Language variation (specifically: optionality between different ways of saying the same thing, as in check out the places vs check the places out) tends to be considered abnormal, suboptimal, short-lived, dysfunctional and needlessly complex, especially in functional or cognitive linguistic circles. In this contribution, we are assessing these assumptions: does grammatical optionality increase the relative complexity (or: difficulty) of language production? We use a corpus-based psycholinguistics research design with a variationist twist and analyse SWITCHBOARD, a corpus of conversational spoken American English. We ask if and how grammatical optionality correlates with two symptoms of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). Our dataset covers 108,487 conversational turns in SWITCHBOARD, 22 grammatical alternation types yielding 57,032 optionality contexts, 589,124 unfilled pauses and 43,801 filled pauses. Analysis shows that overall optionality contexts do not make speech production more dysfluent – regardless of how many language-internal probabilistic constraints are in operation, or how many variants there are to choose from. With that being said, we show how some alternations in the grammar of English are more prone to attract or repel production difficulties than others. All told, our results call into question old dogmas in theoretical linguistics, such as the Principle of Isomorphism or the Principle of No Synonymy.

The phonological status of Old English (OE) fricatives has been a vexed one, the general agreement being that the distribution of voiced ([v ð z ɣ]) and voiceless ([f θ s x]) fricatives was allophonic (Fulk 2001; Minkova 2011, 2014). We argue that OE was a fortis–lenis language specified for [spread] in terms of laryngeal realism, or ‘glottal width’ (GW) (Avery & Idsardi 2001). We discuss OE lenis and fortis stops, the structure of voiceless geminates ([ff], [ss], [tt], etc.) and voiceless geminate‑like structures ([sp], [st], [xt], etc.) and conclude that OE had phonologically marked fricatives for GW, found as the first member of phonetically voiceless (partial) geminates ([ff] /fGWf0/, [sp] /sGWb0/). Unmarked singleton fricatives, by contrast, were phonetically enhanced with GW in strong positions (foot‑initially in trochees and degenerate feet) and with ‘glottal tension’ (GT) in post‑tonic foot‑internal intersonorant position, which is less controversial. They were, however, unenhanced word‑finally and when couched between unstressed vowels, and thus phonetically variably voiced. We explore some of the consequences of entertaining such ideas.

The modal auxiliary form must plus perfect aspect (must have +V-en) has recently acquired the meaning of direct evidentiality in Multicultural London English, the new London dialect. Because the new meaning is a recent innovation we have a rare opportunity to witness its development at first hand, unlike earlier changes in the history of must. Our analysis supports the view that the classic definition of evidentiality in terms of information source is too narrow to explain the expression of evidentiality in spoken interaction, and that a broader definition in terms of epistemic authority is more appropriate. We argue that the direct evidential meaning is a coherent further step in the semantic changes undergone by must during its history. It represents a previously undocumented pathway in the grammaticalisation of evidentiality. It also supports the view that evidentiality is not a purely lexical phenomenon in English.

In the 1880s, Sievers proposed that in Old English words such as *feorhes, the loss of the post-consonantal *h caused compensatory lengthening of the vowel: fēores. Since there are no unambiguous traces of this sound change in later English, widespread analogical restitution of the short vowels was assumed (e.g. from feorh). The evidence for this lengthening is largely metrical. I argue that while Sievers is correct that words like <feores> often need to scan with a heavy initial syllable, this need not be explained by a general lengthening in the language at large. Indeed, the distribution of where heavy scansions are required in verse is typical for metrical archaisms: late prehistoric metrical values of words preserved for poetic convenience. Just as wundor ‘marvel’ can continue to be scanned as monosyllabic *wundr, or contracted hēan can scan as disyllabic *hēahan, so can light-syllabled feores continue to scan as heavy *feorhes. The same sets of poems that prefer non-epenthesized or non-contracted forms also prefer the heavy scansions of feores-type words. If heavy scansions of feores-words are seen as a matter of poetic convention, then the hypothesis of compensatory lengthening in the language generally is left without evidence and should be rejected.

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such subphonemic differences between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef & Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).

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.

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.

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 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.