This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

Tags are widely acknowledged as being an important feature of colloquial British English. In this article, I examine a type of tag that has to date received little attention in the literature beyond sociolinguistic research into its interpersonal functions: right-dislocated lone pronouns, or ProTags. Biber et al. (1999) acknowledge that the demonstrative pronoun that can be used as a right-dislocated tag in conversational British English, but corpus data reveal that other pronouns can also be used as ProTags.

Based on a range of examples, primarily taken from large-scale corpora, I examine the form of the ProTag construction and its functions, comparing it with other tags used in British English, particularly question tags. In common with other tags, ProTags are a classic case of language conveying more than straightforward propositional content. I consider to what extent proposed analyses of the functions of tag questions carry over to ProTags, and briefly whether this construction has been a feature of British English for longer than might at first be assumed.

This article examines the history of a construction type which has been almost completely disregarded in the extensive literature on complementation, namely declarative complement clauses introduced by if and though. Contrary to the standard view, which favours an adverbial analysis for these clauses, it is shown here that there are convincing arguments for considering certain if- and though-clauses as complements, though it is also admitted that their behaviour differs in some respects from standard cases of declarative complementation. The article also reveals the existence of a number of factors favouring the selection of the minor complementizers if and though over the major complement-clause links that and zero in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Evidence has primarily been drawn from the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

This article presents a diachronic corpus-based study of the distribution of mandative that- and to-clauses complementing deontic adjectival matrices in the extraposition construction, as in It is essential to work upwards from easier workloads (CB). It shows that the to-infinitive encroaches on the that-clause from Early Middle English onwards and comes to predominate in Late Middle English. It thus adduces evidence for Los's (2005) account of the rise of the to-infinitive as verbal complement: against the generally held view that the to-infinitive replaced the bare infinitive, Los (2005) shows that it spread at the expense of the subjunctive that-clause in Middle English, e.g. after intention verbs and manipulative verbs. After considering various factors such as the distribution of the to-infinitive in the adjectival complementation system, the tense of the matrix of the adjectival constructions and the Anglo-Saxon versus Romance origin of the adjectives, I conclude that the rise of the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices in Middle English has to be explained by analogy between verbal and adjectival mandative constructions. In addition, this study shows that – unlike with the verbal constructions – the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices stabilizes at roughly a 3:1 ratio to the that-clause from Early Modern English onwards. For these later periods, finally, it is proposed that the clausal variation may be motivated by lexical determination, discourse factors such as information structure, and stylistic preferences.

Buchan Scots exhibits a unique phonological process in which mid vowels undergo raising that is triggered by both voiced consonants and stressed high vowels. The fact that the triggers of assimilation do not fall neatly into a single natural class under most feature theories makes it an interesting challenge to straightforward analysis. Given the phonological patterns and a variety of phonetic facts about Buchan, I propose a [Lowered Larynx] feature to explain both vowel height and consonant voicing in this language. I present an autosegmental analysis of the segment inventory and phonological patterns in the framework of the Parallel Structures Model of feature geometry (Morén 2003, 2006, 2007). This analysis provides a unified and minimal account of the assimilation facts and supports the claim that phonological activity is dependent on the structure of the contrast system of a given language (Dresher, Piggot & Rice 1994). Furthermore, the representational analysis fits neatly into a constraint-based model and contributes to the growing body of literature claiming that representations are important even to optimality-theoretic analyses.

The topic of this article can be exemplified by the final clause of the following attested sentence: I don't know how he found out that she belonged to that lass, but find out he has. Clauses like this one show a preposed verb phrase that is headed by a plain verb whereas the non-preposed verb phrase of their canonical counterparts is obligatorily headed by a perfect participle (i.e. he has {found / *find} out). This peculiarity of verb phrase preposing, which will be referred to as the perfect participle paradox, has seldom been discussed. The article starts by showing that clauses that manifest the paradox are more frequent in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and in the British National Corpus than their non-paradoxical analogues with preposed canonical perfect participles. The article then looks at the paradox from the point of view of generative syntax, discusses and rejects previous analyses, and argues that a solution entails the rejection of two assumptions that have been associated with a lexicalist position, especially by proponents of distributed morphology. These are the assumptions that (a) a syntactic terminal is an item supplied by the lexicon and comprising a phonological representation and (b) that syntax may not manipulate the internal structure of syntactic terminals. The article proposes an analysis that is not based on these assumptions, but argues that the analysis does not entail the superiority of a distributed morphology framework.

This article aims to provide a fresh approach to the study of hypercorrection, the misguided application of a real or imagined rule – typically in response to prescriptive pressure – in which the speaker's attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an ‘incorrect’ result. Instead of more familiar sources of information on hypercorrection such as attitude elicitation studies and prescriptive commentary, insights are sought from quantitative and qualitative data extracted from the 2-billion-word Global Web-based English corpus (GloWbE; Davies 2013). Five categories are investigated: case-marked pronouns, -ly and non-ly adverbs, agreement with number-transparent nouns, (extended uses of) irrealis were, and ‘hyperforeign’ noun suffixation. The nature and extent of hypercorrection in these categories, across the twenty English varieties represented in GloWbE, are investigated and discussed. Findings include a tendency for hypercorrection to be more common in American than in British English, and more prevalent in the ‘Inner Circle’ (IC) than in the ‘Outer Circle’ (OC) varieties (particularly with established constructions which have been the target of institutionalised prescriptive commentary over a long period of time).

English testifies to a remarkable pattern of lexical gaps. In quite a few cases, particlestem nouns (e.g. the income) and adjectives (e.g. incoming) exist in the current language whereas their corresponding verbs (e.g. *to income) do not. Verbs with the opposite morpheme order (e.g. to come in) are, of course, attested. Since most relevant nouns and adjectives are derivatives of verbs, the word-class shift must either have entailed an inversion of the morphemes, or the verbs must have dropped out of the language. A diachronic analysis does indeed reveal that particle-stem verbs have a lower ‘life-expectancy’ than the corresponding nouns and adjectives. This difference is claimed to follow from differing degrees of compatibility between word classes and morpheme orders. The criterion of syntacticity shows particle-stem nouns and stem-particle verbs to be internally consistent but stem-particle nouns and particle-stem verbs to be inconsistent. This inconsistency gives rise to the observed historical instability of particle-stem verbs. While also disfavoured in this framework, the currency of stem-particle nouns (e.g. the handout) can be attributed to a conspiracy of several facilitatory effects which tend to override the arguments against this word type. The fact that linguistic units may fall into disuse necessitates certain revisions of the notion of optimality as the backbone of Optimality Theory.

Some English adjectives accept both synthetic and analytic comparative and superlative forms (e.g. thicker vs more thick, happiest vs most happy). As many as 20+ variables have been claimed to affect this choice (see Leech & Culpeper 1997; Lindquist 2000; Mondorf 2003, 2009). However, many studies consider one variable at a time without systematically controlling for other variables (i.e. they take a monofactorial approach). Further, very little research has been done on superlatives. Following Hilpert's (2008) multifactorial study, we investigate the simultaneous contribution of 17 variables towards comparative and superlative alternation and further measure the strength(s) of the predictors. On the whole, phonological predictors are much more important than syntactic and frequency-related predictors. The predictors of the number of syllables and final segments in <-y> consistently outrank other predictors in both models. Important differences have also been identified. Many syntactic variables, such as predicative position and presence of complements, are weak or non-significant in the comparative model but have stronger effects in the superlative model. Further, higher frequency of an adjective leads to a preference for the synthetic -er variant in comparatives but the analytic most variant in superlatives. The study shows that generalizations about comparatives do not straightforwardly carry over to superlatives.

A case is made for the derivation of the regional word eagre ‘tidal surge’, ‘bore’, and relatives or variants found in other contexts, from OE ē(a)gor- meaning ‘flood’ or the like, despite the phonological difficulty. A Latin source is proposed. The evidence for the word is considered alongside place-name evidence, and explanations are tentatively reaffirmed, and proposed, respectively, for two problematic names in Nottinghamshire and Gloucestershire.

This article investigates some functions of the determinative sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. It traces, quantifies and models the diachronic development of sum(e) as a pre-head element from a usage-based, cognitive Construction Grammar perspective by postulating several semi-specified but also abstract constructional OE and ME NP-schemas and sketching the observable (changing) network (re)configurations. By analyzing texts from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME) and the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), the article especially focuses on the demise of the so-called ‘individualizing’ usage with singular nouns and traces the incipient stages of sum(e) as an indefinite near-article with plural and mass nouns. R was used to calculate correlation coefficients and measures of statistical significance in univariate analyses, and for multivariate regression models to address questions involving more than one predictor variable. It is shown that the usage of sum(e) with singular nouns became marginalized because of constructional competition with the numeral ān. In Old English, the two forms were both occasionally used to mark indefiniteness before singular nouns, but ultimately ān became the default marker of indefiniteness ousting sum(e). We also show that that the usage of sum(e) as an indefiniteness marker for plural nouns increased drastically from the later ME period onwards, particularly in informal text genres. Moreover, from the earliest periods onwards, there is a strong preference for this function to occur with complex NPs with pre- and post-head modification, which seem to have acted as bridging contexts.

The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.

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 takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verb carry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especially bear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example of carry sheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for native bear as default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.

This article traces processes of change affecting the concessive adposition notwithstanding in written American English from the early nineteenth century to the present. Data from the Corpus of Historical American English show that, first, there is a dramatic decline in the frequency of notwithstanding. Second, while notwithstanding as a conjunction or conjunct becomes nearly obsolete, its use as an adposition increases in relative frequency. These two developments are interpreted as specialisation in ongoing grammaticalisation, whereby the range of formal alternatives is reduced within the domain of concessive adpositions more generally and among uses of notwithstanding in particular. Third, the postposition becomes the most frequent syntactic variant in the twentieth century. The strengthening of the postposition coincides with two tendencies: (i) the respective phrases are placed in non-final sentence position, and (ii) the noun phrase complements in such constructions are extremely short. In consequence, NP complements of notwithstanding are maximally de-accentuated, being very short and far removed from the focus position. Structuring information in this way is not an option for other concessive connectives, and it is argued to be one of the factors resulting in the strengthening of postpositional notwithstanding in late modern and present-day American English.

In English, some complex words can display exceptional accent preservation (EAP): they can preserve an accent from their base even when this would violate a general restriction against adjacent accents (e.g. retúrn → retùrnée). This article analyses EAP both empirically and theoretically. The analysis of a set of 291 derivatives from Wells (2008) shows that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the relative frequency of the base and its derivative and partially also to syllable structure, and that these two factors have a cumulative effect. It is also shown that the existence of a more deeply embedded base (e.g. colléct→ colléctive → còllectívity ~ collèctívity) can increase the likelihood for a derivative to display EAP. A formal account of the phenomenon is proposed building on Collie's (2007, 2008) ‘fake cyclicity’ analysis, using weighted constraints (Pater 2009, 2016) and Max-Ent-OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Finally, a model of lexical access building on Hay's (2001, 2003) model and integrating more deeply embedded bases is proposed.

In this article we offer a diachronic analysis of simultaneity subordinator as against the background of simultaneity subordinators while, whilst, when from 1650 to the end of the twentieth century. The present survey makes use of data extracted from the British English component of ARCHER (version 3.1), focusing in particular on fiction, the register par excellence for the use of simultaneity subordinators. We analyse our data according to a selection of parameters (ordering, verb type, duration, tense and aspect, subject identity, simultaneity type) and show that, against a background of relative stability, the major change is a dramatic increase in the frequency of simultaneity as-clauses from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards. Adapting the historical work on stylistic change by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1997), as well as theoretical and experimental accounts of the semantics of English simultaneity markers, we highlight an interesting parallelism between the spread of as-clauses in oral narrative from childhood to adulthood and the spread of as-clauses in modern fiction. In either case, the spread of as may be symptomatic of an evolution in narrative techniques, particularly in respect of the means by which complex events are typically represented.

Present-day historians of English are widely agreed that, throughout its recorded history, the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable (1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).

In this article we investigate the role of semantic relations in grammatical alternations. The specific alternation we look at is that between the proper name modifier construction, e.g. the Obama government, and the determiner genitive, e.g. Obama's government. Through the use of an experimental study in which participants were asked to rate the naturalness of the two constructions in 20 attested natural language contexts and provide paraphrases of the semantic relations in question, we tested when the two constructions alternate and whether either construction expresses semantic relations that block alternation. Our initial finding is that none of the relations we studied is categorically associated with only one of the constructions, but that certain relations – notably possession and name – are far more preferentially associated with determiner genitives and proper name modifiers respectively. Despite these ‘default’ associations, participants nevertheless identified a range of possible interpretations for many of the examples, meaning that our study simultaneously supports the opposing theoretical views of default relations and semantic underspecification. Further, our study validates the inclusion of semantic relations in genitive alternation studies as a major factor despite the notorious difficulties in their operationalisation. Animacy distinctions, although more straightforward to codify, appear to be of lesser importance. Methodologically, our study shows the value of an experimental approach as a corrective to researcher intuitions about the identification of semantic relations in context.