International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 19

International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 19 University of Duisburg-Essen 22-26 August 2016 Book of Abstracts 1 Organizers and Scientific Committee Local organising team Birte Bös Nuria Hernández Monika Forstreuter Claudia Claridge Sebastian Wagner Ines Fricke-Groenewold Raymond Hickey Katharina von Elbwart Zohra Hassan Michael Wentker Scientific Committee Aarts, Bas Kortmann, Bernd Allan, Kathryn Krug, Manfred Archer, Dawn Kytö, Merja Arnovick, Leslie Laing, Meg Auer, Anita Lange, Claudia Bauer, Laurie Lenker, Ursula Beal, Joan Mair, Christian Bergs, Alex Mazzon, Gabriella Brinton, Laurel Mondorf, Britta Burridge, Kate Nevalainen, Terttu Culpeper, Jonathan Pahta, Päivi Cuycken, Hubert Plag, Ingo Durkin, Philip Smitterberg, Erik Fischer, Olga Schreier, Daniel Fitzmaurice, Susan Smith, Jeremy Gut, Ulrike Taavitsainen, Irma Hilpert, Martin Tieken, Ingrid Horobin, Simon Traugott, Elizabeth Hundt, Marianne van Kemenade, Ans Ingham, Richard von Mengden, Ferdinand Jucker, Andreas Wright, Laura Kohnen, Thomas 2 Our Sponsors 3 Plenary Sessions ‘No gentleman goes on a bus’: H.C. Wyld and the historical study of English Simon Horobin University of Oxford H.C. Wyld was one of the most important linguists of the early twentieth century. He began his career as a student of Henry Sweet and later went on to hold the Merton chair in English Language at Oxford. Wyld wrote numerous books on English philology; A History of Modern Colloquial English was published in 1920, with further editions appearing into the 1950s. As the standard textbook, Wyld’s work defined the historical study of English throughout much of the twentieth century. Wyld embarked on his career as a neutral observer, for whom one variety of English was just as valuable as another – a key axiom of modern descriptive linguistics. However, this stance of scientific objectivity found itself on slippery ground when it came to describing the relationship between regional dialect and Standard English. In this paper I shall argue that Wyld’s ideas of dialect and standard continue to influence modern studies of the history of Standard English. Shift in politeness values of English Discourse Markers: a cyclical tendency? Gabriella Mazzon University of Innsbruck One of the most challenging objects of study investigated within the currently expanding frameworks of historical and diachronic English pragmatics is the development, spread and use of discourse and pragmatic markers (collectively abbreviated as DMs). The formal heterogeneity of these items has made their study highly interesting for scholars investigating processes like grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, while their acquisition of pragmatic values have been analysed from several perspectives, especially thanks to the development of synchronic and diachronic corpora of historical English, which has supplied abundant data form a variety of text-types. The talk brings together some recent results in this field and sets them in dialogue, focussing however not on the transition of a language form towards becoming a discourse or pragmatic marker, but on the ensuing phases, variously characterised by persistence, layering, and increased formal fixity, occasionally including erosion. The comparison of corpus analyses of some DMs in historical English seems to show consistent trends in the direction some items take in acquiring new (inter-)subjective functions. Similarly to English modal verbs, which developed epistemic meanings after deontic ones in what appears a rather systematic ways, some English DMs have gradually acquired new features, which often brings 4 them, within a process of subjectification, to be increasingly involved in the expression of relational values such as politeness. Furthermore, even within politeness systems themselves, it appears that some DMs tend to be used first with mitigating/hedging functions, and to become later associated with other signals reinforcing, rather than weakening, the pragmatic strength of a face-threat. A possible next step seems for these items to become perfunctory and thus lose any pragmatic strength, thus completing the “cycle” of their pragmaticalization. The talk with close with hypotheses on whether this tendency can be indeed considered as a pragmatic cycle, comparable to structural cycles like the “negative cycle”, which also seems partly determined by pragmatic reasons. Reconstructing Variation and Change in English: The Importance of Dialect Isolates Daniel Schreier University of Zurich Dialect isolates are commonly perceived as traditional and conservative. The belief is remarkably persistent and has been adopted for speaker selection in traditional fieldwork (non-mobile older rural males, NORMs, as target speakers) and given rise to controversial processes such as “colonial lag” (Görlach 1987, Hundt 2009). Claims that enclave varieties are generally static have been revised and it is now generally recognized that they may undergo simultaneous innovation as well: “they are not simply preserved versions of earlier forms of the language on the mainland but have themselves gone through processes of their own” (Hickey 2004: 9). I would like to argue here that one should with benefit focus on conservative features rather than conservative dialects as such, thus shifting the perspective from holistic (variety-related) to structural (feature-specific). I would like to focus on a feature that was well-attested in earlier forms of British English and is still salient in the public eye today, though it has become obsolescent and disappeared: hypercorrect /h/ (in words that have an initial vowel and stress on the first syllable, egg, engine, etc.). According to Milroy (1992), the Norfolk Gilds (late 14th century) or the Paston Letters (late 15th century) exhibit variable use of <h> spellings, namely both absence (in <alpenie> ‘halfpenny’) and un- etymological insertion (in <hoke lewes> ‘oak leaves’), and it also is found in Charles Dickens’ renderings of Working Class London English (e.g. “gas microscopes with hextra power”, in the Pickwick Papers). Inserted /h/ has been lost from 20th century British English (only surviving in cases of occasional hypercorrection, such as in the letter <h>, pronounced /heit∫/). However, this conservative feature has been maintained in several post- colonial English varieties around the world, so I would like to argue here that, with due caution of course, these provide an ideal opportunity both to quantitatively study variation and to reconstruct usage in former British varieties. I will map and discuss reports of the feature where it has survived (e.g. in Caribbean and Pacific Englishes), report some pioneering findings from a large- 5 scale analysis of South Atlantic English, and then generally assess the relevance of dialect isolates for the reconstruction of variation and change in earlier English. Görlach, Manfred. 1987. “Colonial Lag? The Alleged Conservative Character of American English and Other 'Colonial' Varieties.” English World-Wide 8, 41– 60. Hundt, Marianne. 2009. “Colonial Lag, Colonial Innovation, or Simply Language Change?” In: Gunter Rohdenburg & Julia Schlüter (eds.). One Language, Two Grammars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13-37. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Late Modern English: Demographics, Prescriptivism, and Myths of Stability Erik Smitterberg Uppsala University One of the characteristics of Late Modern English that several scholars have drawn attention to is the apparent stability of its structure. Romaine (1998: 7) argues that this stability “challenges any simple-minded view of the relationship between social change and language change which might lead us to expect that language change is necessarily faster and more radical during periods of social upheaval”. As Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009: 105) notes, one effect of the Industrial Revolution was the weakening and break-up of hitherto stable social networks; as weak networks make it easier for linguistic innovations to spread through a community, one might thus expect Late Modern English to feature a great deal of language change. Several scholars have suggested possible reasons why Late Modern English stands out from earlier periods in this regard. For instance, Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009: 105) mentions the popularity of normative works on usage as one factor that contributed to constraining language change. Beal (2004: 125–126) argues that the difference between Late Modern English and other historical periods may be due in part to the nature and quantity of the evidence available: the richness of the evidence for Late Modern English pronunciation may itself make it difficult to notice systematic phonological change. To the extent that the same is true of Late Modern English grammar, recent methodological developments in corpus linguistics as regards the compilation and analysis of large historical corpora may facilitate detection of such change. The aim of this paper is to discuss linguistic stability and change in Late Modern English against the background of what we know about (i) the nature of language change, (ii) the possible influence of normative works on usage, (iii) social changes during the Late Modern English period, and (iv) the interplay of language and society. Among other things, I will argue that the answer to the question of how much change Late Modern English undergoes depends in part on whether language

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