A Corpus Analysis of (The) Last/Next plus Temporal Nouns

초록

Many reference grammars cover the use of last and next, but none pays overt attention to when and why those words combine with circle divide or the before temporal nouns; for example, (a) I came to Boston circle divide last year and (b) I've been in Boston for the last year. Based on three theoretical notions of predicated time, extensivity, and the null article, and a corpus analysis of the tokens of (the) last/next from the Brown Corpus, the 1996 LA Times Corpus, and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, this article presents a detailed account of when the determiners last and next combine with null or the; why last/next followed by singular temporal nouns occur with null, as in (a), or with the, as in (b); and why only singular temporal nouns, but not plural temporal nouns or non-temporal nouns, can combine with null + last/next.

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