A Corpus-Based Analysis of “Be Made of”, “Be Made from”, “Be Made out of” and “Be Made with”

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Published: Jan 1, 2013

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Juliana Wijaya

Abstract

This study investigates the use of “be made of,” “be made from,” “be made out of, and “be made with” by native speakers of American English. Previous studies have suggested that the preposition following “be made” correlates to the materials or substance that forms the source. Analyzing the targeted forms in both oral and written discourse, this corpus based study, however, reveals that there is inconsistency in the choice of the preposition, especially in “be made from.” These targeted forms occur in certain genres and there are competing forms. One occurs more in informal conversation while the rest are used in both formal and informal discourse. The extended use of these forms and their lexical and syntactic collocations are also discussed in this study.

Article Details

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No. 1 (2013): Thoughts 2013
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Articles

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Author Biography

Juliana Wijaya

Juliana Wijaya is a lecturer at UCLA and teaches at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She has done research, presented and published in the fields of second and heritage language pedagogy and acquisition, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. She received her BA in English from Petra Christian University, Indonesia, her MA in linguistics from the University of Oregon, and PhD in applied linguistics from UCLA. Currently Dr. Wijaya is the president of the consortium for the teaching of Indonesian in the US (COTI).

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