Compared to German Ja and Nein, English Yes and No are used less frequently, and often in combination with short sentences consisting of a pronoun and an auxiliary or modal verb: Yes I will; No I won't. When such a short sentence is used, Yes and No may be omitted: I will; I won't; I do; I don't; He can; They certainly won't. This difference in usage is established (1) by comparing the marriage vow in German and English, where the officiant's question is answered by Ja in German but by I will or I do in English; (2) by citing material from a practical grammar for German students of English; and (3) by studying the way Shakespeare has his figures answer decision questions, or Yes/No-questions, in comparison with Schlegel's way of rendering their answers in his German translation. Next it is shown that Shakespeare's way, which is essentially the same as modern usage, differs radically from earlier English usage up to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1388–1400) and Troilus and Cresseide (1382–6) and the anonymous York Plays (fourteenth century) and Towneley Plays (late fourteenth century), which all reflect the Germanic usage, essentially the same as in German. It is concluded that the modern English usage arose during the two centuries between Chaucer and Shakespeare, as a Late Middle English and Early Modern English innovation. As for the reason why English developed this un-Germanic way of answering decision questions, reference is made to Insular Celtic: decision questions are answered with short sentences in both Irish and Welsh, and this usage is old in both languages. The viability of this contact explanation is underlined by Irish English, where Yes and No are used even less frequently than in Modern Standard English, and short sentences are the normal way of answering decision questions.

The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit and hence bulkier variant occurs preferably in final position. The first variation context concerns semi-reflexive verbs that can take either an explicit self-pronoun or a zero variant. It turns out that the rapid decline of the self-pronoun is delayed in end position. The second case study focuses on Early Modern English affirmative declarative clauses, which may alternate between finite verb forms or do-supported ones. This study reveals that do-support is favoured in end position. These findings ultimately contribute to an empirical validation of end-weight, the implications of which are discussed against the backdrop of processing-related support strategies.

Across Englishes, frequently used epistemic/evidential complement-taking predicates (e/e ctps) have undergone conventionalisation, whereby subject + e/e verb constructions are reanalysed as formulaic stance markers. However, the system of e/e ctps in Australian English (AusE) – and the degree to which they have grammaticalised – remains unexplored. In this article, we offer a quantitative analysis of the most frequent e/e ctps in the spoken portion of the International Corpus of English – Australia. Multivariate analysis shows that think and guess stand as canonical encoders of speaker attitude, and reckon is multifunctional, encoding epistemic modality and evidentiality. Assuming that (inter-)subjective meaning represents the last stage in semantic change, our results indicate that AusE reckon is less grammaticalised than think and guess.

The article focuses on inherent variability in syntax and the challenge that it presents for theories of language structure, using illustrative data from the Scottish town of Buckie (Smith, 2000). Inherent variability challenges a linguistic theory at three levels of theoretical adequacy: structural (Does the theory distinguish the relevant structures?), contextual (Does it allow structures to be related directly to their social context?), and behavioural (Does it allow an explanation for the observed frequencies?). The article summarizes the relevant claims of Word Grammar and shows (1) that it has at least as much structural adequacy as any other theory, (2) that it has more contextual adequacy than other theories because it formalizes the theory of Acts of Identity, and (3) that it at least provides a theoretical foundation for future advances towards behavioural adequacy. The article also argues against the minimalist analysis of the was/were alternation in Buckie (Adger, 2006).

Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.

In this article we address a hitherto unstudied causal conjunction in English, seeing as though. Occurring predominantly in informal registers, the conjunction is typically used to introduce information which the speaker takes to be self-evidently true and on whose basis some further comment, or query, is made. Drawing on data derived from internet searches we draw up a semantic profile of the expression in comparison and contrast with other reason connectives, namely, seeing (that) and since. The data suggest that seeing as though is associated with highly subjective construals of the reason relation. We also address the internal structure of the expression. The use of seeing in a reason conjunction is traced to a common conceptual metaphor, whereby knowing is seeing. More puzzling is the occurrence of as though. While rejecting the possibility of a compositional analysis of the expression, we note that as though is only one of a number of items which can occur with causal seeing. These items have to do with the appearance of things and are in fact able to occur as complementizers after predicates of seeming and appearing. To this extent, as though is consistent with the subjectivity associated with the complex conjunction. In the course of our investigation, we also document the extraordinary proliferation of reason connectives that involve lexical items such as seeing, as, though, and several others, and suggest that this exuberance of new forms may not be unrelated to the subjectivity inherent in the construal of causal relations.

The focus of this article is what Anderson (2005: 72) describes as ‘another chronic puzzle in English’, the case of to-contraction. We set out to show that the extent and nature of to-contraction has not been captured by the literature to date, because researchers have been concerned with two forms which are no longer synchronic to-contractions: wanna and gonna, and have taken a syntactic or morphological approach. On the basis of new phonological data from British English varieties we argue that the reduction of /t/ in to should be taken as evidence of to-contraction. We claim that to is a phonological clitic and to-contraction is simply the incorporation of the clitic to into the preceding prosodic word.

What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was no do-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions.

This article studies the emergence of a grammatical pattern, the proper noun modifier construction shown in the Obama administration, an Edinburgh restaurant. The only dedicated historical corpus study, by Rosenbach (2007, 2010), is limited in terms of time depth and data included, and suggests that only proper noun modifiers denoting places such as Edinburgh are found in the early seventeenth century. Using corpus data that span the full history of English, we trace the construction back to two Old English precursors, genitival modifiers without inflectional marking, e.g. Jericho feldes ‘the fields of Jericho’, and compounds, e.g. Easter æfen ‘Easter eve’. We combine macro-level visualisations of distributions and qualitative micro-analyses to show how these source constructions developed into the present-day English construction. The development defies simplistic views on grammatical change, but illustrates that grammatical patterns develop out of multiple sources under the influence of a multiplicity of factors. New patterns only emerge gradually and exploit existing ambiguities in the language.

The study aims to enrich the available acoustic data pertaining to vowels of what may tentatively be called contemporary RP or near-RP. The corpus comprised BBC radio and TV broadcasts of seven male and seven female newsreaders. F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthongs (kit, dress, trap, foot, strut, lot, fleece, palm, goose, thought and nurse) and 4 diphthongs (goat, price, mouth and face) were taken. The results are presented both as raw mean F1 and F2 frequencies in Hertz and on a plot normalised according to Lobanov (1971). The results, among other things, confirm our hypothesis that the onset of mouth is now decidedly fronter than and does not overlap with the onset of price. Furthermore, we sought to determine the exact extent of goose-fronting, which according to our data is, even in this variety of English, fronter than centre, as well as the quality of the goat glide, which seems to be following suit.

Phrasal compounds are taken to be word-level structures that combine a lexical head with a phrasal non-head. Several claims have emerged from the pertinent literature: phrasal compounds allegedly only have nominal heads, can host a variety of syntactic structures in non-head position, are determinative, and are instances of expressive morphology. The existence of adjectival phrasal compounds is either explicitly denied in the literature, or considered a marginal phenomenon at best. This article presents data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008) that show that adjectival phrasal compounds do exist in English. We demonstrate that they are similar to non-phrasal adjectival compounds and to nominal phrasal compounds. At the same time, they crucially differ from nominal compounds in the prototypical semantic relations between head and non-head: adjectival phrasal compounds are mostly similative-intensifying as opposed to determinative. We argue that this property is also found in noun–adjective compounds and follows naturally from the semantics of the head category in question, viz. adjectives as mostly gradable predicates. In turn, the majority of adjectival phrasal compounds in our data feature a strong expressive component, a characteristic they share with other phrasal compounds.

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

This article concerns English proper noun modifiers denoting organizations, people and places and their German and Swedish correspondences. It supplements previous studies touching upon contrastive comparisons by providing large-scale systematic findings on the translation correspondences of the three aforementioned semantic types. The data are drawn from the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), which contains popular non-fiction, a genre previously not studied in connection with proper noun modifiers. The results show that organization-based modifiers are the most common and person-based ones the rarest in English originals. Compounds are the most frequent correspondences in German and Swedish translations and originals with genitives and prepositional phrases as other common options. The preference for compounds is stronger in German, while it is stronger for prepositional phrases in Swedish translations, reflecting earlier findings on language-specific tendencies. Organization-based modifiers tend to be translated into compounds, and place-based modifiers into prepositional phrases. German and Swedish translators relatively often opt for similar target-language structures. Two important target-language differences emerge: (i) compounds with complex heads are dispreferred in Swedish (US news show > *USA-nyhetsprogram) but unproblematic in German (US-Nachrichtensendung), and (ii) compounds with acronyms (WTO ruling > WTO-Entscheidung) are more frequent in German.

This article presents a novel approach to the phenomenon of intrusive-r in English based on analogy. The main claim of the article is that intrusive-r in non-rhotic dialects of English is the result of the analogical extension of the r~zero alternation shown by words such as far, more and dear. While this idea has been around for a long time, this is the first study that explores this type of analysis in detail. Specifically, I provide an overview of the developments that led to the emergence of intrusive-r and show that they are fully compatible with an analogical approach. This includes the analysis of frequency data taken from an eighteenth-century corpus of English compiled specifically for the purposes of this article and the discussion of a related development, namely intrusive-l. The article also presents a review of the evidence about the variability of intrusive-r, which serves as the basis of an evaluation of previous approaches. Once the notion of analogy is made formally explicit, the analogical approach becomes capable of providing a unified account of the historical development and the variability of intrusive-r. This is demonstrated through a computer simulation of the emergence of the phenomenon based on the eighteenth-century corpus mentioned above. The results of the simulation confirm the predictions of the analogical approach.

This article discusses the existence of transitive expletives in a variety of English. Belfast English has none of the features previously proposed as licensing transitive expletives, but nevertheless allows these, calling into question previous analyses of the licensing of this structure. This article considers the properties of transitive expletives in this variety, showing that they are restricted to sentences where the associate is quantified, and that the associate can appear in a range of positions, similar but not identical to those available to ‘floated’ quantifiers. It is argued that Belfast English has a higher merge position for the expletive than does Standard English, and that the general availability in English of quantifier positions between T and vP – perhaps because auxiliaries in English head phases, and phases can be closed by a quantification – means that, even though Belfast English is not a Verb Second language, a position is available for both the expletive and the associate.

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.

The concept of speaky-spoky, a pejorative label for hypercorrect speech in Jamaica, has thus far been described in the context of shared speech community norms (Patrick 1999). In this article, I analyze a stretch of speaky-spoky discourse and its recontextualization. The theoretical perspectives from which the data are examined are that of the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010) and of entextualization (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996). The method of analysis draws on Goffman's writing on frames (1974) and production formats (1981). I argue that the ideological dimensions and interactional versatility of the speaky-spoky concept have thus far not received enough empirical attention. To address this gap, I propose to interpret speaky-spoky as a dynamic and relational ‘construct resource’ (Fabricius & Mortensen 2013) that speakers draw upon to highlight social meaning in interaction.

This article analyses the formal and stylistic features of phrasal verbs in the Old Bailey Corpus and compares them with results obtained from the speech-related genres of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), namely diaries, drama, letters and sermons. Phrasal verbs tend to be associated with spoken colloquial registers both in PDE and previous stages of the language, although this statement has been challenged by Thim (2006a, 2012), who argues that in EModE the (non-)occurrence of phrasal verbs in a particular text seems motivated by its contents, rather than its degree of formality. The results in this study show that phrasal verbs were a feature of the spoken language already in LModE, since their frequency is remarkably higher in trial proceedings, arguably the closest representation of the spoken word of the past. However, in contrast to other speech-related text types, the frequency of phrasal verbs in trial proceedings decreases over time, which seems to point towards a decolloquialisation of this genre over time. The study also shows differences at the formal level across genres, demonstrating that sermons display more formal and archaic characteristics, whereas trial proceedings contain features which bring them closer to the spoken language.

Based on an investigation of the Old Bailey Corpus, this article explores the development and usage patterns of maximizers in Late Modern English (LModE). The maximizers to be considered for inclusion in the study are based on the lists provided in Quirk et al. (1985) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002). The aims of the study were to (i) document the frequency development of maximizers, (ii) investigate the sociolinguistic embedding of maximizers usage (gender, class) and (iii) analyze the sociopragmatics of maximizers based on the speakers’ roles, such as judge or witness, in the courtroom.

Of the eleven maximizer types focused on in the investigation, perfectly and entirely were found to dominate in frequency. The whole group was found to rise over the period 1720 to 1913. In terms of gender, social class and speaker roles, there was variation in the use of maximizers across the different speaker groups. Prominently, defendants, but also judges and lawyers, maximized more than witnesses and victims; further, male speakers and higher-ranking speakers used more maximizers. The results were interpreted taking into account the courtroom context and its dialogue dynamics.

This study employs corpus semantic techniques to examine the semantics of light verbs and light verb constructions (LVCs) in Singapore English, Hong Kong English and British English via their respective components in the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum 1996). The study investigates onomasiological variation (see Geeraerts et al.1994) by identifying selection preferences in natural use between light verb constructions and their related verb alternatives. In addition, identity evidence is forwarded as a valuable corpus semantic tool, in which instances of naturally occurring language data resemble classic identity tests for polysemy. Via a close reading and manual semantic analysis of thousands of instances of light make, take, give and their semantic alternatives, this study finds remarkable consistency across the three varieties of World Englishes (WEs) in onomasiological preferences, even in extremely nuanced features of LVCs. Onomasiological evidence and identity evidence also suggest the new finding that the three light verbs and their constructions exhibit degrees of lightness, and that these degrees of lightness are extremely consistent across regional varieties.