The term substitution refers to the process during which situational actants selected by a verb are substituted by expressions with non-situational meaning. In the paper, the investigation of substitution processes is focused on two groups of verbal units: (i) phase verbs with inceptive meaning which enable the substitution of object actants and (ii) psychological verbs of two types: (a) type trápiť ‘worry’, and (b) type mrzieť ‘feel sorry for sth.’ which enable the substitutions of subject actants. On the basis of corpus data, collocational preferences are stipulated for phase verbs with inceptive meaning and a collostructional analysis is used to calculate the mutual attraction of substituted non-situational nouns and the given type of microconstruction in order to build up a detailed picture of correlation between corpus frequencies and degrees of entrenchment concerning the various semantic groups of nouns. At the same time, cognitive and pragmatic (contextual) factors determining the interpretation of sentence structure with substituted actants are closely investigated. On the other hand, the corpus data reveal that no such attractions can be specified within the group of psychological verbs, which shows that in the case of these verbal units, substitution is better described in terms of a pragmatic process.
The paper notes that while grammars and other linguistic works assume that not precedes the infinitive marker to in English, one can quite often encounter the reverse ordering, to not. The second section provides an overview of the relevant literature. The third section compares spoken data from the British National Corpus and the Spoken BNC2014, and analyzes the written data from the Corpus of Historical American English, concluding that the frequency of to not (relative to not to) has indeed been rising significantly in recent decades. The fourth section attempts to identify some factors underlying this change, most importantly chunking and potential semantic differentiation. It is suggested that chunking might be an especially important factor affecting the change, but further analysis is needed, relying on more advanced statistical methods.
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