Adopting the standpoint of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and the corpus- based method known as Distinctive-Collexeme Analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 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.

This paper adopts a constructional approach to grammatical structure (Goldberg 1995; 2006) and a corpus-based method for investigating pairs of semantically similar constructions and the lexemes that occur in them. The method, referred to as distinctive-collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a), is used to determine which of the lexemes occurring in two constructions are most distinctive for either of them. On the basis of the case study concerning the imminent-NOUNconstruction versus the impending-NOUN construction, the paper demonstrates that one construction attracts some nouns more strongly than the other does. Moreover, the results of the distinctive-collexeme analysis of this pair of constructions reveal that there are clearly distinctive collexemes for each of the two constructions, and that the frame-constructional semantics is a contributing factor in the selection between these two patterns.

Applying frame semantics, usage-based construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology, this article seeks to explore the nature of the extraposed construction with past participles complemented by that-clauses. To this end, the author extracts the occurrences of the It BE V_en that-construction from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), determines its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional features, and identifies verbs that are strongly associated with the construction in question. The study meaningfully contributes to a growing body of research on it-extraposition by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of one of its variants, a grammatical pattern with past participles that has not been hitherto investigated in much detail from a quantitative corpus- based perspective.