Eva Zehentner
List of John Benjamins publications in which Eva Zehentner is involved.
Title
2025 I’m all virtual-peopled out: Creativity and productivity in the case of the English ‘exhaustive’ construction Today’s Innovations, Tomorrow’s Conventions: Usage-based approaches to incipient developments in English, Lorenz, David and David Tizón-Couto (eds.), pp. 43–73 | Article
This paper assesses the recent development of a particular constructional template, viz. the ‘exhaustive’ construction in English. This pattern combines a form of [all X-(e)d out] with a meaning of ‘being exhausted from excessive experiences with X’, where the X-slot is proposedly almost… read more
2023 The emergence of the English dative alternation as a response to system-wide changes: An Evolutionary Game Theory approach Ditransitives in Germanic Languages: Synchronic and diachronic aspects, Zehentner, Eva, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy Colleman (eds.), pp. 19–55 | Chapter
This chapter revisits the much-discussed question whether a causal relationship holds between several changes observed in the history of English; these are (a) the increasing use of prepositional patterns, (b) the loss of nominal case marking, and (c) the fixation of constituent order. Located… read more
2023 Differences in syntactic annotation affect retrieval: Verb-attached PPs in the history of English International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 28:3, pp. 378–406 | Article
Prepositional phrases (PPs) play an important part in English argument structure constructions, but pose considerable challenges for linguistic investigations of any kind. In addition to the fact that PP-attachment is generally notoriously difficult to model computationally, a particularly… read more
2023 Ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages: New avenues and new challenges Ditransitives in Germanic Languages: Synchronic and diachronic aspects, Zehentner, Eva, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy Colleman (eds.), pp. 1–18 | Chapter
2022 Chapter 8. Prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure and beyond English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning, Los, Bettelou, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), pp. 201–224 | Chapter
This paper is the first to use a bottom-up, corpus-based, exploratory approach to the full range of prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure. Contrary to what previous research leads us to expect, the overall token frequency of prepositions during this period decreases, and they… read more
2020 Reconsidering subjectification from the perspective of animal signalling Tracking Language Evolution as an Interdisciplinary, Cross-Theoretical Enterprise, Gaeta, Livio (ed.), pp. 138–152 | Article
This paper discusses the view that subjectifications (i.e. semantic changes through which words come to index speakers’ evaluations or their attitudes towards a proposition) are primarily motivated by speakers’ need for self-expression (Traugott 2010). Approaching the issue from the perspective… read more
2020 Cognitive reality of constructions as a theoretical and methodological challenge in historical linguistics The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research, Colleman, Timothy, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena (eds.), pp. 371–382 | Article
This squib discusses empirical challenges incurred by assuming cognitive reality as a defining feature of constructions and the constructional network, as done in most usage-based, cognitive construction grammar approaches. Specifically, it zooms in on the methodological challenges in… read more
2020 Constructional networks and the development of benefactive ditransitives in English Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar, Sommerer, Lotte and Elena Smirnova (eds.), pp. 167–211 | Chapter
In this paper, we address the question of how to model syntactic alternations in Diachronic Construction Grammar terms. We argue that positing horizontal links between constructions in addition to vertical ones is particularly beneficial in accounting for change. Our case study is the emergence… read more