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The present book aims to show how the notions of more-support and processing complexity apply to determinants from all core levels of linguistic analysis.
It introduces a range ...
The present book aims to show how the notions of more-support and processing complexity apply to determinants from all core levels of linguistic analysis.
It introduces a range of novel and hitherto neglected factors that affect comparative alternation.
This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic (prouder) and
analytic (more proud) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands - a
compensatory strategy referred to as more-support.
The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity - presumably owing to its ability to facilitate
early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possibly because the degree marker more can
serve as a structural signal foreshadowing cognitive complexity.
A bird's eye view of 24 determinants reveals that the processing effort which triggers the analytic comparative emanates from structures that are
phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, lexically, semantically or pragmatically complex.
By bridging the gap between corpus-based variation research and psycholinguistic and typological approaches, the book breaks new ground in uncovering the
functional motivation behind the continued variability of synthetic-analytic contrasts, and offers a unified explanation for the systematic variation
encountered in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and diachrony.
