• ISBN: 9789027214430
  • Category: Linguistics
  • Status: To be shipped from overseas 5-10 Days

£92.00

The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English

by Yao, Xinyue Published by John Benjamins

Published 2024.

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. As a corpus-based study of grammatical change, it is innovative in the following aspects: Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the two verb forms' context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences; it employs state-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods (e.g., mixed-effect logistic regression and random forests) to track the verb forms' functional changes over two and a half centuries; it uncovers new evidence both in favour of and against well-known pathways of grammatical change; it offers a compelling, contact-based account of grammatical differences between American and British English; and it brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

Other books that matched your search

Related books that matched your search