An Analysis of Fragments in Present-Day Written and Spoken English
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Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
info
- Francisco Gallardo-del-Puerto (coord.)
- Mª del Carmen Camus-Camus (coord.)
- Jesús Ángel González-López (coord.)
Editorial: Editorial de la Universidad de Cantabria ; Universidad de Cantabria
ISBN: 978-84-19024-15-2
Ano de publicación: 2022
Páxinas: 56-64
Congreso: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (44. 2021. Santander)
Tipo: Achega congreso
Resumo
Corpus-based research on “fragments” (i.e. syntactically non-canonical expressions with a propositional meaning equivalent to that of a full sentence, e.g. Well done to Giles) is scarce and has mainly focused on their communicative function in spoken registers. This investigation comes to bridge this gap in the literature by reporting the results from a corpus analysis of sentence fragments in Present-Day English with data from the parsed British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). The results show that, although being more pervasive in spoken language, especially in unscripted monologues, fragments are not infrequent in written registers, particularly in correspondence and creative texts. In these texts, they occur more commonly as phrases (e.g. no more of this conjecture) and verbless clauses (e.g. Back to Cambridge tomorrow), while in spoken texts there is a greater incidence of clausal fragments, particularly insubordinate clauses (e.g. If only it would!).