The book, which is a festschrift for Professor Kristin Davidse, KU Leuven, comprises ten chapters plus an introduction setting out the relationship between the individual chapters and Davidse's writings. The introduction provides a brief biography of Professor Davidse, highlighting the significance of her multiple contributions and the role she has played as colleague, mentor and teacher in inspiring those (very much including the present author) who have had the great pleasure of working with her. The ten substantiative chapters, like Davidse's own inspiring work, are grounded in extensive data analysis and rigorous detailed argumentation with theorising drawn from a range of functional and cognitive linguistic theories. All the authors, like Davidse, ascribe to the view that grammatical structure (i) is symbolic and motivated, and (ii) it provides for the structuring and conventionalisation of conceptual structure. This entails that the compositional meaning of constructions must be examined, and that linguistic analysis must take account of syntactic patterns, prosodic patterns and semantic patterns in establishing the range of meanings for a construction.
The editors have divided the book into three sections, the first of which focuses on information structure. This section contains three chapters which all question ‘assumed wisdom’. Chapter 1 is Gunther Kaltenböck's careful corpus study of there-clefts with zero subject relativiser (pp. 17–43). He locates a surprisingly high number of there-clefts with zero relativiser – 170 – in the spoken component of the British National Corpus. He follows Davidse (Reference Davidse1999, Reference Davidse2014) in categorising there-clefts as being either specificational or presentational, with the former further subdivided into enumerating and quantifying. Numerically presentational there-clefts represent a bare majority in the corpus. Kaltenböck argues that the omission of the relativiser results in the weakening of the pragmatic presupposition associated with the bi-clausal nature of matrix clause and cleft relative clause resulting in a mono-clausal construction. This is most noticeable in presentational there-clefts. A speaker is able to present the argument and predicate as all new information within a single clause. This results in a flouting of the ‘Principle of the Separation of Role and Reference’ (Lambrecht Reference Lambrecht1994), which prohibits the introduction of a referent and a predication in the same clause. Kaltenböck's work shows that such constructions represent pragmatically efficient (for the speaker at least) ways of combining role and new referent within a single syntactic unit, at least in spoken discourse. It is clear that there is much more to learn, as Kaltenböck acknowledges about this sadly neglected construction. But this is as good a place to start as any.
Chapter 2 (pp. 45–69) is Hilde Hasselgård's comparative parallel corpus study of the form and function of impersonal passives with an expletive and non-agentive pronominal in Norwegian (det) and English (it). She shows that, while such constructions are present in both languages, Norwegian alone uses the constructions with transitive and intransitive verbs in material process clauses. English restricts the constructions to verbal and mental processes. Not surprisingly, the construction is therefore more frequent and diverse in Norwegian. Of the four subtypes she identifies, only extraposition and parentheticals are found in both languages; however, the translations between the two languages of these subtypes are frequently non-congruent, Hasselgård's careful metafunctional reasoning demonstrates that interpersonally and textually they fulfil very similar functions in both languages. They are used to distance or lower commitment to a proposition, to ensure that the subject theme is devoid of referential information as well as ensuring that the pronominal it or det is a thematic constituent with no information focus. Hasselgård's chapter illustrates the importance of linking the functional description of an individual construction with theorising about the functions of a language.
Chapter 3, Tom Bartlett's study of the information structure of Gaelic, illustrates the dangers of theorising through the lens of Standard Average European and of assuming that an unmarked clause encodes a topic comment structure, e.g. Lambrecht's Principle of the Separation of Role and Reference. Bartlett demonstrates that Gaelic is process orientated. The canonical VS order encodes a non-categorical meaning with all of the arguments falling within the assertion established by the verb. To place an argument outside the scope of the verb, a speaker needs to produce a marked structure, such as a cleft whose bi-clausal nature allows the separation of a nominal argument from verbal scope. Bartlett provides a systems network mapping the typology of marked clauses in Gaelic. While his work shows the distinction between the primary cut of unmarked ‘atopical’ and marked ‘topical’, it would be fruitful to tease out the structural realisations and cultural implications of the more delicate options presented, especially in the light of Bartlett's claim that notions of topicality and atopicality are not distinct ways of viewing the world, but rather systems of textual organisation found within an individual language.
Chapters 4 to 6 are usage-based approaches to grammar and the lexicon. Chapters 4 and 5 are diachronic corpus studies within the usage-based construction grammar tradition. In chapter 4 (pp. 99–122), Elizabeth C. Traugott studies the emerging meaning potential of the construction Oh, by the way. This construction emerged from the fusion of the two separate discourse markers oh and by the way in American English at least as early as 1840. Traugott shows that while the initial use of the construction encoded a topic shift to new content, two newer meanings have emerged, namely a hedge to a potentially face-threatening remark and a marker which signals disalignment with and mockery of the words spoken by an absent third party. Adopting a construction grammar approach, she illustrates how since the 1920s the construction has been undergoing constructionalisation, which she defines as the establishment of a new symbolic association of form and meaning among a network of language users. The possibility that the two symbolic associations may be disambiguated by different prosodic choices is raised and is clearly worthy of further investigation. Traugott's chapter is an unusual and welcome addition to the construction grammar literature in that she incorporates pragmatic knowledge into her account of the meaning potential of Oh, by the way.
Dirk Noël in chapter 5 examines the decline in the use of the Deontic-nci construction, e.g. be obliged to, be forbidden to, be permitted to, etc. (pp. 123–44). Schmid's (Reference Schmid2020) Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization (EC) model is used to explain the attrition of the construction. This model argues that change occurs through the conventionalisation of linguistic expressions through sustained repetition within a speech community coupled with individual entrenchment. The model recognises a distinction between conventionalised constructions and the linguistic knowledge of an individual speaker. Noël applies the EC model to change resulting from loss. Using corpus data, he demonstrates a fall in the overall use of 32 per cent of tokens between the eighteenth century and the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. To examine individual uses, he turns to 25 authored novels written between 1848 and 1863 and finds a very mixed picture. Some authors have decreased their use of the constructions, while others have increased theirs, and others have not exhibited any differences in frequency. De-conventionalisation of the construction coupled with individual de-entrenchment has resulted in a change in which not all speakers participate to the same extent. The decline in the use of the Deontic-nci construction is not the result of communal change, generation change or lifespan change. It is individual change with some speakers functioning as attributional innovators.
Chapter 6 further demonstrates the importance of considering social factors when describing language change (pp. 145–82). Christopher S. Butler and Anne-Marie Simon-Vanderbergen's synchronic corpus-based study investigates register and sociolinguistic variation between the indefinite pronouns somebody/someone and everybody/everyone. Previous literature has argued that the body/one pairs are semantically equivalent and in free variation, although the one pronoun is believed to be both more frequent and to have wider distribution. In their corpus investigation Butler and Simon-Vanderbergen found no semantic differences between the somebody/someone pair in regard to the criterion of specificity. As regards the use of the construction, their study both confirmed and refuted previous hypotheses. Age, as predicted, was the significant factor in distinguishing the use of the pronouns with younger speakers preferring the one variant while older speakers favoured the body variant. Conversely, they found no support for claims that the body variant was preferred in conversation and that the one variant was preferred both by women and professionals. They concluded that the ongoing change towards the greater use of the one variant is driven by younger speakers, though further investigation is required.
The remaining four chapters are more eclectic but all address questions of interest to the development of functional linguistics theory. Chapter 7 by Merlijn Breunesse and Holger Diessel (pp. 185–207) investigates the potential influence of iconicity on the encoding of distance in demonstrative systems in a sample of 180 geographically distributed languages drawn from 130 language families. Their findings confirm previous studies that proximal distance is more frequently encoded by demonstratives containing higher F2 values, while distal terms are more frequently encoded by lower F2 values. Furthermore, their comparison between proximal and distal terms in individual languages found the expected motivated relationship occurred in around 70 per cent of the languages which employed vowel contrast to signal distance. In the second part of the chapter the authors investigated other possible iconic effects, such as tone, vowel lengthening, reduplication and number of syllables, and found some evidence that the proximate/distal distinction is coded by high versus low tone, shorter versus lengthened vowels, base versus reduplication and fewer versus more syllables. Their study provides some valuable further support for Ohala's (Reference Ohala, Hinton, Nichols and Ohala2006) frequency code, but the sample sizes are small and further investigation is required. However, it is clear that the issue of iconicity and the naturalness of grammar coding is a rich topic for further investigation.
In chapter 8 (pp. 209–36), Lucy Chrispin and Lise Fontaine's study is from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) tradition. SFL is a grammar of clauses with transitivity identified as a configuration of participants. There are six process types, two of which are behavioural and mental. This chapter examines the semantic and lexico-grammar profile of the verb watch and by contrast see. In SFL terms the former is typically found in behavioural process clauses and the later in mental perceptive process clauses. SFL argues that lexis is ‘most delicate grammar’ (Halliday Reference Halliday1961/2002), and that consequently lexical verbs emerge from the realisation of choices at clausal rank. Thus it is assumed that the realisation of watch implies that it is found in a behavioural process. Yet, as Chrispin and Fontaine note, this does not have to be the case. Their corpus study of the lexemes watch and see demonstrate clearly that in English the lexical semantics of watch and see realise multiple and unique patterns, and hence from an SFL perspective the individual verb tokens occur in clauses with different process types. The value of the chapter lies in the explication of the meaning potential of the lexeme watch and showing how it contrasts with other verbs in terms of features such as complementation patterns and Aktionsart. This type of work has the potential to enrich SFL description by enabling a more fine-tuned taxonomy of verb processes.
In chapter 9 (pp. 237–65), William B. McGregor argues that linguists must produce evidence for a zero marker or produce evidence as to why zero-marking is necessary prior to incorporating it into their descriptions. He rejects the commonly held view that the presence of an ergative case marker entails the necessity/presence of absolutive case, see for example Palancar (Reference Palancar, Malchukov and Spencer2009). McGregor produces convincing evidence from the Australian language Gooniyanda, where case marking is a phrasal phenomenon, to suggest that there is no evidence for zero case marking. He does so by (i) ruling out the possibility of a zero postposition, (ii) the implausibility that zero case marking could attach to each item in the NP, and (iii) the confusion engendered by having identical stem and inflected form of nominals. In addition, he provides evidence that the assumed zero marking for absolutive case in Gooniyanda does not result in useful linguistic generalisations. McGregor's work implies that language may contain unary case systems: a view that is most certainly plausible based on this evidence, but one that is somewhat troubling in that grammatical systems can no longer be defined in terms of paradigmatic oppositions.
The concluding chapter is from the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) tradition and reworks Gleason's (Reference Gleason1965) distinction between enation and agnation (pp. 267–98). Evelien Keizer in line with FDG thinking reinterprets enation and agnation in terms of representational and interpersonal frames and elements that are to be inserted into the frame. As the deletion or addition of operators does not result in a new frame, Keizer's distinction differs from Gleason, who argued that the distinction was between structures and lexemes. To illustrate, the relationship between (i) Colin is a tennis player and (ii) Colin plays tennis is agnate for Gleason (different structure same lexemes) but enate for Keizer (same state of affairs). While the term agnation has been taken up in the literature, the term enation has not. Yet Keizer reminds us that enation and agnation are of huge importance not only for language description, but also in categorising how speakers of particular languages conceptualise frames in daily communication. In addition, Keizer's chapter has the dual purpose of serving as an introduction to FDG theory and providing a convincing case that grammatical description cannot be divorced from the social situation and discourse settings.
To conclude, the editors are to be applauded for not only curating the individual chapters but also arranging them in three themes which pay homage to Davidse's important contributions in the development of functional and cognitive linguistics. It is my firm hope that this work, solid and influential in its own right, will not only be read but also will inspire readers to engage with Davidse's ongoing and important oeuvre.
