A large-scale diachronic analysis of the English passive alternation
We present the first large-scale, multivariate study analysing the de-velopment of the passive alternation in 19th- and 20th-century American En-glish. Based on 2,318,251 tokens of the BE- and the GET-passive, extracted fromthe Corpus of Historical American English, we explore the strength and stabi...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Chapter/Article Conference Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2023
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| In: |
Language and linguistics in a complex world
Year: 2023, Pages: 31-55 |
| DOI: | 10.1515/9783111017433-003 |
| Online Access: | Resolving-System, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111017433-003 Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111017433-003/html 
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| Author Notes: | Axel Bohmann, Julia Müller, Mirka Honkanen, Miriam Neuhausen |
| Summary: | We present the first large-scale, multivariate study analysing the de-velopment of the passive alternation in 19th- and 20th-century American En-glish. Based on 2,318,251 tokens of the BE- and the GET-passive, extracted fromthe Corpus of Historical American English, we explore the strength and stabilityof several reported constraints on the GET-passive, such as informality, subjectresponsibility, adversativity, and non-neutrality. Additionally, our analysis in-cludes a range of syntactic predictors. The results indicate a persistent associa-tion of the GET-passive with informal contexts, but weakening of most otherconstraints. A particularly strong effect size is observed for the semantic groupof the passivized verb, developed by clustering over a word-vector representa-tion of all verbs. This finding indicates strong lexical-semantic conditioning ofthe passive alternation. We discuss several challenges in the big-data approachwe use and develop a sketch of future research in this direction. |
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| Item Description: | Gesehen am 02.12.2024 |
| Physical Description: | Online Resource |
| ISBN: | 9783111017433 9783111017891 |
| DOI: | 10.1515/9783111017433-003 |