Non-meaningful words: co-indexing constructions, and other illustrative contributions from a conversation-analytic corpus of German: the thesis of non‑compositionality in construction grammar

Abstract

This paper investigates the discrepancies between the sum of lexical meanings and the holistic meanings of constructions in authentic German conversations, as documented in qualitative analyses of conversational sequences. These discrepancies differ from the well-known mismatches between phraseological meanings and the summation of meanings within idiomatic expressions. Qualitative analyses of conversational sequences were conducted on segments from German call-in radio shows, utilising conversation-analytic methods that reconstruct the participants’ perspectives in the interaction. Theoretical frameworks are drawn from interactional linguistics and construction grammar. One of the aims of this study is to demonstrate that most linguistic constructions are more specific than the complex schematic constructions of construction grammar, but less specific than complex idiomatic expressions. The research identified two types of discrepancies: words that lack their conventional lexical meanings (e.g., nochmal, kurz, vielleicht) and instances where sentence meaning builds on a non-verbalised, implicit component from the previous sentence (e.g. weil-and obwohl-clauses with the finite verb in the second position). These findings suggest that, more frequently than previously assumed, sentence meaning cannot be derived by simply summing the individual meanings of sentence constituents. The study advocates for treating entire linguistic constructions in language learning, particularly if they are partially or fully lexically specified, as they represent the most effective linguistic solutions for recurring situations.