#RC21 Susan Hunston: Construction Collocation. Identifying Sequences of Meaning

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Susan Hunston: »Construction Collocation. Identifying Sequences of Meaning «

Abstract:

This paper illustrates the value of what Partington has called the ‘serendipity’ of corpus investigation. Investigations into what typically follows selected words and phrases have led to unexpected observations about what typically occurs before them as well. Examples include verbs such as DECIDE, when complemented by a wh-clause, and the construction or Unit of Meaning COME to terms with, which is followed by a noun phrase indicating a difficult or painful situation. In each case, the verb (DECIDE, COME) occurs disproportionately frequently in a non-finite form, and is preceded by a construction indicating obligation, effort and difficulty (e.g. have to, took a long time to, found it hard to). In other words, the ‘node’ construction occurs at the centre of a more-or-less predictable sequence of three units. This phenomenon can be described in terms of constructions or of Units of Meaning, and the sequencing of units can be likened to collocation between lexical items. While the examples quoted in this paper have been identified serendipitously, as the by-product of other studies, certain features suggest that a more purposeful search for similar phenomena could be undertaken, for example by focusing on verb lemmas with atypical wordform frequencies. It is argued that what is here tentatively called ‘construction collocation’ is a key aspect of discourse-building and deserves further study.