There are two important differences between American English and British English with respect to main verb have. First, American English typically employs do-support in constructions such as Do you have any coffee? while traditional British English does not. Secondly, American English typically does not use have in expressions such as I took a shower whereas British Isles English does: I had a shower. In this article, we discuss the possibility that there is a connection between these two facts. We argue that the connection lies in the failure of have in North American English to acquire the full range of dynamic meanings that it has acquired in other varieties of English, and suggest language contact as one explanation for this phenomenon.

This article is a corpus-based investigation into the presence or absence of the conjunction þæt in dependent sentences containing a gif-clause in Old English and attempts in the process to shed light on the historical development of indirect speech. Encumbered by the addition of the gif-clause, a complex dependent sentence reveals facts about indirect speech that a simple dependent sentence cannot. Firstly, the article draws attention to a great number of instances of the zero form (the þæt-less construction) in which the dependent sentence is accompanied by a gif-clause, and, noting its structural similarity to direct speech, ascribes the zero form's origins to direct speech. Secondly, it is pointed out that in Old English, constructions with þæt still clearly reflect the influence of direct speech and closely resemble the zero form in structure. Thirdly, all this is attributed to the fact that OE prose was still unregularized and retained traits of spoken language, which may have made it difficult to accommodate a complex dependent sentence.

This article approaches the study of pragmatic meaning in English modal verbs like can, may, and shall in early eighteenth-century English prose using the techniques of corpus linguistic analysis, politeness theory, and social network analysis. The study is based on a quantitative survey of modal expressions across registers in a corpus of fourteen early eighteenth-century authors, which yields relative frequencies of occurrence according to genre and to author. Together with the sociohistorical information provided by the strategic coalitions constructed to develop, nurture and maintain relationships between clients and literary and political patrons, this survey provides the context for a pragmatic study of politeness strategies. The subsequent qualitative examination of letters in the oeuvres of selected authors yields a rich picture of individual pragmatic variation. The study reveals that although the corpus as a whole exhibits trends for different usages in different genres, the letters exhibit a predominance of modal expressions that may be used to index the facework involved in building and maintaining relationships of patronage. Within this genre, modal choice is influenced by a writer's sense of the relationship with the patron as well as the degree of risk and cost involved in the communication.

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.

This article reports the results of a study based on a corpus of simple (i.e. only written) and complex (both written and oral) shortenings, that is, initialisms (a category comprising acronyms, e.g. laser, and alphabetisms, e.g. BBC), as well as clippings (lab), blends (motel), and abbreviations (Mr). The study intends to confirm the validity of the tools provided by the revised version of prototype theory for a systematic account of these metalinguistic categories, which are often neglected in lexical morphology. A set of defining parameters and possible values was devised and applied to the items of the corpus. As a result, these items were distributed along a continuum of central, peripheral, and borderline cases of all the categories considered. The body of the article is an in-depth account of the centre–periphery structure of the superordinate category of initialisms, with particular attention being paid to the fuzzy boundaries featuring clippings and blends. In the last section, shortenings are categorized and represented by means of a radial polycentric network of the type devised in Lakoff (1987).

This article is an attempt to account for data, collected from twenty speakers of Tyneside English (TE), which seem to indicate that syllabification of the oral stops in certain positions in English is subject to dialectal variation, and that the issue of syllabification is closely linked to patterns of glottal reinforcement and glottal substitution in the TE variety. Models of syllable structure based on data from ‘standard’ accents such as Received Pronunciation (RP) therefore fail to account for patterns in nonstandard varieties. In what follows, I propose some revisions to the RP-based account provided in Giegerich (1999) which are necessary to account for the TE data and, furthermore, I emphasize the need for a more holistic approach to studies of variation, which attempts to synthesize structural and sociolinguistic principles.

In this article, I discuss vowel reduction, stress, and vowel harmony in Buchan Scots English, a dialect spoken in Aberdeenshire in northern Scotland. Work by Wölck (1965) describes Buchan Scots English as having vowel harmony. This article explores the conditions that restrict the distribution of vowels in those syllables that do not receive a primary stress. Such syllables allow a smaller range of contrasts, and vowel height in these syllables is at least partially predictable from a preceding stressed vowel. These facts show that both vowel reduction and vowel harmony operate in Buchan Scots English.

This article surveys the debate on the origin of periphrastic do, with particular attention to the hypothesis that Celtic languages might have exerted some influence. With respect to the facts, it is argued that there are various types of Celtic hypotheses and that one type is sensible, though unlikely to be proven and even less likely to be proven to be the only relevant factor. With respect to the debate itself, it is shown that a Celtic origin hypothesis is accepted more widely among non-British scholars, and we speculate why that might be the case.

Old English fricatives at points of morpheme juncture are studied to determine whether they conform to the rule of voicing between voiced sounds that applies morpheme-internally. Should we expect a voiced or a voiceless fricative in words like OE heorð-weorod, Wulfweard, and stīðlīce? The evidence examined regards chiefly compounds and quasi-compounds (the latter comprising both forms bearing clear derivational affixes and ‘obscured’ compounds, those in which the deuterotheme has lost its lexical independence), though a small amount of evidence in regard to voicing before inflectional suffixes is considered. Evidence is derived from place-names, personal names, and common nouns, on the basis of Modern English standard pronunciation, assimilatory changes in Old English, modern dialect forms, post-Conquest and nonstandard Old English spellings, and analogous conditioning for the loss of OE /x/. A considerable preponderance of the evidence indicates that in compounds as well as in quasi-compounds, fricatives were voiced at the end of the prototheme when a voiced sound followed, but not a voiceless one. It follows from the evidence that there was no general devoicing of fricatives in syllable-final position in Old English, despite Anglo-Saxon scribes' use of <h> for etymological [Γ] in occasional spellings like <fuhlas> and <ahnian>. Old English spellings of this kind need be taken to imply nothing more than a tendency for <h> and <g> to be used interchangeably in noninitial positions, due to the noncontrastive distribution of the sounds they represent everywhere except morpheme-initially. Rare early Middle English spellings of this kind may or may not have a phonological basis, but they cannot plausibly be taken to evidence a phonological process affecting /v, ð, z/.

The clear-cut distinction between free adjuncts and absolutes based on the presence in absolutes of an overt subject different from the subject of the matrix clause, as opposed to the covert subject – controlled by the subject of the matrix clause – of free adjuncts, does not always hold. While it is generally agreed that unrelated free adjuncts are fairly frequent in Present-day English (PE), absolutes whose subject is identical to that of the matrix clause are regarded as obsolete (Jespersen, 1909–49; Kortmann, 1991; Söderlind, 1958; Visser, 1963–73). However, no statistical evidence has been provided on this topic for earlier stages of the history of English. This article quantitatively assesses whether the various degrees of relatedness observed in Early Modern English (EModE) coincide with those attested for PE, and concludes that the boundaries between free adjuncts and absolutes were considerably fuzzier in EModE, a phenomenon to which punctuation decisively contributed.

The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to-infinitives with the verb help, the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before -ing-complements depending on prevent, and the choice between -ing- and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start. In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these differences need to be interpreted against diachronic changes affecting Late Modern English grammar as a whole. The description of twentieth-century developments is mainly based on data obtained from matching corpora of British and American standard English. Since in all three cases studied developments did not originate in the twentieth century, additional data from the quotation base of the OED were used to outline the long-term evolution of the relevant portions of the grammar since ca. 1600. In general/methodological terms, the article aims to show that an utterance-based model of language change, in combination with the exceptionally well-developed corpus-linguistic working environment available to the student of standard English, can lead to new discoveries even in a well-studied area such as the grammar of standard English.

The phenomenon of Definite Article Reduction (DAR) is the realization of the definite article in northern British English dialects in a range of vowel-less forms, usually written t' in literature. The origin of DAR is assumed to be the assimilation of the initial fricative of the Middle English definite article þe to produce a te form, a sound change recorded for many dialects of Middle English. This article examines the validity of this hypothesis by analysing the distribution of fricative allomorphs in the modern dialects in comparison with the details of the Middle English change. The predicted distribution of fricative forms is not found at most localities, indicating that the development hypothesis is incorrect, but the available data are too scanty to suggest an alternative model.

Unless-constructions have often been compared with conditionals. It was noted that unless can in most cases be paraphrased with if not, but that its meaning resembles that of except if (Geis, 1973; von Fintel, 1991). Initially, it was also assumed that, unlike if-conditionals, unless-sentences with counterfactual (or irrealis) meanings are not acceptable. In recent studies by Declerck and Reed (2000, 2001), however, the acceptability of such sentences was demonstrated and a new analysis was proposed.

The present article argues for an account of irrealis unless-sentences in terms of epistemic distance and mental space embeddings. First, the use of verb forms in irrealis sentences is described as an instance of the use of distanced forms, which are widely used in English to mark hypotheticality. In the second part, the theory of mental spaces is introduced and applied to show how different mental space set-ups (in conjunction with distanced forms) account for the construction of different hypothetical meanings. The so-called irrealis unless-sentences are then interpreted as a number of instances of mental space embeddings. Finally, it is shown how the account proposed explains the fact that some unless-constructions can be paraphrased only with if not while others only with except if.

The two properties that characterize Ablaut reduplication in English (chit-chat, dilly-dally) are: (1) identical vowel quantity in the stressed syllabic peaks, (2) maximally distinct vowel qualities in the two halves, with [i] appearing most commonly to the left and a low vowel to the right. In addition, Ablaut reduplicatives are described as having a trochaic contour, yet there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the stress on the second part of the formation. Historically, Ablaut reduplication appeared long after Copy reduplication (boo-boo, yo-yo) and flourished during the Renaissance; its productivity declined sharply in the twentieth century.

This article treats Ablaut reduplicatives as verbal art products, analogs of dipodic poetic meter. The naturalness of the template ensues from the interaction of conflicting segmental and prosodic constraints on identity and markedness. An independently established hierarchy blocks high back vowels from appearing in these forms. The height difference is a response to the principle of INTEREST which favors maximum perceptual differentiation between the stressed vowels. The linear ordering of the vowels correlates with domain-final lengthening. The ambiguity between compound stress and level stress that these words exhibit is related tentatively to the existence of a separate prosodic domain, a dipodic colon. The article provides Optimality-theoretic support for the analytical relevance of gradient phonetic properties and the relevance of the colon as a separate prosodic layer, and potentially enriches the taxonomy of metrical forms in English.

Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 771, and Suzanne Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. IV: 1776–1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xix + 783.