How come that’s a construction? A construction grammar approach to the how come construction in spoken American English
Date
2021
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Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
This MA thesis aims at combining corpus linguistics and construction grammar, two of the active fields in contemporary linguistics. The research focuses on a construction used in informal spoken American English: how come. Studies taking a constructional approach to spoken discourse are more recent and less numerous than those dealing with written language. I will show how the two modes differ and why it can be difficult to analyze spoken language. The research question of the thesis is as follows: What are the form-meaning properties of the how come construction and how are they attested in spoken American English? I expect to see non-normative sentence structure and prominent features of spoken language in my data, in addition to some instances of non-canonical discourse functions of the said construction.