Reaction Object constructions in English. A corpus-based study

  1. Montserrat Martínez Vázquez 1
  1. 1 Universidad Pablo de Olavide
    info

    Universidad Pablo de Olavide

    Sevilla, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02z749649

Book:
Language Windowing through Corpora
  1. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño (ed. lit.)
  2. Begoña Crespo García (ed. lit.)
  3. Inés Lareo Martín (ed. lit.)
  4. Paula Lojo Sandino (ed. lit.)

Publisher: Servizo de Publicacións ; Universidade da Coruña

ISBN: 978-84-9749-401-4

Year of publication: 2010

Volume Title: Part II, L-Z

Volume: 2

Pages: 551-561

Congress: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (2. 2010. A Coruña)

Type: Conference paper

Abstract

Little attention has been paid to Reaction Objects (RO) constructions (Levin, 1993), which involve theuse of an intransitive manner of speaking verb or a verb of signs with a non-subcategorized object(Pauline smiled her thanks). Besides, the researchers who touch on this construction do not usuallyinclude empirical evidence. The examples supplied are limited, which leads to a general tendency toovercite the examples supplied by Levin (1993). In this talk I will attempt a more fine-grained analysis ofROs in English based on the analysis of examples extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary AmericanEnglish (COCA). The corpus findings suggest that the construction is richer and more varied than it hasbeen assumed.