A Collostructional and Constructional Approach to the Transitive out of -ing Construction

This paper investigates the so-called transitive out of -ing construction, characterised by the structure of NP subject + V1 + NP object + out of VP2[-ing] predicate with corpus data (e.g., I cheated you all out of being in my life), and offers a construction-based account of the construction. In this paper, based on 725 examples from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), we first explore its real-life uses in terms of the verbs frequently found in the V1 slot, favoured distribution patterns based on their semantic classes, subject types, preferred interpretation types, and frequent V1-V2[-ing] pairs, adopting collostructional analyses. We then show that the overall grammatical properties of the transitive out of -ing construction as well as the idiosyncrasies of its two atypical variants can be best accounted for in the Construction Grammar perspective.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the transitive out of -ing construction and offers a construction-based account of it. Based on analysis of 725 examples, it reveals the specific usage patterns of the construction in real-life contexts and explains its grammatical properties and variations within the framework of Construction Grammar.