Edited by Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Violeta Sotirova
Linguistics and Literary History systematically explores the advantages of an inter-disciplinary approach within the broad area of English studies. It brings together stylistics, literary theory and diachronic linguistics in order to explore their interaction at various methodological, descriptive… read more
The present work contributes to a better understanding of the English system of degree by means of a study of a number of aspects in the evolution of adjective comparison that have so far either been considered controversial or not been accounted for at all. As will be shown, the diachronic aspects… read more
Previous scholarship dates the development of stacked modification in English to the late Middle English period and the operationalisation of the modern NP functional structure to the end of the seventeenth century (Fischer 2006; Feist 2012). These studies have mainly focused on linguistic factors… read more
This paper explores the competition between round brackets and other punctuation
marks as delimiters of kinesic parentheticals in Austen’s dialogue (e.g.
said Harriet, in a mortified voice). Drawing mainly on an analysis of Emma,
the investigation suggests that, linguistically, round brackets in… read more
Round brackets undergo a process of stylistic re-evaluation that coincides with the development of Austen’s literary career (from pernicious elements that break the perspicuity of the Enlightened sentence to positively appraised markers of spoken spontaneity and emotion). Through a corpus-based… read more
Through a corpus-based study of the behaviour of little (ME-PDE), the paper explores (a) the effects of processes of subjectivisation (vid. De Smet and Verstraete 2006) on the syntactic configuration of the English NP and (b) how these latter relate to key iconicity postulates. More specifically,… read more
