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On Productivity of the CAUSED-MOTION Construction in Present-day English
Machová, Eva ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Lehečková, Eva (referee)
The purpose of this master's thesis is to define the productivity of the caused-motion construction and describe what syntactic and semantic constraints limit it. While some consideration is given to the possibilities of using the construction's arguments, the principal focus is on the study of the main verbs that occur in the construction. The verbs can come from a variety of different semantic classes because of the construction's polysemous character and the coercion process, which allows constructions to change verbs' meaning and valency structure. The major constraints on the productivity of constructions that were discussed in Goldberg (1995), Suttle & Goldberg (2011) and Robenalt & Goldberg (2015) are the semantic coherence principle, the correspondence principle, similarity to attested verb classes, coverage, statistical pre-emption and conservatism via entrenchment. These, together with the semantic constraints imposed by the caused-motion construction's meaning, were the expected restrictions on the productive use of verbs in the construction. The analysed examples of the caused-motion construction come from the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al., 2017) which can be considered representative of present-day spoken British English. The construction and corpus token frequencies of the main verbs...
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