The Distribution of Also and Too: A Preliminary Corpus Study

Abstract

This paper discusses distributional differences between the two additive particles also and too on the basis of corpus evidence. Three hypotheses are explored: (i) also and too are characteristic of different registers or styles, (ii) the use of also and too is sensitive to structural properties of the 'added constituent', and (iii) the use of the two particles depends on the distribution of 'added material' over the sentence. The discussion centres around the question to what extent corpus-based methods are appropriate to test these hypotheses. While hypothesis (ii) can straightforwardly be tested (and confirmed), the other two hypotheses pose methodological challenges of different types. Corpus-based test procedures are outlined for both hypotheses and preliminary results are given, but it is pointed out that specific types of questions could be answered more easily by applying common elicitation procedures