Language Between Description and Prescription is an empirical, quantitative and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, the book investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, Lieselotte Anderwald demonstrates that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized, and some recessive features were not...
Language Between Description and Prescription is an empirical, quantitative and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writi...
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics. The volume comprises twelve chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of theoretical and methodological...
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply information structure as it relates to langua...
In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. Huber demonstrates how several non-motion verbs receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition, she analyzes which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion in select Old and Middle English texts, demonstrating that while...
In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs...
This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petre analyzes: - The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weoroan 'become' as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. - The merger of is 'is' and bio 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb, and how it is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. - The co-occurrence of multiple changes that led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing...
This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. Peter Petre an...
