???? ??????? ????? Hilde Hasselgard 2010
First published in print format 2010
ISBN-13 978-0-521-51556-6
ISBN-13 978-0-511-67964-3
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
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Hilde Hasselgard is Professor of English Language at the University of Oslo. Her previous publications include Introducing English Grammar (with Magne Dypedahl and Berit L?ken, ), English Grammar: Theory and Use (with Stig Johansson and Per Lysv°ag,) and a series of articles on word order, cohesion and information structure.
In this original study, Hilde Hasselg°ard discusses the use of adverbials in English, through examining examples found in everyday texts. Adverbials – clause elements that typically refer to circumstances of time, space, reason and manner – cover a range of meanings and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The description of the frequency of meaning types and discussion of the reasons for selecting positions show that the use of adverbials differs across text types. Adverbial usage is often linked to the general build-up of a text and can reflect its content and purpose. In using real texts, Hasselg°ard identifies a challenge for the classification of adjuncts, and also highlights the fact that some adjuncts have uses that extend into the textual and interpersonal domains, obscuring the traditional divisions between adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts.
The focus of this study is how adverbials are used in present-day English. The first step is to survey the types of adverbials that exist and the positions in the clause that may be filled by an adverbial, i.e. to establish what the possibilities are. But a more intriguing question is how the possibilities are exploited by native speakers of English. The adverbials thus need to be studied in their natural environment, i.e. in real text, and so it was decided to base the study on corpus material, more specifically, the British part of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), compiled at the Survey of English Usage, University College, London. A general problem in using electronic corpora for the study of a syntactic phenomenon is the difficulty of searching automatically for syntactic functions. The ICE-GB is both tagged and parsed to facilitate such searches. However, it does not distinguish adjuncts from other types of adverbials. A search for all occurrences of adverbials in the ICE-GB (using ICECUP ?.?; see Nelson et al. ) tells us that the corpus contains,adverbials distributed over,‘text units’ (roughly corresponding to sentences). These are of course overwhelming numbers for most purposes and in this case prompted the decision to select a number of texts that could work as a ‘core corpus’ for the quantitative part of the study. These texts were then searched manually for adjunct adverbials.
Naturally, there are still advantages to working with a parsed corpus. The ability to search for specific syntactic structures is useful for finding supplementary examples of phenomena that are too rare in the core corpus to grant any kind of conclusions. Some examples of this are adverbials in
cleft sentences (see chapter ?), sequences of adverbials in clause-initial position (section ?.?) and sentences in which an initial adverbial is followed by inversion (section ?.?.?). See further, Nelson (????) and Nelson et al. (????) for introductions t
As mentioned above, the main material for the present study is the ICEGB. This implies that the main focus is on British English. However, other corpora have also been consulted. The British National Corpus (BNC, see further http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/) has been used for supplementary examples. Furthermore, some examples have been taken from the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), a prosodically annotated corpus of spoken British English.
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