Nowadays, linguists do not question the existence of synchronic variation, and the dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony. They recognize that synchrony can be motivated regionally (diatopic variation), sociolinguistically (diastratic variation), or stylistically (diaphasic variation). But, further, they can also recognize the hybrid nature of synchrony, which is referred to as "dynamic synchrony." This conception of synchrony assumes that similar patterns of usage can coexist in a community during a certain period and that their mutual relations are not static but conflicting enough to result in a future systematic change through symptomatic synchronic variation. Emergence of a large corpus of written texts for some languages has enabled quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of the synchronic conditions for diachronic changes, over both long and short spans of time. Most of the 14 papers in this volume represent studies on synchronic and diachronic variations based on such corpus data. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.

The book brings together current research on the description of English using a range of corpora. It consists of a foreword, a review of the diachronic studies and another of the synchronic studies, twelve research papers, and a subject index. Five of the papers are about diachronic description and seven are about synchronic description.

Preliminary Material /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- The corpus-user's chorus: (Based on The Major General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance) /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Introduction: The changing face of corpus linguistics /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Oh Canada! Towards the Corpus of Early Ontario English /Stefan Dollinger -- Favoring Americanisms? vs. before and in Early English in Australia: A corpus-based approach /Clemens Fritz -- Computing the Lexicons of Early Modern English /Ian Lancashire -- EFL dictionaries, grammars and language guides from 1700 to 1850: testing a new corpus on points of spokenness /Manfred Markus -- The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer /Antonio Miranda García , Javier Calle Martín , David Moreno Olalla and Gustavo Muñoz González -- Prediction with SHALL and WILL: a diachronic perspective /Maurizio Gotti -- Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective /Anneli Meurman-Solin and Päivi Pahta -- Changes in textual structures of book advertisements in the ZEN Corpus /Caren auf dem Keller -- “Curtains like these are selling right in the city of Chicago for USD 1.50” - The mediopassive in American 20th-century advertising language /Marianne Hundt -- Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English /Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith -- Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus /Mats Deutschmann -- How recent is recent? On overcoming interpretational difficulties /Göran Kjellmer -- Looking at looking: Functions and contexts of progressives in spoken English and 'school' English /Ute Römer -- Ditransitives, the Given Before New principle, and textual retrievability: a corpus-based study using ICECUP /Gabriel Ozón -- The Spanish pragmatic marker pues and its English equivalents /Anna-Brita Stenström -- WebCorp: A tool for online linguistic information retrieval and analysis /Barry Morley -- Diachronic linguistic analysis on the web with WebCorp /Andrew Kehoe -- New ways of analysing ESL on the WWW with WebCorp and WebPhraseCount /Josef Schmied -- I'm like, “Hey, it works!”: Using GlossaNet to find attestations of the quotative (be) like in English-language newspapers /Cédrick Fairon and John V. Singler -- Corpus linguistics and English reference grammars /Joybrato Mukherjee -- Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: the complementary role of small and large corpora /Christian Mair -- but it will take time...points of view on a lexical grammar of English /Michaela Mahlberg -- Corpus linguistics, grammar and theory: Report on a panel discussion at the 24th ICAME conference /Jan Aarts.

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.

Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale - the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts. This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data. It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general. Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics. A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text.

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

This book brings together a variety of approaches to English corpus linguistics and shows how corpus methodologies can contribute to the linking of diachronic and synchronic studies. The articles in this volume investigate historical changes in the English language as well as specific aspects of Middle and Modern English and, moreover, of English dialects. The contributions also discuss the development of English corpus linguistics generally and its potential in the future. Special focus is given to the continuity between Middle and Modern English – much in line with the linking in previous studies of Middle English and Old English under the generic term “medievalism”. This volume highlights the continual development of English from the medieval to modern period.