Syntactic structures and corpus linguistics: The case of English causative constructions
(2002) The Linguistics Association of Great Britain Spring Meeting 2002 — Location: Ormskirk (9.April.2002)
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- Abstract
- A few years ago, Oostdijk & de Haan (1994: 41) pointed out that ‘[l]arge-scale quantitative studies of syntactic structures and phenomena are long overdue’. Admittedly, while lexical studies have been common practice throughout the history of corpus linguistics (cf. Meyer & Mackintosh 1996: 257), syntax, until recently, has been approached much more timidly. However, a snapshot of the proceedings of a recent corpus linguistics conference (ICAME 2001, see De Cock et al. 2001) shows that the latter might be gaining ground, for the analysis of syntactic phenomena represents 43% of the contents, as compared to only 16% of lexis. Yet, a closer investigation reveals that not all types of syntactic phenomena equally benefit from this new interest. Thus, grammatical words and parts of speech attract a lot of attention. Syntactic structures, on the other hand, i.e. combinations of lexical items, parts of speech and/or syntactic phrases (e.g. 'see' + NP + infinitive), tend to be neglected. The reason for this discrepancy lies in the greater difficulty involved in automatically retrieving syntactic structures. This will be demonstrated by giving a brief survey of the different types of syntactic phenomena and the methodologies that can be used to extract them from a corpus. The study of complex syntactic structures within corpus linguistics will be illustrated by the case of English periphrastic causative constructions (e.g. 'He made me believe we were late'; 'I had the video fixed'). After explaining how such structures can be retrieved semi-automatically, I will show that a corpus methodology can be combined with a theoretical framework, in this case the cognitive framework. More precisely, it is the theory known as ‘Frame Semantics’ (see Fillmore 1982, Petruck 1996) that has been chosen to give a unified account of the data stemming from the corpus analysis. According to this theory, the frame of causation is made up of a number of so-called frame elements, as appears from the following sentence: His son (CAUSE) got twenty people (AFFECTED) to join (EFFECT) the association (PATIENT) For each of these elements, several parameters have been examined, such as the animate/ inanimate nature of the participants or the realisation of the elements at the syntactic level. Moreover, the influence of the medium has been studied and a collocational analysis has been carried out. Some results will be presented here, with special emphasis on the findings challenging statements found in the literature. To give but one example, what emerges from the authentic data is that causative make is predominantly used with an inanimate CAUSE, which contradicts the claim often made that its subject should be agentive (cf. Givón 1993: 9). The ultimate aim of this analysis is to pinpoint the syntactic, semantic and stylistic factors triggering the use of a particular causative construction.
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Gilquin, G. (2002). Syntactic structures and corpus linguistics: The case of English causative constructions. The Linguistics Association of Great Britain Spring Meeting 2002, Ormskirk. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225335