Morphological and syntactic identification of clauses of universal concession in British National Corpus

Abstract

The article investigates morphological and syntactic organization of English sentences of universal concession in modern English fiction dramatic, prose and verse texts of the British National Corpus. In the context of the studied sentences identification with the semantics of concessive action, the main attention is focused on generalization of morphological and syntactic characteristics of universal sentences of concession with the verification of their statistical data implementation in the modern English corpus. It has been found out that in the fiction texts of the British National Corpus English sentences of universal concession are actualized in four syntactic types of sentences: in simple, compound, complex, and cohesive types, where the concessive action clause is introduced by various types of conjunctions such as though, even though, although; in any case, in spite of; yet … (al)though etc. with / without punctuation for the cohesive type. Morphological features of means of syntactic connection are defined in three types of clauses of concession with hypotactic, paratactic, cohesive conjunction coherence in the morphological configuration as: “simple means of connection – conjunctions or adverbs”, “complex or composite means of connection – prepositional phrases”, “correlative means of connection – correlative conjunctions or disjuncts”. Seven basic morphological and syntactic subtypes of English sentences of universal concession have been identified with the syntactic description of models of concessive clauses as: finite / non-finite -ed (-ing) participial / non-finite to infinitive / nominative / prepositional / adjective / adverb clause of concession. In order to identify the structural semantic grid of the studied sentences, taking into account the corpus analysis in terms of the semantic marking tagging with the collocation [+1 Right] to the right of the conjunction of the universal concession, the quantitative indicators of nine structural and semantic types of concessive clauses are determined and calculated in the adjustment of the concessive conjunction with any verb, noun, adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, pronominal categorical phrase, as well as the agreement with any article and punctuation.