The idea of devoting a special issue to the question of future time reference in English began with the seminar we jointly convened on ‘What Future for the Future Tense in English?’ for the ESSE-8 conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, between 29 August and 2 September 2006. This in turn raises the question as to why we should have thought of future time reference in English as a topic of interest in the first place. We had in fact both been interested in questions relating to tense, aspect and modality for several years, and we had long been struck by the fact that (much to the despair of many non-native speakers) English is particularly well endowed with ways of expressing future time reference by comparison with many other European languages.

This study addresses the development of the English third-person singular present tense suffix from an interdental fricative (giveth) to an alveolar fricative (gives). Based on the PCEEC corpus, we analyze more than 20,000 examples from the time between 1417 and 1681 to determine (i) the temporal stages in which this development took place and (ii) the factors that are correlated with this change.

As for (i), we use a bottom-up clustering method which shows that the shift from -(e)th to -(e)s is best characterized as consisting of five stages. As for (ii), we examine multiple language-internal and language-external factors, including several variables proposed in earlier accounts. We fit a generalized linear mixed-effects model, which allows us to predict nearly 95 per cent of all inflectional choices correctly, thus revealing which factors shaped the development over time in a data-driven and highly precise way.

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.

This article presents a diachronic corpus-based study of the distribution of mandative that- and to-clauses complementing deontic adjectival matrices in the extraposition construction, as in It is essential to work upwards from easier workloads (CB). It shows that the to-infinitive encroaches on the that-clause from Early Middle English onwards and comes to predominate in Late Middle English. It thus adduces evidence for Los's (2005) account of the rise of the to-infinitive as verbal complement: against the generally held view that the to-infinitive replaced the bare infinitive, Los (2005) shows that it spread at the expense of the subjunctive that-clause in Middle English, e.g. after intention verbs and manipulative verbs. After considering various factors such as the distribution of the to-infinitive in the adjectival complementation system, the tense of the matrix of the adjectival constructions and the Anglo-Saxon versus Romance origin of the adjectives, I conclude that the rise of the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices in Middle English has to be explained by analogy between verbal and adjectival mandative constructions. In addition, this study shows that – unlike with the verbal constructions – the to-infinitive with adjectival matrices stabilizes at roughly a 3:1 ratio to the that-clause from Early Modern English onwards. For these later periods, finally, it is proposed that the clausal variation may be motivated by lexical determination, discourse factors such as information structure, and stylistic preferences.

Buchan Scots exhibits a unique phonological process in which mid vowels undergo raising that is triggered by both voiced consonants and stressed high vowels. The fact that the triggers of assimilation do not fall neatly into a single natural class under most feature theories makes it an interesting challenge to straightforward analysis. Given the phonological patterns and a variety of phonetic facts about Buchan, I propose a [Lowered Larynx] feature to explain both vowel height and consonant voicing in this language. I present an autosegmental analysis of the segment inventory and phonological patterns in the framework of the Parallel Structures Model of feature geometry (Morén 2003, 2006, 2007). This analysis provides a unified and minimal account of the assimilation facts and supports the claim that phonological activity is dependent on the structure of the contrast system of a given language (Dresher, Piggot & Rice 1994). Furthermore, the representational analysis fits neatly into a constraint-based model and contributes to the growing body of literature claiming that representations are important even to optimality-theoretic analyses.

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.

In this article we offer a diachronic analysis of simultaneity subordinator as against the background of simultaneity subordinators while, whilst, when from 1650 to the end of the twentieth century. The present survey makes use of data extracted from the British English component of ARCHER (version 3.1), focusing in particular on fiction, the register par excellence for the use of simultaneity subordinators. We analyse our data according to a selection of parameters (ordering, verb type, duration, tense and aspect, subject identity, simultaneity type) and show that, against a background of relative stability, the major change is a dramatic increase in the frequency of simultaneity as-clauses from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards. Adapting the historical work on stylistic change by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1997), as well as theoretical and experimental accounts of the semantics of English simultaneity markers, we highlight an interesting parallelism between the spread of as-clauses in oral narrative from childhood to adulthood and the spread of as-clauses in modern fiction. In either case, the spread of as may be symptomatic of an evolution in narrative techniques, particularly in respect of the means by which complex events are typically represented.

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Marušič 2004).

Most grammarians refuse to treat will as a marker of future tense in English. We examine the arguments against treating will as a tense and find them weak; the arguments in favour of treating it as a modal also turn out to be poor. We argue that will should be treated as a marker of future tense, and that its so-called modal uses are either not modal or have independent explanations. The one exception is the volitional use of will: to account for this, we propose that willingness is a semantic relic from an earlier meaning of the word.

This article describes and analyses five different ways of expressing futurity in English (shall/will, be going to, be to, the simple present and the present progressive) in a Construction Grammar framework. It suggests that the different expressions can be captured as an onomasiologically motivated family of constructions in which the single constructions are differentiated by complex co- and contextual configurations. The latter can be elegantly captured in a Construction Grammar framework since constructions by definition can include pragmatic features. Also, this article claims that constructions may be equipped with an additional ‘context slot’, in which co- and contextual information can be stored. In a final section, this article turns to the issue of tense as a grammatical phenomenon and its genesis in grammaticalisation processes. It is suggested that a Construction Grammar account can make the age-old debate about a future tense in English redundant. Instead, it complements studies in grammaticalisation and opens up some interesting perspectives on parallel developments in the onto- and phylogenesis of constructions.

Basing myself on synchronic and diachronic data analysis, I argue in this article that size nouns (SNs) such as bunch/load(s)/heap(s) of within binominal NPs display synchronic variation which can be hypothesized to be the result of grammaticalization processes. Synchronically, I propose that SNs have two major non-head uses, a quantifier use, e.g. a bunch of people walked in, and a valuing(-quantifying) use, in which the referent is evaluated rather than quantified. The latter is restricted mainly to bunch/load of, e.g. What a bunch of gobbledygook. The semantic and syntactic reanalysis of SNs as quantifiers has recently been acknowledged (e.g. Traugott forthcoming), but the valuing use of SNs remains largely unrecognized (see Brems 2007). On a theoretical level, it will be argued that head, quantifier and valuing(-quantifier) SN-uses synchronically have to be studied as collocationally constrained constructions in that the semantico-syntactic parsing of each SN-use links up with specific collocational patterns (Sinclair 1991). Head uses are restricted to sets of (un)count concrete nouns, whereas quantifier uses team up with all sorts of (un)count concrete as well as abstract nouns. Valuing uses show restrictions to concrete animate and abstract nouns, which they typically evaluate negatively, and have negative semantic prosody patterns, in which the SNs themselves come to predict negative collocates (see Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995; Bublitz 1996). The grammaticalization of SNs will be hypothesized to involve not only processes of semantic generalization and collocational extension, but also collocational reclusterings characterized by particular semantic prosody constraints. The latter are not traditionally associated with processes of grammaticalization and hence offer new insights into the semantic changes that may accompany grammaticalization.

The evolution of verbs expressing necessity in the history of English, such as *þurfan and need, has been studied in detail, especially their semantic competition and their grammaticalization (see Molencki 2002, 2005; Taeymans 2006; Loureiro-Porto 2009). However, analogous verbo-nominal expressions involving the morphologically related nouns þearf and need and the verbs be and have have received little attention, despite their relevance as semantic competitors of the verbs and their subsequent fossilization in high-frequency expressions such as if need be and had need. The current article fills this gap by studying the development of verbo-nominal expressions with þearf and need from Old to early Modern English, and asks: (i) whether the verbs and the verbo-nominal expressions undergo similar processes of grammaticalization, and (ii) whether there is any connection between the evolution of the verbal and the verbo-nominal sets. Analysis of these verbo-nominal constructions in a 4.1 million-word corpus (including the Helsinki Corpus and fragments of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler) shows that, firstly, both idiomaticization and grammaticalization are relevant in the development of verbo-nominal constructions; secondly, their evolution is key to the understanding of the development of the necessity verbs *þurfan and need; and finally, the competition between constructions with þearf and need calls into question the well-known hypothesis that phonological confusion with durran caused the disappearance of *þurfan in the ME period (see Visser 1963–73: 1423, §1343).

This article discusses the synchronic status and diachronic development of will be -ing and shall be -ing (as in I'll be leaving at noon).2 Although available since at least Middle English, the constructions did not establish a significant foothold in standard English until the twentieth century. Both types are also more prevalent in British English (BrE) than American English (AmE).

We argue that in present-day usage will/shall be -ing are aspectually underspecified: instances that clearly construe a situation as future-in-progress are in the minority. Similarly, although volition-neutrality has been identified as a key feature of will/shall be -ing, it is important to take account of other, generally richer meanings and associations, notably ‘future-as-matter-of-course’ (Leech 2004), ‘already-decided future’ (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002) and non-agentivity. Like volition-neutrality, these characteristics appear to be relevant not only in contemporary use, but also in their historical expansion. We show that the construction has evolved from progressive aspect towards more subjectivised evidential meaning.

This article offers a constructional approach to complement-taking mental predicates (CTMPs), e.g. I think, accommodating a whole class of CTMP types (i think, i suppose, i imagine etc.) and their variant forms (e.g. I would think, I should have imagined) in a constructional taxonomy. CTMPs are generally believed to depend on their prototypical simple present form in order to convey an epistemic/evidential meaning. Corpus evidence shows, however, that there exist several variant forms that equally function as interpersonal modifications. Such variation has long presented a stumbling block to studies approaching CTMPs from the point of view of grammaticalization theory, since this framework has traditionally been rather inimical to the idea that a grammaticalized item may encompass a paradigm of variant forms and instead requires internal fixation into an unalterable form. It will be argued that CTMPs should be regarded as constructions constituting a taxonomy characterized by several levels of schematicity. It will be demonstrated that the most frequently used CTMP, i think, has reached the highest degree of entrenchment and schematicity, and consequently sanctions the widest range of variant forms, which are disseminated throughout the taxonomy by virtue of analogization.

A non-standard form of the definite article is used by upwards of a million speakers every day and yet it has received little attention in terms of a phonological analysis. The most recent discussions have been a historical and contemporary survey, spectrographic investigations and sociolinguistic surveys. It is clearly a complex issue and has relevance to a number of theoretical questions, some of which are rarely addressed. We need to know the range of phonetic forms; the phonological distribution of the forms; the historical development and whether this helps with a synchronic analysis; and the number and nature of the lexical storage forms. The distribution varies between localities and between speakers; many speakers also use standard English the. The historical development is not at all clear, but does throw some light on what the synchronic grammars should be like. There appears to be a break between those grammars in which the phonetic forms of the definite article are predictable in terms of the phonological environment and those later grammars that have lexically specific forms. The changes that have taken place cannot be explained in terms of simple system-internal mechanisms and some knowledge of the sociohistorical background to the emergence of the new grammars is necessary. This article looks at historical sources from the mid seventeenth century onwards to try to determine the changes that have taken place in the northern dialects concerned, and proposes population movements and expansion as a determining factor in the changes that are in evidence. One possible scenario in terms of new-dialect formation during the nineteenth century is suggested. For the modern variants polysystemic, declarative grammars are proposed, with the possibility of grammar-switching under certain circumstances, such as repair or interaction with outsiders.

Two main hypotheses have been proposed to account for the word order of negative inversion (NI) in varieties of non-canonical English (e.g. Don't nobody else care). An auxiliary inversion analysis argues that the word order is derived via movement of the auxiliary to the left periphery, whereas an existential analysis argues that the word order is an artifact of deletion of the expletive subject, paralleling there-insertion existential constructions. After reviewing these hypotheses, I provide empirical evidence that neither of these theories adequately explains the peculiarities of NI. I advance a third hypothesis, namely that NI is the result of negative movement to the specifier of NegP, and that this movement is pragmatically motivated by an existential meaning in NI constructions. Syntactically, NI is made possible through the Neg-Criterion (Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991, 1996). This analysis explains problems encountered by prior analyses, and offers a unified analysis for variation in NI across dialects. Finally, I explain cross-dialectal differences in NI by considering the relationship between subject requirements and agreement.

This article argues that be to is primarily a modal auxiliary expressing the necessity of future actualization of the ‘residue-situation’ (= the situation referred to by the clause minus be to). Eight possible ‘M-origins’ (= origins of the necessity) are identified. The ‘futurish’ use of be to in present-day English is closely related to these modal uses, especially to the use in which the M-origin is an official arrangement.

The modal interpretation shifts to a futurish interpretation when the emphasis shifts from the present existence of the necessity to the future actualization of the residue-situation. This shift of emphasis is accompanied by a loss of doubt about this future actualization.

In other words, the futurish reading comes to the fore when the (strong or weak) origin of the necessity is bleached, so that the hearer's attention is directed to the future actualization of the residue-situation. Various cases of such bleaching are treated. In some cases (e.g. when be to collocates with still or yet, as in He is still to keep the first of his promises), the bleaching of the M-origin is complete, so that only the sense of futurity (and hence of ‘not-yet-factuality’) is left. In some examples there is no clear difference between be to and will any more, so that the two are interchangeable within the same sentence.

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.