What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was no do-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions.

Phrasal compounds are taken to be word-level structures that combine a lexical head with a phrasal non-head. Several claims have emerged from the pertinent literature: phrasal compounds allegedly only have nominal heads, can host a variety of syntactic structures in non-head position, are determinative, and are instances of expressive morphology. The existence of adjectival phrasal compounds is either explicitly denied in the literature, or considered a marginal phenomenon at best. This article presents data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008) that show that adjectival phrasal compounds do exist in English. We demonstrate that they are similar to non-phrasal adjectival compounds and to nominal phrasal compounds. At the same time, they crucially differ from nominal compounds in the prototypical semantic relations between head and non-head: adjectival phrasal compounds are mostly similative-intensifying as opposed to determinative. We argue that this property is also found in noun–adjective compounds and follows naturally from the semantics of the head category in question, viz. adjectives as mostly gradable predicates. In turn, the majority of adjectival phrasal compounds in our data feature a strong expressive component, a characteristic they share with other phrasal compounds.

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

This article discusses the existence of transitive expletives in a variety of English. Belfast English has none of the features previously proposed as licensing transitive expletives, but nevertheless allows these, calling into question previous analyses of the licensing of this structure. This article considers the properties of transitive expletives in this variety, showing that they are restricted to sentences where the associate is quantified, and that the associate can appear in a range of positions, similar but not identical to those available to ‘floated’ quantifiers. It is argued that Belfast English has a higher merge position for the expletive than does Standard English, and that the general availability in English of quantifier positions between T and vP – perhaps because auxiliaries in English head phases, and phases can be closed by a quantification – means that, even though Belfast English is not a Verb Second language, a position is available for both the expletive and the associate.

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

This article concerns English proper noun modifiers denoting organizations, people and places and their German and Swedish correspondences. It supplements previous studies touching upon contrastive comparisons by providing large-scale systematic findings on the translation correspondences of the three aforementioned semantic types. The data are drawn from the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), which contains popular non-fiction, a genre previously not studied in connection with proper noun modifiers. The results show that organization-based modifiers are the most common and person-based ones the rarest in English originals. Compounds are the most frequent correspondences in German and Swedish translations and originals with genitives and prepositional phrases as other common options. The preference for compounds is stronger in German, while it is stronger for prepositional phrases in Swedish translations, reflecting earlier findings on language-specific tendencies. Organization-based modifiers tend to be translated into compounds, and place-based modifiers into prepositional phrases. German and Swedish translators relatively often opt for similar target-language structures. Two important target-language differences emerge: (i) compounds with complex heads are dispreferred in Swedish (US news show > *USA-nyhetsprogram) but unproblematic in German (US-Nachrichtensendung), and (ii) compounds with acronyms (WTO ruling > WTO-Entscheidung) are more frequent in German.

Renaat Declerck and Susan Reed, Conditionals: a comprehensive empirical analysis. Topics in English Linguistics 37. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. xviii + 565. Hardback €98.00/sFr169/$108, ISBN 3 11 017144 9.

This article presents a novel approach to the phenomenon of intrusive-r in English based on analogy. The main claim of the article is that intrusive-r in non-rhotic dialects of English is the result of the analogical extension of the r~zero alternation shown by words such as far, more and dear. While this idea has been around for a long time, this is the first study that explores this type of analysis in detail. Specifically, I provide an overview of the developments that led to the emergence of intrusive-r and show that they are fully compatible with an analogical approach. This includes the analysis of frequency data taken from an eighteenth-century corpus of English compiled specifically for the purposes of this article and the discussion of a related development, namely intrusive-l. The article also presents a review of the evidence about the variability of intrusive-r, which serves as the basis of an evaluation of previous approaches. Once the notion of analogy is made formally explicit, the analogical approach becomes capable of providing a unified account of the historical development and the variability of intrusive-r. This is demonstrated through a computer simulation of the emergence of the phenomenon based on the eighteenth-century corpus mentioned above. The results of the simulation confirm the predictions of the analogical approach.

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

This study employs corpus semantic techniques to examine the semantics of light verbs and light verb constructions (LVCs) in Singapore English, Hong Kong English and British English via their respective components in the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum 1996). The study investigates onomasiological variation (see Geeraerts et al.1994) by identifying selection preferences in natural use between light verb constructions and their related verb alternatives. In addition, identity evidence is forwarded as a valuable corpus semantic tool, in which instances of naturally occurring language data resemble classic identity tests for polysemy. Via a close reading and manual semantic analysis of thousands of instances of light make, take, give and their semantic alternatives, this study finds remarkable consistency across the three varieties of World Englishes (WEs) in onomasiological preferences, even in extremely nuanced features of LVCs. Onomasiological evidence and identity evidence also suggest the new finding that the three light verbs and their constructions exhibit degrees of lightness, and that these degrees of lightness are extremely consistent across regional varieties.

This brief response to Elizabeth Closs Traugott's contribution ‘“Insubordination” in the light of the Uniformitarian Principle’ could begin with John Lennon: ‘Imagine there is no. . . sentence.’

While it is undoubtedly true that historical data do not lend themselves well to the reproduction of experimental findings, the availability of increasingly extensive data sets has brought some experimenting within practical reach. This means that certain predictions based on a combination of synchronic observations and uniformitarian thinking are now testable. Synchronic evidence shows a negative correlation between analysability in morphologically complex words and various measures of frequency. It is therefore expected that when the frequency of morphologically complex items changes, their analysability will change along with this. If analysability decreases, this should in turn be reflected in decreasing sensitivity to priming by items with analogous composition. The latter prediction is in principle testable on diachronic data, offering a way of verifying the diachronic effect of frequency change on analysability. In this spirit, the present article examines the relation between changing frequency and priming sensitivity, as a proxy to analysability. This is done for a sample of 250 English ly-adverbs, such as roughly, blindly, publicly, etc. over the period 1950–2005, using data from the Hansard Corpus. Some of the expected relations between frequency and analysability can be shown to hold, albeit with great variation across lexical items. At the same time, much of the variation in our measure of analysability cannot be accounted for by frequency or frequency change alone.

This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.

This article analyses the formal and stylistic features of phrasal verbs in the Old Bailey Corpus and compares them with results obtained from the speech-related genres of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), namely diaries, drama, letters and sermons. Phrasal verbs tend to be associated with spoken colloquial registers both in PDE and previous stages of the language, although this statement has been challenged by Thim (2006a, 2012), who argues that in EModE the (non-)occurrence of phrasal verbs in a particular text seems motivated by its contents, rather than its degree of formality. The results in this study show that phrasal verbs were a feature of the spoken language already in LModE, since their frequency is remarkably higher in trial proceedings, arguably the closest representation of the spoken word of the past. However, in contrast to other speech-related text types, the frequency of phrasal verbs in trial proceedings decreases over time, which seems to point towards a decolloquialisation of this genre over time. The study also shows differences at the formal level across genres, demonstrating that sermons display more formal and archaic characteristics, whereas trial proceedings contain features which bring them closer to the spoken language.

This article examines the use of the semi-modals have to, have got to and need to in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), a corpus of spoken Northeastern English dating from the late 1960s to the present day. It will be shown that the semi-modals have, in many contexts, replaced the historically older must as markers of obligation and necessity in this variety. Moreover, the two most frequent variants in the corpus, have to and have got to, will be examined in the light of current theories of grammaticalisation. Internal and external constraints, which have been shown in the literature on root modality to have played an important role in the distribution of variants in other regional varieties of British and North American English, will be tested in DECTE. The article will also examine the rise of need to in this northeastern variety, as the most recent addition to the group of variants marking obligation and necessity.

The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al.2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the Constant Rate Effect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like, but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S-curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like, the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

This study tests the applicability of the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the Uniform Information Density Principle (Jaeger 2010) on adjectival data as regards the variation between retaining and omitting the complementizer that in English adjectival complementation constructions. More specifically, the study tests the effect of different factors of potential importance on this variation across extraposed (e.g. It was inevitable (that) he should be nicknamed ‘the Ferret’) and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I'm happy (that) we are married). While both the factors concerned with the Complexity Principle and the Uniform Information Density Principle are found to have an effect on post-predicate clauses, less clear effects are found concerning extraposed clauses. I attribute these findings to the difference between the two constructions in terms of their frequency of co-occurrence with different matrix subject types and with different adjectives.

Susan Hunston, Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £40.00, ISBN 0 521 80171 0. Paperback £14.95, ISBN 0 521 80583 X. Pp. xii + 241.

Charles F. Meyer, English corpus linguistics: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £45.00, ISBN 0 521 80879 0. Paperback £16.95, ISBN 0 521 00490 X. Pp. xvi + 168.

Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts, Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Hardback £95.00, ISBN 90 272 4888 5. Paperback £55.00, ISBN 90 272 4889 3. Pp. xviii + 342.

Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD), the dental pronunciation of /t/ and /d/ before /r/ and /ər/, is a well-known feature of English varieties throughout Ireland. PreRD is often accompanied by an /r/-Realisation Effect (RRE), whereby /r/ is pronounced as a tap after the dentalised consonant, and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint (MBC), such that PreRD is blocked by Class 2 morpheme boundaries. Although an Irish origin for PreRD has been suggested, the presence of PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in northern English dialects in a form nearly identical to what is found in Ireland suggests that the origins of PreRD lie instead in English in Britain. The possible existence of PreRD in Scotland is suspected, but definitive evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC there has never been published. In this article, I provide the first detailed analysis of these features in Scotland, using unpublished data collected as part of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. It will be seen that there is substantial evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in Scots dialects. The presence of these features in Scotland has important consequences for their history in Britain, and confirms the British origin of PreRD in Ireland.

This article approaches the study of pragmatic meaning in English modal verbs like can, may, and shall in early eighteenth-century English prose using the techniques of corpus linguistic analysis, politeness theory, and social network analysis. The study is based on a quantitative survey of modal expressions across registers in a corpus of fourteen early eighteenth-century authors, which yields relative frequencies of occurrence according to genre and to author. Together with the sociohistorical information provided by the strategic coalitions constructed to develop, nurture and maintain relationships between clients and literary and political patrons, this survey provides the context for a pragmatic study of politeness strategies. The subsequent qualitative examination of letters in the oeuvres of selected authors yields a rich picture of individual pragmatic variation. The study reveals that although the corpus as a whole exhibits trends for different usages in different genres, the letters exhibit a predominance of modal expressions that may be used to index the facework involved in building and maintaining relationships of patronage. Within this genre, modal choice is influenced by a writer's sense of the relationship with the patron as well as the degree of risk and cost involved in the communication.