Death-related intensifiers in the history of the English language: grammaticalisation and other proccesses of language change

The experience of death is, anthropologically, of the most genuine concern for all cultures and societies worldwide, since it marks the most extreme limits of human existence. With such an impact on our routines, it should come as no surprise that it can be effectively exploited as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-linguistically. Although some studies have addressed the uses of specific intensifiers from the semantic field of death (cf. Claridge 2011 on dead and Margerie 2011 on to death), a comprehensive diachronic corpus-based study of death-related intensifiers is still missing. This dissertation, therefore, sets out to fill this gap by accounting for the semantic evolution of the intensifiers dead(ly), mortal(ly), and to death, covering from the Middle English period (1100-1500) to Present-day English

The rise and development of parenthetical needless to say: An assumed evidential strategy

The article traces the diachronic development of the assumed evidential needless to say. This parenthetical expression allows the speaker to make certain assertions regarding the obviousness of what s/he is about to say, thus serving as an evidential strategy that marks the information conveyed as being based on inference and/or assumed or general knowledge. Parenthetical needless to say has its roots in the Early Modern English needless to-INF construction (meaning ‘it is unnecessary to do something’), which originally licensed a wide range of infinitives. Over the course of time, however, it became restricted to uses with utterance verbs, eventually giving rise to the grammaticalized evidential expression needless to say. In fact, it is only in Late Modern English that the evidential pragmatic inferences become conventionalized and that the first parenthetical uses of the construction are attested. In Present-day English, parenthetical needless to say occurs primarily at the left periphery with forward scopeS

Innovacións léxicas no campo das novas tecnoloxías e das redes sociais: alternativas para o galego

The domains of computing and the new technologies have undergone dramatic changes over the last decades, transforming radically the way we communicate. As was already the case in other disciplines, these changes prompted the systematic borrowing of terms from English, which is often inevitable. The present paper reviews some of the most recent neologisms in the field of the new technologies and social networks, analysing their origin and degree of use in Galician, and additionally proposes an alternative Galician name for these concepts.Os campos da informática e das novas tecnoloxías experimentaron importantes avances nas últimas décadas e mesmo revolucionaron as nosas formas de comunicación. Todo isto trouxo consigo, como xa ten acontecido noutros ámbitos, unha inxente cantidade de anglicismos, aos que na maior parte das veces resulta case imposible facerlles fronte con éxito. Este artigo ofrece unha revisión dalgúns dos neoloxismos máis recentes nas áreas das novas tecnoloxías e das redes sociais, analiza a súa orixe e uso na lingua galega e propón denominacións propias alternativas

The Primary Education Learners' English Corpus (PELEC): Design and compilation

Abstract: This paper describes the process of design and compilation of the Primary Education Learners' English Corpus (PELEC), a learner corpus which includes written (14,577 words) and spoken materials (47,032 words) from Primary Education learners in the Autonomous Community of Cantabria. It is composed of data from a total of 252 students in the fourth and sixth grade of Primary Education (aged 9-10 and 11-12, respectively) who were studying in five different state schools which followed either a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) or an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) approach