Publicaties

This chapter focuses on the dynamic interaction of lexical items with their syntactic and discourse environment in Modern French. If one adopts a multi-criterial approach of class membership, one is forced to conclude that many (ephemerous) tokens resulting from non-canonical yet productive uses of lexemes in conflicting syntactic constructions only exhibit partial class membership. As such, these instances of coercion need to be distinguished ...

In light of the partial productivity puzzle (see e.g., Goldberg 2019 for a recent discussion), recent work in Construction Grammar has explored the connection between constructional productivity and linguistic creativity (i.a., Hoffmann 2018, 2019, 2020a; Bergs 2019). While current research into productivity has been mainly concerned with intralinguistic determinants such as type/token frequency and semantic similarity, the present study ...

This paper investigates different aspects of syntactic productivity and its relation to semantics. Based on a case study of 43 Dutch minimizing constructions, the correlations between nine different variables are examined: metrics of lexical openness (TypeTokenRatio, HapaxTokenRatio, HapaxTypeRatio), measures of conventionalization (FrTop1, MeanFrTop3, SDTop3), characteristics of the frequency distribution (Alpha parameter of the Zipf curve) and ...

Language comprehension involves the derivation of the meaning of sentences by combining the meanings of their parts. In some cases, this can lead to ambiguity. A sentence like Every hiker climbed a hill allows two logical representations: One that specifies that every hiker climbed a different hill and one that specifies that every hiker climbed the same hill. The interpretations of such sentences can be primed: Exposure to a particular reading ...

The study of the fronted adjectival predicate in French seems to tell the story of a steady decline of the construction, slowly fading away under the influence of the emerging SVO order. Frequency indexes confirm this theory, but as to productivity, this is “another story”. This could be explained by the development of new sub-constructions, some of which seem to correlate with the new typological status of French. These sub-constructions are ...