The caused motion construction revisited : theoretical and cross-linguistic perspectives

Gallez, Françoise [UCL] De Knop, Sabine [USL-B]

In her description of the English caused motion construction (CMC) Goldberg (1995 & 2006) defines the oblique argument essentially as a local goal expressed by a directional prepositional phrase. A study of German instances of the CMC in the corpora DeReKo of the Institute for German Language (IDS-Mannheim) reveals a greater variety in the realization of the oblique argument. Apart from the expression of a local goal (1-2), the German oblique argument can also express a state or a temporal goal (compare Dalmas & Gautier 2013; Dewell 2011), e.g. (3) and (4). (1) Der Fußballer köpft den Ball ins Tor. (lit. 'The soccer player heads the ball into the goal') (2) Der Fußballer köpfte eine Ecke von Marcel W. ins Tor. (lit. 'The soccer player headed a corner into the goal') (3) Der Fußballer köpft das Team zum Erfolg. (lit. 'The soccer player heads the team to (the) success') (4) Der Fußballer köpft das Team in die nächste Saison. (lit. 'The soccer player heads the team into the following term') This variation largely depends on the motion expressed by the construction, i.e. actual, non-actual or subjective motion, and on the nature of the other arguments and the interaction between them in the CMC (verb, subject, object). In (1) the local goal (ins Tor) is associated with the actual motion of a concrete object (den Ball). Construction (2) also describes actual motion and the object (die Ecke) corresponds metonymically to the ball. By contrast, in (3) and (4) the meaning of the construction is extended (also compare the description of resultatives by Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004): the object (das Team) is being moved metaphorically into a state (zum Erfolg) or to a later moment in time (in die nächste Saison). As the constraints on the construction are language-specific and typologically motivated (Talmy 2000) there is no one-to-one correspondence between the German constructions and their French equivalents. Consequently, the translation of these constructions constitutes a challenge for French speakers of German. Against this background, our study aims (i) at describing possible extensions of Goldberg's CMC (family of constructions), (ii) with data from DeReKo at illustrating the specificities and constraints of the German CMC, and (iii) in a cross-linguistic perspective at exploring the major differences between the German CMCs and corresponding French equivalents with examples from the translation corpora OPUS. References: Dalmas, M. & Gautier, L. (2013). Les constructions causatives avec mouvement en allemand: d'une saisie phraséologique à une explication constructionnelle. Langages 2013/1 (n° 189), 81-102. doi: 10.3917/lang.189.0081 Dewell, Robert B. (2011). The meaning of particle / prefix constructions in German. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press. Goldberg, A. & Jackendoff, R. (2004). The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language, 80(3), 532–568. doi: 10.1353/lan.2004.0129 Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. 2, Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge: MIT Press. Corpora: DeReKo: http://www1.ids-mannheim.de/direktion/kl/projekte/korpora.html?L=1 Lüngen, H. (2017). DEREKO - Das Deutsche Referenzkorpus. Schriftkorpora der deutschen Gegenwartssprache am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Bibliothek, 2017. OPUS: http://opus.nlpl.eu/ Tiedemann, J. 2012, Parallel Data, Tools and Interfaces in OPUS. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’2012).