Persuasive Americans vs. brutal Brits? A collostructional study on the transitive out of -ing construction

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Jungsoo Kim Rok Sim
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제42권 제3호, 739~769쪽, 전체 31쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2025.12.30

국문 초록

Wulff et al. (2007) argued that Americans are “persuasive” while Brits are “brutal,” based on differences in the transitive into -ing construction, adopting the distinctive collexeme analysis. In the use of this construction, American English typically prefers communication and persuasion verbs (e.g., talk and coax), as in They talked Cassie into breaking up the nuptials, whereas British English more favorably selects force and negative emotion verbs (e.g., pressurize and bully). This study examines whether Wulff et al.’s (2007) generalization “persuasive Americans vs. brutal Brits” also extends to the transitive out of -ing construction (e.g., They talked Cassie out of breaking up the nuptials). Drawing on large-scale corpus data from GloWbE and NOW (2010 to May 2025), we analyze verbs in the V1 slot using collostructional methods (collexeme, distinctive collexeme, and covarying collexeme analyses). Our findings reveal that the generalization largely holds: American English exhibits a broader range of verbs, with communication and persuasion strongly represented (e.g., talk), while British English favors force verbs (e.g., rule and price). At the same time, notable deviations emerge: American English also shows strong distinctive associations with negative emotion verbs (e.g., scare, intimidate, and shame), a preference not observed in British English. These results broaden our understanding of the transitive out of -ing construction and refine the claim that Americans are “persuasive” and Brits are “brutal, demonstrating that although the dialectal divide is robust, its expression shifts in systematic ways across related constructions.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Literature review and research questions

3. Data and methodology

4. Corpus findings

5. General discussion

6. Conclusion

References

키워드

Transitive out of -ing construction American English British English collostructional analysis corpus linguistics