Paula Rautionaho - Böcker

In this collection of innovative and original articles, an international team of scholars demonstrate the newest technological trends and data-intensive technologies in the empirical study of English linguistics. Through a range of in-depth case studies, it advocates for the use of advanced technologies and digital tools to enable study in this ever-evolving field. To achieve optimal coherence across the volume, each chapter answers a core question: 'How can data-intensive and computational methods help scholars answer research questions that are solidly grounded in the theoretical foundations of English linguistics?' Digitalization is expected to accelerate, and this development will continue to impact research in the humanities. This volume fills in a clear gap and will drive empirical linguistic research forward, by introducing a variety of innovative techniques and tools that not only offer new answers to old questions in English linguistics but also open up exciting new research questions in the field.

This collection charts the evolution of grammatical variation in Englishes from Late Middle English to the present, using corpus linguistic tools to address divergence and convergence in local and global perspectives.The book considers both diachronic and synchronic perspectives in grammatical variation across varieties of English across the UK, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The volume reflects on the questions of whether patterns of variation diverge or converge and to what extent catalysts for change are shared in time and space. Chapters look at different factors in grammatical variation at both the macro and micro level, investigating specific linguistic and grammatical features but also at wider phenomena in contact linguistics, social patterns, social networks, and media-based corpora. Chapters progress from the local to the global, all with an eye towards using the latest methodological approaches from corpus linguistics to shed light on the affordances of data-informed methods to study grammatical change and the possibilities for future research.This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and World Englishes.