The perfect in World Englishes has attracted much attention recently, especially from a semasiological perspective, in which the analytic have + participle is analysed in comparison with the synthetic preterite. This article intends to achieve a more holistic picture of the expression of perfect meaning in World Englishes, which allows us to identify how perfect meaning is expressed in all pragmatic contexts. In this study, all the occurrences of ten high-frequency verbs are examined in order to single out those expressing perfect meaning. The corpus (8.8m words in total) includes ten components of the International Corpus of English: eight Outer Circle varieties from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and two reference varieties: British and American English. The relevant examples are tabulated across variables such as presence of adverbials, type of perfect meaning, lexical verb, mode, text type and evolutionary stage. The results show that the envelope of variation is much wider than the one traditionally acknowledged in current grammars of English, and that type of meaning, lexical verb or text type are crucial determiners in the choice of particular forms to express perfect meaning. By contrast, mode or evolutionary stage does not seem to have a bearing on the differences between varieties.

This article documents novel uses of the noun heaps in New Zealand English, namely as quantifier and intensifier, by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpus data. Closely following in the footsteps of lots, heaps is the second most frequent size noun in New Zealand English. On the basis of exhaustive coding of four corpora of New Zealand English (spoken and written), the article describes and exemplifies the various uses of heaps in this English variety. Results show heaps is preferred in speech compared to writing, and that its most common use is as a quantifier, followed by an extension to an intensifying use, which has received comparatively less attention in the literature (and never specifically in the context of New Zealand English). An examination of early New Zealand English in the ONZE Corpus testifies to this incoming change, with heaps grammaticalizing into an adverb and bearing the semantic role of intensifier. Multivariate statistical tests show that innovative uses of heaps are largely driven by younger speakers.

This article proposes a hierarchy of functional heads encoding the features [±control], [±initiation], [±state], [±change] and [±telic] (see Ramchand 2008). It is argued that this allows for a superior analysis of split intransitivity in English than the traditional notion of ‘unaccusativity’ – the idea that there are two classes of intransitive verbs which differ in relation to the underlying status/positions of their arguments. Rather, it is shown – on the basis of a systematic consideration of a wide range of English verbs – that the proposed diagnostics for unaccusativity in English identify multiple classes, whose behaviour can be captured in terms of the proposed hierarchy. Good correlation is found between the classes identified by the English diagnostics and Sorace's (2000) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH), providing further support for the cross-linguistic applicability of the ASH to split intransitive patterns.

Debate continues over what was spoken in Britain before, during and after it was settled by the Anglo-Saxons in the middle of the first millennium ad. Schrijver (2009) argues that phonological and phonetic developments in Old English provide vital clues. Accordingly, Old English changed in different ways from other Germanic languages due to contact with an early British Celtic variety that resembled Old Irish. Aspects of this proposal have been greeted with a degree of interest and approval by linguists but have escaped detailed review. This article argues instead that the Old English developments are closely aligned to those found in other Germanic languages. It also includes novel research results which explain the variation in late Northumbrian Old English <eo> and <ea> spellings on (morpho)phonological grounds, showing that this alternation too provides no evidence for Celtic influence.

This article presents an analysis of the distribution and syntactic behavior of the English expression slash, as in John is a linguist slash musician. The interpretation of this ‘effable slash’ is largely equivalent to intersective and, but it differs from other connective devices like Latin cum, N–N compounding and the orthographic slash </>. A corpus study of American English finds that slash is productive in this use. Its syntactic properties confirm its status as coordinator, but it is distinguished from standard coordinators and and or, in that it imposes category restrictions on the conjuncts: it cannot coordinate full clauses or noun phrases with determiners. I propose that words like slash, period and quote form a class of ‘effable punctuation’ that entered the spoken language from writing. In sum, by incorporating slash into the grammar of English, I argue that slash is a rare example of innovation in a ‘very closed’ functional category.

In English, the position of the AP in the nominal phrase is determined by its form: only structurally simpler phrases are said to be licit in prenominal position, more complex ones have to follow the noun. Recent studies have reported an increasing use of nominal premodifiers in English, so the question arises whether this trend affects only simpler phrases or whether a new structural option emerges – complex APs in prenominal position. Drawing on data from COHA, this article investigates which types of AP occur prenominally. The data show that certain types of complex APs are gaining ground in the prenominal position. Most of these can be analyzed as complex words rather than complex phrases and hence do not indicate major syntactic changes in the English NP. However, some of the attestations, such as easy-predicates with a to-infinitival clause, are complex phrases. It is argued that it is the dependency relation between their rightmost element, a lexical verb, and the noun they modify which makes them occur in prenominal position.

The emergence and development of the Way construction was famously examined by Israel (1996) in a study which traced the modern form of the construction to three senses or subschemas, namely manner of motion (He stumbled his way to the front door), means of motion (He dug his way out of the prison) and incidental activity (He whistled his way out of the room). The present article moves beyond the late Middle English period – the starting point of Israel's research – and looks at the precursors of the Way construction since Old English times, as well as its interaction with the Intransitive Motion construction (IMC) (He walked into the room). By approaching the data in terms of Goldberg's typology (1997) of verb-construction relationships, which is finer-grained than Israel's tripartite division, the analysis identifies the areas of conceptual and constructional overlap that have existed between the Way construction and the IMC in the course of history, and shows that the Way construction has gradually specialised in the expression of those relations which could not be readily coded in the IMC, such as means of motion and incidental activity. The study thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how the constructicon, the repertory of constructions making up the grammar of a language, may change over time.

A large number of grammatical and lexical changes occurred in Middle and Early Modern English leading to the type of language we witness today. Other West Germanic languages were more conservative. This article focuses on some of the major contrasts between Modern English and German and proposes a new unifying generalization for them, going beyond Sapir's (1921) ‘drift’ and the comparative typology of Hawkins (1986, 1995). The contrasts involve a systematic expansion in word-external properties in English, whereby individual words carry less syntactic and semantic information in their grammatical and lexical representations and have become more reliant on neighboring words for the assignment of linguistic properties. Defining drift in this way captures more of the observed contrasts and subsumes counterexamples to earlier unifying generalizations. It also has implications for theories of real-time language processing and for the interface between linguistic typology and psycholinguistics.