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What's in a clause?

Milton's participial style revisited

In this article, I aim to identify and explicate stylistic distinctiveness in the use of -ed clauses in parts of Milton's Paradise Lost, in the process testing findings outlined in a 1968 article by Seymour Chatman. I compare the frequency of occurrence of the clause type in the Milton texts with that in a constructed corpus of Early Modern English poetry, and with that in the Helsinki corpus. I measure differences in usage of the clause type by focusing on the use of -ed clauses in stretched chains of control, and on the way adverbially functioning -ed clauses map onto conceptual semantic space. I demonstrate how literary effects are conditioned and enabled by the clause type's properties as outlined in cross-linguistic studies. I prove that in the data analysed Milton's use of -ed clauses is a distinctive feature of his style.

Key Words: chains of control • desententialization • discourse structure • figure—ground • free adjuncts • semantic variability • syntactic unrelatedness

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