Affiliation:
1. University of Rochester
Abstract
Abstract
Rare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions
exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this variation are not well understood. This exploratory
study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: <the A> (the rich),
<a Nprop Nprop> (a Bob Gates), <Nsing
Nprop Nprop> (architect Julia Morgan), <D Npl Nsing>
(the jobs data), and <Nsing A Nsing> (home electronic
equipment). Repetition tendencies are very strong in the first and second of these and somewhat strong in the third; in
the fourth and fifth they are much weaker, only slightly higher than those of common NP expansions such as <D A
Nsing> (the black dog). To explain this variation, we suggest that constructions may be
associated with different types of discourse: constructions with high repetition tendencies tend to occur in persuasive rather
than informative discourse.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics