ABSTRACT
We revisited Rickford et al.’s 1995a study of topic-restricting as far as-for example, as far as linguistics is concerned or as far as linguistics goes, but sometimes without verbal coda, as in simply as far as linguistics—to see how a variety of newer computational tools not available to the earlier study might benefit investigation of this relatively rare construction. By programmatically extracting, parsing, and annotating examples from the 500 million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English, we were able to assemble about five times as many examples, and for the companion survey, Internet-based crowdsourcing enabled us to work with a larger and more diverse set of participants than the original work. Our study supports most of Rickford et al.’s conclusions, while also uncovering new properties of the construction; of particular interest, evidence that coda omission is increasing in real-time, and that the increase is due entirely to omission of is/are concerned, not goes/go.
