The paper presents the results of a complex study of ?onsonantal phonemes' syntagmatics, registered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word throughout the historical development of the English language. The analysis of frequencies of consonantal clusters' actualization allowed the author to characterize the regularities of their…

All languages change over time. English has undergone continuous change throughout its three major periods: Old English (roughly from 450 to 1100 AD), Middle English (from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (from 1500 to the present). Sound is one of the most easily influenced parts of language to be subject to different changes. Sound change is…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

There is a long linguistic tradition in which language change is explained in terms of first language acquisition. In this tradition, children are considered to be the agents of language change, or at least the agents of changes in the underlying grammar. Since the early 1980s, this has been formulated in the (generative) terminology in terms of…

An alternative scansion of Old English alliterative poetry is proposed. The approach uses a binary branching template and focuses on the importance of secondary stress and unstressed syllables. Examples are drawn from the poem "Beowulf." It is argued that the alternative scansion has two advantages over both traditional and more recent…

Spelling patterns in English and their underlying unity are described. A direction for research in the area of Anglo-Saxon and Old English words in present-day English is suggested. (RM)

Traces the historical changes of the verb "like" and shows how the verb's role in Modern English has a greater influence in syntax as opposed to semantics. This change in the verb's function has led to the formation of a new lexical subcategorization frame, or redefinition of the verb. (TR)

An analysis of stress patterns in Old English poetry addresses conflicting theories of and lack of uniformity in scansion and proposes that this problem is due primarily to scansion of a given half-line by somewhat arbitrary assignment to one of five types, with no rule-governed word stress principles upon which to base its scansion. It is…

Contends that the language of the suburbia--the language of the British middle class--is a dead language, because it has so few sources of contemporary enrichment and vitality, and because it is derivative and unoriginal and relies heavily on an imagery that stems from obsolete popular speech. (RJ)

An alternative account of the Old English verb-complement word order and the change from OV to VO is offered, based on an analysis of 16 Old English texts. Evidence is provided that the change does not involve abrupt reanalysis but rather synchronic competition between two grammars, beginning in the Old English period and continuing into Middle…

Seven papers on various topics in language research are presented, including: "What Makes the Japanese Inscrutable?: A Linguistic Perspective" (Julie Bruch); "A New Look at Old English Metrics" (Alison K. Huettner); "A Class of Indefinites in Vietnamese" (Laura A. Michaelis); "Cohesion and the Yiddish Consecutive…

Papers in comparative and historical linguistics are presented. "The Independent Development of Mid Tone in Suma" (Mary Bradshaw) extends earlier research on tone change in Gbaya languages to Suma, a Gbaya language previously not included. "Diachronic Morphology: An Overview" (Brian Joseph) reviews diachronic morphological…