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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Hauptverfasser: Bohmann, Axel (VerfasserIn) , Müller, Julia (VerfasserIn) , Honkanen, Mirka (VerfasserIn) , Neuhausen, Miriam (VerfasserIn)
Dokumenttyp: Kapitel/Artikel Konferenzschrift
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: 2023
In: Language and linguistics in a complex world
Year: 2023, Pages: 31-55
DOI:10.1515/9783111017433-003
Online-Zugang: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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Verfasserangaben:Axel Bohmann, Julia Müller, Mirka Honkanen, Miriam Neuhausen
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung: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.
Beschreibung:Gesehen am 02.12.2024
Beschreibung:Online Resource
ISBN:9783111017433
9783111017891
DOI:10.1515/9783111017433-003