Claudia Claridge is Chair in English Linguistics at the Universitat Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She is one of the compilers of the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts and is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000), based on the above corpus. Her main research interests lie in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, and corpus linguistics. Within these fields, she has published articles on such diverse topics as irony, similes/comparison, superlatives, questions, conditionals, and discourse deixis. She has also contributed articles to v...