Make us difficult
Portrait of a non-standard construction
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.
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
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4.2The GloWbE corpus
- 5.Usage patterns and productivity
- 6.Conclusion
- Note
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Sources
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References