International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research (IJELLR)

EA Journals

Conjunction

Functional Conversions of Phraseological Units Working As Prepositions (Published)

This research presents examples from corpora where ‘in spite of’ directly follows clauses and behaves like a conjunction although the phenomenon has not been widely acknowledged and has been regarded as a mistake. This study empirically investigates whether ‘in spite of’ and other group prepositions expressing concession cause a functional shift from a preposition to a conjunction without causing any morphological changes. The research procedure is as follows: (i) The frequency of [in spite of + SV] in universally available corpora is shown from synchronic and diachronic perspectives; (ii) it is clarified how [in spite of + SV] is used in context, semantically and syntactically; (iii) what influences the establishment and functional conversion of [in spite of + SV] into a conjunction is explained; and (iv) whether other phraseological units expressing concession express the same phenomenon as [in spite of + SV] is explored based on quantitative and qualitative viewpoints.

Keywords: Concession, Conjunction, Corpus-Based Research, Functional Shift, Group Prepositions, Phraseological Units, Phraseology

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