Constructions and Frames - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2011

This paper offers a corpus-based study of the noun phrase pattern exemplified in This is anticipated to be more common a scenario than fleas spreading bubonic plague, referred to as the Optional Postposed Indefinite Article Noun Phrase (OPIANP). The central question is whether there is semantic motivation for this postposition of the indefinite article. The results suggest that there is such motivation, namely that the OPIANP could be an extension of a more frequent construction identified as the Postposed Indefinite Article Noun Phrase (PIANP). It is shown that the pattern’s semantics is unpredictable from its component parts and that its primary function is to position already given arguments on an adjectival scale, thus foregrounding scalar qualities and backgrounding the nominal meaning. These findings are then discussed in light of current grammatical theory, and some suggestions are made for future research.

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence.In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event.This paper provides a history of the construction in its different stages and tries to uncover the mechanism and factors that favored the increase in its productivity over the centuries. It also attempts to understand these facts from a typological standpoint, as an effect of some kind of a transitivity split that took place in Old Spanish, which gave rise to a type of marked construction, associated to some specific verbs.

This paper discusses a range of attested examples of NPs in which proper names are preceded by articles, determiners, and adjectives, arguing that such instances do not constitute a change into a common noun category. On the basis of such examples, it is claimed that the meaning of proper names relies not on unique reference, but on frame metonymy. Frames evoked by proper names interact with NP constructions, yielding a range of uses driven by the discourse context. Further, it is shown how the use of modified proper names in copular constructions is best explained through the framework of blending and the concept of constructional compositionality (as defined in Dancygier and Sweetser 2005).

The current study documents and analyzes the previously unrecognized English if and when construction. This construction coordinates a conditional and a temporal conjunction, as in if and when P Q; Q until and unless P; and a wide range of other micro-constructions. The current study documents the various types of if and when constructions, examines their relation to temporal and conditional constructions, and analyzes their variations in form and meaning from a Construction Grammar perspective.