Abstract

This study examines how speakers extend prototypically intransitive “noise” verbs (coughed, laughed, sneezed) into Caused Motion and Resultative Constructions, as described by Goldberg (1995). Using corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the analysis identifies the linguistic mechanisms and cognitive-semantic principles that support these non-prototypical uses. Results indicate that, despite their conventional intransitivity, these verbs are productively coerced into transitive frames when licensed by constructional meaning. Path and result phrases play a key role in signaling these interpretations. While both corpora provide evidence of such constructions, American English demonstrates greater frequency and flexibility, particularly in Resultative uses. These findings support a construction grammar framework, highlighting the role of usage patterns in shaping argument structure and extending verb meaning.

Keywords

  • noise verbs
  • intransitive verbs
  • Caused Motion Construction
  • Resultative Construction
  • BNC
  • COCA
  • concordance lines
  • usage-based
  • construal
  • semantic coercion

About the author

Dorota Chłopek

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3636-8969

Dorota Chłopek was born in Jędrzejów, Poland. She holds a degree in English philology from the Faculty of Philology at the University of Silesia in Katowice, where she also earned her PhD in linguistics. She subsequently obtained her postdoctoral degree (habilitation) at the Faculty of Arts of Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. Her academic research centers on cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and selected aspects of functional linguistics, with a particular focus on the interplay between grammatical constructions and conceptual semantics. Her work examines linguistic phenomena through the lens of cognitive paradigms, offering contrastive insights into English and Polish. She currently holds a research and teaching position at the University of Bielsko-Biała in southern Poland.

How to cite

CHŁOPEK, Dorota. Linguistic Creativity in Motion: How Speakers Extend Intransitive Verbs into Argument Structure Constructions. Global Insights & Research Network [online]. 2025, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 123–166. ISSN 3029-8318. Available from: https://girn.uk/1-2025/linguistic-creativity-intransitive-verbs-argument-structure/

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Licence and copyright

Copyright © 2025 Dorota Chłopek. This article is open access, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

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