Present-day English Research Articles

Emergent labial stops in English

The lexicon of English contains a number of words which developed emergent stops, mostly p, b, t, d. Some of these words have functioned as variants of forms without such stops (cf. OE endleofan ~ enlefan or gandra ~ ganra) but in most cases they prevail in Present-day English, as exemplified by OE nimol > ModE nimble, OE æmtig > ModE empty.The present study examines the process of labial stop epenthesis from the perspective of diachrony and diatopy. I searched for the words containing emergent labial stops in the texts collected in historical English corpora to identify their uses with and without parasitic consonants. This made it possible to establish a precise chronology of the process, which was at work from Old to Modern English, and the context in which such stops appeared.

Review of Lebrun (1965): 'Can' and 'May' in Present-Day English

Review of Lebrun (1965): 'Can' and 'May' in Present-Day English

‘I'm so ditching school to babysit.’

This paper focuses on the use of preverbalsoin present-day English. While its use as an intensifier (meaning ‘so much’ or ‘very much’) has been attested already in Early Modern English (OED online, s.v.so, adv. and conj., sense 15), it has only recently acquired emphatic meaning (‘truly’ or ‘definitely’, seeOED online, s.v.so, adv. and conj., 2005 Draft Additions). Compare:(1)I do so love weddings. They're such joy. (SOAP YR2005)(2)I'm so ditching school to babysit. (SOAP AMC2007)In (1),socan be paraphrased with ‘very much’ or ‘so much’ (I do love weddings very/so much), because it modifies scalarlove, indicating degree (viz. you can love weddings above anything else/ a lot/ a little/ not at all, etc.). This paraphrase does not work for (2), however: in this case,somodifies non-scalarditch, meaning that a degree reading is not accessible (either you ditch school at a given time or not).Soin Example (2) does not convey intensity but expresses the speaker's certainty that they are going to ditch school in order to babysit:I'm so ditching school to babysit –‘I am definitely ditching school to babysit’.

Intensification in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing

While intensifiers are primarily associated with informal spoken registers, they serve important interpersonal functions also in more formal registers like academic prose. The use of intensifiers in scientific writing has accordingly been explored in Present-Day English, and previous studies have also investigated diachronic changes in this register in Middle and Early Modern English. However, the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that at least in medical writing it represents an important transition period both intellectually and textually. To follow up on the trends and developments established in previous work, this paper explores the patterns of intensification in eighteenth century medical writing using Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2019), which contains a large collection of texts representing different areas of medicine. While the intensifiers that are selected for study are ubiquitous in the data, their frequency varies considerably between individual texts, and this variation is often linked to the characteristics of individual sub-registers. At the same time, the use of intensifiers in this period is characterized by stability rather than dramatic change, despite ongoing changes in the sociocultural context of medicine. Along with providing a detailed investigation of the frequency of the main intensifiers in different categories of medical writing of the period, the analysis describes their co-selection patterns with particular adjectives.

“He loved his father but next to adored his mother”:Nigh(ly),Near, andNext(To) as Downtoners

In Present-Day English, nearly functions as an approximator downtoner meaning ‘almost, all but, virtually,’ as do earlier variants based on the same root— nigh, nighly, near, next ( to)—though more rarely and in more restricted contexts. Nigh functions as an approximator downtoner in Old and Middle English. When near displaces nigh, nigh is retained as a downtoner with lexical adjectives expressing negative semantic prosody. Near is used as a downtoner in later Middle and Early Modern English. However, degree adjunct uses are not well attested, thus pointing to incomplete grammaticalization. During the eighteenth century, the new -ly form ( nearly) takes over the innovative downtoner function and the old form ( near) is retained in the original locative sense, with some remnant downtoner uses. Next ( to) grammaticalizes as a downtoner, but proceeds only to the degree modifier stage and involves a high degree of idiomaticization, thus suggesting incipient grammaticalization. As spatial adverbs, nigh/ near/ next ( to)/ nearly represent one of the well-known sources for the grammaticalization of degree adverbs. However, these forms seem to follow a pathway where the degree modifier use (adjective/participle modifier) precedes the degree adjunct use (verb modifier), contrary to the reverse pathway postulated for other degree adverbs.

“That’s well good”: A Re-emergent Intensifier in Current British English

Well has a long history and is found as an intensifier already in older English. It is argued that diachronically well has developed from its etymological meaning (‘in a good way’) on a cline of adverbialization to an intensifier and to a discourse marker. Well is replaced by other intensifiers in the fourteenth century but emerges in new uses in Present-Day English. The changes in frequency and use of the new intensifier are explored on the basis of a twenty-year time gap between the old British National Corpus (1994) and the new Spoken British National Corpus (2014). The results show that well increases in frequency over time and that it spreads to new semantic types of adjectives and participles, and is found above all in predicative structures with a copula. The emergence of a new well and its increase in frequency are also related to social factors such as the age, gender, and social class of the speakers, and the informal character of the conversation.

An interactive visualization of Google Books Ngrams with R and Shiny: Exploring a(n) historical increase in onset strength in a(n) huge database

Using the re-emergence of the /h/ onset from Early Modern to Present-Day English as a case study, we illustrate the making and the functions of a purpose-built web application named (an:a) lyzer for the interactive visualization of the raw n-gram data provided by Google Books Ngrams (GBN). The database has been compiled from the full text of over 4.5 million books in English, totalling over 468 billion words and covering roughly five centuries. We focus on bigrams consisting of words beginning with graphic <h> preceded by the indefinite article allomorphs a and an, which serve as a diagnostic of the consonantal strength of the initial /h/. The sheer size of this database affords us the possibility to attain a maximal diachronic resolution, to distinguish highly specific groups of <h>-initial lexical items, and even to trace the diffusion of the observed changes across individual lexical units. The functions programmed into the app enable us to explore the data interactively by filtering, selecting and viewing them according to various parameters that were manually annotated into the data frame. We also discuss limitations of the database, of the app and of the explorative data analysis. The app is publicly accessible online at https://osf.io/ht8se/.

Visualizing the development of prose styles in Horse Manuals from Early Modern English to Present-Day English

This paper offers a data-driven analysis of the development of English prose styles in a single genre (instructive writing) dealing with a single topic (the correct way of feeding a horse) in 13 texts with publication dates ranging between 1565 to 2009. The texts are subjected to three investigations that offer visualizations of the findings: (i) a correspondence analysis of POS-tag trigrams; (ii) an association plot analysis; (iii) hierarchical clustering (dendrograms). As the period selected – Early Modern English to Present-Day English – does not involve any major changes in English syntax, we expect to find developments that are predominantly stylistic.

An Excursion on Land

A fundamental aspect of political language is the words we use for potentially contentious political-cultural concepts, as well as how we use them. This paper investigates the use of the noun land in a small sample of English authors, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, comparing that use to how the same authors use the nouns country and nation, as presented in a previous paper along the same lines. In addition to simple frequencies, the combinatory potential of the noun land is examined. Special attention is paid to the use of land in the works of Shakespeare and Marie Corelli. Land in Shakespeare was shown to have a higher combinatory potential than country, which was ascribed partly to the formal properties of the word, partly to its suitability as part of Shakespeare’s imagery, in the context of the political situation in England in the late sixteenth century. Corelli’s abundant use of land is seen as exaggeratedly symptomatic of Victorian style, which has contributed to the word being stylistically marked in present-day English. A general finding is that land, even when used in a political sense, retains some of its concrete meaning, which may contribute to its rhetorical usefulness.

Isoglosses and language change: Evidence of the rise and loss of isoglosses from a comparison of early Greek and early English

AbstractWe analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

The encounter of two cultural identities: The case of social deixis

In contact with foreign environment, the encounter of two (or more) cultures is common in situations with an incompatible cultural aspect. A typical example is T-V distinction. In most languages, mainly European ones, conveying social deixis oscillates between two poles: T and V forms. Present-day English is the only mainstream language with the absence of morphological markers for conveying T/V relationships. The present research examines the concept of expressing social distance in Slovak and in English, languages respectively having and lacking overt T/V markers, in order to specify the distinctiveness of English vs. Slovak lingua-cultural identity and/or discursive practice of the respective culture with regard to expressing social distance. This is done in two steps. Firstly, the underlying concepts (a lingua-cultural identity, social distance, T/V forms) are studied by means of the conceptualizing scheme (Kačmárová, Bilá, Vaňková 2018); its essence lies in accounting for and in aligning four sub-processes: frame establishment, encoding (pre-understanding), contextualization (salience), and code configuration. The conceptualization process utilized a set of principles (adopted from Clyne, Norrby & Warren 2009). Secondly, based on the theoretical results, the questionnaires were designed. The questions for native speakers of Slovak examined the preferences in the usage of T vs. V forms; the questions for native speakers of English examined the preferences in the usage of informal vs. formal ways of communication. The present study indicates that the conceptualizing process may as well be of hierarchical nature. Thus, the mere conceptualization of T vs. V or informal vs. formal may emanate from the conceptualization of social distance in terms of a set of principles, the conceptualization of the specific principle in terms of the relationship types, the conceptualization of the relationship type in terms of a specific culture and the conceptualization of a culture-specific relationship type through language means (T or V).

Review of Jansen & Siebers (2019): Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English

This article reviews Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English EUR 1059789027204141

Speaker stance and evaluative -ly adverbs in the Modern English period

Present-day English makes major use of adverbs for the expression of speaker stance, following what has been described as the adverbialization of speaker attitude. Two adverbial constructions have particular stance-expressing functions: those with an adverb that modifies a clause or sentence (SAdv) and those with an adverb that modifies an adjective phrase (AdjAdv). The emergence of modal and evaluative SAdvs from verb-phrase-modifying adverbs (VPAdvs) via inferencing and scope expansion has been well documented. There is a large literature on the diachronic development of Present-day English intensifiers such as absolutely or really. Much less attention has been paid to the evaluative function of many AdjAdvs. This paper focuses on the relationship between extra-clausal stance -ly adverbs of the SAdv construction and their intra-clausal counterparts of the AdjAdv construction. It is argued that -ly adverbial modification of adjectives cannot be reduced to intensification. It has become a favoured site for the expression of speaker evaluation, contributing to increase in information compression. The evaluative AdjAdv and SAdv constructions are seen to share a semantic schema, and by hypothesis belong to a single more abstract constructional schema. While earlier types appear to have evolved from circumstance adverbs, later types may have been coined by analogy in a cycle of increasing productivity.

How to Make New Use of Existing Resources:

This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of, the study will make a methodological contribution to historical dialectology by showing that there are extensive, severely underused resources that can reveal valuable information about the geographical variation of English even if they were not originally designed for that purpose. Most crucially, the article introduces a way to investigate Early Modern English from the perspective of regional variation, thus paving the way for future research in a field that has been extremely challenging to study in the past.

An ecosystem view of English word-formation

Abstract This article takes a function-to-form approach to word-formation in present-day English and argues that the ecosystem metaphor can help morphologists see competition in word-formation and its resolution in a new light. The analysis first draws correspondences between four lexical functions (transcategorial, transconceptual, evaluative, and compacting) and ten formal operations (prefixation, suffixation, compounding, blending, morphostasis, stress shift, clipping, desuffixation, initialization, and replication) and concludes that there is no across-the-board interoperation competition to encode each function, but rather a fairly complementary distribution of the operations between the four functional subsystems. Each functional subsystem is then reviewed in turn and it is shown that, again, there is no full-scale competition at this level, but rather some fairly pronounced tendencies towards complementariness, and, in one case, also towards combination. The broad division of labor within each subsystem can, remarkably, be accounted for in different terms: the conditioning is primarily semantic (with formal subconsiderations) in the transcategorial and transconceptual subsystems while it is formal in the evaluative and compacting subsystems.

Battling for semantic territory across social networks. The case ofAnglo-Saxonon Twitter

AbstractIn Present-Day English, the termAnglo-Saxonis used with three dominant meanings, which have been labeled “historical/pre-Conquest”, “ethno-racial” and “politico-cultural” uses (cf. Wilton 2019). From at least the middle of the 19th century, the second sense has been politically appropriated to convey the racial notion of white supremacy. Recently, a fierce conceptual and socio-political controversy over the meaning and implications of the termAnglo-Saxonhas spilled over into academia, ultimately causing the vote of the members of theInternational Society of Anglo-Saxonists(ISAS) to change its name toInternational Society for the Study of Early Medieval England(ISSEME).We discuss this development as a paradigm case of controversies over the conceptual territory associated with a contested term. Using the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2020) as a theoretical framework, we analyze a large collection of Twitter posts (n ~ 510,000) with a view on the conventionalization and entrenchment processes involved in the conceptual and political controversy.

Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL) or Middle English Compensatory Lengthening (MECL)?

This study addresses a controversial aspect of the change traditionally known as Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL): the variable results of lengthening in disyllabic (C)V.CVC stems, theheaven–havenconundrum. It presents a full philological survey of the recoverable monomorphemic input items and their reflexes in Present-day English (PDE). A re-examination of the empirical data reveals a previously unnoticed correlation between lengthening and the sonority of the medial consonant in forms such aspaper,rocket,gannetandbaron, as well as interplay between that consonant and the σ2coda. The alignment of disyllabic stems with a medial alveolar stop and a sonorant weak syllable coda (Latin,better,otter) with (C)V.RVR stems (baron,felon,moral) opens up a new perspective on the reconstruction of tapping in English. The results of lengthening in disyllabic forms, including those previously thought of as ‘exceptions’ to the change, are modeled in Classical OT and Maxent OT, prompting an account which reframes MEOSL as a stem-level compensatory process (MECL) for all inputs. We show that OT grammars with conventional constraints can correctly predict variation in the (C)V.TəR stems and categorical lengthening or non-lengthening in other disyllabic stems. Broadening the phonological factors beyond the open-syllable condition for potential stressed σ1inputs in (C)V.CV(C) stems allows us to apply the same constraints to stems whose input structure does not involve an open syllable and to propose a uniform account of stressed vowel quantity in all late Middle English mono- and di-syllabic stems.

A contribution to Old English lexicography

Abstract This article contributes to Old English Lexicography with the lemmatisation of five Old English class VII verbs. The scope is restricted to ūtgangan, wiðhealdan, oferscēadan, onbefeallan and ongangan, for which very little information can be gathered from the available lexicographical sources. Lemmatisation is a pending task because there is not a complete list with all the attested forms by dictionary word, and because the available corpora are unlemmatised. The methodology focuses on the manual revision of the inflectional forms (retrieved from the DOEC) using lexicographical and textual sources with the aim of providing the citations together with their translation into Present-Day English. As a result, this work provides insights on building dictionary entries for these verbs, including the list of inflectional forms attested in the corpus, the meaning definition, and the morphology of the word formation. The entries for these lemmas, if listed by the dictionaries, are often incomplete, but more importantly, they are not based on a lemmatised corpus.

ORIGINS OF FUNCTIONAL TRANSPOSITION WITHIN THE CATEGORY OF TIME AND SPACE PREPOSITIONS: LEXICALIZATION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION

This paper is an attempt to reanalyze the established order within the category of parts of speech, in particular prepositions and adverbs, as the units from these categories are characterized by the highest level of functional transposition in the language. We argue that overlapping of the categories was caused by the inclination of the Old English grammarians to take over main grammatical rules and exceptions, class division, definitions etc. from the Latin language. At the same time, grammatical phenomena existing in Old English were ignored or fitted to the already adopted Latin definitions and rules. That led to confusions, misunderstandings and overlapping in the grammatical system of Old English. The paper addresses the processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization which, according to our hypothesis, are observed within the category of prepositions in Old English and predetermined subsequent functional transposition. The analysis explains the phenomenon of functional transposition of the units which are simultaneously ascribed to several categories, e.g. prepositions, adverbs, particles etc. The class of space and time prepositions has undergone lexical and grammatical transformations which were consequently institutionalized in the language and the units became subjects to functional-semantic and functional-grammatical transposition the results of which are observed in present-day English. The former process resulted in transposition of the meaning, sometimes metaphorical, and further functioning of these units as adverbs, particles etc.; whereas the latter led to purely grammatical usage of the units, for instance substitution of the category of cases in English, uprise of new grammatical prefixes, loss of rigidness in word order.

Old English law-codes

AbstractLaw language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared tooewills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison ofoelaw-codes andoewills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile ofoelaw-codes and statutes of later periods.