Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context
Subtitle: Eight Hundred Years of LIKE
Publisher: Benjamins Publishing Company, John
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9789027259523
Subjects: English language, syntax
Description: Like' is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of 'like', each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of 'like' in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.