The phone makes us scream: corpus study of English and Russian

This study explores English and Russian speech verbs with phone prepositional phrases (PPs). It investigates two hypotheses: 1) A phone PP produces an independent construction and 2) A phone PP can be freely added to any speech verb. Two constructions in English and two constructions in Russian are used as the material for the analysis. In both languages I explore a neutral phone construction and compare it with a construction meaning ‘speak into the phone’. I present a new method – statistical profiling, that explores which words occur in a slot of a construction most frequently and how that frequency list for a slot is changed if another slot is filled. This paper shows that English on the phone phrase can freely be added to any speech and sound verb, while other phone PPs produce different phone constructions.