Bøger i Studies in English Language serien

"Drawing on an extensive corpus-based study, this book explores theoretical and empirical discussions of stance research applied to data from Early Modern English. It also presents a new method for the study of pragmatic phenomena, making it essential reading for researchers and students in both historical pragmatics and corpus pragmatics"--

What do 'bimbo,' 'glitch,' 'savvy,' and 'shtick' all have in common? They are all expressions used in informal American English that have been taken from other languages. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive description of borrowings in informal American English, based on a large database of citations from thousands of contemporary sources, including the press, film, and TV. It presents the United States as a linguistic 'melting pot,' with words from a diverse range of languages now frequently appearing in the lexicon. It examines these borrowings from various perspectives, including discussions of terms, donors, types, changes, functions, and themes. It also features an alphabetical glossary of 1,200 representative expressions, defined and illustrated by 5,500 usage examples, providing an insightful and practical resource for readers. Combining scholarship with readability, this book is a fascinating storehouse of information for students and researchers in linguistics as well as anyone interested in lexical variation in contemporary English.

Combining Forms (CFs) are a major morphological phenomenon in Modern English, yet while they have been discussed in some morphological literature, no full-length study has been devoted to this topic so far. This pioneering book addresses that gap by providing a framework in which CFs are marked as distinct from their neighbouring categories such as abbreviations and blending. It splits CFs into four distinct categories - neoclassical (e.g. bio-therapy, zoo-logy), abbreviated (e.g. e-reader, econo-politics), secreted (e.g. oil-gate, computer-holic) and splinters (e.g. docu- from documentary in docudrama). It shows that the notion of CF spans a wide spectrum of processes, from regular composition to abbreviation, from blending to analogy, and schema. Modern and emerging English CFs are analysed by adopting a corpus-based approach, and measuring their realised, expanding, and potential productivity. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for researchers and advanced students of morphology, English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and lexicography.

This book develops a corpus-based, constructional model of speech acts, and shows how it can be implemented in teaching practice. Its critical review of current illocutionary theories and the varied range of practical activities that it offers will be invaluable for both EFL professionals and students or researchers in linguistics.

"Turn-taking is a fascinating feature of conversational interaction, due to its systematic and ordered nature. However, research has so far focused mainly on American and British conversations, with other varieties of English receiving much less attention. This pioneering book addresses this gap by exploring turn-taking patterns and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English. Bringing together research from the fields of Conversation Analysis and World Englishes for the first time, Neumaier conducts an empirical study based on authentic audio data of interactions in these global varieties of English, and demonstrates that conversational strategies differ between speaker groups with different cultural backgrounds. Shedding new light on the impact of cultural and sociolinguistic factors on conversational patterns, it is essential reading for advanced students and scholars interested in language, variation, and social interaction, as well as those working in the fields of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, and World Englishes"--

"Combining both qualitative and quantitative methods and juxtaposing two linguistic theories, this study provides an account of the function and development of evaluative of-binomials, an important phenomenon in the English language. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading for researchers in syntax, semantics, and corpus linguistics"--

Why do recordings of speakers engaging in reported speech at British Prime Minister's Questions from the 1970s-80s sound so distant to us? This cutting-edge study explores how the practices of quoting have changed at parliamentary question time in light of changing conventions and an evolving media landscape. Comparing data from authentic audio and video recordings from 1978-1988 and 2003-2013, it provides evidence for qualitative and quantitative changes at the micro level (e.g., grammaticalisation processes in the reporting clause) and in more global structures (e.g., rhetorical patterns, and activities). These analytic findings contribute to the theoretical modelling of evidentiality in English, our understanding of constructions, interaction, and change, and of PMQs as an evolving community of practice. One of the first large-scale studies of recent change in an interactional genre of English, this ground-breaking monograph offers a framework for a diachronic interactional sociolinguistic research programme.

This book provides both fresh insights into sixteenth and seventeenth-century spelling standardisation in England, and an exploration of the history of the printed book and its development in the socio-cultural history of the time. It is essential reading for those interested in writing systems and the history of the English.

Ideal for researchers and students in English historical linguistics and syntax, this comprehensive study traces the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English. Based on large amounts of empirical evidence it shows the phrasal verb to be one of the most idiosyncratic features of English.

Investigates the change and evolution of a fascinating English construction - comparative correlatives (e.g. the more you eat, the fatter you get). This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in English linguistics, grammar, syntax, and the history of the English language.

An intensive overview of Mexican American English, linking it to the speech of other immigrant groups worldwide. This study is of particular interest to students and researchers in linguistics, as it provides insight into language contact, immigrant groups' response to majority cultures, and an analysis of language-transfer effects.

A study of how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian speakers have been represented in British fiction. It explores the evolution of language ideologies and explains its computational techniques as part of a digital humanities toolkit. An ideal text for students and scholars of English historical linguistics and English literary studies.

Have you ever wondered whether to spell a particular compound with a space or a hyphen - and why? This book discusses what compounds are and how they differ from other linguistic units. It provides a detailed analysis of English compound spelling and suggests a rule of thumb for doubtful cases.

Based on authentic English-language material, and backed by the latest statistical methods, this book explores the impact of gender on linguistic choices in English-speaking countries worldwide, considering local social realities. It is essential reading for researchers and advanced students with an interest in language, gender and World Englishes.

A new, thought-provoking account of the theory of grammar and language processing, based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is.

Taking a corpus-based approach, this innovative and groundbreaking text maps regional grammatical variation in written American English. A statistical analysis of these maps demonstrates for the first time that regional variation exists in written Standard American English, and identifies modern American dialect regions.

Richly illustrated throughout with textual analyses, this book challenges widely held beliefs about grammatical complexity, academic writing, and linguistic change in English. This important new work will be of interest to discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists.

Why does English pronunciation differ from other related languages? This book addresses this and other questions by analysing a high number of innovative Middle English spellings. Stenbrenden explores the changes in long-vowel pronunciation, using empirical data to date, localise and interpret the beginning of these changes.

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, social categories, particles and interjections - and links particular words to particular cultural norms.

This study explores 'signalling nouns' - nouns whose meaning can only be determined by the context in which they are used. It investigates how they function in academic discourse, what their semantic properties are, and the linguistic environments in which they can and cannot occur.

What makes the noun phrase 'the man I saw' more complex than 'the man'? Designed for researchers and students interested in questions of language complexity, this book aims to answer that question by exploring variation in more than three billion words of British and American data.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and sociolinguistics.

Drawing on recent developments in the field of indexicality, world Englishes and corpus research, Jakob Leimgruber offers readers a new way of thinking about and analysing the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English.

Is construction grammar a useful framework for the study of language change? Hilpert combines the current linguistic theory of construction grammar with advanced corpus-based methodology in order to study language change in a new way. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change.

English comment clauses such as I think and you know have been widely studied in present-day English. This study, however, constitutes the first full-length treatment of the history of comment clauses in the English language, and proposes a varied and complex conception of their development.

Early English texts did not have a convention of quotation marks for reporting direct speech. This raises problems for interpreting and understanding represented discourse. Colette Moore examines the strategies pre-modern texts used to indicate direct speech and the implications of these strategies for reading Middle and Early Modern English works.

An exploration of grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. The book 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.

An examination of the influence of nineteenth-century philology on European thought. Haruko Momma considers, among other matters, the impact of William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit on historical studies of language and culture, the Philological Society's role in the making of the OED, and the rise of English studies at universities.

The first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on genres such as spoken language, TV, newspapers, and literary works. Using approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, it explores both speaker- and addressee-related aspects of hyperbole, and shows it to be an important contributor to language change.