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This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or loss, node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions, homostructions, constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally, contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical, psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.

In recent years, text and media linguistics have focused on genres in the new media. This is almost always accompanied by the question of the establishment and development of such content. Due to the diversity of genres and their dynamic development one can speak of an almost inexhaustible field of research. The book is located in this field of research. Its goal is to examine the origin and nature of readers'comments by readers of French and English popular science magazines. Media content is dissected by using text linguistic tools. Transmedial cultures are explored across time, platforms, languages, and editing houses.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

This book provides a collection of articles on subordination in English framed from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. It covers ample areas of the history of the major subordinated structures of English and their recent development in various native and non-native varieties. Most contributions are based on large electronic databases and corpora of written and spoken texts. The book focuses on the continuum that links subordinated and coordinated structures in a fluid way, shows their permanent state of flux, and sheds light on the whole system's dynamic essence by discussing a large number of explanatory principles at work in shaping it. Many of these are well-known from the grammaticalization and the Construction Grammar theories, such as the concepts of attractor, multi-sourcing, inheritance, categorial incursion, metaphorization or exaptation. This volume represents the latest trends in the field by some of its most prestigious specialists.

This volume includes eleven papers pertaining to different areas of linguistics and organised into three sections. Part I contains diachronic studies which cover data from Middle English to Present-Day English and which explore phenomena such as the status of extender tags, the distribution of free adjuncts, post-auxiliary ellipsis, and the use of ‘ephemeral'concessive adverbial subordinators. Part II comprises studies on grammar and language processing dealing with topics such as the interaction between syntactic and structural complexity and verbal agreement with collective subjects, the influence of distributivity and concreteness on verbal agreement, the interaction of complexity and efficiency in pronoun omission in Indian English and Singapore English, and the methods and approaches used for grammar teaching in modern EFL/ESL textbooks. Finally, Part III revolves around lexis, discourse and pragmatics, with papers that discuss the development of the discoursal representation of social actors in Argentinian newspapers after the military dictatorship, the construction of women's gender identity through positive and negative emotions in women's magazines, and spelling-to-sound correspondence on Twitter.

Situated within the long-established domain of temporality research in Second Language Acquisition, this book aims to provide an update on recent research directions in the field through a range of papers which explore relatively new territory. Those areas include the expression of modality and counterfactuality, the effect of first language transfer, aspectuo-temporal comprehension, aspectuo-temporal marking at a wider discursive level, and methodological issues in the study of the acquisition of aspect. The studies presented explore English and French as second languages, involving both child and adult learners from a range of first language backgrounds in both instructed and naturalistic learning contexts. The studies draw on both spoken and written data which explore various facets of the learners'second language comprehension and production. The volume offers new, but complementary insights to previous research, as well as pointing to directions for future research in this burgeoning field of study.

A full-length study of monocollocable words, i.e. words whose usage is severely restricted to one or a few combinations only (such as English ado in without much/further ado), that brings together corpus-based data from the four languages along with studies analysing, along both general and language-specific lines, monocollocable words in terms of their frequency, lexical as well as morphosyntactic behaviour, and various facets of their peripheral status. Each of the four langauges covered, namely, English, Italian, German and Czech also offers a short introduction of the respective languages written in English, Italian, German and Czech. A rare contribution to our knowledge of an as yet little studied field, the book will attract the attention of, and stimulate a new interest in, all who are ready to acknowledge that collocation is a core phenomenon of language – lexicologists, lexicographers with a focus on phraseology, language typologists, linguists with a contrastive and historical agenda, and language teachers alike.

This book documents changes and trends in English predicate complementation. In-depth case studies of grammatical patterns presented here uncover new links between form and meaning in these constructions, offering fresh insights into explanatory principles to account for variation and change in the system of English predicate complementation.

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

This volume has its origin in a selection of the papers presented at the Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2), held at the University of Vigo in October 2009 and designed and organised by postgraduate students belonging to the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. The purpose of the conference was to allow young professional researchers to share and survey their current views on linguistic research. Four of the ten chapters included address the diachronic change undergone by particular lexical items, namely the morphosemantic change illustrated by the development of the morpheme punk, the historical evolution of including and included, the origin and semantics of the expletive form adsheartlikins, and the structure and distribution of nominalisations referring to actions or processes. Variation is also approached from a diatopic perspective in the study of expressions of obligation and necessity (must and have to) in New Englishes, the distribution and functions of the discourse marker eh in Channel Island English, and regional variability of vowel phonology in Scottish Standard English. Lastly, three studies address semantics and culture in the field of L2 learning. These contributions focus on the assessment of Lexical Frequency Profile applications in the analysis of Romanian learner English, the role of cultural knowledge in the learning process of English as an International Language, and L1 typicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning.

This monograph is one of the first theoretical studies of optatives. Optative constructions express desire without an overt lexical item that means ‘desire'. The author specifically investigates optatives with the syntax of embedded clauses that contain prototypical particles such as ‘only'. He rejects the view that optativity arises compositionally from the standard semantics of embedded clauses and prototypical particles. The following system is proposed: Desirability is due to a generalized scalar exclamation operator EX. Furthermore, clausal properties such as factivity/counterfactuality are encoded in a Mood head, which co-determines morphological mood and complementizer choice. Finally, the prototypical particles that optatives contain are truth-conditionally vacuous presupposition triggers. As a result, these meaning components do not interact directly, but their meanings converge, with the consequence that they prototypically co-occur. This monograph is of interest for formal semanticists, syntacticians, pragmaticists and morphologists, and especially relevant for research on mood and particle semantics.

The book shows how the system of English predicate complementation has been undergoing an amazing amount of variation and change in recent centuries, and identifies explanatory principles to account for this change and variation, with evidence from large electronic corpora of both British and American English.

It is well known that British and American English differ substantially in their pronunciation and vocabulary - but differences in their grammar have largely been underestimated. This volume focuses on British–American differences in the structure of words and sentences and supports them with computer-aided studies of large text collections. Present-day as well as earlier forms of the two varieties are included in the analyses. This makes it the first book-length treatment of British and American English grammar in contrast, with topics ranging from compound verbs to word order differences and tag questions. The authors explore some of the better-known contrasts, as well as a great variety of innovative themes that have so far received little or no consideration. Bringing together the work of a team of leading scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to those working within the fields of English historical linguistics, language variation and change, and dialectology.

This book has been shortlisted for an ESSE book award 2012 in English Language and Linguistics, Junior Scholars. This volume approaches the analysis of variation in English from diachronic, diatopic, and contrastive/comparative perspectives. The individual case studies, all closely interrelated, are organized into three parts or sections. Part I (Diachronic Studies) applies a variationist methodology to the analysis of developments in the use of the courtesy marker please, adverbs in -ly, the s- genitive and a number of phrasal combinations with the verb get. It also examines Early Modern English regional dialect vocabulary. Part II (Diatopic Studies) is concerned with the analysis of several morphological and phonological features in different varieties of English, namely Standard English, Modern Scottish English, Galwegian English, and Black South-African English. Part III (Contrastive Studies) contains four chapters dealing with the contrastive analysis of a number of morphosyntactic features, such as the use of modifiers of adjectives by advanced learners of English, the acquisition and use of aspect by advanced EFL learners with different mother-tongue backgrounds, a comparison of the tempo-aspectual categories of English and Italian, and some of the problems encountered by researchers when compiling and analysing learner corpora of spoken language.

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.