This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well. As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: "Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies", "Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics", and "Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora". The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades - from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools.

This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. The articles fall into four sections: (a) the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; (b) the status of emerging modal items; (c) stylistic variation and change; (d) sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. The book is of considerable value to students and teachers of English and Linguistics at undergraduate and graduate level worldwide.

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern En

Corpus-based studies of diachronic English have been thriving over the last three decades to such an extent that the validity of corpora in the enrichment of historical linguistic research is now undeniable. The present book is a collection of papers illustrating the state of the art in corpus-based research on diachronic English, by means of case-study expositions, software presentations, and theoretical discussions on the topic. The majority of these papers were delivered at the

Inspired by Frank Palmer's work, this book addresses a set of specific topics pertaining to the description of modality in English and places them in a broader context. A number of more general theoretical and typological matters are also raised, which bear upon the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. The methodology adopted is mostly functional-typological, though some reference is made to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from cognitive linguistics to parametric variation. Modal meanings are seen to extend beyond particular lexical and grammatical exponents, through sentential semantics and into actual contexts of use. At the same time, the study of modality seems to challenge commonly held views on the relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis. Other languages discussed include Brazilian Portuguese, Classical and Modern Greek and Spanish.