The V slot in causative constructions: A collostructional analysis
(2004) Third International Conference on Construction Grammar — Location: Marseille (7.July.2004)
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- Although causative constructions have been dealt with a lot in the literature, there is at least one aspect that has largely been ignored, namely their phraseology. It is widely accepted (if only implicitly) that causative constructions are ‘always safe’ (Stocker 1990: 61) and so can be used with any old verb. In other words, it is often assumed that no lexical restrictions are placed on V in constructions such as [X MAKE Y Vinf] or [X CAUSE Y Vto-inf], e.g. (1) But on the other hand, the approach would also make learners realize (in the sense of recognize) the significance of grammar, and raise their consciousness of its relevance. <BNC:W:CBR 1562> (2) Heating collapses the blue spectral peak, causing the violet luminescence to shift towards red. <BNC:W:H9S 1964> That this is far from being the case is obvious if one carries out a collostructional analysis, that is, an investigation aiming to establish the ‘lexemes [which] are strongly attracted or repelled by a particular slot in the construction’ (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003: 214). On the basis of corpus data extracted from the British National Corpus, the method will be applied to the V slot of causative constructions with 'cause', 'get', 'have' and 'make'. It will be shown that, with the exception of [X GET Y VPP] and [X HAVE Y VPP], which present quite similar collexemes, causative constructions tend to attract and repel different verbs and sets of verbs, e.g. 'do' with [X GET Y VPP] and [X HAVE Y VPP] and descriptive verbs with [X MAKE Y Vinf], as in: (3) Right can we get your teeth done now do you think? <BNC:S:KBW 6538> (4) his daughter does a bit of hair dressing on the side, and she’s having people come to have their hair done <BNC:S:KST 3076> (5) Makes me seem ever so old! <BNC:S:KBG 391> We will also see that a number of factors can influence collostructions. One of them is medium. As a rule, spoken and written collostructions do not coincide (e.g. 'do' in [X GET Y VPP] or [X HAVE Y VPP] is typical of speech), which can be related to Stubbs’s (1995: 249) claim that collocations are very much dependent on text type. In addition, it will be investigated whether collostructions may vary according to word form, as has already been demonstrated for collocations (see e.g. Newman & Rice 2003). The approach will also be qualitative and it will be seen that a verb can occur in different constructions, yet be used differently. Compare the following pair of sentences: (6) After all, one might dream up all kinds of outlandish ideas, and make them look good by persuasive argument decked out in the trappings of authority and the careful selection of data. <BNC:W:CBR 898> (7) The therapist tried to get her to look at such situations from her parents’ viewpoint. <BNC:W:B30 749> Finally, the results of the corpus-based collostructional analysis will briefly be compared with experimental data from sentence completion tasks, in an attempt to determine whether corpus-attested and elicited constructions differ in their collostructional behaviour.
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Gilquin, G. (2004). The V slot in causative constructions: A collostructional analysis. Third International Conference on Construction Grammar, Marseille. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225332