Announcing: A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO RESULTATIVES

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the publication of:

A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO RESULTATIVES, Hans C. Boas (the
University of Texas at Austin) ;paper ISBN: 1-57586-408-8, $35.00,
cloth ISBN: 1-57586-407-X, $70.00,  415 pages, copyright 2003 by CSLI
Publications. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email:
pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

Providing a unified solution within the frameworks of Construction
Grammar and Frame Semantics, Hans C. Boas develops a corpus-based
account of resultative constructions in English by grouping them in
two classes: conventionalized and non-conventionalized.

The usage-based model used here proposes that each particular sense
of a verb constitutes a conventionalized mini-construction, which is
crucial information for the licensing of arguments. In contrast,
verbs in non-conventionalized resultative constructions can acquire a
novel meaning and thereby a new syntactic frame. This associative
process is based on a semantic overlap with a conventionalized
resultative in combination with contextual background information.

English and German resultatives are compared to illustrate the
distinct lexical polysemy networks of English and German verbs. In
particular, it is demonstrated that etymologically related verbs
exhibit different distributions of resultative constructions because
of the differences in conventionalized usage patterns.

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