You are driving me up the wall! A corpus-based study of a special class of resultative constructions

Abstract

This paper focuses on resultative constructions from a computational and corpus-based approach. We claim that the array of expressions (traditionally classed as idioms, collocations, free word combinations, etc.) that are used to convey a person’s change of mental state (typically negative) are basically instances of the same resultative construction. The first part of the study will introduce basic tenets of Construction Grammar and resultatives. Then, our corpus-based methodology will be spelled out, including a description of the two giga-token corpora used and a detailed account of our protocolised heuristic strategies and tasks. Distributional analysis of matrix slot fillers will be presented next, together with a discussion on restrictions, novel instances, and productivity. A final section will round up our study, with special attention to notions like “idiomaticity”, “productivity” and “variability” of the pairings of form and meaning analysed. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies based on giga-token corpora that explores idioms as integral parts of higher-order resultative constructions.