ABSTRACT

English elemental ordering in a non-canonical word order incorporates preposing, postposing and elemental reversal. This paper intends to explore how these types of elemental ordering are distributed during the last two centuries by employing the Corpus of Historical American English or COHA. The findings demonstrate that preposing has been increasing apparently but still in its inceptive phase; postposing, subsuming existential there and presentational there, generally keeps plateauing with existential there dominating presentational there; and elemental reversal experiences a trend of gradual decreasing, which is attributed to the dominance in occurrences of passive with a by phrase construction over those of inversion. This research provides us with a corpus linguistic insight of exploring elemental ordering, which distinguishes itself from other researches focusing on information status.

摘要

非规范词序中的英语元素排序包含前置、后置和元素反转。本文旨在通过使用美国历史英语或 COHA 语料库来探索这些类型的元素排序在过去两个世纪中是如何分布的。研究结果表明，前置条件明显增加，但仍处于起步阶段；后置，包含那里的存在主义和那里的表象，通常保持平稳，那里的存在主义主导那里的表象；和元素反转经历逐渐减少的趋势，这归因于被动的出现占主导地位短语结构优于倒置。这项研究为我们提供了探索元素排序的语料库语言洞察力，这与其他专注于信息状态的研究不同。