There構文の関係節の歴史的発達

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Other Title
  • There コウブン ノ カンケイセツ ノ レキシテキ ハッタツ
  • On the Historical Development of Relative Clauses with T here Existential Constructions

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the development of English Amount Relatives (ARs). This paper shows from a survey of historical corpora that the two types of relative clauses, Pseudo Relatives (PRs) and ARs, which appear to be different from each other, are developed from the one of the two structures. It is known from the observations by McCawley (1981 and 1998 among others) that the status as the main clause of there constructions is weak. However, Early English allows topicalization of the antecedent of the relative clauses followed by existential there constructions. This yields an ordering “associate NP+there be+relative clauses (PRs),” which is not allowed in Present-day English. Though this prohibited ordering (associate NP+there be+relative clauses (PRs)) was allowed from Middle English to Late Modern English. However, because a restriction to the extraposition of relative clauses arose, topicalization of the antecedent of PRs declined. As a result, there existential constructions were demoted to subordinate not only in semantically but also in syntactically. Due to the demotion of there existential constructions, the relative clauses got promoted to the main clause, which results in an emergence of ARs.

Journal

  • IVY

    IVY 56 95-113, 2023-12-20

    名古屋大学英文学会

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