Operationalising construal. A corpus-based study in cognition and communication constructions

Abstract: This study seeks to demonstrate that the Behavioural Profile Approach, specifically Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis (Geeraerts et al. 1994; Gries 2003), can be used to quantitatively describe lexico-grammatical construal (Langacker 1987; 1999). It examines the of – about constructional alternation for the complementation of cognition and communica-tion predicates. The predicates sampled include know, speak, talk, and think distributed across the two prepositions in British and American Eng-lish. In total, a sample of some 700 occurrences are analysed; the annota-tion schema is based on previous literature in the field (Radden 1981; Rudzka-Ostyn 2003; Dirven 2003; Lindstromberg 2010). Using a combi-nation of mixed-effects logistic regression, multiple correspondence analysis, and loglinear analysis, the study is able to successfully identify a behavioural profile of the two alternations, which can be interpreted as an operationalisation of the opposing construals. Although distinct pro-files are obtained, an adequate means for separating the conceptual con-tribution of the predicate and the complement will require further investi-gation.