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Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English.
Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works.
The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.
eBook
The Verb Phrase in English
The chapters in this volume feature new and groundbreaking research carried out by leading scholars and promising young researchers from around the world on recent changes in the English verb phrase. Drawing on authentic corpus data, the papers consider both spoken and written English in several genres. Each contribution pays particular attention to the methodologies used for investigating short-term patterns of change in English, with detailed discussions of controversies in this area. This cutting-edge collection is essential reading for historians of the English language, syntacticians and corpus linguists.
eBook
The English it-Cleft
This book examines the structure and function of the English it-cleft configuration from within the framework of construction grammar. It defends a straightforward extraposition-from-NP analysis (on which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative, modifying the initial it) and claims that all types of it-cleft involve nominal predication. Support for this analysis comes from three main areas: (a) the central role of definiteness in the creation of specificational meaning, (b) the existence and makeup of predicational (and proverbial) it-clefts, and (c) the early, historical it-cleft data. In addition, the book contains a sizeable diachronic component, drawing data from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and from the International Corpus of English - Great Britain. This investigation informs and advances what is an otherwise simple account of the English it-cleft, explaining how and why the configuration has developed an assortment of peculiar, construction-specific properties over time.
eBook
Questions of syntax
\"There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought. Yet there are far fewer than there might have been. We need to understand why, in both cases. One common and relevant theme that runs through these chapters, with varying degrees of explicitness, concerns how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other things, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role) and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. More and more questions need to be asked, if we are to achieve depth of explanation. Comparative syntax provides evidence bearing on questions which are not initially comparative in nature. It is extremely fruitful to search for correlations across syntactic differences as a means of establishing a new kind of window into the language faculty. Micro-comparative syntax is an especially powerful tool that allows us to probe questions concerning the most primitive units of syntactic variation, and whose growth in recent decades is to be compared with the development of the earliest microscopes, . Comparative syntax sheds light on what might at first appear to be lexical questions, as in the case of transitive verbal need, whose cross-linguistic distribution is less arbitrary that it appears to be, when viewed in the context of a silent counterpart of have\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Corpora, constructions, new Englishes : a constructional and variationist approach to verb patterning
This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes.
eBook
A Historical Syntax of English
This book discusses a number of approaches to charting the major developments in the syntax of English, addressing key issues of interpretation and focus for the benefit of students of the topic. It does not assume any knowledge of Old or Middle English or of formal syntax, although students should be familiar with traditional syntactic concepts such as verbs and nouns, subjects and objects, and a general knowledge of linguistic concepts such as morphology or case.Drawing on explanations from both formal and functional approaches, Los explores how syntactic changes are the product of the interaction of many factors, external (the product of a certain sociolinguistic constellation of language or dialect contact) and internal (e.g. the loss of morphology, pressure from analogy).The book will strike a balance between theoretical explanation and accessibility to readers who have not had any training in formal syntax.
eBook