Page 135 - Costellazioni 6

GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

Sentence (1b) demonstrates an even more radical impact of the
caused-motion construction. Here, the caused-motion construction ap-
plies to an intransitive verb. The verb sneeze normally denotes a pro-
cess that only involves one argument, the sneezing person. In the
caused-motion construction, however, it has three arguments, and the
meaning imposed by the construction can be described as ‘one’s
sneezing causes a thing to move to a place’. An interesting side effect
is that can be used with one or three arguments, but not as a transitive
verb with two arguments, i.e. we can’t say *Fred sneezed the tissue.
These examples clearly show that grammatical constructions
have meaning of their own independently of the lexical items used in
them. When, as in these sentences, the meanings conveyed by the
lexical words and the grammatical construction are in conflict, gram-
mar normally wins out and coerces an interpretation that is in line
with its grammatical construction.

1.2 Grammatical structure is motivated
Most words are arbitrary, i.e. there is no motivated connection between
the form of a word and its meaning. Grammatical constructions, on the
other hand, are to a large part motivated. A convincing example of moti-
vation in language is iconicity, i.e. the conceived similarity between a form
of a sign and its meaning. Consider the following instances of word order:
the order of the clauses in (2a) and the order of the adjectives in (2b):

(2a) Silvia had a baby and got married.
(2b) It is a cute little Italian boy.

The order of the coordinated clauses in (2a) reflects the order in which
the two events occurred: Silvia first had a baby and then got married,
possibly as a result of having a baby. If we reversed the order of the
clauses, i.e. as Silvia got married and had a baby, its meaning would
change, too: Silvia first got married and then had a baby. both interpre-
tations are due to the iconic principle of temporal order. The sequential
order in which coordinated sentences are presented is thus meaning-
ful—it is, in fact, so self-evident that we don’t give it any thought.
Let us now consider the order of the attributive adjectives in (2b).
The order of the three adjectives sounds natural and cannot really be

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