Journal of English Linguistics

The purpose of this article is to provide a new analysis of an ill-understood type of infinitival clause, which has been previously labeled purpose clauses or elliptical infinitive clauses and is called weak purposive clauses (WPCs) here. It starts with a puzzle: some infinitives can be parsed as either adverbial or relative, as is evidenced in the ICE-GB corpus, which has been used for illustrative purposes. In The spider monkey picks leaves or fruit to eat, the infinitive to eat is potentially parsed as adverbial (‘in order to eat them’) or relative (‘which it can then eat’). The author demonstrates that those infinitives, for which the distinction is neutralized, pertain to the WPC class and need to be distinguished from typical relative infinitives and infinitival rationale clauses (traditional adverbial clauses of purpose). The semantic and syntactic properties of the class are described in full detail (e.g., meaning, control properties), including several properties that have gone unnoticed (the variety of gap functions, the potential absence of gaps, double relativization) or failed to be adequately explained (these infinitives’ assertoric force). It appears that for most WPCs, a continuative (relative) clause interpretation is superimposed on an adverbial one, leading to syntactic ambiguity.

The English have-perfect can be traced to Old English [habban ‘have’ + noun + perfect participle]. A comparative look at the development of the have-perfect in Romance suggests a way to reassess the Old English corpus, which in turn reveals that the string [habban + noun + perfect participle] had three distinct structures and values aside from the periphrastic perfect. The author shows that the likeliest source of the have-perfect is a periphrasis denoting the achievement of a result or a persisting resultant state. This implies that the relationship between possessive and auxiliary habban is less direct than previously claimed.

This study investigates the acquisition of a local variant of the STRUT vowel in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, United Kingdom. While the local accent has no distinction between STRUT and FOOT, the incoming Polish speakers arrive using something close to the standard pedagogical model of British English pronunciation, which clearly separates the two. Measuring the change in production toward the local variant along with corresponding social factors suggests that, in addition to the experiential factors of length of residence and having a native-speaker partner, attitude toward Manchester also affects the degree of vowel change, with a more positive attitude encouraging a greater degree of acquisition. The results are discussed in the context of individuals’ attitudes and use of the STRUT vowel as part of the process by which they position themselves in relation to the target community.