Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use
Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use
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DOI：
10.1017/s1360674311000025
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发表时间：
2011-07-01
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Gray, Bethany
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Biber, Douglas;Gray, Bethany
许多关于语法变化的讨论都集中在会话互动的语篇语境中的语法创新。我们在这里认为，它也有可能出现语法创新的书面语篇的交际需求。特别是，学术写作（信息散文）独特的交际特征导致了一种严重依赖名词结构的话语风格的发展，广泛的短语修饰和相对缺乏动词。通过跟踪这种语篇风格的历史发展，我们还可以观察到写作中出现的特定语法功能的发展。我们在这里集中在两个语法特征-名词作为名词性前置修饰语和介词短语作为名词性后置修饰语-分析他们的历史发展在过去的四个世纪中的语料库的学术研究写作（相比，其他寄存器，如小说，报纸报道和会话）。我们的分析表明，这些语法特征在英语的早期历史时期的功能和变化相当有限。然而，在19世纪和20世纪，它们变得更加频繁和富有成效，伴随着它们的功能，变体和词汇联想范围的重大扩展。这些扩展主要局限于信息性的书面语篇，说明了新的语法功能出现在书面语篇而不是言语中的方式。
Many discussions of grammatical change have focused on grammatical innovation in the discourse contexts of conversational interaction. We argue here that it is also possible for grammatical innovation to emerge out of the communicative demands of written discourse. In particular, the distinctive communicative characteristics of academic writing (informational prose) have led to the development of a discourse style that relies heavily on nominal structures, with extensive phrasal modification and a relative absence of verbs. By tracking the historical development of this discourse style, we can also observe the development of particular grammatical functions that are emerging in writing. We focus here on two grammatical features - nouns as nominal premodifiers and prepositional phrases as nominal postmodifiers - analyzing their historical development over the last four centuries in a corpus of academic research writing (compared to other registers such as fiction, newspaper reportage and conversation). Our analysis shows that these grammatical features were quite restricted in function and variability in earlier historical periods of English. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became much more frequent and productive, accompanied by major extensions in their functions, variants, and range of lexical associations. These extensions were restricted primarily to informational written discourse, illustrating ways in which new grammatical functions emerge in writing rather than speech.