A construction analysis of [be done X] in Canadian English

This thesis is an analysis of the Canadian English construction ‘be done X’ [bdX], where X is a direct object noun phrase, as in ‘I’m done my homework’. The study is grounded in a cognitive linguistics framework, which examines the relation of language structure to cognitive principles and mechanisms not specific to language, including pragmatic and interactional principles. It is based on a corpus created from Canadian web blogs and investigates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse level properties of the construction. The results provide empirical evidence that a cognitive approach can account for the many layers of meaning that are conveyed in this construction. It asks the larger question of how constructional meaning is arrived at, and suggests that the current cognitive theory needs to be expanded to allow for a fuller account of meaning in a constructional framework.