This study investigates reduction of 1SG possessives in possessive–noun constructions in Lancashire dialect. On the basis of a corpus of twenty-six interviews we show that reduction patterns according to (in)alienability. This dialectal evidence runs counter to the normal assumption about English, i.e. that there is no such effect. Following work by Haspelmath (2006b) that reinterprets iconicity effects in terms of frequency, we proceed to show that frequency may indeed underlie alienability/iconicity in our data as well. Relative frequency seems more useful in capturing the correlation with reduction than absolute frequency. For a few [1SGPOSS-N] combinations the reduction facts are problematic for the frequency-based account we offer. These difficulties might seem to disappear in the light of the construction grammar notion of schemas, but we point out that this notion itself has serious theoretical problems associated with it. Future theory-driven work on dialect grammar may help resolve these issues.

This article is concerned with peripheral modifiers in the English noun phrase. It is argued that this kind of modification is an Early Modern English innovation. Later, in the nineteenth century, the slot underwent a rapid extension on both the type and the token levels, as is shown by historical corpus inquiry. To account for the diachronic processes involved, a constructional, usage-based approach is used, with an onomasiological rather than a semasiological perspective on grammaticalisation.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the syntactic, pragmatic and semantic determinants of word-order variation in Modern English, exemplified by the specific case of the use of long passives as order-rearranging devices. Word order in English and in most other SVO languages is affected by a number of factors such as animacy, semantic role, discourse status and syntactic complexity (Sornicola 2006). In this article, which analyses the influence of such factors in the use of long passives, I will try to show that their effects are construction-specific; in particular, that factors which are crucial in determining word order in some constructions – factors such as the animacy of the constituents involved – are entirely overruled by others in the case of Modern English long passives. Corpus data presented here will also serve to address issues pertaining to the nature of the determinants of grammatical variation, such as their independent versus epiphenomenal character, their interactions, and the locus of their effects on word order.

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

Unless-constructions have often been compared with conditionals. It was noted that unless can in most cases be paraphrased with if not, but that its meaning resembles that of except if (Geis, 1973; von Fintel, 1991). Initially, it was also assumed that, unlike if-conditionals, unless-sentences with counterfactual (or irrealis) meanings are not acceptable. In recent studies by Declerck and Reed (2000, 2001), however, the acceptability of such sentences was demonstrated and a new analysis was proposed.

The present article argues for an account of irrealis unless-sentences in terms of epistemic distance and mental space embeddings. First, the use of verb forms in irrealis sentences is described as an instance of the use of distanced forms, which are widely used in English to mark hypotheticality. In the second part, the theory of mental spaces is introduced and applied to show how different mental space set-ups (in conjunction with distanced forms) account for the construction of different hypothetical meanings. The so-called irrealis unless-sentences are then interpreted as a number of instances of mental space embeddings. Finally, it is shown how the account proposed explains the fact that some unless-constructions can be paraphrased only with if not while others only with except if.

The article addresses two recent hypotheses regarding the history of the English fricatives /f/–/v/, /s/–/z/, /θ/–/ð/: the hypothesis that phonemicization of the voicing contrast occurred in Old English, and the related claim that the reanalysis of the contrast was due to Celtic substratum influence. A re-examination of the arguments for early phonemicization leads to alternative interpretations of the observed voicing ‘irregularities’ in Old English. The empirical core of the article presents the patterns of alliteration in Old and Middle English; this kind of evidence has not been previously considered in evaluating the progress of the change. The analytical core of the article is dedicated to the dynamics of categorization based on edge vs domain-internal contrasts, the relative strength of the voicing environments, and the distinction among fricatives depending on place of articulation. A comprehensive LAEME and MED database of all relevant forms reaffirms the traditional position regarding French influence for the phonemicization of voicing for the labial fricatives. The categorization of the contrast for the interdental fricatives is a language-internal prosodic process, and the history of the sibilants requires reference to both external and internal factors. The shift from a predominantly complementary to a predominantly contrastive distribution of the voiced–voiceless fricative pairs has been occurring at different rates for a whole millennium. The claim that phonemicization is attributable to Celtic influence in Old English is empirically and theoretically unsubstantiated.

This article connects the quantitative study of grammaticography with a more traditional corpus-linguistic investigation of the progressive passive. Based on a careful analysis of over 250 grammars of English published during the nineteenth century in Britain and the US, I will try to answer the question whether prescriptivism has had any influence on purported differences between British and American English in the rise of the progressive passive. This article will argue that text-type sensitivity is the overriding factor determining the occurrence of the progressive passive in the nineteenth century, rather than national differences between British and American English. Prescriptive comments during the nineteenth century did not influence developments in American English significantly. However, during the 1950s modern-style prescriptivism can be shown to have massive effects on American newspaper language. Combining quantitative historical grammaticography and corpus-linguistic studies can thus extend our insights into the factors that influence language change.

This article argues that the data on English evidential markers indicate that evidentiality is not a grammatical category which is only applicable to some languages, but can be considered a universal semantic function that tends to trigger the grammaticalization of lexical forms. This study investigates five criteria that can help us locate linguistic forms on the lexicon–grammar continuum: reduction, desemanticization, backgrounding, decategorialization and paradigmatization. Although it has not reached the full maturity of so-called ‘evidential languages’, English provides evidence of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Evidentiality is thus a relevant notion for English which substantially impacts the organization of the lexicon of the language, and the evolution of its grammar.

This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one low-frequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data come from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are, however, clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable, and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.

In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with pied-piped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.

This article contributes to our knowledge about the prosodic realisation of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information-seeking questions (ISQs). It reports on a production experiment testing the prosody of English wh- and polar RQs and ISQs in a Canadian variety. In previous literature, the contribution of prosody to the distinction between the two illocution types has often been limited to the intonational realisation of the terminus of the utterance, i.e. whether it ends in a rise or a fall. Along with edge tones, we tested other phonological and phonetic parameters. Our results are as follows: (i) The intonational terminus was distinctive only for polar questions (rise vs plateau), not for wh-questions (low throughout). (ii) Moreover, the semantic difference between RQs and ISQs is signalled by pitch accents. It is reflected in nuclear pitch accent type for wh-questions, and accent type and position for polar questions. (iii) Phonetically, RQs are produced with longer constituent durations and – for wh-questions – a softer voice quality in the wh-word. Taken together, several intonational categories and phonetic parameters contribute to the distinction between RQs and ISQs. A simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is in any case insufficient.

The clear-cut distinction between free adjuncts and absolutes based on the presence in absolutes of an overt subject different from the subject of the matrix clause, as opposed to the covert subject – controlled by the subject of the matrix clause – of free adjuncts, does not always hold. While it is generally agreed that unrelated free adjuncts are fairly frequent in Present-day English (PE), absolutes whose subject is identical to that of the matrix clause are regarded as obsolete (Jespersen, 1909–49; Kortmann, 1991; Söderlind, 1958; Visser, 1963–73). However, no statistical evidence has been provided on this topic for earlier stages of the history of English. This article quantitatively assesses whether the various degrees of relatedness observed in Early Modern English (EModE) coincide with those attested for PE, and concludes that the boundaries between free adjuncts and absolutes were considerably fuzzier in EModE, a phenomenon to which punctuation decisively contributed.

The frication of the voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ in word-final intervocalic position in Dublin and Middlesbrough English is examined in controlled data, and the acoustic characteristics of fricated realisations of /t/ are compared with other fricatives. The findings are that /t/ is not the only plosive to be fricated in the data sample, but does appear to differ from other plosives in terms of the regularity of frication and its nongradient character for some subjects. The realisation of fricated /t/ at both localities differs from that of other fricatives, and is probably perceptually distinct from other fricative contrasts at each locality, but is not identical across the two localities. On the basis of data presented here, it appears unlikely that fricated /t/ in Middlesbrough English is a direct transfer effect from the language of Irish immigrants to Middlesbrough.

The range of structures commonly classed as close appositives forms a rich ecological niche where each construction relates to the other constructions forming a dense network of taxonomic and inheritance ties (Goldberg 1995). As a first approximation to the concept of close apposition, however, the structure of that network falls outside the scope of this article, where I focus on the theoretical notion of close apposition itself, on how it deviates from that of loose apposition (Acuña-Fariña 2006), and on an analysis of a quintessentially close appositive construction, the the poet Burns type in the literature (Curme 1947; Lee 1952; Fries 1952; Haugen 1953; Hockett 1955, 1958). The thesis that these strings are formed by a doubly endocentric structure where the putative first segment (the poet) is a grounded nominal (i.e. an active referent; e.g. Langacker 1991; Taylor 2002) is rejected. Instead, it is argued that these highly conventionalized close appositions are instances of ‘inchoate’ noun phrase structure, and that the internal constituency of such strings is not fully elaborated due to a lack of strong functional pressure. Three reasons are put forward in order to defend such a view: 1. the construction has as its job the activation of a social referent, and in the social world that we inhabit this is usually done either by name or profession, with no logical incompatibility between the two; 2. the construction is a hybrid of distinct and more productive (and fully elaborated) templates, which act as attractor poles and pull constituency in opposite directions; and 3. the construction is easily identifiable as such ‘from the top’. This makes it unnecessary to have to spend valuable cognitive resources (like creating, storing and deploying inaudible, abstract, constituent structure) when, somewhat metaphorically, one can reach the final destination of that journey (the last stop being meaning) directly, as it were, with no changing of trains (Haiman 1994; Boyland 1996; Hay 2001). The present analysis is framed along lines compatible with various forms of Construction Grammar.

In this article I discuss the persistence of non-standard past tense forms in traditional and modern dialect data in the face of strong prescriptive norms against such non-standard forms. Past tense forms like she drunk or they sung are still encountered frequently, although prescriptive grammars have militated against such usage for over a century, as a detailed investigation of nineteenth-century grammar books can show. I will argue that an increasing insistence especially by British nineteenth-century grammarians on distinct paradigm forms like drink – drank – drunk is based on a (mistaken) Latin ideal and that it has not carried much weight with the ‘average’ speaker for functional reasons: non-standard forms in <u> can be functionally motivated and are more ‘natural’ past tense forms in the sense of Wurzel (1984).

Assuming that the Uniformitarian Principle refers to processes of production and perception, I argue that it remains invaluable for work on language in the last five thousand years or so, the period of linguistic historical record. In this article I show that some proposals about the development of ‘insubordination’ (Evans 2007), particularly those that link it to degrammaticalization (e.g. Higashiizumi 2006 on because-monoclauses; Brinton 2014 on as if clauses), are artifacts of theory (Kaiser & Struckmeier 2015), and do not conform to processes that can be projected from a Uniformitarian Process Principle that pays attention to interactional practices. I investigate evidence in the history of English for the development of finite independent monoclauses that are introduced by subordinators, for example, Because you don't understand, If we could see that picture again, As if you are not gorgeous. I conclude that, at least in English, such monoclauses are chunks that are used incrementally in on-line interaction, just like independent NPs and prepositional and adverbial phrases (Ford et al. 2002; Couper-Kuhlen 2011; see also Lindström & Londen 2008 on Swedish monoclauses with subordinators; Gras & Sansineña 2015 on Spanish monoclausal que-constructions). In such cases degrammaticalization is not relevant. The Uniformitarian Processes Principle can serve as an important corrective on artifacts of theory.

This article describes and critically examines the challenging task of compiling The London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) from start to end, accounting for the methodological decisions made in each stage and highlighting the innovations. LLC–2 is a half-a-million-word corpus of contemporary spoken British English with recordings from 2014 to 2019. Its size and design are the same as those of the world's first machine-readable spoken corpus, The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English with data from the 1950s to 1980s. In this way, LLC–2 allows not only for synchronic investigations of contemporary speech but also for principled diachronic research of spoken language across time. Each stage of the compilation of LLC–2 posed its own challenges, ranging from the design of the corpus, the recruitment of the speakers, transcription, markup and annotation procedures, to the release of the corpus to the international research community. The decisions and solutions represent state-of-the-art practices of spoken corpus compilation with important innovations that enhance the value of LLC–2 for spoken corpus research, such as the availability of both the transcriptions and the corresponding time-aligned audio files in a standard compliant format.

The variable phenomenon in which /t/ can be realized as a tap or rhotic approximant in varieties of Northern British English (commonly referred to as t-to-r, Wells 1982: 370) has received some attention in English linguistics as debates have appeared over how best to model its phonology (e.g. Carr 1991; Docherty et al. 1997; Broadbent 2008). The occurrence of t-to-r seems to be constrained by the preceding and following phonological environment in a largely systematic way and so it is often accounted for within a rule-based model of grammar. Problematically, however, the rule does not apply blindly across the board to all words which fit the specified phonological pattern. Instead, t-to-r shows evidence of being lexically restricted, and this fact has recently encouraged a usage-based interpretation. Until now, there has been relatively little attempt to test the usage-based thesis directly with fully quantified data gleaned from naturally occurring conversation. This article investigates the extent to which certain usage-based predictions can account for variation attested in t-to-r in Liverpool English. Using oral history interviews with Liverpool English speakers born in the early 1900s, we examine the usage-based predictions first proposed by Broadbent (2008) that t-to-r is more likely in (a) high-frequency words and (b) high-frequency phrases. There is some support for the importance of lexical frequency as a motivating factor in the use of t-to-r, but our data do not fully support either of these claims wholesale. We suggest that t-to-r is not constrained simply by word frequency or phrase frequency alone, but by a combination of both. Finally, we explore the possibility of employing notions from Cognitive Grammar such as schema strength (e.g. Taylor 2002; Bybee 1995: 430) in our interpretation of these data.

This article looks into convergence processes that involve distinct phonological systems in dialect contact situations, exemplified by the variety of English that developed on Tristan da Cunha, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Based on a discussion of the community's social history and an auditory analysis of the segmental phonology of late nineteenth-century Tristan da Cunha English, this article reconstructs the early contact scenario and looks into both phonological convergence and independent innovative mechanisms that accompany new-dialect formation. The data presented here show that dialect contact gives rise to mixing of several inputs (so that ‘new’ dialects draw features from several ancestral varieties), that the interaction of transplanted dialects may also trigger independent, variety-specific mechanisms, and that the interplay of feature retention, input mixing, and local innovation lead to distinctive and (on occasion) endemic varieties of English.

The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (will and be going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time, be going to has been gradually increasing in frequency relative to will over the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towards be going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.