English verbo-nominal structures Be + Prepositional Phrase: FSP under scrutiny
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The focus of this corpus-based paper is on structures which, depending on their context and the communicative needs of the discourse participants, can perform different functions and thus affect the information flow, the message. The research methodology adopted for this study is the theory of functional sentence perspective, where it holds that if something is said about a context-dependent subject, the sentence implements the Quality Scale. Under favourable conditions, however, the occurrence of a context-independent subject in the same kind of structure may lead to a presentational configuration (Presentation Scale). The paper looks at English clauses featuring verbo-nominal predications that follow the pattern Be + Prepositional Phrase (such as be under scrutiny, be on the move, be in the air and others) and studies their presentational potential. Taking into account their syntactic, textual and information structures, the analysis strives to determine whether – and under what circumstances – such predicates express existence/appearance of a new phenomenon on the scene. For the purposes of analysis, the Be + PrepP structures (extracted from the British National Corpus and processed by the SketchEngine corpus tool) will be classified into and assessed within several categories. |