Syntactic variation in English quantified noun phrases with all, whole, both and half (review)

Much work has been done on the syntax and semantics of quantifiers in English. In contrast, we know relatively little about how English quantifiers are used, in particular, what influences the variation between quantified NPs that have basically the same meaning. This book, which is the author’s dissertation from Växjö University, is a corpus study of variation of quantified NPs that contain one of the four quantifiers: all, whole, both, and half. Four variation patterns are investigated: (i) presence or absence of of, for example, all the childrenvs. all of the children; (ii) presence or absence of the, for example, both booksvs. both (of) the books; (iii) position of the quantifier, for example, half an hourvs. a half hour; and (iv) alternative lexical items, for example, all the bookvs. the whole book.

After the introduction (Ch. 1), Ch. 2 reviews the study of syntactic variation in English, which serves as a frame for the present study. Ch. 3 gives an overview of English NPs, in particular, the four quantifiers that are the focus of the study. Both syntactic and semantic properties are described. Ch. 4 introduces the corpus material used in the study. The spoken data comes from two sources—the Longman Spoken American Corpus and the British National Corpus; the written data comes from three newspaper corpora— The New York Times(American English), The Independent(British English), and The Sydney Morning Herald(Australian English).

Chs. 5 to 7 present the results of the study. Ch. 5 reports the overall frequency distribution of variants. In most cases one variant is predominant. For example, among NPs with all/whole, a determiner, and a mass N, 93% of the tokens are in the form all+ det + mass N, for example, all the action, and only 5% have the form all of+ det + mass N, for example, all of this stuff.

Ch. 6 considers two nonlinguistic factors that affect the variation: region and medium. The former is found to play a significant role in the variation, but not the latter. Thus the presence of ofis more frequent in American English than in British English. Further, Australian English is positioned between the other two varieties.

Ch. 7 examines linguistic factors that affect the variation. Several factors are involved, including type of determiner, properties of the NP head, presence of certain elements (e.g. modifiers and focus markers) in the NP, and syntactic function of the NP. Many correlations are presented. For instance, when an NP includes a singular count N and a definite article, wholeis used overwhelmingly (e.g. the whole question), as opposed to all, all of, and whole of.

Ch. 8 concludes the study by looking at each variable and ranking all of the factors that are significant in the choice of variant. The choice between all(92%) and all of(8%), for example, in NPs with all, determiner, and plural N, is influenced by five factors: an adjacent of, syntactic function of the NP, region, presence of a modifier, and presence of a focus marker.

The book is clearly written. It should be useful to anyone interested in the use of quantifiers, syntactic variation, and corpus study; it also provides a valuable source for reference grammars.