‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactivewhat-xconstruction in spoken dialogue

Abstract

In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, theLondon–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactivewhat-xconstruction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactivewhat-xconstruction features the interrogativewhatdirectly followed by a phrasal or clausal complementx. Moreover,whatforms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactivewhat-xconstruction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.

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