Channel and constructional meaning: A collostructional case study

Abstract

Research on grammatical structure, including construction-based research, is sometimes criticized for not paying sufficient attention to variational dimensions such as register, channel, etc. Our recent research on constructions, which is based on a set of quantitative corpus methods that we refer to as collostructional analysis, is theoretically subject to such criticism, as we have investigated the meaning of a range of constructions without paying attention to these variables at all. In this paper, we address this potential criticism. Using recent methodological extensions of our method, we show how variables like channel can be included in collostructional analysis. On the basis of three case studies, we show that (i) constructions may display channel-specific associations to individual lexical items, (ii) constructions differ with respect to their channel sensitivity, and (iii) the meaning of a given construction does not vary across channels. We argue that the inclusion of channel-specific information is a necessary addition to the specification of a construction’s properties even though it does not interact substantially with constructional semantics.

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