Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Szczesniak, Konrad

Titel

Regular and Irregular Aspects of Grammatical Constructions

Ist Teil von

• SKASE journal of theoretical linguistics, 2018-09, Vol.15 (3), p.170

Ort / Verlag

The Slovak Association for the Study of English

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This study focuses on two grammatical forms, the Incredulity Response Construction and the je videt / vidief construction. By analyzing their form and usage, I intend to weigh in on the debate concerning the importance of regularity and unpredictability inherent in grammatical constructions. The debate, initiated by Chomsky's dismissal of idiosyncratic forms as peripheral, has gained momentum especially in recent years, with cognitive linguists uncovering more unpredictable aspects of language forms and claiming that language is primarily idiosyncratic, not regular. As a result, current cognitive linguistic descriptions of constructions highlight what is unpredictable and all but dismiss the regular aspects of constructions. The present study argues that the two sides--the predictable and the form-specific--coexist and thus have obvious implications for models of mental representations of language forms. By extrapolation, a recognition of a balance of the regular and irregular properties is relevant to our theorizing on how speakers learn and use constructions: just as the presence of idiosyncratic properties makes it necessary to memorize special cases of forms, the presence of regular properties can be assumed to ease the learning burden. An accurate description of any construction should attempt to detail both those aspects that can be predicted by rule and those that are endemic to a given construction and must be memorized.Keywords: grammatical construction, idiosyncrasy, regularity, IRC, je videt / vidief construction