Revisiting N waiting to happen: word, construction, and corpus choices in a collostructional analysis

Abstract

In undertaking any collostructional analysis, a researcher must make decisions concerning the properties of words, constructions, and corpora. Each of these crucial aspects of the analysis can be dealt with in alternative ways: words can be investigated as either lemmas or inflected forms; a construction can be characterized in alternative ways (reliance on semantics or syntax or some combination thereof, the span of the construction, etc.); the choice of corpus (or corpora) will be influenced by whether a researcher has an interest in different genres and varieties, whether the study is synchronic or diachronic, etc. I review various ways in which a researcher’s decisions about words, constructions, and corpora are relevant to a corpus-based study of N waiting to happen, referencing throughout the collostructional analysis of this construction by Stefanowitsch and Gries. The approach adopted here can be seen as supplementing Stefanowitsch and Gries’ original collostructional analysis. It illustrates how multifarious the results of a corpus-based study of constructions can be and serves as a reminder that no one corpus-based measure can possibly answer all the questions linguists might reasonably ask about a construction.