This article examines the status of scalarity in the analysis of the meaning of the English determiner any. The latter's position as a prime exemplar of the category of polarity-sensitive items has led it to be generally assumed to have scalar meaning. Scalar effects are, however, absent from a number of common uses of this word. This suggests that any does not involve scales as part of its core meaning, but produces them as a derived interpretative property. The role of three factors in the derivation of the expressive effect of scalarity is explored: grammatical number, stress and the presence of gradable concepts in the NP. The general conclusions point to the importance of developing a causal semantic analysis in which the contributions of each of the various meaningful components of an utterance to the overall message expressed are carefully distinguished.

Most handbooks and grammars contend that in Old English the voiced fricatives [v, ð, z] were merely allophones of /f, θ, s/ in sonorous environments. How these voiced fricatives became phonemes is debated among scholars. In this article, all previous accounts are critically reviewed. A new proposal is then presented, which explains the facts in a more direct way than previous theses. I argue that phonemicisation of a previous allophonic voice alternation in fricatives had already taken place in many areas of Anglo-Saxon England through language contact with Brittonic. Voiceless as well as voiced fricative phonemes existed in Brittonic at the time of contact, and language shift would have led directly to the phonemicisation of the previous allophonic variation found in early Old English.

In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactive what-x construction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactive what-x construction features the interrogative what directly followed by a phrasal or clausal complement x. Moreover, what forms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactive what-x construction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.

This article surveys the debate on the origin of periphrastic do, with particular attention to the hypothesis that Celtic languages might have exerted some influence. With respect to the facts, it is argued that there are various types of Celtic hypotheses and that one type is sensible, though unlikely to be proven and even less likely to be proven to be the only relevant factor. With respect to the debate itself, it is shown that a Celtic origin hypothesis is accepted more widely among non-British scholars, and we speculate why that might be the case.

This article describes and discusses the appearance and increasing frequency of uh, um and er in American English journalistic prose from the 1960s to the early 2000s as part of the colloquialization of the language. The three variants uh, um and er are shown to have different uses in writing than in speech; in writing they can be shown to qualify as words, while their status in speech appears to be on a cline of wordhood. In writing, they belong to the class of stance adverbs, serving metalinguistic purposes. Two types are distinguished, depending on sentence placement: in initial position, uh, um and er are attitude adverbs and in medial position, they are style adverbs. Although er is dispreferred in initial position and preferred for correction of previously used words, every variant can be used for all discourse-pragmatic functions, which supports classifying them as one lexeme.

The two properties that characterize Ablaut reduplication in English (chit-chat, dilly-dally) are: (1) identical vowel quantity in the stressed syllabic peaks, (2) maximally distinct vowel qualities in the two halves, with [i] appearing most commonly to the left and a low vowel to the right. In addition, Ablaut reduplicatives are described as having a trochaic contour, yet there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the stress on the second part of the formation. Historically, Ablaut reduplication appeared long after Copy reduplication (boo-boo, yo-yo) and flourished during the Renaissance; its productivity declined sharply in the twentieth century.

This article treats Ablaut reduplicatives as verbal art products, analogs of dipodic poetic meter. The naturalness of the template ensues from the interaction of conflicting segmental and prosodic constraints on identity and markedness. An independently established hierarchy blocks high back vowels from appearing in these forms. The height difference is a response to the principle of INTEREST which favors maximum perceptual differentiation between the stressed vowels. The linear ordering of the vowels correlates with domain-final lengthening. The ambiguity between compound stress and level stress that these words exhibit is related tentatively to the existence of a separate prosodic domain, a dipodic colon. The article provides Optimality-theoretic support for the analytical relevance of gradient phonetic properties and the relevance of the colon as a separate prosodic layer, and potentially enriches the taxonomy of metrical forms in English.

It is argued in this article that the postnominal ‘and adjective’ construction in Old English (e.g. Sodfßstne man & unscyldigne (LAW2,40.45) ‘righteous person and guiltless’ and pßas fullan ofnes & pßas peostran (BEDE,13.430.4) ‘that full furnace and that dark’) should be not analyzed as an instance of ambilateral adjective placement, but as an instance of DP coordination with an empty nominal element, pro, in the second conjunct. As a consequence, the adjective contained in the postnominal ‘and adjective’ construction is analyzed as an attributive adjective in prenominal, i.e. pre-pro position.

This article examines the usefulness of Skousen's Analogical Modeling (AM) for explaining morphological change. In contrast to previous accounts of analogy, AM constitutes a general unified model of language that accounts for both sporadic and systematic changes. AM also provides explicit constraints on analogy that allow explanation of how morphological changes begin, which forms most likely serve as patterns for analogy, and which forms are most likely to change.

AM is then tested on the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English (in-, un-, dis-, etc.), using the Middle and Early Modern English portions of the Helsinki corpus as a basis for prediction. AM was given the task of using forms containing negative prefixes for one time period to predict the prefixes that adjectives would take in the subsequent time period. For each of the roughly seventy-year periods in the corpus, AM was able to predict valid prefixes about 90 percent of the time.

It has generally been assumed that Celtic linguistic influence on Old English is limited to a few marginal loanwords. If a language shift had taken place from Celtic to Old English, however, one would expect to find traces of that in Old English phonology and (morpho)syntax. In this article I argue that (1) the way in which the West Germanic sound system was reshaped in Old English strongly suggests the operation of a hitherto unrecognized substratum; (2) that phonetic substratum is strongly reminiscent of Irish rather than British Celtic; (3) the Old Irish phonetic−phonological system provides a more plausible model for reconstructing the phonetics of pre-Roman Celtic in Britain than the British Celtic system. The conclusion is that there is phonetic continuity between pre-Roman British Celtic and Old English, which suggests the presence of a pre-Anglo-Saxon population shifting to Old English.

Research on the English genitive (e.g. Rosenbach 2007: 154) reports increasing use of the s-variant. This has been explained as extension to inanimate possessors, a semantic shift (e.g. Hundt 1998; Rosenbach 2002), or due to the pressures of economy in journalism, a register change (Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008). The present work reports on a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the genitive in vernacular Canadian English using socially stratified corpora and individuals of all ages. The results show that human, prototypical possessors are 96 per cent s-genitive and non-humans are 95 per cent of-genitive. Within the small envelope where both forms are possible, we discover that variation patterns quite differently depending on animacy. For humans, use of the s-genitive is stable in apparent time and correlates with whether or not the possessor ends in a sibilant. In contrast, non-human collectives/organizations reveal an increasing use of s-genitives in apparent time and a favouring effect of short possessors, persistence (when an s-genitive has occurred recently in the previous discourse) and when the individual has a blue-collar job. Groups comprising humans (collectives and organizations), such as our church's youth group, and places that are possible locations for humans (countries, cities, etc.), as in Toronto's best restaurant, are the prime conduit for this change. These findings from vernacular speech confirm the extension of the s-genitive in inanimates by semantic extension.

This article tries to fill a descriptive gap in the literature on English possessive NPs by offering a systematic description of indefinite possessive NPs (e.g. a friend's house, a widow's pension, men's suits). Specifically, two descriptive issues are dealt with. Firstly, the different types of determining indefinite genitives are discussed. It is shown that indefinite determiner genitives can have specific reference, generalized reference or generic reference. Moreover, it is argued that in all of these cases, the indefinite genitive specifies a reference point (Langacker 1993) for the identification of the ‘possessee’ and functions as a grounding predication. It is also proposed that subsective gradience (Aarts 2004, 2007) can be diagnosed for determining genitives, i.e. that more central and more peripheral members can be distinguished within this category. Secondly, the distinction between determining and nondetermining, classifying genitives (e.g. a [woman's magazine] ‘a magazine for women’) is re-examined. This distinction is relevant to the description of indefinite possessive NPs, since they have been considered as evidence for a fuzzy boundary between determining and nondetermining genitives (Taylor 1996, Rosenbach 2006). It is argued, against such an analysis, that the two functions of the genitive can be clearly distinguished, even in ‘bridging contexts’ (Evans & Wilkins 2000), i.e. contexts in which both a determining and a nondetermining reading are supported. Consequently, there is no intersective gradience (Aarts 2004, 2007) between determining and nondetermining genitives on the level of the constructional semantics.

The nature and behaviour of complex and compound adverbs (e.g. very much, heretofore, anyway) has not received much scholarly attention in recent years. In the case of very much, for instance, recent literature (e.g. Dixon 2005) considers it a clause-internal adverb which typically modifies phrasal constituents (e.g. I liked the present very much; very much alive). The latter claim, however, appears to clash with previous observations (cf. Bolinger 1972) on the growing scope of the adverb in Present-day English. Through a corpus-based diachronic study (1500–present day), the present article unearths a number of environments where very much does not seem to fit neatly within the functional classifications that it has been assigned to in recent literature and standard grammars of English. It suggests that, from the Late Modern English period onwards (1800–), very much seems to have been developing sentence modifier functions, hence moving along Traugott's (1995) Internal Adverb > Sentence Adverb > Discourse Particle cline.

The word such represents a challenge to most grammatical treatments when it comes to assigning it to a particular word class. In this article I consider the syntactic as well as the semantic properties of such. I argue that its conventional dual treatment as a determiner and as a pronoun (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik, 1985) is unwarranted. I also discuss some more recent treatments (Altenberg, 1994; de Mönnink, 1996; Siegel, 1994) and argue that these too cannot fully account for the facts. Based on syntactic evidence drawn from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), I will argue that the analysis I refer to as the ‘uniform adjective analysis’ of such (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) best accounts for the facts.

This article concentrates on the question of language contact between English and Celtic in the period between the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britannia (?AD 449) and the Norman conquest of England (AD 1066) but in some places reaches out to West Germanic times and to the period after the Norman conquest. It focuses on a certain region, that of the Southern Lowlands, mainly Anglo-Saxon Wessex, and deals with evidence that has been mentioned before: (1) the twofold paradigm of ‘to be’ and (2) the Old English designations for Celts that refer to their status as slaves. The article demonstrates that both the syntactic and the lexico-semantic evidence is particularly concentrated in West Saxon texts. Together, both types of evidence are shown to support the assumption that a very substantial Celtic population exerted substratal influence on (pre-)Old English by way of large-scale language shift in one of the early heartlands of England. This substratal Insular Celtic influence on Old English is contrasted with the adstratal Celtic influence on continental West Germanic.

Following the Uniformitarian Principle, the Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH; Hawkins 2004) predicts a directionality in language change: if the same content can be expressed by two competing structures and one of these is easier to process (see Hawkins 1999, 2004), then the simpler structure will be preferred in performance. Consequently, it will be used more often with a greater range of different lexical items, which increases its type frequency and ultimately leads to it being more cognitively entrenched than its alternative (see Hawkins 2004: 6). As an analysis of the diachronic evolution of the family of English comparative correlative constructions (the more iconic cause–before–effect C1C2 construction the more you eat, the fatter you get vs the less iconic effect–before–cause C2C1 construction you get the fatter, the more you eat) shows, however, the PGCH only played a secondary role in the genesis of this set of constructions. In this article, I will present a usage-based constructionist approach that allows researchers to reinterpret the classical Structuralist notion of gaps in the system as gaps in the mental constructional network. This type of Cognitive Structuralist analysis accounts for the presence of the less iconic C2C1 structure (and the absence of the more iconic C1C2 structure) in OE, the genesis of C1C2 structures at the end of the OE period as well as the processing effects predicted by the PGCH once both the C1C2 and the C2C1 constructions were in competition during the ME period.

Competition between two methods of marking recipient/beneficiary and theme has figured in much recent research:

1. (1) Jim gave the driver £5.   (indirect object before direct object)

2. (2) Jim gave £5 to the driver.   (direct object before prepositional phrase)

A reverse double object variant is often ignored or treated as a minor and highly restricted variant:

1. 1. (a) ?Jim gave £5 the driver.   (direct object before indirect object)

   2. (b) Jim gave it him.

However, pattern (3) was much more widespread even in late Modern English, while there is clear dialectal variation within present-day British English.

In this article we investigate the pronominal pattern (3b), mainly in relation to pattern (1), tracking its progressive restriction in distribution. We mine three of the Penn parsed corpora for the general history in English of double object patterns with two pronoun objects. We then add a further nine dialect and/or historical English corpora selected for coverage and representativeness. A usage database of examples in these corpora allows more detailed description than has been possible hitherto. The analysis focuses on verb lemmas, objects and dialect variation and offers an important corrective to the bulk of research on the so-called Dative Alternation between patterns (1) and (2). We also examine works in the normative grammatical tradition, producing a precept database that reveals the changing status of variants as dialectal or preferred. In our conclusion we show the importance of prefabricated expressions (prefabs) in the later history of (3), sketching an analysis in Construction Grammar terms.

While stylistic variation in attention-based models has been foundational to sociolinguistic theory (Labov 1972a; Trudgill 1974), other studies (e.g. Coupland 1985; Eckert 1989; Drummond 2018; Snell 2018) conceptualise style as a resource used in the context of identity construction. I synthesise these two approaches to sociolinguistic style and consider social meaning in the context of variable attentional load. Informed by a study of lexical variation in Cornwall, I account for an inverted style pattern with recourse to local identity, social meaning and language ideology. In doing so, I introduce an attention-to-self model of style. This model posits that when speakers pay greater attention-to-self, they closer approximate a desired self, a target identity that they aspire to embody. For example, when speakers subvert the standard language ideology, their stylistic target may not be ‘educated’ or ‘posh’, but ‘local’. In such cases, careful speech styles can be conducive to the production of local dialect forms as a performance of identity. I propose that the stylisation of local identity in careful speech styles in Cornwall should be interpreted in the context of an alternative linguistic market, a Cornish micro-market, which subverts the value system of the dominant linguistic market.

This article investigates uses of the adverb again in Early Modern English (EModE) correspondence. The study collects occurrences of again and analyses their interpretation. It reveals interesting differences in the use of again between EModE and Late Modern English (LModE) as well as Present-day English (PDE). To bring out the grammatical significance of the results, we connect the study methodologically as closely as possible with Beck, Berezovskaya & Pflugfelder's (2009) study of LModE/PDE correspondence. We show that the key diachronic alteration we observe when considering EModE is not just numerical in nature but also qualitatively distinct from the later change at the transition between LModE and PDE. At the heart of our proposal is the finding that while a structural approach to again (Rapp & von Stechow 1999; Beck 2005) is successful for characterizing the transition between LModE and PDE, a uniform analysis for the entire diachronic trajectory is not warranted; a combined theoretical modelling is required instead. Specifically, a lexical analysis relying on counterdirectionality (e.g. Fabricius-Hansen 2001) is required to capture the differences in the EModE data.

This article presents a historical cognitive analysis of the development of phrasal verbs (PVs) with out and away in Early and Late Modern English. Semantically, PVs in Present-Day English can be classified as being (a) fully compositional (e.g. go out), (b) partially idiomatic, with the particle having an aspectual (i.e. grammatical) function (e.g. work away) and (c) (fully or highly) idiomatic (e.g. make out ‘understand’; see Quirk et al. 1985, Jackendoff 2010). As is clear from this classification, the development of PVs has, at least, involved grammaticalization and idiomatization. However, there is no consensus in recent grammaticalization research on how these two kinds of changes are related.

The literature suggests that the particles used in the partially idiomatic PVs were undergoing grammaticalization in the Old and Middle English periods. Therefore, to understand the semantic and conceptual relationships between partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs, a closer investigation of the uses of PVs after Early Modern English is in order. In this article, focusing on the distributions of away and out taken from colloquial corpora of Early and Late Modern English, namely, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), it is shown through descriptive characterizations that the partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs are instances of idiomatization caused by grammaticalization and by lexicalization, respectively. Based on these observations, the developments of these two types of PVs can be explained by a Usage-Based Model put forth mainly by Langacker (2000) and Bybee (2006, 2010). Specifically, the idiomatization of partially idiomatic PVs involves repeated schema extractions leading to productivity, whereas the idiomatization of fully or highly idiomatic PVs involves the ‘conserving effect’, whereby a highly entrenched linguistic expression with high frequency resists further language change.

This article addresses the thorny question of how to distinguish between complement and modifier PPs within the NP. Most of the accounts offered so far fail because they assume the distinction to be a rigid one: none of the semantic and syntactic criteria provided can be used as diagnostic tests for category membership, simply because the boundary between the two categories is not clear-cut. Instead, it is argued that the only viable way of accounting for the differences in formal behaviour between certain PPs within the NP is to recognize that this behaviour reflects a distinction at the conceptual level. Since, at the conceptual level, the distinction between ‘complement’ and ‘modifier’ is gradual (defined in terms of degree of activation), there is no basis for a strict linguistic dichotomy: therefore, the formal features of the PPs in question are to be regarded as approximations of the cognitive status of the concept in question, not as indications of all-or-none class membership. In addition to offering a more promising account of the complement–modifier distinction itself, the prototype-based approach proposed can also be regarded as providing plausible explanations for the formal differences commonly associated with (prototypical instances of) the two categories.