Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English
Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English

Author: Laurel J. Brinton

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9027230501

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The focus of this carefully selected volume concerns the existence, frequency, and form of composite/complex predicates (the “take a look” construction) in earlier periods of the English language, an area of scholarship which has been virtually neglected. The various contributions seek to understand the collocational and idiomatic aspects of these structures, as well as of related structures such as complex prepositions (e.g., “on account of”) and phrasal verbs (e.g., “look up”), in their earliest manifestations. Moreover, study of these constructions at the individual stages of English leads to diachronic questions concerning their development, raising issues pertaining to grammaticalization, lexicalization, and idiomaticization-processes which are not always clearly differentiated nor fully understood.

On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change
On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change

Author: Hendrik De Smet

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-11-15

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 9027268002

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In much writing on language change, there is a tacit assumption that change operates on a single source construction to produce an innovative target construction. This volume challenges this assumption, by showing that many changes involve interactions between multiple source constructions. In fact, the involvement of multiple source constructions is unexceptional. The phenomenon is observed in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is seen in language-internal change as well as in contact-induced change. Interactions may obtain between independent but historically related constructions as well as between historically unrelated constructions. The contributions to this volume, on the one hand, present specific case studies on changes involving multiple source constructions, in various domains of grammar and in a variety of languages. On the other hand, they discuss how such changes can be accommodated in current theoretical models of language. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 37:3 (2013).

Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English
Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English

Author: Matti Rissanen

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9783039108510

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The majority of these papers were delivered at the 25th Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held at the University of Verona on 18-23 May 2004

Constructional Approaches to English Grammar
Constructional Approaches to English Grammar

Author: Graeme Trousdale

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-08-27

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 3110199173

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This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.

Studies in the History of the English Language VI
Studies in the History of the English Language VI

Author: Michael Adams

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 3110345951

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The relationships among data, evidence, and methodology in English historical linguistics are perennially vexed. This volume – which ranges chronologically from Old to Present-Day English and from manuscripts to corpora – challenges a wide variety of assumptions and practices and illustrates how diverse methods and approaches construct evidence for historical linguistic arguments from an increasingly large and diverse body of linguistic data.

The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence
The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence

Author: Ying Wang

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2016-10-06

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 9027266719

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This book examines delexical verb + noun collocations such as make a decision, give rise to and take care of in Swedish and Chinese learner English. Using a methodological framework that combines learner corpus research with a contrastive perspective, the study is one of the very few in the field to incorporate corpora of the learner’s L1 to investigate the effects of L1 influence. The book provides a highly detailed and multi-faceted analysis of delexical verb + noun collocations in terms of frequency of occurrence, lexical preferences and morphosyntactic patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results on overuse, underuse and errors are presented with linguistically and pedagogically relevant interpretations that include cultural and discourse aspects. More importantly, the book throws light on how L2 learners may alternate between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle as well as the extent and nature of L1 influence on their collocational use.

Language Contacts Meet English Dialects
Language Contacts Meet English Dialects

Author: Esa Penttilä

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-06-12

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1527554791

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This book presents a collection of fresh research on language contacts and dialects, and the interface between the two. The volume celebrates the work of Professor Markku Filppula, an eminent scholar in the fields of Irish English, Celtic contacts in the history of English, and language contacts and vernacular universals in nonstandard Englishes. The articles in this volume explore theories and methods employed in the study of language contacts and variation, Celtic substrata in Irish and British English, and dialect in the British Isles. The writers’ perspectives range from cognitive processing to sociolinguistics, and from theoretical and comparative discussions to new empirical, corpus-based studies.

Phrasal Verbs
Phrasal Verbs

Author: Stefan Thim

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 3110257033

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The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction (‘phrasal verb’) from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed. From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The author argues that their common perception as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.

Collocations as a Language Resource
Collocations as a Language Resource

Author: Sonja Poulsen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2022-04-08

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9027257981

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Are collocations problems or solutions to problems? If you take the perspective of the foreign learner, as in traditional phraseology, they are certainly challenging, and they have therefore been categorized as arbitrary, or even defective, deviations from an assumed norm of full compositionality. This is a paradox because their ubiquity in language and their importance for language proficiency are undisputed. The book provides a critical review of the traditional phraseological approach to collocations with its classical categories and its roots in structural and generative linguistics as well as traditional Russian phraseology. Instead, it proposes a theory of collocations as an independent functional domain, no longer characterized as “odd comings-together of words” that are neither fully compositional nor fully idiomatic. It fills a research gap and should appeal to phraseologists and cognitive linguists as well as psycholinguists, neurolinguists, corpus linguists, PhD-students and other advanced students of linguistics who are interested in exploring collocations as a language resource and may be interested in contributing to it.

'Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed'
'Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed'

Author: Javier Pérez-Guerra

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9783039107889

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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).