This article offers an account of i-umlaut in Old English based on lexical minimality: the elimination of redundancies from, in this case, the phonological subentries in the lexicon. And the notation is that of Anderson & Ewen (1987), which is based, crucially for the present formulation, on simplex features which may combine in varying proportions. These assumptions combine to favour system-dependent underspecification. In accord with lexical minimality, the approach taken here is also polysystemic: thus, for instance, Old English vowels, even Old English accented vowels, do not enter into only one system of contrasts. The phonology is a system of systems sharing some but not all contrasts. The article attempts to show that on this basis some of the many apparent anomalies that the evidence has been thought to suggest can be resolved in terms of a simple coherent formulation. Concerning the interpretation of this evidence, it is the intention of the article to minimize appeals to phonetic features and phonetic processes not warranted by textual and comparative testimony. It is suggested that lack of attention to polysystemicity and a pervasive indulgence on the part of historical phonologists in phonetic fantasies undermine the conclusions reached by generations of scholars concerning the development of phonological systems, both in general and in particular.

Intonation is known to convey many nuances of meaning, both emotional and attitudinal, but a way of explaining how these meanings arise has so far remained elusive. While some emotions may have direct correlates in a speaker's voice, such correlates are harder to find for attitudinal meanings.

The word please is typically a routine expression of courtesy, but data from the International Corpus of British English (ICE GB) reveals please to be a pragmatic marker with a wide range of expressive functions. This study, which uses a quantitative approach combined with qualitative analysis, has implications for the study of other pragmatic particles, and also provides the basis for the understanding of attitudinal intonation in a wider context.

This article examines grammatical conditioning of the use of nonstandard -s in expletive there sentences. The discussion is based on data from a Midlands variety of English (UK). In negative constructions, speakers tend to allow for nonstandard -s with no and constituent not, but not to use it with n't or clausal not. Further, nonstandard -s is admitted in declarative existentials, but disfavoured in interrogatives. By comparison, occurrences of nonstandard -s in nonexistential structures did not seem to demonstrate these constraints. Investigating such constraints is instructive in several respects. First, they help to identify the nature of nonstandard -s. Second, they provide new evidence for the generative inquiry into issues relating to subject–verb agreement. Third, they delimit variable contexts for variationist analyses. In this way generative and variationist objectives meet. I will argue that researching syntactic variation necessitates combining generative and variationist methodology.

In this paper we analyse variable presence of the complementizer that, i.e. I thinkthat/Øthis is interesting, in a large archive of British dialects. Situating this feature within its historical development and synchronic patterning, we seek to understand the mechanism underlying the choice between that and zero. Our findings reveal that, in contrast to the diachronic record, the zero option is predominant – 91 per cent overall. Statistical analyses of competing factors operating on this feature confirm that grammaticalization processes and grammatical complexity play a role. However, the linguistic characteristics of a previously grammaticalized collocation, I think, exerts a greater effect. Its imprint is visible in multiple internal factors which constrain the zero option in the other contexts. We argue that this recurrent pattern in discourse propels the zero option through the grammar. These findings contribute to research arguing for a strong relationship between frequency and reanalysis in linguistic change.

Some nonmodal tense forms (e.g. thought) can trigger one or two kinds of modal interpretation, viz. suspended factuality (implicating present counterfactuality) of the complement clause (I thought you weren't married) or discourse tentativeness (I thought you might lend me your camera). The authors explain how this nonmodal use of the past tense – the thinking is represented as a past fact – can lead to one of these modal interpretations of the complement clause. In doing so they discuss various observations in connection with these and other I thought that…constructions and similar uses of other past-tense and past-perfect forms.

This article examines the usefulness of Skousen's Analogical Modeling (AM) for explaining morphological change. In contrast to previous accounts of analogy, AM constitutes a general unified model of language that accounts for both sporadic and systematic changes. AM also provides explicit constraints on analogy that allow explanation of how morphological changes begin, which forms most likely serve as patterns for analogy, and which forms are most likely to change.

AM is then tested on the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English (in-, un-, dis-, etc.), using the Middle and Early Modern English portions of the Helsinki corpus as a basis for prediction. AM was given the task of using forms containing negative prefixes for one time period to predict the prefixes that adjectives would take in the subsequent time period. For each of the roughly seventy-year periods in the corpus, AM was able to predict valid prefixes about 90 percent of the time.

Vivian Cook, The English writing system. London: Arnold, 2004. Pp. vi + 229, ISBN 0 340 80864 0

We would like to thank the following colleagues for kindly agreeing to referee papers for the journal over the past year.