Register-Contingent Entrenchment of Constructional Patterns: Causal and Concessive Adverbial Clauses in Academic and Newspaper Writing

One of the main assumptions of usage-based constructionist approaches is that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as a repository of constructions, which emerge from experience with language and whose strength of mental representation (entrenchment) is a function of their usage frequency. On the basis of a multistep statistical procedure geared to identify patterns of adverbial clause constructions in two distinct registers, we argue that a model of language that generalizes over situational contexts is implausible. Instead, a more adequate model of linguistic knowledge comprises a set of subrepositories that are adapted to the discourse-functional needs of situational contexts, in which constructions have register-specific entrenchment values.