The expression no matter, combining with an interrogative clause X, expresses 'it doesn't matter what the value is of X' and displays many syntactic and semantic peculiarities. To better understand the grammatical properties of the construction in question, we investigate English corpora available online and suggest that some of the irreducible properties the construction displays can be best captured by the inheritance mechanism which plays a central role in the HPSG and Construction Grammar. We show that the construction in question has its own constructional properties, but also inherits properties from related major head constructions.
We thank Hyunwoo Lee for the help in its presentation and the audiences in the conference for questions and comments. We also thank three anonymous reviewers of this journal for comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (KRF 2009-A00065).