2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Grammaticalization and Pragmaticization of Discourse Markers with Electronic Corpora
| Project/Area Number |
16520296
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Tottori University |
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Principal Investigator |
FUKUMOTO Hiroji Tottori University, Faculty of Regional Sciences, Associate Professor, 地域学部, 助教授 (60273877)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | Grammaticalization / Discourse Marker / Corpus / Early Modern English |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to examine from the viewpoints of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization how discourse markers have developed in the history of the English language. In order to analyze this, I used three electronic corpora : Shakespeare Corpus, Helsinki Corpus, and Drama Corpus.
First, I investigated the collocation of the first person personal pronoun with verbs of saying. I concluded that grammaticalization occurs often when the construction occurred medially and finally in the sentence from a syntactic viewpoint, and when it appeared with an interrogative sentence and an imperative sentence.
In addition, I dealt with the idiomatic expressions look you and I pray you. As a result, it became clear that look is followed by the pronoun you overwhelmingly and the bleaching of the meaning in this construction had already occurred at that time. Therefore, I found many examples which are functioning as a discourse marker. Besides, it turned out that the fixed expression I pray you is used almost parenthetically in the beginning of a sentence like a sentence adverb even in Early Modern English.
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Research Products
(12 results)
