This article explores an instance of dialect levelling in South East England, the reversal of Cockney diphthong shift. We trace this reversal through an apparent-time analysis of 52 speakers from Debden, a community in Essex with East London heritage. Dynamic vowel analyses of word-list and passage data suggests a reversal of the diphthong shift towards SSBE targets which has occurred most abruptly in those born after 1992 potentially as a result of increased social mobility in this generation. We compare the results in Debden to previous findings in the south-eastern towns of Milton Keynes and Reading where apparent-time change was also observed away from a shifted vowel system and towards SSBE targets (Kerswill & Williams 2000, 2005). In diverse areas of South East England, a common process of levelling towards the pan-regional standard is present which is not occurring exclusively as a result of dialect contact or face-to-face interaction. Nonetheless, each community exhibits a distinct trajectory and timing of language change which can be attributed to different patterns of movement and resettlement and, in particular, access to social mobility and the retention of community networks.

This multifactorial study reviews the determinants of particle alternation after uninflected try in varieties where English is native. The effects of a number of previously discussed and novel predictors are probed in data from well-known corpora. The results confirm the inclinations of North American varieties (try to) in contrast with those of the Australasian, British and Irish varieties (try and in speech but try to in writing). The previously reported general effects of the tense of try, mode and horror aequi are also corroborated. As regards the effect of register, the study contributes the finding that following Latin-based infinitives favor try to in most varieties, especially in writing. The article discusses the status of the substantiated effects with respect to the notions of conventionalization and entrenchment: crucially, the higher degree of conventionalization of try to in North American varieties (a) makes the use of this variant less conditional on the sequential need to license euphony and (b) neutralizes the general contextual/register distinction for the alternation. From a usage-based viewpoint, the findings suggest that the higher frequency of a multiword sequence in a specific variety, and the higher degree of activation in the language users’ minds, can make it less contingent on general probabilistic constraints.

While stylistic variation in attention-based models has been foundational to sociolinguistic theory (Labov 1972a; Trudgill 1974), other studies (e.g. Coupland 1985; Eckert 1989; Drummond 2018; Snell 2018) conceptualise style as a resource used in the context of identity construction. I synthesise these two approaches to sociolinguistic style and consider social meaning in the context of variable attentional load. Informed by a study of lexical variation in Cornwall, I account for an inverted style pattern with recourse to local identity, social meaning and language ideology. In doing so, I introduce an attention-to-self model of style. This model posits that when speakers pay greater attention-to-self, they closer approximate a desired self, a target identity that they aspire to embody. For example, when speakers subvert the standard language ideology, their stylistic target may not be ‘educated’ or ‘posh’, but ‘local’. In such cases, careful speech styles can be conducive to the production of local dialect forms as a performance of identity. I propose that the stylisation of local identity in careful speech styles in Cornwall should be interpreted in the context of an alternative linguistic market, a Cornish micro-market, which subverts the value system of the dominant linguistic market.

Some of the linguistic changes which are crucial in the history of English and have traditionally been ascribed to Middle English can already be observed in late Northumbrian. One of these changes is the extension of genitive singular -es from the a-stems to other noun classes. Another is the spread of nominative/accusative plural -as from the masculine a-stems to the neuters and to other declensions. The aim of this article is to establish the actual scale on which these two interparadigmatic analogical changes are found in the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels and to the Durham Collectar, both dating from the tenth century.

The present study intends to shed more light on the process of morphological restructuring affecting the declensional system of late Northumbrian, and has three main aims: (a) to determine the pattern of dissemination of the innovative inflectional endings; (b) to establish which variables are significant in these analogical processes: declension, type and token frequency, grammatical context, Latin lemma, demarcation; and (c) to account for the different developmental tendencies of these two linguistic changes.

This article focuses on the controversy over whether complex numerals in English are constituents. Contra the traditional view (e.g. Hurford 1975; Greenberg 1990 [1978]), the cascading structure proposed in Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) maintains that cross-linguistically a complex numeral does not form a constituent to the exclusion of the NP complement. The derivation of an additive complex numeral, e.g. twenty-two people, thus involves an underlying source form with a nominal conjunction, e.g. twenty people and two people. Based on the argumentation established in He (2015) and He et al. (2017) supporting complex numerals as constituents in Chinese and minority languages in southern China, this article first demonstrates that the non-constituency analysis is not viable for English, as the underlying forms of additive complex numerals may be ill-formed and also not semantically equivalent to the surface forms. We then offer evidence to support the constituency analysis from constituency tests and behavior of post-numeral and pre-numeral modifiers. Finally, we demonstrate that the extra mechanism of grafting, proposed by Meinunger (2015), is unnecessary for English complex numerals.

In spontaneous English, which clauses can deviate from traditional syntactic schemas by having a resumptive pronoun where a gap would otherwise be. Some researchers claim that such uses of which are not errors but rather a reanalysis. However, there is no consensus as to how which is being reanalyzed. Collins & Radford (2015) suggest that it behaves like a caseless relative pronoun; Sells (1985) and Kjellmer (1988) posit a subordinating conjunction behavior; Daalder (1989) posits a coordinating conjunction behavior; and Miller (1988: 116), Kuha (1994), Loock (2007) and Burke (2017) note that which can be replaced by both subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, but they do not commit to one over the other. Here, we present prosodic and syntactic data in which such uses of which behave more like a coordinating conjunction than like a relative pronoun or subordinating conjunction.

English tense/aspect-marking is an area where variation abounds and where many theories have been formulated. Diachronic studies of the preterit/present perfect alternation indicate that the present perfect (e.g. I have eaten already) has been losing ground to the preterit (e.g. I ate already) (e.g. Elsness 1997, but see Hundt & Smith 2009, Werner 2014). However, few studies have examined this alternation in vernacular speech. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing spoken data from Ontario, Canada, from an apparent-time perspective. Using a large archive of multiple communities and people of different generations, we focus on linguistic contexts known to be variable, viz. with adverbs of indefinite time. Results indicate that, in contrast with previous studies, the alternation is mostly stable. We find evidence of change only with the adverb ever. Where there is evidence of change, this change is different from the predictions in the literature, with the preterit increasing in frequency. We suggest that a minor constructionalization process operates in tandem with ongoing specialization of the preterit/present perfect contrast. Taken together, these results provide another example of the importance of including speech in research on language variation and change and of the unique contribution certain constructions make to more general systems of grammar.

Phrasal verbs (e.g. fade away, give up) tend to be associated with spoken, colloquial registers, not only in Present-day English, but also in previous stages of the language. This view has recently been challenged by Thim's (2006a, 2012) ‘colloquialization conspiracy’, according to which the idea that phrasal verbs are colloquial is based on a misconception which first arose in the eighteenth century. In the current study we seek to verify Thim's claim by exploring phrasal verbs in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a 1.2-million-word corpus of Early Modern English (EModE) speech-related text types. Based on a sample of over 7,000 examples, we demonstrate that the linguistic features, distribution and high productivity of phrasal verbs in the EModE period point towards a full entrenchment of these combinations in the spoken language, which leads us to the conclusion that the colloquial status of phrasal verbs in EModE is not merely a matter of a ‘colloquialization conspiracy’.

While relational nouns (cousin) are traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this article approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for the ontological class of the noun's referent (focusing on nouns denoting artifacts, natural kinds, occupations, humans and locations), I find that Percent Possessive is positively correlated with a noun's per-million-word frequency. Comparing across different web communities, I find that a noun is more frequent, and shows a greater ratio of definite to indefinite tokens, in the community where its Percent Possessive is significantly higher. I take these findings to be consistent with the claim that a noun is more easily interpreted as relational (as measured by Percent Possessive) when human interaction with its referent is more conventional (as measured by its frequency and definite-to-indefinite ratio). Inspired by the many authors who have suggested a socio-cultural component to relationality and possession, this article explores at scale in English how nouns reflect the conventions of the people who use them.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the indexical fields of two variables, one phonological (rhoticity) and one morphosyntactic (past tense be), in oral history interviews with speakers from Oldham (Greater Manchester, UK), born between 1907 and 1929. In a quantitative analysis of the variation, we account for a range of linguistic constraints, and find some evidence suggesting that rhoticity does not tend to cooccur with nonstandard past tense be. To investigate this further, we employ a modified version of the Lectal Focusing in Interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015; Sharma 2018), allowing us to track the speakers’ variation in interaction. Using this method, we explore the indexical fields of the variables, which we suggest are potentially in conflict, perhaps explaining the observed pattern of non-cooccurrence. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the status of rhoticity and past tense be in relation to prescribed standard English, as well as shifting and stable variables, influences their indexical potential in interaction.

This article identifies just so as a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Just so is shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning wins out over the conditional meaning, thus filling the niche of an informal purpose subordinator and providing an alternative to its multifunctional and semantically ambiguous competitors so that and so. With increasing grammaticalization the just so purpose subordinator also exhibits signs of intersubjectification, being coopted for syntactically independent, interpersonal uses (e.g. just so we're clear) and culminating in the emergence of a new discourse marker in the form of just so you know in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. To account for the emergence of purpose just so, a constructional network approach is adopted, which considers the network links to other purpose subordinators, notably so that and so.