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January 3, 2007
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This paper reports the results of a usage-based study of gapping (as in “I ate fish, Bill [ ] rice, and Harry [ ] roast beef”), one of the most extensively studied syntactic constructions in English. Using the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) as the database, our investigation demonstrates that gapping is an extremely marginal grammatical construction in English. It is virtually non-existent in interactive speech and has only a very limited presence in certain types of monologues and written registers. Syntactically speaking, gapping favors simple structures, linking and low transitivity verbal elements, and can ostensibly be deemed as copula-derived. From a discourse pragmatic point of view, information flow, social interaction, and stylistic functions are found to be contributing factors to the ways that gapping structures are constituted and used. Our study can thus be taken as evidence that an adequate understanding of the form and discourse functions of syntactic structures is best achieved through examinations of actual language use.
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January 3, 2007
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While McEnery and Wilson (1996: 16) argue for a combination of introspection and corpus data, many linguists still only draw on either of the two data sources. In this article I will show that treating the two types of data as corroborating evidence allows a far more detailed analysis of the categorical and variable constraints governing syntactic variation than the two types of data would have allowed individually. To illustrate this point, I will present the results of a case study on preposition placement in English relative clauses which combines a statistical corpus analysis and a magnitude estimation grammaticality judgement experiment.
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This study takes a close look at four-noun compounds in English and German. A comparison of 200 items from each language reveals no structural differences. The preponderant type places the major constituent boundary between the second and the third morpheme, thereby creating a symmetrical hierarchical structure. Left-branching occurs more frequently than right-branching in consistently branching compounds. No such bias emerges in centre-branching types. Flat structures occur both at the upper and lower level of embedding, though at a very low frequency. The main stress marks the major constituent boundary in symmetrical, though not in asymmetrical compounds in English whereas it only marks the major constituent boundary in right-branching compounds in German. The German interfix <s> is indicative of minor rather than major constituent boundaries. A unified account of four-member compounds is proposed whose point of departure is the perceptual strategies that are employed during the comprehension of the much more frequent two-member compounds. These processing strategies are extended to the larger complexes such that the structural patterns which are compatible with these strategies are favoured. By contrast, the structural patterns which induce a garden-path effect are disfavoured.
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Semantic prosody , or discourse prosody as it is also known, has come to be a familiar dimension of corpus-based lexicology (see Louw 1993, Stubbs 1995, Sinclair 1991, Partington 2004 for examples), though it is not without its critics (cf. Whitsitt 2005). As Whitsitt demonstrates through his survey of the relevant literature, there are different emphases in the ways in which the term semantic prosody has come to be understood. The most common understanding that we seem to encounter, however, is that some words, or word groups, occur in contexts which are understood by the researcher to have ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ nuances, or prosodies (with KWIC displays of concordance lines facilitating the discovery of these prosodies). The prosodies are not simply to be equated with the nuances found at any one collocational position or with any one part of speech, but rather they emerge from miscellaneous lexical and phraseological phenomena in the context of usage of the word in question. In some interesting cases (e. g., the negative prosody associated with cause , as discussed in Stubbs 1995), the prosody is not particularly obvious, or even evident at all, to the researcher or native speaker prior to the corpus-based analysis.
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January 3, 2007
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Introduction This discussion note argues that distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) can be applied to analyses of diachronic corpus data, and that such an application makes it a useful tool for the study of grammaticalizing constructions. In analyses of synchronic corpus data, distinctive collexeme analysis demonstrates how several given constructions differ from each other with respect to conventionally associated lexical material. Different collocational preferences are taken to reflect semantic differences between the investigated constructions. Applied diachronically, the method can be used to compare the collocational preferences of a single construction in different periods of time. Systematic differences in the collocational preferences can be interpreted as an ongoing change in the constructional semantics.
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In his discussion note, Hilpert outlines an intriguing and very promising application of distinctive collexeme analysis to diachronic data. He tracks lexical associations of the English shall -future from Early Modern English to Present-Day English, showing how shifts in these associations can be related to the semantic development of the construction from ‘obligation’ to ‘intention’.
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