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Article published In:
Constructions and Frames
Vol. 13:2 (2021) ► pp.230–262

Testing the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction

A constructional account of subject extraposition

| Université de Lille
| Northern Arizona University
| Northern Arizona University

This corpus-based study tests the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction by examining the syntactic realizations of subject extraposition (e.g., it is important to, it seems that), and by investigating at which level(s) of formal description a difference in form also entails a difference in function. The results show that distinct pairs of form and function, i.e. constructions, can be found at different levels of abstraction, but that these constructions also subsume formal realization patterns that do not encode a difference in function. This suggests that the Principle of No Synonymy largely breaks down at low levels of formal description. The study also offers a constructional account of subject extraposition by identifying a number of subject extraposition constructions, thereby showing that this is a syntactic phenomenon that is best analyzed as a family of constructions.

Keywords: subject extraposition, Construction Grammar, Principle of No Synonymy, levels of abstraction, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Construction Grammar and the Principle of No Synonymy
  • 3.Subject extraposition and previous research
  • 4.Corpus and method
    • 4.1BNC-15
    • 4.2Classification systems
    • 4.3Data extraction, coding and statistical analysis
    • 4.4Operationalizations of key concepts and research questions
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The highest level of abstraction
    • 5.2The intermediate level of abstraction
    • 5.3Low level of abstraction
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00052.lap
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