Date: Wednesday 03 July 2024, 12:15 pm to 13:45 pm
Venue: C601, Bismarckstr. 1
About: This event is organized by the RTG Dimensions of Constructional Space.
Title: A Construction Grammar approach to marginal constructions: Converging evidence on the
family of English Objoid Constructions
About the speaker: Tamara Bouso is a Senior Lecturer at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Her research interests include language variation and change, (Diachronic) Construction Grammar, and transitivization processes in the history of English.
Abstract
My line of research focuses on changes in argument structure, with special reference to the processes of (de)transitivization that have affected a set of marginal constructions involving nonprototypical object types, i.e. “objoid” constructions, using here Allerton’s (1982) terminology. An example is the Reaction Objoid Construction (ROC) in syntactic patterns like Pauline smiled her thanks (Levin 1993) where an originally intransitive verb of manner of action (e.g. smile) is followed by an Noun Phrase that fills the object slot and expresses a reaction or an emotion of some kind (e.g. thanks = ‘gratitude’); the overall constructional meaning of the ROC is “express X by V-ing”, as in “Pauline express her thanks by smiling” in the example just given. Adopting a “usage-based” (Bybee 2010) Construction Grammar perspective (Goldberg 1995; 2006; 2019), in my PhD Thesis (Bouso 2018) and subsequent publications (Bouso 2020; 2021; 2022a; 2022b, among others), I explored the idiosyncratic nature and historical development of the ROC on the basis of naturally occurring data from a number of synchronic and diachronic corpora. The results obtained in these studies confirm the “marginal” (Hoffmann 2020a) status of the ROC. The ROC is a relatively low-frequency pattern that finds its niche in the nineteenth-century British sentimental novel, and historically, the ROC follows the same developmental pathway as other transitivizing constructions such as the well-known way-construction (Israel 1996; Traugott and Trousdale 2013). It is first attested with more transitive-like verbs and spreads over to more prototypical intransitives (e.g., verbs of sound and light emission such as purr and flare, in She [the cat] saw, and purr’d applause; and The star flared its goodbye) over the course of the Late Modern English period.
In my talk at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, I will go a step further, offering a Construction Grammar account of another marginal construction, namely the one I refer to as the Superlative Objoid Construction or SOC (Bouso and Hundt 2023; Bouso 2024). First, the Modern SOC will be characterized as a polysemous degree modifier construction structured around two core meanings, i.e., “to be in one’s best state or condition” (e.g., She felt (at) her best) and “to do X at one’s highest standard or level” (e.g., She worked (at) her best). Then, it will be shown that the trajectory of the SOC and its allostruction, the at-SOC, is strikingly similar to the one traced for the ROC, with both constructions undergoing grammatical constructionalization in American English at the turn of the twentieth century. The talk will conclude with converging evidence on the connections among four members of the family of English Objoid Constructions. Specifically, following Ungerer (2021), structural priming (implemented with an automatic maze variant of self-paced reading) will be used to test (i) the psycholinguistic reality (Hoffmann 2020b; Cappelle 2024) of a mother node joining the two allostructions of the SOC, and (ii) the transitivity cline that seems to exist among the Reaction Objoid (She smiled her thanks), the Cognate Objoid (She smiled a sweet smile, He told a sly tale), and the Superlative Objoid (They worked (at) their hardest) Constructions.