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Linguistic and Political Backlash and Conformity in Eighteenth-Century Scots

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Linguistic and Political Backlash and Conformity in Eighteenth-Century Scots 1 ‘An Eye for an Aye’: Linguistic and Political Backlash and Conformity in Eighteenth-Century Scots LING690 Sarah van Eyndhoven Abstract This study examines the effects of social and political changes that were occurring during the eighteenth century in Scotland on the use of written Scots, focussing in particular upon authors who were known to have been for or against the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. In order to capture a holistic representation of the levels of Scots in writing, I explore the proportion of Scots lexemes, compared with their corresponding English lexemes, in a purpose-built corpus containing a range of eighteenth-century texts. This corpus contains both texts that were produced by a general cross- section of Scottish society, and a number of politically-active individuals. I take a quantitative sociolinguistic approach to historical data by utilising statistical techniques that examine linguistic variation in a data-driven manner. This enables a more detailed and empirical exploration of Scots in the eighteenth century, which until now has been largely examined on a descriptive basis only. Using a number of statistical tools that are well suited to historical analyses, such as Variability-based Neighbour Clustering (Gries & Hilpert, 2008), conditional inference trees (Hothorn et al., 2006) and random forests (Breiman, 2001), I have been able to reconstruct both the general patterning of the Scots language over time and the extralinguistic factors encouraging or suppressing its presence in writing. In particular, I compare the use of Scots between the general literate population and political individuals active during this time period. I also explore the effect of the latter’s political sympathies on their language choices, and uncover several new and interesting effects conditioning the levels of Scots in their writings. I tie these results to the underlying political change and discontent characterising Scotland during this time, as well as the general linguistic changes taking place across the eighteenth century as a result of broader processes of change over time. 2 Contents 1.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4 2.0 Literature Review ............................................................................................................................ 11 2.1 Historical Background - Linguistic Change .................................................................................. 11 2.1.1 The Union of the Parliaments, 1707 .................................................................................... 11 2.1.2 The Age of Politeness ........................................................................................................... 13 2.1.3 Scottish Standard English ..................................................................................................... 17 2.1.4 Antiquarianism ..................................................................................................................... 19 2.1.5 Vernacular Revival ............................................................................................................... 22 2.2 Historical Background - Political Change .................................................................................... 26 2.2.1 Political Tension ................................................................................................................... 26 2.2.2 Radicalism ............................................................................................................................ 30 2.3 Divergence and Convergence ..................................................................................................... 35 2.3.1 Intertwining Influences ........................................................................................................ 37 2.3.2 The retainment of Scots ....................................................................................................... 39 2.3.3 The complexities of the eighteenth century ........................................................................ 41 2.4 Previous Analyses ........................................................................................................................ 41 3.0 Research Questions ........................................................................................................................ 44 4.0. Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 45 4.1 The Corpus .................................................................................................................................. 45 4.1.1 Corpus Compilation .............................................................................................................. 45 4.1.2 OCR ....................................................................................................................................... 55 4.1.3 LaBB-CAT .............................................................................................................................. 58 4.2 The variable phenomenon .......................................................................................................... 67 4.2.1 Dictionary compilation ......................................................................................................... 68 4.2.2 Extracting the variable ......................................................................................................... 86 4.2.3 Circumscribing the data ....................................................................................................... 87 4.2.4. Recoding factor levels ......................................................................................................... 88 4.3 The data process revisited .......................................................................................................... 92 5.0 Results and Discussion .................................................................................................................... 94 5.1 The benefits of Statistical Modelling .......................................................................................... 94 5.2 Statistical Modelling – The Temporal Analysis ........................................................................... 96 5.2.1 Variability-Based Neighbour Clustering (VNC) ..................................................................... 96 5.2.2 VNC - The general literate Scottish population ................................................................... 97 5.2.3 VNC – the political members of the corpus ....................................................................... 102 5.3 Statistical Modelling – The Extralinguistic Factors .................................................................... 105 3 5.3.1 Conditional Inference Trees ............................................................................................... 105 5.3.2 Random Forests ................................................................................................................. 108 5.3.3 General Scottish Society .................................................................................................... 112 5.3.4 Politically-Active Scottish Society ...................................................................................... 130 6.0 Further Discussion......................................................................................................................... 147 7.0 Limitations and Future Directions ................................................................................................. 153 8.0 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 155 9.0 References .................................................................................................................................... 157 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. 175 Appendices .......................................................................................................................................... 177 Appendix One.................................................................................................................................. 177 Appendix Two ................................................................................................................................. 178 Appendix Three ............................................................................................................................... 178 List of Figures ...................................................................................................................................... 180 4 1.0 Introduction The relationship between language and politics has been attested in a number of studies (Hall-Lew et al., 2017, Hall-Lew et al., 2010, Kirkham and Moore, 2016), though many are focussed largely on contemporary or fairly recent cases of political change or politicians. These studies are often based around language manipulation for particular political purposes, or the language of politicians ascribing to certain political identities. Hall-Lew et al. (2017) analysed a number of marked phonological variants in speakers from the main Scottish political parties in
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