Abstract
The following article discusses nominal constructions with syntactic dependents. The focus lies on so-called “shell nouns”, such as fact, idea or problem, i.e. nouns that can be described as “containers” reducing complex pieces of information expressed by clauses. After describing the relationship between the two linguistic approaches of idiom principle and construction grammar, the article goes on to present a corpus analysis of shell nouns and their respective syntactic complementations, coming to the conclusion that these complementations can be described as constructions, in the sense that the syntactic patterns can be said to convey a meaning that goes beyond the semantic sum of the constituents.
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