The existential there-construction typically features prominently in studies of non-canonical syntax (e.g., Birner & Ward 1998), both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. Current approaches within the World Englishes paradigm are mostly concerned with (non‑)concord or default singulars in the existential clause, as in there’s bears back there (Walker 2007; Collins 2012), a phenomenon that is by no means absent from earlier stages of English. This chapter makes use of the rich data represented by the Old Bailey Corpus 2.0 (1720 to 1913) to zoom in on developments within the existential construction in Late Modern English, a period which combines relatively little syntactic change in comparison to earlier periods of English with extensive activities in the realm of codification (cf. Leonard 1962; Sundby et al. 1991; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). Two case studies probe into the tension between language change from above and below with respect to the occurrence of default singulars in existential constructions, highlighting some of the many aspects of non-canonicity that intersect in the variable realisation of this particular construction.

Adverbials do not only fulfil various semantic functions and come in various shapes and sizes; they may also be either obligatory or optional. However, it is the status as an optional, often inherently flexible constituent that has resulted in its frequent neglect in previous research. This holds true especially in relation to fronting, commonly defined as the sentence-initial placement of core elements. This paper proposes a distinction between two kinds of fronting phenomena, namely fronting (i.e., the initial placement of optional sentence constituents, enabling the consideration of optional adverbials) and preposing (i.e., the initial placement of obligatory constituents). It investigates the production of adverbial fronting phenomena in German learners of English compared to their native-speaker peers. While some of the results confirm a number of findings attested in previous research endeavours (e.g., the overrepresentation of particular semantic functions in sentence-initial position), others, including the correlation between the likelihood of encountering a fronted adverbial and sentence length and, with regard to the native speaker data, the newness of information, are more surprising. All in all, the paper proves the importance and justification of the consideration of adverbial fronting (as opposed to preposing) as part of the study of non-canonical syntax.

This synopsis rounds off the collected volume by summarising the main findings with regard to the concepts, approaches, and methods in studies on (non-)canonical syntax: First, the contributions corroborate the ubiquity of non-canonical syntax – a phenomenon which occurs in all areas of language use. The synopsis then refers back to the definition of the concept of (non‑)canonicity provided in the Introduction to the volume. The contributions to the volume, however, show that both the existence of neighbouring alternatives and the functions of non-canonical constructions are of importance when it comes to understanding non-canonical syntax and its longevity, despite its rarity. This demonstrates that a combination of the theory- and the frequency-based approaches is indeed essential. The synopsis also discusses the predominance of empirical and corpus-based approaches to the study of syntactic (non‑)canonicity, but also emphasises the merits of methodological pluralism, before it finally specifies a number of desiderata for future research into syntactic (non-)canonicity.

Cleft constructions are non-canonical in several regards: they deviate from a minimally complete grammatical structure since they involve lexical material absent from the corresponding non-cleft; they are information packaging devices and are rare across registers. Previous work on clefts has identified various factors influencing the use of clefts, such as formality, topicality, weight, and informativity. Building on these findings, this chapter examines the communicative purpose of evaluating as a further factor by comparing a large corpus of primarily evaluative texts with a control corpus of primarily non-evaluative texts. This investigation reveals that in both corpora most clefts are evaluative. They are thus very closely associated with the situational communicative intention to evaluate (rather than with the primary textual communicative purpose). Consequently, clefts are a (more) canonical syntactic choice when speakers/writers intend to express evaluations and may even be regarded as part of an extended set of overtly evaluative lexico-grammatical stance constructions. The study further shows that the formal and semantic characteristics of clefts, including the presupposition, the ‘known fact’ effect, and the exclusiveness implicature, permit the flexible foregrounding and backgrounding of evaluations, which, in turn, may account for the frequent evaluative use of these constructions.

ProTag constructions – pronouns that appear in the right periphery and which do not have the clarificatory function of right-dislocated constituents – are non-canonical in two senses: (i) they represent an addition to a syntactically and semantically complete and coherent ‘basic’ structure, and (ii) they are a feature of colloquial spoken British English/non-standard dialects, and hence are infrequently attested. Recent work on ProTags has elucidated their properties in Present Day British English and in a small sample of Early Modern English data. Focusing on demonstratives used as ProTags, this chapter builds on earlier work by examining the occurrence of ProTags in a larger corpus covering a greater time span. This investigation reveals that demonstrative ProTags, though rare, are attested from the late sixteenth century. Mycock & Misson’s (2020) finding that the most commonly used demonstrative ProTag in Early Modern English was this switching to that by the twentieth century is not only confirmed, but shown to be a relatively recent change. It is also revealed that the frequency of overt antecedents has decreased over time. We consider the implications of these changes and the factors that motivate the presence of what appears to be a completely superfluous pronoun.

While Present-Day English has SVO as its canonical word order, word order preferences have undergone substantial changes since Old English times. Not only has word order become more fixed (especially with respect to unmarked sentence-initial elements) in main clauses, but verb-final in subordinate clauses has also been lost. The change from V2 to SVO, in particular, has traditionally been attributed to changes in morphology (particularly the loss of case marking). As word order flexibility in declarative main clauses became more restricted, English developed alternative ways to reorder clause elements for information-structuring purposes, including different kinds of passive construction. This chapter reviews previous research on word order changes in the history of English with a view to showing major developments in the field of English historical syntax, such as the shift from largely qualitative to more quantitative, data-based approaches, a change in focus from canonical to non-canonical word order or from core to more peripheral clause elements. Major theoretical models serve as the backdrop of these developments in the field of English historical syntax.

This first chapter introduces the reader to the central research questions and hypotheses investigated in this book. In particular, it discusses the role that the morphologically and semantically related simple verbs (e.g. notice in the case of take notice of) may play for the semantic evolution of the CPs. It draws on previous literature, showing that not much has been done in the way of studying the role of the simple verb. Further, the chapter introduces other factors that may help predict or explain the evolution of the CPs. The chapter is rounded off by a summary of the book’s structure.

It is the purpose of Chapter 3 to outline the semantic and syntactic properties of the CPs under investigation (Section 3.1 and Section 3.2) and to make clear that each of the CPs investigated in this study has a morphologically (and mostly semantically) related simpler verb counterpart in the paradigm (Section 3.3). The chapter is rounded off by a presentation of the three central hypotheses of this study (Section 3.4).

While I have so far looked at semantic changes affecting the CPs under investigation, I now turn to the question of which types of syntactic changes these constructions go through. This change of perspective is driven by the question of whether semantic and syntactic changes run in parallel (see Scenario 1, Section 1.1), whether semantic changes proceed faster than syntactic ones in the sense of ‘form follows function’ (Scenario 2) or whether syntactic changes are primary and semantic changes set in later (Scenario 3).

The analyses presented in Section 8.2 show whether all those Type I-CPs which undergo semantic specialization/restriction (make answer to, make mention of, make use of, take leave of and take notice of; see Chapter 7) are part of the same scenario (either Scenario 1, 2 or 3) or whether they differ as to when semantic and syntactic changes set in. For a start, however, I place all CPs under investigation (no matter whether they undergo semantic specialization or not) on a scale that measures their degree of syntactic fixation in twentieth-century BrE (see Section 8.1).