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Constructions with Lexical Integrity*

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Constructions with Lexical Integrity* Constructions with Lexical Integrity* Ash Asudeh1,2, Mary Dalrymple2, and Ida Toivonen1 1 Carleton University 2 Oxford University abstract Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning com- Keywords: binations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases syntax, lexicon, that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words semantics, constructions, that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyn- Lexical Integrity, cratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammar- templates, ians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but also Swedish, Dutch, denied the lexicon/grammar distinction. In this paper, we consider LFG, the word/phrase and lexicon/grammar distinction in light of Lexical- Glue Semantics Functional Grammar and its Lexical Integrity Principle. We show that it is not necessary to remove the word/phrase distinction or the lex- icon/grammar distinction to capture constructional effects, although we agree that there are important generalizations involving construc- tions of all sizes that must be captured at both syntactic and semantic levels. We use LFG’s templates, bundles of grammatical descriptions, to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be *The authors contributed equally and are listed in purely alphabetical order. This paper is a revised and expanded version of Asudeh et al. (2008). We grate- fully acknowledge the support of the following grants: an Early Researcher Award from the Province of Ontario (Asudeh), Leverhulme Research Fellowship #RF- 2012-295 (Dalrymple), NSERC Individual Discovery Grant #371969 (Asudeh), and SSHRC Standard Research Grant #410-2010-1841 (Toivonen). For helpful comments, we thank the audience at LFG08, in particular Kersti Börjars, Marie- Elaine van Egmond, Dag Haug, Helge Lødrup, and Nigel Vincent. We also thank the audience at SE-LFG 5. For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, we are grateful to Elizabeth Christie, Ray Jackendoff, Stefan Müller, and Ivan Sag. Any remaining errors are our own. Lastly, we thank the editors, staff, and reviewers at JLM. Journal of Language Modelling Vol 1, No 1 (2013), pp. 1–54 Ash Asudeh et al. invoked either by words or by construction-specific phrase structure rules. Phrase structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of phrasal constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of word and phrase are preserved. Con- structional effects are captured by systematically allowing words and phrases to contribute comparable information to LFG’s level of func- tional structure; this is just a generalization of LFG’s usual assumption that “morphology competes with syntax” (Bresnan, 2001). 1 words, constructions, and the lexicon The observation that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size forms the basis for Construction Grammar (Fill- more, 1988; Fillmore et al., 1988; Kay and Fillmore, 1999; Gold- berg, 1995, 2006; Goldberg and Jackendoff, 2004; Michaelis, 2010; Sag, 2010; Boas and Sag, 2012).1 A meaning that is associated with a word or a part of a word may also be associated with a phrasal structure in the same language, or in another language. Construction Grammar takes the structure and organization of the collection of listemes/constructions as crucially important, and a central concern is the study of the relations among constructions: this contrasts with Di Sciullo and Williams (1987), who consider the collection of listemes to be unstructured and the study of the relations among listemes unin- teresting. Examples such as (1)–(3) involve correspondences between phrasal structures and idiosyncratic meanings; the syntactic frame of the multi-word expression itself, perhaps along with some specifica- tions on what words are permitted, evokes some interpretation. (1) The bigger the better. (Fillmore et al., 1988; Culicover and Jack- endoff, 1999) (2) What’s that koala doing sleeping in the corner? (Kay and Fill- more, 1999) (3) Smithy drank his way through university. (Jackendoff, 1990; Goldberg, 1995) 1 See Sag et al. (2012) for a historical overview of Construction Grammar and further references. See Sag (2012) for an informal overview of a formal theory of Construction Grammar (Sign-Based Construction Grammar). [ 2 ] Constructions with Lexical Integrity Most words in the expressions above are exchangeable for other words, so they seem more flexible than prototypical idioms. Yet their form and associated interpretation must be learned by English speak- ers, as these constructions do not, it is argued, follow from general compositional principles of English grammar. On the Construction Grammar view, such expressions are not a peripheral part of the grammar which need not be accounted for in grammatical theory; in- stead, they lie at one end of a continuum of structures relating forms to meanings. Constructions as pairings of form and meaning can be larger or smaller than a word, and can have structure and meaning that is general or predictable to a variable extent. Following on from this view, Construction Grammarians have denied the utility of a strict division between word-internal grammatical regularities and phrasal regularities, or between semantically bleached grammatical structures and structures which contribute specialized or irregular meanings. As a consequence, Construction Grammarians have tended to emphasize commonalities across types of constructions rather than differences, and to de-emphasize differences between word-level and phrase-level constructions. A distinction between words and multi-word expressions is not fundamental to Construction Grammar, although such a distinction is not necessarily in principle ruled out. In fact, some advocates of Con- struction Grammar go so far as to claim that the distinction between lexicon and grammar is no longer useful, as illustrated by the follow- ing quotes: [M]orphemes are clear instances of constructions in that they are pairings of meaning and form that are not predictable from anything else. It is a consequence of this definition that the lexicon is not neatly differentiated from the rest of gram- mar. (Goldberg, 1995, p. 4) In Construction Grammar, no strict division is assumed be- tween the lexicon and syntax. (Goldberg, 1995, p. 7) Every theory of language has to take a word to be a complex of phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures; com- monly, the store of words is called the lexicon.… Aspects [(Chomsky, 1965)] treats the lexicon as a component of lan- guage distinct from the rules of grammar. Words are taken to [ 3 ] Ash Asudeh et al. be the locus of irregularity in language, while rules of gram- mar encode all the regularities. Words get into sentences by being inserted into syntactic derivations, at the point when syntactic trees are being built and before trees begin to be manipulated and fed to phonology and semantics. … But while [this view of the lexicon] was altogether plausible in the context of early work in generative grammar, I believe that subsequent developments reveal it as another major mis- take that has remained in the background as unquestionable dogma within the mainstream school of thought. (Jackend- off, 2007, p. 53) It is also telling that the section that contains this last quote is titled “Another Fundamental Mistake: The Lexicon/Grammar Distinction”. Another perspective on this fundamental issue arises if we ask whether there is any necessary theoretical distinction between words and phrases. Many linguists agree that words and phrases must be distinguished (Anderson, 1992; Aronoff, 1993; Sadler and Spencer, 2000; Stump, 2001; Blevins, 2006), though the word/phrase distinc- tion is denied by some linguists, not just some working in Construction Grammar, but also those working within the Distributed Morphology paradigm (Halle and Marantz, 1993, 1994; Marantz, 1997; Siddiqi, 2009), which otherwise has quite different morphosyntactic assump- tions. We believe that there is a fundamental reason to maintain the distinction between words and phrases that has previously gone un- addressed in the literature. Natural language morphology mainly falls within the class of regular languages (see Beesley and Karttunen 2003 and references therein); even challenging non-concatenative morpho- logical phenomena, such as circumfixation and root-and-pattern mor- phology, can be characterized by regular means (Beesley and Kart- tunen, 2000, 2003). There is one exception to this generalization: productive reduplication can be characterized only by a more power- ful context-sensitive grammar.2 However, morphologists have so far 2 Beesley and Karttunen (2000, p. 6) show, however, that, if one can assume that “there are only a finite number of words subject to reduplication (no free compounding)”, even total reduplication, e.g. as in Malay, can be captured by regular means. [ 4 ] Constructions with Lexical Integrity not discovered any other phenomenon besides reduplication which re- quires going beyond regular languages: words do not contain deeply nested dependencies or long-distance dependencies, for example. It seems, then, that natural language morphology falls within the regu- lar languages, with one exception: reduplication. Natural language syntax is formally very different: it is pervaded by dependencies that require at least context-free power to describe. Partee et al. (1993, pp. 480ff.) provide a proof that English isnot a finite-state language, using nested dependencies
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