Third Party Funds Group - Sub project
Acronym: GRK 2839 Project 12
Start date : 01.10.2022
End date : 30.09.2027
This study explores constructs such as the following:
(1) He still regards himself as a working farmer.ARCHER-1979-NEW
(2) We consider it almost one of the necessaries.ARCHER-1875-ADV
(3) He finds the bromide to be most suitable.ARCHER-1864-MED
(4) She takes me for a milkman.ARCHER-1820-DRAMA
These examples share an underlying Argument-Structure-Construction wherein an Attributor attributes an Attribute to an Attributee. In contrast to other Secondary Predication Constructions (D'hoedt & Cuyckens 2017a), this attribution does not alter the state of the Attributee like the “Resultative-Construction”, but is a subjective evaluation which may not be factual (Halliday 1967, 63. Compare: He considers them husband and wife doesn’t mean the couple is actually married, whereas He pronounced them husband and wife confers marital status.). This is why these constructions, also known as “AGENT–ÆFFECTED–JUDGEMENT”-Construction (Herbst & Uhrig 2009), will be termed Evaluative-Attribution-Constructions in this study, as the “evaluative” or “mental” (D’hoedt & Cuyckens 2017b) versions of the Object-Attribute-Construction from Herbst’s and Hoffmann’s “Constructionist Approach to Syntactic Analysis” (CASA, Object Attribute Construction ATTR: NP & ADJ).
Despite semantic similarities, there is considerable formal variation – in other words, considerably different slot fillers – which is the starting point for delineating different members of the EAC family. Aside from the verb slot, there are differences in the Attribute-slot, which is, e.g., a Noun-Phrase as in (1), (2), and (4) or an Adjective-Phrase (3). Moreover, the EAC connects the Attributee with Attribute-slot with either the prepositions as (1) and for (4), without any filler as in (2) or with to be as in (3).
The study first argues against modeling the EAC (a) as a single abstract construction and (b) as multiple allostructions due to its formal variability (cf. Cappelle 2006, Colleman 2011, Herbst & Huber 2022, Perek 2015, Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004). Instead, it advocates for a dynamic constructional family with constructions on multiple levels of abstraction. Constructionhood is hereby motivated empirically and usage-based, so only variants with either high frequency (e.g., in comparison with competing constructional candidates on other levels of abstraction) or some degree of idiosyncracy are considered constructions in their own right (Goldberg 2006, CON1).
Therefore, the frequency developments of the EAC variants have to be analyzed. This is done with manually annotated data from the ARCHER corpus (1600-1999). In general, the EAC declines in frequency, especially with Germanic verbs like think (1600-49: 313 hits vs. 1950-1999: 69 hits), in contrast to the rise in French loan words like consider as filler of the verb slot (1600-49: 10 hits vs. 1800-49: 70 hits). Aside from these constructional variants with high-frequency verbs, frequently co-occurring fillers of different slots are promising constructional candidates. The mutual influence of verb and “connector” slot is intriguing due to their low type frequency (verbs: 36, connector: 4) and the resulting likelihood of high-frequent collocations. A covarying collostructional analysis confirmed that especially as and for have a strong attraction to certain verbs (e.g., Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004b), whereas to be does not, so the latter does not seem to have lower-level constructions (CON2).
Aside from intra- also extra-linguistic factors such as variety, sex of author are taken into account in order to estimate their influence on the change of this constructional family (CON3, USE4).
References:
ARCHER Consortium. 2019. ARCHER 2019 – Beta Version 2: A representative corpus of historical English registers, 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013/2016/2019. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber & Edward Finegan; expanded by a consortium of universities. Example usages obtained under the terms of the ARCHER User Agreement.
Cappelle, Bert. 2006. Particle placement and the case for ‘allostructions’. Constructions 1. 1–28.
Colleman, Timothy. 2011. Ditransitive verbs and the ditransitive construction: A diachronic perspective. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 59(4). 387–410.
D’hoedt, Frauke & Hubert Cuyckens. 2017a. Language change in constructional networks: The development of the English Secondary Predicate Construction. Language Sciences 59. 16–35.
D’hoedt, Frauke & Hubert Cuyckens. 2017b. The development of the as-secondary predicate construction: Constructionalization and internalization. Language Sciences 59. 16–35.
Goldberg, Adele E. & Ray Jackendoff. 2004. The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80. 532–569.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004b. Co-varying collexemes in the into-causative. In Michel Achard & Suzanne Kemmer (eds.), Language, culture, and mind, 225–236. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English, Part 1. Journal of Linguistics 3. 37–81.
Herbst, Thomas & Judith Huber. 2022. Diachronic Construction Grammar: Introductory remarks to this special issue. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 70(3). 213–221.
Herbst, Thomas & Peter Uhrig. 2009. Erlangen Valency Patternbank: A corpus-based research tool for work on valency and argument structure constructions. Available at https://www.patternbank.fau.de (accessed 22 January 2026).
Herbst, Thomas, Thomas Hoffmann & Peter Uhrig. 2018. CASA — A constructionist approach to syntactic analysis. Available at https://constructicon.de (accessed 22 January 2026).
Perek, Florent. 2015. Argument structure in usage-based Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.