Existential there Constructions in English Applied Linguistic Articles and Novels: Perspectives of Pragmatic Aspects, Semantic Interpretations and Vicinity of Syntactic Structures

Main Article Content

Abhinan Wongkittiporn

Abstract

This study examined the existential there constructions in English applied linguistic articles and English novels. Previous studies investigating this construction concentrated on learners of English as a Foreign Language (i.e., Japanese and Korean EFL learners) and the corpora of spoken register (i.e., British National Corpus). This study contributes to the perspectives of pragmatic aspects, semantic interpretations and vicinity of syntactic structures of existential there constructions. The data collection of this study was derived from seven English novels due to their being best sellers (www.amazon.com) and 13 Journal of English for Academic Purposes due to its indexation in Q1 Scopus database (www.scimagojr.com). A total of 339 sentences, gathered from applied linguistic articles and English novels, are isolated into 110 tokens and 229 tokens, respectively. The framework of pragmatic aspects, semantic interpretations and syntactic structures follows Gregory and Biner (1995), Jiang & Hyland (2020) and Radford (2009), respectively. The pragmatic aspects of existential there constructions in both datasets are explained by end-weight principle. Semantic interpretations of existential there constructions in both datasets appears similarly in regard to subjectivity, quantification, list of things and comparison. Vicinity of syntactic structures with existential there constructions in applied linguistic article is reduced relative clauses; however, vicinity of syntactic structures of existential there constructions in English novels are to- infinitive clauses and adjective clauses. The results of this study are expected to be useful for EFL and learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) how to learn grammar implicitly from applied linguistic articles and novels.

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How to Cite
Wongkittiporn, A. (2022). Existential there Constructions in English Applied Linguistic Articles and Novels: Perspectives of Pragmatic Aspects, Semantic Interpretations and Vicinity of Syntactic Structures . Wiwitwannasan Journal of Language and Culture, 6(1), 47–70. Retrieved from https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/wiwitwannasan/article/view/253245
Section
Academic articles / Research articles

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