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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 3 of 5

English Coordinate Constructions
  • A Processing Perspective on Constituent Order
  • Arne Lohmann
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    29 September 2014
  • Drawing on extensive corpus-based research, this book explores the nature and behavior of coordinate constructions in three case studies, covering order in copulative compounds, binomials (bare phrases), and more complex phrases. Historically, research on order in coordination has concentrated on so-called irreversible binomials, but Lohmann's research places significant focus on reversible ad hoc coordination and also presents a detailed comparison between irreversible and reversible binomials. This book uses empirical analyses to explore a wide range of factors, ranging from pragmatic to phonetic influences on the ordering process. It also offers readers a processing perspective on the results obtained, and puts forth a processing explanation for the characteristics of irreversible binomials. The book is ideal for researchers and advanced students working in English linguistics, syntax and psycholinguistics, and due to the multifactorial methodology applied it will be of particular interest to quantitatively minded corpus linguists.

Late Modern English Syntax
  • Edited by Marianne Hundt
  • Published online:
    05 September 2014
    Print publication:
    14 August 2014
  • The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.

Noun Phrase Complexity in English
  • Eva Berlage
  • Published online:
    05 July 2014
    Print publication:
    05 June 2014
  • This book explores noun phrase (NP) complexity in English, showing that it is best accounted for both by a linear and a hierarchical parameter: its length and its type of postmodifier(s). The study is methodologically unique in that it combines univariate and multivariate analyses in an investigation of four different syntactic variables. Drawing on more than three billion words of British and American data, Eva Berlage shows that the length and the structure of the NPs, along with language-external factors such as the regional variety of English, work as powerful determinants of the variation. On a theoretical level, the book reveals that the structural complexity of NPs cannot be sufficiently captured by (phrasal) node counts but that we need to incorporate the degree to which NPs are sentential. The book is designed for researchers and students interested in syntax, language variation, sociolinguistics, structural complexity and the history of English.

The Culture of Singapore English
  • Jock O. Wong
  • Published online:
    05 July 2014
    Print publication:
    12 June 2014
  • This book provides a fresh approach to Singapore English, by focusing on its cultural connotations. The author, a native Singaporean, explores a range of aspects of this rich variety of English - including address forms, cultural categories, particles and interjections – and links particular words to particular cultural norms. By using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which is free from technical terminology, he explains the relationship between meaning and culture with maximal clarity, and an added strength of this study lies in its use of authentic examples and pictures, which offer a fascinating glimpse of Singaporean life. Through comparisons with Anglo English, it also explores some difficulties associated with Standard English and cultural misunderstanding. Lending a unique local perspective and written with an incisiveness that makes it ideal for both academic and non-academic readers, this book will appeal to all those interested in Singapore English and its cultural values.

Parentheticals in Spoken English
  • The Syntax-Prosody Relation
  • Nicole Dehé
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    05 June 2014
  • 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.

English in the Caribbean
  • Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad
  • Dagmar Deuber
  • Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    03 April 2014
  • This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.

Narrative in English Conversation
  • A Corpus Analysis of Storytelling
  • Christoph Rühlemann
  • Published online:
    18 December 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2014
  • 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 Rühlemann 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, Rühlemann 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.

Singapore English
  • Structure, Variation, and Usage
  • Jakob R. E. Leimgruber
  • Published online:
    05 July 2013
    Print publication:
    09 May 2013
  • In recent years the study of English and its global varieties has grown rapidly as a field of study. The English language in Singapore, famous for its vernacular known as 'Singlish', is of particular interest to linguists because it takes accent, dialect and lexical features from a wide range of languages including Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien and Tamil, as well as being influenced by the Englishes of Britain, Australia and America. This book gives a comprehensive overview of English in Singapore by setting it within a historical context and drawing on recent developments in the field of indexicality, world Englishes and corpus research. Through application of the indexicality framework Jakob Leimgruber offers readers a new way of thinking about and analysing the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English. This book is ideal for researchers and advanced students interested in Singapore and its languages.

Constructional Change in English
  • Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax
  • Martin Hilpert
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    28 February 2013
  • Martin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

The Verb Phrase in English
  • Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora
  • Edited by Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech, Sean Wallis
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    14 February 2013
  • The chapters in this volume feature new and groundbreaking research carried out by leading scholars and promising young researchers from around the world on recent changes in the English verb phrase. Drawing on authentic corpus data, the papers consider both spoken and written English in several genres. Each contribution pays particular attention to the methodologies used for investigating short-term patterns of change in English, with detailed discussions of controversies in this area. This cutting-edge collection is essential reading for historians of the English language, syntacticians and corpus linguists.

English as a Contact Language
  • Edited by Daniel Schreier, Marianne Hundt
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    17 January 2013
  • 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.

Standards of English
  • Codified Varieties around the World
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    06 December 2012
  • The notion of a 'standard' variety of English has been the subject of a considerable body of research. Studies have tended to focus on the standard features of British and American English. However, more recently interest has turned to the other varieties of English that have developed around the world and the ways in which these have also been standardised. This volume provides the first book-length exploration of 'standard Englishes', with chapters on areas as diverse as Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. This is a timely and important topic, edited by a well-known scholar in the field, with contributions by the leading experts on each major variety of English discussed. The book presents in full the criteria for defining a standard variety, and each chapter compares standards in both spoken and written English and explores the notion of register within standard varieties.

Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects
  • A Study in Corpus-Based Dialectometry
  • Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
  • Published online:
    05 December 2012
    Print publication:
    25 October 2012
  • Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a significant part. This book explores grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. In doing so it presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences. These features include, for example, multiple negation (e.g. don't you make no damn mistake), non-standard verbal-s (e.g. so I says, What have you to do?), or non-standard weak past tense and past participle forms (e.g. they knowed all about these things). Utilizing state-of-the-art dialectometrical analysis and visualization techniques, the book is original both in terms of its fundamental research question ('What are the large-scale patterns of grammatical variability in British English dialects?') and in terms of its methodology.

From Philology to English Studies
  • Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
  • Haruko Momma
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    04 October 2012
  • The study of English language and literature in Britain changed dramatically between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. From Philology to English Studies explores the contribution of philology to this movement. Haruko Momma charts both the rise and fall of philology from antiquity to the late eighteenth century, and the impact of modern philology on the study of modern languages and literatures. Focusing in detail on the work of key philologists in the nineteenth century, Momma considers how they shaped European discourse and especially vernacular studies in Britain: William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit in British India gave rise to Indo-European studies; Max Müller's study of this same language helped spread the Aryan myth to the English-speaking world; the OED achieved its greatness as a post-national lexicon under the editorship of James Murray, a dialectologist originally from Scotland.

Interactions across Englishes
  • Linguistic Choices in Local and International Contact Situations
  • Christiane Meierkord
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    26 April 2012
  • 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.

Antonyms in English
  • Construals, Constructions and Canonicity
  • Steven Jones, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis, Caroline Willners
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    23 February 2012
  • 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.

Analysing Older English
  • Edited by David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully, Emma Moore
  • Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    01 December 2011
  • Is historical linguistics different in principle from other linguistic research? This book addresses problems encountered in gathering and analysing data from early English, including the incomplete nature of the evidence and the dangers of misinterpretation or over-interpretation. Even so, gaps in the data can sometimes be filled. The volume brings together a team of leading English historical linguists who have encountered such issues first-hand, to discuss and suggest solutions to a range of problems in the phonology, syntax, dialectology and onomastics of older English. The topics extend widely over the history of English, chronologically and linguistically, and include Anglo-Saxon naming practices, the phonology of the alliterative line, computational measurement of dialect similarity, dialect levelling and enregisterment in late Modern English, stress-timing in English phonology and the syntax of Old and early Modern English. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in English historical linguistics.

Premodifiers in English
  • Their Structure and Significance
  • Jim Feist
  • Published online:
    25 October 2011
    Print publication:
    27 October 2011
  • 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.

The English Language in Canada
  • Status, History and Comparative Analysis
  • Charles Boberg
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    26 August 2010
  • The English Language in Canada examines the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English, focusing on the 'standard' variety heard across the country today. The discussion of the status of Canadian English considers the number and distribution of its speakers, its relation to French and other Canadian languages and to American English, its status as the expressive medium of English Canadian culture and its treatment in previous research. The review of its history concentrates on the historical roots and patterns of English-speaking settlement that established Canadian English and influenced its character in each region of Canada. The analysis of its principal features compares the vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar of Canadian English to standard British and American English. Subsequent chapters examine variation and change in the vocabulary and pronunciation of Canadian English, while a final chapter briefly considers the future of Canadian English.

Medical Writing in Early Modern English
  • Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    03 February 2011
  • Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.

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