This article provides a corpus-driven overview of the ‘epistemic space’ surrounding the use of two lockwords of Early and Late Modern English writings on midwifery and childbirth, child and uterus. Rather than searching for epistemic stance markers themselves, this study employs the ‘bottom-up’ approach by examining the propositions containing these lockwords, and then seeing what particular epistemic meanings are signalled by the surrounding discourse context. Both treatises and periodicals representative of medical writing from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries are examined, thus allowing any diachronic trends characteristic of a period that witnessed much change in midwifery practices, and medicine more broadly, to be uncovered. Data are drawn from the Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) and Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT) corpora.

Pseudo-partitives are strings of the form [N1 – of – N2] in which N1 denotes a quantity or amount of whatever it is that N2 denotes and in which N2 is a bare nominal. Such strings come in two types, depending on whether the combination shares the number value of N1 or N2. The first type can be analyzed along familiar lines, but the second one is a hard nut to crack. The article presents existing treatments, showing that they all involve departures from independently motivated principles. As an alternative we propose an analysis that is cast in the Typed Feature Structure notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. It handles both types of pseudo-partitives, arguing that N1 and the preposition of are complement-selecting heads if the number value is shared with N1, while N1 and the preposition are head-selecting functors if the number value is shared with N2. The switch from head to functor status is characteristic of grammaticalization and is shown to affect pseudo-partitives with a quantifier noun or a collection noun as N1, but not pseudo-partitives with a measure noun or collection noun. Examples and quantitative data are extracted from COCA.

This article examines a hitherto unnoticed set of deictic uses of the English proximal demonstrative this, namely those where the speaker is contained in the referent of the demonstrative NP. The usual case, where the speaker is not contained in the referent, has been extensively studied and the choice between proximal and distal has been argued to be based on a combination of physical (proximity of the referent to the speaker) and psychological/subjective factors. The present article focuses on those cases where the speaker is contained in the referent, arguing that this leads to a categorical choice in deictic uses, with only proximal this being possible. The article further shows that there are four relevant types of containment. First, spatial containment, where the speaker is physically located in the referent (e.g. this room); second, situational containment, where the referent is an event or state and the speaker is a participant in it (e.g. this conversation); third, set containment, where the referent is a group of people of which the speaker is a member (e.g. in this family); and fourth, temporal containment, where the speaker (or more precisely the time of utterance) is contained in the referent (e.g. this week).

This study aims to examine functional idiosyncrasies of seemingly synonymous constructions and explain their frequency distributions in different spoken registers. To this end, lexical and discoursal approaches in the corpus-based research of constructions are combined to investigate how significant collocates of three suggesting constructions – namely, let's, what/how about and why don't you/we – are contextually situated in British English. Constructional analyses of the spoken part of the British National Corpus show that the three suggesting constructions primarily perform different metadiscourse and directive functions. Based on these functional variations, the present study explains the distribution and usage of the three suggesting constructions across the five spoken registers.

This article presents a quantitative study of the referential status of PPs in clause-initial position in the history of English. Earlier work (Los 2009; Dreschler 2015) proposed that main-clause-initial PPs in Old English primarily function as ‘local anchors’, linking a new clause to the immediately preceding discourse. As this function was an integral part of the verb-second (V2) constraint, the decline of local anchors was attributed to the loss of V2 in the fifteenth century, so that only the contrasting and frame-setting functions of these PPs remain in PDE. This article tests these hypotheses in the syntactically parsed corpora of OE, ME, EModE and LModE texts, using the Pentaset-categories (New, Inert, Assumed, Inferred or Identity; Komen 2011), based on Prince's categories (Prince 1981). The finding is that Identity clause-initial PPs decline steeply from early ME onwards, which means the decline pre-dates the loss of V2. A likely trigger is the loss of the OE paradigm of demonstrative, which functioned as standalone demonstrative pronouns as well as demonstrative determiners, and the loss of gender marking more generally. From EModE onwards, main-clause-initial PPs that still link to the preceding discourse do so much more indirectly, by an Inferred link.