Volume 40 (2016): Issue 1 (March 2016)

This present study focuses on the description of the development of phrasal verbs (PVs) in Late Modern Spoken English and, specifically, aims at analysing texts taken from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, a valuable source of spoken language from past time periods. From a diachronic perspective, the emergence of new PVs can be considered strictly linked to the process of direct formation and analogical generalization resulting in PVs as they are known in Present Day English (PDE). This study is a corpus-based investigation conducted on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a corpus that has been compiled by using texts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and annotated with the Visual Interactive Syntax Learning interface (VISL). The analysis reveals that, in the time span 1750-1850, this verbal group underwent a gradual process of change also due to the contribution of direct formation and analogical generalization, a process that started in the Early Modern English (EME) period and that continued to the Late Modern English (LModE) era.

Linguistic avoidance - the conscious or unconscious non-use of a problematic language expression and/or the substitution of another - is difficult to demonstrate empirically in historical terms, as it constitutes a negative action that leaves no positive trace. However, all hope is not lost for the empiricist: the very conspicuousness of the problematic expression’s absence can in fact be measured across a time period. A perhaps unique case in point in English is the avoidance of number-word expressions such as five millions of individuals and, alternatively, five million individuals precisely at the point in history when it became unclear which of the two expressions was the correct one, i.e. when usage was shifting. At this point, newspapers in the US and the UK, following patterns that were similar but not contemporaneous, began to favor numerical expressions like 5,000,000 individuals. The timing of the shift corresponded to the time gap between US and UK newspapers in their respective gradual rejection of the now obsolescent (Obs) five millions of individuals in favor of the present-day English (PdE) construction five million individuals. Then, in both countries, newspapers largely discontinued the use of numerical expressions like 5,000,000 individuals when it had become clear that the PdE construction had prevailed. In other words, the numerical expression was conspicuously substituted to avoid choosing between the Obs and PdE versions of the numberword expression, and this avoidance left a clear empirical trace.

We introduce the Language Change Database (LCD), which provides access to the results of previous corpus-based research dealing with change in the English language. The LCD will be published on an open-access linked data platform that will allow users to enter information about their own publications into the database and to conduct searches based on linguistic and extralinguistic parameters. Both metadata and numerical data from the original publications will be available for download, enabling systematic reviews, meta-analyses, replication studies and statistical modelling of language change. The LCD will be of interest to scholars, teachers and students of English.

This article deals with pronoun omission in subject position and its connection with subject-verb agreement in Indian English and Singapore English. Agreement morphology has been found to be a predictor and facilitator of pronoun omission cross-linguistically in that it aids in the identification and retrieval of the referents of omitted pronouns. The results of a corpus study partly confirm this trend, since they show that agreement morphology does have a weak facilitating effect in both varieties examined; that is, pronoun omission increases when the subject and the verb agree in person and number. However, this is only true for lexical verbs; non-modal auxiliaries (i.e., be, have, do), on the contrary, show a low percentage of omitted pronouns and no facilitating effect of agreement morphology. To account for this finding, the possible inhibiting effect on pronoun omission of the frequency of co-occurrence of pronouns and non-modal auxiliaries was also explored.

Contrastive focus reduplication (CR) is a type of reduplication in English which picks out a prototypical or intensified reading of the reduplicated element and shows contrastive stress on the reduplicant: for instance, speakers may use talk talk to indicate that a ‘real talk’ - as opposed to e.g. ‘just small talk’- took place. The present paper pursues an empirical, corpus-linguistic approach to CR: Based on three mega-corpora of contemporary English, the following aspects in particular are investigated: the importance of the co-text of CR, the possibility of emerging default interpretations for some frequent CRs, and the function(s) CR serves in discourse. In addition, it contains the first analysis of the sociolinguistics of the phenomenon, based on a corpus of blogs. It emerges that contrasts and/or synonyms are commonly employed to clarify the meaning of CR - most frequently in the form of the unreduplicated base (not talk, but talk talk) or an explanatory phrase (talk talk, by which I mean a serious conversation). CR is most frequent in blogs maintained by women and by young speakers. Its presence in blogs shows that CR is not limited to (fictional representations of) spoken dialogue. Though generally rare, it is also found in other genres (such as fiction, news, and even academic prose). Apart from its disambiguating function, CR is also used for creative purposes (as a kind of wordplay) and apparently serves to build rapport between interlocutors (or bloggers and readers) via reference to common ground.