Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study

Abstract

In recent decades, corpus linguistics has become one of the mainstream paradigms in the study of languages, in particular in the study of English. All of the authors of the book under review here have played a crucial part in this development, as compilers and also as early researchers of corpora of Present-Day English (Leech: LOB; Leech/Smith: Lancaster 1931 Corpus; BLOB-1931; Mair/Hundt: F-LOB and Frown). Claiming to have been “more intimately engaged with these corpora than any other research group” (xix), the authors highlight the “affection” they feel for corpora (xx). And indeed, the book is a token of their affection for corpus linguistics and for the corpora analyzed. The volume aims at giving an empirically-based account of how the English language has been changing recently, i.e. in the time-span from 1961 to 1991/2. This time-span is determined by the corpora used, namely the four corpora of the wellknown “Brown quartet” or “Brown family”, i.e. Brown (American English) and LOB (British English) for 1961 and Frown (American English) and F-LOB (British English) for 1991/2 (descriptions of the corpora are found in Chapter 2.2 and in Appendix II). The strength of this group of corpora lies in their comparability: they are of virtually the same size and the same selection of texts and genres (represented by 500 matching text samples of c. 2,000 words of written British or American English). All of these corpora have – individually or comparatively – been much used in recent years, but the authors nonetheless claim that the studies collected in this book present a new approach, namely a new kind of corpus-based historical research labelled “comparative corpus linguistics” or “short-term diachronic comparable corpus linguistics” (24; for a discussion of the methodology, see also Chapter 2, 24–50). The comparisons themselves are documented in many statistical tables and charts, exhaustively comparing frequencies across time, varieties and genres (fortunately, the authors decided to move many of the more complex tables and diagrams to Appendix III). Yet, even if the studies can generally be said to follow a more “rigorous methodology” than some comparable studies, presenting “comparative corpus linguistics” as a new approach here seems somewhat awkward, given that the 1991/2 corpora F-LOB and Frown were deliberately designed by the Freiburg team (among them Mair and Hundt) for allowing comparison with the earlier LOB and Brown corpora. As its subtitle specifies, the book focuses on changes in grammar (cf. the broader design of Mair 2006, which is also based on a systematic evaluation of virtually the same corpora, but also discusses changes in the lexicon etc.). After the two introductory chapters outlining the methodology and introducing the corpora, the main parts of the book – seven chapters – concentrate on changes in the verb phrase: the subjunctive (in particular the were-subjunctive and the revival of the “mandative subjunctive”; Chapter 3), modal auxiliaries and so-called “semi-modals” such as (have) got to/gotta, wanna or to be going to (Chapters 4 and 5), the progressive (Chapter 6), the passive (beand get-passive as well as medio-passive; Chapter 7), expanded predicates with “light verbs” plus deverbal noun such as have/take a look (Chapter 8), and non-finite constructions (infinitives, gerunds; Chapter 9). Chapter 10 focuses on the noun phrase, discussing a range of changes in noun-noun sequences (such as animal rights campaign), in genitives (s-genitive vs. of-genitive) and in relative clauses (particularly the choice of wh-relativizers, that or zero).