Semantic variability of constructions with the verb ‘to break’

The paper focuses on semantic variability of constructions with the verb to break. The subject of the research is resultative meanings of the constructions with the verb break. In the paper the following hypotheses were developed: the meaning of a lexical nucleus in a predicative construction is modified by the semantics of a variable component in the construction; the verb break + adjective is used in quasi-transitive meaning and describes a transition into a certain state. The relevance of the work is determined by researchers’ interest in the problems of using quantitative methods and corpora for describing functionality of verbs. The novelty of the paper consists in the possibility to estimate the relevant character of the definitions of the verb to break and the system of meanings represented in the corpus. The language material was selected by way of continuous sampling from the COCA and contextual analysis. The next stage of the research implied structural and functional classification of the constructions with the verb to break. Semantic variability of the constructions was established with the help of semantic clusterisation of the collocates. It was found that the verb ‘to break’ retains the seme of a sudden, fast and violent change which leads to its frequent use in political and military context. While adjectives in break + adjective + noun constructions can either be divided into certain semantic clusters or be used at random, the further research will focus on studying the factors which determine regularities in adjective semantics in break + adjective + noun constructions.