Abstract
AbstractEnglish Comparative Correlatives (CCs) consist of two clauses, C1 and C2:[The more we get together,]C1[the happier we’ll be.]C2Recently, large corpus studies based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English have unearthed various meso-constructions in English CCs using covarying–collexeme analysis. The present study tests these findings against data from the British National Corpus (BNC), aiming to replicate previous results against data from another standard variety of English (British English) and a corpus that is sampled from a wider range of registers. Over 2,000 CC tokens from the BNC were analyzed with regard to hypotactic features, filler types encountered as comparative elements, and deletion phenomena. Moreover, in contrast to earlier corpus studies (such as Hoffmann, Thomas, Jakob Horsch, and Thomas Brunner. 2019. “The more data, the better: a usage-based account of the English comparative correlative construction.” Cognitive Linguistics30(1): 1–36), the present study also investigates the frequency of the semantically related C2C1 construction (You will be the happierC2,the more we get togetherC1) that previously has been found to be considerably less frequent than its counterpart. The results of the present analysis confirm that English CCs possess more paratactic than hypotactic features and, supporting most of the findings of Hoffmann, Horsch, and Brunner (2019) provide even stronger evidence for the existence of several symmetric meso-constructions.
Highlights
Our analysis confirmed the findings of previous studies and uncovered new, hitherto unknown, facts about the English Comparative Correlatives (CCs):
Since focus particles appear to be only acceptable in C2 in C2C1 structures, we assume that C2C1s encode a pragmatic, focusing function
Both of these features can be found in the present-day English CCs, albeit with very low frequencies
Summary
Belonging to the group of “filler–gap constructions” (Sag 2010), the comparative correlative ([CC] Culicover and Jackendoff 1999) is a construction that in its most basic form consists of two clauses that in the following will be referred to as C1 and C2: (1) [The [more]FILLER-C1 we get together,]C1 [the [happier]FILLER-C2 we’ll be.]C2 known as “comparative conditional construction” (McCawley 1988), “covariational conditional” (Goldberg 2003), “proportional correlative” (den Dikken 2005), “the-clauses” (Sag 2010), or “the... the... construction” (Cappelle 2011), CCs have attracted substantial interest in the last two decades due to several interesting semantic and syntactic properties they exhibit.den Dikken 2005; Borsley 2004; Sag 2010; Cappelle 2011) as well as corpus studies (Hoffmann 2014a, 2014b; Hoffmann2017a, 2017b; Hoffmann 2018; Hoffmann 2019; Hoffmann et al 2019). Known as “comparative conditional construction” (McCawley 1988), “covariational conditional” (Goldberg 2003), “proportional correlative” (den Dikken 2005), “the-clauses” (Sag 2010), or “the... Concerning their semantics, CCs are characterized by encoding both asymmetric and symmetric relationships. There is a cause–effect relationship where C1 acts as an independent variable, or “protasis”, and C2 is the corresponding dependent variable or “apodosis” (Goldberg 2003: 220). This becomes apparent when paraphrasing (1): getting together is the cause of us becoming happier. The semantics of CCs have been described as a “pair of semantic differentials” with a “monotonic relationship” (Hoffmann 2014a: 169; Sag 2010: 525–26)
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