The English get-passive in spoken discourse: description and implications for an interpersonal grammar

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Carter ◽  
Michael McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Past Participle ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Probabilistic Grammars

Using a 1.5-million-word sample from the CANCODE spoken English corpus, we present a description of the get-passive in informal spoken British English. Previous studies of the get-passive are reviewed, and their focus on contextual and interpersonal meanings is noted. A number of related structures are then considered and the possibility of a passive gradient is discussed. The corpus sample contains 139 get-passives of the type X get + past participle (by Y) (e.g. He got killed), of which 124 occur in contexts interpreted as adversative or problematic from the speaker's viewpoint. Very few examples contain an explicit agent or adverbials. Main verb frequency is also considered. Where contexts are positive rather than adversative, newsworthiness or focus of some kind on the subject and/or events is still apparent. The corpus evidence is used to evaluate the terms upon which an interpersonal grammar of English might be developed, and a contrast is drawn between deterministic grammars and probabilistic ones, with probabilistic grammars offering the best potential for the understanding of interpersonal features.

Infinitival relative clauses in spoken discourse

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer Geisler
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
The Matrix

ABSTRACTThis article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event.

The Tones of English“English English” rather than “British English” since, whether or not the systems described here are valid for all varieties of English in England (probably not), they are certainly not valid for many varieties of Scots. The textual material used in this study consisted of natural live conversation by speakers of “RP”: three speakers in the main sample, one of these and three others (in different combinations) in the remainder. All were aware they were being recorded – and quite accustomed to it. My thanks are due especially to David Abercrombie, K. H. Albrow, J. C. Catford and J. McH. Sinclair for valuable help in discussion. Since this paper was first written as a series of lectures, previous works on the subject are not referred to in detail: the debt to them will be clear, but the following especially should be mentioned: The important book Intonation of Colloquial English by J. D. O’Connor and G. F. Arnold (London, Longmans, 1961) appeared after this paper was first written for publication. I would not have adopted their analysis into ten “tone groups” (= my “tones”) since it seems to me to conflate contrasts belonging for grammatical purposes at different degrees of delicacy. But the detailed analysis, the wealth of examples, and the phonetic description are quite invaluable. More recent still is the paper “The correspondence of prosodic to grammatical features in spoken English”, by Randolph Quirk and others, presented by Professor Quirk to the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (Boston, 1962) and appearing in the Proceedings. This last paper describes the first results of a study in the correlation of intonation patterns with certain grammatical units and structures in a sample of English from unscripted broadcasts. The work of which this forms a part will be a major contribution to the study of spoken English. (1963)

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
International Congress ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
First Results ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Textual Material

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

scholarly journals Orientations towards English among English-medium Instruction Students

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Karakaş
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
English Medium Instruction

Abstract Based on the empirical data of my PhD research, this paper analyses the perceptions of 351 undergraduate students enrolled at English-medium universities towards English in terms of the language ideology framework. The students were purposively sampled from three programs at three Turkish universities. The data were drawn from student opinion surveys and semi-structured interviews. The findings paint a blurry picture, with a strong tendency among most students to view their English use as having the characteristics of dominant native varieties of English (American English & British English), and with a high percentage of students’ acceptance of the distinctiveness of their English without referring to any standard variety. The findings also show that many students’ orientations to English are formed by two dominant language ideologies: standard English ideology and native speaker English ideology. It was also found that a large number of students did not strictly stick to either of these ideologies, particularly in their orientation to spoken English, due, as argued in the main body, to their experiences on language use that have made them aware of the demographics of diverse English users and of the diverse ways of using English.

The English general extender

English Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Maryann Overstreet
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
General Category ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Pragmatic Markers

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and, and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or. In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun (stuff/things) or a pronoun (something/everything), with an optional comparative phrase (like that/this). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know, I mean, like and sort of, ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1).

scholarly journals "… It's Really Ultimately Very Cruel …": contrasting English intensifier collocations across EFL writing and academic spoken discourse

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Juliano Recski
Keyword(s):  
Efl Writing ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Linguistic Repertoire ◽  
Colloquial Style

This paper investigates and contrasts recurrent intensifier collocations across a corpus of EFL writing - The International Corpus of Learner English - ICLE (Granger, 1993) and The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English - MICASE (Simpson et al., 2002). It seeks to show that such recurrent collocations are an important part of writers and speakers' linguistic repertoire and that they may provide a window onto their lexicon. On general grounds, the results indicate that there is a great predominance of boosters over maximizers and that a limited number of maximizers and boosters are used in recurrent combinations. The analysis further revealed that maximizers tend to intensify non-gradable words while boosters tend to intensify gradable ones and that EFL writers' overuse of intensifiers appears to be associated with colloquial style and an exaggerated tone that is often considered to be inappropriate in formal academic texts.

Dynamic have in North American and British Isles English

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill ◽  
Terttu Nevalainen ◽  
Ilse Wischer
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
American English ◽  
Full Range ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British English ◽  
Main Verb

There are two important differences between American English and British English with respect to main verb have. First, American English typically employs do-support in constructions such as Do you have any coffee? while traditional British English does not. Secondly, American English typically does not use have in expressions such as I took a shower whereas British Isles English does: I had a shower. In this article, we discuss the possibility that there is a connection between these two facts. We argue that the connection lies in the failure of have in North American English to acquire the full range of dynamic meanings that it has acquired in other varieties of English, and suggest language contact as one explanation for this phenomenon.

scholarly journals An Analysis of The English Gerund as Subject, Direct Object, Subject Complemet, and Object of Preposition

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-64
Author(s):  
Raflis Raflis ◽  
Arozato Lase
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Numerical Data ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Distribution Method ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Subject

The problem in this journal is gerund, verbal ending -ing and serves as a noun. Gerund differs from grammar construction in English because it is able to convert a verb into a noun by adding -ing at the end of the verb. At the same time, there is also a continuous tense form that adds -ing at the end of the verb. For students who start learning English will be confused with the form -ing that can be a noun and also a verb in the same sentence. The method used is the method of distribution, the method of data analysis into object analysis is part of the language itself. Objects in the distribution method are always part or element of the language being observed. In analyzing the data, the authors use qualitative methods. Qualitative research is a type of social science research that collects and works with non-numerical data and which seeks to interpret the meaning of the data being analyzed. In this study, researchers used descriptive design with the aim to analyze gerund as subject, direct object, complement of subject, and object of preposition at Tempo magazine in 2015. The author finds gerund formulation as follows: Gerund as Subject (Main + Main Verb + Complement), gerund as Direct Object (Subject + Main Verb + Gerund), gerund as Subject Complement (Subject + to be + Gerund), and gerund as Object of Preposition (Subject + Primary Keyword + Preposition + Gerund). The study found that Tempo magazine used gerund in magazines with higher gerund percentages as the preposition object. There are 8 gerunds as the subject, 5 gerund as a direct object, 6 gerund as complementary subject, and 23 gerund as the preposition object.

scholarly journals Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie Love
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Distribution ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract This paper investigates changes in swearing usage in informal speech using large-scale corpus data, comparing the occurrence and social distribution of swear words in two corpora of informal spoken British English: the demographically-sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014); the compilation of the latter has facilitated large-scale, diachronic analyses of authentic spoken data on a scale which has, until now, not been possible. A form and frequency analysis of a set of 16 ‘pure’ swear word lemma forms is presented. The findings reveal that swearing occurrence is significantly lower in the Spoken BNC2014 but still within a comparable range to previous studies. Furthermore, FUCK is found to overtake BLOODY as the most popular swear word lemma. Finally, the social distribution of swearing across gender and age groups generally supports the findings of previous research: males still swear more than females, and swearing still peaks in the twenties and declines thereafter. However, the distribution of swearing according to socio-economic status is found to be more complex than expected in the 2010s and requires further investigation. This paper also reflects on some of the methodological challenges associated with making comparisons between the two corpora.

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