KOLEKSEME MODALNOG IZRAZA BE OBLIGED TO

Abstract

This paper investigates the collexemes of the modal expression be obliged to, i.e. the construction be obliged to V in terms of which infinitival complements are attracted to and which are repelled by the construction. Starting from the viewpoint of Construction Grammar, that constructions are form-meaning pairings of varying degrees of complexity and schematicity, this paper aims to investigate which verbs are more likely to fill the open slot in the construction examined. Moreover, relying on the claim that constructions themselves carry meaning, it is assumed that the collexemes of this construction will be, to some extent, conditioned by the meaning of the construction itself. The core meaning of the construction is to denote extrinsic obligations, so it is expected that collexemes of the construction will denote some unwilling actions. The research was conducted on the online Canadian corpus applying the quantitative method of collostructional analysis, more precisely, the Simple Collexeme Analysis, developed by Gries and Stefanowitsch (2003). The aim of colostructional analysis is to find out which lexical items are “typical” of a given grammatical construction. Collostructional analysis is used to find out which lexical items in a given slot are most strongly attracted to a grammatical construction, and which are repelled by it. Furthermore, collostructional analysis also tells us something more about the construction itself since the meaning of the construction should correspond with the meanings of the lexical items that occur in it. Thus, by exploring which lexical items typically occur with the construction, we will obtain insight into the meaning of the construction itself. The Simple Collexeme Analysis is used to investigate which lexical items, or in our case which types of infinitival complements, typically occupy a given slot in a single grammatical construction, i.e. which lexical items the construction in question most strongly attracts. Furthermore, it also provides us with a ranked list of those lexical items which is interpreted qualitatively, and the interpretation of that list usually clearly displays that lexical items which are most strongly attracted to the construction are in most cases semantically closely related. As expected, qualitatively examined results revealed that there is a semantic relation among verbs that are most strongly attracted to the construction, as well as among those that are most strongly repelled by the construction. Namely, the verbs attracted to the construction are dynamic/action verbs, belong to formal register, and tend to share a core meaning of “giving something up”. Furthermore, a lot of these verbs denote some kind of verbal action. On the other hand, the verbs repelled by the construction are also dynamic/ action verbs, but they tend to denote some kind of physical action, usually one whose completion brings certain benefits to its performer. Additionally, these verbs mainly belong to the informal register, highlighting the difference between the verbs being attracted to the construction and those being repelled by it. Regarding the construction itself, it has been noticed that the construction has a tendency to express obligations related to verbal actions rather than those related to physical actions, so it may be concluded that the construction is more used for expressing obligations related to speech acts.