This article examines the status of scalarity in the analysis of the meaning of the English determiner any. The latter's position as a prime exemplar of the category of polarity-sensitive items has led it to be generally assumed to have scalar meaning. Scalar effects are, however, absent from a number of common uses of this word. This suggests that any does not involve scales as part of its core meaning, but produces them as a derived interpretative property. The role of three factors in the derivation of the expressive effect of scalarity is explored: grammatical number, stress and the presence of gradable concepts in the NP. The general conclusions point to the importance of developing a causal semantic analysis in which the contributions of each of the various meaningful components of an utterance to the overall message expressed are carefully distinguished.

This article presents a diachronic corpus-based study of the distribution of mandative that- and to-clauses complementing deontic adjectival matrices in the extraposition construction, as in It is essential to work upwards from easier workloads (CB). It shows that the to-infinitive encroaches on the that-clause from Early Middle English onwards and comes to predominate in Late Middle English. It thus adduces evidence for Los's (2005) account of the rise of the to-infinitive as verbal complement: against the generally held view that the to-infinitive replaced the bare infinitive, Los (2005) shows that it spread at the expense of the subjunctive that-clause in Middle English, e.g. after intention verbs and manipulative verbs. After considering various factors such as the distribution of the to-infinitive in the adjectival complementation system, the tense of the matrix of the adjectival constructions and the Anglo-Saxon versus Romance origin of the adjectives, I conclude that the rise of the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices in Middle English has to be explained by analogy between verbal and adjectival mandative constructions. In addition, this study shows that – unlike with the verbal constructions – the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices stabilizes at roughly a 3:1 ratio to the that-clause from Early Modern English onwards. For these later periods, finally, it is proposed that the clausal variation may be motivated by lexical determination, discourse factors such as information structure, and stylistic preferences.

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Marušič 2004).

Basing myself on synchronic and diachronic data analysis, I argue in this article that size nouns (SNs) such as bunch/load(s)/heap(s) of within binominal NPs display synchronic variation which can be hypothesized to be the result of grammaticalization processes. Synchronically, I propose that SNs have two major non-head uses, a quantifier use, e.g. a bunch of people walked in, and a valuing(-quantifying) use, in which the referent is evaluated rather than quantified. The latter is restricted mainly to bunch/load of, e.g. What a bunch of gobbledygook. The semantic and syntactic reanalysis of SNs as quantifiers has recently been acknowledged (e.g. Traugott forthcoming), but the valuing use of SNs remains largely unrecognized (see Brems 2007). On a theoretical level, it will be argued that head, quantifier and valuing(-quantifier) SN-uses synchronically have to be studied as collocationally constrained constructions in that the semantico-syntactic parsing of each SN-use links up with specific collocational patterns (Sinclair 1991). Head uses are restricted to sets of (un)count concrete nouns, whereas quantifier uses team up with all sorts of (un)count concrete as well as abstract nouns. Valuing uses show restrictions to concrete animate and abstract nouns, which they typically evaluate negatively, and have negative semantic prosody patterns, in which the SNs themselves come to predict negative collocates (see Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995; Bublitz 1996). The grammaticalization of SNs will be hypothesized to involve not only processes of semantic generalization and collocational extension, but also collocational reclusterings characterized by particular semantic prosody constraints. The latter are not traditionally associated with processes of grammaticalization and hence offer new insights into the semantic changes that may accompany grammaticalization.

A non-standard form of the definite article is used by upwards of a million speakers every day and yet it has received little attention in terms of a phonological analysis. The most recent discussions have been a historical and contemporary survey, spectrographic investigations and sociolinguistic surveys. It is clearly a complex issue and has relevance to a number of theoretical questions, some of which are rarely addressed. We need to know the range of phonetic forms; the phonological distribution of the forms; the historical development and whether this helps with a synchronic analysis; and the number and nature of the lexical storage forms. The distribution varies between localities and between speakers; many speakers also use standard English the. The historical development is not at all clear, but does throw some light on what the synchronic grammars should be like. There appears to be a break between those grammars in which the phonetic forms of the definite article are predictable in terms of the phonological environment and those later grammars that have lexically specific forms. The changes that have taken place cannot be explained in terms of simple system-internal mechanisms and some knowledge of the sociohistorical background to the emergence of the new grammars is necessary. This article looks at historical sources from the mid seventeenth century onwards to try to determine the changes that have taken place in the northern dialects concerned, and proposes population movements and expansion as a determining factor in the changes that are in evidence. One possible scenario in terms of new-dialect formation during the nineteenth century is suggested. For the modern variants polysystemic, declarative grammars are proposed, with the possibility of grammar-switching under certain circumstances, such as repair or interaction with outsiders.