The cognitive mechanisms involved in the “DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME” construction: Evaluating proposals from Construction Grammar and Formal Semantics

Abstract

There are broad disagreements between existing models regarding the mental representations and processes involved in the "DEGREE ADVERB + PROPER NAME" construction, including disagreements regarding the semantics of the degree device, the category status of the proper name, the construction’s expressed meaning and its (non-)compositionality, and, crucially, the operation that holds between the degree device and the proper name. Our corpus-based investigation into two competing models from Construction Grammar and Formal Semantics shows that these models collectively make useful contributions to the scientific understanding of this construction, but neither is empirically adequate. Most importantly, we find that the construction participates in several non-predicted expressed meanings; multivariate analyses show that the three amenable to statistical analysis cluster with different semantic usage-features. We argue that the best way to account for the construction’s semantics-pragmatics is via a previously-dismissed cognitive mechanism: an enrichment-/strengthening-type operation whereby a pragmatically-supplied scale is added to the message.

Relationship with a semioreferential object as a predictor variable: The case of insiders’ and outsiders’ uses of “very New York” on Twitter

“…How very LA; This is very LA; a very LA morning; very LA) (Gonzálvez-García, 2014;Sant, 2018;Wee & Tan, 2008); (2) Predication of a logical or grammatical subject via a variety of copular verbs (e.g. This feels very LA; She talks quite LA; He is very LA) (Frazer-McKee, 2020; Gonzálvez-García, 2014); (3) Metonymic exploitation of the proper name's encyclopaedic potential (Bylinina, 2011;Duffley, 2020;Frazer-McKee, 2020;Frazer-McKee & Duffley, preprint), as in Pizza is very New York (metonymic access to the notions of food and pizza) or Black clothing is very New York (metonymic access to the notion of fashion and popular fashion colours);…”