The goal of this paper is threefold: (i) to present some practical aspects of using the full-text version of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of a linguistic trend of change; (ii) to test a widely held assumption that sentence length in written English has been steadily decreasing over the past few centuries; (iii) to point to a possible link between changes in sentence length and changes in English syntactic usage. The empirical proof of concept for (iii) is provided by the decline in the frequency of the non-finite purpose subordinator in order to. Sentence length, genre and the likelihood of occurrence of in order to are shown to be interrelated.

The paper compares the usage of singular they with two morphologically similar constructions in British and American English. The constructions in question are lose one’s life and lose one’s job. The results obtained suggest that singular they, at least used with the two constructions in focus of this work, seems to be more widely used in the American variety of English than in the British variety. An additional aim of this work is to present and discuss some practical aspects of working with mega-corpora. The work shows how and where quantitative language studies need to be accompanied by manual and qualitative investigations. The corpora used in this work are the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

The main focus of this study is the so-adj-a construction seen as an instantiation of grammatical obsolescence in progress. Starting at where Klégr’s (2010) synchronic study of the construction’s local grammar and syntactic functions leaves it, the present work provides a diachronic account of changes in the frequency of use in the last two centuries; their implications; and an overview of possible causes that had led to the situation in which the construction became considerably rare in Present Day English. Methodologically, the paper features quantitative and statistical analyses of corpus data. The work uses the framework for the investigation of grammatical obsolescence designed in the author’s doctoral thesis (Rudnicka 2019). Additionally, the present chapter suggests extravagance as a cognitive motivation behind the emergence of the so-adj-a construction.

The topic of the “negative end” of change is, unlike the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to increasingly gain attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this article is threefold, namely to discuss (i) the terminology, (ii) the concepts, and (iii) the causes associated with the “negative end” of change in grammar. The article begins with an overview of research conducted on the topic. It then moves to situating phenomena referred to as loss, decline or obsolescence among processes of language change before elaborating on the terminology and concepts behind it. The last part of the paper looks at possible causes for constructions to display a gradual or rapid, but very consistent decrease in the frequency of use over time, which continues until the construction disappears or until there are only residual or fossilised forms left.

This paper is an empirical case study of grammatical obsolescence in progress. The main variable of study is the English purpose subordinator in order that, which is shown to be steadily decreasing in its frequency of use, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This work applies a data-driven approach for the investigation and description of obsolescence, recently developed by Rudnicka, Karolina. 2019. The Statistics of obsolescence: Purpose subordinators in Late Modern English. NIHIN: New Ideas in Human Interaction: Studies. Freiburg: Rombach. The methodology combines philological analysis with statistical methods used on data acquired from mega-corpora. Moving from the description of possible symptoms of obsolescence to different causes for it, the paper aims at presenting a comprehensive account of the studied phenomenon. Interestingly, a very significant role in the decline of in order that can be ascribed to the so-called higher-order processes, understood as processes influencing the constructional level from above. Two kinds of higher-order processes are shown to play an important role, namely i) an externally-motivated higher-order process exemplified by the drastic socio-cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ii) an internally-motivated higher-order process instantiated by the rise of the to-infinitive (rise of infinite clauses).