International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2010

The so-called ‘raising-to-subject’ pattern that verbs of the type believe can occur in is usually treated as the passive alternative for the so-called ‘raising-to-object’ pattern. In addition to broadening the empirical basis for the opposite claim that the English and Dutch raising-to-subject (or ‘nominative and infinitive’) patterns have a special functionality which is different from that of the passive construction, this paper specifically examines the stronger proposition that this has always been the case. It empirically investigates whether this proposition holds equally well for English and Dutch through a comparison of the frequencies of believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject patterns in two diachronic corpora. The methodology makes use of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis.

This article reports on a detailed corpus-based and contrastive analysis of the syntactic, semantic and functional properties of English depend, French dépendre and Dutch afhangen, liggen and zien as markers of intersubjectivity. Based on three large-scale monolingual corpora of spoken English, French and Dutch, the results show that these intersubjectivity markers are semantically related to a conditional meaning of the verbs they are based on: viewpoints expressed or asked for in the preceding discourse are presented as valid only in particular circumstances. Furthermore, it is shown that the markers have undergone a process of decategorialisation, as they appear almost exclusively in third person present tense, and as the range of subjects that can be combined with these markers is more restricted than the non-intersubjective uses of these verbs. Finally, a detailed corpus analysis of the Dutch markers shows that their use is mainly determined by regional and functional parameters.

This corpus-based study examines first-person verbs in Methods sections in English and Spanish. Quantitative analysis was based on rhetorical Move categories and qualitative analysis on linguistic profiles (collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody). Both the English and Spanish subcorpora had more texts without first-person verbs than with this verb form. However, in the texts with this feature, the frequency was significantly higher in Spanish and the distribution of the rhetorical Moves associated with the first-person forms was also significantly different. The qualitative analysis revealed that in the English texts, the first-person signals the reasoned choice of a non-standard procedure (32 tokens) compared to only seven standard procedures, whereas in the Spanish texts the distribution was even (25 and 26 tokens, respectively). The results support cross-cultural differences in discourse functions that have implications for both translation and academic writing in cross-cultural contexts.

This paper examines the frequency, distribution and function of 1st person self-references with the cognitive verbs think and believe, and penser and croire in British English and French argumentative discourse comprising 29 British political interviews (178,712 words) and 26 French political interviews (118,825 words). It employs quantity-based methodology supplemented by insights from a context-dependent qualitative analysis, considering explicitly the co-occurrence of these cognitive verbs with discourse connectives. It argues for these 1st person self-references to be assigned not only a subjectivising function, but also one of expressing intersubjectivity. In the two sets of data, the parenthetical constructions signify that the status of a particular piece of information encoded in a proposition is open for negotiation. Depending on their co-occurrences with discourse connectives they may boost or attenuate the pragmatic force of the contribution which they qualify.

The present paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of modality in English and French finite noun complement clauses. On the one hand, we claim on the basis of cross-linguistic and semantic evidence that modality is a common intrinsic feature of nouns that license that/que complement clauses, and, as a consequence, that head nouns are modal stance markers. On the other hand, this paper shows that indicative-subjunctive alternation in that/que noun complement clauses is determined by the modality type of the governing noun. Contrastive analysis of French and English provides evidence to substantiate these claims.

The paper deals with the qualitative and quantitative parameters of equivalence between the realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian. The focus of the contrast is on the auxiliary and adverb strategies (van der Auwera et al. 2005) in English (can, could, may, might vs. maybe, perhaps, possibly) as opposed to the corresponding modal verb and adverb/particle strategies in Lithuanian (galeti “can/could/may/might” vs. gal, galgi, galbut, rasi, lyg ir “maybe/perhaps/possibly”). The purpose of the corpus-based study is to find out which means of expression are preferable in the two languages and what the scope of their meanings is. The paper will also look at the frequency of epistemic and non-epistemic use of the modal expressions in the original and in translation.