type Positive (Broad) negative
epistemic 2 6
deontic 1 10
conative 1 1
volitive 0 5
none 3 0
Ms Morrell attempts damage limitation by telling her boss to keep his mouth shut and not rock the boat , but on he goes collecting more enemies and being let down by erstwhile friends. (OHPC: journalism)
We are represented by men hungry for high political office who will therefore not rock the party boat ; men whose loyalty is to their political careers, not necessarily their constituents [etc.]. (OHPC: periodical cited in non-fiction) Sadock ( 1974: 122) discusses the FEIin the world which functions as an emphasizer in wh-interrogatives structures, that is structures beginning with
who, what, where, and so on. More particularly, in the world occurs in
rhetorical questions where the speaker/writer wants to hear the answer rather than know it. They are indirect speech acts, expressives or directives, rather than simple requests for information:
This second tale brought me up short. I said: 'Where in the world did this proposal come from?' 'You'd be surprised.' (OHPC:
biography)
As I thought about that perceptive question I realised its
implications. Was the message or the product important enough to present properly? Did the result matter to those of us who were involved? And if it was important, to us and the country, why in the world weren't we snuffing out all those niggling grievances and getting on with the job of winning? (OHPC: non-fiction)
She was about to close her eyes again when she heard a far-off roaring. She sat up and frowned. What in the world could it be? She whimpered as the noise filled her ears. It was now unbelievably loud. (OHPC: fiction)
All this relates to colligating and collocating structures as observed. It does not begin to deal with FEIs where certain structures are precluded--in the same way that some transformations of FEIs are precluded. For example, Mel'čuk ( 1995: 206) points out that several FEIs meaning 'die', such as kick the bucket,
bite the dust, and snuff it, cannot be associated with an indication of the cause
of
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death, apparently for semantic reasons. I can find only one counterexample in BofE, and it comes from British journalism:
When AIDS started to be taken seriously (i.e. a cabinet minister kicked the bucket with it ).
These kinds of restriction and preference operate on individual items, and so are described on an individual basis. Alt makes a more general point in
discussing to-infinitive and -ing complementation of verbs, particularly begin ( 1991: 462ff.). While in many cases, either structure is possible, often with little change in meaning other than change of aspect or focus, he observes that where FEIs, idiomatic phrasal verbs, and other kinds of institutionalized metaphors occur in the complements, the to-infinitive structure is preferred and the -ing structure may be blocked. For example, this began to set my
teeth on edge (Birmingham Collection of English Text) is unlikely to have the
variation *this began setting my teeth on edge. Alt suggests that this can be
explained in terms of stativity and idiomaticity, and it is clearly another aspect of FEIs needing detailed exploration.
Finally, a minor but none the less interesting phenomenon is when FEIs collocate with other FEIs. Francis points out that be a case of typically co-occurs in BofE with FEIs ( 1993: 145), functioning as a preface which compares a situation already established in the discourse with another one familiar to the reader/hearer. Her examples include It's simply a case of
keeping fingers crossed and For it may not just be a case of having egg on your face. Another FEI where this happens is not be one to --, for example:
But Mr Bakeris not one to go out on a limb --he is only too well aware that the Middle East is a graveyard of American peace proposals, many of them killed by Mr Shamir. (OHPC: journalism)
Charltonis not one to lose sleep over anything--apart, perhaps, from the one that got away--and the superior technique his players will encounter next summer leaves him utterly unconcerned. (OHPC: journalism)
With £10.8m turnover, Robinsonis not one to rest on laurels : this afternoon will find him working in the Bath branch of Jigsaw, a few miles from his home in the village of Colherne. (OHPC: journalism) See Section 10.5 for a discussion of colligating FEIs and other words which metalinguistically signal FEIs or other choices of lexis.
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6
Variation
Corpus studies of FEIs show clearly that their forms are often unstable. Fixedness is a key property of FEIs, yet around 40% of database FEIs have lexical variations or strongly institutionalized transformations, and around 14% have two or more variations on their canonical forms. Of course, some FEIs are more fixed than others, and some, for example, take place and at all, do not vary at all; however, variation is very widespread. This is not a
phenomenon confined to English, but has been reported by people involved in text-based or corpus-based studies of FEIs in other languages. For example, Clausén ( 1996) discusses it with respect to Swedish, and Cignoni and Coffey ( 1995) with respect to Italian: lexicographers working with Danish and Czech have also observed it (personal communications). Nor are all these variations ad hoc manipulations for stylistic effect. Such exploitations happen (see
Section 6.7) and are very noticeable in text, but they are not the dominant type. Designating departures from canonical forms as 'artistic deformations' ( Mel'čuk 1995: 213) or 'wordplay' ( Schenk 1995: 257) underplays the
prevalence and significance of the phenomenon of variation.
Variation is fairly consistent across FEI types: see Table 6.1 . Variation is also relatively consistent across frequency bands. Table 6.2 shows what proportion of FEIs in each frequency band were found in OHPC with variations. In fact, the most deviant figure is for the least frequent FEIs, and this clearly reflects the fact that if