Late Modern English Syntax
About this book
The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of data sources (corpora)
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Late Modern English syntax in its linguistic and socio-historical context
- 2 The decline of the BE-perfect, linguistic relativity, and grammar writing in the nineteenth century
- 3 Letās not, letās donāt and donāt letās in British and American English
- 4 Do we got a difference? Divergent developments of semi-auxiliary (have) got (to) in British and American English
- 5 From contraction to construction? The recent life of āll
- 6 Books that sell ā mediopassives and the modification āconstraintā
- 7 Beyond mere syntactic change: a micro-analytical study of various and numerous
- 8 Culturally conditioned language change? A multivariate analysis of genitive constructions in ARCHER
- 9 On the changing status of that-clauses
- 10 Variability in verb complementation in Late Modern English: finite vs. non-finite patterns
- 11 Opposite developments in composite predicate constructions: the case of take advantage of and make use of
- 12 Constrained confusion: the gerund/participle distinction in Late Modern English
- 13 āYou are a bit of a sneakā: exploring a degree modifier in the Old Bailey Corpus
- 14 If you choose/like/prefer/want/wish: the origin of metalinguistic and politeness functions
- 15 Epistemic parentheticals with seem: Late Modern English in focus
- 16 Syntactic stability and change in nineteenth-century newspaper language
- 17 ā[W]ell are you not got over thinking about going to Ireland yetā: the BE-perfect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century...
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
