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This article sheds new light on the usage constraints of be able to, by combining empirical evidence from the British National Corpus (BNC, Davies 2004–) with theoretical insights on the semantics–pragmatics interface. First, we show that be able to does not, contrary to the general assumption, express only ‘ability’ but it shares most of the root meanings usually associated with the possibility modals can and could (Coates 1983: 124). The data analysis shows that what is called ‘opportunity’ in Depraetere & Reed's (2011) taxonomy is the most frequent meaning of be able to. We then turn to the notion of actualisation, which is often claimed to be the main distinguishing feature between be able to and can/could. The qualitative analysis of the BNC dataset provides the empirical evidence, lacking in previous research, for the claim that actualisation is indeed a defining property of the modal periphrastic form. Starting from a reassessment of the semantics–pragmatics interface in terms of a fourfold distinction, we argue that actualisation is a generalised conversational implicature and constitutes conventional pragmatic meaning (that is, conventional non-truth-conditional meaning).

How do we know thatwould ratherandmay wellare more idiomatic thanwould wellorwill really? Can this intuition be measured systematically in usage data? Traditionally, modal idioms suchhad/’d better,would/’d ratherormight (as) wellare seen as distinct from more compositional collocations, which may be modally harmonic (could possibly,will probably) or not (could also,might even). Yet the collocation of modal auxiliaries + adverbs (mod + adv)is more complex than suggested by a binary classification into idioms and non-idioms. This article uses data from COCA and the method of collostructional analysis to show that the difference between qualitatively distinct types ofmod + advis a matter of degree. Modal idiomaticity should be seen as gradient along a continuum from strong association (would rather) to strong dissociation (would well). The results support assumptions that statistical information about the collocational behavior of modal auxiliaries is a cue for the scope of adverbial modification and is thus an important aspect of speakers’ knowledge of modal meaning. The study contributes to recent approaches to modality from a ‘combinatorial’ perspective, which recognizes the importance of the lexical environment in core areas of grammar.

This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causativebring(bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the diachronic stages of detransitivisation for a recessive English verb we gain first systematic, empirically validated insights into the link between transitivity and language change.This article adduces support for the claim thatbringcaus+to-infinitive has (almost completely) lost its ability to take fully fledged direct objects. There are, however, at least three, partly overlapping contexts, in which this verb can stand its ground: with reflexives, modals and negation. What these contexts have in common is that they reduce the clause's transitivity, defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 251) as ‘the effectiveness with which the verbal action takes place’. Assuming that the higher the transitivity, the stronger the effect of the verbal action is on the object, these detransitivised contexts can be interpreted as alleviating the effect of the verbal action.

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

It is well known that can and may have similar meanings and that the choice of the modal auxiliary in the English sentences is not arbitrary in native...

This article examines the use of the semi-modalshave to, have got toandneed toin theDiachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English(DECTE), a corpus of spoken Northeastern English dating from the late 1960s to the present day. It will be shown that the semi-modals have, in many contexts, replaced the historically oldermustas markers of obligation and necessity in this variety. Moreover, the two most frequent variants in the corpus,have toandhave got to, will be examined in the light of current theories of grammaticalisation. Internal and external constraints, which have been shown in the literature on root modality to have played an important role in the distribution of variants in other regional varieties of British and North American English, will be tested in DECTE. The article will also examine the rise ofneed toin this northeastern variety, as the most recent addition to the group of variants marking obligation and necessity.

The so-called invariant tags, such aseh, okay, rightandyeah, are extremely frequent in general English speech and have been studied extensively in recent years, especially in the spoken expression of teenagers, where they are a very common feature.In this article I focus oninnit, as inShe love her chocolate innit?andIt was good innit?For this purpose, I analyse and discuss data extracted from two comparable corpora of teen speech: theBergen Corpus of London Teenage Language(COLT), compiled in 1993, and theLinguistic Innovators Corpus(LI), created in 2004. The analysis considers the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the expression, and asks three fundamental questions: hasinnitremained stable in use over time or has it increased in frequency? Hasinnitpreserved its original grammatical features, or has it undergone notable changes? To what extent isinnitespecially associated with teentalk, at least in London speech, rather than with the speech of adults? Contrasts are also drawn with the standard tagisn't it.Findings confirm thatinnitis typical of the language of London teenagers and has not gone out of use; on the contrary, its frequency has increased over the last few years. In contrast, the proportion of tokens found in the language of their adult counterparts is rather marginal. At present,innitconserves syntactic features of its own: it does not follow the regular question tag formation rules and can represent not only the verbbebut alsodo,haveand most of the modal verbs. Furthermore, it continues to show a high degree of flexibility in the sentence, occurring not only in final but also in initial and medial positions. Finally, it appears thatinnitshould no longer be regarded as a simple invariant tag. It tends to behave more and more like a pragmatic marker serving to express the speaker's attitude to the content of the message, thus often reflecting the relationship between the participants in the interaction, and also contributing to the organisation of the discourse. In this respect, two new discourse functions ofinnitare identified and described: emphatic and text organiser.

‘How ‘English’ are the phrasal verbs really?’ and how did this highly familiar but often ill-described construction evolve ‘from its early history up to the present’? (p. 1). Thim’s book, which may be considered less as an ambitious empirical investigation of the topic than as a competent critical survey of its literature, aims at answering these two questions. That these questions are intertwined is clear from the answers they receive in this work. First, the phrasal verb is not very special to English. While the term phrasal verb ‘is rarely ever used except with respect to English’ (p. 2), Thim points out, as many scholars have done before him, that there are close parallels to be found in other languages, most notably in the other present-day Germanic languages. For instance, the German prefix verb aufgeben ‘give up’ may occur as two separate words, with the prefix auf (a cognate of up) even obligatorily split from the verb by a Direct Object noun phrase (e.g. Sie gab ihre Arbeit auf ‘She gave up her job’). Thim further cites examples of particle verbs from Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish, as well as from Afrikaans, Faroese, Icelandic and Yiddish, to support the claim that the English verb-particle construction is certainly not an isolated language-specific phenomenon. Second, these close parallels then help Thim answer the question about the evolution of the ‘English’ phrasal verb, whose origin can be traced back at least to Proto-Germanic. In Indo-European languages more generally, Thim reminds us, prefix verbs and particle verbs have developed out of adverb-verb sequences. And in fact, in various languages belonging to genetically more distant families, particle-like verb prefixes, or ‘preverbs’, have formed out of adverbs, typically derived themselves from previously independent relational nouns. English may look special in that particles now standardly follow the verb, leaving aside exceptional structures of the type In came a strange figure (more on which below). However, in Old English, and still in early Middle English, particles could appear in both preverbal and postverbal position, depending to some extent on clause type (subordinate or main) and finiteness, rather like the separable prefixes we encounter in Continental West-Germanic languages such as present-day Dutch or German. Thim strongly rejects the widespread misconception ‘that there must have been a ‘rise’ of the phrasal verb’ (p. 145), that is, that the phrasal verb was a Middle English or later innovation which superseded an earlier pattern, one with inseparable prefixes. Rather, Thim argues, the apparent emergence of postverbal particles in English is nothing but an epiphenomenon of independent, wellestablished changes in the language system, the most important of which is the long-term shift from basic O(bject)V(erb) order in Proto-Germanic to VO order in Modern English. In Old English, the oldest order, Object – particle – Verb, was typically found in subordinate clauses and occasionally still in main clauses. When the verb started to occupy the second position in clauses (‘V2 movement’), unstressed preverbs that had fused with the verb stem moved along with it as inseparable prefixes. By contrast, preverbs carrying stress (‘particles’) remained independent and stayed behind in final position when the verb itself moved leftward. It was first the finite verb (v) which moved (O prt V v → v O prt V), causing a clausal brace with the non-finite main verb (v … V), but the latter subsequently rejoined the finite verb in a process known as exbraciation (v O prt V → v V O prt). Extraposition of especially heavy objects may have played a role in dissolving the brace and further yielded the alternative structure with the particle immediately following the verb (v V prt O).

Present-Day English is generally assumed to possess only a handful of lexicalized reflexive verbs (absent oneself from, pride oneself on, etc.) and to use reflexive pronouns neither for the marking of motion middles nor the derivation of anticausative (decausative) verbs. Such middle uses of reflexive markers (non-argument reflexives) are widespread in other European languages. Based on corpus evidence, Geniušienė (1987), Peitsara (1997) and Siemund (2010) demonstrate that English reflexive pronouns do occur in these functions and offer extensive lists of the verbs involved. I here follow up the historical development of these verbs from Middle English to Present-Day English. My analysis is based on a survey of the relevant verb entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (222 verbs), complemented by an examination of the OED quotation base. My study shows that the number of reflexive verbs in English has gradually, but steadily, increased since the emergence of complex reflexives (myself, yourself, etc.) in Middle English. They often result from lexicalization processes, but the data also show more regular patterns indicative of grammatical processes. The Oxford English Dictionary proves to be a rich and highly valuable data source for carrying out serious grammatical analyses.

This article examines possible motivations for the choice of particle verb word order in Middle English (1100–1500) and Early Modern English (1500–1700). The word order alternation of Present-Day English particle verbs, which presents language users with a choice between verb–object–particle and verb–particle–object order, first emerged in Early Middle English (twelfth century). For Present-Day English, several studies (e.g. Gries 1999, 2003; Dehé 2002) have shown that the choice is influenced by a number of linguistic factors, such as the heaviness of the object (morphosyntactic factor) and the givenness of the object (discourse factor). This article reveals the influence of a number of morphosyntactic factors and also shows that the choice is increasingly influenced by the givenness of the object. The differences between Present-Day English on the one hand and Middle and Early Modern English on the other hand are discussed in the light of syntactic changes going on in these periods. It is argued that the developments in particle verb syntax are characterised by an increasing division of labour between the two word orders, which may also explain why both orders survive into Present-Day English.

This article presents a historical cognitive analysis of the development of phrasal verbs (PVs) with out and away in Early and Late Modern English. Semantically, PVs in Present-Day English can be classified as being (a) fully compositional (e.g. go out), (b) partially idiomatic, with the particle having an aspectual (i.e. grammatical) function (e.g. work away) and (c) (fully or highly) idiomatic (e.g. make out ‘understand’; see Quirk et al. 1985, Jackendoff 2010). As is clear from this classification, the development of PVs has, at least, involved grammaticalization and idiomatization. However, there is no consensus in recent grammaticalization research on how these two kinds of changes are related.The literature suggests that the particles used in the partially idiomatic PVs were undergoing grammaticalization in the Old and Middle English periods. Therefore, to understand the semantic and conceptual relationships between partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs, a closer investigation of the uses of PVs after Early Modern English is in order. In this article, focusing on the distributions of away and out taken from colloquial corpora of Early and Late Modern English, namely, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), it is shown through descriptive characterizations that the partially idiomatic and idiomatic PVs are instances of idiomatization caused by grammaticalization and by lexicalization, respectively. Based on these observations, the developments of these two types of PVs can be explained by a Usage-Based Model put forth mainly by Langacker (2000) and Bybee (2006, 2010). Specifically, the idiomatization of partially idiomatic PVs involves repeated schema extractions leading to productivity, whereas the idiomatization of fully or highly idiomatic PVs involves the ‘conserving effect’, whereby a highly entrenched linguistic expression with high frequency resists further language change.

This article argues that be to is primarily a modal auxiliary expressing the necessity of future actualization of the ‘residue-situation’ (= the situation referred to by the clause minus be to). Eight possible ‘M-origins’ (= origins of the necessity) are identified. The ‘futurish’ use of be to in present-day English is closely related to these modal uses, especially to the use in which the M-origin is an official arrangement.The modal interpretation shifts to a futurish interpretation when the emphasis shifts from the present existence of the necessity to the future actualization of the residue-situation. This shift of emphasis is accompanied by a loss of doubt about this future actualization.In other words, the futurish reading comes to the fore when the (strong or weak) origin of the necessity is bleached, so that the hearer's attention is directed to the future actualization of the residue-situation. Various cases of such bleaching are treated. In some cases (e.g. when be to collocates with still or yet, as in He is still to keep the first of his promises), the bleaching of the M-origin is complete, so that only the sense of futurity (and hence of ‘not-yet-factuality’) is left. In some examples there is no clear difference between be to and will any more, so that the two are interchangeable within the same sentence.

Henry & Cottell (2007) argue that Belfast English (BE) sentences such asThere shouldn't anybody say thatandThere've lots of people passed the testare transitive expletive constructions (TECs) similar to those that are a feature of Icelandic. They propose that the difference between BE and Standard English (SE) is that whereas expletivethereis introduced in Spec vP in the latter it is introduced in Spec TP in the former. On the assumption that transitive subjects originate in Spec vP, this entails that expletivetherecannot co-occur with a transitive verb. While it is clear that BE is different from SE in this area, it is not clear that BE has TECs while SE does not. There are a variety of examples which are acceptable in BE but not SE which do not seem to be TECs. SE also has certain examples which might be called TECs. The result of this is that Henry & Cottell's analysis is not very successful. It seems that what distinguishes BE from SE is not what verbs may follow the associate of the expletive but what elements may precede it. SE allows an associate immediately afterbe, but BE also allows an associate immediately after modals andhave, and for some speakersseemandlikelyas well. The facts can be captured in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar by assuming thatbehas an extra lexical description with expletivethereas its subject and the associate as an extra complement in both varieties of English, and that modals andhave, and for some speakersseemandlikelyas well, have an extra lexical description of this form in BE. Generalizations can be captured if the pairs of lexical descriptions are analysed as alternative ways of fleshing out basic underspecified lexical descriptions.

Compared to GermanJaandNein, EnglishYesandNoare used less frequently, and often in combination with short sentences consisting of a pronoun and an auxiliary or modal verb:Yes I will;No I won't. When such a short sentence is used,YesandNomay be omitted:I will;I won't;I do;I don't;He can;They certainly won't. This difference in usage is established (1) by comparing the marriage vow in German and English, where the officiant's question is answered byJain German but byI willorI doin English; (2) by citing material from a practical grammar for German students of English; and (3) by studying the way Shakespeare has his figures answer decision questions, or Yes/No-questions, in comparison with Schlegel's way of rendering their answers in his German translation. Next it is shown that Shakespeare's way, which is essentially the same as modern usage, differs radically from earlier English usage up to Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales(1388–1400) andTroilus and Cresseide(1382–6) and the anonymousYork Plays(fourteenth century) andTowneley Plays(late fourteenth century), which all reflect the Germanic usage, essentially the same as in German. It is concluded that the modern English usage arose during the two centuries between Chaucer and Shakespeare, as a Late Middle English and Early Modern English innovation. As for the reason why English developed this un-Germanic way of answering decision questions, reference is made to Insular Celtic: decision questions are answered with short sentences in both Irish and Welsh, and this usage is old in both languages. The viability of this contact explanation is underlined by Irish English, whereYesandNoare used even less frequently than in Modern Standard English, and short sentences are the normal way of answering decision questions.

For grammarians, acquiring some understanding of ‘finiteness’ as a linguistic concept has been a longstanding problem, even if frequently unacknowledged as such. It seems to me that the problem derives, in particular, from the fact that arriving at a universally applicable characterization of the syntactic status of finiteness is difficult to reconcile with how it has been claimed to be manifested morphosyntactically in different languages. In what follows I explore the consequences for our understanding of the role of morphological and periphrastic subjunctives in English of drawing a distinction between finiteness as a syntactic property and the possible signalling of this property in the morphology. The discussion presents no novel data or novel claims concerning the interpretation of the sentences cited (at least, not intentionally); it merely confronts the familiar with the characterization of finiteness proposed here. And I have also tried, in the interests of accessibility and generality of application, to minimize appeal to parochial theoretical assumptions beyond that involving finiteness and the recognition of grammatical periphrasis, i.e. analytic expression of a category otherwise signalled morphologically, and of the traditional concept of reaction.

The paper rejects the standard view according to which every tensed verb in English agrees with its subject in person and number. It argues that person is irrelevant to all verbs except BE, and that past-tense verbs and modals (other than BE) have no number agreement features. It discusses agreement mismatches which reflect the subject's meaning, but rejects the idea that subject–verb agreement may be a semantic rule; it proposes instead a new feature ‘agreement-number’. This extra number feature applies only to the subject of a tensed verb and by default has the same value as the subject's ordinary number, while also allowing various kinds of mismatch (for I and you, and for cases of ‘semantic’ agreement). It also offers analyses of agreement with non-nominal subjects and dummy there, and shows how the analysis for Standard English generalizes easily to a range of variations found in nonstandard dialects. The theoretical basis for the analysis is Word Grammar, whose main advantage is that features are free to be assigned by rule because they are not used in classification.

Using data drawn from twenty American plays written since 1889, this paper analyzes the usage of the weak obligation modalsshouldandought, which previous researchers (e.g. Coates, 1983; Leech, 1987; Palmer, 1987) have regarded as essentially synonymous. It is shown that there is a clear distinction between these words, withshouldexpressing individual opinions andoughtemphasizing a common opinion regarding the obligation in question. This use of obligationshoulddoes not occur in five plays written between 1889 and 1911, appearing for the first time in this database in a play written in 1926. The development of obligationshouldparallels other changes in the modal system which have taken place at the same time – asshouldhas increased in frequency, so have the other individually-oriented modalsgot toandgonna, and asoughthas declined in frequency, so have the other group-oriented modalsmustandwill.