布瓦(1987)指出参数(包括新信息)优先出现在S或O角色上,但没有实际影响,英语毕业论文,这导致制定一个给定的约束使得其中的角色是“传递的主题”。 Bois (1987) notes that arguments comprising new information appear preferentially in the S or O roles, but not in A role, which leads to formulation of a Given A Constraint, where A role is the ‘transitive subject’, S role the ‘intransitive subject’ and O role the ‘transitive object’. He formulates Given A Constraint as “avoiding introducing a new referent in the A-role argument position”. According to his study, A-role argument position is seven times less likely to contain new information. Fox (1987) and Fox and Thompson (1990) apply Bois’s notion to examine the distributional pattern of relative clauses in English conversation, and find that S-relatives and O-relatives predominate over A-relatives, where S-relatives represent that the relative pronoun is the subject of an intransitive verb of the relative clause, A-relatives mean that the relative pronoun is the subject of a transitive verb of the relative clause and O-relatives express that the relative pronoun is the object of a transitive verb of the relative clause, as shown in the following examples respectively. (10) S-relativesand he’s got a spring that comes way up. (Fox, 1987:859) (11) A-relatives No in fact I know somebody who has her now. (Fox, 1987: 859) (12) O-relatives This man who I have for linguistics is really too much. (Fox, 1987:859) According to Fox (1987), the preponderance of S-relatives and O-relatives over A-relatives in her study receives the support from the following facts. First, O-relatives predominate over A-relatives since the NPs in subject positions of O-relatives mainly consist of exphoric pronouns such as the speaker I and the hearer you in spontaneous English conversation, they serve as better anchors than the NPs in the object positions of A-relatives which are usually made up of full NPs that usually represent new information in conversation. According to Fox’s study, A-relatives are more likely to be chosen when the NPs in the object positions of A-relatives perform the function of linking the current utterance to the preceding discourse, as shown by her in (11). However, the NPs in the object positions of A-relatives rarely represent given information in English conversation since they frequently are the position for new information to be introduced (Givon, 1979; Bois, 1987; Fox, 1987 and Fox and Thompson, 1990). A-relatives thus tend to be fairly rare in spontaneous conversation. Second, the preponderance of S-relatives over A-relatives may be caused by the reason that the subject positions of intransitive verbs tend to be chosen to introduce new discourse entities (Bois, 1987). Thus, the subject positions of intransitive verbs in S-relatives usually form the position where new information is likely to be given, as shown by a spring in (11). Fox and Thompson (1990) add that the head NPs of S-relatives tend to be indefinite nonhuman objects in the main clauses, and by the time we hear the object head NPs, we have already heard the main-clause subjects which are typically pronouns in speech contexts. In such cases, the object head NPs are already grounded by the main-clause subjects. This is what Fox and Thompson refer to as main-,英语论文范文 |