It-extraposition with past participles and that-clauses: a quantitative corpus - based analysis

Abstract

Applying frame semantics, usage-based construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology, this article seeks to explore the nature of the extraposed construction with past participles complemented by that -clauses. To this end, the author extracts the occurrences of the It BE V en that-construction from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), determines its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional features, and identifies verbs that are strongly associated with the construction in question. The study meaningfully contributes to a growing body of research on it-extraposition by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of one of its variants, a grammatical pattern with past participles that has not been hitherto investigated in much detail from a quantitative corpus-based perspective.