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  3. Studies in English Language

The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national and international varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership.

  • General Editors: Merja Kytö, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Editorial Boards: Bas Aarts, University College London, John Algeo, University of Georgia, Susan Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, Christian Mair, University of Freiburg, Charles F. Meyer, University of Massachusetts

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83 results in Studies in English Language

Page 1 of 5

Composite Predicates in English
  • Processes of Specialization
  • Eva Berlage
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025

Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction
  • A Corpus-Based Analysis of Spoken English
  • Tony McEnery, Isobelle Clarke, Gavin Brookes
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interaction between L1 and L2 speakers, and explores three corpora to show, in spoken interaction with L1 speakers across a range of tasks, the dynamics of discourse construction. Considering factors including cultural background, task and proficiency, it characterises the repertoire of discourse functions used in these interactions and shows how they vary according to a range of variables. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Verbal Medicines
  • The Curative Power of Prayer and Invocation in Early English Charms
  • Leslie K. Arnovick
  • Published online:
    29 November 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • Religious texts played a central role in Early English, and this innovative book looks in particular at how medieval Christians used prayers and psalms in healing the sick. At first glance, the variety and multiplicity of utterances, prayers, exorcistic formulas, and other incantations found in a single charm may seem to be random and eclectic. However, this book shows that charms had distinct, logical linguistic characteristics, as well performative aspects that were shaped by their usage and cultural significance. Together, these qualities gave the texts a unique role in the early development of English, in particular its use in ritual and folklore. Arnovick identifies four forms of incantations and a full chapter is devoted to each form, arranged to reflect the lived experiences of medieval Christians, from their baptism in infancy, to daily prayer and attendance at Church celebrations, and to their Confession and anointing during grave illness.

Intensifiers in Late Modern English
  • A Sociopragmatic Approach to Courtroom Discourse
  • Claudia Claridge, Ewa Jonsson, Merja Kytö
  • Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024
  • The development of intensifiers has long been identified as an area of vibrant change in Late Modern English. This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive study of intensifiers in this period, and shows how they have changed over time. It uses speech-based and interactive data from the Old Bailey courthouse in London, enriched by extralinguistic information in the Old Bailey Corpus, to investigate an unprecedented range of intensifiers, including downtoners, boosters, and maximizers. The courtroom acts as a social microcosm of the period, providing unique insights on gender, class, and courtroom roles, and their effects on language use. The usage of intensifiers is illuminated from a lexico-grammatical angle, focusing on their formal and semantic features, as well as those of the items they modify. These perspectives are linked to temporal developments from 1720 to 1913, to offer a complete picture of variation and change in the intensifier area.

Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics
  • Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English
  • Daniela Landert
  • Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • Based on an extensive corpus-based study, this revealing book explores how epistemic stance is expressed in the early modern period, and in doing so, presents new methodologies for using corpora to investigate issues in historical pragmatics. It provides a new, corpus-driven method for the analysis of pragmatic functions that rely on context-dependent interpretations. By retrieving passages that include a high-density of the pragmatic function under investigation, the subsequent analysis can reveal previously neglected forms and context-dependent factors. It includes four empirical studies that apply the method to the analysis of epistemic stance in four Early Modern English corpora, the result of which emphasise the importance of context for the expression of stance. It also includes an appendix with inventories of Early Modern English stance expressions, offering starting points for further research studies. It is essential reading for researchers and students in historical pragmatics and corpus pragmatics.

Borrowings in Informal American English
  • Małgorzata Kowalczyk
  • Published online:
    31 August 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • What do 'bimbo,' 'glitch,' 'savvy,' and 'shtick' all have in common? They are all expressions used in informal American English that have been taken from other languages. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive description of borrowings in informal American English, based on a large database of citations from thousands of contemporary sources, including the press, film, and TV. It presents the United States as a linguistic 'melting pot,' with words from a diverse range of languages now frequently appearing in the lexicon. It examines these borrowings from various perspectives, including discussions of terms, donors, types, changes, functions, and themes. It also features an alphabetical glossary of 1,200 representative expressions, defined and illustrated by 5,500 usage examples, providing an insightful and practical resource for readers. Combining scholarship with readability, this book is a fascinating storehouse of information for students and researchers in linguistics as well as anyone interested in lexical variation in contemporary English.

Consonantal Sound Change in American English
  • An Analysis of Clustered Sibilants
  • Wiebke H. Ahlers
  • Published online:
    10 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • Research on sound change often focuses on vowels, yet consonantal sound change also offers fascinating insights into language development and variation. This pioneering book provides a detailed investigation of consonantal sound change in English, by analyzing a large corpus of specifically designed field recordings from Austin, Texas. It offers one of the most in-depth analyses of /str/-retraction to date, drawing comparisons with studies of change in the distinguishing phonetic features of other varieties of English, and with studies of /str/-retraction in other Germanic languages. It further deepens our understanding of sound change by including qualitative data to position the sound change in the social reality of Austin, showing that specific sound changes are universally driven by age, gender and ethnicity. The results provide a testing ground for models of sociolinguistic and sound change, and highlight the importance of the social fabric of language in modeling language change.

The English Binominal Noun Phrase
  • A Cognitive-Functional Approach
  • Elnora ten Wolde
  • Published online:
    29 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • The binomial noun phrase, or of-binomial, is an important phenomenon in the English language. Defined as a noun phrase that contains two related nouns, linked by the preposition of, examples include a hell of a day and a beast of a storm. This pioneering book provides the first extensive study of the evaluative binominal noun phrases (EBNP) in English, exploring the syntactic rules that govern them, and the (functional) semantic and pragmatic links between the two nouns. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, corpus data, and two different theoretical approaches (Construction Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar), it argues that the EBNP now functions as a stage in a grammaticalization path that begins with a prototypical N+PP construction, continues with the head-classifier, and ends with two new of-binominal constructions: the evaluative modifier and binominal intensifier. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading for researchers in syntax, semantics, and English corpus linguistics.

Conversation in World Englishes
  • Turn-Taking and Cultural Variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English
  • Theresa Neumaier
  • Published online:
    30 March 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • Turn-taking is a fascinating feature of conversational interaction, due to its systematic and ordered nature. However, research has so far focused mainly on American and British conversations, with other varieties of English receiving much less attention. This pioneering book addresses this gap by exploring turn-taking patterns and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English. Bringing together research from the fields of Conversation Analysis and World Englishes for the first time, Neumaier conducts an empirical study based on authentic audio data of interactions in these global varieties of English, and demonstrates that conversational strategies differ between speaker groups with different cultural backgrounds. Shedding new light on the impact of cultural and sociolinguistic factors on conversational patterns, it is essential reading for advanced students and scholars interested in language, variation, and social interaction, as well as those working in the fields of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, and World Englishes.

Transitional Morphology
  • Combining Forms in Modern English
  • Elisa Mattiello
  • Published online:
    13 December 2022
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022
  • Combining Forms (CFs) are a major morphological phenomenon in Modern English, yet while they have been discussed in some morphological literature, no full-length study has been devoted to this topic so far. This pioneering book addresses that gap by providing a framework in which CFs are marked as distinct from their neighbouring categories such as abbreviations and blending. It splits CFs into four distinct categories – neoclassical (e.g. bio-therapy, zoo-logy), abbreviated (e.g. e-reader, econo-politics), secreted (e.g. oil-gate, computer-holic) and splinters (e.g. docu- from documentary in docudrama). It shows that the notion of CF spans a wide spectrum of processes, from regular composition to abbreviation, from blending to analogy, and schema. Modern and emerging English CFs are analysed by adopting a corpus-based approach, and measuring their realised, expanding, and potential productivity. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for researchers and advanced students of morphology, English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and lexicography.

Genre in English Medical Writing, 1500–1820
  • Sociocultural Contexts of Production and Use
  • Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Turo Hiltunen, Jeremy J. Smith, Carla Suhr
  • Published online:
    13 October 2022
    Print publication:
    13 October 2022
  • Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book offers novel perspectives on the history of medical writing and scientific thought-styles by examining patterns of change and reception in genres, discourse, and lexis in the period 1500-1820. Each chapter demonstrates in detail how changing textual forms were closely tied to major multi-faceted social developments: industrialisation, urbanisation, expanding trade, colonialization, and changes in communication, all of which posed new demands on medical care. It then shows how these developments were reflected in a range of medical discourses, such as bills of mortality, medical advertisements, medical recipes, and medical rhetoric, and provides an extensive body of case studies to highlight how varieties of medical discourse have been targeted at different audiences over time. It draws on a wide range of methodological frameworks and is accompanied by numerous relevant illustrations, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students across the human sciences.

Standardising English Spelling
  • The Role of Printing in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Graphemic Developments
  • Marco Condorelli
  • Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • The standardisation of English spelling that resulted from the advent of printing is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of English. This pioneering book explores new avenues of investigation into spelling development by looking at the Early Modern English period, when irregular features across graphemes became standardised. It traces the development of the English spelling system through a number of 'competing' standards, raising questions about the meaning of 'standardisation'. It introduces a new model for the analysis of large-scale graphemic developments from a diachronic perspective, and provides a new empirical method geared specifically to the study of spelling standardisation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The method is applied to four interconnected case studies, focusing on the standardisation of positional spellings, i and y, etymological spelling and vowel diacritic spelling. This book is essential reading for researchers of writing systems and the history of English.

Syntactic Change in Late Modern English
  • Studies on Colloquialization and Densification
  • Erik Smitterberg
  • Published online:
    19 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021
  • Syntactic Change in Late Modern English presents a stability paradox to linguists; despite the many social changes that took place between 1700 and 1900, the language appeared to be structurally stable during this period. This book resolves this paradox by presenting a new, idiolect-centred perspective on language change, and shows how this framework is applicable to change in any language. It then demonstrates how an idiolect-centred framework can be reconciled with corpus-linguistic methodology through four original case studies. These concern colloquialization (the process by which oral features spread to writing) and densification (the process by which meaning is condensed into shorter linguistic units), two types of change that characterize Modern English. The case studies also shed light on the role of genre and gender in language change and contribute to the discussion of how to operationalize frequency in corpus linguistics. This study will be essential reading for researchers in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time
  • Exploring Recent Change
  • Elisabeth Reber
  • Published online:
    27 August 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021
  • Why do recordings of speakers engaging in reported speech at British Prime Minister's Questions from the 1970s–80s sound so distant to us? This cutting-edge study explores how the practices of quoting have changed at parliamentary question time in light of changing conventions and an evolving media landscape. Comparing data from authentic audio and video recordings from 1978 to 1988 and from 2003 to 2013, it provides evidence for qualitative and quantitative changes at the micro level (e.g., grammaticalisation processes in the reporting clause) and in more global structures (e.g., rhetorical patterns, and activities). These analytic findings contribute to the theoretical modelling of evidentiality in English, our understanding of constructions, interaction, and change, and of PMQs as an evolving community of practice. One of the first large-scale studies of recent change in an interactional genre of English, this ground-breaking monograph offers a framework for a diachronic interactional (socio-) linguistic research programme.

Gender in World Englishes
  • Edited by Tobias Bernaisch
  • Published online:
    11 December 2020
    Print publication:
    07 January 2021
  • How do women and men from around the world really speak English? Using examples from World Englishes in Africa, America, Asia, Britain and the Caribbean, this book explores the degree of variation based on gender, in native-, second- and foreign-language varieties. Each chapter is rooted in a particular set of linguistic corpora, and combines authentic records of speakers with state-of-the-art statistical modelling. It gives empirically reliable evaluations of the impact of gender on linguistic choices in the context of other (socio-)linguistic factors, such as age or speaker status, under consideration of local social realities. It analyses linguistic phenomena traditionally associated with genderlectal research, such as hedges, intensifiers or quotatives, as well as those associated with World Englishes, like the dative or genitive alternation. A truly innovative approach to the subject, this book is essential reading for researchers and advanced students with an interest in language, gender and World Englishes.

Speech Acts in English
  • From Research to Instruction and Textbook Development
  • Lorena Pérez-Hernández
  • Published online:
    16 November 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • Speech acts, those actions carried out mainly by means of language, are used in English in a range of complex ways. However, they have rarely been covered in English as a foreign language (EFL) materials and textbooks. Bringing together current theories from pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, this book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive model of directive speech acts and showing how to teach them to learners of English. It provides a review of the strengths and weaknesses of current theories of illocution and a critical assessment of existing EFL textbooks. Descriptions of the meaning and form of directive speech act constructions are given in the cognitive pedagogical grammar of directive speech acts (included), which offers a wealth of examples to make the information accessible to non-specialist readers. The book also provides a wide range of practical activities, showing how research on illocutionary acts can be implemented in practice.

Transforming Early English
  • The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots
  • Jeremy J. Smith
  • Published online:
    08 May 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020
  • Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.

English in the German-Speaking World
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    11 November 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019
  • English has a considerable history in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and present-day English has a significant influence on the vocabulary of modern German. Examining the ongoing influence of English on German in these countries, Raymond Hickey leads a team of authors to explore a wide range of topics, such as the history of English teaching in Germany, the type of English spoken in German-speaking countries today, and the role of English in German society. Borrowings from English in present-day German, as well as the use of English in public places, is also discussed, as is the use of English by non-Germans living in Germany, and the situation of Germany as a country with English as a foreign language. Comparisons with other European countries are also analysed, and a consideration of the German-English interface in places as far apart as the United States and Namibia, is also presented.

English in Multilingual South Africa
  • The Linguistics of Contact and Change
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    07 November 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a plethora of contact scenarios, all of which have resulted in language variation and change, and which forms the main focus of this insightful volume. Written by a team of leading scholars, it investigates a range of sociolinguistic factors and the challenges that South Africans face as a result of multilingualism and globalisation in both education and social interaction. The historical background to English in South Africa provides a framework within which the interfaces with other languages spoken in the country are scrutinised, whilst highlighting processes of contact, bilingualism, code-switching and language shift.

Variation in English Worldwide
  • Registers and Global Varieties
  • Axel Bohmann
  • Published online:
    03 November 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • World Englishes is one of the most active fields of present day linguistic research. This book provides a comprehensive overview of variation in English across the globe, by analysing a large corpus of texts from the English speaking world. The analysis draws on a larger number of individual texts and linguistic features than previous studies have done. It includes a systematic comparison of the influence of register and national variety on variation in English world-wide, and explores patterns of variation in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The results provide a testing ground for theoretical models, and highlight the importance of register in mediating linguistic differences across national varieties.

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