I apologize if this posting has gone out to the list twice.  Jim Kenkel

***************************************

I thank Johanna for her helpful reply and for providing the information from
Goldberg's site.

          The description/definition of a construction from Goldberg seems
to have weaker criteria than Croft applies.  Although Goldberg's notion of
"predictability" is easier to follow than Croft's notion of "wholeness," I
still have reservations. My biggest difficulty with "go Xing" as a
"construction" was that I didn't see it as a "whole." Its interpretation
depends crucially on analysis into semantic categories, as the discussion
has made clear. I suppose that Croft's goal is to minimize syntactic
analysis, but explaining the interpretation and acquisition of these
structures does involve hypothesizing distinct semantic categories and then
labeling them.  Thus, it seems to me that these expressions also have a
level of predictability to them. The learner, with little exposure, by
applying his semantic analysis of 'activity types' into 'leisure activities'
and 'non-leisure activities,' which presumably reflects our cognitive
organization, can predict the meaning of a whole class of expressions -
which can't be done with "kick the bucket"  type expressions. Is it unfair
to ask if the "semantics is unpredictable," why does everyone agree so
readily on the intepretation of these expressions?

          Constructions are claimed to be learned as complex  lexical items
- all of a piece. However, it seems that some kind of formal analysis is
necessary for the acquisition of at least some lexical items - for instance,
compounds. Pinker points out the children produce both 'mouse catcher' and
mice catcher' but don't produce 'rats catcher,' saying only 'rat catcher.'


          Describing reflexive structures as 'constructions' is much more
problematic. I don't think that it is plausible that the interpretation of
the reflexive sentences we've been considering can be accounted for without
considerable formal analysis.

  If through frequent exposure to sentences like

                  1. Mary wants to help herself

  the learner figures out that 'herself' is coreferential with the first
noun phrase/person/"grounded thing" mentioned, how would that learner not
misinterpret this sentence without access to some kind of formal analysis:

                  2. Alice wonders who Mary wants to help herself.

          To my mind, construction grammar's challenge is to explain how the
learner knows that, in spite of surface distributions, 'Mary wants to help
herself' is one kind of construction in the first sentence but is a
different construction in the second case - and how this is done without
some kind of formal analysis. Moreover, in the learning account sketched by
Johanna, what kind of input would the learner get which tells her that
contraryto surface distributions, 'herself' receives different
interpretations in the two sentences? Is this something learners are taught
in school? Wouldn't we expect some people to misinterpret the antecedent of
'herself.' Although some may find the sentence to be inelegant, they don't
misinterpret the  coreference.

          Johanna asks about the importance of 'learnability' to discussions
on this list.  I think that important goals of the ATEG list are to try to
understand something of the nature of language and to relate that
understanding to problems of language use for students. Linguists have
observed not  only that much of our knowledge of language is both very
complex but that it is also not consciously learned. We might say that much
of our  complex linguistic knowledge comes for free. The accounts of
learning attributed to "construction grammar" place a heavy burden on the
learner without providing an account of how learners get the needed negative
input or corrections from others. I don't know how such an approach would
explain the acquisition of reflexives, for instance.

           Grammatical descriptions which aren't constrained by plausible
accounts of language acquisition are more likely to be artifacts of the
grammarian's taxonomy than reflections of the grammar which the learner has
tacit knowledge of. I think that presenting these kinds of descriptions to
learners adds to their burden, a situation a teacher would like to avoid. At
this summer's ATEG conference, Bob Yates and I argued this point with
regard to "sentence patterns." We claimed that what students "know" is
argument structures of verbs. This is what they learned when they acquired
the  language.  Sentence patterns are taxonomical  artifacts but are not
reflective of the learner's grammar and therefore present the students with
an unnecessary learning burden.

          A second goal of teaching grammar to native speakers is to help
them apply their conscious knowledge of grammar to problems of language use.
Robert DeBeaugrande, in his 1984 paper, "Forward to the basics," suggests a
number of criteria for writing learner grammars. One of these is that
grammatical accounts should mesh with what learners know. For the reasons
given above, I am not convinced that anyone "knows" that "Mary want  to help
herself" is a construction in the sense discussed here. I don't know how
conceiving of the whole grammar as "constructions" would help  learners
trying to apply their conscious knowledge of grammar to challenges of
language use.

          I am not claiming that all aspects of language are learned in the
same way. I think that the 'go Xing' are not learned the same way as
reflexives.  I know that issues of acquisition and learnability are
controversial, but I believe that we need to keep these issues in mind when
we offer grammatical  descriptions to our students.

                  Jim Kenkel, Eastern Kentucky University

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