UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Variation between BE- and GET-passives (examples 1 and 2) is a well-attested phenomenon (Hundt et al. 2024; Fehringer 2022; Schwarz 2015, 2017; Collins 1996) and has even been described as “one of the most active grammatical changes taking place in English” (Weiner & Labov 1983). Yet, large-scale, quantitative studies of this variable have been lacking until recently. This is due to difficulties in formally circumscribing the variable context (true passives as opposed to formally identical structures like statal or inchaotive expressions as in examples 3 and 4) as well as operationalizing some of the hypothesized constraints on the variation, such as the alleged adversativity for and responsibility of the subject.

1. I applied, but was not invited for an interview.
2. I applied, but did not get invited for an interview.
3. Kim is excited to join the team.
4. Kelly got exhausted playing two games back to back.

In this talk, I outline some of these challenges and present methodological solutions to scale up quantitative analysis of the English passive alternation using large corpora. Based on recent collaborative work (Bohmann et al. 2023, fc.), I present an automated approach towards delineating central passives from non-central (stative, inchoative, etc.) constructions and methods for operationalizing adversativity through sentiment analysis and subject responsibility through automatic animacy detection. Based on 1.4 million instances of the passive alternation sampled from the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010), a robust but receding effect of subject responsibility can be observed. However, rather than adversativity it appears to be non-neutrality of emotion (whether negative or positive) that predicts higher rates of GET-passives. Beyond the immediate case study, this talk makes a case for adoption of tools from data science for the study of linguistic variation.

References:

• Bohmann, Axel, Julia Müller, Mirka Honkanen, Miriam Neuhausen. 2023. “A Large-scale Diachronic Analysis of the English Passive Alternation.” In Beatrix Busse, Nina Dumrukcic and Ingo Kleiber (eds), Language and Linguistics in a Complex World, 31-56. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Bohmann, Axel, Julia Müller, Mirka Honkanen, Miriam Neuhausen. Forthcoming. Linguistic Data Science and the English Passive. [Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities]. Bloomsbury.
• Collins, Peter C. 1996. “Get-passives in English.” In: World Englishes 15, 43–56.
• Davies, Mark. 2010. Corpus of Historical American English. www.english-corpora.org/coha.
• Fehringer, Carol. 2022. “The Get-passive in Tyneside English: A Highly Frequent yet Constrained Variant.” English World-Wide, 43(3): 330-356.
• Hundt, M., Dallas, B., & Nakanishi, S. (2024). “The Be- Versus Get-passive Alternation in World Englishes. World Englishes, 43, 86–108.
• Schwarz, Sarah 2015. “Passive voice in American soap opera dialogue.” In: Studia Neophilologica 87, 152–170.
• Schwarz, Sarah. 2017. “‘Like getting nibbled to death by a duck’: Grammaticalization of the get-passive in the TIME Magazine Corpus.” In: English World-Wide 38, 305–335.

Five decades after the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics, and more than two after its multi-disciplinary “empirical turn” (Janda 2017), the present-day research paradigm exhibits some tension between strands of research that strongly emphasize either embodiment or usage. While the ‘usage-based model’ has driven the steep development of corpus-linguistic methods in CL, the ‘corpus-to-cognition’ link has never been a direct one, given that function/meaning can only be read off from the frequency and distribution of linguistic forms and that standard corpora usually gather usage data from communities, not individuals – thus reflecting the conventionalization, rather than entrenchment, of form-meaning pairs (e.g. Schmid 2017).

Multimodal corpora (e.g. Uhrig 2017) add a new dimension to usage data, potentially linking corpus and cognition in new ways. Under the assumption that spontaneous co-speech gesturing is a more directly embodied form of expression than spoken language, multimodal corpus data may open a ‘window’ to embodied aspects of ‘thinking-for-speaking’ (e.g. Alibali et al. 2014; Hostetter & Alibali 2008; Mittelberg 2013). At the same time, and reflecting the above-mentioned tension, the hypothesis of ‘multimodal constructions’ in cognitive usage-based construction grammar requires a degree of conventionality in gestural forms of expressions, thereby potentially weakening the direct-embodiment position (cf. Zima & Bergs 2017).

Starting out from the distinction between ‘construction’ and ‘construct’ (cf. Hoffmann 2017), the lecture discusses the results of several studies employing multi-modal corpus data (Hampe 2022, Hampe et al. 2023) to shed light on different types of syntactic constructions, thereby raising a number of theoretical and methodological questions around issues of ‘embodiment’ and ‘usage’ and contributing to current debates about the experiential grounding (e.g. Barsalou, 2008; Casasanto, 2014) of linguistic meaning.

Selected references

• Alibali, Martha et al. (2014), Gesture in reasoning. An embodied perspective. Shapiro, L. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, 150-156. Abington/New York: Routledge.
• Barsalou, Lawrence W. (2008), Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59: 617-645.
• Casasanto, Daniel (2014), Experiential origins of mental metaphors: Language, culture and the body. Landau, Mark J. et al. (eds.), The Power of Metaphor: Examining its Influence on Social Life, 249-268. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
• Hampe, Beate (2022), Between embodiment and usage: Conventionalized figurative expressions and the notion of 'idiom set'. Herbert L. Colston, et al. (eds.), Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, 157-190. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.
• Hampe, Beate, P. Uhrig, M. Johnson (2023), Researching Multimodal Constructions. Theoretical and empirical foundations II. Talk at ICLC 2023, Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
• Hoffmann, Thomas (2017), Multimodal constructs, multimodal constructions? The role of constructions in the working memory. Linguistic Vanguard 3(s1)
• Hostetter, Autumn, Alibali, Martha (2008), Visible embodiment. Gestures as simulated action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 15:
• Janda, Laura (2017), The quantitative turn. Dancygier, Barbara (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 498-514. Cambridge, etc.: CUP
• Mittelberg, Irene (2013), The exbodied mind: Cognitive-semiotic principles as motivating forces in gesture. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill and S. Teßendorf (eds.). 2013. Body– language–communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction. (HBLK 38.1.), 750-779. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
• Uhrig, Peter (2017), Newsscape and the Little Red Hen Lab. A digital infrastructure for the large-scale analysis of TV broadcasts, 99-114. Anglistentag (Proceedings):
• Schmid, Hans-Jörg (ed.) (2017), Entrenchment and the psychology of language learning: How we reorganize and adapt linguistic knowledge. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton
• Zima, E. and A. Bergs (2017). Towards a multimodal construction grammar. Special issue. Linguistics Vanguard. A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences 3 (s1)

Deaf and hearing children are sensitive to language and progress through similar developmental milestones when immersed in a language-rich environment (Lillo-Martin and Henner, 2021). Access to and opportunities for communication, however, are often delayed for deaf children growing up in predominantly hearing and often non-signing family contexts. That leaves them at risk of language deprivation during the critical period for (language) development (e.g. Hall et al., 2019).

Taking a social-constructivist approach, the present study explores the situated multilingual multimodal communication during moments of joint attention in diverse early caretaker-child interactions. More specifically, we investigate how individuals with different experiences and resources of communication use multilingual multimodal communication strategies in order to accommodate sensory and communicative needs in initiating and sustaining joint attention.

Video-recorded data of play sessions between caretakers and children (9-24 months) with severe to profound hearing loss were collected in collaboration with the Yorkshire Auditory Implant Service (YAIS) at Bradford Teaching Hospitals, NHS Foundation Trust (UK). The play sessions were recorded at a stage in the paediatric assessment pathway that preceded (potential) cochlear implantation. Data from a total of eight caretaker-child dyads were analysed with ELAN, an annotation tool for audio and video recordings (ELAN, 2021). We identify multimodal communication strategies – auditory, visual and/or tactile – used within the individual caretaker-child dyads and also look at them across dyads in relation to moments of joint attention. We examine both the caretaker’s and the child’s communicative behaviour with regard to individual affordances, context and the interactional situation.

Moving away from predominantly language-driven approaches of the past, this study provides a template for systematic multimodal analysis that reflects the multimodal nature of communication and accounts for contingency and synchronicity in the process of meaning making that does not always become apparent in a purely linguistic framework but equally shapes and supports communicative behaviour.

The application of findings, emphasizing individual resources rather than deficits, is relevant to early intervention with families and provides caretakers with guidance on how to make communication accessible to their child, especially within the critical period of the first year/s of life that form the building blocks for later (language) development.

References

• Elan (version 6.9). 2024. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan.
• Hall, M.L., Hall, W.C. and Caselli, N.K. 2019. Deaf children need language, not (just) speech. First Language. 39(4), pp.367-395.
• Lillo-Martin, D. and Henner, J. 2021. Acquisition of sign languages. Annu Rev Linguist. 7, pp.395-419.

For over a century, language has been considered as an amodal and arbitrary system with a primary modality of speech. Yet, as argued in our book A Multimodal Language Faculty (Cohn & Schilperoord 2024), this conception of language cannot account for many of the basic observations revealed in the past decades of language research, particularly the growing recognition of the importance of multimodality. I will present a multimodal model of language that accounts for all unimodal behaviors across the vocal, bodily, and graphic modalities along with their multimodal combinations. This “grand unified” model directly allows for semiotic promiscuity across iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, while warranting new understandings of linguistic innateness, relativity, universals, and evolution. Altogether, this approach heralds a shift to a Multimodal Paradigm of the language sciences, re-imagining both its cognitive faculty and the notion of “language” itself.