Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis
-
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
and
Andrew McMichael
Abstract
This paper empirically tests a number of criteria proposed in the literature to identify the prototype of a linguistic category in order to see how they compare with each other - and what this can tell us about the concept of prototypicality. The item under investigation is through, and the starting point is an intuition-based definition of prototypical through. The different criteria are frequency of use, ease of elicitation, historical origin, patterns in L1 acquisition and patterns in L2 use. All instances of through retrieved for testing each of these criteria are classified according to a taxonomy couched in Construction Grammar terms. The findings confirm the special status of the intuition-based prototype of through (the [X moves through Y] construction) according to some of the criteria, but also reveal divergent results, in particular a central use of the instrumental prepositional phrase with through. Conclusions are drawn about the theoretical concept of prototypicality and its possible multi-faceted nature, and more generally about the place of empirical evidence in Cognitive Linguistics.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Editorial: Corpora, constructions, cognition
- Facing the facts of fake: A distributional semantics and corpus annotation approach
- Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis
- Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door
- Divergent theories, converging evidence: The constructional semantics of competing future constructions
- Syntax from and for discourse II: More on complex sentences as meso-constructions
- The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach
- Unifying entrenched tokens and schematized types as routinized commonalities of linguistic experience
- Reconciling older and newer approaches to grammaticalization
- Construction Grammar for students: A Constructionist Approach to Syntactic Analysis (CASA)
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Editorial: Corpora, constructions, cognition
- Facing the facts of fake: A distributional semantics and corpus annotation approach
- Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis
- Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door
- Divergent theories, converging evidence: The constructional semantics of competing future constructions
- Syntax from and for discourse II: More on complex sentences as meso-constructions
- The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach
- Unifying entrenched tokens and schematized types as routinized commonalities of linguistic experience
- Reconciling older and newer approaches to grammaticalization
- Construction Grammar for students: A Constructionist Approach to Syntactic Analysis (CASA)
