Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the...
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, l...
Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the "World Englishes" community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative...
Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of think...
Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a significant part. This book explores grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over 30 counties. In doing so it presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences. These features include, for example, multiple negation (e.g. don't you make no damn mistake), non-standard verbal-s...
Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a significant part. This b...
