Constructions across grammars

Organized by: Martin Hilpert & Jan-Ola Östman

The workshop will explore the role of constructions in scenarios where speakers are competent in multiple grammars, either speaking several varieties of the same language or being able to switch between altogether different languages. These scenarios include situations of language contact, bilingualism, multivariate language use, language development, and second language acquisition, amongst others.
The workshop will address the very pertinent question of how speakers in these situations make use of constructional generalizations. Are constructions from one language or variety projected to another one? Do speakers form ‘meta-constructions’ that establish correspondences between constructions across languages? How are issues of variability handled? Do different scenarios lead to different strategies of grammatical representation? What are the theoretical implications of such representations?
Participants in the workshop primarily work within constructional approaches to language (different versions of construction grammar, cognitive grammar, etc.), and they provide different perspectives on the questions raised above from the point of view of their work on a diverse group of languages.

Schedule:

Monday, June 18, 2012

10:00 Martin Hilpert (FRIAS) & Jan-Ola Östman (FRIAS)

• Introduction

10:30 Seza Doğruöz (Tilburg University)

• On-going change in light verb constructions: A case study of Turkish spoken in the Netherlands

11:15 Coffee break
11:45 Timothy Colleman (Ghent University)

• Indirect passive constructions across varieties of Dutch

12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Steffen Höder (University of Münster)

• Arguments for phonological elements in Diasystematic Construction Grammar

14:45 Stefan Pfänder (University of Freiburg)

• Constructions across grammars: Two types of transfer

15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Kyoko Hirose Ohara (Yokohama National University)

• Toward a constructicon building for Japanese

16:45 Ruprecht von Waldenfels (University of Bern)

• Constructional similarity and contact within, across and beyond the Slavic languages: The case of grammaticalized ‘give’

19:30 Conference Diner

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

09:00 Florent Perek (FRIAS) & Martin Hilpert (FRIAS)

• Testing constructional tolerance: Are argument structure constructions equally powerful across languages?

09:45 Bracha Nir (University of Haifa)

• Clause Packages across grammars: A contrastive analysis of L1 and L2 narrative texts

10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Philipp Wasserscheidt (University of Berlin)

• Refining formal features of constructions: Support from bilingual data

11:45 Lunch break
14:00 Yoshiko Matsumoto (Stanford University)

• Noun-modification across genres and grammars

14:45 Coffee break
15:15 Jan-Ola Östman (FRIAS)

• On constructions as “universal” resources

16:00 Short break for refreshments
16:15 Martin Hilpert (FRIAS) & Jan-Ola Östman (FRIAS) (moderators)

• Closing discussion

17:30 Conference ends