FROM SYNTAX TO PHRASEOLOGY: A PHRASEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SCHEMATIC CAUSED-MOTION CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This article presents the main grammatical characteristics of English constructions generally referred to as complex transitive constructions (Quirk et al., 1985), causative resultatives (Goldberg and Jackendoff, 2004) and caused-motion constructions (Goldberg, 1995, 2006, 2018). It is claimed, in light of some empirical corpus-based studies (Hampe, 2010; Rosa, 2020; Xia, 2017) that low-level phraseological constructions such ‘talk some sense into somebody’ play a crucial role in motivating the entrenchment and use of highly schematic caused motions such as ‘Frank sneezed the foam off the cappuccino’. In order to support this view with empirical data, we present the analysis of 1284 caused-motion utterances extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), out of which we were able to identify 12 fixed expressions and 9 statistically attested phraseologisms. At last, we discuss the implications that such relationship between grammar and phraseology may present in the understanding of schematic structures such as the caused motion.