engleski

Enriched compositionality in light verb constructions in Croatian

The notion of mental grammar, understood as a complete collection of patterns, templates or schemas of the language, stored in the brain of a language user, represents the central theoretical construct of modern linguistics. Without a direct access to mental grammar, the investigation of information structure constraints, seen as a decisive factor in the formal structuring of a sentence, proves to be the primary point of access into understanding the gradient structure of mental grammar. Link of the mental grammar to the information structure is grounded in the fact that “making sense” involves, among other things, knowledge of patterns and the fact that we must ascribe to the speaker’s mind a mental grammar that specifies possible sentence patterns. Although classic generative approaches build on the differentiation between the lexicon and the grammar, there are many theories, particular insights, as well as experimental approaches that advocate the inseparability of grammar and lexicon. All of them depart from the principle distinction between the rules and the lexemes. The rules are no more treated as procedures, but as templates or schemas (pieces of structure with variables), which brings them closer to lexemes. We adopt this, fundamentally constructivist theoretical approach, using Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture as a starting point. In PA there is no strict division between lexicon and grammar. Rather, words and standard rules are at the opposite corners of a multidimensional continuum that includes all sorts of mixed items such as idioms and meaningful constructions. An important consequence of this view is that semantics in not necessarily in a one-to-one relation to syntax, but most often in a many-to-many relation, which needs to be explicitly stated. Based on an ongoing project of establishing the correlation between concreteness and imageability, I investigate the interface of syntax and semantics in light verb constructions in Croatian. The specific aim is to understand the relationship of processing constraints of morphosyntactic and semantic agreement of concrete and/or abstract (ie. high and low imageable) lexical items in light verb constructions compared to their verbal counterparts such as dati dar/poljubac – darovati/poljubiti, složiti priču/dramu – ispričati/dramatizirati, baciti ples/đir – zaplesati/prođirati and the like. In targeting the syntax- semantics interface, I combine a theory-driven introspective and experimental top-down approach with a corpus-based bottom up approach. This enables me to address two main research points, namely the complexity of systematic relations and the prototypicality and variability of constructions. Therefore, based on psycholinguistically established correlation between concreteness and imageability, I will report on the results of the analysis of local (linear) and global (hierarchical) constraints in processing of light verb constructions in Croatian with a special insight into the relationship between concreteness and/or imageability and agreement. Methodological novelty of such an approach is reflected in connecting a theoretically-based qualitative and quantitative psycholinguistic research with a corpus study, which makes possible development of specific construction frames of the figurative potential for the predictive lexical analysis, as well as grammatical patterns in mental grammar of Croatian.

enriched compositionality, light verbs, syntax-semantic interface, abstractness, information structure

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