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Article published In:
Constructions and Frames
Vol. 13:2 (2021) ► pp.193–229

Slovak comparative correlatives

A usage-based construction grammar account

 | Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Comparative Correlatives (CCs) are biclausal constructions (e.g. The harder you work, the more you earn) that have complex semantics and form. This is the first construction grammar-based corpus study to investigate Slovak CCs, based on a 500-token sample. I argue that intra-clausal word-order phenomena can be explained through processing efficiency, based on Hawkins’ principle of Early Immediate Constituents (2004), and I use covarying-collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2005) to provide evidence for the existence of meso-constructions. The findings of this study contribute to construction grammar’s “aspirations toward universal applicability” (Fried 2017: 249), proving that the theory is also suitable for analysis of syntactic patterns in Slavic languages.
Keywords: Slovak, comparative correlative, Slovak National Corpus, usage-based construction grammar, covarying-collexeme analysis, meso-constructions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Slovak CC construction
  • 3.Corpus study: Results and analysis
    • 3.1 filler type
    • 3.2 lexical filler
    • 3.3 verb presence
    • 3.4Comparative element position
    • 3.5Covarying collexeme analysis of the data
      • 3.5.1Covarying-collexeme analysis of filler types
      • 3.5.2Covarying-collexeme analysis of lexical fillers
      • 3.5.3Covarying-collexeme analysis of verb presence
      • 3.5.4Covarying-collexeme analysis of comparative element position
  • 4.Discussion of the results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00051.hor
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