Search results for "Verb phrase"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Verb Phrase Inversion in fictional and non-fictional written english
2014
In the last decades, full inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause, as in"Beside him was a table full of well-known books", have been the subject of extensive research from a functional perspective. This paper is a further contribution to this line of research and offers a corpus-based analysis of a particular type of full inversion, namely verb phrase inversion (for example,"Standing grim and alone was the hulking eyesore of the territorial prison"), in written English texts. In recent work on inversion, there does not seem to be complete agreement as regards the distribution of verb phrase inversion in fiction and non-fiction. On …
Action-Depicting Gestures and Morphosyntax: The Function of Gesture-Speech Alignment in the Conversational Turn
2021
The current study examines the role of action-depicting gestures in conversational turns by focusing on their semantic characteristics and temporal position in relation to their verbal affiliates (action verbs or more complex verb phrases). The data are video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual construction sites in Norway. The analysis distinguishes two modes of action depiction: generic depictions, which represent the action as a general type, and contextualized depictions, which in addition include deictic references to the spatio-material environment or iconic representations of the specific manner of action performance. These two modes typically occupy differ…
Never saw one – first-person null subjects in spoken English1
2016
While null subjects are a well-researched phenomenon in pro-drop languages like Italian or Spanish, they have not received much attention in non-pro-drop languages such as English, where they are traditionally associated with particular (written) genres such as diaries or are discussed under a broader umbrella term such as situational ellipsis. However, examples such as the one in the title – while certainly not frequent – are commonly encountered in colloquial speech, with first-person singular tokens outnumbering any other person.This article investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the (non-) realisation of first-person singular subjects in a corpus of colloquia…