Extract

Abstract: This paper adopts a constructional approach to grammatical structure and a corpus-based method that is specifically geared to investigating interactions between lexical items occurring in two different slots of a grammatical construction. The method, referred to as covarying collexeme analysis, is used to identify the strength of association between the verb grać (play) and the manner adjunct occurring in the act-manner construction in Polish. The paper shows that there are pairs of lexical items that co-occur significantly more frequently than expected in the act-manner construction in the soccer domain. In addition, the results of the analysis of the co-variation of collexemes in two different slots of the same construction seem to suggest that such interactions are determined by frame-semantic knowledge.

Keywords: construction, Construction Grammar, frame, Fisher-Yates exact test, covarying collexeme analysis

1. Introduction

The issue of the investigation of interactions between words and grammatical structures has received considerable attention in recent years. Previous studies have concentrated on the preferences or restrictions associated with one particular slot in the construction. Stefanowitsch and Gries, for example, have analyzed the relationship between a particular construction and the lexical items occurring in a particular slot provided by it, both in relation to the language as a whole (Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003) and in relation to semantically or functionally near-equivalent constructions (Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004a). In this work they have demonstrated that such relationships rest on the degree of semantic compatibility between the meaning of the...