Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
As the legislative bodies of democratic nations, parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics, big data,… read more
The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001), it is often applied to studies that do not, in fact, fullfil the… read more
Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights… read more
This chapter investigates discourses of mental health in the British parliament over two centuries (1800–2020). A pattern-driven approach is used to explore terminology related to mentally ill people, mental institutions, and mental health in general. The study focuses on lexical trends in… read more
A key task in the study of the system of English predicate complementation is to account for the variation between to infinitive and gerundial complements of verbs and adjectives in recent English. This chapter examines to infinitive and to ‑ing complements of the adjective accustomed, with data… read more
Originally introduced in literary theory, Gerard Genette’s concept of paratext has been increasingly adopted in historical linguistics as a collective term for features other than the so-called ‘body text’. While this development and the renewed attention to these features is welcome, we argue… read more
Family and kinship are fundamental concepts of human society and of political governance. Proceeding from the notion that frequency of reference can be taken as a simple measure of visibility and representation, this study examines diachronic trends of kinship reference in British parliamentary… read more
The observation, recognition and interpretation of signs of illness has been recognised as one of the cornerstones of medical practice since Hippocrates. Over the centuries, the repertoire of signifier terms used by medical writers has undergone numerous changes. This chapter traces the history of… read more
The borderless nature of blogging raises the question whether the traditional regionally defined varieties of English continue to hold true (see Crystal 2011). In order to investigate the extent to which the language published online without external intervention is similar around the world, this… read more
This article looks at the frequency and use of sequences of two or more attributive adjectives in early modern medical writing in English. Taking as a starting point the observation that long sequences of premodifiers are one of the many linguistic features that add complexity to present-day… read more
Historical linguists frequently find themselves working with primary texts of uncertain or dubious origin. Sometimes the author of a text is not known at all or the authorship has been contested on the basis of book-historical evidence; but, whatever the reason is, uncertainties about authorship… read more
This paper discusses the lexicographical contributions of John Halle (1529–1568), a surgeon and a Protestant poet from Maidstone, Kent. Halle was a member of progressive group of elite surgeons intent on improving the profession’s prestige by educating its members and by producing vernacular… read more
The hyperlink of digital hypertext is a text organizing device which allows the creation of alternative structures through texts organized as networks. This paper examines the inherent keyness of the hyperlink by comparing hyperlinks to statistical keywords derived from text through computational… read more
