The article presents a study of the process of gender change in the thirteenth-century Southwest Midlands, based on twenty texts localized in this area. The assumption is that a study limited to a single text community would give a better view of the patterns of change than studies spanning a wide chronological and/or geographical range. It is suggested that the system of pronominal gender assignment went through a process of semantically based reorganization during this period, and that the resulting patterns are most usefully described using the model of a hierarchy or continuum of individuation (Dahl 1999a: 99; Siemund 2008: 140). The gender assignment of individual nouns is found to be remarkably regular, and the material seems to give no reason to assume a period of confusion between the Old and postmedieval English systems of gender assignment.

This study examines sociophonetic variation in different functions of like among adolescents in London and Edinburgh. It attempts to determine the factors that may explain this variation. Our results suggest that the function of like correlates primarily with contextual factors, rather than the phonetic factors of vowel quality, /l/ to vowel duration and /k/ realisation. In particular, the preceding and following segments and their bigram predictability emerge as highly significant, in addition to the boundary strength following like. In both London and Edinburgh, the vowel appears to be the only non-contextual feature that is sensitive to the function of like: quotative be like is more likely to be monophthongised than other functions of like. We argue that the more monophthongal nature of quotative like is due to the syntactic and prosodic context in which it occurs.

Middle expressions (The car drives smoothly, The book doesn't sell, These chairs fold up) have long fascinated students of the English language. This article examines some of the factors which contribute to the acceptability of such expressions. Rejecting a lexicalist approach, which aims to identify a class of middle-forming verbs, we propose, instead, a global characterization of the construction, with specific focus on properties of the subject referent in association with the semantics of the predicate. The middle construction, we argue, presents a non-Agent participant as primarily responsible for the potential actualization of the process designated by the verb phrase. The subject referent, therefore, has to be able to be construed as possessing properties which significantly facilitate, enable (or, as the case may be, impede) the unfolding of the process in question, while, at the same time, the contribution of the Agent to the process is backgrounded. We explore this thesis with specific reference to the qualia structure of the subject nominal.

There is a puzzling asymmetry in English with respect to free relative clauses introduced by what and who, with the former (e.g. [What Glenn said] didn't make much sense) intuitively being much more acceptable than the latter (e.g. [Who Glenn married] didn't make much money). In this squib, we explore this degraded acceptability of who free relative clauses, and from the results of an experimental study we identify syntactic features of the sentence that influence the level of acceptability. We discuss the difficulty in finding an independently motivated solution to the puzzling asymmetry within current theories of syntax, semantic and processing. Finally, we touch on a broader theoretical question relating to the robust cross-linguistic process by which elements of the set of wh-words in a language are able to extend their function from introducing interrogative clauses to introducing other clausal constructions.

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.

The basic valency orientation of Old English has been addressed in a number of studies, without any consensus emerging so far. From a synchronic point of view, a key question is whether the pronounced tendency to labile coding in Present-day English can be traced back to the Old English period. In order to give a convincing answer, this article examines from a synchronic and diachronic point of view two of the procedures by which the basic valency of Old English has been assessed: computation of verbs and evaluation of the causative ja-formation. Concerning the former, it shows that the valency of whole verb classes in Old English is determined by previous processes of morphophonetic merger and cannot therefore be used as evidence for labilisation processes (transitivisation or detransitivation) taking place in OE itself. With respect to the latter, the article assesses whether the causative ja-formation is still a transitivising operation in Old English by examining the valency of all causative ja-pairs and incorporating recent research on the effectiveness of sound alternations as morphological markers. This article concludes that it is not, as it does not consistently signal an increase in valency. Rather, a tendency to labile coding is detected. In this respect, the article supports, with more conclusive evidence, previous research which advanced the same hypothesis.

For Rothwell (1998: 156) ‘words of ultimately French origin became part of the lexis of English as a result of the myriad daily contacts between Anglo-French and Middle English in the minds and under the pens of a whole literate class’. Although such contact interfaces between Francophone and Anglophone speakers clearly must have existed, not enough is known as to the means by which French-origin lexis was borrowed and diffused. I argue that a principal agency of contact-induced lexical change in Middle English was the clergy in their everyday role of spiritual guidance, whether or not they themselves composed religious texts. French loans in works of spiritual guidance are known to be common from the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse onwards (Trotter 2003a). According to contemporaneous sources, English clerics received a Francophone-medium school education (Orme 1973), which would have familiarised them with the French vocabulary used in religious instruction in chantry schools and beyond.

The various manuscripts of the Cursor Mundi, a work of lay religious instruction probably composed around 1300, also offer a revealing window on the process of lexical innovation and replacement instigated by the clergy. An analysis of variant lexical forms, native and French-origin, found in the first 10,000 lines of this work shows that the latter would go on to replace native items the majority of the time. The loss of many native variants, e.g. niþ, mensk and þole, and their replacement, respectively, by envy, honour and suffer, can be attributed to the role played by the clergy in diffusing French-origin items in the domains of discourse they dominated. Rather than merely reflecting the pre-existing lexical knowledge of monolingual English speakers, the clergy's use of such items initially introduced and then maintained French-origin lexemes in at least the receptive competence of such speakers. Their regular and widespread contact with the population at large would have enabled the take-up of lexical innovation via the spoken medium, thus motivating the use observed in homiletic and devotional written texts of extensive French-origin lexis.

Ever since the days of Jespersen, voices have been raised which argue that relative that is not a pronoun like who and which, but a conjunction/complementizer, as shown in particular by the ban on the sequence preposition + that, which is claimed to be best described by treating that as a conjunction. Taking up the question of the proper analysis of that as it appears in the word's relationship to prepositions, the present paper argues that in actual fact the descriptions built by Jespersen and various generative grammarians on the view of that as a conjunction/complementizer are not at all adequate to deal with some crucial facts of the word's syntax. Noting then some further facts which even the traditional ban is unable to deal with, the paper develops a new approach to the question which is derived from an examination of Finnish relatives and which handles all the English facts noted in terms of a general principle about the internal order of elements within the fronted relative phrase. The principle invoked is completely neutral as regards the word-class status of that, but some of the facts explored strongly argue for the classification of the word as a pronoun.

This article discusses two groups of prosodically and linearly integrated modifiers: evaluative (‘subject-oriented’) adverbs (e.g. cleverly, stupidly and recklessly) and non-restrictive prenominal modifiers (e.g. old as in my old mother). What these two groups of elements have in common is the rather puzzling fact that both are (or have been analysed as) relatively low-level modifiers (i.e. as part of the proposition), while at the same time being non-truth-conditional/non-restrictive (suggesting they are non-propositional). In this article it is argued that although there is indeed compelling syntactic evidence that these elements modify a relatively low layer in the clause (proposition or lower), this need not be incompatible with their non-truth-conditional/non-restrictive status. Using the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), an analysis is proposed in which these elements are not part of the proposition expressed by the clause in which they occur, but instead form part of a separate proposition, in which they function as non-verbal predicates taking a specific layer of analysis (e.g. a proposition, State-of-Affairs, entity or property) as their argument. The analysis proposed not only reconciles the specific semantic and syntactic properties of the modifiers in question, but also reveals the similarities between the two groups of modifiers discussed.

Old English fricatives at points of morpheme juncture are studied to determine whether they conform to the rule of voicing between voiced sounds that applies morpheme-internally. Should we expect a voiced or a voiceless fricative in words like OE heorð-weorod, Wulfweard, and stīðlīce? The evidence examined regards chiefly compounds and quasi-compounds (the latter comprising both forms bearing clear derivational affixes and ‘obscured’ compounds, those in which the deuterotheme has lost its lexical independence), though a small amount of evidence in regard to voicing before inflectional suffixes is considered. Evidence is derived from place-names, personal names, and common nouns, on the basis of Modern English standard pronunciation, assimilatory changes in Old English, modern dialect forms, post-Conquest and nonstandard Old English spellings, and analogous conditioning for the loss of OE /x/. A considerable preponderance of the evidence indicates that in compounds as well as in quasi-compounds, fricatives were voiced at the end of the prototheme when a voiced sound followed, but not a voiceless one. It follows from the evidence that there was no general devoicing of fricatives in syllable-final position in Old English, despite Anglo-Saxon scribes' use of <h> for etymological [Γ] in occasional spellings like <fuhlas> and <ahnian>. Old English spellings of this kind need be taken to imply nothing more than a tendency for <h> and <g> to be used interchangeably in noninitial positions, due to the noncontrastive distribution of the sounds they represent everywhere except morpheme-initially. Rare early Middle English spellings of this kind may or may not have a phonological basis, but they cannot plausibly be taken to evidence a phonological process affecting /v, ð, z/.

This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100–1500) and Early Modern English (1500–1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb–object–particle and verb–particle–object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999, 2003; Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English.

The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.

Recent work on word-order change in the history of English has shown that late Middle English prose retains object–verb order as a productive option in contexts with an auxiliary and a quantified or negated object, and also in topicalization structures. In order to determine when these limited types of object–verb order became impossible, we have examined a collection of sixteenth-century prose texts. Our findings are that the patterns attested in late Middle English in fact continue until 1550, but then appear to dwindle away. We present the relevant object–verb data, discuss the reasons for the survival of the patterns found, provide an explanation for a difference at the level of detail between the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century data, and offer some suggestions about the reasons for the eventual loss of the structures in question.

The emergence and development of the Way construction was famously examined by Israel (1996) in a study which traced the modern form of the construction to three senses or subschemas, namely manner of motion (He stumbled his way to the front door), means of motion (He dug his way out of the prison) and incidental activity (He whistled his way out of the room). The present article moves beyond the late Middle English period – the starting point of Israel's research – and looks at the precursors of the Way construction since Old English times, as well as its interaction with the Intransitive Motion construction (IMC) (He walked into the room). By approaching the data in terms of Goldberg's typology (1997) of verb-construction relationships, which is finer-grained than Israel's tripartite division, the analysis identifies the areas of conceptual and constructional overlap that have existed between the Way construction and the IMC in the course of history, and shows that the Way construction has gradually specialised in the expression of those relations which could not be readily coded in the IMC, such as means of motion and incidental activity. The study thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how the constructicon, the repertory of constructions making up the grammar of a language, may change over time.

In this article I discuss article usage in NPs with subjective and objective adjectival premodifiers. The main topic of the article is the tendency of semantically subjective adjectives to be used in indefinite NPs. This correlation is independent of the frequency of the adjective, and the uneven article distribution becomes even more skewed when an overt indicator of subjectivity, such as very or much, is introduced to the NP. I explain this tendency in terms of accessibility: subjective modifiers provide the speaker with a way of expressing a personal evaluation of the referent, and this evaluation is typically new information in discourse. Consequently, subjective premodifiers strongly favour indefinite NPs. By contrast, objective modifiers often encode information that is typical of the referent or else accessible from context or through world knowledge. Because the information expressed by the modifier is accessible, the accessibility of the discourse referent itself determines article choice, and the distribution of articles is more even. I also show that the connection between subjectivity and indefiniteness may provide the linguist with a useful tool in semantic disambiguation and diachronic research. Case studies of two polysemous -ing participles, moving and glowing, show that when used as a nominal premodifier, the subjective sense of the word (e.g. moving, ‘emotionally touching’) strongly favours indefinite NPs over definite NPs. We will also see that when a participle (outstanding) or a noun (key) develops a subjective sense and undergoes category change to adjective, the new sense is particularly often used in indefinite constructions, and the semantic change and gradual adjectivisation of the word is mirrored in the gradual increase in the use of indefinite NPs.

In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too.

We investigate the ‘extensibility’ of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The ‘ideal’ economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one ‘sound’, one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as ‘scribal error’ rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us – flexible matrices of substitution and variation.

The paper rejects the standard view according to which every tensed verb in English agrees with its subject in person and number. It argues that person is irrelevant to all verbs except BE, and that past-tense verbs and modals (other than BE) have no number agreement features. It discusses agreement mismatches which reflect the subject's meaning, but rejects the idea that subject–verb agreement may be a semantic rule; it proposes instead a new feature ‘agreement-number’. This extra number feature applies only to the subject of a tensed verb and by default has the same value as the subject's ordinary number, while also allowing various kinds of mismatch (for I and you, and for cases of ‘semantic’ agreement). It also offers analyses of agreement with non-nominal subjects and dummy there, and shows how the analysis for Standard English generalizes easily to a range of variations found in nonstandard dialects. The theoretical basis for the analysis is Word Grammar, whose main advantage is that features are free to be assigned by rule because they are not used in classification.

Ellipsis alternation refers here to the alternation between two kinds of ellipsis remnants whose correlates are prepositional phrases. One kind of remnant includes the preposition hosted by its correlate and the other doesn't. This alternation is now known to be cross-linguistically widespread although it was originally assumed to be banned in languages without preposition stranding under wh-movement. I argue that there is a nonsyntactic relationship between ellipsis alternation and preposition stranding that helps explain the availability and distribution of both types of remnants in terms of general performance preferences. Two pieces of corpus evidence from English are offered in support of this argument. The first piece of evidence reveals that the content of a remnant and its correlate affects ellipsis alternation both in languages without preposition stranding and in English. The second piece of evidence shows that the availability of preposition stranding in English nonelliptical clauses supports the use of prepositionless remnants via structural persistence, that is, reuse of syntactic structure found in antecedent clauses. These data lead me to conclude that ellipsis alternation is subject to a stronger processing constraint in English than in languages without preposition stranding.

The current study examines patterns of TH variation in Hong Kong English (HKE). In particular, it examines patterns in the realization of the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ as the voiceless labiodental fricative [f],2 a process known as TH-fronting, as well as realization of the voiceless of TH as [s]. Previous research on HKE (Bolton & Kwok 1990; Hung 2000; Deterding et al.2008; Setter et al.2010) has established that TH-fronting is a variable phenomenon in HKE, with both intra- and inter-speaker variation, though no research to date has examined the social and linguistic constraints that govern this phenomenon in HKE. The current study also examines the realization of TH as [s], which has not been documented in previous research on HKE, but was found to be a variant of TH in the current study. This article thus examines the social (defined here as non-linguistic constraints such as gender, medium of instruction and proficiency) and linguistic (syllable position, linguistic environment, stress) factors which impact the realization of TH in HKE and whether these factors differ for the realization of TH as [f] or [s].

The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100 and 1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes following the arrival of a co-hyponym in a semantic space) were low in the Middle English period, regardless of language of origin.