A Corpus-based Approach to the Study of Permissive Constructions in English and Ukrainian

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus based contrastive study of permissive constructions in English and Ukrainian. Sentences with studied permissive constructions are viewed as sentences with secondary predication constructions expressed by a nonfinite complement after the complement taking a predicate with the meaning of permission. In English the secondary predicate within the non-finite complement is expressed by the Infinitive, Participle I, Participle II and Nominals (adjective/noun). In Ukrainian the only type of permissive constructions available are with the Infinitive as secondary predicate. Permissive constructions present a network of constructions with partly schematic, partly substantive ‘meso-constructions’ playing an important role in the entrenchment process. Identification of ‘meso-constructions’ is helpful for shaping the correct search query. The research material is gathered from two corpora, namely COCA and General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC). The frequency analysis of data helps to draw conclusions within the Usage-based Construction Grammar approach.