LSA.105 | Constructions in Context

Adele Goldberg
MW 4:50-6:30
location: 32-123

This course will present a relatively new approach to grammar in which learned form-function pairings (constructions) play a central role (cf. e.g., work by Culicover, Fillmore & Kay, Goldberg, Jackendoff, Lakoff, Langacker, Lambrecht, Michaelis, Sag.)

Two major questions will form the focus of lectures/discussion:

1) How do learners acquire generalizations such that they readily produce a potentially infinite number of novel utterances based on a finite amount of input? I.e., what is learned, how is it learned, why is it learned, and how are generalizations constrained?

2) Why are languages the way they are? I.e., what roles do information structure, pragmatics, semantics and processing play in island constraints and generalizations about how arguments are realized cross-linguistically?

Experimental, corpus and cross-linguistic evidence will be used to address these questions. There are no prerequisites.

Recommended Textbooks
Title: Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure
Author: Adele E. Goldberg
Publisher: U. of Chicago Press
ISBN:0226300862

Title: Constructing a Language
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:0674010302