This book has been shortlisted for an ESSE book award 2012 in English Language and Linguistics, Junior Scholars. This volume approaches the analysis of variation in English from diachronic, diatopic, and contrastive/comparative perspectives. The individual case studies, all closely interrelated, are organized into three parts or sections. Part I (Diachronic Studies) applies a variationist methodology to the analysis of developments in the use of the courtesy marker please, adverbs in -ly, the s- genitive and a number of phrasal combinations with the verb get. It also examines Early Modern English regional dialect vocabulary. Part II (Diatopic Studies) is concerned with the analysis of several morphological and phonological features in different varieties of English, namely Standard English, Modern Scottish English, Galwegian English, and Black South-African English. Part III (Contrastive Studies) contains four chapters dealing with the contrastive analysis of a number of morphosyntactic features, such as the use of modifiers of adjectives by advanced learners of English, the acquisition and use of aspect by advanced EFL learners with different mother-tongue backgrounds, a comparison of the tempo-aspectual categories of English and Italian, and some of the problems encountered by researchers when compiling and analysing learner corpora of spoken language.

Autorentext

The Editors: Carlos Prado-Alonso works as a full-time postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Lidia Gómez-García is employed as a research assistant to the Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Iria Pastor-Gómez is an FPU researcher funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation at the University of Santiago de Compostela. David Tizón-Couto works as a research assistant to the Language Variation and Textual Categorisation Research Unit at the University of Vigo.

Inhalt

Contents: Carlos Prado-Alonso: Introduction: Exploring New Methodologies in English Language Research - Fátima María Faya-Cerqueiro: Please in the Nineteenth Century: Origin and Position of a Courtesy Marker - Teo Juvonen: Genitive Variation in Late Middle and Early Modern English: The Persistence of the s -Genitive in the Correspondence Genre - Paula Rodríguez-Puente: The Effects of Lexicalization, Grammaticalization and Idiomatization on Phrasal Verbs in English: Some Combinations with get as a Test Case - Milagros Chao-Castro: Does it Fall Short of Expectations? On the Origin and Behavior of the Dual-form Adverb Short/Shortly - Javier Ruano-García: 'The Account Book of William Wray': An Evaluation of Yorkshire Lexis in two Inventories (1599-1600) - Anissa Dahak: Vowels in Inter-tonic Syllables: A Corpus-based Study - Ole Schützler: Unstable Close-mid Vowels in Modern Scottish English - Katrin Sell: Current Vowel Changes in Irish English: Analysing Galwegian English - Lize Terblanche: Morphological Productivity: A Black South African English Perspective - Viktoria Börjesson: Reinforcing and Attenuating Modifiers of Adjectives in Swedish Advanced Learners' English: A Comparison with Native Speakers - Svetla Rogatcheva: 'I've only found the answer a few days ago': Aspect Use in Bulgarian and German EFL Writing - Susanne Schneider: 'Progressivity' in English and Italian: A Typologically Guided Comparative Study - Beatriz Tizón-Couto: Complement Clauses in a University Learner Spoken English Corpus: Issues Behind Compilation and Analysis.