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A Corpus-Based Study of the Grammaticalization of Partitive a body of

Language, Literature and Culture
Vol.2 , No. 1, Publication Date: Apr. 9, 2019, Page: 16-22

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Authors

[1]	Huiqing Huang, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
[2]	Qingshun He, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.

Abstract

During the past decades, grammaticalization has been an important topic for linguistic studies, and size noun constructions, or binominal quantifiers have been taken by researchers as an ideal entry point for investigating the phenomenon. The result is the emergence of many studies focusing on the grammaticalization of size noun constructions in different languages, including English, Spanish, and Polish. Most of these studies attempt to explain the mechanism or motivation behind grammaticalization and many are corpus-based. Being equally aware of the advantages of a corpus-based approach to the study of a grammaticalization process, in this research, we intend to investigate the grammaticalization of the English partitive a body of, a construction belonging to the category of size noun constructions and not yet touched upon so far, and its stylistic preference based on evidences derived from two corpora, the COHA and the BNC. The findings of our research include: (1) Partitive a body of has the potential to be fully grammaticalized, but currently this process has shown no sign of completion; (2) Partitive a body of tends to be used mostly in formal academic texts rather than in informal spoken texts. These findings can be explained by the association and dissociation of the semantic focus and logical focus within the target construction a body of.

Keywords

Grammaticalization, Corpus-Based, a body of, Stylistic Preference

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