LINGUIST List 13.2433

Wed Sep 25 2002

Diss: Text/Corpus Ling: Wiliarty "Turns of..."

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

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1. vinke, Text/Corpus Ling: Wiliarty "Turns of Phrases: Formulaic..."

New Dissertation Abstract

Institution: University of California at Berkeley
Program: Department of German
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2001
Author: Kevin Patrick Wiliarty 

Dissertation Title: 
Turns of Phrases: Formulaic Directionals and Grammaticalization in
Dutch Language Change and German Second Language Acquisition

Linguistic Field: 
Text/Corpus Linguistics, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Historical
Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Applied Linguistics

Dissertation Director 1: Thomas F Shannon
Dissertation Director 2: Claire Kramsch
Dissertation Director 3: Eve Sweetser


Dissertation Abstract: 

This dissertation explores the role of formulaic language in the
collective negotiation of form and meaning in the historical
development of Dutch and in adult acquisition of German. In both areas
of inquiry, the author considers 1) how formulaic expressions
contribute to the emergence of grammatical constructions and 2) how
cognitive, social and pragmatic pressures shape grammatical
development. The author proposes that many details of synchronic idiom
make sense only from a historical, cognitive and social perspective.

In the first half of the dissertation, the author demonstrates how
idiosyncratic features of the Dutch postpositional construction
reflect its context of emergence in a quantified adverbial phrase
construction. These observations are based on a corpus study of over
300 pages of modern Dutch fiction by three different writers. Details
of the postpositional construction's synchronic distribution and
semantics suggest that its emergence was facilitated, perhaps even
prompted, by a formulaic postpositional phrase in Middle Dutch whose
modern reflex represents the most frequent instantiation of the
construction in the modern corpus.

In the second half of the dissertation, the author presents and
analyzes the results of written and oral tests of prepositional usage
administered to more than 100 native and non-native German
speakers. These results demonstrate that formulaic language plays an
important role in the development of learner German. All subjects
preferred phrases that felt familiar to them, but this preference
sometimes led non-native speakers to unidiomatic responses. Subjects
overgeneralized certain prepositional phrases, and some patterns of
overextension were characteristic of more proficient speakers. The
author argues that these systematic overextensions do not represent
interference from the learners' native language, but an independent
development within the learner community that exploits openings in the
German grammar itself. These novel patterns of learner German can be
traced directly to specific, highly prominent prepositional phrases in
the learner variety.

The author concludes that grammatical change operates not directly on
abstract grammatical constructions, but rather on specific-often
formulaic-instantiations of a construction in pragmatically, socially
and culturally saturated contexts.