Volume 50, Issue Historica-vol-37 -

This paper provides a detailed corpus-based account of the formal and functional changes that be going to underwent in Late Modern English. Despite be going to’ s popularity, such studies remain rare for this period, in which the construction’s grammaticalization went through a second phase. Our analysis shows that the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from intention to prediction, which originated in contexts with third person subjects. Reporting the intention of others generally involves a certain amount of guesswork, which eventually resulted in the creation of an additional, epistemic layer of prediction, reinforced by the gradual extension of be going to to express non-imminent future situations. It is argued that this shift involves an increase in subjectivity, as the emphasis gradually moved away from the grammatical subject to the speaker: what mattered was no longer the intentions of the subject, but the knowledge of the speaker about them. Attention is also drawn to parallel developments in other future markers, particularly will . Interestingly, and in spite of significant differences, each of these went through an intermediary stage that involved past tense uses with reference to a future in the past, which was already known to the speaker.

An article published in 2014 argued that the third-person singular present tense indicative zero was already present in Norfolk English before the arrival of Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants in Norwich in the middle of the sixteenth century. This position differs from that of Trudgill, who has argued that zero-marking in Norfolk English arose as a result of language contact between the immigrants (or ‘Strangers’) and local English people. One response to the earlier article is that it relies on examples involving the verb have , and that this verb is something of an exception as it is found with zero-marking in other varieties of English. The present article addresses that concern by providing further evidence that zero-marking was already used in Norfolk English for verbs other than have before the arrival of the Strangers in Norwich. It then evaluates whether, although zero-marking was present prior to 1565, Trudgill’s language contact thesis may nevertheless help to explain how zero-marking became a common feature of Norfolk English and indeed of varieties of English elsewhere in East Anglia. In short, this article aims to shed further light on the interesting question of how and when zero-marking developed in Norfolk English.

There is a wide array of spellings attested in Middle English for initial OE hw - in words such as when, where, what, who, which . Those beginning with ‘q’, found mostly in the North (including Scotland) and Northeast Midlands, have long been the subject of scholarly debate. The consensus is that they represented an articulation stronger than [hw], usually assumed to be [xw]. Just a handful of scholars have suggested that the articulation could have been [kw], but there is so far little detailed argument for this position. We propose that at least a subset of reflexes of OE hw - words came at least variably to be pronounced with initial [kw]. We suggest that this strengthened pronunciation existed alongside [xw], and lenited [hw] and [w], as well as simple [h] with the [w] deleted. We link (as some other scholars have) the history of these spellings with that of northern lenition of original initial [kw] to [xw]/[hw]/[w]. We approach the problem from a strongly variationist perspective, presenting (in accompanying appendices) detailed information on the ‘q’ spellings accessible from LAEME and eLALME. We review all the data, from the earliest attested forms through to modern dialect surveys, including place-name evidence, and we assess previous arguments on the topic.

Romanian has a large class of nouns characterized by masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural. This phenomenon of alternating gender is frequently argued by traditional grammarians of Romanian, Romance linguists, and linguist typologists to constitute a neuter or third gender, distinct from masculine and feminine . The present study argues, from close analysis of a wide range of diachronic and comparative dialectal data, that the neuter is in fact an epiphenomenon of agreement behaviour that depends crucially on the inflexional identity of the singular and plural forms of the nouns. Hypostatization of a third gender is dangerously liable to obfuscate the true mechanisms at work. Principled explanations of some apparent exceptions to my overall claim will be offered. I also investigate, however, some ways in which the emergence of a third gender of the type so widely assumed already to exist might be latent in Romanian, and speculate in general on how alternating gender might emerge diachronically.

This article surveys possible factors affecting particle alternation in British English between 1650 and 1990. When particle verbs are transitive, the speaker is presented with two possible choices: verb-particle-object (VPO) or verb-object-particle (VOP). Research has shown that there are a number of phonological, morphological, semantic and discourse-functional variables which may affect the speaker’s choice. The present article focuses on the influence of six morpho-syntactic variables, namely the noun phrase (NP) type of the direct object (DO), the length of the object, the complexity of the DO, the presence of a directional prepositional phrase (PPdir), the type of determiner of the object NP and the type of particle. The data show that, although the VPO order tends to be the predominant one, some of these variables can determine the type of arrangement selected by the speaker. The results are also compared with previous research on Middle English, Early Modern English and Present-day English, showing that the tendencies observed have changed over time.

In this study we analyze ego-documents and metalinguistic texts from nineteenth century and early twentieth century Chilean Spanish showing a number of cases of phonetic-phonological hypercorrections. Our focus is the interaction between language-normative discourses and language use. We work with the assumption that hypercorrections are a symptom of the speakers’ linguistic consciousness regarding the norm and the (overt) prestige associated with certain variants, and thus they reveal the influence that normative ideas exert over language use. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chilean Spanish underwent a process of linguistic standardization, which manifested itself through a number of ‘disciplinary texts’ (grammars, dictionaries) that offered an exoglossic normative model. Chilean Spanish differed from this normative model in a number of features which were subject to overt condemnation and also were precisely those affected by hypercorrection in our data.

In a number of recent works, verbs and expressions encoding causative alternations have been regarded as a possible test for measuring the basic valency orientation of a language. This paper focuses on the basic orientation of valency in Homeric Greek. The test applied for determining this parameter is that proposed by Nichols et al. (2004, Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8(2). 149–211), focusing on 18 causative alternations. The investigation carried out in this paper shows that Homeric Greek belongs to the detransitivizing type, showing an active-middle alternation as the preferred pattern for expressing causative alternations. This study aims to enrich the typological literature on this topic and positions itself among other studies of valency orientation in ancient Indo-European languages, such as Old Hittite, Old Indo-Aryan, Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Slavic, which show transitivizing strategies along with voice alternation patterns.

This article argues against the claim by Emonds and Faarlund (2014, English: The language of the vikings . Palacký University: Olomouc) that English died out after the Norman Conquest, and was replaced by a North Germanic variety referred to as “Anglicised Norse”, which had been formed in the Danelaw area in a concerted effort by the Norse and Anglo-Saxon populations, presumably to overthrow the ruling French elite. Emonds and Faarlund base their claim on the existence of some 20–25 linguistic features which are said to have been absent from Old English, but which are present in Present-Day English and in Scandinavian languages. This article argues that genetic affiliation cannot be inferred from shared syntactic, morphological or lexical features, which may easily result from independent convergence in historically related languages. The main counter-argument, however, is chronological: the majority of the features adduced are indeed attested in Old English and often in other West Germanic languages also, and hence may not be attributed to Old Norse; nor can features which are not attested in English until late Middle English or early Modern English come from Old Norse. The continuity of English in the written record likewise renders the suggested scenario highly unlikely.

This paper explores register variation in diaries and travel journals during the early and late Modern English periods (1500–1900), based on the case study of preposition placement, specifically preposition stranding ( which I refer to ) and preposition pied piping ( to which I refer ). Findings show that diaries and travel journals in general have a similar frequency of stranded and pied-piped prepositions, but that sharp differences emerge in their diachronic evolution. The trends suggest that the two registers generally follow the same historical drift towards oral styles previously observed in non-specialised registers, albeit at different rates and with only a moderately oral-like pattern in the nineteenth century. Also of note is that the frequency of stranded prepositions in diaries is lower than expected. I will argue that, although norms on ‘proper’ style and eighteenth-century prescriptive norms of ‘correct’ English play an important role, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, one should also take into account register-specific characteristics such as the topic and purpose of the text, the setting in which it is produced (private/public), the participants involved and the production circumstances of the text. Likewise, idiolectal differences should not be underestimated, since they can on occasions skew results.