In Watching TV with a Linguist, Fägersten challenges the conventional view of television as lowbrow entertainment devoid of intellectual activity. Rather, she champions the use of fictional television to learn about linguistics and at the same time promotes enriched television viewing experiences by explaining the role of language in creating humor, conveying drama, and developing identifiable characters. The essays gathered in this volume explore specific areas of linguistics, pr...

This book examines grammatical changes that took place in the medieval language contact situation between English and French from 1066 until 1500. It investigates structural copying phenomena and their connection with the lexicon, finding that copying of lexical verbs with a predicate-argument structure accelerated wider grammatical changes, and shows why the traditional notion of borrowing should be replaced with the more adequate concept of copying. The authors start by taking a fresh loo...