A Study On The Subjectival Position And The Syntactic Complexity In Spoken English

The sentence is considered as the key unit of syntax. In quantitative linguistics, there are many ways to probe the inter-relationships among constituents of sentences, such as length, complexity, position and frequency, etc. The subject of the sentence is also an important constituent. It usually works as an unmarked theme, which is the point of departure of the message. This thesis is corpus-based and employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, aiming to study the relationship between the subjectival position and the sentential syntactic complexity in the spoken part of ICE-GB.The result of the study shows that the PSFEs in ICE-GBS serve43different sentential syntactic functions and the ten most frequent PSFEs account for91.61%of the total. The sentential syntactic complexities in ICE-GBS range from1to126. The number of sentences increases along with the sentential syntactic complexity, until reaching to the peak and then begins to decrease. The number of sentential structural variations increases along with the sentential complexity until reaching to the peak. Then it begins to decrease. In ICE-GBS, the sentential subjects appear in43different positions in the sentences, with the predominant position of1. The sentential subjectival position can indicate the sentential syntactic complexity, that is, the later the subject appears, the more syntactically complex the sentence.