We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in gold, false or bind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body of OED and corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphotactic models is indeed likely to have played a role in establishing VVCC rhymes in the English lexicon, since VVCC rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/d|z/ began to establish themselves in lexical phonotactics at the same period in which they also started to be produced in inflection, and clearly before similar types that had no inflectionally produced analogues (i.e. VV[sonorant]/t|s/ as in fault, dance). At the same time, we show that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis that homophonies between lexical and morphotactic rhymes are dispreferred. We argue that under the specific historical circumstances that obtained in English, natural ways of eliminating the resulting ambiguities failed to be available. Finally, we show that, once the phonotactically and semiotically dispreferred VV[sonorant]/d|z/ rhymes had been established, the emergence of morphotactically unambiguous rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/t|s/ was to be expected, since they filled what was an accidental rather than natural gap in the phonotactic system of English (see Hayes & White 2013).

The present article offers a corpus-based analysis of the diachronic development of the usage profiles of three adverbial non-finite clauses in Modern English: the free adjunct, the verbal gerund and the absolute construction. By treating present-participial adverbial clauses and adverbial gerunds as part of a single adverbial ing-clause network, this article sheds new light on the different semantic and functional-pragmatic factors motivating the formal variation within the ing-clause network. By means of two mixed-model logistic regression analyses, we determine the relative impact of the independent variables of adverbial semantics, position, degree of coreference and length on the language user's choice in (i) whether or not to include augmentation (syndesis) and (ii) whether or not to include an overt subject in the adverbial ing-clause. The resulting picture is one of an emerging adverbial ing-clause network in which the internal variation is determined by principles of processing complexity.

The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit and hence bulkier variant occurs preferably in final position. The first variation context concerns semi-reflexive verbs that can take either an explicit self-pronoun or a zero variant. It turns out that the rapid decline of the self-pronoun is delayed in end position. The second case study focuses on Early Modern English affirmative declarative clauses, which may alternate between finite verb forms or do-supported ones. This study reveals that do-support is favoured in end position. These findings ultimately contribute to an empirical validation of end-weight, the implications of which are discussed against the backdrop of processing-related support strategies.

On the basis of extensive corpus analysis, we reconstruct the history of very and the paths of change along which it acquired new meanings. We propose an analytical model that, firstly, assigns general semantic functions to the (sub)modifier relations in the English noun phrase and, secondly, identifies subsenses of these functions on the basis of collocational, semantic and pragmatic distinctions observed in different contexts. Thus, we arrive at a comprehensive description of the various (sub)modifier relations in which very has functioned in its history. Having been borrowed into English as part of fixed collocations such as very Ihus (‘the true Jesus’) and croice verra (‘the true cross’), very successively acquired the functions of descriptive modifier, noun-intensifier, focus marker, adjective-intensifier, classifier, postdeterminer-intensifier, quantifier-intensifier and postdeterminer. This description allows us to interpret the history of very as a paradigm case of progressive grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification involving leftward movement in the English NP (Adamson 2000). Our analytical model allows us to capture finer mechanisms of change such as collocational extension, pragmatically driven host class expansion, invited inferences and analogy.

While the ‘progressive’ construction [BE Ving] (Hewas playing tenniswhen Jane came in) has been studied extensively both diachronically and synchronically, studies of its functional development tend not to extend further back than Early Modern English. This article draws attention to the functional changes [BE Ving] goes through already in Middle English, whose analysis sheds new light on the principles of early grammaticalization. To understand the observed changes, all uses of [BE Ving] are considered, not only those that have a clear verbal and aspectual function. During Middle English, important changes occurred in the frequencies of the various co-texts of [BE Ving]. They involve the increase in backgrounding adverbial clauses, which leads to the semanticization of ongoingness, a feature that was initially only associated with [BE Ving] by pragmatic implicature. The outcome is grammaticalization by co-text: co-textual changes paved the way for the acquisition of progressive semantics in [BE Ving] itself.

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

Prior research has identified a large number of processing-related factors that affect language users’ choices between two (or more) competing linguistic variants. However, one factor that up until now has not been taken into account is the reliance on formulaic language. This is surprising given a growing body of evidence demonstrating that recurrent multiword units – formulaic sequences and low-scope constructional patterns – play a key role in language learning and processing. Building on insights from research on formulaic language and usage-based constructionist models of language, we take a first step towards determining whether and to what extent formulaicity affects choices language users make in encoding the preverbal message. Focusing on clause ordering in English complex sentences with adverbial clauses (ACs), we investigate whether the choice between a preposed and a postposed AC is affected by the degree of formulaicity of the clause, as measured by (1) the amount of formulaic sequences in the AC and (2) the degree of entrenchment of an AC when treated as a low-scope pattern. Based on a reanalysis of the data in Diessel (2008), we found that the likelihood of an AC being produced in the cognitively more demanding sentence-initial position increased with higher degrees of formulaicity for both measures investigated. We conclude that reliance on formulaic language can be conceived of as a ‘support strategy’ compensating for increased processing effort.

In Present-day English blame is known to be the only verb which participates in what Levin (1993) calls the ‘blame alternation’ (e.g. Mira blamed the accident on Terry vs Mira blamed Terry for the accident). This article investigates how the modern usage has developed since the verb was borrowed from Old French at the beginning of Middle English, an area which has received little attention so far. With a comprehensive survey of the quotations database of the OED Online, the main focus is on the diachronic relationship between different syntactic patterns and the animacy of the target of blame. It will be demonstrated that, contrary to the common accounts in grammars and previous studies, the target is often not an animate being, and the two constructions forming the blame alternation have a very different origin and development, with a gap of five centuries between their first attestations. The status of the participant role expressing the cause of blame, which is considered to be omissible if it receives a definite interpretation from the context (e.g. Mira blamed Terry), will also be questioned.

This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causative bring (bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.

The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the diachronic stages of detransitivisation for a recessive English verb we gain first systematic, empirically validated insights into the link between transitivity and language change.

This article adduces support for the claim that bringcaus + to-infinitive has (almost completely) lost its ability to take fully fledged direct objects. There are, however, at least three, partly overlapping contexts, in which this verb can stand its ground: with reflexives, modals and negation. What these contexts have in common is that they reduce the clause's transitivity, defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 251) as ‘the effectiveness with which the verbal action takes place’. Assuming that the higher the transitivity, the stronger the effect of the verbal action is on the object, these detransitivised contexts can be interpreted as alleviating the effect of the verbal action.

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 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.

This article discusses the peculiar use of the simple present/past in full-verb inversion (i.e. locative inversion, directional inversion, quotative inversion, presentational there), and the corresponding scarcity of progressive aspect in these contexts. While it is normally ungrammatical in English to use the simplex tenses to report events that are ongoing at reference time, inversion seems to defy this restriction. Building on a combination of insights from analyses of aspect and of full-verb inversion in English, this study presents a cognitive-functional explanation for this exceptional characteristic of inversion that has gone largely unnoticed in previous accounts. I argue that there exists a canonical relationship between the preposed ground and the postposed figure in full-verb inversion and that this meaning of canonicity ties in perfectly with the perfective value that I deem constitutive of the English simple tenses. In addition, some cases of directional inversion involve a ‘deictic effect’ (Drubig 1988): in these instances, the conceptualizer's vantage point is anchored within the ground and the denoted (dis)appearance of the figure is construed as inevitable. On the basis of a large sample of corpus data and native-speaker elicitations, I demonstrate that the use of the progressive is disallowed in inverted contexts that involve a deictic effect, while its use is dispreferred but not excluded in other cases of inversion. This study thus brings together insights from the domains of information structure and aspect in English, and merges these into a comprehensive cognitive account.

We propose an explanation for a traditional puzzle in English linguistics involving the use of articles with the nominal modifiers same, identical and similar. Same can only take the definite article the, whereas identical and similar take either the or a. We argue that there is a fundamental difference in the manner in which a comparison is made with these modifiers. Identical and similar involve direct comparisons between at least two entities and an assertion of either full property matching (identical), or partial property matching (similar). The comparison with same proceeds differently: what is compared is not linguistic entities directly, but definite descriptions of these entities that can be derived through logical entailments. John and Mary live in the same house entails the house that John lives in is the (same) house that Mary lives in. There must be a pragmatic equivalence between these entailed definite descriptions, ranging from full referential equivalence to a possibly quite minimal overlap in semantic and real-world properties shared by distinct referents. These differences in meaning and article co-occurrence reveal the sensitivity of syntax to semantic and pragmatic properties, without which all and only the grammatical sentences of a language cannot be predicted.

The present article contrasts two processing principles, the Domain Minimization Principle (e.g. Hawkins 1999, 2004) and the Complexity Principle (e.g. Rohdenburg 1996, 2007b) in structures involving the extraction of postverbal elements out of (competing) complement clauses. The Domain Minimization Principle may be described as a processing tendency which consists in minimizing the size and complexity of various domains including the filler–gap domain in cases like the following: This is a problem (that) they had promised (that) they would tackle. By contrast, the Complexity Principle represents a correlation between processing complexity and grammatical explicitness. It stipulates that more explicit (and typically more bulky) constructional options are favoured in cognitively more complex environments.

This article deals with two sets of rival complements. The behaviour of the first group of clausal alternatives is in line with Hawkins’ prediction, though incompatible with the Complexity Principle. However, there is an even larger group of complement pairs whose distribution inside and outside extraction contexts is predicted by the Complexity Principle but unaccounted for by Domain Minimization. Thus, in extraction contexts, the visible effects of the two antagonistic principles are found with virtually complementary ranges of complement types. The article concludes by attempting to account for the kind of division of labour observed between the two principles under scrutiny. It will be suggested among other things that, in English, the marked infinitive (on its own or with an associated NP) enjoys a privileged or target status in extraction contexts.

This article investigates the emergence and early use of possessive havegot in English. Two hypotheses about its emergence are tested on historical data (c.1460–1760). One hypothesis is based on communicative functionality, suggesting that got was inserted as a ‘pattern preserver’ to compensate for the increased reduction of have. The other hypothesis invokes the conventionalization of an invited inference, thus a (non-functional) semantic shift which does not immediately serve to support a communicative function. The diachronic evidence is found to support only the latter hypothesis.

In the second part the early stage of the variation of have and havegot is investigated (c.1720–50). The results show a strong register difference, but also a division of labour between the variants that can be explained by the syntactic and semantic properties of havegot as having emerged out of a present perfect of get. Thus, the variation is organized in a functionally motivated way.

It is concluded that in the development of possessive havegot functional constraints apply to the variation early on, but do not play an evident role in the emergence of the new variant. This suggests that functional motivations are a directing force but not necessarily a driving force in language change.

The concept of speaky-spoky, a pejorative label for hypercorrect speech in Jamaica, has thus far been described in the context of shared speech community norms (Patrick 1999). In this article, I analyze a stretch of speaky-spoky discourse and its recontextualization. The theoretical perspectives from which the data are examined are that of the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) and of entextualization (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996). The method of analysis draws on Goffman's writing on frames (1974) and production formats (1981). I argue that the ideological dimensions and interactional versatility of the speaky-spoky concept have thus far not received enough empirical attention. To address this gap, I propose to interpret speaky-spoky as a dynamic and relational ‘construct resource’ (Fabricius & Mortensen 2013) that speakers draw upon to highlight social meaning in interaction.

Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD), the dental pronunciation of /t/ and /d/ before /r/ and /ər/, is a well-known feature of English varieties throughout Ireland. PreRD is often accompanied by an /r/-Realisation Effect (RRE), whereby /r/ is pronounced as a tap after the dentalised consonant, and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint (MBC), such that PreRD is blocked by Class 2 morpheme boundaries. Although an Irish origin for PreRD has been suggested, the presence of PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in northern English dialects in a form nearly identical to what is found in Ireland suggests that the origins of PreRD lie instead in English in Britain. The possible existence of PreRD in Scotland is suspected, but definitive evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC there has never been published. In this article, I provide the first detailed analysis of these features in Scotland, using unpublished data collected as part of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. It will be seen that there is substantial evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in Scots dialects. The presence of these features in Scotland has important consequences for their history in Britain, and confirms the British origin of PreRD in Ireland.

There is a puzzling asymmetry in English with respect to free relative clauses introduced by what and who, with the former (e.g. [What Glenn said] didn't make much sense) intuitively being much more acceptable than the latter (e.g. [Who Glenn married] didn't make much money). In this squib, we explore this degraded acceptability of who free relative clauses, and from the results of an experimental study we identify syntactic features of the sentence that influence the level of acceptability. We discuss the difficulty in finding an independently motivated solution to the puzzling asymmetry within current theories of syntax, semantic and processing. Finally, we touch on a broader theoretical question relating to the robust cross-linguistic process by which elements of the set of wh-words in a language are able to extend their function from introducing interrogative clauses to introducing other clausal constructions.