During late Old and Middle English, the distribution of short and long vowels in stressed syllables was profoundly altered. The changes involved have traditionally been understood as conspiring to optimize syllable quantity according to the position of the syllable in the word. However, Minkova's reformulation of so-called Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL) as a purely compensatory process appears difficult to reconcile with the traditional approach, which has recently been further compromised by suggestions that Trisyllabic Shortening was not a genuine historical sound change. In this article, Minkova's analysis is supported with new evidence of phonological conditioning behind the irregular lengthening of unapocopated disyllabic stems (e.g. raven vs heaven, body, gannet). I propose solutions to Riad's ‘data problem’ and ‘analytical problem’. Optimality Theory allows Minkova's revised statement of MEOSL to be integrated into a broader, non-teleological account of late Old and Middle English quantitative developments, including coverage of processes of lexical change such as borrowing and diffusion.

This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of ‘error’ in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective.

In this article, I relate the loss of weorðan in the past tense to the loss of an Old English grammatical subsystem that encouraged the expression of narrative by bounded sentence constructions. This type of construction represents a situation as reaching its goal or endpoint, and serves to mark progress in a narrative (e.g. then he walked over to the other side). Instead of this system, from Middle English onwards a mixed system emerges with differently structured bounded sentence constructions as well as, increasingly, unbounded sentence constructions – which structure events as open-ended, usually by means of a progressive form (e.g. he was walking). I show how weorðan in Old English was strongly associated with the Old English system of bounded sentence constructions – an association with boundedness is not surprising given its meaning of ‘(sudden) transition into another state’. In the thirteenth century this rigid Old English system started to break down, as primarily evidenced by the disappearance of the time adverbial þa and the loss of verb-second. Wearð, being strongly associated with the old way of structuring narrative, decreased too and eventually disappeared.

While the ‘progressive’ construction [BE Ving] (Hewas playing tenniswhen Jane came in) has been studied extensively both diachronically and synchronically, studies of its functional development tend not to extend further back than Early Modern English. This article draws attention to the functional changes [BE Ving] goes through already in Middle English, whose analysis sheds new light on the principles of early grammaticalization. To understand the observed changes, all uses of [BE Ving] are considered, not only those that have a clear verbal and aspectual function. During Middle English, important changes occurred in the frequencies of the various co-texts of [BE Ving]. They involve the increase in backgrounding adverbial clauses, which leads to the semanticization of ongoingness, a feature that was initially only associated with [BE Ving] by pragmatic implicature. The outcome is grammaticalization by co-text: co-textual changes paved the way for the acquisition of progressive semantics in [BE Ving] itself.

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.

So-called anticipatory it has been variously classified as a semantically empty prop it, as a referential pronoun, and as a category with an inherently cataphoric function. This article, which is based on a corpus study of actually occurring instances of anticipatory it, examines some of the arguments put forward for each of these classifications and – following Bolinger (1977) – argues for an analysis as ‘definite nominal’ with some referential force which can establish a referential link with a clausal constituent in the immediate context. As such, anticipatory it takes an intermediate position between prop it and referring it, all of which are linked by a scale of gradience specifying their scope of reference (wide vs. narrow). This view of anticipatory it, which allows for both anaphoric and cataphoric reference, can account for all informational types of it-extraposition as well as it-extraposition with complement omission, and provides a possible explanation for cases of it-omission.

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.

OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long-debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (see van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted more recently to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective (see Bech 2001; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), focusing on the given-before-new hypothesis (Gundel 1988) and its consequences for OV/VO. While the work by Taylor & Pintzuk (2012a) focuses specifically on the newness of VO orders, the present study is particularly concerned with the givenness of OV word order. It is hypothesized that OV orders are the result of leftward movement from VO orders, triggered by givenness. A corpus study on a database of subclauses with two verbs and a direct object, collected from the YCOE (Taylor et al.2003) corpus, and subsequent multinomial regression analysis within a generalized linear mixed model shows that OV word order is reserved for given objects, while VO objects are much more mixed in terms of information structure. We argue that these results are more in line with an analysis which derives all occurring word orders from a VO base than an analysis which proposes the opposite.

Previous work in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics has shown adjectives to take an intermediate position between nouns and verbs. This claim is made more specific in this article through a phonological (and to a lesser extent, morphological) test of the ‘equidistance hypothesis’. On seven criteria, English adjectives are found to exhibit a much greater affinity with nouns than with verbs. This pattern of results is brought about by the syntagmatic context in which the three word classes typically occur. The rhythmic context in which adjectives are embedded is similar to that of nouns but dissimilar to that of verbs. This bias gives rise to suprasegmental differences which in turn lead to segmental differences. The proposed account rests upon the assumption, independently verified, that nouns and verbs differ in length, a disparity that might have a syntactic cause. A tentative case is made for a cross-level harmony constraint according to which the similarity between adjectives and nouns is not particular to the phonological level but characterizes the linguistic system more generally.

In English morphological literature, the term ‘tautological compound’ has been typically used to refer to two distinct – but closely related – phenomena: (1) compounds composed of a hyponym and a superordinate term (such as oak tree); and/or (2) compounds based upon two synonymous units (such as subject matter). Such combinations are one of the quirkiest – and least researched – phenomena of English compounding. Their oddity can be attributed to two main factors. First, as their name, ‘tautological compound’ implies, at face value such combinations can be considered as prime examples of the redundancy of language. Second, they do not follow normal compound-forming rules in the sense that both constituents can function as the semantic head (as opposed to ‘normal’ English compounds, which follow the Right-Hand Head Rule).

Perhaps it is the quirkiness of tautological compounds that accounts for the fact that not much has been said about them in traditional accounts of compounding, which typically relegate them to a marginal area of the English language. However, there is more to tautological compounds than meets the eye. What the present study wishes to demonstrate is that the term ‘tautological compound’ is a misnomer, as such combinations are far from being tautological or redundant in their meaning. Accordingly, the article first clarifies the notion of tautological compound, and then aims to give an account of the various roles that such combinations play in language, thereby demonstrating their non-tautological and non-redundant nature – in order to assign this much-neglected category to its proper, well-deserved place within English word formation.

In this article the authors examine six different analyses of the meaning of unless that have been argued in the literature, and present a new analysis in which a careful distinction is made between the semantic meaning and the pragmatic interpretations of unless. Contrary to the common belief that unless cannot be used in irrealis conditionals, it is shown that unless can actually be used in two different senses there, one in which it alternates with except if, but not if . . . not (e.g. He wouldn't have done it {unless I had / except if I had / *if I hadn't} asked him to, and I didn't) and one in which it alternates with if . . . not but not with except if (e.g. You did do well, but you wouldn't have succeeded {unless I had / if I hadn't / *except if I had} helped you). It is shown, finally, how the various interpretations of unless can be reconciled with a common semantic meaning and how the different constraints on the use of unless, except if and if . . . not can be accounted for.

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the development of the future time expressions will, ’ll, shall, be going to, progressive with future time reference, and be to in the course of the late modern period. The article focuses on possible reasons for the considerable changes that have taken place in the past few centuries. To what degree can the changes be described as certain forms having been (partially) replaced by others? To what degree have general or register-specific changes in discourse affected the use of future time expressions? These questions are investigated on the basis of the British part of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers).

The analysis reveals that it is a complex interaction of both types of processes that is responsible for the recent evolution of future time expressions. Redistribution processes turn out to be highly complex in themselves, going far beyond the frequently described replacement of shall by will and probably proceeding in chains. With respect to discourse change, one result is an unexpected overall decrease in the tendency of writers (and speakers) to refer to their own plans, intentions, etc. Partly responsible for this development is a discourse change in science writing, where the author has increasingly disappeared from the text, so that text structure is much less frequently expressed in terms of the author's intention. A further register-specific discourse change that the investigation brings to light is a development in diaries from an earlier restriction to reporting past events to the expression of more personal views, including hopes and fears for the future.

Definite article reduction (DAR) is a dialectal variable confined to the North of England. In DAR dialects, the standard article alternates with a reduced one, which is mostly realised as a glottal stop and sometimes as a voiceless fricative before vowels. DAR is a salient sociolinguistic marker in the sense of Labov (1972) and Trudgill (1986). This article argues that its salience is derived from its status as a good boundary marker that listeners can utilise in order to segment the speech stream.

Salience is the property of a variable which makes it cognitively or perceptually prominent both for speakers of the dialect and for speakers of other dialects. DAR is a salient marker inasmuch as it shows variation and style shifting, can be an identity marker, and has long been recognised by layperson and linguist alike as a typical feature of Northern speech.

It will be argued that DAR is salient since it is a good word-boundary marker. The reduced article constitutes domains of low transitional probability, which listeners exploit to segment the speech signal. It has been recognised that word segmentation plays a major role in speech processing and that listeners use statistical inferences (besides other kinds of information) to locate word boundaries. The conclusion is that the salience of DAR can be derived from its distributions, as these distributions result in the variable's perceptual prominence.

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such as hapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay & Baayen (2002) – to provide quantitative and qualitative descriptions of changes in the productivity of native -ness and borrowed -ity, -cion, -age and -ment in Early Modern English. Ultimately, the study argues that diachronic productivity is best evaluated with a multifactor analysis, including measures of suffixal decomposability, aggregation of new derivatives and evidence of hybridization. It also suggests that increased use of neologisms with borrowed suffixes in Early Modern English might be explained by the increasing transparency of these suffixes in derivatives during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

This paper seeks to redefine apposition, a term that is often used in the literature with a remarkable lack of precision. Starting from paradigmatic instances of apposition (Romulus, the legendary founder; Santiago, the capital of Galicia), the main resemblances to the paradigm are analysed in an attempt to measure the validity of a general syntactic relation that is often put on a par with co-ordination and dependency. Paradigmatic appositions and other related nominal patterns are shown to be structures of nonrestrictive modification (i.e. not really appositions) which are best understood in reference to the concept of a Local Domain. The second unit of these structures has its scope in the local domain of the first unit, of which it is an expansion, not in the larger domain of the sentence. By contrast, most instances of non-nominal apposition (e.g. He ran – absolutely raced – up the hill; Burton-Roberts, 1975) are seen as true appositions, as defined in this paper, namely as structures whose two units relate independently to a Sentence Domain without forming a superordinate node in it. Crucial to the distinction between the Local and the Sentence domains is the role of intonation boundaries. These are strongly obligatory only with those structures which have been considered paradigmatic appositions in the literature (Romulus, the legendary founder), and their role is to isolate the second unit within them from the remainder of the sentence, thus preventing it from having a function in it. The intonation boundaries are also responsible for the most distinctive feature of these structures, namely the predicative relationship binding the two units together (Dupont, 1985; Koktová, 1985; Longrée, 1987; Forsgren, 1988).

There are two important differences between American English and British English with respect to main verb have. First, American English typically employs do-support in constructions such as Do you have any coffee? while traditional British English does not. Secondly, American English typically does not use have in expressions such as I took a shower whereas British Isles English does: I had a shower. In this article, we discuss the possibility that there is a connection between these two facts. We argue that the connection lies in the failure of have in North American English to acquire the full range of dynamic meanings that it has acquired in other varieties of English, and suggest language contact as one explanation for this phenomenon.

This article explores measures, operationalisations and effects of rhythm and weight as two constraints on the variation between the s-genitive and the of-genitive. We base the analysis on interchangeable genitives in the news and letters sections of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), which covers the period between 1650 and 1999. Thus, we are ultimately concerned with the applicability of two factors that have their roots in speech (rhythm: phonology; weight: online processing) to an ‘unconventional’, written data set with a historical dimension. As for weight, we focus on the comparison of simple single-constituent and more complex multi-constituent measurements. Our notion of rhythm centres on the ideally even distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. We find that in our data set, both rhythm and weight show theoretically unexpected quadratic effects: rhythmically better-behaved s-genitives are not necessarily preferred over of-genitives, and short constituents exhibit odd weight effects. In conclusion, we argue that while rhythm is only a minor player in our data set, the quadratic quirks it exhibits should inspire further study. Weight, on the other hand, is a crucial factor which, however, likewise comes with measurement and modelling complications.

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.

Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light of the corpus-based observations.

In this article we explore the range of aspectual and quantificational readings that are available to two kinds of deverbal nominalizations in English, conversion nouns and -ing nominals. Using data gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC), we examine the range of readings available for the conversion and -ing forms of 106 English verbs in context. We distinguish eventive versus referential readings, looking at instances of both count and mass quantification for the two kinds of nominalizations. Within the eventive readings we also distinguish bounded versus unbounded aspectual readings, and within bounded readings two types that we call ‘completive’ and ‘package’. We argue that the quantificational properties and aspectual intepretation of both conversion and -ing nominalizations are not rigidly or even loosely determined by the form of the nominalization, but that the lexical aspect of the base verb (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive) plays some role in circumscribing aspectual readings. We argue that the strongest role in determining quantificational and aspectual readings is played by factors arising from the context in which conversion forms and -ing nominalizations are deployed. The aspectual interpretation of conversion and -ing nominalizations can be influenced by the presence of temporal and quantificational modifiers, by surrounding tenses, as well as by encyclopedic knowledge. We conclude with a consideration of the theoretical implications of our findings.