To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).
Journal articles on the topic 'Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Davies, Mark. "Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-million word Corpus of Historical American English." Corpora 7, no. 2 (November 2012): 121–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2012.0024.
Full textAbstract:
The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) contains 400 million words in more than 100,000 texts which date from the 1810s to the 2000s. The corpus contains texts from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and non-fiction books, and is balanced by genre from decade to decade. It has been carefully lemmatised and tagged for part-of-speech, and uses the same architecture as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), BYU-BNC, the TIME Corpus and other corpora. COHA allows for a wide range of research on changes in lexis, morphology, syntax, semantics, and American culture and society (as viewed through language change), in ways that are probably not possible with any text archive (e.g., Google Books) or any other corpus of historical American English.
2
Shilikhina, Ksenia. "Metapragmatic Evaluation of Verbal Irony by Speakers of Russian and American English." Research in Language 10, no. 3 (September 30, 2012): 299–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0027-8.
Full textAbstract:
The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing.
3
Frayne, Craig. "An historical analysis of species references in American English." Corpora 14, no. 3 (November 2019): 327–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2019.0177.
Full textAbstract:
This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.
4
Jucker, Andreas H. "Apologies in the History of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)." Corpus Pragmatics 2, no. 4 (May 16, 2018): 375–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41701-018-0038-y.
Full text
5
López-Couso, María José, and Belén Méndez-Naya. "From clause to pragmatic marker." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 15, no. 1 (February 28, 2014): 36–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.15.1.03lop.
Full textAbstract:
Propositional attitude predicates, such as English think, guess and seem, occur parenthetically in many languages. In this article we pay attention to a group of propositional attitude predicates which can be labelled epistemic/evidential, namely appear, look, seem and sound, and which, in addition to degree of certainty, also give an indication of the evidential source. In this study we describe the different parentheticals available with these verbs, paying special attention to like-parentheticals (e.g. Going to be a big one, looks like), a development characteristic of American English. Using data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies 2010-) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, Davies 2008-), we explore whether these developments can be conceptualised in terms of grammaticalisation and (inter)subjectification. In the structural domain, these parentheticals show fixation, decategorialisation and fusion. In the semantic-pragmatic domain, they show signs of generalisation of meaning and increased (inter)subjectivity.
6
Levin, Magnus, and Hans Lindquist. "Like I said again and again and over and over." Current issues in phraseology 18, no. 1 (May 13, 2013): 7–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18.1.04lev.
Full textAbstract:
This study discusses an adverbial pattern which has so far been largely overlooked, namely ADV1 and ADV1, as in again and again, on and on and over and over. The paper is primarily based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The data show that these patterns follow typical paths of change, such as a movement towards more abstract meanings (metaphorization; over and over increasingly referring to repetition rather than to physical motion), lexicalization (e.g. up and up being used as a noun with idiosyncratic meaning in on the up and up), subjectification (e.g. on and on expressing negative connotations), iconic variation (again and again and again referring to multiple repetitions), simplification (loss of again after over and over), and the development of discourse functions (and on and on meaning “and so on”).
7
Kang, Namkil. "A Corpora-based Analysis of You must and You have to." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 5, no. 3 (August 26, 2021): p39. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v5n3p39.
Full textAbstract:
The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the frequency of you must and you have to in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The COCA clearly shows that you have to may be the preferable one for Americans. When it comes to the genre frequency of you must and you have to, you must is the most frequently used one in the TV/movie genre and you have to is the most commonly used one in the blog genre. The BNC indicates, on the other hand, that you have to may be preferred over you must by British people. The BNC clearly shows that in the fiction genre, you must is the most widely used one, whereas in the spoken genre, you have to is the most frequently used one. This paper argues that the expression you must know is the most preferred by Americans, followed by you must go, you must understand, you must think, and you must take, in that order. This paper further argues that the expression you have to go is the most preferred one in America, followed by you have to get, you have to say, you have to make, and you have to take, in that order. Additionally, the BNC shows that the expression you must know is the most preferred by British people, followed by you must provide, you must go, you must get, and you must take, in that order. The BNC indicates, on the other hand, that the expression you have to go is the most preferred by British people, followed by you have to pay, you have to get, you have to take, and you have to make, in that order. Finally, the COHA clearly shows that you have to may have been the most preferable one for Americans in 1930, whereas you have to may have been the most preferable one for Americans in 2000.
8
KIM, JONG-BOK, and MARK DAVIES. "English what with absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective." English Language and Linguistics 24, no. 4 (July 23, 2019): 637–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674319000169.
Full textAbstract:
There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.
9
Tarish, Abbas Hussein. "A Corpus Analysis of Changes in the Use of British and American English Modals and Semi-Modals." International Journal of English and Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (February 23, 2018): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/ijecs.v1i1.3049.
Full textAbstract:
This research has two main purposes. The first one is to test the modal replacement hypothesis proposed by Smith (2003) and discussed by Leech (2003), on the basis of data from the Hansard Corpus (THC- 1.6 billion words, 1800-2000) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA - 400 million words, 1810-2000). The second purpose of the study was to draw upon time series models to generate insights about how modal and semi-modal frequencies have changed over time. Cumulatively, these two forms of analysis addressed an acknowledged gap in the current literature on modal and semi-modal frequency change, namely the question of whether modals are being replaced by semi-modals.
10
Hutton, Lizzie, and Anne Curzan. "The Grammatical Status of However." Journal of English Linguistics 47, no. 1 (February 11, 2019): 29–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424218817811.
Full textAbstract:
Popular grammar books have long admonished their readers for using conjunctive adverbs as coordinators, and nowhere more than in the case of however. The very force of this prescription suggests that the rule is far from intuitive for many users of standard edited English: examples of however taking on a syntactically coordinating function (equivalent to but) are not difficult to find, nor are they limited to unedited sources. This paper addresses the question of whether prescriptivism is clouding our view of a linguistic change in the grammatical status of however. Drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), we argue that the apparent “confusion” about whether however can serve as a clausal coordinator may be closely related to its increasing preference, over the past century-and-a-half, for clause-initial placement. Descriptive grammars of the last twenty years have labeled select conjunctive adverbs other than however “marginal coordinators.” This paper presents the hypothesis that however is following a historical trajectory similar to the “marginal coordinators” so and yet, whose mixed function is now accepted as standard; and it explores the extent to which shifting patterns in sentence placement preferences—as a result, perhaps, of colloquialization—may be a factor in the changing grammatical function of however.
11
Cunha, Evandro L. T. P., and Søren Wichmann. "An algorithm to identify periods of establishment and obsolescence of linguistic items in a diachronic corpus." Corpora 16, no. 2 (August 2021): 205–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2021.0218.
Full textAbstract:
When exploring diachronic corpora, it is often beneficial for linguists to pinpoint not only the first or the last attestation dates of certain linguistic items, but also the moments in which they become more strongly established in the corpus or, conversely, the moments in which they, despite still being part of the language, become obsolete. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to assist the identification of such periods based on the frequency of items in a corpus. Our simple and generalisable algorithm can be used for the investigation of any linguistic item in any corpus which is divided into time-frames. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method using lexical data from the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), providing case studies on the statistics and characteristics of words that appear in or disappear from this corpus in different periods.
12
Su, Hang. "Local grammars and diachronic speech act analysis." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21, no. 1 (August 28, 2020): 109–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00038.su.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract This paper proposes a method that is designed to facilitate diachronic speech act analysis. The proposed method draws on the corpus linguistic concept of local grammar – an approach which seeks to account for, not the whole of a language, but one meaning or function only. Local grammar descriptions capture both formal and semantic regularities of speech act realisations, and local grammars offer a more reliable way to quantify speech act realisations across time. It is particularly in this respect that it is argued that a local grammar approach can be useful for diachronic speech act studies, which is demonstrated subsequently by tracing one particular speech act, namely “apology”, in a sample of the Corpus of Historical American English (coha).
13
Lodej, Sylwester, and John G. Newman. "The non-spiritual semasiology of the adjective divine in Late Modern American English." International Journal of Language and Culture 1, no. 1 (August 22, 2014): 60–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.1.1.04lod.
Full textAbstract:
This paper examines semantic change in the adjective divine as evidenced in its attributive constructions in Late Modern American English. Even before modern English times, the word was capable of bearing two meanings, one spiritual and one non-spiritual. However, according to the Oxford English dictionary, the adjectival divine, a Middle English loanword from Old French, was used earlier (fourteenth century) in the spiritual sense “pertaining to God” and later (fifteenth century) in the non-spiritual sense “supremely good,” and further that it was used primarily in the spiritual sense and secondarily in the non-spiritual sense into modern English times. It is with semantic developments regarding these two senses in American English, particularly the rise in frequency and spread in the applicability of the non-spiritual sense of divine in American English, with which we are concerned here. A main object of the investigation is to identify metaphorical conceptualizations that have been responsible for the emergence of conceptual values, which themselves have facilitated the diachronic semasiological patterns observable in extant textual materials. The corpus of historical American English (COHA) is the source of the bulk of the data analyzed.
14
Dong, Baohua. "A Diachronic Approach to the Motive of Crypto-Functions of Formal Markers in English." English Language and Literature Studies 6, no. 2 (May 18, 2016): 161. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v6n2p161.
Full textAbstract:
<p>This paper, based on the exploration of crypto-functions of formal markers in English (Dong, 2016), preliminarily attempts to explicate the motive of their crypto-functions in systemic functional framework through a diachronic approach. The study firstly claims that formal markers can be treated as one of multiple linguistic expressions deployed for constructing the experiential phenomenon. Then the study assumes that the motive of crypto-functions of formal markers can be revealed from the diachronic conventionalization of multiple linguistic expressions towards formal markers in their process of experience construction. And such an assumption has then been tested with the distribution frequencies of formal markers in Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). It is found that, with the diachronic increase of the distribution frequencies of formal markers in COHA, the diachronic conventionalization of multiple linguistic expressions towards formal markers does exist, and that such a conventionalization is then attributed to language chunk composed of formal markers together with other following elements and renders formal markers prefabricate potential, thus resulting in their crypto-functions. </p>
15
Kang, Namkil. "Five Types Involving the Subjunctive: A Corpora-based Analysis." Studies in English Language Teaching 8, no. 4 (November 20, 2020): p48. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/selt.v8n4p48.
Full textAbstract:
The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed frequency analysis of the five types it is imperative that, it is vital that, it is essential that, it is important that, and it is necessary that within the British National Corpus (100 million, British, 1980s-1993), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1.0 billion, US, 1990-2019), the Corpus of Historical American English (400 million, US, 1810s-2000s), and the Hansard Corpus (1.6 billion, British Parliament). In this paper, we have examined the frequency of the five types and collected the data. A major point to note is that it is important that was the most preferred by British people, followed by it is essential that, it is vital that, it is imperative that, and it is necessary that, in that order. The BNC clearly shows, on the other hand, that it is important that was the most commonly used one in the spoken genre, magazine genre, newspaper genre, and academic genre. A further point to note is that it is important that was the most preferred by Americans, followed by it is imperative that, it is essential that, it is vital that, and it is necessary that, in that order. The COCA clearly indicates that it is important that was the most widely used one in the blog genre, web genre, spoken genre, fiction genre, magazine genre, newspaper genre, and academic genre. The reason why it is important that was the most preferred by Americans and British people in the academic genre may be that a moderate obligation is suitable for conveying factual information. With respect to the COHA, it is worth noting that it is necessary that was the most preferred by Americans from 1810 to 2000, followed by it is important that, it is essential that, it is imperative that, and it is vital that. As for the HC, it is important that was the most preferred by British politicians, followed by it is essential that, it is vital that, it is necessary that, and it is imperative that. It is worth noting that Americans and British politicians show the similar pattern in the ranking of the five types in that Americans did not prefer a strong statement or the strongest statement, whereas British politicians did not prefer the strongest statement.
16
Шилихина, К. М., and В. В. Смирнова. "Использование наречий evidently и obviously в функции маркеров эпистемической оценки в американском варианте английского языка." Вестник ВГУ. Серия: Лингвистика и межкультурная коммуникация, no. 2 (March 25, 2020): 86–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.17308/lic.2020.2/2844.
Full textAbstract:
Статья посвящена анализу английских наречий ‘evidently’ и ‘obviously’, которые функционируют не только как полнозначные наречия, но и как маркеры эпистемической оценки. Постепенный семантический сдвиг, который продолжается на протяжении последних двух столетий, привел к тому, что в значительном количестве контекстов наречия ‘evidently’ и ‘obviously’ стали использоваться в качестве «гибридных» маркеров эвиденциальности и эпистемической оценки, т. е. как указатели на источник информации, дающий говорящему полную уверенность в достоверности сообщаемой информации, а затем – и как маркеры проблемной достоверности. Под проблемной достоверностью в работе понимается такая эпистемическая установка говорящего, в соответствии с которой коммуникант по какой-либо причине не может быть полностью уверен в достоверности сообщаемой информации. На материале корпусов The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), The Corpus of Contemporary American English (СОСА), а также англо-русского параллельного подкорпуса НКРЯ проводится диахронический анализ употреблений этих наречий в американском варианте английского языка. Анализ проводился по пяти хронологическим срезам: 1800–1849 гг., 1850–1899 гг., 1900–1949 гг., 1950–2000 гг. и 2000–2017 гг. (последний срез анализировался по данным корпуса СОСА, в котором, помимо письменных текстов, представлена и устная речь). Анализ корпусных данных позволяет сделать вывод о том, что возможность употребления ‘evidently’ и ‘obviously’ в функции маркеров полной уверенности в достоверности связана с их исходной семантикой зрительного восприятия, а их использование в роли маркеров проблемной достоверности становится возможным благодаря регулярному метафорическому семантическому сдвигу «зрительное восприятие – умозаключение».
17
Perales-Escudero, Moisés D. "To Split or to Not Split." Journal of English Linguistics 39, no. 4 (December 20, 2010): 313–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424210380726.
Full textAbstract:
This article reviews the history of the proscription of the English split infinitive and presents a corpus-based investigation of its present usage and distribution across registers in American English. Using archival research, the article traces the history of the proscription and offers historical examples of its use. Contrary to popular belief, the historical review of prescriptive sources reveals not a Latin origin for the proscription but a German one. Thus, an ideology of Teutonic kinship seems to have at least partially driven the proscription of the split infinitive. Latin-based proscriptions seemed not to have existed in written form, or if they did, they did not survive. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to investigate the presence of multiword lexical items including the split infinitive. Combinations of “ to + adverb” were identified in the different COCA registers. Distinct bigrams and trigrams emerge in the different registers of the COCA, but it does not seem to be the case that oral registers, where the force of the proscription would be less strong, influence the emergence of split infinitive patterns in written registers. The results are discussed within the framework of prescriptivist ideology, grammaticalization, and idiomaticity.
18
Hoeksema, Jack, and Donna Jo Napoli. "Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions." Journal of Germanic Linguistics 31, no. 3 (July 29, 2019): 225–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1470542719000084.
Full textAbstract:
Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent saysI love youtodeath, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.
19
BRANDÃO, Luiz Henrique Mendes, and Jesiel Soares SILVA. "TRANSFORMAÇÕES LEXICO-SEMÂNTICAS CORRELATAS À INFLUÊNCIA DA INTERNET." Trama 16, no. 37 (February 27, 2020): 4–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.48075/rt.v16i37.23604.
Full textAbstract:
Neste trabalho, objetivou-se analisar as transformações ocorridas no uso da linguagem por parte de seus usuários tendo como base o período correspondente ao início dos anos 90, momento histórico em que a internet ainda não havia sido popularizada no mundo, em comparação ao ano de 2017, período marcado pelo amplo acesso à internet, principalmente nos países mais desenvolvidos. Para tal, realizou-se uma investigação tendo como base o COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) com o intuito de se verificar, através da associação de palavras com seus colocados, como alguns termos eram utilizados antes da popularização da internet e após o mesmo fenômeno. Através da análise estatística dos insumos, foi possível identificar que certos termos da língua (neste caso da língua inglesa) passaram a ser utilizados mais frequentemente para expressar algo relacionado à tecnologia, tendo sido os sentidos anteriores rebaixados, nesta transformação semântica, a uma frequência menor ou muito menor de uso após a realidade do acesso amplo à internet, o que representa uma transformação léxico-semântica propiciada por um fenômeno de alcance global que influencia a vida das pessoas de modo a ressignificar o uso que fazem do mundo e consequentemente a metalinguagem que utilizam nas trocas que realizam com o mesmo.REFERÊNCIASBENSON, M., BENSON, E., ILSON, R. (orgs.)The BBI dictionary of english word combinations. Amsterdã/Filadélfia: John Benjamins, 1986.BIBER, D. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 600 million words, 1990-present, 2008. Disponível em: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/. Acesso em: 19 fev. 2020.CASTELLVI, Maria Teresa CABRÉ. La clasificación de neologismos. Alfa, São Paulo, 50 (2): 229-250, 2006DAVIES, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing, Brigham, v. 25, n. 4, 2010. Disponível em: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/25/4/447/997323?redirectedFrom=fulltext. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2019.FRANCIS, W. N.; KUCERA, H. Frequency analysis of English usage: lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982DAVIES, Mark; KIM, Jong-Bok. Historical shifts with the INTO-CAUSATIVE construction in American English. The Gruyter mouton, [S.L.], v. 57, n. 1, 2019. Disponível em: http://web.khu.ac.kr/~jongbok/research/2019/2019-ahci-into-historical-shift-linguistics.pdf Acesso em 21 ago. 2019DICIONÁRIO PRIBERAM DA LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA. Desenvolvido por Lello editores, Porto, 1996 e 1999. Licensiado à Priberam em 2008. Disponível em: https://dicionario.priberam.org/sobre.aspx Acesso em 21 ago. 2019KJELLMER, G. A. A dictionary of English collocations: based on the Brown Corpus, v. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994KREMELBERG, David. Practical statistic: a quick and easy guide to IBM ℗ SPSS ℗ Statistics, STATA, and other statistical software. Sage: Los Angeles, 2011.MC ENERY, Tony, et al. Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2019), 39, 74–92MODIS, Theodore. The end of the internet rush. Technological Forecasting Social Change, Lugano, v. 72, n. 8, 2005. Disponível em: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162505000843 Acesso em: 21 ago. 2019OLIVEIRA, Lúcia Pacheco de. Linguística de corpus: Teoria, interfaces e aplicações. Matraga, Rio de janeiro, v. 16, n. 24, 2009. Disponível em: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/matraga/article/view/27796. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2019PARTINGTON, A. Patterns and meanings: using corpora for english language research and teaching. Amsterdã/Filadélfia: John Benjamnins, 1998ROBINSON, Mary; DUNCAN, Daniel (2019) Holistic Approaches to Syntactic Variation: Wh-all Questions in English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: v. 25, n. 1 , 2019. Disponível em: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss1/23/. Acesso em: 21 ago. 2019SANCHEZ, A. Definición e historia de los corpos. In: SANCHEZ, A. et al. (orgs.). CUMBRE: corpus linguístico de español contemporaneo. Madri: SGEL, 1995, p. 7-24.BERBER SARDINHA. T. Linguística de Corpus. Barueri, SP: Manole, 2004.SINCLAIR, J. McH. Beginning the study of lexis. In: BAZELL, C. E. In memory of R. Firth. Londres: Longman, 1966, p. 410-430.SVARTVIK, Jan. Corpora are becoming mainstream. In: THOMAS, J. and SHORT, M. (orgs). Using corpora for language research. London and New York: Longman,1996. p 3-13.Recebido em 16-11-2019 | Aceito em 12-02-2020
20
Lopes, António. "Exploitation of the Didactic Potential of the COCA in Task-Based Language Teaching Involving Cultural References." e-TEALS 8, no. 1 (December 1, 2018): 73–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/eteals-2018-0004.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies) on the Brigham Young University website has been used in the English as Foreign Language (EFL) classroom to help learners better understand how language works at different levels of analysis and also to develop their writing skills. However, it also allows learners to explore culture-related content, by giving them access to invaluable information about social, ideological, political and historical contexts. Moreover, it provides the means to examine the ways in which such aspects intersect with language and condition its use. The understanding of this cultural and discursive dimension of language is pivotal in the training of undergraduate students in the areas of humanities and social sciences. To determine how far the COCA can contribute to increase this awareness, a series of task-based activities involving writing was drawn up and carried out in an EFL class of undergraduate students. They were first introduced to this corpus analysis tool and encouraged to explore it further. Later on, in order to complete a writing task, they were prompted to resort to a series of strategies to collect information about relevant events, personalities and social or cultural phenomena, to analyse and interpret data, and to draw conclusions about the modes in which culture and language can interact. This paper provides (a) the rationale and a brief literature review on this topic, (b) a description of the task-based activities, the implementation process, the students’ strategies and the evaluation procedures, and (c) a critical reflection on this study that may open the path for further developments in this area.
21
Sandford, Jodi L. "Taste and sight." Jezikoslovlje 20, no. 2 (December 11, 2019): 221–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.29162/jez.2019.8.
Full textAbstract:
Embodiment is central to the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis. We receive the infor-mation of the world around us through the bodily sensations; i.e. we per-ceive, then process and conceptualize it. Research into the sensory do-mains has continued to elicit further examination of how we use meta-phoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Inves-tigation has been carried out both on the single sense domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. Linguistic transfer between various senses seems to respect a hierarchy from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hear-ing and sight), even though some variation of this hierarchy has been noted. The present study is the first part of a two-fold analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of taste and sight. The objective is to verify what collocations occur between the two do-mains: do they respect the hierarchy, and how frequent, or how strong are they? Corpus analysis of the construction of the adjective + noun type are in keeping with existing literature: the sensory domain that func-tions as source is understood as an adjective modifying another sensory domain, which is found in the form of a noun. This research concentrates on cross-modal pairs found through a corpus-based analysis of taste ad-jectives in the description of vision nouns, e.g. delicious colors. Linguis-tic data were retrieved from corpora that allow for comparison of the ac-tual usage and definition of these constructions. These include the Cor-pus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Mapping Meta-phor with the Historical Thesaurus of English. The experimental method-ology is in keeping with the usage-based approach of Cognitive Linguis-tics, considering frequency and relevance.
22
Dronov, Pavel S. "Actions speak louder than words, Stupid is as stupid does: Lexico-grammatical changes of proverbs in American press and web communication." Rhema, no. 3, 2020 (2020): 9–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.31862/2500-2953-2020-3-9-21.
Full textAbstract:
The paper presents a corpus-inspired analysis of lexico-grammatical changes of proverbs in American press and web communication as documented in two synchronous and historical corpora (namely COCA and COHA). Being a case study of two proverbs, Actions speak louder than words and Handsome is as handsome does, it reveals differing types of changes such as variants, derivatives based on modifications (mostly adnominal ones), and derivatives based on syntactic transformations. The tendency is noted for one of the proverbs to turn into a phraseoscheme X is as X does (including but not limited to the “Gumpism” Stupid is as stupid does).
23
Schwarz, Sarah. "“Like getting nibbled to death by a duck”." English World-Wide 38, no. 3 (December 1, 2017): 305–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.38.3.03sch.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract This large-scale corpus study explores new parameters which might indicate grammaticalization of the get-passive in recent American English, where the construction has increased in frequency. To this end, large samples of both be- and get-passives from the TIME Magazine Corpus were analyzed with regard to tense, aspect, and situation type (Aktionsart). While tense and aspect preferences of the passives were diachronically stable, the results of the situation-type analysis were of interest for two reasons. First, they showed clear differences in the way get- and be-passives are used which reflect the get-passive’s inchoative origins. And second, the diachronic analysis of situation-type preferences for get-passives provides a first indication that they may be further grammaticalizing as they begin to behave more like canonical be-passives in the most recent data. This finding is tentatively supported by supplementary data from COHA.
24
Hilpert, Martin. "Dynamic visualizations of language change." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16, no. 4 (December 21, 2011): 435–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16.4.01hil.
Full textAbstract:
This paper uses diachronic corpus data to visualize language change in a dynamic fashion. Bivariate and multivariate data sets form the input for so-called motion charts, i.e. series of diachronically ordered scatterplots that can be viewed in sequence. Based on data from COHA (Davies 2010), two case studies illustrate recent changes in American English. The first study visualizes change in a diachronic analysis of ambicategorical nouns and verbs such as hope or drink; the second study shows structural change in the behavior of complement-taking predicates such as expect or remember. Whereas motion charts are typically used to represent bivariate data sets, it is argued here that they are also useful for the analysis of multivariate data over time. The present paper submits multivariate diachronic data to a multi-dimensional scaling analysis. Viewing the resulting data points in separate time slices offers a holistic and intuitive representation of complex linguistic change.
25
Pacheco-Franco, Marta, and Javier Calle-Martín. "Suffixes in Competition." International Journal of English Studies 20, no. 2 (October 19, 2020): 169–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.6018/ijes.415371.
Full textAbstract:
This paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of the linguistic competition between the suffixes -our/-or in Early Modern English. It is conceived as a state of the art to provide an explanation of the development and distribution of these competing suffixes in Early Modern English. The study is based on the distribution of the most common set of words with alternative spellings in the period to investigate the development and the standardisation of the -our and -or groups. The study offers the quantitative distribution of the suffixes in the period corroborating the participation of phenomena such as linguistic extinction, specialisation, blocking and lexicalisation in the configuration of the contemporary morphological paradigm. The source of evidence comes from the corpus of Early English Books Online (Davies, 2017) for the period 1470–1690. In addition to this, the study also relies on sources such as the Evans Corpus (2011), the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008).
26
ANDERWALD, LIESELOTTE. "Measuring the success of prescriptivism: quantitative grammaticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive." English Language and Linguistics 18, no. 1 (February 6, 2014): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674313000257.
Full textAbstract:
This article connects the quantitative study of grammaticography with a more traditional corpus-linguistic investigation of the progressive passive. Based on a careful analysis of over 250 grammars of English published during the nineteenth century in Britain and the US, I will try to answer the question whether prescriptivism has had any influence on purported differences between British and American English in the rise of the progressive passive. This article will argue that text-type sensitivity is the overriding factor determining the occurrence of the progressive passive in the nineteenth century, rather than national differences between British and American English. Prescriptive comments during the nineteenth century did not influence developments in American English significantly. However, during the 1950s modern-style prescriptivism can be shown to have massive effects on American newspaper language. Combining quantitative historical grammaticography and corpus-linguistic studies can thus extend our insights into the factors that influence language change.
27
Hou, Zhide. "Using semantic tagging to examine the American Dream and the Chinese Dream." Semiotica 2019, no. 227 (March 5, 2019): 145–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/sem-2016-0116.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis paper uses Wmatrix to generate semantic tagging to compare corpora of media representations between the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. The USAS tagger is used to assign the semantic field tags to the America Dream Corpus (ADC) and the Chinese Dream Corpus (CDC). The motivation of this study is to replicate the studies using an automated and inclusive method based on semantic tagging (Potts, A. & P. Baker. 2012. Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English? International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(3). 295–324), and more importantly, to conduct a broad semantic categorization on both national dreams so as to uncover the cultural, social and historical similarities and/or differences. It is found that the cultural difference of the individualistic home and work association of the American Dream versus the collectivistic nation and world attributions of the Chinese Dream. The different historical stage and social-economic contexts are disclosed from the different temporal positions from time category, and the contrastive tags associated with negative representation of the American Dream and positive representation of the Chinese Dream.
28
VAN OSTADE, INGRID TIEKEN-BOON, and VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA. "Have went– an American usage problem." English Language and Linguistics 19, no. 2 (July 2015): 293–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674315000118.
Full textAbstract:
Have wentmay seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status ofhave wentin the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances ofhave wentandhave goneshowed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.
29
Anderwald, Lieselotte. "Natural language change or prescriptive influence?" English World-Wide 34, no. 2 (May 17, 2013): 146–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.34.2.02and.
Full textAbstract:
This paper investigates five morphological Americanisms in their diachronic development since 1810 on the basis of data from the Corpus of Historical American English, namely the past tense forms of THRIVE, DIVE, PLEAD, DRAG, and SNEAK. THRIVE is a clear case of an irregular verb becoming regular; in the other four lexemes (DIVE, PLEAD, DRAG and SNEAK), the irregular forms are actually a new development, as the corpus analysis can show. Present-day Americanisms can thus be the result of different historical processes that diverge from British English: differential speed in the same process, or change in a different direction. In both cases of change, it is a valid question to ask whether they might have been the result of prescriptive pressure. In order to investigate the question in how far prescriptive grammars may have influenced this trend towards more regular or towards newly irregular forms, my corpus-linguistic data is correlated with changing recommendations in historical grammar books of English, based on a quantitative investigation of my collection of 258 grammars. I propose that prescriptive influence both on the regularization of THRIVE and on the process of ‘irregularization’ of DIVE, PLEAD, DRAG and SNEAK is minimal, and that we are most likely dealing with genuine changes from below. These changes are then, with some time lag, reflected in the (not so) prescriptive grammars of the time.
30
Bisiada, Mario. "A cross-linguistic analysis of the ‘homework’ metaphor in German and English political discourse." Discourse & Society 29, no. 6 (October 8, 2018): 609–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926518802916.
Full textAbstract:
A frequently encountered expression in political discourse across languages is the assertion that someone has not ‘done their homework’. As the expression is a combination of structural metaphor and understatement, it is a figurative frame that simplifies public debates by presenting complex issues such as economic reforms as simple tasks and stifles critical and consensual political debates by replacing questions of fairness and adequacy with unquestionable moral obligation. In spite of this manipulative force, metaphor research has paid little attention to this metaphor. I investigate its emergence and pragmatic effects in American and German newspaper discourse through the Corpus of Historical American English/Corpus of Contemporary American English and Die ZEIT corpora. Findings for both English and German show that, while the metaphor was originally used for positive self- and negative other-representation, it is now used increasingly often without specifying whether or not someone has done their homework, which is evidence to suggest that it has become accepted in public discourse as a normal way of framing political issues.
31
Cichosz, Anna. "The origin of English clause-initial quotative inversion." Journal of Historical Linguistics 8, no. 3 (December 31, 2018): 318–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17002.cic.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract This study is a corpus-based investigation of the development of English clause-initial quotative inversion, i.e. the construction in which a reporting clause with SV inversion is placed before the quoted message. The analysis makes use of various corpora of historical and contemporary English in order to document quantity and quality changes in the investigated construction in all stages of English. The study shows that the construction observed in Present Day English has developed in a continuous way since the period of Old English, although it has been a low-frequency pattern in each historical period. Moreover, the construction has developed differently in British and American English. In the former variety, the clause-initial quotative inversion is still quite rare and limited to newspapers, mostly tabloids; in the latter, it is quite widespread in magazines, where it shows an exceptionally high frequency and a growing collocational range.
32
VARTIAINEN, TURO. "From twig-skinny to Kate Moss skinny: expressing degree with common and proper nouns." English Language and Linguistics 23, no. 4 (October 10, 2019): 901–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674319000303.
Full textAbstract:
This article provides a constructional (CxG) analysis of N-ADJ compounds in which the noun receives a degree reading (e.g. bullet-straight, Kennedy-handsome). A semantic analysis based on similes and scale matching is provided, and the recent history and increased productivity of the construction are examined in light of data from both the Corpus of Historical American English and a range of present-day corpora. The article introduces new evidence of the increased functional flexibility of both common and proper nouns in English and discusses the ongoing conventionalisation of proper noun degree modifiers in both American English and other varieties of English. The results of the study suggest that the recent introduction of proper noun degree modifiers has been supported by both constructional (semantic) change and macro-trends that have affected English usage more generally.
33
Schwarz, Sarah. "“This Must Be Looked Into”: A Corpus Study of the Prepositional Passive." Journal of English Linguistics 47, no. 3 (June 18, 2019): 249–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424219851837.
Full textAbstract:
This paper addresses the need for a comprehensive, corpus-based study of the prepositional passive in the recent past. Sets of prepositional passives from 1870 to 1999 were collected from the Corpus of Historical American English and compared with a control group of “regular” passive sentences. After presenting the diachronic frequency of prepositional passives over the time period, the study explores a number of special characteristics that have been suggested as being typical of the prepositional passive: lexicalization of verb + preposition, participle + noun + preposition combinations with light verbs such as made use of, coordination with another passive verb, “affectedness,” and the perceived significance of the subject referent. The results of the corpus-based investigation add new dimensions to our understanding of the construction’s use.
34
SHEVCHENKO, TATIANA. "ENGLISH WORD STRESS IN LONG-TERM LANGUAGE CONTACT." Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, no. 2 (2021): 160–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.22250/2410-7190_2021_7_2_160_168.
Full textAbstract:
The paper summarizes the results of recent studies concerned with English accentual patterns dynamics in polysyllabic words, based on English and French language contact. Canadian English reflects the present-day situation of language contact. Intersection of a variety of tendencies is observed which are due to accentual assimilation in lexicon of Romance origin borrowed from French. The recessive and the rhythmical are the major ones in the historical perspective. The data collected in dictionaries are further supplied with sociocultural comments based on corpus and opinion survey cognitive analyses. The presence of rhythmical stress was discovered in British, American and Canadian Englishes with the growing tendency in compound words due to disappearing of the pattern with two equal stresses. The tendency is most vivid in bilingual speakers from the Province of Quebec who accentuate word-final syllable.
35
Pischedda, Pier Simone. "Translating English Sound Symbolism in Italian Comics: A Corpus-Based Linguistic Analysis across Six Decades (1932–1992)." Arts 9, no. 4 (October 26, 2020): 108. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts9040108.
Full textAbstract:
Linking interdisciplinarity and multimodality in translation studies, this paper will analyse the diachronic translation of English ideophones in Italian Disney comics. This is achieved thanks to the compiling of a bi-directional corpus of sound symbolic entries spanning six decades (1932–1992)—a corpus that was created following extensive archival work in various Italian and American libraries between 2014 and 2016. The central aim is to showcase practical examples coming from published comic scripts and to highlight patterns of translation in each of the five different time windows which were chosen according to specific historical, linguistic and cultural vicissitudes taking place in the Italian nation. Overall, the intention is to shed light on an under-developed area of studies that focuses on the cross-linguistical transposition of ideophonic forms in comic books and to pinpoint how greater factors might influence the treatment of such deceptively miniscule elements in the comic books’ pages.
36
Collins Winn, Christian T. "The Blumhardts in America." PNEUMA 38, no. 3 (2016): 249–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700747-03803001.
Full textAbstract:
This essay, the first reception history of proto-Pentecostals Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt in Anglo-American literature, charts three phases of reception of the Blumhardts in English-speaking circles. The first phase focused on the healing ministry of the elder Blumhardt, which took place primarily in the nineteenth century. The second phase began in the mid-twentieth century and was devoted especially to introducing the Blumhardts to English-speaking readers. It included attempts by theologians and ethicists to appropriate the Blumhardts for constructive theological purposes. The third phase, currently underway, is marked by scholarly assessment of the Blumhardts in their historical setting and by an effort to translate more of the Blumhardt corpus into English. The conclusion offers unsystematic interpretive observations culled from the reception history itself, with an eye to the future appropriation of the Blumhardts in the English-speaking world.
37
Kytö, Merja, and Suzanne Romaine. "“We had like to have been killed by thunder & lightning”." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6, no. 1 (February 22, 2005): 1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.6.1.02kyt.
Full textAbstract:
This article discusses the semantic and pragmatic history of a grammatical construction consisting of a form of Be/Have + like followed by an infinitival verb form, which became obsolete in Standard English in the nineteenth century, but still survives in some regional varieties of British and American English, e.g. she liketa had a heart attack. It provides an example of a grammatical category that Kuteva (1998) has called “action narrowly averted” (ANA or avertive) with the meaning ‘on the verge of V-ing, but did not V’. Using a corpus of texts covering the last six centuries, we document the historical circumstances under which the avertive meaning emerged via invited inferences of counterfactuality drawn in the specific discourse context of predictive conditional constructions.
38
Liu, Dilin, and Qiyang Mo. "Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas: A Corpus Analysis of the Development of the On Track/Off Track Idiom Pair." Journal of English Linguistics 48, no. 2 (April 23, 2020): 137–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424220912455.
Full textAbstract:
Using the theoretical constructs of “image schema” and “conceptual metaphor,” this study examines the use and historical development of on track and off track as a pair of metaphorical idioms in American English. Specifically, this article is concerned with usage patterns and semantic changes of the expressions over the past two centuries in three American English corpora. We study the semantic features of the subject nouns as the “trajectors” and the diverse verbs used with the on/ off track metaphors in order to uncover the main cognitive mechanisms underlying the use of the two idioms. The results of the study delineate how the development of the metaphorical idiom pair was largely motivated by PATH/FORCE conceptual metaphors based on image schemas and licensed by the Event-Structure Complex Metaphor; this demonstrates the important role of image schemas and conceptual metaphor in language use and development. The results also reveal that, in using metaphors based on image schemas, speakers/writers may activate very specific embodied images, and that context influences the use of the metaphorical idiom pair. Our results also support findings from previous corpus-linguistic theory-guided corpus studies of lexical/syntactical constructions, confirming again the vitality of this research.
39
Werner, Valentin. "Love is all around: a corpus-based study of pop lyrics." Corpora 7, no. 1 (May 2012): 19–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2012.0016.
Full textAbstract:
Although they are an integral part of everyday life, song lyrics are not included in any of the standard corpora of English (e.g., BNC, ICE, CIC, Brown family) that are currently available. In this paper, I report on an analysis of lyrics based on a chart corpus containing British and American pop songs. The purpose of this study is to test various stylistic, diatopic and historical factors, with the help of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings from earlier research are tested against further corpus evidence, while I provide a broader statistical basis and more illustrative examples than in previous studies. I also address more theoretical issues, such as the principles behind the production of lyrics and the question of whether pop song lyrics can be categorised in terms of ‘spoken’ versus ‘written’ or ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’. I argue that pop lyrics constitute a rather special register. Finally, I outline areas of further study.
40
WERNER, VALENTIN, and ROBERT FUCHS. "The present perfect in Nigerian English." English Language and Linguistics 21, no. 1 (June 13, 2016): 129–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674316000137.
Full textAbstract:
This article offers an analysis of present perfect (PP) use in Nigerian English (NigE), based on the Nigerian component of theInternational Corpus of English(ICE). First, we analyze variable contexts with the Simple Past (PT; determined by temporally specified contexts) as one of the main competitors of the PP, and thus assess the PP-friendliness of NigE in contrast to other varieties. We further provide an alternative measure of PP-friendliness and test register effects in terms of normalized and relative PP and PT frequencies. Our results indicate an overall reduced PP-friendliness of NigE and show internal variability in terms of PP frequencies in different variable contexts. As regards register effects, NigE does not show less variability of PP frequencies compared to British English (BrE). However, the distribution of the PP across registers in NigE does not follow the British pattern where certain registers are particularly PP-friendly. We discuss potential determining factors of the low frequency of the PP in NigE, and conclude that neither substrate influence nor general learning mechanisms on their own can comprehensively account for it. Instead, we suggest that historical influence from Irish and perhaps (at a later point) American English, in conjunction with general learning mechanisms, may be responsible.
41
HUNDT, MARIANNE. "Animacy, agentivity, and the spread of the progressive in Modern English." English Language and Linguistics 8, no. 1 (April 21, 2004): 47–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674304001248.
Full textAbstract:
One aspect of the grammaticalization of the progressive is its spread in Modern English. Previous studies suggest that the progressive was initially restricted to animate or agentive subjects and spread to inanimate or nonagentive subjects only during the later stages of grammaticalization in Modern English. The article discusses the contextual variables – animacy and agentivity – that have been used in previous research. ARCHER – A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers – is then used (a) to verify the hypothesis that progressives increasingly co-occur with inanimate/nonagentive subjects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (b) to test the reliability and comparability of previous research, (c) to verify whether the weakening of the contextual constraint was a condition for or a result of the spread of the progressive form in the nineteenth century, and (d) to find out whether there are any regional differences between American and British English in the loss of the contextual constraint.
42
Yao, Xinyue. "Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect." Journal of English Linguistics 42, no. 4 (September 9, 2014): 307–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424214549560.
Full textAbstract:
This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.
43
Malá, Marcela. "A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study of a Change in the Use of Non-Finite Clauses in Written English." Prague Journal of English Studies 6, no. 1 (July 26, 2017): 151–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pjes-2017-0009.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractOccasional notes in secondary literature suggest that there is a growing tendency to use non-finite clauses in written English. It is partly attributed to the fact that during the process of historical development the English finite verb has lost much of its dynamism and the nominal elements of predication, namely infinitives, participles and gerunds have gradually become semantically more important. This paper deals with the occurrences of non-finite clauses in the tagged Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora, which are matching corpora of American English and British English respectively. The article looks at 1) the use of noun phrases followed by -ing participles, -ed participles and to-infinitives, 2) the use of -ing/-ed clauses with/without overt subordinators and 3) the occurrences of to-infinitive clauses. When the structural patterns 1), 2) and 3) were taken as wholes there was always an increase in the frequency of occurrence of non-finite clauses demonstrated by hundreds of examples in the Frown and F-LOB corpora. This may be considered significant since there is only a 30-year difference between the Brown/Frown and LOB/F-LOB corpora. The findings thus completely support the premise that when the perspective of the research is diachronic, in written English non-finite clauses are becoming increasingly prominent.
44
Yao, Xinyue, and Peter Collins. "Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English." Corpora 8, no. 1 (May 2013): 115–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2013.0036.
Full textAbstract:
A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.
45
Rohdenburg, Günter. "The Replacement of Direct Objects and Directly Linked Gerunds by Prepositional ones after shirk, refrain and lack in Modern English, with Special Reference to Clause Negation." Anglia 138, no. 4 (November 11, 2020): 561–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0049.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractIn most Eastern European languages, clause negation typically triggers the replacement of a “direct” case such as the accusative by a less direct one like the genitive. In English, the contrast is – with several verbs – partially paralleled by that between directly linked complements and their prepositional counterparts. This corpus-based paper explores the relevant behaviour of three verbs which possess an intrinsic negative semantics: shirk, refrain (in earlier stages of Modern English), and lack. It is found that negated clauses definitely promote a) prepositional objects with all three verbs and b) prepositional gerunds after shirk. In the case of refrain, the historical British database displays only a weak tendency for negated clauses to favour the increasingly common prepositional gerund. The prepositional variant turns out to be virtually absent from the passive of shirk, a fact assumed to be due to the general avoidance of preposition stranding in favour of available transitive structures. With lack, the rivalry between the two object variants is additionally constrained by two prosodic tendencies, the preference for phrasal upbeats and sentence end-weight. Throughout, American English displays a distinctly greater sensitivity to clause negation than British English.
46
Hundt, Marianne, Gerold Schneider, and Elena Seoane. "The use of the be-passive in academic Englishes: local versus global usage in an international language." Corpora 11, no. 1 (April 2016): 29–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2016.0084.
Full textAbstract:
In this paper, we examine the diffusion of a syntactic change in a specialised text type in different World Englishes – in particular, the use of be-passives in academic discourse in nine contact varieties of English and six English as a Native Language (ENL) varieties. The Zürich-parsed International Corpus of English (ICE) makes it possible to retrieve automatically, for the first time, the two variants in the envelope of variation: active transitive constructions and be-passives. We apply regression analysis in order to gauge the effect of potential external factors that play a role in the choice between them: regional variety (with potential influence from the substrate in the contact varieties) and academic sub-discipline. The use of the passive has undergone change in the twentieth century (see, for example, Leech et al., 2009 ). As a necessary backdrop for variation found in the ICE corpora, we therefore use historical data from the extended Brown family of corpora, which have also been parsed at the University of Zürich. The results of our analysis show that regional variety is less important than academic sub-discipline: with the sole exception of American English, be-passives are about equally frequent in both ENL and contact varieties; moreover, they are distributed similarly across all varieties according to academic sub-discipline (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology).
47
Shao, Bin, Yingying Cai, and Graeme Trousdale. "A Multivariate Analysis of Diachronic Variation in A Bunch of noun: A Construction Grammar Account." Journal of English Linguistics 47, no. 2 (May 17, 2019): 150–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424219838611.
Full textAbstract:
On the basis of data retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English, this paper provides a multivariate analysis of diachronic change in collocations of the sequence a bunch of followed by a noun in the Late Modern and contemporary English periods. Our results show that (1) the partitive semantics shifts in the period from the 1910s to the 1960s from the original dominant meaning ‘bundle’ to ‘group,’ while the quantifier function/‘large quantity’ meaning of bunch becomes more entrenched from the 1970s onwards, though the three meanings continue to co-exist in the contemporary language; and (2) there exist statistically significant correlations between semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties of the noun collocates in the partitive and quantifier constructions. While much work on diachronic construction grammar is concerned with the question of how new constructions come into being, the present article complements such research by providing a detailed account of the nature of persistence of the earlier partitive construction and the embedding and gradual entrenchment of the newer quantifier construction. It therefore addresses the consequences of “constructionalization” on a source construction, and the nature of frequency effects in “post-constructionalization” changes.
48
Tartakovsky, Roi, and Yeshayahu Shen. "Meek as milk and large as logic: A corpus study of the non-standard poetic simile." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28, no. 3 (July 27, 2019): 203–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947019865445.
Full textAbstract:
A novel distinction is proposed between two types of closed similes: the standard and the non-standard. While the standard simile presents a ground that is a salient feature of the source term (e.g. meek as a lamb), the non-standard simile somewhat enigmatically supplies a non-salient ground (e.g. meek as milk). The latter thus violates a deep-seated norm of similes and presents interpreters with unexpected difficulty, whereby the concept set up to be an exemplar of a quality is actually less than ideal to fulfil this role. The main question addressed here is how these two simile types are relatively distributed across poetic and non-poetic corpora. We elaborate the criteria for what constitutes the non-standard simile, including separating it out from adjacent phenomena like the ironic simile (e.g. brave as a mouse), and go on to explain our operational criteria for salience. Then, we report culling 329 closed similes from an anthology of poetry and 350 closed similes from two corpora of non-poetic discourse, the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. An independent judge rated the salience of each ground-and-source pair of each of the similes, presented in randomized order. Results show that while the standard simile is found in both types of discourse, the non-standard kind is only marginally present in the non-poetic corpora but makes up over 40% of the similes in the poetic corpus. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theories of poetic language and literariness.
49
Moorehead, Sanae Kawaguchi, and Greg Robinson. "On the Brink of Evacuation: The Diary of an Issei Woman, by Fuki Endow Kawaguchi." Prospects 28 (October 2004): 359–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s036123330000154x.
Full textAbstract:
One of the most significant gaps in our historical understanding of the expulsion and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II is a knowledge of how Japanese Americans themselves perceived events as they occurred. Former camp inmates have produced an enormous corpus of literature, particularly in the last thirty years, dealing with their wartime experience, including oral histories, memoirs, essays, plays, poetry, and fiction. These have provided valuable insight as to how the government's policy played out in the lives of its victims, and have included a store of information useful in reconstructing the overall camp experience. Still, memoirs are by their nature products of hindsight and recollection, formed of material drawn from the untidy storehouse of human memory. They inevitably give an incomplete and less than trustworthy accounting of past sensations, especially the traumatic emotions and painful human relations that characterized the wartime Japanese American experience. In contrast, the contemporary written record of the wartime Japanese American experience is both relatively sparse and uneven. Surviving letters, essays, and journals stress the experience of the Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, who comprised the majority of camp inmates. Members of the immigrant Issei generation, less long-lived and fluent in English than their children, have produced little material despite various efforts to create Issei archival and oral history collections. Such documents by the Issei as do exist are generally in Japanese and are thereby impenetrable to the vast majority of scholars in the United States.
50
Stebletsova, Anna. "Academic Discourse in Western Research at the Turn of the 21st Century: Evolution of Approaches and Concepts." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije, no. 5 (January 2021): 5–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2020.5.1.
Full textAbstract:
This review paper discusses the concept of academic discourse as one of the most rapidly developing branches in contemporary linguistic research. The objective of the review was to observe and analyze basic paradigms and approaches to academic discourse in applied linguistics, genre analysis and discourse analysis developed by British, American and European linguists and examine academic discourse issues. The timeline of the review includes three periods from the middle of the 20 th century to the present. The focus on the Anglophone literature is determined by the historical interrelation between academic discourse research and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and by an increase of national research of academic discourse and EAP. The review demonstrates evolution of academic discourse research approaches according to the time periods and domineering concepts. The review results demonstrate the contribution of Swales' genre analysis approach to the development of academic discourse research and learning. The author indicates that current research into academic discourse obviously has a cross-disciplinary trend and is based on the combination of comparative analysis and corpus linguistics methods. The author makes a conclusion that this trend will remain a significant part of academic discourse investigation and results in an increase of national publications addressing the academic discourse issues.