Laurel J. Brinton

Lexicalization and language change

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of words into the lexicon, it has been viewed by some as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by others as a routine process of word formation, and by others as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. As a first overview of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

The Linguistic Structure of Modern English

This text is for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in contemporary English, especially those whose primary area of interest is English as a second language, primary or secondary-school education, English stylistics, theoretical and applied linguistics, or speech pathology. The emphasis is on empirical facts of English rather than any particular theory of linguistics; the text does not assume any background in language or linguistics. In this newly revised edition numerous example sentences are taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. A full glossary of key terms, an additional chapter on pedagogy and new sections on cognitive semantics and politeness have been added. Other changes include: completely updated print references; web links to sites of special interest and relevance; and a revised, reader-friendly layout. A companion website that includes a complete workbook with self-testing exercises and a comprehensive list of web links accompanies the book. The website can be found at the following address: http://doi.org/10.1075/z.156.workbook Students completing the text and workbook will acquire: a knowledge of the sound system of contemporary English; an understanding of the formation of English words; a comprehension of the structure of both simple and complex sentence in English; a recognition of complexities in the expression of meaning; an understanding of the context and function of use upon the structure of the language; and an appreciation of the importance of linguistic knowledge to the teaching of English to first and second-language learners. Laurel J. Brinton is Professor of English Language at the University of British Columbia. Donna M. Brinton is Senior Lecturer in TESOL at the University of Southern Californias Rossier School of Education. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English is a revised edition of The Structure of Modern English by Laurel J. Brinton (2000).

Aspectuality and countability: a cross-categorial analogy 1

This paper expands the analogy between events and count nouns, and between states/activities and mass nouns in English to include other situation types, including iteratives, habits, and multiple situations. It explores the evidence used to make such analogies, namely, the quantificational features of deverbal nouns, as each of the deverbalizing devices in English has its own aspectual qualities. It shows further that a number of parallels can be drawn between different types of bounding and debounding in the nominal and verbal domains. Finally, the paper presents a schema of the cross-categorial analogies relating to inherent meaning (mass/count features in nouns, situation types in verbs) and the semantic operations of (de)bounding and (de)collectivizing (quantificational and aspectual modification).

The Extremes of Insubordination: Exclamatory as if!

In present-day colloquial English, exclamatory as if denies an expressed or implied state of affairs, as in He thinks you’ll be impressed. As if. This usage is often attributed to a speech style of the 1980s and a popular television program, but OED-3 gives a 1903 instance from dialogue in an American novel. After undertaking a corpus study of exclamatory as if in present-day and historical English, this article explores the association of exclamatory as if with monoclauses or insubordinated clauses such as As if I was the one at fault. The occurrence and meaning of such clauses in present-day English are described. The article then examines the postulated derivation of as if monoclauses from full adjunct conditional clauses via processes of insubordination. Finally, the article considers an alternative development of monoclausal as if (and exclamatory as if) involving ellipsis of complement clauses in it is/looks/seem as if. . . structures rather than directly from adjunct adverbial clauses.

Historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics: problems and strategies

Corpus linguistics is “the sine qua non of historical linguistics” (McEnery and Wilson 2001: 123). Contemporary corpus linguistics has led to significant advances in historical linguistics, most notably in the speed and ease with which data can be retrieved. The English historical linguist has available for use a wide variety of corpora. However, none is entirely ideal. Only two corpora, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Helsinki Corpus, provide the full diachronic span from Old English to the present day. The OED quotation bank, though not a corpus strictly speaking, can – with caution – be fruitfully used by the historical linguist (Hoffmann 2004). At only 1.5 million words for 1000 years of language history, the Helsinki Corpus, a balanced general-purpose corpus, may prove too small for some types of searches. Apart from these sources, the historical English linguist must cobble together a variety of corpora from the individual periods of English, ranging from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus containing almost all extant Old English texts, to the Middle English Dictionary (sharing many of the weaknesses of the OED), to the rich Chadwyck-Healey corpora designed primarily for the literary scholar (and quite user-unfriendly for the linguist). After a review of the historical corpora available to the English linguist, this paper explores some of the problems encountered by a scholar wishing to apply corpus linguistic methodology in the field of historical pragmatics. I articulate the strategies that I have adopted in my work on pragmatic markers and, more recently, on comment clauses in the history of English (Brinton 2008). As a case study, I explore the development of the comment clause (as) you say in the history of English. The use of a mixed qualitative/quantitative corpus-based approach allows for a detailed, empirically based description of the rise of (as) you say; at the same time, it permits testing of the “matrix clause hypothesis”, the prevailing theory concerning the origin of comment clauses that has been extrapolated from Thompson and Mulac’s synchronic work on I think/guess. Frequency counts of the presumed source construction (i.e., you say that S) in the earlier periods cast doubt on the validity of the matrix clause hypothesis. Corpus data suggest a more nuanced view of the rise of this comment clause, namely, that a variety of structures, including relative/adverbial as you say, main clause you say, and you say following a fronted element all contributed to its genesis.

Building and evaluating web corpora representing national varieties of English

Corpora are essential resources for language studies, as well as for training statistical natural language processing systems. Although very large English corpora have been built, only relatively small corpora are available for many varieties of English. National top-level domains (e.g., .au, .ca) could be exploited to automatically build web corpora, but it is unclear whether such corpora would reflect the corresponding national varieties of English; i.e., would a web corpus built from the .ca domain correspond to Canadian English? In this article we build web corpora from national top-level domains corresponding to countries in which English is widely spoken. We then carry out statistical analyses of these corpora in terms of keywords, measures of corpus comparison based on the Chi-square test and spelling variants, and the frequencies of words known to be marked in particular varieties of English. We find evidence that the web corpora indeed reflect the corresponding national varieties of English. We then demonstrate, through a case study on the analysis of Canadianisms, that these corpora could be valuable lexicographical resources.

Lexicalization and Language Change: Frontmatter

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of words into the lexicon, it has been viewed by some as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by others as a routine process of word formation, and by others as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. As a first overview of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

Lexicalization and Language Change: List of abbreviations

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of words into the lexicon, it has been viewed by some as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by others as a routine process of word formation, and by others as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. As a first overview of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English

Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English (henceforth PCGE) is a collection of papers originally presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held in Düsseldorf in 1997, supplemented with a number of solicited papers. The purpose of the volume is “to broaden the range of empirical cases of grammaticalization in . . . English, and thereby cast more light on a number of current themes in grammaticalization” (1). As Olga Fischer and Anette Rosenbach point out in their introduction to PCGE, English, with its dearth of inflectional morphology, would not seem to be particularly well suited to the study of grammaticalization, the historical process that, according to the best-known definition, “consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status” (Kurylowicz 1965, 69). However, as Fischer and Rosenbach also point out, the shift from synthetic to analytic structures in the history of English necessitates grammaticalizations of a somewhat different sort, and the well-recorded history of English provides opportunities for careful case studies, such as those of lovely, pray/prithee, methinks, to, (al)though, and OE onginnan/beginnan and soþlice/ witodlice found here. The “themes” of grammaticalization studies that figure most prominently in this volume are the directionality of grammaticalization, the distinction between grammaticalization and lexicalization, and the relation between synchronic variation and grammaticalization. My overall impression of this volume is that it presents a variety of papers relating to diachronic change in the history of English, which of themselves are worthwhile and very interesting, though not all of the papers are as tightly focused on grammaticalization as the title of the volume—and the informative introduction to grammaticalization provided by Fischer and Rosenbach—might lead one to expect. Nonetheless, the volume makes a significant contribution to the study of grammaticalization. Most germane to the topic of grammaticalization are eight of the papers in PCGE, seven of which are empirical studies that concomitantly raise larger issues concerning grammaticalization and one of which is primarily theoretical. In conjunction with a close examination of methinks, Ilse Wischer (“Grammaticalization