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"Constructions" and Grammar: Evidence from Idioms

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... Con referencia a los idioms, en "Prosodic Templates in English Idioms and Fixed Expressions," el autor abandona los caminos tradicionales de estudio-gramatical (Horvath and Siloni 2017), semántico (Gehrke and McNally 2019) o lexicográfico (Ayto 2009)-para centrarse en el estudio de sus rasgos prosódicos, más concretamente, en el estudio de los patrones de sílabas acentuadas y no acentuadas, basadas en el concepto de foot, dejando atrás estudios sobre el mismo tema como el de Shiobara (2010). Si bien este artículo enlaza dos campos, idioms y prosodia, aparentemente opuestos, pensamos que podría haberse adentrado más en las implicaciones semánticas relacionadas con la estructura métrica, aunque esto, quizás, pueda ser objeto de otro estudio vinculado al que tenemos entre manos. ...
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... Given that this study aims to obtain evidence regarding storage, we delineated a core set of idioms in Section 2.1, which all have properties that force them to be stored in the grammar. As observed by Horvath and Siloni (2017), the questions we should ask regarding any fixed clausal expression are: (a) Is the meaning of the expression unpredictable based on the composition of its parts and does it involve figuration? (b) Is there evidence that it is stored in the storage component of the grammar, and not extragrammatically (see examples (10)-(11) and the relevant discussion)? ...
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Idiom surveys conducted on both English and Hebrew motivate a distinction between phrasal idioms, which are headed by a lexical head, and clausal idioms, which involve sentential functional material. The surveys show that these two types of idioms have different patterns of distribution across diathesis alternations. A verbal passive phrasal idiom necessarily shares its idiomatic meaning with the corresponding transitive, while the unaccusative, adjectival passive and transitive can head their own phrasal idioms. This behavior of phrasal idioms contrasts with the strong tendency of clausal idioms to be specific to a single diathesis. The Type-Sensitive Storage (TSS) model, which we propose, accounts for these findings, by motivating a different storage (lexical listing) strategy for each idiom-type. Phrasal idioms are argued to be stored as subentries, while clausal idioms are independent entries. Assuming the verbal passive is derived post-lexically, thus lacking its own lexical entry, the model explains why it cannot host idiomatic meanings specific to it. In contrast, the adjectival passive, unaccusative and transitive have their own lexical entries under the model, and thus can have their own idiomatic meanings. Clausal idioms are stored as independent entries, and therefore their storage does not depend on the existence of other lexical entries.
... However, as far as the transitive-unaccusative alternation is concerned, this approach is implausible. While uniqueness of unaccusative and transitive idioms is a pervasive phenomenon, as shown in Table 1 (and exemplified in (12a) above and (14) below), unaccusative verbs systematically have a transitive alternant (with a Cause external role) and vice versa, except isolated sporadic gaps (Haspelmath 1993, Reinhart 2002 Thus, the 'inheritance' approach cannot account for the entire set of findings (for more evidence against this approach, see Horvath & Siloni 2017). An anonymous JL referee proposes another possible approach, one that relies on a difference in valence between verbal passives, which have two arguments available (including the implicit external argument), versus unaccusatives and adjectival passives, which are one-place predicates. ...
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Using a new methodology, the paper reports experimental work that sheds light on the organization of the lexicon, the storage technique of phrasal idioms, and the derivation of various diatheses. We conducted an experiment to examine the pattern of distribution of phrasal idioms across several diatheses. Native speakers of Hebrew were taught invented Hebrew idioms inspired by French idioms. The idioms were headed by predicates of three diatheses: a verbal passive, an adjectival passive, and an unaccusative verb. After learning the idioms, the participants evaluated for each idiom how likely it was that it shared its idiomatic meaning with its transitive version. The results show that the distribution of phrasal idioms depends on the diathesis of their head. Subjects perceived the likelihood of the verbal passive to share idiomatic meanings with its transitive counterpart as significantly higher than that of both the adjectival passive and the unaccusative. The findings provide support for the claim that phrasal idioms are stored in the lexicon, not in an extra-grammatical component, since their perception by speakers turned out to be dependent on a grammatical property, the diathesis. This dependency can be explained if phrasal idioms are stored as subentries of their head. The findings also reinforce the view that adjectival passives and unaccusatives are listed in the lexicon, but not verbal passives. Finally, they support the existence of an active lexicon, where thematic operations can apply.
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This paper presents a corpus-based study of constructions in English and Spanish, with a special emphasis on equivalent semantic-functional counterparts, and potential mismatches. Although usage/corpus-based Construction Grammar (CxG) has attracted much attention in recent years, most studies have dealt exclusively with monolingual constructions. In this paper we will focus on two constructions that represent conventional ways to express ‘insanity’ in both languages. The analysis will cover grammatical, semantic and informative aspects in order to establish a multi-linguistic prototype of the constructions. To that end, data from several giga-token corpora of contemporary spoken English and Spanish (parallel and comparable) have been selected. This study advances the explanatory potential of constructional idioms for the study of idiomaticity, variability and cross-language analysis. In addition, relevant findings on the dialectal distribution of certain idiom features across both languages and their national varieties are also reported.
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The paper reports and discusses two surveys we conducted to systematically assess the distribution of English phrasal idioms across various diatheses (transitive, unaccusatives, adjectival and verbal passives). Both surveys, a quantitative survey of idiom dictionaries and an experimental one using invented idioms, show that the distribution of phrasal idioms depends on the diathesis of the idiom’s head. While transitives, unaccusatives and adjectival passives can head idioms specific to them, verbal passive idioms uniformly have a transitive (active) version. This pattern, we argue, shows that phrasal idioms are stored in the (pre-syntactic) lexicon as subentries of the entry of their head (not as independent entries). Further, it reinforces proposals that the verbal passive is a post-lexical output, which consequently lacks its own lexical entry, contrasting in this respect with the other diatheses we examined. Our findings also provide evidence that the lexicon comprises derived entries, which we take as indication that it is an active component of grammar.
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