We explore the surprising lexical be construction in English (e.g. Why don’t you be quiet?). After an overview of previous discussions, an investigation of the use of lexical be in the COCA and SOAP corpora is provided. It is shown that its distribution is highly skewed and that it is completely felicitous only under a very limited set of conditions. An account of lexical be is then provided showing that the conditions that license it are inherited from more general constructions, most importantly the negative imperative construction and the ‘Why don’t you’ construction. In this light, it is suggested that the lexical be construction, with its special properties, provides strong evidence for a constructional approach to linguistic competence along the lines of Goldberg (1995), Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), Sag (2012).

Metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals have considerable persuasive power in political discourse, yet they are rarely studied together. To explore the interactions between these interrelated phenomena, we employ three methods of analysis: Metaphor Identification Procedure, Inference Anchoring Theory, and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Our data come from Polish political debates broadcasted during the 2019 pre-election campaign. We test hypotheses about the frequency of the associations between metaphors, arguments and emotional appeals. Hypothesis 1 predicts that arguments containing metaphors are more frequent than arguments without metaphors, hypothesis 2 predicts that arguments containing emotional appeals are more frequent than arguments without them, and hypothesis 3 predicts that arguments with metaphors and emotional appeals are more frequent than any other combination. The results show that metaphorical arguments do not outnumber non-metaphorical ones (H1 is falsified), and arguments that are both metaphorical and emotional do not outnumber the sum of all other types (H3 is falsified). Emotional arguments are more common than non-emotional ones (H2 is verified). We suggest that when political actors articulate their arguments, they often choose a particular metaphor to evoke positive or negative emotions in their audience.

Contrary to traditional thought in linguistics and editing, recent studies using corpus-based evidence suggest that historical English usage patterns influenced prescriptive usage manuals’ guidelines more than the other way around. To explore the modern relationship between English language prescriptions and usage, this study focuses on the wide-reaching genre of written online news and the topic of gender-fair language. It compares changes regarding gender-specific titles in the Associated Press's stylebooks to actual usage trends as documented by the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. Results from NOW show -man title variants as the dominant form in the early 2010s, consistent with AP style at that time. However, many gender-neutral (including -person) variants saw rapid uptake in usage in the mid-2010s to become the most frequent forms by 2021, contrasting AP guidelines that only started listing -person and other neutral forms as ‘acceptable' around 2017 and as the prescribed forms more recently. These results indicate both an increased cultural consciousness for changing gender equity standards as well as a willingness of many news writers, editors, and publishers to defer to culturally significant language trends even if authoritative guides do not yet endorse them.

The English Preposing in PP construction (PiPP; e.g., Happy though/as we were) is extremely rare but displays an intricate set of stable syntactic properties. How do people become proficient with this construction despite such limited evidence? It is tempting to posit innate learning mechanisms, but present-day large language models seem to learn to represent PiPPs as well, even though such models employ only very general learning mechanisms and experience very few instances of the construction during training. This suggests an alternative hypothesis on which knowledge of more frequent constructions helps shape knowledge of PiPPs. I seek to make this idea precise using model-theoretic syntax (MTS). In MTS, a grammar is essentially a set of constraints on forms. In this context, PiPPs can be seen as arising from a mix of construction-specific and general-purpose constraints, all of which seem inferable from general linguistic experience.

We investigate a class of adjective phrases composed of a deadjectival adverb ending in -ly and an adjective head (e.g. staggeringly incompetent, absolutely terrific, fiscally responsible), a compact construction whereby two adjectives may jointly contribute to evaluative meaning. Using corpus methodologies on more than 1 million examples and relying on semantic analyses of about 1,000 instances, we propose that the construction can be divided into different semantic subtypes, including Degree (deeply disturbing), Focus (utterly ridiculous), Manner (delightfully performed), Reaction (strangely compelling), Topical (historically inaccurate) and Epistemic (intuitively obvious), among others. Using this typology, we investigate the relative distribution of each subtype across several registers of written English. We found a high frequency of the Reaction subtype in book, film and art reviews, and we suggest a discourse-functional explanation for this, linked to the perceived value of originality in expressive writing. This investigation reveals the power of semantically informed, corpus methodologies to shed light on the distribution of specific constructions.

One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims to shed further light on this issue. By means of a collexeme analysis, this article investigates the semantic features of the infinitives that occur with auxiliary do in several Middle English corpora. The results show that auxiliary do was not connected to verbs with specific semantic profiles, but it was employed in different contexts and had various functions. Specifically, the data suggest that auxiliary do was used (i) as an accommodation tool to facilitate the use of low-frequency verbs, particularly of French origin, and (ii) as an aspectual particle to mark both perfectivity and habituality. It is argued that the multifunctionality of auxiliary do in Middle English played a crucial role in the preservation of the construction before it spread to the NICE (i.e. negation, inversion, code and emphasis) environments.

This article sheds light on the significant yet nuanced roles of shame and guilt in influencing moral behaviour, a phenomenon that became particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic with the community’s heightened desire to be seen as moral. These emotions are central to human interactions, and the question of how they are conveyed linguistically is a vast and important one. Our study contributes to this area by analysing the discourses around shame and guilt in English and Japanese online forums, focusing on the terms shame, guilt, haji (‘shame’) and zaiakukan (‘guilt’). We utilise a mix of corpus-based methods and natural language processing tools, including word embeddings, to examine the contexts of these emotion terms and identify semantically similar expressions. Our findings indicate both overlaps and distinct differences in the semantic landscapes of shame and guilt within and across the two languages, highlighting nuanced ways in which these emotions are expressed and distinguished. This investigation provides insights into the complex dynamics between emotion words and the internal states they denote, suggesting avenues for further research in this linguistically rich area.