Systemic and constructionist reflections on the approach to relational clauses realized with the verb to be

Abstract

This study assesses the plausibility of an interface between Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday; Matthiessen, 2004) and Goldberg’s Constructionist model (1995; 2006) for the analysis of relational clauses with the verb ser (“to be”). It is hypothesized that these clauses constitute constructional subschemas of the macroconstruction [NP + Cop + X], whose attributive and identificative variations result from the interplay between systemic-functional choices and constructional principles of inheritance and polysemy. The corpus consists of 48 reports of homophobic violence published on news websites between 2014 and 2019, from which 124 intensive relational clauses were extracted. Manual coding was carried out with a focus on the thematic roles of paired structures. The results show that, through a quali-quantitative approach integrating SFG and Construction Grammar, each relational clause with ser instantiates a subschema of the macroconstruction [NP + Cop + X], differentiated by the nature of the third slot (AdjP or NP) and by the projected ideational roles. In the corpus, the attributive mode predominated, with 98 occurrences (79.04%) as opposed to 26 identificative ones (20.96%). It was observed that the qualificative, classificative, and identificative constructions respectively reflect gradients of evaluation, categorization, and definition, demonstrating how metafunctional choices (SFG) intertwine with constructional schemas (CG) in the production of meaning.