Adjectives in extraposed constructions with that-clauses: a quantitative corpus-driven analysis

Abstract

This paper employs the background assumptions of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) as well as a quantitative corpus-driven method for investigating the reciprocal interaction between adjectives and the extraposed construction with that-clauses in American English. The method, referred to as the attraction-reliance measure (Schmid 2000; Schmid & Küchenhoff 2013), is applied to the determination of strongly attracted and repelled adjectives of the it is ADJ that-construction. On the basis of the data extracted from the academic sub-corpus of COCA, the paper indicates that some adjectives are more strongly attracted to this construction than others, and that the occurrence of certain adjectives in this construction is more significant than their use in different types of extraposed constructions. In addition, the findings seem to point to frame-semantic knowledge as a determining factor affecting the mutual association between adjectives and the construction under study.

Nouns in the Be of N-Construction: A Corpus-Based Investigation

“…In other words, nouns that are strongly related to the construction in question can be classified according to the semantic frames they invoke on the basis of subjective judgments (cf. Wiliński, 2018).…”

“…The results of these calculations were converted to percentages by multiplying the observed frequency of a particular noun in the pattern in each case by one hundred (cf. Wiliński, 2018). These statistical tests were performed by means of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.…”

“…The percentages obtained from these measures were taken as indexes of a noun's strength of attraction to, or reliance on, the construction: it can be observed that the higher the percentage is, the stronger the attraction to, and reliance on, the pattern at the center of this investigation (cf. Wiliński, 2018).…”

“…The procedure adopted in this quantitative study involved three steps (cf. Wiliński, 2018Wiliński, , 2020. The first stage was to estimate the observed frequencies.…”

“…Recently, the increased application of online corpora has provided ideal possibilities for exploring the reciprocal relation between different kinds of grammatical patterns and the words combining with them in naturallyoccurring discourse, as indicated by a multitude of studies (e.g. Hilpert, 2014;Kaleta, 2014;Stefanowitsch, 2014;Perek, 2015;Kim & Davies, 2016;Yoon & Wulff, 2016;Wiliński, 2017Wiliński, , 2018Wiliński, , 2020, to mention a few). Perek's (2015) quantitative corpus-based investigation, for example, showed how a corpus-based method can aid in explaining many issues concerning the argument structure of words and providing quantitative descriptions of their usage, whereas Yoon and Wulff's (2016) study examined Spanish infinitive and sentential constructions collocating with various complements and determined the verbs that are strongly attracted to a particular complement.…”