This chapter presents an up-to-date overview of what we know about contemporary grammatical variation in England, drawing on a range of sources such as traditional and variationist dialectological investigations, as well as those using new technologies such as smartphone apps and Twitter feeds. It begins with an assessment of how common the use of non-standard morphosyntax is vis à vis Standard English, before presenting a well-cited list of the most widespread features that are claimed to be found right across the country. The chapter then describes contemporary non-standard grammatical variation in England, examining, in turn: verbs, negation, adverbs, prepositions, plural marking, pronouns, comparison forms, articles and conjunctions. Beyond an account of contemporary morphosyntactic variability, this survey also helps us to locate those linguistic features and those geographical areas about which we hold very little up-to-date information, and, in the light of reports of widespread traditional dialect levelling, points to those non-standard features whose vitality appears to be precarious.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the English articles the and a(n) in SLA and intervention research. The chapter discusses semantic concepts commonly addressed in SLA studies of articles, including definiteness, specificity, genericity, and kind reference. After a review of relevant SLA experimental studies on the topic, Chapter 3 provides an overview of intervention studies with English articles. The intervention studies are divided into two types: those that focus on particular instructional techniques, such as explicit instruction and different feedback types, and those that take as their starting point theoretical approaches to article semantics. English is the target language in all of the studies discussed, and many of the studies focus on challenges posed by English articles for learners from article-less native languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Chapter 2 examines linguistic changes that can be accounted for by solving labeling paradoxes. In Chomsky (2013, 2015), merging a head to a phrase no longer automatically results in the projection of that head into a label and labeling paradoxes arise when two items merge that are (too) symmetric. These paradoxes can be resolved in several ways, namely by having one of the XPs move or by feature-sharing. The resolution discussed in this chapter involves the change from phrase to head, a possibility not discussed by Chomsky. The changes discussed involve pronouns reanalyzing as functional categories, i.e. as T or v, and demonstratives reanalyzing as articles and complementizers. In the changes, a third factor resolution to the labeling problem can be observed: a change from feature-sharing and agree to Minimal Search. The changes also show other factors involved, e.g. the difference between <Q,Q> and <phi,phi> sharing. The wh-elements whether and how are specifiers and show no reanalysis to head, which indicates their feature-sharing is stable.

This paper investigates article use in learner corpora in order to (i) examine how both the native language and proficiency level influence the patterns of article use, misuse, and omission and (ii) examine whether patterns of the overuse of the with specific indefinites found in experimental studies are also present in learner corpora. To this end, 200 texts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus are examined: 100 texts from Spanish-speaking learners of English and 100 texts from Russian and Ukrainian-speaking learners of English. Each subcorpus has an even distribution between learners at CEFR B1 and B2 proficiency levels. The results confirm that the learners’ native language affects article use: speakers of Spanish, an article language, show an increase in correct article use with proficiency; in contrast, speakers of Russian, an article-less language, continue to make article errors. On the other hand, the particular patterns of article misuse found in prior experimental work are not found in learner corpora: while Russian-speaking learners do overuse the with indefinites in the corpora, this error type is not tied to specificity. This null finding could be due in part to the relatively low number of errors of the overuse in the learner corpus.

This chapter considers the considerable theoretical difficulties posed by the UK duties to avoid conflicts of interest (Section 175 and Section 177 of the UK Companies Act). The chapter also looks at the common contractual responses to these rules and examines some theoretical problems with them.There is also an exploration of whether these theoretical problems are ever likely to create real-world problems, and suggests some ways to mitigate them, and some suggestions for policymakers.

Grammatical gender in modern Germanic languages displays strong variation. Some languages retain three adnominal genders (e.g., German, Icelandic), others reduced the system to two genders, usually by a merger of masculine and feminine gender (e.g., Dutch, Swedish). In English and Afrikaans, adnominal gender is completely lost. Pronominal gender, on the other hand, does not always reflect adnominal gender, and is retained in at least three genders in all Germanic languages. The chapter starts from the presentation of lexical gender systems in Germanic languages and dialects, reflecting the relevant assignment criteria. It then turns to pronominal gender systems, showing that mismatches, specifically between adnominal and pronominal genders, can result in a re-organization of gender systems. Since many Germanic languages retain a second class of nouns next to gender, namely declension classes, the interrelation between gender and inflection classes is subject of a final section before conclusions are drawn.