The Power of Attraction: SO ADJ AS TO V Construction and its Collexemes

Abstract

Adopting the assumptions of usage-based construction grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006), the paper aims to explore the grammatical construction so ADJ as to V with respect to the lexical items occurring in two different slots of the construction. A central idea of the theoretical framework is that syntactic constructions may be as meaningful as lexical items, and, hence, they have the power to attract semantically compatible lexemes. This metaphorical power of attraction, in fact, is indicative of the level of construction entrenchment in the speakers’ minds. The method applied is covarying collexeme analysis (a subtype of collostructional analysis developed by Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, Stefanowitsch 2013), a quantitative and corpus-based approach designed to identify pairs of words that occur together in the same construction more or less frequently than expected. The obtained list of most strongly attracted ADJ–V combinations reveals that a great majority of adjectives denote a negative quality, which is perceived as the cause of the activity in the V slot. The consequence, on the other hand, is reserved for verbs of cognition, emotion, speech, and rarely for true dynamic verbs. A limited number of positive polarity adjectives appears to be used productively, only when the pattern is conventionalized through recurrent communicative situations. Finally, adjectives denoting size or quality, bordering the meaning of too- and enough-patterns, were observed in 12% of the analyzed collexeme pairs.