Full Description
Written by one of Britain's most distinguished linguists, this book is concerned with the phenomenon of variance in English grammar and vocabulary across regional, social, stylistic and temporal space.
Contents
Foreword
1. Variance in English: the global context
2. Variance and the concept of good usage
3. Language varieties and standard language
4. Language spread and language variation
5. Linguistic variance: nature and art
6. Orwell and language engineering
7. Exploring the English genitive: a tribute to Jespersen
8. A case study of multiple meaning
9. Non-finite clauses in Chaucer
10. On having a look in a corpus
11. The Survey of English Usage and adverbial realisations
12. Grammatical data by elicitation
13. A problem of modality
14. Acceptability experiments in spoken English
15. A tough object to trace
16. Activating latent contrasts
17. Contrasts in lexical semantics
18. Aspect and variant inflexion
19. Taking a deep smell: sex and a single verb
References
Index
