What does Left Dislocation Syntactically Comprise? Evidence from Late Modern English

[Abstract] As part of a major project on left dislocation in the recent history of the English language, this paper aims at defining the Left Dislocation phenomenon taking data from a late Modern English corpus as a point of departure. Given that the label LD has not been uniformly applied to the same periphery phenomena across the board in the specialized literature, it is crucial to make clear what I understand and label as LD in order to continue on with functional and pragmatic analyses in my future research. Furthermore, the aim of this paper is to point out several grammatical features (both syntactic and semantic) which have an effect on the conception of the examples retrieved as more or less prototypical examples of LD, or as non-LD. I base this investigation on data taken from two electronic collections containing literary texts from the Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a previous selection of texts, a corpus of over six hundred thousand words was gathered for each century, adding up to an overall corpus of more than one million two hundred words. All LD tokens here presented have been retrieved through manual search

Variables are valuable: making a case for deductive modeling

Abstract Following the quantitative turn in linguistics, the field appears to be in a methodological “wild west” state where much is possible and new frontiers are being explored, but there is relatively little guidance in terms of firm rules or conventions. In this article, we focus on the issue of variable selection in regression modeling. It is common to aim for a “minimal adequate model” and eliminate “non-significant” variables by statistical procedures. We advocate an alternative, “deductive modeling” approach that retains a “full” model of variables generated from our research questions and objectives. Comparing the statistical model to a camera, i.e., a tool to produce an image of reality, we contrast the deductive and predictive (minimal) modeling approaches on a dataset from a corpus study. While a minimal adequate model is more parsimonious, its selection procedure is blind to the research aim and may conceal relevant information. Deductive models, by contrast, are grounded in theory, have higher transparency (all relevant variables are reported) and potentially a greater accuracy of the reported effects. They are useful for answering research questions more directly, as they rely explicitly on prior knowledge and hypotheses, and allow for estimation and comparison across datasets.Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C2021/52Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PID2020-118143GA-I0

'These hands, they are apt enough to dislocate and tear thy flesh' : On left dislocation in the recent history of the english language

As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight