Construcciones implicativas en inglés introducidas por un pronombre interrogativo en el Modelo Léxico Construccional

Abstract

The Lexical Constructional Model (LCM; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2007, 2008, 2011; Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza 2008a, 2008b; Ruiz de Mendoza 2008) is a comprehensive model of language that accounts for meaning construction at all levels of grammatical description. In the LCM constructions are distributed among four levels of representation that interact in principled ways: argument structure (level 1), implicature (level 2), illocution (level 3) and discourse (level 4). The aim of this paper is to provide a full characterization of the English Wh-interrogative family of inferential constructions, understood as a web of interrelated form-function pairings (Gonzálvez-García 2011), within the framework of the LCM. We shall examine the morphosyntactic, semantico-conceptual and pragmatic properties of three inferential (i.e. level-two) constructions: the ‘what’s X doing Y?’ construction, the ‘wh- do you think you BE-present V-ing?’ construction and the ‘who do you think you are?’ construction.