Review. Nick C. Ellis, Ute Römer and Matthew Brook O’Donnell. Usage-based approaches to language acquisition and processing: Cognitive and corpus investigations of construction grammar

Abstract

This book, published in the Language Learning Monograph Series, is the result of a long-lasting collaboration between three researchers, Nick Ellis, Ute Römer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, who come from different—but complementary—backgrounds: cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, and computer science. This combined expertise shines through in each of the 10 chapters which, taken together, provide a comprehensive account of the use, acquisition, and processing of Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs) in English from a usage-based, and more particularly Construction Grammar perspective. The main focus is on three VACs, namely, the Verb Locative, or intransitive motion construction (e.g. He ran into the room), the Verb Object Locative, or caused motion construction (e.g. She put the box under the bed), and the Verb Object Object, or ditransitive construction (e.g. They gave me a present), with occasional references to the Verb Object, or transitive construction (e.g. I closed the door). The book has a strong empirical basis and relies on a variety of data, from corpora of child speech or learner language to experimental data coming from free association tasks or lexical decision judgments, among others. These data allow the authors to test a number of clearly identified hypotheses, centred around several general research questions, each of which is the topic of an individual chapter, as briefly outlined below.