A corpus analysis of prototypical causation in written scientific and technical English
Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera, María Beatriz Pérez Cabello del Alba · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2011
In an attempt to come to a better understanding of the concept of prototypicality, this article compares two different tools for explaining prototypes, viz. the theoretical constructs found in the literature on cognitive linguistics and claiming to describe cognitively salient models, and frequency of linguistic usage as evidenced in the UVaSTECorpus. In particular, this article focuses on the periphrastic causative constructions of the verbs allow, cause, and enable, and investigates two research questions: (i) are prototypes the most frequently corpus-attested items? (ii) Are there significant differences among these verbs, considering that cause is an implicative causative, whereas allow and enable are non-implicative causatives? Results are commented on making our case for indicating that the notion of prototypicality is fuzzy and must be interpreted in terms of language varieties. This paper follows Gilquin's work (2006) but explains the results obtained in terms of medium (written) and genre (scientific and technical English).