Binomials in the History of English: Fixed and Flexible

Description

Binomials, such as for and against, dead or alive, to have and to hold, can be broadly defined as two words belonging to the same grammatical category and linked by a semantic relationship. They are an important phraseological phenomenon present throughout the history of the English language. This volume offers a range of studies on binomials, their types and functions from Old English through to the present day. Searching for motivations and characteristic features of binomials in a particular genre or writer, the chapters engage with many linguistic levels of analysis, such as phonology or semantics, and explore the important role of translation. Drawing on philological and corpus-linguistic approaches, the authors employ qualitative and quantitative methods, setting the discussion firmly in the extra-linguistic context. Binomials and their extended forms - multinomials - emerge from these discussions as an important phraseological tool, with rich applications and complex motivations.

Joanna Kopaczyk is a researcher in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh and an associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She is a historical linguist with an interest in corpus methods, formulaic language, the history of Scots and historical multilingualism. She has given talks at conferences in Europe, the USA and Australia, and taught on various aspects of the history of English and Scots at universities in Poland, Germany, Finland, and the UK. Hans Sauer is emeritus professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munchen and currently also professor at Vistula University, Warsaw. He received a festschrift on his 65th birthday, and the commemorative medal of the faculty of arts at the Masarykova Univerzita v Brne, Czech Republic. He was president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) in 2004-5, and a member of the advisory board of the Richard Rawlinson Center (RRC) at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo for twenty years.

'Binomials in the History of English contains chapters providing detailed, interesting, and highly informative historical descriptions of binomials in English: fixed structures such as to and fro or knife and fork that are joined by a coordinator. Individual chapters contain descriptions of the form and function of these structures in texts taken from all the major periods of English, ranging from the roles that they played in Old English poetry and law to their stylistic uses in modern English novels.' Charles Meyer, University of Massachusetts, Boston