John Benjamins Publishing Company
Low-level patterning of pronominal subjects and verb tenses in English
Abstract
This paper explores patterns of co-occurrence of selected subject pronouns (I, you, she, he) with past, present, and future tense uses of English verbs, with a focus on give, send, and bring. Statistically significant overuse and underuse of the subject pronouns are determined by reference to overall frequencies of subject pronouns and verb tenses in two corpora of spoken language. A key result is that I is overused with give, send, and bring in the future tense but underused in the present and past tenses. Co-occurrence preferences such as these are not easily intuited and demonstrate the value of corpus-based methodologies in refining our notions of the semantics of argument structure.
Abstract
This paper explores patterns of co-occurrence of selected subject pronouns (I, you, she, he) with past, present, and future tense uses of English verbs, with a focus on give, send, and bring. Statistically significant overuse and underuse of the subject pronouns are determined by reference to overall frequencies of subject pronouns and verb tenses in two corpora of spoken language. A key result is that I is overused with give, send, and bring in the future tense but underused in the present and past tenses. Co-occurrence preferences such as these are not easily intuited and demonstrate the value of corpus-based methodologies in refining our notions of the semantics of argument structure.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Encoding transfer, let/allow and permission in Modern Irish 13
- Degrees of causivity in German lassen causitive constructions 53
- Grammaticalization of ‘give’ in Slavic between drift and contact 107
- ‘Give’ and semantic maps 129
- How Europeans GIVE 147
- Ditransitive constructions in Gan Chinese 177
- The argument realisation of give and take verbs in Māori 195
- GIVE an its arguments in Bohairic Coptic 227
- Giving is receiving 253
- Enabling and allowing in Hebrew 271
- Low-level patterning of pronominal subjects and verb tenses in English 295
- The morphological, syntactic and semantic interface of the verb GIVE in Lithuanian 327
- Rise and fall of the TAKE-future in written Estonian 353
- Causation in the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara 385
- The fare causative derivation in Italian 425
- Information-structural encoding of recipient in non-canonical alignments of Persian 463
- Index 491
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Encoding transfer, let/allow and permission in Modern Irish 13
- Degrees of causivity in German lassen causitive constructions 53
- Grammaticalization of ‘give’ in Slavic between drift and contact 107
- ‘Give’ and semantic maps 129
- How Europeans GIVE 147
- Ditransitive constructions in Gan Chinese 177
- The argument realisation of give and take verbs in Māori 195
- GIVE an its arguments in Bohairic Coptic 227
- Giving is receiving 253
- Enabling and allowing in Hebrew 271
- Low-level patterning of pronominal subjects and verb tenses in English 295
- The morphological, syntactic and semantic interface of the verb GIVE in Lithuanian 327
- Rise and fall of the TAKE-future in written Estonian 353
- Causation in the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara 385
- The fare causative derivation in Italian 425
- Information-structural encoding of recipient in non-canonical alignments of Persian 463
- Index 491
