On Verbs Operating in Presentation and/or Quality Scale Sentences
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The present, corpus-based paper sets out to explore the cardinal role of the English transitional verb within the sentence perspective. In the framework of Firbasian theory of FSP, sentences implement either Presentation or Quality Scale; most (if not all) transitional verbs, being Janus-faced elements, then generally appear to be capable of acting within both the scales. The paper strives to examine the syntactic and semantic qualities of the transitional verbs, and to show what verbs – and, more importantly, under what conditions – tend to operate in one of the dynamic semantic scales. Model sentences, extracted from British National Corpus, will be contrasted and discussed in terms of their presentational/qualitative verbs, partly with the help of Sketch Engine Corpora software. Such a contrastive analysis seems to be a promising step in depicting the distinctive features of the Pr- vs. Q-scale sentences respectively. |