Change in contemporary English: A grammatical study (review)

This book, focused on twentieth-century developments in British and American English, valuably foregrounds recent grammatical change, raising the question in the first few pages of what makes grammatical change difficult to perceive. As these four authors go on to explain, grammatical change is typically subtle and slow (the well-known exceptions such as the rise of quotative like are probably well known exactly because they are exceptional); the most notable grammatical changes also may be happening behind the curtain of prescriptivism. In other words, prescriptive attention to a few select shibboleths such as the use of whom versus who (which the authors argue has actually changed fairly little over the past few centuries) can encourage linguists to select these constructions for descriptive examination—in the process privileging these constructions over others (such as the increasing lexical density of the noun phrase), which may be changing the structure of the language more radically.

This is an important book for anyone interested in recent grammatical change and in corpus-based methodologies for studying grammatical change. The book is brimming with detailed information about specific structural changes in English over the past few decades, complemented by productive speculation about the functional explanations behind these changes. These major explanatory processes include (as summarized in Ch. 11): grammaticalization, colloquialization, densification of content, and change induced by contact among regional varieties of Standard English.

Replete with new material for experts on English syntax (both synchronic and diachronic), the book has the potential to be a valuable resource for advanced students as well, with one caveat: the book expects control of fairly technical terminology from the very first pages. For example, the second page of the book introduces the question of whether nonfinite relative clauses (e.g. the book to read on that topic) are spreading, possibly at the expense of finite alternatives (e.g. the book that one should read on that topic). There are example sentences of these kinds of clauses, but the terminology itself (e.g. ‘finite’, ‘nonfinite’) is taken for granted; a few pages later, terms such as ‘lexico-grammatical’ appear without explanation, and ‘re-analysis’ is glossed only briefly as ‘the development of a new underlying form for an established surface sequence’ (7).

That said, the potential benefits for students are real and important. First, the book assiduously lays out the details of the corpus-based searches at the core of each of the central eight chapters. These descriptions, by pioneering scholars in the field, provide excellent models for how to use corpora to study complex syntactic phenomena and for how to navigate some of the tricky methodological decisions involved both in specifying the data set and categorizing the data (some of which often must be done manually). For example, Ch. 7 details the methodology for retrieving get-passives including: decisions about how to categorize get married (weighing one scholarly treatment against another) and about excluding idioms; the automatic retrieval of all instances of get followed by a past participle; and the required post-editing to exclude instances where the participle functions as an adjective (e.g. get drunk). Second, the book opens up for students and established scholars alike innumerable possibilities for future studies. There are dozens of linguistic questions begging for articles if not dissertations mentioned in the pages of this book.

The authors assert confidently in the preface that corpus linguistics ‘is now a mainstream paradigm’ (xix), and the book effectively demonstrates what such studies can reveal. Importantly, the authors are also candid about the limits of the studies presented here, be those due to the limits of the corpora (e.g. they are comparatively small and cover only thirty years), the limits of feasibly retrievable data, or the limits of what the available data can indicate about the mechanisms of grammatical change. The four central corpora include: the Brown corpus (American English, 1961); the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus (British English...