“Panic seized me“: A Case Study on a Transitive Verb Operating in Presentation Sentences
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the framework of the theory of functional sentence perspective (Firbas 1992), sentences implement either presentation or quality scale. Even though a number of verbs, owing to their syntactic-semantic characteristics, tend to operate primarily in one of the scales, most verbs generally appear to be capable of acting within both the scales. In authentic communication, the sentence perspective is determined by various criteria: apart from the relative “weightiness” of the postverbal modification, it is especially the context-independence of the subject along with the presentational capacity of the verb that plays a crucial role. It is evident that in the case of transitive verbs (which are, by nature, largely qualitative), the key aspect is represented by their semantic affinity with the subject. The present, corpus-based paper sets out to explore the syntactic and lexically semantic qualities of the transitive verb seize. Making use of two large corpora (viz. British National Corpus and the English-Czech parallel corpus InterCorp), the proposed case study will try to delimit under what conditions seize tends to operate in one of the two dynamic semantic scales respectively. Model sentences (such as Panic seized me) will be contrasted and discussed in terms of their presentational/qualitative features with special regard to the phenomenon of S-V semantic affinity. |