The English similative construction: A formal description in the Construction Grammar approach

When linguistic accounts describe the English similative construction, they tend to concentrate on its most prototypical formal variant, exemplified with the sentence Susy is like her sister. Nevertheless, linguistic data from the selected linguistic literature and The Corpus of Contemporary American English indicates many other expressions that code this construction. This paper attempts to compile and describe these expressions, grouping them into formal categories, whose semantic and formal structure is represented using the Construction Grammar formalism. Based on this formal examination, I will propose a formal taxonomy of the English similative construction, describing the taxonomic relations between higher level and lower level formal categories.