Thomas Hoffmann is Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as Furong Scholar Distinguished Chair Professor of Hunan Normal University. Notable publications include Preposition Placement in English (CUP, 2011), English Comparative Correlatives Interface (CUP, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (co-edited with Graeme Trousdale, OUP).

https://www.ku.de/slf/anglistik-amerikanistik/englische-sprachwissenschaft/mitarbeitende/prof-dr-thomas-hoffmann 

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dUDkPp4AAAAJ&hl=de

ABSTRACT 

A central property of human cognition is symbolic thinking – the ability of our minds to pair a string of sounds ([hɑːt] or letters <heart>) with an arbitrary meaning (‘♥’). All speakers of English have stored thousands of such form-meaning pairings (also known as ‘words’) and are thus able to communicate with each other about topics as diverse as love, life, football or quantum mechanics. Now, all linguistic theories agree that words are one of the central units of any language. In addition to words, however, most theories postulate additional mechanisms for the combination of words into utterances (combinatory syntactic rules that have no access to meaning). In contrast to this, Construction Grammar holds that form-meaning pairings are not only a useful concept for the description of words, but that all levels of grammatical description involve such arbitrary and conventionalized form-meaning pairings. This extended notion of the Saussurean sign has become known as the ‘construction’ and includes morphemes, words, idioms, as well as abstract phrasal patterns – and, perhaps, also football chants and schemas for poems (Hoffmann & Bergs 2018).

The present talk will provide an overview of usage-based Construction Grammar approaches to English (Diessel 2019; Goldberg 2006, 2019; Hilpert 2019; Hoffmann 2022; Trousdale & Hoffmann 2013). It will cover all levels of syntactic description, from word-formation over phrasal and clausal phenomena to football chants and jokes. Moreover, it will showcase how constructionist approaches can account for language acquisition, variation and change. 

References

Diessel, Holger. 2019. The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, Adele. 2019. Explain me this: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Hilpert, Martin. 2019. Construction Grammar and its Application to English. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2022. Construction Grammar: The Structure of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffmann, Thomas & Bergs, Alexander. 2018. A Construction Grammar approach to genre”. CogniTextes 18: 1–27. 

Hoffmann, Thomas/ & Trousdale, Graeme, eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.