Operationalising construal. A corpus-based study in cognition and communication constructions
Operationalising construal. A corpus-based study in cognition and communication constructions

Summary/Abstract: This study seeks to demonstrate that the Behavioural Profile Approach, specifically Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis (Geeraerts et al. 1994; Gries 2003), can be used to quantitatively describe lexico-grammatical construal (Langacker 1987; 1999). It examines the of – about constructional alternation for the complementation of cognition and communication predicates. The predicates sampled include know, speak, talk, and think distributed across the two prepositions in British and American English. In total, a sample of some 700 occurrences are analysed; the annotation schema is based on previous literature in the field (Radden 1981; Rudzka-Ostyn 2003; Dirven 2003; Lindstromberg 2010). Using a combination of mixed-effects logistic regression, multiple correspondence analysis, and loglinear analysis, the study is able to successfully identify a behavioural profile of the two alternations, which can be interpreted as an operationalisation of the opposing construals. Although distinct pro-files are obtained, an adequate means for separating the conceptual contribution of the predicate and the complement will require further investigation.

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