Olguín Martínez, Jesús & Stefan Th. Gries. 2026. The link between syntax, semantics, discourse, and lexicon in counteridenticals: A multivariate extension of co-varying collexeme analysis. Functions of Language (published online). https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.24101.olg
The present study goes beyond traditional Usage-Based Construction Grammar research 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. The paper provides a novel way to explore the following question: how do syntax, semantics, discourse, and lexicon fit together in a unified model of linguistic architecture? To investigate this domain, we examine counteridentical constructions (e.g., if I were you, I would do it) based on 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. The findings of the paper suggest that not only syntax, but also other grammatical domains can influence the compatibility of lexemes in particular slots of constructional schemas. The theoretical implications of the present research are problematic for formal linguistic theory, in which the distinction between lexicon and syntax has played an important role.