This paper investigates the expressive function of two types of binary English blends composed of personal names: determinative blends such as Messidona, where the referent of the whole blend is the same as the referent of one of the names (Messi), and coordinative blends like Clintasha (Clint + Natasha), referring to (real or imagined) couples in a romantic relationship. We present the results of two complementary studies exploring quantitative methods for studying the functions of blending. Specifically, we use sentiment analysis to test the hypothesis commonly advocated in the literature that blends are expressive word-formation devices. The first study compares the contexts of name-based determinative blends and non-blends to investigate to what extent name blending as a word-formation pattern carries expressive meaning. The second study explores the relation between the expressive nature of coordinative blends and different registers and communicative constellations. On a theoretical level, the paper corroborates earlier research on the expressive nature of blends but also challenges previous claims about the irregular nature of blending by showing that expressiveness is a systematic property of the word-formation process. On a methodological level, we show how recent data analytic tools can be used to address theoretical linguistic questions in morpho-pragmatics.

This chapter explores the Spanish Creole Debate (Granda 1968; Schwegler 1999; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2021) through Afro-Veracruz Spanish (AVS), a vernacular spoken in rural Veracruz, Mexico. Findings align with studies on other Afro-Hispanic dialects (Díaz-Campos & Clements 2008; Sessarego 2013a, 2014, 2015, 2019), showing that colonial Veracruz lacked the conditions for creole formation, challenging earlier claims (McWhorter 2000: 11). By integrating sociohistorical and linguistic perspectives, it adds a valuable piece to the Spanish Creole Debate.

This computational modelling work investigates whether different rhetorical sections as subgenres of postgraduate English academic texts can be characterised by distinct types and amounts of syntactic structures. A corpus of dissertations written by students with different English language backgrounds and academic contexts was subjected to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. Using a novel analytical method on linguistic data, this study identifies strong syntactic predictors of genres with the robust statistical modelling of ensemble learning. This method consists of four machine learning predictive classifiers of Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, deep learning artificial neural network, and Gradient Boosting as the stacked layer and the Naive Bayes method as the meat-learner. The discussion of findings examines the extent of variability among the rhetorical sections of MA dissertations regarding the type and distribution of coordination, subordination, phrasal complexity, as well as the length of syntactic structures.

This chapter offers a close analysis of the Uniformitarian Principle and its use as a conceptual tool for understanding and narrating language contact and language change, paying special attention to the social life of Anguillian, the English-lexifier Creole language of Anguilla, the most northerly of the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands. The language and aspects of the situation of contact that led to its emergence are described from a novel uniformitarian perspective that integrates insights from general linguistics, Communication Accommodation Theory, and the analysis of early colonial-era archives.

What psycholinguistic mechanisms shape the emergence of Creole languages, and are these processes unique or universal across human language evolution? In this exploration, determiner-noun fusion (DNF) in Haitian Creole takes center stage, challenging assumptions about the sole role of substrate influence. By analyzing DNF patterns in Haitian Creole and comparing them to those in Mauritian Creole, the chapter reveals how statistical learning – hallmarks of word segmentation – plays a pivotal role. These findings align Creole emergence with broader linguistic processes, refuting claims of a “break in transmission.” This chapter bridges Creole linguistics and psycholinguistics, providing support for the Uniformitarian Principle and reshaping the debate on Creole emergence.

The uniformitarian approach to language evolution advocated by Mufwene, DeGraff, and Aboh claims that the emergence of creoles is driven by the same restructuring processes as those of other languages. Together with the genetic inheritance from the parent languages, language contact and population structure are important factors which may explain why some emergent varieties exhibit more divergent structures than others. The analysis of Brazilian Portuguese presented here has been conceived of within this uniformitarian view on language evolution. Despite the striking divergence between the Brazilian and the European Portuguese varieties, Brazilian Portuguese cannot be considered a creole language because it was not forged in a society characterized by the same demographic distribution pattern of the ecologies in which creole languages have emerged. It is, nevertheless, a language that has emerged in an ecology of intense multilingualism in which European, Bantu, Gbe, and Native Brazilian languages interacted daily. Explanations for its peculiarities will then have to take this fact into consideration. From a uniformitarian approach, the study of a non-creole language resulting from intense multilingual contact such as Brazilian Portuguese can help shed light on its main claim: that creoles and noncreoles have emerged by the same restructuring mechanisms.

Framed within historical pragmatics, this chapter revisits and explains the nature of Portuguese encounters along the western coast of Africa as reported by sailors, missionaries, and merchants. The chapter examines sources written in Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, or, later, English. Although Portuguese was used as the trade lingua franca in forts such as Elmina, there is no evidence that it ever pidginized. This disputes the long-held assumption in creolistics that the initial contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans systematically produced pidgins. An important reason is that the use of Portuguese was restricted to the brokers, also known in colonial history as intermediaries, middlemen, and go-betweens. By the seventeenth century, the coastal fortifications were also quite cosmopolitan contact settings where various Europeans speaking different languages and Africans interacted with each other in diverse languages, often without interpreters. Professional interpreters were needed particularly for expensive-commodity transactions. The chapter shows that contact between different populations and “brokers on the move” led to the emergence of new Portuguese varieties in the Cape Verdean archipelago and in Rios de Guiné, just like Portuguese itself had developed from the contact of populations migrating within the former Roman Empire.

By 1700, written Scots had largely disappeared from most printed text types. However, chapbooks – cheap booklets sold on the street from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Fox 2020: 386) – may have promoted Scots usage given their wide appeal, audience, and topic range. Thanks to the National Library of Scotland, a recently digitised collection of Scottish chapbooks has been made available to the public, representing a novel and invaluable resource that has not yet seen quantitative, linguistic analysis. To explore this under-researched time period and medium, we utilise the defoe tool (Filgueira Vicente et al. 2020b) to extract a large number of variable Scots tokens for statistical analysis. Our results indicate the persistence and prevalence of Scots features in imaginative prose, but also local news, which aligns with both historical and contemporary findings (Donaldson 1989a,b; Cruickshank 2017; Shoemark et al. 2017b) and suggests the continuity of Scots in print.

This study is a multivariate analysis seeking to identify semantic and syntactic factors influencing the alternation between to-infinitival and bare gerundial clauses in subject-control complements of the verb fear in contemporary American English. It builds on recent qualitative discussions of this alternation and recent multivariate analyses of similar binary alternations involving a prepositionally linked (rather than bare) gerundial option. We draw upon the American component of the Corpus of News on the Web, sampling subject-control complements from a period extending from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2021. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression provides varying degrees of support to numerous manifestations of the Complexity Principle, as well as strong support for the so-called Choice Principle. There is also low-quality evidence for a continuing diachronic decline of the to-infinitive.

Distributional approaches following the Firthian principle have revolutionized linguistics. While Firthian approaches in collocation research detect syntagmatic relations and are a key research area in corpus linguistics, Firthian distributional semantics and their neural counterpart of word embeddings detect paradigmatic relations and have fundamentally impacted computational linguistics. We combine these two closely related approaches: our hypothesis, following Ricoeur’s view of a metaphor as a clash of two normally distinct semantic fields, is that idioms are collocations in which the lexical participants typically have low semantic similarity in the word embedding space, i.e. low values for the cosine metric. We test if the cosine metric, replaceability with synonyms, and linear combinations with collocation measures improve idiom detection for three constructions: verb-PP, light verbs, and compound nouns. We report improved idiom detection by 10 to 80 per cent, and almost half of compound noun non-compositionality is predicted by cosine alone. We trace how compound nouns are changing in spoken and written English, mirroring digitalisation and the revolution of the internet.