Do-support involves the mandatory inclusion of the auxiliary do, historically bleached of semantic meaning and now serving purely morphosyntactic functions. While extensively researched in English since Ellegård (1953), its counterpart in Scots has received less attention (although see Meurman-Solin 1993; Gotthard 2019, 2024a). This article investigates whether early Scots do exhibited similar functions to English ‘intermediate do’, as analysed by Ecay (2015), before stabilising into its current role, as this would indicate that the emergence of do-support is more likely to be an independent development in Scots. This investigation aims to gauge the likelihood of Scots do-support resulting from contact with Southern English during anglicisation, the process which saw English forms favoured over Scots in Scottish writing. Proportions of affirmative and negative declarative do from the Parsed Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (1540–1750; Gotthard 2024b) are measured across various syntactic contexts, with results assessed against criteria for contact-induced change. The social context and timing of the rise of Scots do suggest do-support being a transfer from Southern English, but its intermediate do qualities compromise this analysis. However, the presence of an intermediate do in Scots might represent a northward diffusion of such a grammar from English into Scots.

The phonological status of Old English (OE) fricatives has been a vexed one, the general agreement being that the distribution of voiced ([v ð z ɣ]) and voiceless ([f θ s x]) fricatives was allophonic (Fulk 2001; Minkova 2011, 2014). We argue that OE was a fortis–lenis language specified for [spread] in terms of laryngeal realism, or ‘glottal width’ (GW) (Avery & Idsardi 2001). We discuss OE lenis and fortis stops, the structure of voiceless geminates ([ff], [ss], [tt], etc.) and voiceless geminate‑like structures ([sp], [st], [xt], etc.) and conclude that OE had phonologically marked fricatives for GW, found as the first member of phonetically voiceless (partial) geminates ([ff] /fGWf0/, [sp] /sGWb0/). Unmarked singleton fricatives, by contrast, were phonetically enhanced with GW in strong positions (foot‑initially in trochees and degenerate feet) and with ‘glottal tension’ (GT) in post‑tonic foot‑internal intersonorant position, which is less controversial. They were, however, unenhanced word‑finally and when couched between unstressed vowels, and thus phonetically variably voiced. We explore some of the consequences of entertaining such ideas.

The article examines a set of nouns which can be interpreted as questions on the degree to which some property holds and can be paraphrased by clauses introduced by how + Adjective, in some interrogative contexts. This subset of nouns is shown to clearly differ from (traditional) Concealed Questions. Nouns that allow the concealed degree reading (DCQ nouns) are argued to share specific semantic features: only nouns that can denote eventualities involving (intensional) gradable states can have degree concealed question readings. The concealed degree reading is shown not only to result from lexical semantic properties of nouns and from the semantics of the predicates that select them, but also to depend on contextual parameters, which can disambiguate concealed question readings.

Language variation (specifically: optionality between different ways of saying the same thing, as in check out the places vs check the places out) tends to be considered abnormal, suboptimal, short-lived, dysfunctional and needlessly complex, especially in functional or cognitive linguistic circles. In this contribution, we are assessing these assumptions: does grammatical optionality increase the relative complexity (or: difficulty) of language production? We use a corpus-based psycholinguistics research design with a variationist twist and analyse SWITCHBOARD, a corpus of conversational spoken American English. We ask if and how grammatical optionality correlates with two symptoms of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). Our dataset covers 108,487 conversational turns in SWITCHBOARD, 22 grammatical alternation types yielding 57,032 optionality contexts, 589,124 unfilled pauses and 43,801 filled pauses. Analysis shows that overall optionality contexts do not make speech production more dysfluent – regardless of how many language-internal probabilistic constraints are in operation, or how many variants there are to choose from. With that being said, we show how some alternations in the grammar of English are more prone to attract or repel production difficulties than others. All told, our results call into question old dogmas in theoretical linguistics, such as the Principle of Isomorphism or the Principle of No Synonymy.

This article explores the use of speech representation verbs in Late Modern English. Drawing data from CLMET3.0, it focuses on paralinguistic verbs in narrative fiction texts from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, as in blubbered in ‘“And only last Sunday – afternoon,” Mr. Povey blubbered.’ (CLMET3.0; 1908, Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale). The results show a drastic increase of these verbs, both in tokens and types, across the Late Modern English period, especially in direct speech constructions. I argue that this trend is linked to developing conventions for and experimentation with speech representation in the growth of especially the novel in the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond: the paralinguistic verbs offer a flexible tool for writers not only to structure dialogue, but also to convey stance and hence influence reader interpretation of characters, roles, situations and themes. The results underscore the importance of studying literary texts for understanding the general development of speech representation mechanisms in the history of English.

Several of the world’s languages exhibit double determination structures, including English dialects which have a construction with a demonstrative determiner and a locative adverb (e.g. this here book). Doubling in demonstratives has commonly been explained as a language’s response to a loss of deixis, leading to a linguistic cycle. However, this explanation cannot be sustained for English because demonstratives are fully functioning grammatical deictics (e.g. this book). In this article, we probe the role of doubling in the history and grammatical development of English double demonstratives with evidence from rural UK dialects. Using quantitative methods and the principle of accountability we calculate proportion of forms and patterning in simple and double demonstratives, enabling us to demonstrate that the doubled form has particular discourse-pragmatic functions, most notably, to flag topics in discourse. Our findings lead us to make two theoretical proposals. First, double demonstratives in English are used for discourse-pragmatic purposes; and second, doubling led to a new, complex determiner suitable to take over discourse-pragmatic functions from simple determiners (complexification of the determiner paradigm). Finally, we suggest that obsolescing features like the English double demonstrative offer key insights for understanding the development of linguistic systems.

Several studies have been devoted, partly or wholly, to the different uses of the adverb actually. Although there is considerable agreement on the main discourse functions actually can perform, there is little consensus on which subtypes to distinguish, and how these subtypes, and the functions they perform, are related to the formal properties of actually. Consequently, conclusions concerning the relation between the various functions of actually and its position and prosodic realization are often contradictory, and the overall picture is still incomplete. On the basis of data from the International Corpus of English – Great Britain, this article presents the results of a systematic (qualitative and quantitative) investigation into the function, position and prosody of actually, and the way in which these factors interact. It is demonstrated that (i) by classifying the many functions of actually identified in previous studies into three major types (propositional, discourse-pragmatic and discourse-organizational) and (ii) by appealing to additional functional factors, such as scope, strength and orientation, to distinguish a limited number of subtypes, it is possible to detect strong correlations between the functions of actually and its formal (positional and prosodic) features.