Laura Michaelis · University of Colorado Boulder · PhdFit
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Dr. Sarah Chen
Stanford · NLP & interpretability
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Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik · 2025-09-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
Abstract This article revisits Charles Fillmore’s vision of the lexicon as the control center of grammar, advancing the claim that idioms are ordinary linguistic objects. Within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), idiomatic expressions – whether fixed phrases, idiomatically combining forms, or formal idioms – are modeled as typed feature structures licensed by lexical entries and constructions. This unified architecture dissolves the traditional boundary between words and rules; in it, idioms occupy distinct points along a continuum of lexical fixity rather than standing outside the grammar. Through analyses of fixed expressions like in the know , idiomatically combining forms such as causative have , and formal idioms like the Split Interrogative, the paper demonstrates how SBCG integrates idiomaticity into a general theory of sign combination, fulfilling Fillmore’s goal of a grammar grounded in the structure of the lexicon.
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-07-31 · 5 citations
bookSenior author
In null instantiation (NI) an optionally unexpressed argument receives either anaphoric or existential interpretation. One cannot accurately predict a predicator's NI potential based either on semantic factors (e.g., Aktionsart class of the verb) or pragmatic factors (e.g., relative discourse prominence of arguments), but NI potential, while highly constrained, is not simply lexical idiosyncrasy. It is instead the product of both lexical and constructional licensing. In the latter case, a construction can endow a verb with NI potential that it would not otherwise have. Using representational tools of sign based construction grammar, this Element offers a lexical treatment of English null instantiation that covers both distinct patterns of construal of null-instantiated arguments and the difference between listeme-based and contextually licensed, thus construction-based, null complementation.
Abstract A paradoxical behaviour of the English resultative present perfect is that while the causal event is unique, its time cannot be specified adverbially, at least in current US English: *We have moved here in 2012. Klein’s influential pragmatic explanation—that the constraint arises from the quantity-based injunction against simultaneously fixing event and reference times—is hard to reconcile with some of the facts: the constraint is neither defeasible nor apparently applicable to past-perfect sentences. I have proposed that the time-specification constraint is one aspect of a broader constraint preventing use of the Resultative Present Perfect (RPrP) to say more about an event that is mutually presupposed to have occurred. In this chapter I extend this constraint to several contexts, only vaguely described in my earlier work, in which verb class, and in particular the directionality of the denoted event, affects usability of the RPrP.
Constructions and Frames · 2024-08-26 · 4 citations
article1st authorCorresponding
Abstract When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions” ( Fillmore 1989 : 17). Construction Grammarians view the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructionsas a matter of linguistic convention-a fact not generally appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product of lexical and constructional licensing ( Zwicky 1994 ). But emergentists and stipulators share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.
Abstract In many traditions of aspectual analysis, verbs (or, rather, predications) are sorted into Aristotelian types, and grammatical aspects are seen as operators that (a) take tenseless propositions as arguments and (b) change the eventuality type of the proposition. This tradition tells us little about how state and action clauses mean what they mean, because it does not explain how aspectual markers affect the meanings of verbs with which they combine. In the present framework, aspectually sensitive constructions selectively bind to componential verb representations, permuting them. In part 1 of this series (Michaelis, 2022), I argued that by viewing such permutations as operations on a verb’s Aktionsart structure, we can explain the relationship between input and output situation types of aspectual mappings effected by verbal morphosyntax. In this article, part 2, I apply this framework to type shifts performed by the English Perfect and Progressive constructions, as well as past and present tenses.
Abstract Coercion is an inferential strategy used to resolve conflict between an operator and its argument. Such conflicts are resolved in favor of the semantic requirements of the operator (Talmy, 2000). Jackendoff (1997) and De Swart (1998), among others, represent coercion through type-shifting operators that intervene between an aspectual operator and its situation-type argument, ensuring that the argument is of the appropriate type for the operator. This framework has a mapping problem: the rules that it uses to represent aspectual-type shifts simply replace one aspectual type (the input) with another (the output), so it does not explain how the input representation constrains the output representation. This article offers a solution to the mapping problem: treating aspectual type shifts as operations on the decomposed semantic representations of verbs. I will show that two such operations can capture both implicit and explicit aspectual type-shifts in English, involving both tense constructions and aspectual constructions.
