How come that’s a construction? A construction grammar approach to the how come construction in spoken American English

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.