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Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax
Edited by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 346] 2019
► pp. 247–268

Variation and change at the interface of syntax and semantics

Concessive clauses in American English

Based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), this chapter inspects diachronic changes of constructions involving the concessive conjunctions although, though and even though from the 1860s to the present day. Following a short summary of changes in semantics and clause structures, the main focus lies on factors that have an effect on the position of the subordinate clause relative to the matrix clause. A Bayesian logistic regression model is used to investigate in how far the position of a subordinate clause can be predicted from the semantics of the entire construction, the connective that is used, and the weight (or length) of the complement, and whether the preferred positions of subordinate clauses change over time.

Keywords: concessives, conjunctions, American English, syntax, Corpus Linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background and previous research
    • 2.1Three semantic types of concessives
    • 2.2‘Contrastive sequencing’
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Semantics
    • 4.2Complement-internal syntax
    • 4.3Complement length
    • 4.4Multifactorial analysis of contrastive sequencing
  • 5.Discussion, conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.346.12sch
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