A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers

Published:2021-01-01 Issue:1 Volume:7 Page:
ISSN:2199-174X
Container-title:Linguistics Vanguard
language:en
Short-container-title:

Author:

Liu Jinlu¹^ORCID,Liu Haitao²^ORCID

Affiliation:

1. School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics , Hangzhou , China

2. Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China; Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies , Guangzhou , China

Abstract

Abstract Object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) can occur in English either with a lexical complementizer or with no complementizer. This paper seeks to investigate constraints on when the complementizer is lexicalized in ORCs, within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. In an analysis of one hundred ORCs, we find that: (a) the mean dependency distance (MDD) of lexicalized ORCs is longer significantly than that of non-lexicalized ORCs; (b) there is no significant difference in mean hierarchical distance (MHD) for lexicalized versus non-lexicalized ORCs; and (c) hierarchical number (HN) influences mean hierarchical distance significantly, and when HN is 1, the MHD of lexicalized ORCs is significantly longer than that of non-lexicalized ORCs. However, there are no significant difference when HN is 2–5, indicating that HN = 1 may be a key point in the ellipsis of relativizers.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics

Link

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0020/pdf

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