Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study

Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the ‘Brown family’ of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receiving particular attention are the influence of American English on British English, the role of the press, the ‘colloquialization’ of written English, and a wide range of grammatical topics, including the modal auxiliaries, progressive, subjunctive, passive, genitive and relative clauses. These subjects build an overall picture of how English grammar is changing, and the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.

[1]  Michael McCarthy,et al.  The English get-passive in spoken discourse: description and implications for an interpersonal grammar , 1999, English Language and Linguistics.

[2]  Thyra Jane Bevier American Use of the Subjunctive , 1931 .

[3]  Larisa Oldireva Gustafsson Nineteenth-century English: The passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing , 2006 .

[4]  Christian Mair,et al.  Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization , 2006 .

[5]  Bengt Altenberg,et al.  The genitive v. the of-construction: A study of syntactic variation in 17th century English , 1982 .

[6]  J. Aitchison Language Change: Progress or Decay? , 1981 .

[7]  G. Leech,et al.  The use of computer corpora in the textual demonstrability of gradience in linguistic categories. , 1994 .

[8]  Daniel D. Ding The Passive Voice and Social Values in Science , 2002 .

[9]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Representativeness in corpus design , 1993 .

[10]  Gabriele Stein,et al.  THE PHRASAL VERB TYPE ‘TO HAVE A LOOK’ IN MODERN ENGLISH , 1991 .

[11]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  "Agile" and "Uptight" genres: the Corpus-based approach to language change in progress , 1999 .

[12]  K. Popper Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach , 1972 .

[13]  Isabelle Buchstaller,et al.  Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: The case of the quotative system1 , 2006 .

[14]  Anette Rosenbach,et al.  Genitive variation in English : conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies , 2002 .

[15]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Current change in English syntax. , 2006 .

[16]  Soili Nokkonen The semantic variation of need to in four recent British English corpora , 2006 .

[17]  Christopher Williams Non-progressive and progressive aspect in English , 2002 .

[18]  G. Pullum,et al.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , 2002 .

[19]  B. Heine Auxiliaries: Cognitive Forces and Grammaticalization , 1993 .

[20]  Francis James,et al.  Semantics of the English subjunctive , 1986 .

[21]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[22]  M. L. Samuels,et al.  Linguistic Evolution: Conclusions , 1972 .

[23]  John M. Anderson Modals, subjunctives, and (non-)finiteness , 2001, English Language and Linguistics.

[24]  Roland Sussex,et al.  A note on the get‐passive construction , 1982 .

[25]  Anthony McEnery,et al.  The UCREL Semantic Analysis System , 2004 .

[26]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Grammatical word class variation within the British National Corpus sampler , 2002 .

[27]  Anthony McEnery,et al.  HELP or HELP to: What Do Corpora Have to Say? , 2005 .

[28]  G. Tottie An Introduction to American English , 2001 .

[29]  Susan Wright Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Subjectivity and experiential syntax , 1995 .

[30]  Federica Barbieri,et al.  Quotative Use in American English , 2005 .

[31]  F. Palmer Modality and the English modals , 1979 .

[32]  P.J.M. de Haan Whom is not dead , 2002 .

[33]  U. Römer Progressives, patterns, pedagogy , 2005 .

[34]  S. Romaine,et al.  The Use of like as a Marker of Reported Speech and Thought: A Case of Grammaticalization in Progress , 1991 .

[35]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Studies in English linguistics for Randolph Quirk , 1980 .

[36]  D. Biber,et al.  Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English , 1999 .

[37]  M Abecassis,et al.  Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English. , 2010 .

[38]  Charles Barber Linguistic change in present-day English , 1965 .

[39]  Robert M. Dixon,et al.  A new approach to Eng-lish Grammar on semantic principles , 1991 .

[40]  Anthony Warner,et al.  PREDICTING THE PROGRESSIVE PASSIVE: PARAMETRIC CHANGE WITHIN A LEXICALIST FRAMEWORK , 1995 .

[41]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  What corpora tell us about the grammaticalisation of voice in get-constructions , 2001 .

[42]  Arne Olofsson,et al.  A participle caught in the act. On the prepositional use of following , 1990 .

[43]  Andreas H. Jucker Social Stylistics: Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers , 1992 .

[44]  P. Trudgill,et al.  International English: A guide to varieties of standard English , 1985 .

[45]  Ruth Möhlig,et al.  Detransitivization in the history of English from a semantic perspective , 2002 .

[46]  Nancy Niedzielski,et al.  The globalisation of vernacular variation , 2003 .

[47]  G. Green How to get people to do things with words , 1975 .

[48]  Ilse Depraetere,et al.  On verbal concord with collective nouns in British English , 2003, English Language and Linguistics.

[49]  Mark Aronoff The Editor's Department , 2001 .

[50]  Suzanne Romaine,et al.  Competing Forms of Adjective Comparison in Modern English: What Could Be More Quicker and Easier and More Effective? , 1997 .

[51]  Peter Collins,et al.  Get‐passives in English , 1996 .

[52]  Margareta Westergren Axelsson Contraction in British Newspapers in the Late 20th Century , 1998 .

[53]  Östen Dahl,et al.  Tense and aspect systems , 1985 .

[54]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  The comparison of adjectives in recent British English. , 1997 .

[55]  David Denison,et al.  The language of the Southey–Coleridge Circle , 2000 .

[56]  W. Nelson Francis,et al.  FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH USAGE: LEXICON AND GRAMMAR , 1983 .

[57]  Ylva Berglund,et al.  Future in Present-day English: corpus-based evidence on the rivalry of expressions , 1997 .

[58]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  Corpus Linguistics and the Web , 2006 .

[59]  David Crystal,et al.  Stories of English , 2004 .

[60]  ANNA H. LIVE,et al.  THE TAKE-HAVE PHRASAL IN ENGLISH , 1973 .

[61]  Jan Svartvik,et al.  A __ comprehensive grammar of the English language , 1988 .

[62]  William J. Crawford The mandative subjunctive , 2009 .

[63]  Debra Ziegeler Agentivity and the history of the English Progressive , 1999 .

[64]  Michael McCarthy,et al.  Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics , 1998 .

[65]  Jan Svartvik On voice in the English verb , 1985 .

[66]  C. Blyth,et al.  I'm like, "Say What?!": A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative , 1990 .

[67]  S. Johansson,et al.  Word Frequencies in British and American English , 1985 .

[68]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  Global feature - local norms? A case study on the progressive passive , 2009 .

[69]  Stefan Thomas Gries,et al.  Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study of Particle Placement , 2003 .

[70]  Randolph Quirk,et al.  Grammatical and lexical variance in English , 1995 .

[71]  Dieter Mindt An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System. , 2000 .

[72]  Eve Sweetser,et al.  From Etymology to Pragmatics: Preface , 1990 .

[73]  David Denison,et al.  Gradience and linguistic change , 2001 .

[74]  B. Strang A history of English , 1970 .

[75]  Richard Hudson,et al.  About 37% of word-tokens are nouns , 1994 .

[76]  Charles Carpenter Fries,et al.  American English Grammar: The Grammatical Structure of Present-Day English with Especial Reference to Social Differences or Class Dialects , 1941 .

[77]  Pam Peters The survival of the subjunctive: evidence of its use in Australia and elsewhere , 1998 .

[78]  I. Westin Language change in English newspaper editorials , 2002 .

[79]  Frederik Theodoor Visser,et al.  An Historical Syntax of the English Language , 2002 .

[80]  F. Palmer,et al.  Mood and modality , 1986 .

[81]  Axel Hübler The expressivity of grammar : grammatical devices expressing emotion across time , 1998 .

[82]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change? , 2009 .

[83]  H. Fowler,et al.  A Dictionary of Modern English Usage , 1926 .

[84]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Variation across speech and writing: Methodology , 1988 .

[85]  Andrew Radford,et al.  Transformational Grammar: A First Course , 1988 .

[86]  Tony McEnery,et al.  The Were-Subjunctive in British Rural Dialects: Marrying Corpus and Questionnaire Data , 2003, Comput. Humanit..

[87]  J. Rickford,et al.  Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress: Loss of the Verbal Coda in Topic-Restricting as Far as Constructions. , 1995 .

[88]  T. Givón,et al.  English grammar : a function-based introduction , 1995 .

[89]  Facchinetti Roberta Be able to in Present-day British English , 2000, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

[90]  Edward Sapir,et al.  Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech , 1955 .

[91]  Erik Smitterberg,et al.  The Progressive in 19th-Century English: A Process of Integration , 2005 .

[92]  Magnus Levin Agreement With Collective Nouns in English , 2001 .

[93]  Pam Peters,et al.  The Cambridge Guide to English Usage , 2004 .

[94]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Recent grammatical change in English: data, description, theory. , 2004 .

[95]  Elena Tognini-Bonelli,et al.  Corpus Linguistics at Work , 2002, Computational Linguistics.

[96]  Laurel J. Brinton,et al.  Attitudes toward Increasing Segmentalization , 1996 .

[97]  R. Quirk,et al.  Longman Guide to English Usage , 1989 .

[98]  Irma Taavitsainen,et al.  Conventions of Professional Writing , 2000 .

[99]  David Sankoff,et al.  Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey: Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation , 1988 .

[100]  Bettelou Los,et al.  The Rise of the To-Infinitive , 2005 .

[101]  Terttu Nevalainen,et al.  Dynamic have in North American and British Isles English , 2002, English Language and Linguistics.

[102]  W. Labov The social motivation of a sound change , 1963 .

[103]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Variation among University Spoken and Written Registers: A New Multi-Dimensional Analysis , 2003 .

[104]  Bruce Mitchell,et al.  Old English Syntax , 1985 .

[105]  J. Holmes,et al.  An introduction to sociolinguistics , 1987 .

[106]  Yngve Olsson,et al.  On the syntax of the English verb : with special reference to have a look and similar complex structures , 1963 .

[107]  Walter Hirtle,et al.  The simple and progressive forms : an analytical approach , 1967 .

[108]  Johan Elsness,et al.  On the progression of the progressive in early Modern English , 1997 .

[109]  Magnus Ljung,et al.  Reflections on the English Progressive , 1980 .

[110]  Benedikt Szmrecsanyi Be Going to Versus Will/Shall , 2003 .

[111]  Paloma Núñez Pertejo The progressive in the history of english with special reference to the early modern english period, a corpus-based study , 2001 .

[112]  Susan Conrad,et al.  Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use , 1998 .

[113]  Wayne Harsh,et al.  The subjunctive in English , 1968 .

[114]  Otto Jespersen,et al.  The Philosophy of Grammar , 1924 .

[115]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures , 2002 .

[116]  A. Bell Language style as audience design , 1984, Language in Society.

[117]  Hilary Chappell Is the get‐passive adversative? , 1980 .

[118]  Robert Dixon,et al.  A Semantic Approach to English Grammar , 2005 .

[119]  John R. Taylor,et al.  What makes a good middle? The role of qualia in the interpretation and acceptability of middle expressions in English , 2004 .

[120]  Minoji Akimoto A Study of Verbo-Nominal Structures in English , 1989 .

[121]  Jean-Marc Gachelin The progressive and habitual aspects in non-standard Englishes , 1997 .

[122]  Bruce Mitchell,et al.  A guide to Old English , 1965 .

[123]  Liliane Haegeman,et al.  The get-passive and burzio's generalization , 1985 .

[124]  D. Allerton Stretched Verb Constructions in English , 2001 .

[125]  Hans Lindquist Livelier or more lively? Syntactic and Contextual Factors Influencing the Comparison of Disyllabic Adjectives , 2000, Corpora Galore.

[126]  Nicholas Fleisher,et al.  The origin of passive get , 2006, English Language and Linguistics.

[127]  E. König On the context-dependence of the progressive in English , 1980 .

[128]  J. Myhill,et al.  Change and continuity in the functions of the American English modals , 1995 .

[129]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Meaning and the English Verb , 1971 .

[130]  William Croft,et al.  Explaining language change : an evolutionary approach , 2000 .

[131]  Elena Seoane Information Structure and Word Order Change: The Passive as an Information‐rearranging Strategy in the History of English , 2008 .

[132]  Juhani Rudanko,et al.  Building a Bridge between the Present and the Past : A Corpus of 19th-century English , 2000 .

[133]  David Denison,et al.  English historical syntax : verbal constructions , 1994 .

[134]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  English in advertising : a linguistic study of advertising in Great Britain , 1966 .

[135]  Angela Downing The Semantics of Get-passives , 1996 .

[136]  Kerstin Meints,et al.  To get or to be? Use and acquisition of get- versus be- passives: evidence from children and adults , 2003 .

[137]  Stig Johansson,et al.  Plural attributive nouns in present-day English , 1980 .

[138]  Uwe Vosberg Die Große Komplementverschiebung: Außersemantische Einflüsse auf die Entwicklung satzwertiger Ergänzungen im Neuenglischen , 2006 .

[139]  Brian Foster The Changing English Language , 1968 .

[140]  Benedikt Szmrecsanyi,et al.  Recent changes in the function and frequency of Standard English genitive constructions: a multivariate analysis of tagged corpora , 2007, English Language and Linguistics.

[141]  G. Nickel COMPLEX VERBAL STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH , 1968 .

[142]  N. R. Cattell,et al.  Composite predicates in English , 1984 .

[143]  Martine Taeymans An investigation into the marginal modals dare and need in British present-day English , 2003 .

[144]  Merja Kytö,et al.  The go -Futures in English and French Viewed as an Areal Feature , 2002 .

[145]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  WHY IS THE PROGRESSIVE BECOMING MORE FREQUENT IN ENGLISH ? A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION OF LANGUAGE CHANGE IN PROGRESS , 1995 .

[146]  Juhani Rudanko Watching English grammar change: a case study on complement selection in British and American English , 2006, English Language and Linguistics.

[147]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  The Meanings of the Modals in British and American English. , 1980 .

[148]  Jean Aitchison,et al.  New media language , 2004 .

[149]  H. W. Fowler,et al.  The New Fowler\'s Modern English Usage , 1900 .

[150]  Kate Kearns,et al.  Durative Achievements and Individual-Level Predicates on Events , 2003 .

[151]  Sebastian Hoffmann,et al.  Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions: A Corpus-based Study , 2005 .

[152]  John F. Turner,et al.  The marked subjunctive in contemporary English , 1980 .

[153]  Brian D. Joseph The Editor's Department: On Change in Language and Change in Language , 2004 .

[154]  O. Jespersen A modern English grammar on historical principles , 1928 .

[155]  Barbara A. Misztal,et al.  Informality: Social Theory and Contemporary Practice , 1999 .

[156]  R. M. Wilson,et al.  A Middle English Syntax. Part I, Parts of Speech , 1961 .

[157]  Claudia Claridge,et al.  MULTI-WORD VERBS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH. A Corpus-based Study , 2000 .

[158]  Kristin Killie Subjectivity and the English progressive , 2004, English Language and Linguistics.

[159]  Terry Walker,et al.  Nineteenth-century English: The subjunctive in adverbial clauses in nineteenth-century English , 2006 .

[160]  Christian Mair,et al.  Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: the complementary role of small and large corpora , 2006 .

[161]  Ann Bodine,et al.  Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’ , 1975, Language in Society.

[162]  W. Labov,et al.  Constraints on the agentless passive , 1983, Journal of Linguistics.

[163]  M. Levin Collective nouns and language change , 2006, English Language and Linguistics.

[164]  Bas Aarts,et al.  Relative whom: a 'mischief-maker' , 2002 .

[165]  Günter Rohdenburg,et al.  On the replacement of finite complement clauses by infinitives in English , 1995 .

[166]  G. Rohdenburg Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English , 1996 .

[167]  R. Quirk,et al.  A Corpus of English Conversation , 1980 .

[168]  Elizabeth Closs Traugott,et al.  Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Subjectification in grammaticalisation , 1995 .

[169]  R. Huddleston Introduction to the Grammar of English: Verbs, nouns and adjectives: the boundaries between them , 1984 .

[170]  M. Krug Emerging English modals : a corpus-based study of grammaticalization , 2000 .

[171]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora , 1997 .

[172]  Rosemary Leonard,et al.  The Interpretation of English Noun Sequences on the Computer , 1984 .

[173]  Leah Dennis,et al.  The Progressive Tense: Frequency of Its Use in English , 1940, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

[174]  Hans Jürgen Heringer Lesen lehren lernen : eine rezeptive Grammatik des Deutschen , 2002 .

[175]  Oliver Christ,et al.  A Modular and Flexible Architecture for an Integrated Corpus Query System , 1994, ArXiv.

[176]  Geoffrey Leech,et al.  Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: a comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora. , 2002 .

[177]  William M. Ryan Pseudo-Subjunctive 'Were' , 1961 .

[178]  Renaat Declerck A comprehensive descriptive grammar of English , 1991 .

[179]  Johannes Scheffer The Progressive In English , 1975 .

[180]  Anke Lüdeling,et al.  Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook , 2009 .

[181]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language , 2006 .

[182]  Marianne Hundt “Curtains like these are selling right in the city of Chicago for $1.50” – The mediopassive in American 20th-century advertising language , 2006 .

[183]  Ronald R. Butters,et al.  Narrative Go 'Say' , 1980 .

[184]  Stig Johansson,et al.  English computer corpora : selected papers and research guide , 1991 .

[185]  M. Stubbs Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture , 1996 .

[186]  S. Collin The future in English , 2004 .

[187]  Angus Macdonald,et al.  Histoire de la forme périphrastique être + participe présent en germanique , 1940 .

[188]  E. Traugott On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English: An Example of Subjectification in Semantic Change , 1989 .

[189]  B. Strang,et al.  Some aspects of the history of theBe+ingconstruction , 1982 .

[190]  Michael Halliday,et al.  An Introduction to Functional Grammar , 1985 .

[191]  Teresa Fanego The Development of Gerunds as Objects of Subject-Control Verbs in English (1400-1760) , 1996 .

[192]  M. Shibatani PASSIVES AND RELATED CONSTRUCTIONS: A PROTOTYPE ANALYSIS , 1985 .

[193]  Paul Rayson,et al.  Recent change and variation in the British English use of the progressive passive , 2007 .

[194]  Joybrato Mukherjee,et al.  English Ditransitive Verbs , 2004, English and American Studies in German.

[195]  Joybrato Mukherjee Corpus data in a usage-based cognitive grammar , 2004 .

[196]  Graeme D. Kennedy,et al.  Book Reviews: An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics , 1999, CL.

[197]  Elly van Gelderen,et al.  A History of the English Language , 2000 .

[198]  Britta Marian Charleston Studies on the emotional and affective means of expression in modern English , 1960 .

[199]  Nadja Nesselhauf The spread of the progressive and its ‘future’ use , 2007, English Language and Linguistics.

[200]  Christian Mair,et al.  Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora , 2002, English Language and Linguistics.

[201]  Gerd Övergaard The mandative subjunctive in American and British English in the 20th century , 1995 .

[202]  G. Tottie,et al.  Tag Questions in British and American English , 2006 .

[203]  Richard W. Bailey,et al.  Nineteenth-century English , 1996 .

[204]  Harry Bunt,et al.  Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue , 2000, Natural Language Processing.

[205]  Douglas Biber Modal use across registers and time , 2004 .

[206]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Temporal Ontology and Temporal Reference , 1988, CL.

[207]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  Animacy, agentivity, and the spread of the progressive in Modern English , 2004, English Language and Linguistics.

[208]  Douglas Biber,et al.  A Textual Comparison of British and American Writing , 1987 .

[209]  Michael Stubbs,et al.  Texts, corpora, and problems of interpretation: A response to Widdowson , 2001 .

[210]  Mats Rydén,et al.  Noun‐name collocations in British English newspaper language , 1975 .

[211]  Gerald Salton,et al.  Automatic text processing , 1988 .

[212]  Graeme Kennedy The distribution of agent marking and finiteness as possible contributors to the difficulty of passive voice structures , 2001 .

[213]  Elizabeth Closs Traugott,et al.  A History of English Syntax , 1971 .

[214]  D. Biber,et al.  Drift and the Evolution of English Style: A History of Three Genres , 1989 .

[215]  Robert Sigley,et al.  Text categories and where you can stick them : A crude formality index , 1997 .

[216]  Liesbet Heyvaert A cognitive-functional approach to nominalization in English , 2003 .

[217]  Laurie Bauer,et al.  Watching English Change: An Introduction to the Study of Linguistic Change in Standard Englishes in the 20th Century , 1994 .

[218]  Julia Schlüter One Language, Two Grammars?: The conditional subjunctive , 2009 .

[219]  A. Wierzbicka 5. Why can you have a drink when you can't *have an eat ? , 1982 .

[220]  R. Raab-Fischer Löst der Genitiv die of-Phrase ab ? Eine korpusgestützte Studie zum Sprachwandel im heutigen English , 1995 .

[221]  John Myhill The development of the strong obligation system in American English , 1996 .

[222]  Ingrid Westin,et al.  A multi-dimensional study of diachronic variation in British newspaper editorials , 2002 .

[223]  N. Fairclough Discourse and social change , 1992 .

[224]  Ekkehard König,et al.  Bedeutung und verwendung der progressivform im heutigen englisch , 1973 .

[225]  Gunnel Tottie,et al.  Try to or try and? Verb complementation in British and American English , 2007 .

[226]  Christian Mair,et al.  Corpus linguistics and grammaticalisation theory: Statistics, frequencies, and beyond , 2004 .

[227]  Marianne Hundt,et al.  English mediopassive constructions: A cognitive, corpus-based study of their origin, spread, and current status , 2006 .

[228]  Gunnel Tottie One Language, Two Grammars?: How different are American and British English grammar? And how are they different? , 2009 .

[229]  Geoffrey K. Pullum,et al.  A Student's Introduction to English Grammar , 2021 .