Traditional prescriptive grammar for English states that the epicene or gender neutral pronoun for third person singular use is he. Research into speaker perceptions has clearly demonstrated that he is not perceived as neutral. Research has also shown traditionally proscribed epicene pronouns such as he or she and singular they to be commonly used, despite the long-standing proscriptions against them. The author examines the endurance of such proscribed options through the lens of markedness theory, considering the impact of cultural values on speakers' epicene pronoun choices. Gender in language is also considered, as well as Kuryłowicz‘s 4th Law of Analogy as a means for understanding patterns of language change. Second person pronoun change is considered as a model for understanding third person pronoun changes currently underway in Modern American English. The author conducts and reports on a corpus study designed to assess the current usage of three epicene pronouns in Modern American English, namely he or she and its variant she or he; one; and singular they. The results of the study are considered in terms of medium, spoken or written, and register, colloquial, standard, or formal. The study suggests that they is generally the preferred epicene pronoun, particularly in spoken language, but that one is the preferred epicene pronoun for formal writing.

<p>There are mainly two ways of comparing adjectives in English: the analytic and the synthetic. The analytic way is to use more and most (for example difficult, more difficult, most difficult). The synthetic, or inflectional, way is to add the endings –er and –est (for instance fast, faster, fastest). During the last twelve centuries the way of forming comparisons in English has evolved from predominately synthetic to the point where both inflections and analytic forms are used. Today many adjectives are almost always compared either synthetically or analytically (e.g. fast and difficult respectively), but sometimes we have two alternatives; for example, we can choose between more polite and politer. The author has three aims with this paper: firstly, to examine how adjectives in English are compared today; secondly, to determine how well the descriptions in modern grammars agree with authentic written English; thirdly, to see whether there have been any recent changes in the way of indicating comparison. This is a quantitative study. A corpus investigation was undertaken: some one hundred common adjectives in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, from 1990–91 and 2005 that vary in their way of expressing comparison were studied. The results were compared with six grammars from the last five decades. After the data collection, the chi square test was applied, showing how statistically significant the changes between 1990–91 and 2005 are. Judging from the data in this study, the synthetic comparison seems to be becoming less common. The author also concludes that the comparison of adjectives in contemporary British English varies considerably.</p>

L'expression « mouvement fictif »' désigne l'utilisation de verbes dits de mouvement ou de déplacement pour décrire une configuration spatiale statique. Ce sujet n'a jusqu'ici pas été traité de manière systématique à partir de données attestées, et son étude s'est généralement limitée au niveau phrastique. En nous appuyant sur les listes de verbes du Lexique-Grammaire, sur la base textuelle Frantext ainsi que sur le cadre théorique concernant la sémantique des verbes de mouvement développé par Aurnague (2011b), nous avons dégagé pratiquement 600 occurrences de mouvement fictif en discours, et ceci afin de comprendre les mécanismes et les motivations de ce type de construction.Bien loin des explications habituellement proposées en termes d'opposition entre Path et Manner, de forme de l'entité et de contraintes bloquant parfois la production d'énoncés de ce type, nos résultats pointent l'importance du Mode de discours, montrent l'utilité de l'adoption d'une sémantique de l'espace dépassant la simple géométrie et plaident pour une approche privilégiant la structure, la configuration de plusieurs entités.Par ailleurs, cette thèse propose une classification qui se veut complète des verbes de mouvement/déplacement du français mobilisant les notions de changement d'emplacement et de relation locative élémentaire, ainsi qu'un corpus d'exemples conséquent constituant une base de travail pour la communauté des linguistes.Au-delà des approfondissements que nous effectuerons, cette étude ouvre la voie à une nouvelle manière de considérer les emplois dits "figurés" des verbes de mouvement. / The term “fictive motion” refers to the uses of verbs of motion which describe a static space configuration. This topic has thus far not been addressed systematically on empirical data, and its study was restricted to the sentence level. Basing our work on the verb lists of the Lexique-Grammaire, on the Frantext database, and on the theoretical framework proposed by Aurnague (2011b) on the semantics of motion verbs, I have extracted up to 600 instances of verb use coded as fictive motion, in discourse, in order to understand the mechanisms and motivations of such constructions.This thesis attempts to go beyond proposed distinctions between Path and Manner, or explanations based on the shape of entities, or even constraints blocking fictive motion uses. Our results highlight the importance of the Mode of discourse, stress the need for a framework in space semantics which relies on functional properties, rather than plain geometry, and advocates an approach based on the structure and the configuration between several entities.Besides, this thesis provides a classification, intended to be complete, of motion verbs in French, which elaborates on the notions of change of location and basic locative relation ; it also makes available a significant corpus of « fictive motion » verb uses for further linguistic studies.This thesis introduces several in-depth studies and paves the way for a new understanding of the ''figurative'' use of motion verbs.

English has an extraordinary number of labile verbs, that is, verbs that can be used both transitively with a causative sense and intransitively with an inchoative sense. This corpus-based study investigates the evolution of the verb grow from exclusively intransitive to labile in British English in the Late Modern English period. A random sample of 500 instances of the verb grow was drawn from the period 1710-1780 as well as from the period 1850-1920 of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts in order to track diachronic changes. The instances in the samples were categorized according to their verb pattern and type of complement (if any), and instances of the past participle grown were also categorized based on the auxiliary used (be/have/none). The study suggests that grow came to be used transitively when resultative intransitive constructions (e.g. be grown (over)) were reanalyzed as passives; that the use of noun phrase complements with copular grow decreased and became archaic to make the distinction between copular and transitive uses less ambiguous; and that the fact that the be-auxiliary was replaced by the have-auxiliary in perfect constructions helped avoid ambiguity between intransitive and transitive uses of grow. Thus, the study provides some empirical evidence for Visser's (1963) hypothesis that the change from be- to have-perfects played a central role in the acquisition of lability.

This essay studies the written performance of 43 Swedish junior high school students. Relative clauses, prepositional usage and subject-verb agreement are studied and analysed in order to see what and how many errors the students make and then finally to see if there is any difference in the performance of boys and girls. Previous research in the area has shown an advantage in favour of girls and this study confirmed this. Even though the differences were not marked, the girls performed better than the boys in the majority of the cases studied. The data further indicated that there is great variation within the gender groups as well as between them.

<p>This study examines to what extent preposition stranding is used in connection with which, whom and who in three different UK papers. Also what factors influence the use of preposition stranding has been studied. The hypothesis that pied-piping is more common than preposition stranding has been confirmed.</p><p>A factor that has a certain influence on the use of preposition stranding is the style of the paper. The more formal of the papers studied, The Times, did not use preposition stranding to the same extent as the other two, The Sun and Today.</p><p>The subject domain of the texts has influence on the use of preposition stranding, with more informal domains such as sports and miscellaneous (e.g. gossip) using stranding to a higher extent than the other domains, e.g. business, politics and culture. The prepositions themselves also influence the use of preposition stranding with some prepositions, such as on, with, for and into, that are likely to appear stranded and others, such as in that are likely to appear pied-piped.</p>

<p>This corpus study discusses the subjunctive construction in mandative sentences in East</p><p>African and Indian English. Data taken from the East African ICE-EA corpus and the Indian</p><p>Kolhapur corpus are compared to previous studies about American English and British</p><p>English, mainly by Hundt (1998) and Johansson & Norheim (1988). Subjunctive, indicative</p><p>and modal periphrastic constructions are identified and examined.</p><p>The conclusion of this study is that the subjunctive construction in mandative sentences is</p><p>more common in Indian and East African English than in British English.</p>

There are mainly two ways of comparing adjectives in English: the analytic and the synthetic. The analytic way is to use more and most (for example difficult, more difficult, most difficult). The synthetic, or inflectional, way is to add the endings –er and –est (for instance fast, faster, fastest). During the last twelve centuries the way of forming comparisons in English has evolved from predominately synthetic to the point where both inflections and analytic forms are used. Today many adjectives are almost always compared either synthetically or analytically (e.g. fast and difficult respectively), but sometimes we have two alternatives; for example, we can choose between more polite and politer. The author has three aims with this paper: firstly, to examine how adjectives in English are compared today; secondly, to determine how well the descriptions in modern grammars agree with authentic written English; thirdly, to see whether there have been any recent changes in the way of indicating comparison. This is a quantitative study. A corpus investigation was undertaken: some one hundred common adjectives in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, from 1990–91 and 2005 that vary in their way of expressing comparison were studied. The results were compared with six grammars from the last five decades. After the data collection, the chi square test was applied, showing how statistically significant the changes between 1990–91 and 2005 are. Judging from the data in this study, the synthetic comparison seems to be becoming less common. The author also concludes that the comparison of adjectives in contemporary British English varies considerably.

This study examines to what extent preposition stranding is used in connection with which, whom and who in three different UK papers. Also what factors influence the use of preposition stranding has been studied. The hypothesis that pied-piping is more common than preposition stranding has been confirmed. A factor that has a certain influence on the use of preposition stranding is the style of the paper. The more formal of the papers studied, The Times, did not use preposition stranding to the same extent as the other two, The Sun and Today. The subject domain of the texts has influence on the use of preposition stranding, with more informal domains such as sports and miscellaneous (e.g. gossip) using stranding to a higher extent than the other domains, e.g. business, politics and culture. The prepositions themselves also influence the use of preposition stranding with some prepositions, such as on, with, for and into, that are likely to appear stranded and others, such as in that are likely to appear pied-piped.

This corpus-based study investigates the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs collocated with the Japanese syntactic compound verb -kiru and aims to establish how the prepositional verb affects the semantic meaning of the verb-kiru construct. The study uses sketchengine’s online database, “Japanese Web2011”, which contains around 8 billion Japanese terms collected from the internet from various online sources from 2011 and onwards. From my results I was able to establish the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs in a -kiru construct from the database, and through a concordance analysis I was able to identify three semantic meanings incurred by the syntactic compound verb -kiru: the semantic meaning of completion, the dual semantic meaning of completion and extremity and the semantic meaning of extremity. Further analysis showed that the semantic meaning of extremity exists in the deep structure of the sentence and when transformed to the surface structure the semantic meaning shifts to that of completion.