This collection features different perspectives on how digital tools are changing our understanding of language varieties, language contact, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and dialectology through the lens of different historical contexts. With a clear focus on English, chapters in the volume showcase a broad range of digital methods and approaches that can contribute to advancing the study of historical linguistics. Visualisation tools and corpus-linguistic techniques are part of the methodologies included in the volume.The chapters present empirically based research, and discuss theoretical aspects that emphasise how digitalisation is changing our analysis of different domains of language, going from phonology, to specific grammatical/morphosyntactic and lexical features, to discourse-related issues more broadly. This book will be of interest to scholars in the history of the English language, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities.

This study is concerned with the categorial status of subordinating conjunctions and the internal and external structure of subordinate clauses. Starting out from the categorizations of subordinating conjunctions that prevail in recent generative linguistic theory, namely complementizers and prepositions, and from the division of syntactic categories into lexical and functional ones, the author investigates the lexical and grammatical properties of subordinating conjunctions which are held to account for both the distribution and the architecture of subordinate clauses. Central to this study is the relation between the category subordinating conjunction, the licensing of its projection and the licensing of its complement and specifier position. Part I is concerned with subordination in early Generative Grammar, the rise of the category C and the categorization of subordinating conjunctions. Part II focuses on recent conceptions of phrase structure, the inventory of syntactic categories, the lexical-functional dichotomy and syntactic movement. Part III is concerned with the lexical properties of complementizers (C), prepositions (P), and a third category of subordinating conjunctions (Subcon) which conflates properties of Cs and Ps. This categorization of subordinating conjunctions is arrived at on the basis of the distribution of the phrases they head and the mechanisms by which these elements license their complement and specifier. Cs, as typical functional heads, license both theirs complement and their specifier on the basis of feature checking mechanisms; Ps, as typical lexical heads, license these positions by theta-marking them. Within SubconP the complement is licensed by feature checking as within CP, and the specifier is licensed by theta-marking as within PP.

This volume contains papers presented at a workshop held at the 18th annual meeting of Deutsche Gesellschaft fA1/4r Sprachwissenschaft in 1996. The articles contained in this volume focus on the lexical vs. functional categoryhood of prepositional elements, their syntactic and semantic properties (also with respect to grammaticalization), aspects of automatic language processing and the meanings of prepositional elements in cognitive linguistics.