The lateral approximant in General British English (GB) is realised as light when occurring in the onset (leaf), and as dark in the rhyme (help, feel, google). Non-prevocalic positions are typical contexts for lenition, analysed in Element Theory as decomposition in weak positions. However, it is unclear how velarisation can be characterised as element loss if light [l] is represented as |A I|, while dark [ɫ] is represented as |A U|. Therefore, I propose that laterals in GB contain both the coronal |I| and the velar |U| element underlyingly (in addition to |A|), but because these cannot combine in a compound segment in English, they are both floating. Their association at the phrase level is determined by the apophonic chain (Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996), mapped onto the structure of the syllable: |I| is attracted to the prevocalic position, |A| to the vocalic position and |U| to the postvocalic position. Darkening thus does not involve lenition of /l/, but partial interpretation in all positions. In contrast, I analyse vocalisation of dark [ɫ] as lenition, involving loss of |A| in weak positions. I integrate the lateral into the system of glides in English, and establish a typology of its behaviour across different accents.

Research on complementizer selection has shown that the presence of a negative particle in a subordinate complement clause influences complement choice, leading to a relatively higher proportion of finite complementation patterns by increasing the complexity of the syntactic environment. Studies have also shown that different types of negation, namely not- and no-negation, increase the tendency towards more explicit complementation options (Rohdenburg 2015). The current study focuses on the effect of not- and no-negation on the complementation profile of the verb regret, which allows variation between finite that/zero-complement clauses and nonfinite (S) -ing clauses. The GloWbE corpus was used to create a data set of more than 4,000 examples from 16 varieties of English. The results of the analysis support previous findings that the presence of a negative marker in the complement clause increases the preference for finite patterns, especially in L2 varieties of English. However, contrary to the expectations of this study, no-negation was found to have a stronger effect on complement choice than not-negation.