Christian Mair

Hans Lindquist

Grammaticalization is an important concept in general and typological linguistics and a prominent type of explanation in historical linguistics. For historical corpus linguists, grammaticalization theory provides a frame of orientation in their effort to analyze and systematize a fast-accumulating mass of data. Students of grammaticalization have become increasingly aware of the potential of existing corpora and established corpus-linguistic methodology for their work. This book continues and develops the dialogue between the two fields. All the contributions are based on extensive use of various electronic corpora. Relating corpus practices to recent theoretical concerns of grammaticalization studies they deal with grammaticalization and historical sociolinguistics, lexicalization and grammaticalization, layering, frequency, grammaticalization and dialects, degrammaticalization and grammaticalization in a contrastive perspective. The papers show that a synthesis of corpus methodology and grammaticalization studies leads to new and interesting insights about the mechanisms of language change and the communicative functions of language.

Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English

The second edition of this successful text provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide. After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authors present a number of recent case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. A final chapter shows how the web and social media can be used as a source for linguistic investigations and contains information on how to compile your own corpus. Each chapter includes study questions, exercises and updated suggestions for further reading.

Hans Lindquist

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