The article deals with two of the long-standing problems in English linguistics: whether it is possible that each noun can have both count and mass senses, and the problem of determining a complete list of the regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. While there have been numerous attempts to solve each of these problems, this article shows the results of applying Cognitive Grammar to them.

The analysis covers a set of concrete nouns representative of English – sixty nouns with different ontological properties and all frequencies of occurrence. These are nouns that are classified by dictionaries as solely count and solely mass. Because of its usage-based character, the analysis scrutinises over 1,700 real-life utterances produced by native speakers of English. The analysis shows that even such nouns possess senses whose properties are the reverse of the properties of the nouns’ basic senses. A thorough examination of the nouns’ basic and extended senses leads to certain grammatical regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. The analysis not only systematises the grammatical regularities determined so far and solves many problems that can be noticed about them, but also proposes novel regularities.

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 1842. Hardback, ISBN 0 521 43146 8. £120.

This article reviews Huddleston & Pullum (2002) from the viewpoint of a co-author of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1985). (This author, however, makes no claim whatsoever to represent the views of the other authors of Quirk et al.) Particular attention is paid to some of the more controversial aspects of Huddleston & Pullum's analysis. It is argued that the two grammars, although similar in their comprehensively wide coverage of English, are not strictly comparable, in that Huddleston & Pullum's grammar is more theory-oriented and Quirk et al.'s grammar is more observation-oriented. These different orientations go with different strengths and weaknesses. In some areas Huddleston & Pullum's more up-to-date account has manifest advantages over that of Quirk et al., but there are also arguably areas where Huddleston & Pullum have not moved with the times.

The study is aimed at revealing collocational adverb–adjective patterns in the British National Corpus (BNC). The adverbs selected for the study include the maximizers absolutely, completely, entirely, fully, perfectly, totally, utterly, wholly. The study involves searches on both the selected adverbs and the adjectives they modify in a bi-directional fashion. It is claimed that only a cognitive and usage-based approach in terms of underlying conceptual structures can provide an accurate description of collocational patterns. The results show that a large proportion of the adjectives have strong bonds with particular maximizers. This is explained through the basic conceptual structure of Boundedness/Scalarity, i.e. the degree to which the adjective lends itself to a bounded or a scalar construal and the adverb is biased towards a totality construal (which is the kind of construal to be expected from maximizers). The results support the hypothesis that a substantial part of the adverb–adjective combinations investigated are (semi)-prefabricated units, presumably easily accessed by native speakers because the combinations are the result of specific construals and their members have close associative and conceptual links in the mental lexicon.

Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.

This paper tries to reveal the constraints on the use of the present perfect progressive (PPP) in combination with numerical object NPs. Existing accounts tend to take situation type classes as a basis for the description of the PPP. It is shown that such an approach does not yield adequate results. (Un)boundedness (Declerck, 1991; Depraetere, 1995) plays an equally important role as (a)telicity in determining whether the progressive can be used or not. (Un)boundedness, as opposed to (a)telicity, is concerned with actual terminal points (of situations referred to) rather than potential (inherent) endpoints. It will be shown in this paper that, in some cases, the conflict between the unboundedness inherent in the progressive form and the boundedness often brought about by numerical object NPs that are used in nonstative sentences results in unacceptability. Considerable attention is first paid to the constraints on the use of the past progressive with numerical object NPs. The second part of the paper focuses on the PPP: apart from (un)boundedness and (a)telicity, the type of perfect and our knowledge of the world also play their part in determining whether or not the PPP is acceptable in sentences with a numerical object NP.

Building on previous studies that have discussed pronominal referencing in Old English (Traugott 1992; van Gelderen 2013; van Kemenade & Los 2017), the present study analyses the pronominal anaphoric strategies of the West Saxon dialect of Old English based on a quantitative and qualitative study of personal and demonstrative pronoun usage across a selection of late (post c. AD 900) Old English prose text types. The historical data discussed in the present study provide important additional support for modern cognitive and psycholinguistic theory. In line with the cognitive/psycholinguistic literature on the distribution of pronouns in Modern German (Bosch & Umbach 2007), the information-structural properties of referents rather than the grammatical role of the pronoun's antecedent most accurately explain the personal pronoun vs demonstrative pronoun contrast in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The findings also highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English.

The distribution of the Saxon genitive and the of genitive in computer manuals is significantly different from their distribution in other texts. This is because the manuals contain a high proportion of computer nouns (nouns referring to computer hardware and software), which pattern like human nouns rather than like inanimate nouns. An analysis of the conventional metaphors used to talk about computers reveals that they are often construed as people, and the higher proportion of the Saxon genitive is a grammatical repercussion of this construal.

The aim of this article is to establish whether the structure of morphologically complex words in English is flat or hierarchical and, in case of the latter possibility, whether it is left- or right-branching, and whether the branching direction is consistent throughout the lexicon. Six criteria (three phonological, one morphological, one lexical, and one semantic) are introduced as arguments bearing on the internal structure of words. These criteria are applied to the complete set of prefix-stem-derivational suffix sequences in English. The overall evidence clearly weighs in favour of the hierarchical right-branching model. Right-branching is argued to be a concomitant of translating meaning into form. No branching-direction preference emerges on the semantic criterion. Right-branching is relatively weak on the lexical criterion, stronger on the morphological criterion, and strongest on the phonological criteria. Left-branching is observed to play a certain role in words with unproductive prefixes and is understood as a symptom of demorphologization. The branching direction is found to be largely, though not entirely, consistent. The six criteria generate a low percentage of conflicting outcomes, suggesting that branching paradoxes are a rather uncommon phenomenon. The reason for hierarchical right-branching structure in English is claimed to lie in the processing advantage that it incurs. This explanation applies not only to the morphological but also to the syntactic and phonological levels. Processing ease thus leads to crosslevel harmony in the English language.

The translation of Lindley Murray's English Grammar (1795) into many different languages is often taken as a starting point for the spread of English as a world language. This article places the developing European interest in English much earlier than that, and it does so by analysing a series of letters in the library of the University of Leiden written by Englishmen from the Late Modern English period to men of letters in the Netherlands. The letters show that English as a medium of communication was not as a rule an issue, even though Dutch letter writers were rarely exposed to English and often lacked the tools – or the teachers – to acquire the language, a situation which would change drastically during the nineteenth century. The article also analyses the earliest attempts at writing in English by Johannes Stinstra, the Dutch translator of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

This article deals in outline with two interrelated aspects of the history of English phonology: aspects that are argued here to involve the loss of contrastive linearization for /h/ and of consonantal status for /w/ and /j/. It is suggested that these histories are clarified if proper attention is paid to contrastivity: it is necessary to identify those aspects of phonological representation which are contrastive, both segmentally and sequentially. Contrastive status can change. In this case, it is proposed here that the position of /h/ in a word has come to be noncontrastive, and that [w] and [j] are no longer contrastively consonantal, but sequential variants of their full-vowel congeners. The characterization of these restructurings involves the recognition of changing patterns of contrastivity. And, crucially, contrastivity involves not just paradigmatic distinctions between segments but also syntagmatic relations between them.

In most theoretical and descriptive treatments of English proforms it seems to be accepted that proforms replace constituents in underlying structure (i.e. phrases or clauses). The aim of the present article is to challenge this assumption. It will be demonstrated that a great many fully acceptable uses of proforms turn out to be quite problematic for the view of proforms as corresponding either to constituents or to semantic and/or syntactic units in underlying representation; nor, it turns out, do proforms necessarily refer to or denote a single (identifiable, retrievable or inferrable) entity. After a brief summary of the relevant literature, the article presents a detailed examination of the actual function and use of English proforms, focusing on a number of frequently used proforms: (i) the indefinite pronoun one, (ii) the predicative proform do so, (iii) the demonstrative pronouns that and those and (iv) certain uses of the personal pronouns we/us and you. On the basis of attested examples, it is argued that these proforms do not necessarily express a unit at any level of underlying representation. Instead an alternative account of the use of proforms is suggested, using the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar, which, with its four different levels of analysis (representing pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological information), possesses the kind of flexibility needed to deal with English proforms in a consistent and unified manner. Finally, an attempt is made to explain some of the constraints on the flexible system proposed.

Our etymological understanding of PDE bread has been influenced, to a considerable extent, by Otto Jespersen's comment that ‘An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.’ This article analyses the evidence behind the possibility that PDE bread might represent a Norse-derived semantic loan, i.e. that OE brēad acquired the meaning ‘bread’, which was more frequently expressed by OE hlāf, because of the influence of its Viking Age Norse cognate (cp. OIc brauð ‘bread’). On the basis of an in-depth study of the attestations of OE brēad and hlāf and their early Middle English reflexes, as well as the use of their cognates in various Germanic languages, the article challenges the traditional view that OE brēad originally meant ‘piece, morsel of bread’ and concludes that Norse influence is not needed in order to account for the semantic history of PDE bread.

This article seeks to identify the phonetic correspondence(s) of the digraph <cg> in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), assessing a range of sources: the etyma in early Germanic (Gmc) languages, the various spellings in OE and the spelling evidence in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. Almost all the textbooks on OE claim that <cg> was pronounced /dʒ/, i.e. as a phonemic affricate, in OE. Evidence is thin on the ground, and the argument rests on certain back spellings <cg> for words with etymological <d+g>, e.g. midgern <micgern>. Words with <cg> in OE go back to Gmc *g(g)j, which subsequently underwent palatalisation, and eventually assibilation and affrication. This article argues that the value [ɟj] is more likely for OE and early ME, and that such an interpretation agrees with the available spelling evidence for both OE and ME, in that there is not one <d>-type spelling in the entire historical corpus until late ME. It is also argued that the development of the voiced (pre-)affricate was later than that of its voiceless counterpart, as voiced fricative phonemes are a late, and infrequent, development in Gmc. Moreover, it is likely that the development of /dʒ/ was affected by the high number of French loans with /dʒ/ which entered the English lexicon after 1066. Thus, the English system of consonant phonemes may not have acquired /dʒ/ until the thirteenth century at the earliest.

Weinert & Miller (1996) suggest that English wh-clefts are a heterogeneous class in that they can have varied degrees of structural integration. Many such constructions depart structurally from the canonical wh-cleft which consists of a wh-clause, the copula and a focus constituent, and in which all the three elements are brought together into a fully integrated utterance. In the types of wh-clefts displaying looser structure, their lack of syntactic integration has so far been related to such linguistic features as (a) omission of the copula, (b) non-canonical copular complementation, e.g. independent main clauses instead of standard infinitival phrases appearing in the focus constituent, (c) lack of a clearly identifiable copular complement, (d) the focusing effect of the wh-clause extending over several clauses (Weinert & Miller 1996; Koops & Ross-Hagebaum 2008; Hopper & Thompson 2008; Callies 2012). Although the disintegrating effect of these features has been observed, the extent of the phenomenon in modern English has not been properly established and other non-integration features have not been investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to use corpus data to identify and examine such non-integration features and to investigate the extent – expressed quantitatively – to which these features are found in wh-clefts with the verb do in the wh-clause. The article also points out the formulaic status of those wh-clauses which become disconnected from their focus phrases.

This article attempts to repair the neglect of the qualitative uses of some and to suggest an explanation which could cover the full range of usage with this determiner – both quantitative and qualitative – showing how a single underlying meaning, modulated by contextual and pragmatic factors, can give rise to the wide variety of messages expressed by some in actual usage. Both the treatment of some as an existential quantifier and the scalar model which views some as evoking a less-than-expected quantity on a pragmatic scale are shown to be incapable of handling the qualitative uses of this determiner. An original analysis of some and the interaction of its meaning with the defining features of the qualitative uses is proposed, extending the discussion as well to the role of focus and the adverbial modifier quite. The crucial semantic feature of some for the explanation of its capacity to express qualitative readings is argued to be non-identification of a referent assumed to be particular. Under the appropriate conditions, this notion can give rise to qualitative denigration (implying it is not even worth the bother to identify the referent) or qualitative appreciation (implying the referent to be so outstanding that it defies identification). The explanation put forward is also shown to cover some's use as an approximator, thereby enhancing its plausibility even further.

It is a generally accepted fact that the use of long-s, or <ſ>, was discontinued in English printing at the close of the eighteenth century and that by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century this allograph had all but disappeared. This demise of <ſ> in printing has been fairly well documented, but there is virtually no literature on what happened to it in handwritten documents. The disappearance of <ſ> and <ſs> (as in ʃeems and buʃineʃs) in favour of <s> and <ss> is generally ascribed to the printers’ wishes to simplify their type-settings. But at what point and to what extent did this simplifying process influence private writing of the period? In this article we have documented the rules, as observed by printers, for the use of long-s in the Late Modern English period, and we illustrate how printing practice during this period compared to the usage of this particular grapheme in letters written by two well-known codifiers of the English language, the grammarians Joseph Priestley and Lindley Murray.

When it comes to intra-dialectal variation, the factors governing the choice between functionally equivalent variants still require an exhaustive analysis. The construction be sat/be stood with progressive meaning alternates with the standard form be sitting/be standing in a number of British English dialects. The present article investigates to what extent the Complexity Principle (see Rohdenburg 1996) and horror aequi (see Rohdenburg 2003) influence the choice between so-called pseudo-passive and progressive constructions. Empirical analyses of spoken data in the British National Corpus reveal that this variation phenomenon is common in dialects of Northern and Southwest England, and to a lesser degree in the Midlands and in London. Moreover, we find considerable differences in the distribution of these pseudo-passives regarding their relative frequency and the number of dialects that make use of them. Drawing on a total of 106 occurrences for the construction be stood vs be standing and 366 for be sat vs be sitting, the article evaluates how far the principles above can be considered as statistically significant determinants of intra-dialectal variation. To this end, it will be essential to test for other factors potentially influencing the choice of dialectal variants, such as age and gender.

This article reports on the use of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.