Ninth-century Kentish Old English <b>/<B>, where it represents a reflex of Germanic [ß], has hitherto been dismissed as an orthographic ‘archaism’. Here, however, it is argued that the graph is a genuine reflection of ninth-century Kentish phonology. The linguistic argument, which invokes the concept of neutralization in reconstructing the Old English obstruent system, is placed in the context of reconstructions of the external history of Kent. Data are drawn from forms of moneyers' names on early Anglo-Saxon coins, discussed in the context of interpretations of manuscript data.

This article argues that English noun-plus-noun constructions (‘NNs’) originate both in the lexicon and in the syntax. It distinguishes between complement–head and attribute–head NNs, as well as between fore-stressed and end-stressed NNs. It argues that complement-head NNs are fore-stressed and originate in the lexicon while attribute–head NNs typically have end-stress and syntactic provenance. The latter are, however, potentially subject to diachronic lexicalization, which may moreover involve the adoption of fore-stress. Hence, lexical NNs may be fore-stressed or end-stressed while phrasal NNs must be end-stressed. Although further potential sources of irregularity are identified, it is demonstrated that the model's predictive power is fairly robust and that, where it fails to predict firm stress patterns, it predicts their variability.

According to Wright (1994a), subjectivity in the English progressive is typically associated with specific linguistic features. In particular, subjective progressives are said normally to occur in main clauses and to involve an adverb(ial) of the type always, a first- or second-person pronominal subject and a private or cognitive verb in the present tense. This study tests Wright's claim against a corpus of Early Modern English prose. The focus is on the kind of subjective progressives that are claimed by Wright to be most subjective of all, namely collocations of the progressive with adverbs such as always. It is shown that the ‘always progressives’ in the corpus are typically found in a subclause, in collocation with an activity verb, and that they commonly occur with different types of subjects and tense/mood combinations. The conclusion is therefore that Wright's predictions concerning typical linguistic contexts for subjective progressives are not borne out.

Based on micro-analysis of a set of British English telephone calls, seven different uses of the phrase never mind are distinguished in terms of (a) sequence type, (b) speaker role, (c) sequential position, and (d) prosodic configuration. It is argued that the methodology employed here is widely applicable not only for ready-made expressions but also for less idiomatic forms such as ‘lexicalized sentence stems’ and other prefabricated chunks of language. Through such a methodology analysts can lay bare what it is that speakers ‘do’ with language and thus come to understand what it is they ‘know’ about its procedural deployment in interaction.

Verbs prefixed with over-exhibit varied subcategorization changes from the base verbs (load hay onto the wagon/$^{*}$overload hay onto the wagon, eat an apple/$^{*}$?overeat apples, $^{*}$sleep his appointment/oversleep his appointment, etc.), which seem to defy a principled explanation. This article argues that the apparently puzzling behaviors of over-verbs can be coherently accounted for within the framework of construction grammar.

Over-verbs, in the excess sense, divide into those involving a container-based understanding and those involving a scale-based understanding. Over-verbs involving a container-based understanding (e.g. overload) differ from their base verbs as to the force transmission in a causal chain. Accordingly, those over-verbs are sanctioned by a different verb-class-specific construction from that which sanctions their base verbs. But over-verbs involving a scale-based understanding (e.g. overheat) are unchanged from their base verbs as to the force transmission, and hence as to the syntactic frame.

On the other hand, over-verbs in the spatial sense (e.g. overfly) are sanctioned by a ‘landmark’-based construction, a construction that does not have to do with force transmission. And some excess over-verbs (e.g. oversleep) are also sanctioned by this verb-class-specific construction.

The proposed account pays close attention to both verbs and constructions. A verb's occurrence in a particular syntactic frame can be explained by claiming that that verb can be sanctioned by a particular verb-class-specific construction, irrespective of whether the verb is morphologically simple or complex. But in order to explain why that verb can be sanctioned by that construction at all, a detailed analysis of verb meanings is called for. In this sense, the proposed analysis is both lexical and constructional.

One aspect of the grammaticalization of the progressive is its spread in Modern English. Previous studies suggest that the progressive was initially restricted to animate or agentive subjects and spread to inanimate or nonagentive subjects only during the later stages of grammaticalization in Modern English. The article discusses the contextual variables – animacy and agentivity – that have been used in previous research. ARCHER – A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers – is then used (a) to verify the hypothesis that progressives increasingly co-occur with inanimate/nonagentive subjects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (b) to test the reliability and comparability of previous research, (c) to verify whether the weakening of the contextual constraint was a condition for or a result of the spread of the progressive form in the nineteenth century, and (d) to find out whether there are any regional differences between American and British English in the loss of the contextual constraint.

Middle expressions (The car drives smoothly, The book doesn't sell, These chairs fold up) have long fascinated students of the English language. This article examines some of the factors which contribute to the acceptability of such expressions. Rejecting a lexicalist approach, which aims to identify a class of middle-forming verbs, we propose, instead, a global characterization of the construction, with specific focus on properties of the subject referent in association with the semantics of the predicate. The middle construction, we argue, presents a non-Agent participant as primarily responsible for the potential actualization of the process designated by the verb phrase. The subject referent, therefore, has to be able to be construed as possessing properties which significantly facilitate, enable (or, as the case may be, impede) the unfolding of the process in question, while, at the same time, the contribution of the Agent to the process is backgrounded. We explore this thesis with specific reference to the qualia structure of the subject nominal.

In current accounts the Old English relative þe is analysed in two radically different ways. The traditional view, inherited from the nineteenth-century grammarians, views the word as a relative pronoun, while the generative analysis, derived from some remarks of Jespersen on the ModE relative that, takes it to be a subordinating particle. The generativist view is based on the word's lack of morphological variation, whereas the older approach examines more generally the grammar of the word, noting that the invariable þe shares the typical nominal categories of number and case, functioning both as a singular and a plural and representing all the four cases of OE nominal elements. A further indication of the word's nominal status is its referential function, distinguishing between specific and generic reference. Against these clear facts, the lack of overt inflection is a minor idiosyncrasy, paralleled by the OE generic man/mon, whose pronominal status is widely agreed. Þe may have been a subordinating particle in origin, but by historical OE times it retained this function in relative clauses only after relative adverbs, having been reanalysed elsewhere either as a relative adverb itself, or, in its most frequent relative use, as a pronoun.

Susan Hunston, Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £40.00, ISBN 0 521 80171 0. Paperback £14.95, ISBN 0 521 80583 X. Pp. xii + 241.

Charles F. Meyer, English corpus linguistics: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £45.00, ISBN 0 521 80879 0. Paperback £16.95, ISBN 0 521 00490 X. Pp. xvi + 168.

Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts, Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Hardback £95.00, ISBN 90 272 4888 5. Paperback £55.00, ISBN 90 272 4889 3. Pp. xviii + 342.

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.

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 1842. Hardback, ISBN 0 521 43146 8. £120.

This article reviews Huddleston & Pullum (2002) from the viewpoint of a co-author of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1985). (This author, however, makes no claim whatsoever to represent the views of the other authors of Quirk et al.) Particular attention is paid to some of the more controversial aspects of Huddleston & Pullum's analysis. It is argued that the two grammars, although similar in their comprehensively wide coverage of English, are not strictly comparable, in that Huddleston & Pullum's grammar is more theory-oriented and Quirk et al.'s grammar is more observation-oriented. These different orientations go with different strengths and weaknesses. In some areas Huddleston & Pullum's more up-to-date account has manifest advantages over that of Quirk et al., but there are also arguably areas where Huddleston & Pullum have not moved with the times.

A well-known peculiarity of Modern English is that nominal possessives can occur in ‘elliptical’ constructions in which no head noun is expressed:

(1)(a) We'll meet at Mary's.

(b) This is Mary's.

(c) Mary's is red.