CORPUS-BASED AND CORPUS-DRIVEN RESEARCH ON THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC FEATURES OF “UP” AND “DOWN” AS UNITS OF FUNCTIONAL TRANSPOSITION IN PRESENT DAY ENGLISH

Yurii Kovbasko

doi:10.23856/4101

Yurii Kovbasko Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4638-3900

Keywords: Linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, preposition, adverbial particle

Abstract

The paper gives attention to the role of psycholinguistic features in the process of functional transposition in Present Day English. This process is stipulated by grammatical and syntactic as well as psycholinguistic factors determining whether any transpositional shift is institutionalized in the language or rejected. The research focuses on the case study of “UP” and “DOWN” as these lexical units have undergone transpositional processes and function as prepositions, adverbs, and adverbial particles. In the course of the analysis two main types of factors have been identified, viz: linguistic – the discourse type, text type, derived text type, text domain, context-governed text domain and type of interaction, level of difficulty; and extra-linguistic – age and gender of authors (for written discourse), age, gender and social class of interlocutors, i.e. speakers and respondents (for spoken discourse). Two opposite groups authors (for written discourse) and interlocutors (for spoken discourse) have been distinguished as the former create discourse having time to think through phrases, constructions, etc., whereas the latter do it spontaneously and often under pressure.

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