TY - JOUR
T1 - Testing the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction A constructional account of subject extraposition
AU - Laporte, Samantha
AU - Larsson, Tove
AU - Goulart, Larissa
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
PY - 2021/12/21
Y1 - 2021/12/21
N2 - This corpus-based study tests the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction by examining the syntactic realizations of subject extraposition (e.g., it is important to, it seems that), and by investigating at which level(s) of formal description a difference in form also entails a difference in function. The results show that distinct pairs of form and function, i.e. constructions, can be found at different levels of abstraction, but that these constructions also subsume formal realization patterns that do not encode a difference in function. This suggests that the Principle of No Synonymy largely breaks down at low levels of formal description. The study also offers a constructional account of subject extraposition by identifying a number of subject extraposition constructions, thereby showing that this is a syntactic phenomenon that is best analyzed as a family of constructions.
AB - This corpus-based study tests the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction by examining the syntactic realizations of subject extraposition (e.g., it is important to, it seems that), and by investigating at which level(s) of formal description a difference in form also entails a difference in function. The results show that distinct pairs of form and function, i.e. constructions, can be found at different levels of abstraction, but that these constructions also subsume formal realization patterns that do not encode a difference in function. This suggests that the Principle of No Synonymy largely breaks down at low levels of formal description. The study also offers a constructional account of subject extraposition by identifying a number of subject extraposition constructions, thereby showing that this is a syntactic phenomenon that is best analyzed as a family of constructions.
KW - Construction Grammar
KW - Corpus linguistics
KW - Levels of abstraction
KW - Principle of No Synonymy
KW - Subject extraposition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122798310&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1075/cf.00052.lap
DO - 10.1075/cf.00052.lap
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85122798310
SN - 1876-1933
VL - 13
SP - 230
EP - 262
JO - Constructions and Frames
JF - Constructions and Frames
IS - 2
ER -