“England and America are two nations divided by a common language.”(George Bernard Shaw)
Adopting a construction-based view of language (Goldberg 1995), we demonstrate that it is possible to uncover differences between British and American English at the lexicosyntactic level, showing that the collexemes, i.e. the words significantly associated with a construction, are variety-dependent. To this end, we compare more than 5,000 verb pair types as they occur in the two varieties in the so-called into-causative construction (as in He tricked me into employing him) and submit them to the scrutiny of a statistical test called distinctive collexeme analysis, which identifies those verbs that distinguish best between the two varieties. Interesting contrasts emerge, such as the predominance of verbal persuasion verbs in the cause predicate slot of the American English data as opposed to the predominance of physical force verbs in the cause predicate slot of the British English data. We discuss how these and other results create a picture of subtle, yet systematic, differences in meaning construction, and we offer an explanation of these differences as reflecting differently entrenched semantic frames.
2019. Gender Effects in Student Technical and Scientific Writing—A Corpus-Based Study. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 62:3 ► pp. 239 ff.
2012. Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent syntactic changes in English. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 157 ff.
Davies, Mark
2015. The importance of robust corpora in providing more realistic descriptions of variation in English grammar. Linguistics Vanguard 1:1 ► pp. 305 ff.
2019. Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
. Linguistics 57:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Deshors, Sandra C.
2017. Zooming in on Verbs in the Progressive: A Collostructional and Correspondence Analysis Approach. Journal of English Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 260 ff.
Deshors, Sandra C. & Sandra Götz
2020. Common ground across globalized English varieties: A multivariate exploration of mental predicates in World Englishes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2021. From movement into action to manner of causation: changes in argument mapping in the into-causative. Linguistics 59:1 ► pp. 247 ff.
Gillmann, Melitta
2023.
Ein Lothar Matthäus braucht keine dritte Person
. Personennamen mit Indefinitartikel als Stancemarker in Politikerreden und Fußballblogs. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 51:3 ► pp. 512 ff.
2024. Corpus linguistics meets historical linguistics and construction grammar: how far have we come, and where do we go from here?. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0
Hunston, Susan & Hang Su
2019. Patterns, Constructions, and Local Grammar: A Case Study of ‘Evaluation’. Applied Linguistics 40:4 ► pp. 567 ff.
KIM, JONG-BOK & MARK A. DAVIES
2016. Theinto-causativeconstruction in English: a construction-based perspective. English Language and Linguistics 20:1 ► pp. 55 ff.
Kim, Jungsoo & Rok Sim
2024.
A Collostructional and Constructional Approach to the Transitive
out of
-
ing
Construction
. English Studies 105:2 ► pp. 263 ff.
2011. Les faits statistiques comme objectivation ou comme interprétation : statistiques et modèles basés sur l'usage. Travaux de linguistique n°62:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
2015. ‘Wheedled Me into Lending Him My Best Hunter’: Comparing the Emergence of the Transitive into -ing Construction in British and American English. In Perspectives on Complementation, ► pp. 128 ff.
Rudanko, Juhani
2017. Lexico-Grammatical Creativity in American Soap Operas: A Case Study of the Transitive into -ing Pattern. In Infinitives and Gerunds in Recent English, ► pp. 57 ff.
SUNG, MIN-CHANG
2023. Functional idiosyncrasies of suggesting constructions in British English. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 321 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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