In Old English we find considerable variation in the infinitival complementation patterns of verbs: some verbs take a bare infinitival complement, some verbs take a to-infinitival complement and some verbs can be complemented by either infinitive. This article evaluates two previous attempts to account for the distribution of the two infinitives and offers an alternative account; it also argues that the increase in the use of the to-infinitive occurred mostly at the expense of the finite complement clause rather than at the expense of the bare infinitive, which is the traditional view.

This paper expands the analogy between events and count nouns, and between states/activities and mass nouns in English to include other situation types, including iteratives, habits, and multiple situations. It explores the evidence used to make such analogies, namely, the quantificational features of deverbal nouns, as each of the deverbalizing devices in English has its own aspectual qualities. It shows further that a number of parallels can be drawn between different types of bounding and debounding in the nominal and verbal domains. Finally, the paper presents a schema of the cross-categorial analogies relating to inherent meaning (mass/count features in nouns, situation types in verbs) and the semantic operations of (de)bounding and (de)collectivizing (quantificational and aspectual modification).

Constructions of noun + noun have been treated in two distinct ways in the literature: either they have been treated as compounds, or they have been treated as noun phrases with modifiers which happen to be nouns. Sometimes it is assumed that there are two distinct classes, which can be neatly distinguished. In this paper it is argued that the criteria which are usually assumed to distinguish between these two construction types do not draw a clear and consistent distinction between a syntactic and a morphological construction. Many of the criteria instead are indirect measures of listedness, which, it is argued, is not sufficient to show morphological status. Accordingly, it is claimed that the criteria to which reference is generally made do not allow us to distinguish between a class of noun + noun compounds and a class of noun + noun syntactic constructions. Rather the two should be treated as variants of a single construction (possibly morphological, possibly syntactic), at least until such time as a suitable coherent distinction can be properly motivated.

This paper discusses the internal structure of eModE gerund phrases, with special reference to the verbalization of subjects and objects in the course of the period. It is shown that the gerund's acquisition of common case subjects (‘John looking at me’) and of direct objects (‘by seeing Jane’) correlates with style, the new verbalized complements being recorded first in the more oral and informal registers. Attention is also paid to the influence of absolute participles on the replacement of PossPs (‘John's looking at me’) by NPs as subject arguments, and to the diffusion of direct objects across the various classes of gerunds. The mixed nomino-verbal properties exhibited by many gerundive nominals by the late seventeenth century are considered in detail, and an analysis is proposed which interprets them as determiner phrases (DPs) where the head D can select various categories of complements. Alongside this phrasal type of gerund, it is argued that a clausal one with fully verbal features must also be recognized as part of the grammar of eModE.

The distribution of the Saxon genitive and the of genitive in computer manuals is significantly different from their distribution in other texts. This is because the manuals contain a high proportion of computer nouns (nouns referring to computer hardware and software), which pattern like human nouns rather than like inanimate nouns. An analysis of the conventional metaphors used to talk about computers reveals that they are often construed as people, and the higher proportion of the Saxon genitive is a grammatical repercussion of this construal.

In a recent squib published in this journal, Juhani Klemola notes that there is ample and well-documented evidence for the loss of the genitive inflection in twentieth-century Northern dialect data as well as in early Modern English and Middle English documents representing Northern dialects.