New Cambridge History of the English Language
Volume III: Change, transmission and ideology
Editor: Joan Beal (Sheffield)
I The transmission of English 1. Dictionaries in the history of English (John Considine) 2. Writing grammars for English (Ingrid Tieken) 3. Speech representation in the history of English (Peter Grund) 4. The history of English in the digital age (Caroline Tagg and Melanie Evans) 5. Teaching the history of English (Mary Hayes) 6. Internet resources for the history of English (Ayumi Miura) II Tracing change in the history of English 7. The history of English style (Nuria Yáñez Bouza / Javier Perez Guerra) 8. The system of verbal complementation (Hendrik de Smet) 9. Tense and aspect in the history of English (Teresa Fanego) 10. Development of the passive (Peter Petré) 11. Adverbs in the history of English (Ursula Lenker) 12. The story of English negation (Gabriella Mazzon) 13. Case variation in the history of English (Anette Rosenbach) 14. The noun phrase the history of English (Wim van der Wurff) 15. Relativisation (Cristina Suárez Gómez) 16. The development of pragmatic markers (Laurel Brinton) 17. Recent syntactic change in English (Jill Bowie and Bas Aarts) 18. Semantic change (Justyna Robinson) 19. Phonological change (Gjertrud Stenbrenden) 20. The history of R in English (Patrick Honeybone) 21. Reconstructing pronunciation (David Crystal) 22. Spelling practices and emergent standard writing (Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy) NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 2 of 62
III Ideology, society and the history of English 23. The ideology of standard English (Lesley Milroy) 24. English dictionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries (Charlotte Brewer) 25. The emerging phonological standard (Lynda Mugglestone) 26. The discourse of prescriptivism (Don Chapman) 27. Early urban vernaculars (Anita Auer) 28. Networks, coalitions and language change (Marina Dossena) 29. Communities of practice in the history of English (Joanna Kopaczyk) 30. Historical enregisterment (Joan Beal and Paul Cooper) 31. Mythologisaton and the history of English (Richard Watts) NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 3 of 62
1
Dictionaries in the history of English
John Considine
I propose an historical account of dictionaries (broadly defined) in the transmission of English as records of education, of multilingualism, and of invention. As records of education, their history falls into three overlapping phases. In the first, from Anglo-Saxon England to the seventeenth century, a young native speaker’s first encounter with a document which codified English would be in the form of a bilingual dictionary of Latin and English. In the second, from the sixteenth century to the present day, elementary monolingual wordlists of English would often be encountered before bilingual wordlists. In the third, from the seventeenth century to the present day (but with particular dynamism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), monolingual wordlists of English were targeted with increasing precision at L2 learners. As records of multilingualism, their history falls into two moieties, again overlapping. From the first Latin-Old English wordlists to the end of the early modern period, other languages were perceived as the measure of English, so that the lexicographer’s task was to find English equivalents for the rich vocabularies of Latin and the prestigious European vernaculars. Thereafter, English started to be perceived as equal to, or the measure of, other languages: there was little sense of a lexical deficit in English, and bilingual dictionaries might indeed be constructed by adding translation equivalents to English dictionaries. As records of invention, their history is again bipartite. From at least the fifteenth century (the early medieval evidence is hard to interpret) to the eighteenth and beyond, dictionaries included entries for unattested and poorly attested words which exploited the morphological possibilities of English. From the sixteenth century onwards, they included entries for new borrowings and formations which were definitely attested, and which demonstrated what had been achieved by the inventiveness of writers and, latterly, speakers of the language. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 4 of 62
2
Writing grammars for English
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
“Where do the rules of grammar come from?” This is how Nick Lowndes, a.k.a. Johnson, opened his column “Original sins” in The Economist of 13 February 2020. A topical question these days, when more usage guides are published than ever and online usage advice proliferates. Just how to formulate such rules was a topical question around the mid-eighteenth century, when English grammar writing took off in a serious way. The first grammar of English dates from 1586, but it is during the 1760s that we see a major increase of new titles, and also a growing interest in grammar books among the publishers. A central figure in all this was the clergyman Robert Lowth (1710–1787), whose Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) became unexpectedly popular, setting a standard for many grammars of English subsequently. The grammar, and Lowth with it, eventually developed into a scapegoat in the fight against prescriptivism. Lowth’s case, however, is unique in that the structure of his grammar, as well as his correspondence with contemporaries like the philosopher James Harris (1709–1780), allows us to study his working method as well as his reasons for writing the grammar in the first place. This chapter will place Lowth and his Short Introduction into the context of the codification of English grammar, starting with the frequently heard – but ineffective – call for an English Academy in the early eighteenth century. Rather than leading to a formally imposed set of rules for the language, grammar writing became a process from below, supported by the publishers, who were aware of the growing need for a standard of linguistic correctness. Topics to be discussed are the interdependence of the grammars (plagiarism), variability in the rules formulated, the role of female grammarians, and the influence of Lowth’s grammar and its eventual eclipse, leading to general criticism of the normative grammatical tradition.
Selected background literature:
Alston, R.C. 1965. A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800. Volume 1, English Grammars Written in English. Leeds: E.J. Arnold & Son. Cajka, Karen. 2008. Eighteenth-century teacher-grammarians and the education of ‘proper’ women’, in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), 191-221. Lowth, Robert. 1762. A Short Introduction to English Grammar. London: A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 5 of 62
Michael, Ian. 1970. English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michael, Ian. 1991. More than enough English grammars, in Gerhard Leitner (ed.), English Traditional Grammars, 11-26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Michael, Ian. 1997. The hyperactive production of English grammars in the nineteenth century: A speculative bibliography, Publishing History 41: 23–61. Percy, Carol. 2008. Mid-century grammars and their reception in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review’, in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.). 125–42. Percy, Carol. 2010. Women’s grammars, in Raymond Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 38–58. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (ed.). 2008. Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar Writing in Eighteenth-Century England, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2011. The Bishop’s Grammar. Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2012. ‘My imperfect attempt towards an English grammar’. Lowth’s indebtedness to James Harris in revising his grammar. Historiographia Linguistica 39/1, 61−75. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2020. Describing Prescriptivism. Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English. London/New York: Routledge, NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 6 of 62
3
Speech representation in the history of English
Peter J. Grund University of Kansas
Representing other people’s voices and speech is a central concern for communication in a range of present-day contexts, situations, and genres, fulfilling various textual, pragmatic, and social functions (e.g., Bakhtin 1981; Tannen 1989; Baynham and Slembrouck 1999; Semino and Short 2004; Holt and Clift 2007). Research into the history of English is starting to show that speech representation was similarly ubiquitous and multivalent in historical periods (for an overview, see Grund and Walker forthcoming). At the same time, while continuity and stability in some features and functions are evident, we also see significant differences over time in the forms and uses of speech representation. This chapter reviews our current understanding of speech representation phenomena in the history of English, covering both synchronic-historical and diachronic patterns in forms and functions. I focus on three broad areas: 1) speech representation mechanisms (including reporting expressions, such as I said, They replied, and speech markers, such as quotation marks; Moore 2011; Cichosz 2019); 2) speech representation modes (e.g., direct speech, indirect speech, etc.; McIntyre and Walker 2011; Walker and Grund 2017); and 3) social, pragmatic, and textual functions of speech representation (such as marking evidentiality, organizing voices, etc.; Claridge 2017; Evans 2017). In addition to reviewing existing literature on these topics, I also push the boundaries of current research by adding new corpus-based analyses of selected features. In my discussion of speech representation modes, I address the much-debated issue of what the “filtering mechanisms” of speech representation mean for our use of represented speech as evidence of the spoken language of the past (e.g., Culpeper and Kytö 2010).
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. [Michael Holquist (ed.); Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (transl.).] Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Baynham, Mike, and Stef Slembrouck. 1999. Speech Representation and Institutional Discourse. In Mick Baynham and Stef Slembrouck (eds.), “Speech Representation and Institutional Discourse,” Special Issue of Text 19(4): 439–457. Cichosz, Anna. 2019. Parenthetical Reporting Clauses in the History of English: The Development of Quotative Inversion. English Language and Linguistics 23(1): 183–214. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 7 of 62
Claridge, Claudia. 2017. Voices in Medieval History Writing. In Terry Walker and Merja Kytö (eds.), “Texts from Speech and Speech in Texts,” Special Issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies 16(1): 7–40. Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Mel. 2017. Royal Language and Reported Discourse in Sixteenth-Century Correspondence. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18(1): 30–57. Grund, Peter J., and Terry Walker. Forthcoming. Introduction: Speech Representation in the History of English. In Peter J. Grund and Terry Walker (eds.), Speech Representation in the History of English: Topics and Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holt, Elizabeth, and Rebecca Clift (eds.). 2007. Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntyre, Dan, and Brian Walker. 2011. Discourse Presentation in Early Modern English Writing: A Preliminary Corpus-Based Investigation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16(1): 101–130. Moore, Colette. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Semino, Elena, and Mick Short. 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Terry, and Peter J. Grund. 2017. “speaking base approbious words”: Speech Representation in Early Modern English Witness Depositions. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18(1): 1–29. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 8 of 62
4
The history of English in the digital age
Caroline Tagg and Mel Evans
The digital age foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. A history of English in the digital age is thus one in which pre-digital ideas and practices inform, and are transformed by, the distinctive technological, social and ideological parameters of the digital. Early internet forum users sought to maximise meaning-making with available linguistic resources, e.g. pre-digital typographical and respelling practices (Shortis 2016), in an emergent ‘interactive written discourse’ (Ferrara et al. 1991). Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, many strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms (e.g. Hinrichs 2012) and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes (e.g. Androutsopoulos & Juffermans 2014; Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2019; Danet & Herring 2008). Meanwhile, digital technologies reproduce and perpetuate the bias and inequalities of offline society (Lumsden & Harmer 2019), seen in practices such as trolling (Donarth 1999; Brabazon 2012) and prevailing media ideologies (Thurlow 2006; Thurlow et al. 2019). The history of English in the digital age, like all histories of English(es), is thus one of continuity, variation and change, anchored in the social lives of its users. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across digital spaces, from Usenet in 1980s to Twitter in 2020. Self-reference and address terms represent a repertoire of sociopragmatic resources that are both distinctively “digital” (e.g. hashtags, usernames), whilst also a continuation of interactive English language practices in non-digital (and pre-digital) spaces (vocatives, pronouns). Our investigation explores how such features show stability and change in light of evolving digital contexts, including the diversifying user-base and technological resources, and the shift from anonymous, dispersed subject-interest groups (e.g. forums) to social network sites with connections to their users’ wider social worlds. Overall, our analysis highlights the enduring importance of continuity, as well as change. As the focus on sociopragmatic markers of identity indicates, the history of English in the digital age involves a complex interplay between new opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating in the offline world.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. & K. Juffermans (2014) Digital language practices in NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 9 of 62
superdiversity: introduction. Discourse, Context & Media 4/5: 1-6. Bou-Franch, P. & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019) Analyzing Digital Discourse: new insights and future directions. London: Palgrave. Brabazon, T. 2012. Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: after avatars, trolls and puppets. Cambridge: Chandos Publishing. Danet, B. & S.C. Herring (2008) The Multilingual Internet: language, culture, and communication online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donarth, J. S. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual. In M. A. Smith & P. Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge, pp. 29– 59. Ferrara, K., H. Brunner & G. Whittemore (1991) Interactive written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication 8/1: 8-34. Hinrichs, L. (2012) How to spell the vernacular: a multivariate study of Jamaican emails and blogs. In A.M. Jaffe, J.K. Androutsopoulos, M. Sebba & S.A. Johnson (eds.) Orthography as Social Action: scripts, spelling, identity and power. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 325-258. Lumsden, K. & E. Harmer (eds.) Online Othering: exploring digital violence and discrimination on the web. Cham: Springer International. Shortis. T. (2016) Texting and other messaging: written system in digitally mediated vernaculars. In V. Cook & D. Ryan (eds.) Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 487-511. Thurlow, C. (2006) From statistical panic to moral panic: the metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11: 667-701. Thurlow, C., G. Aiello & L. Portmann (2019) Visualizing teens and technology: a social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery. New Media & Society 22/3: 528-549. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 10 of 62
5
Teaching HEL through renewed philology
Mary Hayes
This essay will offer an account of how the History of English Language (HEL) was taught in the nineteenth century and then a prospectus for a renewed curriculum. An original course in burgeoning “English Language and Literature” departments, HEL was based in the scholarly discipline of philology. For this, HEL is perceived as a conservative course that perhaps better belongs to a curriculum erstwhile. Given how early HEL educators enthused about the cultural value of the English language’s “Anglo-Saxon” roots, it’s understandable how some departments and instructors regard it today: at best, it’s a relic, and at worst, an academic endorsement for retrograde politics. Recall, however, that nineteenth-century philology was itself a controversial field. It no longer pertained strictly to biblical exegesis. For its inquiry into the origins and families of various languages, it smacked of Charles Darwin’s provocative geological work. Thus, I inquire: How can HEL courses in the twenty-first century capitalize on strategies that are academically and even politically progressive? In proposing new directions for teaching HEL, this essay explains pedagogical methods that draw on the “new philology.” If “old philology” had posited texts as scholarly editions, “new philology” finds most value in a network of textual forms: variants, marginalia, visual components, status as a material object, digitization, and authorial circumstances. This variety of textual media suggests how the new philology could be—and has been—profitably adapted to the HEL classroom. This essay will offer practical examples of assignments and activities that incorporate the methods of new philology. I’d like to consider the full implications of this pedagogical approach by attending to “new philology” in its original conception: a branch of Mexican ethnohistory that drew on native-language texts to construct a history of colonialism from the indigenous point of view. The textual techniques used in new philology are in fact a means for a corrective end: recuperating the voices of peoples put under erasure. This essay will explore the implications of bringing this essential component of the new philology to HEL pedagogy. At the very least, students would recognize that studying HEL does not entail the discovery of discrete linguistic origins that recommend a certain hegemonic tongue.
Working Bibliography
Davis-Secord, Jonathan. “Approaching the History of English through Material Culture.” In Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language: NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 11 of 62
Pedagogy in Practice. Edited by Mary Hayes and Allison Burkette, 335-44. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Driscoll, M. J. “The Words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology: Old and New.” Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Edited by Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge, 85-102 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2010). Giancarlo, Matthew. “Philology, Theory, and Critical Thinking through the History of the English Language.” In Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language: Pedagogy in Practice. Edited by Mary Hayes and Allison Burkette, 59-70. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lerer, Seth. “The History of the English Language and the Medievalist.” In Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language: Pedagogy in Practice. Edited by Mary Hayes and Allison Burkette, 71-80. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Momma, Haruko. From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Restall, Matthew, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” Latin American Research Review 38 (2003): 113–134. Turner, James. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Warren, Michelle R. “Introduction: Relating Philology, Practicing Humanism,” PMLA (2010): 283-88. Warren, Michelle R. “Shimmering Philology,” postmedieval 5 (2014): 389–397. Williams, Tara. “The Value of the History of the English Language Course for the Twenty-First Century.” Profession (2010): 165–176. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 12 of 62
6
Internet resources for the history of English
Ayumi Miura Osaka University, Japan
Since the appearance of the last volume of CHEL (Hogg 1992-2001), one of the most remarkable changes in the study of the history of the English language – or arguably any subject area – has been the global spread of the Internet and its application to transform old resources while creating new ones. The latest academic environment is inextricably connected with the ongoing development on the online space. To give a few examples, the push for ‘open access’ has encouraged dissemination of various scholarly products on the web and free of charge. It is now an established practice for print textbooks to be enhanced with a companion website offering additional resources (e.g. van Gelderen 2014, Johnson 2016, Brinton and Arnovick 2017, Gramley 2019) and for advanced handbooks to include a chapter focusing on online resources (e.g. Busse 2012, Traxel 2012, López-Couso 2016). The Internet is also acknowledged to be highly effective for student engagement and public outreach (Gerber 2017, Seargeant 2017, West Brown 2019), and the field of the history of English has been successfully promoted on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as other free online services aimed at the public audience, like YouTube. This chapter will provide an overview of online resources for the study of the history of the English language which have been developed in the last two decades. It will cover materials which used to be ready only in print or physical format, such as manuscripts, texts, dictionaries and concordances; corpora and databases which are accessible from the web; research projects whose outputs involve Internet access; multimedia learning tools and modules which supplement traditional classroom teaching; as well as (often informal) communication platforms which help develop the field beyond academia. The chapter will also discuss some desiderata in the currently available resources. (299 words)
References
Brinton, Laurel J. and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2017. The English language: A linguistic history. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Companion website: www.oupcanada.com/BrintonArnovick3e Busse, Beatrix. 2012. Resources: Online resources for teaching. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook, vol. 2, pp. 1190-200. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Gerber, Natalie. 2017. Engaging multimedia in the HEL classroom. In Mary Hayes NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 13 of 62
and Allison Burkette (eds.), Approaches to teaching the history of the English language: Pedagogy in practice, pp. 345-56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gramley, Stephan. 2019. The history of English: An introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Companion website: https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138501096/ Hogg, Richard M., ed. 1992-2001. The Cambridge history of the English language. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Keith. 2016. The history of early English: An activity-based approach. London: Routledge. Companion website: https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138795457/ López-Couso, María José. 2016. Corpora and online resources in English historical linguistics. In Merja Kytö and Päivi Pahta (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics, pp. 127-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seargeant, Philip. 2017. Teaching the history of English online: Open education and student engagement. In Mary Hayes and Allison Burkette (eds.), Approaches to teaching the history of the English language: Pedagogy in practice, pp. 357-64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traxel, Oliver M. 2012. Resources: Electronic/online resources. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook, vol. 2, pp. 1131-48. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. van Gelderen, Elly. 2014. A history of the English language. Revised ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Companion website: https://benjamins.com/sites/history_of_english/ West Brown, David. 2019. Online resources for illustrating and researching historical language. In Colette Moore and Chris C. Palmer (eds.), Teaching the history of the English language, pp. 315-19. New York: Modern Language Association of America. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 14 of 62
7
The history of English registers
Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and Javier Pérez-Guerra University of Vigo, Spain
The study of change in style in the history of English has received a great deal of attention from various perspectives, amongst them the multi-dimensional approach (MDA) to linguistic analyses of register variation à la Biber. The MDA has served as the analytical framework of a wide-range corpus studies since the late 1980s (Biber 1988, 1995), covering both speech-based and written textual dimensions, and it is still thriving over thirty years later, as evinced, for instance, in the development of methodological tools (Nini 2013, Egbert & Staples 2019). While early research paid special attention to the historical drift of English registers, largely based on ARCHER (Biber & Finegan 1989, 1992; see Kytö 2019 for an overview), more recent work has turned towards synchronic variation in university language, online media, World Englishes, and other new registers (cf. Berber Sardinha & Veirano-Pinto 2019, Biber 2019). In this chapter we revisit the first wave of MD studies in the history of English in the light of Biber & Conrad’s (2019[2009]) approach to register/genre/style, recent work on the socio-historical context of the Late Modern English period (1700-1900), and newly developed diachronic corpora. The empirical basis of our research consists of textual sources pertaining to the domains of natural (Astronomy, Life Sciences) and social sciences (Philosophy, History), sampled from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich & Crespo-García 2007) and the Late Modern English Medical Texts corpus (Taavitsainen & Hiltunen 2019). In an attempt to describe the evolution of scientific language during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we discuss the selection of an inventory of linguistic features leading to the (statistical) recognition of a number of factors, and account for the factors’ dimensional interpretation and the subsequent scaling of (sub-)registers across the dimensions. The quantitative and the qualitative analysis of the most representative features per (sub)register and dimension will reveal trends of on-going variation as regards registers and style in a key period for the linguistic development of scientific registers.
References
Berber Sardinha, Tony & Marcia Veirano Pinto (eds.). 2019. Multi-dimensional analysis: Research methods and current issues. New York: Bloomsbury. Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 15 of 62
Biber, Douglas. 2019. Text-linguistic approaches to register variation. Register Studies 1(1), 42-75. Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad. 2019 [2009]. Register, genre, and style, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan. 1989. Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65(3), 487-517. Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan. 1992. The linguistic evolution of five written and speech-based genres from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations in historical linguistics, 688-704. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Egbert, Jesse & Shelley Staples. 2019. Doing multi-dimensional analysis in SPSS, SAS and R. In Tony Berber Sardinha & Marcia Veirano Pinto (eds.), Multi-dimensional analysis: Research methods and current issues, 125-44. New York: Bloomsbury. Kytö, Merja. 2019. Register in historical linguistics. Register Studies 1(1), 136-67. Moskowich, Isabel & Begoña Crespo-García. 2007. Presenting the Coruña Corpus: a collection of samples for the historical study of English scientific writing. In Javier Pérez-Guerra, Dolores González-Álvarez, Jorge Luis Bueno-Alonso & Esperanza Rama-Martínez (eds.), ‘Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed’. New insights into Late Modern English, 341-58. Bern: Peter Lang. Nini, Andrea. 2013. Multidimensional Analysis Tagger. https://sites.google.com/site/multidimensionaltagger Taavitsainen, Irma & Turo Hiltunen. 2019. Late Modern English medical texts. Writing medicine in the eighteenth century. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 16 of 62
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The system of clausal complementation
Hendrik De Smet KU Leuven
This chapter addresses the history of the English system of clausal complementation. An introductory section is devoted to explaining what complementation is and briefly listing the major changes in this domain (the decline of that-clauses and the loss of the subjunctive, the loss of bare infinitives, the rise of to-infinitives, gerunds, participles and other clause types). The bulk of the text is then to be devoted to four major questions. First, where do complement clauses (or CCs) come from? The history of English suggests at least three recurrent pathways: (i) adverbial clauses turn into CCs (e.g. lest-complements); (ii) phrasal units undergo clausalization (e.g. the gerund, the to-infinitive); (iii) subject-like and predicate-like elements are welded together into a CC (e.g. ECM constructions, for…to-infinitives, secondary predicates). The development from paratactic structures (posited for the that-clause) is more questionable. Second, how do CCs spread? The characteristic pattern is one of lexical diffusion, though the speed of diffusion can vary greatly from one change to the next. A tentative generalization is that diffusion runs from predicates with meanings situated in the external world to predicates with more internal meanings (emotion, thought representation, perception). Third, how does the system change as a whole? Though the term ‘Great Complement Shift’ is perhaps a misnomer, English sees an unmistakable trend towards more non-finite complementation, perhaps reflecting a growing preference for backgrounding structures. This leads to a number of variation hotspots, where finite CCs compete with non-finite alternatives, or non-finite alternatives compete among themselves. Fourth, what becomes of CCs? At least two pathways of change are open to CCs, with the CC in both cases becoming more main-clause like: (i) the matrix clause develops into an operator, either as auxiliary or as parenthetical; or (ii) the matrix clause disappears altogether, leading to insubordination.
References
Cuyckens, H., F. D’hoedt, B. Szmrecsanyi. 2014. Variability in verb complementation in Late Modern English: finite vs. non-finite patterns. In M. Hundt (ed.), Late modern English syntax, 182-203. Cambridge University Press. De Smet, H. 2013. Spreading patterns: Diffusional change in the English system of complementation. New York: Oxford University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 17 of 62
D'hoedt, F. 2017. Language change in constructional networks: The development of the English Secondary Predicate Construction. Doctoral dissertation: KU Leuven. Fanego, T. 1996. The development of gerunds as objects of subject-control verbs in English (1400-1760). Diachronica 13: 29-62. Fonteyn L. 2019. Categoriality in Language Change: The Case of the English Gerund. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaunisto, M. & J. Rudanko. 2019. Variation Between Sentential Complements: The Case of Work At -ing and Work On -ing. López-Couso, M. J. 2007. Adverbial connectives within and beyond adverbial subordination: The history of lest. In U. Lenker & A. Meurman-Solin (eds), Connectives in the History of English, 11-27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Los, Bettelou. 2005. The Rise of the To-Infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rohdenburg, Günter. 1995. On the Replacement of Finite Complement Clauses by Infinitives in English. English Studies 76(4). 367-388. Ruohonen, J. & J. Rudanko. 2019. Comparing explanatory principles of complement selection statistically: a case study based on Canadian English. Studia Neophilologica. 1-18. Thompson, S. A. & A. Mulac. 1991. A quantitative perspective on the grammaticalization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In E. C. Traugott & B. Heine (eds), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. 2: Focus on types of grammatical markers, 313-329. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van linden, An. 2010. From premodal to modal meaning: Adjectival pathways in English. Cognitive Linguistics. 21. 537-571. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 18 of 62
9
Tense and aspect in the history of English
Teresa Fanego University of Santiago de Compostela
The verbal system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was based primarily not on distinctions of tense, “a deictic category that locates situations in time” (Comrie 1976: 5), but rather on distinctions of aspect, which “is not concerned with relating the time of the situation to any other time-point, but with the internal temporal constituency of the one situation” (ibid.). The shift from the three aspect system (imperfective, perfective, retrospective) of late PIE to the binary tense system (past vs. non-past) of Germanic involved, on the one hand, the reinterpretation from perfective and retrospective to a past tense coding complete events in the past; on the other, the reinterpretation from imperfective to a non-past capable of expressing both present and future time, as in the Old English clauses his lic liþ on Hreapadune ‘his body lies in Repton’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 755) and ic arise of deaðe on þam þriddan dæge ‘I [will] arise from death on the third day’ (ÆCHom I, 10.152.7). These changes “explain why there is a complete lack of aspectual forms in the older forms of Germanic” (Hewson & Bubenik 1997: 210; see further Hewson 2012) and why in historical times the various Germanic languages have developed analytic aspectual patterns of various kinds. In the case of English, these include several periphrases to code the prospective future (e.g., She will show you your room, You’re going to become a great artist, I’m about to sell the house, etc.; cf. Hilpert 2008, Petré & Van de Velde 2018, etc.), a retrospective perfect to mark past events relevant to the present (I have seen her twice; cf. Macleod 2014, 2019, Hristov 2020), and a fully grammaticalised be-progressive (She is reading a book; Kranich 2010, Rautionaho & Fuchs 2020). Alongside these we find a variety of other periphrases, some of which have now disappeared from the standard language, as happened with the be-perfect (Jenny & James are walked to Charmouth this afternoon, 1804 Austen, Letters) that alternated with the have-perfect until about 1900 (Kytö 1997), while others, by contrast, are currently becoming grammaticalised, as is the case of the progressive sequence exemplified by Bill went whistling down the street, consisting of a deictic verb of motion (come, go) followed by an -ing participle and an oblique complement (Goldberg 2006: 50–52; Fanego forthcoming). The history of the English verb phrase is thus “a story of gradual complexification” (Fischer, De Smet & van der Wurff 2017: 107), from the limited inflectional system of OE into the far more elaborate and largely periphrastic system of Present-day English. The proposed chapter will examine this course of development and how it has impacted the functional range of the inflectional past NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 19 of 62
and non-past tenses. Also considered is the rise of the do-periphrasis as a tense carrier in both questions (Does she like it?) and negatives (She did not like it), and the possibility that its meaning might at first have been perfective and completive, “focus[ing] on what happened” (Denison 1985: 53; see further Denison 1993: 255–291, 446–468; Garrett 1998; van der Auwera & Genee 2002).
References:
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denison, David. 1985. The origins of periphrastic do: Ellegård and Visser reconsidered. In Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem F. Koopman & Frederike van der Leek (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam, April 10–13, 1985, 45–60. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Denison, David. 1993. English historical syntax: Verbal constructions. London & New York: Longman. Fanego, Teresa. Forthcoming. On the history of the English VVingOBL construction. Journal of English Linguistics. Fischer, Olga, Hendrik De Smet & Wim van der Wurff. 2017. A brief history of English syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrett, Andrew. 1998. On the origin of auxiliary do. English Language and Linguistics 2(2): 283–330. Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hewson, John. 2012. Tense. In Robert I. Binnick (ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 507–535. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hewson, John & Vit Bubenik. 1997. Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages. Theory, typology, diachrony. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hilpert, Martin. 2008. Germanic future constructions. A usage-based approach to language change. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hristov, Bozhil. 2020. Grammaticalising the perfect and explanations of language change: Have- and be-perfects in the history and structure of English and Bulgarian. (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics 10). Leiden & Boston: Brill. Kranich, Svenja. 2010. The progressive in Modern English. A corpus-based study of grammaticalization and related changes. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kytö, Merja. 1997. Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English. In Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö & Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), English in transition: Corpus-based studies in linguistic variation and genre styles, 17–85. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Macleod, Morgan. 2014. Synchronic variation in the Old English perfect. Transactions of the Philological Society 112(3): 319–343. Macleod, Morgan. 2019. The preterit and perfect in Middle English. https://blog.philsoc.org.uk/2019/03/27/the-preterite-and-perfect-in-middle- english/ NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 20 of 62
Petré, Peter & Freek Van de Velde. 2018. The real-time dynamics of the individual and the community in grammaticalization. Language 94(4): 867–901. Rautionaho, Paula & Robert Fuchs. 2020. Recent change in stative progressives: A collostructional investigation of British English in 1994 and 2014. English Language and Linguistics. Published online: 07 February 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431900042X van der Auwera, Johan & Inge Genee. 2002. English do: On the convergence of languages and linguists. English Language and Linguistics 6(2): 283–307. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 21 of 62
10
Developments in the passive construction
Peter Petré KU Leuven
English, as most other languages, can topicalize (‘bring attention to X as a topic’) either the agent or the patient of an event. The first, more neutral option is realized as the active construction (A cat broke the vase), the second as the passive, which can omit the agent (because it is unknown or irrelevant), or include it (to introduce it), as in The vase was broken (by the cat). This chapter discusses the complex history behind this deceptively simple role of the passive. In Old English, passives were not primarily event-oriented (Petré 2014, Smirnova et al. 2018), but instead referred to the event’s outcome (e.g., The cat knocked over the vase, and now it is broken), a resultative meaning still common today. Unambiguously event-oriented passives (e.g., they were tortured for hours) only developed in Middle English, after which they closely followed the active verb paradigm, as seen in the appearance of a progressive passive in the eighteenth century (the house is being built) (Hundt 2004). Additionally, Old English grammar marked participants through case inflections, which allowed topical non-subjects to appear pre-verbally. In Middle English case was lost, preverbal position became restricted to subjects, and topics had to be coded as subjects. As the passive could cater for non-agentive subjects, it started to expand to a number of cross-linguistically uncommon forms such as the prepositional (he was laughed at) and recipient passives (he was given a book) (Dreschler 2015), as well as constructions that are neither active nor passive (e.g., get fired, where the patient is partly responsible, or middle constructions like this tent sleeps four). Special attention is devoted to the complex timing of and connection between these developments, as well as to the question if these constructions are/were also related in the minds of actual speakers (Anthonissen 2020).
References
Anthonissen, Lynn. 2020. Special passives across the lifespan: Cognitive and social mechanisms. UAntwerp: PhD dissertation. Dreschler, Gea. 2015. Passives and the loss of verb second: A study of syntactic and information-structural factors. Utrecht: LOT. Hundt, Marianne & Carolin Biewer. 2004. The passival and the progressive passive – a case study of layering in the English aspect and voice systems. In Hans Lindquist & Christian Mair (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalisation in English, 79–117. Amsterdam: Benjamins. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 22 of 62
Petré, Peter. 2014. Constructions and environments: Copular, Passive and related Constructions in Old and Middle English (Oxford Studies in the History of English 4). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smirnova, Elena, Robert Mailhammer & Susanne Flach. 2019. The role of atypical constellations in the grammaticalization of Germanand English passives. Diachronica 36(3). 384–416. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 23 of 62
11
Adverbs in the history of English
Ursula Lenker University of Munich, LMU
Adverbs are the ‘mixed bag’ among the word classes, comprising such diverse items as time, space or manner adverbs (PDE now, here, quickly), intensifiers (PDE very, terribly) or stance (PDE surely, frankly) and linking adverbs (PDE however, therefore). Because of this heterogeneity, adverbs are often thought to defy systematicity. After a rough sketch of the various types of adverbs and their developments, four case studies will show, however, how adverbs nicely illustrate systematic patterns of semantic and morpho-syntactic change in English. First, changes in the inventory of English intensifiers will exemplify regularities in semantic change: As also attested cross-linguistically, adverbs in intensifier function commonly come from a very restricted number of source domains, namely place/dimension (PDE highly), quantity (ME ful), quality (OE swīþe), truth/factuality (OE sōþlīce; PDE really) or taboo or swear words (PDE damned). Two further test cases will demonstrate how adverbs have been affected by wider typological changes: This applies to the history of de-adjectival adverbs in -ly, the now (in standard Englishes) obligatory adverbial suffix, re-analyzed from the adjective ending OE {lic} plus adverbial suffix {e}. This process, which seems to run counter to the loss of inflectional endings in English, will be shown to be precisely a consequence of this loss of endings, specifically in adjectives. Also, the loss of case (and thus deictic force) in demonstratives has led to significant changes in the morphological make-up and the inventory of linking adverbials. Instead of pronominal deixis (dative þæm or instrumental þy in OE for þæm/þy), means of spatial (hence) and temporal deixis (after all) are now employed for anaphoric reference. In its concluding section, the chapter will focus on adverbial placement. While speakers of earlier English could use various word order patterns for marking their information-structural choices, adverb(ial)s are now the only flexible constituent in the rigid SV(O) pattern of un-marked declaratives. Today, certain placement options, in particular of linking adverbs, are exploited for information-structural purposes, though highly dependent on register and medium (e.g. medial however in written academic prose or final though or however in the spoken mode).
Selected Literature
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2010. Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge: CUP. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 24 of 62
Lenker, Ursula. 2010. Argument and Rhetoric – Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin: de Gruyter. Méndez Naya, Belén. 2008. English Language and Linguistics. Special Issue on English intensifiers. Peters, Hans. 1993. Die englischen Gradadverbien der Kategorie booster. Tübingen: Narr. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 25 of 62
12
The story of English negation
Gabriella Mazzon University of Innsbruck
Even after many decades of incessant research, the system of negation in English still has a story to tell, especially as concerns its diachronic development. The present chapter will try to tell this story by reviewing a few of the main strands and occasionally delving into peculiar details. The chapter will follow a thematic, rather than a chronological, progression, and will mostly focus on sentential negation, which is still being discussed in its diachronic development more than a century after Jespersen’s suggestion of a “negative cycle”. After a short Introduction, the chapter will review Major changes and continuities in English sentential negation, looking at studies on negative placement and on the scope of English negators, as well as reviewing the “negative cycle” (Wallage 2012, Blanchette 2013, Ingham 2013, Burke 2014). This will be followed by sections on The rise, fall and persistence of Negative Concord and on Word order and the pragmatics of negation, which will examine phenomena such as Negative Raising, inversion and meta-linguistic negation, taking into account pragmatic principles (e.g. Neg-First or End-Weight) concurring to characterising negation as a markedness-related phenomenon (Ingham 2007). In the ensuing section, substantial space will be devoted to Negation in the lexicon, reviewing local negation phenomena such as affixal negation (Chapman & Skousen 2005) and Negative Polarity Items (Blanchette & Nadeu 2018, Burnett et al 2018), both still present in present-day English, but also historically relevant phenomena such as negative contraction (Jack 1999, Mazzon 2004: 29-33). A final section, preceding a succinct Conclusion, is devoted to Variation and changes in progress, in order to highlight the dynamic character of the negation system both in standard English and in other varieties. Although formal approaches will be mentioned (Horn 2010), the chapter will give greater prominence to sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic angles of research on English negation from a diachronic point of view (Nevalainen 2006, Campoy 2013, Childs et al 2013, Walkden & Morrison 2017).
Selected References
Blanchette, F. 2013. Negative Concord in English. Linguistic Variation 13(1): 1-47. Blanchette, F., & Nadeu, M. 2018. Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites. Journal of Pragmatics 129: 123-139. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 26 of 62
Burke, I.G. 2014. ‘Giving a Rat's’ about Negation: The Jespersen Cycle in Modern Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(4): 453-485. Burnett, H., Koopman, H., & Tagliamonte, S. 2018. Structural explanations in syntactic variation: The evolution of English negative and polarity indefinites. Language Variation and Change 30(1): 83-107. Campoy, J. 2013. Ladylikeness and Sociolinguistic Submission in Late Medieval English Society: Gender-based Use of Negation in John Paston I and Margaret Paston / Propiedades de una dama y sumisión sociolingüística en la sociedad del inglés medieval tardío: Uso de la negación condicionado por género en John Paston I y Margaret Paston. Atlantis 35(1): 11-33. Chapman, D. & R. Skousen. 2005. Analogical Modeling and morphological change: the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English. English Language and Linguistics 9(2): 333-357. Childs, C., Harvey, C., Corrigan, K. P., & S. Tagliamonte. A. 2015. Comparative sociolinguistic insights in the evolution of Negation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2): 21-30. Horn, L. 2010. Multiple negation in English and other languages. In: L. Horn (ed.), The expression of cognitive categories: Expression of negation, 117-148. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ingham, R. 2007. Negp and Negated Constituent Movement in the History of English, Transactions of the Philological Society, 105(3): 365-397. Ingham, Richard. 2013. Negation in the history of English. In D. Willis, C. Lucas & A. Breitbarth (eds.) The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Vol. 1: Case studies 119-150. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jack, George. 1999. Negative Contraction in Old English verse. The Review of English Studies New Series 50 (19):133-154. Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: Høst. Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A History of English Negation. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Negative concord as an English “vernacular universal”: Social history and linguistic typology.”Journal of English Linguistics 34: 257-278. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2008 The codifiers and the history of multiple negation in English, or, why were the 18th-century grammarians so obsessed with double negation? Studies in Language and Communication 73: 197-214. Walkden, George & Donald Alasdair Morrison. 2017. Regional Variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52(2): 173-201. Wallage, P. 2012. Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history of English. English Language and Linguistics, 16(1): 3-33. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 27 of 62
13
Case variation in the history of English
Anette Rosenbach North-West University
Along the typological change of English from a more synthetic to a more analytic language grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English got increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions from the Middle English period, without however completely replacing the former. The present chapter focuses on two prominent grammatical alternations that arose as a result of this development, i.e. genitive and dative variation:
(1) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king (2) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary.
Variation is constituted by the variable expression of a possessive (1) and a ditransitive relation (2), respectively, that differs in the marking and the position of the possessor (1) / the recipient (2). In genitive variation (1) the possessor can be either in prenominal position, marked by possessive ’s (the king’s horse), or be expressed by a postnominal prepositional of-phrase (the horse of the king). In the dative alternation (2) the recipient can be realized either by an NP in postverbal position (John gave Mary a book) or by a prepositional to-phrase following the theme (John gave a book to Mary). This chapter gives an overview on genitive and dative variation in the history of English, tracing their origin and development. Note that genitive variation will receive more attention as its history has been better researched than the development of dative variation. The following issues will be addressed:
1. Variants: How do the Present-day English genitive and dative constructions emerge over time? 2. Method: How can we determine the quantitative distributions of genitive and dative constructions and study them over time? 3. Constraints on variation: What are the factors that condition the choice of genitive and dative constructions? And how do these constraints operate over time? 4. Theoretical implications: How does linguistic theory (e.g. sociolinguistics, psycho- and cognitive linguistics, probabilistic grammar) inform the study of genitive/dative variation and change (and vice versa)? And how do quantitative studies modify what has been perceived as ‘received wisdom’ in traditional handbooks? NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 28 of 62
Selected references
Altenberg, Bengt. 1982. The genitive v. the of-construction: A study of syntactic variation in 17thcentury English. Malmö: CWK Gleerup. De Cuypere, Ludovic. 2014. The Old English to-dative construction. English Language and Linguistics 19 (1): 1 – 26. Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive variation in English. Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Smrecsanyi, Benedikt, Anette Rosenbach, Joan Bresnan & Christoph Wolk. 2014. Culturally conditioned language change? A multi-variate analysis of genitive constructions in ARCHER. In Late Modern English syntax, M. Hundt (ed), 133-152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolk, Christoph, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2013. Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English. Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica 30(3): 382 – 419. Zehentner, Eva. 2017. Ditransitives in Middle English: on semantic specialisation and the rise of the dative alternation. English Language and Linguistics 22(1): 149 – 175. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 29 of 62
14
The noun phrase in the history of English
Wim van der Wurff University of Newcastle upon Tyne
This chapter will present a descriptive account of the changes that the noun phrase (NP) has undergone in the history of the language. The overall model of NP structure used to identify areas of change will be that of Quirk et al. (1985), which provides a well-known and well-articulated descriptive template for the NP. In discussing developments in Old English, the model will be supplemented with the further categories used in Fischer et al. (2000). The main sections of the chapter will each be devoted to one specific structural element or property of the NP that has undergone significant change. Within these sections, the various changes will be discussed in chronological order, with cross-connections between properties being pointed out where appropriate. After a basic introduction to NP structure and a preview of the most prominent historical changes within the NP, the first main section will address the system of case, gender and number, tracing its evolution from Old English to Late Modern English. This will be followed by a section dealing with further developments that have affected the determiner system, including the emergence of the in/definite article, the use of quantifiers as central determiners and changes in pre-determiners. The next element to be discussed will be adjectives, with developments in their positioning, their formal marking – including adjective comparison –, the expansion of adjective stacking and also the development of certain adjectives into post-determiners. The final section will focus on developments in the head noun of the NP, in particular in the use of nominal compounding. Special attention will also be devoted here to changes in NPs without an (overt) noun, as in present-day the rich and the inevitable, for which new historical data from recent research will be presented and compared with data from Dutch, drawing on Barbiers (2005).
References
Barbiers, Sjef (2005) Variation in the morphosyntax of one. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 8.159-183. Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman and Wim van der Wurff (2000) The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 30 of 62
15
Relativisation
Cristina Suárez Gómez University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
The chapter begins with an overview of the research on relative clauses and relativisation processes from Old English to present-day varieties of English around the world (e.g. Denison 1998; Biber et al. 1999; Rissanen 1999; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2002; Leech et al. 2009; Suárez-Gómez 2006, 2014, to mention a few). This first section is followed by a data-driven quantitative account of the main changes observed in the distribution of relative markers over the centuries. The chapter uses a historical sociolinguistics approach, which interprets syntactic change as a gradual evolution in response to linguistic and sociolinguistic constraints. Down through its history, English has exhibited three relativisation strategies: pronominal, invariable and zero. Traditionally, the choice of relativisation strategy has been determined by the animacy of the antecedent and the type of relative clause (animacy and information parameters), although distribution has also been influenced by other variables such as style or syntactic function of the relative gap. The historical account chronicles the replacement of the OE pronominal paradigm se-seo-that by wh- forms from ME onwards, the specialisation of that as the only invariable relativiser from the thirteenth century onwards, the recent emergence of new invariable relativisers (e.g. inwhich, Radford 2019), and the change in clauses introduced by zero relativiser from paratactic structures to hypotactic ones. The second, data-driven part of the chapter highlights the changing frequency of each relativiser over time, and the changing weight of the different predictors used. It also includes a micro-analysis of recent changes in relation to relative constructions and individual relativisers, especially in less formal language, such as the demise of which in favour of that, and the specialisation of who with human antecedents in subject function. Already widely reported in both standard and World Englishes, these innovations seem likely to become part of the grammatical core of standard English.
References
Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In Suzanne Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol IV, 1776-1997. Cambridge: CUP, 92-329. Biber, Douglas, et al. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 31 of 62
Leech, Geoffrey, et al. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol III, 1476-1776. Cambridge: CUP, 187-233. Suárez-Gómez, Cristina. 2006. Relativization in Early English (950-1250). Bern: Peter Lang. Suárez-Gómez, Cristina. 2014. Relative clauses in Asian Englishes. Journal of English Linguistics 42(3): 245-268. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 32 of 62
16
The development of pragmatic markers: Pathways and processes
Laurel J. Brinton University of British Columbia
Pragmatic markers, extra-sentential forms occurring preferentially at the clause boundary, have procedural meaning and serve a range of “pragmatic” ((meta)textual, (inter)subjective) functions (Brinton 2017: 2–11). They can be traced back to the earliest English, e.g. the much-discussed hwæt of Old English (Brinton 1996, 2017, Stanley 2000, Walkden 2013, Cichosz 2018). While pragmatic functions remain constant, the forms are transitory. It is now possible to trace the histories of many different pragmatic markers, given the rich diachronic research conducted over the past twenty-five years. After discussing difficulties involved in the historical study of these characteristically oral forms, the chapter presents an overview of pragmatic forms found in the history of English (Brinton 2010). The remainder of the chapter focuses on two issues: the origins of pragmatic markers and syntactic pathways they follow, and the diachronic processes responsible for their development. Pragmatic markers arise from a variety of sources (Fraser 1988, 1990). Adverbs are one common source (Traugott 1982, 1995). A second source is declarative main clauses, which become demoted to parenthetical “comment clauses” (Thompson & Mulac 1991; Brinton 2006); imperative main clauses follow the same route. Many pragmatic markers can also be traced back to adverbial clauses. Finally, some pragmatic markers derive from nominal relative clauses. The chapter discusses prototypical examples following all of these syntactic pathways. A debate has arisen about how best to account for the processes responsible for the formation of pragmatic markers. Views have focused on lexicalization (Wischer 2000; Fisher 2007) and grammaticalization (Traugott 1995, Brinton 1996), as well as “pragmaticalization” (Erman & Kotsinis 1993, Claudige & Arnovick 2010). Recently, a process called “cooptation” has been proposed (Heine 2013, Heine et al. 2019, in prep). The chapter does not resolve this debate, though it suggests that grammaticalization may be maintained (see Degand & Evers-Vermeul 2015) if a broader view of “grammar” is adopted (Diewald 2010, 2011).
References
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The comment clause in English: Syntactic origins and pragmatic development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 33 of 62
Brinton, Laurel J. 2010. Discourse markers. In Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical pragmatics, 285–314. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Brinton, Laurel J. 2017. The evolution of pragmatic markers in English: Pathways of change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cichosz, Anna. 2018. The constituent order of hwæt-clauses in Old English. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 30(1). 1–42 Claridge, Claudia & Leslie Arnovick. 2010. Pragmaticalisation and discoursisation. In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical pragmatics, 165–192. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Degand, Liesbeth & Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul. 2015. Grammaticalization or pragmaticalization of discourse markers? More than a terminological issue. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 16(1). 59–85. Diewald, Gabriele. 2010. On some problem areas in grammaticalization studies. In Katrina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler, & Ekkehard König (eds.), Grammaticalization: Current views and issues, 17–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diewald, Gabriele. 2011. Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. In Heiko Narrog & Bernd Heine (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 450–461. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erman, Britt & Ulla-Britt Kotsinas. 1993. Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know. Studies i modern språkvetenskap, 76-93. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic change: Formal and functional perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Bruce. 1988. Types of English discourse markers. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 38. 19–33. Fraser, Bruce. 1990. An approach to discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics 14. 383–395. Heine, Bernd. 2013. On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics 51(6). 1205–1247. Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, & Tania Kuteva. 2019 Forthcoming. On the rise of discourse markers. Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva, & Haiping Long. In prep. On the rise of discourse markers. Stanley, E. G. 2000. Hwæt. In Jane Roberts & Janet Nelson (eds.), Essays on Anglo-Saxon and related themes in memory of Lynne Grundy, 525–556. London: King’s College London, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies. Thompson, Sandra A. & Anthony Mulac. 1991. A quantitative perspective on the grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. II, 313–329. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. From propositional to textual and expressive meanings: Some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on historical linguistics, 245–271. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 34 of 62
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995 (version of 11/97). The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Manchester, UK, August 1995. Available at www.stanford.edu/~traugott/ect-papersonline.html Walkden, George. 2013. The status of hwæt in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 17(3). 465–488. Wischer, Ilse. 2000. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization – “methinks” there is some confusion. In Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, & Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of change: Grammaticalization in English, 355–370. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 35 of 62
17
Recent syntactic change in English
Jill Bowie and Bas Aarts University College London
The chapter opens by discussing what is meant by ‘recent syntactic change’. We first look at Saussure’s distinction between diachronic and synchronic studies, and how it is difficult to maintain in the face of changes continuously taking place. While much of historical linguistics has focused on long-term changes, such as the Great Vowel Shift, we need to recognise that changes are always happening, even over short periods of time. This means that any cut-off point for ‘recent change’ is somewhat arbitrary. In this chapter we focus on syntactic change over the last 50 to 100 years, but make links to longer-term trends where relevant.
We then survey the findings of current research in this field, considering the following questions:
· Which areas of English syntax are currently undergoing change? For example, researchers have looked at changes in the areas of modality, tense and aspect, quotatives, non-finite complementation, and nominalization. · To what extent do the changes identified relate to longer-term trends of change in English? · How do the changes vary between spoken and written language, and across different genres?
We go on to discuss methodological issues that arise in researching recent change. We will consider the different kinds of corpora available for investigating recent change in English, and the strengths and weaknesses of different types of research drawing on these corpora. For example, grammatically parsed corpora allow precise searching for grammatical structures but are typically small, given the high costs of achieving accurate parsing of a corpus. This means that it is hard to search for less frequent phenomena. Although they are sometimes tagged (though seldom parsed), the multi-million-word mega-corpora now available provide more limited searching options in terms of syntactic structures, but their larger size allows for detailed investigation of the lexical patterning of syntactic changes.
As a case study, we consider several aspects of recent change in the English perfect. In previous research we have reported a steep decline in the frequency of the infinitival perfect (as in would like to have seen that), in spoken British English and in written American English (Bowie and Aarts, 2012; Bowie, Wallis, and Aarts, 2013; Bowie and Wallis, 2016). We here report new research (a) showing a steep NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 36 of 62
decline in the use of the -ing perfect (as in having made the mistake three times) in written American English, based on COHA (Davies, 2010–) and other corpora, and (b) investigating current trends in the use of past tense forms instead of past participle forms in the perfect (e.g. has went, have began, had broke), with numerous examples to be found in the 14-billion-word iWeb Corpus of material taken from the Web (Davies, 2018–).
References
Bowie, Jill, and Bas Aarts (2012) Change in the English infinitival perfect construction. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 200–210. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Bowie, Jill, and Sean Wallis (2016) The to-infinitival perfect: a study of decline. In: Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane and Cristina Suárez Gómez (eds.), Re-assessing the Present Perfect (Topics in English Linguistics, 91), 43–94. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter. Bowie, Jill, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts (2013) The perfect in spoken British English. In: Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis (eds.), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (Studies in English Language), 318–352. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Mark (2010–) The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810–2009. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/ Davies, Mark (2018–) The 14 Billion Word iWeb Corpus. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/iWeb/ NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 37 of 62
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Semantic change
Justyna Robinson
Semantic change (meaning shift) traditionally involves shifts in the meaning of words. In a wider sense, changes in meaning apply to any linguistic construction, not just to a word. For example, there are changes in the meaning of going to+verb construction, changes in the meaning of suffix -wise, changes in the meaning of high rising terminus. Changes in meaning can be considered from the onomasiological perspective, i.e. words that are used to express and given concept, or semasiological perspective, i.e. meanings that a given word has. In the current chapter I focus on semasiological change in words. However, many social and cognitive processes that I present here are applied to explain meaning changes of units that go beyond the level of a word. Development of a new meaning leads to disappearance of the older meaning or a situation of coexistence of the newer and older meaning (polysemy). The processes of semantic change are usually discussed from the perspective of outcomes of the change (narrowing, generalisation, pejoration, amelioration) or cognitive processes that lead to change (metaphor, metonymy) (Geeraerts 2010). The social contexts of change are less typically accounted for in established accounts of semantic change (e.g. McMahon 1994). Therefore, this chapter provides a more detailed discussion of social processes in semantic change. Firstly, I show how semantic change is motivated by socio-cultural changes (e.g. amelioration of aggressive). This brings in the consideration of semantic change at the level of denotation and connotation. Secondly, I outline new areas of research which show how semantic changes progress through social categories of generation, gender, social class, as well as style. Here I bring in the distinction between changes in usage and changes in meaning. I also account for semantic change as a process revealing individual and group identity. Finally, I show how changes in the meaning of words reflect ideologies of a nation (example of Cornwall). I touch on distinction between linguistic and social/indexical meaning and methods used to investigate semantic change (Allan and Robinson 2011). The discussion is mainly based on examples from the present day English and current pop culture.
Selected references
Allan, K. and Robinson, J.A. eds., 2011. Current methods in historical semantics (Vol. 73). Berlin/NewYork: Walter de Gruyter. Geeraerts, D., 2010. Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMahon, April, M., 1994. Understanding language change. Cambridge: Cambridge NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 38 of 62
University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 39 of 62
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Phonological change
Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden University of Oslo
Phonology is concerned with the system of distinctive sounds (phonemes) in a language (Cruttenden 2008), and how these phonemes may be combined (phonotactics). Phonemes are frequently established through minimal pairs, e.g. pet /pet/, bet /bet/. Phonological changes may thus be defined as innovations that bring about a change in phoneme inventories and phonotactics, and may be divided into splits, mergers and losses, shifts, cluster changes and phonotactic changes. In keeping with the title of the second part of this volume, this chapter will first outline the means by which it is possible to trace sound-change in the history of English, from spellings and alliterations in Old English, rhymes and foreign loans in Middle English, via phoneticians’ transcriptions in early Modern English, to machine recordings in Present-Day English. However, phonemic changes may be hard to trace, since distinctiveness in historical stages may be difficult to establish: the evidence is often ambiguous, and minimal pairs may be hard to find (e.g. for breaking diphthongs); commonly, the loss or birth of a distinctive sound may be established only after a considerable time has elapsed from the inception of the change. Secondly, this chapter will examine instances of splits (e.g. the phonemicization of voiced fricatives, Minkova 2014), mergers and losses (e.g. OE ȳ/y > ī/i, Ringe & Taylor 2014), shifts (e.g. the Great Vowel Shift, Stenbrenden 2016), cluster changes (e.g. OE hn > n) and phonotactic changes (e.g. non-rhoticity, Wells 1982) in the history of English, assessing the types of evidence found for these changes, as well as their phonological consequences. Causes and explanatory models (e.g. language contact, ‘naturalness’) will be suggested if and where relevant, and theoretical frameworks (e.g. gestural and articulatory phonology, Browman & Goldstein 1989, 1992) will be considered to the extent possible within the limitations set by the volume’s format.
References
Browman, C. P. & L. Goldstein. 1989. Articulatory Gestures as Phonological Units. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research 1989: 69-101. Browman, C. P. & L. Goldstein. 1992. Articulatory Phonology: An Overview. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research 1992: 23-42. Cruttenden, A. (ed.). 2008. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London: Hodder Education. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 40 of 62
Minkova, D. 2014. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ringe, D. & A. Taylor. 2014. A Linguistic History of English. Volume II: The Development of Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stenbrenden, G. F. 2016. Long-Vowel Shifts in English, c. 1050-1700: Evidence from spelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 41 of 62
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The history of R in English
Patrick Honeybone University of Edinburgh
Certain aspects of the history of the English rhotic have been much discussed in previous work, and are relatively well understood. Other aspects of the changes that the rhotic has undergone are less well studied. In this chapter, I aim to say something about both well-known and lesser-discussed developments, offering a broad overview of changes that have affected and involved the segment throughout its history in English, informed by historical, theoretical, dialectological and sociolinguistic research. The loss of rhymal-r (and the connected rise of a linking-r-type sandhi process and phonemicisation of new vowel contrasts) which began in parts of England in the 17th and 18th century has been tracked through direct and indirect evidence in some detail (e.g., Lass 1997, 1999, Minkova 2014), and the related development of intrusive-r has also been subject to considerable discussion in the literature, with accounts invoking various mechanisms, including rule-inversion (Vennemann 1972) and analogy (Sóskuthy 2013). I will discuss this material, but will also show that there is more to consider, including (i) evidence (from both theoretical phonology, such as McCarthy 1993, and sociophonetics, such as Foulkes 1997) that some varieties have developed both synchronic r-deletion and r-insertion, and (ii) evidence from other r-related phenomena, such as pre-r dentalisation (Maguire 2012), which is informative as to whether a variety still has underlying rhymal rhotics (even if they are missing on the surface). The rise of non-rhoticity and associated patterns of r-sandhi (and their spread through varieties of English around the world) will thus take up a major portion of the chapter (along with the associated questions of whether the rhotic has been lost at the underlying and/or surface level, and of whether the new vowel contrasts are necessarily underlying - see Giegerich 1992). The other main issue, which is much less discussed in existing literature, and which I will address first in the chapter, concerns the changes that have occurred in the realisation of the rhotic in varieties of English around the world (irrespective of phonological context). This has led to the current vast dialectological variety in English 'r-sounds', taking in such articulations as post-alveolar approximants, bunched and retroflex approximants, labiodental approximants, coronal taps and trills, and uvular fricatives. This will require some engagement with the question of 'what counts as a rhotic?', connecting to work such as Wiese (2001) and Navarro (2018).
References NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 42 of 62
Foulkes, Paul. 1997. English [r]-sandhi – A sociolinguistic perspective. Histoire, Epistémologie, Langage 19, 73-96. Giegerich, Heinz. 1992. English phonology: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, section 6.2. Lass, Roger. 1999. Phonology and morphology. In Lass, Roger (ed.) The Cambridge history of the English language, volume III, 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, section 3.4.3.3. McCarthy, John. 1993. A case of surface constraint violation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38, 169-195. Maguire, Warren. 2012. Pre-R Dentalisation in northern England. English Language and Linguistics 16, 361-384. Minkova, Donka. 2014. A historical phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, section 5.2 Navarro, Sylvain. 2018. Rhotics and the derhoticization of English: A Dependency Phonology analysis. In Böhm, Roger & Harry van der Hulst (eds). Substance-based grammar – the (ongoing) work of John Anderson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 339–364. Sóskuthy, Márton. 2013. Analogy in the emergence of intrusive-r in English. English Language and Linguistics 17, 55-84. Vennemann, Theo. 1972. Rule inversion. Lingua 29, 209-242. Wiese, Richard. 2001. The phonology of /r/. In Hall, T. Alan. (eds). Distinctive Feature Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 335-368. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 43 of 62
21
Reconstructing pronunciation
David Crystal
This chapter identifies a different focus from the earlier chapters that deal with phonological change, as it is it is an exercise in applied historical phonology. The notion of original pronunciation (OP) has arisen because of the interest in this process that has come from people who are not themselves phonologists, but who want to know how an earlier period of English sounded in order to add a fresh dimension to their performance. Following a discussion of the kinds of evidence available at different periods, I focus on Early Modern English, reviewing five constituencies: early music, bible translations and liturgy, heritage projects, non-dramatic poetry, and theatre. The primary interest has been in relation to Shakespeare, where OP takes its place alongside other 'original practices' as part of an ethos where the intention is to get as close as possible to how the plays would have been performed and heard during his lifetime. I describe several specific ways OP has been used by practitioners, with particular reference to rhyme, wordplay, phonaesthetics, and characterisation. I briefly review the history of the OP movement, beginning with the work of 19th-century phoneticians, and continuing throughout the 20th and into the present century with the 2004 initiative at Shakespeare's Globe, which launched a new era of interest. I illustrate some of the challenges of working with OP by a case study of the options surrounding the phonetic character of /r/, with particular reference to its description in Ben Jonson's English Grammar. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which OP projects can achieve authenticity.
References
Crystal, D. 2013. Early interest in Shakespearean original pronunciation. Language and History 56 (1), 5-17. Crystal, D. 2016. The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, I. 2011. Ben Jonson: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ellis, A. J. 1869-74. On Early English Pronunciation. London: Philological Society. Wall, John N. The virtual St Paul's Cross project. North Carolina State University: English Department. https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 44 of 62
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Spelling practices and emergent standard writing
Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy University of Murcia
Standardisation is a key and complex issue in the history of languages. The process is triggered by language or dialect contact and widespread awareness of variation; it also relates to a discoursive (ideological) project emphasising the desirability of uniformity (and correctness) in language use (Deumert 2004; see also: Joseph 1987; Armstrong and Mackenzie 2013). The achievement of uniformity proceeds through the reduction of variation by means of dialect levelling and koineisation―the emergence of a new variety from the selection, recombination and simplification of features from various related dialects. Two key aspects in the sociolinguistic study of standardisation are focusing and supralocalisation. Focusing involves processes of linguistic micro-accommodation between speakers negotiating identity who change their verbal behaviour to adopt those features of the group(s) they wish to identify with; it necessarily entails the engagement between individuals sharing aims and resources to build a common identity, which means that the ‘communitiy of practice’ construct is useful to explore the initial stages of (proto-)standardisation. As a combination of inter-speaker linguistic changes, standardisation also involves social and geographical diffusion; the supralocalisation of variants being determined in this case by the usual sociolinguistic (age, gender, social class, professional background, social network, etc.), stylistic (addressee, audience design, context and situation) and geolinguistic (distance, demography, etc.) constraints (Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006; Beal 2016). In the history of English, a large-scale process of normalisation leading to the formation of present-day written standard English developed in late Middle and early Modern English (1400-1600), once the prevalence of Latin and French started to decline and in parallel to the progressive use of the vernacular in the complex administration of a centralised state (Wright 2000; Nevalainen 2003; 2012). In this stage, standardisation affected mainly spelling and grammar and the selection (levelling, koineisation) and acceptance (diffusion, supralocalisation) of variants from these two levels can systematically be studied in the light of the sociolinguistic principles described above.
References
Armstrong, Nigel and Ian E. Mackenzie. 2013. Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 45 of 62
Beal, Joan C. 2016. Standardization. In The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Merja Kytö and Päivi Pahta, 301-317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deumert, Ana. 2004. Language Standardization and Language Change. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and Power. The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. London: Frances Pinter. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2003. English. In Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present, edited by Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbussche, 127-156. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2012. Variable focusing in English spelling between 1400 and 1600. In Orthographies in Early Modern Europe: a Comparative View, edited by Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste, 127-165. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. Nevalainen, Terttu and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. 2006. Standardisation. In A History of the English Language, edited by Richard Hogg and David Denison, 271-311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Laura, ed. 2000. The Development of Standard English, 1300-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 46 of 62
23
The ideology of standard English
Lesley Milroy University of Michigan
Public discussions of linguistic issues are generally carried out with reference to an assumed ideal form of English, other varieties often by comparison being judged as inadequate. Discourses of this sort were first elaborated in the work of eighteenth century scholars such as Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, forming part of a long process of the standardization of English (Milroy and Milroy 2012). Language standardization is generally associated with political imperatives such as claims to national distinctiveness and autonomy, and the construction of internal social cohesion. Modern nation states have regularly developed nationalist ideologies whereby linguistic and other differences are viewed as undesirable, and even dangerous, while the ideal society is identified as socially and linguistically homogeneous. Standard language ideologies, i.e. beliefs about language with reference to notions of correctness in relation to an ideal standard form, vary considerably not only over time (Curzan 2014), but in different nation states, and are generally articulated by powerful social groups. While US and British concepts contrast sharply with each other (Lippi-Green 2012), in both nations standard language ideologies have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, they can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by native speakers, intimately connected not only with vested interests but with with attempts to explain connections between language and the social world. The very large community of non-native users of Standard English as a lingua franca do not orient to these nationally distinctive ideologies (Peterson 2020).
References
Curzan, Anne. 2014. Fixing Englis: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy 2012 (4th ed.) Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. London: Routledge Peterson, Elizabeth. 2020. Making sense of “Bad English”: an Introduction to Language attitudes and Ideologies. London: Routledge. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 47 of 62 NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 48 of 62
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English dictionaries from the 18th century onwards
Charlotte Brewer University of Oxford
The earliest monolingual dictionaries in English were deliberately limited in their coverage of the language - for example, in treating ‘hard words’ only - but from the early eighteenth century onwards the tradition of more general dictionaries of the language became established. Heavily influenced by Johnson’s dictionary (1755), this tradition set out to represent and to support ‘best usage’ - often, the usage of the ‘best writers’ - and to suppress or condemn less polite or acceptable vocabulary. Nineteenth-century dictionaries widened the range of usage covered but still harked back to Johnson as an exemplar. This tradition was largely swept away by the OED (1884-1928), which committed itself to a descriptive and objective methodology. Revolutionary as this was, the OED could not wholly realise its new aims. In representing the history and development of the language, it continued to favour the usage of ‘great writers’, while social, cultural and technological constraints affected its choice of which words to include, and how to define and describe them once included. With hindsight (and electronic searching), it is easy to identify the OED’s exclusions and biases as well as their ideological bases, for example in the treatment of vocabulary related to race, sexuality, gender, politics and nationalism. Social, cultural and technological developments in English-speaking societies have since brought about enormous changes to the general English dictionary, most now based on corpuses. But decisions about which existing words and senses to update and which new ones to record, and about how and whether to identify their register and other features of usage, remain subject to ideologically inflected decisions and sensibilities now as formerly. And in societies increasingly conscious of the rights and preferences of racial, ethnic, sexual and other minorities, it remains a question as to whose usage a general dictionary of vocabulary in English should include and/or prioritise. My proposed contribution to CHEL will discuss these and related matters in a roughly chronological sequence. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 49 of 62
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The emerging phonological standard
Lynda Mugglestone University of Oxford
This chapter will examine the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supra-regional accent of English. Engaging in detail with the challenges of recovering phonological history, it will document the increased salience of both localisation and delocalisation in representations of speech from the later eighteenth century, alongside the shifting complex of social and cultural attitudes to identity as articulated in public and private texts, and widely replicated in popular culture, whether in advertising, magazines, or literary texts. Particular attention will be given to the intersection between formal prescription and private practice, as well as manifestations of language anxiety. By the late nineteenth century, for example, there was an abundance of primary texts on the need for, and claimed existence of, a normative model of speech, while an emerging national education system likewise claimed – and addressed -- desiderata of this kind. What individuals do, and their own processes of convergence -- or divergence – nevertheless remains vital in assessing the extent to which the persuasive rhetoric of delocalised speech filtered into everyday use, and the diverse patterns of modification that might emerge. Important, too, within historical investigation of this kind is the advent of changing processes by which normative models of speech might be fostered. Early pronouncing dictionaries might, for example, represent a new genre within the history of lexicography, complete with detailed transcription systems which, at least intentionally, set out regulative norms for a national accent. The advent of broadcast English offered, however, other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English might be implemented and encouraged. Across the chapter, the aim will be do engage with the shifting imaging of identity, and the social and cultural pressures this reveals, alongside the patterns of vernacular and pragmatic resistance which remain part of the conflicted history of RP.
References
Joan Beal, English in Modern Times, Chapter 6: ‘Phonological Change in later Modern English’ Joan Beal, ‘The Place of Pronunciation in Eighteenth-Century Grammars of English’, Transactions of the Philological Society, July 2013, 111, pp.165-178. Raymond Hickey, ‘Supraregionalization’, in Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton, The History of English: Varieties of English (Berlin: Mouton, 2017), Chapter 19. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 50 of 62
Charles Jones, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2006) Lynda Mugglestone, Talking Proper. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: OUP, 2007) Lynda Mugglestone, (2010). ‘Registering the language - dictionaries, diction, and the art of elocution’. In Raymond Hickey (ed.) Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.309-338. Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Benjamin Smart and Michael Faraday: The Principles and Practice of Talking Proper in Nineteenth-Century England’. In M. Adams and A. Curzan (eds.) Contours of English and English Language Studies: In Honor of Richard W. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, pp.87-107. Lynda Mugglestone, ‘'Speaking Selves'. Johnson, Boswell, and the Problem of Spoken English', Transactions of the Johnson Society (2019). NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 51 of 62
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Discourse of prescriptivism
Don Chapman Provo University, Utah
The history of the English language includes changes in English’s status and speaker attitudes, and among the most important domains for those areas is the prescriptive tradition. This chapter will examine the changes in the discourse of the prescriptive tradition over time. Social and correctness evaluation of variation are central concepts in this discourse, and for such evaluation three conditions are needed (cf. Algeo 1991): a recognition of variation, an evaluation of the variation, and promotion of certain variants over others. The nature of prescriptivist discourse has changed in subtle ways as those conditions have come together. We have record of social and correctness evaluation of language in the Old English period, but largely for Latin, not English (see Ælfric’s Grammar and Colloquy) (Chapman forthcoming a). In Middle English, we see an awareness of sociolinguistic variation, especially among regional dialects. (See Higden’s translation of Trevisa’s Polychronicon and Caxton’s preface to Eneydos) (Chapman forthcoming b), and perhaps a few hints of evaluation, but not much promotion of variants. Those hints of social valuation become much more frequent and direct in the Early Modern English period, which saw the rise of standardising forces like printing. Scholars self-consciously studied spelling, pronunciation, word meaning, punctuation, and grammar (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011). As they encountered variation, they increasingly, though not uniformly, promoted certain variants over others. As English became an important school subject, the authority of the pedagogical tradition increased, and correctness and evaluative claims were made with increasing confidence in the 1800s. Challenges that arose in the early 1900s led to two tracks in prescriptivist discourse: prescriptivism and descriptivism. Two major developments in the late 20th century–the maturing of variationist sociolinguistics and of corpus linguistics–has led to more modulated evaluative judgments, and to a much lesser degree, correctness judgments.
References
Algeo, John. 1991. ‘Sweet are the Usages of Diversity.’ Word (42): 1-17. Chapman, Don. Forthcoming a. “Grammar is the Key: Ælfric’s Grammar and the Teaching of Latin in Tenth-Century England.” The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching.”Ed. Simon Coffey. University of Amsterdam Press. Chapman, Don. Forthcoming b. “HEL specimen texts and the anxiety of boundaries.” Boundaries and Edges in the History of the English Language. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 52 of 62
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2011. The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 53 of 62
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Early standardisation and urban vernaculars
Anita Auer Université de Lausanne
The emergence of a more uniform and supra-local variety of written English during the Late Middle English and Early Modern English periods has already received much scholarly attention. To date, the variety of English used in administrative texts from London is often perceived as the source of what developed into written Standard English (cf. Fisher 1977; Fisher et al. 1984). Even though this ‘traditional’ account has been convincingly challenged (e.g. Wright 2000; Benskin 2004), the processes involved in the uniformisation of written English, e.g. the conditioning factors for changes on different linguistic levels, are not fully understood yet. One way of shedding new light on the complex processes involved in the early development of written Standard English is to systematically investigate and compare data sources (various text types; ideally manuscript and print) from important regional centres in England over the period 1400-1700. Literacy rates were significantly higher in these cities, and so was therefore text production (cf. Kermode 2000: 442). The current chapter will focus on early supralocalisation processes and the role of written urban vernaculars in England. First, an overview of relevant databases and studies will be given that are significant for the investigation of the topic (e.g. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, A Corpus of Middle English Local Texts, The Emerging Standards Corpus, The Corpus of Early English Correspondence; Wright ed. 2000, Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003, Auer et al. 2016). Second, relevant findings on the variation and diffusion of selected linguistic variables such as (a) the third person singular inflections and plural markers and (b) orthographic variation will be presented. Third, the role of the printing press in the diffusion of supralocal forms will be discussed. All in all, the urban focus allows us to gain a better understanding of the processes involved in the development of written Standard English.
References:
Auer, Anita, Moragh Gordon & Mike Olson (2016) English Urban Vernaculars, 1400-1700: Digitizing Text from Manuscript. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Ignacio Palacios-Martínez (eds.) Corpus Linguistics on the Move: Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 21-40. Benskin, Michael (2004) Chancery Standard. In C. Kay et al. (eds.) New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-40. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 54 of 62
Fisher, John H. (1977) Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century. Speculum. A Journal of Medieval Studies 52, 870-899. Fisher, John H. et al. (1984) An Anthology of Chancery English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Kermode, Jenny (2000) The Greater Towns 1300-1540. In D.M. Palliser (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Volume I. 600-1540. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 441-465. Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Wright, Laura (ed.) (2000) The Development of Standard English (1300-1800). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Laura (2000) Introduction. In Laura Wright (ed.) The Development of Standard English (1300-1800). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-8. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 55 of 62
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Variation and change in and through social networks
Marina Dossena University of Bergamo
Important studies in historical sociolinguistics have stressed the significance of social network investigations – see, for instance, Fitzmaurice (2010), Laitinen & Auer (2014), and Conde-Silvestre (2016). Not only do social networks contribute to the maintenance of norms, but they also contribute to the onset of change: innovations are introduced by subjects with weak ties with certain members of one network as they develop instead stronger ties with members of another network. This is the case, for instance, of emigrants, whose links with the ‘old country’ may get weaker and whose linguistic uses therefore reflect less and less the innovations that are taking place there, while instead they begin to participate in the usage of new, perhaps less homogeneous contexts, and therefore contribute to the establishment of new norms (see Hickey 2019: passim). However, in spite of the interest that social networks elicit in terms of their linguistic vivacity, their intrinsically dynamic and often unique characteristics make them difficult sources for the identification of overarching linguistic phenomena. In every network, membership may be more or less consistent in terms of age and gender; moreover, there may also be a significant class bias in studies that only take into consideration one specific network in a relatively restricted time frame. In order to map phenomena beyond the specificity of individual networks, it would be useful to investigate network clusters, so as to see what neighbouring networks have in common and what specific features they display. In this contribution I intend to focus on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, of the exchanges of political activists (such as suffragists) and business correspondents. After an overview of the materials at hand, I will outline how the roles that informants are observed to play in the different networks to which they participate contribute to their definition as central or peripheral nodes, and in what ways this has an impact on the linguistic uses of other participants who share their goals, but whose status is not necessarily comparable.
References
Conde-Silvestre, Juan-Camilo 2016. A ‘Third-wave’ Historical Sociolinguistic Approach to Late Middle English Correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters. In Russi, Cinzia (ed.) Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics, Berlin: De Gruyter, 46-66. DOI: 10.1515/9783110488401-006. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 56 of 62
Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2010. Coalitions, Networks, and Discourse Communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the Early Eighteenth-century Essay. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.) Eighteenth-Century English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 106-132. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511781643.008. Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2019. Keeping in Touch: Emigrant Letters across the English-speaking World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/ahs.10. Laitinen, Mikko & Auer, Anita 2014. Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835). In Pfenninger, Simone E. et al. (eds) Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 187-212. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.159.10lai. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 57 of 62
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Communities of practice in the history of English
Joanna Kopaczyk University of Glasgow
The community of practice (CoP) is a recent addition to the historical-sociolinguistic theoretical frameworks aiming to capture the conditions in which language change occurs and explain why it produces particular outcomes. The framework stems from the 20th-century realisation that language variation and change depend on the characteristics of the community and the ways in which it interacts, and it adds an important element of practice – a set of behaviours and choices shaped by a joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared tools (Wenger 1998). CoP thus complements other concepts taken over from present-day sociolinguistics and sociology, such as speech communities, social networks and discourse communities, all of which have been applied to the study of the history of English. This chapter will address the similarities and differences between these concepts at the start, and focus on the CoP and its relevance to various communicative contexts throughout the history of English. Jucker and Kopaczyk (2013) brought dimensions of practice into historical linguistics: a joint enterprise might be, for example, manuscript production; mutual engagement - family and business relationships; and shared tools - spelling and typographic conventions. Because CoP is a framework developed in the context of learning and apprenticeship (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998), it helps to capture the idea of passing practices from one generation to the next. It also helps to understand how linguistic practices are shaped and sustained to enable communicative endeavours happening in a particular community. This chapter presents the most prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been employed: letter writing, manuscript production, the production of early prints, and professional discourse, including multilingual practices. In line with Holmes and Meyerhoff's (1999) observation that "[a] CoP requires quality of interaction", the studies informing this chapter engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication in which language change - or, indeed, resistance to change - may be observed.
Selected bibliography
Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo. A 'third-wave' historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters. In Cinzia Russi (ed.) Current trends in historical sociolinguistics, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 46-66. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 58 of 62
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1998. "Communities of practice: Where language, gender, and power all live." In Jennifer Coates (ed.) Language and Gender: A Reader, 484-494. Oxford: Blackwell. Hofmann, Klaus. 2018. Approaching Transition Scots from a micro-perspective: The Dunfermline Corpus 1573-1723. In Rhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux (eds.) Historical dialectology in the digital age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holmes, Janet, and Miriam Meyerhoff. 1999. The community of practice: Theories and methodologies in language and gender research. Language in Society 28: 173-183. Jucker, Andreas H. and Joanna Kopaczyk. 2013. Communities of practice as a locus of language change. In Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Communities of practice in the history of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 1-16. Kaislaniemi, Samuli. 2017. The early English East India Company as a community of practice: evidence of multilingualism. In Esther-Miriam Wagner, Bettina Beinhoff and Ben Outhwaite (eds.) Merchants of innovation: The languages of traders, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 132-157. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2002. Communities of practice. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 525-548. Oxford: Blackwell. Watts, Richard J. 2009. Grammar writers in eighteenth-century Britain: A community of practice or a discourse community? In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.). Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar Writing. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 37-56. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 59 of 62
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Indexicality, enregisterment and the history of English
Joan C. Beal and Paul Cooper University of Sheffield and University of Liverpool
Indexicality and enregisterment are terms introduced by Silverstein (2003) and Agha (2003, 2007) as part of an ideological approach to linguistic variation and change. Such an approach belongs within what Eckert (2012) calls the ‘third wave’ of sociolinguistics: an approach characterized by a focus on the active agency of communities of practice in constructing social meaning via linguistic variation. Conde-Silvestre (2016) notes that “historically-oriented approaches within the third wave are, at the moment, scarce”. Such studies are becoming increasingly common, however, as this chapter demonstrates. The chapter starts by explaining two concepts that are essential to understanding the construction of social meaning from linguistic signs: indexicality and enregisterment. Indexicality is used by Silverstein (2003) to account for different levels of awareness of the association between linguistic features and social characteristics on the part of speakers and hearers. Agha describes enregisterment as the identification of a set of linguistic norms as “a linguistic repertoire differentiable within a language as a socially recognised register” which has come to index “speaker status linked to a specific scheme of cultural values” (2003: 231). Johnstone succinctly expresses the key research question for studies of indexicality and enregisterment: “How do particular words, ways of pronouncing words, grammatical patterns, and patterns of intonation come to point to particular identities and activities?” (2016, 632). Agha’s (2003) study of the enregisterment of Received Pronunciation will be discussed as foundational research within this framework. We then discuss what evidence can be found for indexicality and enregisterment in historical texts and the challenges involved for the historian of English working within this framework. We focus on three types of evidence:
1. Metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments 2. Dialect literature and literary dialect 3. Ego-documents, including letters, memoirs and autobiographies.
We discuss case studies using these types of evidence, including Cooper (2013, 2020) and Beal (2020). The chapter concludes with a summary of the advantages and limitations of indexicality and enregisterment as tools for historical linguistic research. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 60 of 62
References
Agha, Asif. 2003. ‘The social life of cultural value’ Language and Communication 23: 231-273. Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beal, Joan. 2019. ‘Enregisterment and historical sociolinguistics’, in Jansen, Sandra and Lucia Siebers (eds.) Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 8-23. Beal, Joan. 2020 (fc). ‘Dialect and the construction of identity in the ego-documents of Thomas Bewick’, in Honeybone, Patrick and Warren Maguire (eds) Dialect Writing and the North of England. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 45-60. Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo. 2016. “A 'Third-wave' Historical Sociolinguistic Approach to Late Middle English Correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters.” In Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. by Cinzia Russi, 46-66. Berlin: de Gruyter. Cooper, Paul. 2013. Enregisterment in Historical Contexts: a Framework. University of Sheffield PhD Thesis. (Available on www.etheses.whiterose.ac.uk) Cooper, Paul. 2020 (fc). ‘Russian dolls and dialect literature: the enregisterment of nineteenth century ‘Yorkshire’ dialects, in Honeybone, Patrick and Warren Maguire (eds) Dialect Writing and the North of England. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 104-122. Eckert, Penelope 2012. “Three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the study of variation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87-100. Johnstone, Barbara. 2016. “Enregisterment: How linguistic items become linked with ways of speaking.” Language and Linguistics Compass 10: 632-643. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.” Language and Communication 23: 193-229. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 61 of 62
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Deconstructing myths in the history of English
Richard J. Watts University of Bern
In Watts (2011: 11), language myths were defined as ‘communally shared narratives told in the construction of an ideological set of beliefs about the structure of language and/or the functional uses to which language is put …’ Myths that form part of hegemonic discourse archives – as I have adapted the term from Foucault (1972) – tend to have long lives, so much so that they become orthodox explanations of the historical development of a language that brook no opposition. In Watts (2011), I located a wide range of ‘language myths’ and attempted to reveal the ways in which they ‘defined’ the assumed ‘facts’ about the history of English. In most cases, the ‘facts’ were challenged by empirical evidence to show that, to all intents and purposes, what they revealed were discursive expressions of ‘faith’, not ‘fact’. As Daniel Dennett says in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996: 23), ‘there is no future in a sacred myth’ simply because ‘one of the things we deem precious is the truth’. Dennett implies that there are such things as ‘non-sacred myths’, but I argue in this chapter that the major feature of a myth is that it is always ‘sacred’ to whatever ideology is being promoted in the discourse archive that makes use of it. In this sense, myths are very different from stories. I shall illustrate the danger of sticking to myths by looking at new evidence from archaeology and historical population genetics to show that English may ultimately derive from a form of Germanic that we might want to call ‘Island Germanic’, and may have been in place along the eastern seaboard of southern Scotland and England from the time of the Storegga Slide on, when the tsunami that it caused inundated the northern reaches of ‘Doggerland’ (or as Jim Leary[2015] calls it ‘Northsealand’). The myth that is still offered, even by such distinguished archaeologists as Barry Cunliffe in Britain Begins (2013), is that prior to the Roman occupation of Britain, the inhabitants of England and southern Scotland spoke varieties of Brythonic Celtic. This, in turn, only consolidates Gildas’s myth of the ‘Anglo-Saxon blitzkrieg’ (a memorable but highly ironic term by Stephen Oppenheimer [2007]). Unravelling the Gildas myth has its effects on a new analysis of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and that, in turn, provides a refreshing new approach to the story, not the myth, of the Beowulf manuscript (Kiernan 1997; Watts 2011: Chapter 2).
References
Watts, Richard J. 2011. Language Myths and the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press. NewCHEL Vol. 3: Change, transmission and ideology Page 62 of 62
Foucault, Michel. [1969] 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Dennett, Daniel. [1995] 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Touchstone. Leary, Jim. 2015. The Remembered Land. Surviving Sea-Level Rise after the Last Ice Age. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cunliffe, Barry. 2013. Britain Begins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gildas. On the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae). Transl. J. A. Giles. Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers. Oppenheimer, Stephen. [2006] 2007. The Origins of the British. London: Robinson. Bede, the Venerable. 2008. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. by Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Transl. Bertram Colgrave. Oxford: Oxford University Press.