Newly Observed Phraseological Unit beyond the Explanations of Existing Linguistic Frameworks – The Way How as an Example (Published)
This study analyses the actual manner of ‘the way how’, a newly established phraseological unit in contemporary English, from semantic, syntactic and corpus perspectives. Previous studies have widely acknowledged that ‘the way how’ has been considered a grammatically incorrect form. However, new findings of ‘the way how’ are as follows: (i) ‘the way how’ is not a minor error because it is observed in written English; (ii) ‘the way how’ has two syntactic patterns (‘the way how’ S + V and ‘the way how’ to do); (iii) in the case of ‘the way how’ S + V, ‘the way’ and ‘how’ are put together due to the analogy of the combinations of an antecedent and a relative adverb and are merged into ‘the way how’. In the case of ‘the way how’ to do, ‘the way to do’ and ‘how to do’ are put together because they are semantically similar; and (iv) historically, the number of times ‘the way how’ is used is increasing currently.
Keywords: A phraseological unit, Analogy, Merging, The Principle Of Linguistic Economy, The Way How
A DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC STUDY OF THE ALTERATION OF UNIFORM EXPRESSIONS FROM THOSE WHO TO THOSE THAT (Published)
It is widely acknowledged that ‘those that’ is used to refer to things. However, ‘those that’ is also used to refer to people, as is ‘those who’. This study reports that this commonly accepted idea is not valid based on synchronic and diachronic analysis. Synchronically, it is not rare to encounter ‘those that’ being used to refer to people. Diachronically, the usage of ‘those that’ in reference to people appeared before the establishment of prescriptive grammar. The conclusion of this study elucidates why ‘those that’ as used to refer to people is due to the operation of ‘that’ as a relative pronoun. When an antecedent includes either people or things on one hand and people or animals on the other, ‘that’ is chosen as a relative pronoun. Consequently, ‘those that’ is a uniform expression used to denote both people and things; furthermore, it is an old and unremarkable expression
Keywords: A phraseological unit, Synchronic and diachronic perspectives, Those that, Uniform, Unmarked that