Adopting the standpoint of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and the corpus- based method known as Distinctive-Collexeme Analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004; Hilpert 2014), the investigation seeks to identify lexemes that indicate a strong preference either for the it is ADJ to V-construction or the it is ADJ that-construction. On the basis of data extracted from the academic sub-corpus of COCA, the study reveals that there are adjectives exhibiting a strong preference for one construction instead of the other, and that the constructions have a tendency to occur with adjectives evoking different semantic frames.

Applying frame semantics, usage-based construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology, this article seeks to explore the nature of the extraposed construction with past participles complemented by that-clauses. To this end, the author extracts the occurrences of the It BE V_en that-construction from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), determines its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional features, and identifies verbs that are strongly associated with the construction in question. The study meaningfully contributes to a growing body of research on it-extraposition by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of one of its variants, a grammatical pattern with past participles that has not been hitherto investigated in much detail from a quantitative corpus- based perspective.