Complement variation in English communication verbs

Complementation patterns might be defined as ways in which a phrase can be completed with another phrase. This dissertation focuses on one such specific pattern: the combination of English verbs which refer to communication, for example “talk”, with prepositional phrases which express a topic, as in “talk about something”. In these contexts, speakers can often choose between two or more topic-introducing prepositions. The main goal of the monograph is to explore what factors make speakers select one of the two major “topic markers” in English: “about” and “of”. The dissertation consists of six chapters. The first one introduces the key concepts employed in the monograph. Chapter Two contains an analysis of the investigated variation couched within a theory of language known as “construction grammar”. Chapter Three discusses the role of quantitative analysis in linguistics and describes the statistical techniques used in three corpus-based studies reported in Chapters Four to Six. These investigations reveal several factors which influence the choice between “about” and “of”. The dissertation additionally offers possible interpretations of the results.