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Cognitive Linguistics ; construction grammar ; syntax ; semantics ; metaphor ; fictive motion Informed by previous research on a special type of English constructions, variously referred to as unpassives, un-participle constructions etc. (Siegel 1973 ; Schönefeld 2015), the present paper adopts a Construction Grammar approach and provides a usage-based analysis of related lexicogrammatical patterns in Croatian. Ever since Sigel (1973), it has been observed that there exists a series of English constructions that recruit the copular verb go and past participles with negative prefixes to produce sentences such as (Radden 1996: 449): (1) a. The garbage went uncollected for weeks. b. Many grammatical errors went uncorrected. c. The importance of counterfactuals has gone unnoticed. Radden (1996) observes that the verb go employed in this construction seems to signal “abnormal and unexpected states of affairs which involve a departure from a normal and expected course of events: garbage cans are regularly emptied once a week, grammatical errors need to be corrected, and so on” (Radden 1996: 449). The stipulation that these kinds of constructions must denote state of affairs judged by speakers as counterexpectational is termed as the Negativity Constraint by Bourdin (2003: 104), who also notes that these constructions are truth-functionally equivalent to some other formally more or less similar constructions such as those in (2), and (3): (2) The crime went without an arrest until (...) (3) As well, public servants, who went years without getting paid under Mr. Mobutu (...) A usage-based analysis of the Croatian Web Corpus (hrWac 2.2) reveals that analogous patterns are also frequently found in Croatian, as is evidenced by sentences such as (4) and (5): (4) Potpredsjednica [Vlade] je upozorila da takvi zločini ne smiju izbjeći lice pravde i proći nekažnjeno. ‘The deputy Prime Minister warned that such crimes must not escape justice and go unpunished. (5) Zadnjih 15 godina nagledali suse i naslušali o krađama, pljačkama, ubojstvima, koji su prošli bez sankcija. ‘For the last 15 years, they have been constantly witnessing and hearing about thefts, robberies and murders which went unsanctioned.’ While English constructions such as those presented in Radden (1996: 449) make use of verbs that can trigger both andative and ambulative readings and past participles with negative prefixes, Croatian constructions such as those in (6) employ the unambiguously ambulative verb proći (derived from pro- ‘through’ and ići ‘go’) and adverbs derived from past participles with negative prefixes, and seem to be in free variation with somewhat less frequent constructions formed by proći and past participles with negative prefixes (cf. Zločin je prošao nekažnjeno ‘The crime went unpunished’ and Zločin je prošao nekažnjen ‘The crime went unpunished’). A collocation search conducted using the Croatian Web Corpus suggests the pattern presented in (5), where proći is combined with a caritive PP, comprises the most productive family of constructions. Our goal in the present analysis is to present data from an extensive corpus search of the proći + bez + NP construction and discuss the heterogeneity of nouns occupying the subject slot and those that are contained in the caritive PP in terms of their animacy/inanimacy and stativity/eventivity, thereby touching upon the issue of a likely constructional split (see Croft 2003). |
