Christian Mair

Christian Mair

List of John Benjamins publications for which Christian Mair plays a role.

Journal

Title

Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English

Edited by Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair

[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 13] 2004. xiv, 265 pp.
Subjects Corpus linguistics | English linguistics | Germanic linguistics | Historical linguistics

Articles

This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and… read more | Article
Review
Review
The growing impact of English in Germany since World War II has largely been dealt with in terms of lexical borrowing. In contrast to this, the present contribution will focus on emerging domains of regular use of English, be it as a lingua franca or as part of multilingual repertoires. Two of… read more | Chapter
The study of “varieties of English around the world”, the “New Englishes” or “World Englishes” emerged at the intersection of dialectology, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics in the early 1980s and has become one of the most vibrant sub-fields of English linguistics. Work in this tradition… read more | Article
The present study offers the first analysis of modals and semi-modals which is based on all six completed Brown family corpora (B-Brown, B-LOB, Brown, LOB, Frown, F-LOB) and shows that the dynamics of diachronic change have prevented the emergence and preservation of stable regional contrasts… read more | Article
Mair, Christian. 2015. Response to Davies and Fuchs. English World-Wide 36:1, pp. 29–33
Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav read more | Commentary
Mair, Christian. 2014. Does money talk, and do languages have price tags? Economic perspectives on English as a global language. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond, Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch (eds.), pp. 249–266
The rise of English to its present position of the world’s undisputed lingua franca and the role of Global English in a multilingual world are core topics of World Englishes research. However, this does not mean that they have not been of interest to researchers in other disciplines, as well – for… read more | Article
Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across… read more | Article
Referring to the work of the Innsbruck-born and Berlin-based dialectologist Alois Brandl (1855–1940), the paper shows how the opportunities provided by early recording technology made linguists question the notion of dialect as a stable, regionally defined variety of a language. It goes on to argue… read more | Article
We investigate variable usage in specificational cleft sentences of the types All I did was help / to help / I helped him find a new job. Previous research identified a drift away from the marked and towards the unmarked infinitive in British and American English in the twentieth century. Spoken… read more | Article
Mair, Christian. 2011. Corpora and the new Englishes: Using the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ to explore research perspectives for the future. A Taste for Corpora: In honour of Sylviane Granger, Meunier, Fanny, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Magali Paquot (eds.), pp. 209–236
Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g.… read more | Article
Review
The contribution is a plea for closer co-operation between sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics in the study of World Englishes, supporting the case with the author’s own findings from the recently completed Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-JA). The variables… read more | Article
Mair, Christian. 2009. Infinitival and gerundial complements. Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and beyond, Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds.), pp. 261–274
The present contribution investigates three patterns of non-finite clausal complementation which are known to be variable in contemporary British and American English, namely the use of bare and to-infinitives with help, the presence or absence of from before gerunds following the verb prevent, and… read more | Article
Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair. 2004. Introduction. Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English, Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair (eds.), pp. ix–xiv
Miscellaneous
The paper argues for a closer collaboration between corpus linguists and grammaticalisation theorists. Corpora have a number of benefits: First, they make it possible to study incipient or ongoing processes of grammaticalisation. Secondly, a quantitative-cum-qualitative analysis of corpus data… read more | Article
After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the… read more | Article
The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and… read more | Article
This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a… read more | Article
Review
Article