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Explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of English, both past and present, methodologically and theoretically.
List of contents
Introduction: analysing English syntax past and present Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Emma Moore, Linda van Bergen and Willem B. Hollmann; Part I. Approaches to Grammatical Categories and Categorial Change: 1. What is special about pronouns? John Payne; 2. What for? Bas Aarts; 3. Whatever happened to 'whatever'? Dan Mccolm and Graeme Trousdale; 4. Are comparative modals converging or diverging in English? Different answers from the perspectives of grammaticalisation and constructionalisation Elizabeth Closs Traugott; 5. The definite article in Old English: evidence from Ælfric's Grammar Cynthia L. Allen; Part II. Approaches to Constructions and Constructional Change: 6. How patterns spread: the to-infinitival complement as a case of diffusional change, or 'To-infinitives, and beyond!' Bettelou Los; 7. 'Me Liketh/Lotheth' but 'I Loue/Hate': impersonal/non-impersonal boundaries in old and Middle English Ayumi Miura; 8. 'That's luck, if you ask me': the rise of an intersubjective comment clause Laurel J. Brinton; 9. Misreading and language change: a foray into qualitative historical linguistics Sylvia Adamson; 10. The conjunction and in phrasal and clausal structures in the Old Bailey Corpus Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg; Part III. Comparative and Typological Approaches: 11. The role played by analogy in processes of language change: the case of English have-to compared to Spanish tener-que Olga Fischer and Hella Olbertz; 12. Modelling step change: the history of will-verbs in Germanic Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent; 13. Possessives world-wide: genitive variation in varieties of English Benedikt Heller and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi; 14. American English: no written standard before the twentieth century? Christian Mair.
About the author
Nuria Yáñez-Bouza is a Lecturer in English Language at the Universidade de Vigo, Spain and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.Emma Moore is a Reader in Sociolinguistics at the University of Sheffield.Linda van Bergen is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh.Willem B. Hollmann is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University.
Summary
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.
