In this chapter we investigate regional patterns in the variation between the two major explicit possessive constructions in the grammar of English, the s-genitive (as in (1a)) and the of-genitive (as in (1b)).

In his study Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World (2007), Edgar Schneider proposes a sociolinguistic and contact-linguistic ‘Dynamic Model’ to account for the emergence of new varieties. He goes on to demonstrate this Dynamic Model in sixteen case studies, covering four continents and spanning the entire functional range from L1 Englishes spoken by descendants of European settler-colonists, through L2 varieties serving as languages of education and administration, to new varieties developing in contact with English-lexifier pidgins and creoles.

This book is an exploration of categories, constructions, and change in English syntax. A great many books are published on the syntax of English, both monographs and edited volumes, and yet another may seem unnecessary. However, we felt more than justified in adding to the sizeable literature here for two reasons. The first, to borrow from Richard M. Hogg and David Denison’s justification for A History of the English Language, is that ‘one of the beauties of the language is its ability to show continuous change and flexibility while in some sense remaining the same.

Late Modern English (lModE) is characterised by comparatively few changes to the inventory of morphosyntactic variants (Denison 1998: 92–3). However, a great deal of linguistic change takes place in the period, as the frequencies and relative proportions of many linguistic features (e.g. the progressive and be vs. have as the perfect auxiliary with intransitive main verbs) change greatly between 1700 and 1900.

The observation that personal pronouns typically sound highly unnatural as the object in of-PP dependents of English noun phrases dates back at least to Lyons (1986: 136). In a table comparing the frames [NP’s N], [(Det) N of NP], and [(Det) N of NP’s], he systematically excludes accusative pronouns from the NP position in the second of these. We will employ the terms used by The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum et al. 2002) for these three constructions: s-genitive, of-PP, and oblique genitive respectively.

This chapter provides evidence bearing on the question of whether Old English (OE) had what can be called a ‘definite article’. The status of se, the cover term I use for the lexeme that includes se, seo, and þæt as well as the other forms in this paradigm, remains a matter of lively debate. Studies that take the point of view that OE had no definite article, or at least that definiteness marking was not obligatory, include Ackles (1997), Watanabe (2009), and Sommerer (2015), among others.

The lexical item for is treated in the literature either as a preposition (We bought it for you) or as a subordinator/complementiser (I preferred for him to take the exam). In this chapter I will argue that there are good grounds for regarding for exclusively as a preposition which can license a noun phrase or clause as complement. In what follows I first take a closer look in Section 2.2 at constructions in which for appears.

In this chapter we will argue that the outcome of processes of grammaticalisation may be determined to a large extent by analogy, by the force of analogical relations that language users perceive to be present between constructions in their language,1 on the basis of both concrete lexical as well as structural and functional resemblances (cf. earlier work by Fischer 2007, 2011, 2013 and De Smet 2009, 2012, 2013).

In the last few years several papers have appeared on the synchrony and diachrony of the ‘comparative modal’ (had/‘d) better, inspired by Denison and Cort (2010), which pays particular attention to the rise of ‘bare’ better, as in You better go. Van der Auwera et al. (2013) provide extensive statistical analysis of British and American usage of ‘d better and its variants.

This book presents contributions to the study of interfaces that have been shaped and inspired in profound ways by María Luisa Zubizarreta’s research program. Since the 1970s, Zubizarreta’s work has pioneered analyses in which the notion of interfaces (or levels of representation) played an essential role. Her research has fundamentally shaped the direction of Romance linguistics and generative grammar over this period. Her first book (Zubizarreta, 1987) explored in some detail issues related to the internal organization of the lexicon and its relationship to syntax. In her third book (Zubizarreta & Oh, 2007), the relationship between a constructional approach to meaning and the lexicon was further investigated by studying how verbal and predicate meaning components, such as manner and motion, articulate in Germanic, Korean, and Romance. In Korean serial verb constructions, manner and motion are encoded in separate morphosyntactic units, whereas in Germanic and Romance the same analysis holds but at a more abstract level of syntactic representation.

Polarity-sensitive items are a peculiar kind of linguistic object. As Israel (2004, p. 207) notes: they are a class of items “which do not themselves express negation or affirmation, but which are restricted to sentences of one or the other polarity.” Broadly speaking, polarity items are expressions whose distribution is sensitive to contexts that express contradiction, contrariety, or reversal (Israel, 2004).

Idioms are also peculiar kinds of objects that have complex syntactic structure but behave like individual lexical units. It turns out that many polarity-sensitive items are idioms, and that intersection provides an interesting insight about both categories, which I will explore in this chapter.

Transfer, i.e. the influence of the first language (L1) in the interlanguage (IL), is a characteristic phenomenon of the process of second language (L2) acquisition. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), different theories have been proposed to predict how and in which stages the grammatical properties for the L1 are manifested in the IL. According to the theory of Full Transfer / Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996), the grammar of the L1 in its entirety is the initial state of the IL. Afterwards, depending on the properties of the L1 and L2, the linguistic input to which the learner is exposed acts as a triggering factor in the reconstruction of the IL grammar. This restructuring process is conditioned by Universal Grammar (UG); for the most part, the IL complies with the restrictions imposed by UG during this whole process.

A well-studied phenomenon in Spanish (and in Romance languages in general) is clitic placement in constructions with so-called restructuring verbs, such as querer “want,” deber “must,” poder “can/may,” soler (habitual aspect), empezar “begin,” estar “be” – which are sometimes dubbed semi-auxiliary verbs, since they express modality and aspect – as well as the true auxiliary haber “have” (see Burzio, 1986; Cardinaletti & Shlonsky, 2004; Cinque, 2004, 2006; Perlmutter, 1983; Strozer, 1976; among many others). What is especially noteworthy about these constructions is that, when pronominal clitics are used, these may be associated either with the main finite verb or the lexical verb in a non-finite form.