The analysis of obligatory or formulaic XVS structures - as in “Here comes the sun” or “Now is the time to solve our problems” - has been neglected in the literature since it has been argued that there seems to be no linguistic variation involved in the use of these types of syntactic constructions. Here, I defend the view that obligatory XVS structures are productive, highly structured constructions which are worthy of serious linguistic investigation. On the basis of a corpus-based analysis of written and spoken texts, it is argued that the different obligatory XVS types distinguished in the literature are clear instances of constructions as understood in the Construction Grammar framework. Despite their formal and functional dissimilarities, the article shows that these XVS structures still relate to one another in systematic and predictable ways, and are in fact grouped in relation to a unit in the schematic network which is naturally most salient - the prototype - and form with it a family of nodes which are extensions from the prototype - in the system. In sum, the analysis here will show that obligatory XVS structures are constructions which form an interconnected, structured system or network and are best understood with reference to different forms of inheritance.
This paper presents an in-depth corpus-based analysis of 'do so' verbal anaphora constructions in different fictional and non-fictional written English texts taken from different computerised corpora of British and American Present-day English, comprising texts from the 1960s, 1990s and 2000s. 'Do so' verbal anaphora, as in 'I ate an Apple yesterday in the park, and Peter did so last week', has received extensive attention from a theoretical perspective. Research has focused mainly on the analysis of the categorical factors -i.e. semantic and syntactic -that determine the use of the construction. Little research, however, deals with the analysis of 'do so' anaphora in real written English. The present analysis, based on tested criteria of multidimensional linguistic variation, sheds light on the linguistic and textual factors that drive the pragmatic use and the distribution of the construction. It will be shown that, in addition to semantic and grammatical factors, genre variation also plays an important role in the use of 'do so' anaphora in written discourse.
This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of subject-auxiliary inversion in both spoken and written English. The focus of the analysis is Chen’s (2013) X Auxiliary Subject construction (XASC), where X codes the fronting of a constituent which triggers the inversion of the auxiliary and the subject, as in “Never has trade union loyalty faced a more baffling test” or “What did he do?” On the basis of a statistical analysis using corpora of written and spoken English, it is argued that the distribution of XAS inversion, in the interrogative mood, is related to the degree of an addressor’s involvement in a text. It will be shown that, in the interrogative mood, the more involvement in a text, the more XAS inversions are to be expected. It is also argued that XAS inversions in interrogative clauses can be seen to serve as discourse markers through which an addressor’s involvement is coded in written and spoken English discourse. The analysis will also show that XAS inversions in the declarative mood also serve an interpersonal function, this, however, being inherently tied to the clause-linking function performed by the construction. Furthermore, the data will show that the distribution of XAS inversions in declarative clauses is related to the degree of informational content of the texts in which these inversions occur.
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