The contributions to this volume smoothly blend synchronic theory and diachronic investigations, and thus offer novel observations about the historical evolution of the English language from various theoretical angles (such as minimalist theory, formal semantics, recent theories on productivity, and various discourse models). By offering new vantage points and improved frameworks for the study of Present-Day English, the papers also provide solutions to problems that have been persistently present in the synchronic analysis of English. The papers are arranged around four thematic headings. The first part discusses patterns and models of replacement, while the second focuses on syntactic and semantic variation. The third part presents case studies of the historical development of adverbials and particles. The final part investigates functional and regional variation in discourse and vocabulary. The 15 peer-reviewed, revised papers were originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in August 2010 in Pécs, Hungary. The volume will appeal to linguists interested in a wide range of areas of linguistic research, including language change, grammatical theory, language variation, semantic change, diachronic discourse analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based study of English.

This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Data are drawn from many languages including Ewe, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hittite, Japanese, Malay, and especially English. This 2003 second edition has been thoroughly revised with substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, and includes a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality in change and the role of grammaticalization in creolization. Grammaticalization will be a valuable and stimulating textbook for all linguists interested in the development of grammatical forms and will also be of interest to readers in anthropology and psychology.

“All families and genera”: Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts aims at exploring scientific writing in late Modern English. This volume is the fourth of its kind devoted to the analysis of the relations between language and different scientific disciplines from 1700 to 1900. Here, forty texts on biology and related fields as compiled in the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts (CELiST) constitute the basis for the fifteen studies describing scientific discourse on methodological issues, the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies. CELiST is accompanied by an updated version of the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), a purpose-designed software. Both the tool and the corpus are freely accessible at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850and CELiST at https://ruc.udc.es/dspace/handle/2183/25720(DOI: https://doi.org/10.17979/spudc.9788497497848). The book is addressed to an international readership. It is of interest for university libraries as well as other academic institutions/societies and individual scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics all over the world.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena, from the history of core arguments, to complements and non-finite clauses, elements in the clause periphery, as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another, however, they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so, they show that historical syntax, and historical linguistics in general, is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions, the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.

This volume brings together contributions tracing the complex paths of change taken by the English language in its long history, from its beginnings in Old English to the present day. It addresses issues in a variety of fields ranging from semantics and morphosyntax to the interface between syntax and phonology, using a number of different theoretical standpoints. As such, the text reflects a diversity of approaches to corpora, and will serve to improve the reader’s understanding of some of the many developments and alterations that have affected English. It will be of interest to all scholars and students working on the history of English, as well as students of historical linguistics in general.

Why do Modern English modal auxiliaries ought to, should, and must, meaning OBLIGATION, occur in the present tense, yet their forms are in the preterite? Why does to accompany ought? One of the solutions to these questions is to look at the history of the English language. This monograph deals with the history of ought to, should, and must, which are of different syntactic and semantic origins: ought to stems from a main verb of Old English āgan ‘to have’ (POSSESSION) along with to; should derives from sculan ‘must’ with its ‘deviation’ to shall, and mōtan originates in ‘to be allowed to’ (PERMISSION). The work concentrates on the transition from Old English (700-1100) to Middle English (1100-1500), which is a crucial period in the history of the English language. Topics addressed include the linguistic review of modality, the philological reading of primary texts, and the occasional reference to the other Germanic languages.

The contributions of this volume centre around the (ongoing) work of John Anderson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and Fellow of the British Academy, who, with detailed studies in phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax as well as careful discussions of historical and methodological issues in linguistics at large, has been and still is the central figure in the development of a theory of language structure driven by the assumption of structural analogy between syntax and phonology and firmly grounded in the long-standing tradition of substantively based grammar behind it. The first contribution is a lengthy ‘interview’, based on a series of written interchanges by József Andor with John Anderson, which focuses on the development of Anderson’s work and its relation to contemporaneous developments in linguistics. The following eight contributions, centring on general issues concerning the historiography of localism, the lexicon, meaning and syntax and, finally, phonology, deal with applications, extensions, answers to criticism and philosophical context of Anderson’s work.

This book comprises a series of studies by a number of scholars working on what might broadly be termed the “medieval” period of the history of English, focusing on Old English, Middle English, and the relatively less well-documented period of transition from the former to the latter. The volume brings together contributions not only from a variety of fields, ranging from semantics and syntax to prosody and phonology, but also from different theoretical standpoints, in order to improve the reader’s understanding of the rapid changes that affect the language at this time. The collection of papers here should be of interest to all scholars and students working on Old or Middle English, as well as to students of historical linguistics in general, given that many of the processes and methodological parameters described here will prove to be directly applicable to the study of other periods and of other languages.

This volume offers a representative selection of the papers presented at the Third ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC3), held in Santiago de Compostela, 21–22 September 2012. The book is structured into four parts. Part I comprises syntactic studies on the auxiliary verb get in Indian English, the grammar of verbs capable of occurring with or without an object in Contemporary English, and isolated if-clauses. Part II includes two papers dealing with word formation patterns and with crosslinguistic influences on motion expression in English and Spanish. The studies in Part III discuss topics related to second language acquisition, such as the difficulties encountered by Spanish speakers in learning English pronunciation, verbal morphology production by Japanese learners of English, and the effects of elicitation on students’ production of English past tense forms. The papers in Part IV revolve around discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, addressing topics such as automatic sentiment detection, perspectival construal patterns in language and cognition, and the effect of emotional valence on disambiguation processes.

This volume brings together a selection of the papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Modality in English, held in Madrid on 9–11 September 2010. The book is divided into two parts, with the first encompassing contributions focusing on the notions of modality, evidentiality and temporality, and the second those that explore modality and its connection with stance and evaluation in specific genres and discourse domains.