This article looks at the role of deflexion in the development of the genitive in English and offers an empirical base for evaluating some claims which have been made about how this development proceeded. It focuses primarily on the claim that it was impossible for the genitive to remain as a morphological case once the other case distinctions were lost in the nominal system. This claim is based on a dubious typological argument and evidence is presented that the genitive retained some inflectional characteristics in Middle English. The article also looks at how the so-called ‘his genitive’ found in some earlier texts fits into the general picture of the development of English possessives.

The phenomenon of off-rhyming is based upon the relationship of similarity among sounds. Sounds perceived as like one another create acceptable off-rhyming pairs. Because the distinctive features of sounds are hierarchically arranged in languages, off-rhyming patterns can reveal the groupings within these hierarchies. Changes in pattern diachronically or among synchronic dialects express rearrangements in the phonological structure of the language. With respect to the consonantal features of English, off-rhymes in the codas of rhyming syllables in the works of twenty British poets writing from c. 1600–1900 have been examined to discover acceptable patterns of similarity. Most common are rhymes of voiceless and voiced pairs of homorganic consonants; /s/ to /z/ is the most frequent pair. The most frequent rhymes apart from homorganic pairs involve alveolar and alveopalatal consonants. With respect to acoustic features, the most frequent rhymes utilize the [±tense] feature, then [±compact] (with [±strident] playing a minor role). These patterns remain consistent over time and across dialects.

It is argued in this article that the postnominal ‘and adjective’ construction in Old English (e.g. Sodfßstne man & unscyldigne (LAW2,40.45) ‘righteous person and guiltless’ and pßas fullan ofnes & pßas peostran (BEDE,13.430.4) ‘that full furnace and that dark’) should be not analyzed as an instance of ambilateral adjective placement, but as an instance of DP coordination with an empty nominal element, pro, in the second conjunct. As a consequence, the adjective contained in the postnominal ‘and adjective’ construction is analyzed as an attributive adjective in prenominal, i.e. pre-pro position.

The United States is, not are. The Civil War was fought over a verb. (Carl Sandburg cited in Walker-Read, 1974: 12)

The article aims to find out whether verbal concord with collective nouns (e.g. committee) in British English is indeed governed by the commonly accepted principle that a focus on the individuals that belong to the group results in the use of a plural verb, whereas a focus on the group as a unit leads to the use of a singular verb. This is a quantitative study: data extracted from the British English sections of the Collins Cobuild corpus have been subjected to statistical tests. The investigation reveals that, with a few exceptions, the preference for a singular verb of the so-called ‘verb-number-variable’ collectives (i.e. collective nouns that occur with both singular and plural verbs) is significant, which suggests that semantic and pragmatic factors do not play the crucial role they are commonly thought to play in the verb number assignment process. The article also includes taxonomic observations: in the first part, in which collectives are defined, a survey is given of their semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics.

The main aim of this article is to provide an explanation accounting for the production of English derived nouns in -ee. In line with Barker (1998), I will argue that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the verbal base are unsatisfactory, and that the conditions for this derivational process must be searched for within semantics. My intention is to explore the semantic factors that might be taken to be pre-eminent in the different sets of verbs taking the suffix using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. It will be shown that a semantic analysis based on a theory of lexical representation like RRG is relevant to account for the formation of derived nouns in -ee in English.I gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Robert Van Valin, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two anonymous readers of a previous version of this paper.