Turns out is not ellipsis? A usage-based construction grammar view on reduced constructions

ABSTRACT

In many theoretical approaches, structures such as Turns out, I was wrong are seen as originally being the result of ellipsis, i.e., the deletion of underlying syntactic material (cf. It turns out, I was wrong.). In contrast to this, Usage-based Construction Grammar advocates a surface-oriented view of syntax and, consequently, eschews the postulation of unexpressed, covert syntactic information. In this paper, we will provide a usage-based explanation as to how such reduced constructions can arise in the first place, namely as online constructs in the working memory. Once reduced structures appear in the input, most approaches concede that they can become conventionalized. In the second part of the paper, we test whether there is any empirical evidence for the conventionalization of the constructions at hand. For this, we draw on one of the largest corpora of spoken English (the UCLA NewsScape Library of International Television News corpus), which yields more than 28,000 relevant tokens. Analysing these data for their distributional frequency, syntactic environment as well as their emotive content (using automatic sentiment analysis), we will show that there is synchronic evidence to suggest that the two structures are two individual, yet taxonomically related constructions.

KEYWORDS:

• Construction Grammar
• usage-based
• ellipsis
• RedHen
• spoken language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See OED online s.v. cookie, n. 4. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40961.

² As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, an alternative account would be “that the final /t/ of the pronoun “it” [could] in fluent speech be indistinguishable from the onset of ‘turns’, leaving only a short unstressed vowel as evidence of a separate word. Mishearing ‘it turns’ as ‘turns’ is thus a strong possibility, with the possible consequence of a syntactic reanalysis.” This is, of course, an alternative explanation. However, this (a) also requires that the initial vowel is not heard, and (b) potential language change (since some speakers could then be expected to only have the Turns-out-construction.) The fact that most speakers exhibit both structures seems to argue against this hearer-based scenario.

³ The so-called Q score is a measure of effect size in HCFAs and indicates the amount of variation explained by a configuration. For the data at hand, the effect size of the preference of It turns out … for that complements (Q = 0.033) is more than ten times higher than the preference of It turns out … for non-finite complements (Q = 0.003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva-Maria Bauer

Eva-Maria Bauer is a junior researcher at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

Thomas Hoffmann

Thomas Hoffmann is Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.