Masked by annotation: Minor declarative complementizers in parsed corpora of historical English
Abstract
This article discusses some of the potential problems derived from the syntactic annotation of historical corpora, especially in connection with low-frequency phenomena. By way of illustration, we examine the parsing scheme used in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCHE) for clauses introduced by so-called ‘minor declarative complementizers’, originally adverbial links which come to be occasionally used in complementizer function. We show that the functional similarities between canonical declarative complement clauses introduced by the major declarative links that and zero and those headed by minor declarative complementizers are not captured by the PPCHE parsing, where the latter constructions are not tagged as complement clauses, but rather as adverbial clauses. The examples discussed reveal that, despite the obvious advantages of parsed corpora, annotation may sometimes mask interesting linguistic facts.
Downloads
Metrics
References
ARCHER-2 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version 2. 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013/2016. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California; modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities are Bamberg, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, Zurich.
Bender, Emily and Dan Flickinger. 1999. Diachronic evidence for extended argument structure. In Gosse Bouma, Erhard Hinrichs, Geert-Jan M. Kruijff and Richard Oehrle eds. Constraints and Resources in Natural Language Syntax and Semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1–19.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Brinton, Laurel. 2014. The extremes of insubordination: Exclamatory as if! Journal of English Linguistics 42/2: 93–113.
Brook, Marisa. 2014. Comparative complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from early fiction. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20/2, Article 2.
Brook, Marisa. 2018. Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change. Language Variation and Change 30/2: 231–260.
Brown Corpus = A Standard Corpus of Present-day Edited American English, for use with Digital Computers (Brown). 1964, 1971, 1979. Compiled by W. N. Francis and H. Kučera. Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island. http://icame.uib.no/brown/bcm.html
Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser. 2005. Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 520 million words, 1990-present. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.
Dirven, René. 1989. A cognitive perspective on complementation. In Dany Jaspers, Yvan Putseys, Wim Klooster and Pieter Seuren eds. Sentential Complementation and the Lexicon: Studies in Honour of Wim de Geest. Dordrecht: Foris, 113–139.
Elsness, Johan. 1982. That v. zero connective in English nominal clauses. ICAME News 6: 1–45.
Elsness, Johan. 1984. That or zero? A look at the choice of object clause connective in a corpus of American English. English Studies 65: 519–533.
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In Irina Nikolaeva ed. Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 366–431.
Fanego, Teresa. 1990. Finite complement clauses in Shakespeare’s English I & II. Studia Neophilologica 62: 3–21; 129–149.
Finegan, Edward and Douglas Biber. 1995. That and zero complementisers in Late Modern English: Exploring ARCHER from 1650–1990. In Bas Aarts and Charles F. Meyer eds. The Verb in Contemporary English: Theory and Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 241–257.
HC = Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. http://www.ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/1477
Heine, Bernd. 2002. On the role of context in grammaticalization. In Ilse Wischer and Gabriele Diewald eds. New Reflections on Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 83–101.
Huddleston, Rodney. 1971. The Sentence in Written English: A Syntactic Study Based on an Analysis of Scientific Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2006. …That is the question: Complementizer omission in extraposed that-clauses. English Language and Linguistics 10/2: 371–396.
Kearns, Kate. 2007. Epistemic verbs and zero complementizer. English Language and Linguistics 11/3: 475–505.
Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial Subordination: A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, second edition, release 4. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCME2-RELEASE-4
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini and Lauren Delfs. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, first edition, release 3. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCEME-RELEASE-3
Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini and Ariel Diertani. 2016. The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, second edition, release 1. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCMBE2-RELEASE-1
Kytö, Merja. 1996. Manual to the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Coding Conventions and Lists of Source Texts (third edition). Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki.
Lakoff, Robin. 1968. Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
López-Couso, María José. 1996. A look at that/zero variation in Restoration English. In Derek Britton, ed. English Historical Linguistics 1994. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 271–286.
López-Couso, María José. 2007. Adverbial connectives within and beyond adverbial subordination: The history of lest. In Ursula Lenker and Anneli Meurman-Solin eds. Connectives in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11–29.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 1998. On minor declarative complementizers in the history of English: The case of but. In Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier eds. Advances in English Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 161–171.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2001. On the history of if- and though-links with declarative complement clauses. English Language and Linguistics 5/1: 93–107.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2012a. On the use of as if, as though and like in Present-day English complementation structures. Journal of English Linguistics 40/2: 172–195.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2012b. On the origin and development of comparative complementizers in English: Evidence from historical corpora. In Nila Vázquez ed. Creation and Use of Historical English Corpora in Spain. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 311–333.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2014. The use of if as a declarative complementizer in English: Some theoretical and empirical considerations. In Alejandro Alcaraz-Sintes and Salvador Valera-Hernández eds. Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics. Bern: Peter Lang, 85–107.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2015. Secondary grammaticalization in clause combining: From adverbial subordination to complementation in English. Language Sciences 47: 188–198.
Marcus, Mitchell, Beatrice Santorini and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics 19: 313–330. Reprinted in Susan Armstrong ed. Using Large Corpora. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 273–290.
McCawley, James D. 1988. The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Noonan, Michael. 1985. Complementation. In Timothy Shopen ed. Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 42–140.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Rissanen, Matti. 1991. On the history of that/zero as object clause links in English. In Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg eds. English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik. London: Longman, 272–289.
Rissanen, Matti. 2008. Corpus linguistics and historical linguistics. In Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö eds. Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 53–68.
Rooryck, Johan. 2000. Configurations of Sentential Complementation: Perspectives from Romance Languages. London: Routledge.
Santorini, Beatrice. 2016. Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the York-Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/annotation/index.html
Tagliamonte, Sali and Jennifer Smith. 2005. No momentary fancy! The zero ‘complementizer’ in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9/2: 289–309.
Taylor, John R. and Kam-Yiu Pang. 2008. Seeing as though. English Language and Linguistics 12/1: 103–139.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena and James A. Walker. 2008. On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47: 1–43.
Warner, Anthony. 1982. Complementation and the Methodology of Historical Syntax. London: Croom Helm.
