The 3d articulation of language, radical construction grammar and phraseology: corpus-based evidence for a theoretical convergence

Colson, Jean-Pierre [UCL]

Thanks to the intensive research activities of a number of linguistic associations in several countries, among which Europhras has been playing a key role, the notion of phraseology is now used across a wide range of linguistic disciplines: phraseology (proper), corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics, to name just a few. Although there may be a general agreement among phraseologists that PUs (phraseological units) are the rule rather than the exception in language, it comes as a surprise that the fundamental theoretical consequences of this practical finding have not been thoroughly investigated. This may be partly due to the fact that one of the original claims in this respect, the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991) was made within the framework of corpus linguistics, a linguistic approach that does not claim to be a general theory of language. General introductions to phraseology (Burger 2003; Burger et al. 2007; Dobrovol'skij & Piirainen 2005) or to formulaic language (Wray 2008) contain references to other linguistic theories with which the paramount importance of PUs is compatible, such as construction grammars or cognitive linguistics. However, the strength of the evidence for the overall importance of phraseology comes from linguistic corpora, and there is therefore still a missing theoretical link between the great profusion of data, and their theoretical underpinnings. In this paper we propose to explore one of those theoretical avenues: the possible convergence between the 3d articulation of language, construction grammar and fresh evidence from corpus-based computational phraseology. As we choose to take a bottom-up approach, the first step may be a tabula rasa: what strong evidence do we have for the paramount importance of phraseology in language use? We will argue that, contrary to what this practical issue may suggest, posing the question already confronts us with a number of important theoretical choices. In the first place, we have to define phraseology either in the narrow sense or in the broad sense (Burger 2003). In the latter case, we will consider as phraseological units a wide array of constructions ranging from communicative formulas to collocations, partial or complete idioms, and proverbs. But our point is that this traditional debate among phraseologists only addresses the tip of the theoretical iceberg. What is really at stake here is the interface between meaning, form and culture in language. Part of our tabula rasa indeed consists in questioning our Eurocentric prejudices about language structure and form. In order to gain fresh insights into the theoretical implications of phraseology, no single hypothesis should be made without confronting it with at least a few non Indo-European, and preferably non-inflectional languages (as inflection is one of the main characteristics of Indo-European languages). A practical consequence for corpus-based research is pretty radical: our methodology has to consider any representation of language structure in corpora as conventional and questionable. In particular, the absence of morpho-phonetic representation in classical linguistic corpora represents a major challenge for testing linguistic hypotheses, as language is in the first place spoken with a number of features such as accent, intonation, stress rules etc. From this point of view, the (Mandarin) Chinese language is particular useful, as it is mainly isolating (there are few bound morphemes), and because it has undergone far less foreign influences in its semantic structure than European languages have. Corpus-based evidence from huge corpora in European languages, but also in Chinese, suggest as a tentative hypothesis that phraseology is primarily based on the statistical association of morphemes, yielding higher scores in the case of bound morphemes, which makes it possible to extend the analysis to the traditional notion of word and to consider a whole palette of associations ranging from two morphemes to longer sequences, as in the case of verbal expressions, idioms or proverbs. While clearly suggesting that (part of) linguistic meaning is fundamentally statistical in nature, these findings, if confirmed by other studies, provide clear evidence for three theoretical approaches. The first one is formulaic language, as investigated by Wray (2008). According to A. Wray, formulaic sequences precisely represent a whole spectrum of structures which she calls MOU (morpheme-equivalent units), and are quite compatible with the corpus-based phraseological data. The only minor difference with the evidence from computational phraseology concerns the role of associations in named entities, an aspect which clearly falls beyond the scope of the more psycholinguistic view taken by A. Wray. The 3d articulation of language, as proposed by S. Mejri (2008), provides another interesting theoretical framework for the phraseological data. According to Martinet (1966), the semantic interface of language consists of the first articulation, morphemes and the second (phonemes). According to S. Mejri, it would be preferable to call phonemes the first articulation, morphemes the second, and to put in a third articulation of language a broad category of lexical units of various size, that may be realized as morphemes, lexical or phraseological units. Last but not least, construction grammar is the only comprehensive theory of language that is compatible with formulaic language, with the third articulation of language, and with the statistical results emerging from the phraseological data. Radical construction grammar (Croft 2001), in particular, is fully compatible with the statistical distribution of phraseological units as it emerges from huge corpora. As pointed out by Croft (2001), there is not only a continuum from lexis to grammar, but also a clear influence of culture on grammatical structure and representation. References Burger, Harald. 2007. Phraseologie. Eine Einführung am Beispiel des Deutschen. Berlin: Eric Schmidt. Burger, Harald, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij, Peter Kühn and Neal R. Norrick (eds.). 2007. Phraseologie / Phraseology. Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter. Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dobrovol'skij, D. and E. Piirainen. 2005. Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural And Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Martinet, André. 1966. Eléments de linguistique générale. Paris: Colin. Mejri, Salah. 2006. Polylexicalité, monolexicalité et double articulation. Cahiers de Lexicologie 2: 209-221. Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wray, Alison. 2008. Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.