How does productivity relate to semantic coherence in the Evaluative Binominal Construction? A cross-linguistic corpus study in Dutch, English, French and Italian
(2024) CogLing Days 2024 — Location: University of Antwerp (12.December.2024)
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- This paper aims at analyzing the Evaluative Binominal Construction (EBC) (e.g., a hell of a day), represented as the constructional schema [DET1 N1 PREP DET2 N2], which connects an N1 expressing an evaluative quality and an N2 indicating the entity to which the quality is attributed. The EBC has already been studied in several languages such as English (Aarts 1994, 1998; ten Wolde 2023), Dutch (Verhagen 2005, Van Goethem 2023) and French (Larrivée 1994), but cross-linguistic studies (e.g., Piunno in press for Romance languages) are scarce and often not corpus-based (e.g., Foolen 2004). The first objective of our study is to fill this gap by providing a corpus-based constructionist analysis of the EBC, including four languages (English, Dutch, French and Italian), and by analyzing the main cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the EBC in the languages under study. Additionally, this case study seeks to re-examine Barðdal's (2008) hypothesis of an inverse correlation between productivity and semantic coherence. Our data are taken from the TenTen corpus family on SketchEngine. Firstly, only the top 20 EBC patterns per language are examined for a general frequency analysis and semantic classification. Secondly, the top 5 EBC subpatterns of each language are analyzed more deeply in terms of formal properties, productivity and semantic specialization, based on corpus samples of 100 relevant occurrences per pattern (i.e., datasets of 500 occurrences per language). Preliminary results reveal on the formal level a wide variation in DET1 position in Germanic (e.g. vier schatten van kleinkinderen ‘four darlings of grandchildren’, my hell of a house) but a preference for a demonstrative in Romance. Furthermore, the Romance EBC often uses nominalized adjectives in the N1 slot (FR quelle drôle de N; IT quell’idiota di N), contrary to the Germanic EBC. The constructional semantics is mainly positive in Dutch (ameliorative or augmentative values) (e.g., een pracht van een kerstkaart ‘a beauty of a Christmas card’; een joekel van een auto ‘a whopper of a car’), both positive and negative in English (e.g., a gem of a book; a hell of a job), and mostly pejorative in Romance (e.g., la putain de patrie ‘that fucking fatherland’, quello schifo di città ‘that disgusting city’). Also, the semantics of the N1 differs between Romance and Germanic languages, referring more frequently to a quality in French and Italian (e.g., cette saloperie d’histoire ‘this fucking story’, quel genio di Leonardo ‘that genius of Leonardo’), and more frequently to an object or a concept in Germanic (e.g., een kast van een huis ‘a giant house, lit. a closet of a house’; a nightmare of a summer). Finally, productivity scores vary greatly from subpattern to subpattern. For instance, in Dutch the pattern with schat as N1 has a TTR of 0.42, while the pattern with joekel reaches a TTR of 0.90. On the theoretical level, the case study will allow us to test the validity of an inverse correlation between productivity and semantic coherence (Barðdal 2008), and to range the set of subpatterns per language on such a cline. References Aarts, Bas. 1994. The syntax of binominal noun phrases in English. Dutch Working Papers in English Language and Linguistics 30, 1-28. Aarts, Bas. 1998. Binominal noun phrases in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 9(1), 117-158. Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2008. Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Foolen, Ad. 2004. Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance languages. In: G. Radden & K.-U. Panther (Eds.), Studies in linguistic motivation. Berlin: De Gruyter, 75-100. Jakubíček, Miloš, Kilgarriff, Adam, Kovář, Vojtěch, Rychlý, Pavel, & Suchomel, Vít. 2013. The TenTen Corpus Family. In: A. Hardie & R. Love (Eds.), 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL 2013. Lancaster: UCREL, 125-127. Kilgarriff, Adam, Rychly, Pavel, Smrz, Pavel, & Tugwell, David. 2004. The Sketch Engine. Proc. Euralex (Lorient, France, July), 105-116. Piunno, Valentina. (in press). Quel genio di lingua. Analisi quantitativa e qualitativa delle costruzioni fraseologiche valutative dell’italiano e confronto con lo spagnolo e il francese. In: E. Lavric, Chr. Konecny, C. Konzett-Firth & M. Messner (Eds.), Actes du IXe Colloque International ‘Linguistique contrastive germano-romane et intraromane’. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Van Goethem, Kristel. 2023. Een pracht van een constructie vs. een prachtconstructie. Een vergelijkende corpusstudie van de syntactische en morfologische Expressieve Binominale Constructie. Nederlandse Taalkunde 28(2), 325-348. Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructiegrammatica en ‘usage-based’ taalkunde. Nederlandse Taalkunde 10, 197-222. ten Wolde, Elnora. 2023. The English Binominal Noun Phrase: A Cognitive-Functional Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hendrikx, I., Piunno, V., & Van Goethem, K. (2024). How does productivity relate to semantic coherence in the Evaluative Binominal Construction? A cross-linguistic corpus study in Dutch, English, French and Italian. CogLing Days 2024, University of Antwerp. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/245901