If this book had a subtitle, it could have been ceci n'est pas une Festschrift ‘this isn't a Festschrift’, after René Magritte's famous La trahison des images (1928). According to its editors, this brick of a book with more than 400 pages of scholarship is not a Festschrift, but it is dedicated to David Denison, Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Manchester, past president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English – ISLE – and one of the founding editors of the very journal you are just reading. Why this is not called a Festschrift is beyond me. Perhaps because the term itself sounds somewhat antiquated and outdated? The first quotation for ‘Festschrift’ in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1898. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) has an example from 1870 and shows a slight clustering of examples around the beginning of the twentieth century. And yet, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) still has 97 hits for it, so it cannot be that bad. Or is it because the term has somehow fallen into disrepute with publishers and academics? Of course, we have seen a number of publications with that name that are more honorary rather than state-of-the-art research. But then there are also a number of Festschriften that had substantial and long-lasting influence in the academic community: A Festschrift for Morris Halle (Anderson & Kiparsky Reference Anderson and Kiparsky1973), the multi-volume Language history and linguistic modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak (Hickey & Puppel Reference Hickey and Puppel1984), Case and grammatical relations: Studies in honor of Bernard Comrie (Corbett & Noonan Reference Corbett and Noonan2008) and even the infamous fake Festschrift Studies out in left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley on the occasion of his 33rd or 34th birthday (Darnell, McCawley & Zwicky [1971] Reference Darnell, McCawley and Zwicky1992) have made a substantial impression. In sum, I believe the term is anything but negative, and David Denison would have deserved a proper Festschrift, especially if it is such a fine specimen as this one, which surely needs to be added to the list of important and influential volumes mentioned before.
This volume, edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Emma Moore, Linda van Bergen and Willem B. Hollmann, contains a total of fourteen individual chapters, which are organized in three thematical parts. Part I deals with approaches to grammatical categories and categorial change; part II looks at constructions and constructional change; part III focuses on comparative and typological approaches.
The first chapter in part I, ‘What is special about pronouns?’, written by John Payne, examines the status of pronouns in the genitive constructions with of-PP and s-genitive on the basis of corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC). He can show that we mainly find three semantic relations in the corpus: quantity, theme and location. Part–whole and property also play a role, but are less frequent than the first three. In addition to that, there is some residue of other examples which are not readily classifiable and sometimes are only illustrated by single examples. Payne is able to show that Lyons's intuition that personal pronouns are at least questionable, if not ungrammatical, in the of-PP construction does not hold in his dataset and these actually occur across a wide range of semantic relations. He finds a broad range of semantic relations that allow the alternation of of-PP and s-genitive, a more limited number of relations that only allow of-PP constructions and only three where the of-PP is strongly disfavored: kin, interpersonal and agent. But even in these cases, there are factors which can lead to a preference for the of-PP variant.
Bas Aarts focuses on for and what kind of functions it can fulfill in present-day English in ‘What for?’ In this theoretically oriented chapter, he shows that for can always be seen as a preposition, rather than as subordinator or complementizer, pace Huddleston & Pullum et al. (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002) and Radford (Reference Radford2004). In consequence, we see a simplification of the lexicon, and a unified account of for as preposition, rather than a historical scenario that invokes the reanalysis of prepositional for as a subordinator. What makes this analysis special is that Aarts argues that for as a preposition does not enter into a construction with the following noun phrase, as other approaches have claimed, but that it enters into a construction with the following clause. This not only explains the parallelism we see in a number of different structures, but it also allows for a similar treatment of the constructions [for [NP to VP]] and [for [(NP) V-ing]] as they both have clausal complements of prepositional for.
Fuzzy grammar and squishy categories also form the topic of Dan McColm and Graeme Trousdale's chapter on ‘Whatever happened to whatever?’ On the basis of qualitative and quantitative data from several corpora, the authors develop a constructional analysis of whatever, which has recently emerged as a new interjection and discourse marker. In particular, they complement Brinton's (Reference Brinton2017) analysis by adding a more quantitative perspective and by introducing the idea of bolstering, i.e. the idea that one construction may serve as the actual source for a new construction (a new form–meaning pairing), but that other related or linked constructions (and changes therein) may strengthen this particular new pattern without being actual sources. In particular they show that the development of constructions (‘chunks’) in dialogue may reinforce the development of constructions (‘chunks’) in monologic uses and vice versa.
In her contribution, Elizabeth Closs Traugott asks whether the three marginal comparative modals better, rather, sooner are converging or diverging in English (‘Are comparative modals converging or diverging in English? Different answers from the perspectives of grammaticalisation and constructionalisation’). More specifically, she concentrates on their development in present-day and historical Englishes from a constructional point of view. (Had) better can be traced back to the eighteenth century, (would, had, should) rather to the fourteenth century, and (would, will, had) sooner to the sixteenth century. By looking at the details of the development of each of these forms she comes to the conclusion that the minute changes in form or meaning should be conceptualized as constructional changes, which ultimately culminate in constructionalization, i.e. the development of constructions with both new form and new meaning. This chapter also shows that from a constructional point of view, which considers both form and meaning, the cline of the development is better > rather > sooner (rather than better > sooner > rather as previous frameworks have claimed).
The fifth and final chapter in this first part is Cynthia Allen's ‘The definite article in Old English: Evidence from Aelfric's Grammar’, in which she revisits the old question whether Old English had a definite article or not. In a careful, philologically guided analysis of Aelfric's grammar and his Old English translations of Latin, she traces where se is used and where it is omitted. She shows that se is not simply an optional element signaling demonstrative meaning. She comes to the conclusion that the presence of se with direct arguments indicates definiteness, while the lack of such marking with other arguments can only mean that readers were expected to assume an indefinite status in these cases. Some syntactic contexts still show variability in the use of se, others show almost obligatoriness. This means that there may have been some sort of definite article, but that this may not have behaved (yet) like the definite article in present-day English. Rather, in line with Denison's (Reference Denison, van Kemenade and Los2006) study, Allen suggests that it is most productive to look at the development of this construction as a matter of gradience rather than categoriality.
Part II of this volume is generally concerned with constructions and constructional changes. It starts off with a chapter by Bettelou Los on ‘How patterns spread: The to-infinitival complement as a case of diffusional change, or “to-infinitives, and beyond!”’. Los sees four different analogies at the heart of the spread of the to-infinitive (narrow paradigmatic analogy, semantic analogy, indirect paradigmatic analogy and broad paradigmatic analogy) and concomitantly four different stages in the development. Movement from one stage (or analogy) to another can be characterized by gradualness or abrupt ‘gearshifts’. The gearshift in Stage IV of the development (broad paradigmatic analogy), which involves a large number of verbs now taking the to-infinitive, is seen as particularly interesting, as it leads to a generalization of the semantics as one of ‘an action that is as yet a non-actuated possibility’ (p. 168), which in turn allows for even more verbs to appear in that construction. Semantic bleaching may thus turn out to be cause and consequence of lexical diffusion.
Ayumi Miura's chapter (‘Me liketh/lotheth but I loue/hate: Impersonal/non-impersonal boundaries in Old and Middle English’) deals with impersonal and non-impersonal boundaries in Old and Middle English, i.e. me liketh, an impersonal structure, versus I love, a personal one. On the basis of extensive corpus data, Miura offers an account that takes both syntax and semantics into consideration and investigates four factors at play here: causation, transitivity, duration of emotion and animacy of the target emotion. Miura is able to show that causation is the main factor for verbs to occur in impersonal or personal constructions, followed by animacy of the target emotion. However, the picture seems to be different for near-synonymous phrasal impersonals such as be/have lief and be loath. These are usually not subject to the four factors discussed. Miura argues that this may be due to lack of data, or, alternatively, to the fact that these are fairly late developments with regard to impersonal meaning, and may also be subject to interferences from the auxiliary have, for example.
If you ask me is the topic of Laurel Brinton's chapter in this section (‘That's luck, if you ask me: The rise of an intersubjective comment clause’). She looks into the development of this phrase from a regular syntactic construction to a pragmatic marker. If you ask me starts out as a regular and fully compositional syntactic phrase in an if … then clause. Today, however, more than 80 percent of if you ask me do not occur in this context, but comment on a preceding clause. Brinton's suggestion is that insubordinate if you ask me developed from a biclausal construction with a complement required by ask. The complement clause was deleted first, followed by the deletion of the ‘performative main clause verb of communication’ (p. 208). In present-day English we find a layered situation, with both the use as pragmatic marker and with the original, literal meaning. Moreover, if you ask me belongs to a larger group of present-day English comment clauses of the if you … type, the development and use of which warrants a more detailed investigation.
In ‘Misreading and language change: A foray into qualitative historical linguistics’, Sylvia Adamson takes a fresh look at the development of the relative clause construction in the Late Modern English period, by employing a decidedly qualitative approach to complement existing and widespread quantitative studies. She argues that a qualitative, philological approach needs to consider the psychological profile of individual authors, careful textual reconstruction and literary contextualization. In particular, Adamson highlights the interesting nature and value of misreadings (mistranscriptions, misquotations, editorial corrections) as evidence of ongoing linguistic change. To that end, she also introduces the process of ‘banalisation’: the simplification of a text by its transcribers or editors in the face of textual difficulty, such as deviant or unexpected forms and structures. Adamson puts forward the hypothesis that banalization can be seen as evidence that a particular grammatical change was already internalized by the speaker (transcriber or editor in this case) and puts this hypothesis to the test by looking at the banalization (and thus also development) of the agreement between relative pronouns and third-person antecedents, i.e. the use of relative which and who with anaphoric he/she/it.
The final chapter in this section, by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg, uses the Old Bailey Corpus to investigate the use of and in phrasal and clausal structures (‘The conjunction and in phrasal and clausal structures in the Old Bailey Corpus’). The Old Bailey Corpus not only allows the study of Late Modern English, it also makes studies in historical sociolinguistics possible. In this case, the authors are interested in gender and socio-economic status. The key idea, on the basis of present-day English findings, is that clausal and correlates with orality/informality, while phrasal and is usually associated with literacy/formality. This means that, for Late Modern English, this variable can shed light on questions such as the ‘genre drift’ towards orality, or colloquialization, in both spoken and written English. Moreover, this study finds some weak indications of female leadership in this change from below towards clausal, and that members of the higher social groups might be ‘maintainers’ of phrasal and in formal contexts due to their greater exposure to written norms.
Part III presents comparative and typological approaches. It begins with a chapter by Olga Fischer and Hella Olbertz on the role of analogy in linguistic change (‘The role played by analogy in processes of language change: The case of English have-to compared to Spanish tener-que’). Their case study is the comparison of the development of the have to construction in English and the tener que construction in Spanish. Fischer and Olbertz show that the development of the two constructions in English and Spanish is based on several similar (analogical) circumstances not shared by Dutch or German. At the same time, there are also differences between the two languages. In English, various constructions are involved in the development of have to, particularly in the context of ‘must’ nede and other expressions of necessity. Through complex analogical processes, constructions with similar morphosyntactic and semantic features influence and co-determine the development of have to into a semi-modal expressing obligation or necessity. In Spanish, the development of the tener que construction basically resembles that of have to, but must be seen in different analogical contexts and in tandem with different necessity constructions, such as the haber/aver construction.
Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent compare the development of ‘will-verbs’ in English, Danish, Dutch, Icelandic and Swedish within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (‘Modelling step change: The history of will-verbs in Germanic’). On the basis of a more global comparison of the four languages, the authors suggest that, formally, will in Dutch, Danish, Icelandic and Swedish is still quite similar to its lexical counterpart, while English shows the most radical developments in this respect. With regard to meaning and semantics, however, Danish for instance has developed much further than the others. They also argue for a reconceptualization of the traditional cline Desire > Willingness > Intention > Prediction and suggest a bifurcation into Willingness and Intention rather than a single, linear trajectory. Börjars and Vincent also argue that more attention needs to be paid to the micro-steps in the individual pathways. When the historical developments are broken down into semantically defined smaller steps, it becomes clear that individual developments can indeed follow individual paths, even when the language(s) show similar starting points.
The chapter by Benedikt Heller and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi takes a comparative look at Englishes around the world (‘Possessives world-wide: Genitive variation in varieties of English’). On the basis of data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) they investigate the variability between s-genitive and of-genitive in nine different varieties of English, four from the Inner Circle (British, Canadian, Irish, New Zealand), two advanced Outer Circle varieties (Jamaica, Singapore) and three Outer Circle varieties (Hong Kong, India, Philippines), using the framework of Probabilistic Grammar. They base their study on five different factors such as possessor animacy and constituent length, many of which with several subcategories, and a complex multifactorial conditional inference tree in order to show which factors (or grammars) universally apply to several varieties and which constraints are more dynamic. They also suggest that a distinction according to status (Inner Circle vs Outer Circle) may probably not be as effective a predictor in comparison to a factor such as ‘linguistic conservatism’ in particular varieties. For Heller and Szmrecsanyi this question opens up interesting and promising perspectives for future research.
Last but by no means least is the chapter by Christian Mair on American versus British English, in particular with respect to orthography, morpholexis and syntax (‘American English: No written standard before the twentieth century?’). Mair (re-)evaluates the claim that American and British English primarily diverged during the nineteenth century and that British English is currently undergoing some Americanization. This maps onto Schneider's ‘Dynamic model’, namely Phase 4 ‘endonormative stabilization’ and Phase 5 ‘differentiation’. Mair is able to show that various processes in the development of American English can be traced back to Phase 4, and that the Spanish American War (1898) or even World War I may represent a ‘symbolic watershed’ (p. 360) that leads to Phase 5 where some other processes may be diagnosed. This means that at least for some variables and phenomena Phase 4 may actually have been a lot later than previously assumed. Mair is also able to document the (later) Americanization of British English for some variables, but also warns that the seeming Americanization of other forms may be due to misperceptions, grammaticalization patterns or more universal factors, such as the horror aequi principle, rather than imitation.
This is a most valuable and interesting volume that showcases current research trends in both synchronic and diachronic English linguistics. Moreover, it beautifully and elegantly reflects the breadth and depth of David Denison's work in that it spans all periods of English, from Old English through Middle and Early Modern English to Late Modern and present-day English. And just like Denison's work, it also includes both an intra- and an interlinguistic comparative perspective by looking at English and its varieties, and English in relation to other languages. Theory-wise, we find chapters dealing with categoriality and fuzziness, constructions and construction grammar, lexical functional grammar, linguistic typology, and philological perspectives. Methodologically, there are several chapters with a more philological approach next to those that work with large-scale corpora, and those that work with complex statistical evaluations, and of course those that combine any of these aspects. In sum, I believe this is a great volume rightfully dedicated to David Denison, ‘a master at this integrative approach to the study of language change and the history of English’ (Mair, p. 361).
