Providing a detailed and comprehensive account of the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English, this study covers almost 400 years in the history of English, and provides both a diachronic and synchronic account based on over 12,000 examples extracted from stratified electronic corpora. The corpus analysis provides evidence of how registers can inform us about the history of English, as it traces and compares the usage and stylistic drifts of phrasal verbs across ten different genres - drama, fiction, journals, diaries, letters, medicine, news, science, sermons, and trial proceedings. The study also sheds new light on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of phrasal verbs, proposing a new approach to the category, considering not only on their grammatical features, but also their historical development, by discussing the category in terms of a number of central mechanisms of language change.

This volume provides a concise overview of the diachronic development of composite predicates (CPs) in Late Modern English, offering clearer evidence of ongoing language change using data less readily available in other corpora. While previous scholarship on CPs exists from a synchronic perspective, this book is the first to focus exclusively on Late Modern English with a diachronic approach to CPs, understood as phraseological verbs consisting of a verb and a deverbal noun or this combination with a preposition, such as to ask a question or to take hold of. The volume builds on real-life spoken data encompassing the proceedings of the Old Bailey at the Central Criminal Court in London, which predate the invention of audio-recording technology. Leone explores syntactic and semantic changes and the role performed by phenomena associated with grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization in this period from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The book sheds light on ongoing processes of change in spoken data, enriching knowledge on language change in this period and offering directions for future research. This book will appeal to scholars in English historical linguistics, syntax and semantics, and language change.

This textbook intends to do a clear, informal review of the history of the English language. Although the main focus is not to provide a thorough social description of the different periods in which the history of English is divided, we want to make it clear that language has changed because it is used by society, and therefore one cannot be understood without the other.

Morphological typology is usually limited to the realm of grammar. Accordingly, English is considered an analytic language due to its poor grammatical morphology – but what about the lexicon? Taking a twofold approach, this study investigates the typological development of English nouns since 1150. First, the focus is on the means used to extend the lexicon: Correlating the central noun formation processes as well as borrowing reveals, for the first time, their quantitative importance – with some surprising results. Second, the structure of the lexicon takes center stage: The morphological analysis of all nouns uncovers diachronic shifts – and striking parallels between grammar and lexicon.

Taking a multi-theoretical approach, this book offers the first in-depth study of the function and development of evaluative of-binomials.

The binomial noun phrase, or of-binomial, is an important phenomenon in the English language. Defined as a noun phrase that contains two related nouns, linked by the preposition of, examples include a hell of a day and a beast of a storm. This pioneering book provides the first extensive study of the evaluative binominal noun phrases (EBNP) in English, exploring the syntactic rules that govern them, and the (functional) semantic and pragmatic links between the two nouns. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, corpus data, and two different theoretical approaches (Construction Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar), it argues that the EBNP now functions as a stage in a grammaticalization path that begins with a prototypical N+PP construction, continues with the head-classifier, and ends with two new of-binominal constructions: the evaluative modifier and binominal intensifier. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading for researchers in syntax, semantics, and English corpus linguistics.

This book provides a fresh perspective on language change in Late Modern English, and is illustrated with corpus-linguistic case studies.

This book merges theory and practical activities to show how research on speech acts can be implemented in EFL teaching.

Based on a rich range of sources, this pioneering book provides a comprehensive description of informal borrowings in American English.

Provides a comprehensive overview of how variation in English world-wide is structured and the factors that motivate this structure.