On contraction in modern English

Kjellmer, Göran

doi:10.1080/00393279708588204

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Similarly, Kjellmer's (1998) study of a British written corpus showed that Aux-contraction was high for will, but in this United States corpus and in Gasparrini's analysis of BNC urban leisure data, Aux-contracted tokens such as the one in (5) were too rare to permit analysis. Aux-contracted have not, as in (6), is more common in our database than in the English corpora discussed in the literature.…”

Section: Analysis Of Aux-contracted Vs Not-contracted Formsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Older texts use full forms more than recent texts in the same genre or register (Biber, 1988). Written registers use full forms more consistently than spoken registers (Kjellmer, 1998, and Tottie, 1991, for British English; Yaeger-Dror, 1997, for American English). Bell (1984) showed that, in declarative sentences in news reporting, contracted forms are more common in the United States than in the British Commonwealth, and it is commonly believed that the full form is more common in British than in American conversational declaratives as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For that reason, the present study narrows its focus to the analysis of not-negation. Not-contraction, which entered the English language around 1600 (Jespersen, 1917;Warner, 1993) 79 than fiction (Kjellmer, 1998). Older texts use full forms more than recent texts in the same genre or register (Biber, 1988).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Lightfoot (1999:186-195) presented historical evidence that {be, will, have} have never functioned like other English verbs. While surface factors (e.g., whether the preceding word ends in a vowel or a consonant) are certainly relevant to choice of Aux-contracted or not-contracted form (Hiller, 1987;Kjellmer, 1998;McElhinny, 1993), they are not discussed in detail here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contraction is not inevitable in these sentence types in British data, as shown in examples (2c) through (2g). In his analysis of written British corpora from the 1960s, Kjellmer (1998) found that questions were only 90% not-contracted. In their study of interviews with older speakers of northern and rural British dialects, Tagliamonte and Smith (in press) 4 found that only 65% of questions were notcontracted, although tags were categorically contracted as they were in our American sample.…”

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confidence: 99%

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It's not or isn't it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategies

2002

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It's not or isn't it? Using large corpora to determine the influences on contraction strategiesM a l c a h Ya e g e r -D r o r , L a u r e n H a l l -L e w , a n d S h a r o n D e c k e r t University of Arizona A B S T R A C TIn analyzing not-negation variation in English it becomes clear that specific strategies are used for prosodic emphasis and reduction of not in different social situations, and that contraction strategies vary independently of prosodic reduction. This article focuses on the factors influencing contraction strategies that are clearly dialect related and attempts to tease out those factors that are related to register and speaker stance. First, we review background information critical to an adequate analysis of not-negation and not-contraction. We then describe the corpora chosen for the present study, the research methods employed in the analysis, and the results of the analysis. The variable under analysis is the choice between uncontracted and not-contracted forms and between not-contracted and Aux-contracted forms in wellformed declarative sentences, for verbs which permit both. We end with some suggestions for corpus composition that will enable meaningful comparisons between social situations and between speakers, or characters, within one corpus. As researchers we can assure that future corpora will permit increasingly inclusive and interesting comparative studies; we close with some suggestions for those who wish to carry out studies.Tottie (1991) showed that there are three direct ways to express negation in English. These are shown in Table 1. She found that the vast majority of English negatives used are not negatives. For that reason, the present study narrows its focus to the analysis of not-negation. Not-contraction, which entered the English language around 1600 (Jespersen, 1917;Warner, 1993) 79 than fiction (Kjellmer, 1998). Older texts use full forms more than recent texts in the same genre or register (Biber, 1988). Written registers use full forms more consistently than spoken registers (Kjellmer, 1998, and Tottie, 1991, for British English; Yaeger-Dror, 1997, for American English). Bell (1984) showed that, in declarative sentences in news reporting, contracted forms are more common in the United States than in the British Commonwealth, and it is commonly believed that the full form is more common in British than in American conversational declaratives as well. Biber (1988), who has done the most work to compare large linguistic corpora from different social situations (or speech "registers"), showed that, if a multivariate analysis is carried out on information concerning variation in many linguistic factors, five register continua (or dimensions) can be isolated for English. Dimension 1, the statistically most significant of these, is a continuous parameter fluctuating from a more informative pole, which he referred to as "Informational," to a socially more interactive pole, which he referred to as "Involved." There is now a fair amount of evidence to support the cla...

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Section: Analysis Of Aux-contracted Vs Not-contracted Formsmentioning

confidence: 99%