A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study of a Change in the Use of Non-Finite Clauses in Written English
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Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
de Gruyter
Abstract
Occasional notes in secondary literature suggest that there is a growing tendency
to use non-fi nite clauses in written English. It is partly attributed to the fact that
during the process of historical development the English fi nite verb has lost much of its
dynamism and the nominal elements of predication, namely infi nitives, participles and
gerunds have gradually become semantically more important. is paper deals with the
occurrences of non-fi nite clauses in the tagged Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora,
which are matching corpora of American English and British English respectively. e
article looks at 1) the use of noun phrases followed by -ing participles, -ed participles
and to-infi nitives, 2) the use of -ing/-ed clauses with/without overt subordinators and
3) the occurrences of to-infinitive clauses. When the structural patterns 1), 2) and 3)
were taken as wholes there was always an increase in the frequency of occurrence of
non-fi nite clauses demonstrated by hundreds of examples in the Frown and F-LOB
corpora. is may be considered signifi cant since there is only a 30-year diff erence
between the Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora. e fi ndings thus completely
support the premise that when the perspective of the research is diachronic, in written
English non-fi nite clauses are becoming increasingly prominent.
Description
Subject(s)
Corpus-based diachronic research, finite/non-finite clauses, written English, syntactic functions of clauses, language change
Citation
ISSN
1804-8722