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A construction grammar analysis of the transitive be perfect in present-day Canadian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2015

YURI YERASTOV
YURI YERASTOV*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Fort Hays State University, 600 Park Street, Hays, KS [email protected]
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Abstract

This article offers a syntactic analysis of the construction [be done NP], e.g. I am done dinner, I am finished my homework, as found in Canadian English and some US dialects. After situating this construction in the context of a productive transitive be perfect in Scots/English dialects, [be done NP] will be distinguished from a set of its conceptual and structural relatives, and ultimately be shown not to be reducible to a surface realization of another underlying structure. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the article problematizes the parsimony of the mainstream generative approach (most recently in MacFadden & Alexiadou 2010) in accounting for the facts of [be done NP] on strictly compositional grounds, as well as the mainstream view of lexical items as projecting theta grids and subcategorization frames (as e.g. in Grimshaw 1979; Emonds 2000). Following Fillmore et al. (1988), Goldberg (1995, 2005) and others, what will be suggested instead is a construction grammar approach to [be done NP], under which a construction holistically licenses its argument structure. Along these lines [be done NP] will be characterized as an abstract construction with some fixed material.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 157 - 178
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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