This study is based on a corpus of 2400 clauses taken from
British national newspapers in 1986 and stored in a
computer database with each clause coded for a number of
grammatical (and some semantic) features. These features
relate to the verb phrase (e.g. finiteness), the clause
(e.g. subordination) and the subject (e.g. form).
In the first stage of the investigation the database is
described in terms of the features coded therein. The
scope of the description is on three levels. First, the
data are described in total and are considered to
constitute a representative sample of newspaper English.
Secondly, the database is split into three pre-determined
sub-databases according to their text-type. These are:
news articles, editorials and readers' letters. A pattern
is discovered of 'letters-as-norm' with the other texttypes
on different sides of the average. Thirdly, the
database is split on a different dimension according to
the eight different newspapers included in the sampling.
A pattern of three groups of newspapers; 'quality',
'central' and 'popular', is found for some features.
The second section exploits the database primarily as an
example of written English, rather than emphasising its
newspaper origins. Here some problems of description,
which have implications for the debate about the division
between syntax and semantics, are explored.
The first such 'problem' arises out of a study of the
environment of copula 'BE' and concerns the borderline
between the grammatical functions of subject and subject
complement. Some well-known differences are confirmed and
some new ones discovered. A small area of overlap,
however, remains.
The second problem is the familiar difficulty of deciding
when an -en form is an adjective and when it remains a
participle. It is argued that the contexts of -en forms
are often influential in their interpretation as
adjectival or verbal forms.
The third problem concerns the sequential verbs (sometimes
called 'catenative' verbs) which govern a following nonfinite verb phrase. These verbs, which defy attempts to
classify them syntactically, are shown to be amenable to
semantic classification. The question of restrictions on
sequences of more than two verb phrases (i.e. two
sequential verbs + one 'normal' verb) is explored and some
tentative conclusions are reached.