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Tough-constructions and the issue of thematicity: a study of the word easy in 17th and 18th century English

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Popelíková J.

Linguistica Pragensia

2015

vol. 25

issue 1

37-48

This article presents an analysis of tough-constructions (TCs) which attempts to describe the formal syntactic properties of these constructions in light of their functional sentence perspective (FSP). It has been suggested by Quirk et al. (1985), Mair (1989) and Biber et al. (1999) that the usage of TCs appears to be motivated, inter alia, by the information structure of the sentence’s content, i.e. the ordering of individual clause elements in such a way that the linear arrangement complies with, or at least closely imitates, the natural progression of an utterance from what is circumstantially given to what is immediately new. TCs, therefore, are expected to be favoured in situations when the noun phrase in the position of their subject is functionally thematic, containing a piece of information that has already been mentioned in the previous discourse. The present study is based on the data obtained from the Old Bailey Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts published between the years 1675 and 1775.

Aspectual and idiomatic properties of the particle on in Late Modern Spoken English

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Leone L.

Topics in Linguistics

2016

vol. 17

issue 1

64-80

The present study focuses on the description of the semantic features of phrasal verbs (PVs) containing the particle on and specifically aims at analysing the historical development of aspectual and idiomatic combinations in Late Modern Spoken English. From a historical perspective, the “figurative usage” (Kennedy, 1920) of PVs is a very interesting feature because it is the product of historical processes resulting in the PVs as they are known in Present Day English (PDE). This study is a corpus-based investigation conducted on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a corpus that has been compiled by using texts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and annotated with the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning interface (VISL). The findings reveal that there was a general shift from spatial to aspectual meaning and a relative stability in the frequency of PVs in the time span 1750-1850. It can be assumed that PVs “have undergone a lexical development from compositional to noncompositional” (Thim, 2012, p. 12), a process that led PVs from being literal to figurative in meaning (Denison, 1981, p. 108; Claridge, 2000, p. 47) due to the semantic shift of particles from a directional to an aspectual connotation (Brinton and Akimoto, 1999, p. 8).

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1 Linguistica Pragensia

1 Topics in Linguistics

1 Leone L.

1 Popelíková J.

1 2016

1 2015

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Tough-constructions and the issue of thematicity: a study of the word easy in 17th and 18th century English

Aspectual and idiomatic properties of the particle on in Late Modern Spoken English