Jóhanna Barðdal
Syntactic Productivity (book proposal)
This book is intended to be an extention and revision of my dissertation, and thus a research monograph. In my dissertation project my research question was focused on the function of morphological case. I used two methods to generate answers on that particular issue, namely, a) to collect new verbs in Icelandic and study which morphological case they occur with, b) to compile a corpus of modern/old Icelandic texts, including six genres, and study the frequency correlations between morphological case, syntactic functions and thematic roles. My dissertation project, thus, brought me, directly and indirectly, to the issue of syntactic productivity. In this book I plan to use two chapters from my dissertation, in revised versions, and complement with two additional studies on syntactic productivity, together with a thorough introductory chapter on theories of productivity. The table of content is as follows:
1 Introduction
2 Productivity
3 Case and Argument structure of new verbs
4 Novel Verbs of Communication
5 Case and Argument structure of Nonce verbs
6 Changes in Case and Argument structure from Old to Modern Icelandic
7 Summary
The body of the book consists of four studies: In the first study I collected new verbs in Icelandic from various sources, both written and spoken. Such data are easily available since Icelanders always make up words for new phenomena. Thus, the verbs in this study are old verbs used with a new meaning, new verbs made from already existing stems, and borrowed verbs. One of the most interesting empirical results of that study is that 25% of the verbs used transitively assign dative case to their objects. This is unexpected on a traditional account where dative objects are assumed to be a marginal category and thus any signs of productivity are unexpected. This is a slightly revised version of chapter 5 from my dissertation.
The second study is a case study of two new verbs of communication, i.e. (e-)meila and SMSa ('send text message'). These verbs qualify to occur in three constructions in Icelandic, the Ditransitive, the Transfer Construction (with an accusative object) and the more general Caused-Motion construction (with a dative object). I use questionnaires to find out how Icelandic speakers rank the various alternatives. This study also reveals some of the social and cultural factors at work when new verbs are either coined or borrowed in a speech community.
The third study is an experiment on nonce verbs in Icelandic and which case and argument structure Icelandic speakers assign to unknown verbs and on which basis. Empirical evidence emerges supporting the idea that constructions exist at different levels of schematicity, and that frequency is a contributing factor. This study has been published as a paper in SKY 13.
The fourth study is a frequency study of case forms of subjects and objects in an Old and Modern Icelandic text corpus which I compiled for the purpose of my dissertation. I investigate the differences in both type and token frequency of various constructions, such as the accusative and dative object constructions and the nominative vs. oblique subject constructions. I compare the development to the development of morphological case in Germanic in general. Three empirical results have emerged: a) The size of the category of dative object verbs has remained stable from Old Icelandic to Modern Icelandic. b) Verbs which have changed their case frames in the course of time have not necessarily developed the nom-acc case frame but other lower-type frequency case frames have also attracted verbs, either on the basis of semantic or formal similarity. c) The internal order of the changes within the case system in Icelandic is approximately the same as the order of the changes in English, Swedish and German. This order of events is predicted by usage-based models of language. This is a heavily revised version of the last chapter of my dissertation.
All these studies focus on the productivity of the various case and argument structure constructions in Icelandic and I thus plan to embed them in a discussion on productivity. In this particular case it is a question of syntactic productivity which is an emerging research area within linguistics, in particular cognitive linguistics.
Productivity has been discussed within morphology but syntactic productivity has only been slightly touched upon in various scholarly works. Within mainstream syntactic frameworks syntactic productivity is usually regarded as speakers’ abilities to produce sentences never encountered before. Thus, within mainstraim research on syntax there has not been much discussion devoted to the question of which argument structure constructions (i.e. categorization frames) can be extended to new verbs and on which basis. Within CxG Adele Goldberg discusses partial productivity in her book from 1995, and bases her discussion on Joan Bybee’s work from 1985 and Steven Pinker’s work from 1989. Bybee also discusses productivity in a paper from 1995. Laura Michaelis and Josep Ruppenhofer touch upon syntactic productivity in their 2001 book on the be-construction in German. Therefore, syntactic productivity is a new and emerging research area, and it seems that my work on productivity is highly relevant, and could, thus, constitute an important contribution to the theoretical discussion on productivity.
The methods that I use have not been used before in syntactic/morpho-syntactic research, i.e. a nonce-verbs experiment on morphological case has not been carried out for a case language before. I know of no work using questionnaires to reveal the acceptability of new verbs when instantiated by certain argument structure constructions, nor have new verbs been systematically collected to study the cases the assign to their arguments. Also, a comparison of the frequencies of case constructions between historical periods of a language has not, to my knowledge, been conducted before. Thus, the research methods I use are highly original.
This research monograph should be of interest to everybody working on Icelandic/ Scandinavian/Germanic, everybody working on morphological case, verbal semantics and argument linking, morphological productivity, syntax, language change, language contact, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics and usage-based models.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, definitions of productivity seem to vary a lot and discussions on these differences have so far not been available in the literature, with the recent exception of Laurie Bauer’s book on morphological productivity (CUP, 2001). Also, the methods I use have not been used before to generate knowledge on productivity. Therefore, I have no doubt that this book will be an important contribution to discussions and theories of syntactic productivity.
| Oppdatert 16.03.2006 avJB |
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