The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and develops a model of how this may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or several case study in the history of the English language in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.

Marianne Hundt is Professor of English Linguistics at Universität Zürich. Her research interests include grammatical variation and change in World Englishes. As a corpus-linguist, she has compiled and worked with corpora in World Englishes research and historical linguistics. She is the author of English Mediopassive Constructions (2007), co-author of Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (2009) and co-editor of English World-Wide.

Sandra Mollin is senior lecturer in English Linguistics at the Universität Heidelberg. Her research focuses on phraseology, varieties of English and the combination of corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methodology. She is the author of The (Ir)Reversibility of English Binomials (2014) and Euro-English: Assessing Variety Status (2006).

Simone E. Pfenninger is Assistant Professor at Universität Salzburg. Her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences in second language acquisition, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. She is the co-editor of the Second Language Acquisition book series for Multilingual Matters.