The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100 and 1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes following the arrival of a co-hyponym in a semantic space) were low in the Middle English period, regardless of language of origin.

Many scholars have held that in late Middle English, in the London dialects from which Standard English grew there existed a vowel /y:/ developed from various native sources and/or used as a substitute for Old French or Anglo-Norman /y/. The aim of this article is to accurately review the relevant evidence adduced by E. J. Dobson and other scholars in favour of a variation between early Modern English /y:/ and /iu/ with a view to offering conclusions based on a direct presentation of the original sources. It will be shown that even the early writers on orthography and pronunciation who correctly describe a sound [y] (as they knew it from French, Scottish and Northern English, as well as from other languages) cannot be adduced as evidence for the existence of a vowel /y:/ in early Modern English.

This article aims to provide a fresh approach to the study of hypercorrection, the misguided application of a real or imagined rule – typically in response to prescriptive pressure – in which the speaker's attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an ‘incorrect’ result. Instead of more familiar sources of information on hypercorrection such as attitude elicitation studies and prescriptive commentary, insights are sought from quantitative and qualitative data extracted from the 2-billion-word Global Web-based English corpus (GloWbE; Davies 2013). Five categories are investigated: case-marked pronouns, -ly and non-ly adverbs, agreement with number-transparent nouns, (extended uses of) irrealis were, and ‘hyperforeign’ noun suffixation. The nature and extent of hypercorrection in these categories, across the twenty English varieties represented in GloWbE, are investigated and discussed. Findings include a tendency for hypercorrection to be more common in American than in British English, and more prevalent in the ‘Inner Circle’ (IC) than in the ‘Outer Circle’ (OC) varieties (particularly with established constructions which have been the target of institutionalised prescriptive commentary over a long period of time).

Research on complementizer selection has shown that the presence of a negative particle in a subordinate complement clause influences complement choice, leading to a relatively higher proportion of finite complementation patterns by increasing the complexity of the syntactic environment. Studies have also shown that different types of negation, namely not- and no-negation, increase the tendency towards more explicit complementation options (Rohdenburg 2015). The current study focuses on the effect of not- and no-negation on the complementation profile of the verb regret, which allows variation between finite that/zero-complement clauses and nonfinite (S) -ing clauses. The GloWbE corpus was used to create a data set of more than 4,000 examples from 16 varieties of English. The results of the analysis support previous findings that the presence of a negative marker in the complement clause increases the preference for finite patterns, especially in L2 varieties of English. However, contrary to the expectations of this study, no-negation was found to have a stronger effect on complement choice than not-negation.

This article argues that the data on English evidential markers indicate that evidentiality is not a grammatical category which is only applicable to some languages, but can be considered a universal semantic function that tends to trigger the grammaticalization of lexical forms. This study investigates five criteria that can help us locate linguistic forms on the lexicon–grammar continuum: reduction, desemanticization, backgrounding, decategorialization and paradigmatization. Although it has not reached the full maturity of so-called ‘evidential languages’, English provides evidence of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Evidentiality is thus a relevant notion for English which substantially impacts the organization of the lexicon of the language, and the evolution of its grammar.

The Gersum Project has significantly developed our understanding of Norse-derived terms in English by providing a highly systematic typology for their identification. However, this article shows that, in order to fully comprehend the lexical impact that Anglo-Scandinavian contact had on medieval English, we need to go beyond the identification of the Norse-derived terms and explore their process of integration into English. To exemplify the benefits of this approach, the article analyses the make-up of the lexico-semantic field of emotion, particularly fear, in the texts attributed to the Gawain-poet, and examines the interaction between native, Norse- and French-derived terms. This analysis moves away from the traditional study of the texts’ vocabulary in relation to their sociohistorical context, considering the terms instead from semasiological, onomasiological and stylistic perspectives. By taking this novel approach, this article addresses key linguistic and literary topics: the formal and semantic factors that facilitated the integration of Norse-derived terms into this lexico-semantic field and, more broadly, the impact that multilingualism had on the expression of emotions in medieval England; diachronic and diatopic variation in the field; and the Gawain-poet's artistry and interest in fear as a key emotion closely linked to other affective and cognitive processes.

This article is an attempt to explain an observable change in present-day English in terms of quite disparate influences. Since the change is not yet complete, it is a messy conspiracy of these influences. By studying life-time changes of this sort we may gain insights into how well-understood historical changes work. The change under discussion is most noticeable in the written form, but its trigger has been the phonetic realizations of the forms to be considered. The forms are exemplified by alternations in noun phrases such as box(ed)sets, skim(med) milk, arch(ed) corbel table. The relationship between the very different structures used in speech on the one hand and writing on the other is also relevant in this case. The NPs with -ed have a structure Adjpp N, whereas the forms without it are compound nouns. Some of the Adjpp forms found in such noun phrases are actually pseudo-past participles; that is, they are not formed from a verb, but take the -ed ending, e.g. four-wheeled, gate-legged. Whether native speakers learn such forms from the spoken or written language to some extent determines how they are perceived. This is relevant because the phonetic realization of members of both sets may be the same, so the phonetic form [bɒks set] may be perceived as boxed set or box set. I also consider the stress patterns of the new compounds, the orthography as a reflection of the structural change, and the ‘Germanic’ tendency towards compounding. The resultant picture is a messy one and the change has certainly not yet been completed, but we can see a conspiracy of disparate areas of the linguistic system putting pressure on certain lexical combinations. It should also be noted that ‘English’ is not a consistent linguistic system: we have to be clear about which variety is being discussed. English ‘belongs’ to many different groups of people, including non-native speakers as a lingua franca, so it is subject to many more influences today than the parochial versions of even just a hundred years ago.

This study examines composite predicates (CPs) in the history of American English and uses an exemplar-based model to explain changes in the frequency of verb–noun pairings over time. Two different types of verb-nominal CPs are considered, including those like take a look, in which a light verb occurs with an abstract nominal object, and others like lose sight, with a more lexically specific verb. Using a corpus of texts written between 1820 and 2009, I track the frequency of different CPs and analyze several families of semantically related nouns that occur with the same verb (e.g. take a look, peak, etc.). Representative families are analyzed to determine the presence of highly frequent verb–noun pairings, or exemplars, that separate themselves over time. The success of exemplars is evaluated according to several factors that may shape patterns of use, including the relative size of noun families, the frequency band of tokens of each family and the distribution of tokens across types within a family. Results indicate that the two types of CPs differ with respect to the evolution and success of exemplary verb–noun pairings and indicate that frequency bands play a role while the size of the noun family and their distributional patterns do not.