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SUMMARY:You talking to me? Auxiliary realisation in spoken and written Bri
 tish English - Andrew Caines (RCEAL)
DTSTART:20080506T150000Z
DTEND:20080506T163000Z
UID:TALK11495@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:It is generally taken for granted by grammarians that every ma
 in clause contains a finite verb\, whether the verb group is simple (he li
 stens to her) or complex (he is listening to her). I used the British Nati
 onal Corpus (BNC) to investigate two types of periphrastic verb constructi
 on – the progressive and perfect – to see whether the ‘obligatory’
  auxiliary verb is indeed always there\, and whether its behaviour differs
  between spoken and written language.  \n\nThe present study shows that at
  times the auxiliary verb is not supplied – for example\, what we doing?
  instead of what are we doing? This non-suppliance occurs more frequently 
 in the BNC’s spoken section than the written. Within the spoken section 
 there are differences according to formality of register. The properties o
 f the construction are of some importance also\, with apparent effects of 
 tense\, polarity\, clause type and subject type. These factors interact so
  that the environment which associates most favourably with non-suppliance
  is the present tense second person subject interrogative construction –
  for example\, you talking to me? in contrast to are you talking to me? In
  this specific construction\, in the most casual register in the spoken se
 ction of the BNC\, the auxiliary is absent in three out of every ten insta
 nces. \n\nA range of semantic\, phonological and syntactic factors conditi
 on the distribution of auxiliaries. This explains why auxiliary non-suppli
 ance favours particular constructions and particular verbs\, while there a
 re constructions in which it cannot possibly occur\, such as the past prog
 ressive and past perfect. This paper is framed in terms of the constructiv
 ist versus generative debate on the nature of language\, favouring the for
 mer view that exemplars and not rules are fundamental. Through sociolingui
 stic analysis\, it will be shown that age and class are significant factor
 s in non-suppliance of the auxiliary\, pointing to a change from below. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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