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English Indefinite Ordinals: A First Explanation

100%
Berezowski L.
Anglica Wratislaviensia
|
2019
|
issue 57
115-124
EN
English ordinals are commonly preceded by the definite article but the pattern is not universal. There are quite a few well attested instances of English ordinals preceded by the indefinite article, which, strangely enough, have not been discussed in published research so far. The paper thus breaks new ground by documenting the pattern and offering an explanation of indefinite ordinal usages. In doing so, the paper draws on data culled from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and, in the absence of publications specifically focused on indefinite English ordinals, relies on broader accounts of the indefinite article. The paper shows that indefinite ordinal usages are well rooted in the meaning of the indefinite article and serve to express the speaker’s viewpoint.
2
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Curious Legal Conditionals

100%
Berezowski L.
Research in Language
|
2011
|
vol. 9
|
issue 1
187-197
EN
The paper examines the use of the modal verb SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals found in legal English. The study traces the history of such usages and compares them to two uses of WILL attested in the same grammatical environment: a temporal use and a nonepistemic modal use. The comparison provides the foundation for examining the use of SHALL in Biblical translations, where this verb has outlived its demise in general English, and both of these sources inform the analysis of SHALL in legal conditionals. Specifically, it is claimed that SHALL is not inherently deontic in legal English but is used as an explicit marker of the authority vested in the author or authors of spoken and written texts. This approach explains why authority conscious drafters can use SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals and in temporal clauses whenever they want to and why the proponents of the plain language movement advocate simply deleting SHALL from legal writing and not replacing it with more popular modals expressing deontic meanings, e.g. HAVE TO, MUST, etc. It is claimed that no such replacements are recommended because there is no deontic meaning to replace and the authority designated by SHALL can be inferred from the context.
3
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The Article vs. the Artists: The Demise of the Definite Article in the Names of Popular Music Groups

100%
Berezowski L.
Anglica Wratislaviensia
|
2012
|
issue 50
125-135
EN
The paper documents and discusses a change in the English language that has not been described yet. The change involves definite article usage in the names of popular music groups and is shown to have started in the 1960s. The description of the change is based on data drawn from the list of hit singles that has been published in the UK every week since 1952. Since the list identifies not only the most popular singles in a given week but also the groups that perform them, from the point of view of linguistics the chart is a large random database of names of popular music groups that can be used for tracking and quantifying changes in the English language. Relying on such data, the paper documents the origins and spread of the change, identifies its key stages and shows that the rate of its progress closely approximates the S curve known to model the spread of linguistic innovations. Relying on recent accounts of article use with English proper names, the paper also discusses factors that may have triggered the change and frames it in a broader perspective of trends in article use.
4
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

Curious Legal Conditionals

100%
Berezowski L.
Research in Language
|
2011
|
vol. 9
|
issue 1
187-197
EN
The paper examines the use of the modal verb SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals found in legal English. The study traces the history of such usages and compares them to two uses of WILL attested in the same grammatical environment: a temporal use and a nonepistemic modal use. The comparison provides the foundation for examining the use of SHALL in Biblical translations, where this verb has outlived its demise in general English, and both of these sources inform the analysis of SHALL in legal conditionals. Specifically, it is claimed that SHALL is not inherently deontic in legal English but is used as an explicit marker of the authority vested in the author or authors of spoken and written texts. This approach explains why authority conscious drafters can use SHALL in the if clauses of conditionals and in temporal clauses whenever they want to and why the proponents of the plain language movement advocate simply deleting SHALL from legal writing and not replacing it with more popular modals expressing deontic meanings, e.g. HAVE TO, MUST, etc. It is claimed that no such replacements are recommended because there is no deontic meaning to replace and the authority designated by SHALL can be inferred from the context.
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