title: Such a Construction! Evidence for an Exclamatory Evaluative Construction with Pivotal such
creator: Queisser, Angela
subject: ddc-400
subject: 400 Linguistics
subject: ddc-420
subject: 420 English
description: In Construction Grammar, form-meaning pairs called 'constructions' are regarded as the basic units of language. This applies not only to words and word meanings but also to grammatical structures and especially to idioms. Lexicon and syntax are not considered separate domains of language. The meaning of constructions often cannot be determined through their lexical makeup alone, but goes beyond it or deviates from it, i.e. it is non-compositional. In this master's thesis, a construction of English will be postulated, specified, and examined for its function in language use. Examples of the 'exclamatory evaluative construction with pivotal such', or 'evaluative such construction', are sentences such as You are [such an idiot] and You are [such a nice person], with the construction enclosed in square brackets. The form of the construction is therefore represented as [such (article) (adjective) noun]. The modifying element such is an obligatory constituent of the construction while the slots for article, adjective, and noun are filled by the speakers. In the literature, such is often described as an intensifying element. In this master's thesis, it is argued that the constructional meaning of the evaluative such construction goes beyond intensification. It is proposed that the construction serves the purpose of evaluation, with a clear tendency towards negative evaluation. This tendency, which is attributed to such, has the consequence that neutral nouns occurring in the construction without a disambiguating adjective take on a negative connotation. This effect of coercion is a clear indication of cognitive entrenchment of the construction. For this master's thesis, three empirical studies were conducted in order to obtain evidence for the hypotheses put forward. In two corpus analyses, the frequency of occurrence of the construction as well as its preferred context and the adjectives and nouns occurring in the individual slots are examined. For this purpose, six English corpora were examined. The analysis of the lexical constituents is particularly revealing and shows that predominantly negative nouns, but positive adjectives, occur in the construction. The third study investigates how speakers evaluate predicative example sentences with and without such, particularly when they occur with neutral nouns. The results show that speakers evaluate sentences with such more negatively. The evidence from the studies is considered substantial but not fully conclusive.
date: 2024
type: Master's thesis
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/34998/1/Masterarbeit_Angela_Queisser_heidoks.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00034998
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-349982
identifier:   Queisser, Angela  (2024) Such a Construction! Evidence for an Exclamatory Evaluative Construction with Pivotal such.  [Master's thesis]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/34998/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: Please see front page of the work (Sorry, Dublin Core plugin does not recognise license id)
language: eng