2024 Volume 166 Pages 59-86
The present paper investigates how the so-called better off construction, an irregular idiomatic construction, emerged in the history of English from three perspectives: cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing (NLP). It then demonstrates various empirical methods to discuss constructions using deep learning. To that end, this paper (i) conducts extensive corpus research to examine the emergence of the better off construction, (ii) analyzes the data from a cognitive linguistic perspective to develop a hypothesis, and (iii) tests the legitimacy of the hypothesis using linguistic and NLP methods such as word vectors. Additionally, through the research on the better off construction, this paper attempts to (1) present a ‘research cycle’ for empirical linguistic analysis by applying various methods from NLP, (2) show the similarities between usage-based analysis and deep learning, and (3) investigate the possibility that deep learning can provide converging evidence for interdisciplinary linguistic analysis.
