Abstract Natural languages avoid syntactic structures with crossed syntactic dependencies. To the extent that such structures nonetheless occur, they have been explained as the result of competing motivations, such as dependency length minimization, the facilitation of incremental language processing, or the preservation of the given-before-new principle. This paper discusses a construction from English for which these explanations do not hold. In sentences such as He has written a good enough story to attract attention , dependency length is not minimized, incremental processing is not at issue, and alternative syntactic patterns allow the same ordering of given and new information. This paper aims to identify a different motivating factor. It advances the compensatory collocation hypothesis, which states that the degree of semantic cohesion between the lexical elements of an utterance impacts speakers’ choices between alternative constructions. If semantic cohesion is high, the speaker may tolerate the presence of a crossed syntactic dependency. Data from the COHA substantiates this idea. Compared to alternative constructions with canonical syntactic structure, examples with crossed dependencies exhibit word combinations with relatively higher collocational strength. This finding is discussed against the background of usage-based network models of linguistic knowledge.
Abstract Studying the emergence of language has often relied on communication games and agent-based models, with a strong focus on referential linguistic signals, often overlooking pragmatic signals that are frequently expressed visually, such as facial signals. These signals are a crucial component of natural interaction, supporting repair, coordination, and negotiation of meaning. We outline existing language emergence experiments, highlighting findings from communication games and research on pragmatic facial signals in interaction, demonstrating their relevance to the emergence of communication systems. Furthermore, computational models of language emergence, such as agent-based models, largely overlook that communication is layered across multiple communication channels. We argue that incorporating pragmatic visual signals into these approaches can help to provide a more nuanced understanding of the processes underlying language emergence in natural, multimodal interaction. Following these insights, we propose two complementary directions for future research. First, communication game paradigms can be adapted to systematically analyze visual pragmatic signals, linking them to existing commonly used measures such as convergence, communicative success, and adaptation of linguistic forms. Second, agent-based models can be extended to multi-channel frameworks in which agents produce and interpret both referential and pragmatic signals, enabling investigation of how layered multimodal information shapes language emergence.
Abstract Recent research in Diachronic Construction Grammar and Creative Construction Grammar has begun to uncover nongradual cases of linguistic creativity. Two gaps nevertheless remain: the scarcity of documented cases of radical and rapid innovation in core grammar, and the need to specify the converging mechanisms by which such innovation arises and spreads in real time. This study addresses both through the Anticanonical Passive Construction (APC) in Chinese, in the form [ bèi X], where X violates conventional passivization constraints. As a form-meaning innovation in core grammar, the APC radically retools the canonical passive into a resource for the satirical construal of subjects as undergoing coercion, loss of agency, and distortion of truth. Combining corpus and survey data, we show that the APC spread rapidly, admitted a wide range of canonically non-passivizable predicates, and is represented in native-speaker knowledge as both interpretable and productively extendable. We explain this development through three converging mechanisms: cognitive biases, including anomaly-triggered grammatical surprise and heightened attention to negative events; joint affect, which facilitates interpretive uptake; and platform amplification, whereby digital affordances and incentives accelerate diffusion. The study expands current accounts of constructionalization by documenting and explaining a core-grammatical innovation in real time.
In this paper, I analyze the crosslinguistic variation in visual perception events in terms of event construals and their usage in discourse. Through an innovative computational analysis of a comparable corpus of 31 typologically diverse languages, I demonstrate that the crosslinguistic variation is governed by two dimensions of construal: the profiling of the Stimulus, and the way in which the Experiencer is construed to exert effort. Whether languages draw lexical boundaries in the conceptual field (some do, others don’t) is furthermore correlated with variation in the usage of construals: a greater prevalence of bridging contexts between the crosslinguistically most often separately lexified extremes (and accompanying opposite construals) is found be associated with drawing a lexical boundary. As such, this paper grounds semantic typological explanation in notions of event construal and a usage-based conception of linguistic structure.
In Dutch, verb-particle constructions are traditionally classified as either separable or inseparable. While the formal distinctions between these two types are straightforward, their semantic differences remain contested. This study investigates whether iconicity plays a role in distinguishing between separable and inseparable verbs. Using both a synchronic corpus study and an experimental forced-choice task using nonce verbs, we test two existing hypotheses that link separability to either concreteness (Booij, Geert. 2002. The morphology of Dutch. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or resultativity (Blom, Corrien. 2004. On the diachrony of complex predicates in Dutch: Predicative and nonpredicative preverbs. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 16. 1-75; Blom, Corrien. 2005. Complex predicates in Dutch: Synchrony and diachrony. Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics dissertation), two notions that can be associated with the principle of iconicity of independence (Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59(4). 781-819). While our corpus-based analysis did not yield any significant patterns, the experimental results do reveal a significant relationship between concreteness and separability for the particles over- and om-. For the particle door-, the findings point to a slight tendency toward resultativity, but this effect did not reach statistical significance. Overall, the findings provide empirical support for the claim that language users associate morphosyntactic separability with iconic meaning distinctions.
