This issue of English Language and Linguistics contains a selection of papers from the fourth conference on Late Modern English, held at the University of Sheffield in May 2010. Twenty-one years previously, when Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), such a conference, let alone the fourth in a series of such conferences, would have seemed highly unlikely. Jones was alluding to the comparative neglect of the more recent past in historical studies of English. Up to this point, linguistic scholars had tended to regard the Late Modern period as unworthy of their attention. Morton W. Bloomfield & Leonard Newmark reflect this view in their assertion that ‘after the period of the Great Vowel Shift was over, the changes that were to take place in English phonology were few indeed’ (1963: 293). They also argue that any changes in the language that had occurred between the eighteenth and the mid twentieth centuries were ‘due to matters of style and rhetoric . . . rather than to differences in phonology, grammar or vocabulary’, going on to claim that ‘historical or diachronic linguistics, as such, is traditionally less concerned with such stylistic and rhetorical changes of fashion than with phonological, grammatical and lexical changes’ (1963: 288). This tendency to disregard anything not viewed as structural is very much of its time, but almost thirty years later, Dennis Freeborn was still claiming that ‘the linguistic changes that have taken place from the eighteenth century to the present day are relatively few’ (1992: 180).

The Editors and Cambridge University Press are delighted to announce that commencing with the present issue English Language and Linguistics is formally associated with the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE; www.isle-linguistics.org) as its official journal. We believe that ELL and ISLE are a perfect match in that both aim to promote research on the English language worldwide. We are confident that this exciting collaboration will be beneficial to the field of English linguistics and all its practitioners. We are working with ISLE on benefits for members; details will be made available on the ISLE website during 2012.

I argue in this article that adverb-forming -ly, unlike its adjective-forming counterpart, is an inflectional suffix, that therefore adverbs containing -ly are inflected adjectives and that, consequently, adverbs not containing -ly are uninflected adjectives. I demonstrate that in English, the traditional category Adverb is morphologically non-distinct from the category Adjective in that it has no morphology of its own but instead shares all relevant aspects of the morphology of adjectives. I demonstrate moreover that such an analysis explains various aspects of morphological and phonological behaviour on the part of adverbial -ly which differ from the behaviour of adjectival -ly and/or from the behaviour of derivational suffixes. And I argue that contrary to a recent claim, the syntactic behaviour of adverbs presents no obstacle to the single-category analysis of adjectives and adverbs warranted by the morphology.

Dental pronunciation of alveolar consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. This Pre-R Dentalisation (PreRD) has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-Realisation Effect and a Morpheme Boundary Constraint. It is less well known that PreRD is (or perhaps was) also a feature of a number of English varieties outside Ireland, particularly in traditional northern English dialects. This article analyses dialect data from northern England in order to determine the nature of PreRD there and its historical relations with the phenomenon in Irish English. In addition, it explores the phonological complexities of PreRD in light of the loss of rhoticity in traditional northern English dialects.

Variation and change in relativization strategies are well documented. Previous studies have looked at issues such as (a) relativizer choice with respect to the semantics of the antecedent and type of relative, (b) prescriptive traditions, (c) variation across text types and regional varieties, and (d) the role that relative clauses play in the organization of information within the noun phrase.

In this article, our focus is on scientific writing in British and American English. The addition of American scientific texts to the ARCHER corpus gives us the opportunity to compare scientific discourse in the two national varieties of English over the whole Late Modern period. Furthermore, ARCHER has been parsed, and this kind of syntactic annotation facilitates the retrieval of information that was previously difficult to obtain. We take advantage of new data and annotation to investigate two largely unrelated topics: relativizer choice and textual organization within the NP.

First, parsing facilitates easy retrieval of relative clauses which were previously difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora by automatic means, namely that- and zero relatives. We study the diachronic change in relativizer choice in British and American scientific writing over the last three hundred years; we also test for the accuracy of the automatically retrieved data. In addition, we trace the development of the prescriptive aversion to which in restrictive relatives (largely peculiar to American English).

Second, the parsed data allow us to investigate development in the structure of the NP in this genre, including not only phrasal but also clausal modification of the head noun. We examine the contribution of relative clauses to NP complexity, sentence length and structure. Structural changes within the NP, we argue, are related to the increased professionalization of the scientific publication process.

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject–verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008).

English makes regular use of a number of recursive structures spanning the syntax–lexicon continuum. While NPs with recursive relative clauses occupy the syntactic end, nominal compounds are located at the lexical end. In between these extremes we find NPs with recursive periphrastic genitives (towards the syntactic end) and NPs with recursive Saxon genitives (towards the lexical end). This study presents a comparative analysis of the branching direction preferences in these recursive structures. The empirical focus is on double of-genitives, which exhibit an overwhelming predilection for right-branching. This contrasts sharply with the double Saxon genitives, which gravitate towards left-branching. The branching direction decision is argued to be under the sway of several distinct factors: a syntactic factor controlling the alternative between leftward and rightward expansion; a lexical factor regulating the idiomatization of a given pair of elements; and a processing factor geared towards preventing garden path effects. Furthermore, branching direction is determined by listeners’ desire to minimize constituent recognition domains. Taken together, these factors are held accountable for the varying branching direction biases found in the different types of NP.

This article presents a historical cognitive analysis of the development of phrasal verbs (PVs) with out and away in Early and Late Modern English. Semantically, PVs in Present-Day English can be classified as being (a) fully compositional (e.g. go out), (b) partially idiomatic, with the particle having an aspectual (i.e. grammatical) function (e.g. work away) and (c) (fully or highly) idiomatic (e.g. make out ‘understand’; see Quirk et al. 1985, Jackendoff 2010). As is clear from this classification, the development of PVs has, at least, involved grammaticalization and idiomatization. However, there is no consensus in recent grammaticalization research on how these two kinds of changes are related.

The literature suggests that the particles used in the partially idiomatic PVs were undergoing grammaticalization in the Old and Middle English periods. Therefore, to understand the semantic and conceptual relationships between partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs, a closer investigation of the uses of PVs after Early Modern English is in order. In this article, focusing on the distributions of away and out taken from colloquial corpora of Early and Late Modern English, namely, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), it is shown through descriptive characterizations that the partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs are instances of idiomatization caused by grammaticalization and by lexicalization, respectively. Based on these observations, the developments of these two types of PVs can be explained by a Usage-Based Model put forth mainly by Langacker (2000) and Bybee (2006, 2010). Specifically, the idiomatization of partially idiomatic PVs involves repeated schema extractions leading to productivity, whereas the idiomatization of fully or highly idiomatic PVs involves the ‘conserving effect’, whereby a highly entrenched linguistic expression with high frequency resists further language change.

Brinton & Traugott (2005) and Brinton (2008) have suggested that light verb constructions of the type take a look (at) are instances of grammaticalisation. This article shows that this is because the emphasis has been on the verb take. Exploring the light verb construction take prisoner, we see that one and the same construction involves both lexicalisation and grammaticalisation processes. For grammaticalisation, the focus will be on the semantic bleaching of take and the productivity of the pattern take + NP. For the lexicalisation of the construction, we will focus on the increasing fixedness of the collocation take prisoner, evident from the decreasing acceptability of the pattern make prisoner, and on the decategorialisation of the original NP prisoner, which is manifested in the loss of plural -s inflection in prisoner. The article further investigates the decategorialisation of prisoner, revealing that the word order of prisoner(s) relative to its complement NP (e.g. take the men prisoner(s) vs take prisoner(s) the men) has a considerable effect on the speed of plural s-deletion.

Definite article reduction (DAR) is a dialectal variable confined to the North of England. In DAR dialects, the standard article alternates with a reduced one, which is mostly realised as a glottal stop and sometimes as a voiceless fricative before vowels. DAR is a salient sociolinguistic marker in the sense of Labov (1972) and Trudgill (1986). This article argues that its salience is derived from its status as a good boundary marker that listeners can utilise in order to segment the speech stream.

Salience is the property of a variable which makes it cognitively or perceptually prominent both for speakers of the dialect and for speakers of other dialects. DAR is a salient marker inasmuch as it shows variation and style shifting, can be an identity marker, and has long been recognised by layperson and linguist alike as a typical feature of Northern speech.

It will be argued that DAR is salient since it is a good word-boundary marker. The reduced article constitutes domains of low transitional probability, which listeners exploit to segment the speech signal. It has been recognised that word segmentation plays a major role in speech processing and that listeners use statistical inferences (besides other kinds of information) to locate word boundaries. The conclusion is that the salience of DAR can be derived from its distributions, as these distributions result in the variable's perceptual prominence.

This article deals with the use of deictic pronouns this/these and that/those as demonstrative determiners in person-referential terms in Early and Late Modern English personal letters. The material for the study comes from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. The data chosen for this study cover personal correspondence between 1600 and 1800. The main purpose of the study is to show the link between the use of such demonstratives and what e.g. Tajfel & Turner (1979; also Hogg & Abrams 1988) call social identification. Since previous research has shown that the use of person reference in Present-Day English is biased towards group distinction, linking positive characteristics to members of one's in-group and distancing people in the out-group with negative reference, it is probable that this was the case in historical language use as well.

The study shows that most of the referents in the letter writers’, and in many cases also in the recipients’, in-group are indexed with positive descriptions and reference terms in positive contexts, whereas identifiable out-group referents mostly receive negative descriptions. The negatively, positively and neutrally evaluative functions were found to be central during both centuries. The neutral function is more prevalent than the others in the seventeenth century, but the negative and positive gain more emphasis in the eighteenth century. This shows that when both pronouns increasingly started to appear as connotative demonstrative determiners, their use as mere indexicals decreased. Overall, we can conclude that although the historical use of demonstrative pronouns as determiners in reference did not show a similar bias towards negative foregrounding to their Present-Day English equivalents, there is some indication that a change towards a more specialised use was on the way from the eighteenth century onwards.

This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of ‘error’ in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective.

The factors governing word order in binomials, i.e. coordinated word pairs of the same word class, have been the subject of discussion for a long time in linguistics. For example, why do we say law and order but not order and law? The article tests seventeen different potential ordering constraints that have previously been suggested, from the areas of semantics, phonology and word frequency, by checking over 500 high-frequency binomials extracted from the BNC against them. A clear hierarchy of constraints is suggested following the analysis of their success in predicting binomial order. In addition, however, attention is drawn to the reversibility status of binomials. The vast majority of English binomials is reversible to a smaller or larger degree. Reversibility scores were computed for all binomials in the sample so that the relationship between reversibility on the one hand and the adherence to the ordering constraints on the other could be analysed, finding that a number of semantic and metrical ordering constraints indeed increase their predictive success towards the frozen end of the reversibility cline. Complying with these constraints, then, increases the likelihood of a binomial to be less reversible. Claims for the influence of certain factors on the freezing process are thus substantiated for the first time.

This article explores the motivations behind the loss of a number of Germanic prefixes in the history of English. Using Old and Middle English translations of Boethius’ de Consolatione Philosophiae as a corpus, it is shown that prefix loss is not specific to a single word category, nor to the presence of morphosyntactic characteristics such as prefix separability. This state of affairs cannot be explained by current theories of prefix loss, which are generally restricted to inseparable verbal prefixes. The fact that some prefixes are lost and some are preserved, also argues against an across-the-board grammaticalisation account, based mostly on semantic factors. It is held here that a closer look at the prosodic structure of native prefixes can provide a principled explanation for the entirety of our data. To this effect, the optimisation of a resolved moraic trochee (Dresher & Lahiri, 1991) amid significant restructuring of the language's lexicon had crucial impact on the fate of prefixed words. In particular, Early Middle English would have come to prefer maximal, branching feet, and avoid words with prefixes constituting heavy, non-branching feet. Ultimately, the preservation of prosodic structure led to the loss of heavy monosyllabic prefixes due to stress clash between prefix and root. Light monosyllabic and bisyllabic prefixes, in contrast, were preserved, since no clash occurred. This argument explains the changes in prefixation from a purely prosodic standpoint, hence accounting for the data for both verbal and nominal prefixes, which were heretofore dealt with separately.

In both standard and nonstandard varieties of English there are several contexts in which the word never functions as a sentential negator rather than as a negative temporal adverb. This article investigates the pragmatic and distributional differences between the various non-temporal uses of never and examines their synchronic and historical relationship to the ordinary temporal quantifier use, drawing on corpora of Early Modern and present-day British English. Primary focus is on (i) a straightforward negator use that in prescriptively approved varieties of English has an aspectual restriction to non-chance, completive achievement predicates in the preterite, but no such restriction in nonstandard English; and (ii) a distinct categorical-denial use that quantifies over possible perspectives on a situation. Against Cheshire (1998), it is argued that neither of these uses represents continuity with non-temporal uses of never in Middle English, but both are instead relatively recent innovations resulting from semantic reanalysis and the semanticization of implicatures.

The translation of Lindley Murray's English Grammar (1795) into many different languages is often taken as a starting point for the spread of English as a world language. This article places the developing European interest in English much earlier than that, and it does so by analysing a series of letters in the library of the University of Leiden written by Englishmen from the Late Modern English period to men of letters in the Netherlands. The letters show that English as a medium of communication was not as a rule an issue, even though Dutch letter writers were rarely exposed to English and often lacked the tools – or the teachers – to acquire the language, a situation which would change drastically during the nineteenth century. The article also analyses the earliest attempts at writing in English by Johannes Stinstra, the Dutch translator of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

This article discusses deletion in spoken and written English. It notes that subjects are frequently dropped both in informal spoken English (Napoli 1982; Zwicky & Pullum 1983b) and in certain registers of written English such as diaries (Haegeman 1990, 1997, 2007; Haegeman & Ihsane 1999, 2001). The article argues in favour of Napoli's phonological analysis of left-edge deletion in spoken English, and provides a formalisation of Napoli's account in the framework of Selkirk's (1995, 2001, 2011) optimality-theoretic analysis of syntax–phonology mapping. A comparison is drawn with the case of subject drop in the diary register. Due to the difference in surface distribution of the phenomenon between the spoken and written cases, the analysis cannot transfer directly. However, I suggest that, combined with arguments made by Haegeman (2002) for a sentence-medial position for modifiers in written English, the phonological analysis can account for a large subset of the diary drop cases.

The occurrence of the Old English negative particle ne ‘not’ preceding a bare infinitive rather than a finite verb is a largely neglected or overlooked phenomenon. It is attested in constructions with uton ‘let's’ and in conjoined clauses with omission of the finite verb (Mitchell 1985). This article discusses evidence gathered mainly from the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, showing that it is a phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously in descriptions and analyses of Old English. It is argued that the factor shared by the two constructions is the lack of an available finite verb for ne to attach to. It is also found that the use of ne for the purpose of negative concord appears to be more variable with infinitives than it is with finite verbs. Whether attachment of ne to a non-finite verb in the absence of a finite one is restricted to bare infinitives is difficult to determine because of the limited evidence relating to other non-finite forms, but there are some indications that use of ne may have been possible with present participles. Finally, some implications that the ne + infinitive pattern has for the formal analysis of Old English are discussed.

This article attempts to repair the neglect of the qualitative uses of some and to suggest an explanation which could cover the full range of usage with this determiner – both quantitative and qualitative – showing how a single underlying meaning, modulated by contextual and pragmatic factors, can give rise to the wide variety of messages expressed by some in actual usage. Both the treatment of some as an existential quantifier and the scalar model which views some as evoking a less-than-expected quantity on a pragmatic scale are shown to be incapable of handling the qualitative uses of this determiner. An original analysis of some and the interaction of its meaning with the defining features of the qualitative uses is proposed, extending the discussion as well to the role of focus and the adverbial modifier quite. The crucial semantic feature of some for the explanation of its capacity to express qualitative readings is argued to be non-identification of a referent assumed to be particular. Under the appropriate conditions, this notion can give rise to qualitative denigration (implying it is not even worth the bother to identify the referent) or qualitative appreciation (implying the referent to be so outstanding that it defies identification). The explanation put forward is also shown to cover some's use as an approximator, thereby enhancing its plausibility even further.