Cover not available

In:Explorations in English Historical Syntax
Edited by Hubert Cuyckens, Hendrik De Smet, Liesbet Heyvaert and Charlotte Maekelberghe
[Studies in Language Companion Series 198] 2018
► pp. 203–234

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 8
Complexity and genre distribution of left-dislocated strings after the fixation of SVO syntax

 | Universidade de Vigo
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.198.09tiz
Abstract
This paper investigates the diachronic development of strings that include both a left-dislocated constituent and a coreferring resumptive in the subsequent clause, thus resembling the reportedly speech-like and informal contemporary Left Dislocation construction. The data is analyzed according to a range of factors relating to the inner configuration of such strings and examined by means of the pertinent statistical tests. The purpose is to arrive at a clearer and broader picture of (i) the general decline of left-dislocated strings, (ii) the factors determining their structural complexity, and (iii) their role as prospective markers of orality in Modern English speech-related texts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief historical survey of LD
  • 3.Goals and hypotheses
    • 3.1Factors that determine the complexity of the LDed constituent
    • 3.2The link between less complex LDed items and speech-related genres
  • 4.Data and methodology
    • 4.1Determining the length of the LDed constituent
      • 4.1.1Dependent variable: Length of the LDed constituent
      • 4.1.2Predictor variables
        • Intervening material
        • Augmentation
        • Punctuation
        • Form of the resumptive
        • Position of the resumptive
        • Genre cluster
        • Period
    • 4.2Exploring the link between speech-related genres and complexity of the LDed constituent
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The diachrony of LD: An overview
    • 5.2Results from the linear model: Complexity of the LDed constituent
    • 5.3Results from univariate statistical tests: Orality and genre
  • 6.Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (77)
References
Acuña-Fariña, Juan Carlos. 1996. The Puzzle of Apposition: On So-called Appositive Structures in English. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Servicio de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 1997. Clitic left dislocation and contrastive left dislocation. In Anagnostopoulou, van Riemsdijk & Zwarts (eds), 151–192.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anagnostopoulou, Elena, van Riemsdijk, Henk & Zwarts, Frans (eds). 1997. Materials on Left Dislocation [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 14]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andrews, Avery D. 2007. Relative clauses. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 2: Complex Constructions, 2nd edn., Timothy Shopen (ed.), 206–236. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer E., Wasow, Thomas, Losongco, Anthony & Ginstrom, Ryan. 2000. Heaviness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76(1): 28–55. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Birner, Betty & Ward, Gregory. 2002. Information packaging. In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey Pullum (eds), 1363–1447. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Kytö, Merja. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2005. Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43: 449–470. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dik, Simon. 1997. The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part II: Complex and Derived Constructions, edited by Kees Hengeveld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dons, Ute. 2004. Descriptive Adequacy of Early Modern English Grammars. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2: 1066–1476, Norman Blake (ed.), 207–408. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren & van de Pol, Nikki. 2016. Divide and conquer: The formation and functional dynamics of the Modern English ing-clause network. English Language and Linguistics 20(2): 185–219.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia, Fox, Barbara & Thompson, Sandra A. 2003. Social interaction and grammar. In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, Vol. 2., Michael Tomasello (ed.), 119–143. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fox, John & Weisberg, Sanford. 2011. An R Companion to Applied Regression, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geluykens, Ronald. 1992. From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction: On Left Dislocation in English [Studies in Discourse and Grammar 1]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. Syntactic, semantic and interactional prototypes: The case of left-dislocation. In Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language, Richard A. Geiger & Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (eds), 709–730. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68(1): 1–76. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1979. On Understanding Grammar. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 1999. English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. Eighteenth-Century English. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Michelle & Michaelis, Laura. 2001. Topicalization and left-dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1665–1706. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan T. 2013. Statistics for Linguistics with R. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harrell, Frank E. 2015. Regression Modeling Strategies, 2nd edn. New York NY: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1992. Syntactic weight and information status in word order variation. Linguistische Berichte 4: 196–219.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hidalgo, Raquel. 2000. Establishing topic in conversation: A contrastive study of left dislocation in English and Spanish. In Talk and Text: Studies on Spoken and Written Discourse, Angela Downing Rothwell, Jesús Moya Guijarro & José I. Albentosa Hernández (eds), 137–158. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin & Gries, Stefan T. 2009. Assessing frequency changes in multi-stage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4): 385–401. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmstedt, Robert & Jones, Andrew R. 2014. The pronoun in tripartite verbless clauses in Biblical Hebrew: Resumption for left-dislocation or pronominal copula? Journal of Semitic Studies 59(1): 53–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd. 1991. Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and Interpretation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. Adverbial participial clauses in English. In Converbs in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König (eds), 189–237. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lennard, John. 1995. Punctuation: And – ‘Pragmatics’. In Historical Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 35], Andreas Jucker (ed.), 65–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leonarduzzi, Laetitia & Herry, Nadine. 2005. Les dislocations: Texts et contexts. In Actes, Congrès de la Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur, Toulouse: France. <[URL]> (30 March 2008).
Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do Linguistics with R. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English: Information structure and syntax in interaction. English Language and Linguistics 13(1): 97–125 Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Los, Bettelou & Komen, Erwin. 2012. Clefts as resolution strategies after the loss of a multifunctional first position. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Traugott (eds), 884–898. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Manetta, Emily. 2007. Unexpected left dislocation: An English corpus study. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1029–1035. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyer, David, Zeileis, Achim & Hornik, Kurt. 2006. The strucplot framework: Visualizing multi-Way contingency tables with vcd. Journal of Statistical Software 17(3): 1–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. vcd: Visualizing categorical data. R package version 1.4–3.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Netz, Hadar & Kuzar, Ron. 2007. Three marked theme constructions in spoken English. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 305–335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ono, Tsuyoshi & Thompson, Sandra A. 1994. Unattached NPs in English conversation. Berkeley Linguistics Society 20: 402–419.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
PPCEME. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, 1500–1710. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. <[URL]>
PPCMBE. The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, 1700–1914. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. <[URL]>
PPCME2. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 1150–1500. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 2nd edn. <[URL]>
PCEEC. The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 1410–1695. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. University of York and University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Guerra, Javier. 1999. Historical English Syntax: A Statistical Corpus Based Study on the Organisation of Early Modern English Sentences. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Discourse status and syntax in the history of English: Some explorations in topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-constructions. In Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso & Bettelou Los (eds), 121–138. New York NY: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Guerra, Javier & Tizón-Couto, David. 2009. On left dislocation in the recent history of English: Theory and data hand in hand. In Dislocated Elements in Discourse: Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Perspectives, Benjamin Shaer, Philippa Cook, Werner Frey & Claudia Maienborn (eds), 31–48. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1997. On the functions of left-dislocation in English discourse. In Directions in Functional Linguistics [Studies in Language Companion 36], Akio Kamio (ed.), 117–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. On the limits of syntax, with reference to left-dislocation and topicalization. In The Limits of Syntax, Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds), 281–302. San Diego CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2017. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. <[URL]>
Río-Rey, Carmen. 2002. Subject control and coreference in early modern English free adjuncts and absolutes. English Language and Linguistics 6(2): 309–323. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robinson, Ian. 1996. The Foundations of English Prose: The Art of Prose Writing from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1995. On the replacement of finite complement clauses by infinitives in English. English Studies 76(4): 367–388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 147–182. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. PhD dissertation, MIT. Published as Ross, John R. 1986. Infinite Syntax! Norwood NJ: Ablex.]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Runge, Steven E. 2010. Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament. Peabody MA: Hendrickson.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shaer, Benjamin, Cook, Philippa, Frey, Werner & Maienborn, Claudia. 2009. Introduction. Dislocation: Concepts, questions, goals. In Dislocated Elements in Discourse: Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Perspectives, Benjamin Shaer, Philippa Cook, Werner Frey & Claudia Maienborn (eds), 1–27. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Snider, Neal. 2005. A corpus study of left dislocation and topicalization. Stanford University, Linguistics Department, manuscript. <[URL]> (30 April 2008).
Tizón-Couto, David. 2012. Left dislocation in English: A functional-discoursal approach. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Left-dislocated strings in modern English epistolary prose: A comparison with contemporary spoken left dislocation. In Outside the Clause: Form and Function of Extra-clausal Constituents [Studies in Language Companion Series 178] Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann (eds), 203–239. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. The History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Old English left-dislocations: Their structure and information status. Folia Linguistica 41(3–4): 405–441.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Trousdale, Graeme. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Hoorick, Bart. 1994. Pragmatic positions and the history of English word order. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 56. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans. 1987. Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Kemenade, Ans & Los, Bettelou. 2013. Using historical texts. In Research Methods in Linguistics, Devyana Sharma & Rob Podesva (eds), 216–232. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1997. Left dislocation. In Anagnostopoulou, van Riemsdijk & Zwarts (eds), 1–10.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Riemsdijk, Henk & Zwarts, Frans. 1997. Left dislocation in Dutch and the status of copying rules. In Anagnostopoulou, van Riemsdijk & Zwarts (eds), 13–30.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9(1): 81–105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yaruss, J. Scott. 1999. Utterance length, syntactic complexity, and childhood stuttering. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42(2): 329–344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zeileis, Achim, Meyer, David & Hornik, Kurt. 2007. Residual-based shadings for visualizing (conditional) independence. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 16(3): 507–525. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue