Multifactor Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study on the Placement of Function Words

Author: Gries
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: The book "Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study on the Word Order Shifting of English Transitive Verb Groups" explores the issue of word order transformation (also known as "minor word movement") in English transitive verb groups from a cognitive-functional and psycholinguistic perspective, employing new analytical methods. The primary goal is to propose a methodology, specifically that the use of corpus, multifactorial analysis, and probabilistic methods to study grammatical phenomena is superior to traditional analytical approaches that rely on acceptability judgments and minimal contrast tests. The multifactorial analytical approach advocated in this book has the following advantages in examining minor word movement: it can describe minor word movement even when the criteria for detail are not clear, all the factors governing this transformation can be integrated into a unified hypothesis to explain it, two structures can be mutually compared in terms of typicality and similarity, it can accurately predict which word order native speakers might subconsciously choose when producing normal speech and discourse (thus passing extremely rigorous tests), and finally, competing hypotheses can be compared based on their predictive power. In addition to the methodological discussion, this research also touches on a more theoretical and linguistically significant issue: how to explain these analytical results. The book argues that various language production theories constructed based on processing effort do not perform well in explaining such phenomena, which contradicts the views of some contemporary scholars, while the interactive activation model of language production can more appropriately explain and evaluate these results.