Ing Construction Research Articles

A Collostructional and Constructional Approach to the Transitive out of -ing Construction

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the so-called transitive out of -ing construction, characterised by the structure of NP subject + V1 + NP object + out of VP2[-ing] predicate with corpus data (e.g., I cheated you all out of being in my life), and offers a construction-based account of the construction. In this paper, based on 725 examples from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), we first explore its real-life uses in terms of the verbs frequently found in the V1 slot, favoured distribution patterns based on their semantic classes, subject types, preferred interpretation types, and frequent V1-V2[-ing] pairs, adopting collostructional analyses. We then show that the overall grammatical properties of the transitive out of -ing construction as well as the idiosyncrasies of its two atypical variants can be best accounted for in the Construction Grammar perspective.

Old English perspectives on the complement shift

Abstract This article gathers a motivated inventory of Old English self-manipulative verbs, including Abstain verbs and Refrain verbs, analyses their semantics and syntax and offers diachronic perspectives on the replacement of that-clause complementation with the from + -ing construction. Such perspectives go in two directions. Firstly, the semantics of the that-clause remains intact throughout the change to the from + -ing construction. Secondly, deverbal nominalisations contribute to the semantics and syntax required by the gerund. The main conclusion is that Refrain verbs are exceptional because the competition leading to the Complement Shift does not hold between finite and non-finite clauses, but between finite clauses and deverbal nominalisations. This has two important consequences: the status of derived nominal linked predications must be acknowledged, and deverbal nominalisations must occupy the top of the syntactic ranking of clause linkage.

A conceptual approach to the –ING construction: aspects of radiality and subjectification

The –ING construction has a number of uses in the English language and teaching it to speakers of other languages poses some challenges, as learners tend to interpret the construction as a verbal one, in the progressive aspect, which is only one part of the picture. Bearing this in mind, we have developed a corpus-based research into the form-meaning/function pairing (Goldberg, 1995, 2006) of the construction, relying on Construction Grammar (Fillmore; Kay, 1999; Goldberg, 1995, 2006) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1990, 1991, 2008), apart from a semantic approach to the –ING construction (Wierzbicka, 1988), essential for describing the –ING construction from a conceptual perspective within the wide-ranging scope of Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts, 2006), which also included Prototype Theory (Rosch, 1973) and Radial Categories (Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987). In regard to methodology, we have taken both a quantitative and qualitative approach to data (Cook; Reichardt, 1979; Richardson, 1985; Creswell, 2010) compiled from an English/Spanish parallel corpus of 1199 verbal –ING occurrences. Our main hypothesis is that the –ING construction, in its verbal function, is more central or prototypical (Rosch, 1973; Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 2008) in respect to its conceptual network and its other functions, namely nominal, adjectival and adverbial. These functions, in turn, exhibit a more peripheral role and are linked to the verbal function through metaphorical extension relationships (Goldberg, 1995, 2006). By performing a corpus-based analysis of the data (Berber-Sardinha, 2002, 2004) we finally argue that there is a radial organisation (Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987) for the –ING construction, which goes from a more concrete level, being this more situated or grounded and thus more objectified (as a “here and now process”), until it gets to a more abstract level, therefore, less situated and more subjectified (taken as a “thing”).

Role of aspect in understanding tense: an investigation with adolescents with SLI.

Morphosyntax has been well researched in specific language impairment (SLI) and there is general agreement that children with SLI have particular difficulties with tense-marking. Less well researched is the role that aspect plays in the difficulties found in tense-marking, especially as tense and aspect are often confounded in English. Initial investigation of the understanding of aspect in preschool children with SLI suggests that they are less sensitive to aspect and its interaction with tense than typically developing (TD) children. It is unclear, however, what is the developmental trajectory of their understanding of aspect and its interaction with tense and whether these difficulties are still found in older children and adolescents with SLI. To investigate comprehension of the grammatical aspect contrast between completed events using the simple past tense -ed/irregular (perfective grammatical aspect) and ongoing events using the past progressive (imperfective grammatical aspect). The role of lexical aspect was also investigated through the balanced use of verbs that were inherently telic (i.e. have a natural end-point) and verbs that required the addition of prepositional phrase for a telic interpretation when used in the perfective aspect condition. A sentence-picture matching task was administered to 10 participants with SLI (aged 12;10-16;8 years) and 30 language ability matched TD children who were split into three groups (mean ages: 5;10, 7;4 and 9;2). Adult-like performance was found by all groups on the perfective aspect condition, but only by the oldest group of TD children on the imperfective aspect condition. The performance of the group with SLI was consistent with their much younger language ability matched TD children in their understanding of the progressive -ing when used to describe ongoing events that have taken place in the past. The lexical aspect of the telicity of the verbs was not found to have any significant effect on performance. Although further investigation of the understanding of aspect (both comprehension and production) is needed, the results have implications for therapy. The past progressive -ing construction is important, particularly for providing context and background information in narratives, but it is not explicitly taught in schools. Therefore, some focus on the temporal nature of tense-marking in therapy may be beneficial to individuals with SLI in understanding the temporal nature of events and how aspect interacts with tense.

The TRANSITIVE INTO -ING Construction in English: A Usage-based Approach

The TRANSITIVE INTO -ING Construction in English: A Usage-based Approach

The role of genre in information structuring in English

In a recent paper, Biber and Gray (2010) provide empirical evidence for the dramatic increase of compressed structures in English academic writing over the last 100 years. According to their corpus findings, the grammatical complexity of academic writing displays a phrasal rather than clausal character, the corollary of which is a compressed rather than elaborated discourse style (the latter one being typical of spoken registers). Given this finding, the question arises as to how far the traditional view that information structure should be viewed as a single partition of information within a given utterance adequately accounts for genre-specific information packaging strategies. To provide an answer to this question, the current study sets out to explore and compare information structuring within what will be referred to here as ‘compression strategies’, namely the use of adverbial subordinate clauses, -ING constructions, and complex NP constructions across two different genres: the highly compressed genre of research article abstracts, and fiction. The findings reported here suggest that in more compressed discourse styles such as academic writing, there is a higher probability of encountering information structure partition not only at the clausal but also at the phrasal level. The present paper highlights the importance of genre variation as one predictor of variation in information structuring within constructions.

Green Buildings: Analysis of State of Knowledge

Green building practices emerged to mitigate the effects of the increasing impact on the environment and to improve the build ing construction process. In this context, a systematic bib lio metric analysis is provided. As a result, 124 articles were found in 40 internationally recognized scientific journals related to green buildings. A quantitative analysis is done to the articles in order to know about the authors and countries with most publications; in addition to their evolution fro m 1980 to 2011. Then a qualitative analysis which aims to obtain the key aspects and obstacles to consider in Green Building and recommendations are given for each aspect. The goal of this paper is to provide building researchers and practitioners a better understanding of how to effectively make decisions to promote energy conservation and sustainability of green build ings.

Quelques réflexions sur BY en anglais

If we go back to the genesis of BY, we soon discover that it has the same roots as the preverb BE-. As a preposition, the major value of BY has always been «around». Our aim is not to label BY as a preposition, a particle or a postposition. By founding our study on examples, we shall try to find out the impact of the original value «around» on the semantic and syntactic uses of BY. Our hypothesis is that the spatial and temporal values of proximity and «passing through» are related to BY+Ving constructions and most structures with BY. Furthermore, the human mind tends to link two entities or two events if they stand in proximity to each other. BY lies at the core of this thesis. Lastly, the microsystem by which/whereby reveals that whereby plays a more complex grammatical role than by which.

Ing forms and the progressive puzzle: a construction-based approach to English progressives

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars.

Analyzing the style of East African newspapers in English

ABSTRACT: This case study looks at one important source of linguistic data ‐newspapers ‐and discusses related problems of text‐type classification and feature interpretation. With texts from the East African ICE components as a database an attempt is made to assess the influence of different production contexts on the formal composition of texts. The issue of house‐style and problems of text categorization are discussed, a distinction being made between different types of reportage (splash and brief articles) and popular informational and persuasive texts (editorials). These genre samples are analysed for the particularly polysemous and multivalued/multifunctional variable of ‐ing constructions, ranging from obligatory and optional (adverbial) clauses to verbal progressives. The analysis exemplifies the possibilities and problems of stylistic variation studies in different sociolinguistic contexts and the importance of recording all possibly influential text‐production features during the corpus collection process for a valid interpretation of the data.