NP-based modification strategies in the recent history of the English language ("when matter in no longer modified")

Resumo

Davison and Lutz (1985: 60) maintain that "the high load of processing would occur in subject position of the target sentence". In the same vein, in his Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory, Gibson (1998: 27) emphasises the relevance of subjects to the determination of the processing cost of a sentence; in his words, "modifying the subject should cause an increase in the memory cost for predicting the matrix verb, whereas modifying the object should not cause such an increment". Subjects (external arguments) and objects (internal arguments) are, in consequence, worth investigating from the point of view of their structural or syntactic complexity. In this investigation we assume (i) that text types can be graded in terms of complexity, (ii) that text types may differ as regards their linguistic complexity both synchronically and diachronically, and (iii), following Taavitsainen's (2001: 141) definition of genre or text type as 2a codification of linguistic features", that structural and syntactic complexity can be measured out by means of linguistic variables. That stated, in this paper we undertake the study of structural and syntactic complexity in a selection of two text types or textual variants, namely letters and news, in the recent history of English by examining a representative sample of declarative sentences retrieved from a corpus of texts from 1750 to Present-day English, namely the British component of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers; Biber et al 1994). Aiming at focusing on formal written-to-be-read texts and informal ("(possibly) speech-based") textual material, we concentrate on the analysis of two text types which can be taken as representative of such labels, respectively news and letters. In Perez-Guerra and Martinez Insua (2007) we offered the preliminary results of a pilot investigation on the complexity of subjects and objects in Late Modern English. In the present paper we focus on the internal structure of such external and internal arguments and pay attention to the pre- and post-modification strategies evinced in the corpus as well as to the syntactic depth of the head nouns in such nominal groups. The Late Modern English data will be compared with in-progress investigation on the Present-day English samples.