Books in the Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change series

The book shows how the system of English predicate complementation has been undergoing an amazing amount of variation and change in recent centuries, and identifies explanatory principles to account for this change and variation, with evidence from large electronic corpora of both British and American English.

Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical change mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of English, the author reports findings from a historical corpus-based study on the reduction of particular consonant clusters and compares them with similar processes in synchronic varieties.

In this coherent historical development of the passive voice in English, the main argument deals not only with the passive per se, but also with its related constructions, which can play vital parts in identifying both functional and structural motivations for creating the passive.

A uniquely focused collection addressing the identification, functional properties, and broader consequences of phonological weakness over a broad chronological range, from Old to Present-Day English and its varieties, enriching the phonological literature with fresh empirical findings from a variety of sources.

In this detailed and rigorous study, the author provides a principled classification of neologisms, their semantic fields and the roles of source languages, along with a sociolinguistic study of the attitudes of 'purists' and ordinary native speakers in the tension between linguistic creativity and the preservation of a distinct language identity.

Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical change mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of English, Daniel Schreier reports findings from a historical corpus-based study on the reduction of particular consonant clusters and compares them with similar processes in synchronic varieties, thus defining consonantal change as a phenomenon involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonological theory and contact linguistics. Moreover, he weighs the impact of external and internal effects on causation, examining data from a total of 15 varieties with different time depths and social histories.

In this detailed and rigorous study, the author provides a principled classification of neologisms, their semantic fields and the roles of source languages, along with a sociolinguistic study of the attitudes of 'purists' and ordinary native speakers in the tension between linguistic creativity and the preservation of a distinct language identity.

This monograph focuses on the description, use and development of the inflectional subjunctive in English and German in the eighteenth century. A close comparison between meta-linguistic comments (eighteenth-century grammars) and actual language usage (corpus study) allows the evaluation of the influence of prescriptivism on language change.