Chapter 5. A data-driven analysis of the structure type ‘man–nature relationship’ in Romanian

The Romanian tri-nominal juxtaposition structure relaÈ›ie om – natură ‘man-nature relationship’ is cross-linguistically widespread and typical of a series of relational nouns, such as agreement, interaction, and mixture, which can have a “compound” expansion (Canada–U.S. agreement, parent–child interaction, air–water mixture, etc.). Our analysis is twofold: we first examine the grammatical relationship between relaÈ›ie ‘relationship’ and om – natură ‘man–nature’, and second the construction om – natură. On the basis of data from a large Romanian newspaper corpus, we show that the “compound” construction om – natură is in fact a free phrase; we call it a Relational Coordination Construction (RCC). It usually embodies valency complements of a relational noun, and it semantically implies reciprocity. The analysis adopts a non-transformational, data-driven perspective within the Construction Grammar framework.