In our first editorial note, published in ELL 1.1 in 1997, we said: There has until now been no one journal which covers the range that ELL is intended to cover, a ‘natural class’ of research interests which deserves to be treated in one place, and at the highest level. English Language and Linguistics exists to promote knowledge and inquiry in the interlocking fields of its title. We hope that ELL will prove so useful that authors will come to regard it as their first choice for submission, while readers turn to it readily because they know it is bound to contain work of value and interest.

In this corpus-based article we explore the development of evidential meanings in English verbs of appearance, together with their acquisition of evaluative meanings. We explore the relationship of these semantic changes to the question of whether there is an increase in subjectivity diachronically, and we show that subjectivity is orthogonal to both develop-ments: an increase in subjectivity appears rather to go with the spread of small clause constructions.

The historical development of the English reciprocal expression each other exemplifies different aspects of language change, both morphosyntactic and semantic. This article examines the formation of the reciprocal marker from the perspective of grammaticalization theory, with a special focus on the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization. It will be argued that an adequate distinction between lexicalization and grammaticalization can only be achieved if we define the two concepts with reference not to an expression's grammatical status before and after the change, but rather to the diachronic processes involved, namely context expansion in the case of grammaticalization, and univerbation combined with fossilization in the case of lexicalization. The development of each other provides evidence for this view. It has its origin in syntactic structures of the type Each of the kings hates the others and has undergone univerbation and fossilization as well as context expansion. It will also be shown that definitions of lexicalization and grammaticalization that are too closely linked to the opposition between lexicon and grammar are problematic for an analysis of the changes undergone by the reciprocal marker. Furthermore, our analysis regards the development of each other as a case of simultaneous lexicalization and grammaticalization.

In this article I present extensive quantitative evidence showing that it is possible to distinguish different Middle English varieties on the basis of the treatment of word-initial h-, and that it is necessary to postulate that, in some varieties, word-initial h- fails to surface in given contexts, though being present as a consonantal phoneme in the underlying representation. This casts a new light on the old problem of whether word-initial h- was lost in Middle English and restored at a later stage: the data presented here suggest that h- loss was never generalized, though h-less forms did surface as contextual variants of h-ful forms.

This article sets out to clarify the contribution of syntactic properties and subject weight for variation between verb–subject and subject–verb order in a database of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century prose. It sets out the syntactic structures which are assumed, and investigates the impact on ordering of a set of factors, using established quantitative methodologies. A series of conclusions includes the continuing distinct status of initial then, the systematic importance of clause-final position, the different impacts of subject length in different contexts, and the presence of a definiteness effect for the late placement of a subject after a nonfinite unaccusative.

Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.

This article discusses the emerging variation between determiner genitives and noun modifiers in Present-day English. Based on the results of corpus analyses and previous studies I show that this variation (1) was not present in earlier English, and (2) results from the fact that determiner genitives have come to be used with nouns low in animacy while noun modifiers have come to be used with nouns high in animacy (mainly) in the course of Modern English. This semantic shift (or rather ‘convergence’) of genitives and noun modifiers has helped to create contexts which are compatible with both determiner and classifier function, i.e. the functions typically expressed by determiner genitives and noun modifiers, respectively. The article complements earlier work on the gradience between s-genitive constructions and noun+noun constructions (Rosenbach, 2006a), providing fur-ther evidence for the claim that semantic overlap may give rise to constructional gradience.

Numerous factors have been identified as being relevant to the spread of the progressive in Late Modern English. The potential role of the ‘future’ use of the construction (as in I'm flying home next week) has, however, been neglected so far. The present study aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of the development of the progressive with future time reference since 1750 in British English. The investigation focuses on the question of whether and to what degree the factors at work in the development of the construction coincide with factors relevant to the development of other types of progressives.

The analysis demonstrates that the ‘future’ use of the progressive does indeed play a part in the spread of the progressive. Several hitherto unknown factors special to the development of the ‘future’ use of the progressive are also uncovered, among them an increased (and possibly) new use of the construction to express spontaneous decisions.

Tom Dalzell, with Terry Victor, The new Partridge dictionary of slang. London: Routledge, 2005. 2 volumes. Pp. xvii + 2189. ISBN 9780415212588/0415212588.

The renegade subset of the English language that is defined as ‘slang’ is, to pun quite unashamedly on both slang and its standard cousin, a ‘bastard’, a term that here stretches its usual definition as ‘illegitimate’ to mean, as the OED has it, ‘having the appearance of, somewhat resembling; an inferior or less proper kind of; … things resembling, but not identical with, the species which legitimately bear the name’. Like standard English it is a language, variously, if inaccurately, synonymized as an argot, a cant, and a jargon, but it is undeniably a rougher-edged variety of that language. A bastard in both registers. It deals, unsurprisingly, with the rougher edges of life. As the essayist J. Y. P. Greig put it in 1938, the content of slang concentrates on ‘sex, money and intoxicating liquor’, and if one adds the vocabulary of ‘recreational’ drugs (which after all are no more than an alternative form of intoxication, albeit one that has drawn the short straw of illegality) there is no reason to feel that anything has changed. Nor had it done in the five centuries of slang-gathering that preceded Greig's analysis. A broad-brush taxonomy of the slang lexis covers crime (notably murder, nonterminal violence, robbery, confidence trickery, and prostitution, as well as the whole world of punishment, especially as regards police and prisons, wherein a whole new subset of language has been coined); intoxication (especially the state of drunkenness); insults whether personal, national, religious or racial; sexuality (including parts of the body and the uses to which they are put, plus of course defecation and allied bodily functions). It is unreservedly sexist: there are few positive words for women, and those only in terms of their sexuality. The word ‘mother’ is most commonly found combined with ‘fucker’, the oedipal polysyllable. There are few abstracts, no philosophizing other than the occasional cynical aphorism. Of caring, sharing, and compassion, as slang itself might have it: ‘sweet fuck all’. It is a rude, brutal vocabulary which revels in its lack of correctness, political or otherwise (it is as orthographically unruly as it is socially: the most ‘spoken’ of all vocabularies, its spelling defies regulation, and who is to say how centuries-old terms were in fact pronounced?); it is, to its credit, honest in its declarations: the word's most likely etymology lies in various Scandinavian terms meaning ‘throw’; to extend the image, it is a language that is wholly ‘in your face’. Yet it is not without wit, nor is the prevalent coarseness there merely for its own sake. It has a purpose. Of humanity most human it reflects our innate tendency to say ‘no’, to run counter to what has been established. If there is a standard, then we evolve an opposition, a contrary, counter-form; if the standard is linguistic, then slang is a counter-language.