Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions

Download or read book Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions written by Gaëtanelle Gilquin and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English causative constructions with "cause," "get," " have "and "make" are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics, which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach). From a methodological point of view, the study illustrates the complementarity of corpus and elicitation data, and offers tools and methods that could be used to investigate other syntactic structures. Finally, the book also has a pedagogical dimension in that it examines how the research findings can be applied to foreign language teaching.