New trends and methodologies in applied English language research III: Synchronic and diachronic studies on discourse, lexis and grammar processing (Linguistic Insights)

This volume includes eleven papers pertaining to different areas of linguistics and organised into three sections. Part I contains diachronic studies which cover data from Middle English to Present-Day English and which explore phenomena such as the status of extender tags, the distribution of free adjuncts, post-auxiliary ellipsis, and the use of ‘ephemeral’ concessive adverbial subordinators. Part II comprises studies on grammar and language processing dealing with topics such as the interaction between syntactic and structural complexity and verbal agreement with collective subjects, the influence of distributivity and concreteness on verbal agreement, the interaction of complexity and efficiency in pronoun omission in Indian English and Singapore English, and the methods and approaches used for grammar teaching in modern EFL/ESL textbooks. Finally, Part III revolves around lexis, discourse and pragmatics, with papers that discuss the development of the discoursal representation of social actors in Argentinian newspapers after the military dictatorship, the construction of women’s gender identity through positive and negative emotions in women’s magazines, and spelling-to-sound correspondence on Twitter. Series page 3 Title page 4 Copyright 5 Table of contents 6 Introduction • Sofía Bemposta-Rivas, Carla Bouzada-Jabois and Yolanda Fernández-Pena 8 Part I: Diachronic studies 18 Looking into extender tags in Late Modern English: The case of or something or other • Alba Pérez-González 20 Referential links in -ing and -ed free adjuncts in Late Modern English • Carla Bouzada-Jabois 40 Ephemerality in concessive subordinators. Evidence from the history of English • Cristina Blanco-García 60 ‘We cou’d not fail of learning the Latin language, as well as we do the Modern Languages’: An empirical study of the licensors and genre distribution of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis in Late Modern English • Evelyn Gandón-Chapela 84 Part II: Grammar and language processing 108 Verbal agreement with collectives taking of-dependents: Syntactic and structural complexity as determinant factors • Yolanda Fernández-Pena 110 Interactivity and opportunism in agreement operations: An experimental study on the production of subject-verb agreement in English and Spanish • Paula Márquez-Caamaño 132 The conventionalization of performance preferences: Pronoun omission in Indian English and Singapore English • Iván Tamaredo 162 How is grammar presented in modern English textbooks? What can we learn from this? • Tamilla Mammadova 186 Part III: Lexis, discourse and pragmatics 206 Coming to terms with a traumatic past: Social actors in the Argentine media • Mariana Pascual 208 Evaluative language, women and advertising: The construction of women’s gender identity • Marta Muñoz-Ramal 234 Spelling-to-sound adaptations on Twitter: The relationship between spelling and pronunciation in a corpus of tweets • Úrsula Kirsten-Torrado 254 Notes on Contributors 274 Notes on Editors 280 This volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Fourth ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4). The eleven papers collected here pertain to different areas of linguistics as varied as diachronic linguistics, syntax, pragmatics or psycholinguistics.