Lotte Sommerer
Biographic Data
| ID | 4607533 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lotte Sommerer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lotte |
| FAMILY NAME | Sommerer |
| SIGNATURE | SOMMERER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5170-5308 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
Construction Grammar is one of the fastest-growing branches of functional syntax. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this handbook provides a complete overview of the current issues and applications in this approach. Divided into six thematic parts, it covers the fundamental notions of Construction Grammar, its conceptual origins and the basic ideas that unite its various branches, its solid empirical grounding and affinities wi…
Go to church or die in prison
This paper traces the diachronic development of prepositional phrases (PPs) with bare institutional/location nouns (e.g. go to church , stay in bed, die in prison ) from Middle English to Late Modern English. Based on a dataset of 2,249 instances extracted from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE2), we investigate changes in the usage of these constructions (i.e. formal and functional features). One question addr…
‘Not that Tight a Family’ – BIG Mess Constructions in Present Day American English
This paper presents a usage-based, constructional analysis of the so-called BIG MESS construction in Present Day English (e.g. how big a mess , that big a deal , too strong a word ). Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is presented in order to analyze the frequency, genre distribution and lexical biases of seven subtypes ( how , however , so , as , too , this , that ). The paper also zooms in on the feature of ‘discontinu…
Some as an indefinite article in Present Day English
This paper investigates the different functions of some in Present Day English. It especially focuses on whether and to what extent some functions as an indefinite article for non-count and plural nouns and as such competes with the bare marking strategy ( I need to buy some milk/some cigarettes vs. I need to buy milk/cigarettes ). It is shown that next to being a quantifier, some has grammaticalized into an article-like element. On the basis of …
Constructional competition and network reconfiguration
This article investigates some functions of the determinative sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. It traces, quantifies and models the diachronic development of sum(e) as a pre-head element from a usage-based, cognitive Construction Grammar perspective by postulating several semi-specified but also abstract constructional OE and ME NP-schemas and sketching the observable (changing) network (re)configurations. By analyzing texts from t…
Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters
This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step ) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics and extension potential (i.e., modificatio…
Article Emergence in Old English
Linguistic diversification as a long-term effect of asymmetric priming
This paper tries to narrow the gap between diachronic linguistics and research on population dynamics by presenting a mathematical model corroborating the notion that the cognitive mechanism of asymmetric priming can account for observable tendencies in language change. The asymmetric-priming hypothesis asserts that items with more substance are more likely to prime items with less substance than the reverse. Although these effects operate on a v…
Investigating the emergence of the definite article in Old English
The article attempts to shed new light on the question if a definite article existed in Old English. First, it tries to determine what it actually means to be an article, discusses several criteria of ‘articlehood’ that have been proposed in the literature, and demonstrates that only some of them are useful for identifying the category in Old English. Next, a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ characteristics of articles is proposed, a…
Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters
This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step ) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics and extension potential (i.e., modificatio…
Investigating the emergence of the definite article in Old English
The article attempts to shed new light on the question if a definite article existed in Old English. First, it tries to determine what it actually means to be an article, discusses several criteria of ‘articlehood’ that have been proposed in the literature, and demonstrates that only some of them are useful for identifying the category in Old English. Next, a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ characteristics of articles is proposed, a…
Article Emergence in Old English
Linguistic diversification as a long-term effect of asymmetric priming
This paper tries to narrow the gap between diachronic linguistics and research on population dynamics by presenting a mathematical model corroborating the notion that the cognitive mechanism of asymmetric priming can account for observable tendencies in language change. The asymmetric-priming hypothesis asserts that items with more substance are more likely to prime items with less substance than the reverse. Although these effects operate on a v…
Constructional competition and network reconfiguration
This article investigates some functions of the determinative sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. It traces, quantifies and models the diachronic development of sum(e) as a pre-head element from a usage-based, cognitive Construction Grammar perspective by postulating several semi-specified but also abstract constructional OE and ME NP-schemas and sketching the observable (changing) network (re)configurations. By analyzing texts from t…
Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters
This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face to face, step by step ) qualitatively and quantitatively by examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). The constructions’ frequency and productivity, as well as their semantics and extension potential (i.e., modificatio…
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
Construction Grammar is one of the fastest-growing branches of functional syntax. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this handbook provides a complete overview of the current issues and applications in this approach. Divided into six thematic parts, it covers the fundamental notions of Construction Grammar, its conceptual origins and the basic ideas that unite its various branches, its solid empirical grounding and affinities wi…
Go to church or die in prison
This paper traces the diachronic development of prepositional phrases (PPs) with bare institutional/location nouns (e.g. go to church , stay in bed, die in prison ) from Middle English to Late Modern English. Based on a dataset of 2,249 instances extracted from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE2), we investigate changes in the usage of these constructions (i.e. formal and functional features). One question addr…
‘Not that Tight a Family’ – BIG Mess Constructions in Present Day American English
This paper presents a usage-based, constructional analysis of the so-called BIG MESS construction in Present Day English (e.g. how big a mess , that big a deal , too strong a word ). Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is presented in order to analyze the frequency, genre distribution and lexical biases of seven subtypes ( how , however , so , as , too , this , that ). The paper also zooms in on the feature of ‘discontinu…
Some as an indefinite article in Present Day English
This paper investigates the different functions of some in Present Day English. It especially focuses on whether and to what extent some functions as an indefinite article for non-count and plural nouns and as such competes with the bare marking strategy ( I need to buy some milk/some cigarettes vs. I need to buy milk/cigarettes ). It is shown that next to being a quantifier, some has grammaticalized into an article-like element. On the basis of …
Linguistics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (6 works) · History (5 works) · Lexicography and Language Studies (4 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · American English (2 works)