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English what with absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2019

JONG-BOK KIM Open the ORCID record for JONG-BOK KIM [Opens in a new window]  and
MARK DAVIES
JONG-BOK KIM
Affiliation:
Department of English Linguistics and Literature, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130.701, Korea [email protected]
MARK DAVIES
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University, ProvoUT84602, [email protected]
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Abstract

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.

Keywords

absolute constructioncorpusConstruction Grammargrammaticalization
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 637 - 666
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics Conference at Iowa State University, 17 September 2016, and at the 7th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, at University of Vigo, 29 September 2017. We thank audiences of the conferences for questions and feedback. Our thanks also go to Anne Abeillé, Bert Cappelle, Adele Goldberg, Jungsoo Kim, Okgi Kim, Laura Michaeli and Rok Sim for comments and suggestions at various stages in the development of this article. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A2A2028437).

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