Verbs prefixed with over-exhibit varied subcategorization changes from the base verbs (load hay onto the wagon/$^{*}$overload hay onto the wagon, eat an apple/$^{*}$?overeat apples, $^{*}$sleep his appointment/oversleep his appointment, etc.), which seem to defy a principled explanation. This article argues that the apparently puzzling behaviors of over-verbs can be coherently accounted for within the framework of construction grammar.

Over-verbs, in the excess sense, divide into those involving a container-based understanding and those involving a scale-based understanding. Over-verbs involving a container-based understanding (e.g. overload) differ from their base verbs as to the force transmission in a causal chain. Accordingly, those over-verbs are sanctioned by a different verb-class-specific construction from that which sanctions their base verbs. But over-verbs involving a scale-based understanding (e.g. overheat) are unchanged from their base verbs as to the force transmission, and hence as to the syntactic frame.

On the other hand, over-verbs in the spatial sense (e.g. overfly) are sanctioned by a ‘landmark’-based construction, a construction that does not have to do with force transmission. And some excess over-verbs (e.g. oversleep) are also sanctioned by this verb-class-specific construction.

The proposed account pays close attention to both verbs and constructions. A verb's occurrence in a particular syntactic frame can be explained by claiming that that verb can be sanctioned by a particular verb-class-specific construction, irrespective of whether the verb is morphologically simple or complex. But in order to explain why that verb can be sanctioned by that construction at all, a detailed analysis of verb meanings is called for. In this sense, the proposed analysis is both lexical and constructional.

Intuitive, sentence-based approaches have so far failed to account conclusively for the choice between a that-complement and an infinitival complement after believe-type verbs, in sentences like I believe something like this to be very much the case (EB2 1297) and I believe that monetary union is political union, and that the creation of a single currency is federalism (HHW 13012). Syntactically, there is no free variation between the two patterns, since there are a number of formal restrictions on the infinitival complements that do not apply to the that-complements. But is there a semantic motivation behind the choice in cases when there are no formal reasons for choosing one or the other? This paper surveys a few earlier suggestions to this effect, but argues that a corpus-based approach unmistakably suggests that factors of a textual nature are at work, rather than purely semantic ones.2

In Bech (2001a, 2001b), I took issue with the oft-repeated claim that Old English conjunct main clauses are commonly verb-final, and disproved it. However, the myth persists. In the meantime, the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE, Taylor et al.2003) has been created, so the time has come to revisit this topic and consider it in light of new, extensive and generally accessible data. Using the YCOE corpus, I confirm and expand on Bech's (2001a, 2001b) empirical findings, showing that (i) OE conjunct clauses are neither typically verb-final nor verb-late, but they are more frequently verb-final and verb-late than non-conjunct clauses are; and (ii) verb-final and verb-late clauses are typically conjunct clauses. These two perspectives must be kept apart: in the first, the starting point is the entire body of conjunct clauses, and in the second it is the entire body of verb-final/verb-late clauses. I propose that the failure to distinguish between the two perspectives, i.e. whether it is conjunct clauses or word order that constitutes the point of departure, is the origin of the misconception concerning conjunct clauses and word order. In order to establish whether this distinction has been fuzzy all along, or whether it must be ascribed to distorted referencing in the course of a century of research, I trace the research on this topic back to the end of the nineteenth century. I show that the alleged verb-finality of conjunct clauses may be ascribed to a whisper-down-the-lane effect – the retelling of the story has changed the story.

Dental pronunciation of alveolar consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. This Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD) has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-Realisation Effect and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint. It is less well known that PreRD is (or perhaps was) also a feature of a number of English varieties outside Ireland, particularly in traditional northern English dialects. This article analyses dialect data from northern England in order to determine the nature of PreRD there and its historical relations with the phenomenon in Irish English. In addition, it explores the phonological complexities of PreRD in light of the loss of rhoticity in traditional northern English dialects.

This article investigates t-to-r in West Yorkshire (WY) English and traces its course from a productive process in the nineteenth century to a lexically restricted fossil in contemporary WY. Nineteenth-century sources suggest that by the end of that century this process was already in decline. During the course of the twentieth century t-glottalling became a feature of the variety and so this article explores the possibility that as the frequency of use of t-glottalling increased, this would quickly overshadow t-to-r usage. Paradoxically, frequency of use is also responsible for the t-to-r phenomenon manifested today. More specifically, t-to-r remains in a small group of frequent words which are related by phonological shape. As a consequence of their frequency and shape, they have lexical strength and this is why a t-to-r fossil is maintained in WY today.

So-called category-determining prefixes in English (befool, delouse, disbar, encage, out- jockey, unsaddle) have been treated as exceptions to the Righthand Head Rule (Williams 1981). This article argues that so-called category-determining prefixation is a V (Verb)-to-V prefixation which takes denominal and deadjectival converted verbs as inputs, and thus special treatment is unwarranted. The hypothesis that conversion underlies N (Noun)/A (Adjective)-to-V prefixation is examined from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Diachronically, it is shown that the prefixes in question all started as non-category-determining V-to-V prefixes, and their N/A-to-V usage was established only in Modern English. With the constant productivity of conversion in the history of English, N/A-to-V usage can emerge from V-to-V usage. Synchronically, denominal/deadjectival prefixed verbs are shown to exhibit input and output properties that prove the above hypothesis: they have a converted counterpart; they are subject to the same morphological constraints as converted verbs; and their semantics is equivalent to the semantics of converted verbs modified by the semantics of V-to-V prefixation. It is concluded that there is no derivational prefix that determines the output category in English.

Present-Day English is generally assumed to possess only a handful of lexicalized reflexive verbs (absent oneself from, pride oneself on, etc.) and to use reflexive pronouns neither for the marking of motion middles nor the derivation of anticausative (decausative) verbs. Such middle uses of reflexive markers (non-argument reflexives) are widespread in other European languages. Based on corpus evidence, Geniušienė (1987), Peitsara (1997) and Siemund (2010) demonstrate that English reflexive pronouns do occur in these functions and offer extensive lists of the verbs involved. I here follow up the historical development of these verbs from Middle English to Present-Day English. My analysis is based on a survey of the relevant verb entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (222 verbs), complemented by an examination of the OED quotation base. My study shows that the number of reflexive verbs in English has gradually, but steadily, increased since the emergence of complex reflexives (myself, yourself, etc.) in Middle English. They often result from lexicalization processes, but the data also show more regular patterns indicative of grammatical processes. The Oxford English Dictionary proves to be a rich and highly valuable data source for carrying out serious grammatical analyses.

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.

Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.

How do we know that would rather and may well are more idiomatic than would well or will really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms such had/’d better, would/’d rather or might (as) well are seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly, will probably) or not (could also, might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv) is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types of mod + adv is a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.

This article contributes to the discussion of parentheticals. It focuses on a specific one-word parenthetical in English, namely what. To account for its distributional behaviour we offer a multifaceted approach. Specifically, our study explains why parenthetical what strongly prefers the position immediately preceding a cardinal number. In this respect, we identify three key questions which can only be answered collectively by looking into its syntactic properties, semantic and pragmatic motivation, and prosodic characteristics. While syntax accounts for parenthetical what being attached to the node that dominates the number, pragmatics takes care of its position immediately preceding the number, and prosody explains the unacceptability of what in sentence-initial position. In this way, this study supports the idea that to fully account for the behaviour of parenthetical structures, the phenomenon should not be restricted to a single component of the grammar. The strength of the present approach also lies in the authenticity and amount of data we used.

Whereas object pronouns regularly occurred before the main verb in Old and early Middle English, such word orders were to a large extent lost in Middle English prose by the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, some isolated later texts still show regular preverbal occurrences of object pronouns. Such word orders are most frequent with three texts that are translations of French sources. This article closely examines one of these texts, the Middle English prose Brut, and its source, and argues that contact influence is the most plausible explanation for its distinct behaviour with respect to object pronoun placement. It is also shown that the translator does not slavishly follow his source and that the contact effects are mainly of the statistical type in that word orders occurring very marginally in other texts appear with high frequencies in the Brut while such a contrast is not found for a word order that is unattested elsewhere. These observations are compatible with the equally exceptional but slightly different distribution of object pronouns in another translation from French, the Ayenbite of Inwyt. The findings of this article show that translation-induced contact and, possibly, contact in bilingual language use more generally can have important quantitative effects and that these have to be seriously considered in any syntactic analysis of historical texts based on a foreign source text.

The English variety spoken in York provides a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the English determiner system as proposed in the Definiteness Cycle (Lyons 1999). York English has three vernacular determiners that appear to represent different stages in the cycle: the zero article, reduced determiners and complex demonstratives of the type this here NP (Rupp 2007; Tagliamonte & Roeder 2009). Here, we probe the emergence and function of demonstratives in the cycle from the joint perspective of language variation and change, historical linguistics and discourse-pragmatics. We will argue that initially, the demonstrative reduced in meaning (Millar 2000) and also in form, resulting in Demonstrative Reduction (DR) (previously known as Definite Article Reduction (DAR)). This caused it to become reinforced. Data from the York English Corpus (Tagliamonte 1996–8) and historical corpora suggest that the use of complex demonstratives was subsequently extended from conveying ‘regular’ deictic meanings to a new meaning of ‘psychological deixis’ (Johannessen 2006). We conclude that survival of transitory stages in the cycle by several historical demonstrative forms, each in a range of functions, has given rise to a particular sense of ‘layering’ (Hopper 1991). Our analysis corroborates the idea that grammaticalization trajectories can be influenced by discourse-pragmatic factors (Epstein 1995; Traugott's 1995subjectification).

This article explores the ways in which constructions of identities of place are embedded in the ideology of race and social orientation in Zimbabwe. Using newspaper reports, memoirs, speeches, advertisements, fiction, interviews and ephemera produced around key discursive thresholds, it examines the production of multiple meanings of key terms within competing discourses to generate co-existing parallel lexicons. Crucially, labels like ‘settler’, ‘African’ and ‘Zimbabwean’, labels that are inextricably linked to access to and association with the land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, shift their reference and connotations for different speakers in different settings and periods. For example, the term ‘settler’, used to refer to white colonists of British origin who occupied vast agricultural lands in colonial Zimbabwe, is appropriated in post-independent Zimbabwe to designate blacks settled on the land in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. The analysis of semantic pragmatic change in relation to key discursive thresholds yields a complex story of changing identities conditioned by different experiences of a raced national biography.

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Marušič 2004).

The literature on the distal demonstrative se in Old English has mainly concentrated on its use as a marker of definiteness (referent identifiability) and deixis. In this article, I focus instead on demonstrative uses that have received much less attention in previous work. Drawing on data from Beowulf, I argue that the distal demonstrative determiner also serves a variety of discourse-pragmatic functions, such as indicating the relative importance of referents; topic continuity; or chapter boundaries.

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject–verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008).

This paper provides an account of be going to and will within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995). Because of the range of interpretations derived from the use of these expressions in different contexts, many previous accounts have characterized them as polysemous. This polysemy has been attributed to semantic retention, whereby both old (lexical) and new (grammaticalized) meanings are recovered in certain contexts. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate: (i) that although be going to does exhibit semantic retention, in a relevance-theoretic framework this does not entail polysemy, and (ii) that interpretations of will previously attributed to semantic retention are, in fact, pragmatically derived, and hence will is also monosemous.

A large number of grammatical and lexical changes occurred in Middle and Early Modern English leading to the type of language we witness today. Other West Germanic languages were more conservative. This article focuses on some of the major contrasts between Modern English and German and proposes a new unifying generalization for them, going beyond Sapir's (1921) ‘drift’ and the comparative typology of Hawkins (1986, 1995). The contrasts involve a systematic expansion in word-external properties in English, whereby individual words carry less syntactic and semantic information in their grammatical and lexical representations and have become more reliant on neighboring words for the assignment of linguistic properties. Defining drift in this way captures more of the observed contrasts and subsumes counterexamples to earlier unifying generalizations. It also has implications for theories of real-time language processing and for the interface between linguistic typology and psycholinguistics.

The historical development of the English reciprocal expression each other exemplifies different aspects of language change, both morphosyntactic and semantic. This article examines the formation of the reciprocal marker from the perspective of grammaticalization theory, with a special focus on the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization. It will be argued that an adequate distinction between lexicalization and grammaticalization can only be achieved if we define the two concepts with reference not to an expression's grammatical status before and after the change, but rather to the diachronic processes involved, namely context expansion in the case of grammaticalization, and univerbation combined with fossilization in the case of lexicalization. The development of each other provides evidence for this view. It has its origin in syntactic structures of the type Each of the kings hates the others and has undergone univerbation and fossilization as well as context expansion. It will also be shown that definitions of lexicalization and grammaticalization that are too closely linked to the opposition between lexicon and grammar are problematic for an analysis of the changes undergone by the reciprocal marker. Furthermore, our analysis regards the development of each other as a case of simultaneous lexicalization and grammaticalization.

The Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter in English pose a long-standing puzzle: not only have their specific principles of composition proved elusive; so has any more general explanation of their ultimate failure. This article argues that the solution to the puzzle lies in interactions of quantity and stress in both the meter and the language. An analysis of the dactylic hexameter as based on moraic trochees explains why stress is more straightforwardly accommodated by some positions than others. Analyses of stress-induced ambiguities in English syllable quantity such as the resyllabification of intervocalic consonants in C[V acute]C[V times over] contexts explain apparent inconsistencies in scansion. When these complexities are taken into account, Sidney's compositions reveal themselves to be systematic and phonologically well founded; ambiguities are acknowledged and the meter is exploited to structure them. Ultimately, however, such ambiguities mean that quantity alone provides an inadequate basis for meter in English, because it underdetermines the metrical possibilities.