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Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 241–260

A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change

| University of Mannheim
| University of Stuttgart

This chapter discusses results from a quantitative study of possible contact-induced change in Middle English in a multi-genre corpus (the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2 (PPCME2), Kroch & Taylor 2000, and a single-genre corpus, the Penn Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), Taylor et al. 2006). We claim that the data from the correspondence corpus are critical to understanding the rise of the recipient passive (more traditionally called the indirect passive) in late ME because they reflect the active competence of writers, much more than other genres do (at least in the PPCME2). More precisely, we argue that our data reflect a verb class specific passive construction that seems to be firmly established in the grammar of the writers. This construction is not calqued from the model language (Old French) but the result of interpreting the French dative as different from the English ‘dative’.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Passive and case
  • 3.The rise of the recipient passive in English
    • 3.1 Allen’s (1995) study
    • 3.2Comparing results from a multi-genre and a single-genre corpus study
  • 4.The language contact hypothesis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.11tri
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