This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling, contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.

It is a well-known fact that the area of the present perfect has always been a hotly contested ground, but recent corpus analyses have shown that grammatical variation in this realm in English is far more pervasive than previously assumed. This volume is the first ever book-length treatment dedicated to corpus-based work on the present perfect. It offers fresh theoretical insights resting on a solid empirical footing and investigates central aspects of language contact and change, grammaticalization, typology, and dialect formation. It sheds light on this morphosyntactic area from different angles, as it comprises both diachronic and synchronic viewpoints. Contributions explore variation in the expression of perfect meaning and the multifunctionality of perfect forms in a number of native and non-native varieties, thus going beyond the traditional British/American English paradigm, while a second focus lies on cross-variety comparisons. Bringing together the knowledge of leading experts in the field, this book represents the state of the art in data-driven research on the present perfect and will be of interest for those working in the fields of language variation and change, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and typology.

This book examines the special nature of English both as a global and a local language, focusing on some of the ongoing changes and on the emerging new structural and discoursal characteristics of varieties of English. Although it is widely recognised that processes of language change and contact bear affinities, for example, to processes observable in second-language acquisition and lingua franca use, the research into these fields has so far not been sufficiently brought into contact with each other. The articles in this volume set out to combine all these perspectives in ways that give us a better understanding of the changing nature of English in the modern world.

Honoured with the 2017 AESLA Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics. Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora comprises fourteen contributions by leading scholars in the field of English corpus linguistics, covering areas of central concern in corpus research and corpus methodology. The topics examined in the different chapters include issues related to corpus compilation and annotation, perspectives from specialized corpora, and studies on grammatical and pragmatic aspects of English, all these examined through a broad range of corpora, both synchronic and diachronic, representing both EFL and different native varieties of English worldwide. The volume will be of primary interest to students and researchers working on English corpus linguistics, but is also likely to have a wider general appeal. Contributors are: Bas Aarts, Siân Alsop, Anita Auer, Jill Bowie, Eduardo Coto-Villalibre, Pieter de Haan, Johan Elsness, Moragh Gordon, Hilde Hasselgård, Turo Hiltunen, Magnus Huber, Marianne Hundt, Mikko Laitinen, Martti Mäkinen, Beatriz Mato-Míguez, Mike Olson, Antoinette Renouf, and Bianca Widlitzki.