Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Major Corpora Cited in the Handbook
- Introduction
- Part I Methodological Considerations
- Part II Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Characteristics
- 4 Intonation and Other Prosodic Features
- 5 Keyword Analysis
- 6 Phraseology and Collocation
- 7 Lexical and Phraseological Complexity in Learner Language
- 8 Grammatical Variation
- 9 Grammatical Change
- 10 Discourse Analysis Using Corpus-Assisted Methodologies
- 11 Corpus Pragmatics
- 12 Multimodal Corpora
- Part III Corpus Analysis of Varieties
- Part IV Other Applications of Corpus Analysis
- Index
- References
9 - Grammatical Change
from Part II - Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Characteristics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2026
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Major Corpora Cited in the Handbook
- Introduction
- Part I Methodological Considerations
- Part II Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Characteristics
- 4 Intonation and Other Prosodic Features
- 5 Keyword Analysis
- 6 Phraseology and Collocation
- 7 Lexical and Phraseological Complexity in Learner Language
- 8 Grammatical Variation
- 9 Grammatical Change
- 10 Discourse Analysis Using Corpus-Assisted Methodologies
- 11 Corpus Pragmatics
- 12 Multimodal Corpora
- Part III Corpus Analysis of Varieties
- Part IV Other Applications of Corpus Analysis
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter discusses corpus linguistic work that investigates change in grammatical phenomena, such as word order patterns, complementation, clause linkage, pronoun systems, or markers of tense, aspect, and modality. The focus is on English grammar, but the main points are applicable to grammatical change in other languages as well. The chapter has two parts. The first part is a selective overview of diachronic studies with different subject matters and theoretical backgrounds in the area of corpus-based work on grammatical change. The overview addresses four core questions:• What grammatical phenomena have been studied?• What corpus-based measures and methods have been used in the process?• Which types of grammatical change are highly amenable to corpus analysis, and which ones less so?• What empirical and theoretical results have emerged?The second part of the chapter offers a detailed report on a diachronic corpus study addressing the English derivational suffix -ment. The study illustrates how corpus-based analysis can reveal the life cycle of a word-formation process. Discussion of the new formations that are typical for different historical stages yields a new perspective on productivity not as a one-dimensional quantitative measure but as a grammatical characteristic shaped over time by structure, meaning, and frequency alike.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics , pp. 177 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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