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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.