Periphrasis, Replacement and Renewal: Studies in English Historical Linguistics

Product Description The contributions to this volume smoothly blend synchronic theory and diachronic investigations, and thus they offer novel observations about the historical evolution of the English language from various theoretical angles (minimalist theory, formal semantics, recent theories on productivity, various discourse models, etc.). By offering new vantage points and improved frameworks for the study of Present-Day English the papers also provide solutions to problems that have been persistently present in the synchronic analysis of English. The papers are arranged around four thematic headings. The first part discusses patterns and models of replacement; the second has syntactic and semantic variation in its focus. The third part presents case studies of the historical development of adverbials and particles. The last part investigates functional and regional variation in discourse and vocabulary. The 15 peer-reviewed, revised papers were originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in August 2010 in Pecs, Hungary. The volume would appeal to linguists interested in the following areas of linguistic research: language change, grammatical theory, language variation, semantic change, diachronic discourse analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based study of English. About the Author Iren HEGED S is associate professor at the Department of English Linguistics, University of Pecs, Hungary. She has been teaching English historical linguistics since 1990. Her research interests also include other areas of historical comparative linguistics, such as phonological and morphological reconstruction of Nuristani languages, or the investigation of the possible distant genetic relationship of language families. Dora P DOR is associate professor at the Department of English Linguistics, Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest. She has been teaching the history of the English language since 1996. Her research interests include the history of the English and the Irish languages, varieties of English, terminology, and lexicography.