Many a NOUN Construction in English: Focusing on Singular and Plural Variants
0
조회
0
다운로드
1
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This study addresses a Many a NOUN construction, which seems superficially to show a mismatch between form and meaning, especially focusing on the singular and plural variants. The major goal of this study is to identify the syntactic and semantic properties of Many a NOUN construction by comparing it with the alternative constructions. This study performs a collostructional analysis to investigate whether this construction takes on a meaning (including function) of its own. The results of this study from the collostructional analysis reveal the three points. First, the Many a NOUN construction forms its own unique construction different from Many NOUNs, Much a NOUN and Much NOUN constructions. The predicates of Many a NOUN construction are not assigned any syntactic constraints. Thirdly, Many a NOUN construction has the words denoting time and abstract object with the strongest collostruction strength on the top positions. In addition, this study provides four different grammatical properties of the Many a NOUN construction. As for constituency, the noun must first combine with a determiner a(n) to form a noun phrase, and then this noun phrase can collocate with the quantifier many. The next issue is the agreement in number. The number agreement in this construction is basically determined by the noun. Thus, the quantifier many in this construction functions as a number-neutral quantifier. As a final result, the study suggests that the prototypical function of this construction is to count the frequency of entities, along with the constructional meaning of denoting a large indefinite quantity of entities.
Abstract
This study addresses a Many a NOUN construction, which seems superficially to show a mismatch between form and meaning, especially focusing on the singular and plural variants. The major goal of this study is to identify the syntactic and semantic properties of Many a NOUN construction by comparing it with the alternative constructions. This study performs a collostructional analysis to investigate whether this construction takes on a meaning (including function) of its own. The results of this study from the collostructional analysis reveal the three points. First, the Many a NOUN construction forms its own unique construction different from Many NOUNs, Much a NOUN and Much NOUN constructions. The predicates of Many a NOUN construction are not assigned any syntactic constraints. Thirdly, Many a NOUN construction has the words denoting time and abstract object with the strongest collostruction strength on the top positions. In addition, this study provides four different grammatical properties of the Many a NOUN construction. As for constituency, the noun must first combine with a determiner a(n) to form a noun phrase, and then this noun phrase can collocate with the quantifier many. The next issue is the agreement in number. The number agreement in this construction is basically determined by the noun. Thus, the quantifier many in this construction functions as a number-neutral quantifier. As a final result, the study suggests that the prototypical function of this construction is to count the frequency of entities, along with the constructional meaning of denoting a large indefinite quantity of entities.
참고문헌 (31)
- Andersen, Roger, "Transfer to somewhere", Language transfer in language learning, 1, pp.177~201 (1983)
- Brown, Gillian, "Discourse Analysis" (1983), Cambridge University Press
- Bybee John, "Morphology : A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form" (1985), John Benjamins
- Givón, Thomas, "English Grammar: A Function-Based Introduction, 2 vols" (1993), John Benjamins
- Goldberg Adele, "Constructions : A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure" (1995), University of Chicago Press
- Goldberg Adele, "Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language" (2006), Oxford University Press on Demand
- Gries, Stefan Th, "Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics : A Study of Particle Placement" (2003), Continuum
- Gries, Stefan Th, "Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on alternations", International journal of corpus linguistics, 9(1), pp.97~129 (2004)
- Gries, Stefan Th, "Language, culture, and mind" (2014), CSLI Publications
- Hanks, Patrick, "Contextual dependency and lexical sets", International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1(1), pp.75~98 (1996)
- Hilpert, Martin, "Distinctive collexeme analysis and diachrony", Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 22, pp.243~256 (2006)
- Hilpert, Martin, "The Oxford handbook of the history of English", pp.233~244 (2012), Oxford University Press
- Hilpert, Martin, "Construction grammar and its application to English" (2014), Edinburgh University Press
- Hopper, Paul, "Emergent grammar", Papers of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp.139~157 (1987), Berkeley Linguistics Society
- Huddleston, Rodney D., "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" (2002), Cambridge University Press
- Hunston, S, "Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English" (2000), John Benjamins
- Jackendoff, Ray S., "Semantic Structures" (1990), The MIT Press
- Langacker, Ronald W, "Topics in Cognitive Linguistics", pp.127~161 (1988), John Benjamins
- Lyons, John, "Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Vol. 510" (1968), Cambridge university press
- Quirk Randolph, "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language", London : Pearson Longman, pp.404~593 (1985)
- Quirk, Randolph, "A University Grammar of English" (1973), Longman
- Anette Rosenbach, "Aspects of iconicity and economy in the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in English", Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, pp.379~412 (2003), DE GRUYTER MOUTON[DOI]
- Rosenbach, Anette, "English genitive variation-the state of the art", English Language and Linguistics, 18, pp.215~262 (2014)[DOI]
- Stefanowitsch, Anatol, "Collostructions : Investigating the interaction between words and constructions", International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), pp.209~243 (2003)
- Stefanowitsch, Anatol, "Co-varying collexemes", Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1(1), pp.146~ (2005)
- Stefanowitsch, Anatol, "The Oxford handbook of construction grammar" (2013), Oxford University Press
- Traugott, Elizabeth, "The Handbook of Historical Linguistics", pp.624~647 (2003), Blackwell
- "The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 1.0 billion words, 1990-2019" (2008)[URL]
- "The Corpus of Historical American English: 475 million words, 1820-2019" (2008)[URL]
- "TIME Magazine Corpus: 100 million words, 1923-2006" (2008)[URL]
- "The Idioms Dictionary", The Idioms, Incorporated, ~ (2013)