Abstract
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.
Go to article