Buch, Englisch, Band 11, 300 Seiten
A statistical corpus-based study on the organisation of Early Modern English sentences
Buch, Englisch, Band 11, 300 Seiten
Reihe: LINCOM Studies in Germanic Linguistics
ISBN: 978-3-89586-651-7
Verlag: LINCOM
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.