The verb to like has fallen repeatedly under the gaze of scholars. One aspect which has stimulated vigorous discussion is its original use in impersonal constructions and its later change of argument structure along with the disappearance of impersonals from English. Nonetheless, evidence from current informal English shows that like is now used in constructions which bear a close resemblance to the older impersonals, although always displaying alternative spelling variants, especially likey. This paper seeks to further our understanding of the verb to like, focusing specifically on these new constructions. To this end I will use likey as a generic label to refer to such new uses and constructions, regardless of variations in spelling (unless otherwise stated). Using data from the Corpus of Historical American English and iWeb Corpus, the study will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. RQ1. What are the morpho-syntactic features of the expression ‘me (no) likey’ in Present-Day English?

2. RQ2. What is the origin of the sequence ‘me (no) likey’?

3. RQ3. Where do phrasal patterns with likey fall on the continuum of idiomaticity (Michaelis, 2017)?

AT FIRST glance the status of English in Hongkong appears as a traditional legacy of colonialism. English is the language of laws and government documents, of schools and universities, of place and street names, of courts and councils. A variety of subtle inducements, and some not so subtle, encourage intercourse with Britain for educational, legal and business purposes, and the language of such intercourse is English. But at the end of June that will all be over. Hongkong will be returned to Chinese sovereignty and the advantages of English will disappear. What next?

The word however is an adverb and an adverb alone. The current online Oxford (Oxford English Dictionary Online, n.d.) and Cambridge (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. a) English dictionaries both have it listed solely as an adverb for British English. At the risk of awakening yet another descriptivist versus prescriptivist war, it must however be acknowledged that however is often used as a conjunction. This can, and frequently does, lead to confusion though, as the reader has to read on before realising that in fact that however was actually being used as a conjunction (or ‘connective’ in modern grammatical parlance). ‘However the cat walked down the street …’ surely has the reader thinking something along the lines of ‘In whatever manner the cat walked down the street …’ But a typical case of what I shall in this article call conjunctive howeveritis would reveal a complete (well, incomplete actually) sentence along the lines of, ‘However the cat walked down the street, even though it rarely ventured from the house.’ Not only are we now left with a sentence fragment, but in such an instance the reader would have to backtrack and subsequently assume the However was in fact being used as a coordinating conjunction. To me this is inefficient and an enemy of lucid writing. The Cambridge English Dictionary raises the warning flag high with the following example (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. b):

Warning:
We can't use however as a conjunction instead of but to connect words and phrases:
My teacher is very nice but a bit strict.
Not:
My teacher is very nice however a bit strict.

The mission of the English Project (www.englishproject.org) is to explore and explain the English language in order to educate and entertain the English speaker, and 2015 was the year of punctuation for the Project because 6 February 2015 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. Aldus was a Venetian printer who shaped the comma, invented the semicolon and created italic fonts. He may have been the greatest punctuator of all time. We ‘punctuated’ the year by looking in turn at the full stop, the semicolon, the colon, the comma, the slash, the hyphen, the parenthesis, the exclamation, the apostrophe, the quotation mark and the question mark. Those twelve provide the fundamentals of English language punctuation, and all of them do more than one job. If we had a complete and unambiguous set of punctuation marks, we might need as many as 50, but the writing world does not want the trouble of such precision. In just same way, the writing world has never accepted the need for 44 separate letters to match the 44 separate sounds of the English language. Providing a separate grapheme (letter) for every phoneme (sound) is the linguist's business. Punctuation marks are ambiguous therefore. They suggest rather than define. They rely on context and the quick wittedness of the reader. If precision is needed, there are proofreader's marks. Merriam-Webster lists 42 of them, but proofreading is a special practice. Punctuation marks are a special set of symbols, and of symbols and signs there is no end. Punctuation marks are regularly appropriated by the devisers of computer languages. Punctuation marks can become logotypes – ‘a single piece of type that prints a word’. The exclamation mark can be made to work like &, $, or @. There are fuzzy edges to the subject of punctuation.

The previous issue of English Today announced the start of a regular feature on questions of English usage and other relevant issues that are being studied in the research project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’ that is being carried out at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics. The first question we would like to have feedback on from readers of English Today relates to the acceptability of have went. The topic was inspired by a number of spontaneous comments from people who had contributed to the attitudes survey I reported on in that issue, and in particular in connection with the disputed sentence I could of gone to that party (http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2012/05/07/attitudes-survey/).

In January 2021, Singapore's national performing arts center ‘Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay’, known especially for the high-quality acoustics of its concert hall, ran a special program called ‘All Things New’, featuring concerts and other art performances. It was advertised on location (see Figure 1), by a leaflet (Figure 2), and in a one-minute video (https://www.esplanade.com/festivals-and-series/all-things-new/2021) also shared on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-7Yw9sTPs), and introduced young artists and bands who performed on the institution's ‘Concourse’ and its open stage called ‘Outdoor Theatre’ (for an example, see Figure 3).

Since its coinage by Hiltz and Turoff (1978) the term computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been adapted and broadly conceptualised as interactive communication by and among human beings via networked computers and mobile devices. Several definitions of CMC have been offered in the literature but Herring's (2007) definition of CMC as ‘predominantly text-based human–human interaction mediated by networked computers or mobile telephony’ is adopted in this article because it stresses the textual aspect of the communicative interaction and accommodates all forms of textual language use mediated by the Internet, the World Wide Web and mobile technologies. This approach to CMC focuses on the production, transmission and exchange of naturally-occurring text-based human language and highlights the fact that human beings (as opposed to automated or artificial systems) are both the agents or initiators and recipients of the communication under investigation. Although communication is not unique to humans, the ability to use human language for meaningful social interactions is the exclusive preserve of the human species. Thus the perspective human beings bring to virtual interactions is accounted for in CMC. Internet interlocutors (also known as online interactants, netizens or textizens in the case of regular SMS texts composers/senders) employ textual data to convey and exchange their thoughts, opinions, observations, feelings as well as messages from other people or sources (Ifukor, 2011). These interactive possibilities make CMC a technology, medium, and engine of social relations (Jones, 1995:11) and language use is at the core.

Recent developments in English language include the rise of many Englishes throughout the world and home dialects appearing in broadcasting, which are increasing in salience rather than diminishing with globalisation; huge increases in the international vocabulary held in common by modern languages, particularly technical and scientific words; and the increases in alternatives in communication. Two restricted English vocabularies as a way to increase the accessibility of English language have received publicity; both are called Globish, one by a Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrière, of 1500 words (2009), and one by an Indian of 4000 words with an accompanying Indianised spelling (Gogate, 2002).

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.

When can a hyphen be described as ‘intrusive’? As with many other ‘rules’ of grammar and of punctuation, use of the hyphen is limited to a specific syntactical context. Hence, to use a hyphen where it should not be used makes it intrusive. Just like the apostrophe, it cannot be used arbitrarily. There is, for instance, a tattooist parlour in the English town of Oldham whose shopfront advertises Inkcredible Tatoo's (sic) and, with it, both the owner's or owners’ ability to play on words in writing and their inability to sign a plural form correctly – the rule being that apostrophes are not used to mark the plural of either common or proper nouns in written English.

The book is an edited collection of 18 chapters written by a total of 21 authors from around the world. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, outlines the book's structure and scope. The editors, Ken Hyland and Lillian L. C. Wong, define the book's purpose as ‘to offer readers a range of different ways of thinking about innovation in English language education, and different methods of investigating the impact of innovation’ (p. 2). The remaining 17 chapters, which are divided into four sections, discuss a range of topics including theoretical frameworks for education, teacher training, curriculum development, and teaching practice.

The various functions of a simple but complicated suffix. Present-day English has relatively few productive suffixes, but /-ij/, spelt both -y and -ie, as in bouncy and birdie, is one of the most striking. According to Quirk et al. in their Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, these affixes ‘can be used fairly freely’ and they are ‘freely used with largely concrete nouns to form gradable adjectives’ (1985:1553).

the eu recently forced microsoft to issue a second version of its windows xp operating system without a built-in windows media player, ruling that, by bundling its own media player, microsoft was effectively blocking competition from rivals (particularly real player and quicktime). microsoft's monopolistic approach in this case also landed it a fine of €497.2 million ($665m). the wrangling lasted well over a year, during which time windows xp with bundled media player had been sold so widely in europe as to partly invalidate the eu's attempts at stopping the us company monopolising and controlling the market. ‘the second version of windows will reflect what consumers want, and not what microsoft imposes on them,’ was the triumphant but belated comment of mario monti, the former eu commissioner in charge of competition.

MICHAEL DUFFY looks at the double negative in English and parallel constructions in some East Asian languages

An assessment of what English has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Low German and the Scandinavian languages

Creating the first scholarly dictionary of the English of Trinidad and Tobago

An account of syllabic stress in English words which emphasizes the regularity of many patterns of word stress