Motivations and mechanisms for the development of the reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue
With data from two comparable corpora of spoken British English, the London-Lund Corpus and the new London-Lund Corpus 2, this study tracks the development of the reactive what-x construction half a century back in time. The study has two goals: (i) to describe the uses of the construction over time and (ii) to establish the motivations and mechanisms related to its development in spoken dialogue.