Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door

Abstract

Abstract The present study focuses on the locative adverbials home and at home, which are interchangeable in some contexts, e.g. She decided to stay (at) home today. Using data from the spoken component of COCA and different multivariate statistical techniques, such as conditional inference trees and dichotomous logistic regression, I investigate the differences between home and at home with regard to several contextual variables, such as the syntactic function of (at) home, the presence of particular adverbs, e.g. back (at) home, figurativeness of semantics and the presence of presupposed arrival in the context. Moreover, special attention is paid to the variables that represent predictability of Verb + (at) home given a verbal predicate and the other way round, as well as linguistic distance between the predicate and the locative adjunct. The effects of these variables are interpreted as a manifestation of the universal tendency to maximize communicative efficiency and minimize cognitive complexity. I also argue that these effects represent an important social aspect of language use that should be taken into account by contemporary Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar.