대한언어학회 전자저널

Park, Seulkee & Kim, Jong-Bok. (2021). Subjectless as-parenthetical constructions in English: A corpus-based approach. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 29(4), 93-112. As-parenthetical constructions usually include either a sentential or predicate gap, but they can also have a subject gap. In this paper, we first investigate the authentic uses of subjectless as-parenthetical clauses, referring to the extracted corpus data. One of the key issues that emerges from the corpus data is that the subjectless as-clause is missing an expletive subject gap as well as a clausal complement gap. The subject gap is construed as a proposition containing a proper predicate for the antecedent. Our corpus findings show that the predicate type in subjectless as-clauses determines whether the expletive subject it is elided optionally or obligatorily. Based on the observed properties, we suggest that subjectless as-parenthetical constructions are base-generated rather than derived from deletion operations. Our corpus-based view can account for the idiosyncratic properties of subjectless as-parenthetical constructions in a streamlined manner.

# as-parentheticals # subject ellipsis # expletive it # conventional implicature # question under discussion

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