What-clefts with adjectives in English: A corpus-based analysis

• Authors: Jarosław Wiliński

Title variants

PL

Zdania rozszczepione z przymiotnikami w języku angielskim

Abstracts

PL

W niniejszym artykule autor stawia sobie za cel zbadanie konstrukcji what-cleft z przymiot-nikami i ustalenie jej cech strukturalnych, semantycznych i dystrybucyjnych poprzez za-stosowanie semantyki ramowej i gramatyki konstrukcji, wykorzystanie danych z korpusu (COCA) i użycie ilościowej metodologii korpusowej. W tym celu autor wydobywa wystąpie-nia konstrukcji z dużego korpusu naturalnie występujących danych, określa jej strukturalne, semantyczne, dystrybucyjne i dyskursowo-funkcjonalne właściwości oraz identyfikuje przy-miotniki, które są silnie związane z omawianą konstrukcją. Artykuł wnosi znaczący wkład do rosnącej literatury na temat konstrukcji what-cleft poprzez jakościową i ilościową analizę jednego z jej wariantów, konstrukcji z przymiotnikami, który nie był do tej pory szczegółowo badany.

EN

This paper aims to investigate the what-cleft construction with adjectives and establish its structural, semantic, and distributional features by adopting frame semantics and usage-based construction grammar, exploiting the data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and applying quantitative corpus-based methodology. To this end, the author extracts the occurrences of the What be ADJ be-construction from a large corpus of naturally-occurring data, determines its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional properties, and identifies adjectives that are strongly associated with the construction in question. The paper makes a significant contribution to a growing body of literature on the what-cleft construction by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of one of its variants, a grammatical pattern with adjectives that has not been hitherto investigated in much detail.

Keywords

EN

what-clefts; construction grammar; frame semantics; COCA; corpus-based analysis

PL

zdania rozszczepione; gramatyka konstrukcyjna; semantyka ramowa; korpus; analiza korpusowa

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Krakowie
• Journal: Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia Linguistica
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 17
• Pages: 258-272

Dates

published

2022

Contributors

author

Jarosław Wiliński

• Uniwersytet Przyrodniczo-Humanistyczny w Siedlcach, Siedlce, Polska

• https://orcid.org/0000000231366529

References

• Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S., Finegan E., 1999, Longman grammar of spoken and written English, London: Longman.
• Bierwiaczonek B., 2016, An introductory English grammar in constructions, Częstochowa: Wydawnictwo AJD.
• Boas H., 2017, Computational resources: FrameNet and Constructicon, [in:] The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics, ed. B. Dancygier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 549–573.
• Collins P., 1991, Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English, London and New York: Routledge.
• Collins P., 2006, It-clefts and wh-clefts: Prosody and pragmatics, „Journal of Pragmatics” 38, p. 1706–1720.
• Croft W., Cruse D.A., 2004, Cognitive linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Declerck R., 1984, The pragmatics of it-clefts and wh-clefts, „Lingua” 64, p. 251–289.
• Declerck R., 1988, Studies on copular sentences: Clefts and pseudo-clefts, Leuven: Leuven University Press.
• Delahunty G., 1984, The analysis of English cleft sentences, „Linguistic Analysis” 13, p. 63–113.
• Deroey K.L.B., 2011, What they highlight is...: The discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures, „Journal of English for Academic Purposes” 11(2), p. 112–124.
• Fillmore C.J., 2006, Frame semantics, Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, ed. K. Brown, Amsterdam: Elsevier, p. 613–620.
• Fillmore C.J., Baker C., 2010, A frames approach to semantic analysis, [in:] The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, eds. B. Heine, H. Narrog, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 791–816.
• Gast V., Levshina N., 2014, Motivating w(h)-clefts in English and German: A hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study, [in:] Frequency, forms and functions of cleft constructions in Romance and Germanic: Contrastive, corpus-based studies, ed. A.-M. De Cesare, Berlin: De Gruyter, p. 377–414.
• Goldberg A., 2006, Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Goldberg A., 2013, Constructionist approaches, [in:] The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, eds. T. Hoffmann, G. Trousdale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 15–31.
• Hedberg N., 1990, Discourse pragmatics and cleft sentences in English. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota.
• Herriman J., 2003, Negotiating identity: the interpersonal functions of wh-clefts in English, „Functions of Language” 10(1), p. 1–30.
• Herriman J., 2004, Identifying relations: the semantic functions of wh-clefts in English, „Text” 24(4), p. 447–469.
• Hoffmann Th., 2017, Construction grammars, [in:] The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics, ed. B. Dancygier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 310–329.
• Hoffmann Th., Trousdale G., 2013, Construction Grammar: Introduction, [in:] The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, eds. T. Hoffmann, G. Trousdale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1–14.
• Huddleston R., Pullum G., 2002, The Cambridge grammar of the English language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kim J., 2007, English cleft constructions: Corpus findings and theoretical implications. „Studies in Generative Grammar” 17, p. 99–122.
• Miller J., Weinert R., 1998, Spontaneous spoken language: syntax and discourse, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Prince E., 1978, A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse, „Linguistic Society of America” 54(4), p. 883–906.
• Quirk R., Greenbaum S., Leech G., Svartvik J., 1985, A comprehensive grammar of the English language, New York and London: Longman.
• Schmid H.-J., 2000, English abstract nouns as conceptual shells. From corpus to cognition, Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Wiliński J., 2020, The preposition under and its noun collocates in the under-NOUN pattern: A quantitative corpus-based investigation, „Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies” 31, p. 23–43.
• Wiliński J., 2021, Nouns in the be of N-construction: A corpus-based investigation, „Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric” 66(3), p. 747–768.
• The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available from https://www. englishcorpora.org/coca/
• The FrameNet project. Available from https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/
• Mediabistro. Available from http://www.mediabistro.com

Identifiers

DOI

10.24917/20831765.17.20

Biblioteka Nauki

2174114