This special issue is concerned with how the multidisciplinary concept ‘sense of place’ can be applied to further our understanding of ‘place’ in the history of English. In particular, the articles collected here all relate in some way to complicated processes through which individuals and the communities they are embedded within are defined in relation to others and to their socio-cultural and spatial environments (Convery et al.2012). We have brought together eight articles focusing on specific aspects of this theme using different theoretical models that offer new insights into the history of the English language from the Old English (OE) period to the twenty-first century. The findings will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English dialectology, lexicography, pragmatics, prototype theory, sociolinguistics and syntactic theory.

This article explores the concept of the supernatural and the characterization of monsters and devils in Old English (OE), using the framework of a prototype model of semantic structure. Although there is a lexical gap, with no OE word equivalent to Present-Day English supernatural, it is possible to identify a set of semantic traits that constitute a covert conceptual category similar to the modern concept and encompassing Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils. The essence of this category is ‘exclusion’. The difference between the modern and medieval concepts is that, for the Anglo-Saxons, the boundary of the supernatural was conceptually much ‘closer’ and conceived in less abstract terms, corresponding to the frontier between the civilized space of society and the unruly alien space beyond. Similarities in the words applied to them reflect the fact that supernatural beings shared this alien space with other more mundane outsiders, such as foreigners and criminals. As its most extraordinary members, however, Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils played an important role in delineating the boundaries of society by acting as a challenge or counterexample to the principles of proper behaviour and accepted beliefs from which that civilized space was constructed and therefore supporting the normative function of the Anglo-Saxons’ ‘sense of place’ in the terms of Convery et al. (2012).

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.

We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.

The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.

Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.

This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.

Competition between two methods of marking recipient/beneficiary and theme has figured in much recent research:

1. (1) Jim gave the driver £5.   (indirect object before direct object)

2. (2) Jim gave £5 to the driver.   (direct object before prepositional phrase)

A reverse double object variant is often ignored or treated as a minor and highly restricted variant:

1. 1. (a) ?Jim gave £5 the driver.   (direct object before indirect object)

   2. (b) Jim gave it him.

However, pattern (3) was much more widespread even in late Modern English, while there is clear dialectal variation within present-day British English.

In this article we investigate the pronominal pattern (3b), mainly in relation to pattern (1), tracking its progressive restriction in distribution. We mine three of the Penn parsed corpora for the general history in English of double object patterns with two pronoun objects. We then add a further nine dialect and/or historical English corpora selected for coverage and representativeness. A usage database of examples in these corpora allows more detailed description than has been possible hitherto. The analysis focuses on verb lemmas, objects and dialect variation and offers an important corrective to the bulk of research on the so-called Dative Alternation between patterns (1) and (2). We also examine works in the normative grammatical tradition, producing a precept database that reveals the changing status of variants as dialectal or preferred. In our conclusion we show the importance of prefabricated expressions (prefabs) in the later history of (3), sketching an analysis in Construction Grammar terms.

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.

Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

The article examines the challenges encountered by historical dictionaries in documenting regional variation in lexis, and in recording and describing the association of lexical items with particular regionally based linguistic identities. After a short section looking at general issues in labelling the regional distribution and provenance of lexical items in historical dictionaries, it looks in detail at the OED’s treatment of three test cases: Mackem ‘person from Sunderland or Wearside’; pet as a term of endearment or form of address; and ram-raid and related terms. All three have some connection with the north-east of England, but this differs greatly in each case: ram-raid (probably) originated in Tyneside, but there is now little awareness of this either inside or outside the north-east; pet did not originate in the north-east, nor is it restricted to use in this region, but it is widely recognized as a marker of north-eastern (or sometimes specifically Tyneside) linguistic identity; Mackem has little currency outside the north-east, but within the region it has some importance in signalling a distinctive Sunderland or Wearside linguistic and cultural identity. The article places these different lexical histories in the context of current research on enregisterment of lexis, and examines how definitions, labelling, descriptive notes and carefully selected quotation evidence can all be pressed into service in attempting to present nuanced accounts of the histories of such lexical items in a historical dictionary.

This article explores the ways in which constructions of identities of place are embedded in the ideology of race and social orientation in Zimbabwe. Using newspaper reports, memoirs, speeches, advertisements, fiction, interviews and ephemera produced around key discursive thresholds, it examines the production of multiple meanings of key terms within competing discourses to generate co-existing parallel lexicons. Crucially, labels like ‘settler’, ‘African’ and ‘Zimbabwean’, labels that are inextricably linked to access to and association with the land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, shift their reference and connotations for different speakers in different settings and periods. For example, the term ‘settler’, used to refer to white colonists of British origin who occupied vast agricultural lands in colonial Zimbabwe, is appropriated in post-independent Zimbabwe to designate blacks settled on the land in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. The analysis of semantic pragmatic change in relation to key discursive thresholds yields a complex story of changing identities conditioned by different experiences of a raced national biography.

This article examines the use of the semi-modals have to, have got to and need to in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), a corpus of spoken Northeastern English dating from the late 1960s to the present day. It will be shown that the semi-modals have, in many contexts, replaced the historically older must as markers of obligation and necessity in this variety. Moreover, the two most frequent variants in the corpus, have to and have got to, will be examined in the light of current theories of grammaticalisation. Internal and external constraints, which have been shown in the literature on root modality to have played an important role in the distribution of variants in other regional varieties of British and North American English, will be tested in DECTE. The article will also examine the rise of need to in this northeastern variety, as the most recent addition to the group of variants marking obligation and necessity.