English Ditransitive Verbs: Aspects of Theory, Description and a Usage-based Model

Przednia okładka
Rodopi, 2005 - 295
The present book offers fresh insights into the description of ditransitive verbs and their complementation in present-day English. In the theory-oriented first part, a pluralist framework is developed on the basis of previous research that integrates ditransitive verbs as lexical items with both the entirety of their complementation patterns and the cognitive and semantic aspects of ditransitivity. This approach is combined with modern corpus-linguistic methodology in the present study, which draws on an exhaustive semi-automatic analysis of all patterns of ditransitive verbs in the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and also takes into account selected data from the British National Corpus (BNC). In the second part of the study, the complementation of ditransitive verbs (e.g. give, send) is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Special emphasis is placed here on the identification of significant principles of pattern selection, i.e. factors that lead language users to prefer specific patterns over other patterns in given contexts (e.g. weight, focus, pattern flow in text, lexical constraints). In the last part, some general aspects of a network-like, usage-based model of ditransitive verbs, their patterns and the relevant principles of pattern selection are sketched out, thus bridging the gap between the performance-related description of language use and a competence-related model of language cognition.

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Spis treści

Methodology
69
5
91
Aspects of a usagebased model of ditransitive verbs
221
corpus coselection
260
References cited
269
Appendix
284
Prawa autorskie

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Strona 254 - Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.
Strona 255 - I would suggest, then, that for language and for other forms of communication (culture), four questions arise: 1. Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible; 2. Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means of implementation available; 3. Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated; 4. Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed,...
Strona 200 - If we metaphorically assume that a word can be written into the [mental] lexicon, then each time a word in processing is mapped onto its lexical representation it is as though the representation was traced over again, etching it with deeper and darker lines each time. Each time a word is heard and produced it leaves a slight trace in the lexicon, it increases in lexical strength.
Strona 67 - Chafe (1992: 96) defines a corpus linguist as a linguist who tries to understand language, and behind language the mind, by carefully observing extensive natural samples of it and then, with insight and imagination, constructing plausible understandings that encompass and explain those observations.
Strona 48 - C is a form-meaning pair <F, S > such that some aspect of F( or some aspect of S. is not strictly predictable from C's component parts or from other previously established constructions.
Strona 196 - From this perspective, grammaticalization is usually thought of as that subset of linguistic changes through which a lexical item in certain uses becomes a grammatical item, or through which a grammatical item becomes more grammatical.
Strona 41 - The patterns of a word can be defined as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning. A pattern can be identified if a combination of words occurs relatively frequently, if it is dependent on a particular word choice, and if there is a clear meaning associated with it.
Strona 252 - ... it is impossible to look at one independently of the other. Particular syntactic structures tend to co-occur with particular lexical items, and — on the other side of the coin — lexical items seem to occur in a limited range of structures.
Strona 254 - ... native speakers do not exercise the creative potential of syntactic rules to anything like their full extent, and . . . indeed, if they did so they would not be accepted as exhibiting nativelike control of the language.
Strona 252 - As communicators we do not proceed by selecting syntactic structures and independently choosing lexis to slot into them. Instead, we have concepts to convey and communicative choices to make which require central lexical items, and these choices find themselves syntactic structures in which they can be said comfortably and grammatically.

Informacje o autorze (2005)

Joybrato Mukherjee holds the Chair of English linguistics at Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany). His research interests include applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, intonation, stylistics and syntax. He is the author of Form and Function of Parasyntactic Presentation Structures: A Corpus-based Study of Talk Units in Spoken English (Rodopi, 2001) and Korpuslinguistik und Englischunterricht: Eine Einführung ("Corpus Linguistics and English Language Teaching: An Introduction"; Peter Lang, 2002).

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