‘Not that Tight a Family’ – BIG MESS Constructions in Present Day American English

This paper presents a usage-based, constructional analysis of the so-called BIG MESS construction in Present Day English (e.g. how big a mess , that big a deal , too strong a word ). Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is presented in order to analyze the frequency, genre distribution and lexical biases of seven subtypes ( how , however , so , as , too , this , that ). The paper also zooms in on the feature of ‘discontinuous modification’ by a clause (e.g. too ADJ qualitative a N sg to -Clause, as ADJ qualitative a N sg as- Clause). The main aim is to sketch the constructional network of the BIG MESS subtypes, discussing the respective form-meaning pairings with their differences in usage and their parent and peer relations. By using collostructional and configural frequency analyses, it is shown that some of the constructional types are formally and functionally very different from each other, which is why their relatedness is called into question. It is argued that not all subtypes form a tight constructional family but that some of them are distant relatives at best. Additionally, the existence of an abstract ‘mothernode’, i.e. [ADV intensification ADJ qualitative a N sg ] Cx will be discussed.