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This paper aims to explore how discourse functions and prosodic realisations can be related through an analysis of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in English. Based on a corpus study of spoken British English through the use of the Aix-Marsec and ICE-GB corpora, our aim is twofold: 1) to establish the singularity of ARCs within the global category of parentheticals; and 2) to show that, for one specific syntactic structure, in this instance ARCs, differences in discourse functions correspond not only to differences in morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics as proposed in Loock's (La Proposition relative appositive en anglais contemporain à l'écrit et à l'oral: fonctions discursives et structures concurrentes, 2005, Journal of Pragmatics 39: 336–362, 2007, Appositive relative clauses in English: discourse functions and competing structures, John Benjamins, 2010) threefold discourse typology, but also to differences in prosodic features (regarding tonal, temporal and intensity aspects).
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Psycholinguistic studies on whether classifiers facilitate processing object-extracted relative clauses (RC) in Mandarin have often made use of a classifier mismatch-match configuration, wherein a preceding classifier mismatches the following RC-subject but matches the modified head noun. However, an examination of the Chinese Treebank corpus 5.0 shows this configuration rarely occurs. None of the 10 tokens of pre-RC classifiers conforms to the mismatch-match configuration in a real sense. Instead, either a dropped RC-subject or some intervening item successfully avoids anticipated lexical disruption effects induced by a mismatching classifier. The results of analysis suggest that the constructed examples used in previous psycholinguistic studies may not realistically test natural language processing procedures.
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Recent research has shown the dative alternation in English to be a productive arena for examining the relationship between group-level variation and the internalization of individuals' grammars. Experimental methods (e.g., Bresnan and Ford, Language 86: 168–213, 2010) and the analysis of large published corpora (e.g., Bresnan et al., Predicting the dative alternation, Amsterdam, 2007) have revealed subtle cross-dialect differences for this variable. The current paper seeks to improve our understanding of this feature and its bearings on experience-based models of grammar by examining African American English (AAE) data from sociolinguistic interviews and from historical letters written by semi-literate ex-slaves. We also consider some methodological problems of conducting corpus-like analyses on non-standard varieties.
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We investigate asymmetry in corpus-derived and human word associations. Most prior work has studied paradigmatic relations, either derived from free association norms or from large corpora using measures of statistical association and semantic relatedness. By contrast, we investigate the syntagmatic relation between words in adjective-noun and noun-noun combinations and present a new experimental design for measuring the strength of human associations. Of particular importance for syntagmatic relations are asymmetric associations, whose associational strength is much larger in one direction (e.g., from Pyrrhic to victory ) than in the other (e.g., from victory to Pyrrhic ). We develop a number of corpus-derived measures of asymmetric association and show that they predict the directedness of human associations with high accuracy.
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