On the Brink of-Noun vs. On the Verge of-Noun: a Distinctive-Collexeme Analysis

• Authors: Jarosław Wiliński
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper uses the terminology of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1996; 2006) and a corpus-based method to investigate a pair of semantically similar constructions and the lexemes that occur in both of them. The method, referred to as distinctive-collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a), seeks to identify lexemes that exhibit a strong preference for one construction as opposed to another: in other words, to uncover subtle distributional differences between two semantically or functionally near-equivalent constructions. On the basis of the case study dealing with the on the brink of- noun construction versus the on the verge of- noun construction, the paper shows that there are lexemes that prefer one of the investigated patterns over the other. Moreover, the results of the distinctive-collexeme analysis reveal that the frame-constructional semantics is a relevant factor in the choice between these two patterns.

Keywords

EN

construction grammar; distinctive collexeme analysis; frame semantics; Fisher exact test

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 425-443

Dates

published

2017-12-30

Contributors

author

Jarosław Wiliński

• Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities*, Poland

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/rela-2017-0024