Present-day English Research Articles

Precept vs. usage: Pronominal case forms in late modern English

ABSTRACT The English pronominal system has been the matter of heated debate among grammarians for the last 300 years. This is especially the case of the dichotomy nominative-objective pronoun forms I/me; he/him; she/her; we/us; and they/them in a set of linguistic contexts. In present-day English, the phenomenon does not appear to be a matter of correct vs. incorrect language, but one of formal vs. informal language, although a different state of affairs is found in earlier periods of English. Since the eighteenth century, a great concern for language correctness grew, resulting in an upsurge in the publication of grammars as an attempt to regularize the language and ‘enforce a uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard’ (Drake 1977: 1). Usage books, however, reveal a lack of consensus among grammarians on the ‘correct’ use of pronouns, and a look at the evidence demonstrates significant variation on their usage during the late Modern period. The present paper aims to investigate the correlation between prescriptivist norms and actual usage as regards English pronominal forms over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Precepts are studied in view of prescriptive commentary in grammars, whereas quantitative data is retrieved from CLMET3.1 (The corpus of late modern English texts). The purpose of this piece of work is therefore twofold: a) to analyze the historical distribution of pronoun case forms in postverbal position in the period 1710–1920 and b) to evaluate the influence that prescriptive rules may have had upon their actual usage over time. Case variation is thus explored in three different linguistic environments, including the use of pronouns after the linking verb be (e.g. ‘it is I/me’) and after the conjunctions than (e.g. ‘she is taller than I/me’) and as (e.g. ‘she is as tall as I/me’).

Historical Continuity in the Morphological Marking of Subjectivity? Textual Perspectives on the Origin of English Adverbial "-ly" in Late Old and Early Middle English

In spite of the fact that the Present-Day English “adverbial signature” – the suffix ‑ly – is peculiar to English among the Germanic languages and that its emergence seems to conflict with general tendencies of language change in English – the loss of inflectional endings and the fact that English is otherwise happy to allow zero-derivation – neither the early history of ‑ly in Old and Middle English nor the exact date and reasons for its remarkable spread have been fully understood. Recently, the subjective semantics of adverbs in ‑ly have received considerable attention, in both synchronic and diachronic studies. This claim for a particular subjective (abstract or figurative) meaning of adverbs in ‑ly, however, rests almost exclusively one study, Donner’s lexicographical examination of MED material (1991). This chapter inspects the potential of comprehensive textual studies for the suggested subjective semantics in the early use of ‑ly, focussing on two late Old English translations of the Theodulfi Capitula and the early Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest idiomatic and colloquial English texts.

Initialisms in Scientific Writing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This paper focusses on the role of initialisms in scientific English articles in the Royal Society Corpus (Fischer et al. 2020; Kermes et al. 2016). The development of scientific initialisms is illustrated with frequency data, a discussion of the evolution of the text topics obtained from topic modelling and an analysis of the development of information-theoretic surprisal values of initialisms in three time spans between 1830 and 1919. The overall frequency and diversity of initialisms for scientific concepts has risen considerably between 1830 and 1919 in the context of the ongoing specialisation of the sciences. Particularly from the 1860s onwards scientific initialisms increasingly become shortcuts for multiword units with wordhood and term status. The surprisal values of scientific initialisms decrease over time as such forms more regularly occur in conventionalised textual contexts and fixed expressions. Overall, the analysis of the RSC texts shows that key developments towards the conventionalisation of scientific initialisms as term formation patterns took place in the transitional period from Late Modern to Present-day English.

New Words with -ment in Present-Day English: Their Properties and the Distinction between Functional and Lexical Categories

New Words with -ment in Present-Day English: Their Properties and the Distinction between Functional and Lexical Categories

Latinate Loan-Cognate Word Pairs in English and Italian: Patterns of Meaning Variation and Change

The aim of this paper is to show the existence of regularities in word meaning variation and change between Latinate borrowings in present-day English and their cognates in Italian, such as gross/grosso, lecture/lettura and rumour/rumore. Starting from an original and shared meaning core, the semantics of these etymologically related words has evolved in different directions in the two languages, often producing what are commonly known as ‘false friends’. Despite their ‘false-friendship’, however, there appear to be some recurrent patterns in meaning evolution: through a qualitative analysis of 30 pairs of English and Italian cognate words, five main processes have been identified, namely meaning bifurcation, original meaning retention, non-figurative meaning extension, figurative meaning extension (via metaphor and metonymy) and meaning inversion.

On analysing fragments: the case of No?

Abstract This paper addresses the analysis of sentence fragments, specifically the English negative polar response item no. Two main types of synchronic analysis have been proposed for present-day English – one in which yes and no are syntactically inert particles which substitute for a clause, the other in which they are the initial element of an elided clause. Using diachronic data from 15th- to 17th-century English, we argue that the emergence of a novel other-speaker question pattern involving no demonstrates that speakers of early English analysed interrogative polar no as the initial element of a clause with TP-ellipsis. This novel pattern has received little attention in the literature, yet this grammatical innovation is interesting because its emergence demonstrates how diachronic change can be used as a diagnostic for underlying grammatical structure.

The Suffix -ster in Present-day English: A Usage-based and Network Model Account

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the present-day distribution of the -ster suffix in English and account for that distribution through the diachronic forces that shaped it. Taking a constructional approach (Bybee 2010), we show that words with the -ster suffix in Middle English constituted a semantically coherent set in so far as the items in that set mostly referred to professions. In the latter part of the first half of the Modern English period, we find a renaissance of -ster usage, albeit with a semantic shift toward the identification of a human agent (usually male) involved in activities that were subversive, illicit or even criminal, e.g. gangster. We sketch out a model in which certain of the constructions stand as central members, or exemplars, which then serve as analogical bases to which other constructions with -ster are extended. We argue that the cumulative effect of the central exemplars of this set strengthens the representation of -ster as formally independent and imbues it with the emergent meaning of subversion, illicitness, or criminality. The result of these diachronic process is a very healthy productivity of -ster in later modern English and a distribution across several domains.

Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation

This article discusses the existence of serial verb constructions in Old English and explores the complementation of aspectual and control verbs as well as other related constructions. The discussion of the Old English data finds remarkable differences with respect to the syntactic configurations of Present-Day English that are described as serial by Roberts (2010). Although the range of serial constructions is more restrictive in Old English, at least with aspectual verbs, the analysis of verbal complementation from the perspective of serialisation allows us to bring other convergent constructions to the discussion, including configurations with linked infinitives and participles in predicative constructions and configurations with pre-modals and the causative verb dōn ‘to do’.

Variation in the Usage of Relativisation Strategies in Migrant and Non-migrant English Speakers

ABSTRACT This study considers the use of adnominal restrictive relative clauses based on data from an acceptability rating task. We asked non-migrant native speakers (n = 24) of English and migrant native speakers (n = 28) of English to judge three different types of relative clauses. Results indicated that these speakers rate the relative markers that and zero more positively in line with the current situation in Present-day English. 1 The similar behaviour in the rating shows that major driving forces of language variation such as colloquialisation and Americanisation are stronger than other forces such as language contact. The similarities in the usage of relativisation strategies observed between contemporary Englishes and language competences of migrant and non-migrant speakers support the emergence of a new variety of English similar to other documented varieties that emerged in comparable contexts. 2

‘There’s far too much arty-farty, namby-pamby, hoity-toity, wishy-washy, lardy-dardy, sun-dried tomato eating, decaffeinated fannying about!': Reduplicative compounds and other iterative sequences in English

ABSTRACT The aim of the paper is to (re-)evaluate the treatment of reduplicative expressions as compound words in nearly all previous work on English. Examples of reduplicative expressions are listed, out of context, and they are labelled as compound words, without providing proper motivations as to why it makes sense to treat them as compounds, in the sense of lexical items that are formed of other lexical items. The paper provides plenty of examples of how the reduplicatives listed in previous work are actually used in present-day English and examines the functions and interpretations of such expressions. The paper shows that most reduplicative expressions are not compound words. Some of them are words in their own right that cannot be divided into meaningful constituents. Some may have a more compound-like reading, alongside a clearly non-compound-like reading; for most such items, the latter function and interpretation seem to be most common. A large majority of alleged reduplicative compounds display clear non-compound-like behaviour. It will be shown that these expressions are likely to be sequences of words that are created by the same (syntactic) process/es that iterate or stack ‘ordinary’ nouns, adjectives and verbs in English.

Lexical representation of the notion coffee in present-day English (on the material of lexicographical sources)

The article is devoted to the study of the lexicon that represents the notion of coffee in present-day English. The novelty of the research is that the corresponding lexical units were established, analysed, and then distributed in groups, with their semantic connections revealed and described. It is quite topical as a great number of modern philology studies focus now on those lexical domains that verbalize various fragments of material and spiritual life of an ethnic community. Thus, in this work, the thematic criterion of stratification of the part of English vocabulary that denotes coffee was applied. The borrowed nature of the lexeme coffee was revealed. The polysemous lexeme possesses a six-component structure, the basic lexico-semantic variant of which fixes the idea of a drink and is characterized by the double axiology of its connotation. It was established that the other meanings were formed as a result of a metonymic shift. We demonstrated that the unit coffee is a core of the lexicon "coffee" with nine thematic groups, further differentiated into thematic subgroups, lexical-semantic groups and synonymic rows. The stylistic classification of the vocabulary was also carried out. The identified groups reflect the components (or their combination) of the notion of coffee, which was initially modelled on the basis of the study of the meaning of the lexeme coffee and finally expanded in the course of further analysis of the lexical fragment.

ДІЄСЛОВО В МОВНІЙ ТА КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНІЙ КАРТИНАХ СВІТУ НОСІЇВ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ

The paper studies the peculiarities of mental representations of the verb in the conceptual worldview and their reflection in the linguistic worldview of English language native speakers. Special attention is paid to the etymology and meaning of the word “verb” in the English language. In particular, its connection with the meaning “word” in general, which is manifested in the corresponding derivatives, is clarified. A tendency to define the verb through its syntactic function in scientific literature has been revealed. The key role of the predicate-argument structure, which reflects the linguistic worldview of English language native speakers, has been established. At the same time, the conceptual structure of the verb meaning and its mental representations shed light on the place of the verb in the conceptual worldview of English language native speakers. In the naive worldview of the English speakers, a tendency to associate the verb with an action or an act can be observed. High productivity of verbification in present-day English, as well as the overall high saturation of verbs in the English language corpora, estimated at 10.86 per cent, testify to the significance of the verb in English. The corpus analysis has been conducted based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English, and iWeb Corpus of modern web communication. The total distribution of verbs across the aforementioned corpora does not reveal any substantial variation. Nonetheless, the corpus data provide illuminating insights into the worldview of the native speakers of English. The prospects of further research in this direction lie in the construction of a mental model of the English verb, which would integrate the approaches to verb semantics within different modern frameworks, employing both experimental findings and empirical corpus data.

Trends in the development of vocabulary for emotion and cognition in English: A millennial perspective

Existing research has shown that there is much variation in diachronic development and borrowability rates across different semantic fields in English, but most work up to now has focused on specialized or technical vocabulary, rather than fields associated with how people express and conceptualize their feelings and thoughts. While some studies have explored the historical evolution of the emotion lexicon (e.g., Diller [2014]) and, to a lesser extent, the cognition lexicon (e.g., Kiricsi [2010]), the contrastive study of these semantic categories has yet to be a focus in the research landscape. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the development of the cognition and emotion lexicon over a period of thousand years, from Old to Present-Day English. We compare the emergence of words in these two semantic fields across three key dimensions: semantic subfields, source languages of roots and morphological structure. For this purpose, we created a sample of approx. 1400 nouns on the basis of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE; categories: 02.01 mental capacity and 02.04 emotion) and analysed their etymology with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary. To annotate the lexical items in our sample, we used the methods of formal-morphological analysis (e.g., Tyschenko [2003]; Krykoniuk [2022]) and semantic analysis (e.g., Pons-Sanz [2022]; HTE [2023]). We analyse our sample with clustering techniques (i.e., Principal Component Analysis and Correspondence Analysis) to determine general trends across the two lexicons (e.g. a greater involvement of Latin roots and compounding in the formation of the cognition lexicon, and Norse-derived roots and conversion in coinage of nouns referring to emotion), as well as specific features of each period of the English language (e.g. the significant impact that the Middle English period had on the lexicalization of memory, fear, compassion, pleasure and suffering, and the early integration of French-derived terms, as suggested by word-formation processes).

The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora

Abstract Since George Lucas’s film A New Hope was first screened in 1977, the Star Wars saga has become a pop-culture phenomenon incorporating films, videogames, books, merchandise, and a quasi-religious philosophy, but linguistic research on Star Wars is scarce and has mainly focused on language use in the films. There is as yet no investigation of the impact of Star Wars on the English language, and the present study fills this gap using corpus-linguistic methods to investigate the extent to which characteristic words and constructions from the Star Wars universe have become established in English. Five Star Wars-derived items included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), namely Jedi, Padawan, lightsabre (with spelling variants), Yoda, and the characteristic construction to the dark side were analysed regarding their frequency of occurrence in four corpora of present-day English (COCA, COHA, BNC, BNC Spoken 2014) and coded regarding their level of independence from the original films. The results show that over one-third of the uses of the investigated Star Wars-derived items are innovative (like the BNC example Other imbibers have gone over to the dark side of beer, rejecting the pasteurised lager produced by the breweries) and thus well integrated into the English language.

A lexicographical approach to neologisms created through blending

Blending has long been regarded as an unproductive word-formation process. “Portmanteau”, a word formed through blending, can be traced back to Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-glass, published in 1871, but the earliest words created this way were found to be in use in the late Middle English period and many of them did not survive. The number of blends failed to experience any apparent increase in the several centuries that ensued. Since the beginning of the 20th century, blending has been playing an ever-increasing role in forming neologisms. Simonini (1966) found that blend words comprised approximately 3% of new English words. Algeo’s (1991) research into neologisms revealed that about 5% of the words were blends. Among the 1,186 new words analyzed by Cook and Stevenson (2010), around 43% were blends. The growing number of new blends in the English vocabulary means the inclusion of more such words in English dictionaries. In the recent updates of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), neologisms such as shockvertising, sharenting, Xennial, and staycation are formed through blending. This paper intends to make a thorough research into new blends recorded not only in monolingual English dictionaries such as the OED, Collins English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary but also in bilingual dictionaries such as An English-Chinese Dictionary of Neologisms in Present-day English and A Dictionary of Blends in Contemporary English. The blends found therein will be classified, and the deficiencies in the coverage of blends in dictionaries like the OED will be discussed in detail.

Idioms in General English Corpora: on Frequency, Register, and Cross-Variety Variation

Research into idioms and phraseology has become an established part of the corpus linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around either corpus-based or corpus-driven methodologies. At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has contributed to establishing an ideal platform for the study of variation in the varieties of English. The present paper rests on these two research strands in a survey devoted to variation on the level of idioms in present-day English, namely those denoting competition. While idioms, first and foremost, are theoretically identified with the frameworks of Phraseology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, among others, this study will make use of a corpus-based method of idioms introduced by Moon and Gustawsson’s idioms frequency and significance threshold, paired with Moze and Mohamed’s sociolinguistic profiling of idioms. The Idioms will be examined in two national varieties of English, namely those spoken in Great Britain and the USA, which are represented in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, respectively. With the assumption that the concept of competition is variety-specific, the main questions to be answered during the analysis are: (1) To what extent can the frequency of use of idioms be regarded an element of variation? and (2) Are there any differences in the prominence of specific variables, such as frequency, register, gender, and age across the two varieties under study? The preliminary findings indicate a significant amount of similarity, but upon closer examination of the data, some important variations are emphasised. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for an inter-variety comparison of the idioms denoting competition and, in so doing, adds to the universality / variation debate.

On the Coronal Palatalization in Early Modern and Present-Day English

In this paper we look at the case of coronal palatalization [t d s z] > [ʧ ʤ ʃ ʒ] in both Early Modern English (EModE) and Present-day English (PDE) with the aim to determine its major phonological factors (such as the context, triggers, etc.) and to explain the existence of numerous palatalized/unpalatalized variants found in different accents of contemporary English, e.g. [ʧuːn]/[tuːn]/[tjuːn]. It is argued here that the key to understanding the operation of palatalization in contemporary English is the change in the parameter setting which allows/disallows for the merger of two antagonistic elements within a single melodic expression – the *|U I| constraint. This Middle English (ME) innovation guarantees the coronals, to the exclusion of labials and velars, the right to undergo full palatalization. Moreover, the historical perspective adopted in this paper sheds some light not only on the linguistic micro-variation evident in contemporary accents of English, i.e. the existence of [ʧuːn]/[tuːn]/[tjuːn] variants, but also on the absence of front vowels from the group of potential palatalization triggers. It is pointed out that the evolution of the ME diphthong [iu] > [juː], a process which bears a direct responsibility for the later coronal palatalization and the growth of the heterogeneous forms in PDE, is a natural reaction to the *|U I| constraint.

Oblique predicative constructions in English withforandas:quavsqualitate qua

English has anoblique predicative constructionin which the prepositionsforandaslicense anoblique predicative complementthat is predicated of a noun phrase, as inWe took herfor a friendandI regarded heras a genius. The construction withforis the oldest, and is found in many other languages. This article traces the history of oblique predicative constructions involvingforandas, and a number of other prepositions, from Old English to Present-Day English (PDE). Visser (1963–73) has suggested that predicativeforandaswere rivals, and that in PDEasis now dominant at the expense offor. I will argue instead that since around 1900 predicativeforandascan clearly be distinguished semantically as expressing the meaningsqua(‘as being’) andqualitate qua(‘in the capacity of’), respectively, and that the existence of these distinct meanings explains why constructions with both prepositions still survive in PDE.

Language play is language variation: Quantitative evidence and what it implies about language change

Abstract: This article argues that language play is intimately related to linguistic variation and change. Using two corpora of online present-day English, we investigate playful conversion of adjectives into abstract nouns (e.g. made of awesome ∅), uncovering consistent rule-governed patterning in the grammatical constraints in spite of this option stemming from deliberate subversion of standard overt suffixation. Building on Haspelmath's (1999) notion of 'extravagance' as one of the keys to language change, we account for the systematic patterning of deliberate linguistic subversion by appealing to tension between the need to stand out and the need to remain intelligible. While we do not claim that language play is the only cause of linguistic change, our findings position language play as a constant source of new linguistic variants in very large numbers, a small proportion of which endure as changes. Our conclusion is that language play goes a long way toward accounting for linguistic innovations—with respect to where they come from and why languages change at all.

World Englishes Today: Towards a Pluricentric Approach of Proficiency Testing

Given the fact that one of the important topics in modern sociolinguistics today is the globalisation of English (Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008), the aim of the present paper is twofold. First, it seeks to discuss the extent to which the spread of English around the world has resulted in the emergence of new linguistic varieties of English or World Englishes (Mourchid, 2019) and how English “no longer has one single base of authority, prestige and normativity” (Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008, p. 3). Second, the paper also seeks to provide “a rationale for proficiency testing that subscribes to the view that accepting English as the global target language requires a proficiency testing framework beyond the monolithic EFL and ESL-based tests” (Al-Kadi, 2022, p. 39). This being said, the current paper calls for a shift in paradigm from the monocentric approach, which conceives of English as being a single language, to the pluricentric approach that celebrates the linguistic variation exhibited in the English language, and which better reflects the sociolinguistic reality of present-day English, which, in turn, reflects the new trend of proficiency testing needed in a modern world where diverse varieties of English compete and struggle to find their ways in EFL classrooms.