Richard Hogg was one of the founding editors of English Language and Linguistics up to his sudden death in 2007. For a short appreciation see Denison & Aarts (2007). The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE), which he had helped to set up, was already in informal operation, though not formally inaugurated until its first conference in Freiburg in November 2008.

The present article discusses the development of adverbial -ing clauses, so-called ‘converb clauses’, in English. We argue that Middle English does not have a category of truly subordinate adverbial clauses in -ing, but that such clauses have developed on the basis of semi-coordinate -ing clauses denoting an accompanying circumstance or exemplification/specification. In the course of the Middle English period, such clauses began to be reinterpreted as clauses expressing adverbial relations such as time, condition, cause, purpose, etc. Another likely source of converb clauses is participial relative clauses. We see the development of converb clauses as an instance of grammaticalization, as it involves the development of a grammatical means of expressing a rhetorical function, viz. the ‘Nucleus-Satellite’ relation (Mathiessen & Thompson 1988). This grammaticalization process also involves subjectification, given that the source constructions are propositional, while time and cause clauses have textual and expressive functions/meanings. The grammaticalization process was probably also fed by other participial structures – notably the progressive and the gerund, which were being grammaticalized at the same time – and also nonclausal adverbial structures.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the syntactic, pragmatic and semantic determinants of word-order variation in Modern English, exemplified by the specific case of the use of long passives as order-rearranging devices. Word order in English and in most other SVO languages is affected by a number of factors such as animacy, semantic role, discourse status and syntactic complexity (Sornicola 2006). In this article, which analyses the influence of such factors in the use of long passives, I will try to show that their effects are construction-specific; in particular, that factors which are crucial in determining word order in some constructions – factors such as the animacy of the constituents involved – are entirely overruled by others in the case of Modern English long passives. Corpus data presented here will also serve to address issues pertaining to the nature of the determinants of grammatical variation, such as their independent versus epiphenomenal character, their interactions, and the locus of their effects on word order.

In the literature it has been proposed that temporal adverbial clauses can be derived by wh-movement of an operator (e.g. when) to the left periphery (Geis 1970, 1975; Enç 1987: 655; Larson 1987, 1990; Dubinsky & Williams 1995; Declerck 1997; Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004: 165–70). After reviewing the arguments that have been proposed in favour of such a movement analysis, the article provides additional empirical evidence in support of the analysis. The data concern so-called Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) or Root phenomena, that is, syntactic phenomena such as argument fronting, Locative Inversion, preposing around be, VP preposing and Negative Inversion, which in English are by and large restricted to main clauses. The unavailability of these MCP in temporal adverbial clauses follows directly from the movement account. The movement analysis will be extended to conditional clauses and factive clauses.

Henry & Cottell (2007) argue that Belfast English (BE) sentences such as There shouldn't anybody say that and There've lots of people passed the test are transitive expletive constructions (TECs) similar to those that are a feature of Icelandic. They propose that the difference between BE and Standard English (SE) is that whereas expletive there is introduced in Spec vP in the latter it is introduced in Spec TP in the former. On the assumption that transitive subjects originate in Spec vP, this entails that expletive there cannot co-occur with a transitive verb. While it is clear that BE is different from SE in this area, it is not clear that BE has TECs while SE does not. There are a variety of examples which are acceptable in BE but not SE which do not seem to be TECs. SE also has certain examples which might be called TECs. The result of this is that Henry & Cottell's analysis is not very successful. It seems that what distinguishes BE from SE is not what verbs may follow the associate of the expletive but what elements may precede it. SE allows an associate immediately after be, but BE also allows an associate immediately after modals and have, and for some speakers seem and likely as well. The facts can be captured in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar by assuming that be has an extra lexical description with expletive there as its subject and the associate as an extra complement in both varieties of English, and that modals and have, and for some speakers seem and likely as well, have an extra lexical description of this form in BE. Generalizations can be captured if the pairs of lexical descriptions are analysed as alternative ways of fleshing out basic underspecified lexical descriptions.

The variable positioning of bare personal pronouns in Old English prose remains something of a mystery. In the role of prepositional object, for example, these elements are often found in positions where other prepositional object types are rarely attested. This article reports the results of an empirical study of a correlation between the variable placement of these pronouns and their specification for grammatical person. By demonstrating that this correlation defies a number of independent explanations, it is argued that person is an important aspect of the syntax of these constituents. The identification of two further correlations, one involving narrative mode and the other involving the relative positioning of preposition and verb, further demonstrates the value of quantitative methods in historical linguistics.

The range of structures commonly classed as close appositives forms a rich ecological niche where each construction relates to the other constructions forming a dense network of taxonomic and inheritance ties (Goldberg 1995). As a first approximation to the concept of close apposition, however, the structure of that network falls outside the scope of this article, where I focus on the theoretical notion of close apposition itself, on how it deviates from that of loose apposition (Acuña-Fariña 2006), and on an analysis of a quintessentially close appositive construction, the the poet Burns type in the literature (Curme 1947; Lee 1952; Fries 1952; Haugen 1953; Hockett 1955, 1958). The thesis that these strings are formed by a doubly endocentric structure where the putative first segment (the poet) is a grounded nominal (i.e. an active referent; e.g. Langacker 1991; Taylor 2002) is rejected. Instead, it is argued that these highly conventionalized close appositions are instances of ‘inchoate’ noun phrase structure, and that the internal constituency of such strings is not fully elaborated due to a lack of strong functional pressure. Three reasons are put forward in order to defend such a view: 1. the construction has as its job the activation of a social referent, and in the social world that we inhabit this is usually done either by name or profession, with no logical incompatibility between the two; 2. the construction is a hybrid of distinct and more productive (and fully elaborated) templates, which act as attractor poles and pull constituency in opposite directions; and 3. the construction is easily identifiable as such ‘from the top’. This makes it unnecessary to have to spend valuable cognitive resources (like creating, storing and deploying inaudible, abstract, constituent structure) when, somewhat metaphorically, one can reach the final destination of that journey (the last stop being meaning) directly, as it were, with no changing of trains (Haiman 1994; Boyland 1996; Hay 2001). The present analysis is framed along lines compatible with various forms of Construction Grammar.

The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.