Thomas Herbst
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany
Thomas Herbst is a Senior Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of English and American Studies of The Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU). Thomas Herbst is one of the key experts in the field of Pedagogical Construction Grammar and Constructicography. He is the founder and lead developer of the CASA-ConstructiCon of the English Language (CASAICon) and the CASA framework (CASA stands for a Construction Grammar Approach to Syntactic Analysis). Together with Thomas Hoffmann he co-authored the book “A Construction Grammar of the English Language” (John Benjamins, 2024) offering a full analysis of the English grammar in terms of constructions.
Plenary talk:
NOT ONLY CONSTRUCTIONS ALL THE WAY DOWN
BUT ALSO LEXICAL ITEMS ALL THE WAY (IN)TO
In this talk, I would like to throw some light on the place of lexical items and other low level constructions in a model of Construction Grammar, and in particular the relation between these constructions and constructions that entail a higher level of abstraction. This will involve discussing such concepts as word, lexeme, lexical unit and lexical item.
Based on the constructionist approach to syntactic analysis (CASA) proposed by Herbst and Hoffmann (2024), it will be shown that positing constructions at a rather high level of abstraction no doubt makes a lot of sense for the purpose of analysing concrete sentences/constructs.
At the same time, in many languages a considerable number of these grammatical constructions are bound to lexical material (English passive cxn: BE + V-en; perfective cxn: HAVE + V-en; progressive cxn: BE + V-ing). It will be argued that – and this fits in nicely with the constructionist view of there being no sharp dividing line between lexis and grammar – distinctions such as that between auxiliaries be or have and a lexical verbs be and have are maybe not as clear-cut as it may seem.
Following the principle that words are learnt in and with the constructions in which they occur (Behrens 2011: 382), the wisdom of the notion of dual class membership will also be questioned with respect to lexical items such as enough, since and others.
From the perspective of language production, it will be argued that for quite a number of constructions it is essential to know which lexical items are commonly used in which constructional slots and that lexical information should thus be part of the description of other constructions, too (Goldberg 2019; Goldberg & Herbst 2021).
Finally, a few suggestions will be made as to how the different aspects of the impact of lexical items on more general constructions can be taken account of in the description of constructions, construction grids, constructiCons and Pedagogical Construction Grammar in general.
References
Behrens, Heike. 2011. Grammatik und Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Konstruktionsprozesse. In Stefan Engelberg, Anke Holler & Kristel Proost (eds.), Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik, 375–396. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2019. Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E. & Thomas Herbst. 2021. The nice-of-you construction and its fragments. Linguistics 59(1), 285–318.
