XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

The American linguist Douglas Biber received his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Southern California in 1984. With others, D. Biber is the author of Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English and Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. The main areas of Biber’s research are corpus linguistics, English grammar, a corpus-based approach to English, register, genre, and style, etc.

Grammatical change in the noun phrase

In the article “Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use” D. Biber and his colleague Bethany Gray dwell on how grammatical change is implemented in real language use. They focus on noun phrase constructions in English. D. Biber and B. Gray document extensions in grammatical variants, lexical associations, grammatical and semantic functions.They believe that these functional extensions have arisen from the communicative requirements of written discourse. They surveyed the historical patterns of use for five phrasal devices: nominalizations, attributive adjectives, appositive noun phrases, nouns as nominal premodifiers and prepositional phrases. They used corpora for their research.

They have come to the certain conclusion. D. Biber and B. Gray proved that these patterns have become ‘written’ grammatical characteristics over the past two centuries. However, at the same time, they remained rare in colloquial conversational discourse. The grammatical features have extended in their grammatical variants, lexical associations, and meanings. These extensions have all emerged in informational writing, associated with the communicative demands of the register. New grammatical uses and functions can emerge in any register.

Register differences

In Biber’s article “Register as a predictor of linguistic variation, emphasizes the importance of register differences at all linguistic levels. He first distinguishes between two major approaches to the study of linguistic variation and use. They are variationist and text-linguistic. Variationist studies differ in their linguistic focus and in the statistical techniques that they employ. However, all variationist studies share certain characteristics. The research goal is to describe a linguistic feature, rather than the characteristics of texts. Each occurrence of the target linguistic feature contains an observation in the research design. The quantitative findings represent proportional preference for one linguistic variant in comparison to other variants. The text-linguistic approach describes language use from the perspective of a normal reader of a text. The description of the passive voice verbs illustrates this difference. From the point of view of variationists, verbs like to be concerned, to be involved are especially associated with the passive voice in speech. When one of these verbs is used in colloquial discourse, it is most likely a passive rather than an active voice verb.

The text-linguistic approach offers a completely different perspective. Most of these verbs are simply not found in spoken texts. Thus, the conversation participant will rarely encounter these verbs in the text, whether in the active or passive voice. However, there are other verbs that are often found with the passive voice in conversation, such as to be called, to be put. These verbs occur most of the time as active voice verbs, so they are not associated with the passive from a variationist perspective. However, the conversation participant will encounter these passive forms much more often than proportionally-preferred verbs that like to be repressed.

Semantic classification of verbs

We go further to another topic. It is a well-known fact that many verbs have more than one meaning. Nevertheless, D. Biber and his co-authors find it possible to classify verbs into seven major semantic domains: activity verbs, communication verbs, mental verbs, causative verbs, occurrence verbs and aspectual ones.

Activity verbs primarily denote actions and events that could be associated with choice. They take a subject with the semantic role of agent, e.g.: to bring, to buy, to carry, etc. Here are some examples: I bought this car from Chris; we went to France for our holidays. Communication verbs involve communication activities relating to such processes as speaking and writing, e.g. to ask, to announce, to call, to shout, etc.

Mental verbs denote a wide range of activities and states experienced by humans. They do not involve physical action and do not necessarily entail volition. Their subject often has the semantic role of recipient. They include both cognitive meanings (e.g. to think, to know, etc.) and emotional meanings expressing various attitudes or desires (e.g. love, want, etc.), together with perception (e.g. to see, to taste, etc.) and receipt of communication (e.g. to read, to hear, etc.).

Causative verbs indicate that some person or inanimate entity brings about a new state of affairs, for example, to allow, to cause, to enable, to force, etc. Occurrence verbs report events (typically physical events) that occur apart from any volitional activities. They include such verbs as to become, to change, to happen, to develop, to occur, etc. Existence verbs report a state that exists between entities, e.g. to be, to contain, to include, to seem, to appear, to involve. Aspectual verbs, such as to begin, to finish, to keep, to continue, to start; characterize the stage of progress of some other event or activity.

Corpus linguistics and the study of English Grammar

In the article “Corpus linguistics and the study of English Grammar” D. Biber describes how corpus analysis can be used to learn English grammar. He considers lexico-grammatical and register factors influencing the use of valency patterns.

It turns out that there are often complex interactions between word sets and grammatical variations. Such lexico-grammatical associations tend to function well below the level of conscious awareness, yet they are highly systematic and important patterns of usage. In this section, Biber illustrates these associations by comparing the valency patterns for the verbs to stand and to begin. Many verbs take only one valency pattern. For example, to wait, to happen, to exist occur only as intransitive verbs, while verbs like to bring, to carry, to offer, and to find occur only as transitive verbs. However, there are many other verbs that can occur with multiple valency patterns, such as to try, to help, to eat, to change, etc.

The verbs to stand, to begin have exactly the same potential to occur with multiple valency patterns. A traditional grammatical description would simply note that these two verbs occur with the same four valency patterns. However, corpus analysis opens up the possibility of using a point of view on such points of grammar. In fact, it turns out that the two verbs stand and begin have strikingly different preferred valency patterns, despite their identical valency potentials.

He has illustrated highly systematic patterns that structure our everyday use of linguistic features in speech and writing. He has documented a related type of pattern: linguistic patterns of coexistence that make up the dimensions of variation between spoken and written registers. Both types of patterns operate below the level of conscious awareness and are usually inaccessible to innate intuition. However, as the analysis above shows, these are extremely powerful patterns that correspond to the main differences between word sets, grammatical variants, lexical-grammatical associations, and registers.

Awareness of these usage patterns is obviously important for both teachers and students. This does not mean that frequency information can be mechanically translated into training and evaluation materials. For example, an additional consideration is the ease or difficulty of learning for specific functions. However, this is also the case when we can no longer afford to ignore the typical usage patterns revealed by quantitative corpus analysis. Instead, we can look forward to important achievements for students as we begin to develop materials that reflect the actual usage patterns of specific registers.

List of references:

D. Biber and B. Gray, Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use; English Language and Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 225, 247-248.

Biber D., Conrad S., Leech G., Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow, 2002

D. Biber, art. “Register as a predictor of linguistic variation”

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151422043.pdf

D. Biber, art. “Corpus linguistics and the study of English Grammar”

http://ojs.atmajaya.ac.id/index.php/ijelt/article/view/93

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