The development of the adversative VP ON NP construction (he called the cops on me)

International audienceThe development of the adversative VP ON NP construction (he called the cops on me) Vincent HUGOUIn a section on ‘actors and patients’, Jackendoff (1990: 187-188) discusses the use of an ‘adversative adjunct’ in English, as in he called the cops on me. The meaning is rather clear: an agent ‘he’ targets his actions at the ‘cops’ and the participant ‘me’ is negatively affected by the result of the event. At first glance, each part of the structure can be analyzed as an instantiation of general syntactic patterns: the NP construction, the subject-predicate construction, the PP construction, etc. Even if the structure seems to be semantically and structurally transparent, I argue that it could qualify as a construction in its own right, as broadly construed by usage-based and cognitive models of constructional approaches (Goldberg 2006: 5). This corpus-based study (eg. COCA, COHA) combines corpus analysis and native-speaker judgment. This construction is productive, as evidenced by its type frequency. The less conventionalized instances (people change on you / you grew up on me) seem to be analogical extensions of well-entrenched constructions (cheat on sb, tell on sb, play a joke on sb, etc.). It can be argued therefore that repeated exposure to frequently occurring instances of varying size and complexity has led speakers to abstract away from individual differences to perhaps arrive at a schema VP on NP. Other facts militate in favor of a constructional approach: for example, an instance like he called the cops on me can be available, albeit sporadically, for passivization, I was called the cops on. This suggests that speakers may have already started to perceive the PP as an argument of the verb, as with other verbs like cheat on sb (considered synchronically an indirect transitive verb: he was cheated on); the PP is reanalyzed as being part of the VP on NP construction. Note that cotextual factors (topic continuity, morphosyntactic persistence) may serve as triggers for those ’unusual’ choices.Diachronic evidence from COHA indicates how a locative/metaphorical adjunct (a curse fell on me) has come to be used more abstractly over time to describe a non-spatial relationship instantiating the conceptual metaphor AFFECTING IS TOUCHING (Boers 1996). Plausibly, the metaphorization of the adjunct developed in parallel with the extension of the construction to new tokens. For instance, the use of the verb die in the construction, as early as 1888, may have facilitated the development of a metaphorical sense since a locative meaning of the PP in he died on me (= while I was lying under him) was improbable from the start. The idiomatization of the PP must have contributed to greater cohesion with the verb and favored the formation of an independent schema, with concomitant partial loss of compositionality. The data reveals verb-(class)-specific sub-constructions (Croft 2003), mainly speaking verbs, change-of-state/of-location verbs, with idiosyncratic constraints: the verb leave cannot enter the construction as it lacks an inherent dysphoric feature that co(n)text may begin to provide: ?he left on me in the night (≈ snuck out on me). These sub-constructions may serve as exemplars and could explain subtle meaning variations.ReferencesBOERS, Frank. 1996. Spatial Prepositions and Metaphor: A Cognitive Semantic Journey along the UP-DOWN and the FRONT-BACK Dimensions. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.CROFT, William. 2003. ‘Lexical rules vs. constructions: a false dichotomy’. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven and K-U. Panther (eds.), Motivation in Language. Studies in Honor of Günter Radden. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 49-68.DAVIES, Mark. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Available at: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/GOLDBERG, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.JACKENDOFF, Ray. 1990. Semantic Structures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press