SEMANTICS OF GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION: CORPUS AND QUANTITATIVE ASPECT

Abstract

Recently, much research in linguistics has become increasingly interested in the use of new methods and tools to analyze authentic linguistic data provided by text corpora. One of the most reliable corpus-based methods is the collostruction analysis, developed by A. Stefanowitsch and S. Th. Gries. Through statistical corpus analysis, this method examines semantics of grammatical construction by measuring the degree of mutual association/ repulsion between a construction and lexical items flling its main slot. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of applying the collostructional analysis to study semantics of one type of the English unaugmented detached construction with explicit subject, a non-fnite construction of a binary structure consisting of a (pro)nominal subject and Participle I as a predicate, as in [ВКЕС [Subj cheeks][Pred burning suddenly]]. Using R statistical software and the script for the collostructional analysis on empirical data drawn from the BNC-BYU corpus, we identify verbs, which reveal signifcant attraction to the predicate slot. The semantic analysis of the most strongly attracted verbs allows determining the semantic verb classes most closely associated with the given construction. It appears that the construction particularly attracts verbs involving the body, verbs of emission, verbs of motion, verbs of existence, touch verbs, and verbs of perception. These verbs belong to the aspectual classes of state and process. The analysis proves that the semantics of the construction [ВКЕС with-less[Subj general noun][Verb Participle І]] sets restrictions on flling its predicate slot with only those verbs whose arguments are compatible with the semantic roles defned by the construction. In its prototypical meaning the analyzed detached construction verbalizes a scenario in which Agent (the subject of the matrix clause) has a Partitive (the subject of the construction) in State/ Process (expressed by the predicate of the construction — Participle I). The evidence from the study suggests that the collostructional analysis substantially advances our understanding of grammatical constructions and their meaning. Clearly, these are only preliminary fndings and further studies regarding collostructional semantics of other types of English detached constructions with explicit subject would be worthwhile.