The paper examines grammatical properties of the so-called Horn-amalgam constructions in English and offers a construction-based analysis. Horn-amalgams are peculiar in exhibiting transparency effects in which the predicative expression within the amalgam clause functions as a syntactic as well as semantic nucleus of the construction. In capturing such transparency effects, the prevailing analyses have resorted to movement and deletion operations, together with the postulation of cleft constructions as their putative sources. The paper discusses empirical data of the construction as well as analytical issues that movement-based accounts encounter. In doing so, we first investigate how Horn-amalgams are used in real-life with corpus data and then offer a construction-based analysis that allows us to capture a wider range of empirical data in a simpler manner.
1. Introduction
2. Search methodology
3. Syntactic properties
4. Semantic and pragmatic functions
5. Movement and deletion-based accounts
6. A construction-based analysis
7. Conclusion
(0)
(0)