Anthony Warner

Why DO dove: Evidence for register variation in Early Modern English negatives

The development of “supportive” (or “periphrastic”) DO in English suffered a curious and sharp reversal late in the 16th century in negative declaratives and questions according to Ellegards (1953) database, with a recovery late in the following century. This article examines the variation between DO and the full verb in negative declaratives in this database, from 1500 to 1710. It is shown that both register variation and age-grading are relevant, and that the periods 1500–1575 and 1600–1710 have radically distinct properties. The second period shows substantial age-grading, and is interpreted as having introduced a fresh evaluative principle governing register variation. Negative questions supply data that suggest that the development of clitic negation may have been implicated in the development of the new evaluation. This change in evaluation accounts for the apparent reversal in the development of DO, and we can abandon the view that it was a consequence of grammatical restructuring.

PREDICTING THE PROGRESSIVE PASSIVE: PARAMETRIC CHANGE WITHIN A LEXICALIST FRAMEWORK

The English progressive passive (e.g. is being c(llird) is first attested in the second half of the eighteenth century. The paper offers a new interpretation of this development as integrated into a series of changes which affected BE (and HAVE) at this period. It arose not as a combination of progressive and passive constructions but (with the other changes) was a consequence of the reduction of inflection in auxiliaries which followed the loss of THOU in informal speech. This is interpreted as a parametric change, for which there is an overt triggering difference in the primary linguistic data, and the account is formalized within HPSG.*

Parameters of variation between verb–subject and subject–verb order in late Middle English

This article sets out to clarify the contribution of syntactic properties and subject weight for variation between verb–subject and subject–verb order in a database of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century prose. It sets out the syntactic structures which are assumed, and investigates the impact on ordering of a set of factors, using established quantitative methodologies. A series of conclusions includes the continuing distinct status of initial then , the systematic importance of clause-final position, the different impacts of subject length in different contexts, and the presence of a definiteness effect for the late placement of a subject after a nonfinite unaccusative.

English Auxiliaries Without Lexical Rules

English auxiliaries show a complex but systematic set of interrelationships between their characteristic construction types. This chapter gives an account of the grammar of these characteristic constructions in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), without using lexical rules or movements interrelating structures, but relying solely on the organization of information within an inheritance hierarchy to make relevant generalizations. The chapter is a development of the lexicalist analysis of auxiliaries given in Warner. The interrelationships proposed between structures are radically different since they are constrained by the need to state them within a hierarchy of unifiable information, whereas lexical rules permit what looks to the practicing grammarian like a more potent ability to manipulate relationships between feature structures. The chapter provides a rather simple and convincing formal analysis of auxiliaries, which appropriately generates their characteristic structures, and integrates the account of negation with an account of scope. Keywords: English auxiliaries; Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG); inheritance hierarchy; lexical rules

Feature percolation, unary features, and the coordination of English NPs

ConclusionSGWWs adoption of unary features creates a range of problems. The general problems affecting feature percolation can be cured by minor redefinitions of the relevant principles. But if we wish to maintain SGWWs attractive position that the syntax of coordination depends on fully general principles which extend directly to cover person categories in NP coordination, while the distinctive behaviour of number in such coordination follows from properties of the phrases which introduce specific conjunctions, then something further is required. A straightforward solution, which will have implications for the treatment of person, number and gender in other languages, is to retain orthodox features with more than one value and modify the scope of feature percolation by permitting the Head Feature Convention to hold for specific, probably unmarked, feature values. This imports the intended effect of unary feature specification into the workings of feature percolation.