A Collexeme Analysis of the English Absolute Construction

While much research in usage-based construction grammar involves processing big amounts of
naturalistic usage data provided by computerized corpora, the analysis of corpus data does not
always utilize methods of linguistic statistics to validate the research findings. In this paper, we
investigate the constructional semantics of the English Absolute Participial Construction, a non-
finite construction that has a binary structure and consists of a (pro)nominal subject and a non-finite
or verbless predicate ([AC [SubjNoun] [PredParticiple I]]). The methodological framework of the study
is that of the collexeme analysis, which, through statistical corpus analysis, measures the degree of
mutual association between particular grammatical constructions and lexical items (Stefanowitsch
& Gries 2003, 2005; Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004 a, b). Using the collexeme analysis on empirical
data drawn from the BNC-BYU corpus, we identify the noun lexemes, which reveal significant
attraction to the subject slot of the analyzed construction. The semantic analysis of the strongly
attracted lexical items allows to determine the semantic classes of nouns that are most closely
associated with the English Absolute Participial Construction. It appears that the construction
particularly attracts nouns denoting parts of body (somatisms). We show that the collexeme analysis
facilitates the study of interaction between lexemes and grammatical constructions and substantially
advances our understanding of grammatical constructions and their meaning.

References:
Stefanowitsch, A. & St. Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the Interaction of
Words and Constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8: 209-243.
Stefanowitsch, A. & St. Th. Gries. 2005. Covarying Collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and
Linguistic Theory 1: 1-43.
Gries, St. Th. & A. Stefanowitsch. 2004a. Extending Collostructional Analysis: A Corpus-
based Perspective on ‘Alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9: 97-129.
Gries, St. Th. & A. Stefanowitsch. 2004b. Covarying Collexemes in the intoCausative.
Language, Culture, and Mind, eds. M. Achard & S. Kemmer, 225- 236. Stanford, CA: CSLI.