Advances in historical sociolinguistics, Nov 24, 2017
This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in so... more This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in sociolinguistics. This model predicts that mobile individuals with ties outside a home community and s ...
This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in ... more This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in English, German and Swedish in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. ...
In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and t... more In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and the same holds true also in linguistics. The rapidly increasing size of corpora, the emergence of dyn ...
Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects ... more Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects with other languages (see, e.g., Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013; Schlucker 2013: 464–5; Breban 2017: 13), t ...
This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English.... more This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English. It is based on material from newspaper corpora and spoken corpora. The findings suggest that dialectal, stylistic, diachronic, syntactic and semantic factors interact in the selection of singular and plural agreement. It was shown that there are differences between regional varieties, between speech and writing and between written and spoken genres. Syntactic influence on agreement was seen in the increased likelihood of plural agreement with increased distance between the noun (the controller) and its agreement-carrying words (the targets). This was observed both in the number of intervening words between a controller and its targets and in the difference between verbs, which are fairly close to their controllers, and pronouns. This trend was found in both speech and writing. These findings suggest that targets acquire more independence of the form of their controllers the further away they are. Semantic factors were also found to be important in British English. The noun itself plays a crucial role in the choice of agreement. A noun such as 'government' very rarely takes singular verb agreement, whereas 'family' takes either singular or plural agreement, and 'couple' generally prefers the plural. A few verbs were found to require singular agreement with collective nouns (e.g. 'consist', 'be set up', 'increase'), but other verb categories (e.g. 'think', 'say', 'work') were not found to influence agreement decisively. These and other features described indicate that a wide range of functional factors influence variation in agreement patterns.
Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are charac... more Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are characterized by their “considerable indeterminacy as to the semantic relationship to be inferred” ( irk e ...
Advances in historical sociolinguistics, Nov 24, 2017
This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in so... more This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in sociolinguistics. This model predicts that mobile individuals with ties outside a home community and s ...
This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in ... more This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in English, German and Swedish in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. ...
In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and t... more In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and the same holds true also in linguistics. The rapidly increasing size of corpora, the emergence of dyn ...
Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects ... more Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects with other languages (see, e.g., Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013; Schlucker 2013: 464–5; Breban 2017: 13), t ...
This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English.... more This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English. It is based on material from newspaper corpora and spoken corpora. The findings suggest that dialectal, stylistic, diachronic, syntactic and semantic factors interact in the selection of singular and plural agreement. It was shown that there are differences between regional varieties, between speech and writing and between written and spoken genres. Syntactic influence on agreement was seen in the increased likelihood of plural agreement with increased distance between the noun (the controller) and its agreement-carrying words (the targets). This was observed both in the number of intervening words between a controller and its targets and in the difference between verbs, which are fairly close to their controllers, and pronouns. This trend was found in both speech and writing. These findings suggest that targets acquire more independence of the form of their controllers the further away they are. Semantic factors were also found to be important in British English. The noun itself plays a crucial role in the choice of agreement. A noun such as 'government' very rarely takes singular verb agreement, whereas 'family' takes either singular or plural agreement, and 'couple' generally prefers the plural. A few verbs were found to require singular agreement with collective nouns (e.g. 'consist', 'be set up', 'increase'), but other verb categories (e.g. 'think', 'say', 'work') were not found to influence agreement decisively. These and other features described indicate that a wide range of functional factors influence variation in agreement patterns.
Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are charac... more Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are characterized by their “considerable indeterminacy as to the semantic relationship to be inferred” ( irk e ...
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