A Construction Grammar Approach To Argument Structure Of English Sentences

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged that allows linguistic observations about form-meaning pairings—constructions—to be stated directly. Constructionists aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileged "core". Researchers argue that unusual constructions shed light on more general issues, and serve to illuminate what is required for a complete account of language.What types of linguistic information do people commonly use to determine sentence meaning? Within linguistic theory, the traditional view is that the verb is the main determinant of the syntax and semantics of sentences and it has been supported by innumerable empirical evidence particularly from the perspective of sentence comprehension studies. However, two latest experiments are reported in the Journal of Memory and Language by Guilia M. Bencini and Adele E. Goldberg (2000), suggesting that argument structure constructions are better predictors of overall sentence meaning than the morphological form of verbs. Experimental results (Bencini & Goldberg 2000) are described which demonstrate that high token frequency of a single prototypical exemplar does indeed facilitate the learning of constructional meaning. General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of innateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for general learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with argument structure generalizations can indeed be learned, given the nature of the input and an understanding of general categorization strategies. Examination of an extensive corpus study shows that tokens of one particular verb is found to account for the lion's share of instances of each argument frame considered. In this thesis we have investigated the role of verbs or argument structure constructions in determining sentence meaning, to test the assertion made by Bencini and Goldberg (2000).This dissertation is essentially an extended argument in favor of Bencini and Goldberg (2000), but it takes a further step claiming that in an L2 context, construction makes a difference on the determinants that conversationers rely on in constructing sentence meaning. Meanwhile, it somehow contributes to the theory development of Construction Grammar by testing empirically in an L2 context.