Review of Meunier, De Cock, Gilquin & Paquot (): A Taste for Corpora. In honour of Sylviane Granger

2012

The grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of cleft constructions in Present-Day English

2012

The present paper examines the development of the variation between a marked and an unmarked infinitival complement clause in three types of cleft constructions in 20th century English. Data from corpora of written and spoken British (BrE) and American English (AmE) evidence a significantly divergent development of these clefts types in speaking when compared to writing. The written corpora show a steady increase in the frequency of clefts, and a decrease of the to-infinitive paired with an increase of the bare infinitive, thus a reversal of preferences in both varieties in all three types of clefts. This erosion of to as an (optional) grammatical marker leads to a higher degree of syntacti…