Participial adverbials in spoken academic corpora: “gonna have a hard time getting through

Vol.1,No.2(2008)

Abstract
Participial adverbial constructions have received a lot of attention as means of complex condensation – a function associated in particular with their use in academic prose. Here the choice of a participial clause1 (as opposed to a fi nite clause) is governed by interplay of a number of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. The corpora of spoken academic English make it possible to investigate the way participial constructions are employed in academic spoken monologue. Their occurrence seems to be infl uenced here by a strong tendency to use fi xed lexico-grammatical bundles comprising participles, which perform the functions of the expression of stance, discourse organization as well as the referential function.
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