Chapter published in:
Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English
Edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Siebers
[Studies in Language Variation 21] 2019
► pp. 49–72

A (great) deal of: Developments in 19th-century British and Australian English

All variants of the form a x deal of are investigated across nineteenth-century English in south-eastern England and in Australia. Determiner uses dominate followed by adverbial uses with verbs and pronominal uses coming last. The great majority of items found include an adjective, almost invariably good or great, thus confirming the routinized nature of the larger phrase. Regarding the two semantic functions of deal, quantification is more common overall, but while this also predominates in England, Australia prefers degree readings and thus a more strongly grammaticalized form. Stylistically, deal-phrases show a preference for involved contexts and to a lesser extent also towards oral contexts. Australian English uses the form to a greater extent, perhaps indicating greater colloquiality, and additionally often shows rising use.
Keywords: quantifier, intensifier, degree, determiner, adverbial, grammaticalization, Late Modern English, variation, routinization, stylistics
Published online: 13 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.21.04cla
References

References

Electronic resources

Primary data sources

COOEE = Corpus of Oz Early English
, compiled by Clemens Fritz 2004 Cf. http://​www​.helsinki​.fi​/varieng​/CoRD​/corpora​/COOEE​/index​.html.
OBC = Old Bailey Corpus
. The speech-tagged and sociobiographically annotated version (version 1.0, 2013-06-04) compiled in the project: Huber, Magnus; Nissel, Magnus; Maiwald, Patrick; Widlitzki, Bianca 2012 The Old Bailey Corpus. Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www​.uni​-giessen​.de​/oldbaileycorpus.Google Scholar

Other

ACE = The Australian Corpus of English
. Compiled by Pam Peters 1986 Cf. https://​www​.ausnc​.org​.au​/corpora​/ace
BNC = British National Corpus
. BNC Consortium 1994 Cf. http://​www​.natcorp​.ox​.ac​.uk. Accessed online at http://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/bnc/
CED = Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760
2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö & Jonathan Culpeper.
COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English . Compiled by Mark Davies 2008 Online at http://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/coca/.
COHA = Corpus of Historical American English
1810–2009 Compiled by Mark Davies (2010–). Online at http://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/coha/
CONCE = A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English
Compiled by Merja Kytö & Juhani Rudanko.
FLOB = The Freiburg-LOB Corpus (‘F-LOB’) (original version) compiled by Christian Mair
1999.
LC = Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts
. Compiled by Josef Schmied, Claudia Claridge & Rainer Siemund 1999.
LOB = The LOB Corpus, original version (1970–1978), compiled
by Geoffrey Leech, Stig Johansson & Knut Hofland1976.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary
, 3rd edition in progress 1989– Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online: http://​www​.oed​.com/.
WordSmith Tools
(version 5.0) 2010 PC software by Mike Scott. Lexical Analysis Software and Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Algeo, John
2006 British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan
1999 Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight
1972 Degree words. The Hague: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brems, Lieselotte
2007 The grammaticalization of small size nouns: Reconsidering frequency and analogy. Journal of English Linguistics 35 (4). 293–324. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Layering of size and type noun constructions in English. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Claridge, Claudia & Merja Kytö
2014a  I had lost sight of them then for a bit, but I went on pretty fast: Two degree modifiers in the Old Bailey Corpus. In Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker & Jukka Tuominen (eds.), Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics, 29–52. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014b ‘You are a bit of a sneak’: Exploring a degree modifier in the Old Bailey Corpus. In Marianne Hundt (ed.), Late Modern English Syntax, 239–268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Claridge, Claudia, Ewa Jonsson & Merja Kytö
2016 ‘Methinks you are mighty funny, gentlemen’: The socio-pragmatics of boosters in the Late Modern courtroom. Presentation at ICEHL 19, August 2016, Essen.
Fritz, Clemens W. A.
2007 From English in Australia to Australian English, 1788–1900. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Corpus of Oz Early English: Description. In Corpus Resource Database (CoRD), available at http://​www​.helsinki​.fi​/varieng​/CoRD​/corpora​/COOEE​/basic​.html. Last accessed March 2018.Google Scholar
N.d. Australian English. See http://​www​.clemens​-fritz​.de​/australian​_english​.htm. Last accessed 30 March, 2018.
Hickey, Raymond 2004 Dialects of English and their Transportation. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of colonial English: Studies in transported dialects, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huber, Magnus
2007 The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In Anneli Meurman-Solin & Arja Nurmi, (eds.), Annotating variation and change (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 1). Available at http://​www​.helsinki​.fi​/varieng​/journal​/volumes​/01​/huber/.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey Pullum
2002 The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Samuel
1755 A dictionary of the English language. Volume I. London: W. Strahan, for Knapton et al. Last accessed on ECCO, 25 March, 2018.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Erik Smitterberg
2006 19th-century English: An age of stability or a period of change? In Roberta Facchinetti & Matti Rissanen (eds.), Corpus-based studies of diachronic English, 199–230. Bern etc.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja & Terry Walker
2003 The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: how "bad" can "bad" data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31 (3). 221–248. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik
1985 A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Smitterberg, Erik
2009 Multal adverbs in nineteenth-century English. Studia Neophilologica 81 (2). 121–144. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2007 The concepts of constructional mismatch and type-shifting from the perspective of grammaticalization. Cognitive Linguistics 18 (4). 523–557. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008a The grammaticalization of NP of NP patterns. In Alexander Bergs & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), Constructions and language change, 23–45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2008b Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English. In Regine Eckardt & Gerhard Jaeger (eds.), Language evolution: Cognitive and cultural factors, 219–250. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

No author info given
2020.  In Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 97], Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 october 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.