Journal of English Linguistics

Focusing specifically on the speech act of advice, the present study investigates the role of democratization, or the flattening of social hierarchies, in the use and development of modal verbs in Present-Day spoken British English. In contrast to previous research, which so far has investigated English modality across a variety of speech acts, this study provides a more controlled environment for testing the democratization hypothesis through its focus on modality in only one speech act. Advice is an appropriate testbed because of its sensitive nature. Based on spoken diachronic data from the London–Lund Corpora, the results show a shift toward not only more equal but also more informal advice-giving strategies, as evidenced by an increase in need to and can, and in constructions involving possibility modals with the inclusive we, and a decrease in must, have got to, might, and would. While by and large the results mirror those of earlier studies, there are also some differences that call for more detailed investigations of the shifts and changes in English modality in specific speech act contexts.

This study examines the use, evolution, and pragmatic functions of bloody in British teen talk from the 1990s to 2016. Drawing on spoken data from four corpora representing different time periods, the findings reveal a marked decline in the use of bloody among teenagers, greater than that observed among older speakers during the same span. Rather than reflecting language innovation, this is interpreted as a generational change. Two main factors may account for this trend: (i) the rise of fuck, whose extreme multifunctionality has taken over many of the roles of bloody, and (ii) the weakening of bloody’s status as a strong swear word for both teens and adults. Syntactically, bloody is now more often used as a noun intensifier than as an intensifier of adjectives, adverbs, or verbs. Pragmatically, beyond expressing frustration, anger, and irritation, bloody in teen talk is also adopting new pragmatic functions such as conveying surprise, disbelief, and humor.

Recent evidence from production studies and meta-linguistic commentary suggests that the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) is rising above the level of consciousness to become negatively evaluated, thus prompting its reversal in apparent time. This study probes Chicago-area adolescents’ social evaluations of salient NCS-implicated vowels via a matched guise task. Since the social meanings of linguistic features are determined through their co-occurrence with other features in styles, NCS vowels are examined in combination with (dh)-stopping, itself a cue to lower socioeconomic status. Results suggest that adolescents are aware of the community-level distribution of these variables, reflecting the class- and age-linked patterning of NCS reversal in Chicago, and that the social meanings of this change in progress are evaluated in the context of broader styles.

Recent studies have documented the retreat of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in the Inland North, as well as the advance of a split between pre-nasal and pre-oral /æ/ (Bat/Ban Split) and a merger of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ (cot and caught, Low-Back Merger) in dialects throughout North America. The present study investigates the status of these three changes-in-progress for fifteen speakers in an urban neighborhood of Rochester, New York, located in close proximity to a university. Our analysis draws on a series of oral history interviews collected in collaboration with a neighborhood organization, alongside participant observation in the community. We describe the clear progression in apparent time of the three dialect features within one Rochester family, then zoom out to the sample as a whole. In the larger sample we find evidence for the presence of both the “new” and “old” dialect features but find that it is not as simple as advance and retreat in apparent time. Rather, we conclude that the social meaning of the NCS is undergoing incipient change and displays a great deal of variability as a marker of localness in the community. Our findings also highlight an underexplored social factor in the study of language change: interaction with higher education, particularly as it relates to sense of place. Rather than analyzing education as a proxy for social class, we propose that higher education impacts sound change in a more nuanced way: through its impact on local culture and social networks, as well as its influence on speakers’ access to and awareness of local and supralocal features and evaluation of what it means to be local.

In argumentative text types, evidential markers serve to construct credibility, authority, and power. Informed by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this paper investigates the development of adverbial, phrasal, and clausal inferential adverbials in the Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions spanning the 1790s to the 2010s. The analysis reveals that therefore constitutes the most common adverbial form but shows a continuous decline throughout the entire time span, with consequently and hence being way less common and demonstrating only minor frequency changes. The prepositional phrases for . . . the reason(s) . . . show an interesting increase but at a lower level. The clausal constructions that is why, this is why, and that’s why represent a fairly recent and infrequent format since the 1940s, with that is why enjoying a steep increase until the 2010s. The qualitative analysis explores the collocations of therefore and for . . . the reasons . . . and examines the text components in which these formats as well as that is why/that’s why are typically found. The findings reveal patterned collocates, including verbs denoting legal agency (AFFIRM, REVERSE, DISSENT), cognitive verbs (CONCLUDE, HOLD, THINK), communicative verbs (PRAY), and the legal adverb void as well as point to striking developments in terms of the subjects which these collocates take. While therefore, for . . . the reasons . . ., and that is why serve as adverbials in the majority and minority opinions, the contracted form that’s why is only used in the transcripts of court trials. It is concluded that the court opinion continues to be an authoritative formal genre. However, there seems to be a shift to a less abstract and more transparent and accessible style. The changing polyphony of voices suggests colloquialization, increasing informality, and democratization of the genre which may be linked to a decreasing discursive authority of the majority opinion of the court.

The study examines lexico-grammatical variation among English texts within registers, empirically testing the claim that linguistic variation among texts is attributable to the situation of use. To this end, the study relies on prototype theory and identifies linguistically central texts, that is, representative of the register central trend, and peripheral texts that deviate linguistically from the central tendency. The study then identifies the basis for this linguistic variation. The findings show that register texts vary in their prototypicality, and linguistic variation among texts is explained in functional terms through communicative differences among texts. The identified patterns of functional correspondence between linguistic and communicative variation are demonstrated consistently in four registers.

British classical choirs are thought to use a prestige accent when singing in English. In Scotland there are two available prestige accents, local (SSE), and supralocal (SSBE). Does local consonant phonology affect choral phonology? Here, I investigate regional accent effects in a real-time study of choral singing in commercially released recordings of choirs from Glasgow and Cambridge. Postvocalic /r/ is auditorily coded and analyzed using Bayesian models. Rhoticity is widespread in Glasgow reflecting the phonology of Scottish varieties; however, it declines over time, perhaps reflecting change to an SSBE referee, or the impact of the choir director’s accent or preferences.

The MOAN–MOWN merger (i.e., the merger of the Middle English sources of GOAT) is an ongoing sound change in Lowestoft English, a variety of East Anglian English spoken at the intersection of the region’s northern and southern sub-zones. This study examines the merger’s progress across three generations in apparent time, using 2615 tokens of spontaneous and word list speech—analyzed dynamically with generalized additive mixed models—alongside perception data from a binary forced-choice identification task. The analysis addresses how phonemic mergers diffuse into areas of stable resistance and whether the target vowel in Lowestoft assimilates to southeastern British varieties where moan and mown are merged under goat. Results suggest a gradual merger by approximation, progressing via incremental stages with different intergenerational targets of assimilation. Change is linked to demographic shifts following the collapse of Lowestoft’s fishing industry, but the merger’s diffusion differs from that of other mergers triggered by social change into areas of resistance, both in terms of mechanism and timeframe. The diffusion of goat fronting is reported, affecting both moan and mown where a contrast is maintained, without a loss of distinction in perception. This demonstrates how phonetic diffusion can operate, despite differences in phonological structure between donor and recipient varieties. However, mown lags behind moan, highlighting how local divergence can accompany long-term convergence toward supra-local norms.

In this introductory paper we outline the aims of the special issue on epistemic and evidential expressions in English across time, the main areas of research within this field and give a summary of the papers included in the special issue, while also highlighting how they contribute to the overarching research aim and how they intersect.

This article explores the modulation of seven verbs that mark source of information in English: believe, hear, know, remember, see, seem, and think. Drawing data from two collections of Early Modern English legal records, the study shows that modulation is of five main types: negation, degree modification, evidential combination, frequency, and justification. The analysis reveals that the modulation fulfills communicative, stance needs related to the language users’ roles as witnesses or participants in a court case. Some uses are localized, responding to situational needs (such as negating a particular piece of information and the evidential foundation of that information), while others involve moves that were likely expected and conventional in testimony (such as expressing sincere conviction). Overall, the study highlights the importance of evidentials as stance resources in historical periods and the need for further attention to such interactional stance means in the description of the history of English.

The aim of this study is to analyze the changes in the frequency and use of obviously over a short period of time in present-day English using comparable spoken corpora. Obviously has both an evidential inferential meaning and intersubjective or engagement meaning where it presents information as shared by the speaker and the hearer. The analysis of the occurrences of obviously shows that it is increasing in frequency as an engagement marker particularly when the use of the first and second person subject suggests a high degree of speaker and hearer presence. The people using obviously as an engagement marker are young, mostly female speakers who use obviously because it is fashionable and new. Specifically, obviously is used instead of of course to express that something is assumed or expected. The rapid rise in frequency of obviously has a parallel in American English which suggests that globalization plays a role for its spread.

This article traces the development of agency prepositions in Old and Middle English passives, documenting the most important stages of the process and presenting them against a larger background of linguistic changes after the Norman Conquest. The study is based on large, syntactically annotated corpora of Early English, and takes into account all the main agency prepositions, that is, þurh ‘through,’ fram ‘from,’ mid ‘with,’ bi ‘by,’ and of, analyzing their token and type frequency, textual distribution, diachronic trends, collocational preferences, and use in lexically fixed formulas. The results are interpreted within the Construction Grammar framework, with the agency prepositional phrase treated as an emerging construction undergoing a slow and particularly difficult constructionalization process hindered by the restriction of the long passive to the written mode.