Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English (Studies in Corpus Linguistics)

Preface; This volume contains revised versions of five out of six papers presented at the international symposium "Corpus research on grammaticalization in English" organized by Hans Lindquist at Vaxjo University, Sweden, in 20-22 April, 2001. The original contributions have been supplemented by another four papers solicited from leading names in the field. In the invitation to the symposium, and later to the volume, the contributors were asked to present new empirical results on grammaticalization in English and to discuss methodological as well as theoretical questions in relation to these in the light of recent developments within the area. We believe that the result is an important collection of papers. The original symposium was supported by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, for which we would like to express our gratitude. In the preparation of the present book we have benefited from valuable advice from Elizabeth Traugott and from an anonymous reviewer. Most of all, however, we would like to thank the participants in the symposium and the additional contributors for their efforts and their patience. Vaxjo and Freiburg, December 2003; Hans Lindquist Christian Mair