as hand-carved or computer-based. Data from the COHA shows that over the last two-hundred years, such forms have undergone a substantial increase in type and token frequency. These quantitative changes motivate...

This paper explores how the visualization tool of motion charts can be used for the analysis of meaning change in linguistic constructions. In previous work, linguistic motion charts have been used to represent diachronic frequency trends and changes in the morphosyntactic behavior of linguistic units. The present paper builds on that work, but it...

This chapter is concerned with phenomena of grammatical change in the English language, and with the question of how these phenomena can be studied in corpus-based analyses. To start out, we clarify briefly what we mean by the terms grammar, grammatical change, and corpus-based analyses. In the words of Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 3), the term gra...

The present paper investigates the question whether different languages can be categorized into ‘constructionally tolerant’ languages, which grant speakers considerable freedom to combine syntactic constructions with lexical items in non-conventional ways, and ‘valency-driven’ languages, which impose stronger restrictions on the way in which constr...

Introduces Construction Grammar as a cognitive-functional theory of language, applied to the structures of English What do speakers of English know in order to produce utterances that other speakers will understand? Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction...

Keratinocytes account for 95% of all cells of the epidermis, the stratified squamous epithelium forming the outer layer of the skin, in which a significant number of skin diseases takes root. Immortalized keratinocyte cell lines are often used as research model systems providing standardized, reproducible, and homogenous biological material. Apart...

How can frequency data from diachronic corpora facilitate research into processes of language change? This paper uses an approach that dynamically visualizes complex patterns of language change (Hilpert 2011a). This technique can be likened to a flipbook of language change: a sequence of graphs visualizes a linguistic phenomenon during successive p...

How can frequency data from diachronic corpora facilitate research into processes of language change? This paper uses an approach that dynamically visualizes complex patterns of language change (Hilpert 2011a). This technique can be likened to a ›flipbook‹ of language change: a sequence of graphs visualizes a linguistic phenomenon during successive...

Ein Spruch, den man einige Sommer lang auf T-Shirts lesen konnte, war Bitte sprechen Sie in ganzen Sätzen: Ich lese die ZEIT. Der Begriff des Satzes, noch dazu des »ganzen Satzes«, ist wie vielleicht kein zweiter mit einer normativen Idealvorstellung von Sprache verknüpft, die sich in Form und auch Inhalt stark an der Schrift orientiert. Geordnete...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

This book presents research on grammaticalization, the process by which lexical items acquire grammatical function, grammatical items get additional functions, and grammars are created. Scholars from around the world introduce and discuss the core theoretical and methodological bases of grammaticalization, report on work in the field, and point to...