This article on Old Norse represents a fundamental departure from the previous literature on loaned material by examining multilingual documents written in Medieval Latin rather than in monolingual English, namely the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). The potential of this richer and more complex interplay between languages will be further addressed throughout the article, which assesses the different kinds of evidence available for establishing the relative plausibility for a word being derived from ON. Dance's (2013, 2018, 2019) taxonomy will be discussed and applied to multilingual material for the first time. The article concludes with some notes on the main semantic fields to which ON-derived lexis contributed within the multilingual lexical networks of the DAR.

This article sheds new light on the usage constraints of be able to, by combining empirical evidence from the British National Corpus (BNC, Davies 2004–) with theoretical insights on the semantics–pragmatics interface. First, we show that be able to does not, contrary to the general assumption, express only ‘ability’ but it shares most of the root meanings usually associated with the possibility modals can and could (Coates 1983: 124). The data analysis shows that what is called ‘opportunity’ in Depraetere & Reed's (2011) taxonomy is the most frequent meaning of be able to. We then turn to the notion of actualisation, which is often claimed to be the main distinguishing feature between be able to and can/could. The qualitative analysis of the BNC dataset provides the empirical evidence, lacking in previous research, for the claim that actualisation is indeed a defining property of the modal periphrastic form. Starting from a reassessment of the semantics–pragmatics interface in terms of a fourfold distinction, we argue that actualisation is a generalised conversational implicature and constitutes conventional pragmatic meaning (that is, conventional non-truth-conditional meaning).

Which normally transitive verbs can omit their objects in English (I ate), and why? This article explores three factors suggested to facilitate object omission: (i) how strongly a verb selects its object (Resnik 1993); (ii) a verb's frequency (Goldberg 2005); (iii) the extent to which the verb is associated with a routine – a recognized, conventional series of actions within a community (Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis 2010; Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí 2010, 2015). To operationalize (iii), this article compares the writings of different communities to offer corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities in which they are more strongly associated with a routine. More broadly, the article explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them.

It has been suggested that metaphor often performs some sort of evaluative function. However, there have been few empirical studies addressing this issue. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which a metaphor needs to be creative in order to perform an evaluative function, or whether there are differences according to the type of evaluation, such as its degree of explicitness and its polarity. In order to investigate these questions, 94 film reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) were annotated for creative and conventional metaphor, and for positive and negative, inscribed and invoked evaluation. Approximately half of the metaphors in our corpus were found to perform an evaluative function. Creative metaphors were significantly more likely to perform an evaluative function than conventional metaphors. Metaphorical evaluation was found to be significantly more negative than non-metaphorical evaluation. Both creative and conventional metaphors were used more frequently to perform inscribed evaluation than invoked evaluation. However, the tendency towards inscribed evaluation was stronger for conventional metaphors than for creative metaphors. From a theoretical perspective, these findings call into question fundamental assumptions about the role of metaphor in performing evaluation, such as the claim, made in the Systemic Functional Linguistics literature, that metaphor invariably ‘provokes’ attitudinal meanings. We have shown that it can do so, but that it does not always do so. The study also offers methodological contributions, by introducing a new protocol for the annotation of creative metaphors as well as detailed guidelines for coding evaluation at different levels of explicitness.

Present-day English is unlike Old English in not using singular demonstrative pronouns with anaphoric reference to human beings. This article adds to the contributions of Cole (2017) and Los & van Kemenade (2018) in our understanding of the factors determining the choice between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Old English by documenting the hitherto unexamined use of these pronouns as heads of relative clauses. It also traces how the singular demonstrative pronouns referring to humans retreated as heads of relative clauses in Early Middle English. A corpus-based study shows that third-person personal pronouns were unusual as heads of relative clauses in Old English and normally referred to specific individuals, while demonstratives were the pronouns of choice for generic reference but could also refer to specific individuals. The increased use of personal pronouns for generic reference is well underway in Early Middle English. While the retreat of the singular demonstrative pronouns to refer to humans in Early Middle English seems to have some connection with the reduced marking of feature distinctions in that period, a simple explanation in terms of loss of gender is untenable.

This article investigates differences between Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Southern British Standard English (SBSE) in the semantic domain of strong obligation. Focusing on the modal verbs must, have to, need to and (have) got to, we use new corpus material from nineteen written and spoken genres in the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SCO) and corresponding texts from ICE-GB. Data are analysed using a mixed-effect multinomial regression model to predict the choice of verb. Language-internal factors include mode of production (written/spoken), grammatical subject (first/second/third person) and source of obligation (objective/subjective). Our results show that, as previous research suggests, SSE is much more likely to employ need to for the expression of strong obligation, and less likely to employ must and (have) got to. This general pattern remains essentially unaffected by language-internal factors. To account for our findings, we draw on the sociologically motivated process of democratisation and the language-internal process of grammaticalisation.

A long-standing assumption in the syntactic literature is that coordination can only target constituents. This assumption has been a subject of much debate, with many authors questioning its validity. This article enters this debate by reconsidering a constraint on left-sharing in coordination which Osborne & Gross (2017) have recently introduced, namely left node blocking. To account for this constraint, Osborne & Gross propose the Principle of Full Clusivity which states that coordination cannot cut into a constituent. They couch their analysis in a Dependency Grammar, assuming that coordination does not have to conjoin constituents and that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. Given that the empirical ground on which the LNB is based is not firm, I seek to experimentally investigate it by conducting a large-scale experiment. The results of the investigation reveal that LNB is wrong; left-sharing is as permissive as right-sharing. The results of the investigation have the immediate consequence that the assumptions on which LNB is based are wrong as well, namely that syntactic structures should be construed as flat. I spell out an analysis couched in terms of left-to-right syntax to account for major cases of left-sharing in coordination.

This squib challenges Patterson & Caponigro's (2015, this journal) claim that there are few acceptable free relative clauses with who. We show that free relatives with who are generally acceptable when they are ‘transparent’ free relatives or complements of a copula, and add further nuance to their findings concerning how the degree of acceptability of free relatives with who varies according to positional factors.