The Distribution Of Sentence-initial And Sentence-final Phrase Length In Written English

The phrase is a linguistic unit of great importance and one of the direct constituents of the sentence; however, previous research on the phrase before mostly focused on the investigation of its categories and structures, but not on its length and distribution. Recently, with the development of quantitative linguistics, the metricizing of linguistic units, especially the length of linguistic units attracts more and more attention. As one of the most important linguistic units, the study of phrase length and its distribution in sentences should be emphasized.Using the written part of the fully parsed ICE-GB corpus as the data source, the present thesis aims to investigate the sentential phrase length distribution, especially the sentence-initial and sentence-final phrase length distribution, and describe it mathematically with some models. The significance of the research is threefold:firstly, it would formalize the description on the phrase and enrich the study of quantitative linguistics on the length of linguistic units; secondly, it would increase the explanatory adequacy and descriptive adequacy of information theory, the principle of end-focus, the principle of end-weight and iconicity by providing data supports; thirdly, in respect of English learning and teaching, it can help students pay more attention to the use of the sentential-initial and sentential final phrase and improve their ability to arrange the phrase in sentences in their writings correctly.The results show that:the length of sentences, when determined in terms of the number of phrase, ranges from1to17and half of them are sentences with3or4phrases; the relationship between the sentence length and its frequency can be best captured by Nemcova and Sedelova’s (2005) model y=axbecx+1; the sentence-initial phrase is shorter than the sentence-finial phrase in length, which can be explained and analyzed with the information structure, the principle of end-weight, the principle of end-focus and iconicity; the relationship between the sentence-initial phrase length and its frequency can be best captured by the inverse regression model, and the relationship between the sentence-final phrase length and its frequency can be best captured by the compound model; in addition, as the sentence length increases, the mean phrase length decreases.