Edited by Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Alba Luzondo Oyón and Paula Pérez Sobrino
[Human Cognitive Processing 58] 2017
► pp. 277–299
This chapter aims to provide a constructionist usage-based analysis of English conative expressions, arguing that a family of related constructions is required to account for the semantico-pragmatic properties of the at-frame in English. Drawing mainly on Broccias’s (2001) and Perek and Lemmens’s (2010) analyses, I challenge Goldberg’s (1995) monosemic analysis of the conative construction, where the ‘directed action’ meaning remains invariable, highlighting the essential role played by the verb’s inherent lexical semantics in determining the specific constructional senses that can be subsumed under the rubric of conative uses. Three distinct configurations are posited: the allative at-construction, instantiated by non-resultative verbs (Tsunoda 1985), the ablative at-construction, instantiated by resultative verbs, and the directional at-construction, compatible with intransitive verbs of ‘visual perception’.