Table of Contents

1. English in the digital age. General introduction Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge and Jeremy Smith; Part I. Linguistic Directions and Crossroads: Mapping the Routes Merja Kytö: 2. Corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to linguistic analysis: one and the same? Charles F. Meyer; 3. Quantitative corpus approaches to linguistic analysis: seven or eight levels of resolution and the lessons they teach us Stefan Th. Gries; 4. Profiling the English verb phrase over time: modal patterns Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Jill Bowie; Part II. Changing Patterns Claudia Claridge: 5. On the functional change of desire in relation to hope and wish Minoji Akimoto; 6. From medieval to modern: on the development of the adverbial connective considering (that) Matti Rissanen; 7. Spoken features of interjections in English dialect (based on Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary) Manfred Markus; Part III. Pragmatics and Discourse Irma Taavitsainen: 8. Interjection-based delocutive verbs in the history of English Laurel J. Brinton; 9. Uh and um as planners in the Corpus of Historical American English Andreas H. Jucker; 10. Religious discourse and the history of English Thomas Kohnen; Part IV. World Englishes Jeremy Smith: 11. History, social meaning and identity in the spoken English of postcolonial white Zimbabweans Susan Fitzmaurice; 12. Singapore weblogs between speech and writing Andrea Sand; 13. Mergers, losses and the spread of English Raymond Hickey; 14. Complex systems in the history of American English William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.

Promotional Information

Addresses current issues in corpus linguistics – methodological, theoretical and applied – with special reference to Englishes past and present.

About the Author

Irma Taavitsainen is Professor Emerita of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden. Claudia Claridge is Professor of English Linguistics at Universität Duisburg–Essen. Jeremy Smith is Professor of English Philology at the University of Glasgow.

Reviews

'This book is a treasure trove. Readers interested in varieties of English or their historical development, in corpus methodologies, their application, or theorised interpretations, will all find something of value here.' Susan Hunston, University of Birmingham

'This edited collection breaks new ground in harnessing the methodology of corpus linguistics to historical language studies. There is a coherent theoretical focus to a wide-ranging set of topics, from the changing function of hesitation markers to the unfolding impact of religious prose on written English. The many insights are bound to inform, frame and stimulate further research in data-driven, diachronic linguistics.' John Corbett, University of Macau