Too early to say: The English too ADJ to V construction and models of cross-cultural communications styles

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies the English too ADJ to V construction. It starts with a (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis (as one of the subtypes of collostructional analysis) of the ADJ-V pairs appearing in the given construction in three regional varieties of English (American, British and Indian English) based on the GloWbE corpus. This analysis establishes the most distinctive and most strongly repelled ADJ-V pairs in the respective varieties. These results are then interpreted from the perspective of three models of inter-cultural and cross-cultural communication styles. The paper demonstrates that the most distinctive and the most repelled ADJ-V pairs do differ across the three varieties and that this may reflect subtle differences in the underlying cultural conceptualizations. The paper also introduces the notion of ‘(multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis of co-varying collexemes’, as an extension of the existing notion of the given type of collostructional analysis.