Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar
Hans C. Boas & Francisco Gonzálvez-García 2014
E-Book: 327 English pages
The chapters in this book show how the different flavors of Construction Grammar provide illuminating insights into the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse-functional properties of specific phenomena in Romance languages such as (Castilian) Spanish, French, Romanian, and Latin from a synchronic as well as a diachronic viewpoint. The phenomena surveyed include the role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish, the relevance of lexicalization for a constructionist analysis of complex prepositions in French, the complementariness of fragments, patterns and constructions as theoretical and explanatory constructs in verb complementation in French, Latin, and Spanish, non-constituent coordination phenomena (e.g. Right Node Raising, Argument Cluster Coordination and Gapping) in Romanian, and variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion in the light of Leonard Talmy’s (2000) typological differences of lexicalization between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.
Quotes
“Construction Grammar has become progressively more influential in linguistics and psychology over the last two decades. But to date, it hasn’t been systematically applied to the Romance languages. This volume, for the first time, lays the groundwork. It show by example how grammatical form-meaning pairings are fleshed out in languages from Latin to French and Spanish, and how they compare both across languages and over time.”
— Benjamin K. Bergen, University of California, San Diego
“We think we know Romance languages, but do we really? The papers in this innovative volume target some of the toughest grammatical problems that linguists have encountered – from complex prepositions to parenthetical phrases to fragmentary expressions – and provide a testament to our ability as language users to adapt linguistic routines to communicative needs. Along the way, the authors illuminate the distinct linguistic solutions that users of Romance languages have evolved – solutions that reflect both the common heritage and divergent histories of these languages. The case studies collected here demonstrate that by embracing idiosyncrasy, usage factors and meaningful syntactic patterns, we gain descriptive precision and breadth. This engaging volume offers insights to any scholar of Romance syntax and the lexicon. It also richly illustrates the way in which Construction Grammar captures the continuum of generality in language – from fixed expressions to highly schematic (and potentially universal) combinatoric patterns.”
— Laura A. Michaelis, University of Colorado, Boulder
“All things considered, Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar is a valuable contribution to the study of Romance Languages Grammar within the Construction Grammar framework.”
— Mar Garachana-Camarero, University of Barcelona, in Languages in Contrast Vol. 15:2 (2015), 294–296