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  3. Studies in English Language

The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national and international varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership.

  • General Editors: Merja Kytö, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Editorial Boards: Bas Aarts, University College London, John Algeo, University of Georgia, Susan Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, Christian Mair, University of Freiburg, Charles F. Meyer, University of Massachusetts

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84 results in Studies in English Language

Page 4 of 5

Medical Writing in Early Modern English
  • Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    03 February 2011
  • Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.

Preposition Placement in English
  • A Usage-based Approach
  • Thomas Hoffmann
  • Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    06 January 2011
  • Preposition placement, the competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?), is one of the most interesting areas of syntactic variation in English. This is the first book to investigate preposition placement across all types of clauses that license it, such as questions, exclamations and wh-clauses, and those which exhibit categorical stranding, such as non-wh relative clauses, comparatives, and passives. Drawing on over 100 authentic examples from both first-language (English) and second-language (Kenyan) data, it combines experimental and corpus-based approaches to provide a full grammatical account of preposition placement in both varieties of English. Although written within the usage-based construction grammar framework, the results are presented in theory-neutral terminology, making them accessible to researchers from all syntactic schools. This pioneering volume will be of interest not only to syntacticians, but also second-language researchers and those working on variation in English.

Hyperbole in English
  • A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration
  • Claudia Claridge
  • Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    25 November 2010
  • Non-literal language is ubiquitous in everyday life, and while hyperbole is a major part of this, it has so far remained relatively unexplored. This volume provides the first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on data from genres such as spoken conversation, TV, newspapers, and literary works from Chaucer to Monty Python. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, it uses approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric to investigate in detail both speaker-centered and emotive aspects of hyperbole, and also addressee-related aspects, such as interpretation and interactional uptake. Illustrated with a range of diachronic case studies, hyperbole is also shown to be a main means of linguistic creativity, and an important contributor to language change. The book concludes with an exploration of the role of hyperbole in political speaking, humour, and literature. Original and in-depth, it will be invaluable to all those working on meaning, discourse, and historical linguistics.

Eighteenth-Century English
  • Ideology and Change
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    06 December 2010
    Print publication:
    24 June 2010
  • The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language, in which the modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. This book is divided into thematic sections which deal with issues central to English in the eighteenth century. These include linguistic ideology and the grammatical tradition, the contribution of women to the writing of grammars, the interactions of writers at this time and how politeness was encoded in language, including that on a regional level. The contributions also discuss how language was seen and discussed in public and how grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers and publishers judged on-going change. The novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the modern period.

The Lesser-Known Varieties of English
  • An Introduction
  • Edited by Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider, Jeffrey P. Williams
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    04 March 2010
  • This is the first ever volume to compile sociolinguistic and historical information on lesser-known, and relatively ignored, native varieties of English around the world. Exploring areas as diverse as the Pacific, South America, the South Atlantic and West Africa, it shows how these varieties are as much part of the big picture as major varieties and that their analysis is essential for addressing some truly important issues in linguistic theory, such as dialect obsolescence and death, language birth, dialect typology and genetic classification, patterns of diffusion and transplantation and contact-induced language change. It also shows how close interwoven fields such as social history, contact linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics are in accounting for their formation and maintenance, providing a thorough description of the lesser-known varieties of English and their relevance for language spread and change.

Adjunct Adverbials in English
  • Hilde Hasselgård
  • Published online:
    03 May 2010
    Print publication:
    25 February 2010
  • In this original study, Hilde Hasselgård discusses the use of adverbials in English, through examining examples found in everyday texts. Adverbials - clause elements that typically refer to circumstances of time, space, reason and manner - cover a range of meanings and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The description of the frequency of meaning types and discussion of the reasons for selecting positions show that the use of adverbials differs across text types. Adverbial usage is often linked to the general build-up of a text and part of its content and purpose. In using real texts, Hasselgård identifies a challenge for the classification of adjuncts, and also highlights that some adjuncts have uses that extend into the textual and interpersonal domains, obscuring the traditional divisions between adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts.

The English Noun Phrase
  • The Nature of Linguistic Categorization
  • Evelien Keizer
  • Published online:
    25 January 2010
    Print publication:
    09 August 2007
  • English has an interesting variety of noun phrases, which differ greatly in structure. Examples are 'binominal' (two-noun) phrases ('a beast of a party'); possessive constructions ('the author's opinion'); and discontinuous noun phrases ('the review [came out yesterday] of his book'). How are these different noun phrases structured? How do we produce and understand them? These questions are central to this study, which explores the interaction between the form of noun phrases, their meaning, and their use. It shows how, despite the need in linguistic analysis for strict categories, many linguistic constructions in fact defy straightforward classification - and concludes that in order to fully explain the internal structure of utterances, we must first consider the communicative, pragmatic and cognitive factors that come into play. Drawing on a range of authentic examples, this book sheds light not only on the noun phrase itself but also the nature of linguistic classification.

Change in Contemporary English
  • A Grammatical Study
  • Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, Nicholas Smith
  • Published online:
    18 January 2010
    Print publication:
    22 October 2009
  • Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receiving particular attention are the influence of American English on British English, the role of the press, the 'colloquialization' of written English, and a wide range of grammatical topics, including the modal auxiliaries, progressive, subjunctive, passive, genitive and relative clauses. These subjects build an overall picture of how English grammar is changing, and the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.

Irish English
  • History and Present-Day Forms
  • Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    08 November 2007
  • English has been spoken in Ireland for over 800 years, making Irish English the oldest variety of the language outside Britain. This 2007 book traces the development of English in Ireland, both north and south, from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing on authentic data ranging from medieval literature to authentic contemporary examples, it reveals how Irish English arose, how it has developed, and how it continues to change. A variety of central issues are considered in detail, such as the nature of language contact and the shift from Irish to English, the sociolinguistically motivated changes in present-day Dublin English, the special features of Ulster Scots, and the transportation of Irish English to overseas locations as diverse as Canada, the United States, and Australia. Presenting a comprehensive survey of Irish English at all levels of linguistics, this book will be invaluable to historical linguists, sociolinguists, syntacticians and phonologists alike.

British or American English?
  • A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns
  • John Algeo
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    10 August 2006
  • Speakers of British and American English display some striking differences in their use of grammar. In this detailed survey, John Algeo considers questions such as:Who lives on a street, and who lives in a street?Who takes a bath, and who has a bath?Who says Neither do I, and who says Nor do I?After 'thank you', who says Not at all and who says You're welcome?Whose team are on the ball, and whose team isn't?Containing extensive quotations from real-life English on both sides of the Atlantic, collected over the past twenty years, this is a clear and highly organized guide to the differences - and the similarities - between the grammar of British and American speakers. Written for those with no prior knowledge of linguistics, it shows how these grammatical differences are linked mainly to particular words, and provides an accessible account of contemporary English in use.

English Corpus Linguistics
  • An Introduction
  • Charles F. Meyer
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 June 2002
  • English Corpus Linguistics is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. It begins with a discussion of the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory, demonstrating that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. Charles F. Meyer goes on to describe how to plan the creation of a corpus, how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus, how to annotate the data that are collected, and how to conduct a corpus analysis of a completed corpus. The book concludes with an overview of the challenges that corpus linguists face to make both the creation and analysis of corpora much easier undertakings than they currently are. Clearly organized and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students of linguistics and English language.

Apposition in Contemporary English
  • Charles F. Meyer
  • Published online:
    20 November 2009
    Print publication:
    19 March 1992
  • Apposition in Contemporary English is a full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analysed.

Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication
  • Jan Firbas
  • Published online:
    19 November 2009
    Print publication:
    25 June 1992
  • Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. Jan Firbas discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rheme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence as brought about by intonation.

Cognitive Space and Linguistic Case
  • Semantic and Syntactic Categories in English
  • Izchak M. Schlesinger
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 1995
  • This study sheds light on the complex relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories. Challenging the view of cases as categories in cognitive space, Professor Schlesinger proposes an understanding of the concept of case. Drawing on evidence from psycholinguistic research and English language data, he argues that case categories are in fact composed of more primitive cognitive notions: features and dimensions. These are registered in the lexical entries of individual verbs, thereby allowing certain metaphorical extensions. This approach to case permits better descriptions of certain syntactic phenomena, as Schlesinger illustrates through the analysis of the feature compositions of three cases.

The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800
  • Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts
  • Edited by Laura Wright
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 September 2000
  • There are many questions yet to be answered about how Standard English came into existence. The claim that it developed from a Central Midlands dialect propagated by clerks in the Chancery, the medieval writing office of the king, is one explanation that has dominated textbooks to date. This book reopens the debate about the origins of Standard English, challenging earlier accounts and revealing a far more complex and intriguing history. An international team of fourteen specialists offer a wide-ranging analysis, from theoretical discussions of the origin of dialects, to detailed descriptions of the history of individual Standard English features. The volume ranges from Middle English to the present day, and looks at a variety of text types. It concludes that Standard English had no one single ancestor dialect, but is the cumulative result of generations of authoritative writing from many text types.

English in the Southern United States
  • Edited by Stephen J. Nagle, Sara L. Sanders
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    09 January 2003
  • The English of the southern United States is possibly the most studied of any regional variety of any language because of its rich internal diversity, its distinctiveness among regional varieties in the United States, its significance as a marker of regional identity, and the general folkloric appeal of southern culture. However, most, if not all, books about Southern American English have been directed almost exclusively toward scholars already working in the field. This 2003 volume, written by a team of experts, many of them internationally known, provides a broad overview of the foundations of and research on language variation in the southern United States designed to invite inquiry and inquirers. It explores historical and cultural elements, iconic contemporary features, and changes in progress. Central themes, issues and topics of scholarly investigation and debate figure prominently throughout the volume. The extensive bibliography will facilitate continued research.

Twentieth-Century English
  • History, Variation and Standardization
  • Christian Mair
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 October 2006
  • Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus data, it shows how we can track ongoing changes to the language, and demonstrates each of the major developments that have taken place. As well as taking insights from a vast body of literature, Christian Mair presents the results of his own cutting-edge research, revealing some important changes which have not been previously documented. He concludes by exploring how social and cultural factors, such as the American influence on British English, have affected Standard English in recent times. Authoritative, informative and engaging, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in language change in progress, particularly those working on English, and will be welcomed by students, researchers and language teachers alike.

Nineteenth-Century English
  • Stability and Change
  • Edited by Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén, Erik Smitterberg
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    19 October 2006
  • This volume of Studies in English Language focuses on the nineteenth century, an important period of both stability and change for the English language. Through ten detailed case studies, it highlights the relationships between English, its users, and nineteenth-century society, looking particularly at gender differences and variation across genres. It also discusses major structural aspects of nineteenth-century English, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, and Germanic vs. Romance vocabulary. Although the nineteenth century is often viewed as a relatively stable period in the development of the language, this volume shows the 1800s to be a time of significant change, some of which continued into the twentieth century. By making comparisons possible with both earlier and later periods, it makes an important contribution to our overall understanding of the history of the English language.

New Zealand English
  • Its Origins and Evolution
  • Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Peter Trudgill
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 May 2004
  • New Zealand English - at just 150 years old - is one of the newest varieties of English, and is unique in that its full history and development are documented in extensive audio-recordings. The rich corpus of spoken language provided by New Zealand's 'mobile disk unit' has provided insight into how the earliest New Zealand-born settlers spoke, and consequently, how this new variety of English developed. On the basis of these recordings, this book examines and analyses the extensive linguistic changes New Zealand English has undergone since it was first spoken in the 1850s. The authors, all experts in phonetics and sociolinguistics, use the data to test previous explanations for new dialect formation, and to challenge current claims about the nature of language change. The first ever corpus-based study of the evolution of New Zealand English, this book will be welcomed by all those interested in phonetics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology.

Legacies of Colonial English
  • Studies in Transported Dialects
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    24 February 2005
  • As a result of colonization, many varieties of English now exist around the world. Originally published in 2005, Legacies of Colonial English brings together a team of internationally renowned scholars to discuss the role of British dialects in both the genesis and subsequent history of postcolonial Englishes. Considering the input of Scottish, English and Irish dialects, they closely examine a wide range of Englishes - including those in North and South America, South Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand - and explain why many of them still reflect non-standard British usage from the distant past. Complete with a checklist of dialect features, a detailed glossary and set of general references on the topic of postcolonial Englishes, this book will be an invaluable source to scholars and students of English language and linguistics, particularly those interested in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology.

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