The usual development of OE [ɑld] in words such as old in Scots is to auld, reflecting the development of this sequence in northern dialects more generally. But in some Scots dialects other pronunciations of these words, reminiscent of dialects of English south of the Ribble–Humber Line, are found. These forms, of the type owld, are found across Lowland Scotland, with particular concentrations in the far north and southwest. Origins in Irish English and English in England have been suggested for this feature of Scots but these hypotheses have not been explored. Aitken & Macafee (2002: 61–2) instead argue for an endogenous origin of both auld and owld, but this proposed double endogenous development of OE [ɑld] is problematic in a number of ways. In this article, I examine the history of these developments in Scots in comparison to their development in dialects of English in England and Ireland. The lack of evidence for the owld development in Older Scots suggests that these forms are of relatively recent origin. Crucially, the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) reveals that the owld pronunciations were in fact a feature of early forms of Standard English. Furthermore, several characteristic features of Irish English have spread into southwest Scotland, and the distribution of owld forms in the area fits this pattern. Thus Scots forms such as owld are not the result of endogenous development, but have their origin in English, in the case of southwest Scotland at least in part from Irish English, and elsewhere in Scotland from early forms of Standard English. These owld forms have been ‘localised’ and reinterpreted as ‘Scots’, alongside or replacing original auld. The analysis of the origins of this feature highlights not only the role of contact with varieties of English in the development of Scots, but also the importance of sources such as the ECEP database for understanding the historical phonology of Scots and English.

From Old English to Middle English inflection is gradually lost. It is assumed that this is mainly due to phonological and syntactic changes. This article, however, argues that the loss of inflection is not a linear process but new systems can emerge, and that morphological changes play an important role. The nominal inflection of the Lambeth Homilies – an Early Middle English manuscript from the southwest Midlands and dated around 1200 – is investigated in detail. It will be shown that analogical changes within and across inflection classes do not simply lead towards a reduction of inflection. The increase in syncretism and decrease in allomorphy result in a new inflectional system. This new system distinguishes singular from plural, feminine from non-feminine (in the singular and plural), and possessive from non-possessive (in the singular and plural). Additionally, the original inflection classes related to different stems are almost lost, except the weak inflection classes. The inflection classes are instead related to gender; that is, gender is the information that best predicts how a noun is inflected.

Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016) define probabilistic indigenization as the process whereby probabilistic constraints shape variation patterns in different ways, which eventually leads to more heterogeneity in the constraints governing syntactic variation across different varieties of English. The present study extends our knowledge of the heterogeneity of probabilistic grammars by sketching a corpus-based variationist method for calculating the similarity between varieties thereby drawing inspiration from the comparative sociolinguistics literature. Based on linguistic material from the International Corpus of English, we ascertain the degree of regional variability of five probabilistic constraints on the genitive, dative, particle placement and subject pronoun omission alternations across three varieties of English, namely British, Indian and Singapore English. Our results indicate that, of the four alternations under study, the genitive alternation is the most homogeneous one from a regional perspective, followed – in increasing order of heterogeneity – by subject pronoun omission, dative and particle placement alternations. On the basis of these findings, we evaluate claims in the literature according to which the extent of probabilistic indigenization is proportional to the lexical specificity of the syntactic phenomenon under study, a hypothesis that is borne out by our data.

The lateral approximant in General British English (GB) is realised as light when occurring in the onset (leaf), and as dark in the rhyme (help, feel, google). Non-prevocalic positions are typical contexts for lenition, analysed in Element Theory as decomposition in weak positions. However, it is unclear how velarisation can be characterised as element loss if light [l] is represented as |A I|, while dark [ɫ] is represented as |A U|. Therefore, I propose that laterals in GB contain both the coronal |I| and the velar |U| element underlyingly (in addition to |A|), but because these cannot combine in a compound segment in English, they are both floating. Their association at the phrase level is determined by the apophonic chain (Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996), mapped onto the structure of the syllable: |I| is attracted to the prevocalic position, |A| to the vocalic position and |U| to the postvocalic position. Darkening thus does not involve lenition of /l/, but partial interpretation in all positions. In contrast, I analyse vocalisation of dark [ɫ] as lenition, involving loss of |A| in weak positions. I integrate the lateral into the system of glides in English, and establish a typology of its behaviour across different accents.

The present corpus-based study deals with eight sets of rivalling prepositions in verb-dependent prepositional phrases. The two or three members of these sets, though equivalent in specific uses, differ in terms of functional explicitness. For instance, in directional uses, into can be regarded as more explicit than in. The main objective is to demonstrate for each of these sets that, in line with the Complexity Principle, the more explicit items are favoured in more complex grammatical environments. The contexts under scrutiny include those produced by passivisation, Heavy NP Shift, object relativisation, the use of full object NPs rather than personal pronouns, and preposition stranding. Thus, we observe that – compared with basic active clauses – preposition stranding in the active induces increased shares of the more explicit prepositions in question. Predictably, even higher degrees of prepositional explicitness are found with the combination of preposition stranding and passivisation. Also, it is shown that Heavy NP Shift tends to trigger greater proportions of the more explicit prepositions than object relativisation. The observed tendencies hold for Present-day English and earlier stages of English as well as for morphologically related and unrelated rival prepositions.

The basic valency orientation of Old English has been addressed in a number of studies, without any consensus emerging so far. From a synchronic point of view, a key question is whether the pronounced tendency to labile coding in Present-day English can be traced back to the Old English period. In order to give a convincing answer, this article examines from a synchronic and diachronic point of view two of the procedures by which the basic valency of Old English has been assessed: computation of verbs and evaluation of the causative ja-formation. Concerning the former, it shows that the valency of whole verb classes in Old English is determined by previous processes of morphophonetic merger and cannot therefore be used as evidence for labilisation processes (transitivisation or detransitivation) taking place in OE itself. With respect to the latter, the article assesses whether the causative ja-formation is still a transitivising operation in Old English by examining the valency of all causative ja-pairs and incorporating recent research on the effectiveness of sound alternations as morphological markers. This article concludes that it is not, as it does not consistently signal an increase in valency. Rather, a tendency to labile coding is detected. In this respect, the article supports, with more conclusive evidence, previous research which advanced the same hypothesis.

This article reports on the use of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.

Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light of the corpus-based observations.

This article presents a corpus analysis of changes over a period of two centuries in speech-reporting constructions in written White South African English (WSAfE), a native variety of English that has been in contact with Afrikaans throughout its history. The analysis is based on register-differentiated comparable diachronic corpora of WSAfE, its parent variety, British English (BrE), and the contact language, Afrikaans. Three related reported-speech constructions are analysed, focusing on changes in the relative frequencies of variants of each construction. These constructions show ongoing change, with similar trajectories of change for WSAfE and BrE in some cases, but divergent trajectories in others. In the latter case, WSAfE and Afrikaans converge on similar frequency distributions, which follow from an accelerated rate of change or a slowing down of the rate of change for particular features in WSAfE in comparison to BrE. Descriptive findings are supported by conditional inference tree modelling. The effect of frequency on reinforcing similar patterns of change in WSAfE and Afrikaans, as well as simplification through the levelling of register differences in WSAfE and Afrikaans are proposed as explanations. The study highlights the importance of converging norms in a multilingual publication industry as a site of contact.

The article deals with two of the long-standing problems in English linguistics: whether it is possible that each noun can have both count and mass senses, and the problem of determining a complete list of the regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. While there have been numerous attempts to solve each of these problems, this article shows the results of applying Cognitive Grammar to them.

The analysis covers a set of concrete nouns representative of English – sixty nouns with different ontological properties and all frequencies of occurrence. These are nouns that are classified by dictionaries as solely count and solely mass. Because of its usage-based character, the analysis scrutinises over 1,700 real-life utterances produced by native speakers of English. The analysis shows that even such nouns possess senses whose properties are the reverse of the properties of the nouns’ basic senses. A thorough examination of the nouns’ basic and extended senses leads to certain grammatical regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. The analysis not only systematises the grammatical regularities determined so far and solves many problems that can be noticed about them, but also proposes novel regularities.

This article explores the anglicisation of the Scots language between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the variation between the orthographic clusters <quh-> and <wh-> found in relative and interrogative clause markers. Using modern statistical techniques, we provide the most comprehensive empirical analysis of this variation so far in the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (Meurman-Solin 1995). By combining the techniques of Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert 2008, 2010, 2012) with mixed-effects logistic regression modelling (Baayen et al.2008), we uncover a different trajectory of change than that which has previously been reported for this feature (Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997). We argue that by using modern methods of data reduction and statistical modelling, we can present a picture of language change in Scots that is more fine-grained than previous studies which use only descriptive statistics.

Based on an investigation of the Old Bailey Corpus, this article explores the development and usage patterns of maximizers in Late Modern English (LModE). The maximizers to be considered for inclusion in the study are based on the lists provided in Quirk et al. (1985) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002). The aims of the study were to (i) document the frequency development of maximizers, (ii) investigate the sociolinguistic embedding of maximizers usage (gender, class) and (iii) analyze the sociopragmatics of maximizers based on the speakers’ roles, such as judge or witness, in the courtroom.

Of the eleven maximizer types focused on in the investigation, perfectly and entirely were found to dominate in frequency. The whole group was found to rise over the period 1720 to 1913. In terms of gender, social class and speaker roles, there was variation in the use of maximizers across the different speaker groups. Prominently, defendants, but also judges and lawyers, maximized more than witnesses and victims; further, male speakers and higher-ranking speakers used more maximizers. The results were interpreted taking into account the courtroom context and its dialogue dynamics.