This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its...

This is the first comprehensive book-length analysis of personal pronouns in present-day English. Drawing on the Survey of English (SEU) corpus and the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), Katie Wales examines a wide variety of discourses, texts and varieties of English around the world. Her approach is pragmatic and functional, rather than formal, and her concern is with speakers and writers and their uses of language in social, cultural and rhetorical contexts. The discussion is illustrated with numerous examples of the usage of personal pronouns and also of reflexives and...

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In Part One, the authors explore topics such as the terminological problems of classification, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In Part Two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms, and to...

This study sheds new light on the complex relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories. Challenging the view of cases as categories in cognitive space, Schlesinger proposes a new understanding of the concept of case. Drawing on evidence from psycholinguistic research and English language data, he argues that case categories are in fact composed of more primitive cognitive notions: features and dimensions. These are registered in the lexical entries of individual verbs, thereby allowing certain metaphorical extensions. This new approach to case permits better descriptions of...

This book traces the development of Standard English, revealing a complex and intriguing history that challenges the usual textbook accounts. Leading scholars offer a wide-ranging analysis, from theoretical discussions of the origin of dialects, to detailed descriptions of the history of individual Standard English features. Ranging from Middle English to the Modern English period, the volume concludes that Standard English had no one single ancestor dialect, but is the cumulative result of generations of authoritative writing from many text types.

Kingsley Bolton uses early word lists, satirical cartoons and data from journals and memoirs to uncover the forgotten history of English in China, from the arrival of the first English-speaking traders in the early seventeenth century to the present. Demonstrating how contemporary Hong Kong English has its historical roots in Chinese pidgin English, the book considers the changing status of English in mainland China over time, particularly recent developments since 1997.

The Prague School theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements in a written or spoken sentence, such as intonation, word order and context. Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.

Apposition in Contemporary English is the first full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous...

The Prague School theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements in a written or spoken sentence, such as intonation, word order and context. Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In Part One, the authors explore topics such as the terminological problems of classification, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In Part Two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms, and to...