earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of likely NP construction. This modern structure, which has been more increasingly found in American English since 2015, shows a new behaviour of likely, unlike the common and aged use of likely as an adjective or an adverb. Two types of analyses have been conducted to examine the behavior of likely NP: collexeme analyses employing Stefanowitch and Gries (2003) and Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004), and configural frequency analyses utilizing Gries(2004). It has been found that the construction has two seemingly different characteristics, which become clearer when comparing it with the use of the synonymous construction likely to be NP: likely NP structure is characteristically used when describing the possibility of logical reasoning, which can be reasonably inferred from strong logical collexemes; However, it is actually preferred in personal registers such as blogs and is frequently accompanied by degree adverbs, which implies the reasoning is not rigorous, but mostly loose.