This excellent new book in De Gruyter's Topics in English Linguistics series brings together an impressive line-up of corpus linguists to examine the topic of clausal subordination using a wide range of data and methodologies. As the title indicates, this is not intended as a comprehensive overview of the topic, but a set of perspectives. In their introduction, the editors note that in English there are perhaps six major types of subordinated structures in English, and not all of these are covered in this volume – for example, there is no chapter on comparatives. The majority of them are discussed, however, and indeed the occasional overlapping of topics offers some fascinating insights. The title is a little less representative of the content in its prioritisation of the ‘synchronic’ over ‘diachronic’. In fact, the diachronic section comes first in the book and contains twice as many chapters (eight to four).
The old-fashioned perception that grammatical change only happens at a glacial rate is constantly challenged in this volume, both at the micro-level of particular constructions, and at the macro-level of clause types. Two of the chapters focus on particularly recent innovation. Alexander Bergs’ ‘Because science! Notes on a variable conjunction’ was prompted by the American Dialect Society's (ADS) choice of because as the 2013 word of the year, in the innovative usage where it is not followed by of or a full clause, demonstrated in elliptical utterances like ‘People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes’. While Bergs shows that this usage is not quite so recent as the ADS suggested, his data suggest that it is on the increase – perhaps influenced by the abbreviated mode of computer-mediated language – and that it presents a challenge to the traditional subordinative role of because. The other demonstration of very recent change is Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Jill Bowie's chapter on -ing clauses in spoken English (‘-ing clauses in spoken English: Structure, usage and recent change’). They make use of the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English, which covers a period between the 1960s and the 1990s, to show increasingly clausal use of -ing. The shift is indicative of a longer-term diachronic change observed by other researchers whereby the nominal gerund form is declining as a distinct usage, and the -ing clause is becoming increasing verbalised.
This process of verbalisation is also observed by Hedrik De Smet (‘From flying Sancho to swooning Altisidora: The changing use of premodifying present participles in three English translations of Cervantes’ Don Quijote’) in his discussion of what he calls ‘situation-oriented present participles’ as in ‘he hauled the sobbing boy to his feet’. In these cases, the participle acts as a kind of ‘compressed subordinate clause relating one event to another’ rather than having a simply adjectival function. De Smet innovatively demonstrates the growing importance of this type of participle usage in English by comparing English translations of Cervantes’ Don Quijote from the seventeenth, nineteenth and twenty-first centuries with their Spanish original. The focus of this book is clearly English (or perhaps Englishes), but one other chapter that does make significant use of cross-language comparisons is Christian Mair's ‘The rise of long catenative constructions in Modern English: New sub-schemas and new stylistic options’, on catenative verbal constructions. Having shown that make NP want to has risen in frequency and become increasingly constructionalised particularly in the last thirty to forty years, he investigates equivalents in German and Spanish in a translation corpus, to assess how language-specific this construction is. While Spanish translations are found to be closer to English than German both structurally and semantically, there is not enough evidence to challenge the generally held assumption that constructionalisation is language specific. Mair does search for a wider range of catenative chains using both the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and finds a higher range and frequency for these constructions in the contemporary corpus, again indicating quite recent developments.
COHA features particularly heavily in the first part of this book, being used as a primary source of data in four chapters, and as a supplementary source in one other. This high usage indicates not only its usefulness, but also, perhaps, the paucity of large diachronic corpora available for general use. Consisting of around 400 million words, and covering the period 1810–2000, over a variety of written texts, COHA allows the examination of tendencies of relatively low-frequency items in one major variety of English. The researchers in this volume did find some technical problems with the corpus: Mair was frustrated by some undiagnosed errors for particular search strings, and both he and David Denison were somewhat thwarted by tagging errors. In his chapter, ‘That-clauses as complements of verbs or nouns’, Denison spends a little time on the recent (post-2000) addition to the inventory of verbs that permit a that-clause complement, detailing tagging problems that prevented full discovery of innovative features. Despite these methodological hurdles, he provides clear evidence of an increasing number of transitive verbs that have traditionally taken an abstract ‘shell’ noun followed by a that-clause complement (‘it highlighted the fact that …’) now following the example of verbs like acknowledge, recommend, suggest in taking a simple that-clause complement (‘it highlighted that …’). Denison suggests a number of explanations for this change, including both the mechanism of analogy and a lack of native-speaker awareness of standard complementation patterns around particular verbs, coupled with a general trend towards greater economy.
Another study that uses COHA exclusively is the chapter by Juhani Rudanko, ‘Semantic roles as a factor affecting complement choice: a case study with data from COHA’, which focuses on a single adjective, unaccustomed, and the change in complementation that has occurred. While the frequencies discussed are quite low, there is still a clear pattern demonstrated with the preferred to infinitive of the nineteenth century being replaced by to -ing complements, to the extent that they are not found in the data at all after 1930. Rudanko argues that this change is part of a more general movement whereby the auxiliary status of to becomes clearer during the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the rise in VP Deletion constructions with to infinitive (e.g. ‘he is eager to go but his sister is not eager to’), whereas unaccustomed has a greater predilection for nominal complements. Günter Rohdenburg's chapter, ‘Expanding the type you can't help laughing’, also addresses a low-frequency set of items: the negative polarity constructions help -ing (‘you can't help feeling’) and help but (‘you can't help but feel’). The scarceness of the construction is addressed by the use of a very large (over 3,000 million words) corpus of British and American newspaper texts, which is the focus of the discussion after a brief historical overview of both varieties. This large data set allows Rohdenburg to find some expanded categories for this construction including the use of reflexives, and the establishment of the optional from-gerund – in line with other verbs with negative implication such as discourage and refrain. The nature of the corpus also allows some regional comparisons, with the distinct evolution of the reflexive help but in AmE (‘he will not be able to help himself but get involved’), with BrE conversely preferring help -ing for the reflexive (‘I can't help myself joining in’).
The chapter by Hubert Cuyckens and Frauke D'hoedt, ‘Resourceful ways of recruiting members: The origin and development of Mental zero-Secondary Predicate Constructions’, covers the greatest historical range. The authors examine corpus data from Old English to Late Modern English for what they term Mental zero-Secondary Predicate Constructions such as ‘I find him very unrealistic’. The topic is also more semantically based than most in this section. Their broad scope allows the authors to formulate a compelling description of how the construction developed based on core mental verbs such as know and believe, increasing in frequency and productivity through the Middle English and Early Modern English periods as secondary mental verbs such as hold and find attracted others to the class. They argue that the evolution of this construction should be defined as categorial incursion, with new verb types being added to an established construction, rather than being considered a multi-source construction.
The overall focus of the diachronic section of this volume on quite recent syntactical developments in a single variety of English (often AmE) is complemented by the more diverse regional focus of the synchronic section. Three of the four chapters are comparative studies of World Englishes. Elisabeth Bruckmaier's chapter, ‘Catenative get in World Englishes’, picks up on the catenative construction previously discussed by Mair – in this instance looking at catenative get. Comparing two New Englishes, Jamaican and Singapore, with British English, she uses the International Corpus of English (ICE) to conduct detailed, qualitative analyses of semantic differences, and the much larger corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) to make frequency comparisons. Bruckmaier finds that the simple catenative (‘I got to like her’) is more prevalent in the New Englishes than the more complex causative (‘Get her walking’), as might be expected. Jamaican English doesn't provide clear patterns, but there is some innovation in Singapore English, particularly with get/got plus bare infinitive (‘you get buy a new car’), which may have some substrate influence.
Singapore English features again in Sven Leuckert's discussion of adverbial subordination with since and while (‘Adverbial subordination across variety types: A synchronic analysis of the syntax and semantics of since- and while-clauses in ENL, ESL, and EFL’). It is treated not so much as a representative of regional variation though, but as an exemplar (along with Hong Kong English) of EFL. Set against the ICE corpora for these varieties are data from ICE-GB (representing English as a Native Language, ENL) and samples from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) to represent EFL. While there are some shared patterns for EFL and ESL varieties, the study surprisingly finds most similarity for while-clauses between ENL and ESL varieties, while since-clauses have more common ground between ENL and EFL. Further research is called for, particularly with more access to spontaneous spoken learner data.
A slightly different set of varieties is covered by Cristina Suárez-Gómez in her contribution on relativisers, ‘A sociolinguistic study of relativizers in spoken Philippines English’ – the only one on this topic in the volume. Singapore and Hong Kong English feature again, alongside Indian English, as points of differentiation from the central variety under discussion – Philippines English. The focus on a single variety allows some helpful discussion of the historical and social background to English in the Philippines. While some distributional similarities are found with relativisers in other Asian varieties, Philippines English demonstrates endonormative tendencies both in the overall distinctiveness of distribution, and in the existence of the variety-specific wherein construction (as in ‘but there's this place in Manila wherein…’).
Rahel Oppliger's chapter, ‘Whatever the specific circumstances, …: A Construction Grammar perspective of wh-ever clauses in English’, is the only one in the synchronic section that looks only at a native variety of English, to describe and analyse sentence-initial concessive conditional wh-ever clauses. The academic prose subcorpus of COCA was used, together with the magazine subcorpus to control for register effect. Approaching the topic within the framework of Construction Grammar (as did Bergs on because), Oppliger finds different levels of schematicity within these constructions. These range from schematic constructions with variable slots to more specific constructions with fixed lexical elements such as ‘whatever the reason’ or ‘whatever the cause’.
The main achievement of this volume is to highlight the sheer complexity and dynamism of the English system of clausal subordination – its state of ‘permanent flux’, as the editors put it. In the conclusion to his chapter, Bergs makes the suggestion that the concept of subordination as a whole needs re-evaluation – placing the example of because on a gradient from traditional subordination (causal) through apposition (‘because science’) to ‘fragmental insubordination’ (because + Ø as in ‘Why can't I have it? Because.’). Subordination is a huge topic, too large for any single collection of papers, but the usage-based approach of the authors here gives a steady flow of insights both at the micro-level of complementation patterns around particular words and phrases such as unaccustomed or help -ing/help but, and with regard to broader categories such as -ing constructions, relatives and catenatives. The editors do a fine job of summarising the complexities of the topic in their introduction, as well as giving a clear, concise overview of each chapter. It might have been helpful to have a little more said in the introduction about the structure of the volume – why the relative imbalance between synchronic and diachronic topics, why the focus on New Englishes in the synchronic section? By the same token, one of the pleasures of this book is the opportunity it offers to see patterns across different methodological approaches and topics – a pleasure that a more overtly programmatic approach to the material might have undermined.
The editors dedicate the book to their former doctoral supervisor Teresa Fanego on her retirement, and Professor Fanego's influence is apparent throughout, not only by way of direct citation and the emphasis on certain topics such as complementation and the gerund, but also in the meticulous and rigorous approach to the data. This is a consistently rewarding and challenging publication, bringing together linguists working at the frontiers of corpus research, and at the boundaries of the clause.
