Away at/on Conative Constructions: A Collexeme Analysis

This paper examines authentic uses of the away at/on conative constructions, which have received much less attention than the typical at conative construction. Adopting the collexeme analysis, this paper investigates what the collexeme verbs are in two constructions and how similar and different their real life uses are. The results first show that the distribution of entire collexeme verbs in the away at/on construction as a whole does not tell us much about their properties and they instead provide a justification for an analysis of the verb-class-specific constructions depending on verb meanings: verbs of ingesting, verbs of cutting, verbs of hitting, and verbs of touching. The results also show that the away at and away on conative constructions do not, in fact, exhibit uniform behavior across the four major different verb classes. They further indicate that the away on conative construction cannot be regarded as a sub-type of the away at conative construction, as opposed to previous literature, since they show different and even contrasting behavior with respect to preferred verb types and preference for literal or figurative usage. Our findings, therefore, suggest that it is worthwhile exploring properties related to collexemes based on verb-class-specific constructions with authentic corpus data and statistical tests and that in this way we can make important observations that simple introspection-based studies are likely to miss out.