The semantics-pragmatics interplay in a partonomic construction: Construals, lexical relations, pragmatic points and ‘the construction itself’

The present article presents a corpus-illustrated description of the English expression the X itself which treats the expression as a grammatical construction, as defined in usage-based construction grammar (an entrenched semiotic routine in a speech community). Investigating the construction's semantic content, we find that it serves to set up a partonomy and construes one of the items therein as a core part, and that it, as an extension of its semantic meaning also has the discourse-pragmatic function of distributing discursive salience. The discussion in the present paper documents the initial steps in the building of a hypothesis regarding the nature of the X itself– one which can be tested and refined in future corpus-based empirical usage-based linguistic research.