On the morning of November 15, 2019, Professor Martin Hilpert delivered his final lecture entitled“The great temptation:What diachronic corpora do and do not reveal about social change”at School of Foreign Languages. From November 11 to November 15, 2019, the young and prominent scholar delivered 5 lectures, covering a wide range of topics on “construction grammar and the analysis of spoken language”, “metaphors and mixed metaphors”, “collostructional analysis”, “diachronic study of constructions”etc. Over 100 graduates, faculty members and doctoral students across the nation sat in those sessions with enthusiasm and interest.
During the lecture, Prof. Hilpert focused on the cognitive analysis with diachronic corpora. At the beginning, he introduced the extensive applications of diachronic corpora in linguistic study to gain sights about lexicography, the evolution of grammar,and historical epidemiology. However, Prof. Hilpert also argued that it takes more systematic analysis of the lexico-historical data to draw robust conclusions. Using a large historical corpora: COHA, developed by Mark Davis, the German linguist analyzed the problems concerning Fillmore’s screwdriver, Flach’s grammar lesson and the rising sea levels of Koplenig and Müller-Spitzer. He concluded that word-use frequencies do not index social changes and sometimes can be misinterpreted by scholars. To cope with these problems, Prof. Hilpert advocated the lexical analysis in obligatory phenomena such as constructions in diachronic corpus studies. He then showcased his study on causation “Make X” based on Kemmer’s categorization of “make X” construction into mechanical action, experiential response and compulsion. Visualized charts are also presented by Prof. Hilpert to verify his three hypotheses, in which uses of make-causative with animate causers and uses of the make-causative in which both causer and causee are animate, are proved to decrease in the course of history. At the end of the lecture, Prof. Hilpert patiently answered questions from the audience.
Martin Hilpert is a young and outstanding cognitive linguist, specializing in construction grammar, language change, construction grammar, and corpus linguistics. His five-session lectures on constructions from the perspective of corpus linguistics open up a new window to cognitive linguistics for students. Inspired by his strict logic and rigorous attitude toward linguistic study, all the audience expressed gratitude to his introduction to the theory and methodology of construction grammar.( author: Li Pandeng)
