This volume is a selection of strictly refereed and extensively revised papers from the ICAME 33 International Conference "Corpora at the Centre and Crossroads of English Linguistics" organised in Leuven from 30 May to 3 June 2012. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents:
Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns / Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte, Caroline Gentens and Lobke Ghesquiere -- Part I. Patterns in the verb phrase -- Light verb constructions in the history of English / Patricia Ronan -- What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? / Stefan Diemer -- The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English: Towards extrapolating from Wright's English Dialect Dictionary / Manfred Markus -- The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English: A longitudinal look / Johan Elsness -- CAN and BE ABLE to in nineteenth-century Irish English: A case of 'imperfect learning'? / Marije van Hattum -- Part 2. Pattens in the noun phrase -- Syntactic constraints in the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English / Gunter Rohdenburg -- Ma daddy wis dead chuffed: On the dialectal distribution of the intensifier dead in Contemporary English / Zeltia Blanco-Suarez -- The case of focus - The reanalysis of subject pronouns as focus markers in subject predicative complement position / Georg Maier -- Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures -- Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English / Juhani Rudanko and Paul Rickman -- A new angle on infinitival and of -ing complements of afraid, with evidence from the TIME corpus / Juhani Rudanko -- Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready / Mikko Hoglund -- Part 4. Patterns of clause combining -- The diffusion of English absolutes: A diachronic register study / Nikki van de Pol and Hubert Cuyckens -- It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing: The case of Norwegian learners / Hilde Hasselgard -- The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC / Ditte Kimps, Kristin Davidse and Bert Cornillie.
Summary:
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. --Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.