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The aim of this study is to analyse a non-uniform process of palatalization in the Mid- dle English Northern dialect, with the main focus on the range of operation of the pro- cess, its conditioning environment and the direction of the change in the four lemmas: EACH, MUCH, SUCH, and WHICH. The fact that palatalization was an active process in the North has been proved by 47% of the Northern texts from the Innsbruck Cor- pus of Middle English Prose, which have demonstrated cases of palatalization in the forms of the lemmas. Referring to the studies of a perceptually motivated sound change and observing certain correlations between the palatalization processes occurring now and in the past, one may infer that the scope of palatalization in the North might have been even wider.

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Solutions are presented, most involving Celtic influences in West Germanic (WG) dur- ing the ancient period, for some long-standing problems involving nominal forms. The M N-SG forms of /n/-stems in WG may be seen as due to loss of /-n/ (in analogical /-ͻͻn/) having happened after shortening. Apparent replacement of the F G-SG by the D-SG in WG may be seen as due to the D-SG of the F personal pronoun being employed, in “external possession”, as a kind of indirect reflexive, after /siin-/ became limited (for reasons connected with Celtic influence) to M SG meaning. This case has analogues in Romance. Final /-s/ in the A-PL of M /a/-stems may be seen as due to Celtic influence causing /-nz/ to be replaced by /-ns/.

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Reduplication has always been an important subject of morphology and language typology. Cross-linguistic studies have identified 45 functions of reduplication in 108 languages. Total reduplication is recognised as productive and systematic in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), possibly due to language contact. The paper aims to present the cases of verbal and nominal reduplication in CSE described in the linguistic literature, and juxtapose them with the examples from the Singapore component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SIN), which seem to be indicative of discrepancies in form and functions.

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The study examines five names of medieval medical practitioners: barber, doctor, leech, physician, and surgeon. The aim is to view the semantic change of those names in non-medical prose texts from the Middle English period. The analysis also considers their origin, frequency, semantic fields, function and both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings in Middle English and later. Furthermore, the research verifies to what extent the findings of Sylwanowicz (2003) are confirmed by the results of a similar examination of a non-medical corpus. The data for the study come from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, with the support of historical dictionaries.

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Idiosyncrasies and peculiarities distinguishing new Englishes from the established ones are often identified and measured by examining the extent to which structural choices and patterns vary across the board. The competition between relativisers wh- and that in the construction of relative clause, which itself is a structurally complex-versus-simple construction site, allows for showing the extent to which choice of a relativiser relates to the construction of a complex or simple relative clause, given different factors. On the other hand, such investigation can also shed some light on the extent to which structural com- plexity characterises new varieties of English. Relying on 628 relative clauses drawn from written academic corpus, the study shows that WH-relativiser is preferred to THAT-relativiser by the Nigerian speakers, and vice versa by the American speakers. It is also found that WH-relative clause is more likely to be complex-structured while THAT-relative clause is more likely to be simple-structured. Among eight factors tested for independent effects, the factors representing relativiser posterior syntactic form, syntactic function, and syntactic positioning of the relative clause appeared to be strong predictors of where we might (not) find a certain relativiser and whether a complex or simple relative clause will emerge.

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Stemming from a conviction that the same phenomenon can be construed differently by different cognisers, metaphors used “reflect[ing] and effect[ing] underlying construal operations which are ideological in nature” (Hart 2011, 2), the present paper investigates how the conceptualisation and linguistic construction of IMMIGRANTS changed over time, forwarding a convenient representation of reality. To that end, the study marries the Cognitive Linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004; Hart 2010; 2011; 2015) with the multifactorial usage-feature analysis (Glynn 2010). The results have shown that in the times of increased migration IMMIGRANTS were objectified, their otherness foregrounded through appropriate discursive strategies and topoi. Curbing immigration in later periods contributed to an observable shift in the linguistic representation of the immigrant out-group.

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Recent research on English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) has indicated that ELF can be analyzed in accordance with the main principles of the Construction Grammar approach (Pirc 2013). Admittedly, while the majority of studies have been devoted to its creative and unpredictable character, little attention has been paid to how ELF can be conceptualized if its emergent elements are treated as constructions. Thus, the present paper conducts a corpus- based study on the Question Tag Construction (henceforth the QTxC) in ELF with a view to indicating in what way the QTxC can be determined. With the support of the VOICE and BNC corpora, the performed analysis has shown that the analyzed realizations of the QTxC in ELF, while having formal properties that deviate from the norms of English, can also be characterized as exhibiting various sub-types of the prototypical function of the QTxC.

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The paper has two main objectives: the first is to present an overview of the phenomenon of multi-word items in English, and discuss their prevalence in native speaker usage. The second is to discuss how proficient non-native speakers of English, and in particular those who are training to become translators, may benefit from classroom training that increases awareness of the primary role of chunks and other multiword units in native-like speech. It is argued that classroom training may tend to emphasise grammar rules and lexis over building a repertoire of multi-word items; more practise in this area may improve fluency, conserve energy, and enhance long-term language learning among adult foreign language users with nuanced foreign language performance goals.

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In recent years, the English-speaking world observed growing awareness of the gender non-binary/genderqueer community. Among other things, this involved the issue of in- clusive language, e.g. the singular they pronoun has been declared the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2015, and by Merriam-Webster in 2019. There is also growing media representation of characters using singular they in popular culture. This, however, poses a challenge to translators, as some languages – like Polish – are much more heavily gendered and lack an obvious equivalent of singular they. This article analy- ses Polish translations of three English-language television series featuring non-binary characters and discusses good practices one can employ when dealing with similar trans- lation challenges.