TY - JOUR

T1 - Well, maybe you shouldn’t go around shaving poodles

T2 - Collostructional and semantic-prosodic variation in the go (a)round Ving and go around and V constructions

AU - Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard

PY - 2024/3/7

Y1 - 2024/3/7

N2 - This article presents a corpus-based study of the go (a)round Ving- and go (a)round and V-constructions in American English. More specifically, it addresses the possibility of the constructions serving as pragmatic markers of stance through the collocational phenomenon of semantic prosody. It is argued that the notions of internal and external constructional properties from the early days of construction grammar as well as the corpus-linguistic idea of association patterns would be beneficial to usage-based construction grammatical descriptions of phenomena such as semantic prosody. Drawing on a 248,145,425-word portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, both simple collexeme analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis are applied to generate output that feeds into semantic-prosodic analysis. Moreover, standard distinctive collexeme analysis and multiple distinctive collexeme analysis are applied at the level of semantic prosodies in the collexemic fields (i.e., distinctive semantic-prosodic analysis), at the level of verbal category colligations (i.e., distinctive colligational analysis), and at the level of speech act functions of usage-events of the two constructions (i.e., distinctive speech act analysis) as a type of trial balloon. The purpose is to expand semantic-prosodic analysis from focusing merely on lexemes to exploring how other linguistic and pragmatic phenomena may be at play.

AB - This article presents a corpus-based study of the go (a)round Ving- and go (a)round and V-constructions in American English. More specifically, it addresses the possibility of the constructions serving as pragmatic markers of stance through the collocational phenomenon of semantic prosody. It is argued that the notions of internal and external constructional properties from the early days of construction grammar as well as the corpus-linguistic idea of association patterns would be beneficial to usage-based construction grammatical descriptions of phenomena such as semantic prosody. Drawing on a 248,145,425-word portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, both simple collexeme analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis are applied to generate output that feeds into semantic-prosodic analysis. Moreover, standard distinctive collexeme analysis and multiple distinctive collexeme analysis are applied at the level of semantic prosodies in the collexemic fields (i.e., distinctive semantic-prosodic analysis), at the level of verbal category colligations (i.e., distinctive colligational analysis), and at the level of speech act functions of usage-events of the two constructions (i.e., distinctive speech act analysis) as a type of trial balloon. The purpose is to expand semantic-prosodic analysis from focusing merely on lexemes to exploring how other linguistic and pragmatic phenomena may be at play.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - disctinctive collexeme analysis

KW - semantic preference/prosody

KW - semantic-pragmatic variation

KW - construction grammar

KW - simple collexeme analysis

KW - internal/external constructional properties

KW - constructional pragmatics

KW - stance

U2 - https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0018

DO - https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0018

M3 - Journal article

JO - Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

JF - Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

SN - 1613-7027

ER -