Chapter published in:
Explorations in English Historical Syntax
Edited by Hubert Cuyckens, Hendrik De Smet, Liesbet Heyvaert and Charlotte Maekelberghe
[Studies in Language Companion Series 198] 2018
► pp. 179–202

Free adjuncts in Late Modern English

A corpus-based study

| University of Vigo
The present paper focuses on the English free adjunct construction in Late Modern English based on data from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE1). Data from this analysis will be compared to information available in existing studies on Early Modern and Present-day English. The findings based on my own data analysis and the data in earlier studies confirm a decrease in the frequency of the free adjunct construction from EModE to LModE and an stabilization from LModE to PDE. Verbal free adjuncts show an increasing preference for present-participial forms and they tend to be placed in final position. Semantically, most verbal free adjuncts are controlled by the subjects of the main clauses and their semantic contribution to the sentence is, in Kortmann’s (1991: 121) terms, “most informative”. Finally, free adjuncts are typically not augmented.
Keywords: free adjuncts, adverbial, dependency, control
Published online: 13 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.198.08bou
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