Your browser does not support the PubReader view.
Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.1009-1025
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 13 May 2025 Revised 18 Jul 2025 Accepted 23 Jul 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202507.1009

Parenthetical Predicates in English as-clauses with Absence of the Subject: A Corpus-based Investigation

Seulkee Park
Academic Research Professor Department of English Linguistics and Literature Kyung Hee University 26, Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 02447, Republic of Korea seulkeepark@khu.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The as-parenthetical construction in English often includes a gap, either at the sentence or predicate level, and shows flexibility in where it can appear in a sentence (see Dehé and Kavalova 2008, Potts 2002). In many cases, these constructions also appear without an explicit subject, especially when only a sentential gap is involved. This study examines how predicates behave in these subjectless as-parenthetical clauses using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The analysis shows that these constructions frequently omit the expletive subject it, yet still form clear and coherent meanings based on the surrounding context. Interestingly, in the previous researches, whether the clause is finite or non-finite, or whether the subject is present or omitted, often does not lead to differences in interpretation. To better understand how different verbs (or predicates) behave in these environments, this study uses a method called distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), which demonstrates which verbs are strongly associated with each construction type. The findings reveal patterns of preference and alternation, presenting how verbs are distributed across different syntactic forms and how the intended meaning remains recoverable even in the absence of overt grammatical elements such as the subject. This paper argues that predicate selection is lexically and pragmatically controlled by constructional environments in subjectless as-parentheticals.

Keywords:

as-parenthetical construction, parenthetical predicates, non-referential subject, distinctive collexeme analysis

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Portions of this work were previously presented at the 9th Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2024) and the 2024 Fall Joint Conference of the Korean Generative Grammar Circle (KGGC) and the Korean Society for Language and Information (KSLI). I thank the audiences at both events for their comments and questions. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2024S1A5B5A17037272).

References

  • Davies, M. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 1.0 billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/, .
  • Dehé, N. and Y. Kavalova. 2008. Parentheticals. John Benjamins Publishing Company. [https://doi.org/10.1075/la.106]
  • Flickinger, D. P. 2008. Transparent heads. In S. Müller, eds., Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 87-94. CSLI Publications. [https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2008.5]
  • Goldberg, A. E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press.
  • Goldberg, A. E. 2006. Constructions at Work: Constructionist Approaches in Context. Oxford University Press.
  • Grice, HP. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics, volume 3: Speech Acts, 41-58. Academic Press. [https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368811_003]
  • Gries, S. Th. 2022a. Coll.analysis 4.0. A Script for R to Compute Perform Collostructional Analyses. Available online at https://www.stgries.info/teaching/groningen/index.html, .
  • Gries, S. Th. 2022b. What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? association? Journal of Second Language Studies 5(1), 1-33. [https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.21028.gri]
  • Gries, St. Th. and A. Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1), 97-129. [https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.06gri]
  • Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316423530]
  • Hunston, S. and G. Thompson, eds. 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198238546.001.0001]
  • Hyland, K. 2005. Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies 7(2), 173-192. [https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365]
  • LaCara, N. 2016. Evidence for deletion in as-parentheticals. The Linguistic Review 33(4), 579-610. [https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2016-0016]
  • Lee-Goldman, R. 2012. Supplemental relative clauses: Internal and external syntax. Journal of Linguistics 48(3), 573-608. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226712000047]
  • López-Couso, M. J. and B. Méndez-Naya. 2015. Epistemic/evidential markers of the type verb+complementizer: Some parallels from English and Romance. In A. D. M. Smith and G. Trousdale, eds., New Directions in Grammaticalization Research, volume 111, 183-208. John Benjamins. [https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.166.05lop]
  • Park, S. and J.-B. Kim. 2021. Subjectless as-parenthetical constructions: A corpus-based approach. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal 29(4), 93-112.
  • Postal, Paul M. 2004. Skeptical Linguistic Essays. Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195166712.001.0001]
  • Potts, Christopher. 2002. The syntax and semantics of as-parentheticals. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20, 623-689. [https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015892718818]
  • Potts, C. 2005. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273829.001.0001]
  • Seppänen, A. and J. Herriman. 2002. Extraposed subjects vs. postverbal complements: On the so-called obligatory extraposition. Studia Neophilologica 74(1): 30-59. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00393270252956188]
  • Stefanowitch, A. and S. Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2), 209-243. [https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03ste]
  • Stefanowitsch, A. and S. Th. Gries. 2009. Corpus-based approaches to constructional grammar. In T. Hoffmann and G. Trousdale, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, 201–221. Oxford University Press.
  • Traugott, E. C. 2022. Discourse Structuring Markers in English: A Historical Constructionalist Perspective on Pragmatics. Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.33]