All in all, Generative Grammar assumes that a speaker’s grammatical knowledge is organized into components: the phonological component, the morphological component, the syntactic component and the semantic component. Construction Grammar, on the other hand, assumes that idiomatic expressions are everywhere and that all grammatical patterns are riddled with exceptions and idiosyncrasies. This leads to the assumption that the totality of our knowledge of language is captured by a network of constructions, a so-called “construct-i-con”.
Furthermore, constructions are symbolic units that are not strictly predictable. As Goldberg puts it, “[a]ny linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist”. Therefore, if the meaning of an idiom cannot be figured out by the literal meaning of its parts, it is a construction.
This assumption does not automatically exclude that even a semantically compositional and regular linguistic form could be a construction, as Goldberg explains: “In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency”. This assumption leads to the fact that predictable linguistic forms such as “I love you” or “How has your day been?” turn out to be entrenched predictable constructions.
Inhaltsverzeichnis (Table of Contents)
- Introduction
- Main Part
- "There you are" - A Constructional Analysis
- The Variability of "There you are" in its different meanings
- Conclusion
Zielsetzung und Themenschwerpunkte (Objectives and Key Themes)
The paper aims to examine the idiomatic expression "there you are" from a constructional perspective, demonstrating that it qualifies as a construction within the framework of Construction Grammar. It explores the various meanings of the idiom, investigates its variability in usage, and ultimately concludes on its nature as a construction.
- Constructional analysis of the idiom "there you are"
- Different pragmatic meanings of the idiom
- Variability of the idiom in word order and usage
- Application of Construction Grammar principles to idiomatic expressions
- Distinguishing between compositional and non-compositional meaning in idioms
Zusammenfassung der Kapitel (Chapter Summaries)
The introduction provides an overview of Construction Grammar, its key principles, and contrasts it with the Chomskyan view of language acquisition. It defines constructions as form-meaning pairs with unpredictable elements and introduces the four detection strategies for identifying constructions.
The main part focuses on the constructional analysis of the idiom "there you are." It presents different contexts and meanings of the idiom, illustrated with examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and invented scenarios. The analysis utilizes the strategies outlined in the introduction to demonstrate how the idiom deviates from regular patterns and possesses non-compositional meaning.
Schlüsselwörter (Keywords)
Construction Grammar, idiom, "there you are," constructional analysis, pragmatic meaning, variability, non-compositional meaning, detection strategies, corpus linguistics.
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- Claudia Rumms (Autor:in), 2016, The Idiomatic Expression "There you are". A Constructional Analysis, München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/428998
