How to Make New Use of Existing Resources:

Abstract

This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of, the study will make a methodological contribution to historical dialectology by showing that there are extensive, severely underused resources that can reveal valuable information about the geographical variation of English even if they were not originally designed for that purpose. Most crucially, the article introduces a way to investigate Early Modern English from the perspective of regional variation, thus paving the way for future research in a field that has been extremely challenging to study in the past.