The history of English passive get is examined, in an attempt to determine both the diachronic pathway of development and the linguistic mechanism of syntactic change. Passive get (as in He got arrested) is shown to have developed from inchoative get (He got sick), and not from causative get (He got himself arrested). Passive get arose in cases where inchoative get took an adjectival passive participle as complement and where viewpoint aspect was perfective. Perfective aspect, which yields a bounded-event reading, encouraged the reanalysis of the adjectival passive participle as a verbal passive participle. Though the pathway of change is the same as that identified by Gronemeyer (1999), the mechanism of change proposed here is novel. The theoretical import of the article is to show how semantic and pragmatic factors like aspect influence morphosyntactic reanalysis, and thereby to raise our expectations about what constitutes a plausible reanalysis and improve our understanding of syntactic change more generally.

While a number of recent studies have documented the back vowel changes affecting White varieties nationally, few studies have examined back vowel fronting in non-Anglo dialects or compared the social and linguistic commonalties and contrasts in the progress of the shift and the vowel classes affected. The present study explores how ethnic and regional alignment affects the dispersion of fronting in three key back vowel classes, the BOOT, BOOK, and BOAT classes. Using instrumental acoustic measurement of relevant vowel classes, this article will examine both the social and linguistic conditioning governing the fronting of these classes in White and Black speakers in Memphis, TN, looking at these results in light of those found by Anderson, Milroy & Nguyen (2002), Ash (1996), and Labov (1994) elsewhere in the US.

The position of adjectives, and especially that of postnominal adjectives, in Middle English is compared to the adjective situation for Old English. Recently, Fischer (2000, 2001), followed to some extent by Haumann (2003), has proposed that in Old English there is a difference in meaning between certain types of preposed and postposed adjectives, which is related to a number of parameters such as definiteness vs indefiniteness of the NP, weak vs strong forms of the adjective, and given vs new information. This article will investigate to what extent the same or similar parameters still hold in Middle English, a period in which postposed adjective position began to decline due to, among other things, the loss of the strong vs weak distinction in adjectives, the rise of a new determiner system and the gradual fixation of word order on both a phrasal and a clausal level. Special attention will be paid to the postnominal and + adjective construction, which is here argued, pace Haumann for Old English, to be similar to postnominal adjectives without and.

The disputed etymology of the river-name Stour is revisited. It is suggested that an ‘Old European’ river-name was taken for an OE adjective, and that this adjective with its antonym represented in the river-name Blyth expressed the principal opposition in the classificatory system imposed on rivers in the Anglo-Saxon period.

This article contributes to the discussion of parentheticals. It focuses on a specific one-word parenthetical in English, namely what. To account for its distributional behaviour we offer a multifaceted approach. Specifically, our study explains why parenthetical what strongly prefers the position immediately preceding a cardinal number. In this respect, we identify three key questions which can only be answered collectively by looking into its syntactic properties, semantic and pragmatic motivation, and prosodic characteristics. While syntax accounts for parenthetical what being attached to the node that dominates the number, pragmatics takes care of its position immediately preceding the number, and prosody explains the unacceptability of what in sentence-initial position. In this way, this study supports the idea that to fully account for the behaviour of parenthetical structures, the phenomenon should not be restricted to a single component of the grammar. The strength of the present approach also lies in the authenticity and amount of data we used.

This article traces the complement selection properties of the adjective accustomed from the eighteenth century to the present. The adjective has frequently selected sentential complements, but the study illustrates a major change affecting the form of such complements. In the eighteenth century they were regularly of the to infinitive type, but today they are almost as regularly of the to -ing type. Both syntactic and semantic factors are identified in the article as having an impact on the change. The study also compares the pace of the change in British and American English, arguing that incipient change was discernible in both varieties as early as the nineteenth century. It is argued further that, at the present time, the change has been completed more fully in American English than in British English. This conclusion is reached by considering sentences with extraction or filler–gap dependencies. The data in the article come from large electronic corpora.

This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one low-frequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data come from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are, however, clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable, and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.

The history of the genitive case from Old English onwards, specifically the diversity of genitival functions in Old English, and the subsequent development of the case as determiner marker as claimed in Rosenbach (2002), can be explained coherently by assuming NP status for genitive nominals and nondistinct categorial status of the determiner class in OE. This article argues that OE, as an inflected language, encodes events in terms of roles carried by participants, and that the genitive case signalled partial or nonparticipation of a designated thing. This enabled a genitive nominal to be subordinated to another NP, which gives a coherent gestalt of the two things, and also to function as a full NP elsewhere. At the same time, the loose categorial status of determiners made it possible for a genitive nominal in prenominal position to function as a determiner. After the OE period, the determiner category became more distinct from others, and a genitive nominal, being a member of this category, ceased to be able to function as NP.

This article offers an in-depth treatment of a ‘nonprototypical’ s-genitive, i.e. the descriptive genitive (e.g. women's magazine), which has so far received little attention in the grammars of English. Various types of descriptive genitives are distinguished, i.e. classifying, metaphorical, and generic genitives. In addition, the article raises a number of theoretical issues of a more general nature, such as the delimitation of syntactic phrases from compounds. Most importantly, it is argued that descriptive genitives provide evidence for constructional gradience in the English noun phrase in two ways: (1) gradience between determiner genitives and descriptive genitives, and (2) gradience between s-genitives and noun + noun sequences. A central claim is made that semantic overlaps may give rise to constructional gradience. In this respect the present article complements earlier accounts of gradience that have emphasized the importance of structural criteria only. The article concludes with a brief consideration of measure genitives, which are in many ways similar to descriptive genitives.

In this diachronic study, we shed light on the development of the functions and structural properties of Adverb all, and suggest that degree modifiers in general should be analyzed in similar terms. We show that the harmonic relationship between Adverb all and its head is best accounted for in terms of boundedness rather than gradability (see Kennedy & McNally, 2005; Paradis, 2001). The stability over a millennium of indeterminacy between bounded and unbounded readings of Adverb all + head sequences, and of the ambiguity in many contexts between Adverb and Quantifier-floated all, shows that a division of labor over time between ambiguous meanings is not necessary (Geeraerts, 1997). Despite its long history, Adverb all has been treated as conversational or an innovation (Bäcklund, 1973; Waksler, 2001). We address the question why certain items like all come to be stereotyped as ‘new’ when in fact they are not.

This article looks into convergence processes that involve distinct phonological systems in dialect contact situations, exemplified by the variety of English that developed on Tristan da Cunha, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Based on a discussion of the community's social history and an auditory analysis of the segmental phonology of late nineteenth-century Tristan da Cunha English, this article reconstructs the early contact scenario and looks into both phonological convergence and independent innovative mechanisms that accompany new-dialect formation. The data presented here show that dialect contact gives rise to mixing of several inputs (so that ‘new’ dialects draw features from several ancestral varieties), that the interaction of transplanted dialects may also trigger independent, variety-specific mechanisms, and that the interplay of feature retention, input mixing, and local innovation lead to distinctive and (on occasion) endemic varieties of English.

This article investigates the omission of the that-complementizer in extraposed subject clauses (e.g. It is obvious (that) she did it), which has so far received very little attention in the literature. Using corpus data from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) various potential conditioning factors are analysed. Of these the following are found to have a major impact on the choice of zero that: informality of the text category, type of matrix predicate, and information value of the complement clause. On the basis of these corpus results the article then proposes a unified explanation for the use of that or zero by positing an underlying abstract feature of ‘distance’; for the that-complementizer, a semantic residue of its original demonstrative use, which gives rise to different pragmatic interpretations, depending on the actual use of that in context.

It is generally assumed that noun–noun (NN) compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. cóurtroom, wátchmaker). However, there is a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. silk tíe, Madison Ávenue, singer-sóngwriter), whose significance and sources are largely unaccounted for in the literature. This article presents an experimental study in which three competing hypotheses concerning NN stress assignment are tested. The stress patterns of novel and existing compounds, as obtained in a reading experiment with native speakers of American English, were acoustically measured and analyzed. The results show that there is indeed a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment, and that all three hypothesized factors, i.e. structure, semantics, and analogy, are relevant, though to different degrees. On a theoretical level, the findings strongly suggest that a categorical approach cannot be upheld and that probability and analogy need to be incorporated into an adequate account of stress assignment in noun–noun constructions. The article also makes a methodological contribution to the debate in showing that experimental studies using pitch measurements can shed new light on the issue of variable compound stress.

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, and Peter Trudgill, 2004. New Zealand English: its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0 521 64292 2. Hb £55.00, US$85.00.

Peter Trudgill, 2004. New-dialect formation: the inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0 7486 1876 7. Hb £45.00.