Prototype Theory and Construction Grammar (original) (raw)

2015

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study addresses research questions concerning the reality and formation of ‘grammatical’ prototypes, and how prototype theory relates to ‘constructional grammar’. Three main approaches are used: (1) a two-stage analysis of the possessive-genitive construction (PG) in the spoken component of the British National Corpus, examining the internal linguistic aspects of the construction, and its referential values; (2) three experiments, the first testing the claim that prototypicality is applicable to grammatical categories, based on data collected from 105 British undergraduates, and the second two looking at complementary aspects of the flexibility inherent in grammatical constructions and the complexity of their internal and external aspects, using data collected from 80 British undergraduates; and (3) an in-depth theoretical analysis of prototypicality as a grammatical tool. From the corpora analyses, apart from the hazards of the frequency factor, it is concluded that there is more to the PG construction than what descriptive accounts of prototypes offer. Much of its semantic interpretation depends on context, world knowledge, and even the cognitive processes of interlocutors. So, the need for cognitive accounts of prototypes is stressed. The first experiment shows that prototype structure of grammatical categories constrains subjects’ processing times. However, the detected within-category variance suggests that the interaction between particular lexical items and the construction is not controlled for. This finding, along with other findings (i.e. a weaker version of compositionality, gestalt perception, idiosyncracy, integrity of linguistic and non-linguistic information, etc.), underlines the need for a constructional grammar. The second and third experiments test for sensitivity to manipulations of the constituent elements of the PG construction and contextual information. The systematic way in which the typicality ratings pattern provides further evidence that the prototype structure constrains our grammatical knowledge. But the high sensitivity of these ratings to changing contexts reveals the ad hoc character of this prototype structure and thus its inadequacy for grammar. These considerations lead us to reject the prototype as a grammatical tool and thus Goldberg’s (1995) version of Construction Grammar in favour of the Fillmore-Kay version (FKG), which is proposed as a supplementary linguistic tool to prototype theory. It is argued that while FKG, as a constrained grammatical tool, identifies which constructions fall within the lattice of a certain grammatical category, prototype theory, as a ‘post-grammatical’ grading device, identifies which of the constructs building from FKG descriptions is central or peripheral.

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