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11 - Syntactic Innovation and Functional Amalgams

from Part III - Case Studies in Constructional Morphosyntax

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Laura A. Michaelis
Edited by
Mirjam Fried  and
Kiki Nikiforidou
Mirjam Fried
Affiliation:
Univerzita Karlova
Kiki Nikiforidou
Affiliation:
University of Athens, Greece
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Summary

This chapter examines a class of grammatical patterns called functional amalgams, for example, That’s the real issue is that you never really know and I have a friend in the Bay Area is a painter. Distinct from syntactic blends, functional amalgams are innovative constructions that combine otherwise incompatible subparts of other constructions. These combinations are not licensed by the canonical phrase-structure rules of the language and may appear illogical or redundant. However, unlike speech errors, functional amalgams are purposeful productions and serve to distribute across constituents units of meaning that would otherwise coalesce in a single constituent sign of a complex linguistic expression. We examine the properties that distinguish functional amalgams from syntactic amalgams, and explore the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic features of functional amalgams, using an array of English sentence patterns as illustrations and showing why amalgams qualify as constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Finally, we extend this conception of functional amalgams to complex words, asking how selection properties of derivational endings may lead to coerced meanings.

Keywords

syntactic amalgamssyntactic innovationdiscourse–syntax interfaceGricean inferencederivational morphologycoercion
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar , pp. 290 - 308
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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