Using data drawn from twenty American plays written since 1889, this paper analyzes the usage of the weak obligation modals should and ought, which previous researchers (e.g. Coates, 1983; Leech, 1987; Palmer, 1987) have regarded as essentially synonymous. It is shown that there is a clear distinction between these words, with should expressing individual opinions and ought emphasizing a common opinion regarding the obligation in question. This use of obligation should does not occur in five plays written between 1889 and 1911, appearing for the first time in this database in a play written in 1926. The development of obligation should parallels other changes in the modal system which have taken place at the same time – as should has increased in frequency, so have the other individually-oriented modals got to and gonna, and as ought has declined in frequency, so have the other group-oriented modals must and will.

This paper attempts to account for the synchronic representations and surface distributions of the long low vowels (particularly of [ɔː] and [ɔə]) in present-day RP and Cockney, as well as to map in detail the twentieth-century developments that have given rise to them. It is argued that the long low vowels must still be underlyingly centring diphthongs in modern RP (as they were at Henry Sweet's time), now synchronically monophthongized by a spread-and-delink rule, while the corresponding underliers in Cockney must since have been restructured into monophthongs. The theoretical framework for this analysis is a version of Lexical Phonology that assumes an English lexicon comprising two levels, where the first level is characterized by cyclic rule application and the presence of the Strict Cycle and Structure Preservation Conditions (Giegerich, 1988; Kiparsky, 1982), and the second level by noncyclic rule application as well as the presence of neither condition (Borowsky, 1989).

The standard analysis of the past perfect is that it represents the time of a situation as anterior to a time of orientation which is itself past with respect to the time of speech. However, there are a couple of uses in which the situation referred to actually lies in the future. This article concentrates on one of these uses, illustrated by sentences like Soon you will again be able to do all the things that you had done before. In this use, the past perfect refers to the future and there does not seem to be a past time of orientation at all. The article not only attempts to account for this use of the past perfect but also offers an explanation for the fact that the same tense cannot be used in other, seemingly similar, sentences, such as the following: [If you peep through this hole in the curtain] you will see the audience that {have/*had} come to see the play.

The apparent rapidity of the loss of case-marking distinctions in English has been used as evidence that Middle English was a Creole. However, an examination of the available facts indicates that the reduction of case marking was more gradual and orderly than has often been assumed. The impression of ‘confused’ usage in many texts disappears once a proper distinction between form and category is made. The reduction of case marking seems to have begun with syncretism of forms but retention of categories, with one form spreading into the territory of another. The facts do not support the idea that case marking was drastically reduced as part of the formation of a Creole. However, it is likely that language contact played a significant role in the quick acceptance of internally motivated changes.

The discourse marker well has four distinct uses in Modern English: as a frame it introduces a new topic or prefaces direct reported speech; as a qualifier it prefaces a reply which is only a partial answer to a question; as a face-threat mitigator it prefaces a disagreement; and as a pause filler it bridges interactional silence.

In Old English well was used on an interpersonal level as an emphatic attention-getting device (similar to Old English hwæt ‘listen’, ‘behold’, or ‘what’). In Middle English, well always functioned as a frame on a textual level. In Early Modern English, and particularly in the plays by Shakespeare, the uses of well diversified considerably and adopted interpersonal uses again.

Ever since the days of Jespersen, voices have been raised which argue that relative that is not a pronoun like who and which, but a conjunction/complementizer, as shown in particular by the ban on the sequence preposition + that, which is claimed to be best described by treating that as a conjunction. Taking up the question of the proper analysis of that as it appears in the word's relationship to prepositions, the present paper argues that in actual fact the descriptions built by Jespersen and various generative grammarians on the view of that as a conjunction/complementizer are not at all adequate to deal with some crucial facts of the word's syntax. Noting then some further facts which even the traditional ban is unable to deal with, the paper develops a new approach to the question which is derived from an examination of Finnish relatives and which handles all the English facts noted in terms of a general principle about the internal order of elements within the fronted relative phrase. The principle invoked is completely neutral as regards the word-class status of that, but some of the facts explored strongly argue for the classification of the word as a pronoun.

Developing an idea first articulated by Luick in 1896, Halle & Keyser (1971) posit the introduction of a new accentuation rule in Middle English (ME), the weight-sensitive Romance Stress Rule (RSR). All post-1971 accounts of English stress take the syllable weight principle of the RSR as their starting point. For twenty-five years there has been no scrutiny of the assumption that syllable weight became relevant for stress assignment in ME. It has been claimed, and the claims have not been addressed, that the RSR is part of the phonology of late OE (O'Neil, 1973), that by late ME the RSR had completely replaced the Germanic accentuation patterns (Nakao, 1977), and that the existence of the RSR in ME justifies the reconstruction of analogical pronunciations such as hardi, holi, riding(e), a real shift from the Germanic to the Romance category (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Luick, 1896). The paper refutes these claims on the basis of new evidence and analysis in terms of generalized prosodic constraints.