Much of the research that has been carried out into the functions of actually and – to a lesser extent – really has focused on their so-called ‘discourse functions’. However, when they appear medially both actually and really are usually classified as intensifiers, and it has been argued that they are often interchangeable (see for example Lenk 1998; Oh 2000; Taglicht 2001). The purpose of this article is to test current thinking on this question by casting further light on the way medial actually and really are used in spoken discourse. Two complementary approaches are taken. Firstly, the interchangeability hypothesis is assessed on the basis of quantitative analyses of data from the British National Corpus. Secondly, the question of the extent to which actually and/or really function as intensifiers in preverbal position is addressed via a detailed qualitative analysis of data from a small corpus of recent BBC radio broadcasts of the panel-based political discussion programme Any Questions. The analyses presented here suggest that the interchangeability hypothesis is untenable and that the two adverbs have different core meanings, with any intensifying function being largely the result of interplay between the distinct semantic properties of each adverb and the discourse context.

This article explores the diachronic development of mirative end up in American English, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and which seems to be, at present, in the process of becoming a parenthetical element. The rise of the various mirative end up constructions is argued to be the result of both pragmatic enrichment and paradigmatic analogy, motivated by a series of semantically and formally related expressions, most prominently by mirative turn out. Moreover, the article delves into the process of cooptation to explain the emergence of parenthetical instances in the present-day language. Cooptation is understood as an intrinsically analogical-driven mechanism when it entails the eventual grammaticalization of formulaic parenthetical constructions. Data for the present study were taken from a variety of diachronic and synchronic sources, which include COHA, COCA and NOW, among others.

This article explores an instance of dialect levelling in South East England, the reversal of Cockney diphthong shift. We trace this reversal through an apparent-time analysis of 52 speakers from Debden, a community in Essex with East London heritage. Dynamic vowel analyses of word-list and passage data suggests a reversal of the diphthong shift towards SSBE targets which has occurred most abruptly in those born after 1992 potentially as a result of increased social mobility in this generation. We compare the results in Debden to previous findings in the south-eastern towns of Milton Keynes and Reading where apparent-time change was also observed away from a shifted vowel system and towards SSBE targets (Kerswill & Williams 2000, 2005). In diverse areas of South East England, a common process of levelling towards the pan-regional standard is present which is not occurring exclusively as a result of dialect contact or face-to-face interaction. Nonetheless, each community exhibits a distinct trajectory and timing of language change which can be attributed to different patterns of movement and resettlement and, in particular, access to social mobility and the retention of community networks.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the indexical fields of two variables, one phonological (rhoticity) and one morphosyntactic (past tense be), in oral history interviews with speakers from Oldham (Greater Manchester, UK), born between 1907 and 1929. In a quantitative analysis of the variation, we account for a range of linguistic constraints, and find some evidence suggesting that rhoticity does not tend to cooccur with nonstandard past tense be. To investigate this further, we employ a modified version of the Lectal Focusing in Interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015; Sharma 2018), allowing us to track the speakers’ variation in interaction. Using this method, we explore the indexical fields of the variables, which we suggest are potentially in conflict, perhaps explaining the observed pattern of non-cooccurrence. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the status of rhoticity and past tense be in relation to prescribed standard English, as well as shifting and stable variables, influences their indexical potential in interaction.

This article takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verb carry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especially bear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example of carry sheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for native bear as default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.

The perfect in World Englishes has attracted much attention recently, especially from a semasiological perspective, in which the analytic have + participle is analysed in comparison with the synthetic preterite. This article intends to achieve a more holistic picture of the expression of perfect meaning in World Englishes, which allows us to identify how perfect meaning is expressed in all pragmatic contexts. In this study, all the occurrences of ten high-frequency verbs are examined in order to single out those expressing perfect meaning. The corpus (8.8m words in total) includes ten components of the International Corpus of English: eight Outer Circle varieties from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and two reference varieties: British and American English. The relevant examples are tabulated across variables such as presence of adverbials, type of perfect meaning, lexical verb, mode, text type and evolutionary stage. The results show that the envelope of variation is much wider than the one traditionally acknowledged in current grammars of English, and that type of meaning, lexical verb or text type are crucial determiners in the choice of particular forms to express perfect meaning. By contrast, mode or evolutionary stage does not seem to have a bearing on the differences between varieties.

The article deals with two of the long-standing problems in English linguistics: whether it is possible that each noun can have both count and mass senses, and the problem of determining a complete list of the regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. While there have been numerous attempts to solve each of these problems, this article shows the results of applying Cognitive Grammar to them.

The analysis covers a set of concrete nouns representative of English – sixty nouns with different ontological properties and all frequencies of occurrence. These are nouns that are classified by dictionaries as solely count and solely mass. Because of its usage-based character, the analysis scrutinises over 1,700 real-life utterances produced by native speakers of English. The analysis shows that even such nouns possess senses whose properties are the reverse of the properties of the nouns’ basic senses. A thorough examination of the nouns’ basic and extended senses leads to certain grammatical regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. The analysis not only systematises the grammatical regularities determined so far and solves many problems that can be noticed about them, but also proposes novel regularities.

The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.

This article analyses adjectival modification in elliptical NPs based on a corpus analysis. It illustrates the fact that descriptive adjectives can be used without nominal heads in English. Whereas in spoken language adjectives denoting more inherent properties feature prominently when the referents are present in the text-external world, no particular types of adjectives appear in written language. In terms of the latter, two major types of linguistic contexts are identified which do not require the use of a nominal head. It is argued that a conception of ‘contrast’ as a ‘non-identity’ condition cannot account for the variation between one-replacement and noun ellipsis since it holds for both phenomena. Similarly, partitivity is argued not to be a relevant requirement for the use of adjectives without nouns.

This special volume is concerned with the syntax of nonstandard varieties of (mainly British) English, and how such syntactic variation is accounted for within a range of theoretical models. There has been a growing interest in the modelling of dialect syntax (a) in a number of languages and (b) in a number of syntactic theories (see, for instance, the research on syntactic microvariation in some Germanic languages in Barbiers, Cornips & van der Kelij, 2002, or the construction-based approach to variation in Leino & Östman, 2005). We have brought together five articles written in different theoretical frameworks (Principles and Parameters, Stochastic Optimality Theory, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Word Grammar, and Construction Grammar), together with an introduction written by the editors, who themselves adopt very different theoretical frameworks.

The main aim of this article is to provide an explanation accounting for the production of English derived nouns in -ee. In line with Barker (1998), I will argue that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the verbal base are unsatisfactory, and that the conditions for this derivational process must be searched for within semantics. My intention is to explore the semantic factors that might be taken to be pre-eminent in the different sets of verbs taking the suffix using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. It will be shown that a semantic analysis based on a theory of lexical representation like RRG is relevant to account for the formation of derived nouns in -ee in English.I gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Robert Van Valin, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two anonymous readers of a previous version of this paper.

We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in gold, false or bind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body of OED and corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphotactic models is indeed likely to have played a role in establishing VVCC rhymes in the English lexicon, since VVCC rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/d|z/ began to establish themselves in lexical phonotactics at the same period in which they also started to be produced in inflection, and clearly before similar types that had no inflectionally produced analogues (i.e. VV[sonorant]/t|s/ as in fault, dance). At the same time, we show that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis that homophonies between lexical and morphotactic rhymes are dispreferred. We argue that under the specific historical circumstances that obtained in English, natural ways of eliminating the resulting ambiguities failed to be available. Finally, we show that, once the phonotactically and semiotically dispreferred VV[sonorant]/d|z/ rhymes had been established, the emergence of morphotactically unambiguous rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/t|s/ was to be expected, since they filled what was an accidental rather than natural gap in the phonotactic system of English (see Hayes & White 2013).

This article investigates the history of what Wells (1982), in his account of present-day accents of English, calls ‘hyper-rhoticity’. That is, the appearance, in rhotic accents, of epenthetic, unetymological rhyme-/r/, usually taking the form of /r/-colouring in modern accents. It is attested most commonly in final unstressed syllables, but may also occur in syllable rhymes after a long, stressed vowel. The article traces the history of this phenomenon and attempts to show that Early Modern English data which have hitherto been interpreted as evidence for loss of /r/ in such contexts are better attributed to hyper-rhoticity. It is also argued here, in an addendum, that not to accept claims for early /r/-loss in unstressed syllables has wider implications for the history of English phonology. That is, to reject theories of loss of /r/ in final unstressed syllables demands rejection of the notion of early articulatory weakening of /r/ in this context, which has been seen as a prelude to the spread of weakening to other contexts, leading ultimately to loss of rhoticity.

Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.

The distribution of the Saxon genitive and the of genitive in computer manuals is significantly different from their distribution in other texts. This is because the manuals contain a high proportion of computer nouns (nouns referring to computer hardware and software), which pattern like human nouns rather than like inanimate nouns. An analysis of the conventional metaphors used to talk about computers reveals that they are often construed as people, and the higher proportion of the Saxon genitive is a grammatical repercussion of this construal.

This paper tries to reveal the constraints on the use of the present perfect progressive (PPP) in combination with numerical object NPs. Existing accounts tend to take situation type classes as a basis for the description of the PPP. It is shown that such an approach does not yield adequate results. (Un)boundedness (Declerck, 1991; Depraetere, 1995) plays an equally important role as (a)telicity in determining whether the progressive can be used or not. (Un)boundedness, as opposed to (a)telicity, is concerned with actual terminal points (of situations referred to) rather than potential (inherent) endpoints. It will be shown in this paper that, in some cases, the conflict between the unboundedness inherent in the progressive form and the boundedness often brought about by numerical object NPs that are used in nonstative sentences results in unacceptability. Considerable attention is first paid to the constraints on the use of the past progressive with numerical object NPs. The second part of the paper focuses on the PPP: apart from (un)boundedness and (a)telicity, the type of perfect and our knowledge of the world also play their part in determining whether or not the PPP is acceptable in sentences with a numerical object NP.

Building on previous studies that have discussed pronominal referencing in Old English (Traugott 1992; van Gelderen 2013; van Kemenade & Los 2017), the present study analyses the pronominal anaphoric strategies of the West Saxon dialect of Old English based on a quantitative and qualitative study of personal and demonstrative pronoun usage across a selection of late (post c. AD 900) Old English prose text types. The historical data discussed in the present study provide important additional support for modern cognitive and psycholinguistic theory. In line with the cognitive/psycholinguistic literature on the distribution of pronouns in Modern German (Bosch & Umbach 2007), the information-structural properties of referents rather than the grammatical role of the pronoun's antecedent most accurately explain the personal pronoun vs demonstrative pronoun contrast in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The findings also highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English.