This article offers a description of a particular lexical item, the English word bit, from a meaning potential perspective making use of the framework lexical meaning as ontologies and construals (LOC). The lexical semantics for bit is described not in terms of meanings per se, but rather in terms of potential for cueing conceptual structures of varying schematicity, put to use through a range of cognitive processes, or construals. The article concludes that some conceptual structures are quite fundamental to bit’s use and that their construal is highly flexible and contextually sensitive. The semantic structures evoked by bit are realized through particular communicative and discursive settings, and these semantic structures provide the raw material for all its situated meanings in response to communicative demands. Ultimately, a meaning potential perspective, in particular the model for describing and explaining lexical meaning adopted in this article, facilitates a rich and explicatory description of bit, both as regards its fundamental structures and their construal in attested language use.

This article explores the concept of the supernatural and the characterization of monsters and devils in Old English (OE), using the framework of a prototype model of semantic structure. Although there is a lexical gap, with no OE word equivalent to Present-Day English supernatural, it is possible to identify a set of semantic traits that constitute a covert conceptual category similar to the modern concept and encompassing Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils. The essence of this category is ‘exclusion’. The difference between the modern and medieval concepts is that, for the Anglo-Saxons, the boundary of the supernatural was conceptually much ‘closer’ and conceived in less abstract terms, corresponding to the frontier between the civilized space of society and the unruly alien space beyond. Similarities in the words applied to them reflect the fact that supernatural beings shared this alien space with other more mundane outsiders, such as foreigners and criminals. As its most extraordinary members, however, Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils played an important role in delineating the boundaries of society by acting as a challenge or counterexample to the principles of proper behaviour and accepted beliefs from which that civilized space was constructed and therefore supporting the normative function of the Anglo-Saxons’ ‘sense of place’ in the terms of Convery et al. (2012).

This article focuses on the controversy over whether complex numerals in English are constituents. Contra the traditional view (e.g. Hurford 1975; Greenberg 1990 [1978]), the cascading structure proposed in Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) maintains that cross-linguistically a complex numeral does not form a constituent to the exclusion of the NP complement. The derivation of an additive complex numeral, e.g. twenty-two people, thus involves an underlying source form with a nominal conjunction, e.g. twenty people and two people. Based on the argumentation established in He (2015) and He et al. (2017) supporting complex numerals as constituents in Chinese and minority languages in southern China, this article first demonstrates that the non-constituency analysis is not viable for English, as the underlying forms of additive complex numerals may be ill-formed and also not semantically equivalent to the surface forms. We then offer evidence to support the constituency analysis from constituency tests and behavior of post-numeral and pre-numeral modifiers. Finally, we demonstrate that the extra mechanism of grafting, proposed by Meinunger (2015), is unnecessary for English complex numerals.

This article on Old Norse represents a fundamental departure from the previous literature on loaned material by examining multilingual documents written in Medieval Latin rather than in monolingual English, namely the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). The potential of this richer and more complex interplay between languages will be further addressed throughout the article, which assesses the different kinds of evidence available for establishing the relative plausibility for a word being derived from ON. Dance's (2013, 2018, 2019) taxonomy will be discussed and applied to multilingual material for the first time. The article concludes with some notes on the main semantic fields to which ON-derived lexis contributed within the multilingual lexical networks of the DAR.

The present study is an exploration of the field of analytic causatives. It focuses on reflexive constructions with bring, cause, make and force. The analysis builds on Mondorf & Schneider's (2016) finding that causative bring has specialized to modal-negated-reflexive uses. It explores whether this emerging constraint reduces overlap with other causatives. A second focal point is on the nature of the constructions’ constraints. The article applies Hopper & Thompson's (1980) concept of transitivity as a cline. Employing the same 76-million-word corpus as Mondorf & Schneider (2016), which consists of fiction from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the article shows that reflexive uses of analytic causatives have almost quadrupled over the past 500 years. Results confirm that bring is the only reflexive causative strongly associated with modal and negated contexts. Furthermore, some of the constructions display characteristic transitivity profiles.

A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this article we present data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, which employs sociolinguistic methodologies in spoken data alongside the results of acceptability judgments. We target three morphosyntactic variables and compare and contrast these across the two data types in order to assess the reliability of the judgment data at community level. The results show that reliability is variable-dependent. For some variables, there is clear correlation; with others, it appears that, as Labov (1996) phrased it, ‘intuitions fail’. We discuss how factors such as salience, social stigma and local identity combine to govern the reliability of judgment data.