Why DO dove: Evidence for register variation in Early Modern English negatives

The development of “supportive” (or “periphrastic”) DO in English suffered a curious and sharp reversal late in the 16th century in negative declaratives and questions according to Ellegård's (1953) database, with a recovery late in the following century. This article examines the variation between DO and the full verb in negative declaratives in this database, from 1500 to 1710. It is shown that both register variation and age-grading are relevant, and that the periods 1500–1575 and 1600–1710 have radically distinct properties. The second period shows substantial age-grading, and is interpreted as having introduced a fresh evaluative principle governing register variation. Negative questions supply data that suggest that the development of clitic negation may have been implicated in the development of the new evaluation. This change in evaluation accounts for the apparent reversal in the development of DO, and we can abandon the view that it was a consequence of grammatical restructuring

The Bracketing Guidelines for the Penn Chinese Treebank (3.0)

This document describes the bracketing guidelines for the Penn Chinese Treebank Project. The goal of the project is the creation of a 100-thousand-word corpus of Mandarin Chinese text with syntactic bracketing. The Chinese Treebank has been released via the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and is available to the public. This document can be divided into six parts. Section I discusses six fundamental grammatical relations that are represented in the Treebank. Section II introduces the bracketing tagset, which includes 23 syntactic labels, 26 functional tags, and 7 tags for null elements. Section III, IV and V specify our annotation schemata for noun phrases, verbs phrases, and other minor categories, respectively. Section VI describes our treatment for empty categories, such as trace for syntactic movement, PRO for control, and pro for argument drop. Section VII and VIII cover the coordinated clauses and subordinating clauses. Section IX, X and XI specify the way we handle punctuation, ambiguity, and some problematic cases

Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1 Anthony Kroch Dialect and Style ....

Introduction This paper reports a study of the speech of a local prestige community, the upper class of metropolitan Philadelphia, that I carried out in 1977 and 1978 under an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship. My informants were primarily older speakers of the upper class community, who at that date retained a characteristic speech style distinct from that of other Philadelphians. The work was conducted to complement an extensive investigation of the Philadelphia speech community, the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation (LCV), that William Labov and his collaborators were then engaged in (Labov 1980, 1981, 1984, 1989, 1990). The results of my study were made available to the LCV project and have circulated informally in the years since it was completed, but they have never been published separately. I selected the upper class as a target for investigation in order to answer two questions. The first was whether there is a social class boundary beyond which the characteristi