The Saussurean sign revisited. Accounting for form-meaning mismatches in Construction Grammar

Koutsoukos, Nikolaos [UCL] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] De Smet, Hendrik [KULeuven]

Since the early days of grammatical description, the relation between form and meaning in linguistic units and the nature of the linguistic primes have been hotly debated issues. F. de Saussure (1916/1995) defined the linguistic sign (i.e. an association of signifiant (form) and signifié (meaning)) as the corner-stone of linguistic theory. Since then it has often been tacitly assumed that there exists symmetry in the relation between the form and the meaning of any given sign, which has been formulated as the Compositionality Principle (Hoeksema 2000). It should not be taken for granted however that all linguistic signs display this symmetric relation. Form-meaning mismatches (or asymmetries) are omnipresent in language (Francis & Michaelis 2002). Three types of form-meaning mismatch can be distinguished: Mismatch type 1: Many forms correspond to one function/meaning Well-described examples of this mismatch usually include synonymous lexemes (such as redouter, craindre, avoir peur ‘to be afraid of’), for which Saussure (1916/1995: 160) already claimed that they “n’ont de valeur propre que par leur opposition”. This mismatch is related to the notion of ‘competition’ between the linguistic signs, in line with the structuralist concept of language as “un système où tout se tient”. A similar type of mismatch can sometimes be observed within a single (morphological or syntactic) construction, e.g. in the form of multiple exponence in inflectional morphology (Harris 2009), affix pleonasm in derivational morphology (see Lehmann 2005) or redundancy in syntax (see, for example, Croft 2000: 136, on paratactic negation). Mismatch type 2: One form corresponds to many functions/meanings Evident examples of this category are polysemous/polyfunctional affixes, lexemes or syntactic constructions. For example, English to-infinitives have been analyzed as polysemous by Wierzbicka (1988). More recently, Colleman & De Clerck (2011) have analyzed the English ditransitive construction as polysemous. This type of mismatch also applies to conversion, in which one form is used to express different functions (e.g. the bridge/ to bridge) (e.g. Valera 2014). Mismatch type 3: The meaning of the syntagm cannot be derived from its signs In morphology, this type of mismatch applies, for instance, to exocentric compounds: in Italian portalettere ‘lit. carry-letters, postman’ or French tire-bouchon ‘lit. pull-cork, cork screw’, the agentive or instrumental meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the formal constituents of the compound. In syntax, unexpected functions of verbs or nouns are hard to account for when adopting a word-level analysis, e.g. transitivity of the verb sneeze in She sneezed the napkin off the table (Goldberg 1995) or the mass noun interpretation of cat in There’s cat all over the place (Michaelis 2003). An interesting question that we have to answer is how to account for these cases of form-meaning asymmetries. In the framework of Construction Grammar, the Saussurean sign has been extended to what is generally known as a ‘construction’ (among others, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). While the Saussurean sign primarily correlates with the word-level (Saussure 1916/1995: 99), constructions encompass any meaningful regularity in language, so that linguistic structure is composed of “constructions all the way down” (Goldberg 2006: 18). One century after the first publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916), this workshop aims to revisit the nature of the linguistic sign from a constructional perspective and to show that a constructionist view of the sign can gracefully integrate phenomena of form-meaning mismatches which have been neglected in other theories. Important arguments for this view may come from the fact that constructions have ‘holistic properties’ (cf. Booij 2010). The complexity of the relations within the constructional network and the possibility of multiple inheritance (De Smet et al. 2013) as well as the possibility of having many-to-many mappings between form and meaning in constructional networks (Van de Velde 2014) may also help to accommodate mismatches. Keywords: linguistic sign, form-meaning mismatch, Construction Grammar References Booij, G. (2010). Construction Morphology. Oxford: OUP. Colleman, T. & B. De Clerck. (2011). 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