Chapter published in:
Analogy and Contrast in Language: Perspectives from Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Karolina Krawczak, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Marcin Grygiel
[Human Cognitive Processing 73] 2022
► pp. 341–370

Chapter 11
Modeling constructional variation

A multifactorial account of the contrast in construal between analogical causative constructions in Polish

| Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

This chapter is a corpus-based quantitative investigation of an alternation between clausal and nominal complements observed for complex causal adpositions in Polish. Constructional alternations represent an excellent example of analogy and contrast in language. Not only do they encode conceptually comparable and yet subtly contrastive content in structurally contrasting forms, but the choice between them is necessarily determined by analogical reasoning. The primary objective of this study is to establish what contrasts conceptually the two forms and therefore determines the speaker’s choice of one of the two constructions and their corresponding construals. While so doing, the study tests empirically a specific hypothesis informed by relevant prior research. The hypothesis in question concerns the impact of the discursive status of information (i.e., its newness vs. givenness) on the choice between clausal and nominal complements of complex causal adpositions. The results, obtained through multivariate modelling of the data, provide evidence to corroborate the importance of this explanatory variable.

Keywords: causal links, clausal and nominal complementation, complex adpositions, corpus-based, multivariate statistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Data and analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Identifying statistical tendencies in the sample
    • 4.2Explaining linguistic choice beyond the sample
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 October 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.73.11kra
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