The Changing English Language

Marianne Hundt is Professor of English Linguistics at Universität Zürich. Her research interests include grammatical variation and change in World Englishes. As a corpus-linguist, she has compiled and worked with corpora in World Englishes research and historical linguistics. She is the author of English Mediopassive Constructions (2007), co-author of Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (2009) and co-editor of English World-Wide. Sandra Mollin is senior lecturer in English Linguistics at the Universität Heidelberg. Her research focuses on phraseology, varieties of English and the combination of corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methodology. She is the author of The (Ir)Reversibility of English Binomials (2014) and Euro-English: Assessing Variety Status (2006). Simone E. Pfenninger is Assistant Professor at Universität Salzburg. Her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences in second language acquisition, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. She is the co-editor of the Second Language Acquisition book series for Multilingual Matters.

• 1. Introduction: language history meets psychology Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin and Simone E. Pfenninger; Part I. Frequency: 2. The Ecclesiastes principle in language change Harald Baayen, Fabian Tomaschek, Susanne Gahl and Michael Ramscar; 3. Frequencies in diachronic corpora and knowledge of language Martin Hilpert; Part II. Salience: 4. Salience in language usage, learning, and change Nick C. Ellis; 5. Low salience as an enabling factor in morphosyntactic change Elizabeth C. Traugott; Part III. Chunking: 6. Chunking in language usage, learning, and change: I don't know Nick C. Ellis; 7. Chunking and changes in compositionality in context Joan L. Bybee and Carol Lynn Moder; Part IV. Priming: 8. Priming and language change Martin J. Pickering and Simon Garrod; 9. From priming and processing to frequency effects and grammaticalisation? Contracted semi-modals in present-day English Christian Mair; Part V. Analogy: 10. The role of analogy in language processing and acquisition Heike Behrens; 11. The role of analogy in language change: supporting constructions Hendrik de Smet and Olga Fischer; Part VI. Ambiguity: 12. Syntactic ambiguity in real-time language processing and diachronic change Claudia Felser; 13. Ambiguity and vagueness in historical change David Denison; Part VII. Acquisition and Transmission: 14. Developing language from usage: explaining errors Elena V. M. Lieven; 15. Transferring insights from child language acquisition to diachronic change (and vice versa) María José López-Cous.

'This innovative collection sketches what a long overdue cooperation of psycholinguistics and language change could look like. By systematically investigating key psycholinguistic factors from both perspectives, it closes a striking gap in historical linguistics.' Lieselotte Anderwald, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel