Atemporal complement clauses in English

A Cognitive Grammar Analysis

Zeki Hamawand
University of Hamburg

This book deals with verbal complementation in English, namely the introduction of a complement clause into the immediate domination of the verb phrase of a main clause. Its scope of analysis is confined primarily to atemporal (non-finite) complement clauses represented by infinitives, participles and gerunds. The notion atemporal refers to a complement clause that is not grounded in time, and so not anchored with respect to elaborated reality. The framework in which the analysis is conducted is Cognitive Grammar (henceforth CG). The general goal of the analysis is to emphasise the importance of cognitive processes in motivating the linguistic structures of language, regard the syntactic form of an expression as reflecting its conceptual organisation and recognise the speaker's capacity to express a situation in alternate ways. Each expression imparts a particular meaning which is distinguishable from the other.

The specific goal of the analysis is to account for the selection of a type of a complement clause construction, which is a function of both meaning and distribution. The meaning of a complement clause construction, which determines its form, is the result of the particular construal the speaker imposes on its conceptual content. Conceptual content refers to the context of knowledge against which the meaning of the construction is characterised. Construal refers to the particular image the speaker selects from a range of alternatives to structure the content of the construction. Distribution is the result of the semantic compatibility that exists between the internal parts of the construction. By integrating all the variables relevant for complement selection, the book presents a unified account of aspects of verbal complementation, and so represents the first in-depth cognitive analysis of atemporal complement clauses in English.

ISBN 9783895867538. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 01. 368pp. 2002.

Composite Predicates in Middle English

Teresa Moralejo Gárate
University of Santiago de Compostela

The present study addresses the need for an account of the linguistic and extralinguistic peculiarities of composite predicates (such as He told me to HAVE a LOOK at the report), formed with don, haven, maken, taken and yeven in the Middle English period, on the basis of the evidence provided by the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Diachronic and Dialectal.
This book addresses the need for an account of the linguistic and extralinguistic peculiarities of composite predicates (such as He told me to HAVE a LOOK at the report), formed with don, haven, maken, taken and yeven in the Middle English period, on the basis of the evidence provided by the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Diachronic and Dialectal.
The volume opens with an introduction covering goals and method. The firt chapter contains a review of previous studies on the topic, a definition of composite predicates and the criteria used to limit them are established. Several issues relevant to the study of CPs, which are dealt with in greater depth later in the study , are introduced.

Throughout the subsequent chapters, composite predicates are considered with regard to different linguistic and extralinguistic parameters, including their chronology and origin, their syntact features and patterning, their distribution across different textual types and their association any particular register. A selection of high frequency CPs and their equivalent simple verbs is contrasted to reveal any extralinguistic or linguistic factors that may motivate the choice of one of the two structures.The book closes with a recapitulation of the main conclusions reached.

ISBN 9783895868535. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 02. 230pp. 52 tables. 2003.

The Spelling Patterns of English

Andrew G. Rollings
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Here at last is a book which describes and explains in great detail how English spelling works. It is therefore a must for anyone wishing to understand better the apparently chaotic orthographic system. It will be of special interest for linguists, language and literacy teachers, and designers of EFL textbooks and materials - and indeed everyone who is or aims to be a literate English-speaker. An earlier, unpublished version of this work has been described by Vivian Cook (in Inside Language) as “a useful and novel approach to spelling”.

The author looks for regularities and shows the system to be neither totally chaotic nor simple, but basically systematic despite its complexity. He relates spelling to the phonology, and shows the importance of syllable division in spellings of vowels, which are classified following orthographic criteria. Further topics discussed include morphemic alternation, underlying forms, marking devices, graphotactic constraints and etymological factors.

Principles underlying the orthography are postulated and illustrated in Part One. In Part Two, partly inspired by generative linguistics, spelling patterns are described and formalised into various types of rules. An Appendix lists and exemplifies all spellings of each sound.

ISBN 9783895867583. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 04. 260pp. 2004.

Handbook of Middle English

GRAMMAR AND TEXTS

Luis Iglesias Rábade
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

This volume is intended to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students with a comprehensive handbook of Middle English. The book begins with a sociolinguistic study of post-Conquest England. Then the volume presents a detailed description of Middle English grammar divided into four parts. The first part is dedicated to morphology, providing students with forms and uses of the traditional parts of speech. The second part of the volume is devoted to a description of the phonology, proposing a historical development of the OE phonemes (and graphemes) until Present Day English.

Students will find the basic rules of the phonological developments accompanied by the most common spellings for the four periods (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Present Day English) and subperiods of the history of the English language. In the third part the volume presents a description of the grammatical categories and functions on Middle English syntactic units. All parts and sections of the book are provided with a wide range of examples, with modern English translations to facilitate a better understanding of Middle English grammar. The fourth part of the volume includes some extracts of early Middle English texts. Each of them is provided with its own glossary. It is particularly easy for students to identify the meaning of a word, because not only are all words included in the glossary, but also a specific meaning is provided for each word in each of its occurrences.

ISBN 9783895869709 (Hardcover). LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 05. 630pp. 2008.

The Progressive in the History of English

Paloma Núñez-Pertejo
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

The present study aims to provide a descriptive account of be + -ing periphrases, as in he was reading a book, in the history of the English language. The controversial origin of these periphrases as well as their later evolution and development is discussed, and special attention is devoted to their behaviour in the early Modern English period, which turns out to be an outstanding stage in the history of be + -ing. For this purpose, computerized data from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal are retrieved and the evidence provided is further analysed and discussed.

The book opens with an introductory chapter which deals with some basic questions, such as the problem of terminology, the formal resemblance between the progressive and other related constructions (e.g. adjectival participles), and also with the definition of the category ‘aspect'. The second chapter offers an overview of the semantics of the progressive, which is a rather complicated issue of English verb syntax.

Attention is devoted to the role played by temporal adverbials in combination with be + ing, to so-called ‘non-progressive verbs', and also to the traditional dichotomy progressive vs. non-progressive (simple) forms.

Throughout the subsequent chapters, the history of the English progressive from Old English to early Modern English is traced on the basis of different parameters, such as paradigm, frequency, distribution and semantics, among others. Other issues included in these chapters are the origin of Old English beon/wesan + -ende, the origin of Middle English be + -ing, the change from Old English -end(e) to Middle English -ing(e) and the development of the gerund in Middle English. As indicated above, the chapter which focuses on the use of the progressive in early Modern English offers data from the Helsinki Corpus. All the examples are classified and studied according to various factors, both linguistic and extralinguistic, including chronology, frequency, paradigm and semantics, as well as their distribution in terms of the type of clause selected and the text type. Finally, the book includes a chapter which summarizes the main conclusions reached.

Paloma Núñez-Pertejo lectures on English as a second language at the Department of English, University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research is mainly focused on diachronic syntax and grammaticalization, especially in the early Modern English period.

ISBN 9783895867422. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 06. 200pp. 2004.

Existential There-Constructions in Contemporary British English

Ana E. Martínez Insua

The present study of contemporary English existential there-constructions (TCs) offers a general view of the state-of-art in current investigation about these constructions, and a corpus-driven analysis of their use in present day British speech and writing. From a functional perspective, this work gathers data from a sub-corpus of the British National Corpus and pays special attention to the influence that the medium of expression might have on the frequency, distribution, form and function of TCs. It addresses the need for a joint approach to TCs that focuses not only on their syntactic and semantic aspects, but also on their pragmatics. From the initial assumption of the signal function of there and TCs, the study proposes a pragmatic categorization of TCs in context, and presents it as the basis for an effective methodology that might lead to a better understanding of TCs and their use in contemporary English.

ISBN 9783895867361. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 07. 200pp. 2004.

Historical and Theoretical Approaches to English Satire

Juan Francisco Elices Agudo
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

From its early origins, satire has been significantly present in most cultural and literary expressions. As can be observed in the satiric pictures of eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth or in the caricatures that are daily published in the most prestigious periodicals worldwide, satire has allowed many artists to channel their critical opinions through wit, irony and verbal playfulness. Therefore, satire emerges as a mechanism that enables to analyse the social, political and religious reality from indirect, pungent, sombre or humorous perspectives. Although its intention or objective might be clear to the eyes of the reader, critics have cast many doubts upon its nature and functioning. This vagueness explains why most attempts to conceptualise satire have clashed with the ambivalence of the mode. It is no wonder, thus, that it is still very difficult to categorise satire as a literary genre, mode or sub-mode, an ongoing debate that is causing a great deal of theoretical divergences.

Considering these antecedents, the present study seeks to clarify the complexities that underlie satire from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The monograph is divided in two main sections. The first is devoted to define satire and delimit its formal and thematic boundaries, for which we draw on the critical paradigms postulated by critics such as Alvin Kernan, Robert C. Elliott, Leonard Feinberg, Matthew Hodgart, Ronald Paulson or Dustin Griffin. This tentative definition is complemented by a typological classification, in which the aim will be to examine the most recurrent types of satire. To finish with this first section, the monograph includes a chapter that centres on rhetorical strategies such as irony, parody, fantasy or wit that satirists employ in their works.

Along the second part, this study will trace an overview on the evolution of satire, from its origins in the early Eskimo communities up to the twentieth century. This historical and literary survey tries to observe not only the stylistic development of the mode but also the way authors have adapted their works to the socio-political, religious or economic reality of their times. We will first explore the state of satire until the nineteenth century, to move on to the twentieth century in order to analyse the changes undergone by the mode and to comment on its literary prospects.

ISBN 9783895867439. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 08. 200pp. 2004.

COLOCACIONES EN LENGUAJE PERIODÍSTICO

LA PREDICACIÓN COMPLEJA EN INGLÉS MODERNO

ANTONIO ÁLVAREZ RODRIGUEZ
Universidad de Santiago

Existe en inglés un tipo específico de construcción verbal formada por un verbo deslexicalizado y un sustantivo que actúa como núcleo de la Frase Nominal Predicativa que acompaña a dicho verbo. Se trata de estructuras complejas, con unas características específicas tan peculiares que las sitúan a medio camino entre la gramática y el léxico. Por un lado tenemos una estructura gramatical con varios elementos que admiten variaciones morfológicas, mientras que por otro, observamos también que estas construcciones pueden considerarse unidades léxicas, con un significado concreto que muchas veces no se corresponde con la suma de los significados de los elementos que en ellas se integran. Además, los distintos grados de fijación de su estructura interna, junto con el carácter idiosincrásico de su significado hacen que se las considere como frases idiomáticas o colocaciones.

En este libro se analiza el comportamiento de dichas estructuras en Inglés Moderno mediante un estudio contrastivo en relación a tres tipos de registros lingüísticos: el lenguaje de la economía y la empresa, el lenguaje del mundo de la política y el lenguaje deportivo. Para ello consideramos distintos aspectos de esta construcción, tanto en lo que compete a su estructura interna como en lo que hace referencia a sus propiedades combinatorias en tanto que unidad léxica que resulta de la suma de sus elementos. Establecemos sus características específicas en inglés actual y su frecuencia de utilización, las características de los elementos individuales que la componen, los verbos y sustantivos más productivos y las combinaciones más frecuentes.

ISBN 9783895869839. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 09. 280pp. 2005.

Aspects of Cameroon English usage : a lexical appraisal

Jean-Paul Kouega
Université de Yaoundé 1

This study examines the innovative and creative development of lexis in Cameroon English. English in Cameroon evolves in a foreign geographical setting where its users are people of different cultures who speak several other languages.

The broad corpus of the study consists of written texts such as official and literary documents, and of spoken texts such as media programmes, conversations and speeches. The narrow corpus, on the other hand, is made up of a collection of new and adapted words which are widespread in the variety. As for the informants, they are mature Cameroonians who are holders of the GCE O’ Level and higher diplomas; they can fully operate in the English language and many of them actually make use of this language in their profession. The analysis reveals several interesting facts about Cameroon English. First of all, there exist a great number of adapted lexical terms in the English used in Cameroon, which is a common feature observed elsewhere in the world in most places where several languages come into contact. Secondly, the vast majority of new and adapted words in Cameroon English come from two widespread languages, namely French, the co-official language of the country, and Pidgin English, a popular non-ethnic lingua franca. Thirdly, while French donates words referring to government institutions and procedural processes, Pidgin English contributes loans for culture-specific domains such as traditional practices and foodstuffs. Fourthly, of the various word formative processes observed in language, the process of borrowing is by far the most productive in Cameroon English. Lastly, because Cameroonians already speak two or more languages before they start schooling and because, while in school, they learn to speak English exclusively from written materials - with their teachers serving as models - the sound system of English in the country is greatly modified: RP phonemes are greatly simplified, and foreign sounds are constantly used; word-stress is often shifted to different syllables, and tonal features are occasionally attached to certain words.



While some of these adapted terms do have English equivalents, many of them refer to concepts and objects which are new to the English community. There is therefore a need for educationists and language teachers in particular, to adjust their syllabus so as to accommodate those adapted terms whose English equivalents are unknown to Cameroonian users or are hardly used by them. There is also a need for lexicographers to bring together those terms which refer to new entities unknown to the English community; these will constitute Cameroon’s contribution to the development of English as a world language.



ISBN 9783895868771. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 10. 318pp. 2006.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics and Interlanguage English

Bettina Kraft & Ronald Geluykens (eds.)
University of Southampton, University of Oldenburg

In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing body of research in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics. The present collection of papers focuses on the pragmatics of interlanguage English, a focus which is justified by the growing importance of English as a global lingua franca as well as by the fact that, in cross-cultural contexts, English is now predominantly used by EFL or interlanguage users rather than by native speakers. The volume also discusses methodological and terminological issues (and problems) in contrastive, interlanguage, intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics

A lot of work in interlanguage pragmatics has traditionally been speech act based; some of the papers in this volume follow this tradition and examine the realization of speech acts such as requests, apologies, complaints, and threat responses. Others investigate the use of interlanguage English (and, in a few cases, French) in a variety of interactional contexts. Such contexts include controlled elicitation procedures (e.g. interviews, role plays) as well as spontaneous conversational interactions.

In short, the collection explores a variety of data collection methods as well as examining a wide range of linguistic phenomena in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (intonation, coherence devices, word order, speech acts). Additionally, a number of methodologies are employed in the various papers (relevance theory, conversation analysis, speech act theory).

This book thus offers a representative overview of the current ‘state of the art’ in cross-cultural pragmatics in general, and the pragmatics of interlanguage English in particular.

Contents

PART I: Theoretical Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
1. Defining Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatics (Bettina Kraft and Ronald Geluykens)
2. On Methodology in Cross-Cultural Pragmatics (Ronald Geluykens)
3. Extending the Scope of Inquiry in Interlanguage Pragmatics: The Case of Focus Constructions (Marcus Callies)
4. Integrating Relevance: An Evaluation of Theoretical Accounts for the Acquisition of Pragmatic Abilities in a Second Language (Beatriz De Paiva)

PART II: Investigating Face-Threatening Acts through Production Questionnaires
5. Variation in British and American English Requests: A Contrastive Analysis (Anja Breuer and Ronald Geluykens)
6. Gender-Based Differences in English Apology Realizations (Eva Ogiermann)
7. Gender Variation in Native and Interlanguage Complaints (Ronald Geluykens and Bettina Kraft)
8. Investigating Preference Organization and Social Variation through Questionnaires: TheCase of Threat Responses (Holger Limberg and Ronald Geluykens)

PART III: Investigating Discourse Phenomena in Interactional Data
9. Intensifiers in the Responses of Native and Non-Native Speakers to Evaluating Questions (Aart Pouw)
10. Coherence Devices in the Englishes of Speakers in the Expanding Circle (Christiane Meierkord)
11. Discourse Patterns in Intercultural Conversations (Winnie Cheng)
12. Tone Choice in the English Intonation of Finns (Juhani Toivanen)

List of Contributors (in alphabetical order)

Anja Breuer (formerly at University of Muenster, Germany)
Marcus Callies (Univerity of Marburg, Germany)
Winnie Cheng (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
Beatriz De Paiva (Heriot Watt University, UK)
Ronald Geluykens (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Bettina Kraft (University of Southampton, UK)
Holger Limberg (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Christiane Meierkord (University of Muenster, Germany)
Eva Ogiermann (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Aart Pouw (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Juhani Toivanen (University of Oulu, Finland)

ISBN 9783895867767. LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics 11. 260pp. 2007.