One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters.

This collection contains 24 articles on the history of linguistics written between 1978 and 1988, divided into three parts: 1. Methods and Models in Linguistic Historiography 2. Tradition and Transmission of Linguistic Notions 3. Schools and Scholars in the History of Linguistics Three articles are written in German, two in French and one in Italian. The remaining eighteen articles are in English.

The four papers presented in this volume are corpus-based investigations into the meaning of the verbs speak, talk, say and tell. More specifically they want to explore how the scene of linguistic action has been put into perspective by these four high-frequency verbs.

This monograph has as its objective to give a critical survey of the development of the theories concerning the essence, the function, and the most characteristic (determining) features of language, and to explore and evaluate the motive forces responsible for this development. The author explains mainly the progressive elements of the theoretical foundations and methodological procedures of different times and schools (trends), and places them in the process which presents the course of development of linguistic theory as an organic whole.

Throughout history, linguists and literary scholars have been impelled by curiosity about particular linguistic or literary phenomena to seek to observe them in action in original texts. The fruits of each earlier enquiry in turn nourish the desire to continue to acquire knowledge, through further observation of newer linguistic facts. As time goes by, the corpus linguist operates increasingly in the awareness of what has gone before. Corpus Linguistics, thirty years on, is less an innocent sortie into corpus territory on the basis of a hunch than an informed, critical reassessment of existing analytical orthodoxy, in the light of new data coming on stream.