Language is considered a defining property of humanity in ancient myths and in contemporary humanities disciplines such as philosophy and in linguistics. But there are competing views about what constitutes the capacity for language. One approach, known as the formal generative approach, regards the language capacity as autonomous from other cognitive abilities, and equates it with the syntactic ability to form an infinite number of sentences from finite means. Another, known as the functional approach, regards the language capacity as a non-autonomous symbolic system. From this perspective factors such as speech acts, narrative discourses, and frequency effects are as important as syntax for understanding the language capacity. Implications of work from these two perspectives for a broad range of disciplines, especially literary studies, are suggested.

Assuming that the Uniformitarian Principle refers to processes of production and perception, I argue that it remains invaluable for work on language in the last five thousand years or so, the period of linguistic historical record. In this article I show that some proposals about the development of ‘insubordination’ (Evans 2007), particularly those that link it to degrammaticalization (e.g. Higashiizumi 2006 on because-monoclauses; Brinton 2014 on as if clauses), are artifacts of theory (Kaiser & Struckmeier 2015), and do not conform to processes that can be projected from a Uniformitarian Process Principle that pays attention to interactional practices. I investigate evidence in the history of English for the development of finite independent monoclauses that are introduced by subordinators, for example, Because you don't understand, If we could see that picture again, As if you are not gorgeous. I conclude that, at least in English, such monoclauses are chunks that are used incrementally in on-line interaction, just like independent NPs and prepositional and adverbial phrases (Ford et al. 2002; Couper-Kuhlen 2011; see also Lindström & Londen 2008 on Swedish monoclauses with subordinators; Gras & Sansineña 2015 on Spanish monoclausal que-constructions). In such cases degrammaticalization is not relevant. The Uniformitarian Processes Principle can serve as an important corrective on artifacts of theory.

This paper examines a short-lived innovation, quotative all, in real and apparent time. We used a two-pronged method to trace the trajectory of all over the past two decades: (i) Quantitative analyses of the quotative system of young Californians from different decades; this reveals a startling crossover pattern: in 1990/1994, all predominates, but by 2005, it has given way to like. (ii) Searches of Internet newsgroups; these confirm that after rising briskly in the 1990s, all is declining. Tracing the changing usage of quotative options provides year-to-year evidence that all has recently given way to like. Our paper has two aims: We provide insights from ongoing language change regarding short-term innovations in the history of English. We also discuss our collaboration with Google Inc. and argue for the value of newsgroups to research projects investigating linguistic variation and change in real time, especially where recorded conversational tokens are relatively sparse.

Discussions of modality (e.g. Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994; Coates, 1983; Lyons, 1977; Palmer, 1986; Traugott, 1989) typically center around two issues: deonticity vs. epistemicity, and degree of subjectivity. Using diachronic evidence from the quasi-modal ought to, this paper argues for the need to recognize a third, crosscutting these two: narrow vs. wide scope. We argue that the epistemic use of ought to developed out of a wide-scope deontic construction, in which the modal was used with deontic meaning, but with propositional scope (contra Bybee, 1988). Rather than attributing an obligation to the subject (i.e. having narrow scope), the modal in this construction makes an assertion about the proposition as a whole, like an epistemic. However, such ought to constructions are found some four hundred years before the first epistemic examples, and thus can be shown to be distinct from epistemic uses (contra Gamon, 1994).

In this diachronic study, we shed light on the development of the functions and structural properties of Adverb all, and suggest that degree modifiers in general should be analyzed in similar terms. We show that the harmonic relationship between Adverb all and its head is best accounted for in terms of boundedness rather than gradability (see Kennedy & McNally, 2005; Paradis, 2001). The stability over a millennium of indeterminacy between bounded and unbounded readings of Adverb all + head sequences, and of the ambiguity in many contexts between Adverb and Quantifier-floated all, shows that a division of labor over time between ambiguous meanings is not necessary (Geeraerts, 1997). Despite its long history, Adverb all has been treated as conversational or an innovation (Bäcklund, 1973; Waksler, 2001). We address the question why certain items like all come to be stereotyped as ‘new’ when in fact they are not.