Discovering constructions by means of collostruction analysis: The English Denominative Construction
-
Beate Hampe
Abstract
Complex-transitive argument structures have received a large amount of attention from syntacticians of both formalist and cognitive-functional orientations. To account for expressions with causative resultative meanings, construction grammar has postulated a family of argument-structure constructions whose core is constituted by the Caused-Motion Construction and the Resultative Construction, exhibiting a locative complement and a predicative complement in the form of an AjP, respectively. Argument structures with NP complements, however, have been largely neglected. The present study investigates these patterns in the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) by means “collostruction analysis”. It shows that the formal distinction between AjP and NP complements corresponds to a constructional distinction hitherto unrevealed, viz. that between the Resultative Construction and another argument-structure construction, here called the “Denominative Construction”. Apart from improving existing descriptions of the network of complex-transitive argument-structure constructions, this study demonstrates that collostruction analysis can be employed in an exploratory way to discover constructions.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Discovering constructions by means of collostruction analysis: The English Denominative Construction
- Input distribution influences degree of auxiliary use by children with specific language impairment
- Experienced action constructions in Umpithamu: Involuntary experience, from bodily processes to externally instigated actions
- Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study
- German children's productivity with simple transitive and complement-clause constructions: Testing the effects of frequency and variability
- Metonymy in word-formation
- German children use prosody to identify participant roles in transitive sentences
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Discovering constructions by means of collostruction analysis: The English Denominative Construction
- Input distribution influences degree of auxiliary use by children with specific language impairment
- Experienced action constructions in Umpithamu: Involuntary experience, from bodily processes to externally instigated actions
- Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study
- German children's productivity with simple transitive and complement-clause constructions: Testing the effects of frequency and variability
- Metonymy in word-formation
- German children use prosody to identify participant roles in transitive sentences
- Book reviews
