Christian Mair

List of John Benjamins publications for which Christian Mair plays a role.

Journal

Title

Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English

Edited by Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair

[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 13] 2004. xiv, 265 pp.
Subjects Corpus linguistics | English linguistics | Germanic linguistics | Historical linguistics

Articles

The chapter studies the intertwined topics of Empire, migration and race in the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005). The British Empire emerges as a prominent topic from the mid-nineteenth century, but rapidly recedes into insignificance in the two decades following World War II. Emigration dominates in… read more
This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and… read more
Mair, Christian 2019 John H. McWhorter. 2018. The Creole DebateEnglish World-Wide 40:3, pp. 349–355 | Review
The growing impact of English in Germany since World War II has largely been dealt with in terms of lexical borrowing. In contrast to this, the present contribution will focus on emerging domains of regular use of English, be it as a lingua franca or as part of multilingual repertoires. Two of… read more
The study of “varieties of English around the world”, the “New Englishes” or “World Englishes” emerged at the intersection of dialectology, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics in the early 1980s and has become one of the most vibrant sub-fields of English linguistics. Work in this tradition… read more
The present study offers the first analysis of modals and semi-modals which is based on all six completed Brown family corpora (B-Brown, B-LOB, Brown, LOB, Frown, F-LOB) and shows that the dynamics of diachronic change have prevented the emergence and preservation of stable regional contrasts… read more
Mair, Christian 2015 Response to Davies and FuchsEnglish World-Wide 36:1, pp. 29–33 | Commentary
Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav read more
Mair, Christian 2014 Does money talk, and do languages have price tags? Economic perspectives on English as a global languageThe Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond, Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch (eds.), pp. 249–266 | Article
The rise of English to its present position of the world’s undisputed lingua franca and the role of Global English in a multilingual world are core topics of World Englishes research. However, this does not mean that they have not been of interest to researchers in other disciplines, as well – for… read more
Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across… read more
Referring to the work of the Innsbruck-born and Berlin-based dialectologist Alois Brandl (1855–1940), the paper shows how the opportunities provided by early recording technology made linguists question the notion of dialect as a stable, regionally defined variety of a language. It goes on to argue… read more
We investigate variable usage in specificational cleft sentences of the types All I did was help / to help / I helped him find a new job. Previous research identified a drift away from the marked and towards the unmarked infinitive in British and American English in the twentieth century. Spoken… read more
Mair, Christian 2011 Corpora and the new Englishes: Using the ‘Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican’ to explore research perspectives for the futureA Taste for Corpora: In honour of Sylviane Granger, Meunier, Fanny, Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Magali Paquot (eds.), pp. 209–236 | Article
Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g.… read more
The contribution is a plea for closer co-operation between sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics in the study of World Englishes, supporting the case with the author’s own findings from the recently completed Jamaican component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-JA). The variables… read more
Mair, Christian 2009 Infinitival and gerundial complementsComparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and beyond, Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds.), pp. 261–274 | Article
The present contribution investigates three patterns of non-finite clausal complementation which are known to be variable in contemporary British and American English, namely the use of bare and to-infinitives with help, the presence or absence of from before gerunds following the verb prevent, and… read more
Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair 2004 IntroductionCorpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English, Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair (eds.), pp. ix–xiv | Miscellaneous
Mair, Christian 2004 Corpus linguistics and grammaticalisation theory: Statistics, frequencies, and beyondCorpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English, Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair (eds.), pp. 121–150 | Article
The paper argues for a closer collaboration between corpus linguists and grammaticalisation theorists. Corpora have a number of benefits: First, they make it possible to study incipient or ongoing processes of grammaticalisation. Secondly, a quantitative-cum-qualitative analysis of corpus data… read more
After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the… read more
Mair, Christian, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey N. Leech and Nicholas Smith 2002 Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: A comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corporaInternational Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7:2, pp. 245–264 | Article
The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and… read more
This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a… read more
Mair, Christian 1991 Presuppositions in English and German subject clausesFurther Insights into Contrastive Analysis, Fisiak, Jacek (ed.), pp. 527 ff. | Article