Chapter published in:
English Noun Phrases from a Functional-Cognitive Perspective: Current issues
Edited by Lotte Sommerer and Evelien Keizer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 221] 2022
► pp. 235–276

Premodification in X-is constructions

Fact and point

| University of Vienna
Although most studies on the X-is construction (thing-is, fact-is, point-is, etc.) acknowledge that premodification is allowed, very little attention has been paid to this property of the construction. Focusing on instances with the head nouns fact and point, this paper seeks to find out which premodifiers can be found in these constructions, and how the development of the construction from a fully specificational copular sentence with a referential subject NP to a non-specificational semi-fixed focus marker affects the type and range of premodifiers allowed. On the basis of data from the British National Corpus (Davies 2004), a number of tendencies and restrictions are identified in terms of (i) token and type frequencies of the premodifiers, as well as type-token-ratio (TTR), and (ii) the class and function of the premodifiers. It is concluded that, as constructionalization takes place, the premodifier position becomes constrained. In addition, it is shown that non-specificational constructions clearly prefer subjective modifiers, which, due to an increase in scope, come to serve a different function (e.g. attitudinal, intensifying, or downtoning). It is argued that the changes observed follow from the gradual changes taking place in the internal structure of the constructions in question. Finally, the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar is used to capture these changes and to explain the consequences of these changes both for the fact-is and point-is constructions in general and for the classes of premodifiers allowed (or preferred).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminaries
  • 3.The fact-is and point-is constructions
    • 3.1Function and form
    • 3.2Specificational vs. non-specificational constructions
  • 4.Premodification in the fact-is and point-is constructions
    • 4.1Premodification patterns for fact and point
      • 4.1.1Most frequent premodifiers
      • 4.1.2Classes of premodifiers
    • 4.2Correlation between premodifier and construction type
      • 4.2.1Premodifier vs. construction type: Fact
      • 4.2.2Premodifier vs. construction type: Point
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.FDG analysis
    • 5.1Introduction to FDG
      • 5.1.1Overall characterization
      • 5.1.2Levels of analysis
        • 5.1.2.1The Interpersonal Level
        • 5.1.2.2The Representational Level
        • 5.1.2.3The Morphosyntactic Level
    • 5.2Premodification in constructions with fact and point
      • 5.2.1 Fact/point as fully lexical nouns
      • 5.2.2The fact-is and point-is constructions as focus-cum-contrast markers
      • 5.2.3The fact-is and point-is constructions as focality markers
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus
Published online: 21 January 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.221.07kei
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