Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Is Language a Collostructicon? A Proposal for Looking at Collocations, Valency, Argument Structure and Other Constructions

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Lexical Collocation Analysis

Abstract

This chapter argues in favour of not regarding collocation and valency as strictly discrete categories but rather seeing them as near neighbours in the lexis-grammar continuum. Following Bybee’s (Usage-based theory and exemplar representation of constructions. In Hoffmann T, Trousdale G (eds) The Oxford handbook of construction grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 49–69, 2013) analysis of the drive me crazy construction, a suggestion will be made for presenting both collocational and valency phenomena in terms of constructions. It will be argued that the constructicon representing speakers’ linguistic knowledge contains both item-specific information and generalized information in the form of Goldbergian argument structure constructions (Goldberg 2016) and in particular that the description of valency slots should provide exemplar representations based on the principles of collostructional analysis as developed by Stefanowitsch and Gries (Inter J Coprus Lingusitics 8:209–243, 2003).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. also, for example, Beckner et al. (2009) and Hoffmann and Trousdale (2013: 1–3)

  2. 2.

    For an outline of the advantages of an approach to language that assumes that knowing a language involves only one type of knowledge, see Stefanowitsch (Stefanowitsch 2011a).

  3. 3.

    When valency or different complementation patterns are dealt with in grammars, they are usually accompanied by lists of verbs that occur in these patterns. See also the pattern grammar approach taken by Francis, Hunston and Manning (Francis et al. 1996; Francis et al. 1998).

  4. 4.

    See also Boas (2003, 2011), Engelberg et al. (2011), Faulhaber (2011), Herbst (2009, 2010, Herbst 2011a, Herbst 2014a, b), Perek (2015) and Stefanowitsch (2011b). This is why the role of lower-level constructions has been stressed by a number of researchers in cognitive linguistics (“mini-constructions” Boas (2003), Hampe and Schönefeld (2006)).

  5. 5.

    Compare also Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013) and Gries (2015). For the influence of frequency and the relevance of different types of frequency measures, see Divjak and Caldwell-Harris (2015).

  6. 6.

    Agent, patient, locative, addressee and instrumental

  7. 7.

    Very occasionally, semantic roles are made use of in the complement blocks of A Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004) to serve precisely this purpose.

  8. 8.

    For a similar form of representation of the frequency of elements occurring in a construction through font size, see Bybee (2013: 61).

  9. 9.

    Apologies to all purists, who consider the terms “transitive” and “valency” to be incompatible.

  10. 10.

    It is obvious that in a general reference constructicon, it might be preferable to give only rather rough indications of frequency because precise IT∈CX-values are only valid for the corpus used anyway.

  11. 11.

    Strictly speaking, one would have to subtract uses of the word letter referring to the letters of the alphabet or multi-word units such as the letter of the law (about 500 instances in the BNC).

  12. 12.

    Note that occasional uses of mail in the sense of e-mail have been ignored here.

  13. 13.

    For related projects see Almela, Cantos & Sánchez (2011), Lyngfelt et al. (2012) or Sköldberg et al. (2013).

References

  • Almela, M., Cantos, P., & Sánchez, A. (2011). Towards a dynamic combinatorial dictionary: A proposal for introducing interactions between collocations in an electronic dictionary of English word combinations. In I. Kosem & K. Kosem (Eds.), Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: New applications for new users. Proceedings of eLex 2011, bled, 10–12 November 2011 (p. 111). Ljubljana: Trojina.

    Google Scholar 

  • Almela, M., Cantos, P., & Sánchez, A. (2013). Collocation, co-collocation, constellation... Any advances in distributional semantics? Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 95, 231–240.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bartsch, S. (2004). Structural and functional properties of collocations in English: A corpus study of lexical and pragmatic constraints on lexical co-occurrence. Tübingen: Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beckner, C., Blythe, R., Bybee, J., Christiansen, M. H., Croft, W., Ellis, N. C., Holland, J., Ke, J., Larsen-Freeman, D., & Schoenemann, T. [The Five Graces Group]. (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system: Position paper. Language Learning, 59 Suppl., 1, 1–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Behrens, H. (2007). The acquisition of argument structure. In T. Herbst & K. Götz-Votteler (Eds.), Valency. Theoretical, descriptive and cognitive issues (pp. 193–214). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Behrens, H. (2009). Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition. Linguistics, 47(2), 383–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boas, H. C. (2003). A constructional approach to resultatives. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boas, H. C. (2011). Zum Abstraktionsgrad von Resultativkonstruktionen. In S. Engelberg, A. Holler, & K. Proost (Eds.), Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik (pp. 37–69). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bybee, J. (2013). Usage-based theory and exemplar representation of constructions. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 49–69). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bybee, J. (2015). Language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cowie, A. P., & Mackin, R. (1975). Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English. Volume 1: Verbs with prepositions & particles. London: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dąbrowska, E. (2015). What exactly is universal grammar, and has anyone seen it? Frontiers in Psychology, 6, ISSN 1664–ISSN 1078.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dąbrowska, E., & Lieven, E. (2005). Towards a lexically specific grammar of children’s question constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(3), 437–474.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Divjak, D., & Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2015). Frequency and entrenchment. In E. Dąbrowska, & D. Divjak (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics, 53–75. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, N. (2003). Constructions, chunking & connectionism: The emergence of second language structure. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 63–103). Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, N. (2008). Phraseology: The periphery and the heart of language. In F. Meunier & S. Granger (Eds.), Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 1–13). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engelberg, S., König, S., Proost, K., & Winkler, E. (2011). Argumentstrukturmuster als Konstruktionen? Identität – Verwandtschaft – Idiosynkrasien. Engelberg, S., Holler, A., & Proost, K. (Eds.), Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik (71–112). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Evert, S. (2005). The Statistics of word cooccurrences: Word pairs and collocations. Dissertation, Institut für maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, University of Stuttgart, URN urn:nbn:de:bsz:93-opus-23714.

    Google Scholar 

  • Evert, S. (2008). Corpora and collocations. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus linguistics. An international handbook (pp. 1212–1248). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Faulhaber, S. (2011). Verb valency patterns: A challenge for semantics-based accounts. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1996). Collins Cobuild grammar patterns. 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1998). Collins Cobuild grammar patterns. 2: Nouns and adjectives. London: HarperCollins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gimson, A. C. (1989). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London: Arnold: recte

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, A. E. (forthcoming). Explain me this. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, A. E., & Herbst, T. (in prep). The nice of you construction: A usage-based constructionist analysis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gries, S. T. (2009). Phraseology and linguistic theory: A brief survey. In S. Granger & F. Meunier (Eds.), Phraseology. An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 3–25). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gries, S. T. (2015). More (old and new) misunderstandings of collostructional analysis: On Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013). Cognitive Linguistics, 26(3), 505–536.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gries, S. T., Hampe, B., & Schönefeld, D. (2010). Converging evidence II: More on the association of verbs and constructions. In S. Rice & J. Newman (Eds.), Empirical and experimental methods in cognitive/functional research (pp. 59–90). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gries, S., & Stefanowitsch, A. (2004a). Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on ‘alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(1), 97–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gries, S., & Stefanowitsch, A. (2004b). Covarying collexemes in the into-causative. In M. Archard & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Language, culture, and mind (pp. 225–236). Stanford: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hampe, B., & Schönefeld, D. (2006). Syntactic Leaps or Lexical Variation? More on ‘Creative Syntax. In S. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (Eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: The Syntax-Lexis Interface (pp. 127–157). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hausmann, F.-J. (1984). Wortschatzlernen ist Kollokationslernen. Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts, 31, 395–406.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hausmann, F.-J. (2007). Die Kollokationen im Rahmen der Phraseologie: Systematische und historische Darstellung. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 55(3), 217–235.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helbig, G. (1992). Probleme der Valenz- und Kasustheorie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Helbig, G., & Schenkel, W. (1969/21973). Wörterbuch zur Valenz und Distribution deutscher Verben. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2009). Valency: Item-specificity and idiom principle. In U. Römer & R. Schulze (Eds.), Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface (pp. 49–68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, Thomas. 2010. Valency constructions and clause constructions or how, if at all, valency grammarians might sneeze the foam off the cappuccino In Hans JöSchmid & Susanne Handl Cognitive Foundations of Linguistic Usage Patterns: Empirical Studies, 225–255. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2011a). The status of generalizations: Valency and argument structure constructions. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 59(4), 347–367.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2011b). Choosing sandy beaches – Collocations, probabemes and the idiom principle. In T. Herbst, S. Faulhaber, & P. Uhrig (Eds.), A phraseological view of language: A tribute to John Sinclair (pp. 27–57). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2014a). The valency approach to argument structure constructions. In T. Herbst, H.-J. Schmid, & S. Faulhaber (Eds.), Constructions – Collocations – Patterns (pp. 167–216). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2014b). Idiosyncrasies and generalizations: Argument structure, semantic roles and the valency realization principle. In M. Hilpert & S. Flach (Eds.), Yearbook of the German cognitive linguistics association, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kognitive Linguistik, Vol. II (pp. 253–289). Berlin/München/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2016a). Foreign language learning is construction learning – What else? Moving towards pedagogical construction grammar. In S. de Knop, & G. Gilquin (Eds.), Applied Construction Grammar, (pp. 21–51). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2016b). Wörterbuch war gestern. Programm für ein unifiziertes Konstruktikon! In S. J. Schierholz, R. H. Gouws, Z. Hollós, & W. Wolski (Eds.), Wörterbuchforschung und Lexikographie. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T. (2017). Grünes Licht für pädagogische Konstruktionsgrammatik – Denn: Linguistik ist nicht (mehr) nur Chomsky. Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 46, 119–135.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T., Heath, D., Roe, I. F., & Götz, D. (2004). A valency dictionary of English. London/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Herbst, T., & Schüller, S. [now Faulhaber]. (2008). Introduction to syntactic analysis. A Valency approach. Tübingen: Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoffmann, T., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Construction grammar: Introduction. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 1–12). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs, J. (2009). Valenzbindung oder Konstruktionsbindung? Eine Grundfrage der Grammatiktheorie. ZGL, 37, 490–513.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klotz, M., & Herbst, T. (2016). English dictionaries. A linguistic introduction. Berlin: Schmidt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. volume I: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive grammar. a basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lieven, E. (2014). First language learning from a usage-based approach. In T. Herbst, H.-J. Schmid, & S. Faulhaber (Eds.), Constructions, collocations, patterns (pp. 9–32). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Prentice, J., Rydstedt, R., Sköldberg, E., & Tingsell, S. (2012). Adding a constructicon to the Swedish resource network of Språkbanken. In J. Jancsary (Ed.), Proceedings of KONVENS 2012 (pp. 452–461). http://www.oegai.at/konvens2012/proceedings/66_lyngfelt12w/.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mukherjee, J. (2005). English Ditransitive verbs. Aspects of theory, description and a usage-based model. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pecina, P. (2010). Lexical association measures and collocation extraction. Language resources and evaluation, 44(1), 137–158.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perek, F. (2015). Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Proisl, T. (in preparation). The cooccurrence of linguistic structures. [working title] Erlangen: PhD thesis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Proisl, T., & Uhrig, P. (2012). Efficient dependency graph matching with the IMS open corpus workbench. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. U. Doğan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the eighth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC ’12) (pp. 2750–2756). Istanbul: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmid, H.-J. (2000). English abstract nouns as conceptual shells. From Corpus to cognition. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schmid, H. J., & Küchenhoff, H. (2013). Collostructional analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings. Cognitive Linguistics, 24(3), 531–577.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schumacher, H., Kubczak, J., Schmidt, R., & de Ruiter, V. (2004). VALBU – Valenzwörterbuch deutscher Verben. Tübingen: Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Siepmann, D. (2007). Wortschatz und Grammatik: zusammenbringen, was zusammengehört. Beiträge zur Fremdsprachenvermittlung, 46, 59–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sinclair, J. (2004). Trust the text. London/New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sköldberg, E., Bäckström, L., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Lyngfelt, B., Olsson, L.-J., Prentice, J., Rydstedt, R., Tingsell, S., & Uppström, J. (2013). Between grammars and dictionaries: A Swedish constructicon. In Proceedings of eLex 2013 (pp. 310–327).

    Google Scholar 

  • Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209–243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stefanowitsch, A. (2011a). Keine Grammatik ohne Konstruktionen: Ein logisch-ökonmisches Argument für die Konstruktionsgrammatik. In S. Engelberg, A. Holler, & K. Proost (Eds.), Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik (pp. 181–210). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stefanowitsch, A. (2011b). Argument structure: Item-based or distributed? Zeitschrift für. Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 59(4), 369–386.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stefanowitsch, A. (2014). Collostructional analysis. A case study of the English into-causative. In T. Herbst, H.-J. Schmid, & S. Faulhaber (Eds.), Constructions – Collocations – Patterns (pp. 217–238). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uhrig, P., & Proisl, T. (2012). Less hay, more needles - using dependency-annotated corpora to provide lexicographrs with more accurate lists of collocation candidates. Lexicographica, 28, 141–180. https://doi.org/10.1515/lexi.2012-0009.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Welke, K. (2011). Valenzgrammatik des Deutschen: Eine Einführung. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • BNC. The British National Corpus. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.

  • COCA = Davies, Mark. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

  • DWDS = Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. https://www.dwds.de. [accessed August 2017].

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. English Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Lexicography, Valency and Collocation, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany

    Thomas Herbst

Authors
  1. Thomas Herbst
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Herbst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Pascual Cantos-Gómez

  2. Department of English, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Moisés Almela-Sánchez

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Herbst, T. (2018). Is Language a Collostructicon? A Proposal for Looking at Collocations, Valency, Argument Structure and Other Constructions. In: Cantos-Gómez, P., Almela-Sánchez, M. (eds) Lexical Collocation Analysis. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92582-0_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation