Title: English<i>what with</i>absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective
Abstract: There are several types of absolute constructions ( ac s) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac , which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA ( Corpus of Historical American English , 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-07-23
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 4
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