Contracted forms in newspaper language: Inter- and intra-textual variation

During the last few decades, contracted forms have been studied by scholars with different aims. Some have focussed on grammatical and register-related factors, conditioning the use of contractions in corpora of spoken and written British English (Black 1977, Forsheden 1983, Hiller 1984, Kjellmer 1995); others, within the framework of generative syntax, have concentrated on ‘knock-out’ factors, blocking contraction of auxiliaries (Zwicky 1970, King 1970, Kaisse 1983 and 1985). It is generally accepted that contracted forms are primarily a feature of spoken, informal English. The role of contracted not in spoken American English characterized by discourse situations and speaker interaction of different kinds has been investigated by Yaeger-Dror (1996, and references therein). This study, which is part of my current work on contractions in written English for a Ph D thesis, is most closely related to the first tradition, even if its scope is more limited and its aim somewhat different: to find possible text-related factors explaining how contracted forms are used in texts of a relatively formal written register. The focus of interest is on the place and function of contractions in the LOB Corpus press text categories A–C, each representing its own genre (reportage, editorials, reviews) with varying levels of formality. The contracted forms dealt with in this paper are the reduced forms of the verbs BE, HAVE, and will , would, encliticized to a preceding element, most often a subject pronoun (AUX-contractions), and also NOT, reduced to n’t and joined to all types of auxiliary verbs (NOTcontractions), e.g. I’m instead of I am, you’ve for you have, couldn’t for could not (see also Figure 1). My material consists of the LOB press texts containing one or more contractions; my method is a close textual analysis of each occurrence. Two basic distinctions are made, between AUXand NOT-contractions, ICAME Journal No. 20