The diachronic syntax of negated adjuncts in English

Ingham, Richard; Tubau, Susagna

doi:10.1007/s11049-019-09450-1

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The interaction of social and linguistic changes is a central issue in both social and historical linguistics, especially in terms of how social evolutions are reflected in language changes [ 20 ]. Past studies focused on the modeling of linguistic changes [ 21 ], although many focused on either long [ 22 , 23 ] or short-term lexical changes [ 8 , 24 – 27 ]. An important emerging trend is to leverage stance to an attitudinal expression in language to monitor social changes [ 28 ].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Wang¹,

Liu²,

Huang

2022

PLoS ONE

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Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

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