In Present-day English (PDE), the to-dative construction refers to clauses like John sold/offered/mentioned/gave the books to Mary, in which a ditransitive verb takes a Recipient that is expressed as a to-Prepositional Phrase (to-PP). This study examines the to-dative construction in Old English (OE). I show, first of all, that this construction was not rare in OE, in contrast to what has been suggested in the literature. Second, I report on two corpus studies in which I examined the ordering behaviour of the NP and the to-PP. The results of the first study suggest that the same ordering tendencies already existed in OE as in PDE: both the NP-to-PP and the to-PP-NP orders were grammatical, but the NP-to-PP was the most frequently used one. However, in OE, the to-PP-NP was more common than in PDE, where its use is heavily restricted. My second corpus study is informed by the multifactorial approach to the English dative alternation and uses a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effects of various linguistic (verbal semantics, pronominality, animacy, definiteness, number, person and length) and extra-linguistic variables (translation status, time of completion/manuscript) on the ordering of NP and to-PP. The main finding is that, generally speaking, the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in PDE were involved in OE as well. No evidence was found for the influence of verbal semantics nor of the extra-linguistic variables. Finally, I argue against the view that to was semantically reanalysed from a Goal to a Recipient marker from OE to ME. Building on evidence that the Recipient use of to was already embryonically present in OE, I make the case that this semantic change was far more gradual than traditionally assumed.

This special issue is concerned with how the multidisciplinary concept ‘sense of place’ can be applied to further our understanding of ‘place’ in the history of English. In particular, the articles collected here all relate in some way to complicated processes through which individuals and the communities they are embedded within are defined in relation to others and to their socio-cultural and spatial environments (Convery et al.2012). We have brought together eight articles focusing on specific aspects of this theme using different theoretical models that offer new insights into the history of the English language from the Old English (OE) period to the twenty-first century. The findings will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English dialectology, lexicography, pragmatics, prototype theory, sociolinguistics and syntactic theory.

The so-called invariant tags, such as eh, okay, right and yeah, are extremely frequent in general English speech and have been studied extensively in recent years, especially in the spoken expression of teenagers, where they are a very common feature.

In this article I focus on innit, as in She love her chocolate innit? and It was good innit? For this purpose, I analyse and discuss data extracted from two comparable corpora of teen speech: the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), compiled in 1993, and the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LI), created in 2004. The analysis considers the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the expression, and asks three fundamental questions: has innit remained stable in use over time or has it increased in frequency? Has innit preserved its original grammatical features, or has it undergone notable changes? To what extent is innit especially associated with teentalk, at least in London speech, rather than with the speech of adults? Contrasts are also drawn with the standard tag isn't it.

Findings confirm that innit is typical of the language of London teenagers and has not gone out of use; on the contrary, its frequency has increased over the last few years. In contrast, the proportion of tokens found in the language of their adult counterparts is rather marginal. At present, innit conserves syntactic features of its own: it does not follow the regular question tag formation rules and can represent not only the verb be but also do, have and most of the modal verbs. Furthermore, it continues to show a high degree of flexibility in the sentence, occurring not only in final but also in initial and medial positions. Finally, it appears that innit should no longer be regarded as a simple invariant tag. It tends to behave more and more like a pragmatic marker serving to express the speaker's attitude to the content of the message, thus often reflecting the relationship between the participants in the interaction, and also contributing to the organisation of the discourse. In this respect, two new discourse functions of innit are identified and described: emphatic and text organiser.

This article investigates uses of the adverb again in Early Modern English (EModE) correspondence. The study collects occurrences of again and analyses their interpretation. It reveals interesting differences in the use of again between EModE and Late Modern English (LModE) as well as Present-day English (PDE). To bring out the grammatical significance of the results, we connect the study methodologically as closely as possible with Beck, Berezovskaya & Pflugfelder's (2009) study of LModE/PDE correspondence. We show that the key diachronic alteration we observe when considering EModE is not just numerical in nature but also qualitatively distinct from the later change at the transition between LModE and PDE. At the heart of our proposal is the finding that while a structural approach to again (Rapp & von Stechow 1999; Beck 2005) is successful for characterizing the transition between LModE and PDE, a uniform analysis for the entire diachronic trajectory is not warranted; a combined theoretical modelling is required instead. Specifically, a lexical analysis relying on counterdirectionality (e.g. Fabricius-Hansen 2001) is required to capture the differences in the EModE data.

The available standard accounts of Old and Middle English usually assert that scribes paid very little or no attention to vowel quantity. However, a great deal of what has been said so far about quantitative changes in Late Old and Early Middle English is based either on purely theoretical models, or on extremely questionable Modern English data. Surprisingly, except for a few more detailed studies on the peculiar orthography of The Ormulum, little has been done so far to analyse other orthographic systems from this perspective. Furthermore, as has already been shown in earlier studies, vowel quantity of Old and Middle English can be reconstructed to some extent on the basis of orthographic evidence from some manuscripts. Since use of the accent mark by some scribes is often associated with vowel length, the primary aim of the present study is to assess the reliability of the accent marks used in MSS Gg. 3.28 (Homilies of Ælfric) and William H. Scheide (The Blickling Homilies) as potential orthographic indicators of vowel quantity. The results of the analysis clearly show that the accent mark is one of those orthographic notations that can be extremely helpful in establishing vowel quantity in a Late Old English manuscript.

This article explores the concept of the supernatural and the characterization of monsters and devils in Old English (OE), using the framework of a prototype model of semantic structure. Although there is a lexical gap, with no OE word equivalent to Present-Day English supernatural, it is possible to identify a set of semantic traits that constitute a covert conceptual category similar to the modern concept and encompassing Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils. The essence of this category is ‘exclusion’. The difference between the modern and medieval concepts is that, for the Anglo-Saxons, the boundary of the supernatural was conceptually much ‘closer’ and conceived in less abstract terms, corresponding to the frontier between the civilized space of society and the unruly alien space beyond. Similarities in the words applied to them reflect the fact that supernatural beings shared this alien space with other more mundane outsiders, such as foreigners and criminals. As its most extraordinary members, however, Anglo-Saxon monsters and devils played an important role in delineating the boundaries of society by acting as a challenge or counterexample to the principles of proper behaviour and accepted beliefs from which that civilized space was constructed and therefore supporting the normative function of the Anglo-Saxons’ ‘sense of place’ in the terms of Convery et al. (2012).

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.

We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.

The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.

Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.

This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.

This article presents an analysis of the phonotactic structures of English presented in The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, paying attention to morphological boundaries, the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, the difference between native and non-native, and considering the distribution of vowels as well as consonants. The phonotactic status of names turns out to be unlike the status of other morphologically unanalysable words, and some new observations are made on consonant clusters as well as vowel sequences, which have previously been overlooked.

This article presents new evidence for the early history of the Northern Subject Rule in the form of an exhaustive corpus study of plural present-tense indicative verb forms in Northern and Northern Midlands early Middle English, analysed in relation to their syntactic context, including subject type and subject–verb adjacency. We show that variation between -∅/e/n and -s endings was conditioned by both subject type and adjacency in a core area around Yorkshire, whereas in more peripheral areas, the adjacency condition was weaker and often absent.

We present an analysis of these facts in relation to the presence of multiple subject positions in early English, which we show contra earlier literature to be relevant for Northern English as well, We view -∅/e/n endings as ‘true’ agreement, which in the relevant dialects is limited to contexts with pronominal subjects in a high subject position, Spec,AgrSP; other forms of agreement (-s or -th) represent default inflection occurring elsewhere. This analysis supports the hypothesis that the NSR arose when the extant morphological variation in Northern Old English was reanalysed as an effect of pre-existing multiple subject positions.

Weinert & Miller (1996) suggest that English wh-clefts are a heterogeneous class in that they can have varied degrees of structural integration. Many such constructions depart structurally from the canonical wh-cleft which consists of a wh-clause, the copula and a focus constituent, and in which all the three elements are brought together into a fully integrated utterance. In the types of wh-clefts displaying looser structure, their lack of syntactic integration has so far been related to such linguistic features as (a) omission of the copula, (b) non-canonical copular complementation, e.g. independent main clauses instead of standard infinitival phrases appearing in the focus constituent, (c) lack of a clearly identifiable copular complement, (d) the focusing effect of the wh-clause extending over several clauses (Weinert & Miller 1996; Koops & Ross-Hagebaum 2008; Hopper & Thompson 2008; Callies 2012). Although the disintegrating effect of these features has been observed, the extent of the phenomenon in modern English has not been properly established and other non-integration features have not been investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to use corpus data to identify and examine such non-integration features and to investigate the extent – expressed quantitatively – to which these features are found in wh-clefts with the verb do in the wh-clause. The article also points out the formulaic status of those wh-clauses which become disconnected from their focus phrases.

Competition between two methods of marking recipient/beneficiary and theme has figured in much recent research:

1. (1) Jim gave the driver £5.   (indirect object before direct object)

2. (2) Jim gave £5 to the driver.   (direct object before prepositional phrase)

A reverse double object variant is often ignored or treated as a minor and highly restricted variant:

1. 1. (a) ?Jim gave £5 the driver.   (direct object before indirect object)

   2. (b) Jim gave it him.

However, pattern (3) was much more widespread even in late Modern English, while there is clear dialectal variation within present-day British English.

In this article we investigate the pronominal pattern (3b), mainly in relation to pattern (1), tracking its progressive restriction in distribution. We mine three of the Penn parsed corpora for the general history in English of double object patterns with two pronoun objects. We then add a further nine dialect and/or historical English corpora selected for coverage and representativeness. A usage database of examples in these corpora allows more detailed description than has been possible hitherto. The analysis focuses on verb lemmas, objects and dialect variation and offers an important corrective to the bulk of research on the so-called Dative Alternation between patterns (1) and (2). We also examine works in the normative grammatical tradition, producing a precept database that reveals the changing status of variants as dialectal or preferred. In our conclusion we show the importance of prefabricated expressions (prefabs) in the later history of (3), sketching an analysis in Construction Grammar terms.

This article critically assesses Lightfoot's (1991, 2006) ‘degree-0 theory’ of language change, specifically the use that Lightfoot makes of empirical data from Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME). This is followed by the presentation of a recent analysis of word order in a variety of OE and ME sources. It is argued that data from these periods do not support the ‘degree-0 theory’. Rather, the data demonstrate that verb-final and object–verb order were less dominant in OE subordinate clauses than previously assumed, and that the shift to SV order was fairly gradual. There is also little in the data to suggest that subordinate clauses and main clauses developed in radically different manners or at radically different speeds. The article highlights the importance of careful data usage, both with respect to type and scope of material, and the interpretation of data collected and categorised by others.

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such as hapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay & Baayen (2002) – to provide quantitative and qualitative descriptions of changes in the productivity of native -ness and borrowed -ity, -cion, -age and -ment in Early Modern English. Ultimately, the study argues that diachronic productivity is best evaluated with a multifactor analysis, including measures of suffixal decomposability, aggregation of new derivatives and evidence of hybridization. It also suggests that increased use of neologisms with borrowed suffixes in Early Modern English might be explained by the increasing transparency of these suffixes in derivatives during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.

Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.

This article has two main goals: (i) to show how nasal–obstruent clusters interact with a Canadian-Raising-type pattern in Liverpool English and (ii) to provide evidence that fine phonetic variation in the realisation of nasal–obstruent clusters influences the production of the preceding vowels. I present quantitative evidence from an acoustic study on price and mouth vowel realisations before nasal–obstruent clusters in Liverpool English. The investigation looks at price and mouth separately before obstruents, nasals and nasal–obstruent clusters, in order to demonstrate that nasal–obstruent clusters influence vowels differently depending on the quality of the vowel. Price realisations before nasal–obstruent clusters are similar to productions before singleton obstruents with the same voicing. Specifically, price has a raised realisation before nasal–voiceless obstruent clusters, but a non-raised realisation before nasal–voiced obstruent clusters, which is the same pattern as before singleton obstruents. Mouth realisations preceding nasal–obstruent clusters show evidence of a greater influence from the nasal. The nucleus formant measurements are similar to those before singleton obstruents, but there is frequent monophthongisation preceding nasal–obstruent clusters in mouth, which is mainly found before singleton nasals. Furthermore, I show that the variation in nasal–obstruent clusters in Liverpool English helps to explain the differences in realisation of the target vowels. Nasal deletion is more frequent in nasal–voiceless obstruent clusters following price, leading to vowel productions similar to those before singleton voiceless obstruents. However, nasal durations are longer in nasal–obstruent clusters following mouth, leading to a greater influence of the nasal in the form of more monophthongal vowel productions.

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

This article develops a functional classification of the different uses of English premodifying present participles and applies it to historical corpus data to show that premodifying present participles have undergone functional change. It is argued that three core functions can be distinguished: identifying uses (e.g. the following evening); type-oriented uses (e.g. a talking dog) and situation-oriented uses (e.g. a passing car). Historically, the use of premodifying present participles has shifted from predominantly identifying and type-oriented uses, to predominantly situation-oriented uses, particularly in narrative discourse. This means that premodifying present participles have come to fulfil a function that is less typical of noun-phrase-internal modification, instead being increasingly used to denote backgrounded situations that are temporally aligned to the situation evoked by their main clause. The shift can be interpreted as an instance of functional clausalization.

The article examines the challenges encountered by historical dictionaries in documenting regional variation in lexis, and in recording and describing the association of lexical items with particular regionally based linguistic identities. After a short section looking at general issues in labelling the regional distribution and provenance of lexical items in historical dictionaries, it looks in detail at the OED’s treatment of three test cases: Mackem ‘person from Sunderland or Wearside’; pet as a term of endearment or form of address; and ram-raid and related terms. All three have some connection with the north-east of England, but this differs greatly in each case: ram-raid (probably) originated in Tyneside, but there is now little awareness of this either inside or outside the north-east; pet did not originate in the north-east, nor is it restricted to use in this region, but it is widely recognized as a marker of north-eastern (or sometimes specifically Tyneside) linguistic identity; Mackem has little currency outside the north-east, but within the region it has some importance in signalling a distinctive Sunderland or Wearside linguistic and cultural identity. The article places these different lexical histories in the context of current research on enregisterment of lexis, and examines how definitions, labelling, descriptive notes and carefully selected quotation evidence can all be pressed into service in attempting to present nuanced accounts of the histories of such lexical items in a historical dictionary.