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This chapter explores the difference between English and its sister languages. It shows that in the emergence of Modern English, simplification dominated complexification to a greater extent than in any other Germanic language. Evidence suggests that this simplification was not a happenstance peculiarity, but due to a sociohistorical hindering of the full transmission of its grammar across generations. English is significantly less complex overall than its sister languages, based on factors such as inherent reflexes, external possessors, directional adverbs, and indefinite pronouns.

This chapter focuses on the meanings of the word evidence in a historical and cultural perspective and on the new discourse of evidence, which plays a fundamental role in modern English across a wide range of genres, registers, and domains. It demonstrates the close links between semantic change, cultural history, and the history of ideas, and it shows how these links can be studied in a rigorous and illuminating way through the use of a semantic methodology (NSM) particularly suited to the needs of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal research. It also shows how the unique Anglo concept of evidence—puzzling or even incomprehensible to cultural outsiders—can be explained in an intelligible way to learners of English who may need to master it to be able to flourish socially, academically, and professionally in the modern world.

This chapter looks at the ‘his genitive’ in earlier stages of English. It is concluded that except for a brief period in Early Modern English, there is no evidence for a possessor doubling construction parallel to those found in many Germanic languages. The possessor doubling construction found in Early Modern English appears to have arisen as a re-analysis of the phrase-final -s genitive.

This chapter examines combinations of determiners and possessives in earlier English. While the combination determiner + possessive is well attested in other Germanic languages, the combination possessor and determiner is rarer and has received scant attention. Arguments for the non-definiteness of possessives based on their co-occurrence with determiners are dismissed.

This chapter focuses on one area of ‘cultural elaboration’ in grammar, namely, on the elaboration of causal relations in modern English. Topics discussed include causation and patterns of social interaction, natural semantic language as a tool for studying ethnosyntax, the meaning of causatives in a cross-linguistic perspective, German lassen constructions, and English let constructions, and comparison of Russian and German.

This chapter discusses the consequences of the loss of the verb-second rule in Old English and Middle English for the organization of information in the clause. The hypotheses about the consequences of the loss of verb-second are inspired by crosslinguistic/psycholinguistic differences between Present-Day English (PDE) on the one hand and Modern Dutch and German on the other hand, but also involve diachronic work, some signposting is in order. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 focuses on the differences between the first position in PDE, where only the subject is available to link to the preceding discourse in an unmarked way, and the first position in a modern verb-second language. It argues that the development of certain types of it-clefts and passives in early Modern English is a response to the loss of verb-second syntax in terms of functions of the first position. Section 3 zooms in on the local anchoring function of verb-second syntax, against the global anchoring system of PDE, which obviates the need for links to the immediately preceding context in that language. Section 4 looks at the evidence of Old English as preferring local rather than global anchors. As the infelicity of local anchors in PDE is more a matter of pragmatics and information structure than syntax, this means that the data cannot be expected to show an all-or-nothing situation from one period to the next, although the changes in preferences by users should be visible nonetheless.

This chapter deals with the study of the discourse status of noun phrases occupying a topicalized, left-dislocated, or (in there-sentences) postverbal position, and discusses the connection between the quantitative spread of these patterns and the increase in the range of the discourse functions fulfilled by such noun phrases. Using a corpus of Early Modern and Late Modern English, the variables taken into account are: overall frequencies for topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-sentences; the type of information conveyed by the noun phrases in question; and the anaphoric distance between the noun phrases and their antecedents. The connection between the informative characterization and propagation of the three constructions and the genre(s) in which they are attested are also discussed. In light of the corpus data, which contains samples of both formal writing and speech-based discourse, the chapter assesses whether the unmarked informative functions of the noun phrases occurring in the database examples of topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-sentences are fulfilled more naturally in formal or informal language.

The morphosyntactic analysis of the verbs that were capable of impersonal use in Old English (OE) was undertaken with the aim of determining the role that the impersonal construction had in the OE grammatical system, its function, and use. This chapter places the findings for OE into the context of the further diachronic development of impersonal verbs and the impersonal construction in Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (EModE). Since a corpus study of ME and EModE is outside the scope of the present investigation, all statements made here either rely on the evidence provided by the Middle English Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary online resources or on secondary literature. The material is preselected for the purpose of pointing out tendencies in the diachronic development of individual verbs and their range of syntactic uses, such as the loss of impersonal uses and the development of syntactic alternatives.

This chapter suggests that the interest in reanalysis as a mechanism of change, while rightly focusing attention on syntactic structure, also contributes to a blinkered view of diachrony. It exemplifies this view with accounts of two widely discussed changes: the Middle English emergence of for noun phrase (NP) to verb phrase (VP) infinitivals, and the Early Modern English emergence of the be going to future. These accounts illustrate an approach whose goal is not just to characterize reanalyses but to understand what lies behind them. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 comments on the modern interest in reanalysis and then treats alleged reanalysis changes as cases of analogy or grammaticalization. Section 3.3 shows that radical reanalysis in syntactic change has been overemphasized, and that most of the changes involved in one well-known alleged case (the English for NP to VP pattern) are broadly analogical. Section 3.4 proposes a new account of the emergence of the English be going to future. This case shows how the combinatorial properties of a source pattern give rise to the properties of an emergent one in grammaticalization. Section 3.5 concludes.

The main phonological changes from Latin to Vulgar Latin / Romance and from early Germanic to Old English are outlined in order to devise criteria for dating prehistoric borrowings. This is followed by a discussion of about 40 Old English words from Greek and some 90 from Latin. While this is a small number compared to the 600–700 Old English words from Latin and Greek, the words in this chapter are sufficiently important culturally as to survive into Modern English, and have some phonological or other property that permits dating. Reborrowings feature prominently in the history of the words in this chapter.

This chapter traces the origins of the three-piece suit and seeks to reconsider the importance of this process by which explicitly political decisions and values become internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits—a process, it uses Edmund Burke's eighteenth-century terms, that “renders a man's virtue his habit” so that “his duty becomes a part of his nature”. It explains that modern English masculinity is nothing if not a conspicuous construction, a self-consciously political and conspicuously public creation, precisely because contemporaries like Burke saw the inculcation and naturalization of virtuous masculine habits as central to England's political order. It also seeks to explain why Charles II would concern himself with introducing the three-piece suit, and, equally importantly, why men still wear three-piece suits.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander the Great in early modern English drama, as a popular but ambiguous emissary of the ancient near east. Alexander’s appeal and notoriety both in Europe and the across the Bosphorus meant that he became a voluble figure of global empire, representing both prevailing European imperial ambitions and their limitations. Drama proves a particularly rich place for exploration of these ambiguities. Highlighting a recurring fascination with imagining a dead Alexander (rather than the humanist exemplary model in life), early modern English drama regularly isolates the figure of Alexander for scrutiny through versions of the mise-en-abyme device, as a way of exploring the unreconciled tensions between the sometime humanist hero and the imperial villain.

This chapter keys the rise of to-datives to the loss of dative case and views it as a continuation of the older direct-indirect object order, where the indirect case was marked for a dative case. It adopts Harley's (1999) adaptation of Larson's VP-shell analysis and treats a wide range of data from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. It shows that the to-dative first emerged in early Middle English as the morphological case system collapsed in most dialects. The chapter offers a careful analysis of various movement operations, arguing for a single base order for to-datives. This permits the argument that what is constant is the fact the indirect objects at all stages received oblique case; what changed is that oblique was once realized by overt case-marking but came later to be realized as a PP.

The background to lexical borrowing in English from Latin and French after 1500 is established in a survey of some of the key developments in language use and in the development of English as a written language. The expanding functions of English are examined, as are changes in relationships between writing in English, Latin, and French, and stylistic developments in the written English. In this context, the data on numbers of borrowings from each language given in chapter 1 is looked at afresh. The effect that changing attitudes towards loanwords in this period had on patterns of borrowing is also assessed. Differentiation in form between French and Latinate strata in the lexicon is examined, as shown by morphological differentiation between Latin and French borrowings, and respelling or remodelling of earlier borrowings. The role of affixes of Latin and French origin in English word formation is assessed. The development of some French and Latin loanwords within English over a long historical period is evaluated, by looking at continuing semantic borrowing, and increasing word frequency in English. Finally, the particular patterns of formation using Latin and Greek elements that developed in scientific and technical language are assessed.