English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. "Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies." "Cognition," 68, 1-76; Gibson, E. 2000. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), "Image,…

On the basis of 572 examples taken from seven million-word corpora of written English the present study--which complements the spoken data-based studies of Oberlander & Delin (1996) and Weinert & Miller (1996)--explores the relationship between information structure and discourse role with reversed what-clefts. The study confirms the typically…

An analysis of adverbial placement in written contemporary English focuses not on the sentence or clause context, as in conventional analyses, but on the textual or discoursal influences on placement. Specifically, the study examines: (1) the major textual and discoursal motivations behind clause-initial placement of adverbials of time and place…

Basing a manual communication system on written forms of English has two problems: (1) conventional forms of manual communication are based on the wrong modality; and (2) they do not represent English on any level. This causes an imbalance in the word-to-sign ratio in the classroom. (PJM)

The so-called deviant character of a set of non-native texts is examined by looking closely at how sentence syntax realizes and affects textual functions. Two broad groups of syntactic phenomena are considered: subordination and "marked structures," such as passives and clefts. Emphasis in this paper is on the following four ways in which syntax…

Compared two Arabic stories and their English translations and two Arabic and English stories with reference to sentence organization, coordination, and subordination. Showed that Arabic and English sentences are differently organized, coordination is more common in Arabic than in English, while subordination is more frequent in English than in…

Reviews the evolution of semicolon use in English, examining the frequency of semicolons, colons, and dashes in grammar, language, and linguistic books from the mid-16th century to the present. Concludes that after flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, the semicolon may have become a marginal component of the English punctuation system. (42…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

Examines comparable speech and writing samples in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to study properties of coordinate structures in English. Findings indicate that "and" is a primary coordinator, that "but" and "or" are more peripheral, and that the concept of…

To find differences and similarities between spoken and written English, analyses were made of four specific kinds of language. Twenty adults, either graduate students or university professors, provided a sample of each of the following: conversations, lectures, informal letters, and academic papers. Conversations and lecture samples came from…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…

This volume contains papers presented in connection with a symposium held in 1975 and sponsored by Abo Akademi, for the purpose of discussing ongoing research in word-order studies. Papers include: (1) a prolegomena by N.E. Enkvist; (2) "On the Ordering of Sister Constituents in Swedish," by E. Andersson; (3) "What is New…

The encyclopedia is designed as a reference work on the history, structure, and use of English. The first section outlines five phases in the development of the English language (origins, Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English) and then proceeds to the varieties of world English and perceptions of English and its future.…