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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 41:1 (2020) ► pp.1–32

The way-construction in World Englishes [*] *

| Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
| Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

The way-construction (e.g. He sang his way into our hearts) is a highly idiomatic English Argument Structure construction. Apart from a brief discussion in Davies and Fuchs (2015: 13), however, no study has looked at the construction in World Englishes. Drawing on more than 14,000 tokens from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), we present the first in-depth empirical analysis of the construction across various types of World Englishes. Our results provide support for Hoffmann’s (2014) claim of the correlation of Dynamic Model stage (Schneider 2003, 2007) and constructional productivity: the overall frequency of the construction as well as the productivity of the verbal, nominal, and prepositional slots of the construction correlate positively with a variety’s phase in the Dynamic Model. Moreover, it turns out that the less entrenched a variety is according to the Dynamic Model, the stronger is its tendency to select specific prototypical, or frequent, fillers in the constructional slots. Finally, we find no evidence for the reliteralisation hypothesis, i.e. that less advanced varieties exhibit a preference for concrete verbs or nouns.

Keywords: Construction Grammar, productivity, way-construction, World Englishes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The Dynamic Model of the evolution of New Englishes
    • 2.2Construction Grammar
    • 2.3The way-construction from a Construction Grammar perspective
    • 2.4Dimensions of constructional variation in World Englishes
      • 2.4.1Productivity of constructions in World Englishes
      • 2.4.2Frequency of non-compositional constructions in New Englishes
      • 2.4.3Preference for prototypical fillers
      • 2.4.4Semantic effects on constructions in New Englishes
    • 2.5Hypotheses
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Dataset
    • 3.2Variables and annotation
    • 3.3Statistical methods
      • 3.3.1HCFA tests
      • 3.3.2LRNE models
      • 3.3.3Mixed effects models
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall frequency
    • 4.2Productivity of the slots
    • 4.3The selection of lexical fillers
      • 4.3.1The fillers in the verbal slot by evolutionary stage (two-way associations)
      • 4.3.2The fillers in the prepositional slot by evolutionary stage(two-way associations)
      • 4.3.3Three-way associations between verbal slot, prepositional slot and evolutionary stage
    • 4.4Semantic aspects of the slot fillers
      • 4.4.1The proportions of motion verbs
      • 4.4.2 concreteness of the V slot
      • 4.4.3 concreteness of N slot
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 24 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00038.bru
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