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This book provides the first empirical study of the history and spread of mediopassive constructions. It investigates the productivity of the pattern, the spread of the construction in Modern English, and looks into text type-specific preferences for the construction. On a more abstract level, it combines the corpus-based description of mediopassive constructions with cognitive linguistic models, drawing largely on notions such as ‘prototype’, ‘family resemblances’, ‘patch’ and ‘construction’. The theoretical modelling is largely based on data from real texts. These come from publicly available machine-readable corpora, text-databases and a single-register ‘corpus’ (American mail-order catalogues). The study combines the corpus-based approach with cognitive theories and is therefore of interest to both empirical and theoretical linguists.
Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and develops a model of how this may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or several case study in the history of the English language in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.
Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from these fields. Special focus is on recent debates surrounding substratal influence in earlier forms of English (particularly Celtic influence in Old English), on language shift processes (the formation of Irish and overseas varieties) but also on dialects in contact, the contact origins of Standard English, the notion of new epicentres in World English, the role of children and adults in language change as well as transfer and language learning. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives for research and is at the same time an up-to-date overview of the state of the art in the respective fields.
The first part of this book deals with the transformation of universities as strategic organisational actors - in some cases creating them as such - while the second shows how governance and authority shifts are affecting the kinds of research goals being pursued by academics in different public science systems.
A collection of cross-varietal studies on a spectrum of grammatical features in English varieties spoken all over the world. It explores the structural unity and diversity of New Englishes and thus investigates central aspects of dialect evolution and language change.
Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, and discusses the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.
The plural form 'Englishes' conveys the diversity of English as a global language, pinpointing the growth and existence of a large number of national, regional and social forms. The global spread of English and the new varieties that have emerged around the world has grown to be a vast area of study and research, which intersects multiple disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of World Englishes from 1600 to the present day. Covering topics such as variationist sociolinguistics, pragmatics, contact linguistics, linguistic anthropology, corpus- and applied linguistics and language history, it combines discussion of traditional topics with a variety of innovative approaches. The chapters, all written by internationally acclaimed authorities, provide up-to-date discussions of the evolution of different Englishes around the globe, a comprehensive coverage of different models and approaches, and some original perspectives on current challenges.
Using the Web as Corpus is one of the recent challenges for corpus linguistics. This volume presents a current state-of-the-arts discussion of the topic. The articles address practical problems such as suitable linguistic search tools for accessing the www, the question of register variation, or they probe into methods for culling data from the web. The book also offers a wide range of case studies, covering morphology, syntax, lexis, as well as synchronic and diachronic variation in English. These case studies make use of the two approaches to the www in corpus linguistics – web-as-corpus and web-for-corpus-building. The case studies demonstrate that web data can provide useful additional evidence for a broad range of research questions.
This anthology brings together fresh corpus-based research by international scholars. It contrasts southern and northern hemisphere usage on variable elements of morphology and syntax. The nineteen invited papers include topics such as irregular verb parts, pronouns, modal and quasimodal verbs, the perfect tense, the progressive aspect, and mandative subjunctives. Lexicogrammatical elements are discussed: light verbs (e.g. "have a look)," informal quantifiers (e.g. "heaps of)," "no"-collocations, concord with "government "and other group nouns, alternative verb complementation (as with "help, prevent)," zero complementizers and connective adverbs (e.g. "however)." Selected information-structuring devices are analyzed, e.g. "there is/are," "like" as a discourse marker, final "but "as a turn-taking device, and swearwords. Australian and New Zealand use of hypocoristics and changes in gendered expressions are also analyzed. The two varieties pattern together in some cases, in others they diverge: Australian English is usually more committed to colloquial variants in speech and writing. The book demonstrates linguistic endonormativity in these two southern hemisphere Englishes.
This book examines the special nature of English both as a global and a local language, focusing on some of the ongoing changes and on the emerging new structural and discoursal characteristics of varieties of English. Although it is widely recognised that processes of language change and contact bear affinities, for example, to processes observable in second-language acquisition and lingua franca use, the research into these fields has so far not been sufficiently brought into contact with each other. The articles in this volume set out to combine all these perspectives in ways that give us a better understanding of the changing nature of English in the modern world.