This book provides the first empirical study of the history and spread of mediopassive constructions. It investigates the productivity of the pattern, the spread of the construction in Modern English, and looks into text type-specific preferences for the construction. On a more abstract level, it combines the corpus-based description of mediopassive constructions with cognitive linguistic models, drawing largely on notions such as 'prototype', 'family resemblances', 'patch' and 'construction'. The theoretical modelling is largely based on data from real texts. These come from publicly available machine-readable corpora, text-databases and a single-register 'corpus' (American mail-order catalogues). The study combines the corpus-based approach with cognitive theories and is therefore of interest to both empirical and theoretical linguists.    Contents:   List of tables and figures  Preface  Chapter 1: Introduction  Chapter 2: Defining the object of study  Chapter 3: Previous studies  Chapter 4: Theoretical background  Chapter 5: The mediopassive in Present Day English  Chapter 6: The history of mediopassives  Chapter 7: Conclusion  References  Appendix 1: Primary material  Appendix 2: Sample pages of Sears & Roebucks catalogues  Appendix 3: Additional tables and figures  Index

English mediopassive constructions: A cognitive, corpus-based study of their origin, spread, and current status (Language & Computers 58) (Language and Computers Studies in Practical Linguistics)

English mediopassive constructions: A cognitive, corpus-based study of their origin, spread, and current status (Language & Computers 58) (Language and Computers Studies in Practical Linguistics) PDF

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