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Loan verb accommodation: a comparison of Old Norse and French in Middle English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 W. JULIANE ELTER, MARLIEKE SHAW
Recent research shows that, even under direct insertion, loan verbs are subject to constraints: for instance, they enter non-finite categories more readily than finite categories. To deepen our understanding of such loan word accommodation biases we investigate two contact situations to test whether biases hold in contact between closely related languages. A corpus study on Norse and French loan verbs
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‘When intuitions (don't) fail’: combining syntax and sociolinguistics in the analysis of Scots Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 E JAMIESON, JENNIFER SMITH, DAVID ADGER, CAROLINE HEYCOCK, GARY THOMS
A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this
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A quantitative exploration of the functions of auxiliary do in Middle English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-17 LORENZO MORETTI
One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims
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Morphosyntactic agreement in English: does it help the listener in noise? Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-03 Marcel Schlechtweg
English morphosyntactic agreement, such as determiner–noun agreement in These cabs broke down and noun–verb agreement in The cabs break down, has a few interesting properties that enable us to investigate whether agreement has a psycholinguistic function, that is, whether it helps the listener process linguistic information expressed by a speaker. The present project relies on these properties in a
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An exploratory investigation of functional variation in South Asian online Englishes Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Muhammad Shakir
This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive
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A topic which I want to know more about – preposition placement in finite WH-relative clauses in World Englishes Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 VICTORIA MUẞEMANN
The present article analyzes the use of preposition stranding (the world which we live in) and pied-piping (the world in which we live) in finite WH-relative clauses in twelve varieties of English. In the light of previous studies, it assumes that the strength of processing constraints and formality effects that drive speakers’ constructional choices should correlate with Dynamic Model stages (Schneider
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Rhythm in the Kingdom: a variationist analysis of speech rhythm in Tongan English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 DANIELLE TOD
This article presents an analysis of speech rhythm in Tongan English, an emergent variety spoken in the Kingdom of Tonga. The normalised Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI-V) is used to classify the variety and determine the social and stylistic constraints on variation in a corpus of conversational and reading passage data with 48 speakers. Findings reveal a greater tendency towards stress-timing in
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English comparative modals and their complements Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 JOANNA NYKIEL, JACOB THAISEN
English comparative modals are combinations of the adverbs rather, sooner and better with an auxiliary. There is recent consensus that the comparative modals rather and sooner have over time developed a different syntax and semantics than better. However, potential differences in the syntax of rather and sooner with respect to patterns of complementation haven’t been explored. This article reports
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A social turn for Construction Grammar: double modals on British Twitter Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 CAMERON MORIN, GUILLAUME DESAGULIER, JACK GRIEVE
Construction Grammar is an emerging theory of language, but the analysis of sociolinguistic variation is still relatively underdeveloped in the framework. In this article, we consider the representation of social meaning in Construction Grammar through a corpus-based analysis of double modals in British English on social media. We describe the use of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Twitter
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When to (not) split the infinitive: factors governing patterns of syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 WILKINSON DANIEL WONG GONZALES
The variability of adverbial placement in the modified infinitive construction (i.e. split infinitives vs. full infinitives with adverbial pre- and post-modification) has been widely discussed in the (American English) literature. Yet a convincing generalized explanation for the variation that simultaneously incorporates language-internal and language-external factors has yet to be found, particularly
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The syntactic status of V-final conjunct clauses in Old English: the role of priming Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 ANNA CICHOSZ
This study is a corpus-based investigation of the use of the V-final (VF) order in Old English conjunct (or coordinate) clauses. The aim of the analysis is to determine which of the two hypotheses formulated in earlier studies of the subject finds more convincing data support in the available corpora of Old English. According to one interpretation, conjunct clauses are a subtype of main clauses, and
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Expanding the scope of grammatical variation: towards a comprehensive account of genitive variation across registers Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 DOUGLAS BIBER, BENEDIKT SZMRECSANYI, RANDI REPPEN, TOVE LARSSON
Most studies of genitive variation in English have considered only the choice of two variants ('s versus of), based on analysis of only tokens that are judged to be interchangeable. We argue in the present article that research on genitive variation can be usefully extended in both respects: including premodifying nouns as a third variant; and attempting to account for all tokens of the genitive. In
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Language change is wicked: semantic and social meaning of a polysemous adjective Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-04 RHYS J. SANDOW, GEORGE BAILEY, NATALIE BRABER
As a result of an ameliorative shift-to-opposite, the polysemous adjective wicked is an auto-antonym, having two senses opposite in meaning, that is, ‘evil’ and ‘good’. We discuss two studies which explore the social life of this word, with the first focusing on its production and the second on its perception. In the first study, conducted in Cornwall, United Kingdom, we find that young men are most
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‘The night before beg'd ye queens's pardon and his brother's’: the apostrophe in the history of English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-24 JAVIER CALLE-MARTÍN, MARTA PACHECO-FRANCO
The apostrophe was introduced into the English orthographic system by the mid sixteenth century as a printer's mark especially designed ‘for the eye rather than for the ear’ (Sklar 1976: 175; Little 1986: 15). Whereas the uses of the apostrophe today are limited to the Saxon genitive construction (the woman's book), to verbal contractions (you'll ‘you will’ or you're ‘you are’) and to other formulaic
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Talking to peasants: language, place and class in British fiction 1800–1836 Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 JANE HODSON
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’
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The long history of shortening: a diachronic analysis of abbreviation practices from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 ALPO HONKAPOHJA, IMOGEN MARCUS
This article investigates continuities and changes in abbreviation practices from late Middle English to twenty-first-century digital platforms. Adopting a diachronic perspective and lexicological framework, it quantitatively analyses frequency patterns across fifteenth-century memoranda, letters and administrative receipts, seventeenth-century letters and depositions, late nineteenth-century letters
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Oblique predicative constructions in English with for and as: qua vs qualitate qua Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 BAS AARTS
English has an oblique predicative construction in which the prepositions for and as license an oblique predicative complement that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The construction with for is the oldest, and is found in many other languages. This article traces the history of oblique predicative constructions involving for and as, and
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‘Well, taakin about he da bring inta me yead wat I promised var ta tell ee about’: representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-16 JAVIER RUANO-GARCÍA
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
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Epistemic phrases and adolescent speech in West London Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-16 ROSAMUND OXBURY, MATTHEW HUNT, JENNY CHESHIRE
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
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Speech reflections in Late Modern English pauper letters from Dorset Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 ANNE-CHRISTINE GARDNER
The overall aim of this article is to show that pauper letters are a valuable, but as yet largely untapped resource for historical dialectological research. Offering a case study based on 31 poor-relief applications sent by 10 individuals to parishes in Dorset between 1742 and 1834, the article aims to identify regional variation, especially as associated with Dorset and/or the Southwest of England
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‘Practised among the common people’: ‘vulgar’ pronunciations in eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 JOAN C. BEAL
In a corpus compiled from the notes in John Walker's pronouncing dictionary (first edition 1791), Trapateau (2016) found that the most frequently occurring evaluative term used was vulgar. In Walker's dictionary, vulgar is defined as ‘plebeian, suiting to the common people, practised among the common people, mean, low, being of the common rate; publick, commonly bruited’ (1791, s.v. vulgar). The frequency
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Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in the Old Bailey Corpus Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 PETER J. GRUND
This article deals with the mechanisms that language users employ in historical periods to represent spoken language in writing. I focus on a set of features known as speech descriptors, which allow users to combine representation and evaluation of the speech (and, possibly, of the speaker), such as most disgusting in ‘he used most disgusting language’. The study shows that such speech descriptors
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Representations of phonological changes in goat and /r/ in the Collection of Nineteenth-century Grammars (CNG) Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 MARCO WIEMANN
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
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Yorkshire folk versus Yorkshire boors: evidence for sociological fractionation in nineteenth-century Yorkshire dialect writing Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-04 PAUL COOPER
In this article I illustrate the discourses surrounding enregistered Yorkshire dialect and identity which appear to demonstrate sociological fractionation (Agha 2007) in nineteenth-century texts including dialect literature and literary dialect (Shorrocks 1996), dialect poems, ballads, songs, dialogues, and the dialect from Yorkshire characters in novels and plays. The emergent discourses highlight
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Reflexive analytic causatives: a diachronic analysis of transitivity parameters Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 ULRIKE SCHNEIDER
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
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Expletive insertion: a morphological approach Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 TIM ZINGLER
English words containing inserted expletives, like absobloodylutely or unbefuckinglievable, are often said to be created by ‘infixation’. One goal of this work is to argue that such claims are self-contradictory. Infixes are affixes, but the expletives are not. Rather, they are themselves morphologically complex, are not bound, and can occur with words from different syntactic categories. Hence, the
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The usage of there sentences with become: the relationship between change of state and appearance/occurrence Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 TAKASHI MINO
Numerous studies have investigated the kinds of verbs that can be used with there constructions. Generally, only existence and appearance verbs can occur in there constructions. However, some cases have been observed involving verbs not lexically expressing existence or appearance. This study focuses on there sentences with the verb become which are noteworthy in the following two respects. First,
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When English complement clauses meet evidential adverbs Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 LOIS KEMP
There is much literature about the licensing of complement clauses by complement-taking predicates. However, less has been written about the licensing of adverbs in a complement clause. This article addresses the licensing of English evidential adverbs in complement clauses extracted from the NOW corpus. The article discusses three factors that determine the distribution of evidential adverbs in complement
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Lexicosemantic diffusion in World Englishes: variable meaning–form relations in prospective verbs Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-24 EDGAR W. SCHNEIDER
This article suggests that in the investigation of World Englishes, which has tended to focus on syntactic, phonological and lexical preferences, the analysis of shifts in word meanings (and meaning–form relations in lexical items) needs to be incorporated. Exemplary small-scale studies show that in polysemic words certain varieties come to prefer specific meanings, and in word fields some varieties
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Double modals in contemporary British and Irish speech Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 STEVEN COATS
This article reports on the use of double modals, a non-standard syntactic feature, in the contemporary speech of the UK and Ireland. Most data on the geographic extent of the feature and its combinatorial types come from surveys or acceptability ratings or from older attestations focused on northern England, Scotland or Northern Ireland, with relatively few attestations in naturalistic data and from
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Survival factors in the early Middle English lexicon Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 JOHANNA VOGELSANGER
Using a corpus linguistic approach, this article aims to answer the question of which factors contribute to a better chance of survival for words in the early Middle English lexicon. Because of the cognitive benefits of rhyme that have been shown in modern studies, there is a particular interest in rhyming position as a potential factor; other factors include frequency, suffix and geographical spread
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The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 BETTELOU LOS, GEA DRESCHLER, ANS VAN KEMENADE, ERWIN KOMEN, STEFANO CORETTA
This article presents a quantitative study of the referential status of PPs in clause-initial position in the history of English. Earlier work (Los 2009; Dreschler 2015) proposed that main-clause-initial PPs in Old English primarily function as ‘local anchors’, linking a new clause to the immediately preceding discourse. As this function was an integral part of the verb-second (V2) constraint, the
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Functional idiosyncrasies of suggesting constructions in British English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 MIN-CHANG SUNG
This study aims to examine functional idiosyncrasies of seemingly synonymous constructions and explain their frequency distributions in different spoken registers. To this end, lexical and discoursal approaches in the corpus-based research of constructions are combined to investigate how significant collocates of three suggesting constructions – namely, let's, what/how about and why don't you/we –
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Deictic this and speaker containment Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 PHILIP MILLER
This article examines a hitherto unnoticed set of deictic uses of the English proximal demonstrative this, namely those where the speaker is contained in the referent of the demonstrative NP. The usual case, where the speaker is not contained in the referent, has been extensively studied and the choice between proximal and distal has been argued to be based on a combination of physical (proximity of
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Epistemic space and key concepts in early and late modern medical discourse: an exploration of two genres Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 RICHARD J. WHITT
This article provides a corpus-driven overview of the ‘epistemic space’ surrounding the use of two lockwords of Early and Late Modern English writings on midwifery and childbirth, child and uterus. Rather than searching for epistemic stance markers themselves, this study employs the ‘bottom-up’ approach by examining the propositions containing these lockwords, and then seeing what particular epistemic
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Pseudo-partitives in English: an HPSG analysis Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 FRANK VAN EYNDE, JONG-BOK KIM
Pseudo-partitives are strings of the form [N1 – of – N2] in which N1 denotes a quantity or amount of whatever it is that N2 denotes and in which N2 is a bare nominal. Such strings come in two types, depending on whether the combination shares the number value of N1 or N2. The first type can be analyzed along familiar lines, but the second one is a hard nut to crack. The article presents existing treatments
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As if that wasn't enough: English as if clauses as multimodal utterance constructions Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 CLAUDIA LEHMANN
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,
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The most stable it's ever been: the preterit/present perfect alternation in spoken Ontario English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-18 KARLIEN FRANCO, SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
English tense/aspect-marking is an area where variation abounds and where many theories have been formulated. Diachronic studies of the preterit/present perfect alternation indicate that the present perfect (e.g. I have eaten already) has been losing ground to the preterit (e.g. I ate already) (e.g. Elsness 1997, but see Hundt & Smith 2009, Werner 2014). However, few studies have examined this alternation
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Is [nuz] really the new [njuz]? Yod dropping in Toronto English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-18 KATHARINA PABST
This article investigates yod dropping, i.e. the loss of the onglide after the coronals /t, d, n/, in Toronto English. Previous research has shown that this change is almost complete in Canadian English. However, most work has drawn on self-reported data rather than actual speech, and few studies have taken word frequency into consideration, although it has been shown to play a major role during earlier
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CP complements of er-nominalisations in English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-04 MATTHEW TYLER
Er-nominalisations which take CP complements are rare in English, but possible. A common construction involving one is to be a firm believer that…. I propose that the behaviour of CP-taking er-nominalisations (‘CoPTErs’) results from a tension. On the one hand, they are Argument Structure Nominals in the sense of Grimshaw (1990), and they ‘inherit’ the argument-taking properties of their parent verb
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The axes of time: spatiotemporal relations in Old English vocabulary Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 EMILIA CASTAÑO, ISABEL VERDAGUER CLAVERA
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
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Quantifying relational nouns in corpora Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-20 LELIA GLASS
While relational nouns (cousin) are traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this article approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for the ontological class of the noun's referent (focusing on nouns
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Segment count and weight in y-adjective comparatives: inroads that bite off more than one can chew! Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-11 DEBORAH CHUA
Adjectival syllable count, often used to predict English comparatives more versus -er, is of little help in predicting the comparatives of adjectives ending in , 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
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Familiar when-relatives and peculiar when-relatives in English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-19 WENSHAN LI, JIANG LIU
Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifying when-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent of when and they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of
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A multivariate account of particle alternation after bare-form try in native varieties of English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-19 DAVID TIZÓN-COUTO
This multifactorial study reviews the determinants of particle alternation after uninflected try in varieties where English is native. The effects of a number of previously discussed and novel predictors are probed in data from well-known corpora. The results confirm the inclinations of North American varieties (try to) in contrast with those of the Australasian, British and Irish varieties (try and
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A Just So Story: on the recent emergence of the purpose subordinator just so Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-13 GUNTHER KALTENBÖCK, ELNORA TEN WOLDE
This article identifies just so as a newly emerging purpose subordinator. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English, it traces its development and steady increase in frequency from its first attestation in the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Just so is shown to represent a case of semantic specialization where the purpose meaning
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Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? The s duration of English regular plural nouns Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-12 MARCEL SCHLECHTWEG, GREVILLE G. CORBETT
Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting
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Syllable weight and natural duration in textsetting popular music in English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-23 KEVIN M. RYAN
Hayes & Kaun (1996) argue that the mapping of syllables onto a metrical grid in textsetting is sensitive to natural duration, not just categorical weight (heavy or light). Most of their evidence, however, derives the final lengthening effects, which admit of another possible analysis (Halle 2004). Drawing on a corpus of 2,371 popular songs in English, I confirm that even when one controls for final
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Raiding the demotic: verse as evidence for speech prosody in Old and Middle English Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-15 CHRISTOPHER B. McCULLY
This article reviews the isomorphism which may or may not have existed between the speech-prosodic principles pertaining in Old English (OE) and in later Englishes, and the metrical patterns evident in both OE and (early) Middle English lyric poetry. A key question is this: was there isomorphism in OE between rules of right-edge phrasal prominence in speech and purely metrical prominence? Recent theories
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Early metrical and lexicographical evidence for functional stress-shifts Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-12 DONKA MINKOVA, Z.L. ZHOU
Only three English diatones, outlaw, rebel, record, out of the current 235-item list in Hotta (2015), are on record prior to the seventeenth century; the latest record of diatonic outlaw is 1786 (Sherman 1975: 63). Whether this type of functional prosodic contrast was inherited or innovative is controversial. We revisit the Old English metrical evidence for functional stress-shifting and present new
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The coinages in Seuss Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-10 BRUCE HAYES
The children's books of Dr. Seuss abound in words that the author invented. Inspection shows that these coinages are not arbitrary, raising the challenge of specifying the linguistic basis on which they were created. Drawing evidence from regression analyses covering the full set of Seuss coinages, I note several patterns, which include coinages that are phonotactically ill-formed, coinages meant to
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Special issue on verse structure and linguistic modelling: introductory notes Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-10 DONKA MINKOVA, CHRISTOPHER B. McCULLY
Verse was first.Verse and its forms have always held the attention of linguists and other humanists. Just over the last seven years there have been meetings spotlighting metrics at the University of Essex (2015), the University of Tallinn (2017), the University of Stockholm (2018), the University of Padua (2022) and most relevant to this special issue, a full session on historical metrics at the 2021
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A quantitative model of verb–object order in Middle English with special reference to the prose–poetry distinction Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 RICHARD ZIMMERMANN
This article reports a regression model for the change from OV to VO in Middle English. It focuses on genre (prose versus poetry) as a predictor by including data from a recently published corpus, the Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry (PCMEP; Zimmermann 2015). Other independent variables considered are time, object type, clause type and weight. The results specify the time course of the development
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Linguistic change and metre: the demise of adjectival inflections and the scansion of ‘high’ and ‘sly’ in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 AD PUTTER
This article examines the inflectional system of adjectives in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, with particular reference to the adjectives ‘high’ and ‘sly’. Since these poets were careful metrists, scansion allows us to determine the syllabic status of adjectives in their verse. While in Chaucer and Gower, the grammatical system for the inflection of monosyllabic adjectives (final -e for weak and plural
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Metrical evidence for the evolution of English syntax Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 GEOFFREY RUSSOM
Kuhn (1933) proposed that the evolution of Germanic syntax began with a need to restore acceptable sentence rhythm after a shift to fixed initial stress. Kuhn found support for his hypothesis in ‘laws’ for word placement that applied in alliterative poetry but not in prose. Kuhn assumed that his laws were syntactic rules of Proto-Germanic maintained by conservative poets. Here I argue that Kuhn's Laws
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Regularized modal verbs in Middle English dialects Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 SUNE GREGERSEN
The article investigates an overlooked development in the history of the English modals, namely the regularization of their plural inflection in Middle English (e.g. prs.ind.pl shulleþ for expected shullen). Using the LAEME and eLALME atlases and a number of electronic corpora, I document the frequency and dialectal distribution of such regularized modal verbs. It is shown that regularized shall was
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Social meaning in archival interaction: a mixed-methods analysis of variation in rhoticity and past tense be in Oldham Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 HOLLY DANN, SADIE DURKACZ RYAN, ROB DRUMMOND
This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the indexical fields of two variables, one phonological (rhoticity) and one morphosyntactic (past tense be), in oral history interviews with speakers from Oldham (Greater Manchester, UK), born between 1907 and 1929. In a quantitative analysis of the variation, we account for a range of linguistic constraints, and find some evidence suggesting
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Complex numerals in English: constituents or not? Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-15 CHUANSHENG HE, ONE-SOON HER
This article focuses on the controversy over whether complex numerals in English are constituents. Contra the traditional view (e.g. Hurford 1975; Greenberg 1990 [1978]), the cascading structure proposed in Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) maintains that cross-linguistically a complex numeral does not form a constituent to the exclusion of the NP complement. The derivation of an additive complex numeral
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Phrasal verbs in Early Modern English spoken language: a colloquialization conspiracy? Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-30 PAULA RODRÍGUEZ-PUENTE, MARÍA OBAYA-CUELI
Phrasal verbs (e.g. fade away, give up) tend to be associated with spoken, colloquial registers, not only in Present-day English, but also in previous stages of the language. This view has recently been challenged by Thim's (2006a, 2012) ‘colloquialization conspiracy’, according to which the idea that phrasal verbs are colloquial is based on a misconception which first arose in the eighteenth century
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Dialect levelling and Cockney diphthong shift reversal in South East England: the case of the Debden Estate Engl. Lang. Linguist. (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-12 AMANDA COLE, PATRYCJA STRYCHARCZUK
This article explores an instance of dialect levelling in South East England, the reversal of Cockney diphthong shift. We trace this reversal through an apparent-time analysis of 52 speakers from Debden, a community in Essex with East London heritage. Dynamic vowel analyses of word-list and passage data suggests a reversal of the diphthong shift towards SSBE targets which has occurred most abruptly