This article presents a sociolinguistic investigation of a rapidly expanding innovation in the UK, glottal replacement, in a variety spoken in northeast Scotland. Quantitative analysis of the form shows a dramatic change in apparent time: from a minority variant in the older generation to a full 90 per cent use in the younger generation. Further analysis of the constraints on use provide a detailed snapshot of how this variant moves through social and linguistic space. Males use higher rates of the non-standard form in the older generations but this constraint is neutralised in the younger generations as the form increases. Styleshifting according to interlocutor also neutralises through time. While these results across the social constraints are in line with previous analyses, the linguistic constraints differ in this variety. In contrast to most other varieties, intervocalic contexts such as bottle show high rates of glottal replacement. Moreover, word-internal foot-initial contexts (e.g. sometimes) also frequently allow the non-standard variant, despite this being rare in other dialects. Although glottal replacement is largely considered to be a ‘torchbearer’ of geographical diffusion, this in-depth analysis suggests that different varieties may have different pathways of change in the rapid transition from [t] to [ʔ] throughout the UK.

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e. paddle strongly evokes water), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (water only weakly evokes paddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of English be going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verb go. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forster et al.2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such as go) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003).

My central concern is the special use of proper names in the English noun phrase first discussed by Rosenbach (2006, 2007, 2010; Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Rosenbach 2005): proper names which are used as modifiers with an identifying function, e.g. theBushadministration (‘Which administration does the noun phrase refer to? The one headed by Bush’). On the basis of a corpus study, I argue that existing analyses of Rosenbach (2007) and Schlücker (2013) fail to account for all cases; they also fail to capture the seemingly contradictory syntactic and functional properties of these proper names in a unified way. My alternative analysis is framed within Halliday's (1994) functional model of the English noun phrase, but radically thinks beyond the typical association of functions with word classes (see also Rijkhoff 2009). My proposal is that the majority of these proper names can be analysed as epithets, a function typically associated with adjectival modifiers such as theredcar. A smaller set, proper name modifiers such as aKerrysupporter, are analysed as complements (Payne & Huddleston 2002). I end by discussing the implications of this dual analysis for another open question, whether proper name modifiers are morphosyntactically phrasal modifiers or part of compounds.

The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (will and be going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time, be going to has been gradually increasing in frequency relative to will over the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towards be going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.

The goal of this article is to uncover the system underlying three types of English relative clauses, and to characterise their distinctive uses in discourse: NP-integrated ones, namely restrictive and ‘a-restrictive’ relative clauses, and non-integrated ones, represented by non-restrictive relatives.

The area at issue is central, since understanding the functioning of these constructions requires reference to the fundamental interface between grammar (language system) and discourse (language use). The discourse functions of the three subtypes of relatives are claimed to be underlain by their intrinsic morphosyntactic and semantic properties. A major aim is to highlight the relative degree of ‘communicative dynamism’ of each subtype of relative clause, in terms of its respective contribution to the construction of discourse.

In doing so, the article focuses on the distinctive properties of presupposed as well as non-presupposed restrictive relatives, and of definite as well as indefinite NPs containing integrated relatives more generally. Along the way, it critically examines certain controversial conceptions of the structural and functional features of the constructions at issue, and, in particular, the claim that there is no essential distinction to be drawn between ‘integrated’ and phrase-external relative clause subtypes at all.

Colloquialisation, a process by which ‘writing becomes more like speech’, has been identified as a powerful discourse-pragmatic mechanism driving grammatical change in native English varieties. The extent to which colloquialisation is a factor in change in non-native varieties has seldom been explored. This article reports the findings of a corpus-based study of colloquialisation in Philippine English (PhilE), alongside its ‘parent variety’, American English (AmE). Adopting a bottom-up approach, a comprehensive measure was derived to determine the degree to which a text prefers grammatical features typical of speech and disprefers those typical of writing. This measure was then used to compare and contrast texts in a parallel, multi-register corpus of PhilE and AmE sampled for the 1960s and 1990s. Evidence for colloquialisation was found to vary across registers. While Philippine press editorials and American fiction show a clear colloquialising tendency, learned writing does not show remarkable changes irrespective of variety. The evolution of PhilE registers cannot be explained by a simple process involving emulation of AmE. The patterns uncovered reflect the uniqueness of the sociohistorical circumstances in which PhilE has evolved.

Edward Young, the midshipman who sided with Fletcher Christian during the Mutiny on the Bounty, which took place in 1789, was an English and St Kitts Creole speaker. The influence of Young's Kittitian lexicon and grammar toponyms (placenames) in the Pitcairn Island language – Pitcairn – exists in features such as the use of articles and possessive constructions. Pitcairn was moved to Norfolk Island sixty-six years after the settling of Pitcairn Island in 1790 by the mutineers and their Polynesian counterparts. While Kittitian for ‘for, of’ and Kittitian-derived articles ha/ah only occur in a few documented placenames in Pitcairn, the fer and ar/dar elements of possessive constructions in placenames in Norfolk, the Norfolk Island language still spoken today by the descendants of the Pitcairners, are more common than in Pitcairn placenames. It is argued that the use of the for/fer possessive construction and article forms are key social deictic markers of identity and distinctiveness, especially in Norfolk placenames. Their usage delineates Pitcairn blood heritage and ancestry (Norfolk: comefrom) as either Pitcairner or non-Pitcairner, and has been expanded in and adapted to the new social and natural environment of Norfolk Island. The analysis draws on primary Norfolk placename data and compares it to secondary Pitcairn data.

This case study focuses on intensificatory tautological constructions (e.g. tiny littlebird, big hugepay rise). The attention that intensificatory tautology has elicited in previous literature is scarce and often centred on specific aspects of its Present-day English (PDE) distribution. Formally, tautological intensificatory patterns often involve the combination of two synonymous size-adjectives (e.g. massive great, tiny little) in a given order (i.e. great big but not big great). Functionally, they are standardly associated with emphatic descriptive modifying functions and informal styles (Matthews 2014: 364; Coffey 2013: 59; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 561–2). This contribution takes a corpus-based, synchronic standpoint in order to (a) refine previous literature's account of the formal and functional distribution of tautological size-adjective clusters in PDE and (b) assess the significance of tautological intensification for functional–structural descriptions of the English Noun Phrase. The analyses indicate that PDE intensificatory size-adjective clusters have a wider functional distribution than has hitherto been observed, with reinforcer and adverbial intensifying functions slowly developing alongside the descriptive modifier functions. More generally, the article shows that tautological size-adjective clusters create pockets of interpersonal meanings whose impact on the formal and functional structure of the NP needs further exploration.

This squib attempts to bring more precision to the understanding of object omission in English by investigating the referential behavior of omitted objects. Allerton (1975) and Fillmore (1986) understand omitted objects as being indefinite, by which they mean that omitted objects are unknown and insulated from their potential referents available in the context. However, this squib presents data that challenge this understanding of indefiniteness, and proposes that the indefiniteness of omitted objects may be more precisely understood as their indeterminacy over their potential referents.