ICE-GB is a 1 million-word corpus of contemporary British English. It is fully parsed, and contains over 83,000 syntactic trees. Together with the dedicated retrieval software, ICECUP, ICE-GB is an unprecedented resource for the study of English syntax.Exploring Natural Language is a comprehensive… read more
On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five – semantically… read more
This paper takes the variation between must, have to and have got to as a window through which to view changes in the modal system in Present-Day British English (1960s–1990s). The results from this study show a dramatic decrease in frequency of the core modal must and a significant increase in… read more
In a number of publications (e.g. Croft 2001, 2004, 2006) Bill Croft has argued that distributional analysis as a methodology for setting up grammatical categories poses problems which can be avoided if constructions, not word classes, are grammatically primitive, and if categories are derived from… read more
Many schools of modern linguistics generally adopt a rigid approach to categorisation by not allowing degrees of form class membership, degrees of resemblance to a prototype or overlaps between categories. This all-or-none conception of categorisation (Bolinger 1961) goes back to Aristotle, and… read more
