Abstract - The construction of macro-events: grammar and lexicon – a typological perspective

This project is a re-examination of recent typological analysis in cognitive semantics (Talmy 1985, 1987, 2000) from the point of view of construction grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006). Talmy has thoroughly de-scribed characteristic typological differences of lexicalization between e.g. Germanic (satellite framed) lan-guages and Romance (verb framed) languages. In Talmy (2000) this pattern is generalized to be valid for a number of macroevents (complex semantic structures = main-event + co-event).

The point of departure is a contrastive analysis that we have made of a number of short stories by H. C. Andersen available in six parallel versions: the original Danish version, an English, a German, a Spanish, an Italian and a French version. The essential questions are: 1) How do we account for the substantial amount of “unfitting data” with respect to Talmy’s theory?, and 2) Is this a typology of lexicalization patterns, as claimed by Talmy, or is it rather a typology of combined construction types (grammatical constructions and lexical constructions)?

We argue that the generalized version of the typology (Talmy 2000) suffers from being formulated ex-clusively in terms of lexicalization patterns. We will suggest that constructions of the main information (MI) and the co-information (CI), of varying degree of specificity, should be the basic units of the typology (Pedersen, forthcoming). This approach permits us to analyze a broader range of expressions as instances of the same typological pattern. We may, e.g., analyze the expression of perception typologically in terms of how the perception path (MI) and the manner of perception (CI) is constructed:

(1)     [She looked happy] MI
              CI
(2)     [Hun så glad ud] MI      (she looked happy out)
              CI	   
(3)     [Parecía contenta (Observándola)] CI
             MI

In the English version the perception path (MI) – perception by someone else – is not lexicalized by the verb look since this verb may appear in frequent expressions like: she looked out of the window, in which the per-ception path is the inverse – perception by the subject. Neither is it lexicalized by the adjective happy. The point is that the perception path (MI) is encoded by the construction as a whole. The CI, on the other hand, is expressed lexically by the verb. The same argument applies for the Danish version. In the Spanish version the perception path (MI) is expressed lexically by the verb parecer, and the manner of perception (CI) may be expressed by an adverbial construction.

This study suggests that a generalized version of the typology has to include both the lexical level and a more schematic constructional level of analysis. In this approach the typology is thus a matter of mapping out the internal structure of macro-event constructions in different languages in terms of lexical versus sche-matic (information structure) constructions (ISC).

References

Lambrecht, K., 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Pedersen, J. CXG and some typological patterns of lexicalization. In: Javier Martín Arista, Deconstructing constructions. Mouton de Gruter. Forthcoming.

Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. I: T. Shopen (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description (vol. 3): Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge Univer-sity Press, Cambridge.

Talmy, L., 1987. Lexicalization patterns: Typologies and universals. Berkeley Cognitive Science Report 47. Berkeley: Cognitive Science Program, University of California.

Talmy, L., 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol.1 and 2. MIT Press, MA Cambridge.