Late Modern English Syntax

1. Introduction: Late Modern English syntax in its linguistic and socio-historical context
2. The decline of the be-perfect, linguistic relativity, and grammar writing in the nineteenth century
3. Let’s not, let’s don’tand don’t let’sin British and American English
4. Do we got a difference? Divergent developments of semi-auxiliary (have) got (to)in British and American English
5. From contraction to construction? The recent life of ’ll
6. Books that sell – mediopassives and the modification ‘constraint’
7. Beyond mere syntactic change: a micro-analytical study of various and numerous
8. Culturally conditioned language change? A multivariate analysis of genitive constructions in ARCHER
9. Variability in verb complementation in Late Modern English: finite vs. non-finite patterns
10. Opposite developments in composite predicate constructions: the case of take advantage ofand make use of
11. Constrained confusion: the gerund/ participle distinction in Late Modern English
12. Syntactic stability and change in nineteenth-century newspaper language

The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.