Full Description
The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.
Contents
1. Acknowledgements; 2. List of contributors; 3. Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns (by Davidse, Kristin); 4. Part 1. Patterns in the verb phrase; 5. Light verb constructions in the history of English (by Ronan, Patricia); 6. What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? (by Diemer, Stefan); 7. The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English: Towards extrapolating from Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (by Markus, Manfred); 8. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English: A longitudinal look (by Elsness, Johan); 9. can and be able to in nineteenth-century Irish English: A case of 'imperfect learning'? (by Hattum, Marije van); 10. Part 2. Patterns in the noun phrase; 11. Syntactic constraints on the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English (by Rohdenburg, Gunter); 12. Ma daddy wis dead chuffed: On the dialectal distribution of the intensifier dead in Contemporary English (by Blanco-Suarez, Zeltia); 13. The case of focus (by Maier, Georg); 14. Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures; 15. Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English (by Rudanko, Juhani); 16. A new angle on infinitival and of -ing complements of afraid, with evidence from the TIME Corpus (by Rudanko, Juhani); 17. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready (by Hoglund, Mikko); 18. Part 4. Patterns of clause combining; 19. The diffusion of English absolutes: A diachronic register study (by Pol, Nikki van de); 20. It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing: The case of Norwegian learners (by Hasselgard, Hilde); 21. The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC (by Kimps, Ditte); 22. Author index; 23. Subject index
