Bücher der Reihe Studies in English Language

This study, the first in the series Studies in English Language, is concerned with the functional and communicative foundations of English grammar, and takes as its specific focus the study of infinitival complement clauses. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and general linguistics.

Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.

New Zealand English is one of the newest varieties of English, and is unique in that its history and development are documented in extensive audio-recordings. On the basis of these recordings, this book examines the linguistic changes New Zealand English has undergone since it was first spoken in the 1850s.

Arguing that cases result from an interplay of cognitive, lexical, and syntactic factors, Professor Schlesinger develops an alternative approach to cases which permits better descriptions of certain syntactic phenomena.

In this comprehensive analysis of personal pronouns in present-day English, Katie Wales examines a wide variety of discourses, texts and varieties of English around the world. Her discussion is illustrated with numerous examples of the usage of personal pronouns and also of reflexives and possessives.

English Corpus Linguistics is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. The author shows how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus; how to annotate the data; and how to conduct a linguistic analysis of it once it has been created.

Storytelling is a fundamental mode of everyday interaction. This book is based upon the Narrative Corpus (NC), a specialized corpus of naturally occurring narratives, and provides new paths for its study. Christoph Ruhlemann uses the NC's narrative-specific annotation and XPath and XQuery, query languages that allow the retrieval of complex data structures, to facilitate large-scale quantitative investigations into how narrators and recipients collaborate in storytelling. Empirical analyses are validated using R, a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Using this unique data and methodological base, Ruhlemann reveals new insights, including the discovery of turntaking patterns specific to narrative, the first investigation of textual colligation in spoken data, the unearthing of how speech reports, as discourse units, form striking patterns at utterance level, and the identification of the story climax as the sequential context in which recipient dialogue is preferentially positioned.

The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its construal in context. Evidence is drawn from natural antonym use in speech and writing, first-language antonym acquisition, and controlled elicitation and judgements of antonym pairs by native speakers. The book also proposes ways in which a greater knowledge of how antonyms work can be applied to the fields of language technology and lexicography.

English is a language at the centre of research into language contact, because its global spread has resulted in contact with an enormous variety of different languages worldwide, leading to the creation of many new varieties of English, including second language varieties, and also pidgins and creoles. This book takes an original look at what happens when speakers of these different varieties interact with one another. Using her own rich fieldwork data from diverse international and South African contexts, Meierkord proposes an innovative approach to how Englishes merge and blend in such interactions, creating further new forms of English and further changes to the language. Through skilful analyses and descriptions, the book provides fascinating insights into where and who the users of English as a lingua franca are and what English then looks like at the levels of phonetics, morphosyntax, the lexicon and discourse.

The order and behaviour of the premodifier (an adjective, or other modifying word that appears before a noun) has long been a puzzle to syntacticians and semanticists. Why can we say 'the actual red ball', but not 'the red actual ball'? And why, conversely, do some other premodifiers have free variation in sentences; for example we can say both 'German and English speakers' and 'English and German speakers'? Why do some premodifiers change the meaning of a phrase in some contexts; for example 'young man', can mean 'boyfriend', rather than 'man who is young'? Drawing on a corpus of over 4,000 examples of English premodifiers from a range of genres such as advertising, fiction and scientific texts, and across several varieties of English, this book synthesises research into premodifiers and provides a new explanation of their behaviour, order and use.

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, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receiving particular attention are the influence of American English on British English, the role of the press, the 'colloquialization' of written English, and a wide range of grammatical topics, including the modal auxiliaries, progressive, subjunctive, passive, genitive and relative clauses. These subjects build an overall picture of how English grammar is changing, and the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.

In this original study, Hilde Hasselgard discusses the use of adverbials in English, through examining examples found in everyday texts. Adverbials - clause elements that typically refer to circumstances of time, space, reason and manner - cover a range of meanings and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The description of the frequency of meaning types and discussion of the reasons for selecting positions show that the use of adverbials differs across text types. Adverbial usage is often linked to the general build-up of a text and part of its content and purpose. In using real texts, Hasselgard identifies a challenge for the classification of adjuncts, and also highlights that some adjuncts have uses that extend into the textual and interpersonal domains, obscuring the traditional divisions between adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts.

Where do dialects differ from Standard English, and why are they so remarkably resilient? This study argues that commonly used verbs that deviate from Standard English for the most part have a long pedigree. Analysing the language use of over 120 dialect speakers, Lieselotte Anderwald demonstrates that not only are speakers justified historically in using these verbs, systematically these non-standard forms actually make more sense. By constituting a simpler system, they are generally more economical than their Standard English counterparts. Drawing on data collected from the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), this innovative and engaging study will be of great interest to students and researchers of English language and linguistics, morphology and syntax.

The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500-1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Taking both an empirical and a theoretical view of the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in English, this book reviews the syntactic and prosodic literature on parentheticals along with relevant theoretical work at the syntax-prosody interface. It offers a detailed prosodic analysis of six types of parentheticals - full parenthetical clauses, non-restrictive relative clauses, nominal appositions, comment clauses, reporting verbs, and question tags, all taken from the spoken part of the British Component of the International Corpus of English. To date, the common assumption is that, by default, parentheticals are prosodically phrased separately, an assumption which, as this study shows, is not always in line with the predictions made by current prosodic theory. The present study provides new empirical evidence for the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in spontaneous and semi-spontaneous spoken English, and offers new implications for a theory of linguistic interfaces.

Speakers of British and American English display some striking differences in their use of grammar. In this detailed survey, John Algeo considers questions such as: *Who lives on a street, and who lives in a street? *Who takes a bath, and who has a bath? *Who says Neither do I, and who says Nor do I? *After 'thank you', who says Not at all and who says You're welcome? *Whose team are on the ball, and whose team isn't? Containing extensive quotations from real-life English on both sides of the Atlantic, collected over the past twenty years, this is a clear and highly organized guide to the differences - and the similarities - between the grammar of British and American speakers. Written for those with no prior knowledge of linguistics, it shows how these grammatical differences are linked mainly to particular words, and provides an accessible account of contemporary English in use.

This volume is a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to processes underlying language change. Clearly defined core concepts are introduced against new psycholinguistic research, taking into account synchronic structures and evidence from language history. It is ideal reading for scholars of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics alike.

The history of the English language is a vast and diverse area of research. In this volume, a team of leading historians of English come together to analyse 'real' language, drawing on corpus data to shed new light on long-established issues and debates in the field.

Examines the influence that English has on German in German-speaking countries, looking at borrowings from English, the use of English in public spaces, how English is learned by native speakers of German, and the historical relationship between both languages. Essential reading for scholars of sociolinguistics, English studies and world Englishes.

An insightful exploration of English in South Africa, ideal for scholars and students concerned with forms of contemporary English. The volume investigates a range of sociolinguistic factors, challenges and changes that South Africans face as a result of multilingualism and globalisation in both education and social interaction.

A comprehensive overview of variation in World Englishes, analysing a wide spectrum of English varieties and registers around the globe. It is essential reading for students and researchers in World Englishes, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

This book explores the role of Russian English in the domains of politics, business, education, mass media, advertisement, tourism, youth subcultures and literature. With a fascinating focus on the role of language in attitudes and identity, Russian English will appeal to students and researchers across a wide range of fields.

Led by a team of experts, this book draws on a range of informal letter corpora and outlines the historical sociolinguistic value of letter analysis, both in theory and practice. This study challenges and questions 'standard' language ideologies and highlights the importance of non-standard vernacular forms.

A collection of new case studies by world-renowned and emerging scholars in the field, which explores English syntactic structure, variation, and change, both past and present, methodologically and theoretically. It is ideal reading for scholars and advanced students in English syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic theory and corpus linguistics.

As a result of colonisation, many varieties of English now exist around the world. This 2005 book explores the role of British dialects in both the genesis and subsequent history of postcolonial Englishes, and how it came about that many still reflect non-standard British usage from the distant past.

A thorough overview and novel analysis of changes to negation, integrating insights and methods from several subfields of linguistics. This book uses statistical techniques and linguistic corpora to track language change. It will be ideal reading for researchers and graduate students in linguistics and the history of English.

Looking specifically at morphological and syntactic change, this book draws on a diverse range of written language data. Examining a variety of genres such as sermons, chronicles, legal and literary texts, it shows the Late Modern period to be an important era in the development of English.

This volume is a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to processes underlying language change. Clearly defined core concepts are introduced against new psycholinguistic research, taking into account synchronic structures and evidence from language history. It is ideal reading for scholars of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics alike.

This book explores the role of Russian English in the domains of politics, business, education, mass media, advertisement, tourism, youth subcultures and literature. With a fascinating focus on the role of language in attitudes and identity, Russian English will appeal to students and researchers across a wide range of fields.

Highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics and language acquisition. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives as well as an up-to-date overview of the respective fields.