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

Kim Ebensgaard Jensen

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    JournalRASK – International journal of language and communication
    Volume41
    Pages (from-to)3-38
    Number of pages36
    ISSN0909-8976
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Keywords

    • cognitive linguistics
    • conceptual semantics
    • construction grammar
    • construal operations
    • hypothesis-building
    • pragmatic points
    • construal
    • usage-based language models
    • usage-based model
    • English language
    • English grammar
    • syntax
    • British National Corpus
    • Corpus of Contemporary American English
    • TIME Magazine Corpus
    • corpus linguistics

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    • Construal operations

      Jensen, K. E.

      01/12/2010 → …

      Project: Research

    • Constructions

      Jensen, K. E.

      01/12/2010 → …

      Project: Research

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