This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change.

Preliminary Material /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- The corpus-user's chorus: (Based on The Major General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance) /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Introduction: The changing face of corpus linguistics /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Oh Canada! Towards the Corpus of Early Ontario English /Stefan Dollinger -- Favoring Americanisms? vs. before and in Early English in Australia: A corpus-based approach /Clemens Fritz -- Computing the Lexicons of Early Modern English /Ian Lancashire -- EFL dictionaries, grammars and language guides from 1700 to 1850: testing a new corpus on points of spokenness /Manfred Markus -- The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer /Antonio Miranda García , Javier Calle Martín , David Moreno Olalla and Gustavo Muñoz González -- Prediction with SHALL and WILL: a diachronic perspective /Maurizio Gotti -- Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective /Anneli Meurman-Solin and Päivi Pahta -- Changes in textual structures of book advertisements in the ZEN Corpus /Caren auf dem Keller -- “Curtains like these are selling right in the city of Chicago for USD 1.50” - The mediopassive in American 20th-century advertising language /Marianne Hundt -- Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English /Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith -- Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus /Mats Deutschmann -- How recent is recent? On overcoming interpretational difficulties /Göran Kjellmer -- Looking at looking: Functions and contexts of progressives in spoken English and 'school' English /Ute Römer -- Ditransitives, the Given Before New principle, and textual retrievability: a corpus-based study using ICECUP /Gabriel Ozón -- The Spanish pragmatic marker pues and its English equivalents /Anna-Brita Stenström -- WebCorp: A tool for online linguistic information retrieval and analysis /Barry Morley -- Diachronic linguistic analysis on the web with WebCorp /Andrew Kehoe -- New ways of analysing ESL on the WWW with WebCorp and WebPhraseCount /Josef Schmied -- I'm like, “Hey, it works!”: Using GlossaNet to find attestations of the quotative (be) like in English-language newspapers /Cédrick Fairon and John V. Singler -- Corpus linguistics and English reference grammars /Joybrato Mukherjee -- Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: the complementary role of small and large corpora /Christian Mair -- but it will take time...points of view on a lexical grammar of English /Michaela Mahlberg -- Corpus linguistics, grammar and theory: Report on a panel discussion at the 24th ICAME conference /Jan Aarts.

An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics is a collection of interviews with fourteen well-known researchers in the field of linguistics. Each interview consists of a set of ten questions: the first seven are common to all contributors while the last three are connected to the research experience of each guest. In the general questions, the invited scholars explore (sometimes controversial) topics such as the concept of representativeness, the role of intuition and the status of Corpus Linguistics. In the specific questions, they provide a thorough discussion of materials and methods in corpus research as well as theoretical and applied perspectives on the use of corpora in language studies. Whether experts or novices, the volume should be of interest to all those who want to learn about corpus linguistics and carry out research in this fascinating and growing area.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the intersecting fields of corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and genre-based studies of language usage. Papers in this collection are devoted to presenting relevant methods pertinent to corpus-based studies of the connection between genre and language change, linguistic changes that occur in particular genres, and specific diachronic phenomena that are influenced by genre factors to greater and lesser degrees. Data are drawn from a number of languages, and the scope of the studies presented here is both short- and long-term, covering cases of recent change as well as more long-term alterations.

The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in near-synonymy. In particular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches used for semantic analysis have successfully uncovered subtle distinctions in meaning between near-synonyms. However, most studies have dealt with the semantic structure of sets of near-synonyms from a synchronic perspective, while their diachronic evolution generally has been neglected. Against this backdrop, the aim of this book is to examine five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL: fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling. Their distribution is analyzed across a wide range of contexts, including semantic, morphosyntactic, and stylistic ones, since distributional patterns of this type serve as a proxy for semantic (dis)similarity. The data is submitted to various univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, making it possible to uncover fine-grained (dis)similarities among the near-synonyms, as well as possible changes in their prototypical structures. The book sheds valuable light on the diachronic development of lexical near-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded.

A critical examination of key concepts and issues in corpus linguistics, with a particular focus on the expanding interdisciplinary nature of the field and the role that written and spoken corpora now play in these different disciplines. It also presents a series of corpus-based case studies illustrating central themes and best practices.

Articles in this volume discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled.

This book delves into Benjamin Franklin’s English, illustrating the variable nature of 18th-century American English and his stylistic manipulation of the potentiality of English. Utilizing corpus methodologies, it offers researchers in historical sociolinguistics unique insights. Benjamin Franklin is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and while his achievements have been well established in the history of America, his linguistic activities have been explored only to a lesser extent. Iyeiri examines his letters and autobiography, which provide linguists with opportunities to study his language. The book is structured using the “form-to-function” framework. The first part focuses on different lexical items one by one, and can be read in the order readers want, whilst in the second part, Iyeiri stitches the arguments together, discussing various grammatical features across different lexical items. This book is a fantastic reference for students and scholars of historical linguistics, varieties of English, and World Englishes.