Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T02:13:00.188Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Relative complexity in scientific discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2012

MARIANNE HUNDT ,
DAVID DENISON  and
GEROLD SCHNEIDER
MARIANNE HUNDT
Affiliation:
Englisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zürich, Switzerlandm.hundt@es.uzh.ch, gerold.schneider@es.uzh.ch
DAVID DENISON
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UKdavid.denison@manchester.ac.uk
GEROLD SCHNEIDER
Affiliation:
Englisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zürich, Switzerlandm.hundt@es.uzh.ch, gerold.schneider@es.uzh.ch
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Variation and change in relativization strategies are well documented. Previous studies have looked at issues such as (a) relativizer choice with respect to the semantics of the antecedent and type of relative, (b) prescriptive traditions, (c) variation across text types and regional varieties, and (d) the role that relative clauses play in the organization of information within the noun phrase.

In this article, our focus is on scientific writing in British and American English. The addition of American scientific texts to the ARCHER corpus gives us the opportunity to compare scientific discourse in the two national varieties of English over the whole Late Modern period. Furthermore, ARCHER has been parsed, and this kind of syntactic annotation facilitates the retrieval of information that was previously difficult to obtain. We take advantage of new data and annotation to investigate two largely unrelated topics: relativizer choice and textual organization within the NP.

First, parsing facilitates easy retrieval of relative clauses which were previously difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora by automatic means, namely that- and zero relatives. We study the diachronic change in relativizer choice in British and American scientific writing over the last three hundred years; we also test for the accuracy of the automatically retrieved data. In addition, we trace the development of the prescriptive aversion to which in restrictive relatives (largely peculiar to American English).

Second, the parsed data allow us to investigate development in the structure of the NP in this genre, including not only phrasal but also clausal modification of the head noun. We examine the contribution of relative clauses to NP complexity, sentence length and structure. Structural changes within the NP, we argue, are related to the increased professionalization of the scientific publication process.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 16 , Issue 2: Selected papers from the Fourth International Conference on Late Modern English , July 2012 , pp. 209 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, Dwight. 1996. The ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London’, 1675–1975: A sociohistorical discourse analysis. Language in Society 25, 333–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, Dwight. 1999. Scientific discourse in sociohistorical context: ‘The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London’, 1675–1975. London and Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bain, Alexander. 1863. An English grammar. London.Google Scholar
Ball, Catherine N. 1994. Automated text analysis: Cautionary tales. Literary and Linguistic Computing 9, 295–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, Catherine N. 1996. A diachronic study of relative markers in spoken and written English. Language Variation and Change 8, 227–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banks, David. 2008. The development of scientific writing: Linguistic features and historical context (Discussions in Functional Approaches to Language). London and Oakville, CT: Equinox.Google Scholar
Barber, Charles. 1997. Early Modern English, 2nd edn.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Clark, Victoria. 2002. Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures. In Fanego, Teresa, López-Couso, María José & Pérez-Guerra, Javier (eds.), English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 223), 43–66. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Conrad, Susan. 2009. Register, genre, and style (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2011. Grammatical change in the noun phrase: The influence of written language use. English Language and Linguistics 15 (2), 223–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Grieve, Jack & Iberri-Shea, Gina. 2009. Noun phrase modification. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English (Studies in English Language), 182–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Pearson.Google Scholar
Bisang, Walter. 2009. On the evolution of complexity – sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia. In Sampson, Geoffrey, Gil, David & Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Language complexity as an evolving variable (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language 13), 34–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cobbett, William. 1823. A grammar of the English language, in a series of letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Repr. in facsimile, 1984.Google Scholar
Crystal, David. 2003. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 5th edn.Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Dekeyser, Xavier. 1984. Relativizers in Early Modern English: A dynamic quantitative study. In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.), Historical syntax, 61–87. Paris and The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denison, David & Hundt, Marianne. Submitted. Defining relatives.Google Scholar
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2000. The Spectator, the politics of social networks, and language standardisation in eighteenth-century England. In Wright, Laura (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800, 195–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, H. W. 1926. A dictionary of Modern English usage. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Garner, Bryan A. 2003. Garner's modern American usage, 2nd edn.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Geisler, Christer & Johansson, Christine. 2002. Relativization in formal spoken American English. In Modiano, Marko (ed.), Studies in Mid-Atlantic English (HS-institutionens skriftserie), 87–109. Gävle: Högskolan i Gävle.Google Scholar
Gilman, E. Ward (ed.) 1994. Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English usage: The complete guide to problems of confused or disputed usage. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy & Shibatani, Masayoshi (eds.). 2009. Syntactic complexity: Diachrony, ontogeny, neuro-cognition, evolution (Typological Studies in Language 85). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gotti, Maurizio. 2003. Specialized discourse: Linguistic features and changing conventions. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Grijzenhout, Janet. 1992. The change of relative that to who and which in late seventeenth-century comedies. NOWELE 20, 33–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gut, Ulrike & Coronel, Lilian. 2012. Relatives worldwide. In Hundt, Marianne & Gut, Ulrike (eds.), Mapping unity and diversity world-wide: Corpus-based studies of new Englishes, 215–41. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, Pullum, Geoffrey K. & Peterson, Peter. 2002. Relative constructions and unbounded dependencies. In Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. et al. , The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 1031–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 2011. Relatives in scientific English: Variation across time and space. Paper presented at CLAVIER 11 conference: Tracking Language Change in Specialised and Professional Genres, Modena.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, Denison, David & Schneider, Gerold. 2012. Retrieving relatives from historical data. Literary and Linguistic Computing 27 (1), 3–16.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Leech, Geoffrey. 2012. Small is beautiful: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Traugott, Elizabeth (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 175–88. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johansson, Christine. 2006. Relativizers in nineteenth-century English. In Kytö, Merja, Rydén, Mats & Smitterberg, Erik (eds.), Nineteenth-century English: Stability and change (Studies in English Language), 136–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. 1984. Der Relativsatz (Language Universals 3). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Michael. 1989. The standardization of English relative clauses. In Trahern, Joseph B. Jr (ed.), Standardizing English: Essays in the history of language change: In honor of John Hurt Fisher (Tennessee Studies in Literature 31), 113–38. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Morris, Richard. 1895. Historical outlines of English accidence, 2nd edn.London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax, vol. 1: Parts of speech (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 23). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2002. The rise of who in Early Modern English. In Poussa, Patricia (ed.), Relativization on the North Sea littoral, 109–21. Munich: LINCOM Europa.Google Scholar
Pérez Guerra, Javier & Insua, Ana E. Martínez. 2010a. Do some genres or text types become more complex than others? In Dorgeloh, Heidrun & Wanner, Anja (eds.), Syntactic variation and genre, 111–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Pérez Guerra, Javier & Insua, Ana E. Martínez. 2010b. Enlarging noun phrases little by little: On structural complexity and modification in the history of English. In Sánchez, Aquilino & Almela, Moisés (eds.), A mosaic of corpus linguistics: Selected approaches, 193–210. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Peters, Pam. 2004. The Cambridge guide to English usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 1984. The choice of relative pronouns in 17th century American English. In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.), Historical syntax, 417–35. Paris and The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne. 1980. The relative clause marker in Scots English: Diffusion, complexity, and style as dimensions of syntactic change. Language in Society 9, 221–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rydén, M. 1984. När är en relativsats ‘nödvändig’? Moderna Språk 78, 19–22.Google Scholar
Schneider, Gerold. 2008. Hybrid long-distance functional dependency parsing. PhD dissertation, University of Zürich.Google Scholar
Sigley, Robert. 1997. Choosing your relatives: Relative clauses in New Zealand English. PhD dissertation, Victoria University.Google Scholar
Strunk, William Jr & White, E. B.. 1999. The elements of style, 4th edn.London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Taggart, Caroline & Wines, J. A.. 2008. My grammar and I (or should that be ‘me’?). London: Michael O'Mara Books.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2002. Variation and change in the British relative marker system. In Poussa, Patricia (ed.), Relativization on the North Sea littoral, 147–65. Munich: LINCOM Europa.Google Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel. 1997a. Literacy and prescriptivism as determinants of linguistic change: A case study based on relativization strategies. In Böker, Uwe & Sauer, Hans (eds.), Anglistentag 1996, Dresden: Proceedings, 83–93. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.Google Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel. 1997b. Overseas relatives: British-American differences in relative marker usage. In Aarts, Jan, Mönnink, Inge de & Wekker, Herman (eds.), Studies in English language research and teaching: In honor of Flor Aarts, 153–65. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yáñez Bouza, Nuria. 2011. ARCHER past and present (1990–2010). ICAME Journal 35, 205–36.Google Scholar