Adjectival syllable count, often used to predict English comparatives more versus -er, is of little help in predicting the comparatives of adjectives ending in <y>, pronounced /i/, here called the y-adjectives. Examples of y-adjectives include silly and worthy. This article considers whether the phonemic segment count (segment count) and penultimate syllable weight (penultimate weight) of y-adjectives may serve as alternatives to syllable count in predicting more versus -er. The segment count and penultimate weight of relevant y-adjective tokens from a set of diachronic corpora are studied, alongside the tokens’ morphological complexity and period of occurrence in two separate, parallel sets of mixed-effects models. Syllabification principles for penultimate weight coding differentiate the two sets of modelling. Findings converge on segment count as a predictor of the comparative form, while the role of morphological complexity remains less clear, emerging significantly from one set of modelling but not the other. A rethinking of adjectival length based on segment count is advanced for our understanding of y-adjective comparatives. Discussed also are downstream implications of variant syllabification theories on accounts of y-adjective comparatives, together with insights shed on morphophonological intersections and the potential place of English y-adjective comparatives within the ambit of English alternations.

This study uses the Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836 database to chart the changing representation of the language of the labouring poor during the early nineteenth century. It finds that, broadly speaking, while the voices of the labouring poor are sometimes represented in novels at the start of the period, most novels evince little interest in either the linguistic nuances of these characters’ speech, or the access to their lives and thoughts that this speech provides. Around the middle of the period, there is a rapid increase in the fictional representation of the voices of the labouring poor specifically in novels set in rural Scotland and Ireland and – at least in some novels – this is connected to a greater interest in the lives and perspectives of these characters. By the end of the period, while there is a broadening out into extraterritorial varieties and a continuing interest in the voices of the rural labouring poor of Scotland and Ireland, these developments have not translated in any substantial way to an interest in either the rural labouring poor of England or Wales, or the urban labouring poor of any nation or region. Overall, the study demonstrates how fiction can be used to provide an insight into changing attitudes towards speakers and language varieties.

The present study is an exploration of the field of analytic causatives. It focuses on reflexive constructions with bring, cause, make and force. The analysis builds on Mondorf & Schneider's (2016) finding that causative bring has specialized to modal-negated-reflexive uses. It explores whether this emerging constraint reduces overlap with other causatives. A second focal point is on the nature of the constructions’ constraints. The article applies Hopper & Thompson's (1980) concept of transitivity as a cline. Employing the same 76-million-word corpus as Mondorf & Schneider (2016), which consists of fiction from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the article shows that reflexive uses of analytic causatives have almost quadrupled over the past 500 years. Results confirm that bring is the only reflexive causative strongly associated with modal and negated contexts. Furthermore, some of the constructions display characteristic transitivity profiles.

Adolescents, particularly those in multiethnic, multilingual communities, have become central to sociolinguistic research in the variationist tradition (Cheshire, Nortier & Adger 2015). In several studies of adolescent speech in European urban centres, the same set of Arabic-derived epistemic phrases, namely wallah, wallahi and related phrases meaning ‘swear’, appear to be in use (see, e.g., Quist 2005; Opsahl 2009; Lehtonen 2015). In this article, we document how these phrases are used in the speech of adolescents from a borough of West London and demonstrate the functional similarities between the current data and studies of adolescents in other West European contexts. Using a distributional analysis, we also draw several comparisons between our data and data collected in previous studies of adolescent speech in London. We find functional and distributional similarities and contrasts in both cases. We then discuss the consequences of these findings for the study of epistemic markers and their relevance in adolescent speech.

This article analyzes Old English vocabulary of time to shed light on the historical, sociocultural dimensions of space–time metaphorical mappings in English. First, we offer an overview of the most significant theoretical and experimental findings on the metaphorical conceptualization of time in Modern English. Then we analyze the sense of time in Old English and describe how native cultural conventions and cross-cultural contact might have contributed to shaping the perception of time in the Old English period. Finally, through corpus and dictionary searches, we explore how space and time were intertwined to convey time notions in the earliest attestations of English. Results show a persistent metaphorical link between space and time in Old English vocabulary and provide evidence for a circular and linear conceptualization of time that flexibly recruited the vertical and sagittal (front–back) axes, and that allowed for time-based and ego-based metaphorical construals, including the time-moving and ego-moving subcases. These data suggest that a baseline conceptualization of time grounded in spatial relations and sensitive to sociocultural factors has existed through time surviving to the present day.

This article explores representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing. It draws on a selection of specimens from the Salamanca Corpus in order to determine what they can tell us about the language of south-western speakers at this time. By focusing on periphrastic do and pronoun exchange, I argue that representations of south-western dialects can be taken as a missing link in the history of these two grammatical features. In fact, the analysis of their distribution and frequency, which this article explores in dialect writing for the first time, shows that they accord with later evidence to an interesting degree. At the same time, the data are placed within the third-wave sociolinguistic models of enregisterment and indexicality so as to show that the conscious representation of these morphosyntactic features reflects contemporary perceptions about their use in south-western dialects while they reveal indexical associations between place, speaker and speech. This article thus seeks to contribute to the history of south-western dialects, while underscoring the validity of dialect writing as a source of Late Modern English speech where the structural and ideological dimensions of dialect intersect.

The following article reports on a multimodal corpus study of English as if constructions. The results of this study suggest that formulaic and insubordinate as if constructions are prosodically chunked as clauses, with formulaic as if constructions uttered with significantly higher pitch and insubordinate as if constructions with lower pitch when being compared with subordinate uses. In addition, insubordinate as if clauses are occasionally accompanied by frowns. It is argued that, although both constructions convey an ironic interpretation, multimodal markers of irony play only a minor role in explaining the findings. Instead, it is argued that the non-verbal features are construction-specific and can reasonably be explained as cross-modal collostructions. As such, the present article provides a description of the non-verbal features accompanying English as if clauses and provides a theoretical explanation. In doing so, some modest evidence for a multimodal Utterance Construction Grammar is also presented.

This article presents an analysis of vowels in the goat set and /r/ in the Collection of Nineteenth-century Grammars (CNG) (cf. Anderwald 2016). My central questions concern the extent to which grammarians provide evidence for early diphthongisation in goat words and for changes in the distribution of /r/ variants in nineteenth-century prestige accents. I furthermore evaluate how far grammars are suitable as a source for researching historical sound changes. I show that monophthongs are the most frequently proposed variants for goat and are often referred to as ‘improper diphthongs’. Some diphthongal descriptions exist for words in open syllables, before /l/ and before plosives in words like know, soul and boat respectively. Concerning the distribution of /r/, I show that most grammars continued to propose two sounds, which were almost exclusively described as ‘rough’ or ‘trilled’, and ‘smooth’ or ‘soft’. However, some grammarians also argued for /r/ having only one sound in all positions and complete post-vocalic /r/ absence. Overall, the grammars in the CNG display a considerable amount of what I assume to be copying from scholars such as Walker (1791) and Murray (1795). Thus, I argue that great care is required when attempting to infer phonological changes from nineteenth-century grammars.