The article discusses the grammaticalization of the be + V-ende/V-ing periphrasis as a progressive marker. On the basis of quantitative data, it is claimed that the periphrasis started out as an emphatic alternative to the simple tenses. Its length, unusualness and optionality made it well suited as an emphatic marker. In the Early Modern English period (c. 1500–1700), the periphrasis was reinterpreted as an emphatic progressive marker. The prototypical – so-called focalized – use of the construction gradually became obligatory (from the nineteenth century onwards). This caused the focalized use of the periphrasis to lose its emphasis, while the so-called durative use of the construction has remained optional and emphatic to this day, like the subjective uses of the periphrasis. The article also explores the question of influence from Latin on the periphrasis in the Old English period (i.e. up to c. 1100), concluding that any such influence is likely to have consisted in a reinforcing effect.

This article investigates variant forms of the demonstrative ‘that’ and the adjective in the Caligula Manuscript of Laȝamon's Brut and concludes that they to a large extent maintain the traditional category distinction between the accusative and the dative by the use of the suffixes -ne and -Vn (where V stands for any vowel) respectively. There are, however, factors that potentially compromise the status of these terminations as case markers: phonetic reduction (which has often been invoked), capricious addition or deletion of final e, occasional doubling or simplification of nasals, and simply unexpected choices of forms in the paradigm. These seem to be consistent with the sort of mistakes that scribes might occasionally make when faced with an original that has a different orthographical and morphological system from their own, and they are not as disruptive of the case-marking system as at first sight they might appear. For one thing, they occur rather rarely and are generally outnumbered by historically expected forms; for another, the resultant unexpected case forms, usually with the stem vowel preferred by the historical forms in the case of the demonstrative, are predominantly accompanied by a historically motivated case form of their head noun. The status of accusative -ne and dative -Vn, in fact, appears to be stable enough to lead to the development of a system or subsystem of indicating case regardless of gender considerations in their respective case contexts. These suffixes can therefore be treated validly as independent case markers, although in concrete cases the possibility always exists that there is an optional final e, an unhistorical double or single n, or an unexpected choice of inflectional forms.

Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule requiring a distinction between shall with first-person and will with other grammatical subjects. Recent shift towards will with all persons in North American English – now also affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The present study of data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) finds that Irish English has not always preferred will. Rather, the present-day situation emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use of will.

In eighteenth-century Irish English, shall predominated. Comparison with other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kytö 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly similar cross-varietal distributions of first-person shall and will. Irish English shifted rapidly towards will by the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English influence drove the change towards first-person will.

We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leech et al. 2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen (1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English, will persisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-person shall in the standard language. Increased use of will might have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that, in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-person will as a change from below. The shift to first-person will that is apparent in CORIECOR would then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this change in other Englishes too.

In English morphological literature, the term ‘tautological compound’ has been typically used to refer to two distinct – but closely related – phenomena: (1) compounds composed of a hyponym and a superordinate term (such as oak tree); and/or (2) compounds based upon two synonymous units (such as subject matter). Such combinations are one of the quirkiest – and least researched – phenomena of English compounding. Their oddity can be attributed to two main factors. First, as their name, ‘tautological compound’ implies, at face value such combinations can be considered as prime examples of the redundancy of language. Second, they do not follow normal compound-forming rules in the sense that both constituents can function as the semantic head (as opposed to ‘normal’ English compounds, which follow the Right-Hand Head Rule).

Perhaps it is the quirkiness of tautological compounds that accounts for the fact that not much has been said about them in traditional accounts of compounding, which typically relegate them to a marginal area of the English language. However, there is more to tautological compounds than meets the eye. What the present study wishes to demonstrate is that the term ‘tautological compound’ is a misnomer, as such combinations are far from being tautological or redundant in their meaning. Accordingly, the article first clarifies the notion of tautological compound, and then aims to give an account of the various roles that such combinations play in language, thereby demonstrating their non-tautological and non-redundant nature – in order to assign this much-neglected category to its proper, well-deserved place within English word formation.

The topic of this article can be exemplified by the final clause of the following attested sentence: I don't know how he found out that she belonged to that lass, but find out he has. Clauses like this one show a preposed verb phrase that is headed by a plain verb whereas the non-preposed verb phrase of their canonical counterparts is obligatorily headed by a perfect participle (i.e. he has {found / *find} out). This peculiarity of verb phrase preposing, which will be referred to as the perfect participle paradox, has seldom been discussed. The article starts by showing that clauses that manifest the paradox are more frequent in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and in the British National Corpus than their non-paradoxical analogues with preposed canonical perfect participles. The article then looks at the paradox from the point of view of generative syntax, discusses and rejects previous analyses, and argues that a solution entails the rejection of two assumptions that have been associated with a lexicalist position, especially by proponents of distributed morphology. These are the assumptions that (a) a syntactic terminal is an item supplied by the lexicon and comprising a phonological representation and (b) that syntax may not manipulate the internal structure of syntactic terminals. The article proposes an analysis that is not based on these assumptions, but argues that the analysis does not entail the superiority of a distributed morphology framework.

The choice of genitive construction in English is conditioned by numerous semantic, syntactic and phonological factors. The present study explores the influence of these factors across different modalities (speech vs writing) and genres (e.g. press, fiction, etc.), and models the mediating effect of language-external variables on internal cognitive and linguistic factors within the context of a probabilistic grammar of genitive choice. The discussion revolves around debates concerning the driving force(s) behind recent changes in newspaper genitives, concluding that the trend reflects a push toward more economical modes of expression in reportage texts. Curiously, analysis finds few significant interactions with low-level processing-related factors, e.g. possessor frequency and lexical density – a surprising result in light of recent research. However, analysis further reveals significant inter-genre variability among several other crucial factors including possessor animacy and final sibilancy, which are significantly reduced in journalistic prose. These latter findings offer indirect evidence in favor of economization, and offer insight into the connections between external stylistic concerns, specific linguistic practices and internal probabilistic weights associated with specific grammatical constructions.

Rivalry between the two English nominalising suffixes -ity and -ness has long been an issue in the literature on English word-formation (see esp. Marchand 1969; Aronoff 1976; Anshen & Aronoff 1981; Romaine 1983; Riddle 1985; Giegerich 1999; Plag 2003; Säily 2011; Baeskow 2012; Lindsay 2012; Bauer et al. 2013: ch. 12). Both regularly attach to adjectival bases, producing nouns with (mostly) synonymous meanings. Most standard accounts assume that stronger restrictiveness of -ity is an effect of -ity being less productive than -ness, and that the observed preferences are an effect of selectional restrictions imposed on bases and/or suffixes. The focus of the present study is on the productivity of the two suffixes in synchronic English and on the diachronic development of that productivity in the recent history of the language. The article presents a statistical analysis and a computational simulation with an analogical model (using the AM algorithm, Skousen & Stanford 2007) of the distribution of -ity and -ness in a corpus comprising some 2,700 neologisms from the Oxford English Dictionary from three different centuries (the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth). Statistical analysis of the OED data reveals that -ity preference for pertinent bases is far more widespread than hitherto thought. Furthermore, the earlier data show a consistent development of these preference patterns over time. Computational modelling shows that AM is highly successful in predicting the variation in synchronic English as well as in the diachronic data solely on the basis of the formal properties of the bases of nominalisation. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the AM model it is shown that, unlike many previous approaches, an analogical theory of word-formation provides a convincing account of the observed differences between the productivity profiles of the two nominalising suffixes and their emergence over time.