This article aims to systematically explain linguistic facts concerning the will + be -ing construction (WBI construction) in terms of a general theory of tense. For this purpose, temporal structures of the WBI construction are constructed based on the tense theory of Wada (2001, 2009, 2011) by combining temporal structures of sentences containing will with temporal structures of sentences containing present-progressive forms. It is shown that the temporal structure-based analysis not only addresses problems with previous studies, but also illuminates the characteristics of the WBI construction in a unified way.

Across Englishes, frequently used epistemic/evidential complement-taking predicates (e/e ctps) have undergone conventionalisation, whereby subject + e/e verb constructions are reanalysed as formulaic stance markers. However, the system of e/e ctps in Australian English (AusE) – and the degree to which they have grammaticalised – remains unexplored. In this article, we offer a quantitative analysis of the most frequent e/e ctps in the spoken portion of the International Corpus of English – Australia. Multivariate analysis shows that think and guess stand as canonical encoders of speaker attitude, and reckon is multifunctional, encoding epistemic modality and evidentiality. Assuming that (inter-)subjective meaning represents the last stage in semantic change, our results indicate that AusE reckon is less grammaticalised than think and guess.

Constructions involving a ditransitive verb, a direct theme object, and an indirect recipient object have been extensively studied – especially in the contexts of the ‘dative’ and the ‘benefactive alternations’, i.e. the alternations between a double-object construction (DOC) (e.g. She gave him a book) and a corresponding prepositional construction (PREP) either with to (e.g. She gave a book to him) or with for (e.g. She bought a book for him). The present study focuses on a ditransitive phenomenon which occurs in British dialects: when both objects are pronouns, three variants of encoding are possible: DOC (e.g. Give me it!), PREP (e.g. Give it to me!) and the alternative double-object construction (altDOC) (e.g. Give it me!). The regional distribution and diachronic development of the three constructions are traced using two corpora containing regional speech: the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED)1 and the online version of the British National Corpus (BNCweb). In concentrating on a dialect phenomenon, in taking language-external determinants of the ‘dative/benefactive alternation’ into consideration, and in investigating these empirically, the present study takes a novel approach to the much-discussed topic of ditransitives in English.

It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwā ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric's Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher's exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause-external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett's (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.

This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100–1500) and Early Modern English (1500–1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb–object–particle and verb–particle–object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999, 2003; Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English.

The focus of this article is what Anderson (2005: 72) describes as ‘another chronic puzzle in English’, the case of to-contraction. We set out to show that the extent and nature of to-contraction has not been captured by the literature to date, because researchers have been concerned with two forms which are no longer synchronic to-contractions: wanna and gonna, and have taken a syntactic or morphological approach. On the basis of new phonological data from British English varieties we argue that the reduction of /t/ in to should be taken as evidence of to-contraction. We claim that to is a phonological clitic and to-contraction is simply the incorporation of the clitic to into the preceding prosodic word.

This article investigates a variety of ways in which prosodic factors influence blend structure in English. Recent approaches no longer consider blends unpredictable, but the role of stress in blend formation has not been investigated in detail yet. This article addresses this problem, focusing on the role of stress in determining the switchpoint of the two bases in the blend, and on the question of what determines the stress pattern of the blend. We investigate these questions using experimentally derived forms, coined by native speakers on the basis of carefully controlled word pairs as stimuli. The results demonstrate that the length of the blend, the location of the switchpoint, and the stress of the blend are crucially determined by stress properties of the two base words of the blend, above all by those of the second word. At a theoretical level, the most important single finding is that preservation of the stress of the second word may happen independently of preservation of segmental material of the stressed syllable (e.g. préstitant from prestígious + dóminant). In contrast to stress, and contrary to earlier claims, syllabic constituency is shown to be of minor importance for switchpoint location. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. On a methodological level, our results show that experimentally elicited blends constitute a valid and highly useful resource for research on blend structure.