Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T13:14:01.775Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The into-causative construction in English: a construction-based perspective1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2015

JONG-BOK KIM  and
MARK A. DAVIES
JONG-BOK KIM
Affiliation:
School of English, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130–701Koreajongbok@khu.ac.kr
MARK A. DAVIES
Affiliation:
Dept of Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602USAmark_davies@byu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 55 - 83
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2013), 18–20 January 2013, at San Diego State University and at the Second Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2014) in 6–9 March 2014, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. We thank the audiences of the conferences for questions and suggestions. The second author thanks Kyung Hee University for inviting him as an international scholar to work on this article with the first author. Our deep thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for constructive criticisms which helped us a lot in developing the article further.

References

Berlage, Eva. 2014. Noun phrase complexity in English. Oxford: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bridgeman, Lorraine, Dillinger, Dale, Higgins, Constance, Seaman, David & Shank, Floyd. 1965. More classes of verbs in English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2012. Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent syntactic changes in English. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Traugott, Elizabeth C. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 157–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francis, Gill, Hunston, Susan & Manning, Elizabeth (eds.). 1996. Collins Cobuild grammar patterns 1: Verbs. London: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1997. Making one's way through the data. In Shibatani, Masayoshi & Thompson, Sandra (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Their form and meaning, 29–53. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2003. Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in cognitive science 7 (5), 219–24.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: Constructionist approaches in context. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele & Jackendoff, Ray. 2004. The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80, 532–68.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan & Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2003. Co-varying collexemes in the into-causative. In Achard, Michel & Kemmer, Suzanne (eds.), Language, culture, and mind, 225–36. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul & Thompson, Sandra. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56 (2), 251–99.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney D. & Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan & Francis, Gill. 2000. Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Israel, Michael. 1996. The way constructions grow. In Goldberg, Adele (ed.), Conceptual structure, discourse and language, 217–30. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Jong-Bok & Lee, Nam-Geun. 2013. The transitive into -ing construction in English: A usage-based approach. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 13 (2), 395–418.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 2003. Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In Facchinetti, Roberta, Krug, Manfred & Palmer, Frank (eds.), Modality in contemporary English, 223–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2002. Three changing patterns of verb complementation in late modern English: A real-time study based on matching text corpora. English Language and Linguistics 6, 106–31.Google Scholar
Malouf, Rob. 2000. Mixed categories in the hierarchical lexicon. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. 2012. Making the case for Construction Grammar. In Boas, Hans & Sag, Ivan A. (eds.), Sign-based Construction Grammar, 31–69. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Mondorf, Britta. 2011. Variation and change in English resultative constructions. Language Variation and Change 22, 397–421.Google Scholar
Mondorf, Britta. 2015. The detransitivization of causative bring in British and American English. Manuscript, University of Mainz.Google Scholar
Rappaport Hovav, Malka & Levin, Beth. 2001. An event structure account of English resultatives. Language 77, 766–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Gunter. 2007. Functional constraints in syntactic change: The rise and fall of prepositional constructions in early and late modern English. English Studies, 88 (2), 217–33.Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2002. Complements and constructions. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2005. Lexico-grammatical innovation in current British and American English: A case study on the transitive into -ing pattern with evidence from the bank of English corpus. Studia Neophilologica 77, 171–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2006. Emergent alternation in complement selection: The spread of the transitive into -ing construction in British and American English. English Linguistics 34 (4), 312–31.Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2011. Changes in complementation in British and American English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2012. The transitive into -ing construction in early twentieth-century American English, with evidence from the TIME corpus. In Hoffmann, Sebastian, Rayson, Paul & Leech, Geoffrey (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Looking back, moving forward, 179–90. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sag, Ivan A. 2012. Sign-based Construction Grammar: An informal synopsis. In Boas, Hans C. & Sag, Ivan A. (eds.), Sign-based Construction Grammar, 69–202. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme. 2013. Multiple inheritance and constructional change. Studies in Language 37 (3), 491–514.Google Scholar
Vosberg, Uwe. 2003. Cognitive complexity and the establishment of -ing constructions with retrospective verbs in modern English. In Dossena, Marina & Jones, Charles (eds.), Insights into Late Modern English, 197–220. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Wulff, Stefanie, Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Gries, Stefan. 2007. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans: Variety-specific meaning construction in the into-causative. In Radden, Günter, Köpcke, Klaus-Michael, Berg, Thomas & Siemund, Peter (eds.), Aspects of meaning construction, 265–81. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar