Lecture: Not gonna lie - An investigation into constructional change

The work-in-progress presented in this talk is based on the ideas of Diachronic Construction Grammar and aims to connect the basic principles of constructional change, more precisely the idea of chunking, outlined in Schmid (2020) with what is known about the composition of prosodic units. As an example, this study will use the phrase not gonna lie and show how the compositional phrase "AGENT BE not going to lie to PATENT" (e.g., "I’m not going to lie to you") became the internet initialism "ngl", using data from the "Corpus of Contemporary American English" (COCA).
The study will first use traditional Construction Grammar analysis for the individual stages of the construction (based on the Goldberg (2006) definition of constructions), to show how the phrase becomes less compositional over time and how the meaning and use of the phrase changes. Furthermore, since these types of analyses tend to emphasize the elements that become fixed, the talk will put particular focus on the elements that are omitted during the development of the construction. As a last point, the talk will show how the parallel reduction theory (Bybee et al. 1994) and the prosodic structure of intonation phrases in English can be used to explain, which elements are omitted during the development of the phrase.

References:
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davies, Mark. 2004. Corpus of contemporary American English. . Acc. 07 April 2022.

Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Info

Day: 2022-05-28
Start time: 09:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Eisenga (2.32)
Track: Diverse
Language: en

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