In:Handbook of Pragmatics: 23rd Annual Installment
Edited by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren
[Handbook of Pragmatics 23] 2020
► pp. 59–75
Argument structure
Published online: 20 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.23.arg3
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.23.arg3
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Conventional pragmatics
- 3.Topicality and givenness
- 4.Focus domain and backgrounded phrases
- 5.Unexpressed arguments
- 6.Ellipsis constructions
- 7.Social context
- 8.Information structure and the double object construction
- 9.Variation across dialects
- 10.Conclusion
Note References
References (94)
Abeillé, Anne, Barbara Hemforth, Elodie Winckel and Edward Gibson. 2019. “Subject-island
constraint? The discourse function of the construction
matters.” In
Annual
Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language
Processing
, Moscow.
Allen, Shanley E. M. 2008. “Interacting
pragmatic influences on children’s argument
realization.” In Crosslinguistic
Perspectives on Argument Structure: Implications for
Learnability, ed. by Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown, 191–210. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Arnold, Jennifer E., Thomas Wasow, Anthony Losongco and Ryan Ginstrom. 2000. “Heaviness
vs Newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on
constituent
ordering.” Language 76 (1): 28–55.
Barðdal, Jóhanna, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and Spike Gildea (eds). 2015. Diachronic
Construction
Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina and R. Harald Baayen. 2007. “Predicting
the dative
alternation.” In Cognitive
foundations of interpretation, ed.
by G. Bouma, I. Krämer and J. Zwarts, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.
Bresnan, Joan and Marilyn Ford. 2010. “Predicting
syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of
English.” Language 86 (1): 186–213.
Brown, Paula M. and Gary S. Dell. 1987. “Adapting
production to comprehension: The explicit mention of
instruments.” Cognitive
Psychology 19 (4): 441–472.
Cappelle, Bert, Ilse Depraetere andRaphael Salkie2017. “What’s
Pragmatics Doing Outside
Constructions?” In Semantics
and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, ed.
by , 115–151. New York: Springer.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1976. “Giveness,
contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of
view.” In Subject and
Topic, ed. by Charles Li, 25–56. New York: Academic Press.
1987. “Cognitive
constraints on information
flow.” In Coherence and
Grounding in Discourse, ed. by R. Tomlin, 21–51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
1994. Discourse,
Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in
Speaking and
Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clancy, Patricia M. 1980. “Referential
choice in English and Japanese narrative
discourse.” In The Pear
Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative
Production, ed. by Wallace L. Chafe, 127–201. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Clark, Herbert H. and Susan E. Haviland. 1977. “Comprehension
and the given-new
contract.” In Discourse
production and comprehension, ed.
by Roy O. Freedle, 1–40. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Collins, Peter. 1995. “The
indirect object construction in English: An informational
approach.” Linguistics 33: 35–49.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical
Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Culicover, Peter W. and Ray Jackendoff. 2012. “A
domain-general approach to ellipsis
interpretation.” Language 82 (2): 305–340.
Davies, Mark. 2008. The
corpus of contemporary American English (COCA): 520 million words,
1990–present. [URL]
Dalrymple, Mary. 2005. “Against
reconstruction in
ellipsis.” In Ellipsis
and nonsentential speech, ed.
by Reinaldo Elugardo and Robert J. Stainton, 31–55. Dordrecht: Springer.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1986. “Primary
Objects, Secondary Objects and
Antidative.” Language 62 (4): 808–845.
1996. “Focus,
pragmatic presupposition, and activated
propositions.” Journal of
pragmatics 26 (4): 475–523.
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Language
Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten
High. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 1979. “Discourse
constraints on Dative
Movement.” In Syntax
and Semantics 12, ed. by S. Laberge andG. Sankoff, 441–467. New York: Academic Press.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1965. Indirect
Object Constructions in English and the Ordering of
Transformations. The Hague: Mouton.
Francis, Hartwell S., Michelle L. Gregory and Laura A. Michaelis. 1999. “Are
Lexical Subjects Deviant?” Proceedings of the
Chicago Linguistic
Society 35 (1): 85–97.
. 1984. Syntax:
A Functional-Typological
Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions:
A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument
Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2000. “Patient
Arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: The role of information structure
in argument distribution.” Language
Sciences 23 (4–5): 503–524.
2006. Constructions
at Work: The Nature of Generalization in
Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2005. “Constructions,
lexical semantics and the correspondence principle: Accounting for
generalizations and subregularities in the realization of
arguments” In The
Syntax of Aspect: Deriving Thematic and Aspectual
Interpretation, ed. by Nomi Erteschik-Shir and Tova R. Rapoport, 215–236. Oxford: Oxford University Press..
Goldberg, Adele E., Jon Sprouse and Norbert Hornstein. 2013. “Backgrounded
constituents cannot be
“extracted”.” In Experimental
Syntax and Island Effects, ed.
by , 221–235. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2019. Explain
me this: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of
Constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E. and Farrell Ackerman. 2001. “The
pragmatics of obligatory
adjuncts.” Language 77 (4): 798–814.
Goldberg, Adele E. and Johan van der Auwera. 2012. “This
is to count as a construction.” Folia
Linguistica 46 (1): 109–132.
Goldberg, Adele E. and Thomas Herbst. To
appear. “The Nice-of-You Construction and its
Fragments.” Linguistics .
Gregory, Michelle L. and Laura A. Michaelis. 2001. “Topicalization
and left-dislocation: A functional opposition
revisited.” Journal of
Pragmatics 33 (11): 1665–1706.
Gries, Stefan T. 1999. “Particle
movement: A cognitive and functional
approach.” Cognitive
Linguistics 10: 105–146.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 1993. “Cognitive
status and the form of referring expressions in
discourse.” Language 69 (2): 274–307.
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1967. “Notes
on transitivity and theme in English. Part
II.” Journal of
Linguistics 3: 199–244.
Hampe, Beate and Stefan T. Gries. 2018. “Syntax
from and for discourse II: More on complex sentences as
meso-constructions.” Yearbook of the German
Cognitive Linguistics
Association 6 (1): 115–142.
Haspelmath, Martin, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie. 2005. The
World Atlas of Language
Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawkins, J. A. 2007. “Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it.” New Ideas in Psychology, 25 (2): 87–107.
Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hoffmann, Sebastian and Joybrato Mukherjee. 2007. “Ditransitive
verbs in Indian English and British English: A corpus-linguistic
study.” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 32: 5–24.
Hoffman, Thomas and Alexander Bergs. 2018. “A
construction grammar approach to
genre.” CogniTextes. Revue de l’Association
française de linguistique
cognitive 18. [URL].
Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt. 2013. English
Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of
English in the British
Isles. London: Routledge.
Kaschak, Michael P. 2006. “What
this construction needs is generalized.” Memory
&
Cognition 34 (2): 368–379.
Katz, Jerrold J. and Paul Postal. 1964. An
Integrated Theory of Linguistic
Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information
Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
LaPolla, Randy J. 1993. “Arguments
against subject and direct object as viable concepts in
Chinese.” Bulletin of the Institute of History
and
Philology 63 (4): 759–813.
Latrouite, Anja and Arndt Riester. 2018. “The
role of information structure for morphosyntactic choices in
Tagalog.” In Perspectives
on information structure in Austronesian languages, ed.
by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara and Atsuko Utsumi, 247–284. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Leino, Jaakko. 2013. “Information
structure.” In The
Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, ed.
by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale, 329–346. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lemmens, Martin. 2012. “More
on objectless transitives and ergativization patterns in
English.” Constructions 1.
Lemmens, Maarten. 1998. Lexical
Perspectives on Transitivity and Ergativity: Causative Constructions in
English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McNally, Louise. 2016. “Existential
sentences cross-linguistically: Variations in form and
meaning.” Annual Review of
Linguistics 2: 211–223.
Montgomery, Michael and Joseph Sargent Hall. 2004. Dictionary
of Smoky Mountain English. University of Tennessee Press.
Michaelis, Laura A. and Knud Lambrecht. 1996. “Toward
a construction-based theory of language function: The case of nominal
extraposition.” Language 72 (2): 215–247.
Mok, Eva H. and John Bryant. 2006. “A
best-fit approach to productive omission of
arguments.” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics
Society 32 (1): 40–62.
Murray, Thomas E. and Beth Lee Simon. 1999. “Want+past
participle in American English.” American
Speech 74 (2): 140–164.
Narasimhan, Bhuvana, Nancy Budwig and Lalita Murty. 2005. “Argument
realization in Hindi caregiver-child
discourse.” Journal of
Pragmatics 37 (4): 461–495.
Oehrle, Richard T. 1976.
The
Grammatical Status of the English Dative
Alternation
. Doctoral
dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ono, Tsuyoshi and Sandra A. Thompson. 1995. “What can conversation tell us about syntax?” In Alternative Linguistics: Descriptive and Theoretical Modes, ed. by Philip W. Davis, 213–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Prince, Ellen F. 1998. “On the limits of syntax, with reference to left-dislocation and topicalization.” In The limits of syntax, ed. by Peter Culicover and Louise McNally, 281–302. Leiden: Brill.
Rappaport, Malka Hovav and Beth Levin. 2008. “The
English dative alternation: The case for verb
sensitivity.” Journal of
Linguistics 44 (1): 129–167.
Rohdenburg, Günter and Britta Mondorf (eds). 2011. Determinants
of Grammatical Variation in
English. Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter.
Ruppenhofer, Josef and Laura A. Michaelis. 2010. “A
constructional account of genre-based argument
omissions.” Constructions and
Frames 2 (2): 158–184.
Siewierska, A. and W.B. Hollmann. 2007. “Ditransitive clauses in English with special reference to Lancashire dialect.” In Structural-Functional Studies in English grammar, ed. by M. Hannay and G.J. Steen, 83–102. Amsterdam: John Benjmins.
Thompson, Sandra A. 1990. “Information
flow and dative shift in English
discourse.” In Development
and Diversity: Language Variation Across Space and
Time, ed. by Jerold A. Edmondson, Crawford Feagin and Peter Mühlhäusler, 239–253. Dallas, TX: SIL.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1988. “Pragmatic
strengthening and grammaticalization.” Annual
Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society 14: 406–416.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization
and Constructional
Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. and Randy J. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax:
Structure, Meaning and
Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. (ed.). 2008. Investigations
of the Syntax Semantics Pragmatics
Interface. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Webelhuth, Gert and Clare J. Dannenberg. 2006. “Southern
American English personal datives: The theoretical significance of dialectal
variation.” American
Speech 81 (1): 31–55.
Wulff, Stefanie, Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan T. Gries. 2007. “Brutal
Brits and persuasive
Americans.” In Aspects
of Meaning Construction, ed.
by G. Radden, K. Köpke, T. Berg and P. Siemund, 265–281. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
