Corpora And Language Change In Late Modern English

"Late Modern English has traditionally been considered a period of stability with regard to language standardization, but a cautious look at crucial aspects of its internal and external history reveals that the period still deserves some scholarly attention. This book aims at presenting valuable tools for the study of Late Modern English along with a selection of studies that approach linguistic variation from various perspectives. In the first part, this book provides an account of the main available corpora for the study of Late Modern English, representative of different text types (medical English or private correspondence, among others), dialects and early new varieties. In the second part, several corpus-based studies assess Late Modern English at different levels so as to shed light on the status of the language of the period"--

This collection reflects Minoji Akimoto's concern with studies of change in English that are theoretically-informed, but founded on substantial bodies of data. Some of the contributors focus on individual texts and text-types, among them literature and journalism, others on specific periods, from Old English to the nineteenth century, but the majority trace a linguistic process - such as negation, passivisation, complementation or grammaticalisation - through the history of English. While several papers take a fresh look at manuscript evidence, the harnessing of wideranging electronic corpora is a recurring feature methodologically. The linguistic fields treated include word semantics, stylistics, orthography, word-order, pragmatics and lexicography. The volume also contains a bibliography of Professor Akimoto's writings and an index of linguistic terms.

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.

Papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Late Modern English, held at the University of Leiden in 2007.

This book brings together a variety of approaches to English corpus linguistics and shows how corpus methodologies can contribute to the linking of diachronic and synchronic studies. The articles in this volume investigate historical changes in the English language as well as specific aspects of Middle and Modern English and, moreover, of English dialects. The contributions also discuss the development of English corpus linguistics generally and its potential in the future. Special focus is given to the continuity between Middle and Modern English – much in line with the linking in previous studies of Middle English and Old English under the generic term “medievalism”. This volume highlights the continual development of English from the medieval to modern period.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues, the period and the status of the discipline itself, as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis, syntax, semantics, morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts, such as year of publication, sex of the author, geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET, the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as the above-mentioned metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics, as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), purpose-designed software by IrLab, is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849

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

This volume includes a selection of fifteen papers delivered at the Second International Conference on Late Modern English. The chapters focus on significant linguistic aspects of the Late Modern English period, not only on grammatical issues such as the development of pragmatic markers, for-to infinitive constructions, verbal subcategorisation, progressive aspect, sentential complements, double comparative forms or auxiliary/negator cliticisation but also on pronunciation, dialectal variation and other practical aspects such as corpus compilation, which are approached from different perspectives (descriptive, cognitive, syntactic, corpus-driven).

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.

Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that forms the tail end of the standardisation process (codification and prescription), during which important social changes such as the Industrial Revolution are reflected in the language. Late Modern English is currently receiving a lot of scholarly attention, mainly as a result of new developments in sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics. By drawing on such research the present book offers a much fuller account of the language of the period than was previously possible. It is designed for students and beginning scholars interested in Late Modern English. The volume includes: * a basis in recent research by which sociolinguistic models are applied to earlier stages of the language (1700-1900) * a focus on people as speakers (wherever possible) and writers of English* Research questions aimed at acquiring skills at working with important electronic research tools such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* Reference to electronically available texts and databases such as Martha Ballard's Diary, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.