It is … quite common for theoretical predictions to go untested (BNC_CMH). A register-specific analysis of the English go un-V-en construction

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into the English go un-V-en construction from a usage-based construction-grammar perspective. The starting point is a quantitative analysis of the respective usage data extracted from the complete British National Corpus (BNC), the results of which are correlated with those gained from an analysis of the more general go adjective pattern. In a second step, the data set is reduced to those instances occurring in the four registers academic prose, newspaper texts, fiction and conversation. These are then submitted to a distinctive collexeme analysis to identify the register-specific behaviour of the patterns at issue. The results of this analysis make it plain that register has an impact on whether and how exactly the patterns are used in authentic communication. This finding is seen as an argument in favour of the requirement for a usage-based approach (to constructions) to incorporate extralinguistic factors.