The paper offers a cognitive linguistic analysis of metaphors informing the conceptualization of sentence structure. In line with cognitive linguistics, it is assumed that the construal of this highly abstract conceptual domain necessarily has a metaphorical basis. Accordingly, it is argued that key differences between alternative syntactic theories can be linked to the metaphorical choices they make. The paper begins with a critical comparison of constituency- and dependency-oriented syntax. The key virtue of the latter is seen in its ability to focus on relation types rather than unit types and unit boundaries. It is then argued that THE SENTENCE IS A BUILDING serves as the core metaphor underlying constituency analysis, whereas THE SENTENCE IS A FAMILY may play a similar role in dependency grammar. The final part of the paper discusses two instructive metaphors invented by Sámuel Brassai, both supporting a dependency grammatical understanding of sentences, namely THE SENTENCE IS A FEUDAL SOCIETY and THE SENTENCE IS A SOLAR SYSTEM. It is demonstrated that each of Brassai’s metaphors has its share of advantages and may be of great service to dependency grammar in language pedagogy.

The main aim of this paper is to show that the notion of the ’self-serving bias’, well established in social psychological research, may have an impact on the way in which speakers verbalise certain experiences. I hypothesise that this perceptual bias will interact with other factors; specifically, gender stereotypes (as defined by psychologists and linguists) and modesty (as defined in linguistic pragmatics). I present corpus evidence for the relevance of the self-serving bias and the complex interplay with gender stereotypes and modesty, based on variation between three different causative constructions (CAUSE, X MAKE Y happen, and X BRING about Y) as well as the use of the adverbs cleverly and stupidly. In both cases, my analysis focuses on the cooccurrence with personal pronoun subjects — specifically, differences in terms of person (first vs third) and gender (masculine vs feminine). The most general conclusion I draw is that cognitive (socio-)linguists may be able to formulate interesting new research questions based on concepts drawn from (social) psychology but that constructs developed within linguistics remain highly relevant as well.

In this chapter it is argued that language discretely combines lexical items into dependency structures rather than recursively embedding syntactic objects into phrase structures. This must be the case if language is to be able to manage discrete infinity and specifiers. In particular it is argued that the ubiquity of subordinators and other subordinating elements in the languages of the world and the fact that these are obligatory in many contexts clearly show that language is not recursive embedding. If language were recursive embedding, the subordinators would be completely redundant, since the subordinate clauses would automatically be embedded under the predicates. Other potential functions of universal subordinators such as Germanic that are discussed and refuted. The chapter will discuss several cases in English, Swedish and German where the universal subordinator is needed to embed the clause, and cases where it is not needed but where other subordination strategies are employed instead. Furthermore, it will be shown that in those cases where the subordinator is omitted and there is no other subordinating strategy, the clauses become desubordinated.

On 9 September 2019, a small symposium was held at the British Academy in London in honour of Professor Richard Hudson’s eightieth birthday. The presenters included former students, colleagues and collaborators of Hudson’s as well other figures from the world of linguistics. The themes of the symposium were led by the ideas that Hudson has championed and developed in his own writing, in particular the notion that language is represented in a single cognitive network, seamlessly integrated with the rest of cognition.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the HAVE perfect in English, paying particular attention to the development of the perfect participle, as a vehicle for discussing what causes directionality in language change, the English HAVE perfect being just one example of the emergence of a category which is a common property of Standard Average European. There are three main claims: that the change to a HAVE perfect only involves one strictly syntactic change, the reanalysis of a complement as an adjunct; that there are semantic changes in the participle driven by the bleaching of HAVE; and that the emergent new category of participle is driven by these semantic changes. The evolution of participles involves the creation of a new linguistic category, in a particular grammatical environment, which is analogous to an ecological niche in evolutionary change.

Dependency distance (DD) is a syntactic complexity measure proposed by Hudson (). With the development of annotated corpora, researchers have become able to examine the relation between DD and processing difficulty using large-scale data. Based on treebanks of twenty languages, Liu () identified the universal later called “dependency distance minimization”. While the mean DD of languages tends to be minimized as constrained by working memory, there also seem to be considerable differences among languages, particularly between Chinese and English (Hudson, ). To investigate whether this variation is induced by corpus-based factors (such as sentence length, genre and annotation scheme) or by deeper motivations (such as syntactic differences of languages), a series of studies were conducted. Their results indicate that while shorter sentences, informative and spoken texts, as well as annotations based on syntactic functions may contribute to shorter DDs, the DD variation between Chinese and English is more likely the result of different syntactic structures and processing mechanisms (such as the use of words rather than affixes to express tense in Chinese).

The manuscript revisits the dependency vs. phrase structure debate that occurred in 1980–1 between Richard Hudson on the one hand and Östen Dahl and Pertti Hietaranta on the other. The debate is taken up first in the area of adjective scope. Dahl’s argument in favor of phrase structure based on adjective scope (e.g. ordinary French house) can be convincingly countered in terms of the component unit of dependency syntax. The component and two additional units of dependency syntax – the full component and the full catena – are presented and developed here. The claim is that the motivation for the layered trees of many phrase structure grammars disappears if the much flatter Dependency Grammar analyses acknowledge these units of dependency syntax. The overarching message, then, is that barring the analysis of coordinate structures, the theory of syntax does not need the higher nodes associated with phrase structure, in line with Hudson’s original message back in 1980.

This chapter provides a further contribution to work on Word Grammar and language change. It explores particular developments in English derivational morphology in order to look in more detail at what kinds of changes occur in the language network over time. This relates to discussions in other cognitive linguistic theories about diachronic variation in the language network, especially in terms of changes to nodes and changes to links between nodes. The main claims that are made are as follows: (i) much change in the network is very local and involves micro-steps, but (ii) some changes can occur which involve more significant restructuring, for instance where language users have reanalysed a part of a word as a word in itself. Since the central goal of Word Grammar is to understand the grammar of words, such changes can be revealing in terms of the theoretical underpinnings of the framework.

In this paper dedicated to Hudson, we discuss the criteria used to define the dependency structure and to characterize the syntactic head of every syntactic unit. Hudson was the first one, in the 1980s, to really try to justify his choices of analysis in dependency syntax by using both distributional criteria with and without removal, but he never stated them in black and white. This paper is an attempt to propose distributional criteria for choosing a syntactic head and proving the head status of words that can generally not stand alone, such as determiners, prepositions, or auxiliaries. Three criteria are stated – a Positive and a Negative distributional criterion with removal and a Distributional criterion without removal – as well as a Distributional criterion for the head of a sentence. These criteria are compared to criteria used in Garde (), Hudson (, ), and Mel’čuk (), showing that Mel’čuk circumvented them in practice, while Hudson applied them quite systematically but never really stated them clearly.

English allows participial forms of verbs to modify nouns, as in the following example: The Rapids in 1834 was a straggling village whose 44 residents clustered mainly along the river on the east side of a single dirt path – the future Front Street. (iWeb Corpus) In this paper, I will address the question of whether attributive V-ing premodifiers in noun phrases are adjectives or verbs. I discuss the evidence for treating (some of) these formatives as adjectives, e.g. deverbal adjectives such as interesting, satisfying, etc., and I will look at the evidence for regarding others, such as straggling in the example above as verbs. I will then discuss so-called ‘synthetic compounds’, such as cake-eating (bear), beer-swilling (neighbour) and wall-straggling (flower). These will be analysed as verbal constructions rather than as adjectives. The evidence will involve the semantics and combinatory properties of V-ing premodifiers in English noun phrases. I will show that V-ing premodifiers can take a full range of dependents and that, with some restrictions, combinations of dependents, e.g. a complement and an adjunct, are also possible.

Hudson () argues raising occurs in not only syntax but also semantics and general cognition and that this supports the hypothesis that language is part of general cognition. One might then expect phonological structures too to be of a sort found in general cognition, and Hudson wonders whether raising occurs also in phonology. As Tallerman () notes, many and unconvincing are the attempts to demonstrate that phenomena thought of as syntactic occur also in phonology, but a truly convincing demonstration would show that movement, normally thought quintessentially syntactic, also occurs in phonology. Raising is a kind of movement; I identify two instances of it in phonology. The first is where the genitive z ending is ‘suppressed’ when the base already has a z ending (child’s, children’s, kid’s, *kids’s, kids’). The second is a proposed phenomenon of ‘raising to onset’: I present a dependency syntagmatics for English phonology and argue that if it is to adequately account for positionally conditioned consonant allophony and if, as is plausible, weak-syllables contain no nucleus, then there must be raising to onset analogous to syntactic raising to subject.