This article surveys possible factors affecting particle alternation in British English between 1650 and 1990. When particle verbs are transitive, the speaker is presented with two possible choices: ...verb-particle-object (VPO) or verb-object-particle (VOP). Research has shown that there are a number of phonological, morphological, semantic and discourse-functional variables which may affect the speaker’s choice. The present article focuses on the influence of six morpho-syntactic variables, namely the noun phrase (NP) type of the direct object (DO), the length of the object, the complexity of the DO, the presence of a directional prepositional phrase (PPdir), the type of determiner of the object NP and the type of particle. The data show that, although the VPO order tends to be the predominant one, some of these variables can determine the type of arrangement selected by the speaker. The results are also compared with previous research on Middle English, Early Modern English and Present-day English, showing that the tendencies observed have changed over time.
The aim of this article is to provide a first overview on several syntactic elicitation techniques used by dialectologists and sociolinguists and to evaluate them from a generative perspective. Both ...oral and written techniques will be taken into account and analysed according to the sociolinguistic situation. In addition, basic problems like the choice of subject, the language used for the interaction will be addressed and discussed on the basis of two syntactic Atlases, the Dutch
SAND and the Italian
ASIS.
In this study of serious verse drama (tragedies and history plays) by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, language is seen as a resource for ...achieving immediacy or distance, situating the play either in a contemporary socio-political framework or else in a national-historical past. The empirical basis for this claim lies in a study of archaic versus innovative syntactic constructions. It is shown that in the early 1590s Shakespeare and his contemporaries made very frequent use of verb-second in declaratives, and tended to avoid do-support in interrogatives. In early Jacobean serious drama, however, "verb-second" had almost disappeared and do-support rose to around 50% of interrogative contexts. Whereas in the earlier period an archaic effect was created by retaining Middle English constructions that ordinary usage had by now either abandoned, or was in the process of doing so, the language of Jacobean serious drama aligned itself on the respective ambient linguistic norms. It is argued that these syntactic preferences conveyed a stylistic effect suitable for representing distance and/or alterity, either with respect to the past or to a foreign context: both perspectives involved late Elizabethan national identity concerns. Conversely, the adoption of contemporary linguistic norms in Jacobean high drama achieved an effect of proximity, facilitating "here-and-now" allusiveness to contemporary themes, especially those of court intrigue and cynical acquisitive materialism.
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