This preliminary study of 285 morphological and cognitive blends (attestation dates 1200-2012) aims to investigate the role of phonesthemes in the structuring of the English lexicon. A study of OED word origins shows a disparity between older (1200-1900) and recent blends . Sound symbolism plays an overriding role in over 50% of older blends, leading to a study of initial phonesthemes (i.e. consonant clusters). Several case studies of diachronic semantic shift attested in the OED point to the existence of multidirectional motivation ties. This preliminary study supports the psycholinguistic theory that 1) there is a structured secondary sound symbolism in English, and that 2) it is still productive today and may play a role in the creation of neologisms as well as ensuring their survival (see Bergen, 2010: 52). A more in-depth usage-based analysis using sophisticated measurement tools is the next step in the study.

Knowledge of the composition of many cultural heritage objects is limited, resulting in many unanswered questions in regards to the provenance, composition, and production methods. In this paper, our objective is to show that dual beam scanning electron microscope (SEM) and focused ion beam (FIB) can be used rapidly and non-destructively to determine the surface and bulk metal compositions in small cultural heritage objects. We show, for the first time, that this novel FIB technique can be successfully applied non-destructively to cultural heritage objects by examining three representative silver plated objects (Candelabra, “Century” spoon, and New York World’s Fair spoon) from the Dallas Museum of Art’s unparalleled collection of modern American silver. In each case, we successfully reveal and characterize the bulk metal as well as the Ag-plating, up to ∼80 µm deep and show that there is no visual damage resulting from the milling process of the FIB. This novel characterization technique can be applied, due to its ease of availability and rapid use, to many other problems in addition to silver plated objects, making dual beam SEM/FIB a possible cornerstone technique in the study of cultural heritage objects.

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This study offers a collocate analysis of the modal marker no doubt (ND) in the EEBO, ECCO and EVANS combined corpora using Sketch Engine. The purpose is to determine the diachronic patterns of usage of ND, and secondly to compare results with the conclusions of existing diachronic pragmatic studies of modal markers. The first step identified five patterns of behaviour based on AM score in decreasing order of frequency: 1 – NDB (no doubt but); 2 – TISND (there is no doubt); 3 – MND (make no doubt); 4 – (ND (parenthetical use); 5 – Ndont (no doubt on’t). The second step consisting in partitioning of the corpus following Hilpert and Gries (2016) produced 3 distinct periods based on EHBO data (1580-1669, 1670-1759, 1760-1799). The findings showed that the relative usage of ND for each period remained remarkably consistent, especially the persistence of non-grammaticalized behaviours MND and TISN. The two major disparities, concerning NDont and parenthetical (ND, were shown to be of likely significance for the changing pragmatic behaviour of ND, which further diachronic study may be able to ascertain.