International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research (IJELLR)

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Functional Conversions of Phraseological Units Working As Prepositions

Abstract

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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This work by European American Journals is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License

 

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Email ID: editor.ijellr@ea-journals.org
Impact Factor: 7.79
Print ISSN: 2053-6305
Online ISSN: 2053-6313
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37745/ijellr.13

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