Table Of ContentProductivity in Argument Selection
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 260
Editor
Volker Gast
Founding Editor
Werner Winter
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Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Heiko Narrog
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Niina Ning Zhang
Editor responsible for this volume
Volker Gast
De Gruyter Mouton
Productivity in
Argument Selection
From Morphology to Syntax
by
Amir Zeldes
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-030079-6
e-ISBN 978-3-11-030391-9
ISSN 1861-4302
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For Nina and Lia
Preface
The present work started with a naive question: does productivity as it has
been described in morphological word formation end at the word level, and
if it does not, what would that mean for syntax? As a result, it grew togeth-
er from two sides like a bridge, from morphology on the one side and the
syntax-semantics interface on the other. It is the author’s hope that a coher-
ent account has been arrived at in the middle.
The subject of this book, argument selection, initially seems like a do-
main of limitless productivity: we cannot possibly enumerate every
conceivable argument of a verb like drink or eat. But at the same time it is
easy to observe empirically that the arguments of the former are fewer in
number, more repetitive and less prone to innovation than those of the latter
in virtually any sample of usage data. Once a certain sample size has been
reached, it becomes difficult to observe novel material for any argument
selection process, but how quickly this point is reached differs for different
lexemes and constructions. Though there are clear pragmatic reasons why
this may be, some cases seem arbitrary. For example if we look at large
amounts of text, why do speakers of English seem to shake so many differ-
ent things but jog so few (other than [someone’s] memory)? Why should
near synonyms like start, begin and commence exhibit a significantly dif-
ferent likelihood of admitting novel objects? And what makes speakers
generate different sized vocabularies for the verbal complement of help to
[VERB] versus help [VERB]? These cases and many others like them are
pervasive in usage data, and motivate a concept of productivity in argument
selection just as it has been defended in morphology.
In presenting the case for productivity in argument selection, two issues
will have to be addressed. To begin with, it will be shown that productivity
is part of speakers’ (implicit) knowledge of their language (Chapters 3–4).
Productivity effects would have to be robust and resist reduction to extra-
linguistic factors, such as the difference between eating and drinking in real
life (see Chapter 5). The sense of productivity meant here will comprise
multiple dimensions. In the first instance, I refer to the likelihood of a
speaker to produce novel forms in a construction, a quantity that has been
studied especially in the sense of Baayen’s (1993, 2001, 2009) potential
productivity (marked (cid:51) ) in morphology. However, as I will discuss at
length, other aspects of what I shall call the Productivity Complex (PC) are
closely related to this in many ways, with the attested and projected total
vocabulary size of a construction’s argument slot or slots, also discussed by
Baayen for morphology, playing an important role. The main line of argu-
viii Preface
mentation leading to the conclusion that speakers have meaningful know-
ledge about syntactic productivity will run along the following three points:
1. Empirical productivity estimates for the same construction behave
consistently within and across comparable datasets.
2. The properties of productivity cannot be accounted for on semantic
grounds without resorting to ‘per head semantic classes’ (as criticized
e.g. by Dowty 1991). This is supported by the fact that (near) synony-
mous constructions and lexical heads have different, inexplicably
idiosyncratic productive behavior.
3. Many partially filled exponents of productive patterns have a near-
saturated vocabulary of arguments which must be stored as such in the
mental lexicon to account for the data. Linguistic knowledge of these
facts complements speakers’ knowledge of the preferred arguments for
each construction (cf. Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003), and is meant to
explain the differential generation of novel arguments in familiar slots.
A second issue to be addressed in this book, especially in Chapter 6, is
how this kind of knowledge may be acquired and stored in a model of
grammar. Here I make a first attempt, which is by no means complete, to
integrate the empirical findings into current theories of usage acquisition
based on properties of the input distribution. Within the framework of con-
struction grammar (Fillmore 1985, 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006a; Croft
2001 and many others), recent work (Casenhiser & Goldberg 2005; Gold-
berg 2006b, 2009; Boyd & Goldberg 2009; and for second language
acquisition Ellis & Ferreira-Junior 2009; Wulff et al. 2009) has shown how
constructions with certain skewed distributional properties are more readily
acquired by both children and adults. In particular, constructions with a few
very frequent types and many infrequent ones (a typical Zipf or LNRE dis-
tribution, see Baayen 2001; Evert 2004) are acquired more quickly and can
be extended more easily by speakers. In line with these findings, this book
aims to show that productive constructions exhibit precisely these proper-
ties and are therefore acquired for productive use by speakers, who then
reinforce their extensibility by producing similar distributions in subse-
quent usage. It is my hope that this book will contribute to the explanation
of the mechanisms of productivity in the syntactic domain, which open up
new questions about usage-based views of grammar.
Berlin, September 2012
Amir Zeldes
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the help of very many peo-
ple. First and foremost my gratitude goes out to Anke Lüdeling and Stefan
Gries who supervised my doctoral thesis on which this book is based. Anke
has not only taught me how to use and understand corpora but has also
guided, helped and encouraged me to publish my work at every turn. Stefan
has been my role model in statistical work and, in spite of the distance be-
tween continents and time zones, was always there to answer my questions
and provide detailed feedback.
Special thanks are due to the many people who agreed to comment on
various parts of the work described here at different stages, in particular:
Peter Adolphs, Jasmine Bennöhr, Hans C. Boas, Peter Bosch, Stefan Evert,
Livio Gaeta, Hagen Hirschmann, Marc Reznicek, Sören Schalowski and
Stefanie Wulff. I thank Felix Golcher for help on some of the more compli-
cated statistical issues that developed during research and for helping me in
getting R to do what I wanted it to. Needless to say, any errors or inaccura-
cies still found in the final version are entirely my own responsibility.
I would also like to express my appreciation for the authors whose work
this volume further develops and owes a great debt to: to Harald Baayen for
developing the morphological productivity paradigm that has fascinated me
for the past few years; to Stefan Evert and Marco Baroni, who introduced
me to Zipf-Mandelbrot models, for implementing the software to process
word frequency distributions in R, and again to Marco and his colleagues
for making the WaCKy corpora available. I am also thankful to the many
authors working on productivity in particular and on the acquisition and
modeling of usage-based grammar in general whose work I am building
upon and which cannot all be mentioned here, but the majority of which are
cited in the course of the text.
My further gratitude is due to the helpful staff at De Gruyter for answer-
ing questions and advising me on formal aspects of the publication. I
especially wish to thank series editor Volker Gast for many valuable com-
ments and corrections to the manuscript.
Finally I would like to thank my family for their love and support and
for teaching me about language and science from early on. And most im-
portantly, I want to thank Nina and Lia, to whom I dedicate this work, for
making life wonderful.
Description:This book centers on the idea that some verbs and other argument structure constructions have an inherently different propensity to realize lexically unfamiliar arguments, independently of lexical semantic meaning. This notion is explored both qualitatively using selected examples, and quantitativel
