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Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and develops a model of how this may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or several case study in the history of the English language in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.

Binomials, coordinated pairs of words, differ as to their reversibility. However, the degree of reversibility of any binomial is not necessarily stable, but is subject to diachronic changes. This article hypothesizes the different pathways of change that a binomial’s degree of reversibility may follow and presents corpus findings to show that all these pathways, and more, do occur. Some 200 high-frequency binomials were analyzed regarding their degrees of reversibility in American English across the twenty decades from 1810 to 2009 using Google Books data. While the reversibility of a binomial may remain stable, changes in terms of freezing, unfreezing, and even order reversal are frequent and probably due to a combination of intra- and extralinguistic factors. The interaction between reversibility changes and frequency changes is discussed in light of usage-based approaches to language. The example of gender binomials shows that sociocultural changes may be reflected in linguistic changes.

The factors governing word order in binomials, i.e. coordinated word pairs of the same word class, have been the subject of discussion for a long time in linguistics. For example, why do we saylaw and orderbut notorder and law? The article tests seventeen different potential ordering constraints that have previously been suggested, from the areas of semantics, phonology and word frequency, by checking over 500 high-frequency binomials extracted from the BNC against them. A clear hierarchy of constraints is suggested following the analysis of their success in predicting binomial order. In addition, however, attention is drawn to the reversibility status of binomials. The vast majority of English binomials is reversible to a smaller or larger degree. Reversibility scores were computed for all binomials in the sample so that the relationship between reversibility on the one hand and the adherence to the ordering constraints on the other could be analysed, finding that a number of semantic and metrical ordering constraints indeed increase their predictive success towards the frozen end of the reversibility cline. Complying with these constraints, then, increases the likelihood of a binomial to be less reversible. Claims for the influence of certain factors on the freezing process are thus substantiated for the first time.

While the study of idiolect is a neglected area in corpus linguistics, the present article suggests that it can be fruitful. As a tool for studying an idiolect, the three-million-word Tony Blair Corpus is introduced. The maximiser collocations occurring in this corpus are compared to those in the BNC in order to identify those which are truly typical of the individual. A quantitative analysis involving three measures of collocational strength (normalised frequency, Mutual Information and log-likelihood) provide candidate collocations which strongly diverge in the two corpora. These are then subjected to tests of synonym preference and register specificity, resulting in a small number of collocations which can count as Blairisms.

Large databases of transcribed speech, downloadable from the Internet, are a corpus linguist's dream. They turn into a corpus linguist's nightmare, however, when the transcriptions are not linguistically accurate. In this paper I assess the suitability of the Hansard parliamentary transcripts (200 million words, downloadable) as a corpus linguistic resource, comparing a sample of the official transcript to a transcript made from a recording of a House of Commons session. The findings are that, as could be expected from earlier research, the transcripts omit performance characteristics of spoken language, such as incomplete utterances or hesitations, as well as any type of extrafactual, contextual talk (e.g., about turn-taking). Moreover, however, the transcribers and editors also alter speakers' lexical and grammatical choices towards more conservative and formal variants. Linguists ought, therefore, to be cautious in their use of the Hansard transcripts and, generally, in the use of transcriptions that have not been made for linguistic purposes.

In deciding whether non-native English is to be classified as a new variety or simply as learner language, a yardstick is needed against which the candidate variety can be tested. This paper offers such criteria for ESL-variety status, based on the three processes in the development of a new variety: expansion in function, nativization of form and institutionalization of a new standard. The criteria are exemplarily applied to the case of non-native English spoken on the European Continent, a recent controversial contender for variety status. It is suggested that if the proposed criteria are applied, Euro-English does not qualify as a New English.

The traditional tripartite model of English world-wide has so far ignored one of the most important functions of English today, namely that of a lingua franca between non-native speakers. In integrating ELF into models such as Kachru's, the question that arises is whether it can count as a variety. Evidence from a corpus-based study of lingua franca English as it is used between European speakers indicates that it is not a non-native variety in the traditional sense. It is suggested here that ELF could be conceptualised as a register, which can be integrated into the variety- and nation-based model only on a functional level.