Processes of change in the history of English (Schneider)

With an eye to principles of linguistic change, the project investigates processes of change with respect to specific phenomena in the history of English and their continuation into varying manifestations in modern varieties. Notably, morphological and syntactic changes in the usage conditions of wh-pronouns as well as properties of certain mental verbs, including the use of as to connect object and object complement in complex transitive clauses, have been central topics of interest.

Publications and presentation

Schneider, Edgar W. 1988. "On polysemy in English, considering consider." In Werner Hüllen & Rainer Schulze, eds., Understanding the Lexicon. Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 157-169

Schneider, Edgar W. 1993. "The grammaticalization of possessive of which in Middle English and Early Modern English." Folia Linguistic Historica 14, 239-257.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1994. "You that be not able to consyder thys order of thinges: Variability and change in the semantics and syntax of a mental verb in Early Modern English." In Dieter Kastovsky, ed., Studies in Early Modern English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 379-402.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1996. "Towards syntactic isomorphism and semantic dissimilation: The syntax and semantics of prospective verbs in Early Modern English." In Derek Britton, ed., English Historical Linguistics 1994. Papers from the 8th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (8. ICEHL, Edinburgh, 19-23 September 1994). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, 199-220.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1996. "Constraints on the loss of case marking in English wh-pronouns: four hundred years of real-time evidence", in Jennifer Arnold et al., eds., Sociolinguistic Variation: Data, Theory, and Analysis. Selected Papers from NWAV23 at Stanford. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 487-499.

Schneider, Edgar W. 1997. "As as 'is'. Is as 'is'?" In Udo Fries, Viviane Müller und Peter Schneider, eds., From Aelfric to the New York Times: Studies in English Corpus Linguistics. Festschrift for Gunnel Tottie. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 33-50.

Schneider, Edgar W. "Animacy versus complexity? A corpus-based long-term investigation of the competition between possessive whose and of which." Paper presented to the ICAME 35 conference, Nottingham.