This article reports on the use of double modals, a non-standard syntactic feature, in the contemporary speech of the UK and Ireland. Most data on the geographic extent of the feature and its combinatorial types come from surveys or acceptability ratings or from older attestations focused on northern England, Scotland or Northern Ireland, with relatively few attestations in naturalistic data and from England and Wales. Manual verification of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Automatic Speech Recognition transcripts from YouTube videos of local government channels from the UK and Ireland shows that the feature exhibits a larger inventory of combinatorial types than has previously been found and is attested in speech from throughout the UK and Ireland. The development may be related to ongoing changes in the semantic space occupied by modal auxiliaries in English.

Old English has traditionally been considered a period of linguistic homogeneity, since most available recorded texts are generally written in the West Saxon dialect. There are, however, isolated texts which have been ascribed to other varieties, in particular Northumbrian and Mercian. In fact, recent research on syntactic dialectology in early English (Kroch & Taylor 1997; Ogura 1999; Hogg 2004, 2006a; Ingham 2006) shows that linguistic variation has been present in the English language from the earliest times. This study reassesses the existence of variation in the syntax of texts belonging to different dialectal varieties in Old English, in particular in relative constructions. Based on an analysis of relative clauses in three versions of the Gospels from late Old English, representing West Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian dialects, we will observe differences in the texts, regarding both the paradigm of relativizers and the position adopted by the relative clause within the main clause. I relate these differences to the existence of linguistic differences in northern and southern dialects.

The category of the noun phrase in English has received much attention in the literature. This article discusses the main defining features of the category from different theoretical angles. Issues such as its structural status, the determination and characterisation of its (morphosyntactic, semantic, cognitive) head, the structural slots which are available in the phrase, and the different possibilities as far as word order is concerned will be approached from structural, syntactic, functional and cognitive perspectives. In the second half of the article, after a review of recent literature on the English noun phrase, we offer a summary of the research included in this issue.

The article discusses the grammaticalization of the be + V-ende/V-ing periphrasis as a progressive marker. On the basis of quantitative data, it is claimed that the periphrasis started out as an emphatic alternative to the simple tenses. Its length, unusualness and optionality made it well suited as an emphatic marker. In the Early Modern English period (c. 1500–1700), the periphrasis was reinterpreted as an emphatic progressive marker. The prototypical – so-called focalized – use of the construction gradually became obligatory (from the nineteenth century onwards). This caused the focalized use of the periphrasis to lose its emphasis, while the so-called durative use of the construction has remained optional and emphatic to this day, like the subjective uses of the periphrasis. The article also explores the question of influence from Latin on the periphrasis in the Old English period (i.e. up to c. 1100), concluding that any such influence is likely to have consisted in a reinforcing effect.

Which normally transitive verbs can omit their objects in English (I ate), and why? This article explores three factors suggested to facilitate object omission: (i) how strongly a verb selects its object (Resnik 1993); (ii) a verb's frequency (Goldberg 2005); (iii) the extent to which the verb is associated with a routine – a recognized, conventional series of actions within a community (Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis 2010; Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí 2010, 2015). To operationalize (iii), this article compares the writings of different communities to offer corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities in which they are more strongly associated with a routine. More broadly, the article explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them.

Recent years have seen a spate of publications that attempt to recontextualise the history of English in contact-linguistic (Miller 2012; Lutz 2013; Durkin 2014) and sociolinguistic terms (Millar 2012), and conversely to confront previous descriptions of contact phenomena with new data and theoretical insights available from situations of language shift and substratum influence (Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008; Vennemann 2011), extensive bilingualism (Schendl & Wright 2011), language acquisition (Ingham 2012) and contact-induced grammaticalisation (Timofeeva 2010). Coupled with advances in our understanding of contact- and acquisition-induced language change (Heine & Kuteva 2005; Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008), and of the role of contact in the varieties of English around the world (Schreier & Hundt 2013), there is a clear need in this area of historical research for scholars to reinvestigate earlier stages of English as a contact language.

Some nonmodal tense forms (e.g. thought) can trigger one or two kinds of modal interpretation, viz. suspended factuality (implicating present counterfactuality) of the complement clause (I thought you weren't married) or discourse tentativeness (I thought you might lend me your camera). The authors explain how this nonmodal use of the past tense – the thinking is represented as a past fact – can lead to one of these modal interpretations of the complement clause. In doing so they discuss various observations in connection with these and other I thought that…constructions and similar uses of other past-tense and past-perfect forms.

Much of the research that has been carried out into the functions of actually and – to a lesser extent – really has focused on their so-called ‘discourse functions’. However, when they appear medially both actually and really are usually classified as intensifiers, and it has been argued that they are often interchangeable (see for example Lenk 1998; Oh 2000; Taglicht 2001). The purpose of this article is to test current thinking on this question by casting further light on the way medial actually and really are used in spoken discourse. Two complementary approaches are taken. Firstly, the interchangeability hypothesis is assessed on the basis of quantitative analyses of data from the British National Corpus. Secondly, the question of the extent to which actually and/or really function as intensifiers in preverbal position is addressed via a detailed qualitative analysis of data from a small corpus of recent BBC radio broadcasts of the panel-based political discussion programme Any Questions. The analyses presented here suggest that the interchangeability hypothesis is untenable and that the two adverbs have different core meanings, with any intensifying function being largely the result of interplay between the distinct semantic properties of each adverb and the discourse context.

In this article, I discuss vowel reduction, stress, and vowel harmony in Buchan Scots English, a dialect spoken in Aberdeenshire in northern Scotland. Work by Wölck (1965) describes Buchan Scots English as having vowel harmony. This article explores the conditions that restrict the distribution of vowels in those syllables that do not receive a primary stress. Such syllables allow a smaller range of contrasts, and vowel height in these syllables is at least partially predictable from a preceding stressed vowel. These facts show that both vowel reduction and vowel harmony operate in Buchan Scots English.

This article discusses the peculiar use of the simple present/past in full-verb inversion (i.e. locative inversion, directional inversion, quotative inversion, presentational there), and the corresponding scarcity of progressive aspect in these contexts. While it is normally ungrammatical in English to use the simplex tenses to report events that are ongoing at reference time, inversion seems to defy this restriction. Building on a combination of insights from analyses of aspect and of full-verb inversion in English, this study presents a cognitive-functional explanation for this exceptional characteristic of inversion that has gone largely unnoticed in previous accounts. I argue that there exists a canonical relationship between the preposed ground and the postposed figure in full-verb inversion and that this meaning of canonicity ties in perfectly with the perfective value that I deem constitutive of the English simple tenses. In addition, some cases of directional inversion involve a ‘deictic effect’ (Drubig 1988): in these instances, the conceptualizer's vantage point is anchored within the ground and the denoted (dis)appearance of the figure is construed as inevitable. On the basis of a large sample of corpus data and native-speaker elicitations, I demonstrate that the use of the progressive is disallowed in inverted contexts that involve a deictic effect, while its use is dispreferred but not excluded in other cases of inversion. This study thus brings together insights from the domains of information structure and aspect in English, and merges these into a comprehensive cognitive account.

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.

We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.

The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.

Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.

This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.

The present article studies the linear order of main and temporal adverbial clauses in the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660–1669). In the development of a framework that combines cognitive and historical data, processing principles identified for Present-day English (e.g. Prideaux 1989; Diessel 2008) are tested for this ego-document from the seventeenth century. The factors investigated are the iconic temporal order of both clauses, the length of the adverbial clause and the implied meaning of the clauses. Moreover, the discourse function of the respective clauses will be discussed. On the basis of the Uniformitarian Principle, the present study assumes that processing principles that are valid for Present-day English predict the position of the clause in past language stages to a similar extent.

This article explores the diachronic development of mirative end up in American English, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and which seems to be, at present, in the process of becoming a parenthetical element. The rise of the various mirative end up constructions is argued to be the result of both pragmatic enrichment and paradigmatic analogy, motivated by a series of semantically and formally related expressions, most prominently by mirative turn out. Moreover, the article delves into the process of cooptation to explain the emergence of parenthetical instances in the present-day language. Cooptation is understood as an intrinsically analogical-driven mechanism when it entails the eventual grammaticalization of formulaic parenthetical constructions. Data for the present study were taken from a variety of diachronic and synchronic sources, which include COHA, COCA and NOW, among others.

This article investigates the history of what Wells (1982), in his account of present-day accents of English, calls ‘hyper-rhoticity’. That is, the appearance, in rhotic accents, of epenthetic, unetymological rhyme-/r/, usually taking the form of /r/-colouring in modern accents. It is attested most commonly in final unstressed syllables, but may also occur in syllable rhymes after a long, stressed vowel. The article traces the history of this phenomenon and attempts to show that Early Modern English data which have hitherto been interpreted as evidence for loss of /r/ in such contexts are better attributed to hyper-rhoticity. It is also argued here, in an addendum, that not to accept claims for early /r/-loss in unstressed syllables has wider implications for the history of English phonology. That is, to reject theories of loss of /r/ in final unstressed syllables demands rejection of the notion of early articulatory weakening of /r/ in this context, which has been seen as a prelude to the spread of weakening to other contexts, leading ultimately to loss of rhoticity.

This special volume is concerned with the syntax of nonstandard varieties of (mainly British) English, and how such syntactic variation is accounted for within a range of theoretical models. There has been a growing interest in the modelling of dialect syntax (a) in a number of languages and (b) in a number of syntactic theories (see, for instance, the research on syntactic microvariation in some Germanic languages in Barbiers, Cornips & van der Kelij, 2002, or the construction-based approach to variation in Leino & Östman, 2005). We have brought together five articles written in different theoretical frameworks (Principles and Parameters, Stochastic Optimality Theory, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Word Grammar, and Construction Grammar), together with an introduction written by the editors, who themselves adopt very different theoretical frameworks.

We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in gold, false or bind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body of OED and corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphotactic models is indeed likely to have played a role in establishing VVCC rhymes in the English lexicon, since VVCC rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/d|z/ began to establish themselves in lexical phonotactics at the same period in which they also started to be produced in inflection, and clearly before similar types that had no inflectionally produced analogues (i.e. VV[sonorant]/t|s/ as in fault, dance). At the same time, we show that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis that homophonies between lexical and morphotactic rhymes are dispreferred. We argue that under the specific historical circumstances that obtained in English, natural ways of eliminating the resulting ambiguities failed to be available. Finally, we show that, once the phonotactically and semiotically dispreferred VV[sonorant]/d|z/ rhymes had been established, the emergence of morphotactically unambiguous rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/t|s/ was to be expected, since they filled what was an accidental rather than natural gap in the phonotactic system of English (see Hayes & White 2013).

The perfect in World Englishes has attracted much attention recently, especially from a semasiological perspective, in which the analytic have + participle is analysed in comparison with the synthetic preterite. This article intends to achieve a more holistic picture of the expression of perfect meaning in World Englishes, which allows us to identify how perfect meaning is expressed in all pragmatic contexts. In this study, all the occurrences of ten high-frequency verbs are examined in order to single out those expressing perfect meaning. The corpus (8.8m words in total) includes ten components of the International Corpus of English: eight Outer Circle varieties from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and two reference varieties: British and American English. The relevant examples are tabulated across variables such as presence of adverbials, type of perfect meaning, lexical verb, mode, text type and evolutionary stage. The results show that the envelope of variation is much wider than the one traditionally acknowledged in current grammars of English, and that type of meaning, lexical verb or text type are crucial determiners in the choice of particular forms to express perfect meaning. By contrast, mode or evolutionary stage does not seem to have a bearing on the differences between varieties.

The main aim of this article is to provide an explanation accounting for the production of English derived nouns in -ee. In line with Barker (1998), I will argue that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the verbal base are unsatisfactory, and that the conditions for this derivational process must be searched for within semantics. My intention is to explore the semantic factors that might be taken to be pre-eminent in the different sets of verbs taking the suffix using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. It will be shown that a semantic analysis based on a theory of lexical representation like RRG is relevant to account for the formation of derived nouns in -ee in English.I gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Robert Van Valin, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two anonymous readers of a previous version of this paper.

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.

This article analyses adjectival modification in elliptical NPs based on a corpus analysis. It illustrates the fact that descriptive adjectives can be used without nominal heads in English. Whereas in spoken language adjectives denoting more inherent properties feature prominently when the referents are present in the text-external world, no particular types of adjectives appear in written language. In terms of the latter, two major types of linguistic contexts are identified which do not require the use of a nominal head. It is argued that a conception of ‘contrast’ as a ‘non-identity’ condition cannot account for the variation between one-replacement and noun ellipsis since it holds for both phenomena. Similarly, partitivity is argued not to be a relevant requirement for the use of adjectives without nouns.