Joybrato Mukherjee – författare

This book provides an overview of basic syntactic categories, analytical methods and theoretical frameworks that are needed for a comprehensive and systematic description and analysis of the syntax of English as it is spoken and written today. It is therefore useful for students of the English language but also for teachers who are looking for an overview of traditional syntactic analysis. In addition, the book explores various related aspects, such as syntactic variation, the relation between syntax and semantics, and psycholinguistic approaches to syntax. One focus throughout is to introduce the reader to the ‘art’ or science of syntactic argumentation. Almost all of the examples that are found in this book are drawn from language corpora – each syntactic concept, therefore, is exemplified by authentic language data.

The author critically discusses the concept of ‹general nouns›, which Halliday/Hasan introduced in their approach to lexical cohesion (1976), and she provides a comprehensive overview of these nouns from a micro- and a macro-linguistic perspective. For the empirical analysis, the author compiled a corpus, which allows statements about a medium- and genre-specific use of ‹general nouns›. For this purpose, she developed an analytical tool, which takes into account formal and semantic features. The major outcome of the corpus analysis is that ‹general nouns› are much more flexible in form and function than Halliday/Hasan assumed and, most importantly, that they fulfil genre-specific functions some of which have not systematically been associated with lexical cohesion.

The present volume includes a selection of 20 papers from the 31st Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held in Giessen (Germany) in May 2010. The conference topic was “Corpus linguistics and variation in English”. All the papers included in the present Conference Proceedings capture aspects of variation in language use on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and/or new methods of utilising corpora for the description of language variation. Of particular interest are the five plenary papers that are included in the present volume, focusing on corpus-based approaches to variation in language from different disciplinary perspectives: Stefan Th. Gries (quantitative-statistical descriptions of variation and corpora), Michaela Mahlberg (stylistic variation and corpora), Miriam Meyerhoff (variational sociolinguistics and corpora), Edgar W. Schneider (regional variation and corpora) and Elizabeth C. Traugott (historical variation/grammaticalization and corpora).