The aim of this chapter is to critically examine the accuracy of the advice on formal, written grammar offered in EFL teaching materials and other normative works. We use corpus data to investigate the use of four grammatical features often labelled as “informal” or “spoken” and find that the… read more
The present study examines the distribution of not-contracted and uncontracted forms in nineteenth-century English. The results show that the proportion of not-contracted forms increases across the nineteenth century, although there is a great deal of variation along genre lines. The results are… read more
The present study, which is based on the CONCE corpus, considers two linguistic features that are characteristic of spoken rather than written production: the progressive and phrasal verbs. The frequency development of these features in nineteenth-century English is examined in relation to… read more