Competing future constructions and the Complexity Principle - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

Competing future constructions and the Complexity Principle

Résumé

This paper presents a contrastive study on the role of syntactic complexity in the choice between different future constructions in English and Norwegian. Previous work on the English future alternation (BE going to vs. will) has shown that going to is preferred in syntactically complex contexts. We replicate this result for English on the basis of data from the Spoken BNC 2014. In addition, we address the question of whether this account can be generalized to another language that shows a very similar alternation, namely Norwegian (skal/vil vs. kommer til å). We use data from the Norwegian Speech Corpus (NoTa) and the BigBrother corpus, showing that syntactic complexity correlates with the shorter form skal here. We take this as an indication that the observed syntactic distribution is actually a side-effect of semantic differences and suggest possible explanations for this.

Domaines

Linguistique
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04062862 , version 1 (07-04-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Olaf Mikkelsen, Stefan Hartmann. Competing future constructions and the Complexity Principle: A contrastive outlook. Suzanne Flach; Martin Hilpert. Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics: New approaches to variability and change., 105, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp.8-39, 2022, Studies in Corpus Linguistics, ⟨10.1075/scl.105.01mik⟩. ⟨hal-04062862⟩
17 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More