Title: Adjectives in extraposed constructions with that-clauses : a quantitative corpus-driven analysis
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 1, pp. [83]-102
Extent
[83]-102
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-1-5
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/138669
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This paper employs the background assumptions of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) as well as a quantitative corpus-driven method for investigating the reciprocal interaction between adjectives and the extraposed construction with that-clauses in American English. The method, referred to as the attraction-reliance measure (Schmid 2000; Schmid & Küchenhoff 2013), is applied to the determination of strongly attracted and repelled adjectives of the it is ADJ that-construction. On the basis of the data extracted from the academic sub-corpus of COCA, the paper indicates that some adjectives are more strongly attracted to this construction than others, and that the occurrence of certain adjectives in this construction is more significant than their use in different types of extraposed constructions. In addition, the findings seem to point to frame-semantic knowledge as a determining factor affecting the mutual association between adjectives and the construction under study.
References
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[27] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2003) On the syntactic and semantic status of anticipatory it. English Language and Linguistics 7(2), 235–255. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674303001096. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674303001096
[28] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2004) It-Extraposition and Non-Extraposition in English: A Study of Syntax in Spoken and Written Texts. Wien: Braumüller.
[29] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2005) It-extraposition in English: A functional view. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(2), 119–159. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.10.2.02kal. | DOI 10.1075/ijcl.10.2.02kal
[30] Mair, Christian (1990) Infinitival Complement Clauses in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] McCawley, James D. (1988) The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Volume II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[32] Miller, Philip H. (2001) Discourse constraints on (non)extraposition from subject in English. Linguistics 39(4), 683–701. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2001.028. | DOI 10.1515/ling.2001.028
[33] Mindt, Ilka (2011) Adjective Complementation: An Empirical Analysis of Adjectives Followed by that-Clauses. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
[34] Pérez-Guerra, Javier (1998) Integrating right-dislocated constituents: A study on cleaving and extraposition in the recent history of the English language. Folia Linguistica Historica XIX, 7–25.
[35] Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. New York and London: Longman.
[36] Rosenbaum, Peter S. (1967) The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
[37] Rowley-Jolivet, Elizabeth and Shirley Carter-Thomas (2005) Genre awareness and rhetorical appropriacy: Manipulation of information structure by NS and NNS scientists in the international conference setting. English for Specific Purposes 24, 41–64.
[38] Schmid, Hans-Jörg (2000) English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells. From Corpus to Cognition. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
[39] Schmid, Hans-Jörg and Helmut Küchenhoff (2013) Collostructional analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings. Cognitive Linguistics 24(3), 531–577. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2013-0018. | DOI 10.1515/cog-2013-0018
[40] Seppänen, Aimo (1999) Extraposition in English revisited. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100, 51–66.
[41] Seppänen, Aimo, Clas Göran Engström and Ruth Seppänen (1990) 'On the so-called anticipatory It.' Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 43, 748–776.
[42] Van linden, An (2012) Modal Adjectives: English Deontic and Evaluative Constructions in Synchrony and Diachrony. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
[43] Wiliński, Jarosław (2017) Normal and anomalous occurrences of adjectives in extraposed constructions with to-infinitive clauses: A quantitative corpus-based study. In: Jarosław Wiliński and Joanna Stolarek (eds.) Norm and Anomaly in Language, Literature and Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 89–106.
[44] The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The full-text data (1990–2012). Available from https://www.corpusdata.org/purchase.asp
[45] The FrameNet project. Available from https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/ (accessed on 20 April 2017)
[46] MonoConc Pro (MP 2.2). Available from http://www.athel.com/mono.html
[2] Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.
[3] Calude, Andreea S. (2008) Clefting and extraposition in English. ICAME Journal 32, 7–34.
[4] Collins, Peter (1994) Extraposition in English. Functions of Language 1, 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.1.1.03col. | DOI 10.1075/fol.1.1.03col
[5] Croft, William (2001) Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[6] Emonds, Joseph (1972) A reformulation of certain syntactic transformations. In: Stanley Peters (ed.) Goals of Linguistic Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 21–62.
[7] Fillmore, Charles J. (1982) Frame Semantics. In: The Linguistic Society of Korea (eds.) Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company, 111–137.
[8] Fillmore, Charles J. and Beryl T. Atkins (1992) Toward a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In: Adrienne Lehrer and Eva F. Kittay (eds.) Frames, Fields and Contrasts. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc, 75–102.
[9] Fillmore, Charles J. and Collin F. Baker (2010) A frames approach to semantic analysis. In: Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford University Press, 313–340.
[10] Fillmore, Charles J., Christopher R. Johnson, and Miriam R. L. Petruck (2003) Background to FrameNet. International Journal of Lexicography 16(3), 235–250. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/16.3.235 | DOI 10.1093/ijl/16.3.235
[11] Francis, Gill (1993) A corpus-driven approach to grammar: principles, methods and examples. In: Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Toginini-Bognelli (eds.) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 137–156.
[12] Goldberg, Adele (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
[13] Goldberg, Adele (2006) Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[14] Gómez-González, María Á. (1997) On subject it-extrapositions: Evidence from present-day English. Revista Alicante de Estudios Ingleses 10, 95–107. | DOI 10.14198/raei.1997.10.09
[15] Gómez-González, María Á. (2001) The Theme-Topic Interface. Evidence from English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
[16] Herbst, Thomas, David Heath., Ian F. Roe, and Dieter Götz (2004) A Valency Dictionary of English: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Complementation Patterns of English Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
[17] Herriman, Jennifer (2000a) Extraposition in English: A study of the interaction between the matrix predicate and the type of extraposed clause. English Studies 6, 582–599. https://doi.org/10.1076/enst.81.6.582.9180. | DOI 10.1076/
[18] Herriman, Jennifer (2000b) The functions of extraposition in English texts. Functions of Language 7(2), 203–230. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v6i1-3.129. | DOI 10.1075/fol.7.2.03her
[19] Hewings, Martin and Ann Hewings (2002) It is interesting to note that…: A comparative study of anticipatory 'it' in student and published writing. English for Specific Purposes 21, 367–383. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(01)00016-3. | DOI 10.1016/S0889-4906(01)00016-3
[20] Hilpert, Martin (2014) Collostructional analysis: Measuring associations between constructions and lexical elements. In: Glynn, Dylan and Justyna Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 7–38.
[21] Hoey, Michael (2000) Persuasive rhetoric in linguistics: A stylistic study of some features of the language of Noam Chomsky. In: Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson (eds.) Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 28–37.
[22] Huddleston, Rodney (1971) The Sentence in Written English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[23] Huddleston, Rodney (1984) Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.
[24] Johnson, Christopher R., Charles J. Fillmore, Esther J. Wood, Josef Ruppenhofer, Margaret Urban, Miriam R.L. Petruck and Collin F. Baker (2001) The FrameNet Project: Tools for Lexicon Building [Version 0.7]. Berkeley, CA: International Computer Science Institute.
[25] Kaatari, Henrik (2010) Complementation of Adjectives: A Corpus-Based Study of Adjectival Complementation by that- and to-Clauses. A master's thesis. Uppsala University, Department of Eng-lish.
[26] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2000) It-extraposition and non-extraposition in English discourse. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.) Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 157–175.
[27] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2003) On the syntactic and semantic status of anticipatory it. English Language and Linguistics 7(2), 235–255. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674303001096. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674303001096
[28] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2004) It-Extraposition and Non-Extraposition in English: A Study of Syntax in Spoken and Written Texts. Wien: Braumüller.
[29] Kaltenböck, Gunther (2005) It-extraposition in English: A functional view. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(2), 119–159. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.10.2.02kal. | DOI 10.1075/ijcl.10.2.02kal
[30] Mair, Christian (1990) Infinitival Complement Clauses in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] McCawley, James D. (1988) The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Volume II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[32] Miller, Philip H. (2001) Discourse constraints on (non)extraposition from subject in English. Linguistics 39(4), 683–701. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2001.028. | DOI 10.1515/ling.2001.028
[33] Mindt, Ilka (2011) Adjective Complementation: An Empirical Analysis of Adjectives Followed by that-Clauses. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
[34] Pérez-Guerra, Javier (1998) Integrating right-dislocated constituents: A study on cleaving and extraposition in the recent history of the English language. Folia Linguistica Historica XIX, 7–25.
[35] Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. New York and London: Longman.
[36] Rosenbaum, Peter S. (1967) The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
[37] Rowley-Jolivet, Elizabeth and Shirley Carter-Thomas (2005) Genre awareness and rhetorical appropriacy: Manipulation of information structure by NS and NNS scientists in the international conference setting. English for Specific Purposes 24, 41–64.
[38] Schmid, Hans-Jörg (2000) English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells. From Corpus to Cognition. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
[39] Schmid, Hans-Jörg and Helmut Küchenhoff (2013) Collostructional analysis and other ways of measuring lexicogrammatical attraction: Theoretical premises, practical problems and cognitive underpinnings. Cognitive Linguistics 24(3), 531–577. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2013-0018. | DOI 10.1515/cog-2013-0018
[40] Seppänen, Aimo (1999) Extraposition in English revisited. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100, 51–66.
[41] Seppänen, Aimo, Clas Göran Engström and Ruth Seppänen (1990) 'On the so-called anticipatory It.' Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 43, 748–776.
[42] Van linden, An (2012) Modal Adjectives: English Deontic and Evaluative Constructions in Synchrony and Diachrony. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
[43] Wiliński, Jarosław (2017) Normal and anomalous occurrences of adjectives in extraposed constructions with to-infinitive clauses: A quantitative corpus-based study. In: Jarosław Wiliński and Joanna Stolarek (eds.) Norm and Anomaly in Language, Literature and Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 89–106.
[44] The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The full-text data (1990–2012). Available from https://www.corpusdata.org/purchase.asp
[45] The FrameNet project. Available from https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/ (accessed on 20 April 2017)
[46] MonoConc Pro (MP 2.2). Available from http://www.athel.com/mono.html