From clerks to corpora : essays on the English language yesterday and today : essays in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson

Why is the Isle of Dogs in the Thames called Isle of Dogs? Did King Canute's men bring English usage back to Jutland? How can we find out where English speakers suck their breath in to give a short response? And what did the Brontës do about dialect and think about foreign languages? The answers are in this collection of empirical work on English past and present in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor of English Language at Stockholm University. The first five chapters report individual studies forming an overview of current issues in the study of Old and Middle English phonology, lexis and syntax. The next six look at Early Modern and Modern English from a historical point of view, using data from corpora, manuscript archives, and fiction. Two more look at the Old English scholar JRR Tolkien and his work. The remaining chapters discuss aspects of Modern English. Several use corpora to look at English usage in itself or in relation to Swedish, French, or Norwegian. The last three look at grammatical models, the pragmatics of second language use, and modern English semantics. Introduction Philip Shaw et al. The Middle English Development of Old English y and Lengthened y: Spelling Evidence Gjertrud F Stenbrenden Linguistic Mysteries Around the North Sea Östen Dahl The Late Middle English Version of Practica Urinarum in London, Wellcome Library, MS 537 (ff. 15r-40v) Javier Calle-Martín Is Plant Species Identification Possible in Middle English Herbals? David Moreno Olalla The Periphrastic Subjunctive in the Old English Multiple Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels Marcelle Cole On the Place-Name Isle of Dogs Laura Wright English Genres in Diachronic Corpus Linguistics Erik Smitterberg & Merja Kytö Here is an Old Mastiffe Bitch Ø Stands Barking at Mee: Zero Subject Relativizers in Early Modern English (T)here-Constructions Gunnel Tottie & Christine Johansson “Norfolk People Know Best”: On the Written Representation of Accents as Performed and Perceived by ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ Gunnel Melchers Sublime Caledonia: Description, Narration and Evaluation in Nineteenth-century Texts on Scotland Marina Dossena The Development of Attitudes to Foreign Languages as Shown in the English Novel Philip Shaw “Mythonomer”: Tolkien on Myth in His Scholarly Work Maria Kuteeva Reflections on Tolkien’s Use of Beowulf Arne Zettersten Commentators and Corpora: Evidence about Markers of Formality David Minugh Recent Changes in the Modal Area of Necessity and Obligation – A Contrastive Perspective Karin Aijmer Motion to and Motion through: Evidence from a Multilingual Corpus Thomas Egan Using the World Wide Web to Research Spoken Varieties of English: The Case of Pulmonic Ingressive Speech Peter Sundkvist Another Look at Preposition Stranding: English and Swedish Discourse Patterns Francesco-Alessio Ursini There is Nothing Like Native Speech: A Comparison of Native and Very Advanced Non-Native Speech Britt Erman & Margareta Lewis “Bachelor Means Nothing Without Husband and Father” : What Collocations Reveal about a Cognitive Category Christina Alm-Arvius Why is the Isle of Dogs in the Thames called Isle of Dogs? Did King Canute's men bring English usage back to Jutland? How can we find out where English speakers suck their breath in to give a short response? And what did the Brontes do about dialect and think about foreign languages? The answers are in this collection of empirical work on English past and present in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor of English Language at Stockholm University. The first five chapters report individual studies forming an overview of current issues in the study of Old and Middle English phonology, lexis and syntax. The next six look at Early Modern and Modern English from a historical point of view, using data from corpora, manuscript archives, and fiction. Two more look at the Old English scholar JRR Tolkien and his work. The remaining chapters discuss aspects of Modern English. Several use corpora to look at English usage in itself or in relation to Swedish, French, or Norwegian. The last three look at grammatical models, the pragmatics of second language use, and modern English semantics.