The shift from the personal pronoun hit to it in Middle English is a case of h-dropping. This study discusses the coexistence of the two forms in a single text by focusing on how they are distributed in different parts of it, and shows that there are some patterns in intra-text variation. The text analyzed mainly is Nicholas Love’s Speculum Vite Cristi (1494).
This is a paper presented at the 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC 2018), Takamatsu, Japan, September 17-19, 2018. It discusses various aspects of negation in Benjamin Franklin’s English, including the frequencies of negation itself, of the negative adverb not (as against other negative forms such as no and never), and of the use of the auxiliary do in negative sentences.
This paper revisits Jespersen’s Cycle of negation. While most studies on this famous theory concentrate on the shift from ne V through ne V not to V not, the present study focuses on the later development of negative constructions in English, namely the shift from V not to do not V (and subsequently to don’t V).
This article discusses the causal conjunctions for and because in Paris and Vienne, which Caxton translated from French into Middle English, analyzing the relationship between his text and some possibly related French ones.
This is an article included in Langauge Contact and Variation in the History of English, edited by M. Uchida, Y. Iyeiri and L. Schourup. It explores the word doubt, both nominal and verbal, in seven published books by Sir Thomas More.
Language Contact and Variation in the History of English is the 7th volume of the series, Studies in the History of the English Language. It is a booklet series of the Japanese Association for Studies in the History of the English Language, which was founded in 1999 by Professor Matsuji Tajima at Kyushu University.
This paper explores the complementation patterns of the verb forbid in contemporary English. Based on the analysis of BAWE and the 2001 issues of two British newspapers, it demonstrates to what extent the –ing construction has been established with this verb in today’s English.
This is a short paper on Joseph Power’s note attached to Earl Rivers’s English Translation of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (British Library). It includes the transcription of the text.