‘Ye whom the charms of grammar please’

Haugland, Kari; McCafferty, Kevin; Rusten, Kristian A.

‘Ye whom the charms of grammar please’

Studies in English Language History in Honour of Leiv Egil Breivik

by Kari Haugland (Volume editor) Kevin McCafferty (Volume editor) Kristian A. Rusten (Volume editor)

Linguistics

Series: Studies in Historical Linguistics, Volume 4

Summary

This collection of articles by colleagues and students of Leiv Egil Breivik presents studies within both core and peripheral areas of English historical linguistics. Core topics covered include the development of existential there and related phenomena, word order, the evolution of adverbials, null subjects from Old to Early Modern English, pragmatics and information structure and aspects of discourse. Contributors also address the emergence of new syntactic constructions in the past and present, language contact and aspects of style in Early Modern English letters and medical texts. The ideological discourses of children’s dictionaries and medieval letters of defence are also explored.
The essays are all empirical studies, based on a wide range of corpora (both historical and contemporary) and applying theoretical approaches informed by Systemic-Functional Grammar, grammaticalization theory, dependency grammar, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistic methods. Issues of methodology, statistics and corpus construction and annotation are also addressed in several contributions.

Excerpt

Cover
Title
Copyright
About the editors
About the book
This eBook can be cited
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Kevin McCafferty, Kari E. Haugland and Kristian A.Rusten: Preface: Charms of grammar/Source of all glamour
Part One: Existential there and other expletives
Kari E. Haugland: Þa rinde hit & þær comun flod & bleowun windas: On expletives and word order in Old English
Gard B. Jenset: In search of the S (curve) in there
María José López-Couso and Susana Formoso-Rodríguez: There follows + that-clause: A case of syntactic blend?
Part Two: Adverbials
Kristin Killie: The development of colour adverbs in Norwegian and English: Similar paths, different paths
Toril Swan: Hopefully: The evolution of a sentence adverbial
Part Three: Grammar
Gisle Andersen: The double copula revisited
Bjørg Bækken: The noun phrase as a style marker in seventeenth-century English
Dagmar Haumann: On the ascent and decline of the passive tough-infinitive
Kevin McCafferty: I think that I will be after making love to one of them: A revised account of Irish English be after V-ing and its Irish source
Ana Elina Martínez-Insua: Language, medicine and choice: A Systemic-Functional study of Early Modern English medical writing
Kristian A. Rusten: Null referential subjects from Old to Early Modern English
Part Four: Information structure and pragmatics
Kristin Bech: Non-specificity and genericity in information structure annotation
Øystein Heggelund:Information structure as an independent word ordering factor in Old and Middle English
Part Five: Discourse
Sarah Hoem Iversen: Do you understand this, my little pupil?: Children’s dictionaries, pedagogy and constructions of childhood in the nineteenth century
Merja Stenroos: Fugitive voices: Personal involvement in Middle English letters of defence
Anna-Brita Stenström: The pragmatic marker come on in teenage talk
Leiv Egil Breivik: A bibliography
Notes on contributors
Index
Series index
Plates

← xii | xiii → Tables

Gard B. Jenset, ‘In search of the S (curve) in there’
Table 1	Frequency counts of three types of existential constructions in Old English texts
Table 2	Example excerpt from the matrix containing frequencies of locative adverbs, existential there, and their contexts by text in YCOE
Table 3	Summary of the logistic regression model
María José López-Couso and Susana Formoso-Rodríguez, ‘There follows + that-clause …’
Table 1	Pseudo-presentational constructions in a corpus of mathematical journals
← xiii \| xiv → Kristin Killie, ‘The development of colour adverbs in Norwegian and English …’
Table 1	Colour adjectives and adverbs in Killie (2007)
Table 2	Verbal collocates of the colour adjuncts in the Oslo Corpus (Killie 2006: 168)
Table 3	Light/blink + colour adjective/adverb on the Internet
Table 4	Adjective declension in Norwegian (after Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo 1997: 366)
Table 5	Lyse/blinke + colour adjective/adverb on the Internet
Toril Swan, ‘Hopefully …’
Table 1	Frequency per million words in the COHA corpus
Table 2	SA hopefully occurrences in COHA
Table 3	Hopefully used as SA in Period II.ii
Gisle Andersen, ‘The double copula revisited’
Table 1	Distribution of the double copula construction in the spoken corpora
← xiv \| xv → Table 2	Recurring left-collocations of is is that in COCA
Table 3	Tuggy’s (1996) double copula categories sorted by prototypicality and expectation of frequency in corpus data from COCA
Bjørg Bækken, ‘The noun phrase as a style marker in seventeenth-century English’
Table 1	Noun phrases as subjects and non-subjects in the three text categories
Table 2	Simple and complex noun phrases in the three text categories
Tables 3	Simple and complex noun phrases in (a–b) subject and non-subject function in the three text categories
Tables 4	Realization of the noun phrase head in (a–b) simple noun phrases in subjects and non-subjects in the three text categories
Table 5	Patterns of modification in the three text categories
Tables 6	Modification patterns in subjects and (a–c) non-subjects in the three text categories
Table 7	Premodifiers in the three text categories
Table 8	Classification of premodifiers in the three text categories
Table 9	Postmodifiers in the three text categories
← xv \| xvi → Table 10	Postmodified noun phrases containing concatenation and/or embedding in the three text categories
Table 11	Classification of postmodifiers in the three text categories
Kevin McCafferty, ‘I think that I will be after making love to one of them …’
Table 1	Variable use of be after V-ing in the IrE of William Carleton and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers
Table 2	Be after V-ing in CORIECOR, 1801–1910
Ana Elina Martínez-Insua, ‘Language, medicine and choice …’
Table 1	Texts on specific diseases
Table 2	General treatises and textbooks in the corpus
Table 3	Regimens and health guides in the corpus
Table 4	Simple and multiple themes according to text and period
Table 5	Marked and unmarked themes according to text and period
Table 6	Types of processes according to text and period
← xvi \| xvii → Kristian A. Rusten, ‘Null referential subjects from Old to Early Modern English’
Table 1	Overt versus null referential pronominal subjects in Old English
Table 2	Overt versus null referential pronominal subjects in Middle English
Table 3	Overt versus null referential pronominal subjects in Early Modern English
Kristin Bech, ‘Non-specificity and genericity in information structure annotation’
Table 1	Annotation scheme for information structure (Haug et al. 2014)
Table 2	Information status of annotated referents in ApT, ÆLS and WSCp
Øystein Heggelund, ‘Information structure as an independent word ordering factor in Old and Middle English’
Table 1	The IV of X elements according to type in eOE SXV clauses
Table 2	The IV of X elements according to type in lOE SXV clauses
← xvii \| xviii → Table 3	The IV of X elements according to type in eME SXV clauses
Table 4	The IV of X elements in SXV clauses
Table 5	The IV of X elements according to type in eOE SVX clauses
Table 6	The IV of X elements according to type in lOE SVX clauses
Table 7	The IV of X elements according to type in eME SVX clauses

← xviii | xix → KEVIN MCCAFFERTY, KARI E. HAUGLAND AND KRISTIAN A. RUSTEN

Preface: Charms of grammar/Source of all glamour¹

On 6 June 2014, Leiv Egil Breivik celebrates his seventieth birthday; at the end of that month, he retires from his post as Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergen, where he has been Head of the merged Department of Foreign Languages since 2007. As a central figure in English studies generally in Norway over many years, Leiv Egil will be missed, both in Bergen and nationally, as a valuable, hard-working colleague who has inspired a couple of generations of students and scholars in the field of English linguistics.

The 16 articles collected in this volume are presented to Leiv Egil by colleagues past and present and former students at the University of Bergen and other universities. The papers are arranged in thematic blocs covering a range of topics that Leiv Egil has worked on in the course of his distinguished career: expletives and existential there, adverbials, general grammar, information structure and pragmatics, and discourse. Throughout the volume, the thread that unites chapters is that the authors approach their various topics from historical perspectives, either looking at interesting phenomena at particular historical moments or in particular periods, or studying developments in the English language diachronically.

The Festschrift opens with a section on ‘Existential there and other expletives’. It seems appropriate to begin with this topic, since Leiv Egil is proverbially ‘the guy who wrote on existential there’. In this section, there are three chapters. The first, by Kari E. Haugland, focuses on expletive it. Gard B. Jenset proposes a new model for the evolution of existential there. And María José López-Couso and Susana Formoso-Rodríguez look at an innovative grammatical ← xix | xx → blend of expletive it and there. The three papers in this section all use Leiv Egil’s important work on existential there as their point of departure, but in the spirit of good scholarship, take issue with various aspects of his work, pushing back the boundaries of explanation and thus adding to the story of expletives in the English language.

Details

Pages: XXXIV, 416
Publication Year: 2014
ISBN (PDF): 9783035306057
ISBN (MOBI): 9783035398144
ISBN (ePUB): 9783035398151
ISBN (Softcover): 9783034317795
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0353-0605-7
Language: English
Publication date: 2014 (April)
Keywords: word order pragmatics grammaticalization theory linguistics
Published: Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2014. XXXIV, 416 pp., num. b/w ill. and tables
Product Safety: Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Kari Haugland (Volume editor) Kevin McCafferty (Volume editor) Kristian A. Rusten (Volume editor)

Kari E. Haugland is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergen. Her research interests are mainly within English historical linguistics and her current focus is Old English syntax. Kevin McCafferty is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergen. His research interests lie broadly in the field of language variation and change, with a focus on Irish English. He is at present studying the history of Irish English. Kristian A. Rusten is a PhD Research Fellow in English Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen. He has published on null subjects in Old English and is working on a doctoral thesis on referential and generic null subjects in Old, Middle and Early Modern English.

‘Ye whom the charms of grammar please’

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← xii | xiii → Tables

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