This grammar book offers a simple but comprehensive syntactic system which enables the student to analyze any sentence down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of constituents at all levels. This analytic technique allows the student to approach the many grammatical problems in a consistent and revealing manner.

This monograph is an empirical study of a particular type of grammatical variation - genitive variation in English. Comparing the results of a Modern English experimental study and historical evidence for the development of genitive variation, the main empirical finding of this study is that the s-genitive has become more productive again from late Middle to Modern English. A new theoretical approach to grammatical variation is proposed which places the choice of genitive construction into the mind of individual language users and, in so doing, tries to account for the observed change.

This work is essentially based on grammaticalization theory a branch of linguistics which has gained prominence since the 1980s. It focuses on the interaction between diachrony and synchrony, langue and parole or, for that matter, competence and performance, I language and ? language. It does not see these levels as distinct linguistic domains, as much structurally oriented work does. It is important for the present purposes that such an interactionist view entails that performance effects may over time cause new grammatical code relations. Hence the importance of statistical empirical research, which led the author to adopt a predominantly corpus-based approach."

Introduction

Bibliography of Leon Kellner’s writings

Should

On the typological status of Old English

What positions fit in?

Language change typology and some aspects of the SVO development in English

Pronoun and reference in Old English poetry

The rise of the passive infinitive in English

Question-answer sequences in Old English

Between hypotaxis and parataxis. Clauses of reason in Ancrene Wisse...

The book offers a novel approach to the question of how to model narrativity against the background of perspectivization. By bringing together contributions from neuro- and cognitive linguistics, literary studies, and picture theory, the volume uncovers basic mechanisms of perspectivization that are common to the different levels of linguistic structure, literary novels, and narrative pictures. As such, it is also a book on narrative perspectivization since its contributions examine in detail the perspectival principles in medieval, romantic and postmodern literature, in the micro-linguistic structure of language, narrative pictures, literary novels, dramatic texts, and everyday stories.