How TV expressions wind their way into your mind

Next month, the English Language Research Group here at the University of Edinburgh will be discussing Blythe & Croft (2012). The paper considers how language changes occur, and finds that, statistically speaking, changes that succeed tend to follow an s-curve. In other words, they start slow, then pick up steam and go along for a while before slowing down. Like this:

The functional creep of "all"

Despite yesterday's post about their failure to consider the idea that all is a determinative, Buchstaller and Traugott (B&T) present a good deal of interesting data on the functional creep of the universal determinative all. These are nicely summarized in their Table 2 (p. 365).