In my mail this morning, from Research Gate, the text of Laura A. Michaelis’s long and rich “Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive: How to make room for the next generation of construction grammarians”, in the John Benjamins journal Constructions and Frames 16.2 (August 2024) — in part an homage to Chuck Fillmore (Charles J. Fillmore, 1929 – 2014), but primarily a development of his ideas. And there, in the middle of the abstract, was a reference to my 1994 Berkeley Linguistics Society paper “Dealing out meaning” (available on-line here), which LM calls my “classic paper” in her article (Chuck himself liked it a lot, but mostly it seemed to have gone without citation, so I thought it had been largely forgotten).
(the Research Gate PDF of LM’s text can be accessed here)
The abstract:
When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions” (Fillmore 1989 : 17). Construction Grammarians view the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructions as matters of linguistic convention — a fact not always appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product of lexical and constructional licensing (Zwicky 1994). But emergentists and stipulators share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.
From the body of the paper, about Chuck’s work on constructions (collected only after his death):
It is only recently that Fillmore’s works on Construction Grammar were collected as Papers on Linguistic Theory and Constructions, the third volume of a CSLI book series entitled Form and Meaning in Language (Fillmore 2020). Here we can witness the debut of the “container diagram” notation for constructions, in the 1985 paper “Syntactic Intrusions and the Notion of Grammatical Construction”, and learn why Fillmore chose that system over phrase-structure rules. The three CSLI volumes of Fillmore’s collected works offer a clear picture of the areas of conceptual tools that Fillmore developed to probe the interface of lexical semantics, indexicality, frame semantics and argument structure. But throughout his long career, in which he mentored some of the most talented scholars of language working today, and oversaw the creation of an extraordinary piece of linguistic infrastructure, FrameNet (Fillmore et al. 2003; Torrent et al. 2018; Ruppenhofer et al. 2016), he published no book-length work.
His academic writing was a marvel of grace and clarity, often very funny. And he was also one of the world’s nicest people. Now it’s a great pleasure to see Laura’s thoughtful piece.
August 29, 2024 at 4:33 pm |
To this day ‘Dealing out Meaning’ sits among my top 5 CxG foundational works. The cases of constructional interaction you discuss are intricate, but I assign as a challenge for the grad syntax students . You have the most compelling description of constructional licensing yet produced. I block-quote it liberally. I remember Ivan didn’t like the distinction ‘constraints vs. constructional licensing’ because he said ‘constructions ARE constraints’. So we developed the term ‘suppression-based’ for the former. Your distinction as I presented it in the 2012 SBCG volume was thus ‘suppression- vs licensing-based frameworks—ruling in vs. ruling out’.
August 29, 2024 at 6:31 pm |
Oh wow, thank you. I had no idea. (I’ve been out of the larger world for a long time, and am pretty much housebound, with no access to books or the library; what I can access are things on the net that come for free, which is not a lot.)