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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

1. By way of introduction

We all agree that the function of language is to communicate meaning.
As aptly phrased by Roman Jakobson, one of the pioneers of twentieth
century linguistics, «language without meaning is meaningless». but
which part of language is meaningful? We mostly think of words as
the meaningful units of language. We are much less likely to associate
grammar with meaning. This paper is meant to show that grammar is
meaningful as well — and rebut the widely held belief that grammar
is no more than a set of formal rules. Let us consider three aspects of
grammar that demonstrate its meaningfulness.

1.1 Grammatical structure is meaningful
Like lexical items, grammatical units are symbolic as a pairing of form
and meaning. It can easily be shown that grammatical constructions are
meaningful. Let us consider the so-called caused-motion construction,
as in Fred threw the letter into the wastebasket. The predicate (throw) of the
sentence has three arguments: a subject (Fred), a direct object (the letter),
and a directional adjunct (into the wastebasket). The meaning of this sen-
tence can be paraphrased as ‘Fred caused the letter to move into the waste-
basket’ — hence the term caused-motion construction. In her construc-
tion-grammar approach, Adele Goldberg (1995: 152-179) demonstrated
that the caused-motion construction is also used with verbs that do not
normally take three arguments, as illustrated in the sentences under (1).

(1a) Fred kicked the dog into the bathroom.
(1b) Fred sneezed the tissue off the table.

In sentence (1a), the verb kick is used in the caused-motion construc-
tion. Kick is a transitive verb that normally only takes two arguments,
as in Sam kicked the ball. An act of kicking affects an object, but it does
not bring about any change: The ball does not burst or fly away. Kick
is thus normally not used in a causative sense and simply means ‘hit
something with one’s foot’. In sentence (1a), however, the number of
arguments of kick is increased by a third argument: into the bathroom.
The meaning of kick has also changed, too: It now means ‘one’s hitting
with one’s foot causes a thing to move to a place’.

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