Linguistics Research Seminar

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:07:00 GMT

The Linguistics Research Seminar series offers the chance to hear about the latest research developments in Linguistics and Modern Languages. Seminars last around an hour and are open to anyone interested.

The next seminar takes place on Wednesday 19 March at 2.30pm in the West Building (Room: WG/13) and looks at the rise of cos and the downfall of for: changes in English reason conjunctions over the past 100 years.

Two notable developments in the use of English reason conjunctions over the past 100 years have been: the steep decline in the frequency of the reason conjunction for and, in contrast, the consistent rise in frequency of the reason conjunction (be)cause, increasingly reduced in speech to the monosyllable /kəz/ (often written cos in transcription).

This presentation, by Geoff Leach from Lancaster University, will try to explain the relationship between these two trends in terms of such historical processes as grammaticalization and colloquialization. The corpora used in this study include the Brown ‘family’ of corpora and the American English corpora COCA and COHA.

For more details visit: Research Seminars or contact Brian Walker, email: b.d.walker@hud.ac.uk

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