This article presents a reanalysis of the syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology of the word actually. It endeavours to show, among other things, that in addition to the distinction between Greenbaum'’s ‘disjunct’ and his ‘adjunct’, we seem to require here a distinction between two kinds of ‘disjunct’: (i) a ‘propositional modifier’ and (ii) a ‘discourse modifier’ (or ‘discourse transition marker’). An examination of constraints on the use of actually as a propositional modifier suggests the need for a feature ‘assertive/nonassertive’, not just on root sentences but on all structures that denote propositions, whatever their syntactic form.

This article deals in outline with two interrelated aspects of the history of English phonology: aspects that are argued here to involve the loss of contrastive linearization for /h/ and of consonantal status for /w/ and /j/. It is suggested that these histories are clarified if proper attention is paid to contrastivity: it is necessary to identify those aspects of phonological representation which are contrastive, both segmentally and sequentially. Contrastive status can change. In this case, it is proposed here that the position of /h/ in a word has come to be noncontrastive, and that [w] and [j] are no longer contrastively consonantal, but sequential variants of their full-vowel congeners. The characterization of these restructurings involves the recognition of changing patterns of contrastivity. And, crucially, contrastivity involves not just paradigmatic distinctions between segments but also syntagmatic relations between them.

The eighteenth century has by and large been viewed as a period during which there was little attention paid to alphabet innovation as a mechanism for achieving the ‘visible speech’ required to represent and ultimately ‘fix’ the prescribed national standard of propriety in pronunciation with which it was obsessed. While there were several writers who sought to achieve a ‘one symbol-one-sound’ co-relation through an elaborate use of diacritic marks attached to the standard alphabet letter-set, with the exception of Thomas Spence and Abraham Tucker, there were very few who advocated the production of entirely new alphabets as a means of achieving this goal. John Wild, schoolmaster of Littleleek, Nottinghamshire, belongs to this symbol-innovating group. The small extant sample of his phonetic symbol system demonstrates a sophisticated and radical attempt to unambiguously match sound with symbol, one which provides important insights into both contemporary pronunciation and, uniquely, into one of its major regional manifestations.

This article integrates aspects of synchronic and diachronic phonological theory with points relevant to the study of a nonreference accent in order to investigate the patterns of consonantal lenition found in the variety of English spoken in Liverpool, England. Points of contact with variationist approaches are addressed, partly because the lenitions are variable processes. An implicational understanding of lenition is developed, thanks to which it is possible to describe the prosodic and melodic environments which inhibit the lenitions. New data from a small corpus investigation into Liverpool English are presented and a theoretical and practical methodology is proposed, which enables the data to be investigated. The descriptive focus is on the segments /t/ and /k/, which are typically realized as affricates or fricatives unless the lenition is inhibited. A notion of ‘melodic lenition inhibition’ is developed to account for some of the inhibitory patterns, whereby the sharing of autosegmental phonological elements gives a segment ‘strength’ in certain environments.

It is generally agreed that the English ‘present tense’ is not appropriately analyzed as indicating present time: present-time events often cannot be expressed in the present tense; conversely, the present tense is often used for nonpresent occurrences. I will argue, however, that these problems are only apparent, arising from a failure to appreciate the numerous conceptual factors that are crucially involved. When these are properly elucidated, using notions available in cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar, the characterization ‘coincidence with the time of speaking’ proves remarkably adequate in accounting for present-tense usage.

The Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter in English pose a long-standing puzzle: not only have their specific principles of composition proved elusive; so has any more general explanation of their ultimate failure. This article argues that the solution to the puzzle lies in interactions of quantity and stress in both the meter and the language. An analysis of the dactylic hexameter as based on moraic trochees explains why stress is more straightforwardly accommodated by some positions than others. Analyses of stress-induced ambiguities in English syllable quantity such as the resyllabification of intervocalic consonants in C[V acute]C[V times over] contexts explain apparent inconsistencies in scansion. When these complexities are taken into account, Sidney's compositions reveal themselves to be systematic and phonologically well founded; ambiguities are acknowledged and the meter is exploited to structure them. Ultimately, however, such ambiguities mean that quantity alone provides an inadequate basis for meter in English, because it underdetermines the metrical possibilities.

This article examines the history of a construction type which has been almost completely disregarded in the extensive literature on complementation, namely declarative complement clauses introduced by if and though. Contrary to the standard view, which favours an adverbial analysis for these clauses, it is shown here that there are convincing arguments for considering certain if- and though-clauses as complements, though it is also admitted that their behaviour differs in some respects from standard cases of declarative complementation. The article also reveals the existence of a number of factors favouring the selection of the minor complementizers if and though over the major complement-clause links that and zero in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Evidence has primarily been drawn from the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

A commonly held view of English definite articles is that they signal that the referent of an NP is familiar to the addressee. However, it is well known that not all definite article phrases meet this familiarity requirement. To account for such nonfamiliar uses, Heim (1982) invokes the mechanism of ‘accommodation’, which enables an addressee to remedy a violation of the familiarity requirement by adding assumptions to the ‘common ground’. In this article we argue that the Givenness Hierarchy framework provides an insightful account of all uses of definite article phrases without requiring an appeal to accommodation. Such an account provides a unified treatment of definite article phrases, including demonstrative phrases and personal pronouns, while at the same time distinguishing among them in a principled way. This proposal is supported by results of a corpus-based examination of the use of definite articles and by an examination of cleft presuppositions.

In this article, I examine the ‘modal’ or ‘empathetic’ (Lyons, 1977: 677) use of the distal (or ‘nonproximal’) determiner/pronoun that: namely, where the intended referent may have just been evoked in the immediately prior discourse, but where the distal pronoun that, not the ‘in-focus’ it or the ‘activated’, proximal this is used. The rationale behind the choice of this particular type of indexical seems to be that the speaker is distancing him/herself from the referent, not wishing to ascribe actuality to it in the way that would be the case if either it or this were used instead. Examination of this particular value of that leads to the hypothesis that the principles underlying the choice of that as opposed to this or it generally are not derived ‘objectively’, as it were, from their situational use in terms of degrees of proximity of a referent or demonstratum to the speaker or hearer, nor primarily in terms of attention focus. They are, rather, social and cognitive, and play an important interactional role in the construction of discourse.

Focusing on words such as bag, hammer, kiss, and dance, which are subject to functional shift, i.e. alternate between noun and verb, this article argues against the traditional view that a category-changing rule derives verbs from nouns and vice versa. The alternative proposal is that root lexemes in general, and words like these in particular, are semantically underspecified with respect to the noun/verb distinction. The lexical semantic representations of such words include event schemas that are compatible with either noun or verb meanings. The verb vs. noun aspect of the meanings is supplied by the morphosyntactic contexts in which they appear. This analysis is shown to account straightforwardly for the general properties of functional shift, such as its ubiquity, productivity, and semantic regularity, and to be supported by both standard kinds of distributional evidence and neurolinguistic evidence.

This article aims to give a new, rigorous, and exhaustive presentation of Jespersen's formalism published in Analytic Syntax (1937). The formalism is described by means of the Backus metalinguistic formulas (Backus, 1959), which were universally adopted for the description of the syntax of computer programming languages. A modernized version of Jespersen's algorithm is proposed and illustrated with a number of significant examples.

For grammarians, acquiring some understanding of ‘finiteness’ as a linguistic concept has been a longstanding problem, even if frequently unacknowledged as such. It seems to me that the problem derives, in particular, from the fact that arriving at a universally applicable characterization of the syntactic status of finiteness is difficult to reconcile with how it has been claimed to be manifested morphosyntactically in different languages. In what follows I explore the consequences for our understanding of the role of morphological and periphrastic subjunctives in English of drawing a distinction between finiteness as a syntactic property and the possible signalling of this property in the morphology. The discussion presents no novel data or novel claims concerning the interpretation of the sentences cited (at least, not intentionally); it merely confronts the familiar with the characterization of finiteness proposed here. And I have also tried, in the interests of accessibility and generality of application, to minimize appeal to parochial theoretical assumptions beyond that involving finiteness and the recognition of grammatical periphrasis, i.e. analytic expression of a category otherwise signalled morphologically, and of the traditional concept of reaction.