Sie befinden Sich nicht im Netzwerk der Universität Paderborn. Der Zugriff auf elektronische Ressourcen ist gegebenenfalls nur via VPN oder Shibboleth (DFN-AAI) möglich.
mehr Informationen...
Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English
Ist Teil von
Text & talk, 2021-10, Vol.41 (5), p.763-785
Ort / Verlag
Berlin: De Gruyter
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ongoing change has been helped by increases in the size of available corpora and even more so by better coverage of spoken English. Secondly, researchers have a much wider range of statistical methods to choose from. Thirdly, conceptual advances have been made in theoretical models of change, particularly with regard to the impact of language ideologies and prescriptivism. In the study of ongoing changes, the corpus-based approach remains indispensable because it remedies the errors of impressionistic observation and helps shift attention from a small number of shibboleths important to prescriptivists to the groundswell of grammatical change that generally proceeds below the level of speakers’ conscious awareness.