The Accessibility Hierarchy in Relativisation : The Case of Eighteenth-and Twentieth-Century Written English Narrative
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: This article aims to test Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Accessibility Hierarchy, together with Fox’s (1987) Absolutive Hypothesis, on the basis of eighteenth- and twentiethcentury written English narrative data. While the patterns of relativisation differ very little across the two centuries, relativisation on intransitive subject (S-RCs) and on direct object (DO-RCs) occurs more frequently than relativisation on transitive subject (A-RCs) and on oblique (OBL-RCs). Moreover, OBL-RCs outnumber A-RCs. On the other hand, relativisation on genitive (GEN-RCs) occurs very infrequently and relativisation on indirect object (IO-RCs) is unattested. It is suggested that the high frequency of S-RCs and OBL-RCs falls out from written narrative requiring a considerable amount of description in order to indicate the states of people or other entities, or to set the scene. The high frequency of DO-RCs follows from Fox’s (1987) suggestion that one of the main functions of RCs is to anchor the head NP in discourse; the other NP in a DO-RC, i.e. the transitive subject NP, tends to be pronominal, and, therefore, a good anchor. The infrequently occurring RCs, i.e. A-, GEN-, and IO-RCs, tend to be formed on grammatical relations that typically appear in pronominal form. In these RCs, therefore, the functions of RCs, whether to distinguish, describe, or anchor, become largely irrelevant. Thus, accessibility in relativisation is not so much motivated by a hierarchy of grammatical relations as by discourse preferences or properties.
Source: Finnish Journal of Linguistics
Authors: Elizabeth Hogbin, Jae Jung Song
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2184117109