Academic Paper |
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| Title: | The Big Mess Construction: interactions between the lexicon and constructions |
| Author: | Jung-Bok Kim |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | Kyung Hee University |
| Author: | Peter Sells |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | Stanford University |
| Linguistic Field: | Syntax |
| Subject Language: |
English
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| Abstract: | The so-called Big Mess Construction (BMC) (e.g. 'so prominent a punctuation'), introduced by a limited set of degree words, places an adjectival expression in the predeterminer position. In movement approaches, such idiosyncratic properties of the BMC have been attributed to the interaction of functional projections and movement operations, whereas in surface-oriented analyses focus has been placed on the supposition of special constructions and their constructional properties. In this article, we show that neither of these two previous perspectives captures the variations and flexibility of the construction in question satisfactorily. Our approach adopts the view that degree words are functors selecting their head, and attributes the peculiarities to the interactions between the lexical properties of the degree items and the constructional constraints in question. |
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This article appears in English Language and Linguistics Vol. 15, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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