In addition to its primary temporal meaning, the adverb now displays a variety of pragmatic meanings in present-day English. Now serves as a means to structure topic changes or to emphasise different steps in an argumentation, providing “a temporal index for the world within the utterance” (Schiffrin 1987: 245). On an interpersonal level, the marker can introduce a subjective opinion, often placing the speaker’s view in disalignment with that of others. With the recognition of interpersonal differences, now also offers the hearer a chance to be involved in the suggested discourse frame. Diachronically, semantically bleached meanings of now are attested as early as the Old English period (Aijmer 2002). This paper aims to further examine various stages in the marker’s semanticpragmatic development, with specific attention for the influence of underlying hypotheses of grammaticalisation – implying semantic bleaching and pragmatic strengthening – and processes of (inter)subjectification, through which historical language change develops meanings that focus increasingly on speaker and addressee (Traugott 1999). The material for this paper is taken from three historical corpora containing speech-based data, i.e. the diachronic part of theHelsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Sampler) (CEECS), and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED).
The objects of the present paper are, first, to chart the occurrence of selfrepetition in the spoken British module “ukspok” in the Cobuild Corpus, and secondly, to present evidence to show that repetition serves a great number of functions, and that far from being an obstacle it is a helpful and sometimes even necessary ingredient for everyday conversation to be successful. It was found that repetititon is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the spoken language and is very often used in preparation for long and complex sentences. It was also found that men have a much higher rate of repetition-introduced turns than women, and that men’s repetition-introduced sentences are much longer than women’s.
When we compare corpora compiled at different periods we can notice that the overall frequency of the adverbs of certainty is different. For example, certainly and surely do not have such a strong position in the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) as in the London-Lund Corpus (LLC). On the other hand, obviously and definitely are proportionately more frequent in the COLT corpus than in the LLC. In particular they have become more frequent in uses involving intensification and affective meaning. Changes in the language are intimately connected with grammaticalization. The article argues that the grammaticalization of obviously and definitely can be explained with reference to the characteristics of adolescent speech.
In this paper we focus on a common construction which has received relatively little attention to date in the literature, namely, want [NP Ving] as in I don’t want you coming around here anymore. Recent British newspaper corpora suggest that this construction is becoming increasingly popular among speakers. Although it occurs in affirmatives and interrogatives, it is most frequently encountered in negative utterances which perform imperative, proclamatory, and exhortatory functions. One reason for this, we maintain, is that the -ing complement, by virtue of its semantics, is felt by speakers to be more forceful and, accordingly, more appropriate to such utterances than an infinitive complement would be. Whereas the infinitive to tends to temporally distance the activity of the verb from the present, the ‑ing reifies the activity of the matrix verb as something ongoing, i.e., in process, thereby rendering it both vivid and immediate. Thus, the construction want [NP Ving] can be regarded as a handy device for speakers to brighten up and strengthen utterances, especially when they want them “to stick”.
Using a corpus of synchronic dialects from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the Roots Archive) I present a quantitative distributional analysis of a series of morpho-syntactic changes: verbal -s (1), causal conjunctions (2), relative clauses (3), the modals of necessity (4), stative possessive meaning (5), and future temporal reference (6)
(1) Them boys goes out.
(2) You’ll have to marry, Willie, for you can’t stay with me all your life
because you need your life to live.
(3) It was a job that I always wanted…It was a job Ø I’ve always enjoyed.
(4) You’ve got to move with the times … one has to do these things.
(5) He’s got bad breath; he has smelly feet.
(6) It’ll only be six month. Didn’t know it were gan be six year.
While the dialects sometimes differ in their favoured variant, internal linguistic constraints are typically shared. These can often be traced to the history of English, and can be interpreted as persistence. On the other hand, cross-dialectal differences, particularly in terms of regional diffusion and social embedding, reveal that the changes are not progressing at the same rate. Indeed, each community represents its own ‘slice in time’. Such findings illuminate how internal grammatical constraints and external factors conspire in the ebb and flow of linguistic change; dialect corpora can provide useful insights into these processes.
This paper reports a study of the uses of modal auxiliaries (can, may, will, shall,must, ought and need), plus a set of related semi-modals (need (to), have got (to),have (to), be going (to) and want (to)), in three parallel corpora of contemporary American, British, and Australian English. Quantitative findings relating to regional and stylistic variation are presented, and consideration is given to the possible influence upon the relative popularity of modal uses of ‘Americanization’, ‘colloquialization’ and ‘democratization’. It is suggested that these external processes provide possible explanations for, inter alia, the differing fortunes of the moribund shall on the one hand and on the other those of the popular semimodalsbe going to and want to, the relative popularity of deontic have to andshould over must, and the differing fortunes of must and have got to.
The choice between NO and NOT in the expression of the negative in English has been found to vary with lexical, syntagmatic, and contextual factors such as medium, register and regional variety. This paper uses matching data from British, American, Australian and New Zealand corpora, in order to examine regional differences in the distribution of NO and NOT, and linguistic factors that promote their use.
The frequency of NO is everywhere boosted by its use (a) as a reaction signal, and (b) in a variety of relatively fixed two-part collocations, such as no doubt, no way etc. With these stripped away, NO emerges as a discretionary resource for both speakers and writers when making negative statements, but it is used much more frequently in NZ English writing than either British or Australian, by the evidence of their respective ICE corpora.
In further analysis of its relative frequency in different written registers, NO occurs more often in fiction than other forms of writing, in four-way comparisons of data from the parallel standard corpora of British, American, Australian and New Zealand English. Thus NO negation is particularly associated with creative and crafted writing, while NOT (N’T) is the default in all other kinds of written and spoken discourse. The combined registerial and regional factors make New Zealand fiction writing a stronghold of the older pattern of negation with NO.
It has been frequently noted that many characteristic features of New Englishes tend to cluster around the interface between lexis and grammar. Focusing on present-day standard Indian English, the largest second-language variety of English, Olavarría de Ersson and Shaw (2003) and Mukherjee and Hoffmann (2006) have shown in recent corpus-based pilot studies that there are also significant differences between Indian and British English in the complementation of ditransitive verbs. In the present paper, we will make use of a large web-derived corpus of Indian English newspapers and extend the analysis of verb complementation in Indian and British English from ditransitive verbs to a semantically and syntactically related class of verbs. Specifically, we will analyse some verbs that are typically associated with the ‘transfer-caused-motion construction’ (cf. Goldberg 1995), which we refer to as ‘TCM-related verbs’. Our findings show that Indian English also displays some interesting deviations from the verb-complementational profile of British English with regard to TCM-related verbs, which raises some more general questions about divergent transitivity trends in the two varieties.
In previous studies on contact varieties of English, a number of shared features have been claimed. The present study presents a corpus-based investigation of two of these features, subject-verb concord and interrogative constructions. By comparing ICE-corpora from Great Britain, New Zealand, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Singapore as well as two smaller corpora from Northern Ireland, the possible roles of substrate influence and more general language contact phenomena are investigated in a systematic way. Corpus evidence suggests that there is indeed a qualitative difference between contact and non-contact varieties due to typological and SLA trends.
The outer circle varieties of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands show similarities as well as differences, due among other things to the Melanesian and Polynesian substrate influence. Possible candidates would be a preference for conversion (to broom the room) or the special usage of invariant tags (Mugler & Tent 2004: 778; Lynch & Mugler 1999: 10). Another possible source for the unity and diversity of South Pacific Englishes is the fact that – due to geographical, political and economic reasons – New Zealand English may in some of the islands supersede the former prestigious American and British varieties as a model for the national standard. This paper discusses the extent to which we can talk about different varieties of Fiji English, Samoan English and Cook Island English, and which features rather call for a ‘Pan-Pacific English’ perspective. To test the unity and diversity of these new varieties of English the internet was used to create a corpus of editorials and letters to the editor collected from newspapers representing the different outer circle varieties in question. The focus will be on the usage of the present perfect. The paper discusses the results as a first step towards a general description of ‘South Pacific Englishes’ as well as the suitability of the www as a source for such a study.
The current contribution is concerned with the disappearance of a number of dialect features from the English language in Ireland during the course of the 19th century. At the outset of this century there were many archaic and dialectal features from earlier input varieties of English as well as transfer features from Irish which had been carried over by bilinguals during the language shift to English. In the course of the 19th century a native middle class arose in Ireland due to the emancipation of, and general education for the Catholic population. This in turn led to the emergence of a supraregional variety of English in which many of the earlier features were removed and/or replaced by more mainstream ones, stemming from southern British usage. Developments were not always straightforward and many features were relegated to vernacular varieties or to positions of slighter salience, thus escaping censure by later generations. The consideration of just what paths was taken by what features forms the backbone of this contribution.
This paper investigates the written wor(l)ds of men and women in eighteenth and nineteenth century Australia. Using a self-collected corpus of early English in Australia, COOEE, possible variation is looked for in a number of fields. In some of them men and women differ a lot, in others not at all. These differences can be attributed to sociocultural factors and/or the gender of the writer. It is naturally difficult to decide which factor is dominant; however, the data suggest some real gender differences e.g. in the area of evidentiality and for linguistic change in progress. Another finding is the unexpected level of similarity of male and female writings. Egalitarianism in early white Australia seems to extend not only to all classes but also to the sexes.
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 contemporaneous changes in British society.
The results show that the most informal genres in the corpus, comedies and private letters, exhibit increasing frequencies, while the formal genre of scientific writing displays stability. These results are shown to be partly similar to those reached in studies of late twentieth-century English, where the progressive and phrasal verbs increase in frequency in some written genres but not others. In previous research, this development has been taken to be part of an ongoing colloquialization of genre norms, which has in turn been linked to the democratization of discourse in post-1945 Western society. The present study demonstrates that related developments can be identified in nineteenth-century Britain, which implies that the concept of colloquialization may explain some of the stability and change attested in the data.
This is a paper about language variation and about language change, investigating the competition between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in Modern English (written and spoken, British and American) as a case study. Drawing on a range of spoken and written corpora and considering a multivariate envelope of seven major conditioning factors (such as possessor animacy and end-weight), we seek to uncover, first, how the probabilistic preferences of British and American journalists might have changed between the 1960s and 1990s, and, second, how such changes in written English relate to the way speakers of English choose between the two genitives. We find that the s-genitive is comparatively frequent in both spoken English and contemporary journalistic English thanks to quite different reasons, and that the recent spread of the s-genitive in press English is due to a process of economization rather than colloquialization.
This article deals with the variation between genitive and common-case NPs as subjects of verbal gerunds in Present-day British English, as in As compensation for Polly’s (Polly) keeping the house, Preston had received twenty thousand pounds. Previous research on the topic has mostly focused on personal pronouns and the possessive/objective distinction, wheras the present paper draws attention to other NPs, those which take or do not take the genitive ’s.
The material comprises 16 million words from the British National Corpus, representing the four genres Academic Prose, Fiction, News, and Conversation. Methods of retrieval are discussed in some detail, since searches for NPs in the common case proved to require manual scanning.
Results show that the genitive form is very infrequent in Present-day English, but figures more often than not in formal texts; this finding is in accordance with modern grammars such as Quirk et al. (1985). More than 50% of all genitives are found in the Academic Prose genre, whereas Conversation displays no genitives at all. Common-case forms are seen to be spread more evenly across genres. Moreover, the linguistic factors phonology, animacy and NP length are seen to have influence on the choice of form.
In addition to its primary temporal meaning, the adverb now displays a variety of pragmatic meanings in present-day English. Now serves as a means to structure topic changes or to emphasise different steps in an argumentation, providing “a temporal index for the world within the utterance” (Schiffrin 1987: 245). On an interpersonal level, the marker can introduce a subjective opinion, often placing the speaker’s view in disalignment with that of others. With the recognition of interpersonal differences, now also offers the hearer a chance to be involved in the suggested discourse frame. Diachronically, semantically bleached meanings of now are attested as early as the Old English period (Aijmer 2002). This paper aims to further examine various stages in the marker’s semanticpragmatic development, with specific attention for the influence of underlying hypotheses of grammaticalisation – implying semantic bleaching and pragmatic strengthening – and processes of (inter)subjectification, through which historical language change develops meanings that focus increasingly on speaker and addressee (Traugott 1999). The material for this paper is taken from three historical corpora containing speech-based data, i.e. the diachronic part of theHelsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Sampler) (CEECS), and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED).
The objects of the present paper are, first, to chart the occurrence of selfrepetition in the spoken British module “ukspok” in the Cobuild Corpus, and secondly, to present evidence to show that repetition serves a great number of functions, and that far from being an obstacle it is a helpful and sometimes even necessary ingredient for everyday conversation to be successful. It was found that repetititon is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the spoken language and is very often used in preparation for long and complex sentences. It was also found that men have a much higher rate of repetition-introduced turns than women, and that men’s repetition-introduced sentences are much longer than women’s.
When we compare corpora compiled at different periods we can notice that the overall frequency of the adverbs of certainty is different. For example, certainly and surely do not have such a strong position in the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) as in the London-Lund Corpus (LLC). On the other hand, obviously and definitely are proportionately more frequent in the COLT corpus than in the LLC. In particular they have become more frequent in uses involving intensification and affective meaning. Changes in the language are intimately connected with grammaticalization. The article argues that the grammaticalization of obviously and definitely can be explained with reference to the characteristics of adolescent speech.
In this paper we focus on a common construction which has received relatively little attention to date in the literature, namely, want [NP Ving] as in I don’t want you coming around here anymore. Recent British newspaper corpora suggest that this construction is becoming increasingly popular among speakers. Although it occurs in affirmatives and interrogatives, it is most frequently encountered in negative utterances which perform imperative, proclamatory, and exhortatory functions. One reason for this, we maintain, is that the -ing complement, by virtue of its semantics, is felt by speakers to be more forceful and, accordingly, more appropriate to such utterances than an infinitive complement would be. Whereas the infinitive to tends to temporally distance the activity of the verb from the present, the ‑ing reifies the activity of the matrix verb as something ongoing, i.e., in process, thereby rendering it both vivid and immediate. Thus, the construction want [NP Ving] can be regarded as a handy device for speakers to brighten up and strengthen utterances, especially when they want them “to stick”.
Using a corpus of synchronic dialects from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the Roots Archive) I present a quantitative distributional analysis of a series of morpho-syntactic changes: verbal -s (1), causal conjunctions (2), relative clauses (3), the modals of necessity (4), stative possessive meaning (5), and future temporal reference (6)
(1) Them boys goes out.
(2) You’ll have to marry, Willie, for you can’t stay with me all your life
because you need your life to live.
(3) It was a job that I always wanted…It was a job Ø I’ve always enjoyed.
(4) You’ve got to move with the times … one has to do these things.
(5) He’s got bad breath; he has smelly feet.
(6) It’ll only be six month. Didn’t know it were gan be six year.
While the dialects sometimes differ in their favoured variant, internal linguistic constraints are typically shared. These can often be traced to the history of English, and can be interpreted as persistence. On the other hand, cross-dialectal differences, particularly in terms of regional diffusion and social embedding, reveal that the changes are not progressing at the same rate. Indeed, each community represents its own ‘slice in time’. Such findings illuminate how internal grammatical constraints and external factors conspire in the ebb and flow of linguistic change; dialect corpora can provide useful insights into these processes.
This paper reports a study of the uses of modal auxiliaries (can, may, will, shall,must, ought and need), plus a set of related semi-modals (need (to), have got (to),have (to), be going (to) and want (to)), in three parallel corpora of contemporary American, British, and Australian English. Quantitative findings relating to regional and stylistic variation are presented, and consideration is given to the possible influence upon the relative popularity of modal uses of ‘Americanization’, ‘colloquialization’ and ‘democratization’. It is suggested that these external processes provide possible explanations for, inter alia, the differing fortunes of the moribund shall on the one hand and on the other those of the popular semimodalsbe going to and want to, the relative popularity of deontic have to andshould over must, and the differing fortunes of must and have got to.
The choice between NO and NOT in the expression of the negative in English has been found to vary with lexical, syntagmatic, and contextual factors such as medium, register and regional variety. This paper uses matching data from British, American, Australian and New Zealand corpora, in order to examine regional differences in the distribution of NO and NOT, and linguistic factors that promote their use.
The frequency of NO is everywhere boosted by its use (a) as a reaction signal, and (b) in a variety of relatively fixed two-part collocations, such as no doubt, no way etc. With these stripped away, NO emerges as a discretionary resource for both speakers and writers when making negative statements, but it is used much more frequently in NZ English writing than either British or Australian, by the evidence of their respective ICE corpora.
In further analysis of its relative frequency in different written registers, NO occurs more often in fiction than other forms of writing, in four-way comparisons of data from the parallel standard corpora of British, American, Australian and New Zealand English. Thus NO negation is particularly associated with creative and crafted writing, while NOT (N’T) is the default in all other kinds of written and spoken discourse. The combined registerial and regional factors make New Zealand fiction writing a stronghold of the older pattern of negation with NO.
It has been frequently noted that many characteristic features of New Englishes tend to cluster around the interface between lexis and grammar. Focusing on present-day standard Indian English, the largest second-language variety of English, Olavarría de Ersson and Shaw (2003) and Mukherjee and Hoffmann (2006) have shown in recent corpus-based pilot studies that there are also significant differences between Indian and British English in the complementation of ditransitive verbs. In the present paper, we will make use of a large web-derived corpus of Indian English newspapers and extend the analysis of verb complementation in Indian and British English from ditransitive verbs to a semantically and syntactically related class of verbs. Specifically, we will analyse some verbs that are typically associated with the ‘transfer-caused-motion construction’ (cf. Goldberg 1995), which we refer to as ‘TCM-related verbs’. Our findings show that Indian English also displays some interesting deviations from the verb-complementational profile of British English with regard to TCM-related verbs, which raises some more general questions about divergent transitivity trends in the two varieties.
In previous studies on contact varieties of English, a number of shared features have been claimed. The present study presents a corpus-based investigation of two of these features, subject-verb concord and interrogative constructions. By comparing ICE-corpora from Great Britain, New Zealand, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Singapore as well as two smaller corpora from Northern Ireland, the possible roles of substrate influence and more general language contact phenomena are investigated in a systematic way. Corpus evidence suggests that there is indeed a qualitative difference between contact and non-contact varieties due to typological and SLA trends.
The outer circle varieties of English in Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands show similarities as well as differences, due among other things to the Melanesian and Polynesian substrate influence. Possible candidates would be a preference for conversion (to broom the room) or the special usage of invariant tags (Mugler & Tent 2004: 778; Lynch & Mugler 1999: 10). Another possible source for the unity and diversity of South Pacific Englishes is the fact that – due to geographical, political and economic reasons – New Zealand English may in some of the islands supersede the former prestigious American and British varieties as a model for the national standard. This paper discusses the extent to which we can talk about different varieties of Fiji English, Samoan English and Cook Island English, and which features rather call for a ‘Pan-Pacific English’ perspective. To test the unity and diversity of these new varieties of English the internet was used to create a corpus of editorials and letters to the editor collected from newspapers representing the different outer circle varieties in question. The focus will be on the usage of the present perfect. The paper discusses the results as a first step towards a general description of ‘South Pacific Englishes’ as well as the suitability of the www as a source for such a study.
The current contribution is concerned with the disappearance of a number of dialect features from the English language in Ireland during the course of the 19th century. At the outset of this century there were many archaic and dialectal features from earlier input varieties of English as well as transfer features from Irish which had been carried over by bilinguals during the language shift to English. In the course of the 19th century a native middle class arose in Ireland due to the emancipation of, and general education for the Catholic population. This in turn led to the emergence of a supraregional variety of English in which many of the earlier features were removed and/or replaced by more mainstream ones, stemming from southern British usage. Developments were not always straightforward and many features were relegated to vernacular varieties or to positions of slighter salience, thus escaping censure by later generations. The consideration of just what paths was taken by what features forms the backbone of this contribution.
This paper investigates the written wor(l)ds of men and women in eighteenth and nineteenth century Australia. Using a self-collected corpus of early English in Australia, COOEE, possible variation is looked for in a number of fields. In some of them men and women differ a lot, in others not at all. These differences can be attributed to sociocultural factors and/or the gender of the writer. It is naturally difficult to decide which factor is dominant; however, the data suggest some real gender differences e.g. in the area of evidentiality and for linguistic change in progress. Another finding is the unexpected level of similarity of male and female writings. Egalitarianism in early white Australia seems to extend not only to all classes but also to the sexes.
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 contemporaneous changes in British society.
The results show that the most informal genres in the corpus, comedies and private letters, exhibit increasing frequencies, while the formal genre of scientific writing displays stability. These results are shown to be partly similar to those reached in studies of late twentieth-century English, where the progressive and phrasal verbs increase in frequency in some written genres but not others. In previous research, this development has been taken to be part of an ongoing colloquialization of genre norms, which has in turn been linked to the democratization of discourse in post-1945 Western society. The present study demonstrates that related developments can be identified in nineteenth-century Britain, which implies that the concept of colloquialization may explain some of the stability and change attested in the data.
This is a paper about language variation and about language change, investigating the competition between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in Modern English (written and spoken, British and American) as a case study. Drawing on a range of spoken and written corpora and considering a multivariate envelope of seven major conditioning factors (such as possessor animacy and end-weight), we seek to uncover, first, how the probabilistic preferences of British and American journalists might have changed between the 1960s and 1990s, and, second, how such changes in written English relate to the way speakers of English choose between the two genitives. We find that the s-genitive is comparatively frequent in both spoken English and contemporary journalistic English thanks to quite different reasons, and that the recent spread of the s-genitive in press English is due to a process of economization rather than colloquialization.
This article deals with the variation between genitive and common-case NPs as subjects of verbal gerunds in Present-day British English, as in As compensation for Polly’s (Polly) keeping the house, Preston had received twenty thousand pounds. Previous research on the topic has mostly focused on personal pronouns and the possessive/objective distinction, wheras the present paper draws attention to other NPs, those which take or do not take the genitive ’s.
The material comprises 16 million words from the British National Corpus, representing the four genres Academic Prose, Fiction, News, and Conversation. Methods of retrieval are discussed in some detail, since searches for NPs in the common case proved to require manual scanning.
Results show that the genitive form is very infrequent in Present-day English, but figures more often than not in formal texts; this finding is in accordance with modern grammars such as Quirk et al. (1985). More than 50% of all genitives are found in the Academic Prose genre, whereas Conversation displays no genitives at all. Common-case forms are seen to be spread more evenly across genres. Moreover, the linguistic factors phonology, animacy and NP length are seen to have influence on the choice of form.