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Dissertations, Department of Linguistics UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Constructional Grounding: The Role of Interpretational Overlap in Lexical and Constructional Acquisition Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nq6b18j Author Johnson, Christopher Publication Date 1999 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Constructional grounding: The role of interpretational overlap in lexical and constructional acquisition by Christopher Ronald Johnson B.A. (University of Chicago) 1987 M.A. (University of California, Berkeley) 1993 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Charles J. Fillmore, Chair Professor George P. Lakoff Professor Dan I. Slobin Professor Eve E. Sweetser Fall 1999 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Constructional grounding: The role of interpretational overlap in lexical and constructional acquisition © 1999 by Christopher Ronald Johnson Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgments Anyone who has had the chance to participate in the life of the Berkeley linguistics and cognitive science community has a lot of thanking to do. I must start with my dissertation advisor Charles Fillmore. His astounding insight into all issues lexical and grammatical, his kindness and patience, and his sly sense of humor have made my graduate experience enjoyable and deeply rewarding. George Lakoff deserves enormous thanks for being generally excited about ideas, for getting students talking to one another, and for taking such an active interest in my project, which never would have occurred to me if it weren’t for his thoughts about the experiential grounding of language. Eve Sweetser’s wise observations on metaphor and historical semantic change have been influendal, and her detailed comments on draft chapters have no doubt improved this text dramatically. Dan Slobin's important ideas about early grammatical acquisition are what first drew me to child language, and his encouragement has really kept me going. I also owe a lot to the Berkeley graduate students I have had the pleasure to get to know. Joe Grady was developing his theory of primary metaphor while the ideas in this dissertation were taking shape: when we discovered how much our work overlapped, it produced the exhilarating sensation that we were on to something. Since then I have benefited enormously from joint work and discussions with him. Kevin Moore listened to the arguments on the following pages when they were far too nebulous to be presented clearly; the fact that he was the first to understand them is a testament to his curiosity, patience, and insight. I also thank the rest of the creative cognitivists that I’ve had so many enlightening conversations with: Collin Baker, Nancy Chang, Michael Israel (also a friend and collaborator), Dan Jurafsky, Pam Morgan, Srini Narayanan, Sarah Taub. Nancy Urban, and many others. I would also like to thank Susanne Gahl, Kevin Moore, and Joe Grady for their friendship and support throughout grad school. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The following scholars have my gratitude for responding to earlier versions of this work and making me think differently about it: Melissa Bowerman, Nancy Budwig, Eve Clark, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Gilles Fauconnier, Jerry Feldman, Adele Goldberg, Paul Kay, Ronald Langacker, Michael Tomasello, Elizabeth Traugott, and Mark Turner. The FrameNet project deserves thanks for providing me with interesting paying work during the end stage of my graduate career, as does the International Computer Science Institute for providing a comfortable and stimulating home for the project, and the National Science Foundation for funding the project. My parents Ronald and Louise Johnson deserve special notice for putting me through college and letting me pursue my own quirky and impractical interests there. And a toast to my friends Fred Zimmerman and Molly Watson for making sure I didn’t spend all my time studying in Berkeley. And thanks most of all to my wife Jordanna Bailkin, who finished her own dissertation with inspiring efficiency, and has done more than anyone to help me finish by just making me so happy. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Linguistic theory and language acquisition 2 1.2 Linguistic signs and based-on relations 6 1.3 Constructional and cognitive approaches to language 9 1.4 Diachronic explanations for based-on relations 20 1.5 Arbitrariness and motivation in acquisition 24 1.6 Methodology 26 1.7 The structure of the dissertation 28 Chapter 2. Constructions and based-on relations 29 2.1 Introduction 29 2.2 The “What’s X doing Y?” construction (WXDY) 32 2.3 A brief look at WH-questions 38 2.4 The relation between WXDY and WH-questions 40 2.5 WH-questions and W XDY in child language 46 2.6 Detailed examination of data from one child 65 2.7 Discussion 77 2.8 A principled account of constructional form 78 Chapter 3. The theory of constructional grounding 80 3.1 Introduction 80 3.2 Constructional grounding defined 81 3.3 Deictic and existential constructions in English 84 3.4 How are deictic and existential sentences related? 89 3.5 The historical relation between deictics and existentials 94 3.6 Deictics and existentials in child language 95 3.7 Interpretation of data 112 3.8 What makes constructional grounding possible 115 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3.9 Why constructional grounding happens 116 3.10 Reconciling motivation and arbitrariness 120 Chapter 4. Polysemy, constructional grounding, and conflation 122 4.1 Introduction 122 4.2 Polysemy and the mapping problem 127 4.3 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 129 4.4 Primary scenes and primary metaphor 138 4.5 The polysemy of see 143 4.6 Constructional grounding and WH-compIements 158 4.7 Visual and mental uses of see in child language 168 4.8 General discussion: Conflation in the acquisition of see 182 Chapter 5. Learning principles and constraints 187 5.1 Introduction: Learning linguistic signs 187 5.2 Natural constraints in early semantic acquisition 191 5.3 Subscenes and primary scenes 203 5.4 Conflation, prototypicality, and leamability 216 5.5 Special issues in constructional acquisition 226 5.6 Conclusion 233 Chapter 6. Conclusion 235 References 238 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 1: Introduction It is quite illusory to believe that where language is concerned the problem of origins is any different from the problem o f permanent conditions. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1983 [1915]) Adopting a constructional view of grammar, this dissertation addresses the question of how one conventional linguistic sign— i.e., one lexical unit or grammatical construction—can be “based on” another. Typically, based-on relations between signs are regarded either as arbitrary results of historical change or as properties of a stable system used by adults. This work proposes a third view. Using longitudinal corpus data, it argues that certain signs are related primarily through a dynamic process in early acquisition rather than through static principles of the linguistic or conceptual system instantiated in the minds of adult speakers. In this process, which is called constructional grounding, a sign that is relatively easy for children to learn serves as the model for another more difficult sign, because it occurs in contexts in which it exemplifies important properties of the more difficult sign in a way that is especially accessible to children. In order for two signs to be related through constructional grounding, there must be a particular type of relation between them, both as they exist in the language, and more specifically as they are used by adults speaking to children. Therefore, the phenomena discussed here require a complex explanation that depends both on the historical processes that shape language and on the cognitive and communicative processes involved in children’s acquisition of language. This work focuses on the acquisitional issues, but places them in a theoretical context that takes account of the relevant historical factors as well. In the general view presented here, a historical change leads to a new state of language in which two conventional signs overlap significantly in function and form. This relation between signs makes it likely that children will model one sign on the other in the acquisition process. Children who do take this learning path will form a conceptual I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. connection between the signs, and this will influence the way they use the signs as adults. As a result, the signs are likely to continue to overlap in form and function. Through this potentially iterative process, language structure and language learning influence and mutually reinforce one another. 1.1 Linguistic theory and language acquisition While this dissertation is about children’s acquisition of language, it is written from the point of view of a linguist— someone especiaiiy concerned with the detailed description of language as a system. Unlike most works on acquisition, it focuses as much on explaining why language has the properties it does as on explaining how children learn about those properties. The phenomena it examines suggest that these two issues are intimately related. The structure of language both reflects the way it has been learned and determines, to some extent, the way it will be learned. When Saussure (1983 [1915]) characterized the aims of modem linguistics, he did so in terms of a dichotomy between two major approaches to the study of language: the diachronic and the synchronic.
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