Over time, lexical items are recycled and take on different or additional meanings from the ones they originally had. Somewhat surprisingly, items may take on converse meanings. This is the case with the prepositions besides and beyond, which may signal either inclusion or exclusion, depending on the context. An etymological examination shows that over time, both words have undergone semantic extension from their original spatial meanings. Syntactically, the primary functions of the two are as prepositions and adverbs. Quantitative results show that while nowadays beyond functions primarily as a preposition, besides functions equally often as an adverb and a preposition. The converse meanings of besides and beyond are shown here to depend on whether the context is assertive or non-assertive. Both words form part of a large group of prepositions of inclusion and exclusion which share both semantic and syntactic features. Syntactically, what is remarkable about all of them is their ability to occur not only with nominal complements but also with that-clauses, bare infinitives, and adjective phrases. One of the issues discussed in this article is what is the best syntactic analysis of these structures. 

This article is a quantitative and qualitative diachronic study of how the expression politically correct (PC) and related phrases are used in the American magazine Time from 1923 through 2006. The data show a dramatic increase in the frequency with which PC-phrases are used in the early 1990s. From this time onwards, the phrases are often used as a means of passing evaluative subjective opinions off as objectively reported facts, especially in reviews of cultural events, where they figure prominently. In contrast to earlier studies, our data show that PC-phrases are not inherently negative; this applies primarily to discourse on environment and business, where to be PC often implies being environmentally or socially conscious in a positive sense. Nevertheless, negative or ironic uses of the terms predominate. Most often they express criticism of unspoken cultural norms rather than being attempts to close down debate or criticizing the replacement of offensive terms by more neutral expressions

English verbs are generally classified as either stative or dynamic, where one of the main differences is said to be that stative verbs are inimical to the progressive aspect. Cases where such verbs do occur in the progressive are often explained away as involving a change in verb meaning. Another common approach to the progressive is to maintain that the progressive form as such can convey a range of meanings. Most commonly, a distinction is made between progressives with aspectual meaning and progressives with subjective meaning. In the present paper we take a functional-semantic approach and argue that all so-called stative verbs can potentially be used in the progressive. We further argue that the grammatical morpheme -ing has a synchronically invariant core meaning which can be pressed into service via the progressive construction to evoke a variety of messages – aspectual and expressive – depending on the context and the communicative needs of the speaker. The data used in the present paper are 132 tokens of BE loving and 66 tokens of BE knowing from the Corpus of Historical American English. Our results suggest that one reason verbs such as these are said to be inimical to the progressive is because this usage is primarily a feature of spoken

Vägar till språk och litteratur är den fjärde utgåvan från Centrum för språk- och litteraturdidaktik (CSL) vid Karlstads universitet. Innehållet består av ett urval av de presentationer som framfördes i juni 2009 under den så kallade CSL-dagen av forskare och studerande vid universitetet. Denna årligen återkommande konferens vänder sig speciellt till verksamma lärare i regionen och syftar till att sprida kunskap och intresse för didaktisk forskning i språk och litteratur och inspirera lärare att bedriva egen forskning eller att samverka med universitetet både när det gäller att formulera problem i verksamheten och att välkomna och stötta examensarbetande studenter.

Bidragen i årets utgåva belyser olika vägar till språk och litteratur: genom boken, genom datorn och genom skrivandet. Temat berör alltså literacy både i dess grundmening som förmågan att läsa och skriva och i den vidare betydelsen att kunna förstå, tolka, skapa texter och anpassa språkbruk till olika sammanhang.