The NP-be-that-construction with shell nouns in American English: a quantitative usage-based study

This article uses usage-based construction grammar theory and corpus-based quantitative methods to examine the characteristics of the NP-be-that-construction in American English, which contains shell nouns and is supplemented by that-clauses. To this end, the author examines examples of this construction drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to determine its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-related features. In addition, the study identifies shell nouns that are strongly associated with this particular construction. This study makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on shell nouns by presenting the results of a detailed, corpus-based, qualitative, and quantitative analysis of constructions containing shell nouns, the copula be, and that-clauses. This grammatical construction has not been systematically and thoroughly studied from a quantitative, corpus-based perspective in the context of American English. The findings of this research show that this construction is often combined with several categories of nouns, each of which refers to different semantic sets. Furthermore, it has been observed that this construction has a specific meaning, appears in various language registers, occurs in different structural forms, and performs many functions in discourse.