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In:English Noun Phrases from a Functional-Cognitive Perspective: Current issues
Edited by Lotte Sommerer and Evelien Keizer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 221] 2022
► pp. 205–234

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Constructional variation and change in N-is focaliser constructions

 | University of Zurich
Published online: 21 January 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.221.06hun
Abstract
This paper revisits the emergence of N-is focaliser constructions. It is the first to systematically use qualitative evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) to establish the chronology of developments from a full clause to a parenthetical. In a second step, diachronic evidence from the Late Modern English Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is used for a quantitative, variationist study of constructional change in the Late Modern period. The relevant stages for this are determined in a bottom-up fashion, using Variability-based Neighbour Clustering (VNC). Multivariate statistical modelling is then applied to model the relative importance of predictor variables for the degree of syntactic integration. The chronological data from the OED and EEBO provide evidence of lexical diffusion from truth is and various other shell nouns to problem is. COHA data further show N-is focalisers to be spreading in discourse frequency. The variationist evidence shows that punctuation is not the most important predictor variable throughout and that it interacts in interesting ways with other predictors. Finally, relatively minor (i.e. numerically infrequent) but conceptually salient changes (such as article omission) are taken to contribute to further constructionalisation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Previous research on the history of N-is constructions
    • 2.2Aims and hypotheses
  • 3.Constructionalisation: Qualitative evidence
  • 4.Modelling constructional change: Methodology
    • 4.1Data retrieval and manual post editing
    • 4.2Predictor variables
    • 4.3Statistical modelling
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Stages in the development of N-is constructions
    • 5.2Constructional change
      • 5.2.1Summary statistics
      • 5.2.2Multifactorial modelling
    • 5.3Summary
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Databases cited
  • Appendix
References (39)
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Databases cited
ARCHER – A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (version 3.2)
CLMET – Corpus of Late Modern English Texts
COCA – The Corpus of Contemporary American English ([URL])
COHA – Corpus of Historical American English ([URL])
EEBO – Early English Books Online ([URL])
OED online – Oxford English Dictionary online ([URL])
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Hundt, Marianne
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