Change in the English infinitival perfect construction
Change in the English infinitival perfect construction
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英语不定式完美结构的变化
DOI：
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
B. Aarts
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Bowie;B. Aarts
由不同时期的文本材料组成的可检索的电子语料库的可用性使研究英语语言的变化变得更加容易。然而，正如本卷各章所反映的那样，在研究当前变化时使用语料库有若干方法学方面的问题。对某些人来说，“大就是更好”（戴维斯，本卷），而对另一些人来说，“小就是美”（亨特和里奇，本卷；史密斯和里奇，即将出版）。我们自己的立场是，虽然我们可以看到使用大型语料库的明显优势，但对小型语料库的详细分析，特别是如果它们被解析，可以揭示其他方法可能错过的趋势。此外，在研究短期内的变化时，我们认为口语语料库特别有价值，因为口语是主要的，语法的变化可能首先在这种媒介中表现出来。本文探讨了英语不定式完成式的短期变化。它首先考察了发生频率的变化，比较了完成时的各种时态形式（现在时、过去时和非有限时）。然后关注不定式完成时，考虑其发生的句法语境和对所观察到的变化的定性解释。这些数据来自伦敦大学学院英语用法调查的现代口语历时语料库（DCPSE）。DCPSE在几个方面是独一无二的。首先，它包含了专门的口语（主要是自发的）英语，在两个具有匹配文本类别的子语料库中，允许在30年的跨度内进行历时比较。较早的子语料库包含大约46.1万个单词，这些单词来自伦敦-隆德语料库（LLC），时间为20世纪50年代末至70年代，而较晚的子语料库包含大约42.1万个单词，来自20世纪90年代初收集的国际英语语料库（ICE-GB）的英国部分。其次，使用专用的语料库探索软件ICECUP （International corpus of English corpus Utility Program）对语料库进行全面解析和搜索。1
The availability of searchable electronic corpora composed of textual material from different periods in time has made studying change in the English language easier. However, as is reflected in chapters of this volume, there are a number of methodological dimensions to the use of corpora in the study of current change. For some big is better‘ (Davies, this volume), while for others small is beautiful‘ (Hundt and Leech, this volume; Smith and Leech, forthcoming). Our own position is that, while we can see the distinct advantages of using large corpora, detailed analysis of small corpora, especially if they are parsed, can reveal trends that may be missed by other approaches. Furthermore, in studying changes over short periods we believe that spoken language corpora are particularly valuable, as spoken language is primary, and changes in grammar are likely to manifest themselves in that medium first. This paper explores short-term changes in the English infinitival perfect construction. It first examines changing frequencies of occurrence, comparing the various tense forms (present, past and non-finite) of the perfect. It then focuses on the infinitival perfect, considering its syntactic contexts of occurrence and qualitative explanations for the changes observed. The data are drawn from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English (DCPSE), based at the Survey of English Usage, University College London. DCPSE is unique in several ways. First, it contains exclusively spoken (and mainly spontaneous) English, in two subcorpora with matching text categories which allow diachronic comparison over a thirty-year span. The earlier subcorpus contains approximately 464,000 words from the London–Lund Corpus (LLC) dating from the late 1950s to the 1970s, while the later subcorpus contains around 421,000 words from the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) collected in the early 1990s. Secondly, the corpus is fully parsed and searchable with dedicated corpus exploration software called ICECUP (International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program). 1