Por mí como si te operas. Constructional idioms of rejection from a constructionist approach

Abstract

Abstract The present study explores partially filled idioms that go beyond the limits of the Spanish phraseological tradition, in that it focuses on semi-schematic patterns that had been relegated to the periphery and does not restrict itself to the pairing phraseological expression and lexicalized form. With a corpus comprising 592 instances extracted from the esTenTen18 corpus (Sketch Engine), the objective in the study of the constructional idioms [ a PRON como si X] and [ por PRON como si X] is twofold. First, to shed light on the “pragmatic point” (Kay and Fillmore 1999) of these discontinuous patterns by describing their rejection illocutionary force, their colloquial dialogic context, and their intensifying speech act; and second, to delve into the lexical variability of the constructions under study in the intersection of creativity and extravagance.