To explicate my meaning about semantics, syntax, and culture a bit, for
Bob and others (Martha, see below for some Constr. Grammar references):

The cultural part of 'go fishing', 'einkaufen gehen' or 'faire des
courses' is that certain activities have been categorized together as,
roughly, routine leisure activities or routine maintenance duties (such
as going shopping). This meaning of 'routine leisure activity' has
become conventionally associated with the verb 'go' in English and
German, but 'faire' in French. Either verb is a likely candidate, since
'faire' is a very general verb for acting, and 'go' is a very general
verb for an initial movement towards another purpose (such as engaging
in a routine activity). While we couldn't predict that French would
choose 'faire' and other languages 'go' for such constructions, we can
see after the fact that the choices make semantic sense. It would be
unlikely, for instance, that 'smile' or 'chase' would appear in such
constructions, since their meanings are both more specific and not
terribly relevant to or compatible with the 'Xing' verb.

In other words, a cultural category--a type of activity--has become part
of the semantics of a syntactic construction. The cultural category
might be the same in all three languages, hence the same 'feeling' Bob
reports (though not being a native of either French or German culture,
it would be hard to claim that he is necessarily fully in possession of
the 'feelings' of natives of these cultures).

Language works by conventionalizing the association between a meaning
and a form. Sometimes it's single words that express the conventional
meaning, sometimes it's a more-complex syntactic construction.

I know that seeing the sense of a construction after the fact is not
terribly appreciated in some formal theories of language, but it is seen
as quite reasonable in functional/cognitive theories. This is one area
of difference between these different schools of linguistic thought.

In response to Sophie, yes, it has to be the whole construction. The
point of my post was that sometimes we understand a construction better
by NOT trying to make it compositional (a sum of the meaning of its
parts). Sure, we lose comfort, predictability, and order when we
'condemn' the power of syntactic templates, but the nature of language
is to not permit such comfort, order, and predictability (infinitive
intentionally split). It might be perfectly fine to say that, in 'go
Xing' the word 'go' (which is not a copula in any sense of the word as I
understand it) is followed by a gerund, but then we must go on to note
that not all verbs appear in the X slot,  or at least that a certain
meaning is conveyed by the construction AS A WHOLE.

I attended a presentation at a Cognitive Linguistics conference a week
or so ago which gave me a blast of insight about the history of the
analysis of language. Most analysts of language, including both modern
linguists and traditional grammarians, approached language in the same
way. They experienced language in wholes--utterances, texts. They tried
to reduce the wholes to parts; they arrived at a set of parts that they
then considered the 'atoms' of language, such as parts of speech. They
then tried to explain language by coming up with syntactic rules to put
the parts back together again. But of course, they were trapped by the
set of parts they had come up with in the first place. The whole history
of grammar and linguistics has been attempts to come up with the right
set of atoms and the right set of rules for putting them together. The
insight of this presentation, given by Bill Croft of the U. of
Manchester, is that we should not try to reduce the wholes too far in
the first place, but we should look at a language as a set of
constructions, each of which has certain syntactic properties and
expresses certain conventionalized meanings, such as passive
constructions or reflexive constructions, etc. We then study such
constructions across languages and come up with observations about their
properties (Croft is a typologist; typologists specialize in looking at
what large numbers of languages have or don't have in common).

Croft has a book called 'Radical Construction Grammar' which sets out
his ideas (Oxford U press, 2000 or 2001). A book on non-radical
Construction Grammar theory is 'A construction grammar approach to
argument structure' by Adele Goldberg, U of Chicago Press, 1997.
Articles on construction grammar would be found with author names such
as Adele Goldberg and Charles Fillmore.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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