While research on language change has formulated robust empirical generalisations about processes and motivations underlying the emergence and spread of linguistic elements, their decline and loss is less well understood. So far a systematic investigation into the processes and motivations of… read more
This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine… read more
Edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder and Juliane House
This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites)… read more
Numerous corpus studies have firmly established that in recent English, most core modals (e.g. must) have been declining in frequency, while the semi-modals (e.g. have to) have been on the rise (cf. e.g. Krug 2000; Mair & Leech 2006; Leech & Smith 2006). The present paper follows the… read more
This contribution summarizes results of the project Covert Translation, where we investigated the influence of Anglophone communicative conventions on German via translation. Our hypothesis was that the prestige of English as a lingua franca and the growing number of translations from English into… read more
Language contact through translation (LCTT) is a particular source of contact-induced language change. While investigations into individual scenarios have shown its importance, major works on language contact have largely neglected this type of language contact. In particular, no attempt has been… read more
It has often been stated that grammaticalization is accompanied by subjectification (e.g. Traugott 1995), which has been rectified to the idea that this process typically tends to accompany only primary grammaticalization, i.e. the very early stages of grammaticalization (Traugott 2010). Taking… read more
This contribution addresses the question of whether and how translation as a classic case of language contact can act as a trigger for convergence and divergence phenomena between two languages. We present two studies which indicate that translation-induced convergence does not occur… read more
The aim of the study is to analyse the subjective uses of the progressive in 17th and 18th century English, i.e., uses of the progressives as expressions of speaker attitude. After an overview of the Old and Middle English meanings of the progressive, I discuss the three different types of… read more
