Inhaltszusammenfassung

This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic (prouder) and analytic (more proud) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands – a compensatory strategy referred to as more-support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity – presumably owing to its ability to facil...This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic (prouder) and analytic (more proud) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands – a compensatory strategy referred to as more-support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity – presumably owing to its ability to facilitate early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possi¬bly because the degree marker more can serve as a structural sig¬nal foreshadowing cognitive com¬plexity. A bird’s eye view of 24 determinants reveals that the proc¬essing effort which triggers the analytic comparative emanates from struc¬tures that are phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, lexically, semantically or prag¬matically complex. By bridging the gap between corpus-based variation research and psycholinguistic and typological approaches, the book breaks new ground in uncovering the functional motivation behind the continued variability of synthetic-analytic contrasts.» weiterlesen» einklappen

Autoren

Klassifikation

DFG Fachgebiet:
Sprachwissenschaften

DDC Sachgruppe:
Sprachwissenschaft, Linguistik