Expansion of the progressive (be+ing periphrastic form, where "be" is at the same time the copula and a statement of existence) was a major feature of modernization of the English verb system in the 19th century. A survey (1787-1880) of a collection of private letters, most from famous writers, reveals that linguistic factors played a small role…

Describes a new research project on York English, a variety in northeast England. Conducted a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature that recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide--"was/were" variation in the past tense paradigm. (Author/ER)

Recipes exhibit a phenomenon nonexistent in other commonly studied varieties, (for example, conversational discourse), namely, zero anaphors as direct objects. This article examines this phenomenon and explores its consequences for linguistic theory. Results reveal that stylistic, semantic, and discourse factors are the most important in the…

The marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English is compared. Similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard…

Variations in the use of perfect "have" and its alternatives in the Trinidadian creole continuum are examined, based on data from a sample of speakers from different social backgrounds. The findings have implications for the study of morphosyntactic variation in other divergent dialect situations. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

Proposes a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of "don't count" (DC) forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies of the English language. Reviews the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyzes the behavior of the traditional DC categories. (29…

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

In a sociohistorical variation analysis of verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English, corpus-based comparisons focus on several extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of forms over successive periods of time. Contrary to customary theories of "colonial lag," the rate of change was faster…