Abstract This article provides a formal phonological analysis of s -retraction, the process by which /s/ is realized as [ʃ] in /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, e.g. street [ʃʧɹiːt]. While previous research has focused on the sociophonetic and acoustic aspects of this phenomenon, this study situates s -retraction within Element Theory (ET), demonstrating that it is driven by the affrication of the following coronal stop. The analysis shows that both the rhotic /ɹ/ and the glide /j/ function as palatal triggers, as they both contain the palatal element | I |, which spreads leftward, affecting the coronal stop and, subsequently, the preceding /s/. The study also explains why s -retraction is restricted to /stɹ/ and /stj/ clusters, while being absent in /spɹ/ and /skɹ/. This absence is attributed to elemental antagonism, as labials and velars contain |U|, which prevents affrication. The article further accounts for dialectal variation in yod coalescence and yod dropping, showing that the presence of these processes determines whether affrication – and, consequently, s -retraction – occurs. Crucially, the evidence from external sandhi suggests that s -retraction is an active phonological process, rather than a purely phonetic effect. The findings align with broader cross-linguistic palatalization patterns, supporting the view that s -retraction is governed by systematic phonological principles.
Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics has argued for greater interactional accountability in analyses of linguistic variation. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by exploring the interactional conditioning of a relatively new pronoun - man - in two datasets: (i) a corpus of speech and social media data from young people in East London recorded in 2016/17 and (ii) a more recent social media corpus of fifty English-language TikTok videos and their comments. Analyses reveal that man is principally used as a third-person singular pronoun (man said 'one two five') and less often as a first-person singular pronoun (man's doing that voice recording thing) contra to previous findings. I argue that third-person singular man is most commonly used in so-called moments of 'byplay' in which the interlocutor is temporarily excluded from the discourse. In this context, man draws attention to the actions or comments of an interlocutor, typically for ridicule or emphasis. I then briefly consider the relationship of man to the pronominal use of bro (bro said 'he's going to heaven') before speculating that the interactional potentials of man/bro could, potentially, promote their diffusion beyond the communities in which they first emerged.
According to recent research, the get-passive, e.g. get arrested, rather than the be-passive, was arrested, has been increasing in frequency since 1850 (Hundt 2001). While some researchers argue that the two variants remain differentiated by semantic nuances like adversativity and agent animacy (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: 167-71), others assume they are interchangeable and vary according to social factors (Weiner & Labov 1983). Recent corpus-based studies (Allen 2022; Fehringer 2022) tested linguistic and social factors, finding that both play a role. In this article, we aim to contribute new insights by analyzing get vs be in a large corpus of vernacular English from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada. Using a combination of mixed-effects logistic regression and decision tree analysis, we find significant effects of animacy, explicit agent, adversativity, speaker gender, level of education and year of birth. The results show that the get-passive is increasing in apparent time. Moreover, we discover a prevailing effect of animacy that reveals the nature of the reorganization taking place in the system across the twentieth century. We conclude that get emerged as a change from below but is gradually losing its stigma and continues to advance into the grammar of English.
The article is an attempt to develop Francis and Michaelis' (F&M) (2014, 2017) account of 'relative clause extraposition' (RCE) in English, in terms of a more discourse-oriented dimension. On the basis of a corpus study, these authors select certain constituent types, enabling a comparison between configurations with and without RCE orderings. The result is a 'prototypical' sequence of constituent types that is claimed to predict whether RCE is felicitous or not.To further develop this analysis, the present article puts forward a three-way distinction, in terms of their degree of communicative dynamism, amongst presupposed (i.e. 'grounded') restrictive RCs, non-presupposed RRCs and 'a-restrictive' RCs (neither restrictive nor (strictly) non-restrictive). Only the non-grounded RCs result in a felicitous utterance when extraposed, since it is only such RCs that may realise a presentational function via RCE ordering. More generally, it is shown that the three main sentence-internal factors claimed by F&M to favour RCE derive from the thetic ('all-new') information-structure status of RCE-containing utterances: thus the key features highlighted are the expression-level reflection of the more basic Information Structure articulation involved in each case.
This work aims to describe and analyze a relatively new, puzzling construction that has become very productive in informal registers of English. It is primarily used by younger generations, especially on the web and social-media platforms, but also in spoken language. It appears with the configuration negative marker + subject in the accusative case + gerund (e.g. Not me taking the train at 5 a.m.; meaning: it is ironic and unexpected that I took the train early at 5 a.m.). These constructions, which we dubbed not-ACC-ing constructions, are strictly root phenomena where negation does not reverse the polarity of the sentence. They convey a peculiar ironic, sarcastic, self-deprecating flavor. The existence of the not-ACC-ing construction raises the following questions, which we will address in this article: (i) How come negation does not have its prototypical function of reversing the polarity of the sentence? (ii) How come the subject is in the accusative case, despite not-ACC-ing constructions being invariably root? (iii) How is their peculiar interpretation obtained? We propose an analysis that captures all their structural and interpretive properties by combining some crucial ingredients of Lowe's (2019) analysis of ACC-ing constructions and Greco's (2020) analysis of Expletive Negation.
The article critically reviews the main claims in the recent literature on the semantics of English at least, at the least and at the very least, as members of a larger family of scalar markers, and it focuses on the common meaning of at least, at the least and at the very least. This semantic 'common core' is described in terms of a scalar component, a positive component and a restrictive component. The context can highlight the latter two components and this is argued to explain the distinction described in the literature in terms of a positive evaluation and a rhetorical retreat. The article also proposes to explain the emphatic character of at the very least in terms of a double scalar comparison.
This study investigates the English concealed passive construction (CPC), as in the car needs washing, using authentic corpus data. While previous research has explored certain aspects of the CPC, little attention has been given to strongly associated matrix verbs (or verb types) and interactions between matrix verbs (or verb types) and other elements of the construction. To address these issues, we apply three types of collostructional analysis, and our findings indicate that no single, straightforward pattern emerges with respect to real-life grammatical properties of the CPC. We then show that the well-known distinction between raising and control constructions, formalized in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), offers a more systematic account for the authentic properties of two subtypes of the CPC. We further argue that this raising vs. control contrast is not arbitrary but arises from the two senses of the verb need, which exhibits a particularly strong statistical association with the CPC.
Noun (N) and Adjective (A) are distinct word classes but share certain features. Some noun uses share more features with how adjectives are used, thus contributing (over time) to a shift from N to A. There is evidence that the use of nouns as adjectives is on the increase (Denison 2013). Earlier work (De Smet 2012) shows key and fun taking different paths shifting to A, apparently because the former is a count and the latter a noncount noun. This article provides a type-based study on the N>A shift during the Late Modern English period on the basis of data from the Oxford English Dictionary and diachronic corpora. Complementing previous research, we address the question of which functional slot (premodifying or predicative) dominates the N>A shift and whether countability of nouns plays an important role. Our findings challenge the view that there is a connection between countability of the nouns in question and the path of the N>A shift. A case study on genius, a noun that is both count and noncount, provides additional quantitative and qualitative analysis of the N>A shift.
This article provides a formal phonological analysis of s-retraction, the process by which /s/ is realized as [integral] in /st(sic)/ and /stj/ clusters, e.g. street [(sic)i:t]. While previous research has focused on the sociophonetic and acoustic aspects of this phenomenon, this study situates s-retraction within Element Theory (ET), demonstrating that it is driven by the affrication of the following coronal stop. The analysis shows that both the rhotic /(sic)/ and the glide /j/ function as palatal triggers, as they both contain the palatal element |I|, which spreads leftward, affecting the coronal stop and, subsequently, the preceding /s/.The study also explains why s-retraction is restricted to /st(sic)/ and /stj/ clusters, while being absent in /sp(sic)/ and /sk(sic)/. This absence is attributed to elemental antagonism, as labials and velars contain |U|, which prevents affrication. The article further accounts for dialectal variation in yod coalescence and yod dropping, showing that the presence of these processes determines whether affrication - and, consequently, s-retraction - occurs.Crucially, the evidence from external sandhi suggests that s-retraction is an active phonological process, rather than a purely phonetic effect. The findings align with broader cross-linguistic palatalization patterns, supporting the view that s-retraction is governed by systematic phonological principles.
This study explores the interaction between pragmatic and phonetic variation, investigating the usage of just in British English. Based on an acoustic and auditory phonetic analysis of 1,260 tokens of just spoken by 100 male speakers of Standard Southern British English, I argue that speakers utilise phonetic resources to indicate pragmatic meaning alongside predictable contextual effects. The realisation of each of the canonical segments of just (/d3/, /Lambda/, /s/, /t/) were investigated using duration, centre of gravity and vowel formant estimates. Discourse-pragmatic uses of just were more likely to exhibit phonetic reduction than adverbial uses in terms of word duration, vowel elision and quality, but not for /s/ and /t/ duration. The realisation of /t/ was dependent on following context, but the effect of function on vowel realisation and duration remained robust despite interactions with surrounding contexts and token stress. This suggests that speakers signal different functions of just via segmental realisation. Analysing just in phonetic detail within its pragmatic and contextual environment describes how the word is shaped in its representation.
I argue for a hybrid analysis of English numeratives that (i) treats the extended basic numeratives (0-99) as lexemes but (ii) analyzes larger expressions as syntactic phrases or coordinations with magnitudes (hundred, thousand, million, & mldr;) as heads and factors ( two hundred, forty-two million, & mldr;) as (obligatory) modifiers. A number of independent diagnostics - including ordinal/fractional morphology, prosodic phrasing and ellipsis/coordination - converge on the existence of a constituent containing all preceding material up to the rightmost base; this directly contradicts the cascading NumP + NP-deletion architecture of Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) when applied to English. The analysis preserves the category assignments of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language - cardinals as determinatives and nouns, ordinals as adjectives, fractionals as nouns - and refines the functional picture: (i) multiplicative factors ( one hundred) function as modifiers, never as determiners or complements, and (ii) additions (one hundred and two ) are coordinates in a coordination. The resulting determinative category is a small closed list, not an open-ended stock of 'numeral lexemes'. Cardinal nouns split in two: proper when they name, common when they count - a division borne out by distributional diagnostics. The result is a more complete, empirically tighter, morphosyntax-sensitive account of English numeratives that explains why English is lexical below 100 but demands overt syntax above it.
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.
