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Abstract:

The lexical items that appear in grammatical constructions may affect the use of these constructions in at least two ways. The first is where particular words directly bias er even restrict the language user to employ a certain construction. This is the case, for instance, for the object contact in sentences like Nijs zoekt nog (naar) contact met deze scholen ‘Nijs is still trying to contact these schools’, where the use of the contact strongly biases the language user to employ the transitive construction without naar – although the intransitive prepositional construction with naar is not completely ruled out. The second way is when the determinants of the choice between constructions are dependent upon the words that are used. For instance, the factors that make a language user opt for the transitive construction or the ‘naar-construction’ differ, depending on whether the verb zoeken, verlangen, peilen, etc. is used. Construction grammar offers a unified way of accounting both types of lexical constraints through the very design of its constructicon, i.e. the network of constructions in a language. This theoretical account also comes with useful methodological implications. In this talk, I will exemplify this through the case study of optional naar in Dutch.