Most speakers of Irish English use a dental stop for words containing <th>, a sound that is generally pronounced as [θ] and [ð], in other varieties of English (Wells 1982; Ó hÚrdail 1997). Alveolar stops [t,d] and dental stops [,] are articulatorily and acoustically similar, and thus it is unusual for a language to use them contrastively (e.g. Ladefoged 2001). Despite this, Irish English contrasts them and speakers of this dialect have no trouble distinguishing them. This raises the question as to whether speakers of a dialect which does not use this contrast can distinguish them. To investigate this, speakers of Irish English and American English participated in an identification task involving words produced by an Irish English speaker. American English speakers had a high accuracy but did significantly worse than Irish English speakers, and both groups did significantly worse when the contrast was in final position than when it was in initial position. A small-scale production experiment examined words with this contrast and the vowel /a/, with the finding that for speakers of both dialects, the vowel is longer in words ending in <th> than <t>. The findings are discussed in the context of linguistic experience, and the effect of surrounding consonants on vowel duration.

There is much literature about the licensing of complement clauses by complement-taking predicates. However, less has been written about the licensing of adverbs in a complement clause. This article addresses the licensing of English evidential adverbs in complement clauses extracted from the NOW corpus. The article discusses three factors that determine the distribution of evidential adverbs in complement clauses. These are the nature of the evidential adverbs, the constraints of the complement clause and the anchor of the evidential adverb. To explore the role of these three factors, I adopt the hierarchical scopal theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). If a complement clause licenses the inclusion of the evidential adverb, then there is a match. Should there be no alignment between the complement clause and the adverb, there will be a mismatch. The results of the analysis of the data show that there are mostly matches, which occur with either a current speaker anchor or an actor anchor. Secondly, it appears that in cases of mismatches, there is always a current speaker. It thus appears that a current speaker anchor can override the constraints of the complement clause.

This article explores the syntax of compound pronouns (e.g. someone, nothing). Several theories of these formatives have been proposed previously (e.g. Kishimoto 2000; Blöhdorn 2009), but most of them fail to account for the fact that compound pronouns behave simultaneously like compounds and phrases. By presenting corpus data of some special coordination and modification patterns of compound pronouns, I argue that they should instead be analysed as compound phrases: constructions which are morphologically compounds, but syntactically phrases. Both features play important roles in determining how compound phrases are modified. Moreover, I propose a modification paradigm based on Larson & Marušič (2004), which classifies common postmodifiers at different levels. Finally, I examine the syntactic behaviour of less frequently used nominal compound pronouns such as nobody, which are supplementary to the phrasal ones.

The goal of this article is to uncover the system underlying three types of English relative clauses, and to characterise their distinctive uses in discourse: NP-integrated ones, namely restrictive and ‘a-restrictive’ relative clauses, and non-integrated ones, represented by non-restrictive relatives.

The area at issue is central, since understanding the functioning of these constructions requires reference to the fundamental interface between grammar (language system) and discourse (language use). The discourse functions of the three subtypes of relatives are claimed to be underlain by their intrinsic morphosyntactic and semantic properties. A major aim is to highlight the relative degree of ‘communicative dynamism’ of each subtype of relative clause, in terms of its respective contribution to the construction of discourse.

In doing so, the article focuses on the distinctive properties of presupposed as well as non-presupposed restrictive relatives, and of definite as well as indefinite NPs containing integrated relatives more generally. Along the way, it critically examines certain controversial conceptions of the structural and functional features of the constructions at issue, and, in particular, the claim that there is no essential distinction to be drawn between ‘integrated’ and phrase-external relative clause subtypes at all.

The lateral approximant in General British English (GB) is realised as light when occurring in the onset (leaf), and as dark in the rhyme (help, feel, google). Non-prevocalic positions are typical contexts for lenition, analysed in Element Theory as decomposition in weak positions. However, it is unclear how velarisation can be characterised as element loss if light [l] is represented as |A I|, while dark [ɫ] is represented as |A U|. Therefore, I propose that laterals in GB contain both the coronal |I| and the velar |U| element underlyingly (in addition to |A|), but because these cannot combine in a compound segment in English, they are both floating. Their association at the phrase level is determined by the apophonic chain (Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996), mapped onto the structure of the syllable: |I| is attracted to the prevocalic position, |A| to the vocalic position and |U| to the postvocalic position. Darkening thus does not involve lenition of /l/, but partial interpretation in all positions. In contrast, I analyse vocalisation of dark [ɫ] as lenition, involving loss of |A| in weak positions. I integrate the lateral into the system of glides in English, and establish a typology of its behaviour across different accents.

Recent research into right-dislocated pronouns has provided details of the form and functions of lone pronoun tag (ProTag) constructions in Present-day British English. In this article, we present the first systematic investigation of ProTag constructions in an earlier variety, Early Modern English. Using as our corpus the dramatic works of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare – writers already known to make use of tag questions in their works – we identified and analysed ProTag constructions. Our findings reveal that ProTag constructions in Early Modern English differ from their Present-day British English equivalents with respect to possible functions: in the earlier variety ProTag constructions could have a ‘Question’ function, the same as tag questions. We also found the relative frequency of demonstrative ProTags compared to personal ProTags to be significantly different: personal ProTags are far more frequently attested than demonstrative ProTags in our corpus of Early Modern English drama texts; this is the reverse of what has been found for Present-day British English. We propose that a key factor in the observed change is extension of the types of referents that demonstrative ProTags can have. This study offers a new perspective on ProTag constructions, their classification and development.

Research on complementizer selection has shown that the presence of a negative particle in a subordinate complement clause influences complement choice, leading to a relatively higher proportion of finite complementation patterns by increasing the complexity of the syntactic environment. Studies have also shown that different types of negation, namely not- and no-negation, increase the tendency towards more explicit complementation options (Rohdenburg 2015). The current study focuses on the effect of not- and no-negation on the complementation profile of the verb regret, which allows variation between finite that/zero-complement clauses and nonfinite (S) -ing clauses. The GloWbE corpus was used to create a data set of more than 4,000 examples from 16 varieties of English. The results of the analysis support previous findings that the presence of a negative marker in the complement clause increases the preference for finite patterns, especially in L2 varieties of English. However, contrary to the expectations of this study, no-negation was found to have a stronger effect on complement choice than not-negation.