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This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail.

Modifying and hedging one’s claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express “epistemic possibility” to avoid making strong statements, viz., , , and . The purpose of this corpus-based study is to explore modal verb usage by Japanese EFL undergraduate students and consider pedagogical implications of our findings. Our analysis suggests that the Japanese students’ use of these modal verbs, especially , has a tendency to be informal and insufficiently academic. While the Japanese students use very frequently, they do not use it sufficiently in the sense of “epistemic possibility”, and some of their use is inappropriate not just in academic English but in English more generally. The observed high frequency of  may be related to topics and may also be due to the influence of L1. We discuss different factors that may explain the findings, based mainly on the overview of factors impacting on EFL learners’ use of academic English offered by Gilquin and Paquot (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1(1). 41–61), suggest several additions to this overview, and discuss implications for the instruction of these modal verbs in academic writing and in order to improve relevant teaching materials.

How do people describe events they have witnessed? What role does linguistic aspect play in this process? To provide answers to these questions, we conducted an experiment on aspectual framing. In our task, people were asked to view videotaped vehicular accidents and to describe what happened (perfective framing) or what was happening (imperfective framing). Our analyses of speech and gesture in retellings show that the form of aspect used in the question differentially influenced the way people conceptualized and described actions. Questions framed with imperfective aspect resulted in more motion verbs (e.g. driving), more reckless language (e.g. speeding), and more iconic gestures (e.g. path gesture away from the body to show travel direction) than did questions framed with perfective aspect. Our research contributes novel insights on aspect and the construal of events, and on the semantic potency of aspect in leading questions. The findings are consistent with core assumptions in cognitive linguistics, including the proposal that linguistic meaning, including grammatical meaning, is dynamic and grounded in perceptual and cognitive experience.

This study investigates reduction of 1SG possessives in possessive–noun constructions in Lancashire dialect. On the basis of a corpus of twenty-six interviews we show that reduction patterns according to (in)alienability. This dialectal evidence runs counter to the normal assumption about English, i.e. that there is no such effect. Following work by Haspelmath (2006b) that reinterprets iconicity effects in terms of frequency, we proceed to show that frequency may indeed underlie alienability/iconicity in our data as well. Relative frequency seems more useful in capturing the correlation with reduction than absolute frequency. For a few [1SGPOSS-N] combinations the reduction facts are problematic for the frequency-based account we offer. These difficulties might seem to disappear in the light of the construction grammar notion of schemas, but we point out that this notion itself has serious theoretical problems associated with it. Future theory-driven work on dialect grammar may help resolve these issues.

If the publisher intends this as a textbook that is actually a problem, as the chapters are too sketchy and too devoid of theory (linguistic and sociolinguistic) to be the backbone of a course in English language or sociolinguistics.

The final layers to be added included even more grammatical items such as relative clause, case and agreement markers. [...] our ancestors moved from grunts lacking any specific meaning to single-noun utterances such as \"Bear!\", to expressions involving verbs and other, more grammatical elements, such as \"There's a bear beside your house!\" Interdisciplinarity is very much in vogue these days. Because of the absence of direct linguistic evidence related to early language, many scholars take an interdisciplinary approach.

Having published the monumental six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language the editors and contributors breathed a sigh of relief ... then went on to produce this more affordable and student-friendly version.