Approaching Language Variation through Corpora

Contents: Geoffrey Leech: Foreword - Shunji Yamazaki/Robert Sigley: Preface: Approaching Variation - Stig Johansson: Interpreting Textual Distribution: Social and Situational Factors - Robert Sigley: Assessing Corpus Comparability Using a Formality Index: The Case of the Brown/LOB Clones - Sebastian Hoffmann/Robert Sigley: Approaching a Linguistic Variable: That-Omission in Mandative Sentences - Graeme Kennedy: Semantic Preference of High-Frequency Mental Verbs in the British National Corpus - Teruhiko Fukaya: Functional Variation in Use of Though and When Clauses - Shunji Yamazaki: Comparing Adjective Comparison across Genre and Time in Standard Varieties of Modern English - Matti Rissanen: On the Occurrence and Variation of the Adverbial Subordination Markers Þe and Þot in Old English texts - Toshio Saito: The Syntactic Development of the Gerund in Early Modern English: A Survey Based on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English - Yoko Iyeiri: The Verb Pray in Chaucer and Caxton - Satoru Tsukamoto: Defining Periods of Middle English by Measuring Rates of Language Change - Pam Peters: Style and Politeness: The Case of the Personal Pronoun - Masahiro Hori: Approaching Literature as a Corpus: Gender-Based Conversational Styles in Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants' - Maria Stubbe: Active Listening in Conversation: Gender and the Use of Verbal Feedback.