LINGUIST List 12.2201

Fri Sep 7 2001

Sum: Relative Word Order Frequencies

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Frederick Newmeyer, Relative word order frequencies

A few days ago I posted a query about published sources for relative
frequencies of word order types (SVO, passive, etc.) in English. I would
like to thank Joe Hilferty, Michaele Smith, and Marcus Callies for their
helpful responses. In fact, there are two relevant recent publications,
both downloadable from web pages:

http://crl.ucsd.edu/newsletter/back-issues.html

Dick, Frederic & Jeffrey L. Elman. 2001. The Frequency of Major
 Sentence Types over Discourse Levels: A Corpus Analysis.
 (February 2001 Vol. 13, No. 1).

and

de Haan, Pieter and Oostdijk, Nelleke (1994), "Clause Patterns in Modern
British English: A Corpus-Based (Quantitative) Study", in ICAME Journal
18, 41-79. http://www.hd.uib.no/icame/ij18/dehaan.pdf

- fritz newmeyer