Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English

Abstract

Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ongoing change has been helped by increases in the size of available corpora and even more so by better coverage of spoken English. Secondly, researchers have a much wider range of statistical methods to choose from. Thirdly, conceptual advances have been made in theoretical models of change, particularly with regard to the impact of language ideologies and prescriptivism. In the study of ongoing changes, the corpus-based approach remains indispensable because it remedies the errors of impressionistic observation and helps shift attention from a small number of shibboleths important to prescriptivists to the groundswell of grammatical change that generally proceeds below the level of speakers’ conscious awareness.