The link between syntax, semantics, discourse, and lexicon in counteridenticals

Abstract The present study goes beyond traditional usage-based work in that it pays close attention not only to the interaction of lexicon and syntax in language use, but also to how other analytic layers of analysis (e.g., discourse) can influence the compatibility of lexemes in particular slots of constructional schemas. To investigate this domain, we examine counteridentical constructions (e.g., if I were you, I would do it ) in a dataset of more than 1,000 examples from The Corpus of Contemporary American English. We focus on significant interdependencies between the slots of the protasis (i.e., types of NPs appearing in the protasis) and apodosis (i.e., semantics of the verb lemma) and how these cross-clausal associations interact with other linguistic variables such as the time reference of the apodosis, the discourse function of the construction, and the order of the protasis and apodosis. We demonstrate a novel application of a multivariate extension of co-varying collexeme analysis via a hierarchical configural frequency analysis.