This article argues that be to is primarily a modal auxiliary expressing the necessity of future actualization of the ‘residue-situation’ (= the situation referred to by the clause minus be to). Eight possible ‘M-origins’ (= origins of the necessity) are identified. The ‘futurish’ use of be to in present-day English is closely related to these modal uses, especially to the use in which the M-origin is an official arrangement.

The modal interpretation shifts to a futurish interpretation when the emphasis shifts from the present existence of the necessity to the future actualization of the residue-situation. This shift of emphasis is accompanied by a loss of doubt about this future actualization.

In other words, the futurish reading comes to the fore when the (strong or weak) origin of the necessity is bleached, so that the hearer's attention is directed to the future actualization of the residue-situation. Various cases of such bleaching are treated. In some cases (e.g. when be to collocates with still or yet, as in He is still to keep the first of his promises), the bleaching of the M-origin is complete, so that only the sense of futurity (and hence of ‘not-yet-factuality’) is left. In some examples there is no clear difference between be to and will any more, so that the two are interchangeable within the same sentence.

This study examines the lexical and grammatical diffusion of TH-fronting amongst adolescents in London, where TH-fronting is well established, and Edinburgh, where it is a relatively new phenomenon. Our results reveal that the application of TH-fronting is constrained in Edinburgh in ways that are not relevant for London, and vice versa. Specifically, whereas TH-fronting is sensitive to phonotactic context and prosodic position in Edinburgh, we observe no such effects amongst the London speakers. Morphological complexity, on the other hand, is a significant predictor of TH-fronting in both regions; however, we also find evidence of significant gender differences in the use of fronting in London that do not emerge in our Edinburgh data. We argue that these results attest to the more established nature of TH-fronting in London as compared to Edinburgh. We also address the question of how speech perception influences the emergence and spread of innovative neutralisation phenomena like TH-fronting. The results of this study further highlight the usefulness of a comparative variationist approach to understanding patterns of dialectal variation and change.

This paper provides an account of be going to and will within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995). Because of the range of interpretations derived from the use of these expressions in different contexts, many previous accounts have characterized them as polysemous. This polysemy has been attributed to semantic retention, whereby both old (lexical) and new (grammaticalized) meanings are recovered in certain contexts. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate: (i) that although be going to does exhibit semantic retention, in a relevance-theoretic framework this does not entail polysemy, and (ii) that interpretations of will previously attributed to semantic retention are, in fact, pragmatically derived, and hence will is also monosemous.

Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

Based on micro-analysis of a set of British English telephone calls, seven different uses of the phrase never mind are distinguished in terms of (a) sequence type, (b) speaker role, (c) sequential position, and (d) prosodic configuration. It is argued that the methodology employed here is widely applicable not only for ready-made expressions but also for less idiomatic forms such as ‘lexicalized sentence stems’ and other prefabricated chunks of language. Through such a methodology analysts can lay bare what it is that speakers ‘do’ with language and thus come to understand what it is they ‘know’ about its procedural deployment in interaction.

A long-standing assumption in the syntactic literature is that coordination can only target constituents. This assumption has been a subject of much debate, with many authors questioning its validity. This article enters this debate by reconsidering a constraint on left-sharing in coordination which Osborne & Gross (2017) have recently introduced, namely left node blocking. To account for this constraint, Osborne & Gross propose the Principle of Full Clusivity which states that coordination cannot cut into a constituent. They couch their analysis in a Dependency Grammar, assuming that coordination does not have to conjoin constituents and that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. Given that the empirical ground on which the LNB is based is not firm, I seek to experimentally investigate it by conducting a large-scale experiment. The results of the investigation reveal that LNB is wrong; left-sharing is as permissive as right-sharing. The results of the investigation have the immediate consequence that the assumptions on which LNB is based are wrong as well, namely that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. I spell out an analysis couched in terms of left-to-right syntax to account for major cases of left-sharing in coordination.

This paper investigates all aspects of the orthography of the Ormulum in relation to the phonology of the late twelfth-century south Lincolnshire dialect which Orm's spelling system was designed to reflect. We show that Orm's adaptations of what he found in existing orthographic systems provided a set of graphic symbols that was fully capable of representing phonological contrasts in the vocabulary of the dialect and which thus in many respects resembled the inventory that an analysis on phonemic principles might provide. However, Orm's system has more orthographic symbols than an analysis of distinctive oppositions in speech would have required. All of these additions are in some measure attributable to following precedent. In this aspect of his spelling system, as in his innovations, nearly all of which also have parallels within the English orthographic tradition, we discern a spelling reformer who, in due consideration of transparency of the system as perceived by the reader, took pains to depart as little as possible from the familiar.

The verbal prefix out- in its scalar-comparative sense is among the most productive English locative prefixes. Although several authors make use of the construction as a test environment for verb classification, few studies have looked at its semantics in any depth. Moreover, previous work on this prefix relies on fairly small databases or self-generated data, and no reliable corpus-based investigations are available, calling into question the usefulness of present semantic analyses and the application of the construction as a test environment.

This study aims at remedying these shortcomings via presenting a database culled mostly from COCA and iWeb. Based on the analysis of the wide range of attestations in the database it is shown that existing generalizations and previous semantic analyses are wrong and that particular restrictions proposed in the literature are not borne out by the data. Several claims, including core features of the formalizations offered in the literature, have to be discarded. Furthermore, alleged base-restrictions on the input out- allows are shown to be far too restrictive. This holds for verbal as well as adjectival and nominal bases. It is shown that approaches that deny the existence of category-changing prefixes are misguided.

Overall, the construction is more flexible regarding possible interpretations and more promiscuous with respect to possible bases than previously thought. At the same time, the system is not unrestricted. Generalizing over the data, this article lays out the requirements and specific challenges any full formal account of out- will have to match.

This article reports on the role pragmatic inferencing plays in accounting for the ways in which native speakers perceive and interpret the semantic transparency of idioms. Although previous studies have suggested that semantic transparency intuitions of idioms are partly motivated by the conceptual metaphors that underlie them (Gibbs 1992; Gibbs et al.1997), findings from other studies (Keysar & Bly 1995, 1999) have raised questions concerning the arbitrariness of such intuitions. This study seeks to further address the discussion on the nature of semantic transparency by examining the role of pragmatic inferencing and encyclopedic world knowledge for understanding how native speakers interpret the relationship between the literal parts and figurative meanings of metaphorical idioms. To this end, semantic transparency ratings were elicited among fifteen native speakers of English for 222 metaphorical English idioms. Furthermore, raters provided qualitative support by justifying their ratings for a smaller subset of 30 idioms. These initial results were then triangulated by a follow-up exploratory study surveying etymological notes from a number of idiom dictionaries. The findings suggest that pragmatic inferencing via encyclopedic world knowledge plays an important role for the non-arbitrary way in which native speakers perceive the semantic transparency of idioms.

Adele Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii + 280.

Goldberg's new work ‘investigates the nature of our knowledge of language, how that knowledge is acquired by children, and how crosslinguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained’. It builds on earlier research on Construction Grammar (CxG) by Fillmore (1986), Lakoff (1987), Fillmore, Kay & O'Connor (1988), and Goldberg (1995), among others. Since the mid-1990s constructions have become more and more popular as an alternative to Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program, but it was not until the new millennium that CxG reached a new level of interest that resulted in an ever-growing body of research (for an overview, see Fried & Östman 2004). Besides numerous articles and monographs, the increased interest in CxG is evidenced by a book series and an e-journal devoted to constructional research, as well as the bi-annual International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG). The publication of Goldberg (1995) inspired much constructional research over the past decade, most notably Croft's (2001) typologically oriented approach to CxG and Tomasello's (2003) constructional account of language acquisition.

Two main hypotheses have been proposed to account for the word order of negative inversion (NI) in varieties of non-canonical English (e.g. Don't nobody else care). An auxiliary inversion analysis argues that the word order is derived via movement of the auxiliary to the left periphery, whereas an existential analysis argues that the word order is an artifact of deletion of the expletive subject, paralleling there-insertion existential constructions. After reviewing these hypotheses, I provide empirical evidence that neither of these theories adequately explains the peculiarities of NI. I advance a third hypothesis, namely that NI is the result of negative movement to the specifier of NegP, and that this movement is pragmatically motivated by an existential meaning in NI constructions. Syntactically, NI is made possible through the Neg-Criterion (Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991, 1996). This analysis explains problems encountered by prior analyses, and offers a unified analysis for variation in NI across dialects. Finally, I explain cross-dialectal differences in NI by considering the relationship between subject requirements and agreement.

Review of Tony Bex & Richard J. Watts (eds), Standard English: the widening debate. London: Routledge. 1999. Pp. xi + 312. Hardback £50, ISBN 0 415 191629; paperback £15.99, ISBN 0 415 191637.

According to D'Souza (1999) the question of standard English ‘is one of the great, unresolved problems that we are carrying into the twenty-first century’ (p. 271). Why should this question be so important and why so unresolved? And what does the book under review here add to our possible understanding of this issue? There are a number of significant issues here. First, there is the question of definition: what is a standard language? From this follows the ontological question as to whether they actually exist or are merely convenient (or inconvenient) fictions. Are we talking about spoken or written language? And in the global context, there are questions such as whether a global standard of international English exists or is emerging? Or is international intelligibility always a negotiation of possibilities with no obvious standard? And how do the new standard Englishes of Singapore, India, or Hong Kong relate both to all the other forms of English within those countries and to the other regionalized standards as well as the possible international standard? From definitional questions we move on to more political and pedagogical ones: Are standard languages hegemonic forms to be opposed? Are standard languages hegemonic forms to be acquired? Does access to standard language give people greater social and economic mobility, or is this another myth associated with standard languages?

In this article, I investigate the implications of socially meaningful sociolinguistic variation for competence grammar, working from the point of view of HPSG as a kind of performance-plausible sign-based grammar. Taking data from African American Vernacular English variable copula absence as a case study, I argue that syntactic constraints and social meaning are intertwined. I present an overview of the literature on social meaning, discuss what grammars are models of, and argue that in order to model socially meaningful variation, competence grammars need to be extended to include social meaning, precompiled phrases, and probabilistic or frequentistic information. I then explore different heuristics for defining the boundaries of competence grammar and discuss the commonalities between the proposed additions and the kind of linguistic knowledge which is generally assumed to comprise competence grammar.

While null subjects are a well-researched phenomenon in pro-drop languages like Italian or Spanish, they have not received much attention in non-pro-drop languages such as English, where they are traditionally associated with particular (written) genres such as diaries or are discussed under a broader umbrella term such as situational ellipsis. However, examples such as the one in the title – while certainly not frequent – are commonly encountered in colloquial speech, with first-person singular tokens outnumbering any other person.

This article investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the (non-) realisation of first-person singular subjects in a corpus of colloquial English. The variables found to contribute to the observed variation are drawn from a variety of linguistic domains and follow up on research conducted in such different fields as first language acquisition (FLA), cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and language variation and change. Of particular interest is the finding regarding the link between null subjects and complexity of the verb phrase, which patterns in a clearly linear fashion: the more complex the verb phrase, the more likely is a null realisation. Not discussed in this form before, this finding, given its high significance and its robustness in light of alternative coding, may prove to be an important candidate for inclusion in future studies on (English) null subjects.

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e. paddle strongly evokes water), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (water only weakly evokes paddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of English be going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verb go. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forster et al.2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such as go) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003).

Salkie & Reed (1997) offer a ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ of tense in reported speech which runs counter to Jespersen's & Comrie's quotative or ‘sequence of tenses’ analysis as well as to the more semantically based analysis proposed by Declerck (1990b, 1991a). In doing so they also cast doubt on the model of the English tense system which was proposed by Declerck (1991a) and has since been further refined and elaborated in a number of articles and in Declerck (1997).

The present article goes into the many arguments that S&R advance, refutes them, and adduces additional evidence for D's theory and against S&R's ‘pragmatic hypothesis’.

Prefixes attached to adjectives/adverbs which are functionally equivalent to booster adverbs, i.e. booster prefixes, are frequent in both Present-day German and Old English. Among the Old English booster prefixes, whose inventory is here discussed in a first survey, for- is by far the most frequent, with respect to both types and tokens. In a more detailed analysis, the study investigates the Old English roots of ME forsooth(e), an emphasizer which became highly frequent at the beginning of Middle English. Forsooth is commonly considered to be a univerbated and lexicalized form of an Old English prepositional phrase for soþ ‘for truth’ (comparable to PDE indeed (< ‘in the deed’) or in fact). Yet analyses of the inventory of booster prefixes in Old English and the booster prefix for- in particular show that an alternative etymology may be suggested: Old English for soþ can also be analysed as the (endingless) accusative singular neuter of the adjective forsoþ ‘very true’.

This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causative bring (bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.

The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the diachronic stages of detransitivisation for a recessive English verb we gain first systematic, empirically validated insights into the link between transitivity and language change.

This article adduces support for the claim that bringcaus + to-infinitive has (almost completely) lost its ability to take fully fledged direct objects. There are, however, at least three, partly overlapping contexts, in which this verb can stand its ground: with reflexives, modals and negation. What these contexts have in common is that they reduce the clause's transitivity, defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 251) as ‘the effectiveness with which the verbal action takes place’. Assuming that the higher the transitivity, the stronger the effect of the verbal action is on the object, these detransitivised contexts can be interpreted as alleviating the effect of the verbal action.

This paper challenges the view that subject-orientation in English de-adjectival -ly adverbs is a syntactic attribute, and favours the hypothesis that orientation is, rather, a lexico-semantic feature. An important part of the evidence supporting this hypothesis derives from the examination of constructions in which an -ly adverb modifies an adjectival head (as in his genially informal manner) and displays a (potential) orientation to a co-occurring noun. The discussion is based on examples from the LOB Corpus.

This article proposes a hierarchy of functional heads encoding the features [±control], [±initiation], [±state], [±change] and [±telic] (see Ramchand 2008). It is argued that this allows for a superior analysis of split intransitivity in English than the traditional notion of ‘unaccusativity’ – the idea that there are two classes of intransitive verbs which differ in relation to the underlying status/positions of their arguments. Rather, it is shown – on the basis of a systematic consideration of a wide range of English verbs – that the proposed diagnostics for unaccusativity in English identify multiple classes, whose behaviour can be captured in terms of the proposed hierarchy. Good correlation is found between the classes identified by the English diagnostics and Sorace's (2000) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH), providing further support for the cross-linguistic applicability of the ASH to split intransitive patterns.