Chapter 4
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A deal (of): Forms and functions
- 3.Variation across time, space, and contexts
- 4.Data and methodology
- 5.Deal in OBC and COOEE
- 5.1Regional and diachronic variation
- 5.2Forms, variants and frequencies
- 5.3Functions: Quantification vs degree
- 5.4Register variation
- 6.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
References
Electronic resources
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COOEE = Corpus of Oz Early English
, compiled by Clemens Fritz
2004 Cf.
[URL].
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.
[URL].

Other
ACE = The Australian Corpus of English
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1986 Cf.
[URL]
BNC = British National Corpus
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CED = Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760
2006 Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö & Jonathan Culpeper.
COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English
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2008 Online at
[URL].
COHA = Corpus of Historical American English
1810–2009 Compiled by Mark Davies (2010–). Online at
[URL]
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
LC = Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts
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1999.
LOB = The LOB Corpus, original version (1970–1978), compiled
by Geoffrey Leech, Stig Johansson & Knut Hofland
1976.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary
, 3rd edition in progress
1989– Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online:
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WordSmith Tools
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2010 PC software by Mike Scott.
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