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The into-causative construction in English: a construction-based perspective1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2015

JONG-BOK KIM  and
MARK A. DAVIES
JONG-BOK KIM
Affiliation:
School of English, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130–[email protected]
MARK A. DAVIES
Affiliation:
Dept of Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT [email protected]
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Abstract

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 55 - 83
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2013), 18–20 January 2013, at San Diego State University and at the Second Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2014) in 6–9 March 2014, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. We thank the audiences of the conferences for questions and suggestions. The second author thanks Kyung Hee University for inviting him as an international scholar to work on this article with the first author. Our deep thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for constructive criticisms which helped us a lot in developing the article further.

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