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.

Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

Variants like negative concord may be highly stigmatised because they have obvious standard alternatives in writing. But what about syntactic features that only ever occur in spoken discourse? One example of a variant that meets this criteria is right dislocation: this refers to the occurrence of a clause followed by a noun phrase or pronoun tag which is co-referential with the preceding subject or object pronoun; for instance, ’She’s lovely, her mum’ or ’I’ve not got an accent, me’. The Midlan High data shows that, unlike negative concord, right dislocation is used by all communities of practice, but there are differences in its frequency of use and, particularly, in the precise formulations of right dislocation used by different communities of practice. These differences reflect how speakers make social moves by exploiting the links between precise syntactic configuration and possible meanings. Significantly, this chapter suggests that the frequency with which certain social groups use particular syntactic constructions is a direct consequence of the need or willingness to express the pragmatic meaning the construction encodes.

This chapter examines the use of ecquis in Roman comedy, especially in Plautus. Although formally belonging to the class of adjectives, pronouns or adverbs, the interrogative markers in ec-, introducing independent as well as subordinate clauses, function as particles introducing “total” questions. The ambiguity needs to be clarified by taking into account the fact that the second constituent qu- plays the role of an indefinite, not of an interrogative element, and that its value tends to fade leaving the prefix ec- as the main semantic determinant of the term. In this respect, it is useful to compare numquis, which, unlike ecquis, is still rarely used in the early period. The controversial etymology of ec- is discussed in the light of the semantic and pragmatic nuances that are revealed in different contexts in relation to the previous or following utterance. While in most cases ec- confers on the question a character of insistence and urgency, thus producing different effects of rhetorical meanings, the value of the questions introduced by ecquis seems fundamentally neutral; ecquis, therefore, does not per se orient the interrogation either in a positive or in a negative sense.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

Chapter 2 describes the feature composition of personal pronouns in European and Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on their similarities and differences with respect to each grammatical person.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

Chapter 7 of Discourse Syntax (Pronouns and Ellipsis) deals with pronouns and ellipsis as another area of grammatical cohesion and of the grammar of discourse. It introduces reference and coreference and the different classes of pronouns. The discussion is based on the distinction between endophoric and exophoric reference, co-referential ties and chains of reference as well as the interpretation of pronouns as expressing extended reference. The chapter also discusses principles of pronoun interpretation and the concept of givenness from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. Givenness is explained with reference to the concepts of accessibility and recoverability, which are also shown to be relevant as conditions of elliptical reference and, in particular, the use of subject ellipsis in discourse. The chapter presents corpus data about the use of pronouns and ellipsis in texts and corresponding patterns of text-linguistic variation, such as interactive and oral language use as well as usage in types of written language (literary and electronic discourse, informal writing).

Through the concept of performativity we can see how ‘the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action’. Language can influence cognitive processes and can highlight certain attributes or qualities of people. This chapter explores the role of pronoun choice as a dehumanizing discursive strategy. By using a pronoun that is normally related to non-human creatures in reference to a human being, the pronoun choice itself becomes the doing of the action of dehumanization. In languages where there are two sets of pronouns, one type is normally used to express personhood, and the other in reference to inanimate objects and to animals. When the inanimate pronoun it is used, the referent is not considered human. On the contrary, in previous research, I have shown that when the pronouns that express personhood are used in reference to humanoid creatures, they can take part in a humanization process that can have obvious consequences for the moral question of how to treat that creature. While the author’s previous research has concentrated on the literary and film application of the importance of pronoun, here conclusions from such research are revisited and ‘it-dehumanization’ examined in real-life discourse.

Hausa’s rich morphology employs prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, the latter with fixed tone melodies. Reduplication is very common. ‘Feminatives’ were created by adding a feminine suffix to words that were already feminine. Plural formation reflects consonant changes such as Klingenheben’s Law and the loss of final nasals. An ongoing drift has been the change of plural nouns into singulars. Similarly one has ‘frozen pluractionals’, i.e., erstwhile pluractionals without simple counterparts. The elaborate ‘grade system’ developed from basic verbs ending in /a/ or /i/ plus synchronically semantically empty CV suffixes and/or an adverb-like extensions such as totality and ventive. Different grades serve as transitivizers and intransitivizers. The ‘efferential’ grade manifests two originally distinct extensions, *-asi and *-da. Singular ethnonyms come from language names, the initial ba- being a reflex of the word ‘mouth’. The plural counterpart with -awa derives from a formative indicating ‘community’. Derivatives indicating agentive, locational, and instrumental are described including ‘pseudo-agentives’, i.e., words with agentive form but without agentive meaning.

This final chapter summarizes the substantive findings spelled out in the book. These involved historical changes in phonology, including major sound laws and the appearance and disappearance of two new diphthongs, morphology, primarily involving gender, plurality in nouns and pluractionality in verbs, and the origin of the verb grade system, and syntax, focusing on significant tenses, e.g. the falling together of the aorist and the subjunctive, and in the total revamping of the indirect object system. It ends by raising unanswered questions, such as: did Old Hausa have two fully functional contrastive Rs?; could reflexives originally have been built on the word for ‘body’ rather than ‘head’?; how did the current Completive TAM pronoun paradigm come to be used as subjects?; what accounts for the large number of body part terms that begin with /ha/?; and if the current efferential grade incorporates two distinct and unrelated suffixes, what would their original difference in meaning and function have been?