If Not For-If It Weren’t/Wasn’t For Counterfactual Constructions: A Multivariate Extension of Collostructional Analysis

Abstract The present paper investigates if not for - if it weren’t/wasn’t for constructions in American English based on the analysis of more than 2,100 constructions extracted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English ( coca ). In analyzing these constructions, we focus on significant interdependencies between the slots of the protasis (i.e. animacy of the referent of the np ) and apodosis (i.e. semantics of the verb lemma) and how these cross-clausal associations interact with other linguistic variables, such as the polarity of the apodosis. We apply a new multivariate extension of collostructional analysis that combines distinctive and (co-varying) collexeme analysis via a hierarchical configural frequency analysis. This allows the analyst to identify associations not just of one slot to a construction or one slot to one other slot in one construction, but to include other features to identify (i) which constructions are preferred by which fillers in, now, one or more slots of one construction and (ii) which constructions are preferred by which (combinations) of one or more fillers.