The evolution of an adjoining construction in the 16th ─ 21st centuries

Abstract

In linguistic literature, despite the importance of resolving of one of the topical issues of modern linguistics ─ the detection of means of joining separate sentences and supra-sentence entities to form larger text units, little attention has been paid so far to the problems of text organization and studying language units participating in its formation. With rare exceptions, the majority of research is carried out synchronically. Nevertheless, a careful diachronic study of language phenomena helps to reveal the nature of many innovative processes in modern languages. Thus, a diachronic approach to studying the structure of an utterance allows to interpret the phenomenon of text units in general and an adjoining construction in particular in an absolutely new way. Many researchers qualified these text units mainly as a syntactic tendency of a language of the late 20th century, i.e. as an exclusively modern phenomenon. The conducted research allows to claim that such a point of view is not justified as the analysis of the English literary texts of the 16th ─ 21st centuries showed that the roots of an adjoining construction go back centuries. However, in different periods of the English language development, the formation and functioning of an adjoining construction was either a more stylistic phenomenon or a syntactic one. Thus, a comparative analysis of the English texts of the 20th ─ 21st centuries and the texts of the 16th ─ 19th centuries showed important differences in the functions fulfilled by an adjoining construction. In the works of fiction of the last two centuries, the adjoining constructions are mostly colloquial in their form and give an expressive colouring to the text. In this case, an adjoining construction can be regarded as a stylistic and syntactic phenomenon, while the adjoining construction s of the previous centuries tended to be the result of purely syntactic transformations of the text by its author.