Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes - Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics

Linguistic Insights

Studies in Language and Communication

Edited by Maurizio Gotti,
University of Bergamo

Volume 181

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Alejandro Alcaraz-Sintes & Salvador Valera-Hernndez (eds)

Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics

Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940695

Published with the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant FFI2011-15186-E).

Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

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About the Editors

Alejandro Alcaraz-Sintes (Casablanca, Morocco, 1959) is senior lecturer (tenured) at the University of Jan.

Salvador Valera-Hernndez (Jan, Spain, 1967) is senior lecturer (tenured) at the University of Granada and teaches regularly at Pavol Jozef afrik University in Koice, Slovakia.

About the Book

The volume brings together a selection of invited articles and papers presented at the 4th International CILC Conference held in Jan, Spain, in March 2012. The chapters describe English using a range of corpora and other resources. There are two parts, one dealing with diachronic research and the other with synchronic research. Both parts investigate several aspects of the English language from various perspectives and illustrate the use of corpora in current research. The structure of the volume allows for the same linguistic aspect to be discussed both from the diachronic and the synchronic point of view. The chapters are also useful examples of corpus use as well as of use of other resources as corpus, specifically dictionaries. They investigate a broad array of issues, mainly using corpora of English as a native language, with a focus on corpus tools and corpus description.

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Contents

B AS A ARTS
Preface

A LEJANDRO A LCARAZ -S INTES
Dictionary- and corpus-based research in historical linguistics

N URIA C ALVO -C ORTS
A corpus-based study of gradual meaning change in Late Modern English

T ERESA F ANEGO
Dictionary-based corpus linguistics and beyond: developments in the expression of motion events in the history of English

M ARA J OS L PEZ -C OUSO / B ELN M NDEZ -N AYA
The use of if as a declarative complementizer in English: theoretical and empirical considerations

M ATTI R ISSANEN
On English historical corpora, with notes on the development of adverbial connectives

O NDEJ T ICH / J AN ERMK
Measuring typological syntheticity of English diachronically with the use of corpora

S ALVADOR V ALERA -H ERNNDEZ
Dictionary- and corpus-based research in applied and descriptive linguistics

M IGUEL - NGEL B ENTEZ -C ASTRO
Formal, syntactic, semantic and textual features of English shell nouns: a manual corpus-driven approach

E DUARDO C OTO -V ILLALIBRE
From prototypical to peripheral: the get + Ven construction in contemporary spoken British English

T HOMAS E GAN
Encoding throughness in English and French

B EATRIZ M ATO -M GUEZ
If you would like to lead: on the grammatical status of directive isolated if-clauses in spoken British English

D ETMAR M EURERS / J ULIA K RIVANEK / S ERHIY B YKH
On the automatic analysis of learner corpora. Native Language Identification as experimental testbed of language modeling between surface features and linguistic abstraction

J UAN S ANTANA -L ARIO
Adjective + whether/if-clause constructions in English. An exploratory corpus-based study

P AUL T HOMPSON
Exploring Hoeys notion of textual colligation in a corpus of student writing

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We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant FFI201115186-E), which has helped cover the organizational costs of the 4th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics organized at the University of Jan (Spain) (22nd-24th March 2011) on behalf of AELINCO (Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics) by A. Alcaraz-Sintes, M. A. Bentez-Castro, A. V. Casas-Pedrosa, A. Daz-Negrillo, F. J. Daz-Prez, J. Fernndez-Domnguez and S. Valera-Hernndez, as well as the publication of this book containing selected papers and guest contributions.

We are also grateful for the assistance given by a number of colleagues who acted as peer-reviewers in the selection process.

The Editors
Jan, June 2013

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The scholarly articles in this volume are based on presentations delivered at the Fourth International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC) held at the University of Jan from 22 to 24 March 2012 under the aegis of AELINCO, the Spanish Association of Corpus Linguistics. The conference attracted almost two hundred scholars from a large number of countries in several continents.

The book before you contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference and is organised into two parts: one focuses on diachronic, the other on synchronic research. Within these two parts the various chapters cover a very wide span of research topics, mostly on English, and each of them attests to the lively issues and debates currently taking place in the burgeoning field of Corpus Linguistics.

This book is a stimulating read and is certain to make an important and lasting contribution to our knowledge.

Bas Aarts
University College London
June 2013

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Abstract

Research on historical linguistics conducted with corpora has for quite some time now come to be accepted as the most reliable type of research, not only to confirm or hypothesize on patterns and causes of linguistic change, but also to test different theoretical models applied to the study of specific grammatical issues and to perform accurate descriptions of language features in or through past synchronies. The present chapter analyses the five contributions in Part 1 insofar as they bear witness to this claim. Five very specific grammar issues are addressed and investigated: the Late Modern English semantic changes and grammaticalization processes undergone by a closed set of nautical