Distinctive adjectives in two variants of the it-extraposition construction: a quantitative corpus-based investigation

Abstract

Adopting the standpoint of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and the corpus-based method known as Distinctive-Collexeme Analysis (Gries and Stefanow-itsch 2004; Hilpert 2014), the investigation seeks to identify lexemes that indicate a strong preference either for the it is ADJ to V-construction or the it is ADJ that-construction. On the basis of data extracted from the academic sub-corpus of COCA, the study reveals that there are adjectives exhibiting a strong preference for one construction instead of the other, and that the constructions have a tendency to occur with adjectives evoking different semantic frames.