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  3. Studies in English Language

The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national and international varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership.

  • General Editors: Merja Kytö, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Editorial Boards: Bas Aarts, University College London, John Algeo, University of Georgia, Susan Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, Christian Mair, University of Freiburg, Charles F. Meyer, University of Massachusetts

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83 results in Studies in English Language

Page 2 of 5

Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
  • Edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Emma Moore, Linda van Bergen, Willem B. Hollmann
  • Published online:
    07 October 2019
    Print publication:
    10 October 2019
  • A pioneering collection of new research that explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of the English language. The volume, with contributions by world-renowned scholars as well as some emerging scholars in the field, covers a wide variety of approaches to grammatical categories and categorial change, constructions and constructional change, and comparative and typological research. Each of the fourteen chapters, based on the analysis of authentic data, highlights the wealth and breadth of the study of English syntax (including morphosyntax), both theoretically and empirically, from Old English through to the present day. The result is a body of research which will add substantially to the current study of the syntax of the English language, by stimulating further research in the field.

English Comparative Correlatives
  • Diachronic and Synchronic Variation at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface
  • Thomas Hoffmann
  • Published online:
    01 May 2019
    Print publication:
    02 May 2019
  • One of the most intriguing features of languages is that speakers can produce novel grammatical utterances that they have never heard before. Consequently, most linguists agree that the mental grammars of speakers are complex systems that must be more abstract than the input they are exposed to. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract speakers' mental representations have to be to allow this grammatical creativity. This book addresses this issue by empirically investigating one specific construction, English comparative correlatives (e.g., the more you eat, the fatter you get). Drawing on authentic corpus data from Old English to Present-day English varieties around the world, it shows how input frequency and domain-general cognitive principles affect the complex mental network of constructions that underlies speakers' linguistic behaviour. This pioneering and original study will be of interest to scholars and students of English syntax and English historical linguistics.

Mexican American English
  • Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect
  • Edited by Erik R. Thomas
  • Published online:
    21 February 2019
    Print publication:
    21 February 2019
  • Responding to the need for a comprehensive treatment of Mexican American English and its varied influences across multiple generations, this volume provides true insight into how language contact triggers language change, and illustrates previously under-recognised links to ethnolects of other migrant groups in different parts of the world. It demonstrates how the variety begins with Spanish interference features but evolves into a stable variety over time by filtering out some of the interference features and responding to forces such as exploitation of its speakers, education, and the need to develop solidarity. A large number of linguistic variables from multiple realms of language are analysed that provide a truly balanced picture of the divisions within the community across a range of linguistic levels such as syntax, phonology, prosody, accent, dialect, and sociolinguistics.

The English Phrasal Verb, 1650–Present
  • History, Stylistic Drifts, and Lexicalisation
  • Paula Rodríguez-Puente
  • Published online:
    18 January 2019
    Print publication:
    31 January 2019
  • Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.

English and Empire
  • Literary History, Dialect, and the Digital Archive
  • David West Brown
  • Published online:
    26 October 2018
    Print publication:
    18 October 2018
  • Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of linguistic representation to changes in the imperial political economy, to evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and to shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. In carrying out his investigation, David West Brown makes the case for a methodological approach that links the distant (quantitative) and close (qualitative) reading of diverse digital artefacts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a variety of scholars and students including sociolinguists interested in historical language variation, as well as literary scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the digital humanities.

English Compounds and their Spelling
  • Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer
  • Published online:
    25 May 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018
  • Anyone writing texts in English is constantly faced with the unavoidable question whether to use open spelling (drinking fountain), hyphenation (far-off) or solid spelling (airport) for individual compounds. While some compounds commonly occur with alternative spellings, others show a very clear bias for one form. This book tests over 60 hypotheses and explores the patterns underlying the spelling of English compounds from a variety of perspectives. Based on a sample of 600 biconstituent compounds with identical spelling in all reference works in which they occur (200 each with open, hyphenated and solid spelling), this empirical study analyses large amounts of data from corpora and dictionaries and concludes that the spelling of English compounds is not chaotic but actually correlates with a large number of statistically significant variables. An easily applicable decision tree is derived from the data and an innovative multi-dimensional prototype model is suggested to account for the results.

Spontaneous Spoken English
  • An Integrated Approach to the Emergent Grammar of Speech
  • Alexander Haselow
  • Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favour of a speaker-based, dynamic perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called 'microgrammar' and 'macrogrammar', which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of 'unintegrated' constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly 'fragmented' character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.

Listening to the Past
  • Audio Records of Accents of English
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    21 July 2017
    Print publication:
    20 April 2017
  • Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional varieties of English from England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and other anglophone countries, the volume explores both standard and vernacular varieties, and demonstrates how accents of English have changed between the late nineteenth century and the present day. The socio-phonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, the history of the English language, language variation and change, phonetics, and phonology.

The Changing English Language
  • Psycholinguistic Perspectives
  • Edited by Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin, Simone E. Pfenninger
  • Published online:
    13 July 2017
    Print publication:
    20 July 2017
  • 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.

Negation in Early English
  • Grammatical and Functional Change
  • Phillip W. Wallage
  • Published online:
    13 July 2017
    Print publication:
    25 May 2017
  • Informed by detailed analysis of data from large-scale diachronic corpora, this book is a comprehensive account of changes to the expression of negation in English. Its methodological approach brings together up-to-date techniques from corpus linguistics and minimalist syntactic analysis to identify and characterise a series of interrelated changes affecting negation during the period 800–1700. Phillip Wallage uses cutting-edge statistical techniques and large-scale corpora to model changes in English negation over a period of nine hundred years. These models provide crucial empirical evidence which reveals the specific processes of syntactic and functional change affecting early English negation, and identifies diachronic relationships between these processes.

Binomials in the History of English
  • Fixed and Flexible
  • Edited by Joanna Kopaczyk, Hans Sauer
  • Published online:
    05 July 2017
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017
  • Binomials, such as for and against, dead or alive, to have and to hold, can be broadly defined as two words belonging to the same grammatical category and linked by a semantic relationship. They are an important phraseological phenomenon present throughout the history of the English language. This volume offers a range of studies on binomials, their types and functions from Old English through to the present day. Searching for motivations and characteristic features of binomials in a particular genre or writer, the chapters engage with many linguistic levels of analysis, such as phonology or semantics, and explore the important role of translation. Drawing on philological and corpus-linguistic approaches, the authors employ qualitative and quantitative methods, setting the discussion firmly in the extra-linguistic context. Binomials and their extended forms - multinomials - emerge from these discussions as an important phraseological tool, with rich applications and complex motivations.

Russian English
  • History, Functions, and Features
  • Edited by Zoya G. Proshina, Anna A. Eddy
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    06 October 2016
  • This fascinating book offers a comprehensive exploration of Russian English as a World English variety. The authors introduce readers to the history of language contact between Russian and English, which has resulted in the Russianization of English and Englishization of Russian. They also discuss the functions of English as a lingua franca in the domains of politics, business and tourism, as a tool in youth subcultures, education and scholarship, and as a creative means in mass media, advertisement, music and literature. The book engages with the major role of English in expressing a speaker's cultural and personal identity within the global community. This accessible and engaging work presents a great number of concepts within the field of Russian linguistics, as well as introducing readers to the outstanding Russian scholars in the field. Essential reading for students and researchers across a wide range of related fields.

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English
  • Linguistic Change in Writing
  • Douglas Biber, Bethany Gray
  • Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    26 May 2016
  • Grammatical Complexity in Academic English uses corpus-based analyses to challenge a number of dominant stereotypes and assumptions within linguistics. Biber and Gray tackle the nature of grammatical complexity, demonstrating that embedded phrasal structures are as important as embedded dependent clauses. The authors also overturn ingrained assumptions about linguistic change, showing that grammatical change occurs in writing as well as speech. This work establishes that academic writing is structurally compressed (rather than elaborated); that it is often not explicit in the expression of meaning; and that scientific academic writing has been the locus of some of the most important grammatical changes in English over the past 200 years (rather than being conservative and resistant to change). Supported throughout with textual evidence, this work is essential reading for discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists.

Long-Vowel Shifts in English, c.1050–1700
  • Evidence from Spelling
  • Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden
  • Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    11 March 2016
  • The English language has undergone many sound changes in its long history. Some of these changes had a profound effect on the pronunciation of the language. A number of these significant instances of language evolution are generally grouped together and termed the 'Great Vowel Shift'. These changes are generally considered to be unrelated to other, similar long-vowel changes taking place a little earlier. This book assesses an extensive range of irregular Middle English spellings for all these changes, with a view to identifying the real course of events: the dates, the chronology, and the dialects that stand out as being innovative. Using empirical evidence to offer a fresh perspective and drawing new, convincing conclusions, Stenbrenden offers an interpretation of the history of the English language which may change our view of sound change completely.

Regional Variation in Written American English
  • Jack Grieve
  • Published online:
    05 January 2016
    Print publication:
    25 January 2016
  • The first study of its kind, Regional Variation in Written American English takes a corpus-based approach to map over one hundred grammatical alternation variables across the United States. A multivariate spatial analysis of these maps shows that grammatical alternation variables follow a relatively small number of common regional patterns in American English, which can be explained based on both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Based on this rigorous analysis of extensive data, Grieve identifies five primary modern American dialect regions, demonstrating that regional variation is far more pervasive and complex in natural language than is generally assumed. The wealth of maps and data, and the groundbreaking implications of this volume, make it essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics, English language, geography, computer science, sociology and communication studies.

Letter Writing and Language Change
  • Edited by Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier, Richard J. Watts
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    16 July 2015
  • Letter Writing and Language Change outlines the historical sociolinguistic value of letter analysis, both in theory and practice. The chapters in this volume make use of insights from all three 'Waves of Variation Studies', and many of them, either implicitly or explicitly, look at specific aspects of the language of the letter writers in an effort to discover how those writers position themselves and how they attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to construct social identities. The letters are largely from people in the lower strata of social structure, either to addressees of the same social status or of a higher status. In this sense the question of the use of 'standard' and/or 'nonstandard' varieties of English is in the forefront of the contributors' interest. Ultimately, the studies challenge the assumption that there is only one 'legitimate' and homogenous form of English or of any other language.

Further Studies in the Lesser-Known Varieties of English
  • Edited by Jeffrey P. Williams, Edgar W. Schneider, Peter Trudgill, Daniel Schreier
  • Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    30 April 2015
  • This volume follows on from The Lesser-Known Varieties of English (Cambridge, 2010), by documenting a further range of varieties that have been overlooked and understudied. It explores varieties spoken by small groups of people in remote regions as diverse as Malta, Bermuda, the Netherlands Antilles, Brazil, the Cook Islands, and Palau. The varieties explored are as much a part of the big picture as major varieties and it is the intention of this collection to spark further interest in the sociolinguistic documentation of minority Englishes in a postcolonial world. Language endangerment is a very real factor for the vast majority of lesser-known varieties of English, and this book aims to highlight that documentation and archiving are key initial steps in revitalization and reclamation efforts. This book will be of interest to historians of English, and scholars in dialectology, language birth and death, language contact, typology, and variation and change.

Signalling Nouns in English
  • A Corpus-Based Discourse Approach
  • John Flowerdew, Richard W. Forest
  • Published online:
    05 January 2015
    Print publication:
    22 January 2015
  • Signalling nouns (SNs) are abstract nouns like 'fact', 'idea', 'problem' and 'result', which are non-specific in their meaning when considered in isolation and specific in their meaning by reference to their linguistic context. SNs contribute to cohesion and evaluation in discourse. This work offers the first book-length study of the SN phenomenon to treat the functional and discourse features of the category as primary. Using a balanced corpus of authentic data, the book explores the lexicogrammatical and discourse features of SNs in academic journal articles, textbooks, and lectures across a range of disciplines in the natural and social sciences. The book will be essential reading for researchers and advanced students of semantics, syntax, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, in addition to scholars and teachers in the field of English for academic purposes.

Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English
  • Preposition Placement 1500–1900
  • Nuria Yáñez-Bouza
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    18 December 2014
  • 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.

Developments in English
  • Expanding Electronic Evidence
  • Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge, Jeremy Smith
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    31 October 2014
  • 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. Combining synchronic and diachronic analysis, the chapters address the major issues in corpus linguistics – methodological, theoretical and applied – and place special focus on the use of electronic resources in the research of English and the wider field of digital humanities. Topics covered include polemical articles on the optimal use of corpus linguistic methods, macro-level patterns of text and discourse organisation, and micro-features such as interjections and hesitators. Covering Englishes from the past and present, this book is designed specifically for graduate students and researchers working in fields of corpus linguistics, the history of the English language, and historical linguistics.

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