This article provides a formal phonological analysis of s-retraction, the process by which /s/ is realized as [ʃ] in /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, e.g. street [ʃʧɹiːt]. While previous research has focused on the sociophonetic and acoustic aspects of this phenomenon, this study situates s-retraction within Element Theory (ET), demonstrating that it is driven by the affrication of the following coronal stop. The analysis shows that both the rhotic /ɹ/ and the glide /j/ function as palatal triggers, as they both contain the palatal element |I|, which spreads leftward, affecting the coronal stop and, subsequently, the preceding /s/.

The study also explains why s-retraction is restricted to /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, while being absent in /spɹ/ and /skɹ/. This absence is attributed to elemental antagonism, as labials and velars contain |U|, which prevents affrication. The article further accounts for dialectal variation in yod coalescence and yod dropping, showing that the presence of these processes determines whether affrication – and, consequently, s-retraction – occurs.

Crucially, the evidence from external sandhi suggests that s-retraction is an active phonological process, rather than a purely phonetic effect. The findings align with broader cross-linguistic palatalization patterns, supporting the view that s-retraction is governed by systematic phonological principles.

Noun (N) and Adjective (A) are distinct word classes but share certain features. Some noun uses share more features with how adjectives are used, thus contributing (over time) to a shift from N to A. There is evidence that the use of nouns as adjectives is on the increase (Denison 2013). Earlier work (De Smet 2012) shows key and fun taking different paths shifting to A, apparently because the former is a count and the latter a noncount noun. This article provides a type-based study on the N>A shift during the Late Modern English period on the basis of data from the Oxford English Dictionary and diachronic corpora. Complementing previous research, we address the question of which functional slot (premodifying or predicative) dominates the N>A shift and whether countability of nouns plays an important role. Our findings challenge the view that there is a connection between countability of the nouns in question and the path of the N>A shift. A case study on genius, a noun that is both count and noncount, provides additional quantitative and qualitative analysis of the N>A shift.

I argue for a hybrid analysis of English numeratives that (i) treats the extended basic numeratives (0–99) as lexemes but (ii) analyzes larger expressions as syntactic phrases or coordinations with magnitudes (hundred, thousand, million, …) as heads and factors (two hundred, forty-two million, …) as (obligatory) modifiers. A number of independent diagnostics – including ordinal/fractional morphology, prosodic phrasing and ellipsis/coordination – converge on the existence of a constituent containing all preceding material up to the rightmost base; this directly contradicts the cascading NumP + NP-deletion architecture of Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) when applied to English. The analysis preserves the category assignments of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language – cardinals as determinatives and nouns, ordinals as adjectives, fractionals as nouns – and refines the functional picture: (i) multiplicative factors (one hundred) function as modifiers, never as determiners or complements, and (ii) additions (one hundred and two) are coordinates in a coordination. The resulting determinative category is a small closed list, not an open-ended stock of ‘numeral lexemes’. Cardinal nouns split in two: proper when they name, common when they count – a division borne out by distributional diagnostics. The result is a more complete, empirically tighter, morphosyntax-sensitive account of English numeratives that explains why English is lexical below 100 but demands overt syntax above it.

This article revisits the diachrony of the genitive alternation, the alternation between ’s and prepositional phrases headed by of in Present-Day English. It is usually assumed to have developed around 1400 CE. For Old English (c. 650–1000 CE), a different alternation between pre-modifying and post-modifying genitive-case-marked noun phrases is suggested to be the genitive alternation. Building on descriptions of competition between genitive-case-marked noun phrases (gen) and prepositional phrases with of (of) in Old English, and unpicking some of the preconceptions about the alternation in Old English, we propose a bottom-up method for systematically identifying possible alternation between of and gen in the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). Our findings indicate that there is plausibly an alternation in Old English that stands in continuity with Present-Day English and suggest a more complex diachrony for the alternation characterized by continuity and discontinuity in the alternants and the envelope of variation.

This article takes a usage-based Construction Morphology perspective to examine the polysemy of the locative prefixoid up in complex words such as upstairs, upland, upheaval and uproot. Drawing on a relational structure model of morphosemantics, it is argued that the prefixoid systematically approximates the functions of different syntactic categories in different complex words: up functions like a preposition (upstairs), adjective (upland), adverb (upheaval) and verb (uproot). These constructions consequently require bases of specific syntactic categories and differ in the ways in which the prefixoid semantically relates to the second element. These subschemas are investigated in detail using corpus data from the BNC, collostructional analysis and various productivity measures to analyze the selectional restrictions of the open slot of the constructions as well as the semantics of the complex words. This approach elegantly solves the question of category change and the difficulties in identifying the syntactic category of the base in complex words with locative prefixoids, providing an alternative to the righthand head rule.

This article aims to explain how passive participles used as prenominal modifiers developed their eventive nature throughout the history of English. It is argued that prenominal participles first expressed stative result states in Old English (OE) and came to express perfect result states later on. The locus of required resultativity in participles was the inner aspect head in OE, while in Early Middle English (EME), it shifted to the outer aspect head. This shift was triggered by the loss of OE aspectual prefixes, which generally functioned to perfectivize or transitivize the verb by affecting its (internal) argument and assigning a change-of-state meaning to the verb. This shift rendered participial formation to be less constrained, as a result of which, it became possible for prenominal participles to express perfect resultative meanings, which in turn gave rise to their eventive meanings.

We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrative contexts (using adverbial clauses to create a narrative sequence) and found that this did not induce a stronger resultative interpretation. We discuss the formal proposals for analysis of these tense/aspect forms in the language, and the consequences this new data has for theories of the tense/aspect system of English.