This article presents an analysis of speech rhythm in Tongan English, an emergent variety spoken in the Kingdom of Tonga. The normalised Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI-V) is used to classify the variety and determine the social and stylistic constraints on variation in a corpus of conversational and reading passage data with 48 speakers. Findings reveal a greater tendency towards stress-timing in speakers of the emergent local elite, characterised by white-collar professions and high levels of education, and those with a high index of English use. Variation is discussed as a consequence of proficiency, language contact and L1 transfer. An acoustic analysis of vowels in unstressed syllables of eight speakers confirms that lack of vowel centralisation (higher F1) is an underlying linguistic mechanism leading to more syllable-timed speech. Stark interspeaker variation was identified, highlighting the need to proceed with caution when classifying L2 Englishes based on speech rhythm.

Numerous studies have investigated the kinds of verbs that can be used with there constructions. Generally, only existence and appearance verbs can occur in there constructions. However, some cases have been observed involving verbs not lexically expressing existence or appearance. This study focuses on there sentences with the verb become which are noteworthy in the following two respects. First, although the verb become is not an existence or appearance verb but a change-of-state verb, the verb is felicitously used with there constructions. Second, become is used without an adjectival or nominal complement, a unique argument realization pattern of the verb not found in other syntactic contexts. This study, based on a detailed examination of actual data in corpora, claims that there sentences with become express the appearance/occurrence of an entity. Although the postverbal noun is structurally a subject in there constructions and the subject of the verb become is usually interpreted as an entity undergoing a change, the postverbal noun of there sentences with become is an entity that has arisen as a result of the changing event.

English words containing inserted expletives, like absobloodylutely or unbefuckinglievable, are often said to be created by ‘infixation’. One goal of this work is to argue that such claims are self-contradictory. Infixes are affixes, but the expletives are not. Rather, they are themselves morphologically complex, are not bound, and can occur with words from different syntactic categories. Hence, the expletives are full words, and the only property they share with infixes is their phonologically determined insertion point. Due to these factors, I suggest that words like absobloodylutely are discontinuous compounds instead, in which the expletive forms a new word with the word it interrupts. I further argue that discontinuous compounding is even rarer than actual infixation cross-linguistically, which makes English a typological outlier. On the other hand, I try to show that the apparently idiosyncratic properties of expletive compounds are compatible with English compounding at a more abstract level. In addition, the article seeks to establish some tentative diachronic and cognitive mechanisms that may have led to the emergence and retention of expletive insertion. The overall conclusion is that, once morphological phenomena are analyzed in sufficient detail, novel structural patterns and parallels may emerge.

The apostrophe was introduced into the English orthographic system by the mid sixteenth century as a printer's mark especially designed ‘for the eye rather than for the ear’ (Sklar 1976: 175; Little 1986: 15). Whereas the uses of the apostrophe today are limited to the Saxon genitive construction (the woman's book), to verbal contractions (you'll ‘you will’ or you're ‘you are’) and to other formulaic expressions (o'clock), its early uses also included other cases of elision and some abbreviated words (Parkes 1992: 55‒6; Beal 2010a: 58). Among this plethora of uses, perhaps one of the most distinctive functions of this symbol is the indication of the genitive construction, which has no full form in Present-day English after the progressive extinction of the genitive case affix. Such a development could have also happened in the regular past morpheme, but its outcome differed, as it continues to be spelled out today.

The present article is then concerned with the standardisation of the apostrophe in the English orthographic system in the period 1600–1900 and pursues the following objectives: (a) to study the use and omission of the apostrophe in the expression of the past tense, the genitive case and the nominative plural in the period; (b) to assess the relationship between the three uses and their likely connections; and (c) to evaluate the likely participation of grammarians in the adoption and the rejection of each of these phenomena in English. The source of evidence for this corpus-based study comes from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2, Denison & Yáñez-Bouza 2013), sampling language use in different genres and text types in the historical period 1700–1900. Additionally, the Early English Books Online corpus (EEBO, Davies 2017) has also been used as material to investigate the early uses of the possessive apostrophe in the late sixteenth century. A preliminary data analysis confirms the second half of the seventeenth century as the period that saw the definite rise of the genitive apostrophe in English, refuting the early assumptions which considered it to be an eighteenth-century development (Crystal 1995: 68; Lukač 2014: 3). The results also suggest that this phenomenon was to some extent associated with the decline of the apostrophe in other environments, more particularly in the expression of the regular past tense forms. Moreover, there seems to be no indication that standardisation emerged from linguistic prescription; instead, grammars seem to have been shaped after use.

This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist. Fragments (e.g. What to do?) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-truth-conditional semantics. As demonstrated in our analysis, both sentence types tend to appear prominently within a paragraph, typically at the beginning or the end. Additionally, within the entire editorial, they are often found in the second paragraph, where the writer presents a contrasting view from the opening paragraph, or in the concluding paragraph. This article argues for considering stylistic properties in the characterisation of grammatical constructions.

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.

This study is a corpus-based investigation of the use of the V-final (VF) order in Old English conjunct (or coordinate) clauses. The aim of the analysis is to determine which of the two hypotheses formulated in earlier studies of the subject finds more convincing data support in the available corpora of Old English. According to one interpretation, conjunct clauses are a subtype of main clauses, and the VF order is used in both groups to signal continuation in discourse, especially with punctual, dynamic and relatively heavy verbs. Under the other view, VF conjunct clauses are syntactically subordinate, with the coordinating conjunction blocking verb movement like a complementiser. The present study shows that while both hypotheses are descriptively adequate, the main mechanism responsible for the use of the VF order in conjunct clauses is syntactic priming, with the VF order activated by a trigger clause (usually subordinate) and spreading to the following conjunct clause(s), which often results in long chains of subsequent VF clauses.

This article focuses on two fragmentary constructions in English: why-fragments (WFs), such as Why (deal with) why-fragments?, and Mad Magazine sentences (MMs), such as (Me) paint the house purple? While both types can be equivalent in meaning to their corresponding fully fledged interrogative sentences, they can also be used to convey a specific nuance of scepticism regarding a particular proposition. To explore the specific nuance enriching the canonical interpretation (i.e. equivalent to that of the corresponding complete questions) of WFs and MMs, and their potential constructionalisation in contemporary English, two corpus-based studies were conducted using data from the BNC1994 DS, Spoken BNC2014 and COCA. The results show that MMs seem to be fully constructionalised, while the significant trends attested for WFs indicate an ongoing process of constructionalisation, at least in contemporary British English. The evidence also shows that both may be classed as examples of an umbrella ‘Sceptical Small’ construction.

English comparative modals are combinations of the adverbs rather, sooner and better with an auxiliary. There is recent consensus that the comparative modals rather and sooner have over time developed a different syntax and semantics than better. However, potential differences in the syntax of rather and sooner with respect to patterns of complementation haven’t been explored. This article reports the results of a corpus study of these two modals and finds that rather patterns like object-raising verbs, allowing a range of complements that are unavailable for sooner. Our analysis of these patterns draws on recent work in the Construction Grammar framework, with forays into its formal implementation, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and we propose that rather differs from sooner in that it constitutes a micro-construction whose features are licensed by both the Modal Construction and the Object-Raising Construction, the latter a subtype of the Transitive Construction.

Successful language-based interaction depends on the reciprocal interplay of two or more speakers. The production of structural fragments rather than ‘full’ clausal units plays a crucial role for this interplay. This article provides an outline of a descriptive framework labeled ‘dual-mind syntax’, which is designed for describing the social signature in spoken syntax. Fragments are not analyzed as deficient and ‘incomplete’ syntactic units, but as a communicative practice used to design structures in a responsive-contingent fashion in social interaction. Based on empirical data coming from recorded natural interactions, it will be shown how speakers use syntactic fragments for coordinating actions and collaborative structure-building and for contributing to the emergence of a structurally integrated, coherent whole.

Construction Grammar is an emerging theory of language, but the analysis of sociolinguistic variation is still relatively underdeveloped in the framework. In this article, we consider the representation of social meaning in Construction Grammar through a corpus-based analysis of double modals in British English on social media. We describe the use of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Twitter posts, including presenting an inventory of observed double modals and maps showing the regional distribution of each of these forms. We find that double modals show a general northern pattern and are concentrated in the Scottish Borders. We also find various rare double modals that occur more widely across the UK. To account for these results, we propose a Construction Grammar account of double modals. We argue that defining double modals as grammatical constructions requires that aspects of their social meaning be delimited, especially register and region. Furthermore, we argue that double modals may be enregistered as dialect constructions, distinguished from standard constructions of British English. We conclude by considering the importance of incorporating social meaning into Construction Grammar, underlining the value of a Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to grammatical theory.

Most studies of genitive variation in English have considered only the choice of two variants ('s versus of), based on analysis of only tokens that are judged to be interchangeable. We argue in the present article that research on genitive variation can be usefully extended in both respects: including premodifying nouns as a third variant; and attempting to account for all tokens of the genitive. In addition, we extend the scope of analysis to explore the possibility of contextual constraints having different importance in different registers.

First, we carry out a text-linguistic analysis comparing the rates of genitive variants in texts from three registers (conversation, newspaper reports, academic articles), showing that genitives overall are much more frequent in written registers, with the premodifying noun variant being especially frequent. Then, a variationist analysis is undertaken to account for the choice of genitive variant in particular contexts and registers. A total of 3,425 genitive tokens were coded for ten contextual characteristics (e.g. length of the Modifying NP, semantic category of the Modifying noun and the Head noun, final sibilancy of the Modifying noun). Statistical analyses with random forests and conditional inference trees are triangulated, showing how contextual factors interact in predicting the use of each genitive variant – and how patterns of variation differ across registers.

The variability of adverbial placement in the modified infinitive construction (i.e. split infinitives vs. full infinitives with adverbial pre- and post-modification) has been widely discussed in the (American English) literature. Yet a convincing generalized explanation for the variation that simultaneously incorporates language-internal and language-external factors has yet to be found, particularly in English varieties that have not received as much scholarly attention as standardized varieties. This article investigates modified infinitive syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English (PhE) using a 135-million-word Twitter corpus. It adopts a Bayesian approach in conducting a multiple multinomial regression analysis of the said variation, with the help of Deep-Learning-based demographic inference tools. Although the conditioning effects of some factors diverge from patterns discussed in prior work, the results generally show that language-internal (e.g. stress and rhythm, adverb type, adverb length) and language-external factors (i.e. time, age, sex, geography) jointly shape the choice to split the infinitive in this linguistic style of PhE.

Fragment answers involve a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions and these answers can be hosted by the negator not (e.g. What was his motive? Not money). The central research questions for such a negative fragment answer concern what licenses the fragment, how we can obtain a sentential meaning from its non-sentential status and what its syntactic structure is. In attempting to answer these questions, there have been two main approaches: deletion-based sentential approaches and surface-oriented, direct interpretation (DI) approaches. This article first discusses attested data of such negated fragment answers that could challenge both directions and argues for a direct interpretation approach in which the interpretation of negative fragments is achieved by discourse machinery. The suggested approach shows that once we have a system that represents structured discourse structures, we could have straightforward mapping relations from a negated fragment answer to its proper propositional meaning.

This study investigates fragments of the type last I heard/checked based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which shows a steep increase in frequency for this construction in recent decades. Syntactically, ‘last I fragments’ are disjuncts that are positionally mobile with respect to their host clause and their ‘elliptical’ form can be linked to different ‘full’ forms, viz. specificational sentences and temporal adjuncts. Functionally, their underlying evidential meaning gives rise to different, more specific discourse functions depending on contextual use: viz. downtoner, booster and ironic use. A comparison with unreduced (full) forms shows that these fragments are more likely to have evidential meaning, with reduced form thus acting as an important functional signal. Finally, it is argued that their grammatical status is best captured by a constructional account, which identifies them as constructionalizing units, rather than a simple ellipsis account.

The present article analyzes the use of preposition stranding (the world which we live in) and pied-piping (the world in which we live) in finite WH-relative clauses in twelve varieties of English. In the light of previous studies, it assumes that the strength of processing constraints and formality effects that drive speakers’ constructional choices should correlate with Dynamic Model stages (Schneider 2007). However, drawing on data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and using mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, the study shows that processing factors affect speakers of all Dynamic Model stages in a very similar way. At the same time, clear differences between variety stages are observed with respect to formality and topic, which strongly affect Phases IV and V but not Phase III. These results are interpreted from a Usage-based Construction Grammar perspective.

As a result of an ameliorative shift-to-opposite, the polysemous adjective wicked is an auto-antonym, having two senses opposite in meaning, that is, ‘evil’ and ‘good’. We discuss two studies which explore the social life of this word, with the first focusing on its production and the second on its perception. In the first study, conducted in Cornwall, United Kingdom, we find that young men are most advanced in the use of wicked ‘good’ while young women appear not to contribute to the incrementation, that is, the advancement, of this change. In the second study, conducted online across England, we find wicked ‘good’, relative to its synonym good, to be perceived as less young and to be evaluated positively across disparate characteristics relating to status and solidarity, particularly by older men. We find wicked ‘evil’, in contrast to its synonym evil, to be evaluated higher in status-type characteristics. This newly uncovered indexical field of wicked presents a possible explanation for the observed changes in production, contributing to ongoing questions about the role of social meaning in driving the incrementation of change. More generally, this article adds to the growing yet limited literature which explores semantic variation through the lens of variationist sociolinguistics.

This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.