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This new edition of the best selling, topic-based introduction to spoken and written English, is now fully revised and expanded with over 50% more material. This practical volume provides a wide range of written texts and transcriptions of speech for commentary and analysis.

The book offers a step-by-step approach to the task of describing what is systematic in conversational behaviour. The book is organised as a series of practical exercises, teaching skills such as transcribing verbal interaction and identifying and describing 'special events'.

This book is aimed at linguists and students interested in the history of English, especially from a genre-oriented perspective, and literary scholars interested in style and poetic language. It places binomials - word pairs - in the context of phonology, stylistics, semantics, translation theory and practice in various periods.

What makes the noun phrase 'the man I saw' more complex than 'the man'? Designed for researchers and students interested in questions of language complexity, this book aims to answer that question by exploring variation in more than three billion words of British and American data.

A collection of new case studies by world-renowned and emerging scholars in the field, which explores English syntactic structure, variation, and change, both past and present, methodologically and theoretically. It is ideal reading for scholars and advanced students in English syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic theory and corpus linguistics.

This practical course book explores the development of the language from Old English to the establishment of Standard English. This third edition has been expanded to provide further background information, with a supplementary website and new sections to outline the development of writing hands and provide a brief introduction to palaeography.

Is construction grammar a useful framework for the study of language change? Hilpert combines the current linguistic theory of construction grammar with advanced corpus-based methodology in order to study language change in a new way. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change.

The first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on genres such as spoken language, TV, newspapers, and literary works. Using approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, it explores both speaker- and addressee-related aspects of hyperbole, and shows it to be an important contributor to language change.

English is a language at the centre of research into language contact, because its global spread has resulted in contact with an enormous variety of different languages worldwide, leading to the creation of many new varieties of English, including second language varieties, and also pidgins and creoles. This book takes an original look at what happens when speakers of these different varieties interact with one another. Using her own rich fieldwork data from diverse international and South African contexts, Meierkord proposes an innovative approach to how Englishes merge and blend in such interactions, creating further new forms of English and further changes to the language. Through skilful analyses and descriptions, the book provides fascinating insights into where and who the users of English as a lingua franca are and what English then looks like at the levels of phonetics, morphosyntax, the lexicon and discourse.

The order and behaviour of the premodifier (an adjective, or other modifying word that appears before a noun) has long been a puzzle to syntacticians and semanticists. Why can we say 'the actual red ball', but not 'the red actual ball'? And why, conversely, do some other premodifiers have free variation in sentences; for example we can say both 'German and English speakers' and 'English and German speakers'? Why do some premodifiers change the meaning of a phrase in some contexts; for example 'young man', can mean 'boyfriend', rather than 'man who is young'? Drawing on a corpus of over 4,000 examples of English premodifiers from a range of genres such as advertising, fiction and scientific texts, and across several varieties of English, this book synthesises research into premodifiers and provides a new explanation of their behaviour, order and use.

Is historical linguistics different in principle from other linguistic research? This volume brings together a team of leading English historical linguists to discuss and suggest solutions to a range of problems in the phonology, syntax, dialectology and onomastics of older English.

Early English texts did not have a convention of quotation marks for reporting direct speech. This raises problems for interpreting and understanding represented discourse. Colette Moore examines the strategies pre-modern texts used to indicate direct speech and the implications of these strategies for reading Middle and Early Modern English works.

An exploration of grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. The book presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences.

This volume provides the first book-length exploration of 'standard Englishes', with chapters on areas as diverse as Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. This is a timely and important topic, with contributions by the leading experts on each major variety of English discussed.

An examination of the influence of nineteenth-century philology on European thought. Haruko Momma considers, among other matters, the impact of William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit on historical studies of language and culture, the Philological Society's role in the making of the OED, and the rise of English studies at universities.

The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its construal in context. Evidence is drawn from natural antonym use in speech and writing, first-language antonym acquisition, and controlled elicitation and judgements of antonym pairs by native speakers. The book also proposes ways in which a greater knowledge of how antonyms work can be applied to the fields of language technology and lexicography.

This volume focuses on British-American differences in the structure of words and sentences. The first full-length treatment of the topic, it will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of English historical linguistics, language variation and change, and dialectology.

As a result of colonisation, many varieties of English now exist around the world. This 2005 book explores the role of British dialects in both the genesis and subsequent history of postcolonial Englishes, and how it came about that many still reflect non-standard British usage from the distant past.

This study, the first in the series Studies in English Language, is concerned with the functional and communicative foundations of English grammar, and takes as its specific focus the study of infinitival complement clauses. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and general linguistics.

Preposition placement refers to the competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?). This volume provides a full grammatical account of preposition placement in English, and will be of interest to syntacticans, second-language researchers, and those working on variation in English.

The first volume to focus on the communicative aspects of English manuscripts from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how these handwritten texts can be used to analyse the history of language as communication between individuals and groups, and discusses the challenges these documents present to present-day scholars.

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. Central themes, issues and topics of scholarly investigation and debate figure prominently throughout the volume.

An examination of the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English. The book includes a discussion of the number and distribution of speakers of Canadian English, a review of its history and a comparison of its vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar to standard British and American English.

Using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, in this book Culpeper and Kytoe offer a unique account of the linguistic features in speech-related genres of writing. Through this, they are able to provide a fascinating insight into what spoken interaction in Early Modern English might have been like.

This book documents the linguistic properties of lesser-known varieties of English from the Pacific, South America and the South Atlantic to West Africa and the Caribbean, exploring their social histories and showing their relevance for language spread and change.

This volume focuses on British-American differences in the structure of words and sentences. The first full-length treatment of the topic, it will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of English historical linguistics, language variation and change, and dialectology.

How did grammatical gender in English get replaced by a system dependent on natural gender? How is this related to 'irregular agreement' (she for ships) and 'sexist' language use (generic he) in Modern English? This study, based on extensive corpus data, offers an important historical perspective on these controversial questions.

This volume examines English during the nineteenth century, a period of both stability and change for the language. Considering both structural aspects and sociolinguistics issues, it compares nineteenth-century English with both earlier and later periods, making an important contribution to our overall understanding of the history of the English language.

The late Middle Ages in England saw a flowering of scientific writing in the vernacular, taking English discourse in new directions and establishing new textual genres. This 2004 book examines the sociolinguistic causes and effects of that process, and offers insights into vernacularisation for linguists and historians of science alike.