RETRACTED – Surprisal and constructional compatibility: evidence from the English of -NP evaluation construction

Abstract This study investigates the English of-NP (noun phrase) evaluation construction (e.g., It’s nice of you to help me plan this wedding ), hypothesizing that its constructional meaning encodes socially mediated evaluation and imposes semantic constraints on the NP slot. We adopt a dual methodological approach, combining collostructional analysis to identify lexeme–construction associations with surprisal analysis using a large language model (LLM) (GPT-2) to assess predictive processing difficulty. The two methods complement each other, capturing both static distributional patterns and dynamic expectancy profiles. Three experimental manipulations were implemented: preposition alternation, variation in NP agentivity and variation in NP intentionality. Results show that NPs conforming to the hypothesized slot constraints yield lower surprisal values, whereas constraint-violating NPs trigger higher surprisal, aligning with the observed collostructional strengths. These findings provide empirical support for the view that constructional compatibility shapes predictive processing and contributes to integrating Construction Grammar (CxG) with prediction-based models of language processing.