Introduction

It is easy to take our knowledge of language for granted. We learn language before we carry our first backpack to school, and we use it almost every waking hour of every day. Although we may not have studied quantum theory, or read Homer or James Joyce, we are each expert at using our own native language. The challenge that all learners face becomes more apparent when we try to learn a second language in school or as adults.

There are many utterances that are perfectly understandable, but which nonetheless tend to be avoided by native speakers of English. If asked, speakers will agree that there is something mildly "off" about them, even though they may have difficulty articulating exactly why they don't sound quite right. For example, we might confess that someone is driving us crazy (or bananas or insane), but we know that it would sound odd to complain that someone is driving us angry. We know that tall bushes are high bushes, but a high teenager is not necessarily tall. We can be creative in how language is used, but our creativity is constrained in ways that can be hard to articulate. For example, someone can tell me something or tell something to me, but they can only explain this to me; that is, it sounds somewhat unconventional to native speakers of English to say, explain me this. That is what this book aims to explain: when, why, and how native speakers are sometimes creative with language and yet at other times much more conservative.

Speakers avoid saying certain things, of course, simply because they want to avoid overtly negative reactions. The following are examples of such ill-advised utterances:

Sorry Mom, I didn't mean to get caught. I only care about my grade in this course. Your nose is too big for your face.

But children are not systematically corrected for the types of utterances this volume aims to address, which will hereafter be indicated by a preceding "?" (?explain me this, ?drive him angry, etc.). Caregivers are much more focused on the content of children's speech than on its form, as long as the message is clear enough. For example, a child who says Me loves you, mommy is more likely to get a hug than a grammar lesson, and a young child who utters an impressively grammatical utterance such as I have just completed a mural on the living-room wall with indelible markers is unlikely to get positive feedback from most parents. The sorts of formulations that native speakers recognize as odd are also not the sorts of formulations that grammar teachers warn against, since they are so rarely uttered by native speakers that no admonishment is needed.

To be clear, it is not that one never hears expressions such as ?explain me this (or ?drive him angry), or that all speakers judge them to be equally odd. In fact, speakers' judgments are gradient and dependent on a number of interrelated factors that are the focus of this book. But corpus and experimental studies confirm that certain types of utterances are avoided by native speakers much more than would be expected by chance. In order to think about how these aspects of language are learned, it's worth thinking about what speakers and language learners are trying to do.

1.1 The Puzzle

The learner's goal is to comprehend messages, given the forms she witnesses, and to produce forms, given the messages she wants to convey. Therefore, speakers must learn the ways in which forms and functions are paired in the language(s) they speak. These learned pairings of forms and functions are referred to here as grammatical CONSTRUCTIONS. Speakers also aim to express their intended messages efficiently and effectively while respecting the conventions of their speech communities, as discussed more below.

Constructions generally allow us to apply our linguistic knowledge to new situations and experiences. English tends to be particularly flexible in the ways in which constructions are PRODUCTIVE. A few examples of productive uses of familiar...