From Clerks to Corpora essays on the english language yesterday and today Editors: Philip Shaw Britt Erman Gunnel Melchers Peter Sundkvist From Clerks to Corpora: essays on the English language yesterday and today Philip Shaw, Britt Erman, Gunnel Melchers & Peter Sundkvist Essays in honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson Stockholm English Studies 2 Editorial Board Claudia Egerer, Associate Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Stefan Helgesson, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Maria Kuteeva, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Nils-Lennart Johannesson is normally a member of the Editorial Board for the Stockholm English Studies book series. He has however not been involved in the editorial process of this publication. Published by Stockholm University Press Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm Sweden www.stockholmuniversitypress.se Text © The Authors License CC-BY Supporting Agencies (funding): Department of English, Stockholm University First published 2015 Cover Illustration: MS Wellcome 537, f. 15r. Reproduced by permission of © Wellcome Library, London. Cover designed by Karl Edqvist, SUP Stockholm English Studies (Online) ISSN: 2002-0163 ISBN (Hardback): 978-91-7635-004-1 ISBN (PDF): 978-91-7635-005-8 ISBN (EPUB): 978-91-7635-006-5 ISBN (Kindle): 978-91-7635-007-2 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.bab Erratum: 2 weeks after publication the following text was added to the title page of chapter 20 (p367): ’Based on an unfinished manuscript, posthumously edited by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm.’ This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Shaw, P., Erman, B., Melchers, G. and Sundkvist, P. (eds) 2015. From Clerks to Corpora: essays on the English language yesterday and today. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.bab To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.bab or scan this QR code with your mobile device. Stockholm English Studies Stockholm English Studies (SES) is a peer-reviewed series of monographs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SES strives to provide a broad forum for research on English language and literature from all periods. In terms of subjects and methods, the orientation is also wide: language structure, variation, and meaning, both spoken and written language in all genres, as well as literary scholarship in a broad sense. It is the ambition of SES to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. Titles in the series 1. Begam, R. and Soderholm, J. 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa 2. Shaw, P., Erman, B., Melchers, G. and Sundkvist, P. (eds) 2015. From Clerks to Corpora: essays on the English language yesterday and today. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.bab Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix A Personal Tribute to Nils-Lennart Johannesson xiii Sydney Lamb — 1 The Middle English Development of Old English y and Lengthened y: Spelling Evidence 1 Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden 2 Linguistic Mysteries Around the North Sea 17 Östen Dahl 3 The Late Middle English Version of Practica Urinarum in London, Wellcome Library, MS 537 (ff. 15r-40v) 35 Javier Calle-Martín 4 Is Plant Species Identification Possible in Middle English Herbals? 53 David Moreno Olalla 5 The Periphrastic Subjunctive in the Old English Multiple Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels 71 Marcelle Cole 6 On the Place-Name Isle of Dogs 87 Laura Wright 7 English Genres in Diachronic Corpus Linguistics 117 Erik Smitterberg & Merja Kytö 8 Here is an Old Mastiffe Bitch Ø Stands Barking at Mee: Zero Subject Relativizers in Early Modern English (T)here-Constructions 135 Gunnel Tottie & Christine Johansson 9 “Norfolk People Know Best”: On the Written Representation of Accents as Performed and Perceived by ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ 155 Gunnel Melchers vi Contents 10 Sublime Caledonia: Description, Narration and Evaluation in Nineteenth-Century Texts on Scotland 177 Marina Dossena 11 The Development of Attitudes to Foreign Languages as Shown in the English Novel 193 Philip Shaw 12 “Mythonomer”: Tolkien on Myth in His Scholarly Work 215 Maria Kuteeva 13 Reflections on Tolkien’s Use of Beowulf 229 Arne Zettersten 14 Commentators and Corpora: Evidence about Markers of Formality 239 David Minugh 15 Recent Changes in the Modal Area of Necessity and Obligation – A Contrastive Perspective 267 Karin Aijmer 16 Motion to and Motion through: Evidence from a Multilingual Corpus 285 Thomas Egan 17 Using the World Wide Web to Research Spoken Varieties of English: The Case of Pulmonic Ingressive Speech 303 Peter Sundkvist 18 Another Look at Preposition Stranding: English and Swedish Discourse Patterns 323 Francesco-Alessio Ursini 19 There is Nothing Like Native Speech: A Comparison of Native and Very Advanced Non-Native Speech 349 Britt Erman & Margareta Lewis 20 “Bachelor Means Nothing Without Husband and Father”: What Collocations Reveal about a Cognitive Category 367 Christina Alm-Arvius (1945–2013) About the Authors 387 Acknowledgements We are grateful, first of all, to the Department of English, Stockholm University for generously sponsoring this publication. We are also grateful to many people for help and advice: to Christina Lenz for prompt and friendly advice throughout the publication process; to David Minugh for help with proof-reading; and to Ingrid Westin for knowledge and help. We are also grateful to all those who attended and presented at the symposium for Nils-Lennart in February 2013 and to all our contributors. Introduction This volume reports studies of English past and present, all based on empirical work and illumined by a variety of theoretical and methodical approaches. Its range and eclecticism makes it a fitting tribute to Nils- Lennart Johannesson, Professor of English Linguistics, Department of English, Stockholm University, on the occasion of his 67th birthday. In addition to knowing him as a wise and supportive colleague, we have all experienced him as a dedicated teacher and some of us even as a brilliant fellow-student. Nils-Lennart first came to our department in the late 1960s as an undergraduate student. After proceeding quickly through the under- graduate as well as the graduate courses, and having spent a fruit- ful period of study at Yale University under the wings of Professor Sydney Lamb, he was ready to present his doctoral dissertation, The English Modal Auxiliaries: A Stratificational Account, in 1976. After a brief period as Research Fellow at Lund University, he returned to our department in 1978, first as Research Fellow, then as Docent and Senior Lecturer. In 1991 he left the department for the University of Trondheim, where he served as Professor of English Linguistics for almost a decade. In the year 2000 he returned to Stockholm, having been appointed to the Chair at our department in succession to Magnus Ljung. It is a daunting task to describe Nils-Lennart’s multi-faceted contri- butions to the department: as a distinguished and productive scholar, committed teacher, organizer of symposia, editor, administrator, and mentor to students as well as colleagues. The following text does not presume to do justice to his complete oeuvre and achievement. His scholarly work has above all been concerned with historical lin- guistics, culminating in a passionate, long-standing commitment to the Middle English twelfth century homily collection Orrmulum, written by the Augustinian canon Orm from Lincolnshire. The ultimate aim of Nils-Lennart’s research on Orrmulum is the production of a new text edition, based on a new transcription of the existing manuscripts. Since x From Clerks to Corpora nobody can improve on the creator’s own account of the project, the reader of this preface is referred to the excellent website www.orrmu- lum.net. Over the years Nils-Lennart has delighted the language semi- nar at our department with glimpses of his ongoing research within the Orrmulum project, characterized by linguistic stringency, wide-ranging use of all technical support, and rich cultural and historical depth. It should not be forgotten, however, that this is just one of many interests. Above all, he is a leading expert on Old English syntax, regu- larly presenting papers at international conferences. He has contributed greatly to studies on dialect in fiction, with special reference to J.R.R. Tolkien, and he takes a great interest in linguistic as well as literary aspects of figurative language, which is reflected in his active role as co-organizer of our department’s annual ‘Metaphor Festival’ and an editor of the festival’s proceedings. He has been a model for us not only as a researcher but also as a teacher and supervisor. His students are always impressed by his conscientiousness and creativity, marked by the production and con- stant improvement of challenging text material for his courses. He is a painstaking and selfless editor and the co-producer of most handbooks, festschrifts and conference volumes published by our department (with the obvious exception of the present volume). We all know him to be unusually knowledgeable in a number of other fields: he is a fine musician, known to play the bagpipe as well as the flute; he is extremely well read, often quoting Galsworthy and Dorothy Sayers by heart, and has published beautiful translations of works by the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown.