Transitive Structures with Generic or Indefinite Object-Arguments in English as Functionally Antipassive Constructions
Nicolas, Aline
Promotor(s) : Van linden, An
Date of defense : 26-Aug-2019/6-Sep-2019 • Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2268.2/7946
Details
Title : | Transitive Structures with Generic or Indefinite Object-Arguments in English as Functionally Antipassive Constructions |
Author : | Nicolas, Aline |
Date of defense : | 26-Aug-2019/6-Sep-2019 |
Advisor(s) : | Van linden, An |
Committee's member(s) : | Brems, Lieselotte
Perrez, Julien |
Language : | English |
Keywords : | [en] English linguistics, [en] transitivity [en] discourse [en] antipassive constructions |
Discipline(s) : | Arts & humanities > Languages & linguistics |
Institution(s) : | Université de Liège, Liège, Belgique |
Degree: | Master en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité didactique |
Faculty: | Master thesis of the Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres |
Abstract
[en] This research paper is concerned with Hopper & Thompson’s conceptual redefinition of transitivity in Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse (1980) in which they reject the dichotomous nature of transitivity and claim that it should be seen as a scalar notion so that structures are ranked as more or less transitive. It concentrates on transitive structures that contain generic or indefinite object-arguments in Present-day English. A corpus study of 1200 analysed instances was carried out to analyse 'people' and 'stuff' as generic, plural and uncount nouns and 'someone', 'anyone', 'somebody', 'anybody', 'something', 'anything' as indefinite pronouns, occurring in object position. The aims of this corpus study are: a) to investigate to what extent these show reduced transitivity and backgrounded discourse status in the sense of Hopper and Thompson (1980), and b) to show that constructions containing such generic or indefinite object-arguments exhibit characteristics of object demotion and support the emergence of functionally antipassive constructions in Present-Day English.
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