Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2019 / A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English

A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English

Paper · 2019 · Prado-Alonso Carlos

Summary

The paper looks at English verb-second subject-auxiliary inversion, which Chen (2013) calls the X Auxiliary Subject construction (XASC). In it, a fronted element X, such as a wh-word, a negative adverb, "so/nor" or a deictic, pulls the auxiliary in front of the subject. Earlier corpus studies left out speech or fiction, or covered only some inversion types. This study covers all six XAS types across genres. It uses four written corpora (FLOB, FROWN, BrE06, AmE06) and one spoken corpus (CSPAE), and relates XAS frequencies to text categories statistically. The two moods behave differently:

  • Interrogative: wh-inversions increase as the text becomes more interpersonal. They peak in spoken conferences and meetings and in fiction, so they can be read as markers of the speaker's involvement.
  • Declarative: inversions cluster in information-dense genres (academic prose, official documents, press reportage). There they both link clauses and put focus on the fronted element and on the new information in the post-verbal subject.

The work matters because it ties a syntactic pattern to register and to discourse function rather than treating it as one uniform rule.

Key points

  • The paper follows Chen's (2013) split of inversion into two groups. ASC (verb-first: conditionals, wishes/exclamatives, yes/no questions) marks mood. XASC (verb-second) is a focus construction.
  • Six XAS types are analysed: wh-questions, negative conjuncts, negative adverbs, positive rejoinders, positive adverbs and deictics.
  • Written data: FLOB (1991), FROWN (1992), BrE06 and AmE06 (2004–2008), grouped into fiction (889,000 words) and non-fiction (1,232,000 words).
  • Spoken data: CSPAE (1994–1998, conferences and meetings, 2,000,000 words).
  • The overall corpus size is inconsistent in the paper. The text says 2,121,000 words, while Table 1 totals 4,121,000.
  • Positive rejoinders ("so does X") are the most frequent XAS type in declaratives. The paper treats them as bi-focal, with stress on both the trigger and the inverted subject.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Split one syntactic phenomenon by mood (interrogative vs declarative) before counting, because the same word order can serve opposite functions in different registers.
  • I2. Treat the fronted trigger (nor, so, never, here) as an anaphoric link back to the previous clause, not just a modifier.
  • I3. Read the post-verbal subject of a declarative inversion as the carrier of new information, and the fronted X as the focus.
  • I4. Use the frequency of question-type inversions as a cheap signal of how interpersonal a text is.
  • I5. Compare a marked sentence with its canonical paraphrase ("nor can he" vs "he cannot either") to isolate what the construction adds.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Parser evaluation on inversion could be reported separately for questions and declaratives, so errors on rare fronted-negative declaratives are not hidden by frequent wh-questions.
  • I2 (frames): "So does Momma Chirak" could be resolved by copying the predicate frame of the previous clause onto the new subject, giving an explainable ellipsis-recovery step.
  • I3 (world): When adding entities to the world of the text, an inverted subject could be flagged as newly introduced, which helps decide between creating a new entity and linking to an existing one.
  • I4 (answer): Readers could use inversion density to tell dialogue-heavy passages in fables apart from expository school texts and adjust their question-answering strategy.
  • I5 (back): The generator could keep such paraphrase pairs and choose the inverted form when the meaning graph marks contrastive focus or clause linking.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de OviedoOviedo · Spain4 works · 2,015 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Philosophy · 211 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Prado-Alonso Carlos. 2019. A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English. Topics in Linguistics 20.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2478/topling-2019-0007

@inproceedings{carlos2019comprehensive,
  title = {{A comprehensive corpus-based analysis of “X Auxiliary Subject” constructions in written and spoken English}},
  author = {Prado-Alonso Carlos},
  booktitle = {Topics in Linguistics 20},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.2478/topling-2019-0007},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2019-0007}
}

References

41 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Anthony, L., 2019. AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. find
  2. Baker, P., 2009. Contemporary corpus linguistics. London: Continuum. find
  3. Baayen, R. H., 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  4. Barlow, M., 2000. Corpus of spoken professional American English. CD-ROM version. Houston. TX. find
  5. Biber, D., 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  6. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E., 1999. The Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman. find
  7. Birner, B., 1996. The discourse function of inversion in English. New York: Garland. find
  8. Brinton, L. J. and Closs Traugott, E., 2005. Lexicalization and language change research surveys in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  9. Butler, C. S., 1985. Statistics in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  10. Chafe, W. L., 1992. Information flow in speaking and writing. In: P. Downing, S. D. Lima and M. Noonan, eds. The linguistics of literacy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 17-30. ↗
  11. Chafe, W. L., 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. find
  12. Chen, R., 2003. English inversion: A ground-before-figure construction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. find
  13. Chen, R., 2013. Subject-auxiliary inversion and linguistic generalization: Evidence for functional/cognitive motivation in language. Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1-32. ↗
  14. Diessel, H., 1997. Verb-first constructions in German. In: M. Verspoor, L. Kee-Dong and E. Sweetser, eds. Lexical and syntactical constructions and the construction of meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 51–68. find
  15. Dorgeloh, H., 1997. Inversion in modern English: Form and function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. find
  16. Duffly, P., 2016. The role of do-auxiliary in subject-auxiliary inversion: developing Langacker’s notion of existential negotiation. Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 269-287. find
  17. Erdmann, P., 1988. (Non-)inverting negatives in clause-initial position in English. In: J. Klegraf and D. Nehls, eds. Essays on the English language and applied linguistics on the occasion of Gerhard Nickel’s 60th birthday. Heidelberg: Groos, pp. 66–81. find
  18. Goldberg, A. E., 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  19. Granath, S., 2007. Size matters – or thus can meaningful structures be revealed in large corpora. In: R. Facchinetti (ed.). Corpus linguistics 25 years on. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 169 188. ↗
  20. Green, G. M. 1982. Colloquial and literary uses of inversion. In: D. Tannen, ed. Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 119-154. find
  21. Jacobsson, B., 1951. Inversion in English with special reference to the Early Modern English period. Uppsala: Almquist Wiksell. find
  22. Kjellmer, G., 1979. On clause-introductory nor and neither. English Studies, vol. 60, no 3, pp. 280-295. find
  23. Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R., 1976.Cohesion in English. London: Longman. find
  24. Hartvigson, H. and Jakobsen L. K., 1974. Inversion in present-day English. Odense: Odense University Press. find
  25. Hofland, K., Lindebjerg, A. and Thunestvedt, J., 1999. ICAME collection of English language corpora. 2nd edition, CD-ROM version. Bergen: The HIT Centre. find
  26. Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K., 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗ our card
  27. Johnson, K., 2008. Quantitative methods in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  28. Kim, J., 2018. Inverted wh-exclamative constructions: a construction-based perspective. Korean Journal of Linguistics, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 465-484. ↗
  29. Kreyer, R., 2006. Inversion in modern written English: Syntactic complexity, information status and the creative writer. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. ↗
  30. Lakoff, G. and Brugman, C., 1987. The semantics of aux-inversion and anaphora constraints. Paper presented at the meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. San Francisco, USA, 27-30 December Lakoff, G., 1991. Cognitive vs. generative linguistics: How commitments influence results. Language and Communication, vol. 11, no. 1/2, pp. 53–62. find
  31. Lambrecht, K., 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  32. Michaelis, L. A. and Lambrecht, K., 1996. The exclamative sentence type in English. In: A. Goldberg, ed. Conceptual structure, discourse, and language. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, pp. 375-398. find
  33. Newmeyer, F. D., 1998. Language form and language function. Cambridge: MIT Press. ↗
  34. Prado-Alonso, C., 2011. Full-verb inversion in written and spoken English. Bern: Peter Lang. ↗
  35. Prado-Alonso, C., 2016. A constructional analysis of obligatory XVS structures. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 51-82. find
  36. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J., 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. find
  37. R Development Core Team., 2019. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Available at: http://www.R-project.org. ↗
  38. Rudanko, J., 1982. Towards a description of negatively conditioned subject operator in English. English Studies, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 349-359 find
  39. Schmidt, D. A., 1980. A history of inversions in English. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University. find
  40. Talmy, L., 2000. Towards a cognitive semantics, Vol. 1. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  41. Traugott, E. C. and Trousdale G., 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/carlos-2019-comprehensive-corpus-based-analysis-x/