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 special issue addresses the question of how we can reconstruct linguistic and textual knowledge before linguistics and philology existed as recognised academic disciplines. It does so by studying the metalanguage of English, that is, the terminology, textual practices and communicative contexts through which linguistic phenomena, textual and discursive artefacts were described, analysed and discussed in the early and late modern periods. Emerging from the MetaLing Corpus project, the collection brings together philological, corpus-based and historiographical perspectives to explore the formation, circulation and transformation of linguistic knowledge between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The introduction outlines the rationale of the project and the current state of research on premodern English linguistic thought before presenting the contributions included in the special issue.

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.

English employs a variety of comparative formation strategies. Theoretical and corpus-based research has established that their distribution depends on a variety of factors. In this article, we take an experimental approach to test analytic, synthetic and double comparative forms in relation to register in American and British English. We report on a rating study investigating the appropriateness and interpretation in terms of evaluativity of the three comparative forms. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that the comparative variants are not considered equally appropriate, but the effect is not as strong as would be expected under the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence is directly related to linguistic judgments. The analytic and double comparative alternatives exhibit lower appropriateness levels than the synthetic comparative. Analytic and double comparative forms are rated as less appropriate in formal than in informal contexts, which did not show an effect on the synthetic form. Furthermore, the analytic variant shows a different behavior in terms of the interpretation than the other forms in that a stronger effect of evaluativity is detected. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for certain hypotheses emerging from corpus-based research.

This article examines Grammatica Anglicana (1594), Paul Greaves’ pioneering English grammar inspired by Ramist principles and one of the earliest grammars dedicated specifically to the English language (Algeo 1985; Padley 1985). Drawing on data from the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA), this article focuses on Greaves’ Prefatory Epistle and his treatment of Early Modern English morphology to demonstrate the mediation of Latin grammatical traditions as both a filter and a model for linguistic reflection (Vezzosi 2012; Marsico 2020a, b). The imitative and emulative mechanisms at play in Grammatica Anglicana reveal a marked syncretism, illustrating how the Latin model was adapted (not always successfully) to accommodate the demands of vernacular language learning (Ragni 2023). Such evidence invites reflection on the epistemic transfers across texts, where pedagogical and rhetorical traditions converged to shape new educational tools (Munzi 1992). Greaves’ work, with its balance of innovation and reliance on established traditions, offers a valuable case study for examining how linguistic knowledge was produced, organised and transmitted in the early modern age, and for addressing the issue of metalinguistic awareness. Ultimately, this article seeks to contribute to broader discussions on the history of language education, revealing how historical materials reflect the ideological, cultural and political dynamics of their time (Burke 2004; Gallagher 2019). By exploring Greaves’ Grammatica in relation to these topics, this article aims to underscore how the intersection of tradition, innovation and sociopolitical forces have always shaped pedagogical practices, offering lessons that remain relevant for today’s educators and researchers.

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.

This study investigates how Early Modern English grammarians approached the category of interjections, tracing its inheritance and adaptation from Latin grammatical traditions, which first introduced the concept into Western linguistic thought. The analysis draws on data from the Early Modern English Grammars Archive (EMEGA), a comprehensive digital resource encompassing nine English (and Latin) grammars published in England between 1542 and 1625. Offering fully searchable texts in their original spelling, alongside their modernised versions, and English translations of Latin grammars, EMEGA illuminates the intricate negotiations between classical traditions and the evolving needs of vernacular English, particularly in the theoretical treatment of lexical categories (Nevalainen 2006; Vezzosi 2012). Although recent scholarship has highlighted the complex pragmatic roles of interjections in human communication (Ameka 1992; Dingemanse 2023, 2024), this linguistic category has long been marginalised in linguistic inquiry. Interjections were often dismissed as peripheral to the ‘core’ concerns of language and characterised as purely emotive expressions with minimal communicative or structural significance (Goffman 1978). This reductive view, shaped by classical grammars, persisted in early modern treatments, even as grammarians began to critically engage with inherited frameworks and develop distinctive forms of metalinguistic awareness regarding category boundaries and contextual meaning (Algeo 1985). The present study leverages the EMEGA archive to examine how Early Modern English grammarians framed interjections, focusing on the distribution and conceptualisation of the metalinguistic label interjection, as well as on terminological precision and stylistic considerations. By situating these treatments within broader socio-cultural and historical contexts, the research explores how interjections were shaped by both classical models and the pedagogical needs of English grammar. In conclusion, the analysis highlights the dynamic interplay between linguistic theory, educational materials and cultural contexts, showing how interjections can function as a diagnostic category for descriptive adequacy and for the historiography of language teaching. This work underscores the enduring relevance of historical grammatical frameworks in enriching our understanding of both past and present linguistic practices.

This article explores the extent to which listeners vary in their ability to notice, identify and discriminate variable linguistic features. With a view to improving speaker evaluation studies (SES), three types of experiments were conducted (noticing tasks, identification tasks and discrimination tasks) with regard to variable features using word- or sentence-based stimuli and focusing on three variables and their variants – (ING): [ɪŋ], [ɪn]; (T)-deletion: [t], deleted-[t]; (K)-lenition: [k], [x]. Our results suggest that the accurate noticing, identifying and discriminating of variants is somewhat higher in words than in sentences. Correctness rates differ drastically between variants of a variable. For (ING), the non-standard variant [ɪn] is more frequently identified and noticed correctly. Yet, for the variables (T)-deletion and (K)-lenition, the standard variants are identified and noticed more successfully. Results of the current study suggest that a more rigorous elicitation of identification and noticing abilities might be useful for a more complete understanding of the nature of social evaluation.

The modal auxiliary form must plus perfect aspect (must have +V-en) has recently acquired the meaning of direct evidentiality in Multicultural London English, the new London dialect. Because the new meaning is a recent innovation we have a rare opportunity to witness its development at first hand, unlike earlier changes in the history of must. Our analysis supports the view that the classic definition of evidentiality in terms of information source is too narrow to explain the expression of evidentiality in spoken interaction, and that a broader definition in terms of epistemic authority is more appropriate. We argue that the direct evidential meaning is a coherent further step in the semantic changes undergone by must during its history. It represents a previously undocumented pathway in the grammaticalisation of evidentiality. It also supports the view that evidentiality is not a purely lexical phenomenon in English.

In the 1880s, Sievers proposed that in Old English words such as *feorhes, the loss of the post-consonantal *h caused compensatory lengthening of the vowel: fēores. Since there are no unambiguous traces of this sound change in later English, widespread analogical restitution of the short vowels was assumed (e.g. from feorh). The evidence for this lengthening is largely metrical. I argue that while Sievers is correct that words like <feores> often need to scan with a heavy initial syllable, this need not be explained by a general lengthening in the language at large. Indeed, the distribution of where heavy scansions are required in verse is typical for metrical archaisms: late prehistoric metrical values of words preserved for poetic convenience. Just as wundor ‘marvel’ can continue to be scanned as monosyllabic *wundr, or contracted hēan can scan as disyllabic *hēahan, so can light-syllabled feores continue to scan as heavy *feorhes. The same sets of poems that prefer non-epenthesized or non-contracted forms also prefer the heavy scansions of feores-type words. If heavy scansions of feores-words are seen as a matter of poetic convention, then the hypothesis of compensatory lengthening in the language generally is left without evidence and should be rejected.

This article argues that through contextualising metalinguistic terms surrounding several dramatic genres in the Early Modern English period, we can begin to uncover more about the contemporary understanding and use of this genre-based terminology. Specifically focusing on the collocations for the genres ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragicomedy’ in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) corpus on CQPweb, this article explores how these genres may have been discussed and recorded in early modern print culture. The article offers an exploration into whether collocation networks offer a productive means of investigating these sorts of metalinguistic terms in early modern discourse. Using this exploratory method, the extracted terms and their corresponding collocations are mapped onto collocation networks which illustrate both unique and shared collocates between the terms considered. These networks provide some linguistic insight into how these terms are used and understood in the period. With inspection of the concordance lines, several observations about the nature of the discursive contexts of these terms can be made. The exploratory collocation networks have revealed more about the discourse surrounding these terms and the different discourse contexts in which these terms occur, including: the classical influence on genres, genre as a marketing and conceptual category in early modern print, and contemporary metaphorical associations of terms. In addition, potential issues related to EEBOv3 are highlighted, including bias towards certain types of texts like catalogues and the issue of spelling irregularities.

This article offers a new reconstruction of the phonological history of pre-Old English, building on a potential parallelism between English, Frisian and North Germanic. Pivotal to the reconstruction is the development of PGmc *a, which is the target of eight different sound laws in the traditional theory. A combination of a conditional early fronting and rounding, followed by a gradual i-mutation impact, both with parallels in Frisian, and a relatively late seventh-century application of breaking before ‑rC can account for most of the attested spellings of instances with PGmc *a in the language of the early Épinal and Erfurt glossaries. This approach is much simpler than the traditional theory and allows parallelisms to be (re)established between the earliest stages of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Norse.

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such subphonemic differences between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef & Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).

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.

The increasingly popular research on the discourse of men and women that had emerged in the second part of the twentieth century gave rise to a number of generalisations, such as the assumption that women tend to use language to prioritise community relationships and cooperation, while men use it with the aim of asserting dominance and control (Romaine 1996: 117). Similarly, it has been affirmed that women’s discourse is usually less detached, more personal, more tentative and more narrative than male, whereas the latter tends to have a more direct, abstract and informational character (see Lakoff 1990; Biber & Burges 2000; Argamon et al. 2003). From a diachronic perspective, Geisler’s (2003) multidimensional study of nineteenth-century letters confirms that men’s language and women’s language differ along several dimensions of variation, the former tending towards abstractness and elaboration, and the latter towards involvement and a certain degree of persuasiveness. However, when comparing scientific and non-scientific prose written by nineteenth-century women, Crespo (2019) demonstrated that female historians tended to write in a more objective and impersonal way than their non-scientist sisters, thus reflecting a general trend of the evolving – and predominantly male – scientific writing that bloomed in the late modern period (Halliday 1988; Taavitsainen 1994; Atkinson 1999).

In this study, we intend to compare the language of men and women nineteenth-century scientists in order to measure the levels of ‘abstraction’, or abstract reasoning, in their writings. Scientific discourse has often been described as containing certain linguistic features that make it abstract or impersonal (Bazerman 1988; Hyland 1998; Gotti 2003). In a pioneering multidimensional analysis performed on a large corpus containing a wide range of English registers, Biber (1988) showed that passive constructions, conjuncts and certain adverbial subordinators are typically found in academic prose, thus making it more abstract. This was later confirmed in subsequent multidimensional analyses that were restricted to scientific registers, some replicating Biber’s dimensions (Conrad 1996), and some yielding new dimensions (Gray 2011; Monaco 2017). Considering the institutionalised prejudice against women scientists (and women in general) in the patriarchal world of the late modern period, expressed by Rousseau (1762) in his doubt as to whether women are capable of abstract reasoning, our aim is to analyse texts of female scientists in order to find out whether they reach the same level of abstraction in their writings as their male colleagues. To this end, we are using data from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich & Crespo 2007; Crespo & Moskowich 2020), a diachronic corpus of scientific texts published between 1700 and 1900, arranged in different subcorpora, each subcorpus corresponding to a specific scientific discipline. On this occasion, we will be looking at texts from nineteenth-century History and Life Sciences, using Monaco’s (2017) multidimensional analysis as a methodological basis and a reference – specifically, Dimension 3, characterised by the presence of passive constructions and nominalisations. The ultimate aim of this article is to evaluate the metalinguistic strategies used by male and female nineteenth-century scientists in order to spot subregister variation, by applying variables such as scientific discipline, sex of the author and genre.

This article explores the analytical potential of the MetaLing Corpus, a collection of Early Modern English texts on language dating from 1500 to 1700. Combining corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches, it demonstrates both the opportunities and the challenges of working with a corpus currently under development and reflects on the methodological implications of a minimalist corpus compilation strategy adopted under project constraints. Following an outline of the principles underlying data selection and corpus construction, the article presents two exploratory case studies focusing respectively on spelling and discourse variation. The analysis of spelling practices points to the interaction between authors and typesetters as a factor shaping orthographic choices and potentially influencing the development of linguistic reflection. At the level of discourse, the analysis uncovers a spectrum of educational orientations across the texts, indicating the presence of an additional discourse domain alongside language analysis and description. This finding contributes to a preliminary understanding of the corpus’ thematic organisation and informs its future development in terms of annotation. More broadly, the study highlights the interpretive possibilities offered by the corpus and the methodological challenges posed by early printed materials. By demonstrating how corpus-based methods can be combined with close reading approaches, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in historical corpus linguistics concerning the analysis, interpretation and digitisation of Early Modern English texts.

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.

We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrative contexts (using adverbial clauses to create a narrative sequence) and found that this did not induce a stronger resultative interpretation. We discuss the formal proposals for analysis of these tense/aspect forms in the language, and the consequences this new data has for theories of the tense/aspect system of English.

This article aims to explain how passive participles used as prenominal modifiers developed their eventive nature throughout the history of English. It is argued that prenominal participles first expressed stative result states in Old English (OE) and came to express perfect result states later on. The locus of required resultativity in participles was the inner aspect head in OE, while in Early Middle English (EME), it shifted to the outer aspect head. This shift was triggered by the loss of OE aspectual prefixes, which generally functioned to perfectivize or transitivize the verb by affecting its (internal) argument and assigning a change-of-state meaning to the verb. This shift rendered participial formation to be less constrained, as a result of which, it became possible for prenominal participles to express perfect resultative meanings, which in turn gave rise to their eventive meanings.

The construction of historical text corpora presents distinctive challenges in terms of metadata curation, annotation practices and long-term accessibility. This article explores how standards-based approaches can enhance the discoverability, interoperability and sustainability of historical linguistic data. Emphasis is placed on aligning corpus design with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Wilkinson et al. 2016), which are increasingly important for research transparency and cross-platform integration in the digital humanities.

After outlining the conceptual landscape of metadata and annotation in corpus linguistics, the article examines several existing projects that demonstrate the operationalisation of metadata standards across genres and temporal ranges. These include corpora that integrate CMDI profiles for complex resources (Paquot et al. 2024), and others that have transformed legacy metadata into machine-readable formats to facilitate data exchange and semantic enrichment (Fallucchi & De Luca 2020). Key issues addressed include orthographic variation, the limits of automated tagging tools for historical data (Pettersson & Megyesi 2018) and the need to balance standardisation with the preservation of linguistic idiosyncrasies.

The article explores a case study of the MetaLing Corpus, a one-million-token historical corpus of English metalanguage from 1500 to 1700 (Andreani & Russo 2026). Practical constraints and editorial decisions are discussed. A minimalist encoding strategy was adopted following compatibility issues with TEI and Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004; Kilgarriff et al. 2014), resulting in a plain-text corpus linked to metadata managed through Omeka using Dublin Core (Caplan 2003).

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on metadata sustainability, annotation design and best practices for corpus construction in underrepresented linguistic domains. It advocates for adaptable, transparent approaches that foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and position corpora as evolving infrastructures within broader digital ecosystems.