Using a corpus linguistic approach, this article aims to answer the question of which factors contribute to a better chance of survival for words in the early Middle English lexicon. Because of the cognitive benefits of rhyme that have been shown in modern studies, there is a particular interest in rhyming position as a potential factor; other factors include frequency, suffix and geographical spread. The data are analysed using survival analysis, random forests and conditional inference trees in R. The results show that geographical spread is the most important factor, usually in combination with particular suffixes. Rhyme is not generally a significant factor in the same vein, and its importance seems to be restricted to individual cases.

Only three English diatones, outlaw, rebel, record, out of the current 235-item list in Hotta (2015), are on record prior to the seventeenth century; the latest record of diatonic outlaw is 1786 (Sherman 1975: 63). Whether this type of functional prosodic contrast was inherited or innovative is controversial. We revisit the Old English metrical evidence for functional stress-shifting and present new attestations of verb–noun pairs in Middle English verse in an effort to establish if the limited inherited stress-shifting model survives, and, if so, whether or how it accommodates the incoming loan vocabulary. The additional verse attestations support the idea of continuity, yet the scarcity of data falls short of statistical verifiability. A search into detailed lexicographical information for 1200–1550 reinforces the hypothesis of continuity by documenting the differential patterns of borrowing of nouns and verbs, prefixed and unprefixed. Taken together, these two sources endorse a proposal that in its earliest stages functional stress-shifting was predicated on prefixation, and that the ongoing conflict between prefixal defooting and Align-L (Root, PrWd) in ME is a necessary component of the diachronic account of English prosody.

Plainly, the effort to apply to historical language study the insights to be derived from synchronic linguistic analysis is fraught with difficulties. The problem is usually conceptualized – as it is by several of the contributors to the present collection of studies – as a difficult marriage of disciplined methods to obstreperous data, a mismatched union somehow to be mediated by the Uniformitarian Principle. To understand the issues properly, then, it would seem a prerequisite to be able to identify what, exactly, the Uniformitarian Principle is. Yet that question itself has no simple answer, in part because the question can be interpreted in at least two ways, both of them bearing directly upon the aims of this collection.

Some of the linguistic changes which are crucial in the history of English and have traditionally been ascribed to Middle English can already be observed in late Northumbrian. One of these changes is the extension of genitive singular -es from the a-stems to other noun classes. Another is the spread of nominative/accusative plural -as from the masculine a-stems to the neuters and to other declensions. The aim of this article is to establish the actual scale on which these two interparadigmatic analogical changes are found in the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels and to the Durham Collectar, both dating from the tenth century.

The present study intends to shed more light on the process of morphological restructuring affecting the declensional system of late Northumbrian, and has three main aims: (a) to determine the pattern of dissemination of the innovative inflectional endings; (b) to establish which variables are significant in these analogical processes: declension, type and token frequency, grammatical context, Latin lemma, demarcation; and (c) to account for the different developmental tendencies of these two linguistic changes.

This squib challenges Patterson & Caponigro's (2015, this journal) claim that there are few acceptable free relative clauses with who. We show that free relatives with who are generally acceptable when they are ‘transparent’ free relatives or complements of a copula, and add further nuance to their findings concerning how the degree of acceptability of free relatives with who varies according to positional factors.

In this article various constructions of English with the form A + N are considered, with particular reference to stress patterns. It is shown that there are several such patterns, and that stress patterns do not correlate with fixed effects. It is also argued that a simple division between compound and phrase does not seem to provide a motivation for the patterns found. The patterns seem to be determined partly by factors which are known to influence stress patterns in N + N constructions, and partly by lexical class, though variability in which expression belongs to which class is acknowledged. It is concluded that this is an area of English grammar that needs further research.

Research in our time offers a welcome flood tide of investigation into how cognitively modern human beings use their basic mental operations to think and act. With luck, it will not ebb. It could become standard, in the way that calculus, once it arose, abided. This tide offers special emphasis, crucial for this issue, on the cognitive origins and operations of language and literature, and in particular on the ways in which systems of multimodal forms can be deployed to prompt for mental operation.

It is with great sadness that we inform our readers of the death of Richard Hogg at the age of just sixty-three. He had been one of the three founding editors of English Language and Linguistics and was set to continue in the role until his retirement in 2009. His death has come as a great shock. We wish to share with readers of ELL at this earliest opportunity our appreciation of, and affection for, our fellow-editor, colleague and friend.

This squib attempts to bring more precision to the understanding of object omission in English by investigating the referential behavior of omitted objects. Allerton (1975) and Fillmore (1986) understand omitted objects as being indefinite, by which they mean that omitted objects are unknown and insulated from their potential referents available in the context. However, this squib presents data that challenge this understanding of indefiniteness, and proposes that the indefiniteness of omitted objects may be more precisely understood as their indeterminacy over their potential referents.

This article proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis of the prefix post- in contemporary English by looking into the possible motivations of the semantic changes which have led to the increasing applicability of the prefix. The prefix's productivity in combinations such as post-truth and post-fact calls for expanding its original definition. These recent combinations go beyond the main two established meanings of the prefix, namely the spatial and the temporal meaning. In order to explain this semantic extension a radial model of categorisation is proposed. Offering an analysis of contexts in which the prefix post- is used in British and American press coverage, especially in relation to the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential campaign, the article claims that the appearance of the prefix in new combinations is motivated by the need to describe the changing reality (especially in political and media discourse).

Kuhn (1933) proposed that the evolution of Germanic syntax began with a need to restore acceptable sentence rhythm after a shift to fixed initial stress. Kuhn found support for his hypothesis in ‘laws’ for word placement that applied in alliterative poetry but not in prose. Kuhn assumed that his laws were syntactic rules of Proto-Germanic maintained by conservative poets. Here I argue that Kuhn's Laws were rules of poetic meter that obscured basic word order. Adopting the universalist approach in Russom (2017), I integrate Kuhn's Laws with the metrical constraints observed by Sievers (1893) and explore the interaction between meter and syntax. When there are no adverse metrical consequences, subject-object-verb order is employed with remarkable consistency in Beowulf, our most valuable source of poetic evidence. My analysis receives independent support from Smith (1971), a study of the earliest Germanic texts that focuses primarily on prose.

This article investigates continuities and changes in abbreviation practices from late Middle English to twenty-first-century digital platforms. Adopting a diachronic perspective and lexicological framework, it quantitatively analyses frequency patterns across fifteenth-century memoranda, letters and administrative receipts, seventeenth-century letters and depositions, late nineteenth-century letters, early twentieth-century letters and a subcorpus of WhatsApp instant messages dating from 2018–19. It then presents analyses of the frequencies of various abbreviation forms, such as clippings, and abbreviated lexemes, such as their use for names, over time. The article then provides a qualitative analysis of these lexeme categories over the centuries, with a focus on specific examples. Major changes to overall abbreviation density across time are identified. The forms of abbreviation also go through major change, but the types of lexemes that are abbreviated stay more consistent over time. For example, abbreviations being used for closed-class function words such as the and that are dominant from the earliest data we have looked at to the present day. Overall, the study demonstrates how situating new media abbreviation practices within a historical continuum can enhance our understanding of them.

Phrasal verbs (e.g. fade away, give up) tend to be associated with spoken, colloquial registers, not only in Present-day English, but also in previous stages of the language. This view has recently been challenged by Thim's (2006a, 2012) ‘colloquialization conspiracy’, according to which the idea that phrasal verbs are colloquial is based on a misconception which first arose in the eighteenth century. In the current study we seek to verify Thim's claim by exploring phrasal verbs in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a 1.2-million-word corpus of Early Modern English (EModE) speech-related text types. Based on a sample of over 7,000 examples, we demonstrate that the linguistic features, distribution and high productivity of phrasal verbs in the EModE period point towards a full entrenchment of these combinations in the spoken language, which leads us to the conclusion that the colloquial status of phrasal verbs in EModE is not merely a matter of a ‘colloquialization conspiracy’.