Ellipsis: investigating linguistic silence

The LVTC Research Group had the pleasure to host the International Workshop 'ELLIPSIS2012: crosslinguistic, formal, semantic, discoursive and processing perspectives' in Vigo on 09-10 November 2012.  
Outline of the workshop: The aim of this workshop was to bring together researchers who were currently looking at ellipsis from different points of view: formal, semantic, discoursive and processing. The goal was to discuss what should be explained by a theory of ellipsis in light of the assumptions of specific frameworks. It provided a discussion forum for researchers from different (sub-)disciplines whose main objective was to describe the characteristics of the different ellipsis types, the natural language processing of ellipsis, the structural representation of the different ellipsis types and their constituents, and to explore the implications of particular theoretical frameworks for the structure of elided elements The workshop was organized into four plenary lectures, fifteen presentations and a poster session. The workshop was honoured with the participation of the following internationally recognised experts on ellipsis:
- Dr. Lobke Aelbrecht (University of Ghent, Belgium), who delivered a speech on "What ellipsis can do for phases and what it can't, but not how;
- Prof. Gerard Kempen (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Leiden University, Holland), on "A neurocognitive model of elliptical grammatical encoding and decoding: The case of clausal coordinate ellipsis";
- Prof. Maribel Romero (University of Konstanz), on "Modal Superlatives and Ellipsis"; and
- Prof. Jason Merchant (University of Chicago, USA), on "'Deep' and 'surface' anaphora, again".
With over 50 participants coming from all over the world and 21 presentations, including papers, plenary lectures and posters, the workshop programme triggered discussion about new trends and lines of investigation and data analysis on ellipsis, analyzing this syntactic phenomenon from different angles such as semantics, psycholinguistics and syntax.

Corpus linguistics and BNCweb

On October 30 Prof. Sebastian Hoffmann taught the seminar “Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb”. Prof. Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann has been Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Trier (Germany) since 2009. Prior to this, he held the post of Lecturer in English Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK) for three years (2006-2009), having work for several years at the University of Zürich, first as a research assistant to Prof. Gunnel Tottie and then as a 'Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter'. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zürich, too. Prof. Hoffmann is a renowned corpus linguist with expertise in methodological and usage-based approaches to the study of language. He is one of the creators of the user-friendly web-interface to the British National Corpus known as BNCweb (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk), the manual guide of which he co-authored together with colleagues Stefan Evert, Nick Smith, David YW Lee and Ylva Berglund (Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb – A Practical Guide, 2008). He also has an interest in practical issues involved in using Internet-derived data for corpus linguistic analyses, in relation to which he has published the article ‘Processing Internet-Derived Text - Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages’ (2007). In addition, he has recently co-edited two volumes on corpus linguistics with Geoffrey Leech and Paul Rayson: English Corpus Linguistics: Looking Back, Moving Forward (2012) and Methodological and Historical Dimensions of Corpus Linguistics (2011), both collections of papers from the ICAME conference held at Lancaster University (2009). Prof. Hoffmann’s research also includes other topics such as diachronic and synchronic syntactic change, in particular grammaticalization of complex prepositions, on which he has written the monograph Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions. A Corpus-Based Study (Routledge, 2005); the use of tag questions in British and American English, a topic on which he has collaborated with Prof. Gunnel Tottie (e.g. 2006, 2009); and World Englishes, for instance on verb complementation in British and Indian English, in particular ditransitive verbs (see Mukherjee & Hoffmann 2006). Most recently he has started working on a large-scale project on Singapore English. 

Outline of the seminar. The seminar provided an introduction to the British National Corpus through its web application, the BNCweb. It consisted of three main parts. In the first place, Prof. Hoffmann provided a general description of the corpus (design and contents), while pointing out the crucial difference between the corpus selection criteria – the ‘[s]pecifications defining the kind and proportion of material to be included for the compilation of the corpus’ (e.g. domain, medium, time) – and the corpus descriptive features – the ‘[c]lassificatory features of the corpus that were not part of the selection criteria, but [were] added post hoc – on the basis of observed evidence’ (e.g. age, gender, dialect). The second part of the seminar addressed ‘some basic [yet necessary] methodological issues’ based on a number of case studies which attendants could test hands-on. Regarding (relative) frequency, Prof. Hoffmann pointed out the importance of normalisation and the importance of choosing the appropriate frequency metrics. The difference between precision and recall was discussed at length, including methods for optimising both. Next was annotation at word level (parts of speech), which he exemplified with the case study of intensifiers. At this point, Prof. Hoffmann explained the use of a variety of tools available in the BNCweb to perform and refine searches, including queries with specific tags, query expressions for less restrictive searches, and wildcards. The third part of the seminar focused on collocations: raw frequency vs. statistical measures of collocational strength, register/domain-specific collocations, and how to investigate collocations with BNCweb. Sample cases included, for instance, say/tell/express an opinion, cause+nouns with negative denotation, and collocations with dangerous. As with the previous tasks, Prof. Hoffmann provided useful tips to take the most advantage of the methodological tools available in BNCweb: expected/observed collocate frequencies and the different association measures one can quickly retrieve from the application, e.g. Z-score, T-score, log-likelihood, mutual information, etc.

English grammar and lexis from a functional perspective

On May 15 and 16 2012 Prof J. Lachlan Mackenzie conducted the seminar ‘Topics in English grammar and lexis’. Prof Lachlan Mackenzie is Honorary Professor of Functional Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since 2007. At this university he started his career as a lecturer after completing in 1973 a 5-year MA course in French and German at the University of Aberdeen, and obtaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. His expertise is in European languages, with a specialization in English linguistics. This expertise has allowed him to work as a consultant in languages and linguistics, with over 30 years of experience. Apart from English, language and linguistics, and typology, his research interests comprise lexicology, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Throughout his career, he has actively collaborated with universities and research centres across Europe. Based in Portugal, he has worked for the last 8 years as a researcher for the ‘Discourse and Literacy’ group of the Institute for Theoretical and Computational Linguistics (ILTEC) in Lisbon. His research there is focused on the relation between Functional Discourse Grammar and dialogue. Prof Lachlan Mackenzie combines his work as a researcher at the Portuguese Institute and as a consultant with the editing of the major journal of functional linguistics, Functions of Language, and the work derived from his position of Research Manager of the Santiago-based international research programme SCIMITAR. Among Prof Mackenzie’s most recent publications are the following: the well-known 2008 monograph, co-authored with Kees Hengeveld, Functional Discourse Grammar: a typologically-based theory of language atructure (Oxford University Press); Writing in English: a guide for advanced learners (2nd ed. 2011, A. Francke), co-authored with Dirk Siepmann, John D. Gallagher and Mike Hannay; and the brand new grammar Compare and contrast: an English grammar for speakers of Spanish, co-authored with Elena Martínez Caro (2012, Comares).

Outline of the seminar: The seminar focused on four topics:
(1) the double-possessive nominalization structure (eg. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait): The presentation focused on the frequency of occurrence of the structure, on its purpose of use, syntactic positioning, the semantic categories of entity proposed by Functional Discourse Grammar, the interaction of nominalization and psych verbs, and its effect on syntactic ‘priming’. It was concluded that the structure is the least used form of nominalization in English. Though it is assumed to have the characteristics of a full transitive clause, it is linked metonymically to various other meanings. It is mainly used to designate mental processes, and it is not in free variation with full clauses.
(2) the adverbializing construction on a friendly basis: The claim is that the formula on a(n) _ basis should be recognized as a construction with a distinct function in English grammar. Based on a quantitative analysis of the BNC, the high frequency of on a regular basis renders this formula as a prototype for the construction. On a regular basis was contrasted with regularly in terms of the frequency and periodicity it expresses. The formula was also analyzed in terms of the complex fillers occupying the slot before basis: their frequency, semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics, and punctuation.
(3) English fail to: This verb was shown to have uses as a periphrastic negative. Adopting a corpus-analytical approach, the verb fail was examined as a complement-taking verb, a ‘subject-raising verb’, and as a periphrasis; the frequency and characteristic of the verbs following fail to were also analysed.
(4) ‘English as a moving target’: Prof Mackenzie looked into the advantages of a teaching approach in which the teacher adopts the role of a fellow learner and for which the Google n-gram viewer becomes a very useful teaching tool. With a few searches for lexicology, inflectional and derivational morphology, Prof Mackenzie demonstrated that the tool is a very attractive device, since it allows comparability and contrast between languages and creates a powerful motivating effect on students towards using corpora to find out linguistic trends on their own.

(De-)Constructionalising the English language

On April 23 2012 Dr Graeme Trousdale taught the seminar "Constructionalization and constructional changes in the history of English". Graeme Trousdale is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches both at undergraduate and graduate level. Dr Trousdale studied English Language and Literature at the University of Manchester before moving to Edinburgh to complete a postgraduate programme. In 2000 he obtained his PhD with a dissertation entitled Variation and (socio)linguistic theory: a case study of Tyneside English. He has been a guest lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow, and has taught in Italy and India as part of various exchange programmes. His research interests cover a broad number of topics, ranging from Grammaticalization and lexicalization in English through to Non-standard varieties of English and Educational Linguistics. He has also done extensive work in the field of Construction Grammar. Dr Trousdale's most recent publications include Introduction to English sociolinguistics (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization, co-edited with Elizabeth Traugott (John Benjamins, 2010). He will soon be presenting the Handbook of Construction Grammar (Oxford University Press), co-edited with Thomas Hoffmann. At the moment he is working with Elizabeth Traugott on a volume which has been given the provisional title Constructionalization and constructional changes.
Outline of the seminar: This seminar provided an introduction to aspects of diachronic Construction Grammar, and its application to changes in the history of English. Particularly, it concentrated on the notion of constructionalization, the creation of new form-meaning pairings as a product of micro neo-analyses. These new constructions may be of varying degrees of schematicity and complexity, and may encode procedural meaning, referential meaning, or some combination of the two. The first part of the seminar provided a general introduction to aspects of Construction Grammar, particularly those aspects which are of relevance to the kinds of language change to be discussed in the second part. Graeme Trousdale argued that constructional knowledge is best represented as a network of nodes linked in a prototype-based inheritance hierarchy, and that constructional change may involve change in nodes (the constructions themselves), in links between nodes, or both. In contrasting constructional change with constructionalization, he also discussed related phenomena like grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization. The second part of the seminar considered three case studies. The first involved grammatical constructionalization – the development of the what with construction (e.g. what with the kids, we can’t take a holiday this year) – where a new procedural marker has emerged since the late Middle English period. The second was the development of the noun forming suffix –dom (as in wisdom and kingdom) as a kind of lexical constructionalization, where a new derivational suffix arises. The third was the development of composite predicate constructions such as he gave him a tongue-lashing 'he chastised him', which was shown to have properties of both grammatical and lexical constructionalization.

Explaining syntactic and grammatical variation

On March 5 and 6 2012 Prof Britta Mondorf taught the seminar "Determinants of grammatical variation in English". Prof Britta Mondorf holds the Chair in English Linguistics at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. She obtained her Habilitation in English Linguistics in Paderborn, and her PhD in Düsseldorf. She was a visiting scholar in institutions such as Wuppertal and Duisburg-Essen Universities. Prof Mondorf has published on linguistic variation, functional grammar, sociolinguistics, semantics, pragmatics and historical linguistics. Well known are her monographs More support for more-support: the role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms (2009) and Gender differences in English syntax (2004), as well as the co-edited volume Determinants of grammatical variation in English (2003). In her current research Britta Mondorf is dealing with reflexivity and (de)transitivizing strategies, the role of language processing in grammatical variation and change, British-American contrasts in syntax and morphology, the functional motivation of synthetic-analytic contrasts, and gender differences.
Outline of the seminar: Which factors constrain the choice between functionally equivalent constructions? This is the central issue explored in the seminar. Prof Mondorf dealt with recent research providing new insights into the factors that determine grammatical variation in English. Thematically the workshop focused on the following four variation phenomena: (i) Comparative alternation: which factors constrain the choice between more proud vs. prouder?; (ii) Gender differences in syntax: Why do women and men differ in their use of causal and concessive clauses?; (iii) Way-constructions: What is the function of way-constructions, eg. Grabski slurped his way to the bottom of the soup bowl?; (iv) Dummy it: What is the function of non-referential it in eg. leg it, move it, shove it. In addition to showing that grammatical variation is systematically constrained by factors from all levels of linguistic analysis, Prof Mondorf discussed pertinent research in terms of its relevance for linguistic theory-building.