Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Comparative and Historical Linguistics

2015

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David Brown, Chris Palmer Dec 2015

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David Brown, Chris Palmer

David C. Brown

Phrasal verbs, such as "run up" in "They always run up our electric bill," have long been of interest to researchers of English linguistics. Scholars have been particularly focused on the definition and categorization of these multi-word items, as well as their grammatical, pragmatic, and semantic functions. Additionally, phrasal verbs have been examined historically, and recently corpus methods have been used to begin investigating phrasal verb frequency and patterns of variation across registers. But few studies have combined diachronic and register-based approaches to analyze the development of the phrasal verb in American English. This study uses large, monitor corpora--The Corpus …

Go to article

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer Feb 2015

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such as hapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay …

Go to article

Glocal English: The Changing Face And Forms Of Nigerian English In A Global World, Farooq A. Kperogi Jan 2015

Glocal English: The Changing Face And Forms Of Nigerian English In A Global World, Farooq A. Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi

Glocal English compares the usage patterns and stylistic conventions of the world’s two dominant native varieties of English (British and American English) with Nigerian English, which ranks as the English world’s fastest-growing non-native variety courtesy of the unrelenting ubiquity of the Nigerian (English-language) movie industry in Africa and the Black Atlantic Diaspora. Using contemporary examples from the mass media and the author’s rich experiential data, the book isolates the peculiar structural, grammatical, and stylistic characteristics of Nigerian English and shows its similarities as well as its often humorous differences with British and American English. Although Nigerian English forms the backdrop …

Go to article

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David West Brown, Chris C. Palmer Dec 2014

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David West Brown, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Phrasal verbs, such as "run up" in "They always run up our electric bill," have long been of interest to researchers of English linguistics. Scholars have been particularly focused on the definition and categorization of these multi-word items, as well as their grammatical, pragmatic, and semantic functions. Additionally, phrasal verbs have been examined historically, and recently corpus methods have been used to begin investigating phrasal verb frequency and patterns of variation across registers. But few studies have combined diachronic and register-based approaches to analyze the development of the phrasal verb in American English. This study uses large, monitor corpora--The Corpus …

Go to article