Investigating recent language change with corpora Introduction

There is an exciting emerging research area in English Linguistics which concerns itself with current change, i.e. changes in the language that have taken place over relatively short spans of time, over decades rather than centuries, as is traditionally the case in diachronic linguistics. Changes across shorter periods of time have been studied in the past by a number of scholars, e.g. by Barber (1964), and more recently by Denison (1993, 1998, 2001, 2004), Krug (2000), Leech (2003, 2004), Leech and Smith (2006, 2009), Mair (1995, 1997), Mair and Hundt (1995, 1997), Mair and Leech (2006), and Smith (2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2005). A number of these publications culminated in Leech, Hundt, Mair and Smith (2009), a state-of-the-art research publication which aims to give an overview of changes in the various sub-systems of English grammar, and offers, for the first time, a relatively comprehensive account of trends of change in the grammatical system of written English. The present volume builds on work based on the ‘Brown family’ of written (printed) corpora reported in Leech, Hundt, Mair and Smith (2009), and other recent research, especially that emanating from the Survey of English Usage at University College London, focusing particularly on spoken English: e.g. Aarts, Close and Wallis (2010), Aarts and Close (2010), Aarts, López-Couso and Méndez-Naya (forthcoming), Aarts, Bowie and Wallis (forthcoming) and Bowie and Aarts (forthcoming). However, even since this book was planned, the field has been moving on greatly, and there are now fresh opportunities to explore the recent history of American English using the corpora assembled by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, 1 and a more extended version of the ARCHER corpus, as presented here in the contribution of Biber and Gray. We have thus brought together in this book leading scholars from around the world, as well as a number of promising young researchers whose work addresses various aspects of current change in English grammar. There are three parameters determining the content of this book. First, as already announced, its focus is on current change – by which we mean change in the recent past, and (as far as it can be determined) in the contemporary language. Secondly, we focus on the verb phrase, including a wide range of verb patterns and constructions which have attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention in recent years. They include the progressive and perfect aspects, the passive voice, intention-marking constructions, (semi)-modal verbs, structures of negation, various complementation patterns, and verb and negative contractions. No major facet of the grammar of the English verb is ignored. The third parameter is the concentration on methodologies for investigating shortterm patterns of change in the language. The papers in this volume all carry out research with text corpora. In tracing the recent history of the language, we naturally turn to diachronic corpus evidence, or at least, to the evidence found in electronic texts or text collections. This applies whether or not we are using corpora sampled from non-