To burst into tears, to get into a brawl, and to burst into laughter: what do these constructions have in common?

Abstract

In this article, we present an excerpt from a research project that aimed to investigate the formal and functional properties of constructions instantiated by the complex predicate cair-support + prepositional noun phrase. Using written texts published on the social network Twitter (currently X) as our corpus, and supported by Construction Grammar, we demonstrate that this verb instantiates constructions that pair form and meaning, with the noun phrase determining the meanings. In order to highlight the role of lexical items in shaping the construction, this excerpt presents an analysis of three semantic fields mobilized by the support verb cair: 1. emotions related to crying; 2. acts of physical violence; 3. manifestations of laughter. Based on a mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative) approach, we observed varied productivity in both types and tokens, evidencing the speaker’s creativity when using a support construction – a grammatical pattern used to express specific semantic effects and pragmatic values not achieved by a simple predicative verb.