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- Title
Mapping constructional spaces: A contrastive analysis of English and Dutch analytic causatives.
- Authors
Levshina, Natalia; Geeraerts, Dirk; Speelman, Dirk
- Abstract
The paper demonstrates how verb and noun classes can be used as a common interface in contrastive Construction Grammar. It presents an innovative approach to the contrastive analysis of constructional spaces (sets of construc-tions covering a certain semantic domain). We compare English and Dutch ana-lytic causatives by using the statistical technique of multiple correspondence analysis applied to data from large monolingual corpora. The method allows us to explore the common conceptual space of the constructions, in particular the sa-lient semantic dimensions and causation types, which emerge on the basis of co-occurring semantic classes of the nominal and verbal slot fillers in construc-tional exemplars. The formal patterns of the constructions at different levels of specificity are projected onto this space. Our analyses show that an average Dutch analytic causative refers to more indirect and abstract causation with fewer ani-mate than its English counterpart. We have also found that the languages "cut" the common conceptual space in unique ways, although the semantic areas of many English and Dutch constructions overlap substantially. Nevertheless, the form-meaning mapping in the two languages displays commonalities. Both English and Dutch constructions with prepositionally marked or implicit causees are strongly associated with animate causees. We have also observed a correla-tion between the directness of causation and the crosslinguistic hierarchy of affectedness marking proposed by Kemmer and Verhagen (1994).
- Subjects
CONTRASTIVE linguistics; ENGLISH language; DUTCH language; CAUSATIVE (Linguistics); VERBS; NOUNS; CONSTRUCTION grammar
- Publication
Linguistics, 2013, Vol 51, Issue 4, p825
- ISSN
0024-3949
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ling-2013-0028