The patterning of the high-frequency verb make in varieties of English: a Construction Grammar approach NA En Fr

Résumé En Fr

This PhD explores structural nativization in New Englishes at the level of lexico-grammar by examining the patterning of the high-frequency verb make in British, Hong Kong, Indian and Singapore English. The analysis is based on over 7,500 instances of make extracted from the International Corpus of English components of each variety under study. It combines the theory of Construction Grammar with the methods of Corpus Pattern Analysis to offer a constructional account of the patterning of make across levels of abstraction. This allows for a systematic identification, at each level of abstraction, of quantitative and qualitative features of the New Englishes that are accounted for in terms of new form-meaning mappings. More specifically, this study examines to what extent the features of nativization are shared across the varieties, and, by studying three New Englishes that form a cline in the Dynamic Model of the evolution of post-colonial Englishes, it considers whether the degree of institutionalization of a variety correlates with linguistic behavior. Finally, this study also contributes to the theory of Construction Grammar by adopting a verb-based, rather than construction-based, perspective on argument structure. In so doing, it probes the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon.

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