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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 41:3 (2020) ► pp.352–367

Make us difficult

Portrait of a non-standard construction

| University of Sheffield

This paper introduces a previously undiscussed English construction, termed the make us difficult construction. Examples of the construction are presented, from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, and a quantitative analysis is conducted of the construction’s text frequency and variant rates. Quantitative data on specific usage patterns is employed to inform an analysis of the construction and its productivity, and recommendations are made for future research.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, International Corpus of English, GloWbE, World Englishes, complex transitive, extraposition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminary observations on the standard in GloWbE
  • 3.The make us difficult construction: Corpus examples
    • 3.1The ICE corpora
    • 3.2The GloWbE corpus
  • 4.Variant rates for the make us difficult construction
    • 4.1The ICE corpora
    • 4.2The GloWbE corpus
  • 5.Usage patterns and productivity
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00054.meh
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