This book constitutes the first full-length diachronic treatment of the English progressive from Old English to Present-day English, focusing on the crucial phase of its grammaticalization between the 17th and 20th centuries. It uses data from the British component of ARCHER-2 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, version 2) to uncover the details of this long-term grammaticalization process, tracing the development of the construction from a stylistic device to a fully-fledged aspect marker. Illustrated by a wealth of examples, the work offers new results concerning the...

This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations, while being adapted to target audience s preferences to a large extent, are...