English Language and Linguistics 15.2: 335–362. C  Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S1360674311000062 The Big Mess Construction: interactions between the lexicon and constructions 1 JONG-BOK KIM and PETER SELLS Kyung Hee University and SOAS, University of London (Received 8 May 2010; revised 28 February 2011) The so-called Big Mess Construction (BMC) (e.g. so prominent a punctuation), introduced by a limited set of degree words, places an adjectival expression in the predeterminer position. In movement approaches, such idiosyncratic properties of the BMC have been attributed to the interaction of functional projections and movement operations, whereas in surface-oriented analyses focus has been placed on the supposition of special constructions and their constructional properties. In this article, we show that neither of these two previous perspectives captures the variations and flexibility of the construction in question satisfactorily. Our approach adopts the view that degree words are functors selecting their head, and attributes the peculiarities to the interactions between the lexical properties of the degree items and the constructional constraints in question. 1 Introduction The so-called Big Mess Construction (BMC) 2 exemplified by corpus examples like (1) is peculiar in that it has predeterminer adjectival elements followed by an NP with the indefinite article: 3 (1) so-type (a) Hunger was now [so powerful] [a force] in its life. (BNC HTM W_ fict_prose) (b) Companies with [as strong] [a balance] sheet as yours have been known to seek acquisitions. (BNC HYE S_meeting) (c) It tells us just [how big] [a mess] the Government has got us into. (BNC K5M W_newsp_other_report) (d) We have far [too great] [a gap] between these two states. (BNC KRG S_brdcast_discussn) (e) [This new] [a phoneme] would have two allophones. (BNC K93 W_ac_soc_science) (f) It’s about [that big] [a diameter]. (BNC KCS S_conv) (g) He proved far [more successful] [a dealer] than he had a client. (BNC EUU W_commerce) 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 14 February 2008, and at the Workshop on the Structure of the Noun Phrase in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Explorations, 2–3 October 2009, Vigo, Spain. We thank the audiences of these two occasions for questions and suggestions. In particular, we thank Sae-Youn Cho, Incheol Choi, Frank Van Eynde, Paul Kay, Jungsoo Kim, Kyeongmin Kim, Shinsook Kim and Ivan Sag for helpful comments and suggestions at various stages. Our thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms which helped to significantly improve the quality of the paper. All remaining misinterpretations and errors are of course ours. 2 The term originates from Berman (1974). 3 The corpora we use in this study include the ICE-GB (International Corpus of English, Great Britain), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and BNC (British National Corpus).