This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.

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.

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.

Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD), the dental pronunciation of /t/ and /d/ before /r/ and /ər/, is a well-known feature of English varieties throughout Ireland. PreRD is often accompanied by an /r/-Realisation Effect (RRE), whereby /r/ is pronounced as a tap after the dentalised consonant, and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint (MBC), such that PreRD is blocked by Class 2 morpheme boundaries. Although an Irish origin for PreRD has been suggested, the presence of PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in northern English dialects in a form nearly identical to what is found in Ireland suggests that the origins of PreRD lie instead in English in Britain. The possible existence of PreRD in Scotland is suspected, but definitive evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC there has never been published. In this article, I provide the first detailed analysis of these features in Scotland, using unpublished data collected as part of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. It will be seen that there is substantial evidence for PreRD, the RRE and the MBC in Scots dialects. The presence of these features in Scotland has important consequences for their history in Britain, and confirms the British origin of PreRD in Ireland.

This article approaches the study of pragmatic meaning in English modal verbs like can, may, and shall in early eighteenth-century English prose using the techniques of corpus linguistic analysis, politeness theory, and social network analysis. The study is based on a quantitative survey of modal expressions across registers in a corpus of fourteen early eighteenth-century authors, which yields relative frequencies of occurrence according to genre and to author. Together with the sociohistorical information provided by the strategic coalitions constructed to develop, nurture and maintain relationships between clients and literary and political patrons, this survey provides the context for a pragmatic study of politeness strategies. The subsequent qualitative examination of letters in the oeuvres of selected authors yields a rich picture of individual pragmatic variation. The study reveals that although the corpus as a whole exhibits trends for different usages in different genres, the letters exhibit a predominance of modal expressions that may be used to index the facework involved in building and maintaining relationships of patronage. Within this genre, modal choice is influenced by a writer's sense of the relationship with the patron as well as the degree of risk and cost involved in the communication.

This study is a corpus-based diachronic analysis of English reporting parentheticals, i.e. clauses introducing direct speech, placed after or in the middle of the reported message. The aim of the investigation is to trace the development of the construction throughout the history of English, establishing the main factors influencing the choice between VS and SV patterns (i.e. with and without quotative inversion respectively), showing how various reporting verbs were increasingly attracted to the construction, and demonstrating the gradual morphological reduction of the main reporting verbs: quoth and say. The study is based on syntactically annotated corpora of Old, Middle, Early Modern and Late Modern English, and uses other corpora to illustrate more recent changes. The study reveals that reporting clauses do not show regular quotative inversion with all subject types until the Early Modern English period and links this development to the emergence of the comment clause with say. It is also claimed that quotative inversion is not directly derived from the V-2 rule and that parenthetical reporting clauses have functioned as a separate construction since the Old English period.

This study tests the applicability of the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the Uniform Information Density Principle (Jaeger 2010) on adjectival data as regards the variation between retaining and omitting the complementizer that in English adjectival complementation constructions. More specifically, the study tests the effect of different factors of potential importance on this variation across extraposed (e.g. It was inevitable (that) he should be nicknamed ‘the Ferret’) and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I'm happy (that) we are married). While both the factors concerned with the Complexity Principle and the Uniform Information Density Principle are found to have an effect on post-predicate clauses, less clear effects are found concerning extraposed clauses. I attribute these findings to the difference between the two constructions in terms of their frequency of co-occurrence with different matrix subject types and with different adjectives.

The be like quotative emerged rapidly around the English-speaking world and has quickly saturated the quotative systems of young speakers in multiple countries. We study be like (and its covariants) in two communities – Toronto, Canada, and York, United Kingdom – in apparent time and at two separate points in real time. We trace the apparent-time trajectory of be like and its covariants from inception to saturation. We take advantage of the prodigious size of our dataset to examine understudied aspects of the linguistic factors that condition quotative variation. Building on earlier suggestions (Cukor-Avila 2002; Durham et al.2012) that be like might show patterning over time consistent with the Constant Rate Effect (or CRE, Kroch 1989), we argue that the CRE does indeed apply to the rise of be like, but needs to be handled with care. Logistic modelling assumes that the top of the S-curve is located at 100 per cent of a given variable context. In the case of be like, the saturation point is nearer 75–85 per cent, with minor variants retaining small semantic footholds in the system. In conjunction with our analysis, we suggest how to adapt the predictions of the CRE to changes likely to lead to saturation but not categorical use.

Susan Hunston, Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £40.00, ISBN 0 521 80171 0. Paperback £14.95, ISBN 0 521 80583 X. Pp. xii + 241.

Charles F. Meyer, English corpus linguistics: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £45.00, ISBN 0 521 80879 0. Paperback £16.95, ISBN 0 521 00490 X. Pp. xvi + 168.

Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts, Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Hardback £95.00, ISBN 90 272 4888 5. Paperback £55.00, ISBN 90 272 4889 3. Pp. xviii + 342.

This article presents an analysis of the phonotactic structures of English presented in The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, paying attention to morphological boundaries, the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, the difference between native and non-native, and considering the distribution of vowels as well as consonants. The phonotactic status of names turns out to be unlike the status of other morphologically unanalysable words, and some new observations are made on consonant clusters as well as vowel sequences, which have previously been overlooked.

This article discusses the niche role that the oblique genitive of the type the friend of John’s occupies in the context of genitive variation. The article shows that the oblique genitive should be considered an independent construction which competes marginally in two syntactic contexts with the s-genitive (as in John's friend) and the of-genitive (as in the friend of John). The first context is one in which all three constructions function as the predicative complement of the clause (e.g. He is a friend of John's / John's friend / a friend of John). Note that in this context the definiteness effect of the s-genitive is downplayed, so that competition is possible with indefiniteness of the other two constructions. The second context is one where the oblique genitive and the of-genitive are introduced by the determiner the. Contrary to the claim that oblique genitive constructions introduced by the definite article must receive restrictive modification of the head (see e.g. Barker 1998; Lyons 1986), the quantitative data presented in this article reveal that oblique genitives introduced by the determiner the are not confined to pre- or postmodification of the head but can occur, albeit rarely, without any modification as in the example the executor of Sir Ralph’s.

The article further compares the oblique genitive, s-genitive and of-genitive with respect to the following five features: noun-headed vs pronoun dependent; animacy of the dependent; length of the noun-headed dependent; determiner of the head; and the semantic relations that can hold between head (e.g. friend) and dependent (e.g. John). The most intriguing theoretical conclusion is that the semantic relations available to head and dependent in the oblique genitive are a subset of those found in the s-genitive, which, again constitute a subset of those that exist in the of-genitive. This means that variation between all three constructions is not only restricted to the two syntactic contexts outlined above but also to a shared set of semantic relations.

This paper deals with the metrical behavior of a class of verbs in Old English whose descendants became the syntactically distinct auxiliaries of the modern period (have, be, may, will, shall, and associated forms). Contrasting two poems from the Old English period (Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon), I show that while the verbs in question show consistently stressed metrical placement in Beowulf, in Maldon they show a pronounced tendency to be placed in unstressed metrical positions, while verbs outside the eventual class of auxiliaries differ indiscriminately. In this way, the poetry suggests a phonological difference between pre-auxiliaries and other verbs perhaps centuries before corresponding morphological and syntactic differences fully emerged in the Middle and early Modern English periods.

Yod-coalescence involving alveolar consonants before Late Modern English /uː/ from earlier /iu > juː/ is still variable and diffusing in Present-day English. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives both (/tj dj/) and (/ʧ ʤ/) British English pronunciations for tune (/tjuːn/, /tʃuːn/), mature (/mǝˈtjʊǝ/, /mǝˈʧʊǝ/), duke (/djuːk/, /dʒuːk/) and endure (/ᵻnˈdjʊə/, /ɛnˈdjʊə/, /ᵻnˈdʒʊə/, /ɛnˈdʒʊə/, /ᵻnˈdjɔː/, /ɛnˈdjɔː/, /ᵻnˈdʒɔː/, /ɛnˈdʒɔː/). Extensive variability in yod-coalescence and yod-dropping is not recent in origin, and we can already detect relevant patterns in the eighteenth century from the evidence of a range of pronouncing dictionaries. Beal (1996, 1999) notes a tendency for northern English and Scottish authors to be more conservative with regard to yod-coalescence. She concludes that we require ‘a comprehensive survey of the many pronouncing dictionaries and other works on pronunciation’ (1996: 379) to gain more insight into the historical variation patterns underlying Present-day English.

This article presents some results from such a ‘comprehensive survey’: the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP). Transcriptions of all relevant words located are compared across a range of eighteenth-century sources in order to determine the chronology of yod-coalescence and yod-dropping as well as internal (e.g. stress, phoneme type, presence of a following /r/) and external (e.g. prescriptive, geographical, social) motivations for these developments.

This article discusses the synchronic status and diachronic development of will be -ing and shall be -ing (as in I'll be leaving at noon).2 Although available since at least Middle English, the constructions did not establish a significant foothold in standard English until the twentieth century. Both types are also more prevalent in British English (BrE) than American English (AmE).

We argue that in present-day usage will/shall be -ing are aspectually underspecified: instances that clearly construe a situation as future-in-progress are in the minority. Similarly, although volition-neutrality has been identified as a key feature of will/shall be -ing, it is important to take account of other, generally richer meanings and associations, notably ‘future-as-matter-of-course’ (Leech 2004), ‘already-decided future’ (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002) and non-agentivity. Like volition-neutrality, these characteristics appear to be relevant not only in contemporary use, but also in their historical expansion. We show that the construction has evolved from progressive aspect towards more subjectivised evidential meaning.

Ninth-century Kentish Old English <b>/<B>, where it represents a reflex of Germanic [ß], has hitherto been dismissed as an orthographic ‘archaism’. Here, however, it is argued that the graph is a genuine reflection of ninth-century Kentish phonology. The linguistic argument, which invokes the concept of neutralization in reconstructing the Old English obstruent system, is placed in the context of reconstructions of the external history of Kent. Data are drawn from forms of moneyers' names on early Anglo-Saxon coins, discussed in the context of interpretations of manuscript data.

The question of equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives (the FBI's director, the chair's leg) and noun modifiers (the FBI director, the chair leg) is a crucial one for Rosenbach's (2007a, 2010) approach to the gradience between genitive and noun + noun constructions as well as for any study of grammatical variation treating the two constructions as syntactic variants (Szmrecsanyi et al. 2016). However, the assumption that there is such equivalence has recently been challenged by Breban (2018) for English and Schlücker (2013, 2018) for German. The present article defends the view that determiner genitives and identifying noun modifiers are sufficiently similar to alternate in certain choice contexts from a variationist perspective, which, as will be shown, proceeds from a notion of equivalence different from the one adopted by in-depth semantic–pragmatic studies. Proper noun modifiers take a prominent role among identifying noun modifiers in their ability to alternate with determiner genitives, but the argument and analysis in this article is not restricted to them.

Based on the occasional presence of personal pronoun objects and particles to the right of the nonfinite verb, Pintzuk (1999) argues that we must allow VO phrase structure in Old English as well as OV phrase structure. This article shows that personal pronoun objects and particles follow the nonfinite verb often enough to indeed assume VO as a genuine option. During the Old English period there is a significant increase in absolute as well as relative frequency. A quantitative analysis reveals that the relevant cases are found particularly often in coordinate contexts (pronouns) and ACI constructions (particles).

This article presents new evidence for the early history of the Northern Subject Rule in the form of an exhaustive corpus study of plural present-tense indicative verb forms in Northern and Northern Midlands early Middle English, analysed in relation to their syntactic context, including subject type and subject–verb adjacency. We show that variation between -∅/e/n and -s endings was conditioned by both subject type and adjacency in a core area around Yorkshire, whereas in more peripheral areas, the adjacency condition was weaker and often absent.

We present an analysis of these facts in relation to the presence of multiple subject positions in early English, which we show contra earlier literature to be relevant for Northern English as well, We view -∅/e/n endings as ‘true’ agreement, which in the relevant dialects is limited to contexts with pronominal subjects in a high subject position, Spec,AgrSP; other forms of agreement (-s or -th) represent default inflection occurring elsewhere. This analysis supports the hypothesis that the NSR arose when the extant morphological variation in Northern Old English was reanalysed as an effect of pre-existing multiple subject positions.

This article offers a syntactic analysis of the construction [be done NP], e.g. I am done dinner, I am finished my homework, as found in Canadian English and some US dialects. After situating this construction in the context of a productive transitive be perfect in Scots/English dialects, [be done NP] will be distinguished from a set of its conceptual and structural relatives, and ultimately be shown not to be reducible to a surface realization of another underlying structure. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the article problematizes the parsimony of the mainstream generative approach (most recently in MacFadden & Alexiadou 2010) in accounting for the facts of [be done NP] on strictly compositional grounds, as well as the mainstream view of lexical items as projecting theta grids and subcategorization frames (as e.g. in Grimshaw 1979; Emonds 2000). Following Fillmore et al. (1988), Goldberg (1995, 2005) and others, what will be suggested instead is a construction grammar approach to [be done NP], under which a construction holistically licenses its argument structure. Along these lines [be done NP] will be characterized as an abstract construction with some fixed material.