Grammaticalization, Subjectification and Non-Concord in English Existential Sentences

Breivik, Leiv Egil; Insua, Ana Elina Martínez

doi:10.1080/00138380802011321

Cited by 32 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…(4) ... there seems to be some kind of disturbance going on ... (EFP 843) The entire corpus was needed to provide a sufficient number of instances. In contrast, for Martinez Insua & Palacios Martinez (2003) and Breivik & Martinez Insua (2008) subcorpora were sufficient for their investigations of the much more frequent constructions with be. 9 Seem is the best attested catenative verb in the corpus (about 30,000 of the 60,735 instances of the lemma seem).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…As noted by e.g.Meechan & Foley (1994:72, 75-76) andOlofsson (2007), the phenomenon under scrutiny is unidirectional in the sense that the verb often varies with plural notional subjects but hardly ever with singular subjects. 11 In this respect, my investigation resembles that byMeechan & Foley (1994) rather than those byMartinez Insua & Palacios Martinez (2003) andBreivik & Martinez Insua (2008), who have chosen the equivalent of the latter principle. This means that our results cannot be compared, apart from very general tendencies.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…(1) There is a book on the table (2) There are some books on the table 1 A similar analysis based on CobuildDirect and limited to seem is to be found in Olofsson (2007). For an analysis of the concord patterns of the basic there + be construction in contemporary spoken British English, see Martinez Insua & Palacios Martinez (2003) and Breivik & Martinez-Insua (2008). Spoken Canadian English has been similarly analysed by Meechan & Foley (1994).…”

Section: Subject-verb Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Apart from the formal/informal dimension, the situation with be is fairly clear-cut in the sense that it is possible to claim that the postponed element is -really‖ the subject of the clause in which it is positioned. 3 Concord in this type of construction has been extensively studied and reported on, for instance by Meechan & Foley (1994), Martinez Insua & Palacios Martinez (2003) and Breivik & Martinez-Insua (2008).…”

Section: Subject-verb Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Existential there and catenative concord. Evidence from the British National Corpus

Olofsson

2011

NJES

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

mentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Subject-verb Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Subject-verb Concordmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Existential there and catenative concord. Evidence from the British National Corpus

Olofsson

2011

NJES

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“…there) 4 . As pointed out above, this provides the construction with a pragmatic meta-informative dimension that should not be neglected (see Martínez-Insua, 2004;Martínez-Insua & Pérez-Guerra, 2006;Breivik & Martínez-Insua, 2008). In fact, the meta-informative dimension of the TC seems to be one of the most important motivations (if not the main one) for the use of the construction in cases such as (2), where a SVX version of the utterance might have been used instead.…”

Section: Tcs and Diathesismentioning

confidence: 97%

When discourse matches syntax: On meta-informative centering theory and discourse coherence in the recent history of English

Insua¹

2011

ijes

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This paper is concerned with how <em>there</em>-constructions may have helped to achieve discourse coherence in the recent history of English. From the theoretical framework of Meta-Informative Centering Theory (MIC) the paper explores the possibility to establish a relation between the syntactic structures under analysis and the distinction between 'smooth-shift' and 'rough-shift' transitions from one centre of attention to another (Brennan, Friedman & Pollard, 1987). This will help, ultimately, to investigate the interaction between centering and MIC theories, word order and information structure in a 'non-free' word order language such as English. A corpus- driven analysis of the behaviour of spoken and written <em>there</em>-constructions from late Middle English to Present Day English will show their capacity to function either as highly coherent structures that continue with the same local topic as the previous utterance(s), or as means to shift the local focus of attention.

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Constrained confusion: the gerund/participle distinction in Late Modern English

Smet¹

2014

Late Modern English Syntax

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English-ing-clauses as in (1) are non-finite clauses built around a verbal head in-ing. Although they all look suspiciously alike, some grammarians argue that-ing-clauses divide into gerunds and present participles (e.g. Jespersen 1940; Declerck 1991). (1) a. He was ruthless, and as to being a villainhe probably was. (1993, BNC) b. Ruth bit her lip and stared at him, not knowing what to say or do. (1993, BNC) c. Until he told her what it was she couldn't even deny having it. (1992, BNC) d. And even if she had cried out, who takes any notice of anyone shouting, even screaming? (1988, BNC) The crucial difference is that gerunds are nominalizations, while present participles are not. This means that gerunds, unlike present participles, occur in the positions typically reserved for noun phrases. Being a villain in (1a) occupies the slot following a preposition, while having it in (1c) functions as direct object to a verb. Therefore, both are gerunds. In contrast, present participles occupy adjectival or adverbial positions. So, because not knowing what to say or do in (1b) functions as an adverbial clause, and shouting in (1d) functions as a restrictive relative clause to anyone, both are present participles. The distinction between gerunds and participles is not generally accepted, at least not for Present-Day English. In the reference grammars by Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999) the distinction is simply not applied. In Huddleston & Pullum (2002) it is explicitly taken issue with, gerunds and present participles being replaced by a single category of "gerund participials". Regardless of whether the distinction makes synchronic sense, however, it has an uncontested basis in historical fact, as gerunds and present participles derive from historically distinct sources. Indeed, the divided opinions between reference grammars can be thought of as reflecting a situation of syntactic ambivalence that is simply the most recent stage in a gradual but incomplete syntactic merger (De Smet 2010). The goal of this chapter is to outline the bigger picture of categorial collapse in the English system of gerunds and present participles and then to link it to the situation found in Late Modern English. As is to be shown, morphosyntactic changes that involve confusion between gerunds and present participles were few and isolated during the Late Modern period. Their very occurrence naturally testifies to a blurring of the lines between the two clause typesand of course the changes further contributed to the blurring. But the evident constraints on their occurrence show that the gerund/participle distinction was certainly not completely defunct in Late Modern English. In what follows, Section 2 discusses the overall history of gerunds and present participles in more detail. Against that background, Section 3 presents a number of changes in Late Modern English. The focus is on complement constructions involving gerunds and present participles as this domain seems to particularly lend itself to confusion between the two claus...

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Grammaticalization, Subjectification and Non-Concord in English Existential Sentences

Cited by 32 publications

References 7 publications

Existential there and catenative concord. Evidence from the British National Corpus

Existential there and catenative concord. Evidence from the British National Corpus

When discourse matches syntax: On meta-informative centering theory and discourse coherence in the recent history of English

Constrained confusion: the gerund/participle distinction in Late Modern English

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