The case of the English conative construction: Rethinking constructional polysemy

Perek, Florent

doi:10.1075/hcp.43.03per

In:Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy
Edited by Dylan Glynn and Justyna A. Robinson
[Human Cognitive Processing 43] 2014
► pp. 61–85

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

Rethinking constructional polysemy

The case of the English conative construction

Florent Perek | Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Published online: 6 November 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.03per

This chapter examines the conative construction, e.g., I kicked at the ball, using collexeme analysis. Previous studies report that strong collexemes of a construction provide an indication of its central meaning, from which polysemic extensions are derived. However, the conative construction does not seem to attract a particular kind of verb that could be used to characterize its central meaning. To address this problem, a variant of collexeme analysis is suggested that consists in splitting the verbal distribution into semantic classes and consider “verb-class-specific” constructions independently. For the three classes tested, the most significant collexemes are found to be verbs whose inherent meaning contains the semantic contribution of the construction in that class. Hence, the most attracted collexemes do provide an indication of the constructional meaning, albeit specific to each verb class.

Keywords: collexeme analysis, semantic classes, verb-class-specific constructions

References (18)

References

Boas, H. (2003). A constructional approach to resultatives . Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Broccias, C. (2001). Allative and ablative at-constructions. In M. Andronis, C. Ball, H. Elston, & S. Neuvel (Eds.), CLS 37: The main session: Papers from the 37th meeting of the Chicago linguistic society. Volume 1 (pp. 67–82). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Croft, W. (2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K. Panther (Eds.), Motivation in language: Studies in honour of Günter  Radden (pp. 49–68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Dixon, R. (1991). A new approach to English grammar: On semantic principles . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fellbaum, C. (1998) (Ed.). WordNet: An electronic lexical database . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fillmore, C., & Kay, P. (MS). Construction Grammar (course reader) . University of California, Berkeley.

Fillmore, C. (2001). Mini-grammars of some time-when expressions in English. In J. Bybee, & M. Noonan (Eds.), Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson (pp. 31–60). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Glynn, D. (2004). Constructions at the crossroads: The place of construction grammar between field and frame. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics , 2, 197–233.

. (2010). Testing the hypothesis: Objectivity and verification in usage-based cognitive semantics. In D. Glynn, & K. Fischer (Eds.), Quantitative cognitive semantics: Corpus-driven approaches (pp. 239–270). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, A., Casenhiser, D., & Sethuraman, N. (2004). Learning argument structure generalizations. Cognitive Linguistics , 15(3), 289–316.

Kilgarriff, A. (1997). I don’t believe in word senses. Computers and the Humanities , 31(2), 91–113.

Levin, B. (1993). En glish verb classes and alternations . Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, St. Th. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 8(2), 209–243.

. (2005). Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory , 1(1), 1–43.

Van der Leek, F. (1996). The English conative construction: A compositional account. In  L. Dobrin, K. Singer, & L. McNair (Eds.), CLS 32: The main session: Papers from the 32th meeting of the Chicago linguistic society (pp. 363–378). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Cited by (20)

Cited by 20 other publications

Order by:

Hotta, Hikaru & Martin Hilpert

2025. English comparative constructions at different levels of schematicity: what is the role of adjective-specific variability?. Cognitive Linguistics 36:4 ► pp. 561 ff.

Bouso, Tamara

2024. Towards a usage-based characterisation of the English Superlative Object Construction. Constructions and Frames 16:1 ► pp. 100 ff.

Kim, Jungsoo & Rok Sim

2024. A Collostructional and Constructional Approach to the Transitive out of - ing Construction . English Studies 105:2 ► pp. 263 ff.

Suethanapornkul, Sakol & Sarut Supasiraprapa

2024. Usage events and constructional knowledge: A study of two variants of the introductory-it construction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 46:2 ► pp. 355 ff.

GRIES, STEFAN T.

2023. New Technologies and Advances in Statistical Analysis in Recent Decades. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 561 ff.

Kim, Jungsoo & Okgi Kim

2023. Diachronic Developments of the Concessive Though -Fronting Construction in American English: A Corpus-Based Perspective . English Studies 104:5 ► pp. 804 ff.

Liu, Yingying & Kevin McManus

2023. Investigating the psychological reality of argument structure constructions and N1 of N2 constructions: a comparison between L1 and L2 speakers of English. Cognitive Linguistics 34:3-4 ► pp. 503 ff.

PEREK, FLORENT

2023. Construction Grammar and Usage‐Based Theory. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 215 ff.

Shan, Weijia & Zhengjun Lin

2023. Collostructional analysis on Chinese modal verb construction neng bu neng + VP. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 21:2 ► pp. 351 ff.

SUNG, MIN-CHANG

2023. Functional idiosyncrasies of suggesting constructions in British English. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 321 ff.

Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman & Antal van den Bosch

2022. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning. Linguistics Vanguard 8:1 ► pp. 305 ff.

Romain, Laurence

2022. Putting the argument back into argument structure constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 33:1 ► pp. 35 ff.

Romain, Laurence

2025. Contingency and prototypicality. Pedagogical Linguistics

Francis, Elaine J.

2021. Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory,

Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Freek Van de Velde & Stefan Grondelaers

2021. Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing. Cognitive Linguistics 32:3 ► pp. 487 ff.

Dattner, Elitzur

2019. The Hebrew dative: Usage patterns as discourse profile constructions. Linguistics 57:5 ► pp. 1073 ff.

Perek, Florent & Amanda L. Patten

2019. Towards an English Constructicon using patterns and frames. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:3 ► pp. 354 ff.

[no author supplied]

2015. Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar [Constructional Approaches to Language, 17],

[no author supplied]

2023. A Constructional Account of Verb-Forming Suffixation [Constructional Approaches to Language, 36],

[no author supplied]

2023. Structural Priming in the Grammatical Network [Constructional Approaches to Language, 35],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.