This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers' of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

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.

Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically conditioned surface forms, -ng and na. This article presents a large-scale corpus study of adjective/ noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word-order variation in adjective/noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word-order choice.

This report describes a new research resource: a searchable database of 4,700 naturally occurring instances of sluicing in English, annotated so as to shed light on the questions that have shaped research on ellipsis since the 1960s. The paper describes the data set and how it can be obtained, how it was constructed, how it is organized, and how it can be queried. It also highlights some initial empirical findings, first describing general characteristics of the data, then focusing more closely on issues concerning antecedents and possible mismatches between antecedents and ellipsis sites.

This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent cooccurrences of the subject and auxiliary in usage, yet is also subject to the constraints of the grammatical context. Novel evidence includes a corpus study and a formal analysis of a multiword expression of classic usage-based grammar.

This article focuses on French espèce de + NP! ‘you + NP!’ to make a case that impoliteness can be conventionalized in linguistic form beyond the level of the lexicon. We argue that the pattern can be considered a construction in its own right and also that it is strongly conventionalized for impoliteness in particular. To support this claim, we adopt both a corpus-based and a questionnaire-based approach. The corpus study reveals not only that espèce de + NP! mainly serves impolite purposes in actual usage but also that it tends to force an impolite interpretation onto noun phrases that do not themselves express negative evaluation. Our questionnaire study complements these findings by showing, inter alia, that the construction is generally judged to be ill-formed when combining with positively evaluative or evaluatively neutral nouns and, at the same time, that such nouns are indeed rated as impolite in the construction. It also points to a difference between calling someone espèce d’idiot! ‘you idiot!’ and calling them just idiot!. We conclude the article with some reflections on why espèce de + NP! is an impoliteness construction.

This article presents a dictionary-based study of vowel reduction and preservation in British English in initial pretonic position and intertonic position. The different variables which have been claimed to influence those processes are tested on a data set of over 4,500 words using regression analyses. Our results confirm the significant effects of syllable structure, position of the vowel, word frequency and opaque prefixation. They also provide weak evidence for other factors such as vowel features and the existence of a base in which the vowel bears a stress, although no clear effects of word segmentability could be found. We also report new findings, as we find that foreign words reduce less than non-foreign words; we find that [+back] vowels reduce less than [−back] vowels in initial pretonic position; and we find a difference in behaviour for vowels followed by /sC/ clusters between non-derived words and stress-shifted derivatives.

This paper investigates the nonstandard use of first‑person singular pronouns (myself and I) in coordinate constructions, such as John and I or John and myself. Native English speakers frequently disregard prescriptive grammar rules by using subject or reflexive forms in place of object forms in sentences like Give those papers to John and I. The frequency of such nonstandard usage raises questions, such as when and why speakers substitute nominative or reflexive pronouns for object pronouns in coordinate constructions, and what evidence exists for the existence of fixed constructions like X and I or X and myself. To address these questions, the study analyzes data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Findings provide strong evidence for the existence of an X and I construction in that the nonstandard form is common after the coordinator but not before. Evidence for an X and myself construction is weaker, since untriggered reflexives also appear outside coordinate constructions. First‑person singular forms are more likely to appear in hypercorrect and untriggered forms that other pronouns. The research suggests that X and I may be stored in a chunk, possibly due to overgeneralizations resulting from prescriptive corrections during language acquisition.

We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19–58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children’s morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child speech, 50 in CDS), with prevalent SV(O) structures; we also found high rates of null subjects in both populations, marginal errors in children’s verbal agreement morphology, and early emergence of serial verb constructions, observed from 23 months of age.

This study reflects on Japan's language policy, focusing on the government‑led proposals implemented in 2006, which suggested replacing loanwords with Japanese equivalents, known as Gairaigo Iikae Teian ‘proposals for replacing loanwords’. By investigating English loanwords, this article explores the impact of English on Japanese vocabulary, while providing insights into the practical implementation of the government-led language policy in Japan for a broader global audience. It also clarifies that the objective of the proposals was not to strictly regulate the use of English loanwords but to offer suggestions, with replacement as one strategy to improve communication, especially when disseminating information through government agencies and media organisations. Through a quantitative investigation on the usage of English loanwords in the media, the results reveal that the overall number of media articles containing the loanwords in the proposed list has increased over the last 30 years. The findings also confirm that loanwords and their Japanese equivalents are not in competition, with one replacing the other. Instead, their usage exhibits a parallel trend in both frequency and increase rates.

This article explores the language of social media by analyzing a selection of linguistic features in four corpora of Swedish social media available at Språkbanken Text: Blog mix, Familjeliv, Flashback, and Twitter. Previous research describes the language of these corpora as informal, spoken-like, unedited, non-standard, and innovative. Our corpus analysis confirms the informal and spoken-like nature of social media, while also showing that these traits are unevenly distributed across the various social media corpora and that they are also present in other traditional written corpora, such as novels. Our findings also reveal that the social media corpora show traits of involved and interactional language.

Do different emotion terms trigger different metaphorical conceptualizations of emotions? What are the effects of the discourse context of the genre on metaphor choice in the conceptualization of emotion concepts? Finally, are such lexical and discourse–contextual effects on emotion-targeted metaphor choice quantifiable? Prior discourse-oriented research has demonstrated from a largely qualitative perspective that metaphor use is dynamic and sensitive to discursive contextual variables (e.g., Deignan et al., 2013; Semino 2010, 2011; Semino et al., 2013; Dorst 2015; Caballero 2016; Knapton & Rundblad, 2018). In the present study, these questions are addressed from a corpus-based multivariate perspective, where detailed qualitative analysis of found examples is combined with quantitative modeling. The study examines negative self-evaluative emotions in English, operationalized through their two nominal exponents, i.e., shame and embarrassment, as attested in the discourse context of three genres – fiction, magazine and spoken TV language. The data are first analyzed qualitatively for relevant contextual variables and then modelled quantitatively. The results demonstrate that while both lexical and genre effects are observed in metaphor choice in the conceptualization of negative self-evaluative emotional experience, their combined effect should also be accounted for, as these two variables are found to interact with each other.