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The Noun Phrase in English: Past and present
Edited by Alex Ho-Cheong Leung and Wim van der Wurff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 246] 2018
► pp. 113–142

Chapter 5
Variable article usage with institutional nouns

An “oddment” of English?

| University of Zurich

In English, singular institutional nouns like church or hospital are variably used with or without a definite article following verb-preposition collocations like go to and be at. British English has been reported to prefer the bare NP use whereas American English allegedly tends towards the variant with the definite article. Corpus data from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English are used to test this hypothesis. In addition to regional variation, language-internal factors (choice and form of head noun, modification, semantics of the construction, collocational effects) are investigated. A variable rule analysis shows that regional variation is, in fact, not the most important factor and that choice of head noun and modification play a more important part. The results confirm that grammar often has a strong lexical base. Theoretical background to the study is provided by construction grammar, on the one hand, and previous work on category gradience.

Keywords: variable article usage, variable rule analysis, British-American grammatical differences, construction grammar, the lexical basis of grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Variable article use and construction grammar
      • 2.1.1Construction grammar and regional variation
      • 2.1.2Construction grammar and semantics: One construction or two?
      • 2.1.3Construction grammar and lexical variation
    • 2.2Article use and category gradience
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1Data retrieval and post-editing
    • 3.2Semantics
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Raw frequencies and proportions
      • 4.1.1Semantics
      • 4.1.2Cross-tabulations
    • 4.2Multivariate analysis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.246.05hun
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