Identifying and intensifying uses of prenominal such: A data-based approach

In this article, I revisit the functional distinction between identifying and intensifying uses of such, as in such a person and such a blunderer respectively. In the literature on such, attention has gone mainly to its classification in terms of word class and position in the NP, and to the different NP-structures it occurs in. This paper adopts a data-based constructional approach of cognitive-functional affiliation, viewing grammatical and lexical syntagmatic patterning as one continuum. It offers a fine-grained description of the identifying and intensifying functions of such by observing their different scopal relations, and grammatical and collocational co-occurrence patterns in the data. It also makes a data-based contribution to the controversy about contexts that are vague between an identifying and intensifying reading. The distributional patterns of identifying, intensifying and vague uses of such in spoken and written contemporary corpus data are quantified and interpreted in terms of genre distinctions.