On the verge of tears and the brink of death

The two idiomatic constructions verge of and brink of are often considered overlapping constructions that express impending future events. Moreover, it is held that brink of in particular tends to express negative events such as disasters, misfortune, and the like. While both are documented in many dictionaries of English, and verge of is sometimes described in English grammars, neither construction had really been systematically studied before Wiliński published a research article in 2017 in which a distinctive collexeme analysis mapped distinctive patterns in the lexical items appearing after of in either construction. Taking a step further, the present study, drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, applies a corpus-based multivariate version of distinctive collexeme analysis to the two constructions, which not only takes collexemes into consideration but involves 11 additional variables, such as, for example, the preposition before verge and brink, semantic prosody, and discourse prosody as well as register. Thus, this article presents usage-based distinctive collo-profiles pertaining to the two constructions that offer more detailed pictures than traditional monovariate analyses can.