This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

A special case of lexical contrast involves contrasting a hyperonym and a hyponym (as in clothes and socks), leading to the narrowing of the hyperonym's sense. However, not all hyperonym/hyponym pairs are amenable to contrast (e.g. ?animals and cats). While category prototype structure forms a strong motivating and constraining factor for hyperonym/hyponym contrast (e.g. Lehrer 1990), what is lacking in previous work is a systematic consideration of the co-hyponyms in real language use. To that end, data from the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) were used to investigate which terms for items of clothing (e.g. coat, bra, jeans) can be contrasted with their hyperonym (either clothes or clothing). While marginal members of the item of clothing category (e.g. belt, hat) have a stronger potential for contrasting with the hyperonym, even prototypical hyponyms (e.g. shirt, jeans) contrasted with clothes/clothing in at least some contexts. Language users can therefore manipulate category boundaries to meet their discourse needs, exploiting a range of dimensions of difference to create contrast. Many clothing terms were also found to contrast more readily with clothes than with clothing, suggesting that the meaning of clothes is generally narrower than that of its near-synonym clothing.

The study aims to enrich the available acoustic data pertaining to vowels of what may tentatively be called contemporary RP or near-RP. The corpus comprised BBC radio and TV broadcasts of seven male and seven female newsreaders. F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthongs (kit, dress, trap, foot, strut, lot, fleece, palm, goose, thought and nurse) and 4 diphthongs (goat, price, mouth and face) were taken. The results are presented both as raw mean F1 and F2 frequencies in Hertz and on a plot normalised according to Lobanov (1971). The results, among other things, confirm our hypothesis that the onset of mouth is now decidedly fronter than and does not overlap with the onset of price. Furthermore, we sought to determine the exact extent of goose-fronting, which according to our data is, even in this variety of English, fronter than centre, as well as the quality of the goat glide, which seems to be following suit.

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.