Diachronic Distribution of Elemental Ordering in English

ABSTRACT

English elemental ordering in a non-canonical word order incorporates preposing, postposing and elemental reversal. This paper intends to explore how these types of elemental ordering are distributed during the last two centuries by employing the Corpus of Historical American English or COHA. The findings demonstrate that preposing has been increasing apparently but still in its inceptive phase; postposing, subsuming existential there and presentational there, generally keeps plateauing with existential there dominating presentational there; and elemental reversal experiences a trend of gradual decreasing, which is attributed to the dominance in occurrences of passive with a by phrase construction over those of inversion. This research provides us with a corpus linguistic insight of exploring elemental ordering, which distinguishes itself from other researches focusing on information status.

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Correction Statement

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Notes

1. The first letter of a term is capitalized according to the convention of Systemic Functional Linguistics.

2. According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), language is composed of three strata: semantics, lexico-grammar, and phonology/graphology. Semantics is realized by lexico-grammar, which is further realized by phonology/graphology.

3. The three constructs in semantic stratum are realized by their corresponding ranks in lexico-grammatical stratum (Halliday, 1994). Precisely, Sequence is realized by clause complex as in (a), Figure by clause in (b) and Element by group in (c). (a) If, as was now asserted, society was a human, not a divine creation, it could be reordered so that mankind could more easily engage in ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 650) (b) He made mathematical calculations. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 651) (c) A first important observation. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 652).

4. The three constructs are instantiated by the following clause, in which she and home are Participants, come is a Process, and cheerfully is a Circumstance. She came home cheerfully. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999, p. 208).

5. https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/.

6. R in all tables of this paper stands for raw frequency and N for normalized frequency.

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported by Beijing Municipal Social Sciences Foundation [Project No. 20YYB007], 1 July 2020-1 July 2023.