Sunday, 27 May 2018

Mandelblit, Nili & Fauconnier, Gilles (2000) “How I got myself arrested: Underspecificity in Grammatical Blends as a source for Constructional Ambiguity” in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam 1997 (eds.) Ad Foolen & Frederike van der Leek: 167-189. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.


1. Grammatical blending in the use of syntactic constructions

We develop an analysis of sentence processing as a case of conceptual and linguistic blending (what we refer to as grammatical blending or grammatical integration): sentence generation involves the blending of a conceived event with a syntactic construction; sentence interpretation starts with a reconstruction of the blending configuration. – 167

The syntactic constructions serve as integrating frames, allowing the linguistic representation of complex events as instances of simple clause constructions. – 167

The central idea is that simple sentence structures can be used to linguistically express a complex sequence of events by blending together elements from the event sequence with the simple sentence structure (the ‘integrating syntactic construction’). – 167

By ‘blending’, we refer to a general cognitive operation. This operation includes a cross-space mapping between two input spaces, and selective projection from the two inputs into a blended space, which may then acquire emergent structure through completion and elaboration. – 167

Grammatical blending, like any blending operation, is possible if a correspondence (cross-space mapping) is found between two conceptual structures in the case of grammatical blending, the correspondence is between the structure of the novel conceived event (the one that is communicated) and the semantics of an integrating syntactic construction. – 167

It is up to the hearer to reconstruct the blending configuration, and elaborate its semantics to fit a possible event in the world. This grammatical underspecification of the blending operation leads to what is sometimes referred to as ‘constructional ambiguity’, or at other times ‘lexical ambiguity’ (if the underspecification of the blend is assigned to a particular lexical item). – 171

2. Blending operations in the Hebrew Morphological binyanim system

3. Blending and underspecificaion in French causative-passive constructions

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