Journal of English Linguistics

A growing literature directly connects historical demographic patterns to the emergence of new dialects or languages. This article moves beyond the usual macro view of such data, relying on simple numbers of speakers and similar information, to focus on the input to new generations of speakers in a so-called substrate setting. The English now spoken in eastern Wisconsin shows a range of influences from German, and we work to reconstruct the kinds of input that the first large generation of English L1, mostly monolingual English-speaking children in the community,likely received at the level of the household and the individual. Evidence strongly suggests that most children in the community would have been widely exposed to heavily German-influenced English, in part due to a critical moment of shift from German to English as the home language in many households.

This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.

This article comprises a sociolinguistic analysis of the distribution of northern features in two sixteenth-century collections of wills of urban and rural provenance (York Clergy Wills and Swaledale Wills and Inventories, respectively). It is suggested that there is a correlation between dialect features such as the Northern Subject Rule, the uninflected genitive, and the third person plural pronouns and the urban or rural provenance of the wills as well as, to some extent, the social rank of the testators. This sheds light on how social factors might condition the resilience of dialect features in sixteenth-century northern English.