In Bech (2001a, 2001b), I took issue with the oft-repeated claim that Old English conjunct main clauses are commonly verb-final, and disproved it. However, the myth persists. In the meantime, the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE, Taylor et al.2003) has been created, so the time has come to revisit this topic and consider it in light of new, extensive and generally accessible data. Using the YCOE corpus, I confirm and expand on Bech's (2001a, 2001b) empirical findings, showing that (i) OE conjunct clauses are neither typically verb-final nor verb-late, but they are more frequently verb-final and verb-late than non-conjunct clauses are; and (ii) verb-final and verb-late clauses are typically conjunct clauses. These two perspectives must be kept apart: in the first, the starting point is the entire body of conjunct clauses, and in the second it is the entire body of verb-final/verb-late clauses. I propose that the failure to distinguish between the two perspectives, i.e. whether it is conjunct clauses or word order that constitutes the point of departure, is the origin of the misconception concerning conjunct clauses and word order. In order to establish whether this distinction has been fuzzy all along, or whether it must be ascribed to distorted referencing in the course of a century of research, I trace the research on this topic back to the end of the nineteenth century. I show that the alleged verb-finality of conjunct clauses may be ascribed to a whisper-down-the-lane effect – the retelling of the story has changed the story.

Ellipsis alternation refers here to the alternation between two kinds of ellipsis remnants whose correlates are prepositional phrases. One kind of remnant includes the preposition hosted by its correlate and the other doesn't. This alternation is now known to be cross-linguistically widespread although it was originally assumed to be banned in languages without preposition stranding under wh-movement. I argue that there is a nonsyntactic relationship between ellipsis alternation and preposition stranding that helps explain the availability and distribution of both types of remnants in terms of general performance preferences. Two pieces of corpus evidence from English are offered in support of this argument. The first piece of evidence reveals that the content of a remnant and its correlate affects ellipsis alternation both in languages without preposition stranding and in English. The second piece of evidence shows that the availability of preposition stranding in English nonelliptical clauses supports the use of prepositionless remnants via structural persistence, that is, reuse of syntactic structure found in antecedent clauses. These data lead me to conclude that ellipsis alternation is subject to a stronger processing constraint in English than in languages without preposition stranding.

Our etymological understanding of PDE bread has been influenced, to a considerable extent, by Otto Jespersen's comment that ‘An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.’ This article analyses the evidence behind the possibility that PDE bread might represent a Norse-derived semantic loan, i.e. that OE brēad acquired the meaning ‘bread’, which was more frequently expressed by OE hlāf, because of the influence of its Viking Age Norse cognate (cp. OIc brauð ‘bread’). On the basis of an in-depth study of the attestations of OE brēad and hlāf and their early Middle English reflexes, as well as the use of their cognates in various Germanic languages, the article challenges the traditional view that OE brēad originally meant ‘piece, morsel of bread’ and concludes that Norse influence is not needed in order to account for the semantic history of PDE bread.

This article analyses the formal and stylistic features of phrasal verbs in the Old Bailey Corpus and compares them with results obtained from the speech-related genres of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), namely diaries, drama, letters and sermons. Phrasal verbs tend to be associated with spoken colloquial registers both in PDE and previous stages of the language, although this statement has been challenged by Thim (2006a, 2012), who argues that in EModE the (non-)occurrence of phrasal verbs in a particular text seems motivated by its contents, rather than its degree of formality. The results in this study show that phrasal verbs were a feature of the spoken language already in LModE, since their frequency is remarkably higher in trial proceedings, arguably the closest representation of the spoken word of the past. However, in contrast to other speech-related text types, the frequency of phrasal verbs in trial proceedings decreases over time, which seems to point towards a decolloquialisation of this genre over time. The study also shows differences at the formal level across genres, demonstrating that sermons display more formal and archaic characteristics, whereas trial proceedings contain features which bring them closer to the spoken language.

This article introduces a quantitative method for identifying newly emerging word forms in large time-stamped corpora of natural language and then describes an analysis of lexical emergence in American social media using this method, based on a multi-billion-word corpus of Tweets collected between October 2013 and November 2014. In total 29 emerging word forms, which represent various semantic classes, grammatical parts-of-speech and word formation processes, were identified through this analysis. These 29 forms are then examined from various perspectives in order to begin to better understand the process of lexical emergence.

This article offers an analysis of present perfect (PP) use in Nigerian English (NigE), based on the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). First, we analyze variable contexts with the Simple Past (PT; determined by temporally specified contexts) as one of the main competitors of the PP, and thus assess the PP-friendliness of NigE in contrast to other varieties. We further provide an alternative measure of PP-friendliness and test register effects in terms of normalized and relative PP and PT frequencies. Our results indicate an overall reduced PP-friendliness of NigE and show internal variability in terms of PP frequencies in different variable contexts. As regards register effects, NigE does not show less variability of PP frequencies compared to British English (BrE). However, the distribution of the PP across registers in NigE does not follow the British pattern where certain registers are particularly PP-friendly. We discuss potential determining factors of the low frequency of the PP in NigE, and conclude that neither substrate influence nor general learning mechanisms on their own can comprehensively account for it. Instead, we suggest that historical influence from Irish and perhaps (at a later point) American English, in conjunction with general learning mechanisms, may be responsible.

In the above mentioned article by Grieve, Nini & Guo, an error has occurred in the section numbering.

Section 4 is missing and has been mistakenly labelled with section 5. All sections and subsections labelled section 5, should be section 4. Which means section 6 should be renamed section 5.