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Chapter 8 1

What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside 2

Constructions? 3

Bert Cappelle 4

Abstract This chapter argues against a view according to which pragmatics, as 5

opposed to semantics, is completely outside grammar. It suggests that, on the 6

contrary, speakers strongly associate various pragmatic aspects of information with 7

constructions. I here give an overview of a wide range of pragmatic phenomena as 8

they have been dealt with in Construction Grammar, a linguistic framework which, 9

as a matter of principle, accommodates pragmatic information in the description of 10

stored form-function units. Such information includes Gricean maxims, information 11

structure, illocutionary force and larger discourse structure. However, Construction 12

Grammarians have been rather vague on what kind of (presumably) pragmatic 13

data should and should not be included in a construction and whether or not, 14

within a given construction, pragmatics and semantics constitute separate layers of 15

information. I demonstrate a heuristic based on cross-linguistic or intra-linguistic 16

comparison of functionally similar constructions (e.g. Can you : : : ? and Are you 17

able to : : : ?) to decide whether we should explicitly specify ‘short-circuited’ usage 18

information (e.g. the request use of Can you : : : ?) that could in principle be obtained 19

purely on the basis of sound reasoning. I also propose that semantics and pragmatics 20

should be treated as distinct levels of functional information in constructions. 21

Keywords Construction Grammar • Gricean maxims • Speech acts 22

• Information structure • Short-circuited interpretation 23

8.1 Introduction 24

Here is a simplistic view of constructions, one which I will not attribute to any 25

particular linguist. In fact, I am not even certain that anyone could be cited to hold 26

this view explicitly. Yet, I do believe it is a conception which is implicit in much 27

work in linguistics, and that spelling it out is therefore warranted. 28

B. Cappelle (�)Université Lille 3, CNRS, UMR 8163 – Savoirs Textes Langage (STL), F-59000 Lille, FranceAQ1e-mail: bert.cappelle@univ-lille3.fr

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017I. Depraetere, R. Salkie (eds.), Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line,Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 11, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_8

115

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116 B. Cappelle

Constructions are units linking form with meaning. The meaning of a construction can 29

be called its semantics. While one may more broadly speak of a construction’s ‘function’ 30

instead of its meaning, constructional semantics is to be distinguished from pragmatics. 31

This latter notion necessarily falls outside of a construction, given that it deals with how the 32

context in which the construction happens to be used may also contribute to its meaning, 33

perhaps better called its ‘interpretation’. 34

This view is problematic, because some constructions have pragmatic content built 35

into them. In this chapter, I will therefore attempt to provide a more satisfactory 36

view of constructions, one which does justice to several ways in which pragmatic, 37

context-dependent effects on the interpretation of a construction can be seen as part 38

of what we know about that construction. 39

So, how can pragmatic meaning be represented in constructions, if at all? The 40

approach taken here to answer this question is qualitative and theoretical. That is, 41

the present chapter does not focus on one particular empirical phenomenon but 42

surveys a range of pragmatic areas (Gricean maxims, information structure, etc.), 43

with the aim of examining if and how different pragmatic tiers of information could 44

be integrated into a description of constructions. In particular, I will examine how 45

pragmatics can be handled by Construction Grammar, a (depending on the variety 46

used) more or less explicit theory of form-function linking. A major question to be 47

resolved is how much pragmatic information speakers have to store in their long- 48

term memory and how much they can just figure out. Interpretations which are in 49

principle computable may nonetheless be ‘short-circuited’. A familiar example is 50

the request interpretation of Can you X? But how can we know whether language 51

users, when hearing such a pattern, make use of a stored interpretation rather 52

than compute it anew on each encounter? We will see that there are often some 53

simple cross- and intralinguistic diagnostics that we can apply as ‘ordinary’ linguists 54

to circumvent psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic experiments designed to probe 55

speakers’ memorized pragmatic knowledge. 56

One construction which is clearly equipped with built-in pragmatics is discussed 57

in a much-quoted paper by Kay and Fillmore (1999) and illustrated by the sentences 58

in (1): 59

60

(1) a. What is this scratch doing on the table?b. What do you think your name is doing in my book?c. I wonder what the salesman will say this house is doing without a kitchen.

(Fillmore and Kay 1999: 3)

61

Kay and Fillmore call the construction used here the What’s X doing Y? (WXDY) 62

construction, named after its special formal features, which include the obligatory 63

use of what and the progressive form of do. This construction doesn’t just have a 64

recognizable form but also comes with a special interpretation: the speaker uses it 65

to make it clear that she judges the situation as being out of the ordinary, to say the 66

least. We immediately understand that the speaker, pointing at a scratch on the table, 67

wishes to express her displeasure at seeing it there: there wasn’t a scratch before, so 68

how come there is one now? Likewise, in the second example, we have no trouble 69

grasping the speaker’s general message that seeing the hearer’s name in her own 70

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 117

book is not what she had expected and that she demands an explanation. And it is 71

the utterer of the third sentence – the actual speaker using this construction, not the 72

salesman – who indicates that a house without a kitchen is an anomaly, and would 73

like to hear the salesman explain this unusual situation. 74

In the old joke about the diner who asks, “What’s this fly doing in my soup?”, 75

the waiter who replies with “Madam, I believe that’s the backstroke” points at a 76

potential ambiguity in the construction. The waiter answers a direct question about 77

the fly’s precise kind of activity. Yet, what the fly is actually doing isn’t something 78

the diner is interested in, as she just wants to indicate her indignation at there being 79

a fly in her soup in the first place. As Kay and Fillmore point out, this special 80

interpretation cannot be the result of a conversational implicature. That is, it is not 81

as if the hearer first considers the speaker’s literal question, then deems this question 82

as being beside the point and finally gets the speaker’s drift, which is that she finds 83

there to be something surprising and incongruous about the scene. The reason why 84

this cannot be what’s going on is that many WXDY sentences, including those in 85

(1a-c), lack such a literal reading: “A scratch, a name, a house, and so on cannot 86

be literally said to be ‘doing’ anything” (Kay and Fillmore 1999: 5). The special 87

interpretational effect of WXDY sentences must instead be analysed as a property 88

of the construction itself. This is also clear from the observation that a WXDY 89

sentence such as What are your children doing playing in my garden? is necessarily 90

an utterance by which the speaker expresses disapproval, while a closely resembling 91

non-WXDY sentence such as Look what your children are doing in my garden may 92

or may not be so interpreted, as it could also easily be followed by How adorable 93

(Kay and Fillmore 1999: 5). 94

Literally intended questions may nonetheless have played a role in how the 95

WXDY construction developed its now-standard special sense. Kay and Fillmore 96

(1999) put it thus: “While the WXDY construction may have had its origin in 97

conversational implicature – through situations in which an individual A is clearly 98

up to no good and B asks what A is doing – the semantics of incongruity 99

is now CONVENTIONALLY associated with the special morphosyntax of WXDY 100

constructs” (Kay and Fillmore 1999: 5; boldface mine). Note that Kay and Fillmore 101

speak of the incongruity judgement in terms of a semantic aspect of the construction, 102

not a pragmatic one. Referring to this passage in Kay and Fillmore’s article, Bybee 103

(2013) further comments: 104

The conventionalization of implicature (or from the hearer’s point of view, inference) is also 105

well-known from grammaticalization research [references omitted – B. C.]. It is thought that 106

the frequent co-occurrence of an inference with a particular construction can lead to that 107

inference being taken as part of the meaning of the construction. The originally inferential 108

meaning can even replace the earlier meaning. (Bybee 2013: 56) 109

Observe again how, in this view, a once-pragmatic interpretation can become an 110

aspect of the semantics of a construction or even supersede the erstwhile semantic 111

information. 112

This leads to two simple but fundamental questions. First, can we ever claim 113

that something pragmatic is part of a construction and is thus an aspect of stored 114

How adorable

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118 B. Cappelle

language knowledge, rather than being a context-dependent interpretation the hearer 115

computes on the fly? Second, supposing that pragmatic information can indeed 116

be incorporated in constructions, does it inevitably become something purely 117

semantic – an inherent aspect of meaning – or can we still distinguish between 118

semantic and pragmatic aspects of a construction? 119

The first question is meant to resolve an apparent conflict between the notion 120

of pragmatics and the notion of constructions. Pragmatics is about how the hearer 121

makes sense of an utterance by applying general cognitive principles to linguistic 122

elements as they occur in a specific context of use. Constructions, in their turn, are 123

viewed in Construction Grammar as “stored pairings of form and function” (Gold- 124

berg 2003: 219). It should be clear that there is something incompatible between 125

these two notions, thus defined: on the one hand, pragmatic ways of figuring things 126

out are general heuristics of common-sense reasoning, which means that they are 127

cross-linguistically valid and hence language- and grammar-independent; on the 128

other hand, the constructions of a particular language are conventionalized form- 129

function pairings which make up the language-specific inventory of lexical and 130

grammatical bits of knowledge that speakers and hearers of that language have 131

internalized. So, to the extent that we can more or less agree on these definitions, the 132

question is simply: Can there be such a thing as ‘the pragmatics of a construction’ 133

without this being a contradiction in terms? 134

The second question starts from the assumption that pragmatic information can 135

be found in a construction, for instance in the form of constraints on how it can be 136

used in particular discourse situations. But if this kind of pragmatic information does 137

belong to what is stored in a construction, is it then to be distinguished from other 138

information, in particular ‘semantic’ information? Put differently, if constructions 139

(as we saw) are defined as conventionalized associations of form and function, does 140

that mean that a construction’s semantic and pragmatic specifications jointly make 141

up this functional pole, with no differentiation between them? 142

As for the first question (‘Can pragmatics be part of constructions?’), I will 143

argue that, indeed, there are constructions whose properties must be assumed 144

to include pragmatic information. Some constructions may have interpretations 145

that are purely context-dependent but others may be associated directly with a 146

particular interpretation. We will examine a test by which we can decide whether 147

an interpretation is stored as part of the construction’s properties or not. To lift a tip 148

of the veil of what is to be presented more fully in Sect. 8.3, we will see that we 149

can make a more educated guess about the stored status of a combination’s prag- 150

matically derivable reading by checking whether another language would express 151

that reading in a very similar way. As for the second question (‘Is constructional 152

pragmatics just a kind of constructional semantics?’), we will see in Sect. 8.4 153

that an answer might lie in a model in which stored pragmatic information co- 154

exists with semantic information without coinciding with it. By way of disclaimer, 155

I should state here that this model is not the Construction Grammar solution to 156

integrating pragmatics in constructions. As a matter of fact, there have been many 157

different ways in which construction grammarians have dealt with pragmatics, if 158

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 119

they have dealt with it at all. We will therefore first consider which pragmatic 159

phenomena have been studied in Construction Grammar, and how they have been 160

approached. 161

8.2 Some Constructionist Work on Pragmatic Aspects 162

In a book review on the Linguist List, Ebensgaard (2014) discusses Del Campo 163

Martínez’ (2013) constructionist study of how illocutionary functions (giving an 164

order, making a request, etc.) are encoded in English, and in doing so, he remarks 165

that “systematic studies of pragmatic aspects of constructions are still few and far 166

between”. To some extent, it is true that Construction Grammar, while it proclaims 167

to account for “the rich semantic, pragmatic, and complex formal constraints” on 168

grammatical patterns (Goldberg 2003: 220), has so far not devoted an enormous 169

amount of attention to pragmatics. If we are allowed to give a rather negative 170

appraisal of the state of affairs, it looks as though only few people operating within 171

Construction Grammar consider pragmatics seriously in their actual work, even 172

though not a single construction grammarian would deny that pragmatics plays an 173

important role in many (if perhaps not all) constructions. One indication of this 174

relative lack of interest may be found in the number of page references to the 175

keyword “pragmatics” in the recent handbook of Construction Grammar (Hoffmann 176

and Trousdale 2013): there are only twelve of them, while “semantic” has a hundred 177

page references, almost half of which span multiple pages. 178

Looking at the situation more positively, though, we have to acknowledge the 179

fact that there does exist some work in Construction Grammar that has focused on 180

various ‘pragmatic’ phenomena. Without attempting to define ‘pragmatic(s)’ here, 181

the following overview is meant to give an idea of how construction grammarians 182

have dealt with a range of topics that are widely agreed to come under the purview 183

of pragmatics, as is witnessed by their coverage in general textbooks on this 184

domain of linguistic study: Gricean maxims, information structure, speech acts 185

and discourse patterns. For other overviews, see Kay (2004), Nikiforidou (2009), 186

the introduction to the papers in Bergs and Diewald (2009), and Lee-Goldman 187

(2011). 188

8.2.1 Gricean Maxims in Construction Grammar 189

According to Grice (1975), speakers and hearers expect each other to behave 190

according to certain maxims of conversation. These maxims are stated in very 191

general terms (e.g. “Do not say what you believe to be false”, “Be relevant”, 192

etc.). On the face of it, Gricean conversational maxims could therefore easily 193

be considered to be an ‘add-on’ to grammar, something which is not part of 194

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120 B. Cappelle

constructional knowledge. Moreover, Grice (1975) himself pointed out that the 195

maxims are equally operative in non-linguistic as in linguistic situations. For 196

instance, obeying the Maxim of Relation means that if you are helping someone 197

in carrying out a task, your physical actions should be appropriate to the needs at 198

hand: “if I am mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handed : : : an 199

oven cloth (though this might be an appropriate contribution at a later stage)” (Grice 200

1975: 47). 201

While the maxims are not specifically linguistic in nature, there are conventional 202

expressions in language which are used to negotiate their competing demands, such 203

as giving enough information (Maxim of Quantity) and not saying anything you 204

can’t back up with adequate evidence (Maxim of Quality). One example is the 205

hedge Don’t take my word for it, but : : : . As far as I am aware, only two papers 206

taking a constructionist approach see Gricean pragmatics not as something which 207

interacts with the conventional meaning of a construction (see e.g. Salmon 2015) 208

but describe how a construction can actually contain information for speakers as 209

to which Gricean maxim is being attended to in which part of the construction. 210

The scarcity of this sort of papers is somewhat surprising, in view of the fact that 211

the article which is often considered to be a foundational one for Construction 212

Grammar – the article in Language on the let alone construction by Fillmore et al. 213

(1988) – deals rather explicitly with the distribution of Grice’s (1975) conversational 214

Maxims in this pattern. Consider the exchange in (2): 215216

(2) A: Can the baby crawl yet?B: It can’t even sit up yet, let alone crawl!

217

Given the context proposition in A’s question, the let alone sentence with which 218

B replies reconciles the Maxim of Quantity (by making her conversational contri- 219

bution as informative as is demanded by the exchange) and the Maxim of Relation 220

(by being relevant to the context proposition, which is specifically about the baby’s 221

ability to crawl). The maxims are obeyed in that order: first that of Quantity, then that 222

of Relation. That the first part is more informative is due a sequence of motoric skills 223

that babies generally go through and which B assumes to be common knowledge to 224

A. Since sitting up is acquired more easily and earlier than crawling, it naturally 225

follows that if this more basic skill hasn’t been acquired yet, then any skill that is 226

harder to acquire or comes later in the normal development of babies will not have 227

been acquired either. 228

There is another, less common use of let alone, which has long been overlooked 229

or unjustly rejected as erratic (Pullum 2013) but which Cappelle et al. (2015) argue 230

to be fully legitimate. An example of this alternative use is given in (3): 231

232

233

(3) “Where’s the father of your ten children?”Chelsea looked at me from over her book, “First, we don’t have ten children, let aloneone, and second, he’s outside smoking his life away.”1

234

1http://www.mibba.com/Stories/Read/147313/In-Your-Eyes-I-Lost-My-Place/1/, accessed 3October 2014.

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 121

Compared to the canonical let alone construction used in (2), we can see that in (3), 235

the order in which the maxims of Quantity and Relation are satisfied is reversed. 236

It is the first part of this let alone sentence (we don’t have ten children) that, by 237

denying the context proposition, satisfies the Maxim of Relation. And it is the clause 238

fragment in the second part (whose fully restored proposition is ‘we don’t have one 239

child’) that satisfies the Maxim of Quantity: in our day and age, nobody is surprised 240

to hear that someone does not have ten children, while there is comparatively much 241

more informative value to the statement that someone doesn’t have any children at 242

all. Pullum (2013) disapproves of an authentic example similar to (3) on the grounds 243

that the speaker seems to present the first proposition as semantically entailed by 244

the second proposition rather than vice versa, thereby getting the meaning of the 245

let alone construction all wrong. However, in this alternative use of the let alone 246

construction, the speaker is not at all concerned with making any logical argument. 247

For example, the relevant portion of (3) is different from (4), where the speaker 248

does make the point that if one doesn’t even have one child, it naturally follows one 249

doesn’t have ten children. 250251

(4) We don’t have ten children, fsince/as/given thatg we don’t have (even) one child. 252

So, what motivates the speaker to use the seemingly deviant use of the let alone 253

construction in (3)? Its function appears to be that of providing an afterthought in 254

which the speaker cancels a conversational implicature that could arise from the first 255

proposition. ‘We don’t have ten children’ allows the hearer to infer that the speaker 256

might still have fewer than ten children (i.e. 9, 8, or 7 etc. children). The speaker, 257

having uttered – or while uttering – the first part of the sentence, realizes this and 258

then hastens to add a clause fragment whose (restored) proposition pre-empts the 259

inference of an unwanted implicature in the mind of the hearer. The status of this 260

second utterance as an afterthought is clear from the fact that it is usually possible 261

to insert for that matter after let alone in such cases, as in Boyfriend? She’d never 262

had one, let alone, for that matter, wanted one.2 263

Both Fillmore et al. (1988) and Cappelle et al. (2015) treat the pragmatic 264

information of the construction as distinct from its semantic information. The 265

semantic information states that the second part of the construction, like the 266

first part, must be understood as conveying a full proposition and that these two 267

propositions are in a scalar relationship. The main semantic difference between 268

the two subtypes of the let alone construction is that the first part is the stronger 269

proposition in the canonical type but the weaker proposition in the afterthought 270

type, in terms of noteworthiness. The pragmatics of both the canonical let alone 271

construction and its illogical-seeming afterthought variant specifies the relative 272

degree of relevance and informativeness of the two parts, besides containing some 273

more detailed information that go beyond the mere satisfaction of Gricean maxims 274

in a certain order. This is illustrated here for the type used in (3) (cf. Cappelle et al. 275

2015): 276

2https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2556576/3/Just-a-Girl, accessed 10 October 2014.

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122 B. Cappelle

‘illogical’ Afterthought let alone Construction 277

Syntax: Xclause let alone Yclause fragment 278

Semantics: Xweaker proposition, and Ystronger proposition 279

Pragmatics: X is more relevant, Y is more informative 280

X could suffice on its own in the context, so it’s not necessary to 281

state Y 282

The speaker states Y to cancel a conversational implicature triggered 283

by X 284

The speaker portrays Y as not worthy of much attention 285

Note that this constructional representation has a tripartite structure, which doesn’t 286

correspond nicely with the popular conception of constructions as pairings of 287

form and meaning (or form and function). However, I find it useful to make a 288

distinction between lexical or propositional semantics, which in the canonical let 289

alone construction further specifies that the second proposition is semantically 290

entailed by the first, and pragmatic information, which encompasses those aspects 291

of a speaker’s knowledge of a linguistic expression that are treated as falling outside 292

the domain of lexical or propositional semantics. 293

Gricean pragmatics in the two let alone constructions discussed here amounts 294

largely to tailoring the sentence according to the demands of the Maxims of Relation 295

and Quantity, by simply obeying these maxims (rather than, for instance, flouting 296

them for special interpretational effects). In fact, this pragmatic aspect of the 297

constructions in essence instructs speakers to distribute old and new information 298

over sentence elements and in that respect is closely related to information structure, 299

a topic we will now turn to. 300

8.2.2 Information Structure in Construction Grammar 301

Quite some constructionist work is concerned with the information status of 302

sentence parts – whether they are topical, focal, presupposed, asserted, weakly or 303

more strongly activated, etc. Indeed, few construction grammarians would disagree 304

with Leino’s (2013: 329) assessment that “[i]nformation structure is without any 305

doubt the pragmatically oriented phenomenon or subject area that has received 306

the most attention in the context of Construction Grammar.” As an example of 307

an information structure construction, consider the Nominal Extraposition (NE) 308

construction discussed by Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996), illustrated in the second 309

sentence of (5): 310311

(5) Announcer: Hear what denture wearers all over America are saying.Denture wearer: It’s AMAZING the DIFFERENCE! [Fixodent commercial](Michaelis and Lambrecht 1996: 216)

312

This construction differs in a number of ways from the more mundane right- 313

dislocation pattern, in which only one element is accentuated: It’s AMAZING , the 314

difference. This latter utterance, but not the one in (5), could be used if the announcer 315

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 123

had said, “Hear what denture wearers all over America are saying about the 316

difference Fixodent has made in their lives”. Crucially, the NE construction has two 317

focal elements: not just the predicate but also the post-predicate NP is in focus. 318

This post-predicate NP refers to a discourse element which, while contextually 319

accessible, is not currently active. 320

Let us now take a look at the Post-Focal comme-N (PFCN) construction in 321

French, meanwhile relabelled as the Right-Detached comme-N (RDCN) construc- 322

tion (Lambrecht 1995, 2004), made use of in the child’s response in (6): 323324

(6) Baby-sitter: Je vais vous raconter une belle histoire, marrante.‘I’m going to tell you a beautiful story, a funny one.’(Starts telling story; child interrupts him.)

Child: C’est pas MARRANT, comme histoire.‘This isn’t a funny story.’

(Lambrecht 1995: 186)

325

The child’s utterance literally means ‘It isn’t funny as story’. The difference between 326

this literal and the freer translation in (6) makes it clear that there is something non- 327

compositional about this pattern: it cannot be strictly predicted from the meaning 328

of its parts that the comme-N phrase should be understood as forming part of 329

the predicate (‘isn’t a funny story’). This interpretation does not follow from the 330

meaning of comme-N outside of the specific grammatical environment c’est AdjP 331

comme N. That the pattern exists at all and has the form that it does is argued by 332

Lambrecht to be motivated by the need to disambiguate another pattern in French: 333

C’est pas une historie MARRANTE , which could either mean something like ‘What 334

one can say about this story is that it isn’t a funny one’ or ‘What one can say 335

about this is that it isn’t a funny story’. The Post-Focal comme-N construction is not 336

similarly ambiguous. In (6), it is perfectly clear to both the child and the babysitter 337

that a story is being told. In this respect, this construction is also very different 338

from the Nominal Extraposition in (6), where the extraposed NP does not denote 339

something presupposed in the discourse. 340

As with Leino’s (2013) earlier quote above, it would again be hard to find 341

anything unfair in his statement that “[i]n the context of and in relation to Construc- 342

tion Grammar, Information Structure has been most studied by Knud Lambrecht 343

[references omitted]” (Leino’s (2013: 329). An indispensable book-length construc- 344

tionist treatment of information structure is Lambrecht’s (1994) monograph, which 345

discusses crucial notions such as topic, focus, pragmatic presupposition, etc. as 346

they play out in particular sentence types. For Lambrecht, information structure 347

constitutes a third layer in the architecture of grammar, alongside (morpho)syntax 348

and semantics, so his work, like Fillmore et al. (1988), diverges from the now- 349

prevailing dichotomous conception of constructions. Lambrecht may be the most 350

important scholar to have looked into information-structural properties of construc- 351

tions, but he is not the only construction grammarian that can be mentioned in 352

connection with information structure. For instance, Goldberg (2000, 2004) shows 353

how the Deprofiled Object Construction allows patient arguments normally required 354

by the verb to be omissible when they have low discourse prominence and when the 355

action is emphasized (e.g. The singer always aimed to dazzle), an analysis to which 356

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124 B. Cappelle

Lemmens (2006) provides some refinements. Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) argue 357

that Ross’s (1967) ‘islands’ for extraction involve backgrounded information. Thus, 358

in (7), a light verb such as say or think presents the contents of its complement as 359

asserted, unlike a manner-of-speaking verb such as mumble or a factual verb such 360

as realize, whose complement provides backgrounded (presupposed) information: 361362

(7) Who did she fsay/think/??mumble/??realizeg that he saw __ ? 363

Kanetani (2009, 2012) discusses Metalinguistic Because Constructions, first noted 364

by Hirose (1992), which take an expression from the preceding context and justify 365

their use by the (current or original) speaker. The attested examples in (8) provide 366

an illustration: 367

368

369

(8) a. Cyber bullying in the Philippines is a growing threat. “Growing”, because internetpenetration rate is increasing and access is becoming easy. (GloWbE)

b. The battles over all this will, to some extent, dominate our politics henceforward.We got a glimpse of the nature of the fight over the debt ceiling in July, and the2012 election will pivot on it. I say “to some extent” because unexpected events,probably in the realm of foreign policy, will surely come along to complicate thepicture. (COCA)

370

These constructions come in two semantically equivalent types, one with and 371

another without an initial performative like I say (or sometimes They say) as an 372

‘activator’, the choice between these types arguably depending on how accessible 373

the speaker assumes the word or expression in question still is to the hearer: 374

note how in (8b), to some extent was used not in the previous sentence but in 375

the sentence before it. Deulofeu and Debaisieux (2009) deal with a somewhat 376

similar construction in spoken French, the Context Focussing Parce Que (‘because’) 377

Construction, which is syntactically not an adjunct and can be inserted at any place 378

in a host utterance. An example is provided in (9): 379

380

381

(9) le roi parce que le roi est très aimé en Thaïlande je crois que j’en ai parlé avant le roiest arrivé [ : : : ] : : : à leur faire comprendre que cette culture était très en dent de scie‘the king’cos the king is very much loved in Thailand – I think I have said thatbefore – the king succeeded in making them understand that this culture was veryuneven’ (Deulofeu and Debaisieux 2009: 44)

382

The pragmatic function of this construction is either to bring the requisite back- 383

ground knowledge into the common ground or to reframe the ground so that the 384

hearer can maximize uptake of information. 385

As a final example, consider the transitive Verb-Particle Construction, where 386

the choice between the ‘joined’ order (e.g. pick up the kids from school) and the 387

‘split’ order (e.g. pick the kids up from school) is influenced not only by lexical 388

and semantic preferences but by a variety of context-related ones, such as the 389

(discourse-)familiarity of the object NP, as discussed by e.g. Gries (2003) and 390

Cappelle (2009). Familiarity goes beyond what has been introduced in the discourse 391

or what the hearer is expected to know already; it also includes how ‘normal’ or 392

‘routine’ a situation is (cf. Bolinger 1971), which helps us understand why for 393

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 125

example websites on “how to pick up a girl” vastly outnumber those on “how to pick 394

a girl up”, something which the discourse-newness of the object NP alone might not 395

be able to explain. 396

For more general introductions to information structure in Construction Gram- 397

mar, I refer the reader to Leino (2013) and Hilpert (2014: Ch. 5). What I hope 398

the examples above have illustrated sufficiently is that there are constructions 399

that put constraints on the information status of its components. This makes 400

these constructions context-sensitive. Yet, the context-sensitivity of a construction 401

does not mean that its interpretation is necessarily variable and unpredictable. 402

On the contrary, since the constraints are constant, such a construction leads to 403

similar interpretations, whenever it is used, about what part of the construction is 404

represented as new, focal, backgrounded, etc. 405

8.2.3 Speech Acts in Construction Grammar 406

Lakoff (1987: 473ff) distinguishes a number of what he calls speech act con- 407

structions, including deictic there constructions, negative questions, inverted excla- 408

mations and wh-exclamations, and discusses their (in)compatibility with certain 409

subordinate clauses. For instance, the inverted exclamation Am I ever hungry! 410

indirectly conveys the statement ‘I’m hungry’ and is therefore permitted in so-called 411

performative subordinate clauses. Compare: 412413

(10) a. I’m gonna have breakfast now, because am I ever hungry!b. *I’m gonna have breakfast now, if am I ever hungry!

414

This contrastive pair is clear evidence that sentence-final because-clauses are 415

performative subordinate clauses – they are used to perform a speech act that by 416

convention conveys a statement and at the same time to provide this as a reason for 417

the main clause statement – while if -clauses are not. 418

An often-cited example of a special construction with a stable illocutionary force 419

is what Akmaijan (1984) refers to as the ‘Mad Magazine’ sentence type, after 420

the famous sentence What – Me worry? of Mad Magazine’s cover boy Alfred E. 421

Neumann. An illustration is given in (11): 422423

(11) Him write a thesis in neuroscience?! (Yeah, sure!) 424

This sentence type is also known as the ‘Incredulity Response Construction’. As 425

Lambrecht (1990) argues, it quotes the Subject and (part of) the Predicate of a 426

context sentence to express the speaker’s disbelief in its propositional content, or 427

at least to express the speaker’s evaluation of the juxtaposition of the Subject and 428

the Predicate as something quite incongruous (Szczesniak and Pachoł 2015). 429

Del Campo Martínez and Ruiz de Mendoza (2012) deal with diverse construc- 430

tional realizations of orders. For instance, using the interrogative construction Can 431

you XVP?, which is essentially a request construction, is one of several ways of 432

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126 B. Cappelle

issuing an order. Thus, an utterance like Can you shut up for a minute? will be 433

understood as an order by virtue of a social convention that stipulates that “[i]f it 434

is manifest to A that a particular state of affairs is not beneficial to B, and if A 435

has the capacity to change that state of affairs, then A should do so” (Del Campo 436

Martínez and Ruiz de Mendoza 2012: 16). A range of similar cultural principles 437

about social interaction make up the cost-benefit cognitive model, which capture 438

speakers’ very general knowledge that they are supposed to help each other if it is 439

at all within their power to do so. Del Campo Martínez’ (2013) study, mentioned at 440

the beginning of Sect. 8.2, relies on this high-level cognitive model of social norms 441

to account for conventionalized ways of realizing a wide range of speech acts: those 442

of ordering, requesting, advising, offering, promising, threatening, congratulating, 443

thanking, apologizing, pardoning, condoling and boasting. 444

Stefanowitsch (2003) analyses the Can-you-X Construction and the Would- 445

you-mind-X Construction. He introduces an Illocutionary force (If) parameter 446

(or ‘attribute’ in Construction Grammar parlance) in these indirect speech act 447

constructions. This parameter is filled with the conventionalized value of ‘request’ 448

but is left empty in the ‘direct’ constructions they inherit from, in which can means 449

‘be able to’ and would mind means nothing more than ‘object to’. We will come 450

back to this proposal in Sects. 8.3 and 8.4. 451

Cappelle (2003) discusses a construction with the particle dè in West-Flemish, 452

which, rather like the What’s X doing Y? construction we considered in the 453

introduction, can signal the speaker’s surprise at the situation expressed and requests 454

the hearer to provide some explanation for it (Haegeman 1993). Let’s consider the 455

utterance in (12): 456

457

458

(12) Ah, Maurice, zie j’hier ook dè? (On bumping into the hearer at a different placethan usual)ah, Maurice, are you here too Prt‘Why, Maurice, you’re here too!’

459

The West-Flemish sentence in (12) is interrogative in form but it is obvious that 460

its function is not to ask whether the hearer is really present – that much can be 461

seen directly. The expression of surprise is not conveyed by the dialogic discourse 462

particle dè as such. Rather, this particle is associated with different illocutionary 463

functions in different sentence types (closed interrogatives, wh-interrogatives with 464

rising vs. falling intonation, declaratives, imperatives, elliptic sentences). Thus, in 465

an utterance such as Oe noemt ie were dè? ‘What’s his name again Prt?’, there is no 466

surprise expressed at all. Instead, this wh-interrogative with falling intonation and 467

dè conventionally signals that the speaker has a lacuna in his memory and prompts 468

the hearer to help him search for the forgotten word, name, song, etc. The diverse 469

sentence types with dè have to be stored as distinct, if related, dè-constructions, 470

since their discursive properties cannot be predicted from any known properties of 471

the sentence types combined with any unitary functional description of dè. 472

Fried and Östman (2005) provide a description in much the same vein of some 473

dialogic particles in Solv and Czech. They argue that these particles require detailed 474

and systematic description in interactional terms, which Construction Grammar is 475

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 127

able to capture if it is enriched with a set of parameters – or ‘attributes’ – which 476

are to be filled with a wide range of pragmatic information – or ‘values’ (cf. also 477

Wide (2009) for a similar proposal). These pragmatic parameters include the type 478

of speech act (question, request, assertion, etc.), speaker information (male/female, 479

younger/older, etc.), specification of whether or not the particle, as used in a 480

particular sentence type, marks a shift of discourse topic, whether or not it expects 481

the hearer to give a more or less specific response, how formal or informal it is felt 482

to be, whether it conveys distance, deference or camaraderie, whether the speaker 483

is positively or negatively involved, and so on. For Fried and Östman (2005), the 484

notion of construction should thus be extended in a dialogic direction. Construction 485

Grammar (CxG) is then in line with one of the major approaches to spoken language, 486

namely Conversation Analysis (CA): “The fundamental feature shared between 487

CxG and CA is the fact that both approaches take all ‘chunks’ of language – large 488

and small, verbal and non-verbal – as equally deserving of description and analysis, 489

without assuming any a priori determined relative degree of theoretical significance 490

that a particular type of structure might have for our understanding of grammatical 491

knowledge” (Fried and Östman 2005: 1754–1755). 492

In Construction morphology (Booij 2010), some specific morphological con- 493

structions have been shown to have unexpected speech act meanings. Coussé and 494

Oosterhof (2012) discuss past participles in Dutch which have the same value 495

as an imperative (e.g. opgerot! ‘bugger off!’, ingerukt! ‘march off!’, opgepast 496

‘be careful!’, niet getreurd! ‘don’t be sad!’). Fortuin (2003) and Van Olmen 497

(2009, 2010), inter alia, discuss cases in which the Dutch infinitive, too, has 498

directive force (e.g. Even kijken ‘Let’s see’, Niet op het veld lopen! ‘Don’t run 499

on the pitch!’). Evaluative affixes can have a wide variety of often contradictory 500

expressive meanings (Jurafsky 1996). For instance, Fortin (2011) points out that 501

the Spanish (so-called) diminutive affix -it- may express deprecation (e.g. mujer- 502

cita ‘woman’Ccontempt) as well as appreciation (e.g. niñ-ito ‘boy’Caffection), 503

intensification as well as attenuation (e.g. ahor-ita now-DIM ‘immediately, right 504

now’ or ‘soon, in a little while’), and exactness (e.g. igual-ito ‘exactly the same’) as 505

well as approximation (e.g. mal-ito ‘kind of bad’) and that, when used in requests, 506

it has the pragmatic effect of illocutionary mitigation, lowering the degree of 507

imposition on the addressee (e.g. ¿Me harías un sangüich-ito, porfa? ‘Could you 508

rustle me up a quick sandwich, please?’). In Construction Grammar, evaluative 509

meanings of affixes and affixoids have recently been discussed by Booij and 510

Hüning (2014), Morris (2013), Norde and Morris (2014), Trousdale (2014) and Van 511

Goethem and Hiligsmann (2014). 512

From the above, it appears that there are quite a few constructions which do 513

not just indicate that the utterance is to be understood as a statement, a question, 514

a command, etc. but which also, or especially, betray the speaker’s heightened 515

emotional involvement in making the utterance. This expressive dimension (cf. 516

Potts 2007) has turned out to be vital for the description of a range of further 517

constructions, such as phrasal verbs (Hampe 2002, Cappelle 2005) and various 518

cases of so-called insubordination (illustrated by As if I would ever do that! or 519

Well, darling, that you of all people should say that! (L.P. Hartley)), which have 520

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128 B. Cappelle

recently been studied for a variety of languages (cf., inter alia, Boogaart 2015, 521

Brinton 2011, D’Hertefelt and Verstraete 2014, Kaltenböck 2006, Schwenter 1996, 522

2016, Van linden and Van de Velde 2014). 523

8.2.4 Discourse Patterns in Construction Grammar 524

Given what we have quoted in Sect. 8.2.3 about the link between Construction 525

Grammar and Conversation Analysis, it will not come as a surprise that some 526

linguists – most notably Jan-Ola Östman – have put forward the idea that larger 527

discourse patterns, exceeding the length of a single utterance, can be described as 528

conventional constructions (Östman 2005). Some of the very specific text types that 529

have thus been approached from a constructionist point of view are news reports 530

(Östman 1999), postcards (Östman 2000), and football chants (Hoffmann and Bergs 531

2012). Bergs (2008) suggests that text types and genres can be integrated in a 532

structured inventory of interlinked constructions, known in Construction Grammar 533

as the ‘constructicon’: 534

Text types such as letters, postcards, faxes, telegrams, emails, and short messages are 535

related and connected in some specific ways, and so are novels, short stories, and other 536

literary genres and subgenres. Also, some genre-constructions actually comprise a number 537

of subconstructions. Newspapers, complex and fairly schematic, are organized and layouted 538

in very specific ways; they include the editorial, the sports sections, finance etc., i.e. less 539

complex but still quite schematic subparts. In Aristotelian drama there are three different 540

main parts or, according to Freytag, five different parts; the Shakespearean sonnet comprises 541

fourteen lines and balances quatrains and tercets (or quatrains and the final couplet); stories 542

of adventure have recurring episodes constructed according to basic narrative structures. 543

All these elements need to come together in order to result in the complex construction of 544

a certain text. A novel without a title would be awkward, and so would a recipe without 545

ingredients; a sonnet with fifteen lines would strike readers as remarkable, and so should a 546

newspaper without headlines. (Bergs 2008: 274) 547

While proposals to accommodate such genre-level or text-type constructions in a 548

Construction Grammar framework are still sketchy, the potential is there and the 549

idea is definitely worth further exploring. 550

8.2.5 Interim and Transition 551

The impression one may get from the above brief survey is that in Construction 552

Grammar research, we find a rich diversity of pragmatic phenomena that have been 553

incorporated in the description and representation of constructions. Among these 554

pragmatic aspects of constructions, we have discussed obedience of constructions’ 555

parts to Gricean maxims, (other) information-structural properties, knowledge 556

about constructions’ illocutionary force and about their function in interaction and 557

knowledge of how constructions fit into larger discourse patterns – or, conversely, 558

of how such larger discourse patterns, viewed as constructions, can be broken 559

8.2.5 Interim and Transition

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 129

down into smaller constructions. We have not even discussed broad cross-cultural 560

differences, but these too could in principle be given their place within an enlarged 561

constructicon. As Yukio Hirose (p.c.) sees it: 562

I understand some linguists like Hans Boas speak of “Contrastive Construction Grammar” 563

[cf. Boas 2010 – B.C.]. If Contrastive Construction Grammar is a meaningful endeavor, as I 564

believe it is, then it should incorporate the general differences (whether typological or not) 565

between languages, because particular languages such as Japanese and English have their 566

own default preferences in construal and the mode of expression, which are expected to be 567

inherited directly or indirectly by particular constructions in those languages. This way of 568

thinking, I believe, is in keeping with the spirit of Construction Grammar. 569

While there is no shortage of studies of specific pragmatic phenomena – although, 570

of course, the more the better – my feeling is that there is an urgent need for some 571

more theoretical reflection about what kind of pragmatic information should and 572

should not be included in constructions and how, if at all, pragmatics differs from 573

semantics. I will address these issues in the remainder of this chapter. 574

8.3 Storage vs. Online Computation 575

Let’s consider the following fundamental question formulated by Jackendoff 576

(2002): 577

What aspects of an utterance must be stored in long-term memory, and what aspects can be 578

constructed online in working memory? (Jackendoff 2002: 152, emphases in original) 579

I will not go into the reasons why Jackendoff asks this question, repeated in 580

Jackendoff (2010: 226), or into the way he elaborates on it. I merely cite it here 581

because it seems to me to lie at the heart of Croft’s (1998) continuum of possible 582

mental representations of lexical or grammatical knowledge, simplified in Fig. 8.1. 583

At the extreme left of the cline, we find the independent entries model, where 584

two formally identical items (or one item and another formally related one) are 585

stored – or entrenched – in the mind as distinct form/meaning pairings. The 586

mind has routinized the link between these forms and their respective meanings. 587

separate storage of

individual form-

use pairings:

[a/U1] and [a/U2]

(or [ab/U2])

storage of just the most

general meaning of forms

but not of their derivable

uses: [a/U] (and [b/W])

but not (a/U1) and (a/U2)

(or (ab/U2))

Fig. 8.1 A cline of possible mental representations of form a with two senses U1 and U2 (or ofform a on its own with sense U1 and of form combination ab with sense U2, where b on its ownhas meaning W); mentally stored items are represented between square brackets

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130 B. Cappelle

Consequently, language users do not need to work out what uses these forms could 588

possibly have (although in the case of, for example, bank1 ‘financial institution’ and 589

bank2 ‘slope of land along a river’, the hearer will still have to decide which of the 590

stored meanings has to be retrieved from the lexicon in a particular usage situation 591

such as Let’s meet at the bank). At the opposite end of the cline, to the extreme 592

right, the model of representation can be called the pragmatic model, but I prefer the 593

alternative term that Croft (1998) suggests, namely discourse model, as it stresses 594

the importance of context-sensitive interpretations of words as used in particular 595

discourse environments. Here, only one general meaning of a word or expression 596

is stored. The more specific uses of this form (on its own or in combination with 597

another form) are not similarly entrenched; instead, language users compute these 598

uses with the aid of general (language-independent) cognitive principles applied to 599

ever-changing contexts of use. 600

We might think that the availability of such ‘pragmatic’ rules, in the sense of 601

general principles of common-sense reasoning and problem-solving, spells nothing 602

good for the constructional status of an expression, that is, for its status as a stored 603

unit. After all, why would we have to store an expression in the lexicon if its correct 604

interpretation may be obvious even to a hearer who didn’t know the expression (and 605

if, likewise, coming up with this expression to convey that interpretation could be 606

an obvious choice for a speaker who didn’t already have that expression stored in 607

the mind)? Yet, storage may still be a possible scenario in that case. Croft points 608

out that while we can use purely linguistic – by which is meant introspective – 609

knowledge to exclude one or more general models on the continuum (i.e., models 610

towards the right in Fig. 8.1), we can’t rely on such knowledge to exclude the more 611

specific models (i.e., the ones towards the left). On the one hand, it’s clear that 612

form-use units must be stored if more general representation models are excluded 613

on the basis of introspective evidence for these units’ irregularity and idiosyncrasy: 614

if there’s no rule by which they can be interpreted, their meaning will have to be 615

learned as such (or, from the perspective of the speaker, choosing a form to convey 616

that interpretation will also have to be part of explicit language knowledge). But 617

on the other hand, it should also be clear that just because there is introspective 618

evidence for regularity or generality of a form-use pairing, this doesn’t mean that 619

it is always (or ever) constructed by applying this rule. So, form-use units which 620

fit a rule can of course be generated by this rule, but they don’t have to and in fact 621

may not be. This explains why Jackendoff (2002: 152) uses the qualifications must 622

and can in the question above: Which parts must be stored and which parts can 623

in principle be constructed on the fly even though they may not be? As Langacker 624

(1987) convincingly argues, it would be erroneous to assume that an expression that 625

is grammatically well-behaved cannot, ipso facto, be stored as a fully memorized 626

entity. This mistaken assumption – that expressions either follow rules or have to be 627

listed as exceptions to the rule-system – is known as the ‘rule-list fallacy’. One of 628

the things that psycholinguistics has taught us is that entities that are very frequent 629

in use are likely to be stored as such, regardless of whether or not they are fully 630

regular. 631

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 131

To summarize, by using purely linguistic methods of analysis, we can prove that 632

an item is ill-behaved (i.e., non-compositional) and so must be locked up, so to 633

speak, in the constructicon; but we cannot prove with purely linguistic methods 634

that a well-behaved (i.e., compositional) item is not stored as an entry in the 635

constructicon. 636

8.3.1 Excluding the Discourse Model of Mental 637

Representation: An Example 638

So, what can we do as ‘ordinary’ linguists, without having to become psy- 639

cholinguists or neurolinguists? As Croft (1998) demonstrates, for any form-use 640

association, we can exclude the extreme discourse model as soon as we find that this 641

association is less than fully predictable. Remember that in this model the form-use 642

pair is pragmatically derived and is not stored in the mind. Obviously, if the form is 643

somehow irregular or if the interpretation is not fully compositional, the item needs 644

to be learned as part of the conventions of the language. Croft (1998) proposes 645

a fairly straightforward means of excluding the discourse model for any given 646

form-use pair. The linguist needs to check whether the translation equivalent in 647

another language is formally equivalent (taking into account non-pertinent structural 648

differences as well as trivial lexical differences). If there is no formal equivalence, 649

then the use of that supposedly pragmatically derived unit must be considered to be 650

stored as such in the first language, rather than being computed on-line. 651

Looking at translation equivalents for the purpose of excluding (or substantiat- 652

ing) the discourse model is a procedure which Lee-Goldman (2011) also considers 653

an indispensable one: 654

Cross-linguistic examination is crucial for [the] study of the grammar-context interface. 655

It is possible to argue purely within English that This is Kim [as used to identify oneself 656

on the phone – B.C.] instantiates a special construction, but there is always the question: 657

could its use not simply be a matter of non-linguistic reasoning and inference, such as 658

from Gricean maxims? Cross-linguistic comparison can defeat (or support) this objection: if 659

another language has similar linguistic parts at its disposal but nonetheless cannot combine 660

them in the same way, with the same interpretation or function, then it is doubtful that 661

inference alone will account for the data. (Lee-Goldman 2011: 8–9) 662

Let’s apply this to water tower, a case discussed by Croft (1998: 158–159). This 663

word is a noun-noun compound which essentially refers, as its name suggests, to a 664

tower containing water. Surely this form needn’t be stored, for what else could such 665

a thing be called? The thing is, however, that such a structure is referred to in French 666

as a château d’eau ‘water castle’ and not as a tour d’eau ‘water tower’. Note, by the 667

way, that English [nouna nounb] compounds correspond with French structures of 668

the form [nounb de nouna], but this basic difference is ignored in checking formal 669

equivalence. Given the lack of formal equivalence, Croft (1998: 159) concludes: 670

“This cross-linguistic difference is strong evidence that the pragmatic model is not 671

appropriate for the derivation of this particular noun compound; otherwise speakers 672

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132 B. Cappelle

of both languages would come to the same solution to the naming of this object”. 673

Critics might object that calling this object a water castle, as the French apparently 674

do (but then in French of course), is a rather marked choice in that language and 675

therefore needn’t force us to conclude that the compound water tower in English is 676

not a fully transparent combination that could be constructed online. Or they might 677

object that even for speakers of French, calling that object water castle is the most 678

natural choice given the abundance of castles in their non-linguistic environment and 679

given the physical similarity of the earliest water towers to castle towers. But then 680

again, when the first water towers appeared in the UK and the US, many of these 681

exemplified the then-popular Gothic revival architecture no less than in France. In 682

other words, a water tower could also have been called water castle in English (or 683

perhaps water fortress or water keep). Other imaginable alternatives could have been 684

water house (by analogy of light house), water storage tower, water supply tower, 685

hydrotower, water building, water pillar, water silo, water tank tower, cistern tower, 686

at least some of these terms being literal translations of terms for this structure in 687

other languages (e.g. in Japanese). In fact, an alternative that is actually used is 688

standpipe. In short, alternative encodings in other languages – or in (older stages 689

of) the same language – may help us realize that a complex expression which seems 690

transparently compositional is not the only obvious choice (as a standard encoding 691

option) and thus may have to be listed as a learned language item. We can make a 692

further claim here: once a combination is conventionalized, it is no longer assembled 693

from scratch each time it is used, nor is it decoded inferentially each time the hearer 694

comes across it. What I mean, to put things more simply, is that a native speaker will 695

not ask, “What should I call this tower-like thing used to get pressure on water”?” 696

and then say, “Hmm, I guess I’ll call it a water tower.” And a hearer competent in 697

English will not ask, “Water tower? What does that mean?” before concluding that 698

it definitely can’t be a tower made of water, so that it must be a tower containing 699

water. 700

The example given here may raise many questions. As I have already hinted 701

at, a main concern is how we can maintain that the existence of a formally non- 702

equivalent translation (e.g. château d’eau in French) is proof that the expression 703

under discussion (water tower in English) is non-compositional, while it may be 704

actually the translation that is non-compositional. After all, a château d’eau is 705

certainly not a castle, while a water tower is definitely a tower. To decide this 706

issue, we could perhaps look at several other languages. Thus, we might find that 707

Dutch and German have watertoren and Wasserturm, respectively, which literally 708

also mean water tower. However, does this then mean that water tower in English is 709

compositional after all? Not necessarily, as several languages might have stumbled 710

upon the same not-fully-compositional naming solution for an object – or have 711

borrowed this solution from each other. In any case, the procedure of looking at 712

another language and finding something rather different there can helpfully alert 713

us to the possibility (without this being a certainty) that the expression in the first 714

language is less obvious than meets the eye. 715

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 133

8.3.2 Excessive Resultatives (Talk One’s Head Off, Sing One’s 716

Heart Out, Cry One’s Eyes Out, etc.) 717

We can apply the cross-linguistic method just demonstrated to more productive 718

patterns as well. Let us take the Body Part Off /Out Construction (BPOC) (e.g. 719

Jackendoff 2002: 173–74; Glasbey 2003; Mateu and Espinal 2007; Espinal and 720

Mateu 2010; Kudo 2011). In Kudo’s (2011) original description of this pattern (later 721

on revised in his PhD thesis), a discourse model of representation was proposed for 722

instances of this pattern. The reason seemed straightforward. Suppose we hear the 723

utterance Jane cried her eyes out, then, according to Kudo (2011), we first process 724

the literal interpretation. We then realize that, obviously, nobody literally causes his 725

eyes to pop out of his head as a result of crying, so we finally infer that the utterance 726

must be understood as a hyperbole. Cappelle (2014) rejects this pragmatic model 727

of mental representation, using the diagnostic shown for water tower above. Let’s 728

consider the steps in the reasoning. 729

First, it can be observed Dutch, which has property and path resultatives much 730

like English does, lacks a perfect equivalent of the BPOC. That is to say, the closest 731

expression is one with a full PP, whose word-by-word translation in English would 732

sound like cry one’s eyes out of one’s head; sing one’s lungs out of one’s body, run 733

one’s legs off of one’s body, etc. Yet, what is even more common in Dutch is an 734

excessively used (reflexive) ditransitive, where the Theme argument often denotes a 735

case of physical damage or deformation, which in English would sound like laugh 736

oneself a fracture, sweat oneself an accident, search oneself a hunch, or where the 737

Theme argument is a nasty disease, usually one that is no longer common but still 738

lives on in public memory, translating as work oneself the pleurisy, startle oneself 739

the typhus, bore oneself the plague, or occasionally involves an imaginary disease 740

that only occurs in this kind of intensifying language use, as in zich het apelazerus 741

werken (lit. ‘work oneself the monkey leprosy’). For an overview of Themes used in 742

this pattern, see Morris (2014). 743

Second, given this formal non-equivalence, we cannot just assume that the BPOC 744

in English constitutes a set of expressions that are simply to be expected in the 745

language. Even if their interpretation may pose no problem, the speaker still has to 746

learn that in English one says run one’s legs off and not run one’s legs off of one’s 747

body or run oneself the pleurisy. Again, we see that more is stored in a language 748

than one might at first sight assume. Even though the form of an expression such 749

as cry one’s eyes out and its interpretation could in principle arise from processes 750

involving implicature/inferencing, cross-linguistic evidence casts doubt on whether 751

this is actually the case. In fact, the cross-linguistic test applied here forces us to 752

abandon the computational model of representation. 753

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134 B. Cappelle

8.3.3 Can You X? 754

Among the most widely used examples of indirect speech acts (ISAs) in the 755

literature, we certainly find Can you X?, as in Can you pass the salt? or Can 756

you close the door? By itself, that is, out of context, this latter sentence could 757

mean two things: (i) ‘Are you able to close the door?’ and (ii) ‘(I request that 758

you) close the door’. Thus, it could be either a question, when it is uttered as a 759

direct speech act, or a request, when uttered as an indirect one. As we saw above in 760

Sect. 8.2.3, Stefanowitsch (2003) treats Can/Could you X?, used to express requests, 761

as a separate construction, a stored unit: 762

[T]he ISA has construction status in spite of the theoretical possibility to derive its 763

meaning from the request scenario on-line (as must in fact be done in the case of non- 764

conventionalized ISAs). (Stefanowitsch 2003: 117) 765

So, why exactly is Can you X? a construction? Can’t the request meaning be worked 766

out via Gricean principles? The answer, according to Stefanowitsch (2003), lies in 767

the observation that some of its formal aspects are unpredictable. We can apply a 768

language-internal diagnostic similar to the cross-linguistic formal non-equivalence 769

test illustrated above for water tower and for the Body-Part Off /Out Construction. 770

In this case, what we can do is compare Can you X? with one or more semantically 771

equivalent expressions in the same language, and check whether these expressions 772

have similar or different formal properties. Can you close the door? (D13a) has 773

as some of its close alternatives (13b) and (13c), at least when it is intended as a 774

request: 775776

777

(13) a. Can you close the door?b. Are you able to close the door? (semantically close to (13a) in meaning (ii)

above)c. Is it possible (for you) to close the door? (idem)

778

Now, as had been noted by Sadock (1974: 90), only (13a) but not (13b-c) allows 779

sentence-internal addition of the illocutionary force indicating device please: 780781

(14) a. Can you please close the door?b. *Are you able to please close the door?c. *Is it possible (for you) to please close the door?

782

So, in its request meaning, (13a) apparently resembles a direct request such as 783

Close the door, please, while (13b) and (13c), though equivalent to (13a) in one 784

of its meanings, resemble non-conventionalized indirect speech acts, which do 785

not license the insertion of please either (e.g. *It’s cold in here, please). It is an 786

unpredictable fact of Can you X? that, unlike its close equivalents, it supports the 787

pre-verbal addition of please. This fact requires storage of this form together with its 788

illocutionary force, which allows it to be directly interpreted as a request, so that we 789

‘know’ it can have please, since this is the case with structures directly associated 790

with the illocutionary force of request. 791

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 135

We have to be careful in how we formulate our line of argumentation. It’s not the 792

case that (13b) and (13c) cannot be used as indirect speech acts for making requests, 793

as Sadock (1974: 78, 90) claims. This is clear from example (15a) given by Brown 794

and Levinson (1987: 139), for which there is ample evidence in actual language use, 795

and a corpus-attested example such as (15b) provided by Leech (2014: 306): 796

797

798

(15) a. Are you by any chance able to post this letter for me? (Brown and Levinson1987: 139)

b. Is it possible to lay the table, do you think, for me? (Leech 2014: 306)799

In other words, what we find is not that Can you X? has an unpredictable semantic 800

property, but rather that it has an unpredictable formal property (viz., pre-verbal 801

insertability of please). Either of these unpredictable properties suffices to grant a 802

sequence construction status. 803

8.3.4 On So-Called ‘Pragmaticalization’ and ‘Short-Circuited 804

Implicatures’ 805

For Leech (2014), the likely reason why cases like (14b) (and, similarly, (14c)) are 806

not found in corpora is this: 807

Are you able : : : ? is not sufficiently “routinized” or pragmaticalized [ : : : ] as a directive 808

formula in English to be able to co-occur with the overt directive pragmatic marker please. 809

(Leech 2014: 305–306; italics in original; cross-reference omitted from the citation – B.C.). 810

The term pragmaticalization was first introduced by Erman and Kotsinas (1993); 811

see also, inter alia, Aijmer (1997), Claridge and Arnovick (2010), Diewald (2011), 812

and Lauwers et al. (2012). 813

Note that pragmaticalization as a term may be confusing. It certainly does not 814

mean ‘development whereby more room is given to language-independent processes 815

of inferential reasoning’. On the contrary, it refers to the conventionalization of 816

what was once a pragmatic interpretation, where I use pragmatic in the sense of 817

‘going beyond the literal, coded meaning’. This is why we can speak of an actual 818

construction in the case of Can you X?. We are dealing here with a form-function 819

pairing stored in the mind. The form no longer has to be constructed by the speaker – 820

nor does the intended meaning have to be calculated by the hearer – online. The 821

form-function association is ready-made. 822

A related concept in this context is that of a “short-circuited implicature”, coined 823

by Morgan (1977: 23), that is, an implicature which the hearer arrives at directly, 824

without having to calculate it. Morgan (1977: 23 ff.) provides many telling examples 825

of fixed and clichéd expressions, all of which have an implicature that is somehow 826

conventionalized. Here is one example discussed by him: 827

There are many cases that involve implicature, but as a matter of convention, so that the 828

implicature is short-circuited. For example, (16) is commonly used to convey something 829

like (17). 830

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PROOF

136 B. Cappelle

(16) If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.(17) They’re all alike, so it’s a waste of time to examine them separately.

831

It is intuitively clear that (17) could be reasoned out as an implicature of (16); but it is 832

now conventional to use (16) to convey (17). Although one has in mind the literal meaning 833

of (16) in using it to convey (17), the form of the expression is strictly part of the convention. 834

Sentences having precisely the same literal meaning but even slightly different form do not 835

convey (17) with the same immediacy. If one manages to convey (17) by saying (18) or 836

(19), it will be as a fresh implicature, without the short-circuiting that accompanies the 837

conventional form (16). 838

839

(18) If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen all of them.(19) You’ve seen them all if you’ve seen one.” (Morgan 1977: 26; original numbering of

examples adapted to fit the present text)840

Morgan discusses many similar cases, some of which are given in (20): 841

842

843

(20) a. You can say that again. (cp. You can repeat that.)b. How many times have I told you : : : (cp. Tell me how many times I’ve told

you : : : )c. It takes one to know one. (cp. It requires one to recognize one.)d. [Policeman to motorist] Where’s the fire?e. [Spouse to spouse] I’ve got a headache.f. Your place or mine?g. Are you crazy?/Have you lost your mind?/Are you out of your gourd?h. Is the Pope Catholic? [as an answer to an obvious question] (Morgan 1977: 27 ff.)

844

Language is full of such clichéd sentences. The interesting thing about them is that 845

they are not quite idioms, since they still have a literal meaning which could in 846

principle function as the basis for an inferential process. This inference, however, 847

has come to be by-passed and the erstwhile indirect reading is now a direct one. 848

All of these sentences instantiate constructions with pre-installed pragmatics. In the 849

next section, we will address the question whether we can give both pragmatics and 850

semantics a place in constructions without having to reduce either of them to the 851

other. 852

8.4 Semantics and Pragmatics 853

8.4.1 More on Can You X? 854

In discussing Can you X?, Morgan (1977) writes: 855

the request nature of the speech act is conveyed without the sort of indirect feeling we 856

attribute to the presence of inference; the literal meaning is in some way latent, rather than 857

the basis for an inference. (Morgan 1977:23) 858

Observe that the literal meaning is considered by Morgan to be part of the pattern, 859

although it is present only in the background. This does not seem to be the 860

case in Stefanowitsch’s (2003) constructional representation, shown below. Let us 861

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PROOF

8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 137

Sem BE-ABLE < >

Syn can SUBJ VPinf

IFor { }

IMy: Ability for

Action

Sem < agt act >

Syn can/could SUBJ2p VPinf

IFor request

Fig. 8.2 The Can you X? construction (Stefanowitsch 2003: 116)

first explain the assumptions behind this visualization. In (Cognitive) Construction 862

Grammar, constructions that share formal and functional aspects are linked to each 863

other in a (default) inheritance hierarchy (for details, see Goldberg 1995: Chapter 3). 864

Higher-level, schematic constructions pass on their properties to lower-level, more 865

concrete constructions, whose own specific properties may however block this 866

inheritance. In Fig. 8.2, the Can you X? construction, represented by the box at the 867

bottom, is linked to the more general Can construction expressing ability, shown 868

at the top, by a metonymy inheritance link (IMy): rather than making a request 869

directly, the Can you X? construction asks something that is closely associated with 870

requesting, namely whether the hearer is able to perform the requested action. This 871

inherent aspect of the request scenario is of course reminiscent of one of Searle’s 872

(1969) proposed felicity conditions on requesting. 873

In the Can you X? construction, unlike in the more general can construction, 874

the (IFor) parameter is filled in with the value ‘request’ but the Semantics (Sem) 875

parameter is left almost empty. While the semantics of the Can you X? construction 876

stipulates that there should be a thematic role of Agent present which is to 877

be expressed syntactically by the second person Subject argument and that the 878

complement of the modal should be an action, the modal verb itself does not carry 879

any semantic value. But even if the semantics of the modal verb is left empty 880

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PROOF

138 B. Cappelle

in this indirect speech act construction, the hearer might still involuntarily think 881

about ability via the construction’s link with the more general modal construction. 882

Nevertheless, Stefanowitsch adds between brackets: 883

I will leave open the question whether can is actually completely empty, or whether it retains 884

a weak trace of its meaning (Stefanowitsch 2003: 117) 885

In other words, the Can-you-X? construction contains pragmatic information 886

directly and semantic information either indirectly or in some strongly ‘diluted’ 887

form. 888

8.4.2 Short-Circuited Interpretation 889

Kay (2004) calls cases like Can you X? and the examples in (20) “strictly 890

interpretational constructions”, that is, constructions which “remain exclusively 891

interpretational, lacking idiosyncratic peculiarities of morphosyntax” (Kay 2004: 892

695).3 Cappelle and Depraetere (2014, 2016a) discuss a few further cases of these 893

interpretational constructions, still involving can (or could). I have listed them 894

in (21). Their conventionalized interpretation is revealed by the fact that it is 895

deliberately or otherwise ignored by the speaker, thus yielding a very marked, 896

and hence humoristic, use. The examples all come from various episodes of the 897

animation series The Simpsons. The relevant expressions are in italics. 898

899

900

(21) a. Lisa: I guess that’s it; these animals are all gonna die.Homer: Not if I can help it, Lisa.Lisa: Do you have an idea?Homer: Uh, no – sorry if it sounded like I did.

b. [context: Homer complains to Marge about his classmates bullying him when hewas a kid : : : ]Marge: Kids can be so cruel.Bart: We can? Thanks, Mom! [starts hitting Lisa]

c. Homer: Come on, boy. Let’s get me a six-pack.Man: Uh, sir, you can’t operate a boat under the influence of alcohol.Homer: That sounds like a wager to me!

d. Homer: Ladies and gentlemen, if I could just say a few words : : : I’d be a betterpublic speaker.

e. Marge [to Homer]: How’s your back, Homey?Homer: I can’t complain.[he then indicates a sign which reads: “No Complaining”]

901

3We pointed out above that morphosyntactically unpredictable properties do occur in the case ofCan you X?, namely the possible pre-verbal position that this construction shares with other directrequests. However, this element is not always present, and when it’s not, a Can you X? sentencelooks like any ordinary question.

, namely the possible pre-verbal position that this construction shares with other direct

UNCORRECTED

PROOF

8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 139

f. Ned: Aw, gee, the man’s just trying to show his wife he cares for her. How can

we sabotage his labor of love?Homer: I dunno. Gasoline, acid, I got some stuff in the trunk.4

902

While in the general construction shown at the top of Fig. 8.2, can is specified as 903

having the meaning ‘BE-ABLE’, this modal can have a small set of basic meanings, 904

including not just ability but also permission, opportunity, and the like (Depraetere 905

and Reed 2011; Depraetere 2014). Not all of the clichéd expressions in (21) actually 906

have a short-circuited implicature. In some cases, all we can say about them is that 907

they come with a preselected choice for what the meaning of can is. And in some 908

cases, there is both a short-circuited semantic disambiguation and a short-circuited 909

implicature on top of that. For this reason, Cappelle and Depraetere (2014) extend 910

Morgan’s notion of short-circuited implicature to short-circuited interpretation, 911

which may hold at the level of semantics and at the level of pragmatics alike. 912

Thus, in (21a), Homer’s utterance uses what we could call the Not if I can 913

help it Construction, which specifies that can has as its meaning ‘HAVE-THE- 914

OPPORTUNITY’ and which moreover has the in-built implicature ‘I’ll prevent 915

this from happening’. The opportunity meaning doesn’t have to be bleached or 916

backgrounded at all by this pragmatic specification; they can sit comfortably 917

alongside each other. The semantic and pragmatic properties are present at the same 918

time in the interpretation of the whole (‘This won’t happen if I have the opportunity 919

to prevent it, and rest assured, I will take that opportunity’). Note also that the 920

form of this construction is rather fixed. While there are related, and similarly 921

conventional items (e.g. Not if I have anything to say about it), we cannot reverse 922

the order of the main clause fragment and the if -clause (*If I can help it, (then) not) 923

and a fuller version like This won’t happen if I can help it does not have the same 924

usage frequency and certainly does not feel like a stored item the way Not if I can 925

help it does. 926

The italicised expression in (21b) has a few hundred thousands of hits on Google. 927

There’s no doubt that adult speakers of English have heard this sequence several 928

times in their lifetime. One might be disinclined to call this a construction, since 929

4A similar example occurs in an episode of the British sitcom Not Going Out:

(i) Lee Anyway, er, it got me thinking. Why don’t we inviteyou two guys round for dinner?

Toby [posh upstairs neighbour,reluctant to accept]

Oh : : : That’s very kind.

Lee Great. Well, I will see you tonight at seven o’clock.Toby It’s very short notice to arrange a sitter.Lee Well, I’ll let you bring the baby round, eh? The more,

the merrier.Toby Right.Lee So how can you refuse?

Toby I’m not sure, give me a minute.

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140 B. Cappelle

there is nothing very special about its form or interpretation. But note that an 930

existential reading (‘There are (many) kids which are cruel’ and/or ‘There are 931

(many) times at which kids are cruel’), which is merely compatible with the 932

meaning ‘GENERAL SITUATION POSSIBILITY’ (Depraetere and Reed 2011), 933

is an integral aspect of the standard interpretation of this sentence. Of course, Bart’s 934

elliptic reply We can? is cleverly used as a ‘hinge’, as it can innocuously refer back 935

to Marge’s utterance while at the same time functioning as if it is a standard indirect 936

speech act to express one’s exhilaration about being given permission for an action. 937

Why should we speak of a construction in (21c), the last example of this set that 938

we will look at in more detail here? This is not so easy to motivate, but to begin 939

with, the Uh, fVocative/Interjection(�like) expressiong part is a conventional way 940

to introduce something unpleasant for the hearer. While this does not necessarily 941

set the semantic value for the negated modal in the following part (you can’t X) 942

as ‘BE-PROHIBITED’, we might wonder whether Homer’s reply would sound 943

as ridiculous if this interpretation wasn’t short-circuited. Sure enough, Homer’s 944

next utterance only sounds funny because the prohibition interpretation is ignored 945

in favour of an ability reading of the sentence with can. It is unlikely that the 946

obviousness of a prohibition interpretation is purely the result of a pragmatic 947

inference process happening in context. Speakers may have heard similar cases and 948

have stored the relevant overlapping portion so that the interpretation becomes semi- 949

automatic. Web-attested examples include Uh, sir, you can’t park here, Uh, miss, 950

you can’t get on the bus with that umbrella open like that, Uh, hey, you can’t ask me 951

about my religious beliefs and Uh, excuse me, you can’t actually do that. 952

For more detailed overviews of how modality can be studied in Construction 953

Grammar, see Boogaart and Fortuin (2016), as well as the articles in Cappelle and 954

Depraetere (2016b). 955

8.4.3 Further Pragmatic Associations 956

Schmid (2014) suggests that I love you (as opposed to, say, She loved him or I 957

like soccer) is a “quasi-fixed lexico-grammatical unit” (p. 239), in other words, a 958

conventional expression stored as a construction, which activates “associations to 959

typical users (lovers, fiction writers, figures in movies), typical situations (romantic 960

moments), typical communicative intentions (assurance of deep affection)” (pp. 961

240–241). Schmid further argues that such pragmatic associations might even play 962

a role in the “chunking and freezing” (p. 241) of constructions, both relatively open 963

lexical bundles, such as I don’t know C wh-element, whereby “S informs H about 964

S’s lack of knowledge” (pp. 271–272) and complete sequences such as yes we 965

can, which as a special catchphrase has become part of the speech community’s 966

collective mind since Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. 967

The more people are familiar with an original formula, the more successfully 968

such a sequence can be used for deliberate modifications. For instance, yes we 969

can has spawned, even outside the community of native speakers of English, such 970

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 141

intentional variations as Yes, we can’t and No you can’t (Schmid 2014: 250, fn. 14), 971

as well as Yes We Candy!, Yes We CandlesTM , Yes We Carve! [Obama pumpkins], 972

Yes Wii Can, Yes We Can-Can Club, Yes we McCann, Yes We Cannes, Yes We 973

Canada, Yes We Canberra!, Yes We Cam’ [DCameron], Yes we Cat! [DCatalonia], 974

Yes We Con!, Yes we Khan, Yes We Plan, and so on, and so forth. Some linguists 975

have come to use the term ‘snowclone’ to refer to any “multi-use, customizable, 976

instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can 977

be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and 978

writers Pullum (2004).” The term is coined with specific reference to the rhetorical 979

trope If Eskimos have N [Dany number] words for snow, X surely have M words for 980

Y, based on the misguided cliché that Eskimos have innumerable distinct words for 981

snow (cf. Pullum 1991 for a debunking of this myth).5 982

Rasulic (2010) provides a Construction Grammar account of this sort of phe- 983

nomenon, discussing variations of aphoristic sequences such as once bitten, twice 984

shy and easy come, easy go, as well as changes of popular quotes such as And now 985

for something completely different (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and Frankly my 986

dear, I don’t give a damn, spoken by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind and voted 987

by a 1,500-member jury as the most memorable American movie quote of all time. 988

The twistings listed by Rasulic include Once married, twice shy, easy come, easy 989

blow, And now for something completely Madonna, and Frankly, my dear, I don’t 990

give a Daimler. Gonzálvez-García (2015) also deals with the linguistic properties 991

of snowclones from a constructionist and, moreover, contrastive (English-Spanish) 992

point of view, focussing mainly on the English saying A bird in the hand is worth 993

two in the bush and its Spanish counterpart Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento 994

volando (lit. ‘Better a bird in the hand than a hundred flying’) and their various 995

manipulations, such as A beer in the hand is worth six in the fridge and Más vale 996

dinero en mano que bonos volando (‘money in the hand is better than bonuses in 997

the air’). Finally, Fiorentini and Marino (2015) discuss the formula “KEEP CALM 998

AND X”, based on the well-known and visually iconic English propaganda poster, 999

from a semiotic point of view. As the authors point out, this pattern “(as well as its 1000

counterparts in other languages, such as Italian) is a widespread formula used over 1001

the Web, in advertising, and in everyday interactions as a softened imperative form, 1002

which rapidly developed new pragmatic meanings.” 1003

As with the comical misuses of modal verb constructions in The Simpsons 1004

mentioned in Sect. 8.4.2, adapting a formulaic expression can only have a humorous 1005

effect if the addressee is familiar with the ‘correct’ (i.e. standard, conventionalized) 1006

expression. Snowclones thus demonstrate that we assume our addressees have 1007

stored in their long-term memory a vast number of (supposedly) fixed expressions, 1008

many of which have their origin in popular culture. This shared familiarity with the 1009

larger cultural context and other so-called encyclopaedic knowledge (knowledge 1010

about ‘the world’) also ties in with what Frame Semantics endeavours to capture 1011

5A large collection of snowclones in English is maintained by O’Connor (2007). Cappelle (2013)lists a few snowclones in Dutch.

writers Pullum (2004).” The term is coined with specific reference to the rhetorical

UNCORRECTED

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142 B. Cappelle

(see, e.g., Boas 2005, Fillmore 1976, Fillmore and Atkins 1992, Petruck 1996). 1012

Interestingly, note that this sister theory of Construction Grammar is called Frame 1013

Semantics and not Frame Pragmatics, a point raised by Andor (2010) in his 1014

interview with Charles Fillmore. It should be clear, though, that allusions to well- 1015

known standard formulae or to famous quotes etc. have a different status from the 1016

contents proper of a sentence. Suppose your interlocutor says “If lusting after naked 1017

Daniel Radcliffe is wrong, I don’t want to be right” and you then say “Amen to 1018

that”, what you agree with is that Daniel Radcliffe is an object of desire; you don’t 1019

agree with the contents of the presumed original from a 1970s soul song: “If loving 1020

you is wrong, I don’t want to be right”, even though you might have appreciated the 1021

creative exploitation of such a stock phrase. That is why it makes sense to distinguish 1022

purely semantic and less direct aspects of communication. 1023

8.4.4 And Then There’s the Reminder Existential Construction 1024

Lakoff (1987) discusses the ‘reminder’ use of the existential construction, illustrated 1025

in (22): 1026

1027

1028

(22) a. There’s always Harry.b. But there’s the dog!c. There’s still the remains of Christmas dinner in the freezer. (Lakoff 1987: 561)

1029

Now, consider how Lakoff comments on this construction – or on a conventional 1030

use of it: 1031

Examples of reminders are most commonly given in the form of lists: 1032

– There’s the cat to feed, the dog to walk, the horse to brush, : : : 1033

– There’ll be Max at the head of the table, Sally next to me, : : : 1034

Lists of this sort are a general feature of English and are not peculiar to reminding uses of 1035

existentials. They apply to all sorts of other constructions: 1036

– Joan is prettier than Sue, richer than Melanie, smarter than Eliza, : : : 1037

– Bring the camera, the backpack, the canteen, : : : 1038

– I want to give Tom a sweater, Jeff an espresso-maker, : : : 1039

– Tom likes cats, Sally horses, Mike dogs, : : : 1040

Existential lists are simply cases where the list construction has applied to an existential 1041

sentence. They are not part of the analysis of existentials at all. (Lakoff 1987: 561–562) 1042

What Lakoff is suggesting here is that the use of a list does not have to be stored as 1043

specific information in the Reminder Existential Construction. It concerns a general 1044

fact of language. But let us consider the following authentic example: 1045

1046

1047

(23) The smartphone is typical of Amazon. There is the remorseless expansion: if you candeliver books and washing machines, why not a phone? There is the ability to switchbetween the real world of atoms and the digital world of bits ( : : : ). There is the drivefor market share over immediate profits. And there is the slightly creepy feeling thatAmazon knows too much about its users already. (The Economist, 21 June 2014, p. 9)

1048

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 143

It seems to me that if there was just one occurrence of There is the : : : in the above 1049

example, this would be strange. The first sentence with a Reminder Existential 1050

Construction raises the expectation that some more such sentences are about to 1051

come. The typical use of this construction in a list is a specification that I would 1052

argue must be stored. How else would Lakoff (1987), in the cited passage above, 1053

be able to assert that examples of this construction are most typically provided in 1054

list form? This list use, we might say, is an implication of the Reminder Existential. 1055

(An implication is not be confused with an implicature, which is a special kind of 1056

implication.) As with any implication, language users pay attention to it and update 1057

their knowledge of the pattern with each new occurrence of it. As Bybee (2006) 1058

writes: 1059

It appears that listeners and speakers follow and keep track of the implications that occur 1060

in particular contexts. In order to know that a certain implication has occurred frequently 1061

and is associated with a certain string of words, speakers must register the context and the 1062

implications from the very first exposure. (Bybee 2006: 22) 1063

This means that there cannot be any sharp distinction between stored aspects 1064

of language and computed aspects of language (cf. Sect. 8.3). Even if aspects 1065

of an expression’s interpretation or use in discourse may initially be processed 1066

compositionally by a learner, these aspects will necessarily also be stored away 1067

in long-term memory from these first encounters. This continued storage will go 1068

on until the non-purely semantic aspects of a pattern are sufficiently strongly 1069

represented in the mind not to be derived anew, in each subsequent usage event, 1070

from knowledge about other aspects of the grammar. 1071

In the case of the Reminder Existential Construction, where in the construction’s 1072

representation should we provide place for the more or less strong intuition that 1073

this construction is especially common in a list context? While a definitive answer 1074

awaits more careful consideration, it is clear for now that this kind of information 1075

does not belong in the Semantics (Sem) part, which Construction Grammarians like 1076

to reserve for propositional semantics (cf. Fillmore et al. 1988), thematic roles, or 1077

the basic, core meaning of an item (e.g. ‘POSSIBILITY’ for can). Nor does it belong 1078

in the Illocutionary force (IFor), which as we saw concerns indirect speech act 1079

information. We might therefore need a separate section, used for other information 1080

about how a construction is typically used, perhaps together with information- 1081

packing properties, connotative value, register and region specifics etc. 1082

8.5 Concluding Reflections 1083

In this chapter, we have taken a look at various pragmatic phenomena – Gricean 1084

maxims, information structure, indirect speech acts, etc. – and the treatment they 1085

have received in Construction Grammar. We have shown how cross-linguistic or 1086

even language-internal evidence can force us to conclude that pragmatic information 1087

is conventionalized and therefore has to be learned and stored. In view of the 1088

topic of this volume – the semantics-pragmatics interface – let us finally reflect 1089

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144 B. Cappelle

on the distinction, if any, that people make between these two aspects of linguistic 1090

knowledge. 1091

From its early days onwards, Construction Grammar has represented construc- 1092

tions as Saussurian signs, with just two poles: 1093

Grammatical constructions [ : : : ] are complex cognitive models with two dimensions: one 1094

characterizing parameters of form and one characterizing parameters of meaning. (Lakoff 1095

1987: 482) 1096

Construction Grammar thus seems to be a theory about bipolar units in this 1097

view. Even if Fillmore et al. (1988) recognized a separate layer of pragmatics, 1098

such a tripartite structure of constructions as containing syntactic, semantic and 1099

pragmatic information has often been reduced to a simpler structure. Fillmore 1100

(2013: 112) speaks of grammatical constructions as “the rules that unite formal 1101

and semantic information into various kinds of linguistic objects”, clarifying in a 1102

footnote that “‘[f]ormal’ here includes syntactic, morphological, and phonological 1103

form; ‘semantic’ includes pragmatics and conventions of usage” (Fillmore 2013: 1104

131). Yet, just because constructions are represented as binary in form, this need not 1105

mean each half is undivided and that semantics actually subsumes pragmatics: 1106

Langacker defines a grammar as a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units. 1107

The conventional linguistic units are symbolic units, and their two halves, form and 1108

meaning. Cognitive Grammar emphasizes the symbolic character of the linguistic sign 1109

(to use the Saussurean term). Langacker argues that the properties of constructions, as 1110

broadly defined, fall into two categories, which we describe here as form (the signifier) 1111

and meaning or function (the signified): the formal properties are syntactic, morphological, 1112

and phonological, and the functional properties are semantic, pragmatic, and discourse- 1113

functional. A construction is thus a symbolic unit, linking form and function as a symbol or 1114

sign. (Croft 2007: 490; emphasis mine) 1115

A question that will have to be more deeply explored in further research is to which 1116

extent we need to make a neat distinction within the functional pole of constructions 1117

between semantic and other information. Goldberg (1995) is rather equivocal about 1118

this when she writes that “[a] notion rejected by Construction Grammar is that 1119

of a strict division between semantics and pragmatics. Information about focused 1120

constituents, topicality, and register is presented in constructions alongside semantic 1121

information” (Goldberg 1995: 7). So, on the one hand, Goldberg here says that 1122

a strict semantics/pragmatics distinction is eschewed but on the other, the list of 1123

pragmatic kinds of information is treated as complementing semantic information 1124

rather than merging with it to form an undifferentiated bag of functional aspects. In 1125

this chapter I have offered a few pointers at how this question may find an answer. 1126

First, we consider the notion of short-circuited implicature useful and have 1127

briefly demonstrated how it can be extended to short-circuited interpretation more 1128

generally. Both semantics and illocutionary force are needed in some constructions. 1129

For instance, in the sequence If I could just say a few words, the semantics 1130

of the modal verb is that of ‘HAVE-PERMISSION’ (rather than ‘BE-ABLE’ or 1131

‘HAVE-OPPORTUNITY’), so this short-circuited interpretational aspect of this 1132

sequence is of the semantic kind. The conventional use of this expression is a short- 1133

circuited interpretational aspect of the pragmatic kind. This use includes the hearer’s 1134

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8 What’s Pragmatics Doing Outside Constructions? 145

expectation that the speaker will not wait for an actual response to see whether or 1135

not the permission has been granted but uses this expression as an accepted hedge 1136

to make an announcement and to ask thereby for some silence from the audience 1137

(cf. Declerck and Reed 2001: 356). 1138

Second, there is other ‘pragmatic’ information than indirect speech act infor- 1139

mation that is stored in constructions. This information may describe everything 1140

we need to know about the larger context in which the construction can be 1141

embedded and the speech situation in which it can be used. Here we find stored 1142

information-structural constraints, information about how the construction helps 1143

structure discourse, as well as register and politeness values (e.g. constraints relating 1144

to social relationships) and (if relevant) allusions to the broader world of literature, 1145

popular culture, etc. All this information might be grouped together under a single 1146

label, although it remains to be seen whether information-structural properties might 1147

not need a separate treatment. This may well turn out to be the case, as being topical, 1148

focused, accessible, etc. usually applies to parts of a construction and not to the 1149

construction as a whole. We thus propose the provisional representational structure 1150

of sentence-level constructions shown in Fig. 8.3. 1151

One thing that has become evident, I hope, is that there is a lot of conventional 1152

knowledge involved in how we understand a sentential construction. Some of this 1153

understanding, of course, is semantic in nature, dealing with the propositional 1154

content of the utterance. Apart from semantic information, we also make use of 1155

pragmatic information in interpreting a construction in use, but not everything that 1156

is pragmatic about this interpretation is necessarily to be considered unpredictably 1157

context-dependent. There is much pragmatics that is conventionally linked to 1158

constructions. Semantics and pragmatics can live peacefully side by side in a single 1159

construction. 1160

Sem

Syn

Prag IFor

Information

Structure

Other Discourse

organisation

Register

Fig. 8.3 A template of constructional representations

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146 B. Cappelle

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Ilse Depraetere for her valuable input to the Simpsons 1161

examples discussed in Sect. 8.4. I benefited from discussions with Yukio Hirose, Masaru Kanetani 1162

and Naoaki Wada ensuing my presentation of a first sketchy version of this text at the University 1163

of Tsukuba. As I drafted this version in a room of the University of Tsukuba’s Guest House in 1164

which Charles Fillmore had previously stayed, I would like to believe I have been particularly 1165

inspired by some of his lasting legacy. Many thanks also to Friedemann Pulvermüller for giving 1166

me the opportunity to present the main points of this text at the Freie Universität Berlin in early 1167

2015; I also thank the members of the audience there for their stimulating questions. Finally, I 1168

would like to thank Ilse Depraetere and Raphael Salkie for their patience with the slow progress of 1169

this contribution, and an anonymous reviewer for some constructive comments. Though the cited 1170

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responsible for any major oversights or misrepresentations, as well as for any other shortcomings 1172

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