Argument-Structure Constructions with Organization Names in the English Eurolect

Abstract

Construction Grammar (Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013) has received very little attention in onomastics, let alone corpus-based approaches, as corpora are just starting to be applied to the empirical study of names (Motschenbacher 2020). This study employs Named Entity Recognition plus verbal pattern extraction in an intermodal corpus (Bernardini 2016) of EU discourse, or Eurolect (Sandrelli 2018). The methodological aim is to mine English argument-structure constructions (Goldberg 1995) with subordinate clauses introduced by that and organization names in the subject slot ([ORG + V + that + SC]). First, the personification recognition method of Dorst, Mulder, and Steen (2011) is applied to quantitatively prove the strong relationship between the extracted argument-structure constructions and personification metaphors in EU discourse. Second, the constructions and their form-meaning pairings are described, both per subcorpus and globally. Results show that, at a macro- and meso-level of schematicity, the [ORG + V + that + SC] construction transversally symbolizes personification as an understanding scheme for institutional relations, constructing organization names with semantically human verbs of belief, speech, and thought. At a microscopic level, however, some constructions occur exclusively in one of the four subcorpora (non-translated, translated, non-interpreted, and interpreted English), meaning that they could be covering specific mediating functions through their name-verb slot choices.