Corpus-based studies of diachronic English have been thriving over the last three decades to such an extent that the validity of corpora in the enrichment of historical linguistic research is now undeniable. The present book is a collection of papers illustrating the state of the art in corpus-based research on diachronic English, by means of case-study expositions, software presentations, and theoretical discussions on the topic. The majority of these papers were delivered at the 25th Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held at the University of Verona on 18-23 May 2004. A number of typological and geographical varieties of English are tackled in the book: from general to specialized English, from British to Australian English, from written to speech-related registers. In order to discuss their tenets, the contributors draw on corpora and dictionaries from different centuries, including the most recent ones; hence, they testify to the fact that past and present are so strongly interlocked and so inextricably entwined that it proves hard if not preposterous to fully understand Present-day English structure and features without turning back to the previous centuries for an in-depth knowledge of the 'whys' and 'hows' of the current state of the art.

Autorentext

The Editors: Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research field and publications are mainly concerned with language description, textual analysis and pragmatics. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English.
Matti Rissanen is Emeritus Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki and a team leader in the Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English, at the same university. His research interests include long-term diachronic development of English syntax and grammatical vocabulary and the compilation of historical corpora.

Inhalt
Contents: Roberta Facchinetti/Matti Rissanen: Introduction Anne Curzan/Chris C. Palmer: The Importance of Historical Corpora, Reliability, and Reading Johan van der Auwera/Martine Taeymans: More on the Ancestors of Need Manfred Markus: Spotting Spoken Historical English: The Role of Alliteration in Middle English Fixed Expressions Irma Taavitsainen/Päivi Pahta/Martti Mäkinen: Towards a Corpus-Based History of Specialized Languages: Middle English Medical Texts Barry Morley/Patricia Sift: Towards the Automatic Identification of Directive Speech Acts Helena Raumolin-Brunberg: Leaders of Linguistic Change in Early Modern England Hans Martin Lehmann/Caren auf dem Keller/Beni Ruef: ZEN Corpus 1.0 Udo Fries: Death Notices: The Birth of a Genre Franck Zumstein: The Contribution of Computer-Searchable Diachronic Corpora to the Study of Word Stress Variation Merja Kytö/Erik Smitterberg: 19th-Century English: An Age of Stability or a Period of Change? Clemens Fritz: The Conventions' Spelling Conventions: Regional Variation in 19th-Century Australian Spelling Tine Breban: The Grammaticalization of the English Adjectives of Comparison: A Diachronic Case Study Göran Kjellmer: Panchrony in Linguistic Change: The Case of Courtesy.