Christian Mair

Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English: a real-time study based on matching text corpora

The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to -infinitives with the verb help , the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before - ing -complements depending on prevent , and the choice between - ing - and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start . In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these differences need to be interpreted against diachronic changes affecting Late Modern English grammar as a whole. The description of twentieth-century developments is mainly based on data obtained from matching corpora of British and American standard English. Since in all three cases studied developments did not originate in the twentieth century, additional data from the quotation base of the OED were used to outline the long-term evolution of the relevant portions of the grammar since ca. 1600. In general/methodological terms, the article aims to show that an utterance-based model of language change, in combination with the exceptionally well-developed corpus-linguistic working environment available to the student of standard English, can lead to new discoveries even in a well-studied area such as the grammar of standard English.

Using Large Corpora

Introduction to the special issue on computational linguistics using large corpora, Kenneth W. Church and Robert L. Mercer generalized probabilistic LR parsing of natural language (corpora) with unification-based grammars, Ted Briscoe and John Carroll accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence, Ted Dunning a program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora, William A. Gale and Kenneth W. Church structural ambiguity and lexical relations, Donald Hindle and Mats Rooth text-translation alignment, Martin Kay and Martin Roescheisen retrieving collocations from text - Xtract, Frank Smadja using register-diversified corpora for general language studies, Douglas Biber from grammar to lexicon - unsupervised learning of lexical syntax, Michael R. Brent the mathematics of statistical machine translation - parameter estimation, Peter F. Brown et al building a large annotated corpus of English - the Penn treebank, Mitchell P. Marcus et al lexical semantic techniques for corpus analysis, James Pustejovsky et al coping with ambiguity and unknown words through probabilistic models, Ralph Weischedel et al.

Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: the role of corpus evidence in the study of sociolinguistic variation and change

The contribution opens with a general discussion of the relationship between sociolinguistics and corpus-linguistics. The point is made that while the concerns of these two traditions in the study of linguistic variability and variation were rather different at the outset they have meanwhile developed in such a way as to make co-operation fruitful and, indeed, necessary. This point is illustrated from the author’s own work on the recently completed Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English. The variables analysed are the use of person(s) as a synonym for people, the presence or absence of subject-verb inversion in questions, the modals of obligation and necessity, negative and auxiliary contraction and, finally, the use of the “new” quotative be like.

Change and variation in present-day English: integrating the analysis of closed corpora and web-based monitoring

Working styles in corpus-linguistic research are changing fast. One traditional constellation, close(d) communities of researchers forming around a specific corpus or set of corpora (the “Brown / LOB community”, “the BNC community”), is becoming increasingly problematical – particularly in the study of ongoing linguistic change and recent and current usage. The present contribution argues that whenever the possibilities of closed corpora are exhausted, it is advisable to turn to the digitised texts which – at least for a language such as English – are supplied in practically unlimited quantity on the world wide web. Web material is most suitable for studies for which large quantities of text and/or very recent texts are required. Specialised chat-rooms and discussion forums may additionally provide an unexpected wealth of material on highly specific registers or varieties not previously documented in corpora to a sufficient extent. On the basis of selected study examples it will be shown that, contrary to widespread scepticism in the field, web texts are appropriate data for variationist studies of medium degrees of delicacy – provided that a few cautionary procedures are followed in the interpretation of the results.

British English/American English Grammar: Convergence in Writing – Divergence in Speech?

Abstract Investigating two well-known instances of British-American lexico-grammatical differences, namely (1) variable prepositional usage after different and (2) the use of must and its alternatives as expressions of deontic and epistemic modality, the present study demonstrates that British and American standard English may differ quite considerably in speech in areas in which they resemble each other closely in writing. While it has been a long-established truism in variation studies to point out that “accent divides, and syntax unites”, recent developments in the compilation of English-language corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques allow us to study the register-specific aspects of regional variability in standard English at levels of delicacy and systematicity unattainable in previous research. It emerges that, in contrast to accent, where there are two clearly distinct British and American standards of pronunciation, the grammar of the two varieties is composed of one common underlying system of options for which speakers in different communities or contexts have different statistical preferences. There is, thus, one English standard grammar, with different (British, American, etc.) ways of using it.

Erfahrung zählt. Frequenzeff ekte in der Sprache–ein Werkstattbericht

Frequency is defi ned in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that there is a non-trivial relation between frequency of occurrence thus defi ned and mental and structural representation, the frequency factor is being investigated with a view both to its explanatory potential and to its challenges in future research.The present paper is based on ongoing research within the DFG funded research training group (GRK 1624) that carries out empirically rich and methodologically coordinated research on frequency effects in language, with an empirical focus on standard and non-standard varieties of European languages. In its integration of descriptive-linguistic and cognitivist approaches and its broad empirical corpus base, the ongoing research opens up a new, constructively critical approach to usage-based modeling in linguistics. The two-pronged approach — extending the breadth of empirical coverage, while at the same time increasing the sophistication of the theoretical models — is a timely one.

Writing the corpus-based history of spoken English: The elusive past of a cleft construction

The past two decades have seen considerable advances in the corpus-based “real-time” investigation of linguistic change in English, both in older stages of the language and in progress now. Inevitably, given our present resources, most claims about changes in the language as a whole have been based on written data. Against this backdrop, the present paper seeks to define the potential and limitations of the corpus-based “real-time” study of change in the spoken language, where even for a well documented language such as English the major problem is the paucity of corpus data. In the absence of recordings of suitable quality, the study of real speech in real time will never be pushed back further than the early 20th century, but as I will make clear with the example of the WW I Phonographische Kommission recordings, a number of interesting resources may well deserve more corpuslinguistic attention than they have received so far. Considerable progress is also likely in the study of the history of the spoken language “by proxy”, i.e. through speech-based genres, of which vast amounts have recently been made available for corpus-linguistic study (Old Bailey, Literature Online, Google N-grams). Particularly with regard to grammar, though, more attention needs to be paid to the question of what is really speech-like in supposedly speech-based genres and which features of spoken syntax are likely to be edited out of the written rendering. Cleft constructions, present both in written and spoken English, but structurally and statistically more richly represented in the latter, will serve as illustration of this point.

Rating Research Performance in the Humanities: An Interim Report on an Initiative of the German Wissenschaftsrat

The author, a professor of English linguistics at Freiburg University, was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) from 2006 to 2012 and, in this capacity, was involved in this advisory body’s rating and assessment activities. The present contribution focusses on issues arising in the rating of research output in the humanities and is informed by his dual perspective, as planner and organizer of the ratings undertaken by the Wissenschaftsrat and as a rated scholar in his own discipline, English and American Studies.

“Selling the Caribbean: An Introduction”

Abstract Taking the cue from the widespread metaphorical use of economic concepts such as resources or markets in both sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the present introduction sets out to discuss more literal aspects of the financial value of languages and the economy of the literary marketplace in the – mostly ‘Anglophone’ – Caribbean. Globalization, in particular a globally operating media and entertainment industry, and increased mobility – both in the shape of migration from the Caribbean and tourism into the region – have led to the widespread commodification of the region’s natural, linguistic, and cultural resources. These developments have shaken up the traditional colonial and early post-colonial order but ushered in new inequalities. This introduction and the present special issue of ZAA explore the potential and dangers of this state of affairs from a cross-disciplinary perspective, bringing together approaches from (socio)linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.

“50 Years of English Linguistics in Germany”: An Introduction

This year’s linguistics special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik departs from convention in not offering the usual collection of academic papers focussed on a shared topic, but four interviews with senior colleagues who have shaped the field in important ways. In other words, it is a small step towards an oral history of English linguistics in Germany or – to be precise – the Germanspeaking academic community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It complements the growing body of publications on the history of Anglistik / Amerikanistik (English and American Studies),1 and it adds the personal perspectives of leading participants in the events and activities recorded. This is a kind of subjectivity which I consider permissible even in scholarly and academic discourse and which I have frequently found quite rewarding. For example, even the reader familiar with the research and publications of David Crystal, M. A. K. Halliday, Geoffrey Leech or John Wells will be enlightened by their “personal histories”, which – alongside those of several other prominent British colleagues – were published by the Philological Society (Brown and Law, eds. 2002). For some years now, the form of the interview, rather than the personal history, has been used to great profit for similar purposes by the editors of the Journal of English Linguistics, who have recruited William Labov (2006), Elizabeth Traugott (2007), Walt Wolfram (2008), Richard Bailey (2009), Robin Lakoff (2010), Terttu Nevalainen (2011), Geneva Smitherman (2012) and Doug Biber (2013) as interviewees. It was with such examples in mind that I decided to approach senior German (-speaking) colleagues to invite them to come together for a similar venture. The four people interviewed – Hans-Jürgen Diller, Udo Fries, Manfred Görlach,