Avertives refer to (mainly past) situations the outcome of which is interrupted, averted, or frustrated instead of completed, as in Meinasin kaatua, mutta ihmeen kaupalla onnistuin pysymään jaloillani ‘I was about to fall, but miraculously managed to stay on my feet’. The aim of this paper is to describe and compare three verbal constructions in Finnish which are frequently used as avertives by means of collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). We propose that these constructions, namely olla + mAisillA ‘to be V-ing’, olla + INFA ‘to be to V’, and meinata + INFA ‘to mean, intend to V’, which all correspond to ‘be about to do something’, constitute a family of related avertive constructions. We first describe them by means of collexeme analyses based on corpus data consisting of online written conversation extracted from the Suomi24 corpus. We then compare the constructions and situate them on Caudal’s (2023) continuum for characterising different kinds of avertive markers. Finally, we offer a box chart characterisation of the constructions at two distinct levels of schematicity, the schematic AUX + INFX construction and a specific usage instance of olla + INFA, following Fried & Östman (2004).

This article takes a usage-based Construction Morphology perspective to examine the polysemy of the locative prefixoid up in complex words such as upstairs, upland, upheaval and uproot. Drawing on a relational structure model of morphosemantics, it is argued that the prefixoid systematically approximates the functions of different syntactic categories in different complex words: up functions like a preposition (upstairs), adjective (upland), adverb (upheaval) and verb (uproot). These constructions consequently require bases of specific syntactic categories and differ in the ways in which the prefixoid semantically relates to the second element. These subschemas are investigated in detail using corpus data from the BNC, collostructional analysis and various productivity measures to analyze the selectional restrictions of the open slot of the constructions as well as the semantics of the complex words. This approach elegantly solves the question of category change and the difficulties in identifying the syntactic category of the base in complex words with locative prefixoids, providing an alternative to the righthand head rule.

One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims to shed further light on this issue. By means of a collexeme analysis, this article investigates the semantic features of the infinitives that occur with auxiliary do in several Middle English corpora. The results show that auxiliary do was not connected to verbs with specific semantic profiles, but it was employed in different contexts and had various functions. Specifically, the data suggest that auxiliary do was used (i) as an accommodation tool to facilitate the use of low-frequency verbs, particularly of French origin, and (ii) as an aspectual particle to mark both perfectivity and habituality. It is argued that the multifunctionality of auxiliary do in Middle English played a crucial role in the preservation of the construction before it spread to the NICE (i.e. negation, inversion, code and emphasis) environments.

How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms such had/’d better, would/’d rather or might (as) well are seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly, will probably) or not (could also, might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv) is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types of mod + adv is a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.

The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.

This paper is a corpus-based investigation of five Swedish constructions that are used to express futurity. The method of Collexeme Analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) is applied to constructions with the auxiliaries ska ‘will’, skall ‘shall’, its past form skulle ‘should’, komma ‘come’, and tänka ‘think’. All of these are future markers that have grammaticalized to varying degrees. The aim of this paper is to investigate semantic differences between constructions with these auxiliaries. By analyzing the main verbs that co-occur with a given auxiliary, it can be statistically assessed what verbs are significantly attracted to the construction. It thus becomes possible to analyze the constructional semantics in terms of co-occurring lexical material. Conversely, it is also insightful to consider what verbs occur significantly less often than expected with a given auxiliary. These procedures allow a fine-grained semantic description in both positive and negative terms.