Book announcement : English Historical Syntax

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Historical English Syntax

A statistical corpus-based study on the organisation
of Early Modern English sentences

Javier Pirez-Guerra, University of Vigo

In this monograph the author explores the syntactic organisation of
declarative clauses from late Middle English to present-day English and
pays special attention to the consequences which the location of the
subject has for the determination of the unmarked word order in Early
Modern English. The data have been taken from two electronic corpora,
namely, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the
Lancaster/Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English.
        The author outlines his own concept of 'theme,' which will be useful
for the (explanatory and descriptive) purposes of describing syntactic
(un)markedness. Such a concept leads to the existence of, on the one
hand, an unmarked SV organisation and, on the other, of several marked
patterns, viz sentences introduced by existential there, instances of
subject extraposition and insertion of it, clefts, topicalisations,
left-dislocations and subject inversions. The subsystems just mentioned
are located on a scale of markedness, according to two variables: first,
frequency, which is investigated by way of the statistical analysis of
the data, and, second, 'linguistic functionality.' This second variable
has been examined in the light of variables such as gender, textual
category, discourse taxonomy, orality and informative principles such as
'given before new' or end-weight.
        JAVIER PIREZ-GUERRA lectures on English linguistics and corpus
linguistics at the Department of English, University of Vigo. His
research is focused on syntactic change from Early Modern English
onwards.

ISBN 3 89586 651 2.
LINCOM Studies in Germanic Linguistics 11.
Ca. 300pp. EUR 61.35 / USD 76 / DM 120 / # 45.
2nd printing: 03/2000



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