A wealth of English : studies in honour of Göran Kjellmer

This edited volume consists in a collection of twenty-three essays dedicated to Professor Göran Kjellmer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The title of the book pays a real tribute to his successful academic life and his profound love of the English language. The papers included are offered both to Professor Kjell-mer and the readers as a colourful bouquet. Before embarking on the reading of the various contributions, I recommend a tour of Kjellmer's bibliography 1 which unmistakably reveals his sense of humour. 'Concerning thirst in battle and dog-riding', 'Why is Winnie the Pooh?', ' The cups that cheer but not inebriate', 'How to crash into a kangaroo', 'He is one of the few men in history who plays jazz on a violin' and 'Cowed by a cow or bullied by a bull?' are only a few of his scientific papers' headings. Undoubtedly inspired by Kjellmer's talent, some of the contributors to the volume also came up with intriguing titles such as: 'A funny thing happened to me on the way to Sidney' (Svartvik), 'Did rhoticity kill the Hillbilly Cat?' (Mobärg) or 'Pin, pin bring me luck, because I stop to pick you up' (Persson), thereby inviting the curious reader to further discovery. A wealth of English contains six sections: grammar, semantics & word-formation , text & discourse, contrastive studies, ELT, and the music & magic in the English language. The grammar and semantics & word-formation headings total seven papers each, while the four additional sections include fewer papers, with the ELT component containing only one paper. The multiplicity of the topics covered, and hence the large scope of the book, may tend to give a rather patchy impression, which does not facilitate the reviewer's task. The present review does therefore not comment on all the articles and is based on a – necessarily subjective – selection. Despite the lack of focus on a central theme, the majority of papers have adopted a corpus linguistics perspective, thereby offering an interesting panorama of linguistic phenomena tackled with the help of corpora. Tottie and Hoffmann's study illustrates the grammaticalization phenomenon through a careful analysis of 'participles that have passed into prepositions' (Fowler and Fowler 1936: 119). They focus on the based on collocation when used as a synonym for because of. Corpus analysis reveals that, while a substantial increase of the frequency of use of based on can be found both …