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.

My contribution explores the potential of Standard Average European (SAE) as a methodological yardstick for the assessment of the Celticity of Standard English (SE), i.e. the degree to which SE may have been influenced by Insular Celtic languages. SAE allows a quantification of the extent to which SE differs from other SAE languages and at the same time shows similarities with Insular Celtic languages which are generally thought to deviate from SAE. The concept of SAE will be introduced and a complex test case will be analyzed: the rise of identical reflexives and intensifiers and the frequency of ‘labile’ verbs, e.g. to break both intransitive and transitive, in English. Reflexives and intensifiers are identical in Insular Celtic, but separate categories in SAE. According to Haspelmath (1993), labile verbs are unusually frequent in English by SAE standards, and they are also very frequent in Insular Celtic. It will be shown that the frequency of labile verbs in SE and Insular Celtic results from the identity of reflexives and intensifiers in these languages. Since the frequency of labile verbs thus can be shown to be a typologically secondary phenomenon, it is the rise of the new system of identical reflexives and intensifiers in SE which is methodologically the relevant linguistic subsystem within the complex test case for which Insular Celtic influence can be proposed and which can be adduced as an argument in favor of the Celtic hypothesis. For the assessment of the Celtic hypothesis, it will therefore be rewarding to complement the initial comparison of SE and Insular Celtic with further data from SAE and general typology whenever the linguistic subsystems under scrutiny allows the inclusion of such data.

This article examines grammatical conditioning of the use of nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences. The discussion is based on data from a Midlands variety of English (UK). In negative constructions, speakers tend to allow for nonstandard -s with no and constituent not, but not to use it with n't or clausal not. Further, nonstandard -s is admitted in declarative existentials, but disfavoured in interrogatives. By comparison, occurrences of nonstandard -s in nonexistential structures did not seem to demonstrate these constraints. Investigating such constraints is instructive in several respects. First, they help to identify the nature of nonstandard -s. Second, they provide new evidence for the generative inquiry into issues relating to subject–verb agreement. Third, they delimit variable contexts for variationist analyses. In this way generative and variationist objectives meet. I will argue that researching syntactic variation necessitates combining generative and variationist methodology.

This article presents a corpus analysis of changes over a period of two centuries in speech-reporting constructions in written White South African English (WSAfE), a native variety of English that has been in contact with Afrikaans throughout its history. The analysis is based on register-differentiated comparable diachronic corpora of WSAfE, its parent variety, British English (BrE), and the contact language, Afrikaans. Three related reported-speech constructions are analysed, focusing on changes in the relative frequencies of variants of each construction. These constructions show ongoing change, with similar trajectories of change for WSAfE and BrE in some cases, but divergent trajectories in others. In the latter case, WSAfE and Afrikaans converge on similar frequency distributions, which follow from an accelerated rate of change or a slowing down of the rate of change for particular features in WSAfE in comparison to BrE. Descriptive findings are supported by conditional inference tree modelling. The effect of frequency on reinforcing similar patterns of change in WSAfE and Afrikaans, as well as simplification through the levelling of register differences in WSAfE and Afrikaans are proposed as explanations. The study highlights the importance of converging norms in a multilingual publication industry as a site of contact.

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, and Peter Trudgill, 2004. New Zealand English: its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0 521 64292 2. Hb £55.00, US$85.00.

Peter Trudgill, 2004. New-dialect formation: the inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0 7486 1876 7. Hb £45.00.

Conversion is a key type of word-formation process in English, but the precise nature of the relation between base and derivative in conversion is rarely discussed, even if conversion is considered as a dynamic process. When it is considered explicitly, the relation has been described in terms of paradigmatic relations between lexemes, specifically homonymy or polysemy. This is usually without any specification of how converted words accommodate the conditions set by the definition of each of these relations, and as a special type of one or the other, because conversion-related words violate some of those conditions. This article is intended as a systematic review of the literature that discusses the relation between conversion-related words in English. We show that a wide range of proposals have been made to describe the relation: homonymy, heterosemy, homomorphy, zero-derivation (as a relation), polysemy, lexical extension, synsemy, hyponymy and paronymy. We review the extent to which each of these terms fits the relationship in major types of conversion, and argue that, if a relationship is to be described between conversion-related pairs, then Cruse's (1986) separation of semantic relations of a paradigmatic type from paronymic relations is of special relevance here. We propose that, regardless of the direction and type of meaning, paronymy applies across the various specific semantic patterns that conversion may involve. We emphasize, however, the possibility of several relations according to the type of conversion, i.e. different types of conversion may need description in terms of a different relation.

English tenses in indirect reported speech appear to behave in unusual ways. In John said that he was happy, the most likely interpretation is that John's being happy was simultaneous with the time of John's speaking. This has led many analysts to invoke a ‘Sequence of Tenses’ rule, while others have proposed that English has two formally identical but semantically distinct past tenses, treating was in the preferred interpretation as a ‘relative past’. Under either treatment, a simple semantics for English tenses cannot be maintained.

This paper argues that time reference in reported speech can only be analysed within a coherent theory of speech reporting. We propose a new way of distinguishing direct and indirect reported speech, based on the notion of Pragmatic Source. Within this framework we then argue that tense in indirect reported speech can be handled by pragmatic principles, without any enrichment of the semantics of tense.

Previous analyses of tense in reported speech by Comrie and Declerck are examined and rejected. Unlike other accounts of reported speech, our approach does not presuppose an ‘original utterance’.

This contribution provides a corpus-based investigation of the history of adjectival resultative constructions (RCs), e.g. He wiped the table clean, with special reference to Old English and Middle English. The article first briefly discusses some of the parameters relevant to a synchronic analysis of RCs, namely causativity, causality and force-dynamics, as well as the distinction between adjectival and adverbial RCs (collectively referred to as ARCs since the two types cannot always be differentiated diachronically). The article then shows that the diachronic data point to an expansion of the ARC from very specific instantiations, involving a limited set of verbs and adjectives/adverbs (i.e. the washing and cutting scenarios), to progressively more general types (which, however, set up a coherent network of analogical extensions). It is observed that this evolutionary path correlates with the metaphorical interpretation of actions as forces and the emergence of ‘proper’ causative examples, i.e. examples where the verb only symbolises the causing subevent in the causal chain evoked by the RC. Further, it is argued that this investigation highlights the importance of the usage-based model in linguistic analysis.

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

The history of the genitive case from Old English onwards, specifically the diversity of genitival functions in Old English, and the subsequent development of the case as determiner marker as claimed in Rosenbach (2002), can be explained coherently by assuming NP status for genitive nominals and nondistinct categorial status of the determiner class in OE. This article argues that OE, as an inflected language, encodes events in terms of roles carried by participants, and that the genitive case signalled partial or nonparticipation of a designated thing. This enabled a genitive nominal to be subordinated to another NP, which gives a coherent gestalt of the two things, and also to function as a full NP elsewhere. At the same time, the loose categorial status of determiners made it possible for a genitive nominal in prenominal position to function as a determiner. After the OE period, the determiner category became more distinct from others, and a genitive nominal, being a member of this category, ceased to be able to function as NP.

Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016) define probabilistic indigenization as the process whereby probabilistic constraints shape variation patterns in different ways, which eventually leads to more heterogeneity in the constraints governing syntactic variation across different varieties of English. The present study extends our knowledge of the heterogeneity of probabilistic grammars by sketching a corpus-based variationist method for calculating the similarity between varieties thereby drawing inspiration from the comparative sociolinguistics literature. Based on linguistic material from the International Corpus of English, we ascertain the degree of regional variability of five probabilistic constraints on the genitive, dative, particle placement and subject pronoun omission alternations across three varieties of English, namely British, Indian and Singapore English. Our results indicate that, of the four alternations under study, the genitive alternation is the most homogeneous one from a regional perspective, followed – in increasing order of heterogeneity – by subject pronoun omission, dative and particle placement alternations. On the basis of these findings, we evaluate claims in the literature according to which the extent of probabilistic indigenization is proportional to the lexical specificity of the syntactic phenomenon under study, a hypothesis that is borne out by our data.

Renaat Declerck and Susan Reed, Conditionals: a comprehensive empirical analysis. Topics in English Linguistics 37. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. xviii + 565. Hardback €98.00/sFr169/$108, ISBN 3 11 017144 9.

This article investigates patterns of variation in the phonetic shape of High Rising Terminal (HRT) intonation contours on declarative utterances in London English. Previous research has demonstrated that there are two pragmatically distinct meanings for HRTs in London, distributed across different groups of users and conversational contexts. Based on current theories of intonational meaning, we would expect this pragmatic differentiation to correlate with differences in tune shape, given the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a contour’s meaning and its phonological form. Following the example of prior studies of HRTs in other locations, analyses focus on three phonetic properties: rise excursion size, rise dynamism, and the alignment of the rise onset with the nuclear syllable. Unlike much previous research elsewhere, mixed-model regression analyses demonstrate that pragmatic differences in how HRTs are used in London do not correlate with differences in the phonetic characteristics under investigation. The discussion focuses on how to reconcile this result with theories of intonational meaning, arguing that the findings for London may be due to the relatively recent arrival of HRTs in the variety, and, as a result, the lack of a differentiated field of form–meaning correspondences for the contour in the region.

Tags are widely acknowledged as being an important feature of colloquial British English. In this article, I examine a type of tag that has to date received little attention in the literature beyond sociolinguistic research into its interpersonal functions: right-dislocated lone pronouns, or ProTags. Biber et al. (1999) acknowledge that the demonstrative pronoun that can be used as a right-dislocated tag in conversational British English, but corpus data reveal that other pronouns can also be used as ProTags.

Based on a range of examples, primarily taken from large-scale corpora, I examine the form of the ProTag construction and its functions, comparing it with other tags used in British English, particularly question tags. In common with other tags, ProTags are a classic case of language conveying more than straightforward propositional content. I consider to what extent proposed analyses of the functions of tag questions carry over to ProTags, and briefly whether this construction has been a feature of British English for longer than might at first be assumed.

This article examines the history of a construction type which has been almost completely disregarded in the extensive literature on complementation, namely declarative complement clauses introduced by if and though. Contrary to the standard view, which favours an adverbial analysis for these clauses, it is shown here that there are convincing arguments for considering certain if- and though-clauses as complements, though it is also admitted that their behaviour differs in some respects from standard cases of declarative complementation. The article also reveals the existence of a number of factors favouring the selection of the minor complementizers if and though over the major complement-clause links that and zero in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Evidence has primarily been drawn from the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

This issue of English Language and Linguistics contains a selection of papers from the fourth conference on Late Modern English, held at the University of Sheffield in May 2010. Twenty-one years previously, when Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), such a conference, let alone the fourth in a series of such conferences, would have seemed highly unlikely. Jones was alluding to the comparative neglect of the more recent past in historical studies of English. Up to this point, linguistic scholars had tended to regard the Late Modern period as unworthy of their attention. Morton W. Bloomfield & Leonard Newmark reflect this view in their assertion that ‘after the period of the Great Vowel Shift was over, the changes that were to take place in English phonology were few indeed’ (1963: 293). They also argue that any changes in the language that had occurred between the eighteenth and the mid twentieth centuries were ‘due to matters of style and rhetoric . . . rather than to differences in phonology, grammar or vocabulary’, going on to claim that ‘historical or diachronic linguistics, as such, is traditionally less concerned with such stylistic and rhetorical changes of fashion than with phonological, grammatical and lexical changes’ (1963: 288). This tendency to disregard anything not viewed as structural is very much of its time, but almost thirty years later, Dennis Freeborn was still claiming that ‘the linguistic changes that have taken place from the eighteenth century to the present day are relatively few’ (1992: 180).

This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

This article examines the syntax and semantics of please. Using a mainstream generative syntactic framework, I propose that syntactically integrated please is a discourse marker that marks the clause in which it occurs as a request. Please may appear clause-initially or clause-medially as determined by a number of factors, including clause type, modality, negation and the application of ellipsis. There is also a homophonous marker please that occurs in clause-final position; clause-final please does not mark requests per se but ‘bonds’ a speaker and addressee, reinforcing their relationship as requester and requestee. This analysis of please provides support for syntactic approaches to speech act structure, particularly the claim that illocutionary force is part of narrow syntax rather than a solely pragmatic phenomenon. The article provides support for pursuing a model of the syntax–discourse interface in which interactions between discourse markers and clause-internal functional elements, such as mood and modality, form the interface between syntax and discourse.

This article investigates the status of the foot–strut split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands area is a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties with a phoneme inventory of five short vowels, where foot and strut are represented by the same phoneme, and southern English varieties which have the foot–strut split and therefore six short vowels. However, a lack of research on the distribution of the foot and strut vowels in the East Midlands exists and to fill that gap, this article examines the possible diffusion of the split northwards as predicted by Trudgill (1986). Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex and location is used to provide an apparent time, multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Surprisingly, the changes that we notice do not concern the increasing distance between foot and strut but mainly foot-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and strut-retraction in Derbyshire which leads to an increase in overlap between foot and strut in all three counties.

This article investigates some functions of the determinative sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. It traces, quantifies and models the diachronic development of sum(e) as a pre-head element from a usage-based, cognitive Construction Grammar perspective by postulating several semi-specified but also abstract constructional OE and ME NP-schemas and sketching the observable (changing) network (re)configurations. By analyzing texts from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME) and the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), the article especially focuses on the demise of the so-called ‘individualizing’ usage with singular nouns and traces the incipient stages of sum(e) as an indefinite near-article with plural and mass nouns. R was used to calculate correlation coefficients and measures of statistical significance in univariate analyses, and for multivariate regression models to address questions involving more than one predictor variable. It is shown that the usage of sum(e) with singular nouns became marginalized because of constructional competition with the numeral ān. In Old English, the two forms were both occasionally used to mark indefiniteness before singular nouns, but ultimately ān became the default marker of indefiniteness ousting sum(e). We also show that that the usage of sum(e) as an indefiniteness marker for plural nouns increased drastically from the later ME period onwards, particularly in informal text genres. Moreover, from the earliest periods onwards, there is a strong preference for this function to occur with complex NPs with pre- and post-head modification, which seem to have acted as bridging contexts.