A gem of a construction. Productivity and semantic coherence of the Evaluative Binominal Construction in Dutch, English, French and Italian

Hendrikx, Isa;Piunno, Valentina;Van Goethem, Kristel
(2025) Constructions binominales en “of” et métaphore — Location: Université Grenoble-Alpes (Online workshop) (21.May.2025)

Files

HendrikxPiunnoVanGoethem_2025_Agemofaconstruction.pdf
  • Open Access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 895.73 KB
Download

Details

Authors
Abstract
This study investigates the Evaluative Binominal Construction (EBC) (e.g., a hell of a day), represented as the constructional schema [DET1 N1 PREP DET2 N2], which connects an N1 expressing an evaluative quality and an N2 indicating the entity to which the quality is attributed. The EBC has already been studied in several languages such as English (Aarts, 1994, 1998; ten Wolde, 2023), Dutch (Verhagen, 2005; Van Goethem, 2023) and French (Larrivée, 1994), but cross-linguistic studies (e.g., Piunno, in press) are scarce and often not corpus-based (e.g., Foolen, 2004). The first objective of our study is to fill this gap by providing a corpus-based constructionist analysis of the EBC, including four languages (English, Dutch, French and Italian), and by analyzing the main cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the EBC in the languages under study. Additionally, this case study seeks to re-examine Barðdal's (2008) hypothesis of an inverse correlation between productivity and semantic coherence. Our data are taken from the TenTen corpus family on SketchEngine. The top 10 EBC patterns per language are examined in terms of formal properties, productivity and semantic specialization, based on corpus samples of 100 relevant occurrences per pattern (i.e., datasets of 1000 occurrences per language). Preliminary results reveal subtle cross-linguistic differences between the four languages. For instance, on the formal level we find a wide variation in DET1 position in Germanic (e.g., ENG a/that/my hell of a house) but a preference for a demonstrative in Romance (e.g. IT quel capolavoro di film ‘that masterpiece of a film’). As regards semantic specialization, the constructional semantics is mainly positive in Dutch (ameliorative or augmentative) (e.g., een pracht van een kerstkaart ‘a beauty of a Christmas card’; een joekel van een auto ‘a whopper of a car’), mixed positive/negative in English (e.g., a gem of a book; a hell of a stink), and mainly pejorative in Romance (e.g., la putain de patrie ‘that fucking fatherland’). With respect to the relation between productivity and semantic coherence, an inverse correlation is often confirmed: while some subpatterns are flexible as they combine high productivity and low semantic coherence (e.g., DU [een pracht van een N] ‘a beauty of a N’), others form more fixed schemas which relate low productivity scores to high semantic coherence (e.g. ENG [a whale of a CONCEPT]. However, we also find several exceptions to this tendency which combine high productivity and high semantic coherence (e.g., IT [quel genio di PERSON] ‘that genius of a PERSON’, FR [ce con de PERSON] ‘that idiot of a PERSON’), indicating that semantically constrained constructions can still be productive. References Aarts, B. (1994). The syntax of binominal noun phrases in English. Dutch Working Papers in English Language and Linguistics, 30, 1–28. Aarts, B. (1998). Binominal noun phrases in English. Transactions of the Philological Society, 96(1), 117–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.00025 Barðdal, J. (2008). Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic. John Benjamins. Foolen, A. (2004). Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance languages. In G. Radden & K.-U. Panther (Eds.), Studies in linguistic motivation (pp. 75–100). De Gruyter. Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář, V., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2013). The TenTen Corpus Family. In A. Hardie & R. Love (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL 2013 (pp. 125–127). UCREL. Kilgarriff, A., Rychlý, P., Smrž, P., & Tugwell, D. (2004). The Sketch Engine. In Proceedings of Euralex 2004 (pp. 105–116). Piunno, V. (in press). Quel genio di lingua. Analisi quantitativa e qualitativa delle costruzioni fraseologiche valutative dell’italiano e confronto con lo spagnolo e il francese. In E. Lavric, Chr. Konecny, C. Konzett-Firth, & M. Messner (Eds.), Actes du IXe Colloque International ‘Linguistique contrastive germano-romane et intraromane’. Frank & Timme. Van Goethem, K. (2023). Een pracht van een constructie vs. een prachtconstructie: Een vergelijkende corpusstudie van de syntactische en morfologische Expressieve Binominale Constructie. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 28(2), 325–348. Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructiegrammatica en ‘usage-based’ taalkunde. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 10, 197–222. ten Wolde, E. (2023). The English binominal noun phrase: A cognitive-functional approach. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108921893
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Hendrikx, I., Piunno, V., & Van Goethem, K. (2025). A gem of a construction. Productivity and semantic coherence of the Evaluative Binominal Construction in Dutch, English, French and Italian. Constructions binominales en “of” et métaphore, Université Grenoble-Alpes (Online workshop). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/245899