scholarly journals Forms and Meanings of Stative Verbs in Progressive Tense: a Corpus Linguistics Research

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-190
Author(s):  
Upi Laila Hanum
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
British English ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Mixed Categories ◽  
National Corpus ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

 AbstractSemantics is the field of linguistic concerned with the study of meaning in language. The aims of the research are to analyze the forms and meanings of the stative verbs in progressive tense in corpora. The data of this research were obtained from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). The data of the corpora used descriptive qualitative. The result of the research shows that the stative verbs are found and used in progressive tense. The stative verbs appeared in all types of progressive tense except future perfect progressive. The use of the stative verbs in progressive tense took place due to overgeneralization in the use of the native speakers’ form of American and British English. The stative verbs in progressive tense used to express temporariness, emotiveness, comprehension and mixed categories of meaning; temporariness and emotiveness, temporariness and tentativeness. Temporariness meaning almost appeared in all types of progressive. Stative verbs in progressive tense indirectly stated temporariness in stative sense of meaning, is contrary to the rules of English grammar.

scholarly journals Transitivity of Try and V Construction in British and American English

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Faisal Mustafa ◽  
Syamsul Bahri Yusuf
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Base Form ◽  
Grammatical Rule ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus ◽  
Finite Verb

Try and V construction is prevalent in British and American English. This construction is found in both spoken and written English, although with different frequencies. The verb in this construction only appears in in the base form. The lack of research on this verb formation leaves many aspects unexplored, one of which is the transitivity of the verb. Therefore, this study is intended to find out the number of arguments informed by this construction by matching the number of arguments to the verb try and the verb following it after the conjunction and. Two verbs were used to test this match, i.e., give and bring, which are three-place predicate verbs, and other two two-place predicate verbs, i.e., see and answer, were used to validate the finding. British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were used to collect the data. The findings show that the number of arguments matched the verb following the conjunction and. Therefore, it can be concluded the number of arguments in try and V construction is not unique to this construction, but it is similar to the try to V, where V is the non-finite verb which selects the number of arguments. This result suggests that try and V construction needs to be included in English grammar textbooks in order that non-native speakers can use and understand this rare grammatical rule in appropriate contexts.

Swearing in Modern British English: The Case of Fuck in the BNC

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony McEnery ◽  
Zhonghua Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
American English ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
British English ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Australian English ◽  
Morphological Variants ◽  
National Corpus

Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently studied, though some recent work on swearing in American English, Australian English and British English has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic account of swear-words in English. In terms of approaches, swearing has been approached from the points of view of history, lexicography, psycholinguistics and semantics. There have been few studies of swearing based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and social class. Such a study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the production of the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus of modern British English, such a study became possible. In addition to parts of speech, the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic features such as age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register, publication medium and domain. While bad language may be related to religion (e.g. Jesus, heaven, hell and damn), sex (e.g. fuck), racism (e.g. nigger), defecation (e.g. shit), homophobia (e.g. queer) and other matters, we will, in this article, examine only the pattern of uses of fuck and its morphological variants, because this is a typical swear-word that occurs frequently in the BNC. This article will build and expand upon the examination of fuck by McEnery et al. (2000) by examining the distribution pattern of fuck within and across spoken and written registers.

scholarly journals British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: Do native British English speakers swear more – or differently – compared to American English speakers?

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Dewaele
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
British English ◽  
Conceptual Representations ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
American English Speakers ◽  
National Corpus

AbstractThe present study investigates the differences between 414 L1 speakers of British and 556 L1 speakers of American English in self-reported frequency of swearing and in the understanding of the meaning, the perceived offensiveness and the frequency of use of 30 negative words extracted from the British National Corpus. Words ranged from mild to highly offensive, insulting and taboo. Statistical analysies revealed no significant differences between the groups in self reported frequency of swearing. The British English L1 participants reported a significantly better understanding of nearly half the chosen words from the corpus. They gave significantly higher offensiveness scores to four words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants rated a third of words as significantly more offensive (including “jerk”). British English L1 participants reported significantly more frequent use of a third of words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants reported more frequent use of half of the words (including “jerk”). This is interpreted as evidence of differences in semantic and conceptual representations of these words in both variants of English.

scholarly journals SEMANTICS OF THE CONSTRUCTIONS WITH SPLIT INFINITIVE

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (34) ◽  
Author(s):  
E.A FROLOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Exact Number ◽  
Expert Assessments ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Integral Feature ◽  
National Corpus

Objective of this article is to define the exact number of split infinitives and the most common splitters in the construction, identify groups of studied constructions united by an integral feature and to determine the semantic features of constructions with a split infinitive. Applied methods. For the purpose of this research language material is collected on the basis of the corpora of texts such as the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The examples of the phenomenon are selected to conduct a semantic experiment using the method of expert assessments, which will reveal the semantic features of constructions with a split infinitive. The informants (native speakers) are asked to grade the sentences with the reference to the norm of standard English and leave their personal comments on the use of split infinitive constructions. Results The acquired data is analyzed from the viewpoint of semantics. As a result of the research the semantic features of split infinitives are described and the difference in semantics of split and usual infinitives is established. Conclusion. The construction with a split infinitive in comparison with the usual infinitive introduces different information to the sentence. Putting an adverb directly before a verb allows to clarify the statement, gives a narrow focus and establishes a semantic connection with a specific verb.

On the use of uh and um in American English

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnel Tottie
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
American English ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
British English ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Time Required ◽  
Difficult Subjects ◽  
National Corpus

This study examines the use of uh and um — referred to jointly as UHM — in 14 conversations totaling c. 62,350 words from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. UHM was much less frequent than in British English with 7.5 vs. 14.5 instances per million words in the British National Corpus. However, as in British English the frequency of UHM was closely correlated to extra-linguistic context. Conversations in non-private environments (such as offices and classrooms) had higher frequencies than those taking place in private spaces, mostly homes. Time required for planning, especially when difficult subjects were discussed, appeared to be an important explanatory factor. It is clear that UHM cannot be dismissed as mere hesitation or disfluency; it functions as a pragmatic marker on a par with well, you know, and I mean, sharing some of the functions of these in discourse. Although the role of sociolinguistic factors was less clear, the tendencies for older speakers and educated speakers to use UHM more frequently than younger and less educated ones paralleled British usage, but contrary to British usage, there were no gender differences.

scholarly journals A Critical Discourse Analysis: The Representation of ‘Homosexual’, ‘Lesbian’, and ‘Gay’ Collocates Words in Cola and BNC Corpus

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 00018
Author(s):  
Restu Anggi Gustara
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
American English ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

This is a Critical Discourse Analysis of the collocation of ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘gay’ terms in the corpus data of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). By conducting Halliday’s theory, this study aims to find out the representation of three terms, ‘homosexual’, lesbian’, and ‘gay’, also the ideology, from the collocation words. As a combined study between Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, a qualitative and quantitative data were used. By using corpus analysis as the method, the researcher analyzes the ideology based on the collected collocates words. The result of the analysis shows that ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘gay’ has a linier relationship. Those three terms are used in different area of public text, which are ‘homosexual’ is more acceptable in academic term and ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are mostly used in the non-academic term. Even though COCA and BNC show the different amount of their existence, they are share the same collocation: rights, relationship, lifestyle, identity, activist, and couple.

scholarly journals The Analysis of Metaphorical Domain on English “Stab Verb” in Corpora

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
LaOde Achmad Suherman
Keyword(s):  
Light Flash ◽  
American English ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Target Domain ◽  
Semantic Roles ◽  
British English ◽  
Pain Memory ◽  
Source Domain ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

Metaphor as part of language is taking special place on Semantics studies which is unique and needs more logical thinking in interpretation. The objective of this research was to ascertain the kinds of metaphorical domains of English stab verb in corpora. The data of this research consist of American English and British English which were mainly taken from two corpora, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC).  The result of this research indicated that, there were source domain and target domain that were employed on the semantic construction of English Stab verb. Source domain ascertained from the semantic roles which lied on the construction of stab verb, they are Agent, Target and Manip, while target domain consists of twenty noun phrases they are: eyes, looks, words, voice, question, guilt/ remorse, sadness, anger, pain, memory, fear, panic, light/ flash, ray, dark, air, sound and directions. Most of these nouns were mapped as Manip or stabbing instrument while dark, air, and direction were mapped as the stabbing target.

scholarly journals English comparative correlative constructions: A usage-based account

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-215
Author(s):  
Thomas Hoffmann ◽  
Thomas Brunner ◽  
Jakob Horsch
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
American English ◽  
Standard Variety ◽  
British English ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Large Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

AbstractEnglish Comparative Correlatives (CCs) consist of two clauses, C1 and C2:[The more we get together,]C1 [the happier we’ll be.]C2Recently, large corpus studies based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English have unearthed various meso-constructions in English CCs using covarying–collexeme analysis. The present study tests these findings against data from the British National Corpus (BNC), aiming to replicate previous results against data from another standard variety of English (British English) and a corpus that is sampled from a wider range of registers. Over 2,000 CC tokens from the BNC were analyzed with regard to hypotactic features, filler types encountered as comparative elements, and deletion phenomena. Moreover, in contrast to earlier corpus studies (such as Hoffmann, Thomas, Jakob Horsch, and Thomas Brunner. 2019. “The more data, the better: a usage-based account of the English comparative correlative construction.” Cognitive Linguistics 30(1): 1–36), the present study also investigates the frequency of the semantically related C2C1 construction (You will be the happierC2, the more we get togetherC1) that previously has been found to be considerably less frequent than its counterpart. The results of the present analysis confirm that English CCs possess more paratactic than hypotactic features and, supporting most of the findings of Hoffmann, Horsch, and Brunner (2019) provide even stronger evidence for the existence of several symmetric meso-constructions.

“That’s well good”: A Re-emergent Intensifier in Current British English

2020 ◽  
pp. 007542422097914
Author(s):  
Karin Aijmer
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
British English ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Over Time ◽  
National Corpus

Well has a long history and is found as an intensifier already in older English. It is argued that diachronically well has developed from its etymological meaning (‘in a good way’) on a cline of adverbialization to an intensifier and to a discourse marker. Well is replaced by other intensifiers in the fourteenth century but emerges in new uses in Present-Day English. The changes in frequency and use of the new intensifier are explored on the basis of a twenty-year time gap between the old British National Corpus (1994) and the new Spoken British National Corpus (2014). The results show that well increases in frequency over time and that it spreads to new semantic types of adjectives and participles, and is found above all in predicative structures with a copula. The emergence of a new well and its increase in frequency are also related to social factors such as the age, gender, and social class of the speakers, and the informal character of the conversation.

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