Forum Lectures

That’s a Word! Middle Class African American English and the Significance of the Spoken Word
Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, most studies of African American English (AAE), have focused on working-class speech communities, largely at the exclusion of middle-class speakers. As a result, little consideration has been given to the linguistic dexterity of middle-class speakers and the extent to which they draw on the full range of the AAE continuum in the construction of their identities. In this talk, I explore some of the ways in which middle class speakers make use of vernacular structural features, as well as camouflaged features, and lexical and rhetorical expression, to strategically construct both race-based and class-based identities.

Usage-based Theory and Language Change
Conceiving of grammar as the cognitive representation of one’s experience with language means that common conceptions of how languages change need to be re-examined. Structuralist models require that change be an abrupt change in the grammar, which is often quite distanced from the details of language use. If cognitive representations contain details of usage, including phonetic detail as well as lexical and contextual information, all aspects of change can be gradual and can occur in language use. Moreover, if grammar is based on experience with language, then a separation of the individual from the community is not necessary, nor is it plausible to assume that speaker and listener play different roles in change. All language users have cognitive representations that reflect what they have heard and produced. Innovation itself is not an individual but a joint phenomenon since it arises from interaction among users who share common biases. These inherent biases make cross-generational directional change possible.

Slouching toward Idiomaticity: Fillmore’s Rough Idea
In their 1988 magnum opus—known as the “let alone paper”—Fillmore and collaborators offer a pithy yet puzzling definition of idiom: “an idiomatic expression or construction is something a language user could fail to know while knowing everything else in the language” (p. 504). What, if any, is the difference between an idiomatic expression and a construction? The central insight of Let Alone is that language presents a continuum of idiomaticity, and that a construction grammar must capture expressions across this gradient—from frozen phrases to fully productive rules (Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Wulff 2010; Culicover & Jackendoff 2005; Croft 2001; Hilpert 2014; Kay & Michaelis 2012). But is in the know—at one end—the same kind of grammatical object as the Head-Complement rule at the other?

Fillmore et al. (1988) list four conditions under which an expression can qualify as a construction: (1) it dependencies are not be limited to a mother and daughters, but span wider portions of the syntactic tree; (2) it specifies syntactic, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information simultaneously; (3) it is a word or lexeme “mentionable in syntactic constructions”; and (4) it is idiomatic by virtue of conveying meaning “distinct from what might be calculated from the associated semantics of the set of smaller constructions that could be used to build the same morphosyntactic object” (p. 501). (Fillmore et al. 1988: 501). All such expressions constitute “conventional pairings between contexts and particular expressions by which conventionalized meanings get conveyed in those contexts” (Fillmore 1979: 72).

Let Alone and other works (e.g., Fillmore & Kay 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore 1979, 1985, 2012, 2013) encouraged us to look at complex expressions through the lens of idiomaticity—to see words as constructions (both constellations of syntactic, phonological and pragmatic properties) and constructions as words (constructions license phrasal signs that mean what they mean in a word-like way). But these analogies obscured some fundamental differences: (a) many (if not most) idiomatic expressions are like sing a different tune, in having syntactically manipulable subparts (as in, e.g., Now a different tune is being sung), and are thus not realistically treated as ‘words with spaces’ (Kay et al. 2025); and (b) it strains credulity to assert that single signs (words and lexemes) are the same thing as combinations of signs (phrases). How can we strike a balance between ‘meaning by convention’ and ‘meaning by composition’ when we are analyzing complex expressions with idiomatic properties?

In this talk, I will address this question by outlining a lexicalist implementation of the idiomaticity continuum, based on Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Boas et al. 2012, Sag 2012, Fillmore 2012, 2013, Michaelis 2012). SBCG represents this range of complex expressions in a uniform way: whether phrasal or lexical, all are modeled as sign types that specify phonological and morphological structure, meaning, use conditions and relevant syntactic information (including syntactic category and combinatoric potential). Constructional meanings are the meanings to be discovered at every point along the idiomaticity continuum.

References
Croft, William. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Culicover, Peter W. and Ray S. Jackendoff. (2005). Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fillmore, Charles J. (1979). Innocence: A Second Idealization for Linguistics. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 63-76).

Fillmore, Charles J. (1985). Syntactic intrusions and the Notion of Grammatical Construction. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 73-86).

Fillmore, Charles J. (2013). Berkeley Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffman and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford University Press. (pp. 111–132).

Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor. (1988). Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of let alone. Language 64: 501-538.

Fillmore, Charles J., Lee-Goldman, R., & Rhodes, R. (2012). The Framenet Constructicon. In H. Boas and I. Sag. (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp. 309–372). CSLI.

Goldberg, Adele. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg, Adele. (2006). Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hilpert, Martin. (2014). Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kay, Paul and Laura A. Michaelis. (2012). Constructional Meaning and Compositionality. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger and P. Portner, (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Vol. 3. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2271-2296.

How learning and use shape evolving linguistic systems
Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use - we learn the language of our community through immersion in that language, and in using that language to meet our communicative goals we generate more linguistic data which others learn from in turn. In previous work we have used experimental methods (artificial language learning and iterated learning) to simulate this process in the lab and show how biases in learning and use can explain some of the fundamental structural features shared by all languages. For example, the fact that languages exploit regular compositional rules for generating meaningful expressions allows languages to be relatively learnable but also exceptionally powerful tools for communication, and we can show that this structure arises naturally as languages adapt to the constraints from learning and use inherent in their transmission. In this talk I’ll review these older findings, then talk about more recent work using the same approach to identify the mechanisms responsible for some other cross-linguistically frequent configurations, in particular teasing apart the contribution of distinct pressures from learning and use in creating frequency-irregularity correlations and communicatively-efficient Differential Case Marking.

What you see is not what you get: The diachronic making of implicational universals
In language typology, implicational universals of the form A → B are generalizations describing empirically observed one-way distributional correlations between two grammatical properties A and B cross-linguistically (e.g. two word orders, or two contexts of use of some grammatical construction): languages that have A also usually have B, whereas B is also found in the absence of A. Despite controversies about possible genetic and areal biases, such distributions are traditionally interpreted as reflecting causal correlation principles linking the two properties, for example processing or usage-based preferences for B over A.

While highly influential both within and outside typology, this view is based on synchronic co-occurrence patterns for A and B. The paper shows that a number of diachronic phenomena that shape these patterns over time pose two general foundational challenges for this view. First, synchronic co-occurrence patterns cannot be taken as evidence for correlation principles, as they may be affected by developmental biases—in several cases, the co-occurrence of A and B follows from the fact that they are derived from one another or from the same source (so that they are actually one and the same property, rather than two independent ones), or from the fact that they are jointly inherited from a single source, rather than arising independently in the language. Second, synchronic co-occurrence patterns reflect the cross-linguistic distribution of several distinct diachronic components—multiple sources and developmental processes that give rise to individual constructions instantiating A and B from one language to another, as well as phenomena leading to the retention or loss of these constructions over time—so that any correlation principle will involve particular such components, and may be related to properties of these components independent of A and B in themselves.

These facts highlight the need for a source-oriented approach to implicational universals and cross-linguistic patterns in general, one where the focus shifts from synchronic patterns to a qualitative understanding of the individual components involved in their diachronic emergence, as well as an understanding of the respective contribution of these components.

From Prosody toward Explanation?
There is now a rich and voluminous literature on relations between prosodic and syntactic structure, and interesting work continues to emerge. A basic observation is that speakers speak in spurts, or intonation units. Some models take syntactic structure as their point of departure and describe processes by which prosodic structure can be derived from it, considering how mismatches between syntactic constituents and prosodic units might be accounted for. Others begin with prosodic structure and consider how grammatical structure might emerge from it over time. With the second approach, it is generally agreed that syntactic and morphological structures tend to develop from the crystalization of frequently occurring sequences of adjacent elements, presumably within the same intonation unit. A closer look at languages which differ syntactically and morphologically from those on which much prosodic analysis has been based can help us to enrich our understanding of such processes. Prosody in Mohawk (Kanien’kéha’) reflects the organization of information at levels from discourse, through sentence-level syntax to fully crystalized morphology, with varying degrees of formal and functional categoriality. A close look at speaker choices in unscripted speech indicates that it is not simple adjacency within the intonation unit that shapes the gradual crystalization of structures, but rather the cognitive organization of ideas underlying the prosodic structure. The trajectory has not stopped with the development of morphology, however. The emergence of the rich morphology has in turn profoundly shaped modern syntactic structure.