Many English adjectives form the comparative in two ways, so that, for instance, prouder occurs alongside more proud. The availability of several forms raises the general questions of when and why speakers choose one variant over the other. The aim of this article is to identify factors of language structure and language use that underlie the comparative alternation and to determine their relative strengths on the basis of data from the BNC through a logistic regression analysis. The results suggest that the alternation is primarily governed by phonological factors, but that syntax and frequency of usage are of importance as well.

The frication of the voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ in word-final intervocalic position in Dublin and Middlesbrough English is examined in controlled data, and the acoustic characteristics of fricated realisations of /t/ are compared with other fricatives. The findings are that /t/ is not the only plosive to be fricated in the data sample, but does appear to differ from other plosives in terms of the regularity of frication and its nongradient character for some subjects. The realisation of fricated /t/ at both localities differs from that of other fricatives, and is probably perceptually distinct from other fricative contrasts at each locality, but is not identical across the two localities. On the basis of data presented here, it appears unlikely that fricated /t/ in Middlesbrough English is a direct transfer effect from the language of Irish immigrants to Middlesbrough.

The article presents a study of the process of gender change in the thirteenth-century Southwest Midlands, based on twenty texts localized in this area. The assumption is that a study limited to a single text community would give a better view of the patterns of change than studies spanning a wide chronological and/or geographical range. It is suggested that the system of pronominal gender assignment went through a process of semantically based reorganization during this period, and that the resulting patterns are most usefully described using the model of a hierarchy or continuum of individuation (Dahl 1999a: 99; Siemund 2008: 140). The gender assignment of individual nouns is found to be remarkably regular, and the material seems to give no reason to assume a period of confusion between the Old and postmedieval English systems of gender assignment.

In this article we make a case for recognizing deictification as a type of grammaticalization and semantic shift in the NP analogous to auxiliarization in the VP. The specific analogy we point out is between lexical verbs that grammaticalize into secondary auxiliaries bound by the finite, as in is going to, has to + verb, and lexically full adjectives that grammaticalize into postdeterminers bound by the primary determiner, as in a different, the same + noun. We present five case studies of the development of postdeterminer meanings, based on the analysis of diachronic and synchronic data. The adjectives studied are opposite, complete, old, regular and necessary, whose postdeterminer uses relate to the basic deictic systems of space, quantity, time and modality. Our analysis of the data shows that the mechanism of secondary deictification can be given a unified characterization as the semantic shift by which a general relation expressed by the adjective is given a subjective reference point in or relative to the speech event.

Kiparsky (1979) proposes that the relative prominence contours of feet are preserved under morphological embedding, e.g. sènsátional → sĕnsàtionálity; àntícipate → ăntìcipátion. Kiparsky's opponents point out the existence of exceptions to such relative prominence preservation, e.g. ìnférior → ìnfĕriórity~ĭnfèriórity. In this article, it is shown that relative prominence preservation is a gradient phenomenon, which is probabilistically predicted by word frequency. This observation necessitates the rejection of the phonological cycle as the mechanism for handling relative prominence preservation – the phonological cycle predicts that relative prominence preservation should be consistently successful. In particular, it is proposed, following Bermúdez-Otero & McMahon (2006) and Bermúdez-Otero (in preparation), that the phonological cycle which applies internal to stratum one in models of Lexical Phonology should be rejected, and replaced by the mechanism of ‘fake cyclicity’. Through its resemblance to the dual-route model of lexical access, fake cyclicity can capture the probabilistic nature of relative prominence preservation.