Programm 74. StuTS

The notion of paradigm has been used in numerous language models, but has mostly been ignored when it comes to usage-based approaches to language, such as Construction Grammar. However, some construction grammarians have been advocating to (re-)introduce the notion of paradigm into constructivist frameworks, in order for the grammar to be able to account for certain phenomena in language that cannot be explained otherwise. While the assumed purpose of paradigms seems to be more or less in line when comparing more traditional approaches to novel constructivist approaches, there are significant differences when it comes to the nature of the paradigm itself: While the former defines paradigms in terms of morphological features, the latter considers paradigms to be a set of constructions, pertaining to certain grammatical category, and leaving morphology aside. In my talk, I offer an alternative approach that aims to unify both concepts.

The notion of (linguistic) paradigm has been used in numerous language models throughout the past century—e.g. Word and Paradigm Morphology (Blevins 2016) and Paradigm Function Grammar (Stump 2001). It is therefore quite surprising that paradigms have mostly been ignored when it comes to usage-based approaches, such as Construction Grammar. Recently however, some construction grammarians, like Diewald (2020), Politt (2022), and Audring (2022), have been advocating to (re-)introduce the notion of paradigm into constructivist frameworks to be able to account for certain phenomena in language that cannot be explained otherwise—such as “implicational relations, the diachronic processes of suppletion and layering, and the impact of paradigm pressure” (Diewald 2020: 306).
While the assumed purposes of paradigms in both more traditional paradigm-related approaches, such as in Blevins (2016), and novel constructivist approaches, such as in Diewald (2020), seem to be more or less in line, there are significant differences when it comes to the nature of the paradigm itself: While the former defines the paradigm as a “set of grammatical words” that are related to a common morphological base or lexeme (Blevins 2016: 64), the latter considers paradigms to be “hyper-construction[s] highlighting the categorical, non-gradient specifics of grammatical categories”, leaving morphology and lexical features aside (Diewald 2020: 277–278). However, there are cases where this limitation to either morphological or grammatical paradigms seems difficult to uphold. Let us consider preterite-present verbs in Germanic languages, for example: This verb class historically goes back to inflectional verb forms with a strong perfect stem (i.e. a grammatical sub-paradigm) that have become independent inflectional paradigms (i.e. a morphological verb class) over the course of time (c.f. Braune 2004). Therefore, the questions may be asked: Is there a way that we could account for both morphological and grammatical paradigms in a constructivist framework?
In this talk, I aim at unifying both approaches by proposing an alternative that does not limit paradigms to either morphological or grammatical features, but instead assumes paradigmatization (the building of paradigms) to be a dynamic concept that can occur on multiple “levels of representation” (Jackendoff & Audring 2020: 10). This is justified by proposing that the cognitive mechanism behind paradigmatization is identical with the mechanism behind (non-linguistic) categorization, meaning that paradigms are dynamic linguistic categories whose members are constructions.
This talk will further explore how the proposed theory could be tested empirically with methods already established for other forms of cognitive categorization. One example would be to investigate whether priming effects—as they have already been observed for non-linguistic categories (c.f. Ray 2008)—can also be observed for constructions that are related either by grammatical features or a common morphological basis. If the assumption that paradigms are categories is correct, we would expect a) that priming effects can be observed in general, and b) that priming effects between morphological and grammatical paradigms do not differ significantly.
References:
Blevins, James P. 2016. Word and Paradigm Morphology (Oxford linguistics). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Braune, Wilhelm. 2004. Althochdeutsche Grammatik I. De Gruyter.
Diewald, Gabriele. 2020. Paradigms Lost – Paradigms Regained. In Lotte Sommerer & Elena Smirnova (eds.), Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar (27), vol. 27, 278–315. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jackendoff, Ray & Jenny Audring. 2020. The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture. Oxford, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Politt, Katja. 2022. Formen und Funktionen von Paradigmen. Peter Lang Verlag.
Ray, Suchismita. 2008. An Investigation of Time Course of Category and Semantic Priming. The Journal of general psychology 135(2). 133–148.
Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure (Cambridge studies in linguistics 93). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Info

Tag: 28.10.2023
Anfangszeit: 10:30
Dauer: 00:25
Raum: NIG Raum 2
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Sprache: en

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