This article offers an account of i-umlaut in Old English based on lexical minimality: the elimination of redundancies from, in this case, the phonological subentries in the lexicon. And the notation is that of Anderson & Ewen (1987), which is based, crucially for the present formulation, on simplex features which may combine in varying proportions. These assumptions combine to favour system-dependent underspecification. In accord with lexical minimality, the approach taken here is also polysystemic: thus, for instance, Old English vowels, even Old English accented vowels, do not enter into only one system of contrasts. The phonology is a system of systems sharing some but not all contrasts. The article attempts to show that on this basis some of the many apparent anomalies that the evidence has been thought to suggest can be resolved in terms of a simple coherent formulation. Concerning the interpretation of this evidence, it is the intention of the article to minimize appeals to phonetic features and phonetic processes not warranted by textual and comparative testimony. It is suggested that lack of attention to polysystemicity and a pervasive indulgence on the part of historical phonologists in phonetic fantasies undermine the conclusions reached by generations of scholars concerning the development of phonological systems, both in general and in particular.

Colloquialisation, a process by which ‘writing becomes more like speech’, has been identified as a powerful discourse-pragmatic mechanism driving grammatical change in native English varieties. The extent to which colloquialisation is a factor in change in non-native varieties has seldom been explored. This article reports the findings of a corpus-based study of colloquialisation in Philippine English (PhilE), alongside its ‘parent variety’, American English (AmE). Adopting a bottom-up approach, a comprehensive measure was derived to determine the degree to which a text prefers grammatical features typical of speech and disprefers those typical of writing. This measure was then used to compare and contrast texts in a parallel, multi-register corpus of PhilE and AmE sampled for the 1960s and 1990s. Evidence for colloquialisation was found to vary across registers. While Philippine press editorials and American fiction show a clear colloquialising tendency, learned writing does not show remarkable changes irrespective of variety. The evolution of PhilE registers cannot be explained by a simple process involving emulation of AmE. The patterns uncovered reflect the uniqueness of the sociohistorical circumstances in which PhilE has evolved.

In Old English we find considerable variation in the infinitival complementation patterns of verbs: some verbs take a bare infinitival complement, some verbs take a to-infinitival complement and some verbs can be complemented by either infinitive. This article evaluates two previous attempts to account for the distribution of the two infinitives and offers an alternative account; it also argues that the increase in the use of the to-infinitive occurred mostly at the expense of the finite complement clause rather than at the expense of the bare infinitive, which is the traditional view.

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters <quh-> and <wh-> found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

This article sheds new light on the usage constraints of be able to, by combining empirical evidence from the British National Corpus (BNC, Davies 2004–) with theoretical insights on the semantics–pragmatics interface. First, we show that be able to does not, contrary to the general assumption, express only ‘ability’ but it shares most of the root meanings usually associated with the possibility modals can and could (Coates 1983: 124). The data analysis shows that what is called ‘opportunity’ in Depraetere & Reed's (2011) taxonomy is the most frequent meaning of be able to. We then turn to the notion of actualisation, which is often claimed to be the main distinguishing feature between be able to and can/could. The qualitative analysis of the BNC dataset provides the empirical evidence, lacking in previous research, for the claim that actualisation is indeed a defining property of the modal periphrastic form. Starting from a reassessment of the semantics–pragmatics interface in terms of a fourfold distinction, we argue that actualisation is a generalised conversational implicature and constitutes conventional pragmatic meaning (that is, conventional non-truth-conditional meaning).

The article discusses compound formation involving proper names from a comparative perspective. While proper names can appear within compounds in English, this is not possible in Greek. The article argues that this follows from a basic difference between English and Greek: English, but not Greek, allows phrases as non-heads of right-headed compounds. As proper names in English are referential in the absence of a determiner, due to the process of D-N merger, they can still be recognized as such within compounds. This is not possible in Greek, where proper names require the presence of a determiner to establish reference.

This article explores the use of connective adverbials or conjuncts (e.g. therefore, on the other hand, firstly) in nineteenth-century English. Drawing on A Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English (CONCE), the study focuses on charting change over time and variation among different genres, and considers the distribution of various semantic types (e.g. contrastive, resultive) as well as individual conjuncts and author styles. We show that nineteenth-century English displays considerable genre differentiation in the use of conjuncts, both in terms of frequency and semantic types of conjuncts employed. Within these larger trends, patterns are also evident for individual conjuncts (e.g. now, therefore, so) and individual authors (e.g. in Letters). Science writing, in particular, reveals a drastic increase in conjuncts (in nearly all semantic types), which sets it apart from other genres. This suggests that the conjunct-heavy style of academic writing that has been attested in studies of Present-Day English was established in the nineteenth century. On a more general level, this result underlines the importance of considering formal genres when charting language change, as they may be in the forefront of the formation of new linguistic patterns that are unique to written texts. The article also contributes to our growing understanding of Late Modern English syntax.

In current accounts the Old English relative þe is analysed in two radically different ways. The traditional view, inherited from the nineteenth-century grammarians, views the word as a relative pronoun, while the generative analysis, derived from some remarks of Jespersen on the ModE relative that, takes it to be a subordinating particle. The generativist view is based on the word's lack of morphological variation, whereas the older approach examines more generally the grammar of the word, noting that the invariable þe shares the typical nominal categories of number and case, functioning both as a singular and a plural and representing all the four cases of OE nominal elements. A further indication of the word's nominal status is its referential function, distinguishing between specific and generic reference. Against these clear facts, the lack of overt inflection is a minor idiosyncrasy, paralleled by the OE generic man/mon, whose pronominal status is widely agreed. Þe may have been a subordinating particle in origin, but by historical OE times it retained this function in relative clauses only after relative adverbs, having been reanalysed elsewhere either as a relative adverb itself, or, in its most frequent relative use, as a pronoun.

The evolution of verbs expressing necessity in the history of English, such as *þurfan and need, has been studied in detail, especially their semantic competition and their grammaticalization (see Molencki 2002, 2005; Taeymans 2006; Loureiro-Porto 2009). However, analogous verbo-nominal expressions involving the morphologically related nouns þearf and need and the verbs be and have have received little attention, despite their relevance as semantic competitors of the verbs and their subsequent fossilization in high-frequency expressions such as if need be and had need. The current article fills this gap by studying the development of verbo-nominal expressions with þearf and need from Old to early Modern English, and asks: (i) whether the verbs and the verbo-nominal expressions undergo similar processes of grammaticalization, and (ii) whether there is any connection between the evolution of the verbal and the verbo-nominal sets. Analysis of these verbo-nominal constructions in a 4.1 million-word corpus (including the Helsinki Corpus and fragments of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler) shows that, firstly, both idiomaticization and grammaticalization are relevant in the development of verbo-nominal constructions; secondly, their evolution is key to the understanding of the development of the necessity verbs *þurfan and need; and finally, the competition between constructions with þearf and need calls into question the well-known hypothesis that phonological confusion with durran caused the disappearance of *þurfan in the ME period (see Visser 1963–73: 1423, §1343).

In one way or another, historical linguists have always been aware of the limitations inherent to working with linguistic data from bygone ages. One of the most substantial limitations, as Petré points out, is that all speakers of a historical variant of a language are unavailable for psycholinguistic study, essentially leaving researchers with their written records as the sole data source. As such, historical linguists often find themselves taking the role of corpus linguists, trying to understand the workings of a language ‘by studying aggregate data that pools the productions of many speakers and writers – often across different media, genres, registers, and even across different time periods’ (Arppe et al.2010: 3). As Petré points out, the practice of studying language on this aggregate level has dominated the methodologies in historical linguistic studies, and very little attention is paid to the individual level.

In this article I illustrate the discourses surrounding enregistered Yorkshire dialect and identity which appear to demonstrate sociological fractionation (Agha 2007) in nineteenth-century texts including dialect literature and literary dialect (Shorrocks 1996), dialect poems, ballads, songs, dialogues, and the dialect from Yorkshire characters in novels and plays. The emergent discourses highlight perceptions of Yorkshire characters in literary texts as boors who use generic enregistered (Agha 2003) ‘Yorkshire’ dialect, whereas many local writers contest these representations and argue that the dialect used by literary characters is inaccurate. Moreover, we can observe quantifiable differences in the representations of dialect features in writing aimed at local versus wider audiences. This also correlates with a broader range of social identities depicted for Yorkshire speakers in dialect literature than in literary dialect. I conclude that the recirculation of these discourses is evidence of sociological fractionation, as we see local writers acting as an ingroup challenging and contesting the views and identities portrayed by an outgroup. At the centre of these discourses, we can consistently observe discussion and use of enregistered Yorkshire dialect, which illustrates the additional ideological complexity of the links between language and identity in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the so-called ‘narrative when’ construction in English. No one has come up with an entirely satisfactory description of this construction which accounts appropriately for both its syntax and content. The descriptive challenge is to explain the unusual balance between the main clause and the when clause: unlike an ordinary temporal when clause (which offers circumstantial information in relation to the main clause), a narrative when clause expresses the primary situation while the main clause merely has a supporting textual function. This article suggests a simple framework for the description of all when clauses within which narrative when clauses are very comfortably accommodated as one of the metaphorical extensions of the basic meaning and syntax of when.

It is shown that the connection posited by Roberts (1997) between the loss of case marking and the shift from OV to VO in English is contradicted by the facts of English and the other Germanic languages. It is argued that this failure is not the result of an incorrect handling of the syntactic or morphological details, but of the way that the proposal straddles the syntax–morphology interface. Parallels are explored with research on verb raising and agreement, and it is proposed that, in order to be more than a descriptive generalization, the claim that some morphological property has a syntactic effect must be couched in terms that both the morphology and the syntax can refer to in a principled way.

English genitive noun-phrase coordinations follow two patterns. The first is the single genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs solely on the final coordinate, e.g. Mary and Jane's; and the second is the multiple genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs on all coordinates, e.g. Mary's and Jane's. When either of the coordinates is a personal pronoun, difficult choices have to be made about the form of the pronoun. These difficulties arise especially with the single genitive, which is judged to be totally ungrammatical in coordinations like *my wife and I's or *my wife and my. On the other hand, the alternative use of the multiple genitive, my wife's and my, conflicts with a preference for the single genitive when the coordinates are felt to constitute a single unit. In this article, we first conduct a corpus-based analysis for genitive coordinations with personal pronouns, based on the British National Corpus. This, supplemented by some non-standard examples from web-based sources, gives some insight into the choices actually made by native speakers. We then provide a theoretical account of the syntactic problems that genitive coordinations with pronouns create. This account is shown to be compatible solely with an analysis of the English ’s genitive as an inflectional affix.

This article re-examines the case for analysing specificational NP be NP sentences as predicative inversions. Taking a constructional and functional perspective, I show that only predicational sentences exhibiting a relation of class inclusion permit a specificational interpretation, and argue, following Higgins (1979), that the form of specificational inversion sentences is dependent upon the construction-specific concept of specificational meaning. In this way, the account provides an explanation for the restrictions on NP predicative inversion that have posed a problem for inverse analyses developed from within the formalist tradition. Since the distributional facts can be better captured than with the alternative equative approach (which treats specificational sentences as instances of semantic equation), the article concludes that specificational copular sentences are best analysed as instances of predicative inversion.

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

Adjectives are paradigmatically versatile: they combine with many different items in the same syntactic configuration. They are also syntagmatically versatile: they occur in many different syntactic configurations. Given this versatility, how and to what extent can lexeme-specific preferences and features of the adjectives be identified? With the adjective quick as its starting point, this article answers this question by using corpus data, contrasting the behavior of quick with that of its semantic neighbors. Case study 1 investigates quick's attributive usage. It is shown that quick in its default usage combines with eventive heads, and that there are clear differences in combinatorial preferences across its semantic neighbors. Case study 2 investigates the quick-to-infinitival construction. Here, direct combination with eventive heads is impossible. It behaves differently from other adj-to-infinitival constructions as well as the competing quickly constructions. Comparison of the availability of this construction for quick's semantic neighbors, and linking this to the results of study 1, shows a clear connection between paradigmatic and syntagmatic distributions.

Henry & Cottell (2007) argue that Belfast English (BE) sentences such as There shouldn't anybody say that and There've lots of people passed the test are transitive expletive constructions (TECs) similar to those that are a feature of Icelandic. They propose that the difference between BE and Standard English (SE) is that whereas expletive there is introduced in Spec vP in the latter it is introduced in Spec TP in the former. On the assumption that transitive subjects originate in Spec vP, this entails that expletive there cannot co-occur with a transitive verb. While it is clear that BE is different from SE in this area, it is not clear that BE has TECs while SE does not. There are a variety of examples which are acceptable in BE but not SE which do not seem to be TECs. SE also has certain examples which might be called TECs. The result of this is that Henry & Cottell's analysis is not very successful. It seems that what distinguishes BE from SE is not what verbs may follow the associate of the expletive but what elements may precede it. SE allows an associate immediately after be, but BE also allows an associate immediately after modals and have, and for some speakers seem and likely as well. The facts can be captured in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar by assuming that be has an extra lexical description with expletive there as its subject and the associate as an extra complement in both varieties of English, and that modals and have, and for some speakers seem and likely as well, have an extra lexical description of this form in BE. Generalizations can be captured if the pairs of lexical descriptions are analysed as alternative ways of fleshing out basic underspecified lexical descriptions.