In British Standard English, number in the verb phrase is exclusively characterized by the use of the -sinflection with the third person singular present tense. World Englishes present a high level of variation as the uninflected third person singular and the inflected third person plural may also occur in these contexts. This paper pursues four objectives: a) to analyse the use of present third person inflections and compare their distribution in different varieties of English; b) to assess the occurrence of forms across speech and writing, text categories and the informants’ age and gender; c) to classify the instances by type of subject (nominal vs. pronominal); and d) to evaluate the impact of proximity agreement, notional agreement and the existence of intervening elements in the choice of the inflection. Our evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian, Singaporean and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English.
Even though its use dropped throughout the 16th and the 17th centuries, it began to gain ground again from the 18th century, resisting the severe criticisms of grammarians from the first half of the 19th century (Calle-Martín and Miranda-García 2009: 347-364; Perales-Escudero 2011: 316-319). Given the historical concerns about the construction, this paper analyses the attitudes towards the split infinitive in the Asian varieties of English, taking the British English practice as a point of departure. The paper has then been conceived with the following objectives: a) to compare the distribution of the construction in British English and some varieties of Asian Englishes; and b) to explore the phenomenon from a variationist perspective, considering any likely variation across speech and writing and across the spoken and written registers. The corpus used as a source of evidence is the International Corpus of English, both the British English and the Asian English components (i.e. India, Hong Kong, Singapore and The Philippines).
Among the different topics studied by palaeography, punctuation has traditionally been disregarded by scholars for being considered arbitrary and unsystematic (Salmon 1988: 285). However, some studies carried out over the last few decades have demonstrated that the English punctuation system underwent a process of standardisation which started in the Middle English period, from a purely rhetorical to a grammatical function. Moreover, it was towards the sixteenth century when a set of punctuation marks was introduced (i.e. the semicolon), a fact that restricted the functions of major punctuation marks up to that time, such as the period and the comma (Salmon 1999: 40). The present paper analyses the punctuation system in Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 135 (ff. 34r–121v), a volume that is most suitable for such a study as it contains two different text types belonging to the genre of medical writing: a surgical treatise and a collection of medical recipes. The results confirm that the different punctuation marks are unevenly distributed in the texts under study and, more importantly, their main functions are found at different levels within the text.
In linguistics the concept of complexity has been analysed from various perspectives, among them language typology and the speech/writing distinction. Within intralinguistic studies, certain key linguistic features associated with reduced or increased complexity have been identified. These features occur in different patterns across various registers and their frequency is an indicator of the level of complexity of different kinds of texts. The concept of complexity has not, to date, been evaluated in early English medical writing, especiallyin terms of different text types. Thus, the present article analyses linguistic complexity in two Early Modern English medical texts, a surgical treatise (ff. 34r-73v) and a collection of medical recipes (ff. 74r-121v) housed as MS Hunter 135 in Glasgow University Library. Since they represent two different types of medical text, they can be productively compared in terms of linguistic complexity. The results obtained confirm that the surgical treatise is more complex than the collection of medical recipes owing to the higher presence of linguistic features denoting increased complexity in the former and of those indicating reduced linguistic complexity in the latter.
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