English historical linguistics 2 Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. 34,2 9783110202656, 9783110251609, 3110202654
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Table of contents :
Preface to the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics......Page 11
Acknowledgments......Page 15
In memoriam......Page 17
General abbreviations......Page 19
71. Early textual resources......Page 23
72. Electronic/online resources......Page 35
73. Lexicographic resources......Page 53
74. Teaching perspectives......Page 67
75. Textbooks......Page 82
76. Online resources for teaching......Page 94
77. Literature......Page 105
78. Music as a language – the history of an idea......Page 118
79. Periodization in the history of the English language......Page 137
80. Myths of the English language; or, alternative histories of “English”......Page 160
81. Spoken and written English – orality and literacy......Page 178
82. Overview......Page 193
83. The historiography of the English language......Page 199
84. North America......Page 217
85. Germany and the German-speaking countries......Page 229
86. The Netherlands and Belgium......Page 245
87. Northern Europe......Page 258
88. East-Central and Eastern Europe......Page 279
89. Southern Europe......Page 301
90. Asia - Minoji Akimoto......Page 318
91. Historical dialectology......Page 325
92. Historical sociolinguistics......Page 342
93. Historical pragmatics......Page 361
94. Information structure and syntax in the history of English......Page 379
95. The actuation problem revisited......Page 394
96. Corpus linguistics......Page 413
97. Frequency and language change......Page 435
98. Lexical diffusion......Page 450
99. Grammaticalization......Page 462
100. Lexicalization......Page 481
101. Diachronic change and language acquisition......Page 503
102. Generative approaches to English historical linguistics......Page 517
103. Construction Grammar......Page 535
104. Lexical Functional Grammar......Page 550
105. German and Dutch......Page 563
106. French......Page 575
107. Celtic and Celtic Englishes......Page 591
108. Latin......Page 607
109. Greek......Page 623
110. Norse......Page 628
111. English in contact with other European languages......Page 642
112. Native American Languages......Page 657
113. Pidgins and creoles......Page 671
114. Middle English creolization......Page 685
115. African American English (AAE) early evidence......Page 697
116. American English......Page 713
117. Re-viewing the origins and history of African American Language......Page 730
118. Regional varieties of American English......Page 743
119. Canadian English in real-time perspective......Page 762
120. Standard British English......Page 783
121. Received Pronunciation......Page 803
122. Estuary English......Page 817
123. Regional varieties of British English Christian Langstrof......Page 832
124. Scots......Page 855
125. English in Ireland......Page 865
126. English in Wales......Page 881
127. Australian/New Zealand English......Page 899
128. Cockney......Page 917
129. Diffusion......Page 935
130. Dialect contact......Page 948
131. Supraregionalization......Page 964
132. English in India......Page 981
133. English in Africa – a diachronic typology......Page 996
134. Second-language varieties of English......Page 1010
135. English-based Creoles......Page 1024
136. Global English......Page 1039
Index......Page 1055
Citation preview
English Historical Linguistics HSK 34.2
Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science Manuels de linguistique et des sciences de communication Mitbegründet von Gerold Ungeheuer (†) Mitherausgegeben 1985−2001 von Hugo Steger
Herausgegeben von / Edited by / Edités par Herbert Ernst Wiegand Band 34.2
De Gruyter Mouton
English Historical Linguistics An International Handbook
Edited by Alexander Bergs Laurel J. Brinton Volume 2
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-020265-6 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025160-9 ISSN 1861-5090 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen Typesetting: Apex CoVantage Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Go¨ttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper s Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com
Contents
Volume 2 Preface to the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton . Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In memoriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . General abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1119 1131 1149 1163 1178 1190
IX. Resources 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.
Early textual resources Kathryn A. Lowe . . . Electronic/online resources Oliver M. Traxel Lexicographic resources Philip Durkin . . . . . Teaching perspectives Michael Adams . . . . . Textbooks Mary Blockley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Online resources for teaching Beatrix Busse .
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X. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.
Literature Andrew James Johnston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music as a language – the history of an idea Dietrich Helms . . . Periodization in the history of the English language Anne Curzan Myths of the English language; or, alternative histories of “English” Richard J. Watts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spoken and written English – orality and literacy Ursula Schaefer
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XI. History of English Historical Linguistics 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.
Overview Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton . . . . . . . . . The historiography of the English language Jeremy J. Smith . North America Thomas Cable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Germany and the German-speaking countries Ilse Wischer. . The Netherlands and Belgium Peter Petre´ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Northern Europe Risto Hiltunen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . East-Central and Eastern Europe Ire´n Hegedu˝s . . . . . . . . . . Southern Europe Teresa Fanego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Asia Minoji Akimoto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1289 1295 1313 1325 1341 1354 1375 1397 1414
XII. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods 91. 92.
Historical dialectology I. Keith Williamson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1421 Historical sociolinguistics Terttu Nevalainen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1438
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Historical pragmatics Irma Taavitsainen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Information structure and syntax in the history of English Bettelou Los and Ans van Kemenade . . . . . . . . . . . 95. The actuation problem revisited Richard J. Watts . . . . . . . . . . . 96. Corpus linguistics Merja Kyto¨ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97. Frequency and language change K. Aaron Smith . . . . . . . . . . . 98. Lexical diffusion Betty S. Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99. Grammaticalization Lieselotte Brems and Sebastian Hoffmann. 100. Lexicalization Laurel J. Brinton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101. Diachronic change and language acquisition Holger Diessel . . . 102. Generative approaches to English historical linguistics Bettelou Los. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103. Construction Grammar Alexander Bergs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104. Lexical Functional Grammar Cynthia L. Allen . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93. 94.
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1475 1490 1509 1531 1546 1558 1577 1599
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XIII. English in Contact 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.
German and Dutch Jennifer Hendriks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . French Janne Skaffari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Celtic and Celtic Englishes Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola . Latin Letizia Vezzosi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greek Brian D. Joseph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norse Richard Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English in contact with other European languages Cristina Sua´rez-Go´mez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native American Languages Keren Rice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pidgins and creoles Suzanne Romaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Middle English creolization David M. Trotter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . African American English (AAE) early evidence Alexander Kautzsch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1659 1671 1687 1703 1719 1724
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XIV. Varieties of English 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.
American English Richard W. Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-viewing the origins and history of African American Language Sonja L. Lanehart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regional varieties of American English Luanne von Schneidemesser . . . Canadian English in real-time perspective Stefan Dollinger. . . . . . . . Standard British English Pam Peters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Received Pronunciation Lynda Mugglestone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Estuary English Ulrike Altendorf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regional varieties of British English Bernd Kortmann and Christian Langstrof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scots Robert McColl Millar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English in Ireland Jeffrey L. Kallen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English in Wales Colin H. Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1809 1826 1839 1858 1879 1899 1913 1928 1951 1961 1977
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127. 128. 129. 130. 131.
Australian/New Zealand English Marianne Hundt Cockney Sue Fox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diffusion David Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dialect contact Peter Trudgill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supraregionalization Raymond Hickey . . . . . . . . .
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1995 2013 2031 2044 2060
English in India Devyani Sharma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English in Africa—a diachronic typology Rajend Mesthrie Second-language varieties of English Daniel Schreier . . . . English-based Creoles Andrea Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global English Joachim Grzega . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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XV. Second-Language Varieties 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2151
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Contents
Volume I Preface to Historical Linguistics of English Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In memoriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . General abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
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Periods Pre-Old English Jeannette K. Marsh . Old English Ferdinand von Mengden Middle English Jeremy J. Smith . . . . Early Modern English Arja Nurmi . . Late Modern English Joan C. Beal . . Contemporary English Jim Miller . . .
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Linguistic Levels
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Phonology Janet Grijzenhout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prosody Donka Minkova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morphology Dieter Kastovsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Syntax Graeme Trousdale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semantics and lexicon Elizabeth Closs Traugott . . . Idioms and fixed expressions Gabriele Knappe . . . . Pragmatics and discourse Andreas H. Jucker. . . . . . Onomastics Carole Hough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Orthography Hanna Rutkowska . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Styles, registers, genres, text types Claudia Claridge
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97 113 129 148 164 177 197 212 224 237
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255 272 294 313 325 340 362 373 385
III. Old English 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
Phonology Robert Murray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morphology Ferdinand von Mengden . . . . . . Syntax Rafał Molencki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semantics and lexicon Christian Kay. . . . . . . Pragmatics and discourse Ursula Lenker . . . . Dialects Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger Language contact Gernot R. Wieland . . . . . . Standardization Lucia Kornexl . . . . . . . . . . . Literary language Robert D. Fulk . . . . . . . . .
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IV. Middle English 26. Phonology Nikolaus Ritt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399 27. Morphology Jerzy Wełna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
Contents
28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
Syntax Jeremy J. Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semantics and lexicon Louise Sylvester . . . . . . . . . Pragmatics and discourse Elizabeth Closs Traugott . Dialects Keith Williamson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language contact Herbert Schendl . . . . . . . . . . . . . Standardization Ursula Schaefer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociolinguistics Alexander Bergs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Literary language Leslie K. Arnovick . . . . . . . . . . . The language of Chaucer Simon Horobin . . . . . . . .
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435 450 466 480 505 519 534 551 576
37. Phonology Julia Schlu¨ter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38. Morphology Claire Cowie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39. Syntax Elena Seoane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40. Lexicon and semantics Ian Lancashire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41. Pragmatics and discourse Dawn Archer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42. Dialects Anneli Meurman-Solin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43. Language contact Laura Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44. Standardization Lilo Moessner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45. Sociolinguistics Helena Raumolin-Brunberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46. Pronouns Ulrich Busse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47. Periphrastic DO Anthony Warner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48. The Great Vowel Shift Manfred Krug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49. Relativization Christine Johansson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50. Literary language Colette Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51. The language of Shakespeare Ulrich Busse and Beatrix Busse
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589 604 621 637 652 668 685 698 714 731 743 756 776 791 808
52. Phonology Charles Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53. Morphology Britta Mondorf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54. Syntax Bas Aarts, Marı´a Jose´ Lo´pez-Couso, and Bele´n Me´ndez-Naya. 55. Semantics and lexicon Marina Dossena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56. Pragmatics and discourse Diana M. Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57. Dialects Susanne Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58. Standardization Anita Auer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59. Sociolinguistics Erik Smitterberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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827 842 869 887 901 915 939 952
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V. Early Modern English
VI. Late Modern English
VII. Standardization 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
Prescriptive tradition Edward Finegan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The complaint tradition Tony Crowley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Standards in the history of English Claudia Lange . . . . . . . . . . Codifiers Carol Percy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English language regard Dennis R. Preston and Jon Bakos. . . . Bible translations Thomas Kohnen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dictionaries and the standardization of English John Considine
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Contents
VIII. English and the Media 67. 68. 69. 70.
Newspapers Udo Fries . . . . . Television Jane Stuart-Smith . Radio Ju¨rg Rainer . . . . . . . . Internet Theresa Heyd . . . . .
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1063 1075 1089 1105
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Preface to the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics
The study of the English language has a lengthy history. The second half of the 18th century saw a phenomenal increase in the number of published grammars of the vernacular language, while the field of comparative linguistics arising in the 19th century was concerned in large part with the Germanic languages, including English. However, it is in the field of theoretical linguistics that English has played a truly central role. While there are no reliable statistics, it seems safe to say that the majority of studies in contemporary linguistics deal at least in part with English, and are also written in English. During the 20th century, monumental works concerned with the English language, both synchronic and diachronic, were produced, following historical/comparative and more contemporary linguistic approaches. In keeping with developments in the field of general linguistics, today it is possible to find descriptions and analyses of the history and development of English from virtually any linguistic perspective: external, internal, generative, functional, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, comparative, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic. There are numerous “Histories of English” to cater to just about every (theoretical) taste, as well as detailed descriptions of historical periods, language levels, or theoretical frameworks of English and specialized studies of individual topics in the development of the language. Work on the history of English has culminated most recently in the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg (1992–2001). Study of the history of any language begins with its texts. Increasingly, however, scholars are turning to dictionaries and corpora of English that are available online or electronically. The pioneer historical corpus of English, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, was first released to scholars in 1991. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary online is now fully integrated with the Historical Thesaurus. The searchable Middle English Dictionary, completed in 2003, is available online along with the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus is also searchable online. ARCHER, A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 1650–1990, accessible at a number of universities, provides a balanced selection of historical texts in electronic form. COHA, a 400-million-word, balanced Corpus of Historical American English 1810–2009, was launched online in 2010. Smaller corpora, such as the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, and the Old Bailey Corpus, have made more specialized corpora available to scholars. Archives of historical newspapers online, including the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, provide another source of electronic data. Finally, syntactically annotated corpora for historical stages of English are being produced, including the The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry, The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, and The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English.
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Preface to the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics Taking into account the important developments in the study of English effected by the availability of electronic corpora, this Handbook of English Historical Linguistics offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and theory-neutral synopsis of the field. It is meant to facilitate research by offering overviews of all the relevant aspects of the historical linguistics of English and by referring scholars and students to more indepth coverage. The handbook is intended primarily for researchers in the field of (historical) linguistics generally, as well as for researchers in allied fields (such as history, literature, and culture). The handbook comprises two volumes, each volume consisting of approximately 70 articles written by a wide variety of authors from a number of different countries world-wide, representing a variety of theoretical approaches, and including both younger scholars as well as more established experts.
Volumes 1 and 2 The sequencing of material in the two volumes of the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics is bottom-up, beginning with detailed studies of the periods, levels, and linguistic components of each period. The second volume moves to a higher level, with a focus on general underlying concepts, theories, and methods as well as new and hitherto rather neglected approaches to the history of English. While the two volumes form a set, with cross-reference as far as possible in order to facilitate reader-guidance, they are also capable of standing alone. Following this essentially inductive approach, then, the first volume (edited by Laurel J. Brinton) is focused on the details of English language history. After overviews of the recognized periods of English (Section I), the volume then treats the linguistic levels. These are broadly understood to include newer components such as prosody, pragmatics, phraseology, discourse, styles, registers, and text types as well as more traditional areas such as orthography and onomastics in addition to the fully acknowledged areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (Section II). These summaries will be useful both to students and to those not working directly in the field of English historical linguistics, such as typologists. Sections III–VI contain detailed descriptions of the different periods – Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Late Modern English – in respect to the range of linguistic levels; discussions of language contact, standardization, sociolinguistics, and literary language are included for most periods. Moreover, for each period, selected important phenomena (such as the development of do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronoun usage, or relativization) have been chosen for more detailed study. Following the treatment of the different periods, the volume addresses a variety of questions of standardization (Section VII), such as the effects that dictionaries, the Bible, language attitudes, and codifiers have on normalizing the language. The last section (VIII) brings the handbook into the 21st century by treating the effects of new media (radio, television, computer) on forms of the language, as well as the longer established effects of newspapers. The second volume (edited by Alexander Bergs) then abstracts away from these details and moves outward to address theoretical concerns raised by the topics covered in Volume 1. Volume 2 first surveys resources for the studying and teaching of English (Section IX). Section X on interdisciplinarity (in particular literature and music) and historiography explores some of the debates involved in writing a history of English, questioning, for example, how the continuum of history is divided into accepted
Preface to the Handbook of English Historical Linguistics “periods”, how oral and written forms of the language are accommodated in a history of English, and how new and perhaps “alternative histories” relate to the more established stories. This is followed by a history of the discipline of English historical linguistics itself, as it has developed in different parts of the world (Section XI). A significant part of Volume 2 covers changes in the English language as they have been theorized in various linguistic fields in the 20th century (Section XII). As Neogrammarian and Structuralist approaches are, to a great extent, embodied in the treatment of topics in Volume 1, this volume begins with later 20th century theories, including Generative Grammar, Construction Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Rates of Change, Frequency, Lexical Diffusion, Grammaticalization, Lexicalization, and Language Acquisition. Related to the theoretical perspectives are new approaches which have been developed in the analysis of the history of English, including Historical Dialectology, Historical Sociolinguistics, Historical Pragmatics, Corpus Linguistics, Information Structuring, and Actuation/Change from Below. Another important aspect of Volume 2 is its focus on the effects of language contact and the often neglected history of different varieties of English. It offers a section on language contact in the history of English, organized by contact languages, and supplemented by discussions of pidginization and creolization in the history of English and its varieties (Section XIII). Section XIV comprises historical sketches of more than ten varieties of English, and complementary theoretical discussions of dialect contact, diffusion, and supra-regionalization. The history of several second-language varieties is treated in Section XV, ending with a discussion of Global English. The beginning of a new millennium seems the right time for taking stock of the long span of scholarship in English historical linguistics and for surveying the field as a whole. Furthermore, the availability of electronic resources has changed the study of the history of English in fundamental ways, and it is important that a new handbook recognize this turning point in the study of English. Laurel J. Brinton, Vancouver (Canada) Alexander Bergs, Osnabru¨ck (Germany)
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Acknowledgments
Foremost, the editors wish to thank the nearly 150 experts in English historical linguistics worldwide who contributed chapters, without whom these volumes would not exist. We are particularly grateful to those who wrote two chapters or who stepped in to fill gaps that arose late in the process of assembling the contributions. We would also like to thank our Advisory Board – Cynthia Allen, Merja Kyto¨, Donka Minkova, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott – who gave us invaluable advice in the initial stages of this project. Thanks too to Anne Curzan, who helped in the planning stages. Our student assistants provided invaluable assistance in the editing stage: Slade Stolar and Martin McCarvill of the University of British Columbia; Jens Bonk, Lisa Gratzke, Barbara Hagenbrock, Claudia Ko¨mmelt, Mona Matzke, Meike Pentrel, and Lena Probst of the University of Osnabru¨ck. At De Gruyter Mouton, we are grateful to former Publishing Director Anke Beck for inviting us to develop this project and to Uri Tadmor to seeing it to completions, to Barbara Karlson for her encouragement, patience, gentle prodding, and expert guidance, and to Ulrike Swientek for her production expertise. For her keen eye and soft touch in copy-editing, we are most appreciative of Catherine Every (of EveryWord), and for her meticulous indexing, we thank Vicki Low (of Scholar’s Cap). We extend our gratitude to all of the following scholars, who generously contributed their time and expertise in serving as referees for the articles contained in these volumes. Some went well beyond the call of duty and reviewed more than one article or both wrote and reviewed an article: Sylvia Adamson John Algeo Ulrike Altendorf Leslie K. Arnovick Richard Bailey Jo´hanna Barðdal Joan Bresnan Derek Britton Ulrich Busse Joan Bybee Deborah Cameron Ruth Carroll Jack Chambers Claudia Claridge Eve Clark Sandra Clarke Richard Coates Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre John Considine Nikolas Coupland
Jonathan Culpeper Hubert Cuyckens Mary Catherine Davidson Hendrik De Smet Dagmar Deuber Hans-Ju¨rgen Diller Stefan Dollinger Bridget Drinka Edwin Duncan Stefan Evert Edward Finegan Olga Fischer Susan Fitzmaurice Robert Fulk Heinz Giegerich Eugene Green Peter Grund Trinidad Guzma´n Gonza´lez Martina Ha¨cker Antonette diPaolo Healey
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Acknowledgments Lena Heine Juan Manuel Herna´ndez-Campoy Susan Herring Raymond Hickey Gary Holland Richard Ingham Matti Kilpio¨ John Kirk Marina Kolokonte Lucia Kornexl William Kretzschmar Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky Merja Kyto¨ Roger Lass Gerhard Leitner Christian Liebl Michael Linn Angelika Lutz T. W. Machan Michael K. C. MacMahon Christian Mair Murray McGillivray Daniel McIntyre Donka Minkova Marianne Mithun Rosamund Moon Bruce Moore Colette Moore Susanne Mu¨hleisen Pieter Muysken Robert Murray Minna Nevala
Hans Frede Nielsen Arja Nurmi Stephen B. Partridge Meike Pfaff Joanna Przedlacka Matti Rissanen Juhani Rudanko Mats Ryde´n Pingali Sailaja Joseph Salmons Holger Schmidt Anne Schro¨der Elena Seoane K. Aaron Smith Dieter Stein Merja Stenroos Patrick Studer Sali Tagliamonte Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen Sarah G. Thomason Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade Carola Trips Uwe Vosberg Susanne Wagner Terry Walker Gregory Ward Brita Wa˚rvik John Wells Gernot R. Wieland Walt Wolfram Alison Wray Nuria Ya´n˜ez-Bouza
In memoriam
We commemorate those friends and colleagues who passed away since this project came into being. Without them, English historical linguistics will not be the same: Richard Bailey, Derek Britton, and Richard Hogg.
General abbreviations
ACC ACT ADJ ADV AN
Angl. AUX AP
C C COMPR DAT CP DEM
DM DU
EModE EWSax. FEM
Fr. GEN
Ger. Gk. Go. Grmc. IE IMP IND INF INFL INSTR
IP Kent. Lt. LModE LWSax. MASC
ME MED ModE NEG NEUT
accusative case active adjective adverb Anglo-Norman Anglian auxiliary adjective phrase consonant complementizer comparative dative case complementizer phrase demonstrative discourse marker dual Early Modern English Early West Saxon feminine French genitive case German Greek Gothic Germanic Indo-European imperative indicative infinitive inflected instrumental case inflection phrase Kentish Latin Late Modern English Late West Saxon masculine Middle English Middle English Dictionary Modern English negative neuter
xx
General abbreviations noun nominative case NP noun phrase O object OBJ objective case OE Old English OED Oxford English Dictionary OFr. Old French OFris. Old Frisian OHG Old High German ON Old Norse OSax. Old Saxon OV object-verb word order P person PASS passive PAST past PDE Present-day English PGrmc. Proto-Germanic PIE Proto-Indo-European PL plural PP prepositional phrase PREP preposition PRON pronoun PRTC participle PRES present PRET preterit S subject SG singular SUBJ subjunctive mood SUP superlative SOV subject-object-verb word order SV subject-verb word order SVO subject-verb-object word order SVX subject-verb-other parts of sentence word order T tense THM thematic vowel TMA tense-modality-aspect TVX topic-verb-other parts of sentence word order V verb V2 verb second V vowel VO verb-object word order VP verb phrase WGrmc. West Germanic WSax. West Saxon XP variable phrase XSV others parts of sentence-subject-verb word order N
NOM
General abbreviations XVS
> < Ø *
other parts of sentence-verb-subject word order changes to, becomes derives from no ending reconstructed form, ungrammatical form spelling
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IX. Resources 71. Resources: Early textual resources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
The corpus Dialect materials and methodology Kentish: a case study Charters Middle English Summary References
Abstract This introduction to the resources available for the history of English focuses on the nature of the evidence and the difficulties associated with individual text types. The chapter focuses on the Old and Middle English periods which perhaps pose the greatest challenge to those who are not specialists in these areas. An overview of the resources available for the early periods highlights general problems in terms of uneven diatopic and diachronic coverage, the uncertainties of dating and localization, together with broader issues relating to manuscript production and scribal practice. Topics surveyed include (for the Anglo-Saxon period) runic and non-runic inscriptions, place- and personal-names, glosses and glossaries, charters, and literary texts. Sections include a discussion of each text type with relevant bibliography, together with consideration of the principles underpinning their study. Texts surviving from the early Middle English period are similarly assessed in terms of their value for the historical study of English, as are selected resources for later Middle English. There is emphasis throughout on methodology and the importance of primary research.
1 The corpus The corpus of Old English is comparatively small (under 3,000,000 word tokens). This manageable size permits full concordancing, and a fully searchable version has been available online (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/index.html) from 1997 as part of the Dictionary of Old English project (DOE) (Cameron et al. [eds.] 1986–) essentially replacing the microfiche versions of 1980 and 1985 (high-frequency words). The importance of this resource to the study of Old English cannot be overestimated. The historical linguist working with the corpus, however, needs to be aware of certain issues relating to its production. A potential problem concerns the treatment of variant texts. As Koopman (1992: 607) observes, there is some inconsistency in the inclusion of texts that appear in more than one version: thus only one version of Bede, but two of the Alfredian translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Lexical variants are generally supplied, but only occasionally syntactic, morphological or phonological variants; this is unsurprising Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1119–1131
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given the origins of this resource as a by-product of the Dictionary project, but does mean that the concordance, while comprehensive, is incomplete. A futher concern of relevance here, noted by Jenkyns (1991: 385) is the DOE policy of expanding abbreviations silently. Other issues relate to the varying quality of the editions used as base texts: it turned out not to be practical to undertake the level of checking of editions against manuscripts initially proposed; reviewers have also noted some lapses in recording editorial emendations. However, the DOE policy of checking dictionary citations against editions means that the Corpus undergoes continual refinement as the Dictionary itself progresses. The corpus of Old English may not be extensive, but there exists a considerable variety of text types. The range is well summarized by DOE’s editor, Antonette diPaolo Healey: The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints’ lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms. (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/about.html [last accessed 17 May 2011])
Some historical linguists appear to assume that one text is broadly equivalent to another in terms of the evidence it supplies; texts are too frequently mined for individual forms generally without discussion of their status, value or circumstances relating to their production; the tendency to take such shortcuts is no doubt exacerbated by the way in which online search engines present their results. Further sections in this chapter elaborate on some of the issues relating to individual text types and their study.
2 Dialect materials and methodology Old English dialectology as a discipline is compromised by the fact that diatopic investigation is hampered by the patchy survival of texts and their diachronic diversity. Crowley’s summary of the situation makes for depressing reading in this regard: There is no evidence for Northumbrian of the ninth century and the early tenth; for Mercian before c.750, or of the later two thirds of the eleventh century; for Kentish before c.800 and after c.1000; and for West Saxon before c.850. Relatively few witnesses date before 950. Those that do are quite important, because texts after 950 are usually affected by the standard Late West Saxon literary language. (Crowley 1986: 103)
Crowley here references the four traditionally-assigned distinct dialect areas for which linguistic materials survive: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Such divisions stem from political structures deriving ultimately from the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. This approach is conceptually flawed because, as Hogg (1988; 1992: 4) has importantly observed, the texts that survive are to be associated not with such political but rather ecclesiastical structures. He proposes (Hogg 1992: 4) instead an alternate
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classification based on dioceses, although does not adopt this taxonomy in his own work. There is much, however, to commend such an approach (or one broadly similar to it) not least because it coheres better with modern dialectological theory such as that which informs The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (McIntosh et al. 1986) and The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (Laing and Lass 2007) – see Williamson, Chapter 91. The study of Old English dialectology has developed in an altogether strange way: as a whole and in general, Old English has a limited, defined, and accessible corpus, but the basic groundwork required to establish dialectal witnesses appears not to have been undertaken or at least is nowhere set out adequately or in full. This has hampered not just phonology but also word-geographical studies (see Kastovsky 1992: 338). There is nothing, therefore, that corresponds either to volume 1 of LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986) or Laing 1993, despite the fundamental nature of these works. For example, no consensus exists as to what constitutes even the basic witnesses of non West-Saxon dialects, in particular Kentish and Mercian. The texts highlighted by Crowley (1986: 102) as “substantial, fairly well dated and localized, and linguistically consistent” (a phrase replete with difficulties) for these dialect areas are, for Mercian, two charters and, for Kentish, nothing. This statement is at variance with the source material identified by both Campbell (1959) and Hogg (1992), although they are not in full agreement either. Behind these discrepancies lie serious issues relating to matters of transmission, status, and localization which are of great consequence to, but too often overlooked by, the linguistic historian. In consequence, historical linguists working in this period tend endlessly to redeploy examples derived from Campbell and Hogg, or, at best, use only a small subset of source material potentially available to them.
3 Kentish: a case study The case study of Kentish demonstrates some of the difficulties with preliminary assessment of the material. In terms of charters, the small number of differences between Hogg’s (1992) and Campbell’s (1959) lists is largely due to the inclusion or omission of early (pre 9th-century) charters, written in Latin, and which therefore only include names. Hogg does not formally list such texts, although does adduce onomastic evidence in his grammar. For Crowley (1986: 101), such evidence is “non-textual” and therefore not considered primary. Both Hogg and Campbell list the later (10th-century) material surviving in MS BL Cotton Vespasian D. vi (comprising the texts short-titled as KtHy, KtPs and CollGl 13). Only Campbell makes it clear that these three texts appear in the same manuscript, but does not explain that only the two poetic texts (KtHy, KtPs) are in the same hand. Both Hogg and Campbell note that the language of the texts is mixed which accounts for their omission from Crowley. In fact, neither Hogg nor Campbell has done justice to the charter material surviving from Kent. Lowe (2001) lists a series of ten single-sheet charters from Kentish charters written in English, 14 Latin diplomas with some significant element of English (generally in the shape of boundary clauses) and 42 Latin diplomas. Most of these contain only place- or personal names, but a few additionally feature some contemporary (or nearcontemporary) vernacular endorsements. As a whole, the material amounts to well in excess of four thousand words, and should form the basis of serious future study into the dialect. Similar work needs to be undertaken for other varieties of Old English.
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4 Charters Campbell, working in 1959, assembled his corpus of pre-10th-century charters from Sweet (1885), and it seems as though Hogg (1992) essentially followed suit, despite the publication in the meantime of Sawyer (1968), which has revolutionized charter study. Now available in revised and updated form online, the “electronic Sawyer” (eSawyer, see http://www.esawyer.org.uk/) lists each charter, together with information about the manuscript(s) in which it is preserved, the monastic archive it belongs to, and a summary of scholarly opinion. The bibliography is strong on historical and palaeographical information, rather less so on linguistic work. The most recent items currently date to 2007; more up-to-date bibliography may be found by consulting the relevant sections in the journal Anglo-Saxon England. Most vernacular charters have been reliably edited by Harmer (1914; [1952] 1989), Whitelock (1930) and Robertson ([1939] 1956). The ongoing British Academy/Royal Society Anglo-Saxon Charters project (since 1968) seeks to reedit the entire corpus (which numbers over 1,500 complete texts) of charters on an archive-by-archive basis with full commentary. To date, 14 volumes have appeared. For the others, one is still obliged to rely on the 19th-century scholarship of Thorpe (1865), Earle (1888), Kemble (1839–48) and Birch (1885–99). These texts (particularly those of the first three) need to be used with caution; Kemble, for example, sporadically normalized texts which do not survive in contemporary form. A trawl through eSawyer reveals that under a fifth of charters survive in anything like their original form; the rest are preserved in cartularies (mostly dating from the 13th through to the 15th centuries) or in antiquarian transcripts. Although many of the single sheets are of known date and provenance and therefore seem to offer the tempting prospect of supplying a matrix of anchor texts, there is a limit to their value as evidence for several reasons. The first echoes the problem with the chronological and geographical spread observed in the Old English corpus at large. Very few charters survive from northern archives, for example, and the majority of pre-10th-century charters are from Kent making comparison between varieties problematic. Palaeography is an inexact science which can at best add only general support to external evidence for dating. Thus a palaeographer can only confirm whether the script of a particular charter is in her or his opinion broadly consonant with its given date or dating range (see further Lowe 2005) and in general there is insufficient material to permit the dating of a particular script more closely than to within around three decades. This precludes attempts to identify phonological trends and developments on a timescale shorter than this.
4.1 Charter boundary clauses It seems to have been normal practice to include vernacular bounds in diplomas from the beginning of the 10th century (Lowe 1998: 74); before then some single-sheet (i.e. those existing in contemporary or near-contemporary form) charters contain topographical terms in English housed within Latin prose. Boundary clauses offer considerable scope for linguistic research particularly from an onomastic, lexicological, and word-geographical approach, and important work has been undertaken in this area by Peter Kitson (1995, 2004). The phonological value of these texts is, however, likely compromised by the centralization of diploma production from the 930s, after which such
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clauses, originally compiled locally, were recopied into the diploma by the main text scribe (Lowe 1998: 64–65). The helpful LangScape database (http://www.langscape. org.uk/index.html [last accessed 17 May 2011]) has recently opened this area to nonspecialists. It presents fully-searchable transcriptions of boundary clauses (with variant texts) together with a variety of other search options (including indices of topographical terms, archive and manuscripts) with associated mapping.
4.2 Onomastics Place- and personal name materials represent some of the most extensive evidence for periods where little else survives. Names in Bede are important witnesses to 8th-century Northumbrian, whereas the Domesday and Little Domesday surveys (the latter comprising circuit summaries of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk) represent aspects of the language (albeit viewed through the filter of foreign scribes using Latin spelling conventions) at the end of the 11th century. The value of names for the study of phonological development has often been questioned in vague and rather unhelpful terms (for example, “[t]here are difficulties in using the evidence of names too freely” [Hogg 1992: 5]). The clearest statement of their limitation as evidence is supplied by Clark: Once semantically emptied, names draw partly aloof from language at large. Although the phonological tendencies that affect them cannot be alien to those bearing on common vocabulary, the loss of denotation allows development to be freer, with compounds obscured and elements blurred and merged earlier and more thoroughly than in analogous “meaningful” forms. Sound-developments seen in names may therefore antedate or exceed in scope those operating elsewhere in the language; and this makes any use of name-material for study of general or dialectal phonology an exercise requiring caution. (Clark 1992: 453)
Important, however, is the point Clark makes here that names will not operate under a set of phonological rules entirely different from that which affects other vocabulary. It is clear that the value of names as evidence will depend entirely on their context, on the conditions and circumstances that gave rise to their transmission, and a case needs to be made for their use on a source-by-source basis; no shortcuts or easy generalizations can be made. Place-name elements offer us insights into the lexis of the quotidian as a necessary corollary to the specialized poetic vocabulary of better-studied Old English texts. Personal names also, importantly, allow us to compare naming practices across the social scale, from those of kings and ealdormen, through thegns and reeves to lesser farm workers and slaves.
4.3 Editions and manuscripts Editions naturally vary considerably in terms of the level of detail they preserve from the manuscripts; it is always worth paying attention to the section on editorial conventions in any given edition and, if it is unclear or none exists, drawing appropriate conclusions. Certain series draw up guidelines for their editors to ensure that similar methods are employed throughout. It is surprisingly rare, even in scholarly editions, for the expansion of abbreviations to be signalled, and the majority of Old English
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texts are punctuated in accordance with modern conventions. It is also worth attempting to establish the principal audience of a given edition; certain editorial decisions (for example, the inclusion or exclusion of variant readings, emendations and so on) that seem surprising to linguists and render the result unserviceable will be entirely acceptable, even welcomed, in other disciplines. By way of (extreme) example, the crowning glory of the series The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition, containing meticulously-edited texts of the separate manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, will be, if we are to believe one of the general editors, “reconstructed texts of the several text-historically defined stages of development of the Chronicle” (Dumville 1994: 48). It seems that these composite texts will be presented in the language of one of the main manuscript witnesses: quite how this will be accomplished for those passages which do not appear in the selected base text is not revealed. This reveals the gulf that exists between the needs and requirements of two separate academic constituencies who nevertheless share many of the same texts. Manuscripts written mostly or entirely in Old English before c.1200 are catalogued in Ker (1957 with additions 1977 incorporated as an appendix to the reissue of 1990). This seminal work is now supplemented by Gneuss (2001; additions 2003).
4.4 Glosses, glossaries, and texts derived from Latin Glossed material is perhaps the most under-utilized source of linguistic evidence in preConquest England. Some, of course, is well known to and heavily exploited by linguists: in particular, glosses in the Vespasian Psalter, the Durham Ritual, Rushworth and Lindisfarne Gospels provide much of our evidence for Mercian and Northumbrian. There ´ pinal, the are celebrated glossaries, too, which are mined in much the same way: the E Erfurt and the Corpus Glossary, again for Mercian. Lexical glosses have been collected and many published; it is of course important to signal words which appear only in glosses as the Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000) and DOE (Cameron et al. [eds.] 1986–) do. It is important to investigate the transmission and interdependence of manuscripts when assessing and attempting to explain this material, and no justice can be done in print to the complexities of a typical glossed page, as Page (1992) effectively demonstrates. Far less well explored than the lexical glosses are the syntactical glosses, a topic best treated by Robinson (1973) who argues persuasively for their importance: Syntactical glossing offers a source of evidence about Old English word-order quite different from any of the evidence used by syntacticians up to now, and it is possible that further study will show this glossing to be a uniquely valuable witness to functional word-order in Old English. Unlike the prose texts, which invariably have at least some literary pretensions, the sequential syntactical marks would seem to be designed to signal straightforward Old English word-order uncomplicated by any distortions or irregularities for the sake of stylistic effect… It has been observed that when an Old English translator is confronted by a complicated Latin sentence with interlocking clauses he will often take the easy way of breaking the thought down into two or more simple Old English sentences, even though the vernacular is known to have been capable of hypotactic as well as paratactic constructions. The conditions of syntactical glossing do not permit such evasions, and so they offer a richer variety of sentence types and sentence lengths than do some of the more pedestrian prose translations in Old English. (Robinson 1973: 471–472)
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This statement is reproduced at length here because it makes the important and underacknowledged point that much Old English literature is derived directly or indirectly from Latin sources. As Mitchell (1985: i. lxi) wisely says “[w]e therefore have to study Latin loan syntax”. In his conclusion, Mitchell (1985: ii. 1006–1007) identifies Latin influence on Old English syntax and syntactical glossing as two of several topics particularly worth investigation. Over twenty years on, little progress has been made in these areas. It is remarkable that Mitchell (1985: i. lxiv) produced his monumental work without access to the DOE microfiche concordance, the first volume of which was issued only when his work was in its final draft. More recent work in this area has undoubtedly profited from the online corpus, despite the reservations expressed by Koopman (1992). Relevant bibliography is collected and annotated by Mitchell (1990; Mitchell and Irvine 1992) and then at intervals (Mitchell and Irvine 1996, 2002, 2006).
4.5 Runes, coins, and inscriptions Crowley considers the evidence supplied by coins, inscriptions, and names in general as “supplementary” (with the apparent exception of the inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross and Auzon (Franks) Casket), and this option seems largely to be shared, although perhaps less baldly stated, by the grammarians. The value of coinage to Old English phonology has been highlighted by scholars such as Fran Colman (1991, 1996) and Jayne Carroll (2010; Carroll and Parsons 2007). Here the ongoing Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (since 1958) is of the utmost importance, separate volumes of which may be consulted in conjunction with the searchable SCBI electronic database (http://www-cm.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/coins/emc/emc_search.php, last accessed 29 January 2012). Non-runic inscriptions have been collected and edited by Elisabeth Okasha (1971 with three supplements 1982, 1992, 2004). A corpus of Anglo-Saxon runes remains a desideratum, although a project is ongoing at the University of Eichsta¨tt to present the material in both paper and database form (see http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/SLF/EngluVglSW/AeRunen.htm and http://www. runenprojekt.uni-kiel.de/, both last accessed 29 January 2012). Meanwhile, scholars will find the bibliographical listing of individual English runic inscriptions in Page ([1973] 1999) invaluable, supplemented by more recent volumes of Anglo-Saxon England: fresh finds are not uncommon. Even more so than with manuscripts, matters concerning layout must be considered by the historical linguist and there is no substitute for looking at the inscription itself instead of simply its transcription or transliteration; peculiarities in orthography may well result from consideration of space or aesthetics. As inscriptions and runes can easily become abraded over time, antiquarian drawings of material, used with due caution, can be of considerable value.
5 Middle English 5.1 Early Middle English The early Middle English period shares many of the same problems as the Old English period in terms of the comparative scarcity of sources. The materials available in
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manuscripts dating from 1150 to 1350 are conveniently assembled in Laing (1993) with an admirably clear introduction as to method and selection criteria. This work, an essential research tool in its own right, was a necessary precursor to A Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English 1150–1325 (Laing and Lass 2007), and should be read in conjunction with the online introduction to the project. There Laing makes the important point that, without the Second Continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle, the terminus a quo for the project would be c.1200 (Laing and Lass 2007: 1:4). Before then survive a few charters from the reigns of William I (now reedited by Bates 1998), William II, Henry I and Stephen catalogued in Pelteret (1990), the Peterborough Chronicle with its First and Second Continuations (Irvine 2004; Clark [1958] 1970), some post-Conquest memoranda of uncertain date, and Domesday Book.
5.2 A Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (LAEME) Laing (1993: 3) distinguishes in her Catalogue between texts created during the period and those that are copies of Old English texts; research shows that, with a few notable exceptions, post-Conquest scribes are timid when faced with Old English material and tend in the main (especially as the period progresses) to duplicate what they see (or think they see) in front of them (see Laing 1991; Lowe 2008). This makes the use of these charters as “anchor” texts difficult, and the paucity of freshly-composed documentary materials exacerbates the problem. Careful manuscript study has allowed Laing to ascribe an small additional number of literary texts to specific areas with varying degrees of certainty; her work emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the broader manuscript context in which an individual text appears. LAEME (Laing and Lass 2007) rejects the questionnaire method of analyzing texts employed for LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986); instead the texts are lexicogrammatically tagged. Particular care has been taken to disentangle distinct scribal contributions. The decision as to whether to tag a text in its entirety was not made purely on the basis of its length, but rather on a number of factors including significance, the nature of the scribal language and other “interpretative complexities” (Laing and Lass 2007: 2.1 3:6). Time constraints led to more restrictive sampling than originally intended: it is important to recognize that the corpus is not, and is not intended to be, fully comprehensive. Nevertheless, it consists of 650,000 fully tagged words which are searchable in a variety of ways: as a research tool for the study of orthography, phonology and morphology of the period it is therefore unparalleled. A specific advantage is that the texts were transcribed diplomatically from the manuscript witnesses themselves importantly retaining consistency of practice across the corpus and a level of faithfulness to scribal usage (such as the retention of wynn, and ) rarely encountered elsewhere. A sister project of LAEME is the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots project (Williamson 2007), LAOS, which uses the same tagging system for Older Scots texts. At present the database (version 1.1 at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html [last accessed 17 May 2011]) covers mainly anchor texts dating 1380–1500, but will eventually extend across the entire period (1150–1700) considerably expanding the coverage in LALME.
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5.3 Late Middle English: A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) Over twenty years, LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986) continues to define and dominate the field of medieval dialectology, with many new projects built upon its achievements. Its usefulness is not restricted to dialectology: its list of sources justifiably claimed in 1986 to be the “largest and most comprehensive list of manuscripts containing Middle English yet published” (i. 39) and its localized texts form the basis of the ongoing Middle English Grammar Project which eventually aims to produce a reference grammar to replace Jordan’s of 1925 (http://www.uis.no/research/culture/the_middle_english_ grammar_project/ [last accessed 29 January 2012]). Thirty-five years in the making without benefit of electronic aids, with analysis of over a thousand manuscripts, and principally the work of just two scholars, LALME is bound to contain errors. What follows is derived from Benskin’s (1991) response to Burton’s (1991) review of LALME. Some inaccuracies exist in the southern (essentially south of the Wash area) survey, largely as a result of perceived time pressures and resultant scanning. The questionnaire required refinement and supplementation as the project progressed, producing unevenness in the early analyses in the southern survey and omission of some relevant features. These and other issues are addressed in the project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for eLALME (2007–10) which will make the materials freely available online with the exciting addition of powerful interactive mapping functionality. There are wider methodological issues. LALME’s authors were well aware themselves of the deficiencies of the questionnaire approach to interrogation of the data, quoting Gillie´ron’s (1915: 45) trenchant observation that “L’e´tablissement du questionnaire […] pour eˆtre sensiblement meilleur, aurait duˆ eˆtre fait apre`s l’enqueˆte”. As Laing and Lass (2007: 1:8) additionally observe, different types of text may well not include examples of particular items: “For instance, a past tense narrative may not have examples of items that elicit present tense verb morphology, while instruction manuals may not have examples of those that elicit past tenses”. Short texts are less likely to exhibit the full range of forms, and specific genres (such as the all-important documentary texts) may have a limited range of vocabulary items of those identified as displaying dialectallyconditioned variation. In consequence, some Linguistic Profiles are at best sketchy, but the number of texts analyzed and the strength of diatopic coverage compensates for this. LALME’s 280-item checklist is still routinely used by scholars from all disciplines to reach preliminary conclusions about the dialect of a particular text.
5.4 The Middle English Dictionary (MED) and Compendium The first fascicle of the print MED was published in 1952, and the last in 1991. Its achievement is extraordinary, but its long genesis inevitably resulted in some changes in editorial focus and inconsistencies. These are discussed by Blake (2002) whose article should be read alongside the MED’s Plan and Bibliography (Kurath 1954) and Supplement I (Kurath et al. 1985). Blake draws attention in particular to a rather ill-tempered exchange between MED editor Kurath and reviewer Visser concerning the omission of words (many from Barbour’s Bruce) from the MED; this apparently was a deliberate decision because of the coterminous production of Dictionary of the Older Scottish
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Tongue, but not one reported in the Plan, nor indeed it seems, implemented consistently in the dictionary itself. For the majority of users, the print MED has been superseded by the rich textual resources of the online Middle English Compendium (McSparran 2002) with its searchable database, hyper-bibliography and a full-text corpus of Middle English prose and verse at present containing some fifty works. As its chief editor, Frances McSparran (2002: 130), notes, “[e]lectronic search mechanisms open up the whole of the dictionary and its 54,000-odd entries for complex searches, restricted by user-specified criteria such as date, manuscript, author, language of etymon, language associated with a field like law or medicine, etc.”. The incorporation of LALME references to manuscript information allowing searches restricted by county is particularly useful. Such a powerful search engine is, however, not necessarily easy or intuitive to use, and the scholar new to the resource is advised to spend time working through the online help pages in order to make the most from it. It is important to remember that the MED itself has not been updated: although bibliographic references have been standardized, and revised datings implemented in order to facilitate searches, no attempt has been made to (for example) replace quotations from editions superseded during the course of the print publication.
6 Summary The discussion above has sought to emphasize the recent developments in resources for this early period that together have the potential to revolutionize work in historical linguistics; this is an exciting time to be working in the field. It has also endeavored to demonstrate that what lies behind all of these corpora, grammars and dictionaries is a series of individual texts. We forget at our peril that (to adapt a phrase) chaque texte a son histoire. Each (and this goes as much for colloborative scholarly projects as for a runic inscription) must be interrogated in a way that is sensitive to the individual mechanics and manifold complexities of its production and history. Without this requisite spadework, we build our house on sand.
7 References Bates, David. 1998. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–1087). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benskin, Michael. 1991. In reply to Dr Burton. Leeds Studies in English 22: 209–262. Birch, Walter de Gray (ed.). 1885–99. Cartularium Saxonicum: A Collection of Charters Relating to Anglo-Saxon History, 3 vols. London: Whiting & Co. Blake, Norman F. 2002. The early history of, and its impact upon, the Middle English Dictionary. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 23: 48–75. Burton, Thomas L. 1991. On the current state of Middle English dialectology. Leeds Studies in English 22: 167–208. Cameron, Angus, Ashley Crandall Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (eds.) 1986–. Dictionary of Old English (DOE). University of Toronto. http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/about.html (last accessed 29 January 2012). Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Jayne and David N. Parsons. 2007. Anglo-Saxon Mint-Names, I. Axbridge–Hythe. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society.
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Carroll, Jayne. 2010. Coins and the Chronicle: mint-signatures, history, and language. In: Alice Jorgensen (ed.), Reading The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Literature, History, Language, 243–273. Turnhout: Brepols. Clark, Cecily (ed.) [1958] 1970. The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon. Clark, Cecily. 1992. Onomastics. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. I. The Beginnings to 1066, 452–488. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colman, Fran. 1991. Money Talks: Reconstructing Old English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Colman, Fran. 1996. Names will never hurt me. In: M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (eds.), ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, 13–28. London: Routledge. Crowley, Joseph P. 1986. The study of Old English dialects. English Studies 67: 97–112. Dumville, David N. 1994. Editing Old English texts for historians and other troublemakers. In: Donald G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (eds.), The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference, 45–52. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Earle, John (ed.). 1888. A Hand-Book to the Land-Charters, and Other Saxonic Documents. Oxford: Clarendon. Gillie´ron, Jules. 1915. Pathologie et the´rapeutique verbales. Bern: Beerstecher. Gneuss, Helmut. 2001. Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Gneuss, Helmut. 2003. Addenda and corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. Anglo-Saxon England 32: 293–305. Harmer, Florence E. (ed.). 1914. Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harmer, Florence E. (ed.) [1952] 1989. Anglo-Saxon Writs. 2nd edn. Paul Watkins: Stamford. Hogg, Richard M. 1988. On the impossibility of Old English dialectology. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Gero Bauer (eds.), Luick revisited: Papers read at the Luick-Symposium at Schloß Liechtenstein, 15–18 September 1985, 183–203. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. Hogg, Richard M. 1992. A Grammar of Old English. Vol. 1: Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. Irvine, Susan (ed.). 2004. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 7, MS. E. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Jenkyns, Joy. 1991. The Toronto Dictionary of Old English resources: a user’s view. The Review of English Studies 42: 380–416. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1992. Semantics and vocabulary. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. I. The Beginnings to 1066, 290–408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemble, John M (ed.). 1839–48. Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici. 6 vols. London: Sumptibus Societatis. Ker, Neil R. 1957. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reissued in 1990 with Ker. 1977 appended. Ker, Neil R. 1977. Supplement to Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. AngloSaxon England 5: 121–131. Kitson, Peter R. 1995. The nature of Old English dialect distributions, mainly as exhibited in charter boundaries. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Medieval Dialectology, 43–135. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kitson, Peter R. 2004. On margins of error in placing Old English literary dialects. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, 219–239. Bern: Peter Lang. Koopman, Willem F. 1992. The study of Old English syntax and the Toronto Dictionary of Old English. Neophilologus 76: 605–615. Kurath, Hans. 1954. Middle English Dictionary: Plan and Bibliography. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
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Kurath, Hans et al. 1985. Middle English Dictionary: Plan and Bibliography. Supplement I. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Laing, Margaret. 1991. Anchor texts and literary manuscripts in Early Middle English. In: Felicity Riddy (ed.), Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, 27–52. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Laing, Margaret. 1993. Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Laing, Margaret and Roger Lass. 2007. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325 Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html (last accessed 17 May 2011). Lowe, Kathryn A. 1998. The development of the Anglo Saxon boundary clause. Nomina 21: 63–100. Lowe, Kathryn A. 2001. On the plausibility of Old English dialectology: The ninth-century Kentish charter material. Folia Linguistica Historica 22: 136–170. Lowe, Kathryn A. 2005. Paleography, Greek and Latin. In: Keith Brown (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd edn. 14 vols. ix. 134–141. Oxford: Elsevier. Lowe, Kathryn A. 2008. The Exchequer, the Chancery, and the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds: Inspeximus charters and their enrolments. English Manuscript Studies 14: 1–26. McIntosh, Angus, Michael L. Samuels and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. McSparran, Frances. 2002. The Middle English Compendium: past, present, future. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 23: 126–141. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mitchell, Bruce. 1990. A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax to the End of 1984 Including Addenda and Corrigenda to Old English Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, Bruce and Susan Irvine. 1992. A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax: supplement 1985–1988. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93: 1–53 Mitchell, Bruce and Susan Irvine. 1996. A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax: supplement 1989–1992. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97: 1–28. Mitchell, Bruce and Susan Irvine. 2002. A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax: supplement 1993–1996. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 103: 3–32. Mitchell, Bruce and Susan Irvine. 2006. A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax: supplement 1997–2000. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 107: 91–116. Okasha, Elisabeth. 1971. Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okasha, Elisabeth. 1982. A supplement to Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions. Anglo-Saxon England 11: 83–118. Okasha, Elisabeth. 1992. A second supplement to Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions. Anglo-Saxon England 21: 37–85. Okasha, Elisabeth. 2004. A third supplement to Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions. Anglo-Saxon England 33: 225–281. Page, Raymond I. 1992. On the feasibility of a corpus of Anglo-Saxon glosses: the view from the library. In: Rene´ Derolez (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Glossography: Papers Read at the International Conference Brussels, 8 and 9 September 1986, 77–95. Brussels: Paleis der Academien. Page, Raymond I. [1973] 1999. An Introduction to English Runes. 2nd edn. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Pelteret, David A. E. 1990. Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay. 2000. A Thesaurus of Old English. 2nd edn. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Robertson, Agnes J. (ed.) [1939] 1956. Anglo-Saxon Charters. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Robinson, Fred C. 1973. Syntactical glosses in Latin manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon provenance. Speculum 48: 443–475. Sawyer, Peter H. 1968. Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography. London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society. Revised and updated version: http://www.esawyer.org.uk/ (last accessed 17 May 2011). Sweet, Henry (ed.). 1885. The Oldest English Texts. London: Oxford University Press. Thorpe, Bernard (ed.). 1865. Diplomatarium Anglicum Ævi Saxonici. London: MacMillan & Co. Whitelock, Dorothy (ed.). 1930. Anglo-Saxon Wills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, Keith. 2007. A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1: 1380-1500 (LAOS). http:// www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/laos1.html (last accessed 17 May 2011).
Kathryn A. Lowe, Glasgow (UK)
72. Resources: Electronic/online resources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Introduction Surveys Dictionaries Thesauri Corpora Further projects Further resources Summary References
Abstract This chapter provides a brief survey of currently available and forthcoming electronic/ online resources that may be used for research in English language history. The focus of this compilation is on those electronic projects and resources that may be of particular interest to historical linguists; it omits those relating primarily to other disciplines, such as literary criticism or source study. It attempts to give mention to as many resources as possible, especially with regard to the most prominent historical dictionaries, thesauri, and corpora. A number of further projects and resources is presented and briefly characterized in order to give an impression of the wide range of material that is currently available. These include select projects dealing with specific aspects from various time periods, primary sources in the form of digitized manuscripts and electronic editions, and digital bibliographies, publications and discussion groups. Web addresses valid on 1 September 2010 are provided for all resources; references are given to representative and complementing printed publications. Some problems involving electronic material are also addressed.
1 Introduction This chapter provides a brief survey of currently available and forthcoming electronic/ online resources that may be used for research in English language history; for a study of such resources intended for teaching purposes, see Busse, Chapter 76. For each Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1131–1148
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project, a web address is given which was valid on 1 September 2010. References to printed works on electronic material have been restricted both for reasons of space and since these become outdated rather quickly. Only some important and representative publications are mentioned which supplement the information found on the respective sites. The focus of this compilation is on those electronic projects and resources that may be of particular interest to historical linguists; it omits those relating primarily to other disciplines, such as literary criticism or source study. It has been attempted to give mention to as many resources as possible, especially with regard to the most prominent historical dictionaries, thesauri and corpora. However, not all of these could be included for reasons of space, in particular concerning the immense number of further projects and resources currently available on the World Wide Web. Whenever an online resource can be accessed without subscription this is indicated in the survey. All other websites as well as the CD-ROMs require a licence. For some corpora, mostly those hosted at the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/), this licence may be obtained free of charge. The representation of digital texts generally conforms to the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) (http://www.tei-c.org/). Non-academic sites are usually excluded unless they make extensive use of scholarly material.
2 Surveys Surveys on electronic resources become outdated rather quickly as new projects are started, ongoing projects are completed or abandoned, and even finished projects may be revised. For example, work on the Old English projects listed in Howe (2001: 501) and the historical corpora listed in Rissanen (2000: 14–16) has progressed significantly since. Moreover, internet resources do not necessarily remain on the same server. For this reason, printed studies such as Arista (1999) may contain a significant number of obsolete web addresses. The same problem may occur with regard to online link collections, which are usually freely accessible. For example, on 11 February 2009, Dan Mosser’s History of the English Language page hosted at Virginia Tech (http://ebbs.english. vt.edu/hel/hel.html) stated that the last update occurred on 23 May 2005; out of the seventy links provided, no less than nineteen were no longer valid. Significantly, the site itself has been taken down since. It is therefore useful to check whether such collections are regularly maintained, as currently seen, for example, in the Electronic Canterbury Tales (http://www.kankedort.net/). There are also periodically updated and annotated lists, such as Circolwyrde (http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/links.php), a feature of the Old English Newsletter, which has provided the latest information on electronic resources for Anglo-Saxon studies on a yearly basis since 2004. With any luck, obsolete web addresses may still be accessible at the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine (http:// archive.org/web/web.php), which contains copies of more than 150 billion pages stored since 1996.
3 Dictionaries The largest electronic dictionary project is concerned with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (http://www.oed.com/). The latest print version of this dictionary is the second edition (Murray et al. 1989–97); it has been digitized and can be searched on CD-ROM, currently in its version 4.0 (http://www.oup.co.uk/ep/cdroms/), which also
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incorporates 7,000 additional entries not listed in printed form. There is no print version of the ongoing third edition, which is confined to web access. On 14 March 2000, the first batch of entries, ranging from M to mahurat, was published online; the remaining entries were taken from the second edition. Since then the subsequent entries have been updated and revised in alphabetical order on a quarterly basis. On 11 December 2008 these ranged until reamy, which resulted in the overall documentation of 263,917 entries at the time. Every regular quarterly update has also included additional entries from across the alphabet as well as revised entries replacing the respective earlier versions. Coinciding with the release of each update, commentaries on the respective changes are put online, which among other extensive background information can be accessed even without subscription. The nature of the revisions is manifold (Simpson et al. 2004). For example, besides providing a consistent terminology throughout OED, entries may be predated if earlier attestations have been found, and Old English quotations are no longer attributed to a particular year, but may be characterized as early, late or general Old English. Queries can be performed in various categories, for example, with regard to “etymologies”, “first cited date” or “quotation work”, which can also be combined in “advanced” searches. In December 2010, after the completion of this chapter, OED was scheduled to undergo a major relaunch including the integration of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (Kay et al. 2009) (cf. below, Section 4) (http://www.oed.com/news/relaunch.html). OED has been used for a large number of academic studies and has even been studied itself, as seen by Charlotte Brewer’s project Examining the OED, which primarily investigates the role of quotations in this resource (http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/, Brewer 2007). In 2003, the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) project at the University of Toronto (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/), which had until then only issued microfiches of letters A–E between 1986 and 1996, published the first electronic version on a CD-ROM containing letters A–F (Healey 2005). The second, latest version has extended this range to letter G, resulting in currently 12,633 entries. Microfiches of letters F and G were issued shortly after their electronic publication. It has been possible to search letters A–G online since 2007; this web version is also continuously updated and complemented (http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/). Each entry contains information in several categories, such as “attested spellings”, “occurrences and usage” or “Latin equivalents in manuscript”, if available. The field “secondary references” points to corresponding or etymologically related entries in other dictionaries; if OED is mentioned, a direct link to this resource is provided. Regrettably, DOE contains no etymological information. A list of both Old English and Latin texts cited in DOE including the consulted editions is freely accessible, thereby providing a useful bibliographical resource. Yearly progress reports are available both at the site and in the Old English Newsletter. The corpus used by DOE (OEC) is available both online (http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/ doecorpus/) and on CD-ROM, the latest version of which was released in 2004. The search engine allows queries for single words, or parts of these, as well as up to three combinations or co-occurrences of whole or fragmentary words, which can also be confined to specific works or major genres. The results are listed according to their Cameron number (Cameron 1973), and page and line numbers are taken from the indicated editions. The output of OEC searches is strictly homographic; length-marks are not included, and þ and ð are distinguished. An additional tool is a “word wheel
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interface” for both English and Latin, which provides alphabetical lists of all types with links to the respective tokens. Bosworth et al.’s (1882–1972) Anglo-Saxon Dictionary including its supplements have been digitized in various ways. Sean Crist’s freely accessible Germanic Lexicon Project (GLP) (http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/) offers several different formats: besides scanned pictures in tiff- and png-format as well as a single “weekly updated” txt-file and html-files of the individual pages achieved by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) (http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html), there is also a specifically designed downloadable application (http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/app/). This particular program, currently in its version 0.2c, allows searches for individual entries as well as a full text search; image-files in jpg-format can be downloaded separately for optional inclusion. There is also an online version (http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/). GLP hosts a number of other dictionaries, grammars, and readers, two of which concern the Old English period. Comparable to the digitization of Bosworth et al. (1882–1972), the second edition of Hall’s (1916) Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is available in tiff-, png- and html-format (http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oe_clarkhall_about.html). However, due to currently incomplete OCR, only 257 of the 373 pages are available as html-files, and there is no downloadable txt-file; moreover, there is no application. Another Old English resource at GLP is the third edition of Bright’s (1912) AngloSaxon Reader (http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oe_bright_about.html). Besides individual pages of the entire book in tiff-, png- and html-format, the glossary can be downloaded as a separate file in html-, xml- and pdf-format. There are several other freely accessible resources that use material from Bosworth et al. (1882–1972), but generally without the second supplement, which is the only volume still in copyright. Kevin Kiernan’s freely accessible site at the University of Kentucky provides scanned images in jpg-format of both the main volume (http:// beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/BT/Bosworth-Toller.htm) and the first supplement (http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/BT2/Toller-Supplement.htm). Two searchable electronic versions have been created by David Finucane: a free one for Macintosh OS X (http://www.davidfinucane.com/bt/index.html), and an iPhone application (http://www. davidfinucane.com/Old_English/). James Jonson’s Old English dictionary page at his Old English Made Easy site draws on a variety of sources, but only acknowledges Bosworth and Toller (http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm). Alphabetical lists are provided not only for Old English headwords, but also for Modern English equivalents. There is no search function, but each beginning letter has a separate htm-address. Based on this resource is Stephen Forrest’s online tool Englisc Onstigende Wordboc (EOW) (http://wandership.ca/projects/eow/about.php), which translates more than 5,000 words from Old English into Modern English and vice versa. The digitization of Bosworth et al. (1882–1972) as part of Bekie Marett’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Project, which is still listed on some web pages, seems to have been discontinued and the site (http://dontgohere.nu/oe/as-bt/) has been taken offline. The Middle English Dictionary (MED, Kurath et al. 1954–2001) was transferred into electronic form in the year of its printed completion (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/). It is part of the Middle English Compendium (MEC) (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/) (McSparran 2002), a freely accessible resource which besides MED includes also an associated hyperbibliography (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/hyperbib/) as well as the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CME) (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/).
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The 54,081 entries of MED as well as the quotations can be searched in various ways. Besides simple searches for headwords and variant forms, Boolean and proximity searches within both entries and quotations are also permitted. Full regular expression searches involving wildcard characters are also possible. As in OED, up to three fields can be combined, such as “definition”, “manuscript” or “date”, though date ranges are not allowed. Each “stencil”, which precedes each quotation and contains information on date, text and manuscript, is linked to the hyperbibliography, which provides information on further manuscripts containing the text as well as editions and other resources. Entries can be displayed without quotations or with quotations in either compact or open display. No revisions and updates to MED have occurred since 18 December 2001, though CME was expanded on 22 February 2006, as stated on the respective websites. Also of interest to scholars of Middle English is the freely accessible Anglo-Norman Online Hub (ANH) (http://www.anglo-norman.net/), which features a revised version of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND) (Stone and Rothwell 1977–92) containing c.24,800 entries. It also includes a searchable database of c.125,000 citations, which are used as the basis for an integrated concordance application. Unlike for Old and Middle English, there is as yet no period dictionary of Early Modern English. However, one online lexicographical resource dealing with this era deserves to be mentioned: Ian Lancashire’s Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) at the University of Toronto (http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/), the follow-up project to the discontinued Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD) (http://www. chass.utoronto.ca/~ian/emedd.html), does not merely list words attested during this period, but is dedicated to the digitization of early English dictionaries themselves (Lancashire 2006). It currently features electronic versions of 166 monolingual, bilingual and polyglot dictionaries as well as various other lexical works dated 1480–1702 containing more than 575,000 word entries. The entries of 112 fully analyzed lexicons have been lemmatized according to their modern spellings and have been given permanent URLs. Two versions of the database are available. The freely accessible public version does not permit all search features, but allows restrictions to date range, author and text; however, the output is generally limited to 100 results. The full version displays all results and also allows further restrictive searches, such as “language”, “genre”, and “subject”. Additional features include browsable wordlists as well as a searchable index with information on more than 1,200 lexical works. There is also a period database containing more than 10,000 Early Modern English texts, access to which, however, requires an additional external subscription. Not many etymological dictionaries of English are available in electronic form. The freely accessible ongoing Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project (IEED) (http://www.indo-european.nl/) at the University of Leiden currently contains no information on the English language. The fullest and most up-to-date resource in this respect is the aforementioned third edition of OED. There are many electronic dictionaries which also have etymological information, such as the CD-ROM of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), currently in version 3.0 of the sixth printed edition (http:// www.oup.co.uk/ep/cdroms/), or the freely accessible dictionary at Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/). One independent project focusing primarily on English etymology is Douglas Harper’s freely accessible Online Etymological Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/). This has been compiled from several printed sources, which are listed at the site. Its search engine allows both headword
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and full text searches. Another electronic resource is Eugene Cotter’s Roots of English (http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/showcase/roots.html), a freely downloadable application, version 4.0 of which has not been updated since 1999. An unusual feature of its search engine is that queries for entries provide an output of etymologically or semantically related Greek or Latin roots as well as English words containing these. However, no sources are given. Electronic dictionaries are also available for historical varieties of English. The largest of these is the freely accessible Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) (http:// www.dsl.ac.uk/), which combines two major printed sources, namely the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), dedicated to entries attested between the 12th and the 17th century (Craigie et al. 1931–2001), and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND), which lists words in Scots used since the 18th century (Grant et al. 1931–2005). Besides full text and headword searches, some other fields are also available, such as “etymologies”, “senses” or “date”, though, as in MED, no date range can be specified. Boolean searches within a single category are also permitted. Queries can be restricted to DOST, SND or any of their supplements. One entry is displayed immediately, while a full list of results is indicated within a separate frame, in either alphabetical order in the case of headword searches, or their order of relevance in any other case. Bibliographic information can also be searched separately. The site is complemented with additional background information taken from the printed versions. The digitization of another variety dictionary, namely the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, Wright 1898–1905), which is dedicated to the 18th and 19th centuries, is currently in development at the University of Innsbruck (Markus and Heuberger 2007). A beta version can be accessed after requesting a free password (http://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/projects/speed/index. html). Finally, another specialized dictionary needs to be mentioned: the Institute for Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham is currently developing an onomastic resource, namely the Vocabulary of English Place-Names (VEPN) (http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/english/ins/vepn/). Its ultimate aim is to list all elements of placenames attested before c.1750. It thereby revises and extends an earlier dictionary (Smith 1956). Of the three volumes published so far as fascicles (Parsons et al. 1997–), the latest one comprising 157 entries ranging from ceafor to cock-pit can also be accessed freely at the site, though only headword searches are possible. Besides listing examples containing the element in question, an entry provides also etymological information and gives references to corresponding or related entries in other dictionaries, most notably OED, DOE, MED and EDD.
4 Thesauri An online version of the second edition of the Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) (Roberts et al. 2000) can be accessed freely at the University of Glasgow (http:// libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/). Improvements to the printed version include the occasional display of additional information in a “comments” field and the indication of word classes as “parts of speech”. In contrast to the aforementioned electronic dictionaries, it is possible to refine searches according to length-marks; moreover, all occurrences of ð have been replaced by þ. Queries are allowed for both Old and Modern English words. The sections containing the respective results are then indicated and can
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be browsed, though currently no alphabetical list is given. The 18 major sections of TOE and their respective sub-sections can also be displayed separately, either in full or confined to “flagged” words which are restricted to glosses, poetry, or single occurrences. Revisions and updates have not occurred since its release in 2005, however, the website states that these are planned. The database of TOE also forms the basis of a derived didactic project called Learning with the Online TOE (http://libra.englang. arts.gla.ac.uk/oeteach/oeteach.html). This consists of fourteen “units” intended for use in class or self-study, most of which contain questions that can be answered with the help of TOE, as well as bibliographies and further links. TOE has also been regarded as a pilot project for the much larger Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), which was completed in 2009 and published in print as Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (Kay et al. 2009) (http://libra. englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/WebThesHTML/homepage.html). In December 2010, after the completion of this chapter, it was scheduled to be electronically incorporated into OED online (cf. above, Section 3). A freely accessible version of some areas in HTE is available online (http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/historicalthesaurus/). HTE contains c.650,000 word meanings ranging from the Old English period until today. These are grouped into three major parts (“The External World”, “The Mind” and “Society”), which are subdivided into sections and further sub-sections. As in TOE, it is possible to search for categories in which a word occurs. In fact, the engine of HTE allows more: besides a general query for synonyms, it is possible to search for specific labels, affixes, parts of speech, and dates or date ranges within currently 333 categories. The results of the searched categories are displayed according to sub-section, entry, part of speech, date or date range of occurrence, and label if applicable. If the meaning of an entry occurs both in Old English and later then two spellings are given. Generally, spellings and further data are taken from OED or unspecified “dictionaries of Old English”. HTE contains no information on etymologies or quotations, but with regard to its chronological range it supersedes all dictionaries of English, even OED, which does not include words attested only before 1150. In its organisation of data on semantic rather than alphabetical principles, HTE represents a unique resource for the study of lexical change. There were initial plans for a third historical thesaurus dedicated to the English language, namely the Thesaurus of Middle English (TME, Sylvester and Roberts 2002), but the project seems to have been abandoned or incorporated into HTE as the original web address can no longer be accessed (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/sesll/ EngLang/thesaur/mideng.htm). An even larger range than HTE is envisaged in the European Historical Thesaurus (EuroHiT), currently in its early development stages at the University of Eichsta¨tt (http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/SLF/EngluVglSW/OnOnEuroHiT.htm), which aims at providing historical onomasiological data for several European languages for comparative purposes by means of a publicly accessible wiki.
5 Corpora A large amount of textual corpora representing various time periods are available in electronic form; for more detailed surveys and discussions of their use, see Claridge (2008), and Kyto¨, Chapter 96. Descriptions of currently 51 corpora, many of which are mentioned in this section, are available at the University of Helsinki (http://www.
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helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/index.html). Corpora usually indicate their size according to the number of words, though the term “token” would be more precise. The dictionary corpora of OEC and CME have already been mentioned above in Section 3. These are hosted by the University of Michigan, which also provides another historical corpus, namely Michigan Early Modern English Materials (MEMEM) (http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/memem/), which is a collection of c.50,000 citations dated 1475–1700, originally compiled to illustrate occurrences of mostly modal verbs in an as yet unrealized dictionary of Early Modern English (Bailey et al. 1975). Both MEMEM, which has not been updated since 1996, and another electronic resource at this location, namely the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (http://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/micase/), which represents a specific register of Present-Day English and currently contains more than 1.8 million words, can be accessed freely. With regard to dictionaries, it has also been suggested that the quotation database of OED may be used as a corpus though one needs to take into account the uneven representation and particular selection principles of the first two editions (Hoffmann 2004). No less than six historical corpora are contained on a CD-ROM produced by the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), the latest, second version of which was released in 1999 (http://icame.uib.no/newcd.htm): the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal (HC); the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS); the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS); the Newdigate Newsletters; the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (Lampeter Corpus); the Innsbruck Computer-Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts (ICAMET). These corpora can also be obtained from OTA. HC and HCOS as well as some pilot studies based on these corpora are described in Rissanen et al. (1993). The historical part of HC contains c.1.5 million words from representative texts dating from the three major periods of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, which are subdivided into three or four chronological phases each. The modern dialectal part contains another c.400,000 words. The current version of HCOS contains c.830,000 words from Scots texts dated 1450–1700. CEECS is merely a sample version of about the sixth of the size of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), which features c.2.7 million words from letters dated 1417–1681 (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html). Newdigate Newsletters contains 2,100 letters from the Secretary of State’s office dated 1673–1692. The Lampeter Corpus consists of c.1.2 million words from 120 non-literary prose texts dated 1640–1740 (http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/chairs/linguist/real/ independent/lampeter/lamphome.htm). ICAMET features c.4 million words of Middle English prose; a fuller version of 6 million words is also available (http://www.uibk.ac. at/anglistik/projects/icamet/). Besides these historical six corpora, the ICAME CDROM contains also several modern ones, namely eight corpora of “written English”, which include the “Brown Family” of corpora, five corpora of “spoken English” and two “parsed” corpora, manuals of which can be consulted freely (http://khnt.aksis.uib. no/icame/manuals/index.htm). Registered users of the CD-ROM can access all corpora also online (http://torvald.aksis.uib.no/icame/cwb/). Information on HC, HCOS, Lampeter Corpus and ICAMET is also contained in the conference monograph by Kyto¨ et al. (1994). This volume provides descriptions of many more historical corpora as well as dictionaries, thesauri and software. Among these is A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER), which contains c.1.7 million words of British and American English dated 1650–1990. Initially devised
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at Northern Arizona University and the University of Southern California, it is now an international collaboration of a number of universities, where it is currently being revised for its third version. ARCHER can only be accessed at those universities involved in the project, for example, at Flagstaff or Freiburg (http://portal.uni-freiburg. de/angl/Englisches_Seminar/Lehrstuehle/LS_Mair/research/projects/archer/). Two corpora compiled by David Denison at the University of Manchester are available at OTA. The Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (CLMEP) (http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/ subjects/lel/staff/david-denison/lmode-prose/) contains c.100,000 words from English letters written between 1861 and 1919. The associated Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (CLECP) (http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/david-denison/corpuslate-18th-century-prose/) contains c.300,000 words from letters written in the northwest of England between 1761 and 1790. The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) (http://es-zen.unizh.ch/) consists of c.1.6 million words collected from newspaper issues published between 1661 and 1791; licensed owners of the CD-ROM can also access this corpus online. Besides HCOS another historical corpus of a regional variety of English is presented in the monograph: the Corpus of Irish English (CIE) (http://www.uni-due. de/CP/CIE.htm) at the University of Duisburg-Essen, which is available on CD-ROM (Hickey 2003), contains over seventy texts dating from the early 14th century to the present day. These include both English texts by Irish writers and the representation of Irish English in texts written outside Ireland. There are several more well-known corpora and electronic text collections that need to be mentioned. The Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections currently comprise no less than 28 corpora and bibliographies from various time periods and genres (http:// collections.chadwyck.com/marketing/list_of_all.jsp). The widest diachronic range is represented by the archive of English Poetry, which in its second edition contains more than 183,000 poems dating from the 8th to the early 20th century. The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, a frequently consulted resource for digitized text collections in the past, was transferred to the Scholar’s Lab in 2007 (http://www2. lib.virginia.edu/etext/). Some electronic texts are still freely accessible. The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) is subdivided into three parts, the first of which, namely Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), was issued on CD-ROM in 2005 (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEM/MEMTindex.html). The upcoming parts will focus on Early Modern English and Late Modern English respectively. The Corpus of English Dialogues (CED) (http://www.engelska.uu.se/corpus. html), a project devised at the Universities of Lancaster and Uppsala, contains c.1.2 million words from speech-related texts dated 1560–1760. The freely accessible Old Bailey Proceedings Online project (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/) hosts the texts of more than 197,000 London trials from the Old Bailey Proceedings conducted between 1674 and 1913, and more than 2,500 biographical details from the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts recorded between 1676 and 1772. Three large corpora of Late Modern English can be downloaded after requesting a free password from Hendrik De Smet at the University of Leuven (https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/): the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) with 10 million words; the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts Extended Version (CLMETEV) with 15 million words; the Corpus of English Novels (CEN) with 25 million words. In addition to corpora which do not contain any further data besides the text itself as well as bibliographical information, there are a number of annotated or “parsed”
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corpora which permit searches for specific syntactic structures. The principles of annotation with regard to three specific corpora are outlined in the respective manuals (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/annotation/). Currently, there are seven parsed corpora which are based on HC or CEEC: the Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (Brooklyn Corpus); the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE); the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry (York Poetry Corpus); the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edn. (PPCME2); the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME); the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC); the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE). The Brooklyn Corpus has been superseded by YCOE, but can still be consulted by requesting access from Susan Pintzuk at the University of York (http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sp20/corpus.html). YCOE, the York Poetry Corpus and PCEEC can be obtained from OTA. PPCME2, PPCEME and PPCMBE are distributed on CD-ROM by the University of Pennsylvania (http://www. ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/). There are various programs aimed at constructing, annotating and searching electronic corpora. Among the most widely used ones are CorpusSearch 2 (http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/), which is also issued alongside PPCME2, PPCEME and PPCMBE, and Corpus Presenter, which is included on the CD-ROMs of CIE and MEMT, and is also freely available in a restricted “lite” version (http:// www.uni-due.de/CP/). Besides the aforementioned MICASE and those included on the ICAME CD-ROM there are several more electronic corpora of Modern and Present-Day English. The largest of these is the freely accessible British National Corpus (BNC) (http://www. natcorp.ox.ac.uk/), which contains over 100 million words of both written and transcribed spoken English from different registers and varieties from the later part of the 20th century. BNC is also hosted by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University (http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/personal/), who besides historical corpora of Spanish and Portuguese has also compiled three corpora of American English, all of which have a specifically devised search interface and can be accessed freely, namely the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which contains more than 410 million words recorded since 1990, the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which contains more than 400 million words recorded since the 1810s, and the TIME Corpus, which contains more than 100 million words recorded since 1923. Present-Day English corpora may also be parsed, most notably the International Corpus of English (ICE) (http://ice-corpora.net/ice/), which is dedicated to world-wide varieties of English. This project combines various corpora of English from around the globe with each one containing c.1 million words of written or transcribed spoken English dated later than 1989 (Greenbaum 1996). Currently, seven corpora can be accessed at the website after requesting a free licence (Canada, East Africa, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Philippines, Singapore), three corpora can be obtained on CD-ROM (Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand), and several more are being developed. The Linguistic Data Consortium (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/) also hosts a large collection of corpora, such as the New York Times Annotated Corpus, which is available on DVD and contains more than 1.8 million articles published in this newspaper between 1987 and 2007. Work on many more corpora of historical English is in progress. One particularly large example is the Diachronic Internet Corpus of English (DICE) (http://dicecorpus.pbworks.com/), which currently contains c.19 million words from 500 non-fiction
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texts dating from the 16th century to the present day; it is announced to be “openended” and continuously incorporating additions. The envisaged web based application will be freely accessible online at the University of Tampere. Another announced corpus is The Corpus of Early American English (CEAE) (http://www.anst.uu.se/merjkyto/ Early_Am_Eng.htm), a project conducted at the University of Uppsala and associated with HC which focuses mostly on the New England area from around 1600 to 1800 and currently contains c.700,000 words. A unique interdisciplinary project in development at the University of Helsinki is Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics (DECL) (http:// www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/DECL.html), which is aimed at providing a model that also takes into account the importance of manuscript evidence for electronic corpora (Honkapohja et al. 2009).
6 Further projects Besides electronic dictionaries, thesauri, and corpora, a large amount of other academic projects dealing with various aspects of language history are available or in development. In order to give an impression of their range, some prominent examples dealing with particular time periods as well as resources providing access to primary sources are briefly mentioned in this section. Projects may be based on the corpus of one particular text, writer, or period, but use it for more or different purposes than the aforementioned electronic corpora. An example for the Old English period is An Inventory of Script and Spellings in EleventhCentury English at the University of Manchester, which is concerned with written evidence dated to the 11th century, including copies of earlier texts and different scribal versions of one and the same text (Powell 2004). The project has produced the freely accessible MANCASS C11 Database (http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/mancass/ C11database/), which contains the text of 1,884 items identified by Cameron number (Cameron 1973) and manuscript shelfmark. Various searches within the database are permitted. A query for a particular word or stem provides a list of attested spellings occurring within a larger lexical group as well as their type frequencies; their occurrences within a wider context can also be indicated. Spelling variants involving the doubling of certain letters or the substitution of one particular letter within a stem can be searched separately. It is therefore possible to establish which variant spellings of a specific word exist, and which of these are preferred in particular texts or manuscripts. Besides storing orthographic information, the database features also illustrations of handwriting, most notably a palaeographic catalogue of certain letter-shapes and links to their occurrences in specific scribal sequences. Information on these sequences, which frequently include palaeographic images, can also be found by searching for particular manuscripts. Typical letter-shapes used by “scriptors”, who are responsible for writing more than one sequence, may also be displayed. By making these features available the database combines the disciplines of orthography and palaeography, and thereby covers two fields relevant to questions of textual transmission. Various linguistic categories are examined in the Middle English Grammar Project (MEG) (http://www.uis.no/research/culture/the_middle_english_grammar_project/), currently in development at the Universities of Stavanger and Glasgow (Stenroos 2007). Based on a specifically devised corpus, version 1.0 of which is freely accessible at the
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site, this project intends to provide a comprehensive reference grammar of Middle English which is to include a full description of variation and change during this period. There are also three projects which are specifically concerned with regional variation in Middle English and Scots; these are being developed at the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh. The freely accessible Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html), currently in its version 2.1, covers the period from around 1150 to 1325. Version 1.1 of the freely accessible Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS) (http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laos1/ laos1.html) contains mainly documents written in Scots between 1380 and 1500. The digitization of literary documents from this period as well as an extension up to the year 1700 are in progress. Both LAEME and LAOS have been called “daughter projects” of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (LALME) (McIntosh et al. 1986), a printed resource which is currently being revised for online publication (http://www.ling.ed.ac. uk/research/ihd/projectsX.shtml). In their final form, all projects will allow various searches for specific linguistic features including displays of their regional distribution on specifically created maps. With regard to the Early Modern English period, the Shakespeare Database Project (SDB) (http://www.shkspr.uni-muenster.de/) (Neuhaus 1989, 1990), currently in its publication phase at the University of Mu¨nster, needs to be mentioned. It uses the “copy text” printings of Shakespeare’s works as a foundation for a relational database. All original spelling texts are lemmatized, all lemmata are morphologically analyzed and classified according to etymology and date of first occurrence with access to all Shakespearean coinages and contemporary innovations. Variation in usage and later editorial emendations are systematically linked. Spevack (1993) is a printed thesaurus listing based on a previous version of the database using the modern spelling Riverside edition (Evans 1974). Besides projects concerned with specific linguistic categories, the accessibility of primary sources is also of particular interest to historical linguists. The importance of manuscripts and early printed books is stressed in various projects. Whereas mere scans of manuscript folios may be available on the websites of various libraries, such as some belonging to the University of Oxford (http://image.ox.ac.uk/), there are also specific projects which use images as a basis for editions and applications; these usually also include a search engine as well as additional material. The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham hosts the Canterbury Tales Project (CTP) (http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/) (Robinson 2003), which has so far issued four CD-ROMs of individual tales as well as two CD-ROMs of the manuscript Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392 D/Hengwrt 154, also known as the “Hengwrt Chaucer”, and a CD-ROM containing two versions of the Canterbury Tales printed by William Caxton. Both early books can also be accessed freely at the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage. html) and De Montfort University (http://www.cts.dmu.ac.uk/Caxtons/). Several more medieval manuscripts have been digitized in order to provide easy access to primary evidence as well as electronic tools and material for further study. The Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/ seenet/) has so far released CD-ROMs of various manuscript versions of Piers Plowman, as well as William of Palerne, The Destruction of Troy, and Cædmon’s Hymn, which is also accompanied by a printed study of the poem (O’Donnell 2005). The
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CD-ROM of Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf (http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/), version 3.0 of which was released in 2011, contains images of all texts in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv as well as the Thorkelin transcripts and early collations. A new transcript and edition of Beowulf is also included. Another image-based edition of an Old English text by the same scholar, namely the Electronic Boethius from the heavily damaged manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Otho A.vi with additional evidence from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 12, is currently in development (http://beowulf.engl.uky. edu/~kiernan/eBoethius/inlad.htm). Bernard J. Muir’s software for Digitising the Middle Ages (http://www.evellum.com/) includes complete scans and editions of two other Old English poetic codices, namely Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, issued on DVD as The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, which is available on CD-ROM. Additional features, such as bibliographies and audio material, are also provided. Electronic versions of originally printed editions may also be available online, though these do not usually include scans of the original manuscripts. Many digitized editions of Middle English texts have been made available by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ tmsmenu.htm), which grants free access to these for individual use. There are also online editions specifically devoted to particular texts, such as Melissa Bernstein Ser’s freely accessible Electronic Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (http://english3.fsu.edu/~ wulfstan/). These may be intended as teaching aids, such as the freely accessible nine Old English texts and text extracts that form part of a hypertext course pack hosted at the University of Oxford (http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/). Such electronic editions often contain hyperlinks to additional information, which may be displayed on the same screen in the form of frames for ease of reference. The already available editions of the freely accessible Online Corpus of Old English Poetry (OCOEP) (http://www.oepoetry.ca/), which is currently being compiled at the University of Calgary, contain three frames displaying the main text, a glossary and textual notes respectively. Those Old English poems not yet edited are provided in merely textual form, taken from the Old English section of the Labyrinth Library at the University of Georgetown (http://www.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/ library/oe/oe.html), which hosts a digitized version of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) (Krapp and Dobbie 1931–53) in html-format. Despite its title, the freely accessible site Renascence Editions (http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ren. htm) does not provide online editions as such, but merely the electronic text of works printed in English between 1477 and 1799; it may therefore be regarded rather as a corpus.
7 Further resources Besides particular research projects, a whole range of electronic material is available which is useful for historical linguists. One frequently encountered issue is the need for specific letters or other graphs that are not generally included in the standard fonts employed in word processing. Several fonts are freely available for this purpose. The latest version 6.0 of the Unicode Standard, which contains over 100,000 characters, also includes a large number of medieval ones (http://www.unicode.org). Junicode, a
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Unicode font developed by Peter Baker at the University of Virginia (http://junicode. sourceforge.net/), is aimed at medievalists and in its version 0.6.17 contains 3,096 characters. The Titus Cyberbit Font, another Unicode font for historical linguists, can be downloaded at the University of Frankfurt (http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/ unicode/tituut.asp). The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) (http://www.mufi. info/) both gathers additional characters to be suggested for inclusion in future Unicode versions and coordinates the allocation of characters in the Private Use Area. A similar purpose is intended by the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) at the University of Berkeley (http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders/). Bibliographies of printed works can easily be searched in electronic format. Generally, academic libraries hold information on most if not all of their stock within databases that can be consulted by their users. Library catalogues may also be linked with one another. The largest central search engine is hosted by WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/), which provides free access to the bibliographic databases of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide. One of the most frequently consulted bibliographies with regard to language and literature is the Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB) (http://www.mla.org/publications/bibliography/). The electronic online version contains all entries from the annually updated printed version since 1926 and is expanded ten times a year. Another regularly updated electronic bibliography is provided by the Old English Newsletter (http://www.oenewsletter.org/OENDB/index.php), which is freely accessible after registration and incorporates the bibliographies of the printed version on a yearly basis. Bibliographies may also be connected to projects, as seen, for example, in the aforementioned MEC, which contains a searchable hyperbibliography of the works cited in MED; with 5,522 entries it is currently the largest electronic database focusing on publications dealing with Middle English (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/ hyperbib/). A particularly valuable resource with regard to the Early Modern English period and slightly beyond is the freely accessible English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) (http://estc.bl.uk/), which contains bibliographic information on more than 460,000 printed works published between 1473 and 1800. A large amount of digitized publications are in the public domain due to their expired copyright. The freely accessible Ebook and Texts Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/ texts/) is a particularly rich resource; it features more than 1 million items that can be browsed by a search engine. The obtained results are available in various formats: besides pdf-, txt- and djvu-files there is also a “flip book”-application based on jpg-files. Among those books included are also the main volume and the first supplement of Bosworth et al. (1882–1972) as well as Hall (1916). Another notable free e-book site is Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), which currently contains over 33,000 items in html- and txt-format. Works in the public domain can also be downloaded in pdf-format at the freely accessible Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/). Moreover, this resource also provides selective preview pages to books that are still in copyright, many of which are of an academic nature; currently, more than 7 million items can be accessed in this way. There is also a purely historical e-book site, namely Early English Books Online (EEBO) (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home/). It contains bibliographical information on more than 125,000 searchable items printed between 1473 and 1700. More than 110,000 of these are available in digitized form; these can be displayed as gif-images on screen or be downloaded in tiff- or pdf-format. An additional subscription
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to the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) (http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/) allows access to the machine-readable converted text of more than 25,000 items in ASCII. The electronic availability of many academic journals has facilitated access to these significantly. The archive of Journal Storage ( JSTOR) (http://www.jstor.org/) currently contains digitized versions of over 1,300 titles and is continually being expanded. Journals may date as far back as 1665 in the case of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but issues from the most recent years are usually not included. In addition to journals JSTOR features also other collections, such as letters, pamphlets or conference proceedings. Journals may have a freely accessible online archive of past articles, such as the Old English Newsletter (http://www.oenewsletter.org/). Besides digitized versions of printed publications, there are also journals or series that are available exclusively online; these are usually peer-reviewed and freely accessible. They may be concerned with various aspects of historical linguistics, such as Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of Helsinki (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/ journal/index.html), or focus on a specific area of language change, such as Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden (http:// www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl/). There are also interdisciplinary journals of interest to historical linguists, such as the one published by the web-based community Digital Medievalist, which has offered articles on bibliographies and editions of medieval texts (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/), and The Heroic Age, which even has an entire issue dedicated to early medieval languages and linguistics (http://www. heroicage.org/). Online discussion groups are generally used to ask questions and exchange ideas that fall within a specific subject area and may take the form of free mailing lists. Usually, archives of past postings can also be accessed by subscribers. The most prominent academically oriented ones for the purpose of this survey are the History of the English Language List (HEL-L) (http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/hel-l/), and the Historical Linguistics List (Histling-L) (https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l/). Other relevant lists include ANSAX-L (http://www.mun.ca/Ansaxdat/index.html) for Anglo-Saxon studies, and Chaucernet (http://pages.towson.edu/duncan/chaucnet.html) for Chaucer and Middle English. There are also several rather specific lists in which academics may be involved, such as ENGLISC (http://www.rochester.edu/englisc/), which is dedicated to composing texts in Old English (Schipper and Higley 1996). Besides mailing lists, there are also online forums, which can be browsed according to topics; postings are permitted after free registration. Currently active forums are hosted, for example, by Đa Engliscan Gesiðas, a society dedicated to Old English language and Anglo-Saxon culture (http://www.tha-engliscan-gesithas.org.uk/gegaderung/), or by David Wilton’s etymology site (http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/). However, though academics may participate in such forums, they are mostly frequented by the general public. Finally, audio versions of past texts recorded by scholars need to be mentioned. These are available in both digital and analogue format. With the exception of most of Beowulf, the entire ASPR, as read by Michael Drout of Wheaton College, is freely accessible in mp3-format (http://fred.wheatonma.edu/wordpressmu/mdrout/), whereas Beowulf and a selection of other Old English poems with Modern English translations and commentaries are available on CD. The Chaucer Studio at Brigham Young
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University has issued a number of readings in Old and Middle English as well as other medieval languages on CD and audiocassette (http://creativeworks.byu.edu/chaucer/). Visual material that attempts to provide authentic pronunciation is found less frequently. Besides some performances available from the Chaucer Studio on DVD and VHS, a well-known example is Benjamin Bagby’s presentation of Beowulf with accompanying music, which is available on DVD with optional Modern English subtitles (http://www.bagbybeowulf.com/). Performances of Early Modern English plays, on the other hand, are usually pronounced in Present-Day English, as seen in the innumerable examples of modern Shakespeare productions.
8 Summary This chapter has shown that a vast number of electronic/online resources in English historical linguistics is currently available or in development. Though these make research in various fields generally easier, it must not be forgotten that there are also several problematic issues attached to the ever-growing amount of material. Besides the already mentioned possible outdatedness of web addresses, online resources may also be subject to continuous changes and revisions, which may mean that results obtained in earlier versions can no longer be verified. The output given by some queries conducted in OED can even change every three months; more recent searches usually provide more precise results though it is also possible for updates to introduce errors. For this reason, the date of access to online resources and the version number of CD-ROM releases should always be noted. Moreover, any search within electronic/online resources is restricted to the possibilities offered by the respective engines, which may not offer all features required by their users, for example, complex wildcard searches or the resorting of results. Another difficulty is that any particular software is not necessarily compatible with the computer system used by the researcher. Programs developed for Windows may not run on Linux systems, and software intended for Windows XP may have problems under Windows Vista or Windows 7. CD-ROMs may also become unreadable, either through damage or simply due to the aging process, which varies, however, considerably. Though back-up copies for personal use are normally permitted, any further distribution will result in legal issues. Generally, electronic data is lost much more easily than printed or analogue material. Nevertheless, if one is aware of the problems relating to electronic/online resources when consulting these, they can facilitate research to an extent not possible before.
9 References Arista, Javier Martı´n. 1999. English historical linguistics online. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 7: 299–306. Bailey, Richard W., Jay L. Robinson, James W. Downer, and Patricia V. Lehman. 1975. Michigan Early Modern English Materials. Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms in cooperation with University of Michigan Press. Bosworth, Joseph, Thomas N. Toller, and Alistair Campbell (eds.). 1882–1972. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. 1 vol. and 2 suppls. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brewer, Charlotte. 2007. Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Bright, James W. 1912. An Anglo-Saxon Reader, Edited with Notes, a Complete Glossary, a Chapter on Versification, and an Outline of Anglo-Saxon Grammar. 3rd edn. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Cameron, Angus. 1973. A list of Old English texts. In: Roberta Frank and Angus Cameron (eds.), A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, 25–306. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Claridge, Claudia. 2008. Historical corpora. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, 242–259. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Craigie, William Alexander, Adam J. Aitken, Margaret G. Dareau, and James A.C. Stevenson (eds.). 1931–2001. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue from the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth. 12 vols. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, G. Blakemore (ed.). 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Grant, William, David Murison, and Iseabail Macleod (eds.). 1931–2005. Scottish National Dictionary. 10 vols. and 2 suppls. Edinburgh: Scottish National Dictionary Association. Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.). 1996. Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Healey, Antonette diPaolo. 2005. The Dictionary of Old English: The next generation(s). In: Tom Trabasso, John Sabatini, Dominic W. Massaro, and Robert C. Calfee (eds.), From Orthography to Pedagogy: Essays in Honor of Richard L. Venezky, 289–307. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hall, John R. Clark (ed.). 1916. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickey, Raymond. 2003. Corpus Presenter: Software for Language Analysis with a Manual and A Corpus of Irish English as Sample Data. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2004. Using the OED quotations database as a corpus: A linguistic appraisal. ICAME Journal 28: 17–30. Honkapohja, Alpo, Samuli Kaislaniemi, and Ville Marttila. 2009. Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics: Representing manuscript reality in electronic corpora. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier, and Marianne Hundt (eds.), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29). Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008, 451–476. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Howe, Nicholas. 2001. The new millenium. In: Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds.), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, 496–505. Oxford: Blackwell. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene´ Wotherspoon (eds.). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krapp, George P. and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds.). 1931–53. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, and John Reidy (eds.). 1954–2001. Middle English Dictionary. 13 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kyto¨, Merja, Matti Rissanen, and Susan Wright (eds.). 1994. Corpora across the Centuries. Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora. St Catherine’s College Cambridge, 25–27 March 1993. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lancashire, Ian. 2006. Computing the Lexicons of Early Modern English. In: Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe (eds.), The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, 45–62. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Markus, Manfred and Reinhard Heuberger. 2007. The architecture of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary: Preparing the computerised version. International Journal of Lexicography 20(4): 355–368. McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. McSparran, Frances. 2002. The Middle English Compendium: Past, present, future. Dictionaries 23: 126–141.
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Murray, James A. H., John A. Simpson, and Edmund S. C. Weiner (eds.). 1989–97. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. 20 vols. and 3 suppls. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neuhaus, H. Joachim 1989. Shakespeare’s Wordforms: A Database View. In: Heinz-Joachim Mu¨llenbrock and Renate Noll-Wiemann (eds.), Anglistentag 1988 Go¨ttingen: Vortra¨ge, 264–279. Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer. Neuhaus, H. Joachim. 1990. Die Architektur eines Shakespeare Hypertext-Systems. In: HansJu¨rgen Friemel (ed.), Forum ’90 Wissenschaft und Technik. Neue Anwendungen mit Hilfe aktueller Computer-Technologien, 308–316. Berlin: Springer. O’Donnell, Daniel P. 2005. Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multi-Media Study, Edition and Archive with CD-ROM. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Parsons, David N., Tania Styles, and Carole Hough (eds.). 1997–. The Vocabulary of English PlaceNames. Nottingham: Center for English Name Studies. Powell, Kathryn. 2004. The MANCASS C11 database: A tool for studying script and spelling in the eleventh century. Old English Newsletter 38(1): 29–34. Rissanen, Matti. 2000. The world of English historical corpora: From Cædmon to the computer age. Journal of English Linguistics 28(1): 7–20. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, and Minna Pallander-Collin (eds.). 1993. Early English in the Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Roberts, Jane, Christian J. Kay, and Lynne Grundy (eds.). 2000. A Thesaurus of Old English. 2nd edn, 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Robinson, Peter. 2003. The history, discoveries and aims of the Canterbury Tales Project. The Chaucer Review 38(2): 126–139. Schipper, William and Sarah Higley. 1996. ENGLISC: a new listserv discussion group. Old English Newsletter 30(1): 16. Schonfeld, Roger C. 2003. JSTOR: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simpson, John, Edmund Weiner, and Philip Durkin. 2004. The Oxford English Dictionary today. Transactions of the Philological Society 102(3): 335–385. Smith, Albert H. (ed.). 1956. English Place-Name Elements. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spevack, Marvin. 1993. A Shakespeare Thesaurus. Hildesheim: Olms. Stenroos, Merja. 2007. Sampling and annotation in the Middle English Grammar Project. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin and Arja Nurmi (eds.), Annotating Variation and Change. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Available at http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/stenroos/ (last accessed 6 June 2011). Stone, Louise W. and William Rothwell (eds.). 1977–92. Anglo-Norman Dictionary. 7 fascs. London: Modern Humanities Research Association. Sylvester, Louise and Jane Roberts. 2002. Word studies on Early English: Contexts for a Thesaurus of Middle English. In: Javier E. Dı´az Vera (ed.), A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics, 136–159. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wright, Joseph (ed.). 1898–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. 6 vols. London: Frowde.
Oliver M. Traxel, Mu¨nster (Germany)
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73. Resources: Lexicographic resources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Historical dictionaries Dictionaries of particular varieties or geographical areas Slang dictionaries A historical thesaurus Dictionaries and other resources for English etymology References
Abstract This chapter offers a brief overview of the main dictionaries of English which have a historical perspective, or which are likely to be of particular use to historians of English. This is followed by a very short survey of current work in English etymology. Throughout I have aimed firstly to list the main relevant work, and give ample bibliographical references so that it can be located simply and easily; and secondly to alert the reader to some of the most distinctive qualities of each resource, particularly those which might confuse a reader new to a particular dictionary or other resource.
1 Historical dictionaries The period dictionaries all came into being in a sense as children of the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED, Murray at al. 1884–), as part of a series of initiatives by Sir William Craigie in the 1920s (see Aitken 1987). The first edition of the OED sought to cover all but the rarest words found in English from 1150 onwards, but normally only included Old English words if they survived into Middle English or later. The period dictionaries have all sought partly to fill perceived gaps in OED’s coverage, and partly to allow a sharper focus on a particular period, or, in the case of Dictionary of Older Scottish Tongue (DOST, Craigie et al. [eds.] 1931–2002), on a particular variety in a particular period. On the history of all of the dictionaries discussed here, the various contributions in Cowie (2008) provide an invaluable starting point, as on the history of English lexicography in general. The OED is now in the middle of its first ever comprehensive revision, in the course of which data and perspectives from the various period dictionaries play a major part. I will therefore look first at the period dictionaries, before turning to look at the OED in its early 21st century incarnation.
1.1 The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) and other resources for Old English Since the late 19th century the vocabulary of Old English has been served by BosworthToller (Bosworth and Toller 1882–98), a dictionary edited by T. Northcote Toller on the basis of the collections of Joseph Bosworth (which were in part made use of in earlier much shorter dictionaries by Bosworth). A substantial Supplement by Toller, a little over half the length of the original dictionary, was added in 1921, and a much smaller Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda was added by Alistair Campbell in 1972. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1149–1163
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A serviceable hand dictionary for students is provided by Clark Hall (1960). For the letters A to G Old English is now served much better by 20th- and 21st-century scholarship in the Dictionary of Old English (DOE, Cameron et al. [eds.] 1986–). The DOE was one of the period dictionaries which emerged from Craigie’s initiative when the first edition of the OED was nearing completion, but in fact the OED has only ever covered that portion of the vocabulary of Old English which survived beyond 1150, omitting most words and senses which were obsolete before that date, and hence DOE is more truly the successor to Bosworth-Toller than to OED. One distinguishing feature of DOE is its tight and symbiotic relationship with its corpus. The body of surviving Old English is obviously relatively small in comparison with the data available for later periods. DOE has the huge advantage of being based on a comprehensive database of the surviving writings in Old English. Electronic publication of DOE makes it possible to exploit this relationship to the full: the dictionary and the database can be used in conjunction, so that quotations can be viewed in their fuller context, and so that the dictionary’s detailed digest of information on spelling variation or grammatical forms can immediately be explored in greater depth using the database. Thus key questions can be carried further along whichever parameters are of interest to the researcher. One thing that Bosworth-Toller, DOE, and even Clark Hall have in common is that dates are not given for quoted sources within the body of the dictionary entry. The dating of nearly all Old English sources is approximate and presents difficulties of one sort or another, and for the specialist readership of an Old English dictionary the information on dating and regional provenance given in the bibliography of a dictionary will be only the starting point for the exploration of numerous difficulties and controversies. The first edition of the OED tempted fate by assigning dates to its Old English quotations, thus in very many cases appearing hopelessly out of step with modern scholarship from an early 21st-century perspective. Old English material in the new edition of the OED instead follows a tripartite division into early Old English (for significantly early material up to 950, such as the early glossaries or the texts traditionally associated with Alfred the Great), Old English (for the vast bulk of Old English material, beginning roughly from the date of the Benedictine reforms), and late Old English (for material from 1100 to 1150).
1.2 The Middle English Dictionary (MED) The MED (Kurath et al. [eds.] 1952–2001) takes advantage of its position as a dictionary of a single fairly coherent period in the history of English in order to reflect medieval society in unusual detail. This has led to criticism from some that MED is a dictionary which (to state the case very crudely) is overly keen to distinguish different senses for each different context of use. However, this very tendency (and it is certainly no more than that) makes MED an unusually rich source for social and cultural historians keen to explore the contexts in which Middle English words were used. In contrast to this very detailed analysis of meanings and contexts of use, there is only very limited labeling of the regional provenance of particular linguistic forms in the body of each entry in MED. In many ways this reflects the limited state of knowledge in the period when MED’s editorial principles were established, as well as the very cautious approach of its early editors. It is now somewhat offset by the much richer documentation on
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regional provenances provided by MED’s bibliography, especially where this can draw on the documentation of the Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English (McIntosh et al. 1986). A related characteristic of MED entries is that there is relatively little separation of material into different sections according to particular form types: to an unusual degree among the historical dictionaries of English, semantics is the main structural criterion within entries in the MED. One particularly innovative area is the treatment of words when they appear as, or as part of, proper names. Such uses are treated in separate sections at the end of the relevant entries, thus avoiding difficult or sometimes impossible decisions about which sense to assign particular examples to. By this structural device uses as names are also identified clearly as being different in kind from other uses of words, while not being neglected entirely. In the light of this, the treatment in MED of vernacular words which occur in multilingual documents is often surprising: these are routinely assigned to the paragraphs of English examples, presumably because the meaning of the word is not in doubt, but in many cases it is very doubtful which language the word should be interpreted as belonging to. In many cases it would be at least as plausible to regard a vernacular word occurring in a Latin or mixed-language document as being Anglo-French rather than Middle English, but in MED such examples are treated as showing English words without comment (see discussion in Durkin 2009: 173–177). A similar treatment is even accorded to English words occurring as code switches in Cornish documents. If MED’s editorial policy were re-thought in the light of modern work on the complexity of language contact situations it is unlikely that precisely this approach would be adopted. The etymologies presented in MED are extremely short, identifying only the immediate antecedent or donor of a Middle English word, and giving little or no documentation of its range of spelling variation or of its meanings. However, one innovative area is in the treatment of mixed Latin and French etymologies, on which see further Section 6.2 below. A truly revolutionary aspect of the editorial policy of MED is the use of a system of double dating, giving as primary date the date of the witness cited (i.e. a particular manuscript, or in some cases an early printed book), followed in parentheses by the putative date of composition of the text (where this differs). This has the huge advantage that the primary dates, used for ordering quotations and seen first by the reader, are those of the firm documentary evidence. The question of whether or not a particular reading may reflect the authorial text is then raised by the presence of the composition date, with additional evidence being brought to bear on this question when alternative readings are cited from other witnesses. It is important to be aware, however, that many of the editions used by MED are critical editions, giving a base text which is typically based on the readings of a particular witness but with numerous editorial normalizations, emendations, and corrections, which may or may not be based on the readings of other witnesses or on what the editor takes to be the more usual practice elsewhere in the same witness. In such editions an apparatus recording deviations from the base text and the readings is normally given, but very often many changes to the text are not listed in the apparatus, on the grounds that they are not taken by the editor to make a substantive difference to the text. For a linguist the implications of such editorial policies in the editions used by dictionaries can be very significant. To a large extent this is a general problem of any linguistic work based on editions which are not entirely
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faithful diplomatic transcripts of a particular witness. However, in the presentation of data in a dictionary it can be easy to lose sight of these issues, since the user is at a remove from the edition, and it is important that MED’s quotations are approached with due caution, and that recourse is made to the edition (and if possible the underlying witnesses) in all cases of doubt. Fortunately, as noted above, the MED is provided with a very comprehensive bibliography (especially in its expanded electronic version) which permits ready identification of the editions used, with dating information (and often also localization) for each witness. For insightful accounts of the history of MED, in addition to its own prefatory materials, see Blake (2002), Adams (2002), Kretzschmar (2002), which all arose from celebrations for the completion of the dictionary.
1.3 A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) DOST (Craigie et al. [eds.] 1931–2002) has been placed here among the period dictionaries because it covers a period which is entirely in the past, with a cut-off date of 1700. However, since it also describes only English as used in a particular place, Scotland, it could equally be placed in the following section on dictionaries of particular varieties or geographical areas. It covers a fascinating time span, documenting a variety of English with an emergent standard independent of that of the south of England, followed in the 17th century by the beginnings of the decline of that independent standard in the face of pressures from the English of England. The nature of this material shaped the inclusion policy of DOST: DOST is a hybrid – “comprehensive” down to 1600, “supplementary” from 1600 to 1700, when it records only the specially Scottish (Aitken 1987: 105). Throughout its history DOST has striven to define itself as a resource distinctively different from the OED, although in some ways the differences of lexicographical approach can detract from the comparison of the lexis of England and Scotland which should be one of the key innovations made possible by DOST. The methodology of DOST has also changed to an unusual degree during the course of its editorial history. One innovation found already in the entries edited by Craigie and continued by his successors Aitken and Stevenson is the tendency to devote separate entries to different form variants of a single (etymologically defined) word. Such an approach is not unknown in OED or other historical dictionaries, but in DOST it became commonplace and something of a hallmark of the dictionary. In latter years (from approximately the letter R onwards) under Dareau’s editorship a different approach again was adopted to the same question, with for instance to and till being combined under a single entry, on the grounds that the meaning and function of the two words are the same. In this particular instance the theoretical underpinning for such an approach is hard to see: the two words are of different etymology (to being from Old English and till from Old Norse), and are very distinct in form, sharing only the same initial consonant. However, a suggestion is made that the two function as distributional variants in early Scots, although the argument is not pursued very far: “In early use the rule of till coming before vowels or h tends to be observed, later the variation seems to be simply a matter of style.” (DOST s.v. til prep.) Such conflation, which goes much further than would normally be countenanced in most other historical dictionaries, is all the more surprising in the latter stages of a dictionary which in its middle period was marked particularly by its tendency to split material into separate entries which most other historical dictionaries
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would tend to treat in a single entry. Sadly, it appears that limitations on time and resources played a considerable part in such decisions (on this particular example and on criticism of DOST’s earlier policy compare Dareau 2002; for further examples of both the early and later policies see the introductory matter to the last volume of DOST). So far as the dating of quoted sources is concerned, DOST largely follows the policy of the first edition of the OED in generally using putative dates of composition. Scottish National Dictionary (SND, Grant and Murison [eds.] 1931–1976) could be considered here among the period dictionaries, since it follows on chronologically immediately from DOST. Both dictionaries can now be consulted online together as part of the website Dictionary of the Scots Language (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/, last accessed 24 November 2010). However, particularly since SND deals with a period in which the functions of written Scots have been severely curtailed, it will be considered below in the company of other regional dictionaries such as English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, Wright 1898–1905).
1.4 An abandoned dictionary of Early Modern English Another of the projects envisaged by Craigie was a dictionary of Early Modern English. A good deal of preparatory work was undertaken at the University of Michigan, but ultimately support could not be found for the full dictionary project. Reservations rested largely on the fact that the samples prepared were perceived not to be sufficiently distinct from the OED’s coverage of the same period to justify the considerable investment which would have been involved. On the history of this project see Bailey (1985) and Aitken (1987). Today the materials which were compiled for the early modern dictionary are being used to help supplement the coverage of this period for the new edition of the OED, providing the sort of high quality results from targeted reading programs which searching of electronic corpora still cannot match (see further Durkin 2002b).
1.5 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) In 1989 the first edition of the OED (Murray et al. 1884–1928) and its supplements (Murray et al. 1933; Burchfield 1972–86) were brought together in a single alphabetical sequence, forming the second edition of the dictionary (Simpson and Weiner 1989). At time of writing in 2010 a quarter of the new, third edition of the dictionary has been published online (Simpson 2000–). This is the first ever top to bottom revision of the OED. At the same time as new words and senses are being added to the dictionary, all of the existing content is being revised. Extensive searches are being made for antedatings, postdatings, and other examples which make a significant difference to the existing documentation; approximately 50% of all existing lemmas and senses are being antedated. Such examples come from a variety of sources: the OED’s traditional targeted reading of historical and contemporary texts, today making extensive use of non-literary as well as literary sources; other historical and regional dictionaries, including all of those mentioned in this chapter; text corpora and other electronic collections; and direct contributions from dictionary users. Especially for the modern period, the focus remains on published, printed material. All definitions and labels are being reassessed. Pronunciations are being updated, using British and U.S. pronunciation models
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established in Upton et al. (2001). All etymologies are being comprehensively revised in the light of a century of scholarship and the new approaches made possible by modern research tools (see further Section 6.2). The availability of databases of historical texts is changing all the time, and is having a truly transforming effect on the OED’s historical lexicography. There remain some areas of difficulty and of controversy. Notoriously, the coverage of 18th-century vocabulary in the first and second editions of the OED is not so comprehensive as its coverage of other periods (see e.g. Brewer 2007); however, availability of the majority of surviving printed 18th-century material in electronically searchable form (especially through Eighteenth-Century Collections Online [ECCO], Gage Cengage Learning 2009) suggests that there is genuinely a dip in lexical productivity in the 18th century, at least in those varieties and registers which are reflected by surviving printed sources. In many instances where the documentation of the OED presented a gap in the 18th century, it remains impossible to fill this gap, even with the help of such resources as ECCO. Exploring and explaining this further will be a major task for English historical lexicology. The first edition of the OED normally gave the presumed date of composition as the date for its quoted sources. The new policy of dating Old English quotations with the broad periodization eOE/OE/lOE has already been discussed in Section 2.1. For Middle English material OED3 broadly follows MED (see Section 2.2), using documentary dates as the primary dates for ordering material, but also paying close attention to composition dates in selecting examples. This creates some areas of difficulty, e.g. with Middle English works which survive only in 16th- or even 17th-century copies, and which thus appear alongside genuinely 16th- or 17th-century uses if cited. In many cases use of such sources can be avoided without any significant loss to the historical picture presented (it should be remembered that typically only a representative selection of Middle English examples are given in OED anyway). Sometimes, use of such sources is unavoidable, e.g. where the composition date would be the earliest date for a word or meaning: in such cases a note is normally supplied drawing attention to the anomaly. Early modern material (and, where relevant, later material) is also dated by date of publication in OED3, hence examples from Shakespeare are now generally dated rather later than the (sometimes speculative) dates of first performance which were normally used in the first edition; significantly, quotations also follow the text of the witness used, not that of a modern critical edition (see further Durkin 2002b on changes in this period). A similar approach is also applied to Older Scots material, with the result that dates are often much later than those found for the same source in DOST. Another innovation is in the ordering of senses within entries. In the first edition this is generally chronological, i.e. following the earliest date of attestation for each sense, but in some instances senses are placed in what seemed to editors their likely order of historical development from one another, even if this ran counter to the actual dates of attestation. This could be termed a “logical” arrangement of material, but it should be noted that the approach remained diachronically motivated: the intention was to reflect what seemed likeliest to have been the historical development of the senses, rather than the synchronic relationships between the various senses of a word. In OED3 material is ordered on a strictly chronological basis, even where this places e.g. a figurative sense earlier than the literal sense from which it appears to have developed. In some cases this may well reflect historical reality, e.g. where in a borrowing
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situation a figurative meaning may have been borrowed earlier than a literal one (e.g. pregnant, recorded earliest in a figurative meaning, which may have been the first to be borrowed from Latin or French). In others it seems likely that the discrepancy is an accident of the historical record (e.g. milksop, which is recorded earlier in figurative use than in the literal sense ‘sop of bread’, and which is recorded earlier still as a surname). On this issue see Considine (1996), Lundbladh (1997), Considine (1997), Allan (2012). The secondary literature on the OED is huge. On the first edition see especially Mugglestone (2000). On the new edition see Simpson (2004), Simpson et al. (2004), and further references given there.
2 Dictionaries of particular varieties or geographical areas Most of the dictionaries discussed in this section are also, in a sense, historical dictionaries, since they deal with a particular variety or geographical area over a particular time span, and at least some of the documentation is in the form of dated quotations arranged chronologically. However, in most of them this is accompanied by (largely synchronic) data from fieldwork, and the resulting dictionaries are thus somewhat hybrid in character. Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, Wright 1898–1905) was a worthy sister (or at least a close relative) of the first edition of the OED, and continues to be of inestimable value to anyone with an interest in historical dialectology. Its continuing importance is reflected by the considerable time and resources which have recently been devoted to the development of an electronic version at the University of Innsbruck. EDD was a pioneering venture in historical dialect lexicography, and the elegance and familiarity of the result makes it easy to overlook how seamlessly various different types of data are brought together. Most obviously, fieldworker reports are drawn upon alongside the results of reading of print (and some manuscript) sources of the type undertaken by OED. The print sources include many secondary sources (especially dialect glossaries and similar studies), as well as primary sources, drawn from literary publications, journals, newspaper columns, and a wide variety of other types of publication. Modern work on sources of this type has shown significant differences between the features which are salient and hence indicated by spellings in dialect writings by and for native speakers of a particular variety, and those intended for people who are not native speakers of that variety (see Trudgill 2002). EDD presents material drawn from all of these diverse sources side by side, with the result that its listing of form variation at the head of each dictionary entry must be used with care, and with constant reference to the supporting documentation given in these form listings and in the quotation evidence which forms the main body of each entry (on this topic see further Durkin 2010a, Durkin 2010b). For more recent coverage of English regional usage, in addition to (sadly too few) glossaries of individual regional varieties in the 20th century and beyond, EDD is complemented by the record of the speech of mostly elderly speakers of traditional regional dialects in the mid 20th century presented in Upton et al. (1994), based on the material of the Survey of English Dialects. A fundamentally similar framework is followed in The Scottish National Dictionary (SND), which presents similar data for Scotland, over a broadly similar historical
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timeframe. Standard, non-regionally-marked English as used in Scotland is largely outside SND’s remit, although “Scotticisms”, i.e. words or senses found only or chiefly in Scottish English, are included, even when they belong mainly or entirely to the standard language as used in Scotland. In this aspect of its coverage SND thus resembles dictionaries such as A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE, Penny 1996), The Australian National Dictionary (AND, Ramson 1988), or The Dictionary of New Zealand English (DNZE, Orsman 1997) (see below) rather than EDD. Modern U.S. regional usage is wonderfully covered by A Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE, Cassidy and Hall 1985–2002; see von Schneidemesser, Chapter 118). Like EDD and SND, DARE combines the results of fieldwork with quotations from various types of literary sources (the latter especially for earlier periods). Its fieldwork methodology is informed by modern work on dialectology, especially the techniques involved in the editing of dialect atlases. This is reflected most obviously in the splendid maps which accompany many of the entries, but is also reflected more fundamentally in the nature of the data on which information on regional distributions is based. The dictionary’s founder editor comments thus on its inclusion policy, which is rather narrower than for instance SND’s: “DARE’s treated lexicon excludes standard words, words of artificial formation, cant or secret vocabularies, highly technical usages, and popular slang. The borderlines of some of these are very difficult to determine” (Cassidy 1987: 126). The material excluded by DARE is part of the core target vocabulary for numerous dictionaries of regionally defined varieties of English. For US English there are A Dictionary of American English (Craigie and Hulbert 1938–44) and its successor A Dictionary of Americanisms (Mitford 1951–), which both ultimately emerged from Craigie’s scheme for the period dictionaries (see Aitken 1987: 102). Both are now somewhat elderly. A new dictionary of distinctively U.S. English would be an enormous undertaking, and hard to delimit. Similar considerations have thus far stood in the way of a dictionary of distinctively English (or British) English. Other dictionaries of what is distinctive in the vocabulary of various regionally defined varieties of English have fared much better. Each takes as its remit to cover broadly that component of the vocabulary which is distinctive to the regional variety in question, or which originated in it or is strongly associated with it. South African English, Australian English, and New Zealand English are served admirably by A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE), The Australian National Dictionary (AND), and The Dictionary of New Zealand English (DNZE). For Canadian English A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Avis 1967) is available, and a new edition currently in preparation (see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sdollinger/dchp2.htm, last accessed 29 January 2012; see Dollinger, Chapter 119) is eagerly awaited; Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story et al. 1982) is also a valuable resource for the distinctive lexis of Newfoundland. The Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy and Le Page 1980) sets an example for one variety of Caribbean English, followed by Dictionary of Bahamian English (Holm 1982); for general coverage of Caribbean English A Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Allsopp 1996) is invaluable, but a more detailed treatment with more of a diachronic perspective would be warmly welcomed. If we turn to gaps in coverage, these certainly exist even for the English of the British Isles. Irish English is particularly poorly represented (although A Concise Ulster Dictionary (Macafee 1986) is invaluable for a very concise treatment of Ulster English).
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Contemporary Indian English awaits a full treatment (in place of which Yule et al. 1903 remains invaluable; compare also Hawkins 1984, among others). The English of for example Singapore or Hong Kong also presents inviting prospects for lexicographical research.
3 Slang dictionaries Few of the dictionaries so far listed exclude slang, but the specialist slang dictionary can provide many useful perspectives. This said, most slang dictionaries with a diachronic perspective show deficiencies in the historical documentation they offer; it thus often is difficult for the reader to tell factually based statements from educated guesswork when assessing suggested dates of first occurrence, and definitions and etymologies. The great exception to this is A Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS, Lighter 1994–2008), offering (for those parts of the alphabet so far published) a historical dictionary treatment of American slang, with dated illustrative quotations, and definitions and etymologies based on these (and also drawing on the secondary literature where appropriate). Slang in British English has been less well served, although there is a great deal of useful documentation in resources such as Partridge (1984), Dalzell and Victor (2006), or Green (2008). For the early modern period Williams (1994) gives very useful documentation on sexual slang. Jonathon Green’s historical dictionary of slang (Green 2010), which has appeared while this chapter has been in press, is a major new contribution to the field. Regional dictionaries such as AND or DNZE can be useful on slang in local varieties. Contemporary slang dictionaries from earlier periods are an invaluable resource, in most cases long since mined for information in OED and elsewhere, but there doubtless remain discoveries to be made: for an overview see Coleman (2004–08).
4 A historical thesaurus In all of the dictionaries listed in this chapter it is possible to trace linguistic history through word forms. Electronic versions of dictionaries also enable users to make searches on meanings, since it is possible to search the wording of definitions. However, this can be a laborious process, and it is always very difficult to be certain that something has not been missed because a difference of wording in a definition was not anticipated. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED, Kay et al. 2009), in preparation for 40 years at the University of Glasgow, now makes it possible to explore all of the documentation of the OED through word meanings, arranged in a thesaurus structure. The OED’s data is supplemented by a comprehensive Old English wordlist, enabling the HTOED to portray the semantic history of English from the earliest times to the present day. Within each semantic category the time period for which each word has been current in a particular meaning can be seen at a glance, enabling readers to analyze the diachronic development of semantic fields and of meaning relations more broadly. Any given item can then be explored more fully in the OED (or beyond in other dictionaries, or in corpora, etc.). Through the HTOED whole new areas of research in English historical lexicology have now become viable. On the history and development of HTOED see Kay et al. (2009).
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5 Dictionaries and other resources for English etymology This brief section will give an overview of the main sources of information on the etymologies of English words, and will note some major trends in recent work. For introductions specifically to English etymology see Bammesberger (1984) and Lockwood (1995); on more general methodological questions see Durkin (2006b, 2009).
5.1 Etymologies of Old English words For reasons of time and resources, DOE does not cover etymologies. Bosworth-Toller (Bosworth and Toller 1882–98) gives only occasional listings of cognates and parallels in other Germanic languages. OED provides much fuller etymologies, but only for those words which fall within its inclusion policy; the same applies to The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE, Onions et al. 1966). For words which are not included in OED, recourse can be made (by those who read German) to Holthausen (1963), but this is not a full etymological dictionary, and for many words it serves as little more than an index to the relevant sections of Pokorny (1959–69); a very few words are covered in much more detail in Bammesberger (1979). For fuller discussion of Old English words of Germanic descent, it is usually necessary to turn to the etymological dictionaries of other Germanic languages, especially Kluge (2002) and the dictionaries of inherited Germanic strong verbs and primary adjectives edited by Seebold (1970) and Heidermanns (1993) respectively; for inherited nouns Wodtko et al. (2008) is extremely useful.
5.2 Middle English and modern English The fullest accounts of the etymologies of most English words are given in OED, although those not yet revised for the new edition are on average many decades old, and many are badly in need of revision. ODEE is a single-volume etymological dictionary, mostly based on OED’s data, but with some supplementary data and reconsideration of some etymologies, especially those in the earlier parts of the alphabet, which are generally in most need of review in OED. There is some further updating in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Hoad 1986). The period dictionaries (except DOE) all offer etymologies, although these are generally very brief (those in SND tend to be somewhat fuller, and often have useful insights). Among the regional dictionaries DARE is particularly strong in this area. The etymologies in MED are very brief, but do show at least one important innovation: dual etymologies are often considered for words which could, on formal and semantic grounds, be from either Latin or French or both (see Coleman 1995, Durkin 2002a). This lead has been taken up in the new edition of the OED, where the availability of much better documentation on medieval Latin and French (both continental and insular), and more generous editorial resources, make it possible to make detailed comparisons of the semantic and formal histories of words in Latin, French, and English. This work opens up further new perspectives on processes of continuing semantic and/or formal borrowing from one or more donor languages over an extended period of time, as an English word acquires further meanings and/or shows continuing formal influence. In so far as the available documentation allows, a similar methodology can be
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applied in examining borrowings from other languages (see Durkin 2004, 2006a, 2008, 2009). In many cases improved documentation, for English and for donor languages, can help resolve questions about the route of transmission of a borrowed word; e.g. marmalade can be shown probably to be an early, 14th-century, borrowing directly from Portuguese, rather than via French as previously thought (see Durkin 1999). Outside the dictionaries, but interconnecting with them, work on language contact has brought many new theoretical perspectives to the study of borrowing in English in recent decades. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Townend (2002) both consider various situations in which the introduction of words into English may have resulted from transfer when speakers switched from another language to English (i.e. a language shift situation), rather than showing borrowing by speakers of English from another language (i.e. a language maintenance situation); this theoretical perspective has shown most potential when applied to the introduction of words from Norse during the Middle English period. In work which overlaps to some extent, Dance (2003) offers a very valuable detailed consideration of intralinguistic spread of borrowed vocabulary. Such processes are generally not reflected well by even the most detailed historical dictionaries, and accommodating such perspectives is likely to be one of the future challenges for English etymology. Work, of course, also continues on English words of unknown or problematic etymology. A detailed investigation of past suggestions combined with often very daring new hypotheses (frequently involving sound symbolism) is shown by the etymologies showcased in Liberman (2008). There is a good deal of very useful bibliographical material in Liberman (2010). A search for previously unconsidered sources for very early Old English borrowings is shown by the work of Theo Vennemann (e.g. 2002).
6 References Adams, Michael. 2002. Phantom Dictionaries: The Middle English Dictionary before Kurath. Dictionaries 23: 95–114. Aitken, Adam Jack. 1987. The Period Dictionaries. In: Robert Burchfield (ed.), Studies in Lexicography, 94–116. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Allan, Kathryn. 2012. Using OED data as evidence. In: Kathryn Allan and Justyna Robinson (eds.), Current Methods in Historical Semantics, 11–39. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Allsopp, Richard (ed.) and Jeanette Allsopp (contributor) 1996. A Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avis, Walter S (ed.). 1967. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: W. J. Gage. Bailey, Richard W. 1985. Charles C. Fries and the Early Modern English Dictionary. In: Peter H. and Nancy M. Fries (eds.), Towards an Understanding of Language: Charles C. Fries in Perspective, 171–204. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bammesberger, Alfred. 1979. Beitra¨ge zu einem etymologischen Wo¨rterbuch des Altenglischen. Heidelberg: Winter. Bammesberger, Alfred. 1984. English Etymology. Heidelberg: Winter. Blake, Norman F. 2002. On the Completion of the Middle English Dictionary. Dictionaries 23: 48–75. Bosworth, Joseph and Thomas N. Toller. 1882–98. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; Supplement, ed. T. Northcote Toller, 1921; Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda, ed. Alistair Campbell, 1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Brewer, Charlotte. 2007. Reporting eighteenth-century vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary. In: John Considine and Giovanni Iammartino (eds.), Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles in Historical Perspective, 109–135. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cameron, Angus, Ashley Crandell Amos, and Antonette diPaolo Healey (eds.). 1986–. The Dictionary of Old English. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, http://www.doe. utoronto.ca/ (last accessed 24 November 2010). Cassidy, Frederic G. and Robert B. Le Page. 1980. The Dictionary of Jamaican English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. and Joan Houston Hall. 1985–2002. A Dictionary of American Regional English. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. 1987. The Dictionary of American Regional English as a resource for language study. In: Robert Burchfield (ed.), Studies in Lexicography 1987, 117–135. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark Hall, John R. 1960. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edn., with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Coleman, Julie. 1995. The chronology of French and Latin loan words in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 93: 95–124. Coleman, Julie. 2004–08. A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Considine, John. 1996. The Meanings, deduced logically from the Etymology. In: Martin Gellerstam, Jerker Ja¨rberg, Sven-Go¨ran Malmgren, Kerstin Nore´n, Lena Rogstro¨m and Catarina Ro¨jder Papmehl (eds.), Euralex ’96: proceedings I–II: papers submitted to the seventh EURALEX International Congress on Lexicography in Go¨teborg, Sweden I., 1996. 365–371. Go¨teborg: Go¨teborg University. Considine, John. 1997. Etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary: a response. International Journal of Lexicography 10: 234–236. Cowie, Anthony P. 2008. The Oxford History of English Lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craigie, William A. and James R. Hulbert (eds.). 1938–44. A Dictionary of American English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craigie, William A., Adam Jack Aitken, James A. C. Stevenson, and Marace Dareau (eds.). 1931–2002. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ (last accessed 24 November 2010). Dalzell, Tom and Terry Victor. 2006. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Abingdon: Routledge. Dance, Richard. 2003. Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland texts. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Dareau, Marace. 2002. DOST: Its history and completion. Dictionaries 23: 208–231. Durkin, Philip. 1999. Root and branch: revising the etymological component of the OED. Transactions of the Philological Society 97: 1–49. Durkin, Philip. 2002a. “Mixed” etymologies of Middle English items in OED3: Some questions of methodology and policy. Dictionaries 23: 142–155. Durkin, Philip. 2002b. Changing documentation in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: sixteenth-century vocabulary as a test case. In: Teresa Fanego, Bele´n Me´ndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts and Change, 65–81. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Durkin, Philip. 2004. Loanword etymologies in the third edition of the OED: Some questions of classification. In: Christian Kay, Carole Hough, and Irene´ Wotherspoon (eds.), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics. Vol. II: Lexis and Transmission, 79–90. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Durkin, Philip. 2006a. Loanword etymologies in the third edition of the OED: The benefits of a consistent methodology for the scholarly user. In: Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, and Dieter Kastovsky (eds.), Medieval English and its Heritage, 61–75. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Durkin, Philip. 2006b. Etymology. In: Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn., 260–267. Oxford: Elsevier. Durkin, Philip. 2008. Latin loanwords of the early modern period: How often did French act as an intermediary? In: Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti, and Marina Dossena (eds.), Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006, 185–202. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Durkin, Philip. 2009. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkin, Philip. 2010a. Assessing non-standard writing in lexicography. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Varieties in Writing: the Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, 43–60. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Durkin, Philip. 2010b. The English Dialect Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary: A continuing relationship between two dictionaries. In: Manfred Markus, Clive Upton, and Reinhard Heuberger (eds.), Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond. Proceedings of the 15th ICEHL in Munich, August 2008, 199–216. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Gage Cengage Learning. 2009. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Gale Digital Collections. http://mlr.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/ Grant, William and David D. Murison (eds.). 1931–76. The Scottish National Dictionary: designed partly on regional lines and partly on historical principles, and containing all the Scottish words known to be in use or to have been in use since c. 1700; Supplement 2005. Edinburgh: Scottish National Dictionary Association. Available online as part of Dictionary of the Scots Language: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ (last accessed 24 November 2010). Green, Jonathon. 2008. Chambers Slang Dictionary. London: Chambers Harrap. Green, Jonathon. 2010. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Edinburgh: Chambers. Hawkins, R. E. 1984. Common Indian Words in English. Delhi/New York: Oxford University Press. Heidermanns, Frank. 1993. Etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch der Germanischen Prima¨radjektive. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hoad, Terry F. (ed.). 1986. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holm, John A. (ed.). 1982. Dictionary of Bahamian English. Cold Spring, New York: Lexik House. Holthausen, Ferdinand. 1963. Altenglisches Etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch, 2nd edn. Heidelberg: Winter. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene´ Wotherspoon (eds.). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene´ Wotherspoon. 2009. Unlocking the OED: The story of the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. In: Kay et al. (eds.), Vol. I., xiii–xx. Kluge, Friedrich. 2002. Etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch der Deutschen Sprache. 24th edn., ed. by Elmar Seebold. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kretzschmar, William A. Jr. 2002. Following Kurath: an appreciation. Dictionaries 23: 115–125. Kurath, Hans, Sherman Kuhn, and Robert Lewis (eds.). 1952–2001. The Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ (last accessed 24 November 2010). Liberman, Anatoly. 2008. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Liberman, Anatoly. 2010. A Bibliography of English Etymology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lighter, Jonathan E. (ed.). 1994–2008. A Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 1994–97 (Vol. II H-O 1997) Vols. I and II first published as: Historical Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Random House. (From Vol. III New York: Oxford University Press).
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Lockwood, William B. 1995. An Informal Introduction to English Etymology. London: Minerva Press. Lundbladh, Carl-Erik. 1997. Etymology and the historical principles of the OED. International Journal of Lexicography 10: 231–233. Macafee, Caroline A. (ed.). 1986. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, Angus, Michael Samuels and Michael Benskin, with the assistance of Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Mitford, Mathews M. (ed.). 1951–. A Dictionary of Americanisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mugglestone, Lynda (ed.). 2000. Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, James A. H., Henry Bradley, Sir William A. Craigie, and Charles T. Onions. 1884–1928. The Oxford English Dictionary. Supplement and Bibliography, 1933. Supplement, 1972–86 ed. Robert W. Burchfield. 2nd edn., 1989 ed. John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner. Additions Series, 1993–97 ed. John A. Simpson, Edmund S. C. Weiner, and Michael Proffitt. 3rd edn. (in progress) OED Online, 2000– ed. John A. Simpson, www.oed.com (last accessed 24 November 2010). Onions, Charles T, with the assistance of G. W. S. Friedrichsen and Robert W. Burchfield (eds.). 1966. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orsman, Harry (ed.). 1997. The Dictionary of New Zealand English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Partridge, Eric. 1984. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th edn., ed. by Paul Beale. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Penny, Silva, (ed.) 1996. A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pokorny, Julius. 1959–69. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch. Bern: Franke. Ritt, Nikolaus, Herbert Schender Christiane Dalton-Puffer, and Dieter Kastovsky (eds.). 2006. Medieval English and its Heritage. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Seebold, Elmar. 1970. Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch der germanischen Starken Verben. The Hague: Mouton. Ramson, William S. (ed.). 1988. The Australian National Dictionary: a Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simpson, John. 2004. The OED and collaborative research into the history of English. Anglia 122: 185–208. Simpson, John, Edmund Weiner, and Philip Durkin. 2004. The Oxford English Dictionary Today. Transactions of the Philological Society 102: 335–374. Story, George M., William J. Kirwin, and John D. A. Widdowson. 1982. Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Townend, Matthew. 2002. Language and history in Viking age England: linguistic relations between speakers of Old Norse and Old English. Turnhout: Brepols. Trudgill, Peter. 2002. Dedialectalisation and Norfolk dialect orthography. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers, and Pa¨ivi Pahta (eds.), Writing in Nonstandard English, 323–329. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Upton, Clive, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., and Rafal Konopka. 2001. The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Upton, Clive, David Parry, and John D. A. Widdowson. 1994. Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar. London: Routledge. Vennemann, Theo. 2002. Key issues in English etymology. In: Teresa Fanego, Belen Me´ndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts and Change. Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 227–252. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Williams, Gordon. 1994. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. London: Athlone Press. Wodtko, Dagmar S., Britta Irslinger, and Carolin Schneider. 2008. Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon. Heidelberg: Winter. Wright, Joseph A. (ed.). 1898–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. London: Henry Frowde (at the expense of Joseph Wright); subsequently: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Electronic version in preparation at University of Innsbruck: http://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/projects/speed/ (last accessed 24 November 2010). Yule, Henry, Arthur C. Burnell, and William Crooke. 1903. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new edn., ed. by William Crooke. London: Murray.
Philip Durkin, Oxford (UK)
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Introduction Linguistics and philology The textbook Common objectives From HEL to HOTEL Unorthodoxies Summary References
Abstract The typical university survey course on the history of English problematically combines linguistics and history. Conceiving such a course is a challenge for many teachers because combining the two subjects is not easy, partly due to recent relations between philology and linguistics. While choosing a textbook is important to overcoming this impasse, the key to a successful course is determining the appropriate objectives, both fundamentals and otherwise essential aspects of the subject, both historical and linguistic. While students often anticipate the History of English (HEL) as a punishing course, it is possible to make History of the English Language (HOTEL) hospitable, instead. Various instructors cited do so by demonstrating the relevance of the material, engaging students as fully as possible, and capitalizing on the familiarity of certain aspects of language, especially lexis. Surveys are not the only courses appropriate to the subject, and teachers should consider unorthodox approaches and unorthodox sites within the curriculum.
1 Introduction The typical university survey course on the history of English language (HEL) combines linguistics and something called “history”, though what “history” means in this case is not obvious. The course is usually part of the English curriculum, usually fits into a single academic term, and usually covers a millennium or more of language Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1163–1178
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history. For several centuries, the language and the history were helpfully restricted to England and southern Scotland (see Watts, Chapter 80); subsequently, though, they spread over the globe in abundant variety. The course depends on literary and other texts as sources of linguistic data, especially in pre-Modern periods, but the degree to which students encounter English in literary contexts is variable. Sometimes the course is taught by a credentialed linguist who teaches in an English department; sometimes it is taught by a literary scholar, often one who studies Old and Middle English literature and culture, but who may have minimal philological training or interest; occasionally it is taught by someone we might call a philologist, though explicitly philological training in English doctoral programs has been on the wane for decades, especially in the United States. Usually, too, a history of English course focuses on language change, though “change” is not the only historical category potentially valuable in language study. The change model focuses attention on what is often called the “inner history” of English. Celia Millward, in A Biography of the English Language, a leading textbook conceived on the change model, describes inner history as “the changes that occur within the language itself, changes that cannot be attributed to external forces”, whereas the “outer history is the events that have happened to speakers of the language leading to changes in the language” (Millward 1989: 10). This is a very narrow sense of language history, albeit a defensible one. Anyway, how can a course probably taught by a linguist untrained in the histories of Anglophone peoples plausibly account for the history of a language like English, given its age and its many varieties, unless it takes a similarly narrow approach? In fact, there are significant areas of agreement among teachers of the history of English about what to teach in a survey and how to teach it; there are, of course, also significant areas of disagreement about both linguistic and historical content of such a course. This chapter begins with the origins of disagreement, and proceeds to illustrate both agreement and disagreement – first in the array of textbooks available to support the course, subsequently in the practice of individual professors as they identify objectives and subjects essential to the course, as well as an effective pedagogical rhetoric for a subject that unnerves many students – and particularize them in course design and student course work. Surveys are not the only curricular means to teach the history of English, however, and, towards the end of the chapter, I consider ways in which to locate the subject at various curricular sites, representing various ways of approaching it linguistically, historically, and textually. The history of English is a naturally interdisciplinary subject, one in which many elements of a liberal education converge – if professors and students (and administrators) keep that in mind, it can be the most significant intellectual experience of an undergraduate’s career.
2 Linguistics and philology Teaching the history of English language hasn’t been problematic for long, because teaching it at all is a relatively new enterprise. Francis A. March (1825–1911) was the first in America or Europe to occupy a professorship dedicated to English Language and Comparative Philology (from 1855, at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania); his Method of the Philological Study of the English Language (March 1865) was the first textbook of the subject. March reported, in an address to the Modern Language Association, “In 1875 the United States Commissioner of Education sent out a circular to
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our colleges inquiring about their study of Anglo-Saxon. Twenty-three colleges then claimed to be reading some of it” (March 1892: xx), and concluded that “AngloSaxon study, delightful and important in itself to specialists, seems also to be necessary for a solid and learned support to the study of Modern English in college” (March 1892: xxi), thus anticipating survey courses designed to demonstrate the connection by charting the history of the language in between. English, which had been overlooked as obvious before, could now be taught by the principles of classical philology: “The early professors had no recondite learning applicable to English”, March said, “and did not know what to do with classes in it. They can now make English as hard as Greek” (March 1892: xxi). By the mid-20th century, many universities and colleges offered courses on the history of English, some of them focused on “periods” of the language (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English), others spanning the chronological whole. The legitimacy of such courses was questioned, however, during the advent of American structural linguistics. The philological tradition was on the verge of becoming outmoded, even though nearly every intellectual impulse in it was absorbed into what we call linguistics today (see Joseph 2002: 46–47). But Leonard Bloomfield intruded dissonance into what had been an academic harmony, when he put “normal” speech ahead of textual speech, and warned students against the wasted effort of a philological “detour” (Bloomfield 1984 [1933]: 22). In a brilliant rhetorical maneuver, Bloomfield addressed the competition he was constructing between modes of language research – in a footnote: “The term philology, in British and in older American usage, is applied not only to the study of culture (especially through literary documents), but also to linguistics. It is important to distinguish between philology […] and linguistics […], since the two studies have little in common” (Bloomfield 1984 [1933]: 512). Bloomfield spoke of a “detour”, but he really meant “wrong turn”. And what started out as a disagreement about methods and aims quickly gathered ideological force. Since Saussure, linguistics has not been a primarily historical discipline, so “the history of English” is, from a linguistic point of view, problematic, and teaching it unfamiliar territory for the average linguist. Yet Werner Hamacher (2010: 996) suggests in his apothegmatic From “95 Theses on Philology”, “The inner law of language is history. Philology is the guardian of this law and of this one alone”. How can both Saussure and Hamacher be right? Today, we generally consider language to be natural, partly a matter of the brain, and partly a matter of ordered social activity, the sort on which we collect data which we then analyze in the social sciences (see Joseph 2002: 46). But “there is nothing natural about a sense of history” (Frank 1997: 500). How does a course on the history of English reconcile these conceptual tensions in practice, and is that practice historical or linguistic, or in some measure both, or more? At least some of the practice must be historical, and not just an account of English’s internal history, but a reconciliation of linguistic features, the language in which they figure, and other historical phenomena. Even if it is somewhat uncomfortable for them, linguists teaching the history of English must pay some attention to philology. Thus, as Cecily Clark argued, The history of language is part of ‘history’ in the wider sense, and can therefore be tapped for evidence of past socio-cultural patterns. The resultant discipline – already wellestablished – might be called ‘Applied Historical Socio-Linguistics’ or, […] more
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Even in a course taught by someone who identifies as a linguist, focused primarily on linguistic phenomena, students should engage some historical questions by examining artifacts of language in their context. Of course, philology and linguistics are not mutually exclusive. Donka Minkova recently mounted “a renewed defense of the inseparability of philology and linguistics” (Minkova 2004: 7), between which “the breach was noticed early, and many outstanding scholars on both sides of the Atlantic set out to ‘heal’ it […] and argued against the absurdity of philology without theory or theory without data” (Minkova 2004: 9). As Edgar Sturtevant and Roland Kent (1928: 9) pointed out, just about when the breach opened, “In fact, the only justification for a separation between linguistics and philology is the necessity for a division of labor – non omnia possumus omnes”. The terms of this division are at issue whether one ponders them from a meta-pedagogical apex or operates them on the ground, in the classroom: how does one divide the labor in a course on the history of English? Clark, though, has more than data for linguistics or theory for philology in mind when she talks about philology as “linguistic archaeology”; she has in mind an independently justified practice that in the synthesis of linguistics and history and more serves broader purposes of liberal education. She wrote: If one sees life as a continuum, synchronically as well as diachronically, as a seamless fabric in which language is woven together with politics, religion, economic developments and socio-cultural relationships, then all linguistic manifestations are – if rightly understood – capable of illuminating these other spheres, in the same measure as language is enriched, impoverished, reshaped by the contexts in which it is used. (Clark 1990: 65)
Research on the history of English and courses that introduce students to that research are the only sites in which Clark’s insight can be realized. To ignore that is to miss an intellectual opportunity of some significance. As Clark (1990: 65) suggests, “In order to reveal these cross-illuminations, all that is needed is appropriate technique”. Our purpose here is to consider that technique, from a pedagogical vantage.
3 The textbook Since nearly all who teach the history of English will need support in areas of the subject where they are less well prepared, and since no textbook is likely to resolve disciplinary tensions or to cover all relevant linguistics as well as all relevant history (it is difficult to imagine the textbook that would satisfy Clark), the choice of a textbook is vexed but, most teachers of the subject would agree, essential. “The issue is the extent to which a course in the history of the English language can also incorporate an introduction to linguistics” (Cable 2007: 18), and the extent to which it does depends in part on a very practical matter, the choice of a text. Were one to choose Manfred Go¨rlach’s (1997) The Linguistic History of English, for instance, one would either teach a wholly linguistic course or supplement the book
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considerably. In Go¨rlach’s book, “there is hardly any consideration of the external (social, political, cultural) background”, for though, “with due caution”, it can “be assumed to have caused, or influenced linguistic change […], the fusion of the two aspects in many handbooks has tended to lead to a certain degree of unexplained selectiveness of the data, fuzziness of terms and methods, or even chattiness of style” (Go¨rlach 1997: xvi). No one will accuse Go¨rlach of chattiness, but his clinical approach may not animate the subject for many students. Linguistics is not a naturally narrative discipline, but history is, and there may be a pedagogical advantage to use of a less linguistically oriented, more historically expansive text, such as Charles Barber’s The English Language: A Historical Introduction recently revised by Joan C. Beal and Philip A. Shaw, because “first-year undergraduates”, for instance, “need and appreciate a narrative which ‘tells a story’ simply and clearly without ‘dumbing down’ or glossing over difficulties” (Barber et al. 2009: ix). The course that balances linguistics and history would require that students read both books. Some of the best available textbooks attempt such a balance. The classic (and generally admired) attempt is Millward’s (1989), whose commonly accepted distinction between a language’s outer and inner histories informs many textbooks besides hers, notably Brinton and Arnovick’s (2006) and van Gelderen’s (2006). Millward’s longest account of external history, however, is no more than five pages long, and there is inevitably then neither sufficient historical material to please the philologist, nor any very continual integration of linguistic and historical events. The outer history of English may have a profound effect on the inner, but many textbook treatments of their relationship are neither profound nor sustained (cf. Blockley, Chapter 75). If social, political, cultural, or literary histories are not among a teacher’s strengths, the available textbooks will not fill those gaps for either instructor or students. Haruko Momma and Michael Matto believe that today, the usefulness of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ as defining conceptions within HEL may have run its course. Above we referred to a ‘feedback loop’ running between language and its ‘environment’; these terms seem salient to us because they acknowledge that a language makes up part of the environment it inhabits. Language is recognized simultaneously as an agent of history and as a product. (Momma and Matto 2008: 8)
Though some textbooks (notably Smith 1996; Leith 1997; Crystal 2004; and Mugglestone 2006) resist the binary construction of inner and outer, it is not clear that there is a trend away from it, partly because those books that resist it (and often conventional periodization, as well) represent different paradigms altogether. How does one choose a text, then? As Thomas Cable, living co-author with the late Albert C. Baugh of America’s leading textbook, A History of the English Language (5th edition 2001), remembers, The cliche´ had it that the Baugh text was strong on the ‘external’ history but weak on the ‘internal’ history. […] The problem for me was that Baugh’s text presented much more about the external history than I had ever learned, leaving me little opportunity to expand on the text in lecture and discussion. On matters that I did know something about and that my graduate education had prepared me to teach – changes in the phonological system between Old and Middle English, for example – the text did not seem to invite elaboration and complication of its succinct story. (Cable 2007: 17)
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Cable seems to argue for teaching to one’s strengths: if you are a linguist, choose a linguistically oriented book of which you can make the most; if you are a philologist, rely on a text focused on external history, and situate language history within larger histories. Alternatively, one might choose a textbook that does best what one does not do – perhaps text and teacher should complement each other. My purpose here is not to assess the available textbooks; that is the subject of another chapter in this volume (see Blockley, Chapter 75). But choosing a textbook is a significant pedagogical consideration: it defines the sort of course an instructor intends to teach. There is a good argument for teaching what one knows best exceptionally well, and so promoting student enthusiasm for the subject. Courses that balance historical and linguistic materials and methods, however, can be very dynamic, with both teacher and students relying on the textbook when they can, but supplementing it continuously from what they know of various disciplines and enacting the study of English language in that exchange.
4 Common objectives There is a very high level of agreement among those who teach the history of English about the fundamental principles any student receiving credit for a course should take away from it. There is considerably less agreement on which topics are essential to conveying those principles, as well as the fullest possible range of historical linguistic knowledge about English.
4.1 Fundamentals In the broadest terms, nearly all courses on the history of English advance three basic linguistic concepts. Glenn Davis (2007: 27–34), in “Introducing HEL: Three Linguistic Concepts for the First Day of Class”, articulates the concepts as follows: (1) “Languages are Systematic and Rule-Governed”; (2) “Spoken Languages are Constantly Changing”; and (3) “The Primary Goal of Language is Communication”. It may not be necessary to introduce all three concepts on the first day of class, and not all teachers will agree that the concepts are equally important to the course, yet they are all addressed, sometimes only indirectly, in nearly every textbook and every course syllabus I have read. Primary among the three concepts is that about “change”, and it is always introduced early in a course that relies on a textbook, if the course follows the book’s presentation of the subject. As already noted, Millward (more or less) begins with change and invests a great deal in setting the terms on which we should understand it (Millward 1989: 5–13), but it comes up quite early in Brinton and Arnovick (2006: 9–18 and 20–22), van Gelderen (2006: 7–10), and Go¨rlach (1997: 9–24). Emphasis on “change” is natural to a conventional linguistically-oriented course, which measures it in terms of the “rules” and “system” identified in Concept (1). If one mounted a critique (within linguistics) of the paradigm represented by Concept (1), thus also a critique of Concept (2), notions of “system”, “change”, and “history” would be problematic. Imagining such an unconventional approach is not idle speculation; it is entailed, for instance by William A. Kretzschmar’s The Linguistics of Speech (2009, esp. 263–271). An advanced course might interrogate assumptions
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about language change after considering Kretzschmar’s argument, as it might historicize the history of English with Giancarlo (2001) as a case study. But textbooks, by their nature, march to the conventional wisdom – orthodoxy sells, and textbooks are made by textbook publishers with profit in mind. Even more historically-minded textbooks discuss language change in conventionally linguistic terms early in the courses they outline (see Baugh and Cable 2001: 16–17; Barber et al. 2009: 32–48). After the Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL)-3 conference, participants in the conference’s pedagogy workshop produced a collection of Teaching Materials: The History of the English Language (hereafter TM) (Participants in the HEL Pedagogy Workshop at SHEL-3 2004). Some syllabi and assignments in TM focus on change, while others assume its central role without treating it explicitly. For instance, Anne Curzan (University of Michigan) contributes a syllabus which focuses on “Language Change and Attitudes toward Language Change” in the second meeting, supplementing Millward with chapters from Jean Aitchison’s (2001) Language Change: Progress or Decay? Jeannette M. Denton (Baylor University) describes a final course project that “involves documentation of how a line or two of Old English text changes in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexis over time through to the present day”. (Unfortunately, TM is unpaginated, so no page numbers are provided here.) In a homework assignment, Betty S. Phillips (Indiana State University) asks students to investigate the relationship of “word-formation & semantic change”. In “A Random Introduction to the Uses of Dictionaries: Seeing what we can learn from a romp in the reference room”, Susanmarie Harrington (currently of the University of Vermont) asks that students investigate issues raised by chronologically various versions of the Lord’s Prayer: she doesn’t use the word change in the assignment, but questions like “What is the Old English source for Modern English loaf?” and “In general, does the ME appear to be more similar to the OE or the later version?” implicitly identify change as the exercise’s central motif. As suggested earlier, conventional notions of language change assume some version of Davis’s Concept (1): they depend on systems and rules. Nevertheless, this is a less obvious emphasis of textbooks and course materials. When it is an explicit, organizing proposition, Concept (1) appropriately appears before Concept (2), for instance in Millward (1989: 1), who observes that “All Languages Are Systematic”, Brinton and Arnovick (2006: 4), and Barber et al. (2009: 12–14). Baugh and Cable, the most philological of texts, begins with a section revealingly titled “The History of English Language a Cultural Subject” (Baugh and Cable 2001: 1–2). Still, rules are a subject throughout the book, from discussion of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws to discussion of dialectically salient features of contemporary American English. In TM, engagement with system and rules is also often implicit, as when Curzan asks within an exercise that introduces corpora, “How many times does the form digged ‘dug’ appear in the King James [Bible]?”, which is really an invitation to consider historical change of the distribution of strong and weak verbs in English. Sometimes, though, recourse to rules is explicit, as when Denton, in the final project mentioned earlier requires that students “Apply the phonological changes to each word [in the passage of Old English selected] using the IPA to represent both the stage to which the rules apply and the output of those changes”. Davis’s Concept (3), “The Primary Goal of Language is Communication” is much less frequently an explicit subject of textbooks and course materials. It is the subject
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of van Gelderen’s (2006: 1) opening sentence, and Millward (1989: 4) addresses it cursorily under the heading “All Languages are Conventional and Arbitrary”. Still, it operates in almost all courses because textbooks (not Go¨rlach, though) and supplementary materials usually turn to texts and textual production as an external motive for linguistic change, and so ground language in communicative behavior. When teachers focus student attention on the Lord’s Prayer, as they do more than once in TM, they are joining linguistic system and language change to social contexts in which communication is a central (but not always the only) goal – a more careful formulation of the concept might reconcile “reflection”, “expression”, and “communication”. This underserved concept, however, is potentially the most important in teaching the history of English – it underpins Clark’s “linguistic archaeology”, and makes the history of English a hub of multidisciplinary inquiry rather than a narrowly specialized course in historical linguistics. To reiterate: no textbook, indeed, no course, can encompass all of the history or all of the linguistics relevant to English. For this reason, the manner in which a teacher supplements a text with “linguistic archaeology” in order to serve Davis’s Concept (3), the degree to which students are invited to go on a dig among the human social behavior packed into “communication”, is an important measure of any course’s success. Uncovering historical artifacts and reconstructing the culture to which linguistic structure and change correspond are intellectual adventures for teacher and students alike.
4.2 Essentials While those teaching the history of English language tend to agree on fundamentals, they do not always agree on what is otherwise “essential”. The vastness of the data and the brevity of the academic term require that teachers choose examples that capture, one might say, more than their fair share of linguistics and history but are thus unusually helpful in focusing the course, as well as providing students with memorable access to the subject – one would satisfy the demands of subject and students at the same time, which is, after all, the pedagogical ideal. Anyone teaching a course on the history of English, and everyone committed to the subject, should ask, as Tara Williams has recently, “What does it mean to know English as a language?” (Williams 2010: 165). The assignments, activities, exercises, and resources in TM suggest (usually obliquely) some of what those teaching the history of English consider important and instructionally useful. For instance, Robert Fulk (Indiana University) has students compare various forms and uses of the Old English subjunctive to the narrower repertoire of Modern English use, so that they can examine the effect of the shift from synthetic to analytic structure on a grammatical category like MOOD, for instance, in the decoupling of mood and inflection. Phillips expects students to understand the operations of Grimm’s Law, as an example of systematic historical sound change that connects Modern English to its Old English, Germanic, and Proto-Indo-European roots. Curzan asks students to conduct a “Historical Investigation of a Grammatical Rule or Point of Usage”, partly to expose the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive rules, partly to historicize usage, and thus to open it to linguistically and historically informed criticism. In another exercise, Curzan asks questions like “What happened during Middle English to make the spelling of these words diverge from the phonology? lamb,
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comb; sword, two (but swim, swallow); which, what” and “How did the verb go acquire the past tense went?” From questions like these, we can infer that Curzan thinks of changes in relations among inflected and uninflected forms, the rise of consistent spelling in a rising standard variety of English, processes like conversion (functional shifting) and suppletion, as something like essential to an undergraduate grasp of the history of English. Curzan’s approach is oblique because students aren’t given answers but are expected to construct them from evidence they’ve learned to muster. But it also very effectively integrates linguistic and historical issues – or more precisely, the best student answers do so. Mary Blockley (University of Texas at Austin) argues that a specific “minimal” set of issues is ‘essential’ not so much in representing core concepts of linguistics as a science, but rather in the paramedic sense of indispensible – whether or not these perceived units and processes turn out to be central to the history of English, you cannot describe the set of language changes that encompass English without knowledge of and reference to them. (Blockley 2008: 18)
Her ten essential topics are palatalization, allophones, regularized do, stress shift, grammaticalization, phonemic length, complementation, diphthongization, the putative ungrammaticality of you was, and raising and fronting. As Blockley (2008: 23) remarks, they “surface in any phase of description that goes above the level of the lexical word or plunges below the surface of standardized spelling’s imperfect record of sound”. These topics enable any number of reinforcing lectures, discussions, and assignments to plumb them; they are linguistic, of course, but even Blockley’s brief descriptions of them draw on textual and cultural history. Blockley generously admits that some other set of ten topics might do as well as hers, but the topics are less important than the pedagogical example Blockley sets in attempting to catch the most history and linguistics possible in the fewest topics. A short list of essentials won’t keep Blockley or any other teacher from engaging a long list of subjects, but serious teachers of the history of English should attempt to derive a similar short list, as a heuristic – as a model, Blockley’s article is required reading. If one’s imagination fails, one can always fall back on Blockley’s list.
5 From HEL to HOTEL The difference between HEL and HOTEL is the difference between punishment and hospitality. Unless one believes that students learn best when they think their homework is torture, one should promote the best learning attitude by using the latter acronym, the modern rather than the medieval one, and conceiving the course to justify it. According to those who teach it, the history of English has a bad reputation. K. Aaron Smith (2007: 71) (Illinois State University) believes that students “often walk away simply with the idea that Old English […] is hard and scary”, and, of course, Old English sets the tone for a chronologically organized course. Felicia Jean Steele (The College of New Jersey) revised her approach to the course because her students felt an unusually high “level of anxiety” and were “discomfited by the unfamiliar material” (Steele
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2007: 35–36). Jo Tyler (2005: 465) (University of Mary Washington) “is confronted each semester with these ‘apprehensive and resentful’ students”. Jeremy Smith (1996: x) (University of Glasgow) notes that “the subject retains a reputation for difficulty and dryness which has tended to deter students from taking it up”. One suspects that teachers are at fault, because, as March (1982: xxi) put it, “they can now make English as hard as Greek”. What strategies and practices can ameliorate students’ experience, so that, even if the history of English is hard, students understand its value and perhaps even enjoy it?
5.1 Relevance Many teachers of the history of English strive to make the subject relevant to the professional lives of students who take the course so “make[s] explicit connections between linguistic analysis and issues of concern to English majors and language arts teachers” (Tyler 2005: 465). The work for her course includes reflective essays and a “teaching portfolio” meant to project learning from the course into future teaching situations. There are pitfalls to teaching in this mode: even if one gauges students’ future needs correctly, it is unlikely that the school curriculum is as adventurous or challenging as higher education is supposed to be, so students may be shortchanged. This caveat considered, Tyler supplements her centrally linguistic materials with Leith (1997) and Geoffrey Hughes’s (2000) A History of English Words, and she also deals lightly with stylistics in a unit on literary devices, so averts the potential danger. Relevance, however, need not be understood as professional utility. Curzan’s TM syllabus, for instance, asserts Throughout the course, we will work to establish the connections between the historical events and features that we are studying and the state/status of Modern English […] On most days, we will also begin the class with questions about Modern English language and literature that we will be able to answer by the end of class through examining the day’s material.
Students know their own language; they want to know more about it. The history of English perhaps matters most to students when it helps to explain the way we talk now or our attitudes about that talk.
5.2 Engagement Students learn most when they do the work, and one way of reassuring them of the value of HOTEL is to keep them elbow deep in the language. Throughout TM, teachers send students into the library, into corpora, out into the community in order to investigate the language. Sometimes they answer questions posed by instructors; sometimes they are encouraged to come up with their own questions. Of course, such exercises introduce students to language resources, and to some protocols of actual research, but, as opposed to reading a textbook, they are effective because they focus student attention and reward that attention with knowledge about English, all the while assuring students that they have the ability to ask and answer serious questions about the
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language and its history. While the subject requires a certain amount of rote learning (terminology for processes, which vowels are low or back, etc.), the anxiety some students feel is alleviated when what they’ve learned the hard way is reinforced in the course of figuring something out.
5.3 Familiarity: the argument for words Students are familiar with words and relatively comfortable with them – more comfortable than they are with phonology, for instance. While we should not ignore other linguistic levels in HOTEL, words can illustrate a lot of what we hope students will learn, including, for instance, most of the processes and features among Blockley’s essentials. Lexis is also the least systematic of linguistic categories, the most culturally bound, and so the easiest to talk about historically. As C. S. Lewis (1960) demonstrated in Studies in Words, one can uncover a great deal about a culture by examining the etymologies and semantic development of just a few words exhaustively, though to constitute an effective history the words must be chosen carefully. Generally, HOTEL has not been designed to imitate Lewis’s approach, but many iterations of the course emphasize words. Eugene Green (Boston University) provides a syllabus in TM that addresses meaning in language broadly, but subjects listed for most weeks are focused on words: “Putting words together and English in historical contexts”, “Words in context and American conversational tendencies”, “Word meanings and concepts and creativity”, “Synonymy and word choice in dialects”, etc. In most cases, the word focus is less insistent, but Curzan requires that students write a word history, Phillips has them explore historical word-formation and semantic change, and, in the assignment described earlier, Denton’s students are required to take every word of their short Old English text through every stage of development to the present day, at least those that have lasted until the present day. Even Tyler’s assignments turn occasionally from questions of “change and stability […] rules of grammatical usage [… and] what language changes have prompted difficulties for English teachers and students” to words, idioms, and proverbs. There are many excellent resources for word study, notably the Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson [ed.] 2000–), an introduction to which is an essential ingredient of any history of English course. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Pickett et al. 2000; henceforth AHD4) is, among general dictionaries, especially historically oriented: etymologies go back to PIE, and there is an appendix dictionary of PIE roots by Calvert Watkins with copious examples of modern reflexes. (Those who want to pursue the ancient roots of English more thoroughly could supplement a history of English text with Watkins’s 2000 The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots). Throughout AHD4, there is a generous selection of “Word History Notes”, which are the model for entries in Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus (American Heritage Dictionaries 2004) and More Word Histories and Mysteries: From Aardvark to Zombie (American Heritage Dictionaries 2006). These and the word history notes in AHD4 illustrate all sorts of historical and linguistic processes and can be assigned prior to a class meeting to set up discussion, used as the basis for any number of assignments, or presented as a model for a word history assignment like Curzan’s in TM. One could easily design a wonderful exercise for advanced classes from material in Anatoly Liberman’s (2010) A Bibliography of English
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Etymology: Sources and Word List: a teacher could set a student on the trail of any of the words in Liberman’s word list; the student could check material among Liberman’s sources and consult other references and, on the basis of all of it, write a fairly sophisticated etymology (for more about Liberman’s pedagogical uses, see Adams 2011).
6 Unorthodoxies Rather than organizing HOTEL according to periods or linguistic categories, one might instead focus insistently on texts, as Russom (2007) suggests is appropriate because it best integrates the language and literary interests within a Department of English Language and Literature. David Crystal, in The Stories of English, is also more often focused on texts and literary figures than the conventional textbook, and his mode is incurably narrative, though he admits that “telling several stories simultaneously is not something which suits the linear expository method of a book” (Crystal 2004: 2), nor, one might argue, does it suit the linearity of traditional survey courses. Crystal’s book is especially good for graduate courses and an excellent resource for teachers who want to pause in the linear presentation of English, weaving something philological from the warp of inner with the woof of outer history. But one can also change the subject from historical change in the structure of English itself, to representing language attitudes, both enacted and reflected. Lynda Mugglestone (2006: 2) explains of her A History of the English Language that “the wider emphasis throughout is […] placed on the twin images of pluralism and diversity, and on the complex patterns of usage which have served to make up English”. This requires an approach to any history of English course captured by Richard W. Bailey’s (2002: 466) question, “In our histories of English, where are those people who spoke the language?”. Bailey and Mugglestone argue for particularity in a discipline that has tended to generalize; while no one denies that the generalization is necessary, one might argue so is the particularization. In a sense, they are working in precisely the opposite direction from Blockley, since, as Mugglestone (2006: 3) writes, “Any history of the language is, in this respect, enacted through innumerable voices”. Yet anyone listening to voices may invite them to speak on Blockley’s essentials, and Blockley’s essentials are undoubtedly illustrated by innumerable voices, so the two tendencies construct a useful tension – in the best courses, they are by no means mutually exclusive, and might best be seen as mutually dependent. Or one can abjure the need for periods or chronology, structural essentials, or the interpenetration of inner and outer histories and frame the course theoretically. Jeremy Smith attempts a historiographical approach to the history of English, concerned with “how the discipline of linguistic history may be pursued […] using selected phenomena in the history of English to exemplify the dynamic processes of change involved” (Smith 1996: 3). This opens up the history of English course to all sorts of sociolinguistic and historical methodologies, such as those of Kretzschmar and Giancarlo, mentioned earlier, though in a course designed on Smith’s example, one would draw on vast and eminently flexible archives of historical and theoretical texts. Or one can turn expectations inside out, into a new configuration, in a sort of intellectual cat’s cradle, as Michael Matto (Adelphi University) does: the “tendency towards” teaching the “‘social history’” of English
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challenges the scientific model, but the challenge has not to date been brought with much gusto […] I am wondering what happens if we complete a radical move towards history and as not ‘how do social forces account for language change?’ but, instead, ‘how does language affect historical, social, or cultural change?’ (Matto 2007: 63)
In any event, the survey, however well supported by textbooks, traditional approaches, and institutional assumptions, is by no means the only legitimate course in the history of English.
7 Summary Like Minkova, Richard W. Bailey (2002: 449): “argue[s] for a renewed philology, one far more comprehensive than any definition of this inquiry usually offered in the twentieth century”. Courses in the history of English can be as ambitious and as instrumental as other forms of scholarship in this renewed philology, and there are many opportunities to teach the history of English beyond the traditional survey. For instance, several universities offer at least occasional courses on English etymology, sometimes conceived as specialist courses for select students, but sometimes conceived more inclusively for large enrollments (examples of the latter include courses by John Considine at the University of Alberta and Gerald Cohen at the University of Missouri – Rolla). Following Bailey’s and Mugglestone’s advice, a course could focus on recovering historical language attitudes, with students quite active in finding the speakers and listening to their voices. In TM, Brad Benz (Fort Lewis College) describes a “Place Name(s) Project” in which students select a cluster of geographically connected names and then, for each name, examine the following: 1) the period when it was named, by whom, what it means & so on; 2) other names it has gone by and differences in meaning …; 3) the etymology of the name itself …; 4) the kind of element involved (e.g., personal name, description of landscape or vegetation, commemoration, etc.); 5) the form of the place name …; 6) an extended consideration of what the name tells us about the external – a maybe internal – history of the language, the people, and the area.
This project is only a small part of a survey, but it reminds us that the history of English can be examined usefully from a primarily philological vantage. Why not offer a full course in English historical onomastics, one that captured most (not all) of Blockley’s essentials, examined a familiar aspect of language, at least on the surface, all the while promoting student engagement through assignments like Benz’s? It would be exactly the invitation to linguistic archaeology Clark had in mind. Such a course cannot accomplish what a survey course accomplishes, but it can come close and do things survey courses can’t do. One of these is to enable the interest of students who won’t commit to a survey but who are attracted by topics such as names and naming, slang, language attitudes, usage, and others that come up in survey courses. At the end of such a course, invariably a student will say to me, “What really interested me was X”. Perhaps the student wouldn’t have known that without a survey to introduce the interest. But if it was a pre-existing interest, a survey can do little to cultivate it. It may be of pedagogical advantage to indulge in niche marketing, on the
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principle that “one size does not fit all”. If we offer more non-survey courses in the history of English, if we develop more opportunities to incorporate the history of English within a degree, we may better communicate the value and pleasure of linguistic archaeology or English historical linguistics, whichever we choose to emphasize. Further, we need not teach the history of English in whole courses devoted to language study. Instead, it can constitute part of any course on a literary subject: students can compile a historical gazetteer while studying Dickens, or explore language attitudes among Jane Austen’s characters and contemporaries, just to mention two rather obvious examples. As many of the exercises in TM suggest, the history of English is in every English text. While anyone can benefit from HOTEL, students in the humanities and social sciences (especially linguistics and anthropology) find it immediately relevant to their broad curricular concerns. Primary among these are students of English literature and culture. Recently, the Modern Language Association, with support from the Teagle Foundation, studied undergraduate majors in language and literature, finally issuing a report that noted, “As readers become cognizant of the complexities of the linguistic system – its codes, structures, and articulations – they become mindful of language and of languages as evolving, changing historical artifacts and institutions, intricately bound up with the cultures expressed through them” (MLA Teagle Foundation Working Group 2009: 289), a sentiment that converges with Cecily Clark’s “linguistic archaeology”. At its most radical, Tara Williams (2010: 169) (Oregon State University) suggests, HOTEL “not only gives students the necessary historical and linguistic foundation for their reading but also makes them aware of the contingent nature of that foundation”. Ever optimistic, Thomas Jefferson (as quoted in Bailey 2002: 466) declared, “We want an elaborate history of the English language”. Scholars tend to respond to his appeal with more books and articles, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course, unless we forget that college and university courses, indeed our very classrooms, are excellent sites for that elaboration.
8 References Adams, Michael. 2011. Review of Anatoly Liberman, A Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List. NOWELE 60/61: 231–244. Aitchison, Jean. 2001. Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. American Heritage Dictionaries. 2004. Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. American Heritage Dictionaries. 2006. More Word Histories and Mysteries: From Aardvark to Zombie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bailey, Richard W. 2002. A Thousand Years of the History of English. In: Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, 449–471. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Barber, Charles, Joan C. Beal, and Philip A Shaw. 2009. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 2001. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Blockley, Mary. 2008. Essential Linguistics. In: Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (eds.), A Companion to the History of the English Language, 18–24. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1984 [1933] Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Brinton, Laurel J., and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2006. The English Language: A Linguistic History. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press. Cable, Thomas. 2007. A History of the English Language. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 17–25. Clark, Cecily. 1990. Historical Linguistics – Linguistic Archaeology. In: Sylvia Adamson, Vivien Law, Nigel Vincent, and Susan Wright (eds.), Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 55–68. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Crystal, David. 2004. The Stories of English. Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press. Davis, Glenn. 2007. Introducing HEL: Three Linguistic Concepts for the First Day of Class. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 27–34. Frank, Roberta. 1997. The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96(4): 486–513. van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Giancarlo, Matthew. 2001. The Rise and Fall of the Great Vowel Shift? The Changing Ideological Intersections of Philology, Historical Linguistics, and Literary History. Representations 76: 27–60. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1997. The Linguistic History of English: An Introduction. London: Macmillan. Hamacher, Werner. 2010. From “95 Theses on Philology”. PMLA 125(4): 994–1001. Hughes, Geoffrey. 2000. A History of English Words. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. Joseph, John E. 2002. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kretzschmar, William A. 2009. The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leith, Dick. 1997. A Social History of English. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Lewis, C. S. 1967. Studies in Words. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liberman, Anatoly. 2010. A Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List. Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press. March, Francis A. 1892. Recollections of Language Teaching. PMLA 7: xix–xxii. March, Francis A. 1865. Method of the Philological Study of the English Language. New York: Harper & Brothers. Millward, Celia M. 1989. A Biography of the English Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Minkova, Donka. 2004. Philology, Linguistics, and the History of [hw] ~ [w]. In: Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 7–46. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Matto, Michael. 2007. The English Language in History. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 63–70. MLA Teagle Foundation Working Group. 2009. Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature. Profession: 285–312. Momma, Haruko and Michael Matto. 2008. History, English, Language: Studying HEL Today. In: Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (eds.), A Companion to the History of the English Language, 3–10. London: Blackwell. Mugglestone, Lynda (ed.). 2006. The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickett, Joseph P. et al. (eds.) 2000. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Russom, Geoffrey. 2007. Literary Form as an Independent Domain of Validation in HEL Pedagogy. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 47–54. Simpson, John (ed.). 2000–. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. online. Oxford University Press. (www.oed.com/). Smith, Jeremy. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Usage. London/New York: Routledge.
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Smith, K. Aaron. 2007. The Development of the English Progressive: A Felicitous Problem for the Teaching of HEL. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 71–88. Steele, Felicia Jean. 2007. Studying like a Scientist: Adapting Successful Pedagogies from the Sciences to HEL. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 14(1): 35–46. Sturtevant, Edgar H., and Roland G. Kent. 1928. Linguistic Science and Classical Philology. The Classical Weekly 22.2 [No. 586]: 9–13. Participants in the HEL Pedagogy Workshop at SHEL-3. 2004. Teaching Materials: The History of the English Language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Tyler, Jo. 2005. Transforming a Syllabus from HEL. Pedagogy 5(3): 464–471 and 479–481. Watkins, Calvert. 2000. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Williams, Tara. 2010. The Value of the History of English Course for the Twenty-First Century. Profession: 165–176.
Michael Adams, Bloomington/Indiana (USA)
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Introduction Internal and external histories of textbooks The “voice” of textbooks Textbooks in the 21st century Summary References
Abstract The disparaged yet subtly influential medium of the textbook seems poised for great changes under the complementary pressures of continual updating made possible by website-based information technology and the totalizing effect of the globalization of English. The variety and quantitative sophistication of research on contemporary varieties of the language should inspire more rigorous approaches to the analysis of historical evidence, and new answers to the questions of how and why the language has changed, though the daunting linguistic paucity of the merely written record has tended to enforce conservatism. While 19th-century exercises in linguistic periodization directed at a popular audience reveal at a first reading only the embarrassing disparity between their assumptions about the forces shaping linguistic change and ours, there now can be a historiography of English that seeks to remedy its own limitations through exploiting connections with disciplines such as archeology and language acquisition.
1 Introduction The history of English in university level departments of American, British, and European universities amounts to a truncated and circumscribed introduction to historical linguistics. Wherever taught, to students for whom it is a first language or not, forks in the road quickly present themselves, and different books make different maps of Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1178–1190
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the material. A history of the English language has at a minimum to describe sequential change in sounds, inflections, and syntax, or what is usually called internal history, which is the default assumption in current textbooks. Lining up these changes with not exclusively linguistic events is the role of external history, the role of which has lately been correspondingly minimal. The implications of this bifurcation and the effects on assumptions and methodology are there from the beginning, and become particularly acute as a textbook moves structurally above the level of the word into the sentence and its functions (Traugott 1972). The traditional support role of external history comes somewhat less in the form of referencing literarily ambitious (and legible) authors of texts and, increasingly, in timelines of events, preferably with a highly localizable place and time if not always a finite number of language-affecting agents: vernacularly literate or credibly Anglophonic kings, Chanceries, plagues, playwrights, punctuational innovations, proclamations, inoculations, immigrations, integrations, identifications, standardizations, and a host of definitions. The other academic discipline also called “English”, English literature, only occasionally gets mentioned, though for many students coursework in English literature precedes study of the history of English. While certain literary innovations such as the rise of vernacular iambic pentameter and the varieties of rhyme can feature in language histories, literary sources are more often apologized for as a necessary evil. And indeed the more that the external history surfaces in a textbook, the more we have to contend with the assumptions of the very axioms of linguistic description being at odds with some of the assumptions, predilections, and constructed objects of history.
2 Internal and external histories of textbooks History approaches language only in its diachronic aspect, the Saussurean distinction that places historical linguistics as only half of linguistics, and perhaps the lesser half of it. Additionally, the individual and communal vicissitudes that history traces pose an implicit challenge to the axiom of linguistic adequacy, the assumption that language always (physical deficit aside) meets the needs of its community. While adequacy in coexistence with change has inspired the study of the role of linguistic variation, there is less discussion of whether changes in the wider culture ever can be shown to affect language directly or even, as in a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, whether particular features of language affect the perceptions of a speech community. A fundamental linguistic axiom is that of universalism, the idea of an underlying (and synchronic) unity in the diversity of language forms, not just in English, but everywhere. Comparison with other languages is therefore crucial for analysis. The necessarily multilingual context is a matter that textbooks engage in a variety of ways. American textbooks must assume students bring little or no knowledge of other languages, even contact languages, to their study of English, and little knowledge of the cartography of the United Kingdom. Particular European histories of English naturally devote some space at a minimum to phonetic points of contrast and comparison with the student’s first language of instruction (Go¨rlach 1997 [1974]; Nielsen 1998, 2005). It remains to be seen if the Bologna process will significantly standardize language instruction in Europe to a degree that will affect the study of language history.
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The matter of earlier standard languages, and the extent to which early texts imply or embody one or more standard languages raises the question of how much social and political content necessarily accompanies an outline of the linguistic history of English. In a recent 20-page account, James Milroy (2007: 20) claims that “a standardised language has multiple origins – both linguistic and social”. For earlier stages of English, the record of the linguistic variation that contributes to that standard is partial, and the analysis of social structure is beset by anachronism as well. Linguistics itself has taken a congenially historical turn in continued developments in the analysis of change, such as the theory of unidirectionality in grammaticalization, the name that Meillet gave to the trajectory that converts syntax into morphology and more generally lexical material into grammatical material (cf. Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). For history of any type, the collection and analysis of evidence is crucial, and yet history differs from sociology and psychology in being humanistic and not an experimental science. Psychologists of language have recourse to human subjects for testing their ideas, and while sound-recordings from across the world are approaching their century, the kind of variation most intensively studied still inclines to the near and now. In connecting this research with the earlier states of the language of course, the evidence is far more elusive, and, once located, complex; evidence that must be accumulated in libraries and archives. In particular, the grammatical phrase “History of X” in all its narrative and material and political associations and consequent ambiguities about what we mean by English may not seem as apt a modifier as historical or even diachronic for the internal history of English language or linguistics. Is the history of English the description of a Germanic language with interdental fricatives, the language of Shakespeare, or the lexemes and idioms in the online urbandictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com), an open-source dictionary managed by a California college student? Like the word “grammar”, the term “history” can be taken as description or analysis, as establishing both generalizations about and prescriptive judgments of the success or utility of particular developments.
3 The “voice” of textbooks History and the English Language got linked fairly early on, almost certainly in the English-speaking world with a third party (literature) playing the role of matchmaker. The mid-19th century state of the textbook documents the curious intertwining of the three disciplines. An investigation rarely is encapsulated by the title that it has in its first publication, rather, the title speaks both to its predecessors and to the new audience that its author and publisher seek to provide with its new perspective. Ten years ago Hans Nielsen memorably romped through a number of earlier textbook titles in the preface to his own book and adds an allusion to Laurence Sterne in his three-volume history, A Journey through the History of the English Language in England and America, thus far published as The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154 (Nielsen 1998) and From Dialect to Standard: English in England 1154–1776 (Nielsen 2005). Such a title as Nielsen’s has what Andrew Scheil (2007), in a survey of Old English textbooks, has termed “a voice”, a foregrounded, allusive, self-conscious written presence of the interests of a particular author in his or her rehearsal of more or less generally-agreed-upon information:
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The difference between Moore and Knott and Reading Old English is one of voice – that instructional narrator emanating from the pages of the text. In an Old English course the “voice” of the textbook must stand as a proxy for the instructor’s voice: there is so much to cover in class periods (particularly the time-consuming process of individual student translations) that one must expect that a certain burden of the teaching will be carried by the voice of the textbook itself, as the student reads and re-reads, e.g., the section on strong verbs, trying to decode what is going on and what is the point of it all, and how important it is anyway, relative to the potential time invested. (Scheil 2007)
Some history textbooks have a lot of voice; some have a lot of bullet points. The voice of historical language textbooks is heard not only in the tone of the narrative and the extent to which it addresses a particular kind of reader, but even in chronological endpoints and other seeming matters of fact. For example, Norman F. Blake (1996) in his History of the English Language confidently adduces 1873 as the beginning of the subject, with its major periods as defined by Henry Sweet even though these divisions conform too narrowly, in his view, to political events like the Norman Conquest. However, the American lawyer, Germanist, judge, ambassador, and protoenvironmentalist George Marsh (1885 [1862]) wrote a series of lectures under the same title some decades before Sweet’s periodization, and with quite different endpoints. Marsh (1885 [1862]) is potentially illuminating because so much has changed since his time, beginning with his conservatism about change in what is, admittedly, a history of the language embodying a literature. Though Marsh knew that a standard language, like society itself, and paleography, recruits from below, his tone of mild condescension to earlier states of the language sometime recalls that of other writers who highlight the idea of history as the unfortunate eddies and riffles in an otherwise laminar flow of time taking. It is almost as if a truly successful language would have no history, if by history we mean irretrievable losses or the emergence of wholly new possibilities for meaning and expression. Yet such resistance to the idea of irreversible change can be the first step to the fractal microsociology of idiolect, and even the dot maps for dialect features as in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME, McIntosh et al. 1986) rather than the reified heavy-line isoglosses of linguistic boundaries in many books. In the study of any Western language comparisons with Latin are inevitable in assessing the penetration and stability of the standard. With the minority status (perhaps 5%) that Leith (1997 [1983]) claims for Received Pronunciation since its recognition can be compared Graham Robb’s more recent claim, in The Discovery of France (Robb 2007), that at the height of the prestige of French as the international language of culture and diplomacy in the 1790s only 11% of those resident within the boundaries of the country were considered by those in charge to be speaking French – in other words, the government judged not only speakers of Basque but those of Breton and Provenc¸al as beyond the linguistic pale. While one may wonder how Roger Wright, the historian of how Romance emerged from Vulgar Latin, would respond to this characterization, the controversy shows the potential for re-thinking what distinguishes a language from a dialect.
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Marsh recognized both literary and linguistic models of 19th-century academic industry as influences on his project. One was the, to him unattractive (Marsh 1885 [1862]: 14), model of Thomas Warton’s 1840 History of English Poetry, from the end of the 11th to the 18th century. The other was the new philology of Bopp, and particularly of Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language, 2 volumes, 1848, 2nd ed. [1852]). Yet surprisingly given the esteem in which Marsh held philology, his early American History of English is not solely concerned with chasing a syllable through time and space. As the tale of his long title suggests, March assumes a mutual influence of language and literature. Marsh more or less follows Craik in a pre-Sweet division of the language. English to his mind is, by its vocabulary, distinct from Anglo-Saxon, an approach reminiscent of that taken by Angelika Lutz (2002), and begins only in 1250. A second period, of more than two hundred years duration from 1350 to 1575, treats as one what now is usually separated into Middle English and Early Modern English. Marsh’s third period is the century that begins with the youth of Shakespeare and ends with the death of Milton in 1674. He describes this culminating period as the maturity of the language in a desperately Homeric simile that is a portrait of English as a not-soyoung man, yet ever strong, yet supple, that would not do today. Alzheimer’s disease and the near-extinction within the past century of Gaelic, aboriginal American languages, and many others show there is as yet no analogue of Human Growth Hormone that can prevent the metaphor of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny from completion in decay: the sequential acquisition of morphology, prepositions and syncope, in a life or a language, will be followed by loss in the other direction. I am far from maintaining that the language of England has at any time become a fixed and inflexible thing. In the adult man, physiological processes, not properly constitutional changes, go on for years before decay can fairly said to have commenced. His organs, indeed, when he passes from youth to manhood, are already fully developed, but under favorable circumstances, and with proper training, they continue for some time longer to acquire additional strength, power of action, and of resistance, flexibility, and one might almost say, dexterity, in the performance of their appropriate functions. New organic material is absorbed and assimilated, and effete and superfluous particles are thrown off; but in all this there are no revolutions analogous to those by which the nursling becomes a child, the child a man. So in languages employed as the medium of varied literary effort, here is, as subjects of intellectual discourse, practical applications of scientific principle and new conditions of social and material life multiply, an increasing pliancy and adaptability of speech, a constant appropriation and formation of new vocables, rejection of old and worn-out phrases, and revivifications of asphyxiated words, a rhetorical, in short, not a grammatical change, which, to the superficial observer, may give to the language a new aspect, while it yet remains substantially the same. (Marsh 1885 [1862]: 33; see also p. 392)
An even more extraordinary metaphor, reprised in the conclusion of the lectures, supposes a nonhuman force in the passage of the centuries developing and propelling the language into relative completeness: I do not purpose to carry down my sketches later than the age of Shakespeare, when I consider the language as having reached what in the geography of great rivers is called the lower course*, and as having become a flowing sea capable of bearing to the ocean of
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time the mightiest argosies, a mirror clear enough to reflect the changeful hues of every sky and give body and outline to the grandest forms which the human imagination has ever conceived. (Marsh 1885 [1862]: 144)
He glosses in a footnote the lower course as follows: In German, Unterlauf, or with some writers, Strom, is that lowest and usually navigable part of the course of a river, where its motion is due less to the inclination of its bed than to the momentum acquired by previous rapidity of flow, and to the hydrostatic pressure of the swifter currents from higher parts of its valley. (Marsh 1885 [1862]: 144)
In other words, to unpack this figure, Marsh saw the pre-Shakespearian history of stillread English as causing the success of the distant stages, and presumably he offered this idea to justify his inclusion of material on the earlier stages of the language, claiming for it a sort of action at a distance. There may also be an implicit comparison with the development through change detectable in other literary traditions of other European vernaculars. Marsh seems to have picked his endpoints to establish the achieved stability of his own standard language as having existed for the statutory period of more than two centuries. March’s segmentation is noteworthy therefore for where it ends as well as where it begins. Not only does he cut off Old English altogether (presumably as insufficiently English for his American audience), but he declares that the history of the language, in its essentials, ended some two hundred years before his writing. This ukase saves him the trouble of characterizations and descriptions of the near past that will date quickly, a difficulty that modern mass market and textbooks seldom avoid. Extravagant ideas about the life and death of languages had been in the air. Silly as Marsh’s segmentation of the field may look, he was familiar with the work of Rasmus Rask and there is the melancholy possibility that early 21st century statements of consensus may look at least as peculiar from the far-off perspective of our own linguistic sesquicentennial when so much more of the detail of language will be recorded, inventoried, parsed and searched. Current axioms of linguistic practice include the adequacy of each stage of every language to its community and the constant of the s-curve in the variable rate of change of an item as it becomes part of the standard. Why were Histories of English written first just from the 19th century on, and why do the first ones end as they do, so much earlier than their own moment of composition than do those of the 20th century and after? Changing notions of literacy, of reconstruction, and, I think, of language death attend these choices. Perversely, given the variation in any language, it is easier to speak confidently of its nature when, like Latin, it is on Vatican life support, as can be seen in a flurry of recent books, such as Janson (2004), written for a popular audience. The impulse to write the history of a living language begins in the discovery that it too is dead in some respects, as can be seen in Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807–08): Looking upon modern European civilization as a product of the Latin and Germanic peoples, all of them formed by the migration of German tribes after the downfall of the Roman empire, Fichte found that among them all the Germans alone had preserved
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On morphological grounds, then, Lithuanian speakers might be said to have a still better case for deep and living roots. Still, the next best thing to relative isolation for making a language emerge in workable clarity as a subject is for it to be partially dead, which puts it not beyond all change but at least safely out of the journalistic first draft stage, and limits the scope with a manageable corpus of material declared worthy by time, and even more worthy by its economic clout. English triumphed, if we are to believe Richard Foster Jones, in 1588 (Jones 1953). In a move noticeable in 16th-century translators’ prefaces that is not much accredited by linguists but welcome to historians, writers in English began to look back on its modest past and retroactively “ennoble” the vernacular. As with many European languages, the bursting of its national borders played a part in leading first-language speakers to consider extra-national developments and gave a new impetus to standardization. The language of the colonies became worthy of notice only after they not only created wealth for the empire but found a measure of political independence for themselves, so that their innovations were perceptible as something other than disfluencies. The role of the present day, when English regards itself in a textbook and is not manifested solely in the facts most congenial with its own assumptions, has been the defining character of comprehensive textbooks since Albert Baugh’s first American textbook in the thirties (Baugh 1935). Marsh’s now-embarrassing exposed assumptions contrast with later, more social, and less literary treatments of the history of English, such as Ishtla Singh’s 2005 outline, which gives equal space to the first and last segments, beginning with Proto-IndoEuropean and ending with English after 1700, so that the emergence of an insular English, let alone its literary tradition, is less emphasized. Singh does quote from the literary criticism surrounding some Old English poems and gives a page each of titles of Middle English and Early Modern English writings. But these references seem a concession to literature students seeking paper topics. Go¨rlach had already illustrated his Linguistic History with Biblical translations that “make no claim to literary excitement” (Go¨rlach 1997 [1974]: preface xvii), reminiscent of Sweet’s “Preface” to his edition of the Alfredian Pastoral Care and its “exclusively philological interest” (Go¨rlach 1997 [1974]: ix). The advent of quantificational studies has reduced the extravagances of interpretation of the past. Discoveries worthy of the ages, or at least of the textbooks that purport to give the facts, remain to be made in describing as neutrally as possible the first or last appearance of distinctive forms or registers. For example, a recent study argues that the 20th century textbook writers projected their contemporary characterization of phrasal verbs as more informal alternatives to simplex verbs, native or borrowed, back into the Early Modern English period in which they emerge in numbers. Stefan Thim’s (2006) contention that the to-be-stigmatized phrasal verbs register was originally neutral requires subtlety; how are we to know from silence that such verbs enjoyed prescriptive acceptance?
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4 Textbooks in the 21st century A look at books published in the 21st century suggests that three trends are currently emerging. The trajectory from the integrating narrative has been taken up by a number of mass-marketed books with more footnotes than photographs or exercises appealing to an audience without a classroom or research libraries (Crystal 2004; Bragg 2002; Lerer 2005; McWhorter 2008). This market does not mean that the academic textbook’s day is over, but rather that it increasingly shares space with accounts that frequently but not always simplify the descriptive detail and that often add an explicit point of view, a voice that not only instructs but entertains or corrects. Second, there is a movement within the newer textbooks towards contextualizing “facts” by several means. A ubiquitous feature is the timeline of events familiar in US literary anthologies, such as the Norton series, but also now given prominence in textbooks such as van Gelderen (2006), Curzan and Adams (2005), Momma and Matto (2008), and Millward and Hayes (2010). Lists of dateable political and cultural events appear sometimes in the absence of any other external history, and the links to be made to internal change are left open. The function of some timelines is hard to see, save as a peg for memory and the danger offered for correlation as causation is great for the naı¨ve student. Other schemas are more linguistically relevant and potentially powerful. Though Brook (1957) self-described his summary of changes from Germanic through Modern English as “indigestible” schemas of sound change taking the form of charts and graphs (for example, Go¨rlach’s (1991: 70) schematic reduction of the Early Modern English work of Dobson), they are an attractive model, particularly with visual and aural illustrations. One such contextualization is by foregrounding a plurality of approaches, a move especially important for a student audience potentially interested in taking the conversation further, particularly in the intermediate periods of the past six centuries, for which literary works frequently provide the impetus for linguistic study. This approach has antecedents in Bloomfield’s curious pattern, seen again in different ways in Fennell (2001), of matching each traditional historical period with a mode of theoretical inquiry developed to account for it. Several books (e.g. Cusack 1998; Graddol et al. 1996; Sacks 2003) address the material culture that affected the conditions of writing in the medieval and early modern period. Another is the foregrounding of themes within subtypes of academic textbooks, such as Blake (1996) on standardization, or the compact linguistic introductions to single periods, e.g. Smith (1999), Nevalainen (2006), and Beal (2004). In a time of change the material in textbooks has several functions that reflect differences in audiences, in preparation, theoretical orientations and in the time they can allot to whatever historical segments they teach. The new textbooks seem to present somewhat less in the way of data, and more attention to generalizations about change, as well as a focus on describing the final stage of standardization. For example, even one of the most comprehensive new textbooks (Brinton and Arnovick 2011), with a remarkably full treatment of Proto IndoEuropean vowels, presents a more limited selection of the Old English noun paradigms than do some books of 50 years ago whose authors could presume a certain study of and interest in the morphology of Old English for itself. Labov’s refusal to accept a sidebar status for his approach (“I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social”
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[Labov 1972: xiii]) has been followed by decades of historical sociolinguistic inquiry that is only now finding its way into mainstream accounts. As literary scholarship in the United States continues to address matters of race, social class, and gender, the full integration of sociolinguistics with earlier forms of historical linguistics will remain an issue for introductory textbooks. Thirdly, while current textbooks treat a wealth of topics, none to my knowledge have yet taken the opportunity to explore long-standing points of contact with research in the neighboring disciplines of language acquisition and loss, archaeology, and anthropology. I hope future work will come to assess both the impact of synchronic work on diachronic material and the implications of diachronic data for current issues in linguistic research, particularly in the continuing global spread of English. Here are a couple of points of potential interest. The early acquisition of verbal -ing by children has been confirmed for several generations. In particular, the psychologist Roger Brown’s work on politeness theory is well-known in linguistic circles, so the apparent absence of reference by history of language surveys to his introduction to child language acquisition (Brown 1973: 259–260; 271–293) or its successors is a little puzzling. The acquisition of verbal –ing contrasts with the historical introduction of the periphrastic progressive tense into Standard English well after the perfect and passive in a reverse of the expected ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. There is even less cause for neglect in considering the implications of Philip Lieberman’s work on the role of the supervowel [i] in supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT) normalization (Liebermann 1984: 111), particularly in the acquisitional tuning of formants so that the variety of formant frequencies made by small and large people are nonetheless perceived as belonging to distinct shared phonemes. What was the impact of the late medieval diphthongization stage of the Great Vowel Shift on the perception of the “carrier” [i] (Liebermann 2006: 164–165) that enables this scaling? The anthropology of the past quarter-century is underrepresented in accounts of the early medieval external history in current textbooks, though here the contentiousness of studies in Celtic-Germanic contact may impede producing a well-balanced summary account. The description of the adventus Saxonum is generally accompanied by a prudent silence about the possibility of any Celtic influence on the early deviation of Old English from Continental Germanic in even recent core vocabulary studies (Polzin et al. [2006]; popularly in Ostler [2006; 2007] and McWhorter [2008]), leaving aside syntax, with its difficulties of reconstruction from slim early records. Updating of the first textbooks continues, in some cases through many editions (Baugh and Cable 2012; Pyles and Algeo 2004). Whether preserving the original section or paragraph order of books that are segmented permits intercalation that will consistently reflect the best or most useful order of information is an open question, and may be moot if electronic media replace paper pages, but parallelism does facilitate crossreference between sections. Whether the next generation of textbooks will continue to have a national curriculum model, like Wikipedia, or whether a designedly global or at least transatlantic textbook will establish itself remains to be seen. Since the Early Modern period there is evidence for L2 users of English, but language contact outside the British Isles has generally merited diachronic textbook discussion only in chapters on (contemporary) World English. The 1988 Braj Kachru diagram representing global English as three overlapping inner, outer and expanding
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circles is ubiquitous in synchronic treatments (McArthur 1988: 97–100 for discussion). Svartvik’s 2006 revision in collaboration with Leech has a three-dimensional version of Kachru’s expanded circle combined with a peak: an apparently single World Standard English rising out of the supra-national regional standards, in order to show an affinity with standardization and the creation of acrolect (Svartik 2006: 226). But is the age of national standards indeed over? The effect of technology on the size and currency of textbooks is certainly a work in progress. The three-year cycle of Samuelson’s Economics is famous among American textbooks. Dictionaries were once said to have a ten-year lifespan, but as of this writing the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will not come out again in paper, continually updateable as it now is online. At what point in the scholarly volleying does its bibliographic representation in a textbook cease to be useful, and do the potentially infinite resources for storing data urge inclusiveness? A case in point is the growth of borrowed vocabulary in Middle English. Otto Jespersen’s 1909–49 study found a place in the first edition of Baugh (1935); in the 4th edition (1993) the co-author added a 1986 reference to Xavier Dekeyser from the Fisiak Festschrift, but nothing in the 5th edition (Baugh and Cable 2002), even omitting mention of Dalton-Puffer’s 1996 discussion of Dekeyser. In a climate of globalization it should at least become desirable as well as possible to acknowledge and facilitate reference between books written for different audiences, as in Kortmann’s (2005: 60) conversion chart of British and American transcription systems, to which could be added the charts in Bronstein (1988).
5 Summary The ideal text will describe the various levels of linguistic organization efficiently as well as provide a survey of current theories for causes and mechanisms of change internal and external. At present, introductory textbook coverage is generally richest for phonological and, to a lesser extent, semantic change, and until very recently virtually nonexistent on pragmatics. Whatever number of paradigms of inflection are provided, basic help needs to be provided for many students on morphological and syntactic fundamentals, such as the role of analogy, grammaticalization, or conservative and innovative change. An order of presentation matters and a strong cross-referencing system of links leading back as well as forward aids with connecting the necessarily discontinuous discussions of the building blocks of the language at different stages. Another desideratum that would help instructors customize the focus appropriate to their students and curricula would be more and more kinds of sections, arranged by form or by function, somewhat along the lines of several texts, including even the present-to-past order of description in Strang (1970). The best textbook view may be one that while acknowledgedly partial, reflects the scholarly work of centuries and yet can still serve, as often it must, as the introduction to many aspects of the study of language.
6 References Algeo, John and Thomas Pyles. 2004. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 5th edn. Boston: Wadsworth Publishing. Baugh, Albert. 1935. A History of the English Language. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company.
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Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 2012. A History of the English Language. 6th edn. London: Longman. Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times. 1700–1945. London: Hodder. Blake, Norman F. 1996. A History of the English Language. London: Macmillan. Brinton, Laurel J. and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2011. The English Language: A Linguistic Introduction. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Britain, David (ed.). 2007. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bronstein, Arthur J. (ed.). 1988. Conference Papers on American English and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Tuscaloosa, Alabama/London: University of Alabama Press. Brook, George L. 1957. English Sound-Changes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crystal, David. 2004. The Stories of English. London: Overlook. Bragg, Melvyn. 2002. Adventure of English. The Biography of Language. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2005. History of English, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Curzan, Anne and Michael Adams. 2005. How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. 2nd edn. New York: Longman. Cusack, Bridget. 1998. Everyday English, 1500–1700. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane. 1996. The French Influence on Middle English Morphology. A CorpusBased Study of Derivation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fennell, Barbara. 2001. A history of English. A sociolinguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman, and Wim van der Wurff. 2000. The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisiak, Jacek. 2005. An Outline History of English. 4th edn. Poznan´: Wydawnictwo Poznan´skie. van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los. 2006. Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell. Go¨rlach, Manfred . 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1997 [1974] Linguistic History of English: An Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Graddol, David, Dick Leith, and Joan Swann. 1996. English. History, Diversity and Change. London: Routledge. Hogg, Richard. M. and David Denison (eds.). 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janson, Tore. 2004. A Natural History of Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1909–49. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. 7 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter (later vols. by Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgard, and London: George Allen & Unwin). Jones, Richard Foster. 1953. Triumph of the English Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Knowles, Gerry. 1997. A Cultural History of the English Language. London: Arnold. Kohn, Hans. 1949. The Paradox of Fichte’s Nationalism. Journal of the History of Ideas 10(3): 319–343. Kortmann, Bernd. 2005. English Linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leith, Richard. 1997 [1983] Social History of English. London: Routledge. Lerer, Seth. 2005. Inventing English: A Portable History of English. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Lieberman, Philip. 1984. The Biology and Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lieberman, Philip. 2006. Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Lutz, Angelika. 2002. When Did English Begin? In: Teresa Fanego, Belen Mendez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words Texts and Change Selected Papers of 11 ICEHL Santiago, 145–172. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Marsh, George. 1885 [1862]. The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature It Embodies. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. McArthur, Tom. 1998. The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. McWhorter, John. 2008. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. New York: Gotham. Millward, Celia M. and Mary Hayes. 2010. A Biography of the English Language, 3rd edn. Boston: Wadsworth Publishing. Milroy, James 2007. The History of English in the British Isles. In: David Britain (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 5–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moessner, Lilo. 2003. Diachronic English Linguistics: An Introduction. Tu¨bingen: Narr. Momma, Haruko and Matthew Matto (eds.). 2008. A Companion to the History of the English Language. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso. Mugglestone, Linda (ed.). 2006. The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nielsen, Hans Frede. 1998. A Journey through the History of the English Language: The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154. 2 vols. Odense: Odense University Press. Nielsen, Hans Frede. 2005. From Dialect to Standard: English in England 1154–1776: A Journey Through the History of the English Language in England and America, Vol. II. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2000. The Persistence of English. Introduction to: M. H Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th edn. 2 vols. New York: Norton. Ostler, Nicholas. 2006. Empires of the World. A Language History of the World. London: Harper Perennial. Ostler, Nicholas. 2007. Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. London: Harper Collins. Polzin, Peter, Tobias Forster, and Arne Ro¨hl. 2006. Evolution of English Basic Vocabulary within the Network of Germanic Languages. In: Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (eds.), Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, 131–138. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Rastorgueva, Tatiana Andrapova. 1983. Istoriya Anglijskogo Yazika. Robb, Graham. 2007. The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography. New York: Norton. Sacks, David. 2003. Letter Perfect. The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z. (originally published in hardback as Language Visible). New York: Broadway Books. Schaefer, Ursula (ed.). 2006. The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth Century England. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Scheil, Andrew. 2007. Old English Textbooks and the 21st Century: A Review of Recent Publications. Old English Newsletter 40.3. http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive.php/essays/ scheil40_3/ (last accessed 17 May 2011). Schlauch, Margaret. 1964. The English Language in Modern Times. London: Oxford University Press.
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Singh, Ishtla. 2005. The History of English: A Student’s Guide. London: Arnold. Smith, Jeremy J. 1999. Essentials of Early English. London and New York: Routledge. Strang, Barbara. 1970. A History of English. London: Routledge. Svartvik, Jan and Geoffrey Leech. 2006. English: One Tongue Many Voices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thim, Stefan. 2006. Phrasal Verbs in Everyday English 1500–1700. In: Andrew James Johnston, Ferdinand von Mengden, and Stefan Thim (eds.), Language and Text: Current Perspectives in English and Germanic Historical Linguistics and Philology, 292–306. Heidelberg: Winter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. A History of English Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Mary Blockley, Austin, TX (USA)
76. Resources: Online resources for teaching 1. Introduction 2. From using web-based material to designing a virtual online environment – points to remember 3. Taking stock – useful tools 4. Summary 5. References
Abstract This chapter describes a selected number of web-based resources for teaching and studying the history of English and English historical linguistics. The chapter begins with an overview of criteria that need to be observed when developing and implementing a web-based environment for teaching the history of English. Online dictionaries and corpora of English are seen as important sources of and tools for (blended) learning environments that focus on the history of English and English historical linguistics. Drawing on a number of representative examples of web-based introductions to the history of English, this chapter also describes the potential of web-based and especially blended learning frameworks.
1 Introduction This chapter focuses on available web-based resources for teaching and studying the history of English and English historical linguistics. It will show that the concept of e-learning and English historical linguistics and the history of English needs to be seen on a continuum with the mere use of electronic materials in class or in blended learning environments at the one end and the implementation of virtual classrooms at the other end. There is a vast number of online historical resources ranging from surveys, dictionaries, thesauruses, corpora, digitized manuscripts and so on (see Traxel, Chapter 72) which can also be used for studying and teaching English historical linguistics and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1190–1200
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the history of English. However, the number of real web-based classrooms that focus on the history of English is much smaller; possible reasons being the time, effort, and money it takes to develop and encourage an incentive for creating a web-based course. And yet, the scarcity of web-based virtual classrooms is also somewhat surprising because an affiliation between linguistics and e-learning environments has often been claimed (Barbereau and Lamb 2005). (Perhaps this is also one reason why we find a number of web-based environments which introduce to general linguistics, Modern English language teaching and/or grammar courses or which are designed for distance education and language teaching programs; see Chemnitz Internet Grammar at http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/InternetGrammar/shared/, or MiLCA Lehrmodule at the department of computational linguistics at http://milca.sfs.uni-tuebingen. de/module.html, both pages last accessed 29 January 2012). Also, e-learning has long been seen as a didactic panacea for improving teaching and learning and for meeting with the shortage of staff at universities. Interestingly, there are a number of recent textbooks which introduce to the history of English (van Gelderen 2010; McIntyre 2008). The efficient utilization and functions of e-learning in general have been rather extensively researched and various national and international communities have been set up. See, for example, The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) at http://www.eadtu.nl/; see also http://www.e-learning.org. There are also various handbooks, such as the Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research (Haythornthwaite and Andrews 2007) and The AMA Handbook of E-Learning (Piskurich 2003). But the possible interplay between e-learning and English historical linguistics/the history of English has been neglected. Therefore, in this overview, a number of didactic, technical, and content-related issues are stressed. These should be taken into consideration when developing web-based courses, when drawing on web-based teaching methods (including technical aspects as well as functional and didactic aspects) or when simply using online material. Also, this chapter shows some representative examples of electronic and e-learning resources, which can be creatively used when teaching and studying English historical linguistics and the history of English.
2 From using web-based material to designing a virtual online environment – points to remember The continuum of using web-based material, on the one hand, and the implementation of a virtual classroom, on the other, as well as the decision about the extent to which web-based learning should be integrated into teaching the history of the English and English historical linguistics embrace some important considerations: • Intended use: decisions have to be made as to when, where, why, and how to use an online environment. • Format: studies (e.g. Short et al. 2006) have shown that a blended learning format – a combination of web-based learning and face-to-face teaching and learning – is most efficient. • Mode of learning: it has been claimed that an emphasis on collaborative learning and constructivist learning (Bremer 2002: 18) is most efficient. Students engage in a
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IX. Resources continual process of constructing their own views and analyses, and they compare their results with those of the instructor and other students. The students: the students’ pre-experience with web-based learning environments needs to be taken into account as well as the different types of learners and their styles of learning. Different models have been used to describe these types of learners. For example, one model that is especially relevant when constructing a webbased environment is that which differentiates between the various perception channels a learner may use to acquire knowledge. There are auditive, visual, and tactile types of learners, who prefer one or the other sensual mode when learning (Bremer 2002: 18). In view of these different models, it is important to stress that each learner works individually when studying. In turn, this implies that the student should also be aware of his/her learning situation (for example, the time to spend on the course) as well as his/her technological prerequisites. It is necessary to advise students on how to proceed and on how to organize their cooperative work in a web-based environment. The creator of the course and the instructor(s): there is a definite increase in workload, in managing the students’ learning experience and in applying this to the modules and units of historical English linguistics under construction. Knowledge of the social, didactic, technical, financial, and thematic contexts and parameters is needed for the creation of a web-based environment. The team: in case a virtual classroom is aimed at an enthusiastic and multi-disciplinary team is needed. This group should at least include technologists, designers and academics teaching English linguistics and the history of English. Good practice and sustainability: due to the amount of time and money needed when creating a web-based course creators need to be realistic about whether the course will be continuously used. Variety of formats: the content of the course should be presented in a variety of formats (audio-files, visual representations and text files etc.) so that the individual types of learners are equally addressed. Photographs, illustrations, and other visual effects promote understanding and lighten up the learning process. The outline of the content and individual sessions should be presented as audio-files. Breaking up the text: the texts should be broken up in meaningful chunks – not only because it is more difficult for a reader to read on the screen but also in order to create coherent learning units. This aspect of coherence could be enhanced by links to other pages within and outside the online environments, so that the navigation gives a sense of movement to the learning process. Teaching methods: a variety of teaching methods, e.g. problem-oriented or cognitivist learning methods, should be used. Navigation: the site navigation, or what Pajares Tosca (2000) calls the “pragmatics of links,” needs to be carefully planned and should include a coherent design of the pages to be navigated so that the user is able to reconstruct the passages and their structure. Color coding is a good strategy to connect thematic sections. It is also helpful to install permanently visible as well as fast links to constant content pages (e.g. to a glossary, the table of contents page, etc.). Frequently, courses can take their students to the next page by means of a link to follow the sequences recommended by the course designer. A “menu” (often found at the left hand side of each
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session page) indicates the sub-sections worked on and the suggested arrangement for exploring topics. “Printer-friendly” notes: they ease the download of the content material and are especially useful for students with passive learning styles. Exercises: these should be created in an interactive way (e.g. cloze-procedures, or test where students can move chunks themselves). Means of self-evaluation (e.g. self-tests, self-assessment mechanisms) are indispensable to guarantee interactivity and a guided learning process. Handbook: a detailed course reader or workbook should be provided in which the instructor informs the student about aims, workload, assessment, deadlines etc., and in which additional material is presented. The instructor should plan carefully and well ahead when to provide the students with course exercises, essay questions, and term-paper topics. Communication: a web-based course should also allow online synchronous (chat, wikis) and asynchronous modes of communication (e.g. e-mail) among students and instructors, because the social element of teaching face-to-face will be lost when teaching and studying online. This situation necessitates the careful choice of a suitable system for synchronous communication (often provided by the local university).
The advantages and disadvantages of web-based learning depend on the institutional and web-based contexts as well as on the instructor and the student. Therefore, in certain institutional settings, a generally perceived advantage may become a disadvantage and vice versa. Nevertheless, in order to raise awareness it is useful to discuss some of the arguments that are traditionally listed in favor of and against web-based learning. As regards disadvantages of web-based learning, students often only read what is actually presented in the online environment. Instead of consulting additional books, some of them are inclined to assume that all knowledge is simply available online. What is called the “serendipity effect” is reinforced, and often students complain about a cognitive overload. As to the advantages of web-based learning it is a clear gain that students have access to the course from anywhere and at any time and can revisit the materials in a multi-modal way. To spread knowledge worldwide and to follow a global pedagogy that would help to reduce costs, human assistance and marking could be seen as a laudable development. There is still not enough research on how learners respond to e-learning and its various manifestations. New technologies may partly exceed our understanding and visualization of how best to use them in order to achieve high quality learning, and often the focus of designers is on technology to the detriment of content and pedagogy (Barbereau and Lamb 2005: 101–114). Evaluation should take account of cultural diversity as well as to the students’ and instructors’ pre-experience with and responses to web-based learning. It should also include different practices within subject disciplines and varying institutional policies. That is, global differences and local circumstances play an important role in whether and how online courses are produced and used pedagogically effectively. Questionnaires as well as focus-group interviews are suitable means of evaluation (Short et al. 2006).
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3 Taking stock – useful tools 3.1 Online dictionaries and corpora The number of useful tools to be incorporated in teaching and studying the history of the English language and English historical linguistics grows rapidly, and they range from surveys and dictionaries, over thesauruses and corpora to digitized manuscripts. Due to digitization initiatives, on the one hand, and corpus research, on the other, e-texts of older books, historical corpora and databases of English historical dictionaries are now electronically accessible. In addition, many English historical dictionaries can now also be accessed online. It comes as no surprise that their potential for studying and teaching word-meaning is not the only way of exploring the history of English and that it is through various electronic search interfaces that study questions in, for example, lexicology and morphology or even the history of speech acts can be more elaborate and efficient than the use of book versions of the respective dictionaries. In electronic dictionaries, like, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) at www.oed.com or the Middle English Dictionary (MED) (see http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med; see also The Dictionary of Old English at http://www.doe.utoronto.ca) so-called “advanced searches”, which may go beyond the Boolean search once one has acquired more than basic knowledge of how to use these interfaces, allow users to investigate, among others, a number of lexicological enquiries. For example, it is possible to search for new lexemes that have been taken up in the OED from the 1970s onwards or blends that have been compiled in the OED since whatever period one is interested in (see also van Gelderen 2010). Jucker and Taavitsainen (2007), for example, have used the OED to collect “speech act verbs” and Mair (2007) uses the OED quotation database on CD-ROM to investigate lexical change of English in the 20th century. The OED (www.oed.com) also provides a “quiz” site which shows users the various functionalities of lexicological and lexicographical research possible with the OED. The “help” website, which elaborates on the range of (historical) searches that can be made, is equally fruitful. The online edition of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (Kay et al. 2009) is an equally fruitful source for the historical study of English. The HTOED arranges the English found in the second edition of the OED into a network of semantic categories and incorporates the diachronic development of words and concepts. With the OED we can trace the meaning of a word. With the HTOED we can now see how a meaning came about and which meanings were among the first to express a particular concept. This is extremely useful because the lexical history of a concept is usually supressed by the alphabetical structure of a dictionary and one needs a certain amount of expertise to extract this kind of information from dictionaries. The Lexicons of Early Modern English (see http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/public/ intro.cfm, last accessed 29 January 2012) is a “historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods” (Lancashire 2008). It serves as one example of how a compiled historical database of Early Modern dictionaries provides not only an impressive overview of the character of
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dictionaries in Early Modern England, but also the opportunity to acquire a variety of lexical and pragmatic information. A look at the entry welcome in the database, for example, reveals a rather long list of occurrences of welcome and its collocations – in the main entries of the respective dictionaries or in the definitions. The dictionaries in which welcome occurs range from 1530 to 1702 and among them are Palsgrave’s (1530) Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse and Florio’s (1598) Worlde of Wordes. In a sub-entry of welcome, Palsgrave (1530) even elaborates on how the speech act of a welcome is paralinguistically supported by opening one’s arms in: I Welcome I take one vp or receyue hym with myn armes |{yt}| maketh courtesye to me/ as the frenche men vse to do/ Ie accueuls, iay accueilly, accueyllir, c|_o|iugate lyke his symple ie cueulx, I gather/ and ie recueulx, c|_o|iugate lyke his symple ie cueuls, I gather. Let hym come whan Fo.CCCC.vii. whan he wyll he shall be welcomed on the best facyon: Viengne quant il vouldra il sera recueilly, or accueilly de la meilleure sorte. (Palsgrave 1530)
This quotation also illustrates the potential in historical dictionaries for what Trudgill and Watts (2002) call “alternative histories of English” and the need for an emphasis on the pragmatic aspects of the history of English. As regards historical corpora, access to ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (Biber and Finegan 1990–93/2002/2007/2010; Biber et al. 1994), for example, the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (Kyto¨ and Culpeper 2006), or the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991) and knowledge of tools that help search them and explain how to interpret the respective results are necessary prerequisites (see Kyto¨ 2010, and chapter 96) for a complete overview of historical corpora). In recent studies of English historical pragmatics, these play a crucial role and they may also be used for web-based teaching purposes. Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) and Kohnen (2006) have pointed to the methodological caveats involved in applying speech act theory diachronically. Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice (2007) elaborate on the general caveats of historical pragmatics. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2009) and its historical clone the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010) allow for diachronic search to draw conclusions about language change.
3.2 Web-based courses of the history of English and other databases – a selection Web-based courses of English historical linguistic or the history of English introduce to or teach aspects of the history of English, language change, or English historical linguistics. The following list of references is a selection of notable courses or relevant sources which can be used to enhance historical linguistic teaching. Visual documentation of the respective features described in the following courses will not, for reasons of space, be given. However, the reader will be referred to the respective URL; all web links were accessed on 29 January 2012. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to present a comprehensive list of all available courses. Old English Online (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/engol-0-X.html), developed at the Linguistics Research Center in Austin, Texas, by Jonathan Slocum and Winfred P. Lehmann, gives an overview of the most important differences between
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Old English and Present-day English focusing on syntax and phonology. It also contains pointers to Proto-Indo-European roots identified by Julius Pokorny. The site is remarkable for its valuable form-index dictionary, in which, for each English word, base forms containing that word in their general meaning are shown, along with a link to everyday usage. In a user-friendly way, general meanings correlate with links to each usage in the numbered lesson. The suggested study of various OE texts is divided up into two to three sentences, which are then translated literally. Words in English Website (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/), developed at Rice University, Houston, Texas, by Suzanne Kemmer, focuses on language change in general and the change of word meanings in particular. Through a modern userfriendly interface, the general developments of the history of English are explained alongside the meaning change of words. The module “History of English” of The Virtual Linguistic Campus (http://linguistics. online.uni-marburg.de) developed at the University of Marburg, Germany, by Ju¨rgen Handke and collaborators is categorized according to the classic periodization of the history of the English language and focuses on the core linguistic areas of phonology, morphology and syntax. It also contains modules about “The Evolution of Language”, “Proto Languages”, “The Classification of Languages”, “Principles of Language Change”, and a section on “Varieties of English”. The main linguistic developments of each of the respective stages of the English language are described. Although there is a bias on phonology, the sessions on the phonology of the respective stages of the English language contain, for example, well-researched audio-files of each spoken phoneme, which are easily clickable. In addition, suitable exercises guarantee that students are able to control the learning process. Although it is doubtful whether the aim of an online environment should be to reduce textual information to a minimum and to do entirely without external links, the highly sophisticated design and the general teaching philosophy behind this and other modules are fruitful. Each session adheres to a common corporate design structure, which enhances the readerfriendly structure and the coherence of what is presented. There is also a general overview of the topics to be discussed in the session. A permanent bar contains links to “Glossary”, “Language Index”, and “Important Linguists”. Each unit within a module contains a worksheet (including the solutions on a separate page). It is also possible to send (via e-mail) feedback to the Marburg team (a pre-created form can be used). There are even audio-versions of the respective sessions, including music. Also, animations are successfully inserted. Each unit is accompanied by a workbook which focuses on the reading and analysis of texts from the respective periods. It informs the users again about the unit they have been studying online, and explains various symbols, before moving on to exercises and sequential print-offs of the content in the online environment. Thus, having to print the hypertexts is avoided. It is therefore a useful supplement to the e-learning environment, which focuses on interactivity and visual information. Knut Hanneman’s EHL Project (English Historical Linguistics) developed at the University of Du¨sseldorf (http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/anglistik1/e-learning/ ehl/) enables BA students to broaden their knowledge of English historical linguistics by using specifically devised web-based modules which include interactive elements, such as self-tests, podcasts, and flash animations.
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Raymond Hickey (http://www.uni-due.de/SHE/) offers a comprehensive website which covers the main findings about language change in general and about the history of the English language. Despite the fact that this website is text-centered, it offers a wealth of material which can be used for blended learning environments or as reference tools. Another outstanding project are eHistLing web pages “English Historical Linguistics” of the University of Basel at http://www.ehistling-pub.meotod.de/. The project is based on a blended learning approach. It promotes online communication and cooperation and supports cognitive and social network processes by including lecture scripts, online tutorials, a key word section, an extensive bibliography, illustrative images, diagrams, and well-chosen hyperlinks. The course gives a systematic overview of the phonological, morphological, and semantic development of the history of English and situates it within the socio-historical contexts. The website focuses on the acquisition of historical linguistic knowledge and analytical techniques. It is based on behaviorist and cognitivist learning theory. Classroom lectures on the history of English and corresponding webbased tutorials are provided to supplement the web-based sessions. Constructivist learning theory guides the second part of this course in which the students are asked to write a research paper on a historical linguistic research question. Students have to form research groups and they act as authors and reviewers at the same time. Furthermore, the publication process is simulated because the papers are discussed in a classroom conference and uploaded to be accessible for all students. Students are also provided with tutorials on, for example, James Murray, one of the first editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Elly van Gelderen’s classic website History of English at http://www.historyofenglish. net/ is a companion to her textbook History of English. Next to chapters explaining the history of the English language and the varieties of English and their development, this website contains useful links which, for example, guide the user towards relevant historical corpora, towards other web-based introductions to the history of English, towards websites that represent the classic “Elizabethan accent”, or towards historical textual editions, early printed pages and manuscripts. The website also contains a glossary and illustrated time-line of the development of the history of English as well as a manual of how to do searches in the Oxford English Dictionary online. Furthermore, excerpts from classic texts important for or representative of each period of the history of the English language are listed electronically. Basic tenets of historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics have not frequently been incorporated in an interactive web-based environment. The module “Historical pragmatics, language change and historical linguistics” of my own web-based course IELO (“Introduction to English linguistics online”) contains an introduction to theoretical frameworks such as historical pragmatics, grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. The general concept of welcome is used to show how the interplay between lexis, grammar, discourse, and context, that is, the patterns of human interaction within the social conditions of earlier periods, is meaningmaking. As an exemplary case, the first session focuses on students’ general knowledge of welcome. Students are asked to write down their initial impressions after watching a video-sequence of the musical Cabaret, in which the conferencier greets the visitors with the famous song “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!” Following this first introduction to the concept of welcome, the French, German and English
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etymological interconnections between these concepts are explored with the help of the OED. There is also a separate unit which aims at studying the uses and functions of welcome through time. Text passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other historical sources are given to highlight the attributive, adjectival, and nominal usage of welcome, as well was the to-construction and respective speech-act realizations. Following the guidelines for web-based learning, students are given continuous feedback, the course is interactive and addresses the different types of learners. Despite the fact that Language and Style (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/ stylistics/, last accessed 29 January 2012), developed by Mick Short at Lancaster University, UK, does not explicitly focus on the teaching of “The History of English”, but touches on stylistic analyses of literary texts from older stages of the English language only in passing, the website illustrates how complex linguistic concepts can be successfully transferred to an online environment. In its focus on the stylistics’ tool-box and its application to the three main literary genres, the course consists of 13 topics relevant to stylistic analyses. The topics are color-coded for each literary genre. Other navigation links, such as a permanent bar at the top right side and initial guidance as to how to go through the course, help create coherence. Printer-friendly notes, graphics, audiomaterial, and self-assessments activate and enhance the learning process in a variety of ways. In the poetry sub-sections, poems from various centuries introduce the stylistician’s tool-box for a stylistic study of poems. Also, the section on the analysis of drama introduces how pragmatic approaches to language study, such as turn-taking management, speech acts and politeness theory, help readers to understand a play-text. For the study of the history of English, the analysis of an excerpt from G. B. Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905) is used to introduce the interplay between turn-taking mechanisms and power structures in a highly rank-conscious society. Grice’s (1975) Cooperative principle and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory are introduced through C. Churchill’s modern play Top Girls (1982).
4 Summary As illustrated, the interplay between English historical linguistics and web-based learning is far from being extensively studied. This is partly due to the fact that, on the one hand, there is a wealth of online material which can be used in a variety of teaching environments. On the other hand, the implementation of virtual classrooms is part of this continuum, but not as frequently realized within English historical linguistics and the study as well as teaching of the history of English. There can be no doubt that the advantages and disadvantages of any kind of web-based learning need to be carefully weighed, taking account of pedagogical requirements and users’ needs.
5 References Barbereau, Danielle and Terry Lamb. 2005. Re-thinking Pedagogical Models for Elearning. Sheffield: Modern Languages Teaching Center, University of Sheffield. Benson, Philip. 2001. Teaching and Researching Autonomy in Language Learning. London: Longman.
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Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1990–93/2002/2007/2010. A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Version 3.1. Consortium of fourteen universities, see http:// www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/archer/ (last accessed 7 February 2012). Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan, Dwight Atkinson, Ann Beck, Dennis Burges, and Jena Burges. 1994. The Design and Analysis of the ARCHER Corpus: A Progress Report. In: Merja Kyto¨, Matti Rissanen, and Susan Wright (eds.), Corpora across the Centuries, 3–6. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bremer, Claudia. 2002. Online Lehren Leicht Gemacht! Leitfaden fu¨r die Planung und Gestaltung von virtuellen Hochschulveranstaltungen. In: Brigitte Berendt, Hans-Peter Voss, and Johannes Wildt (eds.), Neues Handbuch Hochschullehre: Lehren und Lernen effizient Gestalten, 1–40, D 3.1. Berlin: Raabe. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Busse, Beatrix and Patricia Plummer. 2005. More Teaching Power than Anything that Could Ever be Printed on Paper?: (E-)Teaching in a Hypertext network. In: Lilo Moessner (ed.), Anglistentag 2004 Aachen Proceedings, 359–379. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 425 million words, 1990– present (COCA). http://corpus.edu/coca (last accessed 7 February 2012). Davies, Mark. 2010. Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2000) (COHA). http://corpus. byu.edu/coha/ (last accessed 7 February 2012). van Gelderen, Elly. 2010. A History of the English Language. 2nd edn. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Handke, Ju¨rgen. 2003. Multimedia im Internet: Konzeption und Implementierung. Mu¨nchen: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. Haythornthwaite, Caroline and Richards Andrews (eds.). 2007. The Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research. London: Sage. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2000. Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: Insults from Flyting to Flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 67–95. Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene Wotherspoon (eds.). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kohnen, Thomas. 2006. Variability of Form as a Methodological Problem in Historical Corpus Analysis: the Case of Modal Expressions in Directive Speech Acts. In: Christian Mair and Reinhard Heuberger (eds.), Corpora and the History of English: Papers Dedicated to Manfred Markus on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, 221–233. Heidelberg: Winter. Kyto¨, Merja. 2010. Data in Historical Pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical Pragmatics, 33–68. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter Mouton. Kyto¨, Merja and Jonathan Culpeper. 2006. A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. With the assistance of Terry Walker and Dawn Archer. Uppsala University and Lancaster University. http://www.engelska.uu.se/Research/English_Language/Research_Areas/Electronic_Resource_ Projects/A_Corpus_of_English_Dialogues/ (last accessed 7 February 2012). Lancashire, Ian. 2008. Lexicons of Early Modern English. http://leme.library.utoronto.ca (last accessed 30 September 2011). Mair, Christian. 2007. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntyre, Dan. 2008. History of English. A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. Pajares Tosca, Susana. 2000. Pragmatics of Links. Journal of Digital Information 1.6. http://jodi.ecs. soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i06/Pajares/ (last accessed 24 June 2010). Piskurich, George M. 2003. The AMA Handbook of E-Learning. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
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Plummer, Patricia and Beatrix Busse. 2006. E-learning and “Language and Style” in Mainz and Mu¨nster. Language and Style 15(3): 257–276. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpio¨, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd edn., Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.), The HIT Center, University of Bergen, Norway. For manual, see http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/hc/index.htm (last accessed 7 February 2012). Short, Mick, Beatrix Busse, and Patricia Plummer. 2006. Preface: The Web-based “Language and Style” course, e-learning and stylistics. Language and Literature 15(3): 219–233. Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker. 2007. Speech act verbs and speech acts in the history of English. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 107–138. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma and Susan M. Fitzmaurice. 2007. Historical Pragmatics: What It Is and How To Do It. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Trudgill, Peter and Richard Watts. 2002. Introduction. ‘In the Year 2525’ In: Peter Trudgill and Richard Watts (eds.), Alternative Histories of English, 1–3. London/New York: Routledge.
Beatrix Busse, Heidelberg (Germany)
X. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography 77. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography: Literature 1. Introduction 2. Literature of the past: basic methodological problems 3. References
Abstract This chapter discusses some of the central problems readers – both historical linguists and literary scholars – encounter when dealing with the literature of the past, especially with that of the very distant past such as the Middle Ages or the Early Modern Period. It focuses on the key issues of (1) periodization, (2) geography and language, (3) notions of the literary, (4) method and theory, (5) canon formation, and (6) authorship and subjectivity, since these are the problems typically invoked when it comes to defining what makes the literature of the past so different from our own (post)modern notions of the literary. The chapter invites readers, first, to develop a methodological awareness of the alterity of the literature from the past; second, to avoid defining that alterity as the mere Other of the (post)modern; and, third, to make use of (post)modern theory and methodology in the service of better understanding that alterity.
1 Introduction The relationship between historical linguistics and literary studies is fraught with problems. Although the two fields go back to the same disciplinary roots – both are (grand) children of 19th-century philology – they have developed in ways so different as to make a dialogue between them dauntingly complicated. This chapter will sketch some of the theoretical and methodological issues which render that dialogue difficult. The perspective chosen here is, however, a decidedly literary one. The situation may look very different if approached from a historical linguist’s point of view. Moreover, I do not claim any kind of objective stance on literary history or theory. Indeed, this chapter is based on the unoriginal premise that such an approach is impossible. Hence, this text is not meant to equip historical linguists with a toolkit enabling them to overcome whatever literary obstructions they might encounter in the course of their research. Yet I do hope that the issues raised here will increase their awareness of some of the methodological problems involved when dealing with literature and that this awareness may help to generate new forms of co-operation between the disciplines. The principal focus is on a set of specific methodological issues whose common denominator is the alterity of the literary text composed in the distant past. When historical linguists come across literary texts they face a twofold problem: first, they are confronted by literary artefacts whose very literariness precludes a straightforward appropriation as linguistic data, and second, they encounter notions of the literary Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1201–1213
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which may differ considerably from those prevailing nowadays. Because historical alterity must always be seen as the central obstacle for the understanding of literature from the past (Jauss 1979), the issues highlighted in this chapter are illustrated mainly by examples from medieval and early modern literature and culture, i.e. from periods whose alterity is most plainly visible. These examples have, however, been chosen such that they throw light on questions relevant to all who study the relationship between literature and historical linguistics, not merely those interested in medieval or early modern English phenomena. Six principal problems will be discussed: (1) periodization, (2) geography and language, (3) notions of the literary, (4) method and theory, (5) canon formation, and (6) authorship and subjectivity. These problems are especially relevant because of the basic role they play in shaping our understanding of the literature of the past. This list could easily be extended and there are sure to be overlaps with other chapters in this volume, such as Curzan (Chapter 79) on periodization, Williamson (Chapter 91) on historical dialectology, and Britain (Chapter 129) on diffusion. Other questions relevant to a discussion of literature from the past, e.g. orality and literacy, are dealt with by other contributors (see, e.g., Schaefer, Chapter 81, on orality and literacy). None of the six topics is treated exhaustively. Instead, each of the chapters draws attention to a few poignant features exemplifying specific aspects of alterity.
2 Literature of the past: basic methodological problems 2.1 Periodization Time and space are two of the most important categories that historians of any aspect of human culture grapple with. Neither can be seen as a given. Each must be viewed as a construct reflecting the specific interests of those who operate with the category. Even though history evolves under conditions imposed by time and space it is history that gives shape to these notions in the first place. This may sound like a truism, a well-worn cliche´ of poststructuralist cultural analysis, but it is nevertheless worth remembering, if only because the major periods of English literary history have remained surprisingly stable. Our basic ideas on the beginning and the end of the literary Middle Ages, for instance, have not changed within the last century and a half. Indeed, the very fact that we still employ the term “Middle Ages” when we deal with literature written between c.500 and c.1500 is remarkable. After all, the term was invented in the Renaissance in the context of a very specific, ideologically driven cultural polemic (Starn 1994: 132–133). Our period boundaries’ relative stability appears even more impressive if seen in the face of the massive paradigm shifts that have taken place both in cultural history and in literary studies. Many of these conceptual shifts were accompanied by sweeping iconoclastic claims to methodological innovation. Yet the major schools of literary interpretation succeeding one another after World War II have left the periodization of English literature virtually untouched. One reason for this is literary history’s precarious status in the academy. “Literary History” is a body of knowledge implicitly taken for granted and usually relegated to introductory courses or lecture series for undergraduates. But it is something few critics are actively involved in since even scholars dealing with the literature of the past display
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a strong tendency to approach their object in a synchronic fashion. Truly diachronic studies which seek to cover long-term change and development in literature are few and far between and usually focus on rather narrow problems. Besides, they are frequently pursued by students of Comparative Literature rather than by scholars who concentrate on a single national literature. This is all the more surprising since the traditional period boundaries in literary studies are anything but innocent. They are ideologically charged and ought, therefore, to be especially sensitive to methodological debate. Precisely because the Middle Ages as a concept is a Renaissance invention do they still tend to play the role of the Other of all that is complex and valuable about modern literature and culture. Not surprisingly, attempts to transgress the well-policed boundaries between the periods are predominantly undertaken by medievalists moving forward in time rather than by early modernists moving backwards. Helen Cooper’s (2004) recent book on romance in English literature, for example, clearly shows how that genre extends far beyond the temporal demarcations that traditionally mark the end of the Middle Ages. But such a line of inquiry is not adopted very frequently. Hence, it is one of the more tragic ironies of literary historiography that the tendency to identify revolutionary breaks in the development of literature is most pronounced amongst scholars whose expertise is limited to only one fairly narrowly defined literary period, i.e. scholars who know very little of the past they are ostensibly using as a backdrop for the revolutionary changes they claim to be identifying. The disconcerting durability of period boundaries has many causes – not least the exigencies of the academic job market and the general drive towards specialization to be witnessed particularly but not only in the English-speaking countries. The huge and ever-widening divide between Anglo-Saxonists and students of Middle English literature is a case in point. It is interesting to note in this context that the barriers segregating students of Old English literature from Chaucerians are not mirrored in the field of historical linguistics where the divide separating Old English from Middle English is transgressed much more easily. Thus, the drive towards ever more narrowly defined fields of research has adverse consequences for literary history. However much individual schools of thought might proclaim a focus on ruptures or shifts – as does the New Historicism with its Foucauldian roots – they are prone happily to reproduce the traditional chronological patterns of literary historiography that have been accepted all too long. Literary scholars are not the only ones to blame, however. After all, the periodization of literary history tends to follow fundamental patterns and basic assumptions developed in neighboring fields such as political, social, or cultural history or even historical linguistics. To be sure, there is a certain logic to this. If we see literature as one cultural phenomenon amongst others then it is obvious that it should be influenced by the pressures of the political, social, economic, and cultural world it is produced and read in. But at the same time, there is something rather uncanny about the odd parallels we discover when we realize that the beginning of the Tudor monarchy in 1485, the introduction of the printing press into England, the transition from Middle English to Early Modern English and the end of medieval literature are all supposed to have happened within a space of ten years. Not all literary scholars have accepted this happy fit of paradigm shifts and ruptures. C. S. Lewis (1954: 55–56), for instance, writing his history of 16th-century English
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literature in the mid-20th did not think that these changes mattered all that much. In fact, Lewis called into question the very validity of the concept of the Renaissance for English literature. For him there was nothing really new about the Renaissance, except perhaps the introduction of Greek learning – and that supposedly affected only a small and select band of humanists. I mention this not because I think Lewis was right, nor because I wish to argue that he was mistaken (which, by and large, he was), but to point out that the problem of literary periodization always rests on a choice of criteria, many of which are quite arbitrary, and more importantly, most of which are derived from human activities whose links to the literary are more or less indirect. Furthermore, the way we describe these external factors’ impact on literature depends entirely on the theoretical framework we employ. New Historicists, for instance, have for the last three decades or so been engaged in breaking down the barriers between text and context. Ostensibly, for them the principal issue is not that of determining literary period boundaries on the basis of extra-literary phenomena. But this has not led them to redefine or even to question traditional period boundaries.
2.2 Geography and language The relationship between literary history and linguistic geography is just as problematic as that between literature and its temporal boundaries. Since our concept of “literature” as an object of academic research originated in the 19th century it tends somehow to be linked to a national language. In the 19th century a nation’s literature gained its particular importance as the highest expression of a national culture and, therefore, as an expression of a national identity which was linked to a national language. Literature as an institution, as an object valued and protected by official authority, is thus a product of the 19th-century nation state – as is the philological origin of historical linguistics, one of whose prime purposes, originally, was to make accessible the treasures of medieval literature as the supposedly undiluted expression of a nation’s spirit. A closer look at the English Middle Ages teaches us how problematic such an assumption is. At the end of the 12th century, when the great works of early French literature were being composed, Angevin England was part of the French literary landscape (Symes 2007: 10–18). Chre´tien de Troyes spent some time in England, Marie de France composed all her works there, and the earliest manuscripts of the Chanson de Roland were also written in England. French, like Latin, was a literary language of England and a huge body of macaronic verse and of multi-lingual manuscripts testifies to how difficult it is from a literary point of view to draw clear distinctions between the cultural spheres of these languages. More often than not they seem to have shared common audiences. And as late as the end of the 14th century we find John Gower composing works in all three of England’s literary languages, i.e. in Latin, Anglo-French, and English. Besides, not only did medieval literary culture not adhere to the geographic, political, and even linguistic boundaries we take for granted at the beginning of the 21st century, but the very role of those geographic boundaries was different. In an age when transport and travel over land was arduous and time-consuming, a topographical feature such as the English Channel was more likely to bring people together than to keep them apart. In the absence of powerful navies and coastal defences the sea was the easiest access for invaders and the many invasions that the
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British Isles were subjected to from the migration period down to the end of the Middle Ages illustrate this fact. One of the well-known results of these many invasions and conquests is that English linguistic history has a strong Scandinavian component (see Dance, Chapter 110). And yet, while the powerful Scandinavian impact on the English language is easily identifiable today through the presence of such basic words as they or till in the English lexicon, the literary influence exerted by the Danes is much less tangible. Beowulf, a poem which like no other epitomizes Anglo-Saxon literature for modern readers (especially for readers who are not professional Anglo-Saxonists) serves as a perfect example. The poem is set in early 6th-century Scandinavia and events at the Danish court play a central role. Consequently, when the epic was first subjected to rigorous academic scrutiny in the early 19th century, Danish scholars actually claimed it as a monument of their own national history and culture. Yet a closer look at the Danes in the poem suggests that the text seems to know hardly anything of Scandinavian culture – contemporary or otherwise. Whatever the Beowulf-poet was trying to do, he was evidently not attempting to give his Danes any recognizable contemporary coloring. This is an important observation because in their eagerness to identify the contexts of historical poems even literary scholars often underestimate the powerful role of fictionality. The Beowulf-poet may have refrained from making his Danes look more authentically Scandinavian because he simply lacked the cultural expertise to do so. At the same time he may not have been particularly interested in any kind of historical specificity at all but rather in using his Danes for fictional purposes of his own. Since the New Critics (Wellek and Warren 1956: 147–150) have taught us that the quest for authorial intent is not only futile but risky, we need not pursue the question any further. What matters is the literary effect. And as far as Beowulf is concerned, that effect results in a fictional universe that manages to be both intensely historical and oddly ahistorical at the same time. It conveys a deep sense of multilayered history since it affords us a glimpse of a past that is distant even from the narrator’s point of view. Yet it also presents us with a legendary landscape that remains ultimately vague and unspecific. In other words, we have no reason to believe that the Denmark in Beowulf is any more realistic than the one that Shakespeare depicts in Hamlet. And this is the case even though the ties between 10th-century England and Danish culture were much stronger than those between England and Denmark in the early 17th century. As John D. Niles (1997: 225–226) states, despite all the Scandinavian places and peoples Beowulf mentions, we never really get a clear idea of how those different places or peoples are supposed to be related to each other geographically, ethnically or linguistically. The fact that many of the names in the poem can actually be identified historically does not automatically mean that the Beowulf-poet and his audience would have interpreted them in the same way as we do. At the end of the day, there is no doubt that in some sense Beowulf is a witness to historical relations between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian cultures, but because of its brilliant exploitation of fictionality and its general aesthetic complexity, the poem defies any attempts to use it as a source that might help us understand the cultural relations between Englishmen and Danes at the time the poem’s manuscript was produced. Given the complex forms of cultural hybridity that obtain in medieval England especially after 1066, it is not surprising that the situation of Middle English literature has been described as essentially post-colonial (Bowers 2000: 53–66). Helpful as
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postcolonial terminology may be for an understanding of how different the Middle Ages were from what we have come to accept as the standard cultural situation of the modern West, postcolonial associations also threaten to obscure medieval and early modern cultural and literary specificity. This is because postcolonial concepts imply notions about identity formation, about the relationship between the center and the margins and about the role of literature in society and within the educational system that are largely useless when it comes to describing the medieval or early modern experience. More importantly, postcolonial criticism’s very focus on a world shaped by the European conquest of a vast expanse of overseas territories tends to reify the period boundaries which, according to postcolonial theory’s own theoretical claims, it should be seeking to deconstruct. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2003: 19) has argued persuasively, postcolonial theory “has neglected the study of the distant past, positing instead of interrogating the anteriority against which modern regimes of power have supposedly arisen”.
2.3 Notions of the literary One of the central difficulties all students of the literature of the past – including historical linguists – have to grapple with is that the very idea of “literature” is a fairly recent one, one that is changing and shifting even as I write. Ever since Romanticism at the latest, the study of literature has revolved around the privileging of literature as an aesthetic object easily accessible in the form of printed books and largely enjoyed through practices of private reading. This has resulted in a special emphasis on self-conscious formal experimentation, on the one hand, and on fictionality, on the other, as typical markers of “literariness”. To be sure, literary works have shown an awareness of these aspects from the earliest times, but there have always been other criteria, too, which have served to distinguish the “literary” from the “non-literary”, such as the use of an elevated style or that of specific topoi. Many types of texts which had still been considered of high literary value right up to the 18th century – letters, historiographical works, speeches or sermons – were considerably demoted in status and it is only in recent times that they have begun again to receive increasing attention. John Donne’s contemporaries valued him as a preacher just as much, or perhaps even more than, as a poet. Similarly, our (post)modern reading habits are ill-attuned to the strong presence of the didactic or even encyclopaedic in literature from the earliest times down to the 18th century. In the same vein, the romantic and post-romantic cult of originality saw a reduced artistic relevance of translation. While the Middle Ages possessed a sophisticated relationship to the question of translation, encapsulated, for instance, in Eustache Deschamps’ famous praise of Chaucer as a “grand translateur” (Pearsall 1992: 81), for a long time modern critics tended to see translation as derivative and paid little attention to the complex theoretical questions medieval and early modern authors debated in the context of scriptural translation, but not only there. It is only within the last two decades that medieval ideas on and practices of translation have received growing attention, a development that has taken place within the larger translational turn which we witness in the humanities and which is to a certain extent driven by increasingly complex notions of intertextuality. Translation is now seen as a highly creative and self-conscious activity that cannot be reduced to the mere act of finding equivalents
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in one language for the words and phrases of another. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, when cultural boundaries were much more fluid and the relationships between the European vernaculars on the one hand and Latin on the other, but also between the vernaculars themselves, were constantly being readjusted, translation was the site of complex ideological and aesthetic negotiation. Some scholars have called into question the applicability per se of the modern notion of “literature” to the medieval and early modern periods. I shall single out one especially brilliant and also very radical example illustrative of this approach. Christopher Cannon (2004) has recently suggested that modern notions of literature ignore the cultural specificity of medieval texts, especially of those problematic medieval texts written in English during the 12th and 13th centuries, i.e. at the very beginning of the linguistic period we call “Middle English”. Cannon argues that we ought to see these works not as representative of some over-arching literary tradition, according to whose standards they are fairly unsophisticated products, but rather as highly individual textual entities meriting individualized critical responses. According to Cannon, the subsequent rise of romance – supposedly the first genre in English literary history to actually identify itself as such – dealt the death blow to that prelapsarian world of individualized textuality. I refer to Cannon’s theory not because I agree with him – I don’t – but because his fascinating Hegelian interpretation of one of the most crucial and yet least studied phases of English literary history represents a challenging attempt to come to terms with the fundamental problem of medieval literature’s alterity: how can we study the literature of the past if we cannot even be sure that the object of our study is what we think it is? Important as his contribution is, Cannon’s theory has at least two fundamental weaknesses. One is that it disregards the multilingual situation of the literary field of medieval England. Latin literature – and to some extent French – was capable of providing a powerful, well-developed and highly – if often implicitly – theorized notion of the literary to the authors who produced works like the Orrmulum or The Owl and the Nightingale. Precisely because medieval English literature did not exist in the comparative isolation of a 19th-century national culture can its notions of textuality and literariness be studied only if seen in conjunction with contemporary developments in Latin or French. The other reason why Cannon’s valiant attempt to rewrite medieval English literary history has to be approached with care is that for all its Hegelian terminology it actually shares in a Foucauldian tradition of romanticizing a state of lost innocence. Just as Foucault (1990: 42–43) proclaimed the absence of homosexual identities for the periods preceding the 19th century, positing instead that there had before been merely individual male-male sexual acts, so does Cannon proclaim the absence of a concept of literature in favor of individual texts. Foucault and many other theorists and historians of culture thus apply what one might arguably call the oldest model of periodization available to Western culture, that of the Fall. But as Jacques Derrida (1974) famously pointed out in his critique of Claude Le´vi-Strauss’s (1973 [1955]: 294–304) equally famous Writing Lesson, there is no point of origin in cultural history, no moment of absolute beginning and, therefore, no state of innocence nostalgically to be invoked. Obsessed with radical breaks and revolutionary ruptures, modern and postmodern historians of culture and literature are too prone to confuse difference with absence. In other words, when studying the literature of the past we must be careful not to cast our notion of alterity in terms of binary oppositions and thus simply define the “medieval” as all we think the modern is not.
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2.4 Method and theory The problem just sketched leads us to another of the basic issues that makes literary history so complex: to what degree are literary critics permitted to employ (post)modern critical tools on literary texts from the past? How anachronistic do we allow ourselves to become? In the early 1960s, an influential American scholar of medieval literature, Durant W. Robertson Jr. (1962), flatly denied the applicability of any kind of modern theory to medieval texts, suggesting instead that all medieval texts had to be read according to a hermeneutical key provided by the Middle Ages itself, namely biblical exegesis. Robertson and his followers argued that all medieval literature had to be read for allegorical Christian messages to be uncovered with the help of the fourfold sense of scripture. In effect, all medieval literature thus meant the same, it was an expression of the Christian religion. For obvious reasons, Robertsonian criticism never spread beyond the confines of medieval studies and was more popular in North America than elsewhere in the world – though it did in a way parallel the conservative, history-of-ideas style of approach expressed, for instance, in E. M. W. Tillyard’s (1959) The Elizabethan World Picture. Today Robertsonian forms of critique have either vanished or been absorbed into the more philologically rigorous types of contemporary medievalist historicism. The reason why Robertson is nevertheless worth mentioning is because he has become something close to the whipping boy of enlightened medieval studies, a spectre invoked when one wishes to attack one or another form of historicism as being too conservative. The ghost of Robertson still haunts Anglo-American medieval studies – he is virtually unknown in Germany – because, erroneous as his totalizing system of hermeneutics was, it did at least attempt to address the question of affording the literature of the past an interpretative system of its own, one not dominated by (post)modern notions of textuality and hermeneutics (Patterson 1987: 26–39). The fundamental question of alterity and anachronism thus addressed cannot be answered here. Much of the history of post-romantic literary theory and criticism can, to a certain extent at least, be read as a continuous engagement with or conscious rejection of this issue. If I nevertheless adopt a provisional stance in this matter, it is in order to remind historical linguists of the slipperiness of the texts they so often deal with as mere sources for their research into the earlier stages of the English language. These sources were not written with a view to becoming sources for historical linguists. Consequently, they will yield evidence – including the most basic forms of linguistic evidence – only to readers prepared to engage with them at their level of cultural complexity, even though it is ultimately impossible to reconstruct that level with any claim to accuracy. This is why literary medievalists will often sniff at the notion of corpus linguistics with its practice of prizing linguistic utterances out of their textual environment and thus divorcing them from a cultural and historical context without which they cannot be understood. Looking back on two decades of New Historicist literary studies, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt (2000) attempted a pragmatic statement on how to view literature from the past, one that derives much of its persuasiveness from the fact that it is not overly theorized. According to Gallagher and Greenblatt, the relationship between a historical work of literature and the discourses of a given time must always be seen in the light of a relative aesthetic autonomy of the literary text. The term “relative aesthetic autonomy” is one they would probably not use themselves,
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but it does seem to express the general current of their argument. This “relative aesthetic autonomy” matters not because it inoculates the text against the vicissitudes of history or because it removes the work of art onto some kind of timeless, universal plane, as the New Critics would have had it. On the contrary, – and this is very much my interpretation of Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s statement – the text’s specific aesthetic qualities make it possible for it to express more than it would be capable of saying if it were wholly reducible to a period’s stated ideological concepts or even its discursive framework as explicitly or implicitly expressed in so many different non-literary texts. As Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000: 17) explain, a historical work of literature is, therefore, “at once immersed in its time and place and yet somehow pulling out and away”. Modern readers “feel at once pulled out of our own world and plunged back with redoubled force into it” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 17). The fact that modern readers are capable of this exhilarating experience when they encounter the strange aesthetic object from the past, the two authors stress, suggests that similar feelings might actually have been generated in the past itself: “It seems arrogant to claim such an experience for ourselves as readers and not to grant something similar to the readers and the authors of the past” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 17). To speak of a “relative” autonomy of the aesthetic, as I did in rephrasing Gallagher and Greenblatt can, therefore, sound misleading. What is important here is precisely the literary text’s ability to give expression to ideas, concepts, and notions in an indirect or even performative way by employing specific aesthetic strategies and devices. And though these aesthetic devices need not be the exclusive property of literary texts, they do enable a literary text to expand and critique the conceptual frameworks of its period in ways not as readily available to text-types from fields where the ideological premises and norms of a given age are more directly and explicitly phrased, e.g. learned treatises, academic textbooks or legal compendia. And this helps us to understand why interpretations relying on (post)modern methods and theories, or interpretations that seem to contradict overwhelming evidence about the ideological structures of a given period cannot automatically be called anachronistic. If literature is capable of expressing through aesthetic means messages and ideas that would (have) be(en) inexpressible in any other form within a specific historical period, then the critic is justified in using every conceivable means of decoding the aesthetic structures which convey these particular meanings and that includes the complete panoply of (post)modern theory and linguistic methodology. By doing so, the critic is not disregarding or erasing historical specificity but rather bringing it into a fuller and more comprehensive view. My reading of Gallagher and Greenblatt is not entirely orthodox since, by and large, the New Historicists have not been too eager to stress the literariness of literary texts. Affirming the general textuality of culture, New Historicist critics have sought to treat supposedly non-literary texts very much like literary ones and vice versa. Thus, works of literature are frequently read in conjunction with e.g. contemporary medical, legal, or theological texts. Inspiring as this critical work has often been it has also permitted critics to let the literary work “rest easy within a contemporaneous sign system” (Strohm 2000: 150). Erasing the text-context-dichotomy has proved, therefore, to be much less of a liberating move than is often claimed. In many New Historicist readings, contemporary discourse has become the text’s new prison, confining its potential meanings in just as rigid a fashion as some of the dominant contexts from the so-called “Old Historicism” had done.
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2.5 Canon formation The anonymous romantic comedy Mucedorus, first printed as a quarto in 1598 and reprinted in 16 quarto editions by 1668, was five times more popular with Shakespeare’s audience than Hamlet (Gurr 2004: 88). This can mean two things – and they are not mutually exclusive. First, it draws attention to the fact that an Elizabethan audience’s tastes differed from ours and that what we consider canonical might not have been seen as important by contemporaries. Second, the observation highlights the issue of popularity versus canonicity, i.e. the problem that even in Elizabethan times there was a clearly felt difference between literary works with a high degree of cultural prestige and texts addressing a less sophisticated audience. In other words, both is true: namely that Shakespeare’s canonical status amongst contemporaries was not what it is today and also that the Elizabethan literary field already distinguished between high-brow and low-brow forms of literary production. Canon formation is thus one of the central and one of the trickiest questions in literary studies, but it is also of interest to historical linguists because it helps them to assess the status of their sources. I do not have the space to expound in detail on how within the last three decades or so not only the canon as such but the very notion of the canon has become the target of harsh, often politically inspired criticism. The traditional canon is seen to contain almost exclusively the works of male writers belonging to the cultural heritage of the great imperialist powers of the 19th century while authors representing ethnic or racial minorities within the great metropolitan centers of the West, authors from outside these metropolitan centers and women were afforded no more than a marginal status. These debates are driven by the legitimate desire to introduce into the canon works previously excluded, yet the discussions thus raised alert us to the complexity and contingency of canon-formation in general and this is just as relevant for our perspective on the literature of the past as it is for the question of what to teach modern high school students and undergraduates. That a poem like Beowulf should be considered the most canonical of Old English texts is an entirely modern phenomenon that disregards both the poem’s manuscript context and, perhaps even more importantly, our huge lack of knowledge with respect to the literary field of Anglo-Saxon England. Because so much medieval literature is irretrievably lost, we can never be quite sure whether the surviving texts were considered of high quality by contemporaries or not, or whether their survival is due to sheer coincidence. For the later Middle Ages, popularity and, to a certain extent, canonicity can often be gauged through the survival rate of manuscripts. But even here we have to be careful: one of the most canonical works of late Middle English literature (in modern eyes), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, survives in only a single manuscript together with the anonymous poet’s other extant works. Does this mean that the poem was unpopular in its time, or even uncanonical? Is it possible at all to employ the notion of the canonical for the time period in question? Our canon of medieval English literature obviously looks different from what medieval audiences would have considered important. And the same is true of Renaissance literature. The privileged status we accord to the Elizabethan and the Jacobean stage would have seemed decidedly odd to contemporaries who would have assigned a much higher status to narrative verse than to drama. That some notion of a canon did actually exist even in the early Middle Ages is beyond question. When Alfred the Great instigated his great translation project he
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obviously considered a certain body of texts more important than others. But those were Latin texts. It is far more difficult to assess whether there was a sense of vernacular canonicity and if so, when it came into being. Chaucer’s work definitely betrays a strong sense of the canonical and imitates Dante in attempting to elevate vernacular poetry to a status comparable to that of classical literature. Changes in the literary canon have been brought about not merely by attempts to include women or representatives of racial and ethnic groups previously marginalized. Fluctuating tastes and interests often lead to a retrospective reshuffle even of the traditional canon. One of the most prominent cases of such a change in appreciation is the fate of the Metaphysical Poets of the early 17th century. Within a few decades their reputation had become tarnished since their dark and complicated metaphors did not conform to the neoclassical taste that dominated the end of the 17th century and much of the 18th. It was only high modernism as embodied by T. S. Eliot that brought the Metaphysicals back into view and elevated them to an illustrious literary status (Eagleton 1983: 37–40). A more recent example of such shifting sensibilities is the case of the late romantic poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Beddoes spent most of his life working on the sprawling and intricately crafted drama Death’s Jest Book, which until recently was largely considered an unstageable and chaotic failure. Now, however, the play is in the process of being completely re-evaluated and raised to the status of an undisputed masterpiece (Berns and Bradshaw 2007: 10–24). Hence the process of restructuring the canon proves to be a complex one. As newly developing aesthetic sensibilities seek hitherto unexposed aesthetic principles in historical texts, new vistas are opened on aesthetic structures previously unrecognized. Natural as this may sound it is actually quite a dramatic and often even painful process.
2.6 Authorship and subjectivity Despite these shifts in the canon, many traditions of 19th- and early 20th-century criticism linger on and still inform much of our thinking about the canon. Until fairly recently, for instance, the vast body of anonymous Middle English lyrics was deemed to be “popular”, i.e. written by simple people for simple people. Only within the last decade or so have scholars begun to understand the full implications of the fact that anonymity is not necessarily a witness to social or aesthetic irrelevance but may simply be due to different notions of authorship (O’Donoghue 2005: 212–222). And these notions of authorship might actually vary from genre to genre more considerably than they do from period to period. But if anonymity can be linked to genre, then anonymity must also be seen as an aesthetic device producing, for instance, the effect of a disembodied voice. And disembodied voices may make very specific demands on a text’s pragmatics. Anonymity plays such an important role in discussions of medieval and early modern authorship because it has been seen as evidence for the supposed absence of subjectivity in the Middle Ages and, to some degree, in the early modern period. This is a view that goes back to the 19th century and was famously expressed by Jacob Burckhardt (1990: 98). He argued that medieval human beings possessed only collective identities determined by their families, tribes, or cities and that they were incapable of seeing themselves as (individual) subjects. Even though Burckhardt’s theoretical premises have become obsolete his basic ideas linger on. Poststructuralists, New Historicists
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and Cultural Materialists all have voiced similar views within their own theoretical frameworks. Critics who deny the existence of subjectivity to the Middle Ages subscribe to a notion of subjectivity shaped by the rise of 18th- and 19th-century bourgeois individualism. They adhere to a model that posits a linear development of subjectivity as a kind of unbroken vector rising in one direction only. That such a view is teleological is obvious; again difference is primarily conceived of in terms of absence and not in terms of an alterity that may, in fact, defy the very categories we bring to bear on it. One possibility these critics do not usually entertain is that of a subjectivity not linked to individuality (Spearing 2005: 1–34), or of a subjectivity that does not express itself through a self-conscious celebration of the individual but, for instance, through a troubled meditation on the conflicted experience of the collective. Nor do they realize that subjectivity and the degree to which it is discussed in literature might vary even within such time periods as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment instead of moving forward in an unbroken continuity (Aers 1992: 177–202). Finally, and this is by far the worst problem from a literary point of view, they do not grant the literary text of the past the ability to stage and construct forms of subjectivity rather than merely to mirror them. To argue that a notion or idea did not exist in the past because it is supposedly absent from the texts of a given period, means falling prey to a whole set of fallacies. First, such a view confuses literary fictions with extra-textual reality. Second, such an approach overlooks the fact that something may actually be hidden under the surface level and, third, it neglects the possibility that a text from the past may be using a form of conspicuous absence as a form of highlighting the very phenomenon it apparently lacks. This, for instance, is what Lee Patterson (1991: 165–230) argues in his classic discussion of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. This brings me to the end of my discussion. Ultimately, what makes our understanding of the literature of the past so complicated is not only the alterity of that literature but also the fact that many of the features we are prone to consider as straightforward evidence of that alterity may, in fact, be the products of self-conscious aesthetic strategies. In other words, when studying literature from the past we must be aware not merely of the possibility of fundamental cultural difference, but also of highly sophisticated forms of artistic expression which actually produce some of those effects we like to associate with the pastness of the past. And this would mean that the past already creates its own fictions of alterity (Johnston 2008: 1–16).
3 References Aers, David. 1992. A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”. In: David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, 177–202. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Berns, Ute and Michael Bradshaw. 2007. Introduction. In: Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1–31. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bowers, John M. 2000. Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author. In: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 53–66. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Burckhardt, Jacob. 1990 [1860]. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Penguin. Cannon, Christopher. 2004. The Grounds of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2003. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cooper, Helen. 2004. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1974 [1967]. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. [De la Grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit] Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. 2000. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gurr, Andrew. 2004. The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1979. The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature. New Literary History 10: 181–229. Johnston, Andrew James. 2008. Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello. Turnhout: Brepols. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude. 1973 [1955]. Tristes Tropiques. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Librairie Plon.] Lewis, Clive Staples. 1954. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Niles, John D. 1997. Myth and History. In: Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.), The Beowulf Handbook, 213–233. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. O’Donoghue, Bernard. 2005. “Cuius Contrarium”: Middle English Popular Lyrics. In: Thomas G. Duncan (ed.), A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, 210–226. Cambridge: Brewer. Patterson, Lee. 1987. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Patterson, Lee. 1991. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pearsall, Derek. 1992. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Blackwell. Robertson, Durant W, Jr. 1962. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spearing, Anthony Colin. 2005. Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starn, Randolph. 1994. Who’s Afraid of the Renaissance. In: John Van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, 129–147. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Strohm, Paul. 2000. Theory and the Premodern Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Symes, Carol. 2007. Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon. In: Paul Strohm (ed.), Middle English, 7–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tillyard, Eustace M. W. 1959. The Elizabethan World Picture. London: Vintage. Wellek, Rene´ and Austin Warren. 1962. A Theory of Literature. 3rd edn. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Andrew James Johnston, Berlin (Germany)
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78. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography: Music as a language – the history of an idea 1. Music, language, literature 2. The separation of literature and music 3. Beginnings of the (mis-)understanding of music as language: the comparison of musica and grammatica 4. The development of the idea of a musical semantics: music becomes language 5. Summary 6. References
Abstract The close relationship of music and language is a commonplace paradigm in many disciplines from the humanities and social sciences to biology. In musicology it has been one of the central fields of study ever since the beginning of rational thinking about music. This chapter will show that the idea of a relationship or even an identity of music and language originates in our conception about what music and language actually are. The fact that today we think about music and language as closely related communication systems with a common origin is the result of a long history of communication not within but about these systems; it is part of the history of scholarly and scientific communication. As this history is, of course, not specific to the English language or to English speaking countries the view of this chapter will be rather international albeit with a focus on English sources.
1 Music, language, literature Papers concerning music and language only rarely ask the question whether the two are actually comparable and can thus be related. When considered accurately, the term “music” does not stand for a single medium of communication, even if it is usually understood that way in everyday discourse. “Music”, first of all, is a symbolic generalization of a number of different systems of communication operating on the basis of diverse media. Often, it utilizes several media simultaneously: between composer and musician it is the medium of the musical tone and its script, the notation; between musician and listener it is, among other things, the medium of sound and its writing, that is the sound recording; between band or DJ and dancers it is the movement and the rhythm, sometimes put into written form as a choreography or as a music video through which new kinds of dancing can be conveyed (cf. Helms 2003). In the face of popular music and the diverse systems of non-European musics one may rightly doubt definitions of music as art, as some authors have done in the past. However, one may at least say that all communication systems of music mark parallel worlds outside of everyday communication. Music transports the listener out of everyday life and into a gamelike, temporally limited and ritualized sphere with distinct rules: dancing music turns a celebration into a festivity; the liturgy and its songs turn the church service into an exhilarating experience; the concert unites rites of festivity Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1214–1232
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and of service; the pop-song transports the audience into dream worlds; and the music in a department store tries to turn the banality of trade into a pleasant experience. In contrast, language is, first of all, a medium of everyday communication. However, within distinct systems of communication it can be transformed into fiction, whether in speech or in writing, in verse, drama or prose. Many comparisons of language and music become dubitable precisely because the scope of “music” is reduced to a medium that consists only of musical tones and notation, while that of language is extended to include the communication system of literature. When evolutionary biologists in the field of so-called “biomusicology” claim a mutual origin of language and music, or even the origin of language from music, their understanding of the term “music” neglects great areas of its extension. The “songs” of birds, whales, or monkeys are communicative systems like language and like the diverse media which constitute the musical systems of communication. To equate those “songs” with music, though, would be the same as to refer to them as literature, which indeed consists of language and yet is so much more than language. Animals communicate through tones, sounds, and rhythms, yet they do not produce music as long as these tones, sounds and rhythms are not used to mark off a communicative situation that is distinguished from everyday life. Music is a communicative act that transcends everyday life using set rules and a clear terminability – similar to a game. Comparisons of literature and music, however, stand to reason. Before the invention of film, these two were the only arts proceeding dynamically through time. Because of their form, which renders them perceivable, both constitute ritualized spheres which are differentiated from everyday communication. Literature describes fictive acts as if they were real whereas music turns real acts into fiction that are not commonplace and sometimes non-committal. Hence the detachment of music and language marks the beginning of the history of the comparison of music and language.
2 The separation of literature and music A comprehensive concept of music that expands with every invention of new broadcasting media – from the first notations to the MP3-file – is characteristic of our culture. However, this cannot be taken for granted. That is, although many cultures have special words for singing, dancing, and playing an instrument as well as for certain rites which comprise singing or dancing, they do not have a superordinate term for the concept of music (cf. Kaden 2006). If singing as one concept in a communication system is only denoted as and understood through the notion of a rite, for instance a prayer, then for the members of that communication system the concept collapses into parts of the prayer but not into melody and text. If singing is understood to be an action which has nothing in common with the activities of playing an instrument or dancing, there is no need for a differentiation between melody and text which would have rendered it comparable to melody and sound of instrumental playing, and melody and movement of dancing. In singing, it is the musical media tone, sound and rhythm that are markers of nonstandard spheres of communication rather than the words of the text. However, pitch and length of the tone are not categorically separated from the articulated sound of the linguistic syllable: they are part of an entity within the prosody. The division of the perception of singing as duality of text and music is a relatively late phenomenon in history. One might presume that the text and music of a song or an opera are
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experienced holistically by a great number of recipients to this day. This holistic perspective is only problematic for those who interpret music and text in written or spoken words; that is philosophers, critics, literary scholars and musicologists. This problem arose in the historic moment of Greek antiquity when a song was no longer only sung, danced or listened to, but also analyzed, which meant that it was broken into parts in order to describe its effect and significance. First evidence of the claim that music can be appreciated without text (and without dance) can be found in the myth about the competition between Apoll (the Greek god and head of the nine Muses) and Marsyas (a minor deity living in springs) – despite the fact that the claim is still negated by Apoll’s victory, who sang and simultaneously plucked the kithara, while Marsyas played the aulos, a wind instrument. The writings of Greek philosophers that have been handed down through history, and particularly those of Plato, extensively reflect the emancipatory process of thinking and talking about music. Plato argues against the separation of text and music which, in his day, had already become an established fact. Plato defines melos (here: the song) as a unity of logos (word), harmonia (melody/manner of singing), and rhythmos (metre/ rhythm) (Politeia 3.398d) and defends this entity arguing that it is hard to identify what harmonia and rhythmos alone, excluding logos, would want to express and imitate. He condemns pure instrumental music that does not accompany vocals or dance and derives its quality from the musician’s virtuosity alone as crude and unwrought (Nomoi 2.669e-670a). In the Nomoi, he uses the term mousike´ for the unity of tone, rhythm, and text. Consistently, he applies the term poieˆteˆs to the concept of the “poet-musician”. Yet he cannot prevent the departure of the enigmatic notion of mousike´ from the unity of the arts of the muses towards autonomy, that is, becoming independent of poetry – both in thinking and with the participants and institutions in the field of artistic practice. The time of Aristotle, then, marks the manifestation of a concept of mousike´ that generally comprises practical musical skills like playing an instrument and singing on the one hand, as well as harmony in its full scope, from the theory of harmony related to practice to the Pythagorean philosophy of numeraries, on the other. The discovery that musical intervals can be conveyed through mathematical proportions (e.g. the octave as a relation of 2:1, the fifth as 3:2, the fourth as 4:3), which in Greek philosophy was ascribed to Pythagoras, led to a further autonomization of the reasoning about music through the introduction of a mathematical reference system. The theory of harmony built on mathematical laws as it was put into writing by Aristoxenos of Tarent (who lived a generation after Aristotle) eventually led to the irrevocable emancipation of the theory of music from poetics. The Pythagorean mysticism of numeraries helped to establish the first theory of the effects of music that was independent of its linguistic meaning: if Creation as a whole is organized through harmonic partition, then the soul of Man is organized harmonically as well (cf. Plato, Timaeus), and, accordingly, can be modulated by the harmony of music. Differences in music can, as a consequence, have different effects on the listener (Politeia 3.398c–399d). The mathematic paradigm of speaking about music as a musica speculativa, from the four Pythagorean mathemata of Archytas of Tarentum (geometry, numeraries, spherical geometry, and mousike´) to the quadrivium of the artes liberales, was propagated until the Renaissance and at some universities even until the Enlightenment. Medieval authors used the term musica to indicate a philosophy of music based on mathematics.
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Until the 15th century, and sometimes beyond that, the English language normally used the terms “musike” or “musique” to denote a scientific-mathematical discipline. John of Salisbury, in his mirror for princes Policraticus sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum (c. 1159), for instance, finds fault in the alleged debauchery and licence of his contemporary music and relates this to missing measure, i.e. the missing numerical order (John of Salisbury 1965: vol. 1, 41–42). In the Middle Ages, practical music, just like the status of a practicing musician, was not worth mentioning. Yet we can assume that the unity of poetry and music was initially perpetuated in mental concepts of singing. The two forms of notation in Ancient Greek that were common in the 5th century BCE, and were sporadically used until the 4th century CE, borrowed their symbols from the Doric and the Ionic alphabet. The next step in developing a script for notation were the neumes which were the first occidental musical notation after a long period without any form of writing. Their principles were developed simultaneously in the Ecclesiae Orientales, that is the churches in the East of the Roman Empire, and in Francia during the 9th century CE. The neumes, as opposed to the ancient Greek notations, were based on the prosodic symbols of the reciters of ancient Greek literature. Early neumes are adiastematic, i.e. they run parallel to the text like prosodic symbols, while the position of the symbol does not denote the pitch. They are simply musical gestures (neuma = gr. nod, sign) designed to help the memorizing of the text. The characters of neumatic notations demonstrate that they were not invented for a notation in the sense of our contemporary understanding of written music. They were rather a mnemonic device for an exalted, ceremonial recitation of text. Yet the tendency to think in tones in applied music, which otherwise can only be found in music theory, can already be observed in notations from before the year 1000 CE: the linear neume-symbols, suggesting movement, yield to the punctum (a loan-word from geometry), which through its arrangement allows for a more precise representation of tone pitch. Especially after the development of staves in intervals of a third, which took place shortly after 1000 CE, the representation of pitch was presumably exact. As opposed to the adiastematic neumes, the note is now constructed mathematically and can be read independently of the text and the memory of its prosody. As long as music and text were still thought of as one it was not necessary to put the rhythm into writing since the syllables provided indications for the approximate lengths and brevities in the performance. It was the implementation of mensural notation in the 13th century that permitted the writing of the durations of tones as mathematically precise parts of a whole and hence led to the ultimate separation of music and text in musical praxis. It became both thinkable and practicable to compose music without a text, that is without the substructure of a pre-existing vocal melody, a cantus firmus; and polyphonic music became an art that was increasingly independent from text. It was not until the advance of humanistic education among musicians around the end of the 15th century that composition and literature converged again. Yet these attempts at unification were always made with awareness of the existing diversities of both systems, and the separation was now considered to be a problem. The comprehensibility of text became an important issue in times of humanism and reformation and from around 1400 the composers increasingly took meaning, form, and metre of the text they chose for their composition into account. During the first half of the 1580s, the members
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of the Camerata fiorentina – an academy-like group of musicians, poets and scholars led by Earl Giovanni Bardi – discussed the relation of text and music on the basis of the antique tragedy. In France, the Acade´mie de Poe´sie et de Musique, which formed around the poet Jean-Antoine de Baı¨f, began testing the use of antique metre in their Musique mesure`e a` l’antique, in 1570. In England it was most notably the composer and poet Thomas Campion who seized these ideas in his measured verse, as he explains in the preamble of his Two Bookes of Ayres: “I have chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together” (London c. 1613). In Germany, it was already around the beginning of the 16th century that composers tried to confer antique metre to music, as odes by composers like Conradus Celtis show. In Italy, and later on also in France, these discussions led to the development of a new musico-dramatic art, the “favola in musica” and respectively the “trage´die en musique”, i.e. the Italian and the French opera. French literary theory of the 18th century even acknowledged opera as a third genre of drama besides tragedy and comedy. From 1850 onwards Richard Wagner’s concept of the Music Drama marked a climax of the attempts to unify music and literature: all parts of music, from a single tone and its duration, to keys and harmonies, to the sound of orchestra and leitmotiv, as well as all parts of libretto, from the sound of vocals and consonants to the form of alliteration to the proceedings, should serve the idea of the drama (Wagner 1852).
3 Beginnings of the (mis-)understanding of music as language: the comparison of musica and grammatica The disconnection of the literary text from music was not necessarily the basis for the understanding of music as a language. The separation of both arts was mainly facilitated through the mathematical understanding of the musical parameters of pitch and length. But although the treatises of medieval theorists followed the antique tradition of describing music as a mathematical discipline, their texts ever and anon contain linguistic terminology used for comparison and for the exemplification of musical concepts. Here, the medieval authors tie in with antique traditions: both the commented translation of Plato’s Timaeus by Chalcidius (4th/5th century CE) and Boethius’s five books De institutione musice (500 CE), standard works of the “musica speculativa” in medieval times and Renaissance, describe the sonus as the smallest unit of the cantus by comparing the former with the phtongi of language. This comparison becomes a commonplace which can be found in many medieval writings (Maier 1999: 149–152) like for instance in the Carolingian “Musica enchiriadis” (9 CE), the most prominent treatise of musical theory in the late Middle Ages, which was also known in England in the 11th century at the latest; or in a fragment of a book entitled Musica, which was probably wrongfully assigned to Alcuin and contained many sections that correspond to the Musica disciplina of Aurelianus Reomensis of the 9th century; or in Walter Odington’s Summa de speculatione musicae (around 1300). The English monk writes the following about musical performance: Et sunt apud nos partes cantilenae sic enim syllabae et pedes sunt partes metri, ita in vocibus phtongi, id est soni, quorum duo vel tres neumam, id est partem cantilenae, constituunt, et pars una vel plures distinctiones faciunt, id est congruum respirationis locum. (Odington 1970: 103)
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And we have parts in song which are like syllables and feet as parts of metre. In voices there are phtongi, that is tones, of which two or three make a neum, that is a part of song, and one or more of them make a distinction that is a joint place of breathing. (my translation, DH)
Especially when mathematical explanatory models prove to be insufficient, for instance when it comes to the description of design features that go beyond single tones, or to breaks and cadences, the theory of music of the Middle Ages uses grammatical terms for explanations. Often theorists also discuss the different meanings of terms in linguistics and music, as for instance with Johannes de Muris, who in his Summa distinguishes the grammatical term “tonus”, which he equates with the three forms of accents, from the same term in music, which he defines as interval, as it is still customary today with the terms semi-tone and whole-tone (de Muris 1963: 210). Fritz Reckow ascribes the prevalent borrowing of grammatical terms by medieval music theorists to their wish for a regulation of musical knowledge. He writes that the educational movement of the Carolingians had already led to a systemization and standardization of knowledge. In the wake of this systemization, music theorists would often refer to the model of the grammatica as a regulated and regularized discipline (cf. Reckow 1992: 84–86). Roger Bacon, however, Aristotelian and strongly influenced by Augustinus’s De Musica, describes the relation between linguistic disciplines and music from a wholly different perspective: in his Opus tertium he classifies music as consisting of melody (“melica”), text (“prosaica”), metrics (“metrica”) and rhythm (“rhythmica”). While melody can be found in singing, the other three paradigms belong to speech. Bacon argues that the musicus, who in all four areas searches for reasons and causes on the basis of numerical principles, is for the grammarian what the geometrician is for the carpenter: “grammaticus est mechanicus in hac parte, et musicus est artifex principalis” (Bacon 1859: 231). For Bacon musica as the theory of harmonical proportions is also the fundament of linguistic disciplines. Grammar, according to Bacon, cannot explain its reasons and causes, the mathematical discipline of music, however, can. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance compared single terms and basic properties of both disciplines to each other, without, though, equalizing the disciplines. It was not before the 17th century that music was no longer seen as just being comparable to linguistic disciplines; establishing the notion that music is a language of its own (see Section 4) was pre-conditional for transferring the term of grammar as an elementary regulating system of language to the elementary tenets of music as well as for explaining the form of compositions with the help of syntactic terms. The publication of the manuscripts The Musical Grammarian written by Roger North in 1726 and 1728 (North 1990) and William Tans’ur’s A Compleat Melody (1734), which was also published with the title A New Musical Grammar, marked the beginning of a production of dozens of basic teachings in music coming up in the 18th and especially the 19th century up to this day, which promise to introduce the reader to the “grammar” of music. The equation of music and language led to the transfer of a large number of linguistic terms to musical terminology, which, most notably, describe the “syntax” of music: the terms period, theme/subject, thought, exposition and recapitulation are examples from English. Examples from German like Hauptsatz ‘main clause’ and Seiten-/Nebensatz ‘side/subordinate clause’ articulate the concept even more clearly. It is no coincidence
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that these terms are mostly associated with the music of the pre-classical (from about 1730 onwards) and the classical period. The new structural orientation of composition on harmony rather than melodic lines led to a symmetrically textured construction of periods (Periodenbau) and easily comprehensible forms like the sonata form, while both techniques suggested the comparison with syntax and the borrowing of its terms for new phenomena. Because of the development of a grammar of music which was build on mere musical parameters the instrumental music could separate from vocal music since it was no longer dependent on words to develop form. The book A Treatise on the Art of Music by the English author William Jones suggested that this development in music marked the close of the golden age of English music from Bird to Handel: “Ever since Instrumental Music has been made independent of Vocal, we have been in danger of falling under the dominion of sound without sense” (Jones 1784: iv). The Scottish writer Alexander Malcolm anticipated this criticism in his A treatise of musick, speculative, practical, and historical in 1721. He argued that, as a matter of course, almost every melody would provoke feelings but the beauty of the new music should be recognized by its design. For him, the aim of the new music was rather “to entertain the Understanding, than to move particular Passions” (Malcolm 1721: 600). The numerous grammars of music that introduce the reader to the basics of musical construction also react to this new demand on the listener to permeate a composition structurally. Accordingly, William Jones writes: “If you play an Adagio of Corelli to a person who knows nothing of Harmony, you will raise no Admiration; for the same reason, as if you were to read Milton or Shakespeare to a man who does not understand the Grammar” (Jones 1784: i–ii). After all, educated people would not need to listen to the music but would be able to get “satisfaction and improvement” only from reading a score (Jones 1784: ii). When the performative element can be omitted and when the delights of music can accrue from the study of the score only, then music has at last drawn level with literature: it becomes an opus. In An Essay on Musical Harmony from 1796, Augustus F.C. Kollmann discusses at length the equation of linguistic form and music. In his chapter about rhythm, for example, he compares musical bars with metrical feet, periods with lines, and episodes with stanzas (Kollmann 1796: 80–81). Eventually John Wall Callcott tags the musical episodes with signs which he compares to punctuation marks (Callcott 1817: 276). Since the audience of the pre-classical and the classical period was increasingly composed of music lovers with little musical education one might speculate that the borrowing of terms from grammar and poetics in the elementary tenets of music facilitated the comprehension and understanding of music for this audience. If on the one hand music can be described with terms of grammar, then, conversely, grammar can use concepts and signs of music – especially in areas where the terminology and the character set of linguistics are insufficient. From early on, notes were used in grammars and language schools, as for example in Franciscus Niger’s (1480) Grammatica brevis, which described the length, stress and melody in the recitation of Latin poetry with the help of musical notation (cf. facsimiles in Littleton 1911: 15). Particularly for the demonstration of the parameters of a language, like its intonation, it was and still is common to revert to parallels in music, like e.g. Joshua Steele did in his An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols, which influenced many succeeding linguists. Steele
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developed a complex notation system for linguistic intonation and rhythm based on musical notation, and postulated a close link between practical music and linguistics to aim at a more detailed description of language (Steele 1775: xiv-xvi) and to refine language in general (Steele 1775: 173): Moreover, having never yet blended the study of music and language together, so as to treat the modulation of speeche as a genus of music under the rules of Melopœia, it is not to be wondered at, that the Greek writers in this learning have been overlooked or misunderstood. (Steele 1775: xvi)
Steele’s method was enhanced in the 19th century by John Thelwall (1812) in his Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and in James Chapman’s (1976 [1821]) The Original Rhythmical Grammar of the English language; or the Art of Reading and Speaking, on the Principles of the Music of Speech.
4 The development of the idea of a musical semantics: music becomes language Since antiquity, the question of the effect on the listeners of music emancipated from the text had been a problem. Only when composers in the renaissance strove to cause this effect by using palpable musical signs was the idea of semantics ascribed to music. The myth of Orpheus, who was able to influence humans, animals, gods and even inanimate nature by his singing, proves the power that was already ascribed to the art of the muses in ancient times, i.e. the power to influence human beings as well as both animate and inanimate nature. Along with the associated detachment of harmonia and logos (see above) the question of the degree of involvement of harmonia in relation to influence and meaning became virulent. The philosophers in ancient Greece did not deny the great effects of non-textual music. However, Plato accused virtuosic music of crudity (Nomoi 2.670a); Aristotle at least ascribed the function of catharsis to this kind of music (Politika 8.1341b, 30–40). The verbal concretion of this effect and its meaning, however, becomes somewhat problematic. In the Nomoi (2.669e), Plato argues that it is difficult to judge what rythmos and harmonia try to express and imitate without text. In Politeia he refers to Damon when he ascribes certain characteristics to the modes: the Mixolydian and the Hyperlydian are described as mournful, the Lydian and Ionic as limp and softish, the Doric as heroical, and the Phrygian is considered to be the tonality of leisure. He also assumes the imitation of certain characteristics in rhythm, without, though, concretizing his assumption (Politeia 3.398d–3.401a.). Although not always consistently, the ascriptions of characteristics to tonalities were passed on from antiquity and through Boethius to medieval times, often enriched with anecdotes about the astonishing effects of music. In their theories of state, both Aristotle and Plato draw conclusions about the use of music in education using the effects of music. Both see the major aim of education in training the faculty of judgement, above all to identify the ethical values of a song. In addition, the evaluation of ethically aesthetic forms and the ascertainment of the effects of music allowed music theorists to draw parallels to poetics and rhetoric. Cicero (De oratore III, (LX) 224–227) and Quintilian (Institutio oratoria I, 10) for example
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pointed to the benefits of musical knowledge for public orators, who were advised to find the most appropriate and striking delivery of their speeches through music and its effects. The assertions of the antique authors about the characteristics of tonalities are heterogeneous and vague, and it is difficult to transfer them to the Gregorian Choral of Christian liturgy. Consequently, many medieval authors referred to them with rather little enthusiasm. However, some evidence on how music can be adjusted to the “materia” of the text through choosing mode and melody can be found very early on in the writings of Johannes Affligemensis, who in his treaty De musica cum tonario, written around 1100, provides some hints on how these adjustments were conducted (Affligemensis 1963). From the end of the 12th century onwards, scholasticism intensified the discussion about the adequacy of music and text. Hieronymus of Moravia for instance argued in the 13th century that music should be written in accordance with the content of the text – i.e., according to the beauty or unseemliness of the text – without the mechanical assignment of modes to characteristics (Reckow 1992: 90). These beginnings of a musical poetics, whose realization still constitutes a desideratum of research in musical practice (see e.g. Stevens 1986; Hughes 1990), certainly never reached a stage in theory in which designated contents of texts would be allocated to concrete musical phenomena. In the beginning of the 14th century music theory went a step further and approved – in conscious imitation of rhetoric – of the deliberate violation of rules in order to cause effects and sketch characters. When medieval authors utilize rhetoric terms in their music treatises, however, they use them as an example for a comparable phenomenon in the adjoining discipline of rhetoric, and not as an attempt to establish a rhetoric of music. Around 1100, for instance, Johannes Affligemensis argued that the homoioptoton, the “apud musicos”, conforms to the homoiophthongon, and in 1417 Gobelinus Person mentions antonomasia and exclamatio in combination with the description of musical means of expression (Person 1907: 195). While grammar and rhetoric are used for comparison and as reference in the Middle Age, and the agreement of music and text was actually more a desirable “ornatus” than a condition (Reckow 1998: 30), the development that concludes with the idea of music as language eventually begins with the advancement of the Renaissance. Shortly before the 16th century, indications in the field of music theory as well as in other disciplines, suggestive that contemporaries expected something different from practical music than they did before, proliferate. Typical examples are Thomas More’s oft quoted propositions in Utopia (1516), in which he presents his ideal of music as an expression of natural feelings so expressive that it touches the hearts of the listeners (More 1965: 236–237). A year later it is More’s friend Richard Pace who substantiates these thoughts. After an elaborate praise of music and its wonderful effects in De Fructu (1517), he bemoans the triviality of the music of his coevals in comparison to the arts of the elder, excoriating that hardly any living musician was able to understand the harmonies he was singing (Pace 1967: 44). This criticism of contemporary music cumulates and becomes a commonplace in music theory and beyond. Humanists rediscovered old reports about the effects of music during their debate about antique literature. Although these reports – generally mediated by Boethius – were also known in the Middle Ages, they gained new authority after the writings of Aristotle and especially those of Plato had been made accessible in the 13th and 15th centuries respectively. Humanists collect extensive
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florilegia concerning the effects and advantages of music, and the longer these lists of its miraculous powers get, the more pressing seems the question why contemporary music is not able to produce such effects and by which means it could gain such powers again (Helms 2001). While the beauty of medieval composition is represented by its (mathematical) mensurability, in the harmonic proportionality of its parts, and in the splendour and festive context of its performance, what matters now in the 15th and 16th centuries is the effect and expression that music reaches through imitation – the Aristotelian principle of mimesis. The idea that music could refer to the subjectivity of the composer or the listener, and that it gains its meaning through this reference, is still foreign in the Renaissance, that only just “invented” the concept of the composer being the creator and owner of his work – eventually, music can thus only imitate what is indicated by its text. However, as the anonymous author in 15th century De origine et effectu musicae writes in the chapter De imitatione rerum effectus in neumi, imitatio is no longer just concerned with the underlying affect, represented through choice of the mode, a certain tempo or a high or low pitch of melody (Anonymous 1983: 111). Now, intelligibility in composition increasingly corresponds to the single phrase, and even the single word. Among the prevailing mood, the affect, attention is also focused on detail. In his Practica Musicae, Franchino Gaffurio (1496: fol. eeiiijv) states that singing has to be adapted to the word of the song, and Gioseffo Zarlino (1588: Chapters VII/II) eventually coined the catchphrase of the “imitazione della parola” in his Sopplimenti musicali. Just like the poet, who imitates things with words ordered in verse, the musician could imitate the expression of the words he wants to compose in music by means of melody and harmony (cf. Du¨rr 1994: 53). With the demand for imitation of the word in music, the step from the effect of music to its meaning is taken. Composers already and increasingly start to experiment with musical means of expression during the first half of the 15th century. Even if more detailed research is still required, one can assume that most means of expression were already known in the first decades of the 15th century before the beginning of the musical Renaissance. The meaning of these, however, changed from being additional ornatus to constituting a central aspect of composition. Composers like Josquin Desprez, a role model for the entire 16th century, were very sensitive towards syntactical units and the metre of their texts, but also towards their semantics. Thus, the meaning of music is generated through different systems of signs. Mathematics not only gives a composition its formal order of its single parts in mathematically beautiful proportions, but also a meaning through number symbolism, which can manifest itself in a distinct repetition of notes or through the choice of a certain metre. Some composers like to apply the secret science of gematria. They transfer e.g. the name of a person into a number by adding up the positions of its letters in the alphabet and representing this figure in their composition e.g. in the number of notes of a melody. “Word painting” is also frequently applied for iconic signs, for instance in depicting a wave through a wavelike progress of a melody. So-called “eye-music” uses musical notation for pictorial symbols like a cross, or two eyes, or blackened notes that are employed to visualize mourning within the notation. Gestural signs can be found, like e.g. slow, low notes symbolizing mourning, or fugued paragraphs to express the concept of flight, as well as musical onomatopoeia, utilized to imitate sighs, cries, or animal sounds. “Soggetti” are created as a theme for a composition by transforming the syllables of a
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name (e.g. “Hercules Dux Ferrariae” in the corresponding mass by Josquin) into solmization syllables and then into notes (in this case: re ut re ut re fa mi re). Further references can be made through quotation of melodies or parts of the polyphonic setting of other pieces and links to their texts. Music can react to form or content of single paragraphs of text through changes in rhythm or contrasts in setting methods, through deliberate violation of rules and creation of dissonances to express violence or agony. Characteristics of modes, though, were the only sign system which was ever used to ascribe intersubjectively accepted meaning with the help of a purely musical phenomenon without reference to another system of signs (like e.g. numbers, pictures or movements). Yet, this system never accomplished unambiguousness. During the 16th century the word is increasingly moving into the center of planning a composition: in his Le istitutioni harmoniche from 1558, Zarlino states that “harmonia” and “numero”, i.e. harmonic setting and rhythm, should serve the “oratione”, not the other way around (Zarlino 1562: 339). Music and text are now understood as distinct artistic systems, yet closely related through the common content of meaning, while it is the music that interprets the text. The members of Camarata Fiorentina went even further in the last two decades of the 16th century in their attempt to revive antique tragedy and its effects, that is the ideal of a “recitar cantando” (Cavalieri 1600: title) for one voice, closely related to the recitation of an actor, focusing more on the expression of music through the artistic ability of the singer and less on the signs of the composer, and thus constituting the tradition of the recitative. A survey of this new ideal can for instance be found in the foreword of the first preserved opera, Jacopo Peri’s Le Musiche Sopra L’Euridice (Florence 1600). Peri, analyzed somewhat hyperbolically, reduces the music to a ‘paratext’ to enhance the effect of the words which can only be done authentically in the display of intense emotion – a factor still mirrored in the libretti of opera up to the present day. While Franco-Flemish and especially Italian composers experimented with their repertoire of possibilities to imitate text and its basic topic, the other side of the communication circle developed the ideal of the critical audience. The state theories of ancient Greece, especially those written by Plato and Aristotle, saw the goal of musical instruction in the education of skilled critics who could judge the ethical value of a composition, and not in the training of virtuoso musicians. This objective was picked up by the humanists in the 15th and 16th century. The development of an urban, educated elite advocated the evolution of this new type of amateur and connoisseur. During the 16th century, the notions about what this connoisseur actually should judge in music diverged. Yet there was general consensus about the assessment of the ethical value of a composition. Nevertheless, Baldessare Castiglione, in his Libro del Cortegiano requires the same skills from his courtiers that modern music critics would need today: analytical hearing that is concentrated on both the construction of the composition and the execution of the interpreter (Helms 2001: 342–3). A similar goal in education is described by Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named the Governour (1531), the major British humanist pedagogical work. Apart from the task “to gyue iugement in the excellencie of their [musicians, D.H.] counnynges”, though, he calls for an interpretation of the allegory of music as a symbol for a well-regulated state and the harmony of its estates (Elyot 1967: Volume 1; 42–43). In his seven chapters about dance, Elyot explicitly shows what such an allegory could look like: every step of man and woman is assigned a corresponding male and feminine virtue. Combined they symbolize the holy sacrament of
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marriage (Elyot 1967: Volume 1, Chapters 19–25). Elyot’s proposition is unique and not imitated in the discussion about the role of music in education throughout the history of communication between composers, musicians and listeners. Yet, his example illustrates the complex of problems of the 16th century: educated musical amateurs try to acquire musical compositions, not by playing music, but ideally by listening, reading and understanding. There is an agreement that music does have an effect which it accomplishes through mimesis. Yet what is lacking completely is a theory that renders understanding possible, a theory that transcribes musical signs into verbal meaning. It thus seems only natural that people orientated themselves towards the linguistic disciplines of rhetoric and poetics where this communicative problem was solved. In treatises by German authors, the term musica poetica first occurs in Nicolaus Listenius’s writings in 1533 and 1537 (Rudimenta musicae and Musica). Although its exact meaning is still a matter of debate in musicology, it remains unquestioned that the musica poetica relates the musica theorica, the speculative science, with the musica practica, which teaches how to make music. It describes the production of an “opus”, relating to both a written piece of music or a written piece about music. Originally, the musica poetica denotes more than a theory of composition. Subsequent authors of the 16th century, like Heinrich Faber in his Musica poetica of 1548 (see Stroux 1976), even more clearly than Listenius include the perspective of the recipient in their notion of the term: in analogy to poetics as a linguistic discipline, which is a set of rules for production and understanding at the same time, they add judgement and correction of a composition to the area of the musica poetica (see in particular Loesch 2001). The musica poetica thus is in its design a method to solve the communication problem between composers and, respectively, musicians and their recipients. When music liberates itself from the text, and when its effects are attributed to the imitation of single words and phrases of the text, music becomes a text itself; a text that is not only effective but also, little by little, reveals meaning. Rather than featuring a structure comparable to syntax, as it was seen in the middle ages, music now consists of a form that in itself becomes a syntax. Instead of decorative elements, music develops terse signs which both the composer and the recipient have to be familiar with. It is surprising that to this day we can find very little explicit communication that resolves and conventionalizes such signs which mediate between listener and musician – despite the calls for this in musical theory in many treatises on political theory and pedagogy, and in other more general writings. More elaborate attempts that lead into this direction were only made by German musical theorists since Joachim Burmeister’s (1606) Musica poetica. Burmeister describes and systematizes music through linguistic terminology. He calls the theory of composition “syntax”, while “orthography” is the instruction for the correct addition of text to music. Finally, he employs terminology from rhetoric to describe 26 musical figures, systematized as melodic, harmonic, and melodicharmonic figures. In these descriptions, Burmeister often refers to paragraphs of compositions by earlier and contemporary composers. In the end, he provides one of the first detailed analyses of music history by describing the structure and rhetoric devices of a composition by Orlando di Lasso. Burmeister’s poetics of music with his theory of what is called musical figures instigates a tradition in German musical theory with authors like Michael Praetorius, Johannes Nucius, Johannes Lippius, and Johann Mattheson. Its climax of a fully systematized theory, though, was only reached at a time when musical aesthetics had long abandoned the theory of musical figures in the
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introduction to Nikolaus Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788). The theory of musical figures subsumes musical signs under terms of rhetoric and poetics. Thus, it manifests the linguality of music, despite the fact that many signs in baroque compositions are of numeric, gestural or iconic nature. Also, the violation of rules, often legitimized as a rhetoric device or as a special effect since the Middle Ages, is eventually the breaking of purely musical rules and applies to language only in the figurative sense. Systematically elaborated theories of musical figures remain a uniquely German tradition. Although English authors also draw parallels between music and language and they also allude to rhetorical devices, none of their texts can be called a theory of the comprehension of music. Thomas Morley (1597: 177–182) advises aspiring composers how to best adjust text and music, but does so only at the very end and on a few pages of his A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, which was to become a standard work in later years. He highlights the expressiveness of modes, keys and, respectively, intervals, as well as that of tempo and rhythm, and recommends word painting in music. When Morley declares that every composer should be in the mood of the words set to music, or that composers should at least try to put themselves in the respective mood and when he explains that the gifts of certain composers to excel in certain musical genres are rooted within their characters it becomes evident that he does not consider music to be a language, but understands literature and composition as two distinct systems whose commonality is the expression of emotion and character. For this, it is fundamentally important that the composer succeeds in putting himself into the correct mood; the appliance and implementation of a theory of musical figures defining exact signs comes second. Only in his “annotations”, Morley speaks of a second practical music following the elementary tenets of music, which he – just as subsequent German authors – describes as the Syntactical, poeticall, or effectiue; treatinge of soundes, concordes, and discords, and generally of euery thing seruing for the formal and apte setting together of parts or soundes, for producing of harmonie either vpon a ground, or voluntarie. (Morley 1597: without page)
The most important indications of the association of musical signs with rhetoric in 17th century England are found outside of the theory of composition with Francis Bacon and Henry Peacham the Younger. In The Compleat Gentleman (1622) Peacham tries to picture music as adequate avocation for the ideal gentleman: Yes, in my opinion, no Rhetoricke more perswadeth, or hath greater power of mind: nay, hath not Musicke her figures, the same which Rhetorique? What is a Revert but her Antistrophe ? her reports, but sweet Anaphora’s ? her conterchange of points, Antimetabole’s ? her passionate Aires but Prosopopoea’s ? with infinite other of the same nature. (Peacham 1906: 103)
Peacham’s focus is on the compensational and recreational effects of music, which renders it the adequate avocation for a gentleman. The allusion to rhetoric is first and foremost used because a publicly active gentleman should be sufficiently proficient in that discipline. Francis Bacon’s reference to the similarities of music and rhetorics can be found in his Sylva Sylvarum (1627). In the second chapter of this history of nature he
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describes ‘sound’ at length. In relation to a discussion about the effects of sounds and especially music he refers to the similarities of musical figures and rhetoric: There be in Musick certain Figures or Tropes, almost agreeing with the Figures of Rhetorick, and with the Affections of the Minde, and other Senses. First. The Division and Quavering, which please so much in Musick, have an agreement with the Glittering of Light […]. Again, the Falling from a Discord to a Concord, which maketh great sweetness in Musick, hath an agreement with the Affections, which are reintegrated to the better, after some dislikes; it agreeth also with the taste, which is soon glutted with that which is sweet alone. The sliding from the Close or Cadence, hath an agreement with the Figure in Rhetorick, which they call Prater Expectarum; for there is a pleasure, even in being deceived. (Bacon 1670: 31)
Here, Bacon does not subsume every musical effect under the system of rhetoric, but describes three forms of signs constituting the effects of music: iconic, harmonic (i.e. purely musical), and rhetorical. In the following he reinforces the proposition that music can have a distinct effect by itself since it appeals directly to the soul: And therefore we see, that Tunes and Airs, even in their own nature, have in themselves some affinity with the Affections : As there be Merry Tunes, Doleful Tunes, Solemn Tunes; Tunes inclining Mens mindes to Pity, Warlike Tunes, & c. (Bacon 1670: 32)
English authors do not share the German enthusiasm about the applicability of rhetoric to music, which can be seen in the work of Charles Butler’s 1636 The Principles of Music. Even Butler, author of a comprehensive textbook about rhetoric from 1598, draws only weak parallels between music and rhetoric. He describes the characteristics of modes right in the beginning of his Principles; however, in the following he does not address the issue of the elements which cause effects in music anymore. In the fourth paragraph Of đe Ornaments of melodi and harmoni he depicts “Consecution”, “Syncope”, “Fuga” und “Formaliti” (Butler 1980: 55). Consecutio, Synkope and form are also linguistic terms (cf. Butler 1980: 62–64), however, Butler understands them purely in musical terms as theory of harmonic progressions, of syncopes or suspended dissonances and of the formation of musical sections. In the first chapter of his second book he eventually mentions the setting of text to music: the composer “must have a spezial care đat đe Note[s] agræ to đe nature of đe Ditti” (1980: 95–98). His indications of how music should relate to text are similar to Morley’s. Butler, being a Rhetorician, does not provide a rhetorical understanding of musical signs either. (Butler’s book is, by the way, not the only one about music transcribed phonetically. In the late 16th century the lutenist Thomas Whythorne also wrote his autobiography in a self-designed phonetic system [see Whythorne 1961]). Four years before Nikolaus Forkel’s extensive 1788 work about a rhetoric in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, William Jones also briefly mentions rhetorical signs in music in his A Treatise on the Art of Music: “How far the figures of Rhetoric are transferable to Music, and how many of them, it may be difficult to ascertain” (Jones 1784: 43). Especially since the second half of the 16th century English composers have set their texts to music rather consciously – albeit more reserved than for instance their Italian coevals – and utilized text interpreting signs in their compositions. To fully describe
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these with the help of philological disciplines, and especially with that of rhetoric (see e.g. Toft 1993; Klotz 1998), though, would miss the attitudes of their time (cf. Bose 1996). Originally, the theory of musical figures, the German Figurenlehre, did not aim for meaning; its referential discipline was rhetoric. The imitation of the text’s subjects was aimed at the effectiveness of a close relation with literature achieved through a striking and optimized musical performance. Yet the reverse was obvious, too: if music could imitate words and thoughts, the signs developing hereby could just as well represent words themselves. Music itself could bear meaning – an idea of crucial importance for the formation of an autonomous instrumental music. Around 1700, the French clavecinists experimented with compositions of instrumental works with characterizing titles. The musical structure of L’Angiune ‘The Eel’, Les Tricoteuses ‘The Knitters’ or L’Arlekin ‘The Harlequin’, for instance, imitates the subject of the titles mainly through musical gestures. Also around 1700, Johan Kuhnau published his six sonatas for harpsichord, Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien. Each one is preceded by a biblical story, whose actions and effects were to be expressed by the following composition. As phrased in Johann Mattheson’s Kern melodischer Wissenschaft, instrumental music was increasingly seen as a ‘tone-language’ (Ton-Sprache) or ‘soundspeech’ (Klang-Rede), i.e. a semantic and syntactic system in its own right. However, music achieves semantic unambiguousness only at the boundaries of its communication system, e.g. in the non-verbal signalling languages of military or hunting music. Hence, instrumental music was declared a medium of emotional expression, contrary to the antique ideal of music as a catalyst or activator of feelings. The objective imitation of emotion in the Baroque developed towards the subjective expression of the composers’ inwardness in the pre-classical era. “Aus der Seele muss man spielen”, writes Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1753, 3. Hauptstu¨ck, Section 7, page 119), Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1812: 89) demands “Ichheit auch in der Musik herauszutreiben”. English authors assumed a more conservative position. Charles Avison, in his An essay on musical expression (1752), describes at length the means of imitation of words through music, yet adopts a rather critical position towards it. Ultimately, he states that the expressiveness of music can be captured less through recipes and rules than through extensive study of famous compositions (Avison 1753: 71–72). The expression within music, he states, is exemplifed rather through its effects on the listener than through distinct signs. In German Romanticism, music was declared to be a language of all those things inexpressible in speech. For the Romantics, music was the ideal and supreme language, as it could bring “das tiefste Innere unsers Wesens zur Sprache”, and would have a “sich auf das innerste Wesen der Welt und unsers Selbst beziehende Bedeutung” (Schopenhauer 1977: 322; Section 52). However, Schopenhauer’s (1977: 322) idea of music as “ganz allgemeine Sprache, deren Deutlichkeit sogar die der anschaulichen Welt selbst u¨bertrifft” is not new. In the 15th century, Johannes Gallicus in his Ritus Canendi already considers music as the universal language due to its mathematical precision (Gallicus 1981: 4). Marin Mersenne (1636) analyzes this aspect extensively in the first book of Hamonie universelle: every body would consist of weight, number, and mesure. Sound would represent those three features, and because of that one could illustrate everything with sound. The ideal, perfect musician would thus be able to devise a natural language with his instrument, which could present everything in its natural form (Mersenne 1636: 43; Proposition 24). Such a language could be understood by every
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human being and by the angels. It would be an immediate medium to transport thoughts and feelings without impediment by reason (Mersenne 1636: 65; Proposition 47). According to legend, Joseph Haydn expressed this in a conversation with Mozart, saying “Meine Sprache versteht man durch die ganze Welt” (Dies 1976: 78). Up until today, the idea of the universality of music versus its “non-universality” is in the center of discussion (cf. Nettl 2005). In the 1960s this idea even led to the attempt to develop a universal writing system based on notation (Juhl 1960). The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (a ‘total work of art’), developed by Richard Wagner (1852) in his Oper und Drama, historically marks an endpoint of attempts to unite literature and music, by placing every participating medium and their systems, from musical tones to a language’s phonemes, into the service of the expression of the drama, which he understood to be the central proposition of an opera. At the same time, the semantics of music were challenged by other theorists and musicians. Eduard Hanslick always doubted the value of music as a medium that expresses nonmusical qualities. In his writing Vom Musikalisch-Scho¨nen (1854), he claims that music’s beauty is specifically musical; not a single musical rule could be deduced from the emotional aesthetics of Romanticism. Music, he says, only consists of music: “To¨nend bewegte Formen sind einzig und allein Inhalt der Musik” (Hanslick 1858: 38). Until today, the separation of the aesthetics of expression and of autonomy shapes the writing about music. Is the pure, apparently objective analysis of musical structures enough, or is it also necessary to go a step further and interpret? Is it about meaning and expression, or is the description of form sufficient? Linguistics remains important for the development of musicological methods, as music is still primarily understood to be a language. One extreme view on analyses, for instance, was Werner Korte’s idea of a structural scientific method, which tries to illustrate the “syntax” of musical movements following Noam Chomsky’s approach. The works of Jean-Jaques Nattiez (1975) about the semiotics of music in particular rekindled the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s about the semiotic character and the meaning of music, a discussion that lasts until today (see, e.g. Agawu 2009).
5 Summary Philology has been a great source of inspiration to the theory and praxis of music ever since music has been considered a language in its own right. This chapter for a handbook of historical linguistics tried to sketch the history of this idea that is fundamental to our thinking about music even today. Even the most sketchy survey of linguistic ideas applied and discussed in musicology during the 20th and 21st centuries would require a book length study. Seen in a historical perspective, it becomes clear that the idea of music as a language is not an ontological truth but just a way of thinking and describing certain facilities of music. Music and literature are closely related sister arts, but is music a language? In the past it was only natural that authors turned to linguistics for theories and methods to describe and construct the communicational capacities of music in the absence of general communication theories. Their approaches proved highly productive and inspired even practical music. But most of them leave the critical reader with the feeling that music and language are comparable only to a certain, often rather basic, degree. History shows that music is not a language; it is a communication system just as language is.
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Thus it needs theories with a more general approach to the functioning of communication like e.g. Niklas Luhmann’s (1987) system theory or George Lakoff ’s and Mark Johnson’s (1980) theory of metaphor to do justice to music and its roles in human societies.
6 References Agawu, Kofi. 2009. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bose, Mishtooni. 1996. Humanism, English Music and the Rhetoric of Criticism. Music & Letters 77: 1–21. Butler, Gregory G. 1980. Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources. Musical Quarterly 66(1): 53–64. Du¨rr, Walther. 1994. Sprache und Musik. Geschichte – Gattungen – Analysemodelle. Kassel: Ba¨renreiter. Helms, Dietrich. 2003. Auf der Suche nach einem neuen Paradigma: Vom System Ton zum System Sound. In: Thomas Phleps and Ralf v. Appen (eds.), Pop Sounds. Klangtexturen in der Pop- und Rockmusik, 197–228. Bielefeld: transcript. Helms, Dietrich. 2001. Die Rezeption der antiken Ethoslehre in staatstheoretischen und pa¨dagogischen Schriften und die Beurteilung der zeitgeno¨ssischen Musik im Humanismus. In: Ulrich Tadday and Ares Rolf (eds.), Martin Geck. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag, 325–351. Dortmund: Klangfarben. Hughes, Andrew. 1990. Word Painting in a Twelfth-Century Office. In: Bryan Gillingham and Paul Merkley (eds.), Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, 16–27. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music. Kaden, Christian. 2006. Musik bei denen, die keine „Musik” haben. In: Michael Beiche, Albrecht Riethmu¨ller (ed.), Musik – Zu Begriff und Konzepten. Berliner Symposion zum Andenken an Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 57–72. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Klotz, Sebastian. 1998. “Music with her silver sound”: Kommunikationsformen im Goldenen Zeitalter der englischen Musik. Kassel: Ba¨renreiter. Korte, Werner F. 1964. Struktur und Modell als Information in der Musikwissenschaft. Archiv fu¨r Musikwissenschaft 21: 1–22. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loesch, Heinz von. 2001. Musica poetica – die Geburtsstunde des Komponisten? In: Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts fu¨r Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 84–91. Schott: Mainz. Littleton, Alfred Henry. 1911. A catalogue of one hundred works illustrating the history of music printing from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, in the library of Alfred Henry Littleton. London: Novello. Maier, Michael. 1999. Die Elemente von Sprache und Musik – drei Vergleiche. In: Albrecht Riethmu¨ller (ed.), Sprache und Musik: Perspektiven einer Beziehung, 141–156. Laaber: LaaberVerlag. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1975. Fondements d’une se´miologie de la musique. Paris: Union Ge´ne´rale d’E´ditions. Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-one issues and concepts. Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press. Reckow, Fritz. 1992. Vitium oder Color rhetoricus? Thesen zur Bedeutung der Modelldisziplinen grammatica, rhetorica und poetica fu¨r das Musikversta¨ndnis. In: Michael Walter (ed), Text und Musik. Neue Perspektiven der Theorie, 77–94. Mu¨nchen: Wilhelm Fink. ¨ ber die erstaunliche Karriere eines preka¨ren muReckow, Fritz. 1998. Musik als Sprache. U siktheoretischen Modells. In: Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch (eds.), Musik als Text.
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Bericht u¨ber den Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft fu¨r Musikforschung, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993. Vol. 2, 28–33. Kassel etc.: Ba¨renreiter. Stevens, John. 1986. Words and music in the Middle Ages: song, narrative, dance and drama, 1050– 1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stroux, Christoph. 1976. Die Musica poetica des Magisters Heinrich Faber. Port Elizabeth: C. Stroux Toft, Robert. 1993. Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart: the Art of Eloquent Singing in England 1597– 1622. Toronto, Buffalo, London: Univ. of Toronto Press. Zaminer, Frieder. 1999. Μουσική. Zur fru¨hen Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte. In: Albrecht Riethmu¨ller (ed.), Sprache und Musik: Perspektiven einer Beziehung, 157–166. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.
6.1 Sources Affligemensis, Johannes. 1963. Musica. In: Martin Gerbert (ed.), Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, 3 vols., St. Blaise: Typis San-Blasianis, 1784; reprint edn., Hildesheim: Olms. 2: 230–265. Anonymous. 1983. De origine et effectu musicae. In: Gilbert Reaney (ed.), The Anonymous Treatise De origine et effectu musicae, an Early 15th Century Commonplace Book of Music Theory. Musica disciplina 37: 109–119. Avison, Charles. 1753. An Essay on Musical Expression. [London 1752], 2nd edn. London: Davis. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. 1753. Versuch u¨ber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Berlin: no publisher. Bacon, Roger. 1859. Opera quaedam hactenus inedita. Vol. 1. containing 1. Opus tertium. 2. Opus minus. 3. Compendium philosophiae. Ed. by J.S Brewer. London: Longman et al. Bacon, Francis. 1670. Sylva Sylvarum or A Natural History in Ten Centuries. Ed. by William Rawley. London: William Lee. Burmeister, Joachim. 1606. Musica poetica: Definitionibus et divisionibus breviter delineata, quibus in singulis capitibus sunt hypomnemata praeceptionum instar [sunoptikos] addita, edita studioˆ et opera. Rostock: Stephanus Myliander. Butler, Charles. 1980 [1636]. The Principles of Music in Singing and Setting. London: John Haviland. Callcott, John Wall. 1817. A Musical Grammar in Four Parts. [1st edn. London 1806]. London: Robert Birchall. Castiglione, Baldessare. 1528. Il libro del cortegiano del conte Baldesar Castiglione. Venice: Aldo Romano and Andrea d’Asola. Cavalieri, Emilio del. 1600. Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo. Nuouamente posta in musica dal Sig. Emilio del Caualliere, per recitar Cantando. Rome: Nicolo` Mutij. Coclico, Adrian Petit. 1552. Compendium musices descriptum ab Adriano Petit Coclico, discipulo Josquini de Pres. Nu¨rnberg: Johann Berg and Ulrich Neuber [reprint Kassel: Ba¨renreiter, 1954]. Chapman, James. 1976. The Original Rhythmical Grammar of the English language; or the Art of Reading and Speaking, on the Principles of the Music of Speech. Hildesheim: Olms [Edinburgh: James Robertson 1821]. Dies, Albert Christoph. 1976. Biographische Nachrichten von Joseph Haydn nach mu¨ndlichen Erza¨hlungen desselben entworfen. [Vienna 1810], Kassel u.a.: Ba¨renreiter. Elyot, Thomas. 1967. The Boke Named the Gouernour [London: Thomas Berthelet 1531]. Ed. by Henry Herbert Croft, 2 vols., London 1883, Reprint New York. Forkel, Nikolaus. 1788. Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik. Leipzig: Schwickert. Gaffurio, Franchino. 1496. Practica musice. Mailand: Guillaume Le Signerre for Johannes Petrus de Lomatio. Gallicus, Johannes. 1981. Ritus canendi [Pars prima]. Ed. by Albert Seay. Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press.
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Hanslick, Eduard. 1858. Vom Musikalisch-Scho¨nen. [1st edn. Leipzig 1854] Leipzig: 2nd. revised edn. John of Salisbury. 1965. Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi carnotensis Policratici sive de nvgis cvrialivm et vestigiis philosophorvm libri VIII. Ed. by Clemens C. I. Webb. London: Oxonii e Typographeo Clarendoniano 1909, reprint Frankfurt: Minerva. Jones, William. 1784. A Treatise on the Art of Music. Colchester: W. Keymer. Juhl, Peer c.1960. Die Globalschrift. Friedrichstadt/Eide. Kollmann, Augustus Frederic Christopher. 1796. An Essay on Musical Harmony, According to the Nature of that Science and the Principles of the Greatest Musical Authors. London: J. Dale. Listenius, Nicolaus. 1533. Rudimenta musicae in gratiam studiosae invventutis diligenter comportata. Wittenberg: Rhau. Listenius, Nicolaus. 1537. Musica Nicolai Listenij. Wittenberg: Rhau. Luhmann, Niklas. 1987. Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Malcolm, Alexander. 1721. A Treatise of Musick, Speculative, Practical, and Historical. Edinburgh: A. Malcolm. Mattheson, Johann. 1737. Kern melodischer Wissenschaft. Hamburg: Herold. Mersenne, Marin. 1636. Hamonie universelle, contenant la theorie e la pratique de la musique. Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy. More, Thomas. 1965. Utopia. Ed. by Edward Surtz. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Morley, Thomas. 1597. A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. London: Peter Short. de Muris, Johannes. 1963. Summa. In: Martin Gerbert (ed.), Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, 3 vols., St. Blaise: Typis San-Blasianis, 1784; reprint edn, Hildesheim: Olms. 3: 190–248. North, Roger. 1990. Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian 1728. Ed. by Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Odington, Walter. 1970. Walteri Odington, Summa de speculatione musicae, 42–146. Ed. by Frederick F. Hammond. Rome: American Institute of Musicology. Pace, Richard. 1967. De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur. Ed. by Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester. New York: Frederick Ungar. Peri, Jacopo. 1600. Le Musiche Sopra L’Euridice. Florenz: Giorgio Marescotti. Person, Gobelinus. 1907. Tractatus musicae scientiae. In: Hermann Mu¨ller (ed.), Der tractatus musicae scientiae des Gobelinus Person. Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 20: 180–196. Peacham (the Younger), Henry . 1906 [1634]. Peachams Compleat Gentleman. Ed. by G.S. Gordon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1977. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. (= Zu¨richer edn., Vol. 1). Zu¨rich: Diogenes. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. 1812. Klavierrezepte. In: Ludwig Schubart (ed.), Vermischte Schriften. Vol. 1, 83–91. Zu¨rich: Geßner. Steele, Joshua. 1775. An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols. London: J. Almon. Tans’ur, William. 1738. A Compleat Melody, or The Harmony of Sion. [1st edn. London 1734]. London: James Hodges. Thelwall, John. 1812. Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language. London: Arch. Wagner, Richard. 1852. Oper und Drama. Leipzig: Weber. Whythorne, Thomas. 1961. The autobiography. Ed. by James M. Osborn. Oxford: Clarendon. Zarlino, Gioseffo. 1588. Sopplimenti musicali. Venice: Francesco de’Franceschi. Zarlino, Gioseffo. 1562. Le Istitutioni harmoniche. Venice: Franchesco Senese [1st edn. Venice 1558].
Dietrich Helms, Osnabru¨ck (Germany) translation Nadja Hekal, Osnabru¨ck (Germany)
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79. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography: Periodization in the history of the English language 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Introduction The rationale for periodization Critiques of periodization in history of English Origins of canonical periods in history of English Debates over criteria for periodization Debates over boundary dates for historical periods Reference work perspectives on periodization Final reflections: the need for one solution? References
Abstract The question of periodization in language, and in the history of the English language specifically, has brought into conversation some of the most eminent historical linguists and historians of English over the past two centuries, dating back to Jacob Grimm, and has raised some of the most fundamental questions one can ask about the history of English, including: What is “English”? This chapter surveys both critical scholarship on periodization in the history of English and published histories of English to summarize the development and current status of the now canonical three-/four-part historical model and to address the theoretical and pragmatic questions that periodization has raised for historians of English. Issues at the crux of scholarly debates include: how the concept of periodization can be reconciled with the realities of language variation and change; the proper criteria for identifying historical periods and/or period boundaries; the best boundary dates to use for both canonical and non-canonical historical models; and the definition of the stated object of inquiry, “English”. In its conclusion, the chapter offers some reflections about the state of the discussion, the extent to which “solutions” are needed, and possible future directions.
1 Introduction The history of the English language, in theory, could be broken up into as many historical periods as the imagination allows. Defined historical periods could span a year, a decade, a generation, a century, or multiple centuries. Or, again in theory, the history of English could be told as one continuous narrative, with no defined historical periods at all. It could, instead, be told as the continuous history of English sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and so on. In practice, however, most histories of English rely on historical periods as a heuristic, a means for parsing, interpreting, and narrating language change. Since the 19th century, the history of English has traditionally been broken into three or four major historical periods (depending on whether early and later Modern English are viewed as one period or two), each spanning several centuries: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English. How did the almost infinite Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1233–1256
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possibilities for periodization in the history of English become so dramatically limited through the canonization of one particular schema? And to what extent has that schema been challenged? The question of periodization in language, and in the history of the English language specifically, has brought into conversation some of the most eminent historical linguists and historians of English over the past two centuries, dating back to Jacob Grimm in the early 19th century. Later that century, Henry Sweet and James A. H. Murray established some of the canonical foundations; in a flurry of articles in the past two decades, central figures in history of English scholarship such as Norman Blake, Jacek Fisiak, Manfred Go¨rlach, and Roger Lass have all weighed in on the question. This scholarly conversation has raised some of the most fundamental questions about the history of English, including: What is “English”? And what qualifies as “linguistic” evidence? This chapter surveys both critical scholarship on periodization in the history of English and published histories of English (a) to summarize the development and current status of the now canonical three-/four-part historical model, and (b) to address the theoretical and pragmatic questions that periodization has raised for historians of English. Issues at the crux of scholarly debates include: how the concept of periodization can be reconciled with the realities of language variation and change; the proper criteria for identifying historical periods and/or period boundaries; the best dates to use for both canonical and non-canonical historical models; and the definition of the stated object of inquiry, “English”. In its conclusion, this chapter offers some reflections about the state of the discussion, the extent to which “solutions” are needed, and possible future directions.
2 The rationale for periodization In practice, scholars across many fields have reached general consensus about the usefulness of periodization as an interpretive device. Periodization has become standard in all forms of history, including literary and linguistic history, although the dates for period breaks vary across disciplines. As detailed below, the periodization of the history of the English language sometimes dovetails and sometimes deviates from the periodization of English literary history. To clarify the terminology, Nicolaisen (1997: 160) usefully distinguishes periodization from stratification: stratification involves “the mostly pragmatic aspect of the chopping up of continuous change”, often by a set length of time (for example, unlike most histories of English, Strang [1970] structures the historical narrative by two hundred-year blocks: 1970–1770, 1770–1570, etc.); periodization, by contrast, involves “certain interpretative and evaluative ingredients” in the definition of historical periods. Of key importance is the recognition that periodization is inherently an artificial, interpretive device imposed upon history, be that the history of a people, a culture, a nation, literature, art, or language. It allows scholars and their audiences to create meaningful schemas for organizing historical information, and once certain periodizations become canonical, they become part of the history itself: part of telling a responsible history is explaining how that history has been told by preceding scholars. In linguistics, historical periodization is often justified through the analogy with the practice of drawing isoglosses in dialectology (Fife 1992; Lass 1994; Wright 1999). As Wright (1999: 25) puts it: “Periodizations are the chronological counterpart of the nearly necessary fictions used in dialectology”. Dialect variation occurs more continuously than
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the isoglosses on any dialect map suggest, yet isoglosses capture something important about the coming together of dividing lines for multiple distinctive variables along a particular regional boundary. Isoglosses obviously require a level of idealization, both about the coherence of a dialect within a given region and about the distinctiveness of that dialect from a neighboring one along a given boundary. Dialectologists do not rely solely, if at all, on purely geographical factors to draw dialect boundaries, although geographical features such as bodies of water and mountain ranges are known to sometimes correspond to dialect boundaries given their effects on population movements and contact between speech communities. Periodization relies on similar idealizations about the coherence of a particular chronological period, as well as about the ability to categorize linguistic features/change into binary categories that correspond to a chronological boundary. In other words, period breaks, like isoglosses, can suggest the presence of a given linguistic feature in one historical period and its absence in the subsequent one, whereas language change also typically demonstrates a gradient-effect, with new and old features overlapping and fuzzy boundaries. Also similar to practices in dialectology, while language historians rarely take external political or social events as adequate for marking chronological boundaries, looking also if not primarily at “purely linguistic” factors, some significant historical events are known to have had dramatic effects on languages and may, as a result, coincide with the historical breaks or boundaries imposed on the language’s history. The imposition of artificial, interpretive schemas onto a continuous entity, be that a language in all its variation at one moment in time or a language as it changes over its history, and the idealization required to do so inherently involve limitations, which have been critiqued in detail for more than a century by historians of the English language.
3 Critiques of periodization in history of English A handful of scholars have directly challenged the concept of periodization as a premise in the history of the English language (Hockett 1957; Jones 1972; Wright 1999), but most critiques of periodization have focused more specifically on how historical periods are presented in histories of English and the potential misleading implications of named historical periods. Fisiak (1994: 47), based on a survey of over one hundred relevant texts such as histories of English and historical grammars, presents one of the most detailed examinations of, and critiques of, scholars’ justifications of periodization. He finds that stages in the history of English are usually justified by “such vague notions as ‘convenience’ (… by far the most widely used justification among historians of English …), ‘clarity of presentation’, ‘pedagogical’ or other unspecified ‘advantages’ ”. Of particular concern are claims such as that in C. M. Millward’s (1996 [1989]: 13) canonical textbook A Biography of the English Language that the dating of breaks at events such as the Norman Conquest or printing is “neither accidental or arbitrary”: for Fisiak, such wording suggests too strong a correlation between external events and language change and may go so far as to imply cataclysmic change in the language around a specific date. Many scholars over the past half century have raised similar concerns about the ways in which the creation of historical periods with discrete chronological boundaries can create the false impression that the language was stable for several centuries during that period and then underwent fairly dramatic change over a short period of time right around the boundary date. Scholars of language variation and change know this
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picture of language change to be false: language change occurs (a) continually, with older forms competing with newer forms at any given moment in time; and (b) gradually, often below the level of consciousness for the speakers involved. At any moment in time, parts of a language’s grammar (including phonology and morphosyntax) demonstrate greater stability and parts are in flux; and speakers are forever creatively manipulating a language’s lexical resources to create new words. While factors such as language contact or social upheaval can accelerate language change for a given speech community, the rate and spread of change is still probably better described as gradual than cataclysmic. Hockett (1957: 63) usefully explains how periodization can belie this linguistic reality: “It does not occur to the layman, however, to doubt that in general a period of stability and a period of transition can be distinguished; it does not occur to him that every stage in the history of a language is perhaps at one and the same time one of stability and also one of transition”. Closely related to this misperception about how language change works is what Wright (1999: 26) calls the “structuralist fallacy”: “the assumption that if there happens to exist now a single name for a linguistic state in the past, there must have existed then a complete single language system which that name is used to refer to”. As all scholars acknowledge, the description of any language variety, be that a historical stage in a language or a dialect of a language, is an idealization: in order to create a coherent description, linguists must assume a level of homogeneity and stability. As modern sociolinguistics has convincingly demonstrated, within any speech community, there will be variation. It is as false to suggest a coherent variety called Early Modern English as to describe Southern American English as one coherent regional dialect of American English. Yet language scholars do both because it is equally true that an idealized prototype of that variety of English (which may or may not correspond to the actual language of any one speaker or speech community) is definably distinct from other varieties of English. Change at different levels of language also occurs at different rates and at different times. For example, in the Early Modern English period, the rise of periphrastic do and the Great Vowel Shift did not perfectly coincide chronologically, happened at different rates in different dialects, and spread according to different sociolinguistic patterns; yet generic descriptions of “Early Modern English” will include both as characteristics of “the language” during that period. History of English scholars must also always take into account the limitations of the available evidence: the surviving written record does not necessarily accurately reflect changes in the spoken language and typically captures more conservative forms. In addition, histories of English, to enhance coherence, tend to tell the history of only selected dialects, specifically those that functioned as standards and/or are the ancestors of Standard English, creating a sense of a teleological progression – and as a result a deceiving sense that the history of English is the history of how we arrived at Standard English rather than the history of all the many varieties of English, past and present (cf. Milroy 1992, 1999). The canonical names for stages in the history of English can also create false impressions about the nature of language and of language change, specifically in terms of the teleology they can imply. The term “middle” in Middle English suggests the movement of the language from a beginning, through a middle, to an end, through this transitional period. As Hockett asserts above, all periods can and should be seen as transitions, and Modern English is just one more stage in the language’s history, not in any way an endpoint. If one imagines a horizontal timeline, the middle of any language’s history is also
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always shifting to the right as the language continues (Lass 2000); if “Middle English” retains that name for several more centuries, it will be much closer to Old English than to the English of that future moment – i.e., it will no longer clearly be in the middle of the language’s history, no matter whether one starts that in the 5th century or the 8th. The other canonical names for periods in the history of English are equally problematic. A period can only be “old” from the perspective of a future moment; as Nicolaisen (1997: 165) points out: “[…] each phase of a language is ‘modern’ to its speakers in its contemporary setting”, which highlights both the problem with “old” and “modern”. At some point, scholars will need to draw a boundary to end Modern English (cf. Curzan 2000), which means that either the new period will become the “modern” period and what we now know as Modern English will need a new name, or the new period will be forced into a label such as “Postmodern English”. To draw such a boundary, however, scholars will need to use criteria different from those Henry Sweet employed over 130 years ago when he first proposed “Modern English” as the third major historical period of English.
4 Origins of canonical periods in history of English Henry Sweet, the renowned phonetician and philologist working in the late 19th century, is generally acknowledged as the creator of the now canonical historical framework of Old, Middle, and Modern English, and most recent scholarship on the topic uses his work as a starting point. However, James A. H. Murray, Sweet’s colleague in London’s philological circles, seems to be equally important in the development of the canonical periodization, as detailed below, offering not only dates for period breaks but also an alternative perspective on the appropriate criteria for setting those boundaries. There were, of course, also other models proposed during the period that did not become canonical. For example, Oliphant (1886) offers a ten-period model in The New English and structures his chapters around authors (e.g., “Caxton’s English”, “Dryden’s English”). Before Sweet and Murray, 19th-century scholars generally relied on a two-period model with five subperiods, schematized by Fisiak (1994: 48) as follows: Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon Half-(Semi-)Saxon English Old English Middle English Modern English
7th century –1150 1150–1250 1250–1350 1350–1500 1500–
This model can be traced back to Jacob Grimm’s division of Germanic languages into Old, Middle, and New/Modern phases from 1819 (Matthews 2000) and to his 1830 twoperiod model for English: Anglo-Saxon (up to the end of 12th century) and “English”, with Old English spanning the 13th and 14th centuries and English from the 14th century onwards (Fisiak 1994). The term “Anglo-Saxon” can be dated back to the 16th century, and 19th-century scholars developed the term “Semi-Saxon” to describe texts that weren’t Anglo-Saxon but were not “English” either (Lass 2000). Murray (1910) traces Anglo-Saxon back to Angul-Seaxan ‘English Saxon’ (in contrast to the Saxons of the continent), first adopted by 16th- and 17th-century scholars studying the works of
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Alfred and Ælfric. Many modern scholars, including Henry Sweet, have expressed concerns about the term Anglo-Saxon, from the false suggestion that the language of that period was spoken only by the Angles and the Saxons or that it was a mixture of those two Germanic dialects, to the inappropriate break in language continuity it may imply between the earliest forms of the Germanic dialect(s) spoken in the British Isles and what later is called “English”. Lass (2000: 14) dates the first appearance of the term “Middle English” to 1839, in Thomas Wright’s Literature and language under the Anglo-Saxons; Matthews (2000: 3) notes that the term “Middle English” remained rare until the 1870s and was not uniformly used after that for several decades. Henry Sweet (1874), in A History of English Sounds, supports the rejection by fellow scholars of Anglo-Saxon and argues against any loose application of “Old English”: it should be reserved for the inflectional stage of the language. This premise leads him to the following proposal for periodization, which laid the groundwork for the model still employed today: I propose, therefore, to start with the three main divisions of Old, Middle, and Modern, based mainly on the inflectional characteristics of each stage. Old English is the period of full inflections, (nama, gifan, caru), Middle English of levelled inflections (naame, given, caare), and Modern English of lost inflections (naam, giv, caar). We have besides two periods of transition, one in which nama and name exist side by side, and another in which final e is beginning to drop. (Sweet 1874: 56)
Nowhere in this first edition does Sweet provide specific dates for these three historical periods, although he refers to “the Transition English [between Old and Middle] of the twelfth century” (Sweet 1874: 39). Later in the book he distinguishes five periods of Modern English with specific dates – e.g., the Earliest (1450–1500), the Early (1550– 1650) – all described purely by phonological characteristics, specifically the development of vowels. Fourteen years later, in the second edition of A History of English Sounds, Sweet (1888) retains the loss of inflections as the determinative criterion for periodization and adds dates for the three major periods, as well as “early”, “late”, and “transitional” subperiods: It is impossible to draw any absolutely definite line between ME and OE on the one side and MnE on the other, but, roughly speaking, fully developed ME may be said to extend from 1150 to 1450, the period between 1200 and 1400 being especially well marked and well represented by written documents. The period from 1050 to 1150 may be distinguished as Old Transition (OTr), that from 1450 to 1500 as Middle Transition (MlTr). The difficulty of drawing a line is increased by the varying speed of change of the different dialects. […] Taking the SthE [Southern English] dialects as the standard we may call everything before 1300 early Middle English (eME), everything after 1300 late Middle English (lME). (Sweet 1874: 154)
Equally interesting, but rarely noted, is Sweet’s reworked description of the line between late Middle and early Modern English, in which he broadens the criteria to include not only phonology and inflections but also historical events. He writes: It is still more difficult to draw a definite line between late Middle and early Modern E. than between OE and eME. The most marked criterion is, no doubt, the loss of final e in name, names etc. The loss of final e – of which we see the beginnings in Ch[aucer],
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and which was completely carried out by the middle of the 15th cent. – broke down the metrical system brought to perfection by Chaucer, and made a new departure necessary. The break between old and new was made more abrupt by the social confusion caused by the Wars of the Roses (1450–71), which, at the same time, helped to level differences of dialect – at least, in the upper classes. When printing was introduced – in 1476 – the language had almost completely settled down into its Modern, as distinguished from its Middle, stage. The diffusion of printed books made the want of a common literary language more and more felt, and, at the same time, greatly facilitated the realization of the ideal – an ideal which was, however, not fully realized till the appearance of Tindal’s translation of the New Testament in 1525 – a work which is wholly modern both in vocabulary and diction. (Sweet 1874: 199)
Sweet is quoted by subsequent scholars as advocating solely inflectional criteria for periodization, but here he clearly introduces historical events as factors in periodization, working in conjunction with language-internal factors. It is impossible to know what prompted this revision in the second edition, but it is hard not to hear echoes of James A. H. Murray’s framing of the historical periods, published ten years before. In between the two editions of Sweet’s A History of English Sounds, James A. H. Murray, shortly to become chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote the entry “English Language” for the ninth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1879. Murray’s piece appears to be ground-breaking both for presenting a more detailed periodization of the language, with dates, and for offering an alternative to the purely internal criteria that underlie Sweet’s original model. But Sweet does not mention it in the second edition of A History of English Sounds, and Murray’s work is not picked up in any of the subsequent critical linguistic scholarship on periodization in the history of English. (An excerpt from Murray’s entry does appear in Matthews’s (2000) collection of primary texts focused on the construction of “Middle English”. I am indebted to Richard W. Bailey for first bringing Murray’s entry to my attention.) Yet it is hard to imagine Sweet did not know the work. Sweet reviewed Murray’s book The Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland in 1874, and Sweet and Murray were in fairly extensive contact in the late 1870s as negotiations with Oxford University Press over a contract for the New English Dictionary came to a head (see E. K. M. Murray 1977). Murray begins the entry with many of the now standard caveats about periodization: the drawing of distinct lines for successive stages is inherently artificial; the progression of a history of English is disrupted by shifts in focus on different dialects as central; language change is gradual and therefore hinders precise dating; changes happen in some dialects earlier than others. Murray then summarizes Sweet’s three-part distinction based on inflectional loss, notes that each period can be divided into an early and late period, and presents the following model with approximate dates, noting that the dates varied considerably for different dialects (recall that Sweet does not provide exact dates in the first edition): Old English or Anglo-Saxon Transition Old English, or “Semi-Saxon” Early Middle English, or “Early English” Late Middle English Early Modern English, “Tudor English” Modern English
–1100 1100–1200 1200–1300 1300–1400 1485–1611 1611–onward
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Murray goes on to explain that some carry Transition Old English down to 1250, Early Middle English to 1350, and Late Middle English 1350 to 1485. He then adds: “But the division given above, which was, I believe, first proposed by Mr Sweet, represents better the development of the language” (Murray 1879: 392). Perhaps more importantly, Murray’s detailed notes on the rationale for the boundary dates include a mixture of internal and external criteria, a striking departure from Sweet’s use of purely internal criteria in the first edition of A History of English Sounds. For example, Murray writes of the first boundary date: “The Old English period is usually considered as terminating 1100, – that is, with the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest” (Murray 1879: 393). The precise boundary for the end of Middle English at 1485 is explained as follows: “[…] and the year 1485, which witnessed the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern English” (Murray 1879: 398). The transition to Early Modern English, however, is also described using internal criteria: Early Modern English captures the decay and disappearance of final e and most syllabic inflections, such that “[i]n the productions of Caxton’s press, we see the passage from Middle to Modern English completed” (Murray 1879: 398). As opposed to, or in addition to, Sweet’s description of Middle English as the period of leveled inflections, Murray describes it as “the Dialectal period of the language” (Murray 1879: 394). This description of the boundary date for Modern English effectively captures the mix of criteria that characterize Murray’s model: The date of 1611, which coincides with the end of Shakespeare’s literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the Bible […], may be taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the Restoration. (Murray 1879: 399)
In the eleventh edition, Murray shifts the date to “the Revolution of 1688” and adds: “The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived 1688 are still in use” (Murray 1910: 596). At times, Murray’s wording can suggest an oddly precise use of boundary dates: This shifting of the literary vocabulary and gradual fixing of the literary spelling, which went on between 1611, when the language became modern in structure, and 1689, when it became modern also in form, suggests for this period the name of Seventeenth-Century Transition. (Murray 1879: 596)
Murray also provides a visual representation of the language’s periodization (see Figure 79.1), which juxtaposes the chronological names (with Sweet’s terminology about full/leveled/lost inflexions) with literary developments in three major dialects of English. A second image appears in the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910, which captures the influence of other languages on different historical periods and includes notes on both literary and historical developments during various periods (see Figure 79.2).
79. Periodization in the history of the English language CHRONOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE Divisions.
Subdivisions.
LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEADING DIALECTS. Dates.
Southern English.
Cædmon, 660. Cynewulf? Bæda, 734.
Durham Glosses, 950–975. 1000
? Old Mercian.
900
(Laws of Ethelbert, 600.)
(Laws of Ine, 700.) Epinal Glossary?
Rushworth Gloss, ? 975–1000.
Literary West-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon.
Old Northumbrian.
OLD ENGLISH (Full Inflexions.)
700
800
Midland English.
Old Saxon and Kentish.
600
Northern English.
Old Anglian.
500
OLD ENGLISH or ANGLO-SAXON.
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Alfred, 885.
Rhymes in Saxon Chron., 937–979. Ælfric, 1000. Wulfstan, 1016. Worcester Chronicle, 1043–79.
1100 Chronicle, 1123–31.
1400 MIDDLE ENGLISH TRANSITION. 1485
MODERN ENGLISH (Lost Inflexions.)
Robt. of Brunne, 1303. Mandeville, 1356.
Cotton Homilies, 1150.
Wycliffe, Chaucer.
Hatton Gospels, 1170. Layamon, 1203. Ancren Riwle, 1220? Procl. of Henry III., 1258. Robt. Gloucester. 1300. Ayenbite, 1340. Trevisa, 1387.
Lydgate, 1425.
Wyntoun, 1420.
Caxton, 1477–90. Dunbar, 1500. Lyndesay.
James VI., 1590.
Standard English.
1611
Middle Scotch.
1500 EARLY MODERN ENGLISH. TUDOR ENGLISH.
Cursor Mundi.
Hampole, 1350. Barbour, 1375.
Ormulum, 1200. Genesis and Exodus, 1230–50. Harrowing of Hell, 1280.
English.
LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH.
English. Early Scotch.
MIDDLE ENGLISH (Levelled Inflexions.)
1300
Chronicle, 1154.
Early Southern English.
Northern
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH, (EARLY ENGLISH.)
Early
1200
Early
OLD ENGLISH TRANSITION (SEMI-SAXON.)
Tyndal, 1525.
Shakespeare, 1590–1613.
(Edgar in Lear.)
Milton, 1626–71.
MODERN ENGLISH. 1800
Modern Scotch.
1700
Dryden, 1663–1700. Allan Ramsay, 1717.
Addison, 1717. Exmoor Scolding, 1746. Johnson, 1750.
Burns, 1790. Scott.
Coleridge, 1805. Macaulay. Tennyson.
Barnes, 1844.
Figure 79.1: A visual representation of the English language’s periodization, from James A. H. Murray’s original entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Murray 1879: 402).
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400 ENGLISH CONQUEST 500
OE Chronicle ni
s
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ha
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L AT I N
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Wyclif & Chaucer, Gower
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Lydgate LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH (M.E. Transition) Caxton THE RENASCENCE
EARLY MODERN OR
Tindale
TUDOR ENGLISH
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P
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A
D
H
Shakespeare
1900
K
Primary Words of Life
Abstract & General Terms
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FR
MODERN ENGLISH
FRE
Johnson 1800
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Words of Common Life
Poetic & Rhetorical
Scientific
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Beowulf
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Technical, Scientific, Commercial
Figure 79.2: An additional visual representation of the English language’s periodization, showing the influence of other languages, in James A. H. Murray’s revised entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Murray 1910: 597).
Henry Sweet’s final representation of the historical periods in the history of English, published in A New Grammar of English (1892), looks strikingly close to Murray’s in terms of dates: For the sake of convenience we distinguish three main stages in the history of the language, namely Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Modern English (MnE). OE may be defined as the period of full endings (mo¯na, sunne, sunu, sta¯nas), ME as the period of levelled endings (mo¯ne, sunne, sune, sto¯nes), MnE as the period of lost endings (moon, sun, son, stones = stounz). We further distinguish periods of transition between these main
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stages, each of which latter is further divided into an early and a late period. The dates of these periods are, roughly, as follows: Early Old English (E. of Alfred) Late Old English (E. of Aelfric) Transition Old English (E. of Layamon) Early Middle English (E. of the Ancren Riwle) Late Middle English (E. of Chaucer) Transition Middle English (Caxton E.) Early Modern English (Tudor E.; E. of Shakespere) Late Modern English
700–900 900–1100 1100–1200 1200–1300 1300–1400 1400–1500 1500–1650 1650–
(Sweet 1892: 211)
By 1910, however, when the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica was published, Murray had shifted the dates for the transition between Old and Middle English back, closer to Sweet’s (1888) version (he also adds the 17th century transition): Old English or Anglo-Saxon Transition Old English, or ‘Semi-Saxon’ Early Middle English
–1100 1100–1150 1150–1250
(Normal) Middle English Late & Transition Middle English Early Modern or Tudor English 17th century transition Modern or Current English
1250–1400 1400–1485 1485–1611 1611–1688 1689–
As captured by these detailed excerpts, the now canonical historical periods have been, since their inception, scholarly fictions. They are important and useful scholarly fictions, which is why they have continued to be the focus of academic discussion and debate. The dates have been and continue to be negotiable and negotiated, shifting fifty years one way or the other, and fundamental to that negotiation are the criteria for determining a period break. Murray’s foundational work in this scholarly conversation, however, remains unmentioned in Kemp Malone’s 1930 article “When did Middle English begin?”, which has been cited subsequently as the first piece of critical scholarship to address the question of periodization. Malone focuses on revising Sweet’s model, primarily in terms of the dating of Middle English but also in terms of criteria. Malone accepts Sweet’s central focus on the leveling of inflections for periodization, although he argues that while Sweet frames his model as based on morphosyntactic criteria (i.e., the leveling of inflections), he is actually describing a phonetic change: the leveling and ensuing loss of vowels in final unstressed syllables. The question then becomes when that leveling began. By examining four Southern manuscripts from the 10th century (the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, the Junius Codex, and the Beowulf Codex), Malone establishes the existence of many clear cases of leveling of the vowel (and some deletion of the final nasal) in the 10th century. He concludes: “The transition period from Old to Middle
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English is not the twelfth century, as the grammarians used to think, nor even the eleventh, as most of them think today, but rather the tenth” (117). Lass (2000), more than 60 years later, provides evidence that Sweet’s criteria are an idealization as there is already leveling in Old English. He writes: The main point is that there is a lot of messiness in weak vowel spellings, and the typically ‘Middle’ accounts for more than half the unhistorical spellings [in OE]. […] Sweet’s criteria are a little out of line with what the texts show: his ‘transition’ period here may be a little late (on his own criteria): if Middle English is the period of levelled inflections, then Peterborough Chronicle is not really ‘transitional’ at all, but as much Middle English as Sweet’s choice of texts for ‘Early Middle English’. (Lass 2000: 23–24)
Malone sets the terms of the debate on Sweet’s ground, with Sweet’s early work alone as the foil rather than in conjunction with Murray’s broader vision of the factors involved in periodization. Malone hypothesizes that Sweet’s model met with such success due to the “neatness and simplicity of this scheme” (110), and his revision of the model adjusts dates and the description of the criteria but not the overall simplicity of the scheme. Critical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, however, has created more complex models, adding more internal criteria as well as in many cases external criteria.
5 Debates over criteria for periodization The greatest bone of contention about the criteria for periodization has been the use of “external” versus “internal” criteria – a debate that could be reframed at a more general level as what counts as “linguistic” criteria. At one extreme are the scholars who define “linguistic criteria” as purely intralinguistic criteria: phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical developments in the language (although lexical criteria typically receive scant attention – see Lutz (2002) for an exception). For example, Fisiak (1994) explicitly equates “linguistic” and “structural”; Lass (2000: 20), in justifying his test for the concept of “middle” in Germanic languages, describes a language-internal point of view as “surely what we ought to be primarily interested in”, in which case “only the typological characters count […]”. At the other extreme are scholars adopting a more sociolinguistic perspective that acknowledges the role that social factors play in language change, in addition to internal factors. For example, Go¨rlach (1989: 98) challenges the narrower typological definition of “purely linguistic” in his explanation of proper periodization. He begins with this assertion: “It will therefore be useful to look for purely linguistic criteria for a linguistic definition of English language history, and only then determine whether a boundary based on linguistic criteria squares with what other disciplines have to suggest”. He then describes three levels of linguistic criteria: (1) structural (important developments in phonology, morphology, syntax, and orthography and lexis which, taken together, result in a markedly different language before and after the watershed), (2) societal (language planning, standardization, ranges of functions and domains), (3) attitudinal (evaluation by speakers of earlier forms of their language, or of their vernacular as compared with French or Latin). (Go¨rlach 1989: 99)
In other words, the “purely linguistic” includes the highly sociolinguistic.
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Periodization based exclusively or primarily on intralinguistic considerations is often framed as the more traditional, if not canonical, approach. The many advocates of this approach trace it back to Sweet, although they often expand the scope of relevant criteria far beyond Sweet’s (and subsequently Malone’s) focus on the loss of inflectional endings, stressing the persuasiveness of cumulative internal evidence. The descriptions of historical periods should capture, they argue, a set of internal features that distinguish the period from those on either side; or as Nicolaisen (1997: 167) describes the goal: “[…] the establishment of essentially linguistic periods, isolated and connected on the basis of cumulative linguistic data”. Not all these scholars dismiss extralinguistic factors, but they emphasize the internal. In fact, Nicolaisen goes on to note: Such a procedure in no way compels us […] to take into account only intra-systemic developments within English itself but would also reckon with extra-systemic influences from outside as a result of contact […]. Initially all data involved in the process of ‘periodization’ should, however, be intra-linguistic while extra-linguistic evidence should be accorded secondary status without having its importance diminished. (Nicolaisen 1997: 167–168)
Lass (2000) has proposed one of the most detailed schemes for categorizing intralinguistic developments in Germanic languages in order to test the concept of “middle,” which he concludes is an identifiable entity. His “archaism matrix” charts the loss versus retention of ten features, including phonological features (e.g., root-initial accent, at least three distinct vowel qualities in weak inflectional syllables) and morphosyntactic features (e.g., adjective inflection, person/number marking on the verb, distinct dative in at least some nouns, grammatical gender). Kitson (1997), however, in an extended argument for a later boundary between Old and Middle English, returns to a single phonological feature: the retention of the front/back unstressed vowel distinction, which he posits as a cornerstone for the maintenance of inflections (or to put it differently, the critical obstacle to the full leveling of inflections). This approach is most obviously reminiscent of Malone’s work. As these descriptions capture, many models based on intralinguistic features focus primarily on the retention versus loss of archaic features, a weakness in the eyes of some scholars, who advocate equal attention to the development of new features. Nicolaisen (1997: 167) summarizes: “proper periodization should take into account both the old and the new, both continuity and change, both inertia and innovation”. Along these lines, Fife (1992: 7) argues for a prototype-based model: “Given some nucleus of cohesive grammatical behavior which serves as the prototype for a historical period, further examples of the language can be judged as either central or peripheral examples of this schematic grammar”. The description of the nucleus of each period is not necessarily dependent on preceding or subsequent ones – in other words, the description may be independent of concepts such as retention and loss. One of the complications of relying primarily or solely on internal criteria is that different levels of structure can suggest different chronological divisions. Whereas the leveling of unstressed vowels and the leveling of inflectional endings are intertwined, later developments such as the Great Vowel Shift, the simplification of many initial consonant clusters, the rise of periphrastic do, and the demise of third-singular present tense -(e)th do not work together to suggest clear chronological boundaries. And scholars can and have made persuasive arguments for privileging different categories of evidence,
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from the phonological to the syntactic. For example, although Malone and Kitson focus on phonological evidence, Fife (1992) argues that phonology is too subject to dialect variation to be reliable as a signal of structure change and privileges instead morphology, followed by syntax, lexicon, and phonology. Internal criteria sometimes also fail to account comprehensively or consistently for period distinctions. For example, while inflectional criteria can arguably help distinguish Old, Middle, and Modern English, they fail to distinguish Early Modern from Modern English – a boundary that has, at this point, become canonical yet difficult to account for purely on internal grounds. In addition, if the loss of inflections is the sole criterion for periodization in the history of English, then Modern English has the potential to stretch on for many more centuries – until, if this were to happen, English completes the cycle that some historical linguists posit and undergoes dramatic cliticization to become more synthetic. As noted above, most recent arguments for the inclusion of external factors advocate using them in conjunction with internal factors, sometimes noting their convenience as boundary markers but usually emphasizing that periods should demonstrate structural coherence based on internal criteria. Fisiak (1994) counters that the internal and external are intertwined, and Go¨rlach’s definition of “linguistic” criteria encompasses both the internal and external. By sharp contrast, Wright (1999: 33) is one of the few scholars to argue for using solely external criteria – although these must be more than “mere chronological accidents” – because internal changes are too slow to make meaningful periods. He concludes with this strong assertion: “If […] historical linguists wish to base successive periodizations on internal considerations alone, there seems to be no reason to have any periodizations at all. Maybe that would be for the best. It is easy to be mesmerized by the differences and fail to see the great continuities” (Wright 1999: 37). If one of the central concerns about responsible periodization is highlighting the artificial nature of the boundary, there is something to be said for external criteria. If presented correctly, external events are clearly not a linguistic line in the sand, dividing a period of the language with specific internal features from a period without those specific internal features. Historical events as period boundaries suggest that these external forces had significant implications for the development of the language (i.e., they are not randomly selected or simply imported from other disciplines) but do not have to imply cataclysmic change. Depending on the criteria scholars employ, the boundary dates for the major periods in the history of English shift, although not all that dramatically except in the rare case when a scholar attempts to fully reconceptualize the enterprise.
6 Debates over boundary dates for historical periods To tell the history of English, one has to start somewhere, which raises the thorny question of whether English, or any other language (creoles perhaps being the exception), really has a beginning. Strang (1970) avoids the issue in her history of English by moving backwards through time, but most histories of English settle on CE 449 (the date provided in historical chronicles for the first invasions by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the rounded-up date CE 450, or the vaguer “5th century”. The traditional rationale is that once these Germanic tribes were isolated on the British Isles, their dialect(s) of
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English began to change in ways different from Germanic dialects on the continent – although, of course, for several centuries the dialects were probably mutually comprehensible. To say that English “starts” in CE 449, however, is as problematic, Nicolaisen (1997) points out, as saying that American English began in 1607 with the settlement of Jamestown. The boundary dates for the period called “Middle English” have been the most hotly contested. As a dividing line between Old and Middle English, the year 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, stands as a given in literary history (Georgianna 2003) and has been used by some in linguistics as a boundary since Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet (Penzl 1994). For historians of English who entertain external factors as potential boundary dates, the Norman Conquest is an obvious candidate. To make it a boundary is not to say that this historical event had immediate or cataclysmic effects on the language (although the wording in some histories of English does seem to suggest this); it is to say that it was a historical event with great import for the history of the language and its speakers. While many of the structural changes between Old and Middle English were not caused by the Norman Conquest, some were probably accelerated by it. The lexicon was clearly dramatically affected over time by the rule of the Norman French, and English prosody, phonology, etc. also show its influence. Sociolinguistically, the Norman Conquest radically altered the status of English in the British Isles, the written and literary tradition, and much more. The impact of Old Norse and the Scandinavian raids from the 9th century on tends to get minimized by this focus on the Norman Conquest. Nicolaisen (1997: 169) notes: It has always surprised me that the extensive Scandinavian influence on English from the tenth to the twelfth centuries has never been regarded as ‘period-making,’ as something straddling Later Old English and Early Middle English, whereas it has usually been taken for granted that the equivalent Norman French influence stands on the threshold of Middle English…
Some of the recent scholarship on the “Middle English creole question” (see also Trotter, Chapter 114) has tried to highlight Scandinavian influence on Old English, and while none of this scholarship proposes specifically moving the dates for Middle English, they do attempt to disrupt the sense that the history of English is a straightforward, linear progression of “one language” from one stage to the next; instead, they argue, contact with other languages can have such a strong impact that the resulting form of the language cannot be categorized as simply as a genetic descendant (in the historical linguistic sense) of the earlier variety (cf. Poussa 1982; Go¨rlach 1986; DaltonPuffer 1995; Danchev 1997). Historians of English focused primarily on internal factors have proposed different boundaries for Middle English, rarely 1066, depending on the factors under investigation. As mentioned above, Malone proposes a date as early as the 10th century. Nicolaisen (1997: 170–171) comes up with the limits of 1000 and 1400 based on his intralinguistic criteria: leveled vowels in unstressed final syllables, concomitant loss of inflectional differentiation, influx of large number of French loanwords and several loan-sounds, a vowel system not yet affected by Great Vowel Shift. Kitson (1997), through a detailed analysis of linguistic evidence in texts from the area between Wiltshire and Herefordshire, argues for 1200 as the earliest boundary date for Middle English, echoing Sweet (1888) and Murray (1910). Up until that point, scribes show
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evidence of maintaining a front/back unstressed vowel distinction; as long as this distinction is maintained, Kitson argues, the shift to a language with fully leveled inflections was not irrevocable (see, however, Lass’s note in Section 4 about the second continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle, dated 1132–1154). As to when Middle English ends, external evidence can be used to point to 1476, when the printing press was introduced into England – an event that allowed the mass production of texts, with a significant impact on language standardization, the form of the book, conceptions of authorship, literacy rates, popular education, and more. Henry VII’s ascension to the English throne in 1485, marking the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, provides another possible boundary date. Some histories round up to 1500 and others use “the (late) 15th century”. Go¨rlach (1989: 103), using his fairly expansive definition of linguistic criteria, argues for an earlier date: “It seems to me that the phonological evidence in combination with the expanded functions of English (with all the consequences in orthography and spelling) and the growing standardization of the English language in England from 1430 onwards leave no better choice for a boundary than at 1430–1450”. One of the fundamental challenges for all the proposed dates above that rely to any extent on internal criteria is how much linguists can know about the spoken language from the remaining written evidence (cf. Schaefer, Chapter 81). For linguists, the history of “English” implies a focus on the spoken language, as the spoken is taken to be the most basic form of any language. Yet the evidence is entirely written – and often literary. And literary figures tend to be invoked often in linguistic descriptions of the early history of English. In a move not picked up by subsequent scholars, perhaps because the schema is not simple and does not allow one coherent narrative, Hockett (1957: 65) tries to separate the history of spoken from written English, giving weight to both; and he offers a significantly different chart to capture the development and periodization of the language. The diagram, adapted from Ernst Pulgram’s adaptation of Kurt Sethe’s work, shows diverging timelines for the written and spoken language (see Figure 79.3). Hockett’s explanation of the period breaks, which draws on criteria quite different from most previous or subsequent scholarship, merits quoting at length: This line begins just before 700 A.D., because that date, so far as we know, is the earliest at which anyone wrote English. Down to the time of Alfred, the “writing” line slants approximately as does the “speech” line, since no very firm orthographic habits had become fixed, so that habits of writing tended to be modified to fit changing habits of speech. Yet the two lines are somewhat separated: even at this very early period, English writing did not reflect speech with complete accuracy. With Alfred, the “writing” line begins to slope downwards more gently, becoming further and further removed from the “speech” line. This is because Alfred’s highly prestigious writings set an orthographic and stylistic habit, which tended to persist in the face of changing habits of speech. The Norman Conquest leads rather quickly to an end of this older orthographic practice; the new “writing” line which begins approximately at this time represents the rather drastically altered orthographic habits developed under the influence of the French-trained scribes. I have begun this line somewhat closer to the “speech” line at the time, on the assumption – of which I am not certain – that the rather radical change in writing habits led, at least at first, to a somewhat closer matching of contemporary speech. From this time until Caxton and printing, the “writing” line follows more or less inadequately the changing pattern of speech, never getting very close to it, yet constantly being modified in the direction of it. But with Caxton, and the
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introduction of printing, there soon comes about the real deep-freeze on English spellinghabits which has persisted to our own day. (Hockett 1957: 65–66)
Hockett also offers a way to think about the place of central literary figures as part of his very strong critique of debates over the boundaries of historical periods: We should never be caught arguing, with each other or with ourselves, whether Layamon is “really” Old English or “really” Middle English – and certainly we should never call his writing “transition” Old English, for the word “transition” is extremely dangerous. We should not even make any such compromise statement as that “Layamon shows certain surviving traces of Old English, but begins to foreshadow what later is to emerge as Middle English”. This statement is all right except for the use, in this particular context, of the terms “Old English” and “Middle English”. Replace “Old English” by “the English of Alfred” or “the English of Ælfric”, and replace “Middle English” by “Chaucerian English”, the statement is valid enough. Alfredian English and Chaucerian English are non-contiguous and non-overlapping time slices in the history of the language. (Hockett 1957: 66)
This proposal acknowledges the ways in which literature like Chaucer’s and Layamon’s provides prototypes for different historical forms of English – and the terminology Hockett suggests highlights linguists’ dependence on the written, as well as the literary, as the source of information about the early development of English. 650
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Alfred AElfric Norman conquest Layamon Ancren Riwle Chaucer Caxton
Figure 79.3: A visual representation of the diverging development of spoken English (bottom sloping line) and written English (top line, sloping at a gentler angle due to the implementation of written standards), with a break from older orthographic practices at the time of the Norman Conquest (Hockett 1957: 65)
Blake (1994) asks for perhaps an even more radical rethinking of how historical linguists tell the history of English: he argues that histories of English should explicitly be arranged around the history of the standard(s). He criticizes histories of English that assume the standard as “English” without acknowledgement, and he urges all
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historians of the language to clarify what they mean by English, which can be viewed as much as an abstract concept as an identifiable collection of linguistic data. The power of the standard to set an example for writers, Blake argues, makes it central to the history of the language, and attention to the standard usefully allows a junction of external and internal factors “in so far as the spread of a standard arises from external factors, but the standard itself is a matter of linguistic features” (Blake 1994: 39). This perspective redraws some of the period boundaries. As Blake explains, “[…] then English can have started only when the first standard was used outside its geographical area even if standardised languages were in use before then” (Blake 1994: 39), and King Alfred’s rule in the 9th century provides the first real standard for English as well as the sense that English is a national language. The start date for Middle English is pushed forward: “So a historical division of the language ought to extend ‘Old English’ until this ideal [the West Saxon standard] ceases to be a force, something which we can probably date to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century” (Blake 1994: 41). The Middle English period, characterized by the lack of a national standard, ends around 1400 with the rise of attempts to create a new national standard. Blake then raises the critical question of how one breaks Modern English, once a standard language has been established. He argues for 1660, the date of Restoration (vs. Go¨rlach’s 1700, which marks the “end of remaining syntactic redundancies and of the use of Latin for expository prose”): “What characterises the earliest part of Early Modern English is the establishment of a standard spelling system in printed material” (Blake 1994: 42). Before then, for example, in Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, standardized spelling may be an ideal but not a fact (Blake 1994: 42). Blake creates three subsequent periods based on developments with the standard, including intellectual attitudes: 1660–1798, characterized by attempts to codify the language and to establish the principles for having and promoting a standard language; 1798–World War I, notable for the attempt to impose these norms through the educational system; and World War I–present, a period during which the standard has been under attack and is no longer accepted unquestioningly (cf. Crystal 2004, 2006). These later periods have received much less attention in the published scholarship, perhaps in part because many scholars have assumed a three-part division, with Modern English extending from the end of Middle English onwards. The break between the Early and Late periods has, it seems, been treated less as a linguistic question – i.e., as a boundary to be determined on purely linguistic grounds, however one defines linguistic. The date is often put near the end of the 18th century, the time of the Industrial Revolution, if not precisely at 1776 with the Declaration of Independence and subsequent attempts to establish a distinctly American English. This assumption of a three-part division, however, may no longer be appropriate if we examine recent reference works on the history of English. And, of course, reference works can have as great an impact on general understandings of the history of English as any piece of critical scholarship.
7 Reference work perspectives on periodization Perhaps the most authoritative resource published on the History of English over the past two decades is the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL), the first four volumes of which provide comprehensive treatments of the four major historical periods, with the last two volumes organized around geography. The first four volumes use cultural, political, and economic factors to delineate four major periods: to 1066,
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1066–1476, 1476–1776, 1776–Present. The project editor Richard Hogg explains these divisions in the preface and notes that linguistic changes, of course, often run across volumes but are typically treated in only one. This editorial decision, however, does not go unchallenged: the Middle English volume editor Norman Blake (1992: 1) states that the political and historical events delimiting his volume, while perhaps significant in the long term, “are hardly appropriate as guides to the dating of periods in it”. History of English textbooks from the past few decades can be either criticized or celebrated for the hodge-podge of criteria from which they typically draw to explain the stages in the history of English. The criteria can include: phonological changes, morphosyntactic changes, lexical developments, major historical events, literary developments and/or specific literary figures, cultural shifts, and sociolinguistic factors. Many standard history of English textbooks – as well as introductory linguistics textbooks that address the history of English – rely on a four-part periodization of English similar to CHEL (cf. Millward 1996; Fennell 2001; Curzan and Adams 2012; van Gelderen 2006), and some employ period names that no longer suggest a subdivided Modern period: Old English, Middle English, early Modern English, Present Day English (Millward 1996; Fennell 2001). A few standard textbooks maintain the three-period model (cf. Finegan 1999; Baugh and Cable 2002), but the table of contents of Baugh and Cable’s text does not suggest a straightforward three-part model: not only do the Norman Conquest and the re-establishment of English after 1200 receive separate chapters from “Middle English”, the history of English after 1500 is broken into the Renaissance (1500–1650), the Appeal to Authority (1650–1800), and the Nineteenth Century and After. The division of the language since the Renaissance is more variable than the now highly standardized use of Old English and Middle English. Mugglestone’s (2006) collection of essays on the history of English, for example, has chapters based on chronological periods, including both Renaissance English and Tudor English as well as 19th century English, and chapters delimited by language-related traditions, such as “English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition”. These five hundred years, much closer to the present moment with a language that is structurally and lexically more familiar, seem to encourage more experimentation with its divisions as well as more specificity, often based on extralinguistic criteria. Mugglestone’s volume also echoes Sweet’s and Murray’s emphasis on transitions. Mugglestone explains in the Introduction: “[…] it is the working-out of change in progress – of transitions in usage – which preoccupies other chapters. The history of English is, in this sense, not a series of static states but, at each and every point in time, patterns of variation reveal the cross-currents of change, whether in the gradual marginalization or loss of older forms, alongside the rise of newer and incoming ones” (Mugglestone 2006: 4). Other recent histories of English suggest this fuzziness of transitions by studiously avoiding dates whenever possible – and in the process offer a creative solution to a vexing problem. Crystal (2004) and Lerer (2007), both written for a wider audience, mix chapters that employ traditional names such Old and Middle English (but without dates) and those that do not (e.g., Crystal’s “A trilingual nation”), and Crystal includes chapters explicitly on transitions. Crystal does, however, tackle the question of boundary dates for Middle English directly: When was Middle English? The question is as difficult to answer as “When were the Middle Ages?” Some people define it with reference to historical events, usually selecting the
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X. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography Norman invasion of 1066 as its starting-point and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, the accession of Henry VII in 1485, as its close. Some use a mixture of literary, linguistic, and cultural criteria, starting with the earliest texts that show significant differences from Old English towards the end of the twelfth century, and finishing with Caxton’s introduction of printing towards the end of the fifteenth (1476). Some take 1100 as the starting-point; some leave it as late as 1200. But no one feels really comfortable with an identification in terms of boundary-points. As the name “Middle” suggests, we are dealing with a period of transition between two eras that each has stronger definition: Old English and Modern English. Before this period we encounter a language which is chiefly Old Germanic in its character – in its sounds, spellings, grammar, and vocabulary. After this period we have a language which displays a very different kind of structure […], with major changes having taken place in each of these areas, many deriving from the influence of French. From a modern perspective, we can sum up the effects of the Middle English period in a single word: it made the English language “familiar”. (Crystal 2004: 105)
Through this detailed explanation of the problem, Crystal skillfully succeeds in not providing boundary dates himself – in other words, he acknowledges the problem but does not pretend to settle it or even suggest that the problem requires a solution. Lerer (2007: 54) focuses on prototypically Middle English without trying to specify when the period began; he opens the Middle English chapter with: “By the middle of the thirteenth century, the English language of both script and street was palpably different from the English at the time of the Conquest”. Of particular note, almost all these recent texts treat the question of the periodization of English directly, often with notable nuance even if the treatment is, of necessity, brief. For example, in her 2006 textbook, van Gelderen outlines the various possibilities for the end boundary date at the beginning of the Middle English chapter, mentioning both external and internal criteria: Several different points can be considered as the end of Middle English: 1400, when the Great Vowel Shift starts; 1476, when printing is introduced; or 1485, when Henry VII comes to the throne. Here, we will consider the year 1500, when the most radical morphological and syntactic changes are complete, as the end of Middle English. (van Gelderen 2006: 111)
Others carefully explain the use of historical events for boundary dates, as Burnley (1992) does in the following two excerpts about the use of 1066 as a boundary date: The beginnings of Middle English might plausibly be associated with the invasion of 1066, after which England found itself host to a second language, Norman French, alongside the English used by the majority. But to date the beginning of Middle English with Norman Conquest would be only partly true, and to understand why this is the case it is necessary to outline some of the major differences between the stages of the language which modern scholars have called Old and Middle English. (Burnley 1992: 63) It is evident from this brief discussion […] that the emergence of the language changes associated with the beginning of Middle English were only loosely connected with the Norman Conquest. In many cases, the dialect writing that the Conquest initiated simply revealed changes which had been in progress for more than two centuries, or diversity which had already been part of pre-Conquest Old English. (Burnley 1992: 65–66)
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Although these modern textbooks do not agree on the dates or the criteria for periodization, most of them do seem to agree on a now arguably established tradition of foregrounding the question of periodization even as they rely on it to tell their linguistic and cultural narratives.
8 Final reflections: the need for one solution? When historians of English talk explicitly about the process of periodization, they often include the importance of recognizing that periodization and the boundaries that it creates are “arbitrary”. But “arbitrary” is the wrong word. The boundaries are artificial but not arbitrary. As this chapter has detailed, scholars have paid meticulous attention to the criteria for creating boundaries, even if they have not always come to consensus. Histories of English have not traditionally imposed “arbitrary” boundaries: even if the criteria have not been discussed explicitly in the text, histories of English have generally relied on identifiable internal and external criteria, as well as an established historiographic tradition, for their periodization. One could argue that we do not all have to agree on the one “correct” periodization for the history of English. The benefit of doing so is the consistency of the historiographic tradition. But over a century’s worth of historians of English have yet to achieve full consensus on periodization, and the historiographic tradition has not suffered greatly. The greatest debates involve little more than a century on either side of canonical dates for the boundaries of Middle English. There is much less consistency about the periodization of English after the 15th century, but as these centuries fade into the past, periodization of them will probably stabilize. Over the past few decades, scholars have offered almost as many solutions as they have critiques when it comes to periodization, and each solution has merits. Fisiak (1994) emphasizes the need to distinguish between “Middle English period” and “Middle English language”, rather than collapse them into “Middle English”. As mentioned in Section 6, Hockett (1957) highlights the benefits of naming periods by authors (e.g., “the language of Chaucer”) as this implies non-contiguous periods. Some textbook writers have provided models for describing prototypical features of canonical stages such as Old and Middle English without providing boundary dates. Wright (1999) advocates avoiding language names altogether, using temporal and locative phrases instead – for example, “in England in the 12th century” rather than “in Middle English” – which would “thereby eliminate the hypostatization implicit in the use of language labels” (Wright 1999: 39). But all these various solutions should not be taken to say that all textbooks need to be rewritten. The critical lesson is that historians of English, particularly those writing reference works, need to be explicit about how they are establishing periods in the history of the language – the internal and/or external criteria they are employing and the implications. Historians of English should take responsibility for explicating all the fundamental terms on which periodization relies, from “English” to each subperiod thereof – “Old English”, “Middle English”, “Early Modern English”, “Present Day English”, and whatever other terms they employ – as well as the criteria they have selected for creating boundaries. Based on the criteria that linguists establish as central, there is no reason that the periodization of the history of the English language would correspond exactly to English literary
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history, but it is equally possible that literary history could be a factor in telling the history of English. In the end, many of the fundamental questions about periodization in the history of English boil down to what counts as “linguistic” history. Historical sociolinguistics encourages us to take the broadest view, which allows the weighting of the external and internal as both important to the speakers who have lived the history of the English language and recognizes the centrality of language variation as part of language change. The English language changes through its use by real speakers in real time, and ideally any periodization of English will capture the history of the structure and of the speakers of the English language in all its many varieties, both spoken and written.
9 References Baugh, Albert and Thomas Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Blake, Norman. 1992. Introduction. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2, 1066–1476, 1–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blake, Norman. 1994. Premisses and periods in a history of English. In: Francisco Ferna´ndez, Miguel Fuster, and Juan Jose´ Calvo (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1992: Papers from the 7th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Valencia, 22–26 September 1992, 37–46. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Burnley, David. 1992. The History of the English Language: A Sourcebook. London/New York: Longman. Crystal, David. 2004. The Stories of English. New York: Overlook. Crystal, David. 2006. Into the Twenty-first Century. In: Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 394–413. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curzan, Anne. 2000. The End of Modern English? American Speech 75(3): 299–301. Curzan, Anne and Michael Adams. 2012. How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. 3rd edn. Boston: Pearson Longman. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane. 1995. Middle English is a Creole and Its Opposite: On the Value of Plausible Speculation. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions, 35–50. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Danchev, Andrei. 1997. The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis Revisited. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 79–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fennell, Barbara A. 2001. A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fife, James. 1992. On defining linguistics periods: gradients and nuclei. Word 43(1): 1–14. Finegan, Edward. 1999. Language: Its Structure and Use. 3rd edn. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Fisiak, Jacek. 1994. Linguistic reality of Middle English. In: Francisco Ferna´ndez, Miguel Fuster, and Juan Jose´ Calvo (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1992: Papers from the 7th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Valencia, 22–26 September 1992, 47–61. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. History of the English Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Georgianna, Linda. 2003. Periodization and politics: The case of the missing twelfth century in English literary history. Modern Language Quarterly 64(2): 153–168. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – A Creole? In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries, Vol. 1, 329–344. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1989. Fifteenth-century English – Middle English or Early Modern English? In: J. Lachlan Mackenize and Richard Todd (eds.), In Other Words: Transcultural Studies in Philology, Translation, and Lexicology presented to Hans Heirich Meier on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, 97–106. Dordrecht, Holland/Providence, RI: Foris. Hockett, Charles F. 1957. The terminology of historical linguistics. Studies in Linguistics 12(3–4): 57–73. Jones, Charles. 1972. Introduction to Middle English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kitson, Peter R. 1997. When did Middle English begin? Later than you think! In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 221–269. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lass, Roger. 1994. Phonology and Morphology. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2, 1066–1476, 56–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Roger. 2000. Language periodization and the concept of ‘middle’. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Pa¨ivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 7–41. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lerer, Seth. 2007. Inventing English: A portable history of the language. New York: Columbia University Press. Lutz, Angelika. 2002. When did English begin? In: Teresa Fanego, Bele´n Me´ndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, Words, Texts and Change: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 145–170. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Malone, Kemp. 1930. When did Middle English begin? In: James Taft Hatfield, Werner Leopold, and A. J. Friedrich Zieglschmid (eds.), Curme Volume of Linguistic Studies, 110–117. Baltimore: Waverly. Matthews, David. 2000. The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Primary Sources. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Millward, Celia M. 1996 [1989]. A Biography of the English Language. 2nd edn. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Milroy, James. 1999. The consequences of standardisation in descriptive linguistics. In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Standard English: The widening debate, 16–39. New York: Routledge. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2006. The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, James A. H. 1879. English Language. In: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. VIII. 9th edn. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Murray, James A. H. 1910. English Language. In: Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. IX. 11th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murray, K. M. Elizabeth. 1977. Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nicolaisen, Wilhelm F. H. 1997. Periodization in the History of English. General Linguistics 35 (1–4): 157–176. Oliphant, T. L. Kington. 1886. The New English. London/New York: Macmillan. Penzl, Herbert. 1994. Periodization in language history: Early Modern English and the other periods. In: Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 261–268. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Poussa, Patricia. 1982. The Evolution of Early Standard English: The Creolization Hypothesis. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia XIV: 69–85. Strang, Barbara M. H. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen. Sweet, Henry. 1874. A History of English Sounds from the earliest period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweet, Henry. 1888. A History of English Sounds from the earliest period with Full Word-Lists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Sweet, Henry. 1892. A New Grammar of English, Logical and Historical. Vol. 1: Introduction, Phonology, and Accidence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wright, Roger. 1999. Periodization and how to avoid it. In: Robert J. Blake, Diana L. Ranson, and Roger Wright (eds.), Essays in Hispanic Linguistics Dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd, 25–41. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta.
Anne Curzan, Michigan (USA)
80. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography: Myths of the English language; or, alternative histories of “English” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Mythical underpinnings of the expression “a language” Defining the temporal limits of “English” Locating other myths and suggesting alternative archives Summary References
Abstract This chapter focuses on some of the myths revolving around the history of the English language in order to hint at which areas alternative histories might fruitfully be suggested (cf. Trudgill and Watts 2002). A concept of “myth” is presented within the framework of Foucault’s term “archive”, and four myths are selected for commentary: the myth of the longevity of English; the myth of a homogeneous language; the myth of language contact leading to “degeneration”; and the myth of the inferiority of northern English when compared to southern English, which is still used discursively to discriminate northerners and is thus a typically English myth. One of the important texts revealing the presence of such myths as early as the 14th century is Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (see Babington 1865), and a discourse analysis is given of the relevant portions of Higden’s text. The language contact myth and the myth of the inferiority of northern varieties of English are then selected to provide brief alternative histories that not only give suggestions as to how those myths might be deconstructed, but also help in the deconstruction of the wider myths of longevity and homogeneity.
1 Introduction In a handbook dealing with the historical linguistics of English as compendious as the present work, it might appear out of place to suggest that perhaps the way in which we think of the term “English” itself is the first problem to which we should direct our critical attention. In considering what the term “alternative histories of English” might mean, I thus find myself confronted with this problem. It is not my aim in this chapter to review different accounts of different varieties of English, although they will without Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1256–1273
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doubt be referred to in passing, but rather to provide a theoretical platform from which we might think a little more carefully about what we are doing as historical linguists, and in particular as historical linguists of “English”. Trudgill and Watts (2002) have suggested that there are alternatives to the orthodox accounts of the “history of English” that have routinely been taught to undergraduates of English since the 19th century (e.g. Baugh 1951; Baugh and Cable 1978; Bloomfield and Newmark 1963; Bradley 1904; Brook 1958; Burchfield 1985; Emerson 1894). The “standard” views of representing the history of English lead to what I now wish to call the funnel view of linguistic history (Watts 2011: Chapter 12), one in which a wider open area at the top of the funnel encompassing a large range of varieties of English in the past narrows considerably at the neck of the funnel with room for only one variety of English, Standard English, as the output. The result of the funnel view is that the standard variety is automatically equated with the “language”. Obviously this is to the detriment of the multitude of other varieties of English that also have a history. But my thoughts on this issue can be taken still further. To begin with, they indirectly challenge the idea that there can ever be such a “thing” as “a language”. Second, even if this hypostasization is allowed to stand, as I shall argue it must, how do we define what counts as Language A and Language B? James Milroy (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006) has written a series of articles both challenging the fixation on so-called “Standard English” in English historical linguistics and the claim that we can call the Germanic language varieties in use in England and southern Scotland from the 5th century on varieties of “English”. Added to these problems, there is yet another. Assume that we do decide to focus on the historical development of “Standard English English”, a term used by Trudgill (1999), regardless of criticisms raised by the Milroys and others (Milroy and Milroy 1991; Milroy 1999, 2002; Bex and Watts 1999; Watts and Trudgill 2002). It should still be obvious that there are many ways of telling that story (cf. Crystal 2002), i.e. that there are still alternative histories without even moving beyond the orthodox framework. The present chapter will thus focus on these problem areas and will first introduce the notion of myth in Section 2 as the basic component in understanding how we conceptualize the expression “a language” in contradistinction to the expression “language” (or “human language”). It is not my purpose in any way to disavow our common understanding of “a language”, but rather to show that if we do not recognize its mythical grounding, we are liable to take any of the possible “stories of English” as representing a rational, and thereby incontrovertible truth. The danger inherent in taking this step is to believe in, and hence not to question, a dominant ideology of language. Section 3 will deal with the problems entailed in trying to define the historical and ontological borders between periods of “English” while still retaining a healthy skepticism towards dominant ideologies of language. Section 4 will then tackle some of the myths underlying more orthodox accounts of the history of the language and will look in some detail at the history of Northern English and at ways in which a new look at Standard English from this perspective offers an alternative account of the former. Section 5 will summarize the moves that have been made in this chapter and briefly mention other important alternative histories for other varieties of English that have been proposed in the literature.
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2 Mythical underpinnings of the expression “a language” The etymological origin of the term “myth” lies in the Greek word μύθος, which simply means ‘story’, and the fundamental narrative aspect of the term has remained at the core of the nexus of meanings prompted by the lexeme ever since. However, that nexus has been extended considerably to include the perception that a myth is not a personal story or an individual act of narration, but is transferred to the individual socially, in the course of social interaction with others, and culturally, through a history of transference that has made it the “cultural property” of a group. A myth therefore provides a narrative cognitive embedding of a belief, or set of beliefs, about some aspect of a socio-cultural group and helps to set up a foundation for performing acts of identity in emergent social practice. Thus, questioning whether a myth is in any sense objectively true is ultimately irrelevant. If even part of the story is believed by the group, it is at least individually and communally true, and for this reason myths “fulfil a vital function in explaining, justifying and ratifying present behavior by the narrated events of the past” (Watts 2000: 33). Stories can only be constructed by human agents, which entails that agency will be transferred to whatever creatures are involved in the stories. Human language functions as a mediator between the physical, the social, and the mental worlds in enlarging and expanding one’s individual mental world in potentially infinite ways. It is an abstract system of symbolic signs that are uniquely designed to allow human beings to “think” and understand rather than simply perceive the world they inhabit, and the thinking and understanding is done in terms of mental blends that allow the projection of abstract concepts that are otherwise not fully comprehensible onto mentally stored physical concepts. By their very nature mental blends are thus metaphorical and metonymic, and language is the major means by which we are able to create those blends. If we now assume that, in order to function as a “ratified” member of a social group, we are constrained to acquiring the linguistic constructions that others use, the step towards projecting a blend in which those constructions are mapped onto a system independent of our own selves is logical and relatively simple. The system is metaphorically projected as “the property” of the group and acquires a nomenclature of its own, which is most frequently closely related to what the group calls itself, but may also simply be referred to as “the language”. The hypostasization is thus nothing more than the construction of a metaphorical blend that becomes embedded through repeated socialization in the minds of the members participating in the group’s activities. It is thus hardly surprising that we accept the “truth” of the existence of languages rather than simply the existence of human language. It is also hardly surprising if the group or groups that perceive themselves to be using “a language” construct communal stories (myths) to explain, justify, and ratify its existence. At one and the same time such “myths” should have a historical underpinning and also provide a present means of distinguishing the group from other groups. It is at this point that linguists encounter a set of apparent paradoxes. I shall call the first of these the homogeneity/heterogeneity paradox. Contrary to common belief, “a language” is hardly a totally homogeneous system (cf. Weinreich et al. 1968). Those using it need flexibility at all times to adapt it to the purposes of the current social practice, and there seems to be an in-built heterogeneity in all human language in any case. However,
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many of the language myths constructed cognitively in explaining, justifying, and ratifying the concept “Language A” are based on notions of perfection, purity, and homogeneity. The second apparent paradox, the unique distinguishability paradox, is derived from the first, and it concerns the conceptualization of a language as a uniquely distinguishable system. Although “Language A” may share a large number of constructions and/or construction types with “Language B”, it nevertheless has a certain number of constructions which allow the researcher to proclaim it as a unique language. The paradox here is that this does not prevent speakers of A or B from communicating freely and easily with one another, and it may also mean that those same speakers may not perceive A or B to be uniquely distinguishable from each other at all. Associated with these two apparent paradoxes is a third, the language-as-a-property paradox, which assumes that the language system is the property of its speakers. Speakers who are not ratified members of the group may still pass as such if they have an equal command of the language variety and if the language variety shared by the group is taken as one of the group’s fundamental defining properties. Each of these three apparent paradoxes is created by a set of language myths and lies at the heart of the unholy alliance between the history of Language A, the standardized variety of Language A, and Language A as a “national language”, i.e. the official language of a nation-state. Groundbreaking work on precisely these paradoxes (Crowley 2003 [1989]; Milroy and Milroy 1991 [1986]; Joseph 1987; Grillo 1989; Bonfiglio 2002; Bex and Watts 1999) has shown convincingly that we are faced here with powerful, ideologically-based hegemonic discourses of language which are historically tied up with the socio-cultural and socio-political discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. Section 3 will demonstrate how these paradoxes lead to gamut of dilemmas which are ultimately unsolvable in any attempt to describe a history of English, and they will provide a rationale for assuming the natural need for a potentially infinite set of alternative histories.
3 Defining the temporal limits of “English” In Section 2 I presented a cognitive rationale for thinking in terms of “a language”, in this case “English”, but with the implicit warning that, as linguists, we are obliged to hold the apparent homogeneity/heterogeneity paradox in our minds at all times. A failure to do so ultimately leads to the funnel view of English, regardless of whether it is consciously or unconsciously believed in, and this view sets Standard English as the teleological goal of research by focusing on Standard English data as its endpoint. In this section I will first consider the three apparent paradoxes to a modern historical view of languages (rather than simply language) presented in Section 2 as being related to the mythical imagination of nation-state communities and argue that they are all linked by the linguistic myth of a “perfect language”. Secondly, I will argue in a more focused manner not only that the orthodox breakdown of “English” into periods is part of the myth of English but also that the validity of using the term “English” at all to refer to those periods, although it might be convenient for researchers, has its distinct pitfalls. On this basis, as I shall argue in Section 4, there are alternative approaches that one might take.
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3.1 Speaking for the dead In setting up a history of any phenomenon, we have to assume firstly that we can recognize it and define it adequately (i.e. we have to tackle the question of what constitutes the phenomenon) and secondly that we can determine at what time-point the history of the phenomenon began. If, for example, we were writing a history of the French Revolution, we would need to define what we understood as the events constituting the Revolution, and then interpret – and I stress the word “interpret” here – the complex series of events prior to it which we took to be in some sense responsible for its occurrence. In other words we would be interested in providing a coherent explanation of both why and how the French Revolution “occurred”. Obviously, alternative interpretations both of what the French Revolution “was” and of what caused it (since causation is what historians set out to explain) can be rather different. It is even more difficult to know where a particular history begins. So even though historians aim at giving an account of causation, no single set of explanations can ever provide an objectively “correct” and definitive account. Part of the study of language has been literally formed in a historical mould since the late 18th and early 19th centuries, one reason being the close interconnection between the concept of a language (rather than merely human language as such) and the development of the modern academic discipline of history. As Anderson (2006 [1983]) clarifies, both are intimately connected with the development of the concept of the nation-state: […] once one starts thinking about nationality in terms of continuity, few things seem as historically deep-rooted as languages, for which no dated origins can ever be given. (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 196)
For Anderson, the orthodox understanding of history is that it serves the purpose of overcoming typical human amnesias; it takes upon itself the onerous duty of “speaking for the dead”. It is worth quoting Anderson at length on this point: All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivion, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. After experiencing the physiological and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to “remember” the consciousness of childhood. How many thousands of days passed between infancy and early adulthood vanish beyond direct recall! How strange it is to need another’s help to learn that this naked baby in the yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot, is you. […] Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be “remembered”, must be narrated. Against biology’s demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism’s markets year by year. (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 204)
The truth of the matter is that modern man needs those narratives, those myths, both to overcome the unalterable human fact that each of us is mortal and to situate the individual within an apparently coherent sociocultural group, and in this way to take the sting out of the reality of mortality. Part of this mythical projection of the individual into a timeless socio-cultural entity is the projection of language into a language. The projection of an imagined community into a “nation” offers the illusion of a nation-state existing beyond our own time and striving for an imaginary perfection and of a language also
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moving towards achieving that perfection (cf. Eco 1993). The narrative illusion is thus the equivalent of a very powerful myth of perfection in which the forgotten dead are given a voice as being instruments in the trajectory towards a homogeneous state. A little reflection, however, should be enough to convince us that this is an illusion. Accepting the “truth” of the existence of languages rather than simply the existence of human language disregards the evidence that any language system that emerges through repeated instantiations of social interaction is by nature heterogeneous and subject to change through the conscious or unconscious agency of its speakers. It also leads to the conscious or unconscious effort to highlight the distinguishability of that system from others, and to claim some form of membership in a group that retrospectively asserts that the language is part of what characterizes the group. This is a common phenomenon used to stress in-group membership and out-group status. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault (1972 [1969]) presents a view of discourse in which the characteristic of every discursive statement is its discontinuity and the unity of the discourse itself is a dispersion of its discontinuity. The appearance of objects, themes, and forms in the discourse is ultimately dependent on external conditions. We can, I think, consider the myth of the homogeneity or perfection of a language to be the main prototypical theme of a modern discourse around which we will find a linked but crucially discontinuous set of other language myths. Foucault also uses the term “discourse archive” to refer to this nexus of discursive statements, by which he understands not a library, but rather “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 129). Those statements are constructed historically, i.e. through time, and I wish to argue, along with Blommaert (2005), that they are constructed narratively and communally (i.e. mythically) to determine what “can be said, expressed, heard, and understood in particular societies, particular milieux, particular historical periods” (Blommaert 2005: 102). The major problem with Foucault’s archive is that, so he believes, “[i]t is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak […]. The archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable” (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 146−147). In other words, the archive is a collection of historical statements that we cannot interpret, and it is thus impossible for us ever to be “within” another archive. However, in order to open up alternative histories of English, none of which will be objectively “true”, we first need to find a way of questioning the discursive archive from within which we speak and to break open other archives. This is what we shall do in Section 4. For the moment, however, it is instructive to question the orthodox breakdown of English into different historical periods in an effort to break open a dominant sub-myth of our own archive, i.e. that English has a long history which is somehow connected to the development of the English (British?) nation. I call it a “sub-myth” because it depends crucially on the myth of the ultimate perfection of a language.
3.2 The myth of the longevity of English: breaking English down into historical periods The constitutive myth in the discursive archive of the nation-state reads as follows: what is imagined as the “nation” is engaged in a teleological development towards some state of perfection. For at least the last 150 years, one of the major defining features of the
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nation-state has been the standardized language, the “legitimate” linguistic representation of that state. However, as Anderson (2006 [1983]) rightly argues, in the late 18th century the first nationalist movements were located in the Americas, and had little to do with language since they were focused on revolution against control from the metropolitan powers, in particular Great Britain, Spain and Portugal. If the nation-state was striving for perfection, then so was the language closely associated with it. In addition, if it could be shown that the language had a long history, it could also be argued that the process of linguistic standardization was nothing more than an awakening of national consciousness, i.e. that it gave a voice to the dead. Hence the principal sub-myth in this archive became that of the longevity of the “national language”, with a further sub-myth arising from it which attempted to justify the idea of a continuous, uninterrupted, relentless development towards the ultimate homogeneous linguistic state of a standard language. The first important challenge to this sub-myth was made by Bailey and Maroldt (1977), and it sparked off a vigorous discussion of whether or not Middle English, and, in some later accounts supporting Bailey and Maroldt, Old English after the Danish settlement, was a creole. The dust has not yet settled in this dispute (cf. Trotter, Chapter 114). James Milroy (2002) locates the following five components in these two sub-myths: 1. English is a very ancient language; 2. English is directly descended from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages; 3. English dates from the fifth century settlement of Germanic tribes in the island of Britain; 4. English has an unbroken and continuous history since that time and is the same language now as it was then; 5. English is not a mixed language: changes in its structure have come about for mainly language-internal reasons. (J. Milroy 2002: 16–17, emphasis in the original)
He goes on to dismantle each of these propositions, arguing that they are “ideological”, or, as I would put it, part of the discursive myth of the development towards perfection and homogeneity which is a very deeply embedded part of one of the dominant discursive formations in our present-day archive. He argues, for example, that it is illogical to talk of Old English, if we have to learn it as if it were a foreign language. Nevertheless, there are several points in the written documents prior to the Conquest in which the language is referred to as Englisc or Ænglisc, and although we come across Norðanhymbre (Northumbrian, Northumbrians), Mierce/Miercan (Mercian, Mercians), Angle (Anglian, Angles, often in opposition to Danes), Seaxan/Seaxe (Saxon, Saxons), none of these terms is used to refer to a language. We are faced with a dilemma at this point. If we call Old English “Anglo-Saxon”, as Milroy suggests, how do we account for the fact that the concept of a language, English, used in all its variations was already embedded as a metaphorical blend in the minds of the inhabitants of pre-Conquest England, and possibly also southeast Scotland? As Anderson (2006 [1983]: 196) points out, “no dated origins can ever be given” for languages, and there are no linguistic principles according to which such datings could be made. If we look at these facts through the prism of our dominant archive, however, it is certainly possible to construct a generally acceptable “history of English”, but such a history is a mythically informed history, and it completely ignores any account of how people who felt they were using English actually went about the everyday job of communicating with others. Milroy is right to reject the contention that development in the English language can be carried out merely by looking at the internal constructions in the language. The
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contention is false on the grounds that it assumes development from one homogeneous state of language to the next, by implicitly believing that we can actually state what those constructions were. This is again the ideological view of a language rejected by Milroy. At all events, contrary to what Foucault believes, it should by now be clear that we can indeed make the effort to stand outside our own archive, and to try tentatively to construct earlier archives informed by different myths. In Section 4 I shall attempt to do just this by dealing with evidence for the existence of three other language myths, two from the early 14th century and one from the late 16th century. I shall then discuss an alternative way of looking at two situations in which little or no linguistic evidence is at hand, but where it is possible to make judicious use of socio-historical facts to help us piece together a speculative account of what may have happened, not so much to the language, but to those who felt they were using the language.
4 Locating other myths and suggesting alternative archives Hypostasizing a language from repeated situations of socio-communicative verbal interaction inevitably leads to mythically grounded narrative accounts of the language or the users of the language. Linguistic myths of English go back at least as far as the early 14th century and could probably be traced back even further were it not for the relatively restricted number of textual sources that have come down to us. Many of those myths are still evident in present-day discourse on English, and they form part of an amalgamation of myths that have collected around the myth of the perfect language. In the first part of this section I shall take a look at three such myths, two of which ultimately contributed to a narrowing focus on the history of standard English whereas the third might have led to an alternative focus on the history of regional varieties of English. I shall argue in Section 5 that the first of the myths that I shall consider has, perhaps indirectly, led to a cultural revival in varieties of Northern English. The third myth, as a reaction to the dominant discourse of standard English, gave rise to a heightened interest in preserving, or at least recording what were thought to be dying regional dialects of English at the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century. However, it might also be said to lie at the basis of a renewed interest in tracing out not only the historical but also the continued development of new varieties of English across the world. In the second part of the section I shall adopt the possibly controversial view that the fundamental reasons for virtually all change are to be found in various forms of language contact rather than in the functioning of language-internal mechanisms. In the spirit of the principle that language contact inevitably leads to language change, I shall briefly reconsider contact between speakers of Old English and speakers of the Danish variety of Old Norse in the Danelaw area of England, and then turn my attention to a grossly neglected area of study, viz. the effects of the Black Death on language contact after 1349.
4.1 Three further myths of English In Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (see Babington 1865), compiled during the first half of the 14th century, we find evidence of at least two language myths that are closely associated with the dominant myth of the language as a perfect, homogeneous system – the myth of wild, barbaric people without a homogeneous language (Myth A), and the
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myth of the corruption of a language through contact with other languages (Myth B). There is even, or so it seems, the hint of a myth that gives rise to alternative accounts of a language as a heterogeneous system, which we could call the myth of language variety (Myth C). Myths B and C are evident in the following quotation from chapter lix of the second book of the Polychronicon, which I have quoted in the original Latin, followed by my own translation. I have also highlighted the statement that there are three types of English, Southern, Midland, and Northern, since, in the chronicle tradition, it was taken from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and forms the basis of a conceptual split between the North and the South in which it is debatable whether or not the Midlands belong to the North or the South (cf. Wales 2006): Angli quoque, quamquam ab initio tripartitam sortirentur linguam, austrinam scilicet, mediterraneam, et borealem, veluti ex tribus Germaniæ populis precedentes, ex commixtione tamen primo cum Danis, deinde cum Normannis, corrupta in multis patria lingua peregrinos jam captant boatus et garritus [Myth B]. Hæc quidem nativæ linguæ corruptio provenit hodie multum ex duobus; quid videlicet pueri in scholis contra morem cæterum nationum a primo Normannorum adventu, derelicto proprio vulgari, construere Gallice compelluntur; item quod filii nobilium ab ipsis cunabulorum crepundiis ad Gallicum idioma informantu […] Ubi nempe mirandem videtur, quomodo nativa et propria Anglorum lingua, in unica insula coartata, pronunciatione ipsa sit tam diversa [Myth C]; cum tamen Normannica lingua, quæ adventitia est, univoca maneat penes cunctos. (Book II, ch. lix) ‘And the English, although from the beginning they were given three types of speech, that is southern, midland and northern as preceding from three peoples of Germany but mainly from a mixture with the Danes, afterwards with the Normans, they now produce foreign-sounding chatterings and bellowings as the native language has been corrupted in so many ways. [Myth B] Indeed this corruption of the native tongue today comes largely from two things; i.e. boys in schools against the custom of other nations, from the first arrival of the Normans, their own common [tongue] being left aside, are compelled to construe [their lessons] in French; on the other hand, the sons of the nobles are taught the language of the French from the very rocking of their cradles […] When surely it is seen as a wonder how the true and native language of the English, compressed within one island, is so diverse in its very pronunciation; [Myth C] the Norman language, however, which has been brought here, retains the one sound with all.’
In Higden’s eyes, both the “mixture” between the Angles (rather than the Saxons and the Jutes) and the Danes, and the subsequent “mixture” with Anglo-Norman French has resulted in the corruption of the language, and one of the principal reasons for this corruption in Higden’s day is attributed to the lack of English mother tongue instruction in the schools. On the other hand, Higden also considers it a “wonder” that English should be “so diverse in its pronunciation” throughout England, which sits rather uneasily with his attribution of corruption to the language. Further on Higden states the following, which he has taken from William of Malmesbury’s De gestis Pontificum Anglorum (c.1125). It constitutes evidence that the North/ South divide goes back at least another 250 years and is deeply entrenched in the mythical discourses on English: Tota lingua Northimbrorum, maxime in Eboraco, ita stridet incondita, quod nos australes eam vix intelligere possumus [Myth A]. ‘All the language of the Northumbrians, above all in York, shrieks in such an undisciplined way that we Southerners can hardly understand it.’ [Myth A]
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The statement itself, whether Higden’s or William’s, is an outright condemnation of the language used in the North (which in this section of the text excludes the Midlands), and it is interesting to note how Higden discursively aligns the reader together with himself as a Southerner in the NP nos australes (‘we Southerners’). This is later followed by the statement: […] praedicta quoque lingua Saxonica tripartita que in paucis adhuc agrestibus vix remansit [Myth A]. ‘[…] also the aforementioned, tripartite Saxon language scarcely exists but among a few rustics.’ [Myth A]
How are we to interpret this statement? The central word here is agrestibus (the ablative plural of agrestis). It can be translated simply by ‘farmer’ or ‘peasant’, but there is a negative ring to the word, and it is often glossed as ‘boorish’, ‘uncouth’, ‘uncivilized’. Its original meaning was ‘one who drives animals out into the fields’, and significantly, John de Trevisa translates it with the Middle English word ‘uplondissh’, i.e. ‘hill folk’ or pastoralists. If we now return to the other quotations from Higden, the expression mirandem videtur could also be translated as ‘it is seen as something strange/abnormal’, which indicates a negative attitude towards the wide variation in English pronunciation, a theme picked up by Caxton towards the end of the 15th century. And if we return to the first quotation, the second reason for the corruption of English can only be its heterogeneity. In a nutshell, we have the following elements of a set of negative myths of English: 1. 2. 3. 4.
There are too many varieties of English. English does not have a unified pronunciation. Those in the North are the worst users of English. Those in the North are uncivilized pastoralists.
This constitutes the myth of the North/South divide, which has persisted, in certain people’s minds at least, right down to the present day. A genuinely positive example of the myth of language variety can be found at the end of the 16th century in Richard Carew’s “The excellency of the English tongue”, which was first printed in 1605 together with Carew’s “A survey of Cornwall” and then as a contribution to William Camden’s Description of England: Moreover the copiousness of our Language appeareth in the diversity of our Dialects, for we have Court and we have Countrey English, we have Northern and Southern, gross and ordinary, which differ from each other, not only in the terminations, but also in many words, terms, and phrases, and express the same thing in divers sorts, yet all write English alike. (1605 [1595], cited in Go¨rlach 1991: 2433)
Carew’s text is repeated almost verbatim in Guy Mie`ge’s The English grammar in 1688. So it seems that what Carew calls the “copiousness” of English was favored by some and frowned upon by others. There is a hitch in the argument here, however, in that Carew seems to be referring to oral varieties of language. His final comment – “yet all write English alike” – even though it can be shown to be demonstrably false at the time when Camden was collecting his materials for his Description of England, is an indication that the move towards a homogeneous form of standard written English was already in progress.
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4.2 Two alternative histories of migration and language contact in England One alternative history of Northern English has recently appeared (Wales 2006), and, significantly, it styles itself in the subtitle as a “social and cultural history”. Wales stresses that her purpose is to produce a history which will offer an alternative to the ideological discourse which uses the myth of the North/South divide to justify a focus on the history of Standard English. She is not primarily concerned to delineate the historical development of Northern English, for the simple reason that there are a large number of rural and urban dialectal varieties that lay claim to being classified as “Northern”. A considerable amount of linguistic material is presented, but her main concerns are to defuse the power of the myth of the North/South divide by locating the origins of negative stereotypes still propagated in the South about Northerners and by making her readership aware of the high level of cultural and social solidarity in the North. So far this has managed to prevent too much erosion through the diffusing influences of standard English and, within the last 30 years, of so-called “estuary” English (cf. Altendorf, Chapter 122). The aims of setting up alternative histories should be precisely this, viz. to challenge a funnel-like focus on Standard English in dealing with the history of English, and I shall refer to Wales’s book in this section. Before re-examining two histories of migration and contact in England, I wish to turn my attention briefly to the radical position that all language change is ultimately triggered by language contact situations. In order to uphold this thesis, it is first necessary to see every situation in which two or more interactants engage in social practice as being per definitionem a language contact situation. Language contact in this case concerns each individual interactant’s linguistic system (see Watts, Chapter 95). In every instantiation of social practice we are involved with the construction and negotiation of conceptual meanings through which we make sense of our world. If the addressees use the same constructions as we do, there is not much difficulty in constructing and negotiating meaning. But even in this case there are still situations in which we need to find some way of prompting for meaning, which may lead us to introduce constructions which have never been used before. In fact, this happens more often than we imagine. If there are differences between sets of constructions, the interlocutors need to find ways of negotiating meaning, which can lead to one or the other of the participants “simplifying” some of the constructions used (see my discussion of the introduction and diffusion of þe as a nondeclinable definite article and þon as a nondeclinable singular demonstrative determiner in Watts, Chapter 95). The first language contact situation is one for which we have little or no documentary evidence from the time during which contacts began but evidence from the late 10th century on for some of the consequences of contact. In 865 the Danes, who had been raiding the Eastern coast of England in their longships on an almost annual basis from the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793, decided to send a “Great Army” bent on the conquest of England rather than simply looting. In the wake of this army settlers from Denmark migrated to England and settled on land in relatively close proximity to the native English. In 866 York was captured and made the administrative center for the Danish occupation of England, and in the successive years Nottingham and Thetford also succumbed, followed by the rest of the five boroughs, Leicester, Stamford, Lincoln, and Derby. From 871 till the first treaty with the Danish ruler Guthrum in 886,
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Alfred’s Wessex waged a defensive war against the Danes. The treaty accepted the overlordship of the Wessex king in England but allowed the Danes to practice their law and customs to the east of the line of Watling Street as far as the River Ouse in Bedfordshire and from there across to the River Lea to its confluence with the Thames. A great deal of work has been carried out on locating place-name evidence for Danish settlements in the Danelaw. The results are only an indirect form of evidence for the possible cohabitation of an Old English speaking population with Old Danish speaking settlers throughout the Danelaw, but they do show a preponderance of settlements in the East Midland county of Leicestershire as well as the counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Above the River Tees there is hardly any toponymic evidence of Norse settlement, while in South Yorkshire there is again evidence of relatively intensive settlement and in Lincolnshire of very intensive settlement. There is almost no toponymic evidence to the west of Watling Street and very little evidence of settlement to the South of the Fenlands in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. To the East of the Fenlands there is a moderately high occurrence of Norse placenames in Norfolk and Suffolk (although nowhere near as high as the concentration in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire), and virtually none in Essex. Two central questions need to be addressed in an alternative history of Northern English, and they are both mentioned by Wales (2006: Chapter 2). On the one hand, we need to know not only the extent of Old Danish influence on the development of English in the Danelaw but also the kind of influence exerted by one variety over the other. On the other hand, we need to have a plausible explanation for the extensive Old Norse vocabulary that has come down into Standard English and also for significant morpho-syntactic changes in what is essentially “the language of the South” from the language of the North (e.g. the third person plural pronoun they and its forms them, their and theirs, the use of the third person plural morpheme -s in the present singular paradigm of the verb, the third person singular feminine personal pronoun she, etc.). I will tackle the second question in the second part of this subsection. Three different solutions to the first question have been proposed by researchers. For example, Poussa (1982) considers that the local forms of Old English resulting from the language contact situation were the result of a process of creolization, which indicates wholesale simplification of the inflectional system of the language, and also implies Danish dominance in the Danelaw. However, her proposal has been severely criticised by Go¨rlach (1986) and by Dawson (2003). A second solution is to postulate that a form of hybrid language between Old Danish and Old English arose through forms of codeswitching and extensive borrowing (Bjorkmann 1969). The third solution, which is much more plausible, is that we have a canonical situation of dialect mixing in which “a supralocal koı¨ne´” developed (Wales 2006: 61; J. Milroy 1992: 181; Millar 2000: 60; Dawson 2003). Siegel (1985: 372) defines koı¨neisation as “a gradual process which occurs only after prolonged contact between speakers who can most often understand each other to some extent”, and a koı¨ne´ would therefore be “the stabilized result of mixing of linguistic subsystems such as regional or literary dialects” (Siegel 1985: 363). Three factors are of importance for koı¨neisation: a) speakers of both varieties must be able to interpret each other’s speech to such an extent that they can also infer one another’s intended or unintended implications; b) the interlocutors must communicate with one another on a regular basis; c) the interlocutors must have more or less the same social status with respect to each other.
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I shall illustrate this with a purely, but not entirely implausible fictional situation. The Danish settlers in the Danelaw may have had the benefit of Danish military strength to back up their search for good arable land, but the population must have been relatively sparse in those areas in which good farming land was to be had (notably in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire, and, above all, Lincolnshire). The overall population of England is estimated at roughly 1,200,000 in the late 9th century, and even this may be very optimistic. There was, in other words, no shortage of land, and there was unlikely to have been serious disputes between the indigenous population and the migrants over land possession. In the towns (e.g. York, the five boroughs, Thetford, Gainsborough, etc.) the incoming migrant population may have been more numerous and have focused on trade with the European North Sea coast. Imagine two farming families living on two sides of a valley, one English-speaking, the other Danish-speaking, both with a herd of cows. Imagine that the housewife of the English family needs to drive the cows in for milking but her husband has been taken sick. And imagine that she decides to go over to the Danish farmstead and ask for help. She greets the Danish farmer and states her problem in her local dialect of Old English (the Northern dialects, from all the evidence of Northumbrian texts going back to the 8th century, had lengthened vowels in place of the diphthongs common in the South and West. The reader must allow for some licence in my use of Old English here. There is after all absolutely no way of knowing how this would have been expressed in any part of the Danelaw. But the situation is, after all, fictional, although plausible): Min bonda is sec. Canst þu me mid þam kinum helpan? my husband is-3PSG sick canst-2PSG thou me with the-DAT cows-DAT help [mi:nbondəɪsˈe:k\ kansθume:mɪdθəmˈki:nəmˈhɛlpən\] “My husband is sick. Can you help me with the cows?” In Old Norse/Old Danish ‘my husband’ would be min bondi, ‘sick’ would be sjuk, ‘canst thou’ would be kannt þu, the dative case of the first person singular pronoun would be mer, ‘with’ would be með, the dative plural of ‘cow’ would be kum, and the verb ‘help’ would be hjalpa. The only possible difficulty would be in expressing the dative case of the definite article, which by this time in Old English would have been þam, and in the Nordic languages, then as now, would have appeared as a post-positional clitic, possibly, in this case innum. So by no stretch of the imagination can we suggest that the Englishspeaking farmer’s wife did not get her message across to the Danish farmer. The two linguistic systems were to all intents and purposes mutually comprehensible. As generations went by Danish settlers were no longer Danish settlers, but inhabitants of the Danelaw. They might have lost their Danish by the third generation, but intensive local contact with English speakers would surely have led to borrowing from various areas of the vocabulary from Danish into English, to the integration of Norse morpho-syntactic elements into English, e.g. they, at (‘that’), til (‘to’), etc., and to extensive leveling in the inflectional system of the resulting koı¨ne´ (or even koı¨ne´s). Depending on the demographic balance between the English-speaking and the Danishspeaking population in the area focused on, Danish will have survived longer in urban than in rural districts. It is well known that Danish survived as an active language in York at least up to the end of the 11th century.
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It is also difficult to find hard empirical evidence to answer Wales’s second question. As we know, an extensive set of words, most of them in common and frequent use, have at some stage been borrowed from Old Norse (either the Danish varieties to the East of the Pennines or the Norwegian varieties to the West) into the Northern dialects of English and have found their way into the standard language. Significant parts of the pronoun system have come from Old Norse (they/their/them, she – the jury is still out on whether or not she derives from Old Norse sources, but the arguments are stacked in favor of this being the case) as well as prepositions/conjunctions like till and common verbs like get. In addition, common, though not uncontested, opinion has it that the third person singular -s inflection in the present tense of the verb has also spread from the Danelaw area. The principal question concerns how such features diffused from above the line of the Wash into southern forms of English. Wales (2006: 85–90) sets up a variant of wave theory that suggests diffusion through trading from market town to market town. The nexus for the spread of Northern forms is postulated as lying in the Humberside region between York and Lincoln. She also takes into consideration Keene’s (2000) analysis of so-called distance values in the exchange of goods and services from 1100 to 1700. Keene actually deals with a number of other significant economic factors involving the dependence on London of other towns and regions in England (e.g. poll-tax payers, debtors to creditors in London), the bynames of people living in London and the provenance of butchers’ apprentices, all of these figures, with the exception of the butchers’ apprentices, applying to the 14th century. If we compare the byname evidence for London, Norwich, and Winchester, it becomes clear that London exerted a vastly greater pull on migrants to the capital than any other town, and although migration from all areas of the compass occurred, the statistics show a preponderance of migrants from the East and Central Midland areas of England. No one, however, at least to my knowledge, has considered the catastrophic effects of the Black Death from 1348 to 1349 on internal migration. This is a serious lacuna in efforts to show how Northern features might have diffused to London. As Wales suggests, trade was undoubtedly important, but trading was carried out along waterways and, apart from coastal shipping to London (e.g. of coal from Newcastle since the 12th century), there are virtually no navigable waterways running North to South in the country apart from a stretch of the River Trent. Heavy goods, particularly if they were perishable, could hardly have been transported by road to London. But men and women could walk there; they could, in other words, transport themselves. The plague pandemic that swept through Europe from 1347 to 1350 spread from the south and southwest of England in 1348, wiping out an estimated 50% of the overall population. Where England was a thriving feudal society of roughly 4,000,000 in 1347, its population had been halved just two years later and the feudal system was in disarray. Survivors of families that had been bound for generations to a demesne found themselves without work, without food and with no other prospects of survival but to leave and look for a livelihood elsewhere. In the period after the Black Death, agricultural laborers must have found themselves in the enviable position of being able to sell their labor to the highest bidder. As always, London acted as a magnet pulling people towards it from humanly walkable distances, e.g. from the southernmost areas of Northern English influence where the linguistic features that later “diffused” had already been present for centuries.
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What the migrants could not have been aware of was that, at every fresh outbreak of the plague within England for the next 300 years, London was always hit most severely with a death rate of over 50%. It was constantly in need of demographic replenishment in the form of migrants and a large percentage of these came from the old Danelaw area. Without doubt they used their imported forms of speech in London, thus contributing directly to the diffusion of those selfsame elements. Many of those who were drawn to London became clerks in the royal chancery in Westminster. The very first document in English in the reign of Henry V contains variation between h- and th-forms of the third person plural pronoun, as the following extract demonstrates: By the Kyng Trusty and welbeloued. ffor asmuche as in cer tain matiers þat gretely touchen and concernen þe good / weele / and worship of vs our Landes lordships and subgittes We haue willed our Comissaries berers herof to comen with you: We woll / desire / and pray you þerfore hertely / þat in suche þinges as þat þei or eny of þeim woll shewe declare / and sey vnto you on our behalf: ye woll yeue vnto hem / and to eche of hem full feith and credence: And we pray you þat ye leue not þis as ye woll þe good weele / and worship abouesaid: Yeuen vndre our priue seel at westminstre þe .xx. day of Iuyll […] To our trusty and welbeloued þe thrifty men notable persones and Comin alte of our Citee of A. or of the Tovne of .B. and to eueriche of þeim. To þe Right Dere in god / and Dere in god eueriche of þees styles may serue for Abbottes / Prioures / Denes Archediacones. And for nede for thrifty Persons (Anonymous 1993)
The fact that London was a melting pot of migrants from all over the country is wellknown (cf. Klemola 1996; J. Milroy 1992), particularly for the 16th century, and the general explanation for the success of the innovations from the Northern varieties of English, particularly with respect to the pronouns they and she, has been functional, i.e. that they avoided possible ambiguities arising from the h-forms (Samuels 1989 [1963]). On the other hand, if Chancery English shows variation between both h- and th-forms, we should take the late 14th century migration from the North, Central and East Midlands more seriously than has hitherto been the case. Above all we need to access any kind of demographic data that would give us information on the provenance of the migrants. It is at least a strong possibility that migrants from the old Danelaw were the majority group in replenishing the 60% losses in the London population in the wake of the Black Death and that they continued to do so throughout the 15th century. At all events, my claim that language contact situations are the prime source of the innovation and diffusion of forms is consonant with the historical study of demographic patterns of internal migration and is an attempt to escape from the mythical constructions of a dominant language ideology favoring Standard English which spawn such sub-myths as the North/South divide. The full importance of Northern English now and in the past has not yet been completely revealed, although Wales’s alternative history of Northern English is a good start.
5 Summary I began this chapter by suggesting that historical linguists studying the English language need to avoid the pitfalls of taking a funnel view of the history of English. This can only be done by making oneself aware of the fact that human beings communicate with
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human language, but that it is a small step to the metaphorical extension of perceived similarities in the constructions used as a common language. Once this step is taken – and it is after all a perfectly natural step to take – it is hedged around with difficulties in that we enter a discursive world of myths about that language which we cannot easily escape in that they form part of a dominant archive in Foucault’s sense of the word. It should be our job, as historical linguists of English, to become aware of the archive – which is in fact historically determined – and to find ways not only of challenging it but also of trying to enter the mythically constructed archives of earlier stages of English. The example that I chose to focus on in this chapter was Katie Wales’s alternative history of Northern English, and with that history in mind, I focused on two periods in the history of both Standard English and Northern English which deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. Both are stories of migration and language contact, but of different kinds and in different circumstances. Other such stories of migration and language contact are offered for New Zealand English by Gordon et al. (2004), for South African Indian English by Raj Mesthrie (1992), for Tristan da Cunha English and for St. Helena English by Daniel Schreier (2003, 2008). Some of the myths that have gone into the construction of the supposed “inferiority” of Northern English are also evident in Crowley’s story of languages in Ireland, offered in the form of a set of source texts in English and Irish (Crowley 2000) and then as a critical commentary of some of those texts during the “colonial period” (Crowley 2005). We have the conscious Them vs Us divide in which the other side, i.e. the non-English, Irish side is constructed as barbaric, uncivilised, dangerous. This is correlated time and again with the position that the Irish are pastoralists (cf. Higden’s comments on Northerners in Section 3) positioning the Irish as the cultural and historical Them to the English Us. We also have the first constructions of a colonial discourse which was to dominate English politics from the 16th to the 20th century. Highlighting the language myths that have, for better or for worse, discursively constructed our view of the history of English is one way to make us conscious of the dominant discourse archive in which we still work. Trying to move beyond and outside that archive will force us to think differently, to consider alternative approaches to the history of language, and in our own particular area to the history of “English” – whatever we take “English” to mean.
6 References Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anonymous. 1993. An anthology of Chancery English. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AnoChan.html (last accessed 13 July 2011). Babington, Churchill. 1865. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, Book 2, ch. lix. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green. Bailey, Charles J. and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. In: Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles, 21–53. Tu¨bingen: Narr. Baugh, Albert. 1951. A history of the English language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Baugh, Albert and Thomas Cable. 1978. A history of the English language. 2nd edn. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Bex, Tony and Richard J Watts (eds.). 1999. Standard English: The widening debate. London: Routledge. Bjorkmann, E. 1969. Scandinavian loan words in Middle English. New York: Haskell Home. Blake, Norman (ed.). 1992. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloomfield, Morton W. and Leonard Newmark. 1963. A linguistic introduction to the history of English. New York: Knopf. Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. 2002. Race and the rise of Standard American. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bradley, Henry. 1904. The making of English. New York: Macmillan. Brook, G. L. 1958. A history of the English language. London: Deutsch. Burchfield, R. 1985. The English language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carew, Richard. 1605. A survey of Cornwall, and The excellency of the English tongue. London. Cravens, Thomas D. (ed.). 2006. Variation and reconstruction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Crowley, Tony. 2000. The politics of language in Ireland: A sourcebook. London: Routledge. Crowley, Tony. 2003 [1989]. Standard English and the politics of language. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crowley, Tony. 2005. Wars of words: The politics of language in Ireland 1537–2004. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crystal, David. 2002. Broadcasting the nonstandard message. In: Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Alternative histories of English, 233–244. London: Routledge. Dawson, Hope C. 2003. Defining the outcome of language contact: Old English and Old Norse. OSUWPL 57: 40–57. Eco, Umberto. 1993. In search of the perfect language. Translated by James Fentress. Oxford: Blackwell. Emerson, Oliver Farrar. 1894. The history of the English language. New York: Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1972 [1969]. The archaeology of knowledge. Translated by. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Gordon, Elizabeth, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, and Peter Trudgill. 2004. New Zealand English: Its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – a creole? In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries, 329–344. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1991. Studies in varieties of English 1984–1988. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Grillo, Ralph. 1989. Dominant languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joseph, John E. 1987. Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. London: Frances Pinter. Kastovsky, Dieter and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.). 1986. Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Keene, Derek. 2000. Metropolitan values: Migration, mobility and cultural norms, London 1100– 1700. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts, 93–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klemola, Juhani. 1996. Nonstandard periphrastic “do”: A study in variation and change. Unpublished PhD. Thesis. University of Essex. Laing, M (ed.). 1989. Middle English dialectology. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Lehmann, Winfred and Yakov Malkiel (eds.). 1968. Directions for historical Linguistics: A symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press. Meisel, Ju¨rgen M (ed.). 1977. Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles. Tu¨bingen: Narr.
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Mesthrie, Rajend. 1992. English in language shift: The history, structure and sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mie`ge, Guy. 1688. The English grammar. London. Millar, Robert McColl. 2000. System collapse, system rebirth: The demonstrative pronouns of English 900–1350 and the birth of the definite article. Bern: Peter Lang. Milroy, James. 1992. Middle English dialectology. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II, 156–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 1999. The consequences of standardisation in descriptive linguistics. In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Standard English: The widening debate, 16–39. London: Routledge. Milroy, James. 2000. Historical description and the ideology of the standard language. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts, 11–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(4): 530–555. Milroy, James. 2002. The legitimate language: Giving a history to English. In: Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Alternative histories of English, 7–25. London: Routledge. Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy. 1991. Authority in language: Investigating Standard English. 3rd edn. London & New York: Routledge. Milroy, James. 2006. Language change and the speaker: On the discourse of Historical Linguistics. In: Thomas D. Cravens (ed.), Variation and reconstruction, 145–164. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Poussa, Patricia. 1982. The evolution of Early Standard English: The creolization hypothesis. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14: 69–85. Samuels, Michael L. 1989 [1963]. Some applications of Middle English dialectology. In: M. Laing (ed.), Middle English dialectology, 64–80. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Schreier, Daniel. 2003. Isolation and language change: Contemporary and sociohistorical evidence from Tristan da Cunha English. Houndmills/Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schreier, Daniel. 2008. St Helenian English: Origins, evolution and variation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Siegel, Jeff. 1985. Koı¨ne´s and koı¨neization. Language in Society 14(3): 357–378. Trudgill, Peter. 1999. Standard English: What it isn’t. In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds.), Standard English: The widening debate, 117–128. London: Routledge. Trudgill, Peter and Richard J. Watts. 2002. Introduction: In the year 2525. In: Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Alternative histories of English, 1–3. London: Routledge. Wales, Katie. 2006. Northern English: A social and cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, Richard J. 2000. Mythical strands in the ideology of prescriptivism. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts, 29–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, Richard J. 2011. Language myths and the history of English. New York: Oxford University Press. Watts, Richard J. and Peter Trudgill (eds.). 2002. Alternative histories of English. London: Routledge. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Winfred Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical Linguistics: A symposium, 95–195. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wright, Laura (ed.). 2000. The development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richard J. Watts, Tegna (Switzerland)
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81. Interdisciplinarity and Historiography: Spoken and written English – orality and literacy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Orality and literacy – some general remarks Distinguishing spoken and written language Historical survey Summary References
Abstract Speaking and writing are alternative linguistic activities which differ in various ways. Although the difference has been seen for a long time, it is only relatively recent that linguists have turned their methodological attention to it. This attention has been much encouraged by studies in orality and literacy as different cultural states as well as simultaneously coexisting social practices. For historical linguistics the awareness of the difference between spoken and written language is even more recent and has resulted in acknowledging that historical linguistic data are invariably written. Moreover, efforts have been taken to assess the “writtenness” of the data and thus to find access to what may be inferred to be actual spoken language. The chapter discusses the consequences of this “bad data problem” from different angles. Section 1 will briefly outline the cultural distinction orality vs. literacy as it translates into the (long) transition from an oral to a literate culture. Section 2 shall sketch the nature of the bad data problem, look into the historicizing of the oral-literate continuum, and discuss an approach that accounts for the development of the vernacular in(to) writing. The concluding Section 3 shall finally give a summary overview of the transition of England from a prevalently oral culture in Anglo-Saxon times to a literate culture in the Early Modern English period, and of the shifting correlations of speaking and writing English.
1 Orality and literacy – some general remarks With the publication of Walter J. Ong’s (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, a larger public became aware of a cultural dichotomy based on whether or not a culture disposes of a writing system. This was, however, only the first peak of preceding research in various disciplines such as classical studies, medieval literary studies, (medieval) history, anthropology, (developmental) psychology, and also linguistics, which all had contributed to the awareness of two sets of differences: those between an oral and a literate culture on the one hand, and spoken and written language on the other. While the first is a heuristic construct which has since also been heavily criticized for its Eurocentricity, the latter has generated a new linguistic subdiscipline. To be sure, the cultural dichotomy oral vs. literate is a heuristic construct which only slowly spread in the arts and social sciences, skeptically put aside by some and fervently rejected by others, simply because it seems very difficult to abstract from our so deeply ingrained literacy. Historians have perhaps been the most reluctant to conceptualize, for instance, the period which we call the Middle Ages in terms of a long cultural transition Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1274–1288
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from orality to literacy (cf. Clanchy 1993: 7–11). Moreover, within this long transition, the role of the voice as mediator has long been underestimated, and so has the role of memorizing. Hence it seems appropriate to conceive at least of the Early and High Middle Ages as a period of vocality (Schaefer 1992: 5–43). Some of that vocality reaches well into the modern period: thus learning to read (and write) for a long time still went along with learning basic texts by rote, and early grammars were cast in the mode of a dialogue (for which reason the Corpus of English Dialogues 1570–1760 [Kyto¨ and Culpeper 2006] also comprises “didactic works”). The historians’ reluctance to distinguish medieval literacy from our modern one may have to do with a fact in which they have been united with language historians for a long time: both disciplines have to rely on written sources. In historical linguistics things have clearly changed over the last twenty years or so: having become aware of the writtenness of their sources, it has also become a rhetorical routine with language historians to regret this data flaw. As a consequence, historical linguists have endeavored to dismantle their (written) data of that writtenness. Yet one should take into account that writtenness is not merely a material condition. Both aspects will be in the center of the following chapter.
2 Distinguishing spoken and written language As a consequence of acknowledging the writtenness of historical linguistic evidence, more recent research has focused much on making up for this flaw, as the locus of most linguistic changes is obviously spoken language. I will subsequently argue that, although these efforts are unquestionably legitimate, they may have unduly bracketed the interest in the ways in which written language itself has developed. In that I follow the claim recently phrased by Margaret Laing and Roger Lass that written language “should be studied in its own right, not just as a representation of spoken language” and that it “should be regarded as an autonomous linguistic system” (Laing and Lass 2007: Introduction, I.1.5). Although Laing and Lass make this postulate with specific regard to spelling, it may well be extended to the “linguistic system” as a whole.
2.1 Solving the bad data problem The “bad data problem” which Labov first phrased in 1972 has become a commonplace in historical linguistics, namely that “historical linguistics can […] be thought of as the art of making the best use of bad data” (Labov 1994: 11). What makes historical evidence bad data is, for one thing, the survival “by chance, not by design”, and secondly the surmise that written evidence may be “riddled with the effects of hypercorrection, dialect mixture, and scribal error” (Labov 1994: 11). Indeed there seems to be no way of escaping this problem if it is our aim to analyze authentic data, and “authentic” here must mean language not tampered with by writing. In reverse, this implies the concession that writing affects language in one way or another, and certainly in ways that go much beyond Labov’s enumeration. For a long time linguists have generally been oblivious to the spoken-written distinction. This is not only true for historical linguistics: in spite of the claimed primacy of spoken language, until the late 1970s there had been little interest in identifying what makes written language different from spoken language (Schaefer 2008: 65–69; Lange
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2008). What is more, the ahistorical Chomskian linguistic model has implicitly made written grammatical language its sole object of analysis (cf. Givo´n 1979b: 103). In historical linguistics the fact that we only have written evidence at our disposal has been tacitly accepted or even been made a defining criterion. Thus, in his Old English grammar Mosse´ states that “le viel-anglais est la langue e´crite en Grande-Bretagne entre 700 et 1150” [“Old English is the language written in Great Britain between 700 and 1150”] (Mosse´ 1950: 19; emphasis added). Yet in a note Mosse´ already concedes, for instance, that “certains indices permettent de penser que de`s 1050 la langue parle´e e´tait de´ja` fort e´volue´e par rapport a` la langue e´crite” [“certain circumstantial evidence allows us to infer that since 1050 the spoken language had already very much developed [i.e. changed] in comparison to the written language”] (Mosse´ 1950: 20, n. II). At least for Old and Middle English the bad data problem proves irremovable, perhaps with the exception of phonology where it has been supposed, for instance, that the early (pre-West-Saxon) scribes’ spelling of the vernacular “in the absence of the pressure of a standard would be roughly phonetic ‘transcriptions’ of speech patterns” (Toon 1992: 429; by “vernacular” I here and subsequently mean the Volkssprache as opposed to Latin). James Milroy (1992: 156) has made similar inferences with regard to the dialectal variation in Middle English. More recently, efforts have been taken on a larger scale to come somewhat closer to spoken language particularly in the early Modern English period by designing, for instance, a corpus of “speech-related texts” (e.g. Culpeper and Kyto¨ 2000; Kyto¨ and Walker 2003) with the Corpus of English Dialogues 1570–1760 (Kyto¨ and Culpeper 2006). Moreover, Douglas Biber and his collaborators with their ARCHER corpus have provided a data compilation which is “designed to investigate the diachronic relations among oral and literate registers of English between 1650 and the present” (1994: 1) (cf. Kyto¨, Chapter 96). Among other things, the work with these corpora suggests that over time writers have become more and more versatile in mirroring spoken language in their texts (e.g. Biber and Finegan 1997). However, it stands to reason that if those writers learn to strip their language of the overload which is conditioned by the medium, we need to ask how that overload got into this form of language to begin with. “Standardization” may be the ready answer; however, this veils more than it reveals unless we conceive of standardization, in its turn, in terms of a potential epiphenomenon of literacy as “social practice” and of writing as “cultural technique” (Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003: 460). Standardization is a historical process in itself, yet one that is usually considered as “change from above” (cf. Lange, Volume 1, Chapter 62). More generally: historical linguists seek to “trace […] features either to the oral level of language as ‘changes from below’, or to the literate end of the scale, as ‘changes from above’ ”, as Matti Rissanen (1999a: 188) has put it. On this general level it may be acceptable to think of changes within written language as ‘changes from above’. There must, however, be an intermediate sphere in which certain linguistic phenomena become the norm (cf. Koch 1988) and join the “language standard” (Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003: 456) or the “protostandard” (Nevalainen 2003: 195). Established by way of “subconscious supralocalization” (Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 288), and thus generated from below, such phenomena may subsequently feed the incipient standard. Nevertheless: as will be discussed in Section 2.2, we need to be aware that as little as today’s written language is simply spoken language in the garb of letters, as much speakers of English had to develop into writers of English.
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2.2 Spoken and written as historic parameters It is a commonplace that, ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically, speaking precedes writing. Moreover, once literacy has been established in a culture the two modes coexist and interact. In the present section I will summarize the scholarly historization of the spoken-written distinction and draw the attention to the heuristic profits of this historization.
2.2.1 Early linguistic assessments It was in the wake of the growing awareness of the spoken-written dichotomy that some scholars in the late 1970s took literacy into account as a factor of linguistic evolution. Thus Paul Kay in 1977 hypothesized that “the direction of linguistic evolution is from a nonautonomous to an autonomous system of communication” (Kay 1977: 24). He has connected this to the “evolutionary process of social differentiation” and has remarked that “it would be surprising indeed if writing were not to affect the direction of language change as well” (Kay 1977: 29). According to Kay the “autonomous speech style” has to develop in a society with increasing labor division and hence an “increasingly complex and diversified speech community whose members collectively control a body of knowledge beyond that which any one speaker can control” (Kay 1977: 30). His evidence mainly comes from onomasiological considerations (such as the field of color terms), but he implicitly also hints at syntactic developments. Talmy Givo´n, in his turn, makes syntax the core of linguistic evolution as he conceives of it as continuous “syntacticization” (Givo´n 1979a: 208). This synchronically translates into the contrast between the correlates pragmatic mode/informal discourse and syntactic mode/formal discourse (Givo´n 1979a: 229f.) and diachronically into the development from informal to formal, and therefore from pragmatic to syntactic. He sums up: “the extreme instance of the formal-planned pole is educated, book-written language” (Givo´n 1979a: 230). Similarly, Kay concludes: “The direction of linguistic evolution is toward the precise and explicit speech of the analytic philosopher, the scientist, and the bureaucrat” (Kay 1977: 30). In evolutionary terms, Pawley and Syder (1983: 551) have subsequently conceived of what they call the “vernacular (or conversational) idiom” as the “ancient system” and “literary (or formal written) style” as “the new” which both exist simultaneously. In the last 20 years or so, this literary, formal written style has been identified as indeed heavily veiling actual historical spoken language. And even where this writtenness itself has been of interest for linguists, more precisely for those who have looked into standardization, this mainly serves the purpose to overcome the medium-induced flaw. But how has this flaw been brought about? The historical answer is superficially simple: when languages enter the written medium, they inevitably, as it seems, undergo a process of Ausbau (Kloss 1978) or elaboration. Again, the latter is a term introduced by Einar Haugen within his model of standardization, where he states that standardization aims at the “elaboration in function” of the language variety that has been selected by the linguistic community (Haugen 1966: 633). But as we will see below, Ausbau or elaboration is the consequence of the medium while for standardization writing and literacy are the prerequisites. Historically we therefore may want to regard written language as being a dignified object of research after all.
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2.2.2 Medium-oriented historical heuristics In his 1986 article “Writing is a technology that restructures thought”, Walter J. Ong made the following statement: “One of the most generalizable effects of writing is separation”, and he continues: “Separation is also one of the most telling effects of writing […]” (Ong 1986: 36). This effect is generated by the possibility to communicate in writing over space and time. In terms of linguistic organization, this results in what Wallace Chafe has called “integrated language” and a stance of “detachment” on the written side and “fragmented language” on the spoken side as a result of speakers’ “involvement” (Chafe 1982; Chafe and Danielewicz 1987). These distinctions roughly correspond to Biber’s textual dimensions “1: Involved vs. Informational Production”, “3: Situation-dependent versus Elaborated Reference” and “5: Non-impersonal vs. Impersonal Style” (Biber and Finegan 1997: 259–260). These distinctions are not dichotomies but rather reflect continua. Projected onto linguistic history we may observe, for instance, that in Old English left dislocation (a “topic construction”, Givo´n 1979b: 84; cf. Los and van Kemenade, Chapter 94) is not unusual and still is not in present-day colloquial English. This suggests identifying the Old English construction as more involved, more oral, and thus less literate. From that we may conclude that if a language enters the written medium, this does not mean that it is immediately fit for the demands of distance. Therefore, in order better to grasp the historical development in a medium-oriented way, we need to have a model at hand which helps us to conceptualize the way in which linguistic means are developed to come up to these demands. Such a model has first been provided by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher in 1985 and has since been further made fruitful for historical considerations (see also Koch and Oesterreicher 1994). Koch and Oesterreicher have suggested speaking of the “language of distance” (Sprache der Distanz) on the one end of the medial continuum and of “language of immediacy” (Sprache der Na¨he) on the other (Koch and Oesterreicher 1985; 1994: 587–588). In that, they are very much in line with Biber, Chafe, and others. With regard to the spoken-written distinction, they underline this to be a dichotomic choice of the medium: either graphic or phonic (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 587). In contrast, the mode of linguistic organization may be more distanced or more immediate, and thus conceptually (more) oral or conceptually (more) literate. Both diachronically and synchronically the medium transfer from phonic to graphic has been called Verschriftung, “scripting”, while the conceptual transition has been called Verschriftlichung “textualization” (see Oesterreicher 1993 for the distinction; cf. also Koch and Oesterreicher 1994). Koch and Oesterreicher define Verschriftlichung as “das Eindringen von bisher auf den Na¨hebereich beschra¨nkten Sprachformen in den Distanzbereich” [“the entering of linguistic forms which have been restricted to the realm of immediacy into the realm of distance”] (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 567). More generally speaking, Verschriftlichung may also refer to the “ ‘Literalisierung’ von Gesellschaften” [“ ‘literalization’ of societies”] (Oesterreicher 1993: 280), that is, to a society’s simultaneously increasing production and use of written material. There is, of course, a strong interrelation between cultural and linguistic textualization as the latter is the prerequisite for the first, as much as the first demands the latter. In addition, the driving force for cultural textualization should very much be sought in the growing complexity of daily administrative affairs in the broadest sense, as Michael T. Clanchy (1993) has shown for medieval England.
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As a historical process, linguistic textualization, in its turn, has two sides which may be conceptualized in terms of intensive and extensive elaboration. As Koch and Oesterreicher observe, in the course of extensive elaboration a linguistic variety has successively to take over “ein Maximum an kommunikativen Funktionen und Diskurstraditionen im Distanzbereich” [“a maximum of communicative functions and discourse traditions in the area of distance”] (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 589; cf. Haugen’s [1966: 933] “elaboration of function” as a component in the development “from vernacular to standard”). On the other hand, in the course of intensive elaboration a specific linguistic variety has to develop and provide linguistic means of expression so that it may “den universalen Anforderungen konzeptioneller Schriftlichkeit genu¨gen” [“meet the universal demands of conceptual literacy”] (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 589). On a general level, these “universal demands” have been summarized by Koch and Oesterreicher as the possibility to communicate over long stretches of time and space on account of linguistic techniques which allow utterances to be released from the “Einmaligkeit der Sprechsituation” [“uniqueness of the situation of speaking”] (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 589). In this sense the distancing effect of writing that Ong has identified makes communication over time and space possible but at the same time demands that the form of communication be linguistically adapted to this separation. In recent years, as historical linguists have become aware of styles and/or genres as the specific locus for linguistic change (cf. Claridge, Volume 1, Chapter 16), research in the intensive elaboration of English has steadily increased, albeit under a different name. Once more it seems that here a notion adopted by Koch and Oesterreicher from Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (1983) may be even more helpful, as it allows us, for instance, to include the contact between written English and the other medieval literate languages on the island. I am referring here to the concept of discourse traditions, a term which is to cover “Textsorten, Gattungen, Stilrichtungen, Gespra¨chsformen” [“text types, genres, styles, forms of conversation”] (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994: 587; on discourse traditions see Koch 1997) and which is particularly helpful because discourse traditions are not necessarily tied to one language. For the medieval history of English the so-called curial style (Burnley 1986, 2001) is a case in point: this discourse tradition has traveled from Latin to French and eventually to English. More recent publications such as Matti Rissanen’s (1999b) on Late Middle English legal language and on the language of statutes (Rissanen 2000), and Irma Taavitsainen’s (2001) on the Late Middle English and Early Modern English scientific register show how profitably research focussing on specific discourse traditions may contribute to our better understanding of extensive as well as intensive elaboration of English (cf. also Lange 2008). Both are simultaneously immense linguistic and cultural achievements. A summary historical outline of these achievements from Old English to the Early Modern English period will therefore be given in Section 3.
3 Historical survey The aim of the present section is to highlight aspects which should contribute to our understanding of the history of English in terms of the slow vernacular transition from orality to literacy and the varying coexistence of spoken and written English. As the format of my contribution demands, I will only discuss exemplary points of
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this transition. Moreover, the nature of our evidence makes it necessary to focus more on literacy than on orality, and therefore also on written language. Finally, this overview cannot solely be restricted to English because in particular medieval literacy in England is inconceivable without Latin and (insular) French.
3.1 The Old English period Handbooks of the history of English provide two dates for the beginning of the linguistic period of Old English. One is 449 CE, the year in which, according to Bede, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling Britain and hence brought Germanic varieties to this Celtic-speaking area. The second is 700 CE, the approximate date for the beginning of written evidence for English. If we disregard the Kentish Laws for the time being, it is, in a way, ironic that this written evidence has come down to us in runic form on the Ruthwell Cross (c.700) and the Franks Casket (first half of the 8th century). This is ironic because, on the one hand, the runes reach back to the pre-Christian era and even to the continental past of the Anglo-Saxons, while, on the other hand, the Ruthwell Cross is an epitome of Christianity and the Franks Casket clearly shows the intertwining of Germanic and Roman traditions (see the respective entries in Lapidge 1999: 194–195 and 403–404). Whereas it remains a matter of speculation whether runes were indeed used, on perishable wood, for more pragmatic purposes in pre-Christian England (cf. Page 1999: 101–102), we should nevertheless note that the English verb write itself refers us back into the runic past, as it originally meant ‘carving’ or ‘cutting’ (cf. OED s.v. write), a procedure which was technically conditioned by the material on which one put the signs. While this etymology links up the history of writing in English with the preChristian Germanic past, continental vernaculars draw their respective terminology from Latin scribere (as German schreiben; cf., however, the somewhat odd etymology of English shrive; OED s.v. shrive). The use of the Roman script in its insular form, in its turn, was brought to England by Irish missionaries (Lapidge 1999: 409–410) and thus goes hand in hand with Christianization. The resulting literacy, and this invariably means Latin literacy, was primarily a religious matter and remained so for a long time. However, Bede gives us an interesting account for what may be regarded as the first Roman scripting of the vernacular: “among other benefits [… King Æthelberht] established with the advice of his counsellors a code of laws after the Roman manner” (transl. Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 151). Unfortunately, these Kentish Laws, which may have been scripted around 603 (Lapidge 1999: 13), have only been preserved in the Textus Roffensis, a codex put together in the first quarter of the 12th century (Richards 1988: 44), so that we cannot really assess the achievement of these first scribes who allegedly were only transliterating. Although Bede’s account of this early scripting of the vernacular is outstanding, it should not surprise us that the (very early) medieval scripting of the European vernaculars started with the Germanic languages. As Herbert Grundmann stated some time ago, in the Romance cultures the litterati must have conceived of their vernacular as a “degenerierte Abart der unverdorbenen Schriftsprache [Latein]” [“a degenerated variation of the uncorrupted written language [Latin]”], whereas no such relation existed for a Germanic vernacular, in particular not for English (Grundmann 1958: 35). In fact, up to the end of the 9th century English evidence remains sparse. Around 890, however, vernacular annalistics is launched with the so-called Anglo-Saxon
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Chronicle. Moreover, with the translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica under the auspices of Alfred the Great we witness another great linguistic achievement: the textualization of the vernacular with the help and on the model of the fully-fledged literate, textualized language Latin. As Blake (1995: 9) has regretfully observed: with regard to the general relation between “speech and writing”, the historical role of translation “has not been given sufficient attention in previous discussions”. Indeed, when English (re-)emerges massively in the 14th and 15th centuries, translations also played a great role (cf. Burnley 1989), and so they did in the 16th and 17th centuries. What Blake states mainly with regard to (lexical) loans is certainly also true on a more general level, namely that translation “involves the impact of one written language on another” (Blake 1992: 11). Whether the decline of Latin literacy in the 9th century automatically gave rise to the increasing use of the vernacular and whether King Alfred really pursued a “strategy […] to encourage writing and reading in English as well as, or instead of Latin”, as Nicholas Orme (2006: 35) has recently claimed, may remain a matter of debate. But there are several indications that, compared to the continent, the versatility in writing the vernacular in the 10th and 11th centuries was extraordinary. A prime example is Ælfric, whose Catholic Homilies with their different stages of redaction today fill two massive printed volumes. In contrast, the extent to which the vernacular was used in administration (e.g. in writs and charters) may have been overestimated in the literature as many of the c.2,000 Anglo-Saxon documents that have come down to us are likely to be post-Conquest forgeries (Clanchy 1993: 28). In fact, “forgeries” is a misleading term because those who produced such documents probably just abided by the new demands of growing textualization in that they “re-created the past in an acceptable literate form” (Clanchy 1993: 319). That written English undoubtedly gained a respectable status in its own right is also manifest in the development of the so-called ‘West-Saxon Standard’ (see Kornexl, Volume 1, Chapter 24), and from the fact that as of the second half of the 10th century texts in Latin were written in the Carolingean minuscule while English texts were written in the Insular minuscule (Gneuss 1992: 120). It would, of course, be moot to speculate how English vernacular literacy would have further developed if the Normans had not brought it to a halt. While the use of English in writing did not immediately cease after 1066, it petered out to such an extent that the indigenous vernacular became largely restricted to the oral realm (see Smith 1992: 49; Laing and Lass 2007: Introduction, I.1.3–4).
3.2 The Middle English period The so-called Peterborough Chronicle, the 12th century continuation of the AngloSaxon Chronicle, may be regarded as one of the first pieces of evidence for Middle English (Clark 1970: xxxvii–lxxiv; Laing and Lass 2007: Introduction, I.1.4). Especially in the so-called Final Continuation (completed around 1155) we can readily see the scribe’s or author’s efforts to script as well as to textualize his vernacular with the result that we are facing a variety of English much different from that of 11th century literary West-Saxon. Here we witness what Roy Liuzza (2000: 144) has captured in the observation that “the end of [scribal] training [in West-Saxon] is the beginning of ‘Middle English’ ”. As has been stated earlier, this scribal training may well have covered in particular the morphological state of Old English for some time. But not only has this
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graphic gloss-over ceased: as Cecily Clark (1970: lxviii) has remarked, in the Final Continuation (1132–1154), “[…] the use of Romance words is increasing, and words are adopted not only to express new concepts but also to replace native terms”. Within the 12th-century literary scenario, the Peterborough Chronicle is an exception as in this and the following century English in writing is rare and new English texts even rarer (Laing and Lass 2007: Introduction, I.1.3f). This scenario is illustrated by the history of the ‘Arthurian material’. At about 1135 Geoffrey of Monmouth finishes his Historia Regum Britanniae in Latin prose, around 1155 Wace reworks Geoffrey into his Roman de Brut in octosyllabic Norman French verse, and somewhere after 1200 Layamon puts together his Brut in traditional alliterating English long-lines (note that Chre´tien de Troyes’ Arthurian romans are dated from 1170 to 1190). Apart from this belated English rendering Layamon also allows us a glimpse at the growing ‘literalization’ of his time. In the prologue he proudly states that he took an English, a Latin and a French book, then seized his pen and “condensed the three books into one” (MS Cotton Caligula, Prologue ll. 16–27). This cultural textualization – or literalization – spread in 12th- and 13th-century Western Europe as a “wunderbare Schriftvermehrung und thematische Entgrenzung des Schreibbaren” [“miraculous multiplication of writing and the thematic unbounding of what is writable”] (von Moos 1997: 313). For England, some impressive early administrative evidence is the Domesday Book (in Latin), whose completion even dates to the year 1086. In the subsequent two centuries the language for – heavily increasing – administrative purposes remained Latin (cf. Clanchy 1993: 44–80). French, in its turn, was the language of written poetry (in the broadest sense) in the 12th century, so that from the sheer number of insular French manuscripts it has even been suggested that the thrust of the scripting and textualization of French (poetry) set out in England (Clanchy 1993: 215–217). In the 13th century, French was also slowly established as the language of law (Brand 2000: 66), while Latin generally remained the language of record well beyond the 14th century. When it comes to the later medieval relation between Latin, French, and English, handbooks are wont to adduce the 1362 Statute of Pleading in order to underline the re-strengthening of English in the 14th century. Although the immediate – and particularly the lasting – effects of this particular royal statute are not yet all clear (Ormrod 2003: 752), the document itself very well illustrates the mid 14th-century linguistic situation. It tries to regulate that the language spoken in court be English, but it does so in French (in heavy curial prose style), as at this time this was the appropriate language for this kind of text, and it commands that legal record keeping be in Latin, as this was the appropriate language for this purpose. However, there was yet another sphere where English was gaining ground in the second half of the 14th century: that of formal teaching. An often-cited piece of evidence is John Trevisa’s translation and updating of Higden’s Polychronicon where we are informed that formal schooling, and this still meant schooling in Latin, has changed from French as teaching language to English (see Kornexl 2003: 249–253). Another example is a translation exercise from the late 14th century in which the graphically dominant French text of the Ten Commandments is accompanied by the Latin and the English version (both above the French text), which indicates that the students were supposed to translate the French text into Latin and English (Kristol 2000: 42). Again it goes without saying that the English version shows heavy traces of lexical influence from
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both Latin and French. Since the late 13th century this formal schooling of the rising middle class took place in grammar schools (Smith 1992: 53), while for the aristocracy education was a matter of private tutoring (which lasted well into the 18th century, as the 19th century new notion of the ‘public school’ shows). That English poetry substantially (re-)entered the literary scenario in the later 13th and in the 14th centuries is well-known. Again we should heed to keep things in proportion. To take one representative example from the first half of the 14th century: MS Harley 2253, which has been compiled by one scribe, and in which, among other English pieces, the so-called “Harley Lyrics” and a version of the romance King Horn have come down to us, is trilingual, as are a number of other contemporaneous miscellanies (see Scahill 2003). In terms of proportion we have to be aware that, by a rough count, only about one third of the folios of MS Harley 2253 actually contain English material. Another witness for the trilingual situation is Chaucer’s prolific contemporary Gower who composed his works in Latin, French and English. I draw attention to these examples to emphasize once more that written English did not substitute French (or Latin) but joined the literate communicative space in England alongside and with the help of French and Latin (cf. also Baswell 2007). The beginning of the 15th century is generally regarded as the time of the ultimate break-through, that of the “triumph of English” (cf. Smith 1992: 51–53). Though the evaluation of Chancery English as the alleged basis for Modern Standard English will be discussed elsewhere (see Schaefer, Volume 1, Chapter 33), it should be noted here that we are only slowly beginning to understand the ways in which written (prose) English generally was being elaborated in the 15th century (but see now Weber 2010). In any event, there can be little doubt that this extensive as well as intensive elaboration of written English has been very much fathered by Latin and by (insular) French, of which the latter, in its turn, only had developed a dignified prose form by the end of the 12th century (Clanchy 1993: 220). In the present context this also raises the question when insular French ceased to be a first language for the upper echelons in England. This question has been settled by now in that scholars agree on the approximate date of 1230 (at the latest) for the shift to English for the majority of that layer of society which originally had French as its first language (cf., e.g. Smith 1992: 51). This does, however, not overwrite the fact that the realm of literacy as a social practice remained very much dominated by French and Latin. What is more: although lay literacy and the use of writing steadily increased during the period under consideration and also extended to new, or modified, discourse traditions such as ‘letter writing’ (cf. Bergs 2004; Nevalainen 2004) in English, large areas of everyday life must have functioned perfectly well without recourse to writing. And this state of affairs very much reached into the Modern period beyond the point when William Caxton in 1476 brought the first printing press to Westminster.
3.3 The Early Modern English period The degree to which our perception of historical stages of writing and written language is informed by our own literate techniques is perhaps best illustrated by the assessment of the introduction of printing. The illusive fixedness of printed language has made modern interpreters attribute to this technical innovation a momentum which hardly stands scrutiny. For one thing Caxton’s first prints come in the guise of manuscript letters, which Strohm (2006: 471) has recently characterized as “protective mimicry of the
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old by the new”, a phenomenon, which is not uncommon when a new medial technology is first established. Moreover, there is the illusion that movable letters automatically create stable spelling. This is a projective fallacy as it was the task of the first printers faithfully to transfer manuscript texts into printed texts. All in all there remain to date opposing views as to the 16th-century role of the printers in the regularizing process of spelling (see Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 282, 290). Another misconception of early printing is the degree to which texts published in print were accessible, as accessibility is not just a matter of proliferation: it still is very much a question of – rather restricted – education. Although there may be no doubt that basic literacy increased considerably after 1550 (see Charlton and Spufford 2004), we need to take into account the actual reach of this literacy. Apart from those very few who attended grammar school (and ‘grammar’ still meant Latin) and perhaps university, for the large majority of the population learning to read (and write) was of a very rudimentary nature. It first comprised “the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Creed” (Charlton and Spufford 2004: 16) which the pupils initially memorized and subsequently had to decipher in writing. Only after that had been achieved the pupils learned to write, as “reading and writing were two very distinct and separate skills, taught about two years apart” (Charlton and Spufford 2004: 16). The split of reading and writing as “separate skills” has a long tradition, which goes back to the early medieval monastery schools and beyond. Moreover, counter to what may be expected from the new Christian denomination with its sola scriptura doctrine, the “Reformation, which laid so much emphasis upon the written word, did not provide for everyone to read it” (Orme 2006: 335). And in that respect there is yet another perception which has been recently corrected, namely that, in contrast to previous views, it was much less Protestantism that fostered literacy in England and elsewhere in (Northern) Europe. As Charlton and Spufford (2004: 19) state, “commercial needs for education overrode all others, both before and after the Protestant Reformation”, an observation which also accounts for the yet increasing literacy in the following centuries. Last but not least, in the present context the endeavors of the orthoepists should be taken into consideration. We usually see them as the first who, after Orm around 1200, explicitly contemplate about so-called correct spelling. Yet this is only one side of the coin. The other comes to the fore, for instance, with Hart’s phonetic principles (Scragg 1974: 60), which should result in the exact correspondence of one letter to one sound. The orthoepists’ striving for regular spelling is indeed apparent, but we should also see that the pedagogical goal of this regularization was to make what was understood as correct reading – and that meant reading aloud – possible. In our days of silent reading (and the simultaneous acquisition of reading and writing) this may seem odd. However: keeping that motivation of the orthoepists in mind, we become once more aware that Pre-Modern and even Early Modern literacy is a far cry from what we conceive of it today: it was still very much informed by vocality.
4 Summary As has been argued here, most of what has come down to us in writing should be considered as influenced by the very medium that allows us to look into these historical linguistic data. However, if we compare the poetic evidence from the early 8th century to
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the prose evidence from the 12th, it is probably the latter that brings us closest to what may be considered to mirror the spoken language of the respective period. Albeit that the former must have been heavily informed by the pre-Christian oral culture, its form most certainly does not reflect conceptually ‘spoken’ language. Moreover, English was only firmly reestablished in writing in the 14th and 15th centuries. In that period English in writing obviously profited very much from the literate languages Latin and French (see Weber 2010). The influence of Latin continued well into the Modern period and hence made the disparity between prose writing in the then establishing standard and the actual spoken language even wider.
5 References Baswell, Christopher. 2007. Multilingualism on the page. In: Paul Strohm (ed.), Middle English, 38–50. Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press. Bergs, Alexander. 2004. Letters. A new approach to text typology. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 207–227. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1997. Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To Explain the Present. Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, 253–275. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique. Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan and Dwight Atkinson. 1994. ARCHER and its challenges: compiling and exploring a representative corpus of historical English registers. In: Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie, and Peter Schneider (eds.), Creating and Using English Language Corpora. Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora, Zu¨rich 1993, 1–13. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Blake, Norman F. 1992. Translation and the history of English. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 3–24. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Blake, Norman F. 1995. Speech and writing: an historical overview. Yearbook of English Studies 25: 6–21. Brand, Paul. 2000. The languages of the law in later medieval England. In: David A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 63–76. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Burnley, John David. 1986. Curial prose in England. Speculum 61: 593–614. Burnley, John David. 1989. Late medieval English translation: types and reflections. In: Roger Ellis, Jocelyn Price, Stephen Medcalf, and Peter Meredith (eds.), The Medieval Translator. The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. Papers Read at a Conference Held 20–23 August 1987 at the University of Wales Conference Center, Gregynog Hall, 37–53. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Burnley, John David. 2001. French and Frenches in fourteenth-century London. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.), Language Contact in the History of English, 17–34. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Chafe, Wallace L. 1982. Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In: Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, 35–53. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace L. and Jane Danielewicz. 1987. Properties of spoken and written language. In: Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels (eds.), Comprehending Oral and Written Language, 83–113. San Diego: Academic Press, Inc. Charlton, Kenneth and Margaret Spufford. 2004. Literacy, society and education. In: David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, 15–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Clanchy, Michael T. 1993. From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Cecily (ed.). 1970. The Peterborough Chronicle. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Colgrave, Bertram and Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors (eds. and transl.) 1969. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kyto¨. 2000. Data in historical pragmatics. Spoken interaction (re) cast as writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1: 175–199. Deumert, Ana and Wim Vandenbussche. 2003. Research directions in the study of language standardization. In: Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present, 455–469. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Givo´n, Talmy. 1979a. On Understanding Grammar. New York, NY: Academic Press. Givo´n, Talmy. 1979b. From discourse to syntax: grammar as a processing strategy. In: Talmy Givo´n (ed.), Discourse and Syntax, 81–112. New York, NY: Academic Press. Gneuss, Helmut. 1992. Bu¨cher und Leser in England im zehnten Jahrhundert. In: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.), Medialita¨t und mittelalterliche insulare Literatur, 104–130. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. Grundmann, Herbert. 1958. Litteratus – illiteratus. Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter. Archiv fu¨r Kulturgeschichte 40: 1–65. Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist 68: 922–935. Kay, Paul. 1977. Language evolution and speech style. In: Ben G. Blount and Mary Sanches (eds.), Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, 21–33. New York, NY: Academic Press. Kloss, Heinz. 1978. Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800. 2nd edn. Du¨sseldorf: Pa¨dagogischer Verlag Schwann. Koch, Peter. 1988. Norm und Sprache. In: Jo¨rn Albrecht (gen. ed.), Energeia und Ergon: Sprachliche Variation – Sprachgeschichte – Sprachtypologie. Vol. 2: Harald Thun (ed.), Das sprachliche Denken Eugenio Coserius in der Diskussion (1), 327–354. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. Koch, Peter. 1997. Diskurstraditionen: zu ihrem sprachtheoretischen Status und ihrer Dynamik. In: Barbara Frank, Thomas Haye, and Doris Tophinke (eds.), Gattungen mittelalterlicher Schriftlichkeit, 43–79. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache der Na¨he – Sprache der Distanz. Mu¨ndlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1994. Schriftlichkeit und Sprache. In: Hartmut Gu¨nther and Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Writing and Its Use, 587–604. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kornexl, Lucia. 2003. From Ælfric to John of Cornwall: Evidence for vernacular grammar teaching in pre- and post-conquest England. In: Lucia Kornexl and Ursula Lenker (eds.), Bookmarks from the Past. Studies in Early English Language and Literature in Honour of Helmut Gneuss, 229–259. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Kristol, Andres M. 2000. L’intellectuel ‘anglo-normand’ face a` la pluralite´ des langues: Le te´moignage implicite du MS Oxford, Magdalen Lat. 188. In: David A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 37–52. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Kyto¨, Merja and Terry Walker. 2003. The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: how “bad” can “bad” data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31: 221–248. Kyto¨, Merja and Jonathan Culpeper. 2006. A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. With the assistance of Terry Walker and Dawn Archer. Uppsala University and Lancaster University. http://www.engelska.uu.se/Research/English_Language/Research_Areas/Electronic_Resource_ Projects/A_Corpus_of_English_Dialogues/ (last accessed 7 February 2012). Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. I: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Laing, Margaret and Roger Lass. 2007. LAEME: A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html (last accessed 7 July 2011).
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Lange, Claudia. 2008. Grammatikalisierung und Diskurstraditionen: Text und Kontext. In: Ursula Schaefer (ed.), Der geteilte Gegenstand. Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philologie(n), 91–103. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Lapidge, Michael (ed.). 1999. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. Liuzza, Roy. 2000. Scribal habit: the evidence of the Old English Gospels. In: Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (ed.), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, 143–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Middle English dialectology. In: Norman F. Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 2: 1066–1476, 156–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ¨ ber pragmatische Mu¨ndlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. In: Barbara Frank, von Moos, Peter. 1997. U Thomas Haye, and Doris Tophinke (eds.), Gattungen mittelalterlicher Schriftlichkeit, 313–321. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. ˆ ge des origines au XIVe sie`cle. I: Viel-anglais. Mosse´, Fernand. 1950. Manuel de l’anglais du Moyen A Paris: Aubier. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2003. English. In: Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present, 127–156. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2004. Letter writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5: 181–191. Nevalainen, Terttu and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. 2006. Standardisation. In: Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language, 271–311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1993. Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung im Kontext medialer und konzeptioneller Schriftichkeit. In: Ursula Schaefer (ed.), Schriftlichkeit im fru¨hen Mittelalter, 267–292. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Ong, Walter Jackson, SJ. 1982. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Ong, Walter Jackson, SJ. 1986. Writing is a technology that restructures thought. In: Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word. Literacy in Transition. Wolfson College Lectures 1985, 23–50. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Orme, Nicholas. 2006. Medieval Schools: from Roman Britain to Renaissance England. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Ormrod, William Mark. 2003. The use of English: Language, law, and political culture in fourteenth-century England. Speculum 78: 750–787. Page, Raymond I. 1999. An Introduction to English Runes. 2nd edn. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Pawley, Andrew and Frances Hodgetts Syder. 1983. Natural selection in syntax: notes on adaptive variation and change in vernacular and literary grammar. Journal of Pragmatics 7: 551–579. Richards, Mary P. 1988. Texts and their Traditions in the Medieval Library of Rochester Cathedral Priory. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society. Rissanen, Matti. 1999a. Syntax. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 3: 1476–1776. 187–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rissanen, Matti. 1999b. Language of law and the development of Standard English. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers, and Pa¨ivi Pahta (eds.), Writing in Non-Standard English, 189–203. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rissanen, Matti. 2000. Standardisation and the language of early statutes. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800. Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, 117–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scahill, John. 2003. Trilingualism in Early Middle English miscellanies: Languages and literature. The Yearbook of English Studies 33: 18–32. Schaefer, Ursula. 1992. Vokalita¨t – Altenglische Dichtung zwischen Mu¨ndlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. Schaefer, Ursula. 2008. Mediengeschichte als Geschichte der europa¨ischen Sprachen, Literaturen und Kulturen. In: Ursula Schaefer (ed.), Der geteilte Gegenstand. Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philologie(n), 61–78. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1983. Traditionen des Sprechens: Elemente einer pragmatischen Sprachgeschichtsschreibung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Scragg, Donald G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, Jeremy J. 1992. The use of English. Language contact, dialect variation, and written standardisation during the Middle English Period. In: Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott (eds.), English in Its Social Contexts. Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, 47–68. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strohm, Paul. 2006. Writing and reading. In: Rosemary Horrox and William Mark Ormrod (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500, 454–472. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. Language history in the scientific register. In: Hans-Ju¨rgen Diller and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.), Toward a History of English as a History of Genres, 185–202. Heidelberg: Universita¨tsverlag Winter. Toon, Thomas E. 1992. Old English dialects. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1066, 409–451. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Beatrix. 2010. Sprachlicher Ausbau. Konzeptionelle Studien zur spa¨tmittelenglischen Schriftsprache. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.
Ursula Schaefer, Dresden (Germany)
XI. History of English Historical Linguistics 82. History of English Historical Linguistics: Overview 1. 2. 3. 4.
Origins and early developments The 20th century Current developments References
Abstract This brief paper gives an overview and summary of the discipline of English historical linguistics as a whole, based on the articles of this section. It sketches its beginnings of and early developments in the field and tries to identify some main currents and themes that can be found in contemporary studies. Moreover, a few additional comments regarding the status of the field in present-day university education and research will be made.
1 Origins and early developments The institutional academic field of English historical linguistics originated in the late 19th century in Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Wischer (Chapter 85) points out that the movement as a whole seems to have been a European one and that we witness parallel developments across several different countries. She identifies the universities of Breslau, Go¨ttingen, Kiel, Marburg, Mu¨nster, and Strasbourg as the early centers in the German-speaking part of Europe. An important aspect of the early history is the fact that the field grew out of the two neighboring disciplines of English philology (which mostly dealt with older stages of English literature and had a strong focus on the edition of manuscripts) and historical-comparative linguistics. Thus, the first scholars focusing on the history of the English language came with different backgrounds, and often pursued their other research interests (such as English literature or Indo-Germanic studies) well into their career as historical linguists of English. Petre´ (Chapter 86) goes back even further and traces the origins into the 17th century Dutch-speaking region, but again, quite obviously, the first scholars did not come from English historical linguistics: e.g., Franciscus Junius the Younger was professor of Hebrew at Leiden University. Moreover, in the early days, scholars did not exclusively focus on purely linguistic aspects, but rather concentrated on questions of reconstruction and the edition of manuscripts. As in the German-speaking area, the major boost in the field came in the late 19th century with the foundation of the chairs at Leiden and Groningen in the Netherlands. Other universities followed in the first half of the 20th century. This is also the time when Belgium reformed its educational system and established chairs of English linguistics in Ghent and Lie`ge. One of the most remarkable facts of this foundation phase and these early developments, however, seems to be that the scholars who worked in these environments are still admired, read, and quoted today. The list is long and can never be comprehensive, Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1289–1295
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but some names that probably should be mentioned here are Hendrik Poutsma, Willem van der Gaaf, Fredericus Theodorus Visser, and Karl Bu¨lbring in the Dutch-speaking region, and Lorenz Morsbach, Ferdinand Holthausen, Eugen Einenkel, Karl Brunner, and Eduard Sievers in the German-speaking region (not to mention the numerous scholars in the neogrammarian tradition who also investigated the early history of English). Similar developments can also be traced in Northern Europe (see Hiltunen, Chapter 87), though the roots do not reach as deep. The first foundations of English historical linguistics in the Northern countries lie in the late 19th century with chairs in Oslo and Copenhagen, the exception being Iceland with its first chair only in 1967 (but even here we should not forget that Grı´mur Jo´nsson Thorkelin was a strong factor in Beowulf scholarship with his 1815 edition). Again, scholars in the field come from different backgrounds, with work being carried out in linguistics and philology. It probably cannot be disputed that the research environment fostered two of the most influential scholars in the field, who lived and worked mostly in the first part of the 20th century: the Dane Otto Jespersen (best known for his monumental A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles [1909–49]) and the Finn Tauno F. Mustanoja (whose A Middle English Syntax [1960] is in many ways unsurpassed even today). That the discipline originated mostly in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas and the Northern countries of Europe should not distract from the fact that the other countries and areas around the world also witnessed important developments. Fanego (Chapter 89), for example, shows that while France has always been more focused on the literary, it also gave rise to the works of Fernand Mosse´, who is still regarded with great respect and whose work is still frequently cited (e.g. his important study of early English [Mosse´ 1945–49]). In Spain and Italy, important chairs in English historical linguistics were appointed after the Second World War in the second half of the 20th century. Both countries now have important research centers (such as Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Vigo, Bari, Bergamo, Naples), produce significant output, and are key international players in the field. In Eastern Europe, similar developments can be discerned. In Poland, for example, the first chairs in English studies were established early in the 20th century and we see a noteworthy increase in numbers after World War Two. Here, too, a number of important scholars developed. Among them are Jerzy Kuryłowicz, Alfred Reszkiewicz, and Margaret Schlauch, who was born in the US but decided to move to Poland for personal and political reasons in 1951. Schlauch’s student Jacek Fisiak established one of the most important centers for research in the history of English at the University of Poznan´. In the Czech Republic, Vile´m Mathesius was one of the first professors of English language and literature (at Charles University, Prague, in 1912). At Masaryk University in Brno (established 1919) Josef Vachek, whose work is still being read today, played a key role in the development of the discipline. Other countries in Eastern Europe seem to have followed suit (see Hegedu˝s, Chapter 88). Apparently, the history of English is now a subject that is taught – sometimes as a core element – in many universities in Eastern Europe, with the exception of some of the newer universities which rather cater for practical courses and teacher training. Research in Asia – Japan and South Korea especially – as Akimoto (Chapter 90) shows, can be regarded as fairly well established now. Most chairs are based on traditions that go back into the 1950s, and the Societies that in one way or another play an important role in education and research have impressive numbers of members.
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Interestingly, Asia sees the same “split” as the other regions just discussed: English historical linguistics as bordering on philology and literary studies. Let us end this tour with the homeland of the two major varieties of English: North America and Great Britain. Unsurprisingly, as Smith (Chapter 83) convincingly shows, interest in the roots of the language has a long history in Great Britain. For example, we find scholars as early as the 16th century (e.g. Sir John Cheke and Matthew Parker) as precursors of the modern academic discipline. Similarly, scholars in the 17th (Alexander Gil, John Wallis, John Wilkins) and 18th (Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Robert Lowth, Sir William Jones to name but a few) centuries also produced important and insightful works in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. These scholars were not trained in English historical linguistics per se, but rather came from a large variety of backgrounds: religion, diplomacy, nobility, literature, the law, and so on. The historical linguistic scholarship that originated in mainland Europe during the 19th century (most notably neogrammarian thought) was brought to England mostly by two scholars at the time: John Mitchell Kemble and Benjamin Thorpe. Thorpe seems to have been an independent scholar; Kemble was at least affiliated with the University of Cambridge, where he lectured on English literature. The development of the Oxford English Dictionary by Sir James Murray in the 19th century must be regarded as one of the most outstanding achievements in the history of the discipline and seems to have given rise to a multitude of scholars and projects, ranging from Alexander John Ellis’s (1869–89) On Early English Pronunciation, through Henry Sweet’s (1900–03) A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, to Joseph Wright’s (1898–1905) The English Dialect Dictionary, Henry Cecil Wyld’s (1921) A History of Modern Colloquial English, Eric Dobson’s (1957) English Pronunciation 1500–1700, and Alistair Campbell’s (1959) Old English Grammar, to name but a few. Note, however, that much of that scholarship had no institutional rigging. Chairs for English Language, let alone diachronic studies, were rare, and many scholars were either independent or had professorships in phonetics or philology (of English but also of the classical languages). Nevertheless, it seems clear that much of the foundation of the discipline was laid at that time in Great Britain. In North America, Cable (Chapter 84) shows there is a stronger focus on general (historical) linguistics, e.g. in the vein of William Dwight Whitney. But at the same time we also find important figures such as Oliver F. Emerson (Cornell) and Thomas R. Lounsbury (Yale) who came from a philological and literature oriented background, but nevertheless made some interesting contributions to the study of the history of English as a language. Albert Baugh’s (1935) A History of the English Language, written in the philological tradition, marked a heyday phase, and it is telling that this remains one of the most widely read textbooks in the history of English. Following the rise of Bloomfieldian structuralism, we see some decrease in interest in English historical linguistics in North America and it is only with Stockwell and Barritt’s work in the 1950s that this research area again gains momentum. In sum, we can say that the origin and early development of research in English historical linguistics seems to have run in parallel in many different regions and countries, despite the fact that we see some time gaps between the different regions. This, undoubtedly, has to do with different educational policies, the socio-economic situation of scholars, and, of course, the historical and philological background against which these studies developed. Another interesting point that seems to emerge here is the impression that some of the “tensions” that marked the emergence of the field have
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either subsisted into the present-day, or maybe are beginning to resurface. But this will be the topic of Section 3. First, we will briefly sketch the developments in the second half of the twentieth century.
2 The 20th century After about 1950 the individual histories of single geographic and cultural regions or countries begin to blur when it comes to the study of English historical linguistics (cf. Cable, Chapter 84). We see an ever growing tendency to collaborate across boundaries and to share ideas – and also, of course, a willingness to move from one context to another. Hence, in the following, we will move away from summarizing the individual histories, and rather take a quick look at the general picture. One of the main things we notice is that the growth and development of more or less ahistorical frameworks such as de Saussurean structuralism and Chomskian generativism has shifted the focus from individual languages and their particular histories to complex synchronic descriptions and the investigation of more “abstract” principles underlying language as such. Naturally, these approaches have been taken up in different regions in different degrees. But it is also simplifying matters too much to focus purely on the ahistorical aspects of these theories: while much of Chomskian generativism is indeed focused on synchrony, we also witness the development of some groundbreaking studies on language change and the history of English, such as King (1969) who developed a generative model of change, or the seminal book by Traugott (1972) investigating the history of English syntax in a generative framework. Other important, though sometimes controversial works in this framework have also come from Lightfoot (1979) on diachronic syntax and a group of Dutch scholars, who have begun very early to adopt the generative framework and can now be counted to the world leading authorities in that respect (see Petre´, Chapter 86; some names are Olga Fischer and Willem Koopman, Ans van Kemenade, Bettelou Los, Elly van Gelderen, to name but a few). The annual international Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference is being held for the fourteenth time in 2012. Because generativism was felt to have little to offer historical linguistics in North America, where it had a very strong hold (see Cable, Chapter 84), Europe was the place where we primarily saw the growth of modern English historical linguistics from the 1950s onward. This is characterized and driven by philological approaches, interdisciplinarity, and an interest in the general principles underlying language change. The Northern countries must be credited for developing large-scale corpora of historical Englishes, without which many studies would not have been possible; other regions, such as Spain, Italy, Belgium, Poland, the UK, and Germany, have developed (functional) accounts of syntactic, morphological, phonological, and lexical change and detailed descriptions of earlier languages stages. Similarly, we see the growth of new fields and new perspectives, including historical dialectology (embodied par excellence in the groundbreaking 1986 Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, put together by team of Scottish scholars around Angus McIntosh [McIntosh et al. 1986]), historical sociolinguistics, such as Suzanne Romaine’s (1982) or James Milroy’s (1992) studies, historical pragmatics as introduced by a group of scholars comprising, inter alia Andreas Jucker from Zurich (Jucker 1995), and Irma Taavitsainen from Helsinki, and also Laurel Brinton from Vancouver. Nevertheless, this vibrant research life could not be
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matched in North America (with the exception of a few important centers such as Stanford, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, or Pennsylvania), where English historical linguistics often assumed much diminished roles in English Departments more focused on literary theory than the language of texts (see Section 3). The growing importance and acceptance of research in English historical linguistics is also documented by the foundation of research centers such as the Variation, Contacts and Change group in Helsinki, founded in 2006 and headed by Nevalainen (cf. Hiltunen, Chapter 87) or the Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization (VLCG) research group in Santiago de Compostela, founded in 1990, and headed by Teresa Fanego (cf. Fanego, Chapter 89), to name but two out of a large number. The important biannual International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) will be held in 2012 in Zurich for the seventeenth time. The North American counterpart is the (bi-) annual Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL) conference, which was started in 2000 by Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell and which will see its seventh anniversary in Bloomington in 2012. All this taken together leaves no doubt that English historical linguistics on the whole is (still) a very lively, vibrant and active research field. However, the current situation is also not without problems, as the last section will show.
3 Current developments While English historical linguistics generally may be considered alive and thriving, the papers in this section, along with some more in Section IX, also point to certain problems in the field. These seem to arise from two factors. The first factor is the still present conflict between philology, literature, and linguistics, which has not been bridged since the institutionalization of English and linguistics as academic fields in the late 19th and early 20th century. We have shown that most scholars in the beginnings were brought up academically as philologists, with a profound interest in and knowledge of literature, textual scholarship, history, and culture. The growing specialization in the field of English has made this breadth of knowledge difficult to attain. Many scholars in literature find it hard to keep up with linguistic theories (and often don’t see why they should), just as scholars in linguistics usually ignore literature as it is seen as epiphenomenal language use that does not provide interesting, reliable data of natural language use. The high degree of technicality in some linguistic frameworks such as generativism has widened this apparent gap, just as the rather opaque thinking in postmodern literary theory. Therefore, philologists, broadly defined as experts in both language and literature, have mostly disappeared. This has led to a situation where Chairs in English Medieval Studies or Anglo-Saxon are in imminent danger. On the one hand, university administrations often (incorrectly) argue that there is hardly any call for this kind of field. On the other hand, the few chairs that remain see a vicious battle between linguistics and literature over who gets appointed. Wischer (Chapter 85) claims that at least in Germany many of those chairs are lost altogether for English or are filled with scholars from literature or cultural studies, maybe in the hope that this will be more compatible and attractive for students. Thus, a lot of research in English historical linguistics is now being done by scholars who are not affiliated with historical chairs or research groups; this can mean the potential long-term endangerment of this line of research. The second factor that is mentioned here in this section and in some papers in Section IX of this volume is not about research, but about teaching. While the number of
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textbooks and handbooks in English historical linguistics is growing, we see a steady decline in student enrollment. Knowledge of the historical stages of the language (sometimes in great detail) was a basic requirement for students and teachers of English in the middle of the 20th century, but fewer and fewer study programs are now including historical components in their curricula. The reasons for this seem to be manifold. Sometimes their applicability and usefulness for future work in- and outside academia are in doubt, sometimes they are considered “too difficult” and “off-putting”, sometimes the proper teaching of Old and/or Middle English would simply take up too much time in an already too crammed curriculum. As a result students may get only a quick rollercoaster ride to familiarize them with the basics and in the hopes that the best of them will stick with this field of study. But when students do not have solid foundations in reading and understanding Old and Middle English they will find most studies that look at sound change etc. very opaque and abstract. On a positive note, we end by pointing to recent trends, such as historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics (see Nevalainen, Chapter 92; Taavitsainen, Chapter 93), which focus very intensely on the language of texts as well as social and cultural aspects of language use; such approaches to the language of the past will undoubtedly lead to continued and renewed interest in research in English historical linguistics. New theoretical approaches, such as Construction Grammar (see Bergs, Chapter 103) also have the potential for opening up new avenues of research in English historical linguistics. The opportunities for exciting historical research facilitated by electronic corpora – ranging from the 20-year old Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al. 1991; currently being updated in XML format) to the recently launched Old Bailey Corpus (Huber and Maiwald 2003–2010) and a wealth of other new corpora – must also be acknowledged (see Kyto¨, Chapter 96). All these developments seem to indicate that historical and synchronic linguistics may be growing closer again, which can only be good for both. In respect to the teaching of English historical linguistics, we note that there are still a number of departments (around the world!) where knowledge of earlier Englishes is treasured and required (and where high enrollment numbers show that there is still strong interest among students for this line of study). This, undoubtedly, will continue to form the basis of scholarship in English historical linguistics. The teaching of the history of English takes on special import as we acknowledge English as a global language and appreciate its place on the internet, in electronic means of communication, and in the social media (see Grzega, Chapter 136; Heyd, Volume 1, Chapter 70). Moreover, we have also come to a fuller recognition of the importance of varieties of English, which involves knowledge of both their forms and histories (see Sections XIII, XIV, and XV).
4 References Baugh, Albert C. 1935. A History of the English Language. 1st edn. New York: D. AppletonCentury Company. Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon. Dobson, Eric John. 1957. English Pronunciation 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ellis, Alexander John. 1869–89. On Early English Pronunciation, with especial reference to Shakespeare and Chaucer. London: Tru¨bner & Co. Huber, Magnus and Patrick Maiwald. 2003–2010. The Old Bailey Corpus: Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. http://www.uni-giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus/index.php (last accessed 26 October 2010).
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Jespersen, Otto. 1909–49. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. 7 vols. Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard; London: Allen & Unwin. Jucker, Andreas H. 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. King, Robert D. 1969. Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press / Edinburgh: Mercat Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Mosse´, Fernand. 1945–49. Manuel de l’anglais du moyen-aˆge, des origines au XIve sie`cle. 2 vols. ´ ditions Montaigne. Paris: Aubier, E Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax. Part 1: Parts of Speech. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Neophilologique. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpio¨, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevanlinna, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd edn., Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.), The HIT Center, University of Bergen, Norway. For manual, see http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/hc/index.htm (last accessed 7 February 2012). Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwell, Robert P. and C. Westbrook Barritt. 1955. The Old English short digraphs: Some considerations. Language 31: 373–389. Sweet, Henry. 1900–1903. A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. A History of English Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Wright, Joseph. 1889–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. London: H. Froude. Wyld, Henry Cecil. 1921. A History of Modern Colloquial English. London: T. F. Unwin.
Alexander Bergs, Osnabru¨ck (Germany) and Laurel J. Brinton, Vancouver (Canada)
83. History of English Historical Linguistics: The historiography of the English language 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Paradigm shifts? The Early Modern period to 1800 The 19th century The 20th century Summary References
Abstract This article presents the history of English historical linguistics in Great Britain and argues that the history of English, as a discipline, is – like other kinds of historiography – accretive, i.e. it builds on scholars of the past, rather than paradigm-shifting. The article’s core is a historical survey, beginning in the renaissance – when the study of the history of Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1295–1312
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English became respectable – and proceeding from there to the present-day. Particular attention is given to John Cheke and Matthew Parker in the 16th century, John Wallis in the 17th, Samuel Johnson and William Jones in the 18th, and Benjamin Thorpe, John Kemble, Dean Trench, Henry Sweet and Joseph Wright in the 19th. The essay then offers a survey of trends in the 20th century, and concludes with an assessment of likely ways forward for the subject in the 21st.
1 Paradigm shifts? Thomas Kuhn (1962), in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, famously argued that science has progressed by means of a series of “paradigm shifts”. The notion of the paradigm shift is now a scholarly cliche´: paradigm shifts take place when the contradictions of a particular view of reality slowly accrue until, overwhelmed by these contradictions, a particular major thinker makes an imaginative leap and sees the subject from a completely new – and contradiction-resolving – perspective. Good examples of such paradigm-shifters include Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein.
1.1 Paradigm shifts in different academic subjects Are all subjects liable to such paradigm-shifts? It seems fairly certain that astronomy, evolutionary biology, and physics – the domains studied by the three thinkers just listed – are; it is simply impossible, for instance, for a modern scientist to hold seriously that the sun goes round the earth, and it is extremely unlikely that a paradigm-shifting reversion to pre-Galilean astronomy will ever take place. Terracentric astronomy is simply no longer intellectually credible, however interesting it may be for historians of science.
1.2 Paradigm shifts in the humanities Are paradigm shifts possible in the humanities? Here the notion seems more contestable. The discipline of history is a good case in point. Although (say) a modern scholar such as Simon Schama may see the French Revolution from a different perspective to (say) Alexis de Tocqueville, members of whose family were either executed or imprisoned during the Terror, it is still possible for Schama to engage profitably with – and indeed to some extent recuperate – de Tocqueville, and to value his “luminous”, albeit “Olympian”, insights (Schama 1989: xiii, xv). Schama feels no need to dismiss de Tocqueville’s views out of hand as having no validity; as an historiographer, de Tocqueville still has something to say to subsequent generations. This disciplinary generosity, combined with a humility about one’s own perspective, is a rather attractive characteristic of best historiographical practice; Gibbon or Tacitus or Thucydides are regularly cited as offering insights on the past which are still to be valued, even if their views are now perceived as expressed in ways modern scholars would not adopt or as necessarily partial because conditioned by the intellectual setting of their own time. History, it seems, has developed as an accretive discipline. Shifts in approach undoubtedly happen, but they seem not to take place in quite the radical way in which they have occurred in, say, physics. We build on de Tocqueville or Tacitus; we do not knock them down.
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1.3 Paradigm shifts in linguistics The notion of “paradigm-shifting” has on some occasions attracted linguists, who have regularly cited, e.g., the publication of Noam Chomsky’s (1957) Syntactic Structures as an event comparable in scientific terms with the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species a century before. Thus one distinguished Chomskyan scholar, Morris Halle, notoriously complained, in 1973, that morphology “has been studied only to a very limited extent” (cited in Sampson 1980: 160), setting aside a tradition of linguistic description at least a century old (the term morphology with reference to grammar was coined by August Schleicher in 1859, the year when Darwin’s Origins was published; see Szemere´nyi 1999: 195). However, Chomsky himself, though frequently highly dismissive of views differing from his own, has been somewhat more modest, claiming (albeit as precursors of his own approach) a connexion with, e.g., the universalist philosophers of the Port-Royal school of the 17th century, and, despite some of the more extravagant claims made for his views, it seems unlikely that Chomsky is a paradigm-shifter in the way that Darwin or Galileo were.
1.4 Paradigm shifts in English historical linguistics The notion of the paradigm-shift is similarly limited in its application to English historical linguistics, the subject of this article. The question of disciplinary status is relevant here, since historical linguistics has a dual disciplinary loyalty: to history and to linguistics. In a recent important collection of conference papers, Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons make the following point: Throughout this volume, we see an ongoing conversation at the heart of historical English linguistics: the question of evidence and historical reconstruction. Robert Fulk puts it eloquently in his discussion of the oral nature of early English vernacular texts and the possibility, if not the necessity, of creating linguistic arguments based on unavailable evidence; ‘it raises’, he concludes, ‘profound questions about explanation in linguistics, most particularly whether the aim of historical linguistics should be to explain the data available or to analyze texts of earlier periods from a realistic historical perspective – that is, whether the primary allegiance of historical linguistics should be to linguistics or to history’. (Curzan and Emmons 2004: x; Fulk’s article appears in Curzan and Emmons 2004: 305–312)
The passage echoes views which have a long pedigree in western thought; they underpin, for instance, Sir William Jones’s distinction between the philosophical study of language, engaging with e.g. “the curious and important science of universal grammar”, and the historical, concerned with “the observation and remembrance of mere facts” (Aarsleff 1983: 127; for Jones, see Sections 3 and 3.1 below). Fulk’s argument would suggest that the allegiance is a dual one, but for the purposes of the current essay the link with history is especially important. Although it is undeniable that there have been shifts in approach in historical linguistics, as with the discipline of history these shifts are gradual, and, it will be argued here, they have been most successful when building upon rather than trampling down the views of predecessors. The notion of the paradigm shift, whereby older views can simply be set aside as no longer tenable, is, it is argued here, not appropriate for the study of the historiography of the English language. As we will see from this necessarily selective study of a vast field, many ideas
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current in (say) the 17th or 18th centuries may still be studied profitably by linguists working in the first decades of the 21st. Although the focus of discussion (reflecting the present author’s expertise) is on the British scene, it is hoped that the insights offered have a more general currency.
2 The Early Modern period to 1800 The historiography of the English language really begins in the Early Modern period, for obvious reasons: it was only then that the vernacular truly became dignified enough to attract scholarly attention. Dante, in the 14th century, had claimed that it was possible to be eloquent in the vernacular (in his case, Italian), and the appearance of major writers in English at the end of the 14th century – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland – is clearly connected to the rise of English as a language in which it was possible to address serious philosophical and literary concerns.
2.1 Sir John Cheke The academic study of the English language correlates with its rise as a medium for intellectual rather than literary enquiry, notably in the expression of religious belief. For instance, in c.1550 Sir John Cheke translated the Bible for Archbishop Cranmer, using a specially-devised spelling-system and a “purified” vocabulary based on Germanicrather than French-derived words; thus centurions become, in Cheke’s usage, hundreders, and parables are biwordes. Cheke was a “new man”, a prominent evangelical who was keenly involved in the controversies which led to the English Reformation; as Cheke’s interest in Germanic roots indicates – something shared by later “purist” and “archaising” writers, such as the poet Edmund Spenser at the end of the 16th century – many evangelicals approached the English language from a historical perspective.
2.2 Matthew Parker Matthew Parker, for instance, who became Elizabeth I’s Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, spent a great deal of time and money looking for evidence of “reformed” religion in the Anglo-Saxon past, and this search inspired him to collect what is still the most important single collection of surviving manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, now in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, UK. Parker taught himself to read Anglo-Saxon, and even to grasp the rudiments of what we would now call AngloSaxon paleography. The study of Anglo-Saxon continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries part of a distinctively Anglican culture, expressed by such diverse figures as William Somner (baptised 1598, d. 1669), who dedicated his first publication on the antiquities of Canterbury to Archbishop Laud, and the nonjuring yet anti-Catholic bishop George Hickes (1642–1715) (for an important discussion, with full references and historical contextualization, see Kidd 1999, especially 106–109.)
2.3 John Wallis As part of this development, it became conventional for contemporaries writing on the usage of their own time to preface their remarks with historical surveys, e.g. Alexander
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Gil (1621), John Wilkins (1668), or Christopher Cooper (1685). Perhaps the most influential such discussion – in Latin, thus catering for a learned and international audience – was in John Wallis’s A Grammar of the English Language, the first edition of which appeared in 1653. Wallis (1616–1703) was a controversial figure, politically supple enough to negotiate his way through the English Civil Wars and receive rewards from both sides. He was appointed to the Savilian professorship of geometry at Oxford in 1649 and was awarded a doctorate in divinity in 1654 under Cromwell, but his place and honours were confirmed in 1660 by Charles II, who made him a royal chaplain; he was appointed in 1661 as one of the revisers of the Anglican prayer book. Wallis’s Grammar appeared in five distinct editions in the author’s lifetime, and was published not only in England but also in Hamburg, Leiden and (in an abbreviated form) in Ko¨nigsberg. A handsome octavo edition was published simultaneously in London and Leipzig in 1765 (see further Kemp 1972, whose translation is quoted below; for extended biographical sketches of all figures just mentioned, see also Dobson 1968: passim and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Matthew et al. (eds.) 2004–08]). Wallis’s discussion of the history of English begins with a survey of “the old British language spoken by the earliest Britons”, although Wallis points out that English “is entirely different and has come from a different place” (Kemp 1972: 77); the view – derived from Bede – that the Gauls, Germans, Britons, and Saxons were the same people, however, persisted amongst many scholars into the 18th century, only laid to rest by Bishop Thomas Percy in his translation of Paul Mallet’s (1770) Northern Antiquities. The old British language, Wallis points out, was shared with that of ancient Gaul, and Wallis notes that “it is very common for the letters g and w to be interchanged; the French name for Wallia (which we call Wales) is Gales…” (Kemp 1972: 79); he goes on to exemplify this practice by comparing French guerre, garant, gard etc. with English warre, warrant, ward etc. (Kemp 1972: 79), although he does not explain how warre etc. have survived into English. British is compared with oriental languages; Wallis draws attention to certain features of vocabulary and grammar which, he holds, are to be found in both Welsh and in “Arabic or Punic” and Hebrew; these similarities, Wallis suggests, may date “back to the confusion of Babel” (Kemp 1972: 81), “like other mother tongues”; the term “mother tongues” (matrices linguae) is not – as he acknowledges – original to Wallis, being taken by him from Josephus Justus Scaliger’s (1610) Diatriba de Europaeorum Linguis. Wallis offers suggestions for further reading on this topic, and then moves on to discuss the origins and development of English. With the withdrawal of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons “got control of what had been the demesne of the Britons and called the part of Britain that they occupied England, and the language which they brought with them English”. (Kemp 1972: 95); Wallis states that he and his contemporaries “generally call it Saxon or Anglo-Saxon now, to distinguish it from modern English” (Kemp 1972: 95). Anglo-Saxon is, we are told, “descended from Old Teutonic, like the Frankish language which was introduced into Gaul, and also like modern German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Prussian and other related languages” (Kemp 1972: 96–97); Wallis clearly believes Prussian to be a Germanic language and not (as modern scholars hold) one of the Balto-Slavic group. Wallis believes that Anglo-Saxon survived “pure and unadulterated” until Norman times; “although the Danes invaded the country during this period, there was no change in the language, because Danish, though not exactly the same as Anglo-Saxon, was very closely related to it” (Kemp 1972: 97).
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The arrival of the Normans, however, says Wallis, meant changes; William of Normandy, “called the Conqueror”, commanded that “all official documents and public proclamations, and all judicial transactions, should be in Neustrian [i.e. Norman French], or French” (Kemp 1972: 97). However, William failed, according to Wallis, because the number of English people was so much larger than the number of Normans: “So the English language, which had become established here, persisted, though many French words, mostly of Latin origin, gradually became current in English, and many English words in due course dropped out of use” (Kemp 1972: 99). Wallis goes on to illustrate the relationship between the two languages by contrasting how “we call living animals by names of German origin, whereas we use French names for their meat when prepared as food. For instance we say: an ox, a cow, a calf, a sheep, a hog, a boar, a deer etc., but beef, veal, mutton, pork, brawn, venison etc. I think this arose from the fact that the Norman soldiers had little to do with pastures…” (Kemp 1972: 99–100). This observation is perhaps Wallis’s most influential statement; it frequently appears still in undergraduate survey-courses on the history of English, possibly given wide currency by Sir Walter Scott’s discussion in the first chapter of Ivanhoe. Wallis sees the impulse to borrow words as not deriving from any deficiency in English – he cites with approval the example of Spenser’s poetry, “unadulterated by foreign ornamentation” – but because we have come to regard it as impossible to say something “elegantly or emphatically unless it has an unusual or foreign flavour about it” (Kemp 1972: 102–103).
2.4 Samuel Johnson Wallis’s outline history (and others like it) underpins most 18th-century accounts of the history of English. For instance, Samuel Johnson (1755) in the preface to his Dictionary, notoriously sought to “recall” the English language to its “original Teutonick character”, to the “pure sources of genuine diction”, and away from the “Gallick structure and phraseology” towards which it seemed to be tending (cited in Bolton 1966: 145). Although there is no explicit historical outline in the Dictionary, it is clear that Johnson derives his discussion from narratives such as that provided by Wallis, and there are even echoes of the purist tradition of Cheke and Spenser. However, Johnson has some interesting things to say about language change in general which are not to be found in Wallis’s book. He notes that “[t]otal and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen […] there are other causes of change, which, though slow in their operation, and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superiour to human resistance, as the revolutions of the sky, or intumescence of the tide” (Bolton 1966: 152). Johnson identifies as such external causes of change not just “conquests and migrations […] now very rare”, whose effects are sudden, but also “commerce […] not always […] confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but […] communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and […] at last incorporated with the current speech” (Bolton 1966: 152). He also identifies “internal causes equally forcible”: The language most likely to continue without alteration, would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniences of life […] men thus busied and unlearned, having only such words
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as common use requires, would perhaps long continue to express the same notions by the same signs. But no such constancy can be expected in a people polished by arts, and classed by subordination, where one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labours of the other. […] Copiousness of speech will give opportunities to capricious choice, by which some words will be preferred, and others degraded; vicissitudes of fashion will enforce the use of new, or extend the signification of known terms. (Bolton 1966: 152–153)
Johnson is here engaging with issues of language contact, social class and stylistic variation; although somewhat unspecific and couched in the distinctive terminology of 18th century linguistics (e.g. “copiousness of speech”), his ideas prefigure quite closely many present-day debates on language variation and change (see e.g. Milroy 1992; Samuels 1972; Smith 1996).
3 The 19th century Towards the end of the 18th century an event took place which has sometimes been claimed as a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s terms: Sir William Jones’s Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, delivered in 1786. Sir William’s speech on that occasion included the following famous passage: The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. (Jones 1807: 34–35; see, e.g. Renfrew 1987: 9 for a characteristic discussion).
This statement is traditionally taken as the first attempt to classify a group of languages on comparative and diachronic principles; and it remains a concise outline of the comparative method, whereby languages are compared in order to reconstruct the nature of their common ancestor. However, its novelty might be questioned. The notion of “mother tongues” was already known to Wallis, as we have seen. Roger Lass has also drawn attention to the work of Conrad Gestner (Mithridates, 1555); Gestner noted the existence of “mother” languages and used the term cognatae (cf. Latin co + gnatus ‘born together’) to refer to groups of related languages (see Lass 1997: 107–108). However, although Jones knew Wallis’s work, he went on to bring empirical philosophy to bear on the historical study of language, in a structured way; and, as has been pointed out, his initial statement was supported by systematic analysis of data (see Aarsleff 1983: 134–135). We might also note Lyle Campbell’s unpacking of Jones’s discussion (Campbell 2006). However, despite the title of his article (Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong), Campbell offers a balanced conclusion: Jones was far from being the initial discoverer of Indo-European relationships or the founder of methods for linguistic comparison. Rather, Jones’ thinking was on the whole
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XI. History of English Historical Linguistics consistent with trends up to and including his day, weaker than some, better than others. His several errors make it necessary to be extremely cautious concerning the methods which led him to these conclusions. Nevertheless, the successful cases – Jones’ and others’ – relied on three sources of evidence, basic vocabulary, grammatical evidence (especially morphological), and some notion of sound correspondences. Definitively, superficial lexical comparisons led to no successful cases and indeed in some instances led Jones astray. These three criteria are still today the foundation of methods for investigating possible distant genetic relationships among languages. (Campbell 2006: 264)
3.1 New philology This was the “new philology”, but its roots lay in the 18th-century British Enlightenment. Jones himself was a polymath who dined regularly with Johnson in Oxford (Holmes 1974: 38) and elsewhere. He was also a radical in contemporary debate, becoming a major figure not only in orientalist studies but also in British jurisprudence, and his advanced views on cultural reciprocity and sexual equality – many pointing forward to those now widely held in liberal circles – meant that, as a political writer, he was for “many establishment figures […] lingering under the liberty tree” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Matthews et al (eds.) 2004–08]). Jones was a philosophical empiricist, interested – as befitted a lawyer – in evidence. He would have agreed thoroughly with the views expressed by, e.g., Dugald Stewart, the near-contemporary Scottish common-sense philosopher; it was, for Stewart, “a very mistaken idea, that the formation of a hypothetical system is a stronger proof of inventive genius, than the patient investigation of nature in the way of induction” (cited in Aarsleff 1983: 112).
3.2 Continental influences Such ways of thinking were also commonplace on the continent of Europe, most notably in Germany and Denmark, and Jones received there a ready audience. He undoubtedly influenced the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, who in turn influenced the great comparative philologists Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm. Bopp’s work ranged widely over Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Germanic; in the preface to the English edition of his Comparative Grammar the translator stated that it had “created a new epoch in the science of Comparative Philology […] corresponding to that of Newton’s Principia in Mathematics…” (cited in Aarsleff 1983: 160). Bopp visited London in 1818 to work on the manuscripts held in the East India Company’s archives. Rask’s major contribution to philology, Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse, was published in 1818, but it derived from a great tradition of Danish philology, including G.J.Thorkelin’s edition of the Old English epic poem Beowulf (1815). Thorkelin had himself visited England and Scotland between 1786 and 1790, looking for historical material, and had used his visit not only to transcribe the text of Beowulf but also to suggest to John Jamieson that he should work on the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), “the first independent lexicographical effort in Britain after Johnson’s Dictionary” (Aarsleff 1983: 164). Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik appeared in 1819, with an important second edition in 1822; “the first large-scale historical examination of the old vernacular and its cognates” (Aarsleff
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1983: 161), it contained the great statement of what has become known to history as Grimm’s Law (for the relationship between Rask’s and Grimm’s presentation of this law, see Collinge 1985: 63–64).
3.3 Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble It was through Rask and Grimm that the new philology was transmitted back to Britain, most notably by Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble. Thorpe visited Rask in Copenhagen, and married a Dane; Kemble visited Grimm in Go¨ttingen, and married (unhappily) a German. Both Thorpe and Kemble were assiduous editors of Old English texts, but they were also active linguistic historians. One of Kemble’s most famous statements encapsulates the notion of the “laws” of language, a notion first discussed by Bopp (Sampson 1980: 16) and does so in a way which continues to influence the study of historical linguistics: “[…] the laws of a language, ascertained by wide and careful examination of all cognate tongues, of the hidden springs and ground-principles upon which they rest in common, are like the laws of the Medes and Persians and alter not” (cited in Aarsleff 1983: 201). Kemble himself exemplified this approach in a factual exposition on vowel-length, derived from Grimm, published in 1835. In this article Kemble shows that he has thoroughly grasped the comparative method: “In order to ascertain the length of the vowel in an A.S. word it is […] necessary to ascertain what vowel corresponds to it in the other principal Teutonic tongues, and by this process alone can we correct the MSS. themselves” (Kemble 1835: 29). Kemble in particular was an influential figure in contemporary culture. The son of the famous actor Charles Kemble, he was a key member of the Cambridge “Apostles” in the 1820s, and a close friend of (among others) Alfred Tennyson the poet, Edward Fitzgerald the translator, Richard Monkton Milnes the biographer, and Frederick Maurice the social reformer. He was also friendly with Richard Chevenix Trench, with whom in 1830 he went to Spain to take part in an unsuccessful uprising against Ferdinand VII. Kemble never managed to secure a university position, largely it seems because of the aggressive tone he adopted towards his opponents; his article on vowellength ended with the statement that “against all quackery, and all quacks, I hold the old motto – ‘War to the knife!’ ” (Kemble 1835: 30). Nevertheless he published widely on antiquities until his death in 1857.
3.4 The Philological Society The new philology quickly dominated 19th-century discussion of the history of language. As early as 1835 it was being harnessed to a religious purpose by Nicholas (later Cardinal) Wiseman; and the term “Grimm’s Law” was first used by another cleric, W.B. Winning, in his Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the Indo-European Languages is Illustrated, and Applied to the Primeval History of Europe, Italy and Rome (1838) (see Aarsleff 1983: 208–209). However, Kemble himself came to focus more on Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology in his later life, and it was not until the foundation of the Philological Society of London in 1842 that the new philology developed an institutional basis in Britain. The Society throughout its history focused on the empirical rather than the philosophical, and thus showed itself to have its origins in the Enlightenment. As its then president, Alexander Ellis, stated in 1873,
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comments on the origin of language – always a concern in the philosophical tradition – were “out of the field of philology proper”: We have to investigate what is, we have to discover, if possible, the invariable unconditional relations under which language, as we observe it, forms, develops, changes, or at least to construct an empirical statement of definite linguistic relations, and ascertain how far that statement obtains in individual cases. Real language, the go-between of man and man, is a totally different organism from philosophical language, the misty illunderstood exponent of sharp metaphysical distinctions. Our work is with the former. We shall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wastepaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculation on the origin of all tongues. (cited in Aarsleff 1983: 230)
3.5 The Oxford English Dictionary Amongst the earlier members of the Society was Richard Chenevix Trench, by now a respectable clergyman; he was Dean of Westminster in 1856, joined the Philological Society in 1857, and in 1863 became the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. In the year he joined the Society, Trench gave his address “On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries”, which is generally acknowledged as the first step in the creation of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, a work to be driven forward most notably by Sir James Murray, who was elected to the presidency of the Philological Society in 1878. According to Trench, this dictionary was to be “an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view” (cited in Aarsleff 1983: 261). The Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson [ed.] 2000–), as it was eventually called, is arguably the greatest single triumph of English historical linguistics; it is also, as we have seen, the outcome of an empirical philological tradition focusing on etymology, with its roots in the Enlightenment.
3.6 Henry Sweet However, the OED was not of course the only outcome of the philological tradition in Britain in the 19th century. Ellis himself was deeply interested in issues of pronunciation, both contemporary and historical; and one of the earliest editors for the Early English Text Society (EETS), founded in 1864 explicitly for the purpose of establishing texts from which the OED could quote, was a young Oxford undergraduate, Henry Sweet. Sweet was to become the leading philologist of his time while, simultaneously, founding what has become the modern discipline of phonetic science. Sweet was a controversial figure who only secured a university position at the age of 56, when, in 1901, he was appointed to a readership in phonetics at Oxford. He received very few honours in his own country, other than an honorary degree of LLD from Glasgow in 1892. But foreigners saw him differently; he received an honorary PhD from Heidelberg in 1875 (only two years after he graduated from Oxford with a fourthclass degree in “greats”, i.e. Classics), and was elected to various learned academies in Germany and Scandinavia. Until the mid-1880s, when he began to focus his energies on modern grammar and phonetics, Sweet was known as an historian of English with a special interest in the production of textbooks, notably his Anglo-Saxon Reader, first
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published in 1876, and his Anglo-Saxon Primer of 1882 (Sweet 1876, 1882); the former replaced Thorpe’s 1834 Analecta Anglo-Saxonica as the standard undergraduate anthology. Both works are, in later editions, still in print. Sweet’s History of English Sounds (1888) was, however, his last major work dealing with earlier periods in the history of English. Something of Sweet’s complex relationship with foreign scholarship can be gathered from the introduction to an edition he published for EETS in 1885: The Oldest English Texts, an important collection containing archaic and dialectal (i.e. non-West Saxon) texts from the Anglo-Saxon period, some of which he later reworked in another textbook, his Second Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet 1887). The Oldest English Texts is still regarded as a major scholarly achievement, but the introduction includes the following interesting personal passage: When I first began [this edition], I had some hopes of myself being able to found an independent school of English philology in this country. But as time went on it became too evident that the historical study of English was being rapidly annexed by the Germans, and that English editors would have to abandon all hopes of working up their materials themselves, and resign themselves to the more humble role of purveyors to the swarms of young program-mongers turned out every year by the German universities, so thoroughly trained in all the mechanical details of what may be called ‘parasite philology’ that no English dilettante can hope to compete with them – except by Germanizing himself [sic] and losing all his nationality. All this is of course inevitable – the result of our own neglect, and of the unhealthy over-production of the German universities – but it is not encouraging for those who, like myself, have had the mortification of seeing their favorite investigations forestalled one after another, while they are laboriously collecting their materials. (Sweet 1885: v–vi)
Sweet (1885: vi) went on to state that his “only regret was that I did not abandon the historical study of English five years ago” to carry on with other work. However, as a reference in the preface “to my friend [Eduard] Sievers” suggests, he had already done something very important for English historical linguistics: he had brought British scholarship back into close contact with German developments, most notably the work of the Neogrammarians, that group of scholars particularly (though not exclusively) associated with the University of Leipzig, where Sievers held the chair of Germanic Philology. The year after Sweet published The Oldest English Texts, the second edition appeared of Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, translated into English in 1891. Paul’s Prinzipien, the so-called “Neogrammarian Bible”, was the summation of a whole program of scholarship.
3.7 The Neogrammarians The Neogrammarian movement, like all movements, produced a number of manifestos. Representative is the following, from Georg von der Gabelentz’s Die Sprachwissenschaft, published in Leipzig in 1901: […] our science should strive to delve even more deeply. Why, in this one out of many related dialects or languages, did a sound change proceed in this particular way, why in a different direction somewhere else, and why in yet a third direction in another language?
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XI. History of English Historical Linguistics We need think only of the Indo-European languages and the developments of their vowels, their velars, palatals, aspirates, and s-sounds: what accounts for the various tendencies among the Aryans, Greeks, Slavs, and the Italic peoples? Climate, life style, contact with neighboring tribes, perhaps temperament and occasionally a certain aesthetic feeling (fashion) – all of these may have played a role, but to what degree and in which direction? It would seem that only with an enormous amount of inductive scholarship will the objective be reached, proceeding microscopically at one time, investigating the nearest, smallest dialects, then again looking far afield at all the language families in all parts of the world. For a science, which aims to probe the laws of events, those common denominators, not matter how neatly they have been worked out, are still merely first steps; they are simplified descriptions, not explanations. (quoted in Baldi and Werth [eds.] 1978: 30)
Two points are perhaps worth noticing in von der Gabelentz’s statement. First, we might note the emphasis on “laws”, a notion first applied to philology by Bopp and Kemble (see Section 3.3 above) but subsequently adopted enthusiastically by the Neogrammarians, as placing their discipline on a par with the natural sciences. The natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, formed the German paradigm for all disciplines, including the historical study of language, although it is important to note that Hermann Paul was careful to distinguish “historical” and “exact sciences” in this respect: “The idea of sound-law is not to be understood in the sense in which we speak of ‘laws’ in Physics or Chemistry […] Sound-law does not pretend to state what must always under certain general conditions regularly recur, but merely expresses the reign of uniformity within a group of historical phenomena” (cited Baldi and Werth 1978: 17). The explosion of German science in the 19th and early 20th centuries seems to have been due in part to a focus on an “understanding of the mechanistic whole by scrutiny of the smallest parts” (Cornwell 2003: 45), something possible only through a massive collective effort. The Neogrammarian enterprise, with its “program-mongers”, was exactly such an effort, and von der Gabelentz’s statement is clearly engaged with “scrutiny of the smallest parts”. Although well outside the compass of this essay, it is interesting, in the light of studies by John Cornwell and others, that Sweet regarded this development as in some sense “unhealthy”. Secondly, however, there is von der Gabelentz’s focus on “inductive scholarship”, pointing directly back to the views on empirical “induction” expressed by Enlightenment scholars such as Dugald Stewart. Neogrammarians – Junggrammatiker – saw themselves as modern, but they were drawing upon a clear philosophical inheritance.
3.8 Joseph Wright Sweet may have been about to abandon historical study, but in 1882 British scholarship came once more into direct contact with the Neogrammarians. Joseph Wright, a Yorkshireman from an impoverished weaving background who had taught himself to read at the age of 15, had arrived in Heidelberg to study mathematics. However, Wright – encouraged by the prominent Neogrammarian Hermann Osthoff – transferred to comparative philology, and became one of Sweet’s “program-mongers”, submitting a doctoral thesis to Heidelberg University in 1885 on qualitative and quantitative changes in the Greek vowel-system. In 1886 Wright moved to Leipzig where, encouraged by
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another distinguished Neogrammarian, Karl Brugmann, he produced a translation of Brugmann’s Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Brugmann 1888–91). The translation appeared in 1894, by which time Wright was in Oxford, teaching Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Germanic to the Association for the Higher Education of Women. In 1901 he became professor of comparative philology at Oxford University, in succession to Max Mu¨ller, the Sanskritist and scholar of comparative religion. Whereas Sweet, like Kemble before him, had alienated his peers by his aggression, it seems that everyone liked Joseph Wright (see E. Wright 1932 for his wife’s full, and rather moving, biographical account). He was a dedicated teacher, who saw lecturing and the writing of textbooks as a crucial part of an academic career, and took a deep personal interest in his students’ development; he was a committed administrator, who worked hard to develop his university’s schools of modern languages and English; and he never lost touch with his roots, publishing his pioneering Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1892. But he was also a dedicated researcher, elected soon after his arrival in Oxford to “the Club”, “the small group of dons who wanted more prominence for research and the professoriate by comparison with college-based undergraduate teaching” (Matthew et al [eds.] 2004–08). His interest in dialects, expressed in print through his monumental English Dialect Dictionary (Wright 1896–1905) and its accompanying English Dialect Grammar (Wright 1905), stemmed from a clear sense that the varieties of English had their own histories. The Grammar, which has never really been surpassed for its scope, is a thoroughly historical work in orientation, with constant references back to Old English, Old Norse, and Old French. The historical approach to study, represented by Wright, continued to dominate much teaching and research amongst Anglicists and, though sometimes unfashionable, has persisted to the present day. In the German-speaking world, the great historical grammars of Karl Luick (1964) and Richard Jordan (1968), which appeared first in 1914 and 1924 respectively and, neither ever completed, represent the apogee of Neogrammarian approaches to the history of English. In the English-speaking world, Wright’s historical approach underpins major surveys such as, e.g., H.C. Wyld’s (1936) A History of Modern Colloquial English, Eric Dobson’s (1968, second edition) English Pronunciation 1500–1700 or Alistair Campbell’s (1959) Old English Grammar. And despite some use of terminology derived from the generative tradition, more recent surveys, such as Richard Hogg’s (1992) authoritative A Grammar of Old English: Phonology, continue to cite Neogrammarian scholarship with approval. The work of Wright and his contemporaries remains an indispensable foundation.
4 The 20th century In 1906, a year after Wright published his English Dialect Grammar, Ferdinand de Saussure began to deliver, at the University of Geneva, the series of lectures known as the Course in General Linguistics. Saussure’s Course, as reconstructed after his death from his students’ lecture-notes, has often been taken as a paradigm-shifting event (e.g. in Culler 1976). But in many ways the continuities in Saussure’s work are as important as the new insights. Saussure began his career as a Neogrammarian: he studied under Osthoff, and his thesis, on the Proto-Indo-European vocalic system, was published
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while he was a student at Leipzig; it remains a key text for Indo-Europeanists. Saussure’s more general importance for the history of linguistic ideas seems to lie in the development of methodological explicitness. His Course made important distinctions which are still crucial, most notably in its development of the “science of signs” and the distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language-study: “Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic” (Saussure 1974: 81). The Course is also often taken as a founding text for structuralism, an approach to the study of phenomena which is sometimes encapsulated by the axiom tout se tient: “everything is connected to everything else” – an axiom often associated with Saussure and his school but whose precise origins are somewhat obscure (see Koerner 1999, chapter 10). Structuralism became a dominant approach not only to linguistic study but also in social sciences such as politics and sociology; the notion of the interconnectedness of things attracted figures contemporary to Saussure as diverse as the social scientist Emile Durkheim and the revolutionary politician V.I. Lenin. Yet it is important to note that the synchronic approach to language was clearly evident in some of Sweet’s writings, both on contemporary and on older usages; thus, for instance, even Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer could be described as a synchronic survey of Old English contrasting with, say, Wright’s Old English Grammar, which is couched in Neogrammarian, diachronic terms. And aspects of structuralism are prefigured in many Neogrammarian writings (see e.g. Baldi and Werth 1978: 1). The notion that synchronic variation results from diachronic process, clearly stated in (say) Karl Verner’s Neogrammarian study of the exceptions to Grimm’s Law, is still a current issue in English historical linguistics (see Collinge 1985: 203–216). Saussure’s great contribution – not to be dismissed in any way – seems to have been to engage with the issues current in contemporary linguistics and to define and disentangle them, allowing for new trends in research. One such trend, undoubtedly valuable, was to develop the description of languages along synchronic lines. This approach to linguistic study dominated, for instance, American linguistics during the first half of the 20th century, involving in particular the gathering of material on a wide range of languages for which there were no historical records (see further the valuable discussion in Andresen 1990). It also underpinned the development of dialectology and sociolinguistics as descriptive approaches to language, a development which continues still. In these approaches the empirical, data-focused traditions which had evolved since the Enlightenment were linked to a systematic approach to data which did not necessarily involve a diachronic orientation. Various notational devices have been developed to allow for more precise descriptions of language-states, e.g. Pikean tagmemics, developed for the analysis of languages without a written tradition, or even the transfer of the terminology and notational practices of generative linguistics – although not necessarily some of their theoretical assumptions – for the analysis of earlier states of much-studied languages (an excellent example is the descriptive account of Old English phonology offered by Lass and Anderson 1975). But valuable descriptive accounts using traditional terminology, along the lines adopted by Henry Sweet, have continued to appear, e.g. Mitchell’s (1985) account of Old English syntax. The appearance of the Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg 1992–2001) offers a series of authoritative descriptive accounts, arranged in synchronic time-slices.
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Descriptive study of the kind just outlined revealed the existence of certain universal features of language, e.g. that all languages are made up of constituent grammars. This universal characteristic of human language was famously distinguished by Noam Chomsky (1957) in Syntactic Structures, and does seem to be confirmed by empirical observation. However, thorough-going Chomskyan linguistics has never been particularly concerned with historical data; indeed, it has been argued, the approach represents a departure from the data-focused, empirical methodologies adopted since the early modern period in favor of a rationalist approach proceeding from the acceptance of a set of a priori assumptions about the nature of the human mind. For that reason, Chomskyan linguistics is not further discussed here. See further Sampson (1980, especially chapter 6), for an important critique.
4.1 New trends In recent years, the descriptive approach to earlier states of the English language has become increasingly sophisticated, aided amongst other things by the enhancements to empirical methodologies allowed by developments in information technology (cf. Traxel, Chapter 72). Dialectological methods for the collection and typological classification of present-day varieties have been applied to earlier periods of English for which the evidence of linguistic variation is fullest; the most significant, and certainly the most sophisticated, outcome to date has been the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (McIntosh et al. 1986, currently being revised for online presentation) and its online successor-projects. “Synchronic” dictionaries of earlier states of the English language, first called for by W.A. Craigie in 1919 (see Craigie 1931), have appeared, e.g. Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary, now online, the ongoing Toronto Dictionary of Old English, and major regional dictionaries, e.g. the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, which together replace Jamieson’s dictionary of 1808 (see Section 3.2 above); these two dictionaries of Scots have also been placed online, linked as the Dictionary of the Scots Language (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/). And the appearance of machine-readable historical corpora, most notably those collected by scholars on the VARIENG project at the University of Helsinki, have made it possible to envisage much more comprehensive descriptions than any yet accomplished. (For an exciting statement of the theoretical implications of these developments, see Kretzschmar 2009).
4.2 Online resources Furthermore, the greatest product of the new philology as applied to the English language, the OED (Simpson [ed.] 2000–), is now itself online, massively enhancing its functionality. The recent appearance, both online and in print, of the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (Kay et al. 2009), a notional classification of the complete historical lexicon, enables the reconstruction of complete semantic fields at different points of time in the history of English; the Thesaurus allows for the lexicological structure of an entire language (insofar, of course, as written records permit) to be reconstructed at various points in time. A synchronic mapping, the Thesaurus of Old English, has already demonstrated (both in its original print form, Roberts and Kay 2000, and online) the usefulness of this approach.
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It could be argued, though, that these descriptive accounts, of whatever theoretical orientation, are primarily synchronic rather than diachronic, in Saussure’s formulation; diachronic linguistics deals with historical explanations for synchronic patterns. In the 20th century, many scholars wrestled with the notion of explanation – some have even doubted whether “explanation” is possible – but a consensus is beginning to emerge.
4.3 Linguistic variation Undoubtedly, the most important explanatory insights into diachronic linguistics in recent years have come from the study of present-day linguistic variation: in the formulation of William Labov, one of the most distinguished modern sociolinguists, “using the present to explain the past” (see his article reprinted in Baldi and Werth 1978: 275–312). Labov and others, notably James Milroy (see Milroy 1992), have shown that language change cannot be explained without reference to the social setting of language; languages comprised systems, but these systems are themselves disturbed through social contact, and it is in the interaction between systems and the competition between variant usages that change seems to come about (see further Samuels 1972). The precise mechanisms involved in such contacts are also increasingly coming under scrutiny, most notably from those scholars interested in the subdiscipline known as historical pragmatics (see e.g. Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008). What is interesting, however, is that all these approaches engage with the kind of social interaction which attracted scholars such as Joseph Wright a century before – something which comes across very strongly in (say) Wright’s (1896–1905) delightful preface to the English Dialect Grammar.
5 Summary Such insights, combined with the new synchronic resources just described, mean that English historical linguistics is, at the beginning of the 21st century, on the verge of making very considerable progress: a new “computational philology”, as Anneli MeurmannSolin (p.c.) has termed it, has arisen. The discipline is in rude health internationally, both within and outside the Anglophone world, as the list of authors in the alreadycited multi-volume Cambridge History of the English Language demonstrates; and the Cambridge History, which appeared between 1992 and 2001 under the general editorship of the late Richard Hogg, himself one of the most significant scholars of his generation, is a summative enterprise that flags the maturity of the discipline. However (of course) such enterprises raise as many questions as they answer. It seems clear that – like all empirical disciplines – English historical linguistics will make progress most quickly if it acknowledges its status as an accretive subject, aware of the value of its methodological and theoretical inheritance from traditions of study extending over several centuries.
6 References Aarsleff, Hans. 1983. The Study of Language in England 1780–1860. London: Athlone Press. Andresen, Julie Tetel. 1990. Linguistics in America 1769–1924: A Critical History. London: Routledge.
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Baldi, Philip and Ronald Werth (eds.). 1978. Readings in Historical Phonology. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press. Bolton, Whitney F. (ed.). 1966. The English Language: Essays by English and American Men of Letters 1490–1839. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brugmann, Karl. 1888–91. Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages: A Concise Exposition of the History of Sanskrit, Old Iranian (Avestic and Old Persian), Old Armenian, Old Greek, Latin, Umbrian-Samnitic, Old Irish, Gothic, Old High German, Lithuanian and Old Bulgarian. (Translated by J. Wright) London: Tru¨bner. Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Campbell, Lyle. 2006. Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong. International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology 40, 1–2: 245–264. www.hum.utah.edu/linguistics/Faculty/oldFacultyPages/ campbell/Campbell_Jones_for_Trask.doc (last accessed 10 October 2011). Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Collinge, N.E. 1985. The Laws of Indo-European. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cooper, Christopher. 1685. Grammatica lingua anglicanae. London. Cornwell, John. 2003. Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Craigie, Sir William A. 1931. New Dictionary Schemes Presented to the Philological Society, 4th April 1919. Transactions of the Philological Society 1925–1930: 6–11. Culler, Jonathan. 1976. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Curzan, Anne and Kimberly Emmons (eds.). 2004. Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dobson, Eric. 1968. English Pronunciation 1500–1700. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. von der Gabelentz, Georg. 1901. Die Sprachwissenschaft. Leipzig: Weigel. Gil, Alexander. 1621. Logonomia anglica. London: Johannes Beale. Grimm, Jacob. 1819. Deutsche Grammatik. Go¨ttingen: Dieterich’sche Buchhandlung. Hogg, Richard. 1992. A Grammar of Old English I: Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. Hogg, Richard (ed.). 1991–2001. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Richard. 1974. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: Harper-Collins. Jamieson, John. 1808. An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: Knapton et al. Jones, Sir William. 1807. Works, Vol. III. London: Stockdale and Walker. Jordan, Richard. 1968 [1924]. Handbuch der Mittelenglischen Grammatik. (Revised by H. Matthes). Heidelberg: Winter. Jucker, Andreas and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2008. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kay, Christian, Michael L. Samuels, Jane Roberts, and Irene Wotherspoon. 2009. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kemble, John Mitchel. 1835. Mr. Kemble on Anglo-Saxon Accents. The Gentleman’s Magazine 4: 26–30. Kemp, J.A (ed.). 1972. John Wallis’s Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Kidd, Colin. 1999. British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1999. Linguistic Historiography: Projects and Prospects. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kretzschmar, William A. 2009. The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Roger and John Anderson. 1975. Old English Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Luick, Karl. 1964. Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache. Oxford: Blackwell. McIntosh, Angus, Michael L. Samuels and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Mallet, Paul Henri. 1770. Northern Antiquities. (Translated by Thomas Percy) London: Carnan. Matthew, Colin, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman (eds.). 2004–2008. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/ index.jsp (last accessed 6 October 2010). Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Paul, Hermann. 1891. Principles of the History of Language. (Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, translated by H. Strong) London: Longman, Green. Rask, Rasmus. 1818. Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandlings Forlag. Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and Language. London: Cape. Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay. 2000. A Thesaurus of Old English. 2nd edn. Amsterdam: Rodopi. http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/ (last accessed 10 October 2011). Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools of Linguistics. London: Hutchinson. Samuels, Michael L. 1972. Linguistic Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1974. A Course in General Linguistics. (Translated by W. Baskin) London: Collins. Scaliger, Josephus Justus. 1610. Diatriba de Europaeorum Linguis. In: Josephus Justus Scaliger, Opuscula varia antehac non edita. Paris: Drouart. Schama, Simon. 1989. Citizens. New York: Knopf. Simpson, John (ed.). 2000– The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/ Smith, Jeremy. 1996. An Historical Study of English. London: Routledge. Sweet, Henry. 1876. Anglo-Saxon Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sweet, Henry. 1882. Anglo-Saxon Primer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sweet, Henry. 1885. The Oldest English Texts. London: Early English Text Society. Sweet, Henry. 1887. A Second Anglo-Saxon Reader: Archaic and Dialectal. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sweet, Henry. 1888. A History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Szemere´nyi, Oswald. 1999. Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thorkelin, Grimus Johannis. 1815. De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV. Poema danicum dialect anglo-saxonica. Ex bibliotheca Cottoniana Musaei britannici. Copenhagen: J.E. Rangel. Thorpe, Benjamin. 1834. Analecta Anglo-Saxonica. London: J.R. Smith. Wallis, John. 1653. Grammatica lingua anglicanae. London. Wilkins, John. 1668. Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. London. Winning, William B. 1838. Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the IndoEuropean Languages is Illustrated, and Applied to the Primeval History of Europe, Italy and Rome. London: Rivington. Wright, Elizabeth Mary. 1932. The Life of Joseph Wright. London: Oxford University Press. Wright, Joseph. 1892. Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill. London: English Dialect Society. Wright, Joseph. 1896–1905. English Dialect Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press. Wright, Joseph. 1905. English Dialect Grammar. Oxford: Frowde. Wyld, Henry Cecil. 1936. A History of Modern Colloquial English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jeremy J. Smith, Glasgow (UK)
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84. History of English Historical Linguistics: North America 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
The 19th century Literary scholars, philologists, and theoretical linguists North America and the world Sociolinguistics Lexicography and lexicology The future References
Abstract The study of the history of the English language in North America, beginning in the 19th century, was a natural extension of the interests of professors of medieval literature. In teaching, this is still largely the case. In research, however, professors of linguistics have added their areas of expertise to our collective knowledge of the subject. Because of institutional structures, most courses in English language history in North America are offered in English departments, and within those departments faculty knowledgeable about the earlier stages of the language do the teaching. Even so, an adequate course now requires attention not only to the traditional topics of phonological and morphological change, the pronunciation of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the lexicographical tradition, Renaissance debates on language, and dialectology, but also at least an awareness of advances in phonological and syntactic theory, grammaticalization, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and English as a global language.
1 The 19th century Serious scholarship on the history of the English language came late to North America. In many ways the lexicographical labors of Noah Webster (1758–1843) during the first three decades of the 19th century were less informed than those of Samuel Johnson half a century earlier, especially in light of European linguistic work that was then in progress. In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language Webster remained oblivious to the discoveries of Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and Franz Bopp. He accepted the scriptural account of the dispersion and the origin of languages, and his etymologizing has been described by Sledd and Kolb (1955: 197) as “simple fantasy”. North American scholars in comparative philology such as William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) looked to European scholarship for guidance. Whitney was Professor of Sanskrit and Instructor in Modern Languages in Yale College, and his book on the study of language was dedicated to James Hadley, Professor of Greek in Yale College (Whitney 1889). For the history of the English language, however, scholars in the United States as in England usually came to the subject from an interest in British literature, especially of the medieval period. A younger contemporary of Whitney’s at Yale, Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838–1915) published a one-volume history of the English language (Lounsbury 1879) that set the shape for the next hundred years, though with Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1313–1325
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adjustments to the definition of periods. Lounsbury was a professor in the English Department, and his scholarship included Chaucer, Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, and Robert Browning. He edited the Yale Book of American Verse. Similarly, Oliver F. Emerson (1860–1927), a professor at Cornell University, produced studies of Chaucer and the Pearl poet as well as a book on the dialect of Ithaca, New York, in addition to his one-volume history of the English language (Emerson 1894). The histories by Lounsbury and Emerson make an interesting contrast in their approach to periodization in the history of the English language, for they reflect the debates that were in the air in Victorian times (see Curzan, Chapter 79). In the first place, there was the question of when the earliest stages of the language could actually be considered “English”. Many philologists, including Lounsbury, saw the English language as beginning with what we now call “Middle English”. The terms “Anglo-Saxon” (from the middle of the 5th century to 1150, by Lounsbury’s division) and “SemiSaxon” (1150–1250) emphasized Continental origins. By contrast, Emerson 1894 followed Henry Sweet in calling the earliest stage by the name now used, “Old English”, emphasizing continuity. At the time, “Old English” and “Anglo-Saxon” were rather charged terms that connected to one’s opinion of the effects of the Norman Conquest, especially as elaborated by the British historian, E. A. Freeman, who saw the French influence as an aberration in the development of English culture. It is ironic that the Anglo-Saxons themselves called their language Englisc.
2 Literary scholars, philologists, and theoretical linguists Kemp Malone’s critique of periodization in his essay “When did Middle English begin?” four decades later (see Curzan, Chapter 79) is an example of the continuing work on the history of the English language by distinguished literary scholars. Malone’s co-editor on a mammoth and at the time authoritative Literary History of England (1946) was Albert C. Baugh, who wrote the first edition of A History of the English Language (Baugh and Cable 2012) during the late 1920s and early 1930s. For much of the scholarship on the history of the English language over the past century, it has mattered little whether the investigator was working in North America, Britain, Continental Europe, or Asia. There has been a sense of a common enterprise with generally agreed on aims and methodologies, often with two co-authors making their contributions from different continents – as in the present volume. The extensive collaboration for the Cambridge History of the English Language is another example with contributors from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States, as well as the UK. As might be expected, approaches influenced by synchronic linguistics diverged from some of the assumptions of traditional philological approaches. With the proliferation of linguistic theories following Bloomfieldian structuralism of the 1930s through the 1950s (Bloomfield 1933; also Sapir 1921), a corresponding multiplicity of histories of the language was unsurprising. The various versions of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar as well as the work of linguists who refined, extended, and opposed it – in generative semantics, lexical functional grammar, and so on (developments described in Newmeyer 1986; cf. Los, Chapter 102; Bergs, Chapter 103; Allen, Chapter 104) – have brought useful insights to the story but have never supplanted traditional philological approaches.
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Several reasons are obvious. The rapidity with which synchronic theories have changed during the past half century following Chomsky (1957) have made full-scale application to the much slower-paced philology impractical. A cautionary example is McLaughlin (1970), based on the Standard Model of Chomsky (1965). Even the adaptation of theoretical advances to contemporary English grammar has its hazards. James Sledd’s wry comment on his experience (writing in the third person) applied to many textbooks of the time: “The spectacular losses of gambling popularizers of American structuralism are now gruesomely familiar: in 1959 James Sledd published an English grammar (drafted between 1952 and 1954), which was accurately described as out of date at the meeting where its publication was announced” (Hungerford et al. 1970: 10). Current linguistic theory has usually contributed to an understanding of the history of the language on specific slices of the story more than on the overarching narrative – for example Robert P. Stockwell’s work in collaboration with others on the Old English diphthongs and on the Great Vowel Shift. Stockwell and C. Westbrook Barritt (1951) argued that the orthographic alternation of the digraphs ea ~ æ in Old English represented allophones of a single phoneme: healf ‘half ’, hægl ‘hail’. Charles F. Hockett (1959) responded that scribes write representations only at the phonemic level, but they do not systematically show all phonemic contrasts: different spellings can refer regularly to the same phoneme with exactly the same phonetic realization in different morphemes. By this view, then, different spellings cannot refer systematically to allophonic differences. A flurry of articles during the 1950s and 1960s, including Kuhn and Quirk (1953) – another example of trans-Atlantic co-authorship – provided views on an analysis that had its theoretical underpinnings in the phonology of George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith (1951). By the time James Sledd (1966) published an essay with the title, “Breaking, umlaut, and the Southern drawl”, Chomsky and Halle’s generative phonology had already dispatched Trager-Smith phonology (Chomsky and Halle [1968] being well known in pre-publication circulation), and Sledd’s glancing references to the apparently similar phenomena in Old English were mainly to state the need for such an investigation of the history. Morris Halle is arguably the most important phonologist of the second half of the twentieth century, although his ventures into historical linguistics and literary prosody have been both stimulating and controversial. Chomsky and Halle (1968) contains a chapter on “The Evolution of the Modern English Vowel System” that has met with skepticism, as has Halle’s theory of poetic meter and history of English stress in Halle and Keyser (1971). A more productive use of verse form for insights into linguistic history was Fulk (1992), which resulted in the revival of Kaluza’s Law. By Fulk’s interpretation of Max Kaluza’s insights of 1896 and 1909, patterns of vowel length in the earliest Old English texts is more systematic than has been realized, and these patterns in turn can be used as a key to dating the texts. Still, there can be no doubt that advances in theoretical linguistics, especially phonology, have stimulated a re-examination of traditional explanations of language change. Just as phonemic theory prompted Stockwell and others to offer and debate alternative analyses of Old English digraph spellings, so a decade later generative phonology was the setting for fructifying work within the theory of “lexical diffusion”: “a theory of the implementation of change by its gradual spread through the lexicon” (see Phillips, Chapter 98). The seminal study, Wang (1969), responded to the Neogrammarian program of the 19th century from a heady context of insights, hypotheses, and debates
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by Morris Halle, Paul Postal, Robert D. King, Paul Kiparsky, and others. Whereas Karl Verner had proclaimed, “There must be a rule for irregularity; the problem is to find it”, Postal (1968: 283) memorably asserted: “there is no more reason for languages to change than there is for automobiles to add fins one year and remove them the next, for jackets to have three buttons one year and two the next, etc.” Although Postal’s extreme position gained no adherents, it derived from advances in linguistic theory of the time, now generally assumed, of understanding “sound change” as “grammar change”. Subsequent work in lexical diffusion from Toon (1976) to the present, including Phillips (2006), have long since moved beyond the polemics of the 1960s. Other studies based on theoretical advances in linguistics include work in grammaticalization and lexicalization, notably Hopper and Traugott (1993) and Brinton and Traugott (2005).
3 North America and the world The lack of a national flavor in studies of historical linguistics is especially true of the earlier periods of the language. For Old English, a book like Moore and Knott (1955) in its many editions has no special American bias, and the same is true for the survey of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English in Moore and Marckwardt (1957). Mitchell and Robinson (2011) is co-authored by Bruce Mitchell, an Australian whose academic career was at Oxford University, and Fred C. Robinson, an American. Peter Baker is an American who was a student of Robinson’s at Yale, and his Introduction to Old English (Baker 2012) is “for students whose interests are primarily literary or historical rather than linguistic”. Cassidy and Ringler (1971) amply confirms that Frederic G. Cassidy, one of the most distinguished dialectologists of the 20th century, had scholarly roots in the oldest period of the language. Naturally, for the later states of the language, when national varieties and global spread become the topics of focus, proximity is a factor, and most studies of American English have unsurprisingly been done by American scholars. In 1919 H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) published The American Language (Mencken 1919), which went through four editions and two supplements. It is interesting that the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of American English was by George P. Krapp (1925), who became the co-editor of the six-volume Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Krapp and Dobbie 1931– 42). John S. Kenyon in addition to his work on Chaucer’s syntax published on American pronunciation (Kenyon 1924, also Kenyon and Knott 1949), and he wrote a classic essay on “Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English” (Kenyon 1948) that would be taken up in more detail and with better methodologies by dialectologists and sociolinguists. The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, published a journal called Dialect Notes between 1896 and 1939. Since 1925 the main journal of the society and a valuable record of the English language has been American Speech. The Society also publishes a monograph series, Publications of the American Dialect Society. Many of the members of ADS and contributors to American Speech also appear in the more recent Journal of English Linguistics. The largest project to involve American historical linguists is the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Taking as its model the linguistic atlases of European speech areas, especially French, German, and Italian, the proposal for an American atlas was made in 1928 at a meeting of the Modern Language Association. Work began in 1931 under the direction of Hans Kurath, a native of Austria
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who maintained his contact with the great tradition of Germanic linguistics after his immigration to the United States through mentors and colleagues that included Eduard Prokosch and Leonard Bloomfield. The New England area was the first to be studied, and the results were published in Kurath et al. (1939–43). During the next half century, fieldwork in other areas was carried on at varying rates, and the results of the independent but closely associated investigations appeared in Kurath (1949), Kurath and McDavid (1961), Allen (1973–76), Pederson et al. (1986–92), Carver (1987), Kretzschmar et al. (1993), and numerous articles and handbooks. Atwood (1966) was firmly in the Linguistic Atlas tradition, though a separate project. Good overviews of American dialectology are by McDavid (1983) and Preston (1993). Although “Canada” is in the name of the Linguistic Atlas project, little work on Canadian English was done under its auspices. Brinton and Fee (2001) describe the historical context that sets Canadian English apart from the two major influences upon it, British English and American English: the settlement of Newfoundland by English speakers since the beginning of the seventeenth century; the establishment of two official languages, English and French; and government settlement policy that contributed to the homogeneity of Canadian English over a huge distance, from Ontario west to Vancouver. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was compiled and edited between 1957 and 1967, originally under the directorship of C.J. Lovell, and upon his death in 1960 by Walter S. Avis, Matthew H. Scargill, and others (Avis et al. 1967; cf. Dollinger, Chapter 119). The distinctiveness of the English of Newfoundland and Labrador is attested by a separate dictionary, Story et al. (1990), and by Clarke (2010). Among the regions of English as a world language that have been investigated by American linguists the Caribbean is especially prominent, relative proximity again a seeming determinant – for example, Le Page and DeCamp (1960), Cassidy (1961), Cassidy and Le Page (1980), and Hinrichs and Farquharson (2011). Bailey and Go¨rlach (1982) is a good consolidation of much that went before and a precursor of much to come beyond the Western Hemisphere. The most prolific and distinguished scholar of South Asian English is Braj B. Kachru, whose scholarly career has been mainly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, thus giving a North American university a claim to leadership in the study of the Indian subcontinent. Among Kachru’s many indispensable writings is the recent Asian Englishes beyond the Canon (Kachru 2005).
4 Sociolinguistics Beginning with William A. Labov’s (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City, the field of sociolinguistics has given a different emphasis to dialects than that of linguistic geography. Especially in urban settings, where the variation is vertical rather horizontal across a map, this approach has been one of the most productive of the past half-century. Among many studies, some of the most prominent are Labov (1972), Mufwene et al. (1998), Eckert and Rickford (2001), Finegan and Rickford (2004), Labov et al. (2006), Rickford (1999), Penfield and Ornstein-Galicia (1985), Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2006). Turner (1949) is often cited as the classic precursor of the study of African American English, the variety that has received by far the most attention from the 1960s to the present (cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117). Lanehart (2001) and Green (2002) are excellent overviews.
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To give a list of individual features that have been investigated in African American English runs the risk of obscuring the system, regularity, and logic that have been a major theme of investigators from the earliest studies in the 1960s to the present. Many of the features are interrelated – for example, the simplification of consonant clusters in words like list (lis’) and the regular plural formation that follows: lisses, as in kiss/kisses. The aspectual system of verbs has been extensively studied, and the regularities and distinctions are well known; for example the absence of be in sentences like, “She a nurse”, compared with invariant be that marks the grammatical category of habitual or durative action: “He usually be ‘round”. Other verbal patterns include stressed been to indicate action or state in the remote past (“She been married”) and the use of done to emphasize the completed nature of an action (“He done did it”). Accounts of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features such as these in African American English have formed a vast bibliography over several decades. Interest continues both in technical linguistic analyses and in educational implications in scholarship and the popular press. Shortly after scholarly research on African American English began, the question of its origins and early development stimulated sustained debate. Over the past 40 years the discussion has been intense, and different hypotheses have gained ascendancy at different times. Until the middle of the 20th century, the “traditional dialectologist” or “Anglicist” explanation was the only one available: features of African American English were to be found in the regional dialects of Britain and Ireland (e.g., Kurath 1949). During the 1960s and 1970s, an alternative was offered, and much was written in favor of a “creole hypothesis”: current African American English results from a creole language with features of West African languages that was widely spread across the plantations of the South (e.g., Dillard 1972). More recent arguments based on newly examined sources have caused some scholars to return to a “New Dialectologist”, or “neo-Anglicist” position – e.g., Winford (1997, 1998), Poplack and Tagliamonte (2001), and McWhorter (2007). Studies in gender and language have flourished since Robin Tolmach Lakoff ’s 1975 groundbreaking work, Language and Woman’s Place. Early responses to the book often took issue with its methodology, assumptions, and implications, while finding stimulation for further research in its assertions and hypotheses. The identification of specific phonological, syntactic, and lexical features grew out of the dominant linguistic theory of the time, Chomsky’s generative grammar, as Lakoff (2004) acknowledges in her own retrospective. So too did her binary judgments that were offered by analogy with grammatical and ungrammatical patterns, the latter marked by asterisks. As a result of these methods from “core linguistics” (a term that sociolinguists have challenged), along with misreadings of what Lakoff actually said, criticism was leveled at what was seen as an oversimplification: “woman’s language” as an ensemble of tag questions and rising intonations suggesting uncertainty, a rich repertoire of color terms (mauve, magenta, etc.) suggesting trivial concerns, “empty adjectives” like divine, charming, cute, hedges of various kinds (well, kinda, I guess, etc.), the use of the intensive so, “speaking in italics” (frequent tonal accents), superpolite forms, and hypercorrect grammar. This last feature was the source of a paradox in William Labov’s somewhat later findings on language change: women seem to be both at once more conservative in upholding correct forms and more innovative in adopting new forms. As with studies of African American Vernacular English, scholarship on women’s language began with synchronic descriptions to determine the facts and then undertook to consider the
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diachronic implications for the history of the language. Although the impetus for studies of gender and language began in North America during the 1970s, at present more historical work is being done in Europe, using databases, for example, of Early English correspondence. Meanwhile, analyses of present-day usage have become more nuanced. For example, Tannen (1993) shows the relativity of forms and traces how a single pattern, such as those catalogued as woman’s language, can have quite different meanings. Along the way, of course, empirical studies in conversational analysis that were not available to Lakoff in the early 1970s have increased our understanding immensely – and have expanded the methods of data collection from judgment by introspection only that was the practice of the time.
5 Lexicography and lexicology To return to the topic with which this survey began, Noah Webster and dictionaries. The publication in 1961 of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Gove 1961) was a lexicographical triumph and a marketing disaster. What would now be called a “database” of 10,000,000 citation slips was twice the number used to compile the original Oxford English Dictionary. Yet a misunderstanding of “structural linguistics” among reviewers in newspapers and magazines, not helped by the representation of Philip B. Gove, the editor, caused many to see a weakening of the moral fabric of the nation in the failure of the dictionary to legislate usage. The journalistic response to Webster’s Third is collected in Sledd and Ebbitt (1962), along with instructive guidance by the editors on the history and intent of English lexicography. Headlines for the reviews indicate the dictionary’s reception, ranging from giddy wit – “Dig Those Words” (New York Times), “Good English Ain’t What We Thought” (Chicago Daily News) – to the apocalyptic – “The Death of Meaning” (Toronto Globe & Mail), “New Dictionary Cheap, Corrupt”, a review that managed to link the dictionary to “bolsheviks … firing squads, mass trials, progaganda, etc. (Castro)” (Detroit News). Finally, among the large-scale projects that will continue to contribute to our understanding of the history of the English language are three lexicographical undertakings that have involved many contributors over time, and several in-depth studies of words and lexicology. The Middle English Dictionary was a half-century in the making at the University of Michigan, whose press has published many studies in English historical linguistics over the years. At the University of Toronto, the Dictionary of Old English is still in progress under the editorship of Antonette diPaolo Healey (1986–). And Fred G. Cassidy, who was a scholar of great distinction in areas already noted in this survey, was the mover behind A Dictionary of American Regional English (Cassidy and Hall 1985–2012), completed after his death. The study of English language lexicography and lexicology has been advanced in the United States by the scholarship of John Algeo (for example, Algeo 2010; Algeo and Algeo 1991), whose expertise on vocabulary enhanced the textbook that was originally written by Thomas Pyles and published in 1964. That book went through several editions under the co-authorship of Pyles and Algeo, and now continues under Algeo’s name. Textbooks for use in history of the English language courses often serve this dual function of summarizing the work of a wide range of specialists and also contributing insights from the particular point of view of the authors – for example, Baugh and Cable (2002), Millward (1996), Gelderen (2006), Brinton and Arnovick (2011), and Lerer (2007).
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6 The future The mention of lexicographical databases at the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan is a reminder that the history of the English language thrives in settings that have archives of primary material. Similarly, the University of Georgia with its holdings of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada is a center of research. Although electronic access to databases around the world is becoming easier, proximity always offers encouragement. Proximity to a distinguished department of linguistics has been a boon to English department philologists, who are often down the hall from theoretical linguists at places like the University of California at Los Angeles and at Berkeley, Indiana University, Stanford University, and the Universities of Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and British Columbia. The institutional relationship is sometimes an uneasy one, in part because departments of Linguistics in North America were carved out of the traditional language departments after which the interests of the separate entities diverged. A succinct example is the schedule for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America and the Linguistic Society of America. For decades the two organizations met in the same city at the same time, but in recent years commuting between sessions of the simultaneous conventions has not been possible. A more encouraging development for history of the English language scholars is the biennial conference SHEL (Studies in the History of the English Language), founded at UCLA in 2000 on the model of the well-established biennial conference in Europe, the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL). Since its inception, SHEL has drawn wide participation by English and Linguistics scholars alike in conferences at the Universities of Washington, Michigan, Northern Arizona, and Georgia, and at Banff, Alberta, Canada. Laments and exhortations concerning the rift between traditional philology and newer linguistics go back to the rise of structuralism in the mid-20th century. Now the rift is so fixed that laments are seldom heard; the situation is accepted as given. Publications in phonology, syntax, semantics, stylistics, and pragmatics pour from Linguistics departments in the United States at an increasing rate, though it is often difficult to fit these into a general history of the English language. A perusal of the MLA International Bibliography confirms the activity in technical studies. Those pages also suggest that even in traditional philology, little work is coming out of English departments in North America, the bulk of activity now flowing from Europe and Asia. Some of this scholarship continues distinguished traditions in the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Poland, Japan, and other countries. Meanwhile, in the United States the focus of departments of English often gives little encouragement to either traditional philology or technical linguistics. Still, the history of the English language is an intrinsically interesting subject, and its anecdotal aspects are appealing to a wide general audience. Even English departments in the United States have the ability to adapt to demand, and the best courses, one is led to think from observation and experience, are undergirded by research and expertise at a specialized level. The kind of re-integration of “philology” and “linguistics” that Minkova (2004) urges is a hopeful vision for the future.
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7 References Algeo, John [1964] 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th edn. Boston: Wadsworth. Algeo, John and Adele S. Algeo. 1991. Fifty Years “Among the New Words”: A Dictionary of Neologisms, 1941–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, Harold B. 1973–76. The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. 3 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amos, Ashley Crandell. 1980. Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Medieval Academy of America. Atwood, Elmer Bagby. 1966. The Regional Vocabulary of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Avis, Walter S., Matthew H. Scargill, and Charles J. Lovell (eds.). 1967. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: Gage. Bailey, Richard W. 1996. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bailey, Richard W. and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.). 1982. English as a World Language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baker, Peter S. [2003] 2012. Introduction to Old English. 3rd edn. Norton, Massachusetts: WileyBlackwell. Baron, Dennis. 1986. Grammar and Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable [1935] 2012. A History of the English Language. 6th edn. Newyork: Pearson. Blockley, Mary. 2001. Aspects of Old English Syntax: Where Clauses Begin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. and Margery Fee. 2001. Canadian English. In: John Algeo (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 6, English in North America, 422–440. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2011. The English Language: A Linguistic History. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cannon, Christopher. 1998. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. and Joan Houston Hall (ed.). 1985–2012. Dictionary of American Regional English. 6 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. 1961. Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica. London: Macmillan. Cassidy, Frederic G. and Robert Brock Le Page (eds.) [1967] 1980. Dictionary of Jamaican English. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. and Richard N. Ringler [1891] 1971. Bright’s Old English Grammar & Reader. 3rd edn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row. Clarke, Sandra. 2010. Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Dillard, J. L. 1972. Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: Random House. Donoghue, Daniel. 1987. Style in Old English Poetry: The Test of the Auxiliary. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eble, Connie. 1996. Slang & Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Eckert, Penelope and John R. Rickford (eds.). 2001. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliason, Norman E. 1956. Tarheel Talk: An Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Emerson, Oliver Farrar. 1894. The History of the English Language. New York: Macmillan. Finegan, Edward and John R. Rickford (eds.). 2004. Language in the USA: Themes for the Twentyfirst Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, John H. 1996. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press. Friend, Joseph H. 1967. The Development of American Lexicography, 1798–1864. The Hague: Mouton. Fulk, Robert D. 1992. A History of Old English Meter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. van Gelderen, Elly. 2006. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gove, Philip B. (ed.). 1961. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam. Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halle, Morris and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1971. English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse. New York: Harper & Row. Healey, Antonette diPaolo. 1986– Dictionary of Old English. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. Hinrichs, Lars and Joseph T. Farquharson (eds.). 2011. Variation in the Caribbean: From Creole Continua to Individual Agency. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hockett, Charles F. 1959. The stressed syllabics of Old English. Language 35: 575–597. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott [1993] 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hungerford, Harold, Jay Robinson, and James Sledd (eds.). 1970. English Linguistics: An Introductory Reader. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman. Kachru, Braj B. 2005. Asian Englishes beyond the Canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kennedy, Arthur G. 1927. Bibliography of Writings on the English Language. Cambridge and New Haven: Harvard University Press and Yale University Press. Kenyon, John S. [1924] 1997. American Pronunciation. 12th edn. by Donald M Lance and Stewart A Kingsbury. Ann Arbor: Wahr. Kenyon, John S. 1948. Cultural levels and functional varieties of English. College English 10: 1–6. Kenyon, John S. and Thomas A. Knott. 1949. A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam. King, Robert D. 1969. Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Krapp, George P. 1925. The English Language in America. 2 vols. New York: Century. Krapp, George P. [1909] 1969. Modern English, Its Growth and Present Use. Revised by A. H. Marckwardt. New York: Ungar.
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Krapp, George P. and Eliot van Kirk Dobbie (eds.). 1931–42. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Kretzschmar, William A., Virginia G. McDavid, Theodore K. Lerud, and Ellen Johnson. 1993. Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Sherman M. and Randolph Quirk. 1953. Some recent interpretations of Old English digraph spellings. Language 29: 143–156. Kurath, Hans, Miles L. Hanley, Bernard Bloch, Marcus L. Hansen, and Julia Bloch. 1939–43. Linguistic Atlas of New England. 3 vols. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University. Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kurath, Hans and Raven McDavid, Jr. 1961. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis (eds.). 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (eds.). 2006. Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach [1975] 2004. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Revised and expanded edition by Mary Bucholtz. New York: Oxford University Press. Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.). 2001. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Le Page, Robert Brock and David DeCamp. 1960. Jamaican Creole. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lerer, Seth. 2007. Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Lighter, Jonathan E., J. Ball, and J. O’Connor. 1994–2002. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Random House. Lounsbury, Thomas R. [1879] 1894. A History of the English Language. 2nd edn. New York: Holt. Machan, Tim William. 2003. English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2004. Positioning ideas and gendered subjects: “Women’s Language” revisited. In: Lakoff, 136–142. McDavid, Raven I, Jr. 1983. American English: a bibliographical essay. In: Jefferson B. Kellogg and Robert H. Walker (eds.), Sources for American Studies, 229–272. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. McLaughlin, John C. 1970. Aspects of the History of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. McWhorter, John H. 2007. Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malone, Kemp. 1930. When did Middle English begin? In: J. T. Hatfield et al. (eds.), Curme Volume of Linguistic Studies, 110–117. Philadelphia: Waverly. Marckwardt, Albert H. 1958. American English. New York: Oxford University Press. Mencken, H. L. [1919] 1936. The American Language. 4th edn. New York: Knopf. Millward, Celia M. [1989] 1996. A Biography of the English Language. 2nd edn. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace. Minkova, Donka. 1982. The environment for Middle English open syllable lengthening. Folia Linguistica Historica 3(1): 29–58. Minkova, Donka. 1991. The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Minkova, Donka. 2004. Philology, linguistics, and the history of [hw] ~ [w]. In: Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 7–46. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson [1965] 2011. A Guide to Old English. 8th edn. Norton, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell. Momma, Haruko and Michael Matto (eds.). 2008. A Companion to the History of the English Language. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Moore, Samuel [1919] 1957. Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections. Revised by Albert H Marckwardt. Ann Arbor: Wahr. Moore, Samuel Sanford B. Meech, and Harold Whitehall. 1935. Middle English dialect characteristics and dialect boundaries. University of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature 13: 1–60. Moore, Samuel and Thomas A. Knott [1919] 1955. The Elements of Old English. 10th edn. Ann Arbor: Wahr. Mufwene, Salikoko S., John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (eds.). 1998. AfricanAmerican English: Structure, History and Use. London: Routledge. Newmeyer, Frederick J. [1980] 1986. Linguistic Theory in America. 2nd edn. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Pederson, Lee, Susan Leas McDaniel, Guy Bailey, and Marvin Bassett (eds.). 1986–92. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. 7 vols. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Penfield, Joyce and Jacob L. Ornstein-Galicia. 1985. Chicano English: An Ethnic Contact Dialect. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Phillips, Betty S. 2006. Word Frequency and Lexical Diffusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell. Postal, Paul M. 1968. Aspects of Phonological Theory. New York: Harper & Row. Preston, Dennis R. 1993. American Dialect Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pyles, Thomas. 1952. Words and Ways of American English. New York: Random House. Rickford, John R. 1999. African American Vernacular English. Oxford: Blackwell. Robinson, Orrin W. 1992. Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Sledd, James. 1966. Breaking, umlaut, and the Southern drawl. Language 42: 18–41. Sledd, James and Gwin J. Kolb. 1955. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sledd, James and Wilma R. Ebbitt. 1962. Dictionaries and That Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers. Chicago: Scott, Foresman. Starnes, DeWitt Talmage and Gertrude Noyes. 1946. The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Stockwell, Robert P. and C. Westbrook Barritt. 1951. Some Old English Graphic-Phonemic Correspondences. Norman, Oklahoma: Battenburg. Stockwell, Robert P. and C. Westbrook Barritt. 1961. Scribal practice: some assumptions. Language 37: 75–82. Stockwell, Robert P. and Donka Minkova. 1988. The English Vowel Shift: problems of coherence and explanation. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Gero Bauer (eds.), Luick Revisited, 355–394. Tu¨bingen: Gunter Narr. Stockwell, Robert P. and Donka Minkova. 1999. Explanations of sound change: contradictions between dialect data and theories of chain shifting. Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 30: 83–102. Story, George M., W. J. Kirwin, and John David Allison Widdowson (eds.) [1982] 1990. Dictionary of Newfoundland English. 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand. New York: Morrow.
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Tannen, Deborah (ed.). 1993. Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1994. The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance. In: Deborah Tannen (ed.), Gender and Discourse, 165–188. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toon, Thomas. 1976. The actuation and implementation of an Old English sound change. Proceedings of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States 3: 614–622. Trager, George L. and Henry Lee Smith. 1951. An Outline of English Structure. Norman, Oklahoma: Battenburg. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. A History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1992. Syntax. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1066, 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing changes as a cause of residue. Language 45: 9–25. Webster, Noah. 1828. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. New York: Converse. Whitney, William D. [1867] 1889. Language and the Study of Language. New York: Scribner. Winford, Donald. 1997. On the origins of African American Vernacular English – a creolist perspective (Part I: the sociohistorical background). Diachronica 14: 305–344. Winford, Donald. 1998. On the origins of African American Vernacular English – a creolist perspective (Part II: the linguistic features). Diachronica 15: 99–154. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes [1998] 2006. American English: Dialects and Variation. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolfram, Walt and Erik R. Thomas. 2002. The Development of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas Cable, Austin, TX (USA)
85. History of English Historical Linguistics: Germany and the German-speaking countries 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction The 19th and early 20th century: the rise of English historical linguistics in Germany The 20th century Summary References
Abstract This essay gives a description of the rise of English historical linguistics in Germany and the German-speaking cultural area in the late 19th- and early 20th century, presenting information on important scholars at several German universities and their works in English philology and medieval studies. It is shown how historical comparative linguists Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1325–1340
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and the Neogrammarians contributed significantly to the advance of studies in English historical linguistics, particularly to new developments in historical phonology but also in morphology and syntax. The essay further deals with the influence of structuralism and generative grammar on English historical linguistics in Germany in the 20th century. Finally, recent developments within the framework of corpus-based sociolinguistic research are described, although, on the other hand, for the last decades we have been facing a growing trend towards modern language studies and a constant decline in the study of earlier stages in the history of English.
1 Introduction English historical linguistics enjoys a rich and fascinating history in Germany and the German speaking cultural area. Especially for the 19th and early 20th centuries it is difficult to confine this scholarly discipline to Germany alone since borders were much more flexible and amenable to change than today. Furthermore, professors and students were very mobile. For example, the first ordinarius (full professor) for English Language and Literature at Humboldt University Berlin, Julius Zupitza (1844–1895), had studied in Breslau and Berlin. After his habilitation (the German postdoctoral lecturer qualification) in Breslau he taught for several years at Vienna University before he was appointed ordinarius in Berlin. Such a career was no exception at all at that time. Another example is Alois Pogatscher (1852–1935). He had studied Classical Philology and German Studies in Graz, and German Studies, Anglistics and Romanistics in Vienna. In 1889, he received his PhD from the University of Strasbourg. In the same year he was appointed to a professorship for English Studies at the German University in Prague. Later he became Karl Luick’s (1865–1935) successor in Graz (for biographical references cf. Haenicke and Finkenstaedt 1992; for the first professorial positions in the New Philologies at German-speaking universities cf. Auroux et al. 2000–01: 1244–1247). German university teachers also taught courses in the Netherlands, and Dutch scholars were trained in Germany. Thus the German scholar Karl Daniel Bu¨lbring (1863– 1917) was appointed professor of English Language and Literature in Groningen before he changed to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t Bonn. On the other hand, the first professor of Comparative Philology in Groningen, Barend Sijmons (1853– 1935), had been trained in Leipzig (Supheert 1996: 11–12). German universities generally attracted students from abroad, and so it happened that American or English graduate authors published their dissertations or articles in German journals, often written in the German language. These aspects of mobility and internationalization have to be kept in mind when talking about the “German” tradition in English historical linguistics. In my chapter I will first be discussing the beginning of English historical linguistics in Germany. It will be shown how philological studies and historical comparative linguistics grew together, and which universities became important centers for the study of English historical linguistics. I will then turn to 20th century pre- and post-war and look at the role that this topic played as a university subject up to the 1980s in East and West Germany. During that period we also notice the change of English historical linguistics as part of English philology, which in the 19th century was basically concerned with the history of language and literature, or medieval studies (cf. “Das
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eigentliche Gebiet der englischen wie jeder modernen Philologie ist ohne Zweifel […] die Literaturgeschichte und die Geschichte der Sprache” (Vie¨tor 1910 [1887]: 5) [‘The real area of English philology, as well as of any other modern philology, is without doubt […] the history of literature and the history of language’]), to a subdiscipline of linguistics with its various theoretical approaches. Finally, with an examination of the current status of English historical linguistics at German universities we find that, together with English medieval studies, it appears to be constantly marginalized (cf. also Johnston 2007).
2 The 19th and early 20th century: the rise of English historical linguistics in Germany English historical linguistics in Germany has its origin in two different but nevertheless interrelated fields of study, English philology and historical-comparative linguistics, which, in the last quarter of the 19th century, were both flourishing disciplines at particular German universities. English philology, as mentioned above, was a historical discipline focussing on the history of English language and literature, while historicalcomparative linguistics was chiefly concerned with the comparison of ancient IndoEuropean languages with the aim of verifying family relationships and reconstructing the proto-language.
2.1 English philology The first chairs for English philology at German universities were established in the 1870s (cf. Christmann 1985a, 1985b). Up to that time professors or lecturers had usually taught several modern Western languages and their literatures. Now they could concentrate on English alone. However, they were still equally familiar with medieval English literature as well as with the history of the English language, since philology was concerned with the study of the history of language and literature. Chairs for English Philology were founded at almost all universities in Germany, although it can be argued that they contributed to a different extent to the progress of this new academic discipline in the German-speaking countries. The most important centers for research and teaching in the field of English Philology were Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Go¨ttingen, Halle-Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Jena, Kiel, Leipzig, Marburg, Mu¨nchen, Mu¨nster, and Strasbourg. Research was largely dominated by textual studies and editorial practice and concentrated on the earliest stages of the language. Early publications were primarily critical editions of previously unpublished manuscripts and contained introductions, prefaces, glosses, commentaries, annotations, afterwords, etc., and as such provided invaluable material for further studies. Other works dealt with phonological and grammatical features of individual texts, addressing questions of authenticity, chronology or textual transmission, such as the dissertations by H. Noelle (1870) on Die Sprache Des Altenglischen Gedichts. Von der Eule und Nachtigall, by Wilhelm Heuser (1887) on Die Mittelenglischen Legenden von St. Editha und St. Etheldreda: Eine Untersuchung u¨ber Sprache und Autorschaft, or by Friedrich Mohr (1888) on Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu den mittelenglischen Legenden
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aus Gloucestershire. There are also metrical studies of Old or Middle English poetry, investigations of syntactic or morphological phenomena in English historical texts, etymological analyses, and treatises on foreign influence on the English vocabulary.
2.1.1 Main centers of study and important scholars At the Prussian University of Breslau Eugen K. Ko¨lbing (1846–1899) had been professor of English Philology from 1880 to 1899. Under his direction, English philology in Breslau gained a high reputation and appreciation among scholars and students nationwide. Ko¨lbing has not only been acknowledged for his brilliant critical editions of medieval texts, but also for his contribution to a productive exchange of ideas among English philologists by founding the journal Englische Studien. Furthermore, he encouraged numerous doctoral students to produce critical editions and analyses of predominantly Middle English texts in which problems were discussed concerning the authorship or sources of a text, its authenticity, and questions about its transmission, major lexicographic or grammatical features, the influence of Latin or Old French originals, meter and rhyme, the motifs of a text, or dialect traits. Another stronghold in English philology at that time was the University of Go¨ttingen. Here Arthur Napier (1853–1916) had taught from 1881 to 1883 before he went to Oxford University. Later on, the famous Lorenz Morsbach (1850–1945) held the chair of English Philology from 1902 to 1921. He belonged to the early German Anglicists who changed from classical philology to English language and literature. Morsbach taught everything from linguistics to literature and from Old English to Modern English. He also supervised PhD theses on English literature, but in his research he concentrated on English historical linguistics. His Mittelenglische Grammatik (1896) and his editions of Old and Middle English texts have become classics (cf. Schabram 2001: 304). At the University of Heidelberg Johannes Hoops (1865–1949) taught from 1896 until his death in 1949. His Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (1911–1940), to which he contributed almost 100 articles himself, was used by two generations of scholars as a reliable reference book. Though his main interests lay in the field of etymology, he also published a Beowulf commentary (1932), and he edited 49 volumes of Englische Studien, 21 volumes of Englische Textbibliothek, and 88 volumes of Anglistische Forschungen. 75 doctoral dissertations were written under his supervision, quite a number of them by American students (cf. Hausmann 2003: 238). At Kiel University Ferdinand Holthausen (1860–1956) was professor of English Philology from 1900 to 1925. He has become famous for his lexicographical research. His Altenglisches etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch (1934) appeared in its third edition (a reprint of the second edition) in 1974. Under Holthausen’s guidance numerous dissertations were written mainly on lexicological or lexicographical topics, such as Old English prefixes, changes in the English lexicon, the Old English names for ships, buildings, vessels, kinship terms, body parts, jewelry, and others. In Marburg it was Wilhelm Vie¨tor (1850–1918), who made the English chair of Marburg University one of the most respected in Germany. Vie¨tor, who taught at Marburg from 1884 till his death in 1918, is mainly known for his engagement in the reform movement in modern language teaching, and for his phonetic and orthoepic works, which he applied to practical language classes. Nevertheless, he also published on related topics in the history of English, including Anglo-Saxon runes. His main interest,
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however, lay in aspects of the more recent history of English. He examined contemporary grammars of the 16th and 17th century in order to derive information about the pronunciation of that time, and he edited Early Modern English texts with phonetic transcription, as for instance A Shakespeare reader in the old spelling and with a phonetic transcription (1906). It is thus not surprising that several of the dissertations that he supervised also dealt with problems of orthography and phonological features in historical texts. The most prominent scholar in English philology at Mu¨nster University was probably Eugen Einenkel (1853–1930). He had been head of the English department since 1886 and in 1892 he was appointed the first extraordinary professor of English Philology there. His teaching subjects comprised the history of English literature up to the present, English historical linguistics as well as practical language classes. For more than 30 years he was in charge of editing the journal Anglia, to which he himself regularly contributed articles. His merits, especially in the field of English historical syntax, are still appreciated today. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-University Strasbourg was the first German-speaking university that established a special chair for English Studies. Its holder was Bernhard ten Brink (1841–1892) from 1872 to 1892. He is thus an important founding father at the beginning of English philology in Germany. During his early years at Strasbourg he also taught Romance literatures and Dutch language and literature, but then he concentrated more and more on English philology. His extensive publications particularly on the history of English literature and on Chaucer also appeared as translations in England.
2.1.2 The first female scholars There were only male university teachers of English philology in Germany in those early times, and even among the students women were very rare. It is interesting to note that the first female scholars who received their PhDs in English philology at a German university included American students at the University of Heidelberg: Erla Hittle, from Richmond, Indiana, graduated in 1900 with a work on the Old English preposition mid. One year later Louise Pound (1872–1958) finished her doctoral dissertation on Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and XVI Century. Both dissertations were supervised by Johannes Hoops and published in the series Anglistische Forschungen. Louise Pound had first applied to Leipzig, where she was rigorously rejected. Heidelberg was obviously more tolerant in this respect. After she had finished her PhD in Heidelberg Pound returned to the United States and enjoyed a lifelong career as professor of English at the University of Nebraska. She even became the first woman president of the Modern Language Association (Krohn 2007: 87–98). Among Hoops’s other female doctoral students were Ida Baumann (1875–?) and Lilian Luise Stroebe (1875–?). Ida Baumann took her doctorate in 1902 with a dissertation on Die Sprache der Urkunden aus Yorkshire im 15. Jahrhundert and Lilian Luise Stroebe finished her PhD in 1904 on Die altenglischen Kleidernamen. Since at that time German universities admitted only those female students that wanted to become teachers, Stroebe emigrated to the United States, where she started an excellent career as an American Germanist.
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2.2 Historical comparative linguistics and the Neogrammarians The 19th century saw the rise of Indo-European studies in Europe and particularly in Germany. Apart from Sanskrit and the classical languages, the older Germanic “dialects” became the central objects of comparative philology practiced by Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm, and Eduard Sievers. Franz Bopp (1791–1867) can be regarded as the founding father of historical-comparative Indo-European linguistics. In his principal work Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen, Altslavischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (1833–1852) he laid the foundation for a consolidated interest in the older stages of the Germanic languages as well. Bopp was professor of Oriental Literature and General Linguistics at Berlin from 1821 to his death in 1867. From 1841 Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) also gave lectures in Berlin, and in 1876 Johannes Schmidt (1843–1901) was appointed chair of Comparative Linguistics and founded the “Berlin School” of philological Indo-European studies, in contrast to the Leipzig Neogrammarian school. This situation also had an impact on the philologies of the modern languages. In 1876 Julius Zupitza (1844–1895) was called from Vienna, where he had been extraordinarius for North Germanic languages, to become the first chair (ordinarius) for English Philology in Berlin. He had studied classical and German philology, in addition to Sanskrit and “Neuere Sprachen” (‘Modern Languages’). In Berlin he taught Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, Old French, Old Provencal, as well as Old and Middle English. By teaching English as a medieval language he managed to enhance its scientific prestige and contributed to the recognition of English philology as a university subject. With his publications covering the whole area of English studies he gained a high reputation on a national and international scale (Ko¨nig 2003: 2118; cf. also Wu¨lker 1896). After Zupitza’s death in 1895, Alois Brandl (1855–1940), who had been ordinarius of English Philology at Strasbourg, succeeded him in Berlin. Although he published in all fields of English historical linguistics, his primary interest was in the area of Shakespeare studies. From 1901 to 1921 he was president of the German Shakespeare Society. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Leipzig became the center of the Neogrammarian school in linguistics. Philologists were no longer satisfied with the collection and descriptive comparison of historical language data. They were now searching for explanations of language change comparable to explanations in the natural sciences. Scholars like Georg Curtius (1820–1885), August Leskien (1840–1916), and later Karl Brugmann (1849–1919) and Eduard Sievers (1871–1922) attracted many ambitious young people, not only from Germany, to study historical linguistics there. Windisch (1887: 31) claims that “Over the years, about 340 students attended Curtius’s seminars on grammar; approximately 60 of them were foreigners, of whom U.S. citizens made up the largest percentage.” Marie Krohn (2007: 87) points out that “[d]uring the 19th century, German universities set the standard for scholarship in the Western world and attracted at least 10,000 American students”. Thus, at the end of the 19th century Leipzig University had indeed turned into a world center of linguistics. During that time, in 1875 the first chair of English Philology was also established at Leipzig. Its holder was Richard Paul Wu¨lcker (from 1884: Wu¨lker) (1845–1910), the founder of the journal Anglia. With the foundation of the “Englisches Seminar” in 1891 he established English as an academic subject in its own right at Leipzig. Wu¨lker was primarily a historical linguist in the Neogrammarian tradition, but he also published
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a two-volume history of English literature. Furthermore, he was a diligent editor of Old and Middle English texts. Students at universities like the one in Leipzig had the advantage of being able to attend courses not only in their chosen philology, but also courses in general or comparative linguistics offered by the representatives of the Neogrammarian school. Hertel confirms that Die Vorlesung u¨ber Phonetik [bei Sievers] insbesondere wurde nicht nur von Studierenden der Sprachwissenschaft und der Germanistik, sondern auch von solchen der neueren Sprachen besucht, die hier fanden, was sie in den Vorlesungen u¨ber ihr eigentliches Studiengebiet vergeblich suchten. (Hertel 1923: 21) [Not only students of linguistics and German studies went to hear the lectures about phonetics [by Sievers], but also those who studied modern languages as they found here what they were missing in the lectures on their actual area of study.]
One of the most famous graduates of the Leipzig School and representatives of the Neogrammarian movement was certainly Hermann Paul (1846–1921). He had finished his PhD and his habilitation in Leipzig before he was appointed professor of German Language and Literature in Freiburg and later in Munich. Together with Wilhelm Braune (1850–1926), professor of German Language and Literature in Gießen, who had also obtained his habilitation from the University of Leipzig, he founded the journal Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur in 1874. In Munich Hermann Paul led the “Seminar fu¨r Deutsche Philologie” from 1893 to 1916. Besides, there had already existed a “Seminar fu¨r neuere Sprachen und Literaturen” since 1876 at Munich University, whose two chairs, one in Romance and one in English, were separated in 1896 with Joseph Schick (1859–1944), a distinguished medievalist and text editor, becoming professor of English Philology. He was a member of the council of the Early English Text Society, and had been holder of the Kaiser Wilhelm chair at Columbia University in New York in 1911/12. Halle, Jena, and Bonn are also universities with a great tradition in historical comparative linguistics. In Halle it was August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), known as the founder of modern etymology, and later his student Berthold Delbru¨ck (1842–1922), one of the Neogrammarians, from whom the philologies received valuable impulses. With the foundation of the English Seminar in 1876 Karl Elze (1821–1889) was appointed ordinarius of English Philology, succeeded by one of his students, Albrecht Wagner (1850–1909), in 1887. In 1870 Delbru¨ck moved to Jena, where he was appointed as chair in Sanskrit and Comparative Linguistics. A year later Eduard Sievers was also called to Jena as professor for German Philology, but he also lectured in Romanistics and Anglistics. Delbru¨ck and Sievers became close friends there. They taught several courses together, Delbru¨ck concentrating on the historical part and Sievers focusing on phonetics (Lu¨hr 2008). When Sievers left Jena in 1883, he was succeeded by Friedrich Kluge (1856–1925), who became ordinarius for German and English Philology. The great philologist and Shakespearean scholar Nikolaus Delius (1813–1888) was lector and later ordinarius for Indian, English and Romance Philology at the University of Bonn. One of his pupils, Jakob Schipper (1842–1915), who was to become professor of English Philology in Vienna, even called him the “founding father of English
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Philology in Germany” (Haenicke and Finkenstaedt 1992: 65). Delius’s tradition was later continued in Bonn by Moritz Trautmann (1842–1920), who had been called from Leipzig in 1880. He held the first independent chair for English Philology in Bonn till his retirement in 1912. Thus the first scholars who had shown a profound interest in the Anglo-Saxon language (as one of the old Germanic dialects) and its literature came from the field of historical-comparative Indo-European linguistics and in particular from Germanic studies, like the Vienna professor of German Karl Tomaschek (1828–1878), who also offered courses on Old English; and Ludwig Ettmu¨ller (1802–1877), who, during his time as a schoolmaster for German language and literature at the Zurich gymnasium, provided the first alliterative translation of Beowulf and a well-known Lexicon Anglo-Saxonicum; and Christian W. M. Grein (1825–1877), who obtained his doctorate for a critical edition of the Hildebrandslied and later edited a Bibliothek der Angelsa¨chsischen Poesie in kritisch bearbeiteten Texten und mit vollsta¨ndigem Glossare herausgegeben (1857–64). Henry Morley (1897: 116) pays tribute to these authors in the following way: “Let it be gratefully remembered that in work of this kind they have done far more than we. Mu¨llenhoff, Ettmu¨ller, Leo, Bouterwek, Grein, Heyne, Wu¨lcker, Sievers, Ten Brink, Ebert, and a dozen more, are names honoured in England wherever English is well studied”. One can say that it was the mutual inspiration between historical comparative and Neogrammarian studies on the one hand, and the increasing academic specialization in the philologies on the other, that led to the flourishing of English historical linguistics in the late 19th and early 20th century in Germany. Inspired by new insights into the mechanisms of sound change and language change in general and by an increasing availability of text editions, the early 20th century witnessed a flood of phonological, morphological and syntactic analyses of Old and Middle English texts.
2.2.1 Studies in phonology The question of sound laws and the regularity of sound change was widely discussed in the Neogrammarian era. New ideas about mechanisms and principles of sound change also gave inspiration to scholars in English philology, and as a consequence there appeared a large number of publications dealing with particular sounds in Old and Middle English texts, often referring to specific dialects. Handbooks and “Grammars” of Old English are mainly concerned with the sound structure. Of special interest for English historical philologists of that time were the sound changes that took place in Middle English and later in Early Modern English. This trend was still accelerating in the early 20th century. Henry Cecil Wyld in his History of English in 1914 tells his readership that his book is just a short primer for students and that for detailed studies they should consult any of the German works: No one will expect to find in each of the three chapters devoted respectively to Old, Middle, and Modern English Phonology the degree of minuteness which would belong, properly, to special grammars of these phases of our language. The student who is particularly interested in any of these will naturally turn to the pages of Sievers and Bu¨lbring, to Morsbach’s Mittelenglische Grammatik, still unfortunately incomplete, to the works of Horn and Jespersen, all of which are first-hand and first-rate books. (Wyld 1914: 5–6)
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In his preface Wyld also expresses his obligation to mainly German scholars from whom he has drawn information: “[…] to Sievers and Bu¨lbring in Old English, to Morsbach, Kluge, ten Brink, and Frieshammer in Middle English, to Luick, Horn, Jespersen, Vie¨tor, and Zachrisson in the Modern period” (Wyld 1914: 6). When Sievers in 1876 published his Grundzu¨ge der Lautphysiologie (later to be retitled Grundzu¨ge der Phonetik), he laid the theoretical groundwork for a flood of systematic and detailed phonetic analyses of earlier stages of the English language. His own study of Old English sounds is included in his great classical Angelsa¨chsische Grammatik, which appeared in 1898 in Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte, edited by Wilhelm Braune and which has passed through numerous editions since then. Its final version, revised by Karl Brunner (1887–1965), was published in 1963. Bu¨lbring’s Altenglisches Elementarbuch, 1. Teil: Lautlehre (1902) is still being cited today especially with regard to Old English dialectal sound features. Likewise, Morsbach’s Mittelenglische Grammatik (1896) has gained a similar international reputation and is repeatedly quoted in modern studies (Minkova 1991: 16). Karl Luick’s publications have become classics in English Historical Phonology, and especially his Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache (1914) has been a standard reference book for every student of English historical linguistics up to the present time. Luick was professor of English and German philology at the universities of Graz and Vienna. He edited the Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Englischen Philologie and published on a variety of topics in English historical linguistics, mainly focusing on metrical and sound features. Wilhelm Horn (1876–1952), another outstanding expert in historical phonology, was the author of Untersuchungen zur neuenglischen Lautgeschichte (1905) and Historische neuenglische Grammatik, Teil I, Lautlehre (1908). Later, his monumental work Laut und Leben, a history of the phonological system of English from 1400 to 1950, was posthumously edited by Martin Lehnert (1910–1992) in 1954. Wilhelm Vie¨tor had also contributed to the growing literature on phonetics in the late 19th century with his Elemente der Phonetik und Orthoepie des Deutschen, Englischen und Franzo¨sischen (1884).
2.2.2 Studies in morphology and syntax Inflectional morphology is an essential part of Old English grammars or historical grammars of the English language in the 19th and early 20th century. Such grammars were written for students and teachers of English as a help to understand Old or Middle English texts, to see the changes of English and to understand modern forms, especially deviation of modern pronunciation from the written form, cf. for example Ko¨rner and Socin’s Angelsa¨chsische Laut- und Formenlehre (1886) or Sievers’s Angelsa¨chsische Grammatik (1898). Max Kaluza’s Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (1890/ 1906) may serve as a typical example of a historical grammar of the English language of that time. It concentrates on West Saxon and modern standard forms. In many aspects Kaluza’s grammar resembles a modern traditional handbook on the history of English: it contains a chapter on historical events in the development of English beginning with Indo-European languages, Germanic languages and the settlement of the British Isles, including various language contact situations and their impact on the English language. Another chapter provides basic knowledge of phonetics, including some general statements on sound change based on Neogrammarian positions. Each of the following
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major chapters on the three periods in the development of English includes phonological and morphological descriptions. The book is based on many other previous texts, especially English works, such as Henry Sweet’s A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, I. (1892); Walter W. Skeat’s Principles of English Etymology, I. The Native Element (1887); Walter Low’s The English Language. Its History and Structure (1897); J. C. Nesfield’s English Grammar Past and Present (1898); T. Northcote Toller’s Outlines of the History of the English Language (1900); John Lees’s An English Grammar on Historical Principles (1902); Henry Bradley’s The Making of English (1904); and Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury’s History of the English Language. Revised and Enlarged Edition (1900). As with the Old English Grammars (or Anglo-Saxon Grammars, as they are usually called), which concentrate on phonology and inflectional morphology, we can find a number of dissertations that describe particular Middle English dialects in terms of their phonological and morphological characteristics, such as Otto Danker’s Lautund Flexionslehre der mittelkentischen Denkma¨ler (1879), a dissertation that appeared in Strasbourg, and Arnold Hoffmann’s Laut- und Formenlehre in Reginald Pecock’s Repressor (1900), a doctoral thesis from Greifswald. Apart from such broad studies of sounds and structures, there are numerous more specific investigations of individual morphological or syntactic phenomena, often based on a meticulous analysis of examples in particular historical texts. Most of these works focus on the Old English period, but there are also Middle English and Early Modern English studies, and even investigations of general historical changes covering the whole development of English, like Bu¨lbring’s (1888) dissertation on the Geschichte der Ablaute der starken Zeitwo¨rter innerhalb des Su¨denglischen. Other topics are the use of the subjunctive; the function of the verbal prefix ge-; the syntax of prepositions, pronouns and numerals; the use of articles; forms of clause combining; sentence negation; the use of tenses; verbal aspect and aktionsart. Syntactic works often occur together at the same time under the guidance of a particular professor. In 1908, for example, at least three dissertations on relative clauses appeared under Brandl’s guidance in Berlin; around 1907/08 Ferdinand Holthausen supervised several dissertations on the syntax of prepositions in Kiel; and in the late 19th century under Wu¨lker’s direction in Leipzig there appeared a whole flood of works related to the syntax of the verb in various Old English poems. Old English syntax also dominated the dissertations supervised by Felix Lindner (1849–1917) in Rostock in the early 20th century. For an extensive bibliography on early works on English historical syntax cf. Visser (1963–1973).
3 The 20th century 3.1 The influence of Structuralism and Generative Linguistics Lass (1969: V) claims that after structuralism was born, a dichotomy arose between “philologists” and “linguists”. This might be true if one presupposes that linguists are only interested in the language system (Saussure’s langue), its elements and their functions, while philologists also include literary, cultural, and psychological aspects. In English historical linguistics, however, at least in Germany, this dichotomy developed only very slowly. Up to the middle of the 20th century, the new historical “linguists”
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were practically non-existent in Germany. There is a general opinion that German scholars were not directly and immediately influenced by structuralist ideas. In this context Coseriu even coined the term “country without structuralism” (Coseriu [1988] 1992: 165, Fn. 43). The reason for this is often seen in the historical tradition of German universities that made it difficult for a descriptive approach like structuralism to gain a foothold (cf. Robins 1973: 84). Helbig (1986: 34) relates it to the fact that on the one hand German scholars were too proud of their Neogrammarian tradition and, on the other hand, that they were largely isolated in the time of fascism and especially during World War II, so that Saussure’s work was not widely known in Germany. A German translation of the Cours de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale did not appear until 1931 and even then no more than 500 copies were sold. Nevertheless, Ehlers (2005) provides sufficient evidence that German scholars were indeed familiar with structuralist ideas about language, at least with those of the Prague School. Wilhelm Horn was such a scholar who, at the beginning of his career, can still be considered a philologist who studied the history of English sounds in a rather traditional way, though influenced by Neogrammarian ideas, cf. his dissertation Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der englischen Gutturallaute (1901) or his Untersuchungen zur neuenglischen Lautgeschichte (1905). His later publications, like Sprachko¨rper und Sprachfunktion (1921) or his most famous work Laut und Leben, which was edited by Martin Lehnert in 1954, clearly display the structuralist influence of the Prague School. Thus, besides relying on psychological arguments in the Neogrammarian tradition, Horn assigns the relationship between form and function an important role in language change. As Ehlers (2005: 208) points out, there had been regular personal correspondence between Horn and several members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which also included an exchange of articles and books. Functional explanations of sound change, however, were not completely new in English historical linguistics. Horn himself when talking about the modern “phonological method” maintains that it has well been known in historical linguistics that sounds do not change without an interrelation to one another, and he mentions Karl Luick, who had emphasized this idea repeatedly (Ehlers 2005: 205). According to scholars of the Prague School, Luick had already come to the conclusion that language change is teleological and that sounds depend on each other – which reflects a beginning of a phonological way of thinking. This means that Luick had obviously already suspected that the interrelation between sounds and their functions in the language system plays an important role in sound change. However, he was bound by his Neogrammarian heritage of psycho-physiology, so that he could not develop a consistent conception of the system (Ehlers 2005: 220). Scholars of the next generation, in particular those focussing on sound changes in English, increasingly applied structural and functional principles to their studies of linguistic changes or their descriptions of historical stages of the language, cf. e.g. Horn’s former assistant Martin Lehnert, who published on Sprachform und Sprachfunktion im “Orrmulum” (1953) and The Interrelation between Form and Function in the Development of the English Language (1957), and Rolf Berndt (1927–1996), one of Lehnert’s doctoral students, who, inspired by Horn’s ideas about the interrelation between form and function in linguistic change, wrote his dissertation on Form und Funktion des Verbums im no¨rdlichen Spa¨taltenglischen: eine Untersuchung der grammatischen Formen und ihrer syntaktischen Beziehungsbedeutungen in der grossen sprachlichen Umbruchsperiode (1954).
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The Austrian linguist Hans Ernst Pinsker (1908–1987), a former student of Luick’s, on the one hand clearly continued Luick’s tradition, while on the other he also brought in structuralist ideas. In his Historical English Grammar (1959), which was to become a standard handbook for generations of German-speaking students, he combined the Neogrammarian view of regular sound change with new concepts from structural linguistics. The first structuralist analysis of the tense system in medieval English can also be found in the works of an Austrian linguist, namely in Gero Bauer’s (1938–1988) habilitation thesis, supervised by Herbert Koziol (1903–1986), another former student of Luick’s, in Vienna, Studien zum System und Gebrauch der ‘Tempora’ in der Sprache Chaucers und Gowers (1968). Bauer was also interested in historical phonology and the relationship between graphemic and phonemic systems. Furthermore, he was the first to offer courses on structural and generative linguistics at an Austrian university. The extent of the influence of generative grammar (cf. Los, Chapter 102) on English historical linguistics in Germany has been even lower than that of structuralism, which must have been due to the fact that the new theoretical approach aimed at an understanding of language competence and was not primarily meant to explain language change. Only recently has there evolved a particular research tradition with a focus on English historical syntax in a generative framework at Dutch universities and sporadically in Germany as well. However, most of the current studies in English historical linguistics in the German speaking countries follow the general trend of corpus linguistics (cf. Kyto¨, Chapter 96) and are empirical, relying on large electronic text corpora.
3.2 English historical linguistics in a divided Germany Up to the 1950s the original concept of philology whereby language and literary studies were closely interconnected was for the most part maintained. However, as early as during and after World War I we saw a drastic decline in publications in the field of English historical linguistics in Germany. This decline continued well after World War II with an additional shift, on the one hand, towards literary studies, and on the other towards Modern English descriptive and applied linguistics. Thus we now witness a change from English philology, including medieval studies and historical linguistics, to a more specialized orientation to literature or linguistics, with the latter more and more focussing on the modern varieties of English. Although a few chairs of English historical linguistics and medieval studies still existed in the second half of the 20th century, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany (e.g. in Aachen, Munich, Go¨ttingen, Berlin, Eichsta¨tt, or Freiburg), and English historical linguistics and medieval studies are still pursued regularly in several other universities, albeit on a more limited scale (Augsburg, Bochum, Bonn, Du¨sseldorf, Erlangen, Gießen, Heidelberg, Mu¨nster, Osnabru¨ck, Regensburg, Trier, Tu¨bingen, Wu¨rzburg), most of the junior staff have not had enough training in the older language and literature to keep the tradition alive. Helmut Gneuss (2005: 39) points out that as early as the 1920s German philologists, who had still been trained in the medievalist tradition, directed the attention of their audience to the living English language of the 20th century and its varieties, including those outside the British Isles. He refers to Heinrich Spies’s (1873–1962) Kultur und Sprache im neuen England (1925) and mentions Spies’s Go¨ttingen colleague Karl
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Wildhagen (1873–1945), who used to be an expert in Anglo-Saxon culture and medieval manuscripts, but became famous only through his Englisch-deutsches, deutsch-englisches Wo¨rterbuch/English-German, German-English Dictionary (1938). And it was Karl Luick, of all people, who in a programmatic speech at a meeting of Neophilologists in Breslau in 1930 demanded that future linguistics should especially deal with the modern language. At East German universities English historical linguistics lost its importance much more drastically and sooner than in the Federal Republic. English studies were reduced to teacher training or translation studies. In the early 1950s, the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Martin Luther University at Halle were the only places remaining in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that kept some continuity with regard to the prewar tradition in English historical linguistics. In Berlin, Martin Lehnert managed to continue Horn’s tradition despite the new academic policy that forced university teachers to concentrate on the study of Present-day English. In Halle, Hans Weyhe (1879–1955) continued to teach English historical linguistics, even after his retirement, till 1953. His successor was Gerhard Dietrich (1900–1978), who held the chair of English Linguistics in Halle till 1968. Although the history of English was one of the subjects that he taught, his major research interests were in the areas of Modern English phonetics and syntax. Among the next generation of English linguists the glorious historical tradition is only marginally visible. Former students of Martin Lehnert, for instance, retained a special interest in English historical linguistics, but were forced by university curricula and academic policy to direct their capacities to Modern English. The only scholar who can be seen as an exception in that respect is Rolf Berndt, who was appointed professor of English linguistics at Rostock University. He is the only East German English historical linguist who kept publishing on topics in the field of English historical linguistics and gained a high reputation even outside the former GDR.
3.3 Recent developments Based on previous research conducted by Deppe and Seidel (1989), it can be argued that Old and Middle English were still taught in the late 1980s in many departments of German universities; however, they were no longer, as a rule, compulsory for students of English. Today, 20 years later, the situation is even worse. Only a few universities in Germany still have an ordinary chair of English historical linguistics or medieval studies, and these chairs often do not even focus on linguistics, but rather concentrate on medieval literature, or exclude linguistics completely; or they are only partly historical and also cover Modern English linguistics or language variation in their denomination. Several of the chairs are currently vacant and at best temporarily replaced. There are some universities that have at least an extraordinary professor or a lecturer who teaches courses in English historical linguistics, or a professor of English linguistics who also has some research interest in the history of English. What has happened to English historical linguistics at those universities that had such a glorious past in the late 19th and early 20th century? The former German universities of Breslau (Wroclaw) and Strasbourg are now Polish and French. Both universities still have English studies, but English historical linguistics is not a central topic.
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In Halle, Leipzig and Jena, English historical linguistics was marginalized after the foundation of the German Democratic Republic. In Halle, the historical English tradition survived till 1965 with Gerhard Dietrich (cf. Section 3.2.). However, his pupils and successors, like his other East German colleagues, concentrated their research and teaching on Modern English. Only after the reunification of Germany was English historical linguistics revived at least to a certain extent in the eastern part of the country, and thus since 2001 there has again been a chair for English linguistics at Halle which also covers a diachronic perspective. But generally, as in many places, scholars tend to concentrate on Early Modern English, in particular on Shakespeare’s language, as well as on language variation and change. These topics are mainly studied from a corpus linguistics perspective, and with a pragmatic, sociolinguistic focus, which is currently the major trend in English historical linguistics in Germany (on current trends in English historical linguistics cf. also Lenker and Sauer 2007). In Leipzig, which was once a world center of studies in English historical linguistics, Levin Ludwig Schu¨cking (1878–1964) was the last Anglicist to achieve important results in all fields of English philology. When he left Leipzig in 1944, the focus of English studies shifted completely to Modern English and American studies. Today, particular attention is given to varieties of English and to applied linguistics. The English department at Jena also had a famous chair from 1925 to 1943, Hermann Flasdieck (1900–1962), a pupil of Morsbach’s. He was editor of the journal Anglia for many years and also one of its most prolific contributors. Altogether he published more than 270 scholarly texts. Nevertheless, after 1945 and the division of Germany, English philology in Jena experienced the same fate as the other East German English departments. Only today, in contrast to many other German universities, a chair for older English language and literature has been re-established, even though with a strong focus on medieval literature. The English departments in West German universities generally retained their tradition in English historical linguistics longer than those in the former GDR, for instance at the Free University of Berlin and at the universities of Bonn, Heidelberg and Munich. At Kiel, Mu¨nster and Marburg, English linguistic research focuses rather on Modern English, dialectology, multilingualism, and corpus linguistics. This situation makes it hard to share Lenker and Sauer’s (2007: 42) rather optimistic view of the future of English historical linguistics in the German-speaking countries.
4 Summary English historical linguistics had a glorious past in Germany and the German-speaking world. Although it is always difficult to say anything about the future, one thing is clear: the versatile philologist of the 19th and early 20th century no longer exists. With an increasing specialization in all sciences, English Studies, too, has become more diversified. Today there are literary scholars, cultural scholars, and there are linguists. The number of linguists in English departments of German universities is comparatively small in relation to scholars in the fields of literature and cultural studies. And again, the proportion of historical linguists ranges extremely low among this small group of English linguists. The 20th century also witnessed a growing separation between general linguistics and the individual philologies. Linguists are organized according to their major research
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approaches and methodologies rather than with regard to the languages that they study. There are applied linguists, generative linguists, sociolinguists, corpus linguists, etc., so that English (historical) linguists are often more closely related to general linguistics departments or to linguists in other philologies than to their literary colleagues in the English departments. Unfortunately, chairs of medieval literature are also largely missing from German universities. This development brings with it a danger of different theories of language change becoming the dominant research aim in historical linguistics, while the original authentic textual sources are increasingly neglected (see also Lowe, Chapter 71). Although one could argue that with the advance of corpus linguistics and the compilation of large electronic corpora, (historical) linguists are provided with sufficient authentic text material to enable them to base their findings on empirical evidence, the problem is that in such cases one has to rely on the choice of texts, on their classification and tagging. What is missing is the scholar who is able to read an authentic manuscript and who has enough contextual knowledge to derive information about its authorship and regional and temporal background. What is even more important is that at the moment, the last generation of English historical linguists in the traditional sense in Germany has already retired, or is about to do so, and successors are either simply not there, or with the introduction of the new bachelor and master studies, the chairs are being re-functionalized into chairs of language variation, applied linguistics, or computational linguistics. One can only hope that many of the young staff who have received their doctorate in English historical linguistics will be inspired by what is going on in this field in other countries, like in Poland, Finland, Spain, or Japan, and, remembering the glorious period of English historical linguistics in Germany, will manage to revive a discipline that is on the verge of being wiped out.
5 References Auroux, Sylvain, E.F. Konrad Ko¨rner, and Hans-Josef Niederehe (eds.). 2000–01. History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present = Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Christmann, Hans Helmut. 1985a. Romanistik und Anglistik an der deutschen Universita¨t im 19. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Christmann, Hans Helmut. 1985b. Klassische, germanische, englische und romanische Philologie der ersten Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld von Universita¨t, Schule und Ministerium. Zeitschrift fu¨r Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 38: 551–558. Coseriu, Eugenio [1988] 1992. Einfu¨hrung in die Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Tu¨bingen: Francke. Deppe, Ulrike and Kurt Otto Seidel. 1989. Die historischen Sprachstufen in den Studienordnungen der Fa¨cher Deutsch, Englisch, Franzo¨sisch und Russisch. Fremdsprachenlehren und Lernen 18: 130–158. Ehlers, Klaas-Hinrich. 2005. Strukturalismus in der deutschen Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gneuss, Helmut. 2005. Englische Spachwissenschaft und Media¨vistik: Vom Blick zuru¨ck zu den Aufgaben fu¨r Gegenwart und Zukunft. In: Gabriele Knappe (ed.), Englische Sprachwissenschaft und Media¨vistik: Standpunkte – Perspektiven – Neue Wege, 37–50. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Haenicke, Gunta and Thomas Finkenstaedt. 1992. Anglistenlexikon: 1825–1990; Biographische und bibliographische Angaben zu 318 Anglisten. Augsburg: University of Augsburg. Hausmann, Frank-Rutger. 2003. Anglistik und Amerikanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Helbig, Gerhard. 1986. Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut. Hertel, Johannes. 1923. Als Eduard Sievers nach Leipzig kam. In: Lachmann, Fritz R., Niels Hansen, and Hans von Maltzahn (eds.), Zum Fu¨nfzigja¨hrigen Jubila¨um des Germanistischen Instituts Leipzig 1873–1923, 13–31. Leipzig: Insel. Johnston, Andrew James. 2007. The Crisis of Medieval English Studies in Germany: Problems and Perspectives. In: Ansgar Nu¨nning and Ju¨rgen Schlaeger (eds.), English Studies Today: Recent Developments and New Directions, 67–94. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Ko¨nig, Christoph (ed.). 2003. Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Krohn, Marie. 2007. Louise Pound: The 19th Century Iconoclast Who Forever Changed America’s Views about Women, Academics and Sports. Clearfiel, UT: American Legacy Historical Press. Lass, Roger. 1969. Approaches to English Historical Linguistics: An anthology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Lenker, Ursula and Hans Sauer. 2007. English Historical Linguistics in the German-Speaking Countries: Continuations and New Departures. In: Ansgar Nu¨nning and Ju¨rgen Schlaeger (eds.), English studies today: recent developments and new directions, 41–65. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Lu¨hr, Rosemarie. 2008. Von Berthold Delbru¨ck bis Ferdinand Sommer: Die Herausbildung der Indogermanistik in Jena. Paper presented in a series of lectures on The History of the Sciences of Antiquity, 9th January 2008, Jena. http://www.indogermanistik.uni-jena.de/dokumente/Weitere/ delbrueck.pdf (last accessed 31 January 2012). Minkova, Donka. 1991. The History of Final Vowels in English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Morley, Henry. 1897. English Writers. An attempt towards a history of English literature. London/ Paris/New York/Melbourne: Cassell and Company. Mu¨ller-Schwefe, Gerhard. 1990. Zur Erinnerung an Tu¨bingens erste Professorin Hildegard Gauger (geb. 1890). Tu¨binger Universita¨tszeitung 43: 19–20. Robins, Robert H. 1973. Ideen- und Problemgeschichte der Sprachwissenschaft. Mit besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Athena¨um. Schabram, Hans. 2001. Lorenz Morsbach (1850–1945). In: Arndt Karl, Gerhard Gottschalk, Rudolf Smend, and Ruth Slenczka (eds.), Go¨ttinger Gelehrte: die Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Go¨ttingen in Bildnissen und Wu¨rdigungen 1751–2001. Vol. 1. Go¨ttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Supheert, Roselinde. 1996. Dutch Anglicists from 1880 to 1960. Meesterwerk: Berichten van het Peeter Heynsgenootschap5: 9–21. http://www.peeterheynsgenootschap.nl/Mpdf/M5-jan1996.pdf (last accessed 3 February 2011). Vie¨tor, Wilhelm [1887] 1910. Einfu¨hrung in das Studium der Englischen Philologie. 4th edn. Marburg: Elwert. Visser, Fredericus Theodorius. 1963–1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill. Windisch, Ernst. 1887. Georg Curtius: Eine Charakteristik. Berlin: S. Calvary. Wu¨lker, Richard. 1896. Julius Zupitza. Anglia 18: 129–131. Wyld, Henry Cecil. 1914. A Short History of English. London: John Murray.
Ilse Wischer, Potsdam (Germany)
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86. History of English Historical Linguistics: The Netherlands and Belgium 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction The Netherlands Belgium The future References
Abstract The Dutch-speaking area can boast a philological tradition in historical English linguistics that goes back to the 17th century. This tradition is continued in the Netherlands to the present day, now focusing on the history of English linguistics. At the same time, this chapter shows that in the last 30 years new research traditions to historical English linguistics have been developed, stemming mainly from a generative framework in the Netherlands, and from a functional, cognitive one in Belgium. These new research traditions have produced innovative research in areas like diachronic syntax, grammaticalization, mechanisms of change, historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, lexicology, and corpus linguistics.
1 Introduction Interest in historical English linguistics goes back all the way to the 17th century in the Dutch-speaking area, with Franciscus Junius the Younger as its best-known pioneer. For a long time this interest was embedded in the philological tradition, which started to bloom in particular in the second half of the 19th century. In this tradition many scholarly editions were produced as well as studies in etymology, historical lexicography, historical phonology, historical syntax, and runology. Over the last three decades this situation has changed drastically, with many Belgian and Dutch universities having downsized or altogether abandoned English philology as a separate subject of research. Simultaneously, however, more theoretically informed approaches on historical linguistics of English have been growing, both generative and functional. Recently, these approaches have also been increasingly combined with corpus-based research. This new vein of research led to numerous studies in the field of grammaticalization studies, the study of mechanisms of change, historical pragmatics, and recent changes in English. The following outline describes the various research traditions, first in the Netherlands (Section 2), and then in Belgium, including an account on the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium (Section 3). It concludes with a preview on what the future brings (Section 4).
2 The Netherlands The study of historical linguistics of English has a long history in the Netherlands (see Kooper 1990; Supheert 1996; Loonen 2000), extending all the way back to the 17th Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1341–1354
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century. The first to study Old English in the Netherlands was probably Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), who is credited with having been the first to see that the Old English Genesis consisted of two different poems. Though not the first, the real founding father of Old English studies was Franciscus Junius the Younger, professor (of Hebrew!) at the University of Leiden. Junius was the first Dutchman to publish important Old English texts like the poems of the Cædmon manuscript – now commonly referred to as the Junius Codex – (Junius 1655) and the four gospels in Anglo-Saxon and Gothic (Junius 1665). When he fell ill in 1673, he left for his favorite town, Oxford, taking with him all his manuscripts and all his unpublished writings. When he died in 1677, he bequeathed his entire collection to the Bodleian Library, where it still is. Among the manuscripts he took was also his etymological dictionary (Etymologicum Anglicanum), which was not published before 1743. After Junius, interest in the history of the English language cropped up in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the grammarian Lambert ten Kate, the Groningen professor of Theology Annaeus Ypey, the Frisian Albert ten Broecke Hoekstra (who called himself a born Anglo-Saxon), the Frisian scholar and collector Joast Halbertsma, and Johannes Pieter Arend (1842), who wrote a book on the history of Old English literature. Reviving the interest of Junius, the University of Leiden established the first chair of Old Germanic languages (including Old English) in 1877. The chair was first occupied by Cosijn, a very active scholar of Old English philology. Besides a widely used grammar of Old English (Cosijn 1888) he also produced several papers on Old English poetry, dealing with grammatical and lexical problems (1896, 1898). Initially though, the tradition of studying the history of English remained to a large extent outside the universities. Famous examples are Poutsma, teacher of English at an Amsterdam grammar school (Stuurman 1987: 191) and author of the monumental A grammar of late Modern English (Poutsma 1914–29), or the popular introduction to Old English by Girvan and Deuschle (1931). Other historical grammarians who for a considerable time mainly worked outside the university were van der Gaaf – appointed in Amsterdam in 1930 – and Fijn van Draat – appointed in Utrecht in 1924. Both are known for their pioneering studies in diachronic syntax, van der Gaaf especially for his The transition from the impersonal to the personal construction in Middle English (van der Gaaf 1904; other influential studies are e.g. van der Gaaf 1917, 1931), and Fijn van Draat (1902) for The loss of the prefix ge- in the modern English verb and some of its consequences. The Dutch scholarly tradition outside the university culminated in the publication of the classic An historical syntax of the English language in three parts by Visser (1963–73), 86 years old when the final volume was published, and former professor of English at the University of Nijmegen (Bronzwaer 1976). Only gradually did the study of English enter the curricula of the Dutch universities. The first university to establish a chair in English language was Groningen, in 1885. In 1912 followed the University of Amsterdam (UvA), in 1923 Nijmegen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), Leiden in 1950, the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) in 1954, and finally Utrecht in 1957. Yet until the 1970s, these English departments were largely one-man shows, and this meant that the area of study varied between linguistics and literature, depending on who was professor at the time. The main areas of historical linguistics covered in the universities until about 1970 were historical phonology, lexicography, and general philology. Historical phonology saw the publication of two widely cited monographs, an early one by Bu¨lbring (1902, Groningen), and one at the end
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of the philological period, by Prins (1972, Leiden), who also did some early work in the domain of lexicography (Prins 1941). More noteworthy in this second domain was the influential Groningen historical lexicographer Osselton (1958, 1998), who divided his academic career equally between universities in Holland (Groningen, Leiden) and England (Southampton, Newcastle). He was also a founder member of the European Association for Lexicography. Another lexicographer originating in Groningen was Swaen (see e.g. Swaen 1943), who was the first to fill the new chair in English language at the UvA (Amsterdam) in 1912. Related to this lexicographical work is the novel study on semantic change by Schreuder (1929). More general philological work includes several editions and studies on the syntax and style of particular Old and Middle English texts or authors (van der Meer 1929; Harting 1937; Vleeskruyer 1953; Kerkhof 1966). From the sixties onwards, the situation changed considerably. The Netherlands were one of the countries that picked up very quickly and thoroughly the novel framework of generative grammar. As is still the case today, practitioners of generative grammar mostly focus on synchronic analyses of contemporary language. So traditional philology went out of fashion. For a while historical linguistics of English stayed at a low level. However, in the eighties the discipline revived in two different ways. First a new tradition of English historical sociolinguistics emerged. This tradition includes the history of English linguistics, with scholars from Nijmegen (e.g. Birrell 1966) and Groningen (Dekker 1999). The center of this tradition is Leiden, with Bremmer’s studies on the early modern interest in the Low Countries for the Old Germanic languages, particularly Old Frisian and its relation to Old English (Bremmer 1988, 1989, 1998), and Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s research on 18th-century grammarians (2000, 2003). Related to her work on the history of linguistics, Tieken-Boon van Ostade is also a research expert in historical sociolinguistics, concentrating on the development of varieties of English between 1500 and 1800, focusing on gender and standard versus non-standard language (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1982, 1987, on the use of do; see also Bax 2000). In 2000, she set up the electronic journal called Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics. She is also the co-ordinator of the current project The codifiers and the English language, which aims to trace different aspects of the process of linguistic influence: between individuals, within social networks, from grammars and grammarians on other grammars as well as on speakers and writers of English (TiekenBoon van Ostade 2011; Henstra 2008; Tieken-Boon van Ostade and van der Wurff 2009; Navest 2011). Also coming from this Leiden tradition is Auer, who is currently assistant professor at Utrecht (Auer 2005 on the use of the subjunctive). The second area is that of more theoretically informed approaches to historical linguistics. The Netherlands were quite early in applying the generative framework to diachronic studies. Unlike the first, this area of research does not have a clear center, with influential scholars affiliated at one point to all Dutch universities: Koopman and Fischer at UvA (Amsterdam), van Kemenade (Utrecht, Leiden, VU, since 2000 RU Nijmegen) and Los (UvA, VU, now also at RU Nijmegen), and, for some years, van der Wurff in Leiden (now at Newcastle University), and van Gelderen in Groningen (now at Arizona State University). In the eighties and nineties these scholars did much innovative work on the diachronic syntax of Old and Middle English. Special attention has been paid to word order phenomena and its relation to case, clitics, and information structure, starting with van Kemenade’s seminal work (1987), and continued in numerous papers and edited books (Koopman 1990; Hulk and van Kemenade 1995;
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Koopman 1996, 1997; van Kemenade and Vincent 1997; van Kemenade 1997; van der Wurff 1997, 1999; Los 2002; van Kemenade and Los 2006; de Haas’s current project on the morphosyntax of Northern English, e.g. de Haas 2008). This tradition also included work on mechanisms of change and grammaticalization (van Kemenade 1992, 1999, 2000). The interaction between word order and discourse structure continues to be researched in the on-going project Word order and information structure: Discourse options after the loss of verb second (van Kemenade and Los 2008; Los 2009; Dreschler 2010; see van Kemenade and Los, Chapter 94). Recently, this research theme has also been linked to typological distinctions such as that between bounded and unbounded language use (Los 2012). Other studies include research on impersonal constructions (Fischer and van der Leek 1983, 1987), on particle verbs (Los 2003; Elenbaas 2003, 2007), and current research on the history of light verbs in the West Germanic languages (Elenbaas 2011). In particular van Gelderen continues to publish on the history of English within newer versions of generative grammar such as the minimalist framework (van Gelderen 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004a, 2004b). The handbook on early English syntax (Fischer et al. 2000), co-written by Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman and van der Wurff, can be seen as a culmination point of this tradition. Unlike van Gelderen, other Dutch historical linguists did not generally endorse the newest transformations of the generative framework, and their publications often show that they are mainly interested in the interaction between function and form, an interest they share with more functional approaches to language. In this vein, Fischer criticized from the beginning Lightfoot’s (1979) generative view on reanalysis as radical grammar change between generations as being too simplistic (Fischer and van der Leek 1981). In searching for a more complete model of syntactic change, she has published widely on the infinitive (Fischer 1989, 1991, 1995), a subject she shares with Los (1998, 2005); on syntactic change related to changes in word order (Fischer 1994; 2000b); on grammaticalization (Fischer 2000a; Fischer et al. 2000); on iconicity (especially analogy) (Fischer 2007), and the interaction between grammaticalization and iconization in language change (Fischer 1999). And, together with Ljungberg, Fischer is the driving force behind the on-going international Iconicity Research Project (Fischer and Ljungberg 2011). The Netherlands have also been generally very active in providing international platforms for presenting research in the field of English historical linguistics. From the beginning, the two Dutch international academic journals Neophilologus (founded 1916) and English Studies, A Journal of English Language and Literature (founded 1919) featured many papers on the history of English. Organizations like the Vereniging voor Oudgermanisten (‘Association for scholars of Old-Germanic languages’) and the Netherlands Society for English Studies keep their members informed on matters touching historical English linguistics. Also, Dutch universities have organized some major international conferences on historical English linguistics, like the Fourth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 4, Amsterdam 1985; see Eaton et al. 1985) and the Third International Conference on the English Language in the Late Modern Period 1700–1900 (LMEC 3, Leiden 2007). Finally, long-term international exchange of expertise has crystallized in a series of symposia on the history of English syntax, alternating between a UK and a Netherlands location, called the York-Newcastle-Holland Symposia on the History of English Syntax, whose latest edition (SHES 9) was held in Leiden.
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3 Belgium The historical study of the English language started in Belgium with the educational reform of 1890 (Lambrechts 1952; Dor 1990). Previously the arts department only existed as a preparatory curriculum for law school, and focused, as far as language studies go, almost exclusively on the classic languages (Latin and Greek). With the reform came the first real arts departments at the four universities of the time, which included a section on English. Yet the degree to which historical linguistics was practiced varied greatly from university to university, and was largely dependent on the individual scholars who were hired at the time. The strongest tradition of historical linguistics of English was established in Ghent, with the coming of Logeman, a Dutchman who studied in Oxford, London and Utrecht (Blancquaert 1936). Much in the spirit of 19th century philology, Logeman is mainly to be remembered for the considerable number of editions of Old English manuscripts and fragments he produced. Most of these have only ever been edited by him (e.g. 1888, Logeman 1889). He was also the first to bring to attention the 11th century inscription known as the Brussels cross, which was re-examined some 50 years later by another famous Belgian scholar (D’Ardenne 1939). Logeman’s successor, Van Langenhove, was a knowledgeable historical phonologist (e.g. Van Langenhove 1925), but was perhaps more important for being one of the first to defend the viability and necessity of a linguistics department of its own, that should be concerned with the link between language, culture and psychology (Meir 1944). Van Langenhove also published some thought-provoking studies on runology (e.g. Van Langenhove 1938), which may have been the source of inspiration for Derolez (1954), whose Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition remains required reading for runologists to this day. A second university to establish a strong philological tradition was the University of Lie`ge, starting with Hame´lius in 1904. His edition of Mandeville’s travels (Hame´lius 1919–23) remains invaluable. His successor D’Ardenne is famous for her editions of various early Middle English texts in the so-called AB-dialect (D’Ardenne 1961, 1977; D’Ardenne and Dobson 1981). After D’Ardenne, the chair of medieval English was held by scholars whose primary interest was literature, but who also made occasional contributions to historical lexicography, either glossography (Mertens-Fonck 1960) or lexical borrowing (De Caluwe´-Dor 1979; Dor 1992). From the 1970s onwards, the study of historical linguistics of English shifted away from Ghent and Lie`ge. The university of Brussels – which split in 1969 into a Flemish (VUB) and a Walloon (ULB) part – had only produced little philological work so far (an exception is de Reul 1901). Between 1970 and 2010, Peeters taught various OldGermanic languages as well as comparative Germanic grammar both at ULB and VUB, and published mainly on etymology, usually against the background of general Old Germanic etymology (e.g. Peeters 1989). After his retirement in 2010, historical linguistics of English has been abandoned as a separate subject by ULB and VUB. Other universities gradually moved away from philology towards theoretically informed approaches to historical linguistics. This renewed interest in historical linguistics is not entirely absent in Ghent, with some work in the field of historical pragmatics (Defour 2008; Van Bogaert 2011). However, the two research centers in this domain have been, in that order, Antwerp and Leuven. In 1971, Louis Goossens, pupil of Derolez, became professor of the newly founded Antwerp University UIA. Initially he
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continued the philological tradition of edition-making (Goossens 1974). Soon however, he turned to newer, theoretical approaches to linguistics, and started publishing on English modals from a functional perspective (Goossens 1982), also making use of new theoretical frameworks such as Dik’s functional grammar (Goossens 1987). Working at the other Antwerp university, UFSIA (as of 2003 the two are merged, together with RUCA, a third one, into University of Antwerp) was Dekeyser, who published numerous articles on historical morphology (e.g. Dekeyser 1975 on number and case; Dekeyser 1980 on gender), syntax (Dekeyser 1984 on relativizers, Dekeyser 1990 on preposition stranding), and lexicology (Dekeyser 1986). From 1971 onwards, he also taught courses related to the history of English at the University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven). Currently, van der Auwera mainly focuses on typological research, but also intermittently continues the Antwerp tradition with some diachronic work on diachronic syntax (van der Auwera 1984), and on the history of non-central modals (Noe¨l and van der Auwera 2009), including supervision of Taeymans’s (2006) diachronic study on need. Currently, the main center of diachronic research and teaching on English is the University of Leuven. While history of English has been a subject at Leuven since 1893, it was not until recently that diachronic linguistics of English has really become the core research field of the English linguistics research group. Before, historical linguistics was practiced only occasionally. The first to do so was also the first professor of English, Bang-Kaup. Originally an orientalist, his background made him into a skilled philologist. In 1902 Bang-Kaup set up the series Materialien zur Kunde des a¨lteren Englischen Dramas, in which he introduced diplomatic editing principles for 16th- and 17th-century English dramatic works (De Smedt 1994), and to which he also contributed himself (Bang-Kaup and Brotanek 1903). Between Bang-Kaup and Dekeyser hardly any diachronic research was done in Leuven. The turnaround occurred in 1997 with the coming of Cuyckens. Research projects by Cuyckens and his collaborators concentrate in particular on grammaticalization in the domain of complementation (Cuyckens and Verspoor 1998; De Smet and Cuyckens 2005, 2007; De Smet forthc.), including related work on mechanisms of change (De Smet 2009; Petre´ 2012). Other work includes research on lexical and morphosyntactic change from a construction grammar perspective (Petre´ 2010 on change in the copular paradigm, Petre´ and Cuyckens 2008 on prefixes), and the interaction between language-external and language-internal change (Van De Pol 2012). Work within this domain also shows strong affinities with current work on diachronic syntax in the Netherlands by people like Fischer, Los and van Kemenade (see Section 2). Research projects on synchronic linguistics of English also increasingly introduced a historical dimension, focusing in particular on grammaticalization in the domain of the noun phrase, with numerous publications on grammaticalized uses of adjectives (Breban and Davidse 2003; Davidse and Vandewinkel 2008; Davidse et al. 2008; Breban 2010a, 2010b; Ghesquie`re and Van De Velde 2011; Ghesquie`re and Davidse 2011), on complex noun phrases (Brems 2003) and on modal adjectives (Van linden 2012), as well as some edited volumes on grammaticalization and related issues such as subjectification (Davidse et al. 2010; Breban et al. forthc.). In addition, Leuven has also acquired expertise in the compilation of historical corpora and databases, with the text collection Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended Version) (CLMET(EV) see De Smet 2005), the on-going corpus project Leuven English Old to New (LEON, see Petre´ 2011), and the Diachronex project (Cuyckens 2011),
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which has developed a learning tool that allows students to gradually advance from the analysis of artificial material – textbook exercises – to natural corpus data, preparing them for doing independent research. Finally, the strong emphasis on diachrony has also led to a strong diachronic teaching program, with three specialist courses devoted to English diachrony besides the general history of English course.
4 The future The preceding account has shown that the Netherlands and Belgium have developed a number of strong traditions in historical linguistics. In Leiden, interesting research is done on historical sociolinguistics, charting prescriptive factors that have shaped language use. Other Dutch universities have contributed considerably to theoretically informed research in the domain of diachronic morphosyntax. In Belgium, the research carried out in Leuven shows many similarities with this syntactic research in the Netherlands. It is therefore to be expected that international collaboration between the two countries will grow in the future. Concrete plans for structural collaboration already exist between Nijmegen and Leuven. While historical linguistics is thriving in both the Netherlands and Belgium, at the same time higher education policies force universities to rationalize their programs, in order to make them more competitive. The effect of this is that in some universities historical linguistics of English has been abandoned. In Antwerp it has been put on a low level for a number of years now, and in Brussels it has disappeared altogether as of 2010. Interestingly, the University of Lie`ge has chosen to revive its tradition in historical English linguistics by remodeling the philological program into a more theoretically informed historical linguistics program (for which they have hired Brems from Leuven). As a consequence, it will be the only French-speaking university to offer a systematic program in historical English linguistics. Also in hosting international conferences, the Dutch-speaking area promises to remain very active, with Leuven hosting ICAME 33 in 2012, and the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 18 in 2014. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Balz Engler, Hubert Cuyckens, Eric Kooper, Olga Fischer, and Lieselotte Brems for providing me with some necessary information to write this chapter.
5 References Arend, Johannes Pieter. 1842. Proeve eener Geschiedenis der Dichtkunst en Fraaije Letteren onder de Angel-Saksen. Amsterdam: Schleijer. Auer, Anita. 2005. Eighteenth-century prescriptivism in English: A re-evaluation of its effects on actual language usage. Multilingua 24(4): 317–341. van der Auwera, Johan. 1984. More on the history of subject contact clauses in English. Folia Linguistica Historica 5: 171–184. Bang-Kaup, Willi and Rudolf Brotanek. 1903. The King and Qveenes Entertainement at Richmond: nach der Q 1636 in Neudruck. Leuven: Uystpruyst. Bax, Randy C. 2000. A network strength scale for the study of eighteenth-century English. European Journal of English Studies 4: 277–290. Birrell, Tom. 1966. The society of antiquaries and the taste for old English 1705–1840. Neophilologus 50: 107–117.
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Blancquaert, Edgard. 1936. Dr Henri Logeman. Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden, 1935–1936. Leiden: E.J. Brill. (Online source: DBNL2005, http://www. dbnl.org/tekst/_jaa003193601_01/_jaa003193601_01_0011.php (last accessed 19 September 2011). Breban, Tine and Kristin Davidse. 2003. Adjectives of comparison: the grammaticalization of their attribute uses into postdeterminer and classifier uses. Folia Linguistica 37: 269–317. Breban, Tine. 2010a. English Adjectives of Comparison: Lexical and Grammaticalized Uses. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Breban, Tine. 2010b. Reconstructing paths of secondary grammaticalization of same from emphasizing to phoric and nominal-aspectual postdeterminer uses. Transactions of the Philological Society 108: 68–87. Breban, Tine, Lieselotte Brems Kristin Davidse, and Tanja Mortelmans. forthc. Grammaticalization and language change: origins, criteria and outcomes. Studies in Language Companion series. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bremmer, Rolf H. 1988. The Old Frisian component in Holthausen’s altenglisches etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch. Anglo-Saxon England 17: 5–13. Bremmer, Rolf H. 1989. Late medieval and early modern opinions on the affinity between English and Frisian: the growth of a commonplace. Folia Linguistica Historica 9: 167–192. Bremmer, Rolf H. (ed.). 1998. Franciscus Junius F.F. and his Circle. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brems, Lieselotte. 2003. Measure Noun constructions: an instance of semantically-driven grammaticalization. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 283–312. Bronzwaer, Wilhelmus. 1976. In memoriam F. Th. Visser. English Studies 57(3): 280–282. Bu¨lbring, Karl D. 1902. Altenglisches Elementarbuch: 1. Teil Lautlehre. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Cosijn, Peter J. 1888. Altwestsa¨chsische Grammatik. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Cosijn, Peter J. 1896. Anglosaxonica III. Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 21: 8–26. Cosijn, Peter J. 1898. Anglosaxonica IV. Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 23: 109–130. Cuyckens, Hubert. 2011. Diachronex. http://www.kuleuven.be/research/researchdatabase/project/ 3H10/3H100511.htm (last accessed 4 October 2011). Cuyckens, Hubert and Marjolijn Verspoor. 1998. On the road to ‘to’. In: Johan van der Auwera, Frank Durieux and Ludo Lejeune (eds.), English as a Human Language: To honour Louis Goossens, 57–72. Mu¨nchen: Lincom. D’Ardenne, Simonne T.R.O. 1939. The Old English inscription on the Brussels Cross. English Studies 21: 145–164. D’Ardenne, Simonne T.R.O. 1961. Þe liflade ant te passiun of Seinte Juliene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Ardenne, Simonne T.R.O. 1977. The Katherine Group: edited from MS. Bodley 34 Bodleian Library. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. D’Ardenne, Simonne T.R.O and Eric J. Dobson. 1981. Seinte Katerine: re-edited from MS Bodley 34 and other manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidse, Kristin and Sigi Vandewinkel. 2008. The interlocking paths of development to emphasizer adjective pure. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 255–287. Davidse, Kristin, Lieven Vandelanotte, and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.). 2010. Subjectification, intersubjectification and grammaticalization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Davidse, Kristin, Tine Breban, and An Van linden. 2008. Deictification: the development of secondary deictic meanings by adjectives in the English NP. English Language and Linguistics 12: 475–503. De Caluwe´-Dor, Juliette. 1979. The chronology of the Scandinavian loan-verbs in the Katherine Group. English Studies 60: 680–685. de Haas, Nynke. 2008. The origins of the Northern Subject Rule. In: Gotti Maurizio, Marina Dossena and Richard Dury (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006, Vol. 3: Geo-Historical
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Ghesquie`re, Lobke and Kristin Davidse. 2011. The development of intensification scales in nounintensifying uses of adjectives: sources, paths and mechanisms of change. English Language and Linguistics 15: 251–277. Girvan, Ritchie and E. L. Deuschle. 1931. Angelsaksisch Handboek. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink and Zoon. Goossens, Louis. 1974. The old English Glosses of Ms. Brussels, Royal Library, 1650 (Aldhelm’s De laudibus virginitatis). Brussel: Paleis der Academien. Goossens, Louis. 1982. On the development of the modals and of the epistemic function in English. In: Anders Ahlqvist (ed.), Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Galway, April 6–10, 1981, 74–97. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goossens, Louis. 1987. The auxiliarization of the English modals. A functional grammar view. In: Martin Harris and Paolo Ramat (eds.), Historical Development of Auxiliaries, 111–143. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hame´lius, Paul (ed.). 1919–23. Mandeville’s Travels, Tr. from the French of Jean D’outremeuse. Ed. from Ms. Cotton Titus C. Xvi, in the British Museum. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner. Harting, Pieter N.U. 1937. The text of the Old English translation of Gregory’s “Dialogues”. Neophilologus 22: 281–302. Henstra, Froukje. 2008. Social network analysis and the eighteenth-century family network: a case study of the Walpole family. Transactions of the Philological Society 106: 29–70. Hulk, Aafke and Ans van Kemenade. 1995. Verb second, pro-drop, functional projections and language change. In: Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts (eds.), Clause structure and language change, 227–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Junius, Franciscus. 1655. Caedmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum. Amsterdam: Christophorus Cunradus. Junius, Franciscus. 1665. Quator d.n. Jesu Christi euangeliorum versiones perantique duae, Gothica scil. et Anglo-saxonica. Dordrecht: Junianis. Junius, Franciscus, ed. by Edward Lye. 1743. Etymologicum Anglicanum: ex autographo descripsit & accessionibus permultis auctum edidit. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. van Kemenade, Ans. 1987. Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English. Dordrecht: Foris. van Kemenade, Ans. 1992. The history of English modals; a reanalysis. Folia Linguistica Historica 13: 143–166. van Kemenade, Ans. 1997. V2 and embedded topicalization in Old and Middle English. In: Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, 326– 352. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Kemenade, Ans. 1999. Sentential negation and clause structure in Old English. In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie, and Wim van der Wurff (eds.), Negation in the History of English, 147–166. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. van Kemenade, Ans. 2000. Jespersen’s cycle revisited: formal properties of grammaticalization. In: Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas, and Anthony Warner (eds.), Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, 51–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Kemenade, Ans and Nigel Vincent (eds.). 1997. Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los. 2006. Discourse adverbs and clausal syntax in Old and Middle English. In Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 224–248. Oxford: Blackwell. van Kemenade, Ans and Bettelou Los. 2008. Word Order and Information Structure: Discourse options after the loss of Verb Second. http://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/523996/programma_losavkfinal.doc (last accessed 30 September 2011). Kerkhof, Jelle. 1966. Studies in the Language of Geoffrey Chaucer. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
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Peter Petre´, Leuven (Belgium)
87. History of English Historical Linguistics: Northern Europe 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction Resources Approaches to HLE Summary References
Abstract This chapter, surveying historical linguistics of English in Northern Europe – here defined as referring to the Nordic countries – has two objectives: (a) to pay attention to the contribution of Nordic scholars to the foundation of modern linguistic approaches to the history of English in the Nordic countries, and (b) to provide an account of the field in the present-day Nordic context, with an emphasis on the latter. The Nordic contribution is seen as forming a continuum, where the present scene owes a great deal to earlier scholarship on the history of the language, on the one hand, and to the proliferation of linguistic theories during the past few decades, on the other. At present, the impact of linguistic theories on historical linguistics of English in the Nordic countries is most strongly reflected in studies inspired by various functionally oriented approaches, such as corpus linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse linguistics, and genre studies.
1 Introduction Any historical study of language change involves reconstruction of lost information on the basis of available evidence. To make sense of the past, the process must necessarily begin with the latter, i.e. locating the available evidence and making it available for research. Interaction of data and theory thus constitutes a continuing process of dialogue. Advances in the availability of research materials will, in time, result in reassessments of the validity of earlier findings. An attempt to sketch the above development in historical linguistics of English (HLE) in Northern Europe will also involve a process of reconstruction. Due to the extensive nature of the subject, only an outline will be aimed at in this presentation. The specifics will be left to be pursued in the studies mentioned in the bibliography and the further readings mentioned therein. The emphasis will be bibliographical rather than content-based. Due to limitations of space, representativeness rather than Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1354–1375
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exhaustiveness will be aimed at. The chapter will begin with a brief account of the history of English studies in the Northern European area, with special reference to the role played by language history in academic education and research. This will be followed by an account of research on the sources of data and the fields of HLE where Northern European scholars have been actively involved.
1.1 Preliminaries For the present purposes, Northern Europe will be understood to refer to the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In the Nordic countries, the institutional establishment of the English language as an academic subject in the form of a professorship takes place between 1873 (Oslo) and 1909 (Lund) (Sandved 2000: 104; Lindblad 2008: 104). In-between these two come Copenhagen (1893) and Helsinki (1907) (Nielsen 2000: 128; Pahta 2008: 22; see also Enkvist 1999: 17–18). At the University of Iceland, founded in 1911, the first chair in English was appointed in 1967 ( Julian Meldon D’Arcy, p.c.). Like elsewhere in Europe, the history of the Nordic English departments reflects the emergence of English as a world language, apparent both in the growth of English language teaching programs and the research carried out in the departments, and like elsewhere in the non-English speaking countries in Europe, the English departments in the Nordic countries train teachers of English for the needs of educational institutions. Yet another shared characteristic is the breadth of English as an academic subject, traditionally comprising both language and literature “according to the broad sense of philology” (Hovdhaugen et al. 2000: 265). Thus, an undergraduate curriculum typically combines elements of contemporary English, linguistics, language history, literary studies and relevant cultural, historical, and social background material. Over the years, research and research-based education in English language studies have also undergone changes as a result of theoretical advances in linguistics. With the emergence of English as a world language the emphasis shifted to Present-day English at the expense of a more philologically oriented approach to language. At the same time, it has to be remembered that some of the most important landmarks of English historical linguistics, such as Jespersen (1909–49) and Mustanoja (1960), have sprung up from this approach. The life’s work of Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), the greatest of Nordic English scholars, is especially significant with regard to the philology/linguistics interface in combining an interest in linguistic theory with an understanding of the specifics of the English language in the description of both its past and present. In spite of the fact that contemporary English has taken over in the academic curriculum long since, the development has also proved beneficial for the study of language history. New theoretical models and insights introduced to gain a better understanding of the present-day language, i.e. the latest phase of linguistic evolution that we have access to, have stimulated attempts at testing their application in the analysis of the linguistic records of earlier ages, thereby providing a starting point for comparisons of different diachronic stages in the language. New ways of looking at how the linguistic system might have worked in the past have arisen as a result, such as historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics. The analogy between past and present also applies to the cause-effect relationships in spite of differences in the communicative contexts.
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Due to the limitations of the surviving written evidence, they are often not fully recoverable. The discussion below contains two partly overlapping chronological strands, with the 1980s as an approximate dividing line marking the arrival of the computer in linguistics. This new resource has had a tremendous impact on how HLE has since developed, especially since computerized linguistic corpora have become available on a larger scale. Although it is true that also in the past linguistic studies could be based on extensive sets of data, and could on those grounds be regarded as instances of corpus studies, the collections of manually compiled data, however large, can hardly match the resources of computerized electronic corpora. The fact that findings based on manually collected data have frequently been called into question by those based on largescale electronic corpora is an indication of the superiority of the new technology of data processing.
2 Resources 2.1 Text editions The construction of historical corpora is today’s parallel to the edition of printed volumes and collections in the past. The two are interdependent, however, for reliable corpora presuppose reliable editions. As far as editing manuscripts into printed editions is concerned, there is a long tradition in such philological basic research in the Nordic countries. A pioneering instance is the work of the Icelandic scholar Grı´mur Jo´nsson Thorkelin, who made two transcriptions of the Beowulf manuscript in the late 18th century and prepared the first publication of the poem in 1815 (Bjork and Niles 1997). Textediting has remained a cornerstone of historical language studies for all periods of English, and most notably for Middle English, due to the regional and generic richness of Middle English manuscripts (see e.g. Sajavaara [1967], Sandred [1971], Nevanlinna [1973], Zettersten [1976], Svinhufvud [1978], Nevanlinna and Taavitsainen [1993], Lindberg [1994, 1997], and Pahta [1998]). A recent example of editorial work of a different kind is the publication of the records of the 1692 Salem witch-hunt in Massachusetts (Rosenthal et al. 2009), produced in collaboration by American and Nordic scholars. It is to be expected that along with printed editions, the number of electronic editions will be increasing in the future (an example of an editorial project which aims at an electronic edition is The Ormulum Project by Johannesson (1993–).
2.2 Historical corpora 2.2.1 Introduction The compilation of electronic computerized corpora of historical texts started in the 1980s. In a couple of decades historical corpus linguistics came to dominate the field of HLE in the Nordic countries. The yield of the new technology is reflected in a burgeoning flow of publications. At the same time, another development has taken place. While earlier the study of English in the various historical periods was more evenly distributed in the Nordic universities, the scene today appears much more concentrated. The strongest investment in the field has been made at the University of Helsinki,
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where a research unit called VARIENG (Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Nevalainen et al. 1998–) was established in the mid-1990s. The unit is largely devoted to research in HLE and its contribution to the field has been significant worldwide. Initially the unit consisted of five research teams, subsequently reorganized in terms of three research domains, (1) Language in Society, covering social dialectology, language and dialect contacts, and meaning and changing culture; (2) Language as Discourse, comprising genre and register variation, discourse patterns, and sociopragmatic processes; and (3) Linguistic Processes and Typology, comprising semantic change, grammaticalization, and variationist typology (Rissanen et al. 2007).
2.2.2 Historical corpus linguistics The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal, initiated by Matti Rissanen and Ossi Ihalainen and compiled in collaboration with their research associates (Rissanen et al. 1991), is the first and probably the most important of the electronic corpora of historical English texts to date (cf. Kyto¨, Chapter 96). The corpus covers the period from the earliest English written records to 1720 and contains samples of representative “text types” (Kyto¨ 1991a). The Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE) subcorpora have subsequently been syntactically annotated in collaboration with the universities of York and of Pennsylvania (see van Kemenade and Los 2006: 609–619). The members of the research teams working at Helsinki University have published several volumes of papers reporting their findings from the Helsinki Corpus (HC). An introduction to the data in Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English with a selection of pilot studies by the compilers of the corpus appeared in Rissanen et al. (1993). It was followed by another collection of corpus-based studies in linguistic variation and genre styles across the diachronic range of periods covered by the material (Rissanen et al. 1997a). This volume addresses, among other things, multidimensional diachronic variation, as attested in the be/have plus past participle variation since Late Modern English (Kyto¨ 1997), the verbs be and have since Old English (Kilpio¨ 1997), the uses of expository apposition in Middle English and Early Modern English (Pahta and Nevanlinna 1997), the expression of personal affect in Early Modern English (Taavitsainen 1997b), and the textual roles of adjectives and open-class adverbs in Early Modern English (Meurman-Solin 1997). Since the publication of the HC, Nevalainen and her team have produced the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC, Nevalainen et al. 1998), which comprises a “family of corpora” of personal letters written in England, c.2.6 million words between c.1410 and 1681. The corpus aims at being representative in terms of a variety of social and content features. The work for the CEEC corpus started in 1993 and is still continuing. A parsed version of the corpus appeared in 2007. This corpus has stimulated several research projects on the linguistic manifestations of social interaction through the medium of letters, including Nevalainen (2001) on conventional formulae in early English correspondence, and Nevala (2004, 2007) on address forms. The most recent collection of studies by the team (Nurmi et al. 2009) contains several essays on the interface of linguistic and social variation, utilizing the CEEC corpus. The compilation of new corpora continues to form an important dimension of the work done in Helsinki. The corpora constructed after the HC include the Helsinki
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Corpus of Older Scots (1450–1700) (HCOS) and the Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC), both edited by Meurman-Solin. The HCOS is based on printed editions and comprises approximately 850,000 words of running text representing 15 different genres (Meurman-Solin 1993), while the CSC comprises approximately 500,000 words of running text representing royal, official, and family letters, based on original manuscripts dating from the period 1500–1730 and originating from various areas of Scotland (Meurman-Solin 2007). Yet another recent corpus emanating from the VARIENG scholars is the Corpus of Middle English Medical Texts, compiled by Taavitsainen et al. (2005), a 500,000 word corpus including texts from three traditions of medical writing, from c.1375–1500. The other Nordic institution that has played an active role in the compilation of electronic historical corpora is Uppsala University, where Merja Kyto¨ has, in collaboration with Jonathan Culpeper, brought out A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (CED, Kyto¨ and Culpeper 2006) (cf. Culpeper and Kyto¨ 1997; Kyto¨ and Walker 2006). The CED corpus consists of 1.2 million-word of computerized Early Modern English speech related texts representing five text types. According to the compilers, Kyto¨ and Culpeper, The CED was compiled as a tool for the study of the language of the Early Modern period; the focus was placed on dialogues because interactive face-to-face communication is known to be an important factor in language change. The corpus was designed to offer easy access to a substantial quantity of data for variationist studies and research into historical pragmatics, as well as the study of speech presentation: it was compiled with particular variables in mind, such as text type, time, gender, and social rank. As the CED focuses on spoken interaction in the past, it facilitates the study of topics such as politeness phenomena, and conversational structure. The CED also includes various modes of speech presentation, e.g. direct and indirect speech, making the material of especial value to those investigating how speech is presented in writing. (Kyto¨ and Culpeper 2006)
Kyto¨ and her co-workers in Uppsala are currently working towards an electronic text edition of English witness depositions from 1560 to 1760 (see Kyto¨ et al. [2006], cf. http://www.engelska.uu.se/research, last accessed 31 January 2012).
3 Approaches to HLE This section provides an overview of the field in terms of areas of study that have featured importantly in the Nordic area in the last few decades. At the same time, it will also be relevant to refer to some earlier studies that either have directly contributed to the emergence of particular approaches or form otherwise important elements of the Nordic profile in the historical linguistics of English. Many of the studies make use of the historical corpora cited above and employ the methodology of corpus linguistics.
3.1 Dialects One of the parameters of grouping historical texts in the HC database is dialect. Historical dialectology of early English is also connected with text editing, providing a frame for analyzing the language of the documents in detail, especially in terms of their phonology, morphology, and spelling. From there it is but a short step to
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considering texts as specimens of the language of a given place or region at a given time. For example, Lindelo¨f (1902) is concerned with an Old English variety of Northumbrian, while Sundby (1950, 1963), Zettersten (1965), and Kristensson (1967, 1987) focus on specific dialects of Middle English. Another strand of historical dialect work is concerned with the background and development of Standard English. Thus, for example, Sandved (1968) provides a detailed comparison of verbal morphology in two versions of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, viz. the late ME Winchester manuscript and the version printed by Caxton, with special reference to Caxton’s role in the development of Standard English. Nielsen (1998, 2009), on the other hand, provides a survey of the evolution of English from its continental backgrounds to the emergence of the standard language. The process of standardization in the Early Modern English period is re-examined in terms of various sets of data, including the language of the early statutes (Rissanen 2000), the standardization of spelling in scientific language (Taavitsainen 2000), and regional varieties (Kyto¨ and Romaine 2000; Meurman-Solin 2000). Ihalainen (1994) is concerned with the kind of descriptive evidence available for regional dialects up to the end of the 19th century. According to him, from about 1500 till the first systematic description towards the end of the 19th century, our knowledge of the dialects comes from occasional regional spellings, comments by the orthoepists, grammarians, and lexicographers, glossaries of “provincial words”, occasional references to local speech in travel literature, fictional texts written to illustrate regional speech, and the use of dialect in literary works (Ihalainen 1994: 197). At the University of Helsinki the dialect work initiated by Ihalainen is continued in a project on social dialectology, which concentrates on linguistic variation displayed by speakers and writers in their everyday contexts of language use, with emphasis on individual language users and their vernaculars.
3.2 Contact Historically, regional dialects frequently undergo changes as a result of influences from the speech of neighboring variants (cf. Trudgill, Chapter 130). The early history of London English is an illuminating example, containing features from several regional dialects. In some cases, such features have their origin in an earlier contact of the dialect with a foreign language. A case in point is the Anglo-Scandinavian contact in the medieval period (cf. Dance, Chapter 110), a topic where Scandinavian scholars have made important contributions, e.g. regarding the shared vocabulary and associated phonological developments (Bjo¨rkman 1900–02) and the rivalry of native and Norse words (Rynell 1948). A subfield of lexis where Scandinavian scholars have been active contributors is onomastics, including the study of names of persons, places and occupations (cf. Ekwall 1936a, 1936b; von Feilitzen 1937; Fellows-Jensen 1968, 1972, 1978, 1985; Selte´n 1972; Thuresson 1950). The close contact between English and Scandinavian in the Middle Ages has also given rise to a (controversial) suggestion of an Anglo-Norse creole underlying the development of Standard English (Poussa 1982). In a recent study, Skaffari (2009a) addresses the impact of the major foreign languages, Norse and French, on Early Middle English lexis in the light of evidence from the HC. One context of foreign language contact that has been particularly brought into focus in recent years is that between Celtic and English, examined in a series of publications by Filppula and his research associates in Joensuu (cf. Filppula and Klemola, Chapter 107; Filppula 1986; Filppula, et al. 2002; Filppula 2006; Filppula et al. 2008).
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Filppula (1986) started the work by comparing the thematic organization of information in a sentence in spoken present-day Hiberno-English and British English, and finds that the thematic organization of material in the former has been shaped by the “focus-first” tendency of Irish, a language with a different basic word order pattern (Verb-SubjectObject [VSO]) from that of English (Subject-Verb-Object [SVO]). In his subsequent research, Filppula expanded the enquiry into the historical contact phenomena between Celtic and English. He and his collaborators point out that even though it is widely accepted that the Celtic languages have played a significant role in the development of so-called Celtic Englishes, i.e. Hiberno-English and Welsh English, the question of a Celtic substratum influence on the English language in England is much more controversial (Filppula et al. 2002: 1). The writers challenge the “orthodox view” of a minimal significance of the “Celtic hypothesis” for the history of English by drawing attention to new perspectives on Celtic influence in syntax and phonology (Filppula et al. 2002: 12– 20) and new evidence for Celtic influence on Old English and Middle English vocabulary and place-names (Filppula et al. 2002: 20–22). The themes of early Celtic influences in English are followed up in more detail in Filppula (2006) and Filppula et al. (2008: 7–132).
3.3 Syntax Research in historical English syntax, as pursued in the Nordic countries, comprises not only studies of the syntactic arrangements of the principal elements of the sentence, but also the constituent-internal organization of the noun and verb phrases, as well as items belonging to individual parts of speech. Needless to say, syntactic descriptions are shaped by the theoretical models adopted. Thus, for example, word-order studies typically emphasize the importance of a network of contributing communicative-functional considerations. Methodologically, corpus-based approaches and quantitative analyses play an important role. Findings from different synchronic stages provide evidence for diachronic conclusions. In English, the establishment of the SVO order brings about a number of adjustments in more locally organized patterns. The perspectives also vary from synchronic studies modelled according to traditional grammar with a focus on the syntax of just one historical author (e.g. So¨derlind 1951–58) or occurrences of particular syntactic patterns in broader sets of historical data (e.g. Jacobson 1951) to diachronic investigations, where theoretical considerations of change play an important part (e.g. Kohonen 1978) – see further Ryde´n (1979).
3.3.1 Word-order Diachronically, syntax may be viewed in terms of how the organization of the nominal groups with regard to the finite verb evolves in different types of sentences. The syntactic arrangement of the principal constituents in the sentence became an important issue for HLE in the 1970s, inspired by research on word-order universals (Greenberg 1963) and word-order typology. In a study of Old English and Early Middle English data, Kohonen traced the developments in terms of factors affecting “the alleged shift SXV-SVX” (Kohonen 1978: 197) quantitatively, especially in terms of the syntactic and textual characteristics of clauses, subjects, objects, verbs, and adverbials, as well as possible reasons triggering the changes towards SVX syntax between c.1000 and 1200 CE. After 1200,
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inversion, which had been typical of main clauses after an initial adverb, together with the verb-final order, mostly occurring in the dependent clauses, are increasingly leveled out, as a result of the establishment of SV syntax (1978: 197–202). The changes are seen as taking place under the influence of factors such as those mentioned above. Twenty years later, Bækken (1998) extended the idea of corpus analysis of wordorder developments to cover the Early Modern English period. In her study, the surface order of the subject and finite verb are investigated in 19th-century English, with special reference to declarative main clauses starting with a non-subject element. The occurrences of the “verb-second” (V2) pattern were examined in a corpus from c.1480 to c.1730, comprising fiction, religious prose, letters and documents, history and geography, and “general” (Bækken 1998: 27). The results indicate that “V2 order was still quite frequent at the beginning of the Early Modern English period, but this changed quite radically in the course of the seventeenth century” (Bækken 1998: 413), with the language of religion being the most conservative genre in retaining the highest rate of occurrence for the V2 order throughout the period. In a sequel to the 1998 book, Bækken (2003) examines the order of the subject and finite verb in 17th-century English, with declarative clauses starting with a non-subject element in focus. The patterns under scrutiny are XSV (non-inverted order) and XVS (inverted order). The data comprise samples of four text categories: descriptive prose, religious prose, history, and letters. The possible influence of a number of features of syntactic and pragmatic nature that may play a role in the choice of the word order pattern is investigated statistically in the different subgroups of the data, but the results do not suggest a uniform development towards the stabilization of the XSV pattern and the corresponding decline of XVS. Rather, the findings suggest that the changes involved take place in a wave-like fashion “by leaps and bounds” (Bækken 2003: 201). In addition to the types of sentence and clauses discussed in the studies above, there are also investigations that focus on other types of sentences and clauses, but which nevertheless tie up with the broader issues of word order changes in English. Thus, Breivik (1983) is devoted to existential sentences introduced by there. The existential dummy subject [there1] is formally identical with the locative adverb [there2], from which it is derived. In line with what is predicted by models of word order typology, the development is assumed to have taken place through a process whereby [there1] is inserted in the pre-verbal position as an empty topic (TVX) and, concomitantly with the establishment of the SVX syntax, is reanalyzed syntactically as the subject of the sentence (see further Breivik 1983: 404–412).
3.3.2 Verb phrase studies: the auxiliaries Be/have. The history of the English auxiliary verbs has given rise to several monographs. The variation between the temporal/aspectual auxiliaries be/have with intransitive verbs in the period 1700–1900 is studied by Ryde´n and Brorstro¨m (1987). The authors examine the temporal/aspectual shift from the stative be-dominated paradigm around 1700 to an almost entirely have-dominated action paradigm around 1900 in a corpus covering both informal and formal registers (Ryde´n and Brorstro¨m 1987: 213– 214). A number of factors contributing to this development are distinguished, including the greater functional load of the auxiliary be and several syntactic, semantic, and lexical factors associated with the state vs. action opposition. The change took a long time
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to complete, for it was not until the end of the 19th century that have wins out as perfect marker at the expense of the state-oriented be. The distribution and uses of the antecedents of be/have in earlier English have recently been examined by Kilpio¨ (1997) and Kyto¨ (1997), based on the evidence of the HC. A number of variables are analyzed, several of them not accounted for in the earlier studies at the same degree of precision, including the chronology, dialect, possible foreign influence, genre, and level of formality of the texts, along with the important linguistic factors of action/process uses, durative, iterative and conditional contexts, main verb, tense, perfect infinitive, and the presence of an object complement. Modals. The modal auxiliaries are analyzed in the framework of socio-historical variation by Kyto¨ (1991b). The study aims at accounting for the development of can (could), may (might), shall (should) and will (would) in early American English by examining the interplay of various linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in the light of evidence drawn from various corpora. The study concentrates on the language spoken and written in the New England area between 1620 and 1720. The results indicate a gradual change in the system of English modals from early stages on. Cumulative evidence is found for the rise of the forms can and will; in early American English conservative, rather than innovative, tendencies characterize the development. Do. The vexed questions regarding the origin of the auxiliary do and its occurrence in various types of sentences in English has given rise to several studies in the Nordic countries. Ellega˚rd (1953) is a landmark in the study of this subject. The results of the study are based on the occurrence of do in different types of sentences in a corpus of 379 texts from 1390–1710. They indicate a progress in the use of the auxiliary in interrogative and negative sentences, as against a decline in affirmative ones, after the mid16th century (Ellega˚rd 1953: 162). Regarding the possible origin of periphrastic do, the author thinks that it was the causative use of the verb that paved way to its auxiliary usage, which would point to literary contexts as its likeliest source of origin. On the other hand, those who are in favor of a more colloquial origin prefer to think in terms of semantic weakening of the lexical verb do or the influence of language contact (Nevalainen 2006a: 200). Klemola (2002: 302) sees the latter alternative as the more plausible one, adducing evidence from present South-Western dialects in favor of medieval Celtic substratum influence as “a likely contributory factor” to the emergence of periphrastic do in English. Ellega˚rd’s study has provided a stimulus for further research on the subject (see Warner 2006), especially in the light of new corpus evidence. Thus, Nurmi (1999), adopting a sociolinguistic point of view and using the CEEC corpus as her data, is able to provide a more detailed picture of the developments towards the regularization of the modern usage of do, especially in terms of dating, social conditioning, importance of informal registers, and gender differentiation involved in the relevant changes. For discussion of factors involved in the rise and early development of the do-periphrasis, see also Raumolin-Brunberg and Nurmi (1997), Rissanen (1999), and Nevalainen (2006a, 2006b).
3.3.3 Noun phrase studies The historical dimension of English nominal constituents covers a multitude of topics from simplex nouns to complex noun phrases. As in the case of the basics of verb syntax, Mustanoja (1960) is a standard authority on the subject for Middle English.
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Similarly, Rissanen (1999) provides an exposition of the noun phrase in Early Modern English in terms of determiners, pronouns, adjectives, and the genitive case. Regarding the structure of noun phrase constructions, the study of Early Modern English by Raumolin-Brunberg (1991), based on Sir Thomas More’s writings, is the most comprehensive. The results of the quantitative analysis are discussed in terms of, e.g., headwords and determiners, the length of the phrases, and the structure of the complex noun phrase. Examples of more specialized studies include, in particular, the history of pronouns. Thus, Kivimaa (1966), addressing þe and þat as clause connectives, Rissanen (1967), the uses of one, and Kahlas-Tarkka (1987), the indefinite pronouns for every and each, deal with Old English and Early Middle English developments. Relative constructions in Early Modern English are examined by Ryde´n (1966). Variation in the Early Modern English paradigm of the second person personal pronouns is investigated by Walker (2007). The study focuses on the variation between thou and you in a set of trial, deposition, and dramatic comedy data from 1560–1760, tracing the progress of you in the three speech-related genres. Further studies dealing with noun phrase structures in Early Modern English include Altenberg (1982) addressing the syntactic variation between the -s genitive and the of-construction in a stylistically diversified corpus of 17th-century English. The results show that a great number of parameters may be involved in the choice of the genitival construction in different contexts. However, the conclusion is that their impact on the outcome is much the same as in Present-day English, and no diachronic change was observable within the period studied.
3.3.4 Adverbials The syntax of adverbials has been most extensively studied by Swan (1988) and Nevalainen (1991). Swan concentrates on the use of sentence adverbials realized by oneword adverbs ending in -ly (OE -lice; e.g. Surprisingly, …) and the shifts, syntactic and pragmatic, involved when a word is redefined as a sentence adverbial. The material consists of English prose texts from Old English to Late Modern English. The results present a picture of considerable variation from one period to another, but at the same time they also show how the multi-functionality of adverbial usage is significantly facilitated in English by the fact that adverbs need not change morphologically, but can freely change from one function to another, retaining the -ly form (Swan 1988: 536). Nevalainen, on the other hand, concentrates on the diachronic development of English focusing adverbs, based on only and its synonyms (Nevalainen 1991: 2). The diachronic corpus covers the period 1500–1900 and contains a variety of genres. The variation in the material is analyzed in terms of a number of external and internal parameters. The findings are discussed in relation to linguistic change in terms of stability and variation as well as the semantic shifts leading to the gradual establishment of only as the “single, most highly productive prototype of the exclusive adverbial category” (Nevalainen 1991: 260).
3.4 Historical sociolinguistics Socio-historical research has been carried out most notably by Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg and their research associates at the University of Helsinki within the domain
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of “Language and Society” (cf. Nevalainen, Chapter 92). The topics addressed focus on the social embedding of English vernacular universals across time; individuals and their vernaculars; user-based variation; the leaders of linguistic change; the role of migration in language change; socially embedded dialect grammar; social interaction, including social networks; and speaker attitudes. By drawing on the CEEC, the team has come up with new findings about the impact of the social context on the language use in the period covered by the material (1410–1681); these are reported in two monographs by Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1996, 2003). The 1996 publication is concerned with elucidating the theoretical and conceptual research apparatus of the project and with a selection of pilot studies on the various independent social variables, such as social stratification in Tudor and early Stuart England, and traits of gender differences in the corpus. In addition, the volume also contains papers on linguistic changes in progress at the time, including a study of the grammaticalization of methinks (PalanderCollin 1996), the use of address forms (Nevala 2004), the interconnectedness of periphrastic do and be+ing (Nurmi 2008), and the “pragmatization” in the use of address forms (Raumolin-Brunberg 1996). The most recent book-length publication emanating from the project is Nurmi et al. (2009), dealing with the language of daily life in England from 1400 to 1800. In a major publication of the project, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) present a sociolinguistic perspective on the history of English, based on the CEEC, focusing on changes in both apparent and real time. An important chapter deals with gender differentiations in the corpus. The findings confirm the hypothesis of women usually leading the process of change. The study shows how the sociolinguistic model may be successfully applied to historical material, e.g. in the analysis of the distinctive features of standard English, including changes in pronouns, the emergence of the auxiliary do, the absence of multiple negation, etc. (see Nevalainen and RaumolinBrunberg 2003: 205). At the same time, they are careful in maintaining that the historical applications necessitate taking into account the special features of the historical material. A succinct overview of the field of historical sociolinguistics is found in Nevalainen (2006c). Another section of the Helsinki project deals with meaning and cultural change, with meaning “defined in its broadest sense, including the ways in which meaning is contextually constructed and negotiated on a social level” (Rissanen et al. 1991). Thus, Koivisto-Alanko (2000) is concerned with the issues of prototypicality, unidirectionality and subjectification in the light of semantic changes involved in the abstract vocabulary of cognition, while Tissari (2003) addresses the changes affecting the meaning of the word love from Early Modern English to the present day, together with associated cognitive metaphors.
3.5 Historical discourse and pragmatics Approaching English usage historically as a contextual and situated phenomenon has provided new avenues of investigation in the form of studies of historical discourse and historical pragmatics. Both micro and macro-level units of discourse in their linguistic realizations are investigated as a form of social action, constitutive of social reality. The materials studied have included both institutional and private communication, investigated in their lexical and grammatical realizations as well as the underlying
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discourse patterns. The theoretical and methodological starting points are, above all, derived from the insights of discourse analytic and pragmatic approaches to language use (see further http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/domain_discourse.html, last accessed 9 December 2010). The smaller units of discourse, previously often left in the shadow of the more major ones, have become an object of renewed interest in terms of their communicative functions. These include a variety of expressions that have arisen as a result of grammaticalization, i.e. a process whereby autonomous lexical items and constructions gradually acquire grammatical functions (see Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). One example of such a process is the development of discourse markers. In a pioneering article on OE þa ‘then’, Enkvist (1972) drew attention to the function of the word as an “action marker” constituting an interface between orality and literacy (on the latter, see Schaefer, Chapter 81). His observation resulted in a series of more detailed studies of OE þa from different discourse-pragmatic perspectives, including temporal chains and narrative structure (Enkvist and Wa˚rvik 1987), grounding (Wa˚rvik 1990a), and the ME reflexes of OE þa and þonne (Wa˚rvik 1990b). The use of interjections and exclamations is a parallel example. Their discourse functions are examined in Middle English by Taavitsainen (1995, 1997a) and in Old English by Hiltunen (2006). The research on grammaticalization shows that the process has played an important role in the history of English. As Rissanen (1997: 3) points out, its consequences are to be seen in developments such as the establishment of the SVO order, the auxiliary system, the prepositional system, as well as the emergence of new pronominal and adverbial forms, and links between the elements of a sentence, both at the clause and the phrase level. Several such developments have been traced in the different subsets of the HC, including indefinite pronouns, the pronominalization of one, adverb derivation, there-compounds, reflexive strategies and the history of methinks (see Rissanen et al. 1997a, 1997b). The latter topic is followed up by Palander-Collin (1996) in a monograph devoted to the expressions I think and methinks in Middle English and Early Modern English up to 1700, with reference to the changes undergone by the expressions in their syntax, meaning, and pragmatics, and special reference to their grammaticalization as first-person evidential markers signalling overtly the writer’s opinion or belief. In addition, the expressions also serve as politeness markers that can be analyzed in terms of social distance and solidarity. The study also pays attention to social ranks, registers in the language of men and women, as represented in the HC. In a series of publications Rissanen has dealt extensively with grammaticalization in the history of English, including expressions of exception, concessive prepositions, adverbial subordinators, and adverbial connectives (cf. Rissanen 2002a, 2002b, 2007, 2009). The application of speech act theory to historical texts has emerged as a new area of HLE (see Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008a: 1–23). The approach covers not only the realizations of speech acts per se, but also politeness and variation in the contextual set-up and related communication strategies. Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008a: 2) suggest that speech act analysis could serve as a ground-breaker towards a pragmatic history of the English language. Their anthology contains two co-authored papers by Taavitsainen and Jucker, one dealing with compliments (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008b) and the other with apologies (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008c). Another line of contextually focused research consists of studies addressing the emergence and development of written genres, i.e. communicative events characterized
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by a set of communicative purposes shared, identified, and mutually understood by the members of the relevant discourse community in which they regularly occur (Swales 1990: 58). Genres provide a source of variation in language and thereby also a source of language change (Taavitsainen 2001). The emphasis has been on the history of scientific genres (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004). Taavitsainen and Pahta, in collaboration with their research team at the University of Helsinki, have investigated medical texts from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period. In their project on scientific “thought styles” in medical English, they aim at “a long diachronic perspective in a multifaceted sociohistorical framework”, as a result of which they have published the electronic Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (Taavitsainen et al. 2005). The database comprises 86 texts (495,322 words) from three traditions of medical writing, surgical treatises, specialized texts, and remedy books from 1375 to 1500. The latest publication from the project is a combined volume of Early Modern medical texts and studies based on them (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2011). A different view into the history of genres is offered by terminological research. From this perspective, Norri (1992, 1998, 2004) examines early medical writings (1400–1550) with a reference to the names of sicknesses and body parts and their origins. At the University of Turku, the history and characteristics of genres have been investigated by several scholars. Peikola is concerned with the religious discourse of the Lollards, with reference to the impact of their specific sect vocabulary in their writings (Peikola 2000) and with the catalogue as a genre of the sect (Peikola 2003). How religious communication works in yet another medieval religious setting involving close ingroup ties among its members is studied by Hiltunen (2003) and Skaffari (2009b), with reference to the Ancrene Wisse. Carroll (2003, 2009) examines the discourse properties of medieval recipes in terms of the notions of “discourse colony” (Carroll 2003) and “vague language” (Carroll 2009). Valle (1999) is a longitudinal study of scientific discourse, as seen in the writings of the Royal Society of London (1665–1965). The material of her study covers both medicine and natural history. The approach involves a close scrutiny of the material as an output of a discourse community of scholars with a variety of internal and external ties, including the different voices involved in the communication of the Society in different periods. The data indicate a gradual change from private epistolary writing to completely public communication towards the end of the period examined. Tanskanen (2003, 2009) is concerned with the genre of letters, especially from the perspective of letter-writing manuals. In the domain of legal genres, the project on the edition of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials (cf. Section 2.1 above) has given rise to several studies of courtroom discourse in the Salem records, including question-answer sequences, recording techniques and editing principles, transmission history, scribal profiling, and discourse strategies (cf. Hiltunen 1996; Grund et al. 2004; Grund 2007; Hiltunen and Peikola 2007; Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen 2007).
3.6 Surveys of language history Studies providing overviews of the history of English either in terms of periods or approaches are important works of reference for assessing the state of the art. Illustrative examples from the Nordic area include Ryde´n (1979), discussing approaches to historical English syntax up to the 1970s, Kisbye (1971–72), providing an account of the
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history of English syntax in terms of a part of speech analysis, and Kisbye (1992), offering a general history of English in a textbook format. More recently, two extensive studies of specific aspects of HLE have appeared in The Cambridge History of the English Language (Rissanen 1999; Nevalainen 1999), both addressing the Early Modern English period. Rissanen’s study is the first comprehensive account of syntactic developments in the 15th and 16th centuries, with special reference to the structural properties of the noun phrase, verb phrase, elements of the clause, simple sentence, and composite sentences. Nevalainen (1999) is concerned with Early Modern English lexis and semantics. The section on lexis examines the expansion of the vocabulary in the light of available dictionary evidence, with special reference to lexical processes and borrowing. The semantic section examines types of meaning shifts and their motivations in Early Modern English lexis. Nevalainen (2006b) has also published a textbook on Early Modern English. It provides an all-round discussion of the linguistic features of English in c.1500–1700, drawing on the Helsinki Corpora (HC and CEEC) for examples and paying special attention to the social context of language use. Finally, Nevalainen and Brunberg (2003) is a textbook on the methodology and major findings relevant to HLE of historical sociolinguistics (cf. Section 3.4).
4 Summary Historical linguistics of English has a long and distinguished history in the Nordic countries, and the field is thriving today. As shown by the discussion above, it is the University of Helsinki where most of the work is being conducted at the present time. But cutting-edge research is also done in several other universities in the Nordic countries. The interplay between present and past is the source of constant stimulation for research on HLE. At present, the most dynamic field of research, from a methodological perspective, is based on data-driven projects utilizing electronic corpora of historical materials. At the same time, the compilation of new corpora, generating new research, is an equally notable trend. In terms of approaches, the stimuli provided by socially and contextually oriented methods, as applied in the study of the language of the past, are among the most fruitful in offering new insights into HLE, and a large number of studies combine the two.
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Carroll, Ruth. 2003. Recipes for laces: An example of Middle English discourse colony. In: Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari (eds.), Discourse Perspectives on English: medieval to modern, 137–165. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carroll, Ruth. 2009. Vague language in the medieval recipes of the Forme of Cury. In: Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.), Instructional Writing in English, 55–82. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kyto¨. 1997. Towards a Corpus of Dialogues, 1550–1750. In: Heinrich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne (eds.), Language in Time and Space. Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, 60–71. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Ekwall, Eilert. 1936a. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ekwall, Eilert. 1936b. Studies on English Place-Names. Lund: Berlingska Boktryckeriet. Ellega˚rd, Alvar. 1953. The Auxiliary Do: The Establishment and Regulation of its Use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1972. Old English adverbial þa – an action marker? Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73: 90–96. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1999. English studies in Finland: Past, present, and future. In: SannaKaisa Tanskanen and Brita Wa˚rvik (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on English Studies, 13–31. Turku: Department of English, University of Turku. Enkvist, Nils Erik and Brita Wa˚rvik. 1987. Old English þa, temporal chains, and narrative structure. In: Anna Giacalone Ramat, Onofrio Carruba, and Giuliano Bernini (eds.), Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 221–237. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. von Feilitzen, Otto. 1937. The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1968. Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1972. Scandinavian Settlement Names in Yorkshire. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1978. Scandinavian Settlement Names in the East Midlands. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1985. Scandinavian Settlement Names in the North-West. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag. Filppula, Markku. 1986. Some Aspects of Hiberno-English in a Functional Sentence Perspective. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. Filppula, Markku. 2006. The Making of Hiberno-English and other “Celtic Englishes”. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 507–536. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Filppula, Markku , Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitka¨nen. 2002. Introduction. Early contacts between English and the Celtic languages. In: Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitka¨nen (eds.), The Celtic Roots of English, 1–26. Joensuu: Joensuun Yliopistopaino. Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto. 2008. English and Celtic in Contact. London: Routledge. Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Some universals of grammar with special reference to the order of meaningful elements. In: Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language, 73–113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grund, Peter, Merja Kyto¨, and Matti Rissanen. 2004. Editing the Salem Witchcraft Records: An Exploration of a Linguistic Treasury. American Speech 79: 146–167. Grund, Peter. 2007. From tongue to text: The transmission of the Salem Witchcraft Examination Records. American Speech 82: 119–150. Hiltunen, Risto. 1996. “Tell Me, Be You a Witch?”: Questions in the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. International Journal for the Semiotics of the Law 9: 17–37.
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Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpio¨, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd edn., Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.), The HIT Center, University of Bergen, Norway. For manual, see http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/hc/index.htm (last accessed 9 December 2010). Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.). 1993. Early English in the Computer Age. Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.). 1997a. English in Transition: Corpusbased Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.). 1997b. Grammaticalization at Work: Studies of Long-term Developments in English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rissanen, Matti, Marianna Hintikka, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Rod McConchie (eds.). 2007 Change of Meaning and the Meaning of Change: Studies in Semantics and Grammar from Old to Present-Day English. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique. Rosenthal, Bernard, Richard Trask, Peter Grund, Risto Hiltunen, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Merja Kyto¨, Matti Peikola, Matti Rissanen, Margo Burns, Marilynne K. Roach, Gretchen Adams, Ben Ray. (eds.). 2009. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryde´n, Mats. 1966. Relative Clauses in Early Sixteenth Century English: with Special Reference to Sir Thomas Elyot. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Ryde´n, Mats. 1979. An Introduction to the Historical Study of English Syntax. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Ryde´n, Mats and Sverker Brorstro¨m. 1987. The Be/Have Variation with Intransitives in English: With Special reference to the Late Modern Period. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Rynell, Alarik. 1948. The Rivalry of Scandinavian and Native Synonyms in Middle English, especially taken and nimen. With an Excursus on nema and taka in Old Scandinavian. Lund: Gleerup. Sajavaara, Kari. 1967. The Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste’s Chaˆteau d’Amour. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique. Sandred, Karl Inge. 1971. A Middle English Version of the Gesta Romanorum: MS Gloucester Cathedral 22. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Sandved, Arthur O. 1968. Studies in the Language of Caxton’s Malory and that of the Winchester Manuscript. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Sandved, Arthur O. 2000. Norway. In: Balz Engler and Renate Haas (eds.), European English Studies: Contributions towards the History of a Discipline, 103–121. Leicester: The English Association. Selte´n, Bo. 1972. The Anglo-Saxon Heritage in Middle English Personal Names. East Anglia 1100– 1399. Lund: Gleerup. Skaffari, Janne. 2009a. Studies in Early Middle English Loanwords: Norse and French Influences. Turku: University of Turku. Skaffari, Janne. 2009b. The WOMANual: Ancrene Wisse on instruction. In: Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari, and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.), Instructional Writing in English, 35–53. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. So¨derlind, Johannes. 1951–58. Verb Syntax in John Dryden’s Prose, Vols. I–II. Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln (Vol. I); Go¨teborg: Elanders Boktryckeri (Vol. II). Sundby, Bertil. 1950. Dialect and Provenance of the Middle English Poem “The Owl and the Nightingale”: A Linguistic Study. Lund: Gleerup. Sundby, Bertil. 1963. Studies in the Middle English Dialect Material of the Worcestershire Records. Bergen/Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press. Svinhufvud, Anne Charlotte. 1978. A Late Middle English Treatise on Horses, edited from British Library MS. Sloane 2584, ff. 102–117b. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Swan, Toril. 1988. Sentence Adverbials in English: A Synchronic and Diachronic Investigation. Oslo: Novus Forlag. Taavitsainen, Irma. 1993. Genre/subgenre styles in Late Middle English. In: Merja Kyto¨, Matti Rissanen, and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), Early English in the Computer Age. Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus, 171–200. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma. 1995. Interjections in Early Modern English: from imitation of spoken to conventions of written language. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 439–465. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma. 1997a. Exclamations in the history of English. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 573–607. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma. 1997b. Genre conventions: Personal affect in fiction and non-fiction in Early Modern English. In: Matti Rissanen, Merja Kyto¨, and Kirsi Heikkonen (eds.), English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Style, 185–266. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma. 2000. Scientific language and spelling standardisation 1375–1550. In: Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800, 131–154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. Language history and the scientific register. In: Hans Ju¨rgen Diller and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.), Towards a History of English as a History of Genres, 185–202. Heidelberg: C. Winter Universita¨tsverlag. Taavitsainen, Irma and Pa¨ivi Pahta (eds.). 2004. Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma, Pa¨ivi Pahta, and Martti Ma¨kinen (eds.). 2005. Middle English Medical Texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma and Pa¨ivi Pahta (eds.). 2011. Early Modern Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2003. “Best patterns for your imitation”: Early modern letter-writing instruction and real correspondence. In: Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari (eds.), Discourse Perspectives on English: Medieval to Modern, 167–195. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2007. Intertextual networks in the correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.), Letter Writing, 73–87. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2009. “Proper to their sex”: Letter-writing instruction and epistolary model dialogues in Henry Care’s The Female Secretary. In: Matti Peikola, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, and Janne Skaffari (eds.), Instructional Writing in English, 125–140. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tissari, Heli. 2003. Lovescapes: Changes in Prototypical Senses and Cognitive Metaphors since 1500. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique. Thuresson, Bertil. 1950. Middle English Occupational Names. Lund: Gleerup. Valle, Ellen. 1999. A Collective Intelligence: The Life Science, in the Royal Society as a Scientific Discourse Community, 1665–1965. Turku: University of Turku. Walker, Terry. 2007. Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Warner, Anthony. 2006. Variation and the interpretation of change in periphrastic DO. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 45–67. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Wright, Laura (ed.). 2000. The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wa˚rvik, Brita. 1990a. On grounding in English narratives: a diachronic perspective. In: Sylvia M. Adamson, Vivien Law, Nigel Vincent, and Susan Wright (eds.), Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 531–542. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Wa˚rvik, Brita. 1990b. The ambiguous adverbial/conjunctions þa and þonne in Middle English: A discourse-pragmatic study of then and when in early English saints’ lives. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 345– 357. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zettersten, Arne. 1965. Studies on the Dialectal Vocabulary of the Ancrene Wisse. Lund: Gleerup. Zettersten, Arne. 1976. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from Magdalen College, Cambridge, MS Pepys 2498. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Risto Hiltunen, Turku (Finland)
88. History of English Historical Linguistics: East-Central and Eastern Europe 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction East-Central Europe Eastern Europe South-Eastern Europe Conclusions and perspectives References
Abstract This chapter surveys the emergence of research in English historical linguistics and the state of the art of teaching this subject in almost two dozen countries which do not necessarily make up a precise geographical unit but could be labeled as the former Eastern Bloc countries. The presentation of data follows a historical rather than a geographical principle. In some cases the subsections discuss the present status of English historical linguistics in higher education rather than the emergence of research in this field, which is due to the limited availability of data. The importance of this overview derives from the circumstance that information and publications appear in so many lesser known languages and – from some of these countries – they are often difficult to obtain. The survey aims to reveal the historical intellectual ties in the sphere of English historical linguistics that may be(come) covert by the fact that most of countries discussed here emerged in a process of secession from earlier geopolitical unions.
1 Introduction The geographical scope of this chapter is far from simple to define because there are problems with geographical definitions caused by the historical changes in political borders (see Todorova 2005). In this region the major centers for the study of English historical linguistics (EHL), from where intellectual threads and connections reached out and created secondary centers of dispersal, form nets that may have been cut through by historical, political changes. At the same time it seems almost impossible to avoid using the popular mental map labeled as the “former Eastern Bloc countries” in the Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1375–1396
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historical survey of EHL because this is what we arrive at when we look at the list of countries surveyed below. The turbulent history of East-Central and Eastern Europe is reflected in university annals, which often reveal a transnational administrative history, e.g. the University of Lviv (Ukraine) was founded by a Polish king in 1661, then re-established by the Austrian monarch to fall back under Polish control after the disintegration of the AustroHungarian Monarchy in 1918 and to be taken over by Soviet rule in 1939. Thus the language of education was either Polish, Latin, German, or Ukrainian, or all four. Due to shifting borders transnational biographies are also frequently found. An illustrative example could be the intriguing life story of Ernest Klein (1899–1983), author of an etymological dictionary of English (Klein 1966–67). He was born in Szatma´rne´meti, in the region called Partium, which then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Klein obtained his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1925. In 1931 he became the rabbi of the Nove´ Za´mky community (already belonging to Czechoslovakia at that time). Having survived the deportation to Auschwitz he returned to his birth place, Szatma´rne´meti (by then renamed as Satu Mare in Romania). In 1950 he emigrated to France and in 1952 he settled in Canada. Klein is today mentioned as a Romanian-born Canadian linguist.
2 East-Central Europe 2.1 Poland Among the countries surveyed in this chapter Poland has the strongest tradition in English historical linguistics and in the fleet of Polish Universities Poznan´ is definitely the flagship in this area. The first half of the 20th century saw a slow but definite progress in the emergence of the field. The first chair of English studies was established in 1911 at the Jagellonian University in Cracow by Roman Dyboski (1883–1945), whose area of interest was English medieval language and literature. His Vienna habilitation dissertation was published in Oxford (Dyboski 1908). He is the author of the first handbook on medieval English literature and language (Dyboski 1910), which remained in use as a university textbook until the 1950s. His lifetime covered two world wars and his research activity was hindered by those turbulent times (he was taken a prisoner of war in 1914 and spent seven years in Russian prisons; for a posthumously published account of this period see Dyboski 2007). In 1935 he co-edited the Middle English manuscript Knyghthode and bataile with his Poznan´ colleague, Zygfryd M. Arend (Dyboski and Arend 1935). The post-war revival period is marked by the activity of three outstanding scholars. Jerzy Kuryłowicz arrived in Wrocław from Lviv (Ukraine) in an escape from the arrival of Soviet troops. Between 1946 and 1948 he taught at the Institute of English Philology in Wrocław, then he moved to Cracow, where he took the chair of General Linguistics at Jagellonian University. EHL was revived in Warsaw in the wake of the arrival of two other scholars, both from the USA: Alfred Reszkiewicz and Margaret Schlauch. Alfred Reszkiewicz (1920–1973), a student of Kuryłowicz, started his studies of classical and English philology in Cracow and also studied at Yale and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1949–1950, postgraduate studies under W. H. Bennett). On his return he started to teach in Warsaw and published essential textbooks on EHL,
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among them two handbooks of Old English grammar, which became classical textbooks still in use (Reszkiewicz 1973a, 1973b). He also wrote a monograph on word order in Late Old English (Reszkiewicz 1966) and another one on sentence elements in Late Middle English (Reszkiewicz 1962). The arrival of the American Margaret Schlauch (1898–1986) was also beneficial to the promotion of EHL in Warsaw. She obtained her PhD with a dissertation on Chaucer at Columbia (Schlauch 1927), then studied Celtic languages under the instruction of Julius Pokorny in Berlin in 1929–1930, and in 1940 she became a full professor at New York University. Being not only a feminist and a Marxist but also an active member of the communist party of the USA, she decided not to return to the USA in 1951 for fear of McCarthyism and joined her sister, who was married to a Polish physicist, living in Poland. Schlauch’s contribution to EHL is manifold: her main achievements in EHL are her books outlining the history of English (Schlauch 1952, 1959), but she also wrote about methodological aspects of teaching EHL (Schlauch 1957). For further details of Schlauch’s life and her relevance for EHL see Rogers 2001, Fis´iak 2004, for her bibliography see Brahmer et al. (1966: 9–20). The institutional birth of English studies in Poznan´ dates back to 1921, when a British scholar, W. A. Massey (1884–1960) was appointed professor, while the emergence of EHL in Poznan´ is associated with the activity of Zygfryd M. Arend (1895–1944), who obtained his BA at the University of London and wrote his doctoral dissertation “The Interverbal Phonetics in Cursor Mundi” in 1926 in Poznan´. Arend continued investigating linking consonants. Part of his dissertation was published (Arend 1930) and is still often cited. However, his research on suprasegmentals in the Ormulum was left unfinished due to the author’s premature death (he was shot in the Warsaw Uprising). After World War II the Poznan´ department was reopened only in 1965. The new foundations were laid by a former student of Margaret Schlauch, Jacek Fis´iak. Having completed his habilitation (Fis´iak 1965) he became the head of the department. Under his leadership in the four decades between 1966 and 2005 a large school of EHL emerged. Poznan´ has a strong institutional basis for study and research in the field of EHL, its School of English has 17 departments. The present structure of the School of English emerged in a period of reorganization between 1996 and 1998, which resulted in the establishment of an independent unit for EHL, the Department of the History of English. Research activity of the staff covers all areas of the history of English from its early beginnings till the 18th and 19th centuries. The Department of Old Germanic Languages was formed in 2004; its scope of research encompasses primarily the prehistory (the Germanic and Indo-European roots) of English. These two departments represent a major achievement for the promotion of EHL because a separate department specializing in EHL is hard to find elsewhere in Europe (except for some Russian and Ukrainian universities).
2.2 Czech Republic English historical linguistics was already represented to some extent in the early period of English studies at Charles University, Prague, where Josef Janko (1869–1947) lectured on Anglo-Saxon grammar (Hladky´ 2000: 184). But the real beginning and evolution of English historical linguistics is inevitably connected to the activity of the Prague Linguistic Circle as both the institutional establishment of English studies and the
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linguists specializing in and teaching English historical linguistics were related to this group of scholars. Vile´m Mathesius (1882–1945), one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle, became the first Czech professor of English language and literature when the first English Department was founded at Charles University of Prague in 1912. The linguistic education of Mathesius – just like that of de Saussure – was linked to the Neogrammarian tradition: his professor was the Neogrammarian Jan Gebauer (1838–1907), specialist in the history of the Czech language. But Mathesius surpassed this tradition by viewing the synchronic system of language in a dynamic stability and promoting the necessity of integrating the comparative and the historical approach to linguistic analysis. This new, functionalist program was outlined as early as 1909 by Mathesius, and he demonstrated how this concept of integration worked on the basis of comparing English with Czech, German and French and on the evolution of Present-day English from Old English via Middle English. This principal work was circulated as a manuscript for decades before it was finally published in 1961 (English version: Mathesius 1975). The legacy and influence of Mathesius was maintained by his students and fellow scholars in the Prague School, such as Bohumil Trnka (1895–1984), who graduated from Charles University in 1919 and became a professor of English and older English literature in 1930. His research encompasses a vast area ranging from a four-volume history of English literature to studies in Germanic philology, primarily the phonology and syntax of English, among them articles on English and Germanic historical phonology. A cross-section of his oeuvre is in Trnka 1982, where chapter four discusses problems of English historical phonology and morphology. Trnka’s monograph on syntactic changes from Caxton to Dryden (Trnka 1930) proved to be seminal abroad as well, e.g. its translation into Japanese in 1956 has increased the popularity of English studies in Japan (cf. Irie 1989; cf. Akimoto, Chapter 90). The Prague department hosts the Oxford-Prague Medieval Workshop dealing with various topics in English medieval literature and English historical linguistics. The most recent, fifth meeting was held in 2010 (the earlier ones were held in 1994, 1995, 1997, and 2006). There are two major projects related to Old English run by the department: An Automatic Morphological Analyzer of Old English (coordinated by Ondrˇej Tichy´) and the digitalization of the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (coordinated by Jan Cˇerma´k, for details see http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/, last accessed 8 November 2011), which is now utilized as a tool both in research and in teaching. The second oldest Czech institution of English studies is the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, which started to operate in 1919. Its history is connected with the name of Josef Vachek (1909–1996), a representative member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, whose role in reviving the Department of English in Brno in the period after World War II was crucial. He was a most seminal figure for the historical study of English. His teaching gave motivation to several Czech scholars to follow the historical line of investigating the English language. His book on the history of English (Vachek 1951) saw several editions and reprints; its English version was published in Leiden (Vachek 1969) earlier than in Czechoslovakia (Vachek 1972, 1975). Among his smaller contributions to EHL, the investigation into the unresolved problem of the phonological evolution of the pronoun she may deserve interest (Vachek 1953). He was also the founder of the journal Brno Studies in English in 1959 (full-text version available online at http://www.phil.muni.cz/wkaa/home/ publikace/bse-plone-verze, last accessed 8 November 2011).
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Vachek’s legacy was continued in Brno by his students: Jan Firbas, Josef Hladky´ and Alesˇ Svoboda. Jan Firbas (1921–2000) concentrated his investigations on developing the Functional Sentence Perspective and in an early work he examined the function of word order in Old English and Modern English (Firbas 1957). Later, however, his focus shifted away from the history of English and his only contribution to this area was amending his professor’s textbook about the historical development of English (Vachek and Firbas 1962), which saw several later editions, most recently Vachek and Firbas (1994). Josef Hladky´ (1931–2008) was primarily interested in lexicology, e.g. he published a monograph on the names of mushrooms (Hladky´ 1996a). He also wrote several textbooks (Hladky´ 1996b, 2003) while teaching in Brno. He compiled the bibliography of Vachek’s works (Hladky´ 1997). Another student of Vachek, Alesˇ Svoboda (1941–2010), who taught not only in Brno but also in Ostrava and Presˇov, specialized in general, comparative, and English linguistics. He contributed to functionalist ideas by a monograph studying the diatheme, i.e. the context-independent pieces of information irretrievable from the immediately preceding context, based on an Old English text by Ælfric (Svoboda 1982). Brno professors A. Svoboda and J. Hladky´ participated in the foundation of another department of English, which operates at the Silesian University in Opava, where the Faculty of Arts originally started as a local branch of Masaryk University in Brno. A small but relevant study by a younger scholar affiliated both with Opava and Brno describes how Old English and Middle English scripts can be included in web pages and provides glyph-to-code reference tables for Old English and Middle English letters (Dra´pela 2004). English historical linguistics is also taught at Palacky´ University, Olomouc – the oldest Moravian university – where the Department of English and American Studies was for some time led by Jaroslav Macha´cˇek (1929–), author of a textbook on the history of English (Macha´cˇek 1963).
2.3 Slovakia The emergence of English studies in Slovakia is connected with the activity of Czech professors at Comenius University in Bratislava. It was the Czech Celtologist Jozef Baudisˇ (1883–1933) who inaugurated English studies in 1924. He was followed by a student of Mathesius, Otakar Vocˇadlo (1895–1974), whose multifarious expertise included Old English as well. Thus the foundations of English philology in Bratislava were similar to those in Prague and Brno, but the progress was not as successful as at Czech universities because in Slovakia “there were no conditions equal to those in Bohemia or Moravia” (Olexa 2000: 191). A promising first sign for English historical linguistics to unfold at the English Department in Bratislava appeared in 1945, when Ja´n Sˇimko (1920–) started to teach linguistics beside Old English literature. Although his primary focus was on literature, he published a book about Middle English syntax (Sˇimko 1957), in which he analyzed grammatical archaisms and concluded – on the basis of variations in subject-predicate order – that the syntax of the analyzed texts was Malorian rather than Caxtonian. Ja´n Sˇimko was appointed professor in 1968, but – having heard about the dramatic news of Soviet occupation while he was abroad on a study trip – he refused to return to Czechoslovakia. The vicissitudes and setbacks in the history of English philology are described by Olexa (2000: 192–198) and Sˇimko (2006).
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English historical linguistics appears in the curricula of Slovak higher educational institutions, but its role seems to be marginal because it is usually taught by linguists who specialize in other areas. Since training is directed at developing practical (mostly pedagogical) skills, it is not surprising that publications dealing with the history of English by Slovak authors are hard to find. The textbooks used are usually those by Czech authors (primarily Vachek 1972, 1975, 1977, 1978 and Hladky´ 1996b).
2.4 Hungary The first chair of English in Hungary was established in Budapest as early as 1886 by Arthur J. Patterson (1835–1899) at the Hungarian Royal University (renamed as Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd University in 1950). At that time linguistics was practically confined to the teaching of English grammar and the primary orientation of the department was for literature (Sarbu 2008: 110). This trend was basically preserved in the interwar period followed by “a gradual dissolution” of English studies in the decade after World War II (for details see Frank 2000). Revival came only after the 1956 revolution under the chairmanship of the eminent literary scholar, Miklo´s Szenczi (1904–1977). Although research and teaching focused on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the Romantics and modern English fiction, the curriculum changes brought about in the late 1960s finally led to the introduction of new subjects, such as the history of the English language (to some extent covering Old English as well) (Sarbu 2008: 112). The first courses in English historical linguistics taught by specialists started in the mid-1970s. Sa´ndor Rot (1921–1996) joined the department in 1974. He started his university career in 1949 in Ungva´r (Uzhgorod), Ukraine, where he laid the foundations for English studies (among others), and he was the head of the Department of English Philology between 1964 and 1974. He compiled the first handbooks on the history of English published in Hungary (Rot 1982, 1992). The subject acquired further prominence in the curriculum when Veronika Kniezsa joined the staff in 1975. Her research focuses on the Scandinavian influence on English especially as reflected in onomastics, as well as orthography and Scots. Studies dealing with EHL occasionally appearing in the ELTE SEAS Working Papers in Linguistics (Budapest) launched in 1994, since 2004 in electronic format: The Even Yearbook (http://seas3.elte.hu/delg/publications/even/index.html, last accessed 8 November 2011, with a further link to The Odd Yearbook). The second department of English in Hungary was established in Debrecen c.50 years after the first one. An English teacher training program started in the fall semester of the 1938–1939 academic year under the leadership of Sa´ndor Fest (1883– 1944), specialist in English-Hungarian literary and cultural relations. Following the tragic death of Fest (during the bombing of Budapest), English studies were revived by La´szlo´ Orsza´gh (1907–1984), whose professional profile was balanced between literature and linguistics (especially lexicography, e.g. Orsza´gh 1977). He re-launched the periodical Angol filolo´giai tanulma´nyok (‘Studies in English philology’), founded by Sa´ndor Fest in 1936 but discontinued after the founder’s death in 1944. The periodical appears now under a new name: Hungarian Studies in English. The majority of papers, however, are still in the area of literature and contributions discussing historical linguistic topics hardly ever crop up in the contents (note the two exceptions: Orsza´gh 1967 and Kniezsa 1981).
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The emergence of the first generation of experts in EHL followed the pattern that could be considered general: before specializing in EHL they were trained in other ´ da´m Na´dasdy teaching EHL at Eo¨tvo¨s University, Budapest linguistic areas, e.g. A attended courses in Germanic linguistics taught by Claus J. Hutterer (1930–1997), in general linguistics and Iranian studies taught by Zsigmond Telegdi (1909–1994). Others were motivated to specialize in EHL by lectures on Slavic and Indo-European historical comparative linguistics read by Jo´zsef Dombrovszky (1912–1996) at Debrecen University.
3 Eastern Europe One of the intellectual legacies of the former Soviet type of educational administration is visible in how EHL appears in the structure of the university study programs in Eastern Europe. The strong tradition for the historical comparative study of Germanic languages in the history of Russian linguistics provided a healthy soil for the growth of specialization in the history of the individual Germanic languages. This tradition, according to which EHL is taught in conjunction with Germanic historical comparative linguistics, survives not only at universities in the territory of the former Soviet Union but also in other places, e.g. Bulgaria. Thus the first specialists in EHL had by default a thorough background in the historical comparative study of Germanic languages. Another relevant trait of the Russian tradition in EHL is that – besides theoretical textbooks and readers – some publications were designed specifically to support seminar work with practical exercises (e.g. Linskij 1963), these are sometimes parts of an integrated series, e.g. Ivanova et al. (1976, 1985); Ivanova and Beljaeva (1980); Grishkun and Otroshko (2006, 2007); or Shaposhnikova (2008, 2009). The survival of the influence of the Russian schools of thought is supported partly by the fact that many linguists specializing in EHL at universities in the Baltic region, or in Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia graduated from or continued postgraduate studies at the leading universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and partly by the circumstance that new editions of the classical Russian textbooks (e.g. Ilyish 1935; Smirnitsky 1955; Rastorgueva 1969) are still in use in the former Soviet republics. However, the training of specialists is shifting from the major Russian universities to the local centers of higher education, although scholars may still return to Russia for postgraduate training or to obtain higher academic degrees. One of the consequences of this shift of geographical focus is already visible in the local publications (especially textbooks), which are becoming available in an increasing number (most of them, however, are written in the local languages).
3.1 Russia 3.1.1 St. Petersburg The Faculty of Modern Languages at Herzen Institute, St. Petersburg/Leningrad was founded in 1919 and one of its 11 departments was called “History of English”. It was at the Herzen Institute that a group of linguists – primarily experts in Germanic linguistics (V. M. Zhirmunsky, S. D. Katsnel’son, M. I. Steblin-Kamensky, V. N. Yartseva, M. M. Gukhman) – developed a new school of thought that came to be known
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as the Leningrad school of grammar. This school was active mostly in the period of 1930–1980 and it played a relevant role in the development of research in the area of EHL. The basic tenets of the school differed from the Neogrammarian tradition by embracing the structuralist approach to language, but at the same time it rejected the structuralist separation of synchrony and diachrony. This attitude is well represented in the works of Viktoria N. Yartseva (1906–1999), who specialized in English historical morphology and syntax (Yartseva 1940, 1960, 1961, 1975). Steblin-Kamensky (1903–1981) studied English in St. Petersburg, and he wrote his candidate dissertation about substantive epithets in Old English poetry in 1943 (for an abridged version see Steblin-Kamensky 1946). Later his interest focused on Old Icelandic and comparative Scandinavian studies. A significant number of experts in EHL were trained by the Leningrad school, e.g. Boris A. Ilyish (1902–1971), a student of Zhirmunsky, wrote his dissertation on the distribution of French loanwords in Middle English literary texts, but later his focus shifted to syntax, thus his academic doctorate was obtained on the basis of a dissertation investigating Chaucer’s syntax in 1946, and later, in 1970 he wrote a monograph on Shakespere’s syntax (both remained unpublished). His textbook is one of the earliest published ones (Ilyish 1935) and it had several later editions. Anatoly Liberman (1937–), working in the USA since 1975, is also a graduate of the Faculty of English at the Herzen Institute, where he was a student of Steblin-Kamensky.
3.1.2 Moscow The primary center for English historical linguistics in Moscow is the Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology (called Department of Germanic and Romance Philology until 2005) founded in 1925 at the Lomonosov University (MGU). A separate Department of English Linguistics was established in 1941. Its basic parameters of education and the curriculum were formulated by Aleksandr I. Smirnitsky (1903–1954), who studied Germanic philology at MGU and graduated in 1924. Smirnitsky was a specialist in English historical linguistics; his reader in the history of English including a lexicographic supplement to illustrate the historical changes of words from Old English to Modern English (Smirnitsky 1938) has become a classical textbook. His Old English textbook (Smirnitsky 1955) was posthumously published. Both of these books became bestsellers reprinted several times. Another relevant headquarters for English historical linguistics is the Moscow State Linguistic University (previously “Maurice Thorez” Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages), where the Department of the Grammar and History of the English Language was founded in 1961. A student of Smirnitsky, Tatiana A. Rastorgueva (1922–1992) became a leading expert in EHL. She taught at the department between 1953 and 1992. Her first dissertation was on the historical development of impersonal sentences (Rastorgueva 1954) and her academic doctoral monograph on the historical changes in English morphology (Rastorgueva 1980). She published a textbook (Rastorgueva 1969), which is still popular outside Russia as well and has a later, English version (Rastorgueva 1983). Her students teach at universities in Russia and in the former Soviet republics. The present research activity of the department focuses on the cognitivecommunicative and discourse-pragmatic aspects of grammatical units belonging to
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different levels in synchrony and diachrony. A research team concentrates on the historical and sociolinguistic variation of functional norms in the English language (Reznik et al. 2001). The department coordinates the work of a scientific student society called “Historical etymology of some areas of English vocabulary”. The Department of English Lexicology at the Moscow State Pedagogical University was founded by Vladimir D. Arakin (1904–1983), who was primarily known as the leader of an influential school of historical semasiology. He is the author of a popular textbook, an outline of the history of English (Arakin 1955). Numerous further publications related to EHL were produced by another scholar at this department, Mark M. Makovsky (a former student of A. Smirnitsky and V. Zhirmunsky). His academic doctoral dissertation of 1969 is devoted to the historical comparative dialectography of the English lexicon. He also compiled an etymological dictionary of English (Makovsky 2005).
3.1.3 Novosibirsk A faculty of foreign languages including an English department was founded at the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical Institute in 1945 by Viktor E. Rauschenbach, a Volga German (distant relative of the rocket scientist Boris Rauschenbach [Dizendorf 2009: 15]). The Russian Academy of Sciences established its local branch in Novosibirsk, which led to the establishment of the Novosibirsk State University in 1958 (now called Novosibirsk National Research State University). The Department of English Philology opened in 1962, its profile is linguistics and intercultural communication, yet History of English is a course integrated in the study program both for those who intend to specialize in teaching EFL and for those who would become interpreters and specialists in intercultural communication. Along with historical sociolinguistics and diachronic typology, EHL is also taught at the Department of the History and Typology of Languages and Cultures. The field of EHL developed in the 1970s and 1980s by the activities and publications of Vulf Y. Plotkin (1972, 1976). He was born in 1927 in Belarus, graduated from St. Petersburg in 1953, taught also in Chis¸ina˘u (Moldova), and emigrated to Israel in 1993. His work is continued by one of his students, Irina V. Shaposhnikova, author of several publications related to the teaching and study of EHL (Shaposhnikova 1995, 1997, 2003, 2008, 2009).
3.2 Ukraine The first scholar relevant for the emergence of EHL in Ukraine was the Austrian Leon Kellner (1859–1928), born in Tarno´w (now in Poland). He obtained a doctorate in Vienna in 1883, and spent some time in England, where he met Frederick J. Furnivall (president of the Early English Text Society). This meeting fostered his interest in the language of Caxton and Shakespeare (see e.g. Kellner 1885). Kellner was appointed professor of English Philology at the University of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) in 1904 but in 1915 he left for Vienna (for an account of that decade in his life see Pils 2008). In the 1920s and 1930s Indo-European linguistics became a catalytic factor in historical linguistics partly due to the activity of Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895–1978), who was born in Stanisławo´w (Austria-Hungary at that time, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He became professor of comparative and Romance linguistics in Lviv (Lwo´w, Lemberg) in 1929. However, in 1946 he left for Poland escaping the Soviet regime. Shakespeare
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seminars, led by the Polish philologist, Władysław Tamawski (1885–1951) in the 1930s, were also relevant for the beginning of EHL. Teachers of English (as well as German) were trained in the framework of classical philology until the Faculty of Foreign Languages was set up in 1950, and the Department of English Philology opened. EHL today is represented by Mykhaylo Bilynskiy, whose research focuses on historical aspects of word-formation and lexicology. At Kyiv National Linguistic University (founded in 1948) a Faculty of English opened at the very beginning. In 1967 the faculty was divided into two departments: the Department of the Grammar and History of English and the Department of English lexicology and stylistics. The latter was headed by Olexandr Morokhovsky (1930–1994), who graduated from Leningrad with a dissertation on English historical syntax (Morokhovsky 1956). He taught courses in EHL and was interested primarily in lexicology, diachronic and synchronic stylistics, as well as text linguistics in its early beginnings (see Morokhovsky 1980). EHL is also taught at the Department of English Philology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The textbooks used in instruction are partly Russian publications, however, locally published sources are becoming increasingly available, e.g. Kostyuchenko (1963), Shakhray (1971, 1976), and more recently Khaimovich (1998), Studenets (1998, 1999), Vasyuchenko (2001), Kolesnik (2004), Verba (2004), Potapenko (2010).
3.3 Belarus The Faculty of English at Minsk State Linguistic University was established in 1948. Among its six departments there is one called Department of the History and Grammar of the English Language, which was created as a separate unit in 1957, but specialists in EHL work also at other departments of the faculty. Valentina F. Rutskaya, a former student of Steblin-Kamensky wrote her dissertation on the vowel system of the Northumbrian dialect of Old English (Rutskaya 1969) and published some articles on this topic (Rutskaya 1971, 1972).
3.4 The Baltic region 3.4.1 Estonia Courses on the history of the English language in Estonia are usually offered in the institutional framework of Germanic studies. Several introductory textbooks were published in Tartu, all of them written by the English philologist and translator, Oleg Mutt (1920–1986). He was a lecturer at the English Department from 1961 until his death. He also acted as head of the department in the period 1961–1978. His publications provide the students with a full overview of the history of English from its Germanic background (Mutt 1973) to Old English (Mutt 1962 and several later editions), Middle English (Mutt 1966), the period of 1500–1700 (Mutt 1979) finishing with varieties of present-day English (Mutt 1977).
3.4.2 Lithuania The first Lithuanian scholars specializing in EHL started their activity in the period after WWII. Albertas Steponavicˇius (1934–) lectured and published extensively on
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the history of the English language. He defended his dissertation on the vocalism of the Kentish dialect in Leningrad in 1965 and has published a series of papers on Old and Middle English phonology in the main Lithuanian journal of linguistics, Kalbotyra (almost exclusively in Lithuanian), but his books (Steponavicˇius 1987, 2006) and some of his studies (Steponavicˇius 1970, 1997, 2000, 2005) are in English. In Lithuania EHL as a subject was part of the curriculum as early as 1924 when English studies were offered in the framework of Germanic studies at Kaunas University (Grigaliu¯niene˙ 2008: 46).
3.5 Romania The first English departments in Romania were established in Bucharest, Ias¸i and ClujNapoca. In Bucharest several important publications appeared written by Edith Iarovici: two textbooks on the history of English (Iarovici 1961, 1970) and articles on EHL (e.g. Iarovici 1965, 1969). Today History of English and Old English in Bucharest is taught by a young scholar, Ruxandra Vis¸an. She investigated Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in an interdisciplinary approach emphasizing that the connection between language and culture contributes to the shaping of modern discourse (Vis¸an 2009). English studies in Cluj-Napoca at Babes¸-Bolyai University used to be a section within the Department of Germanic Languages until 1959, so the first chairpersons were professors of German. The English department has grown to become the second most important after the one in Bucharest. Adrian Papahagi’s research fields include palaeography, manuscript study focusing on cultural, literary and occasionally on linguistic aspects of Old, Middle and Early Modern English texts. Besides teaching BA courses, such as History of English, Old English Literature, Comparative grammar of the Germanic languages, he is also affiliated with the Center for Manuscript Studies (CODEX, University of Cluj). In Ias¸i, history of English is taught as a compulsory course on the BA level at the English Department of “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University (for a sample syllabus see http://www.uaic.ro/uaic/bin/download/Cooperation/BAcoursesLettersenglishlglit/ HistoryofEnglish.pdf, last accessed 8 November 2011). Following the introduction of the Bologna system the former two-semester course had to be reduced to one semester. At present Adrian Poruciuc teaches the subject. He has published textbooks (Poruciuc 1987 and later revised editions) and several monographs on EHL (Poruciuc 1995, 1998, 1999a, 1999b). His professor was Gheorghe Iva˘nescu (1912–1987), specialist ´ cole in Romance, Indo-European and general linguistics, who studied abroad as well (E ´ Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris in 1934–1935 and also in Rome between 1935–1937).
4 South-Eastern Europe In the process of the disintegration of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia the following new states emerged in 1991: Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, BosniaHerzegovina, and then the remaining Yugoslavia became a union of Serbia and Montenegro, but in 2006 Montenegro left the union and in 2008 Kosovo gained its independence. The higher educational system in the new states naturally shows the historical intellectual connections with the main university centers of the former Yugoslavia (Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana): it is often the case that a professor is active at
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universities in more than one of these new states. Since research in EHL is marginal in most of the newly established states, only Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia will be discussed here.
4.1 Serbia At Belgrade University the Department of English was founded in 1929, its first head was Vladeta Popovic´ (1894–1951), who obtained his doctoral degree in London in 1925 (published as Popovic´ 1928). Although he was an expert in literature, he also gave lectures on the history of English. After the death of Popovic´ the development of English studies was continued by his wife, Mary Stansfield-Popovic´ (1899–1989). In 1958 Draginja Pervaz wrote a dissertation on grammatical gender in Laʒamon’s Brut (Pervaz 1958). There is a locally published two-volume outline of the historical grammar of English written by Gordana Korac´ (Korac´ 1993, 2002). Slobodanka Đolic´ (a graduate of Belgrade University, doctoral degree in applied linguistics in Zagreb) is a prolific author of books about various aspects of the English language, among them a textbook on the history of English (Đolic´ 2002). This textbook is also used at several universities, e.g. at the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. In Novi Sad the emergence of the Department of English Studies in 1954 (the same year when the Faculty of Philosophy was founded) is connected with the activity of Belgrade professors Marija Stansfield-Popovic´ and Draginja Pervaz. English historical linguistics is represented primarily by the work of Radmila B. Sˇevic´, who wrote a monograph on Middle English adverbials (Sˇevic´ 1991). In the younger generation Tanja Milic´ev specializes in the syntax of Old English and is co-author of a workbook in the history of English (Milic´ev and Sˇevic´ 2002).
4.2 Slovenia Janez Oresˇnik (1935–) did his undergraduate studies in Indo-European comparative linguistics and obtained his PhD in Germanic linguistics at the University of Ljubljana in 1965. He also studied and carried out postdoctoral research at various universities (Copenhagen 1959–1961, Zagreb 1962–1963, Reykjavik 1965–1966, Harvard 1969–1970). His main publications are in the area of Scandinavian languages, especially Icelandic. More recently his name has been associated with the Slovenian model of Natural Syntax, a theory of strong and weak syntactic variants, which investigates the evolutionary trends of the competition between synonymous syntactic units in language history. The application of the theory to Old English has produced several publications (e.g. Trobevsˇek-Drobnak 1990, 1994, 1999; Oresˇnik and Trobevsˇek-Drobnak 1992). In the 1970s the historical linguistics courses taught at the department of English by Janez Oresˇnik were taken over by one of his students, Francˇisˇka Trobevsˇek-Drobnak, author of a historical grammar of English (Trobevsˇek-Drobnak 1993).
4.3 Croatia The foundation and development of the Zagreb Department of English is connected with the name of Rudolf Filipovic´ (1916–2000), a local graduate, who also had a chance to study in Sheffield and London. His activity is described in detail in the history of the
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department (Vidan s.a.). Filipovic´ was interested in historical aspects of linguistic study, primarily in the history of Anglicisms (Filipovic´ 1983, 2000) and headed a major endeavor of creating an etymological dictionary of Anglicisms in European languages. One of his students, Dora Macˇek (1936–) became a specialist in EHL and wrote her doctoral thesis on the expression of future in Chaucer’s language, a project she started when she was a student of the late Angus McIntosh (1914–2005) at the University of Edinburgh. Besides teaching EHL, she is the founder of Scandinavian studies in Zagreb. In Zagreb and Zadar EHL used to be a subject taught for two years, but it has been reduced to a one-year course, which limits the possibility both for dealing with theroretical issues in more detail and for reading old texts (Jutronic´ 2003: 136). Locally developed materials for teaching are available but only in manuscript format (Jutronic´ 1984; Macˇek 2003). In Split, History of English is an elective course on the BA level taught by Dunja Jutronic´ (1943–). She graduated from Belgrade University in 1967 and continued her studies at Pennsylvania State University, where she obtained her MA and PhD. She is primarily affiliated with the University of Maribor (Slovenia). She gave a succinct account of the state of EHL in Slovenia and Croatia (Jutronic´ 2003), in which she discussed the main reasons why EHL is becoming marginalized.
4.4 Bulgaria English Philology as a degree subject at Sofia University was established within a composite Department of Germanic Studies as early as 1928. Constantine Stephanov (1879– 1940), a graduate from Yale (1901), was appointed the first English lector in Sofia in 1906 (Shurbanov and Stamenov 2000: 267). Courses on English historical linguistics were launched by Stephanov, whose professional interest was both in literature and in linguistics but in his teaching activity he gave a significant portion to courses on the history of English (Early English, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English grammar). His publications covered aspects of culture and history as well as geographical variation and language contacts. He devoted a long study to Latin elements in English (published in two parts, Stephanov 1921, 1924). The subject of EHL also owes a lot to Roussi Roussev (1900–1988), whose original area of study was classical languages. He taught Middle English grammar but he did not publish in this field. An independent department of English philology at the University of Sofia was founded in the early 1940s. The “patriarch” of the department was Marco Mincoff (1909–1987), an expert on Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama. Mincoff – like Roussev – studied classical languages in Sofia but obtained his doctoral degree in Berlin with a dissertation devoted to a historical linguistic topic: he analyzed Anglo-Saxon expressions of power and might (Mincoff 1933). His study was restricted to a limited number of texts available to him at the time but his dissertation is still an important monograph for studying the semantic development of OE words like rice, maga, welig, eadig, spedig, gesælig, earm, þearfa, etc. His English Historical Grammar (Mincoff 1955) has been reprinted several times. In an article about the Lindisfarne Gloss he argued that the errors in the gloss can be attributed to the scribe’s miscomprehensions of the Latin text (Mincoff 1938). Mincoff was head of the Department of English and American Studies between 1951 and 1974, a period in which English philology differentiated into literary and linguistic studies and English historical linguistics
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emerged as a specialization. A graduate of the American College of Sofia, one of the oldest American educational institutions outside the United States, Maria Rankova (1914–1989) read lectures on the historical grammar of English from 1965 until her retirement in 1974. She wrote detailed studies about the development of periphrastic do (Rankova 1964, 1966) and an outline of the history of English (Rankova 1971). Andrei Danchev (1933–1996) published numerous articles on various aspects ranging from English historical phonology to syntax (Danchev 1969, 1975, 1997). Mincoff, Rankova, and Danchev were seminal teachers, several of their former students teach EHL at various universities, e.g. Donka Minkova (UCLA), Christo Grancharov (University of Plovdiv), Mira Kovatcheva (University of Sofia), Yana Chankova (South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad).
5 Conclusions and perspectives EHL in the examined region is the offspring of the wider area of English medieval philology: it emerged due to the specialization of interest in the linguistic aspects of medieval literary texts, which is a pattern of evolution not unusual in other parts of Europe. Another pattern that can be considered general is that EHL emerged as a specialization within institutes of Germanic Philology. Although this institutional arrangement may have “tended to impede the development of English studies” (Haas 2000: 358), at the same time it may have been benevolent for EHL because university curricula in Slavonic countries still maintain a strong tradition of teaching Germanic historical comparative linguistics as a prerequisite of courses in English historical linguistics. This chapter may serve as the starting point for further in-depth studies investigating the emergence of EHL in the countries surveyed here. Some countries, e.g. Poland and Russia would provide a vast amount of material for further consideration, while the history of EHL in other countries (especially in some regions of South-Eastern Europe) needs to be further examined because information is either not available at present, or detailed information is provided only in the lesser known local languages. In many cases EHL is in a status nascendi at new universities, especially at those that grew out of teacher training colleges within the past decade or so. EHL is unlikely to appear in the curriculum of those newly established universities that cater for the practically oriented training favored in the current economic constellation. Among the surveyed countries Poland and Russia are definitely the flagships of English historical linguistics both in research and in teaching. But while Polish results are well integrated in the international circulation of knowledge, the international community of specialists may be unaware of the approaches used and the progress made by Russian (or other East European) experts. Providing more opportunities for scholarly meetings in East-Central and East European countries could facilitate the flow of information. This has already started with the activity of the European Society for the Study of English. In the area of EHL the pioneering Polish initiatives to organize major conferences (such as the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics and the first International Conference on Middle English) are welcome examples, and promising continuation is seen in the events of the sixteenth ICEHL organized in Pe´cs, Hungary (2010) and the latest, seventh ICOME meeting held in Lviv, Ukraine (2011).
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Acknowledgements: In the process of writing this survey I was in contact with 67 colleagues from 15 countries. I am grateful to every one of them for the assistance and support they have given me. Although sometimes a single short message contained crucial information for the progress in writing this chapter, for limitations of space the short list below contains the names of those colleagues only with whom I have exchanged several messages. The responsibility for the content of the chapter, however, is all mine. Bulgaria: Mira Kovatcheva (University of Sofia), Jana Chankova (South-West University Neofit Rilski, Blagoevgrad) Czech Republic: Martin Adam (Masaryk University, Brno) Estonia: Suliko Liiv (Tallin University) Lithuania: Jone˙ Grigaliu¯niene˙ (University of Vilnius), Violeta Kale¨daite¨ (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas) Romania: Adrian Porucic (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Ias¸i) Russia: Irina V. Shaposhnikova (Novosibirsk National Research State University) Slovakia: Gabriela Misˇsˇı´kova´ (Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra) Slovenia: Francisˇka Trobevsˇek-Drobnak (University of Ljubljana) Ukraine: Mykhaylo Bilynsky (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv)
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Introduction France Italy Spain The Future References
Abstract Though the interest in English historical linguistics in Southern Europe is relatively recent, the present chapter shows that over the last 20 years scholars in France, Italy and Spain have published innovative research in the field, both in the more traditional areas of English historical linguistics (historical lexicology and lexicography, dialectology, textbooks and teaching materials) and in new research areas (grammaticalization and mechanisms of change, corpus linguistics, text types and specialized discourse, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, multidimensional and computational analysis).
1 Introduction Unlike European countries such as Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, where English Studies in general, and English historical linguistics in particular, have a long history (see, respectively, Markus 2000: 145–147, Haas 2008: 75–78, Loonen 2000: 92 and Wischer, Chapter 85), the interest in English historical linguistics in Southern Europe dates back to more recent times and has been confined to France, Italy, and Spain. English Studies in the other three Mediterranean countries, namely Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus, have a focus on literature and culture, or at best on synchronic linguistics, as can be seen from the accounts in Parkin-Gounelas (2008), Kayman (2000), and Stephanides and Goutsos (2008). The following outline, therefore, pays attention only to developments in the field in France (Section 2), Italy (Section 3) and Spain (Section 4); Section 5 of this chapter contains a brief conclusion.
2 France According to Bonel-Elliott (2000: 71–72), during the 19th century English Studies in France were primarily a matter of the study of English literature, with chairs established at the Universities of Lille (1893), Lyons (1897) and the Sorbonne (1901). Little by little, however, other subjects were added to the curriculum, and in 1927 Rene´ Huchon (1872–1940), generally considered to be the pioneer of English philological studies in France, was appointed as the Sorbonne’s first professor of English philology (see Carruthers 2001; Mouchon 2006: 198). He was the author of a long, two-volume history of the English language (Huchon 1923/1930), and of a number of other publications on medieval English, such as a translation into French of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1397–1414
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In 1941 Emile Pons (1885–1964), a literary historian specializing in Old and Middle English literature, succeeded Huchon at the Sorbonne. He was a near contemporary of Fernand Mosse´ (1892–1956), arguably the most influential figure France has ever produced in the field of English historical linguistics. Mosse´ obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne with a dissertation on the history of the progressive, in two parts (Mosse´ 1938a, 1938b), which has itself become a classic. According to Cre´pin (cited in Martin 2006: 154–155), Mosse´ would have been Huchon’s natural successor, but political issues having to do with the German occupation of France prevented his promotion. In 1949, however, he was awarded the chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the prestigious Colle`ge de France. His Manuel de l’anglais du Moyen Age des origines au XIVe sie`cle, published in two volumes between 1945 and 1950, was translated into English shortly afterwards (Mosse´ 1952) and remained for a long time the standard introduction to medieval English at both European and American universities. In the Foreword to Mosse´’s handbook, Kemp Malone pointed out that “it bears witness to the lively interest that the French now take in our common medieval heritage” (Mosse´ 1952: v). The comment was apposite, for during the two or three decades following World War II, French anglicists published numerous studies on medieval English literature, as well as on medieval English language. Also importantly, the Center d’Etudes Me´die´vales Anglaises (CEMA) was created at the Sorbonne thanks to the efforts of Marguerite-Marie Dubois, while an oral examination on the grammar of Old, Middle or Renaissance English became one of the requirements to complete a degree in English at French universities (see Bonel-Elliott 2000: 73; at present the CEMA is devoted exclusively to the study of English medieval literature and culture). Among the linguistic and philological publications from this period, the following, all published in Paris, deserve mention: Antoine Culioli, Transformation du syste`me modal en anglais me´die´val: disparition du subjonctif (1960); Paul Bacquet, La structure de la phrase verbale a` l’e´poque alfre´dienne (1962), L’etymologie anglaise (1976); Andre´ Cre´pin, Proble`mes de grammaire historique: de l’indo-europe´en au vieil anglais (1978), Grammaire historique de l’anglais: du XIIe sie`cle a` nos jours (1978); Georges Bourcier, Les propositions relatives en vieil-anglais (1977), L’orthographe de la langue anglaise. Histoire et situation actuelle (1978), Histoire de la langue anglaise. Du Moyen Age a` nos jours (1978). This latter work was translated into English by Cecily Clark (Bourcier 1981), and became quite popular outside French-speaking countries to supplement standard works such as Strang (1970), in large measure because of its detailed account of the phonological history of English. Hence, by the middle of the 20th century, English Studies in France had a solid philological tradition. In some respects, however, it could be said that French historical linguists and philologists were swimming against the tide. Firstly, the international impact of their work was limited by the choice of French as the language of publication, a policy which does not seem to have changed in any significant way in recent decades: Mouchon’s (2006) bibliography of French research on English historical linguistics, updated to 2006, contains 213 entries, of which a mere 24 are in English. Secondly, while elsewhere in Europe research in English Studies saw an increased tendency towards compartmentalization and specialization in either linguistics or literature, it was common in French departments of English to do combined research in language, literature, and culture. Culioli, for instance, is known today primarily as a synchronic linguist, but was also the author of a “supplementary” dissertation entitled Dryden, traducteur de Chaucer et
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de Boccace (Paris, 1960). Bacquet’s supplementary dissertation (1962) was on the work of Thomas Sackville, while Cre´pin’s main dissertation (1970), published as Cre´pin (2005) discussed Old English poetics. This lack of specialization is also apparent today, and is even considered desirable, to judge from a recent report by Carruthers (2001: Introduction historique) on English medieval studies in France. By the end of the 1960s, and especially after the student revolution in 1968, pressure from students was instrumental in bringing more contemporary British civilization onto the curriculum, at the expense of diachronic studies (see Prost 1992). The result was that, as aptly pointed out by Mouchon (2006: 204), “il est difficile depuis de trouver des anglicistes diachroniciens et des the`ses consacre´es a` ce domaine” [‘since then it has been difficult to find diachronic anglicists and dissertations in this field’]. In order to fully understand the nature of the changes that took place from the 1970s onwards, it is instructive to consider the programs for the agre´gation and the CAPES (‘Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du Second Degre´’), the competitive examinations which provide students who pass them with permanent pensionable jobs as secondary school teachers. For these examinations a new course is set nationally and published about one year before the exam. The course is then taught at every university, and reflects the core areas of current university degrees, among which the history of English is most often absent. At some French universities, the Sorbonne (Paris IV) being one example, a general course on the history of English is offered, though only as an option, with students able to choose English phonology instead (see also the pessimistic report in Carruthers [2001: Introduction historique]). Thus, the program for the 2009 agre´gation d’anglais, as published in the Official Bulletin of 29 May 2008, consists of a literary component (the anonymous Everyman, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Ford’s A Multitude of Sins), a civilization component (for the year in question, the presidency of the United States from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush and the debate over the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, 1787–1840), and a linguistics component (consisting basically of a linguistic commentary of a text). What then is the present situation of English historical linguistics in France? Despite the decreasing role of diachronic linguistics in university curricula, several general histories of the English language, written in French, have appeared over the past few years, such as Chevillet (1994), Cre´pin (1994), Taille´ (1995), or Ste´vanovitch (1997); they are used as textbooks at those French universities where courses on the history of English are still offered. Aside from this, however, diachronic research by French anglicists is rarely published in specialized journals or collective volumes, nor is it often presented at international conferences. Some exceptions to this generalization are the work of Arnaud on the development of the progressive in Late Modern English (e.g. Arnaud 1983, 1998) and, more recently, the research carried out by Boulonnais on the grammaticalization of adverbs of sameness and excess (Boulonnais 2005) and by Banks, Professor of English at the University of Western Brittany, on the development of the scientific journal article (Banks 2008).
3 Italy The first chairs in English Studies were established in Italy following World War I, when, as pointed out by Marenco (2000: 53), “the League of Nations […] encouraged
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such inducements to international understanding”. Shortly afterwards came the creation of the departments of English at the Universities of Turin (1926), Rome (1932), and Milan (1937), and gradually the establishment of specialist degrees in English at virtually every Italian university. In most of them, the emphasis was on literature rather than language, yet the presence of philologists with an international reputation at universities such as Bergamo and Naples was instrumental in the development and growth of English historical linguistics. At Naples it was Thomas Frank (1925–1990) who played a decisive role (see Sornicola 1998). Frank was born in Vienna, but he moved to Britain early in his life, and studied at London and Oxford. While in Oxford he met the Italianist Cesare Foligno, who was then about to take up the chair of English Literature at the University of Naples and who persuaded Frank to leave Britain in 1952 and pursue a university career in Italy. He first worked as an assistant to Foligno, then as temporary professor (1972) of History of the English Language, and finally (1982) as permanent professor of History of the English Language. His earliest publications in this field date from the mid 60s, with the volumes Dall’antico al medio inglese (Naples, 1965) and Storia della lingua inglese (Naples, 1968). They were followed by other studies dealing both with the history of English and the history of linguistic thinking in 17th and 18th century Britain (e.g. Frank 1979, 1983, 1985). As noted by Sornicola (1998: 14), during the period in which Frank was professor of History of the English Language he worked intensively to develop the scientific and didactic activities of the chair. He had many graduate students, and was in touch with historians of the English language from other Italian universities, in particular Nicola Pantaleo, who in 1986 had been appointed to the professorship of History of the English Language at the University of Bari. In 1987, Frank, Pantaleo and a large troop of Neapolitans that included Gabriella Di Martino, Silvana La Rana and Gabriella Mazzon, participated in the Fifth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics at Cambridge. This marked the beginning of a continued presence of Italian scholars at international conferences and meetings on historical linguistics. One year later Pantaleo and Frank organized at Bari and Naples the first conference of SLIN (‘Storia della Lingua Inglese’), an unofficial association of historians of English in Italy whose aim was to give greater visibility to the discipline. Since then, fifteen SLIN conferences have been held, and corresponding volumes of proceedings have been published by the organizers (see, e.g. Aitchison et al. 1990; Pantaleo 1992; Di Martino and Lima 2000; Barisone et al. 2004; Bertacca 2005, etc.). Italy is thus, to my knowledge, the only European country where teachers and researchers united by their common interest in the history of English meet regularly to present their work and exchange opinions. The list of the Italian academics who participate at the SLIN meetings would be too long to give here in full, but includes, among many others, Ermanno Barisone, Cristiano Broccias, Nicholas Brownlees, Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, Marina Dossena, Richard Dury, Roberta Facchinetti, Maurizio Gotti, David Hart, Giovanni Iamartino, Susan Kermas, Gabriella Mazzon, Massimo Sturiale, and Letizia Vezzosi. Together with Naples and Bari, the University of Bergamo was also crucially involved in the early stages of the development of English historical linguistics in Italy. In the 1980s the holder of the chair of Germanic Philology at Bergamo was Fausto Cercignani, who had worked with Eric Dobson at Oxford and produced, very largely under
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Dobson’s influence, one of the best treatments of Elizabethan pronunciation available to date (Cercignani 1981), as well as other important work on the phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages (e.g. Cercignani 1980). Cercignani’s teaching induced one of his students, Maurizio Gotti, to prepare a dissertation on Middle English morphology under his supervision. A few years later Gotti was appointed professor of English Language and Translation Studies at Bergamo, and in a relatively short period of time he managed to establish his department as one of the major centers for the study of English historical linguistics. Gotti’s research interests are wide-ranging and include, among others, the features and origins of specialized discourse, from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective (e.g. Gotti 1996, 1998, 2003, 2005, 2006a, etc.), English lexicology and lexicography, with particular regard to specialized terminology and cant (e.g. Gotti 1999, 2002a, etc.), and English diachronic syntax, with a special focus on modality (e.g. Gotti 2002b, 2006b; Gotti et al. 2002, etc.). Several colleagues and former students of Gotti, such as Richard Dury, Roberta Fachinetti and Marina Dossena, have also established solid reputations in the field of English historical linguistics. Dossena, for instance, has done important work on verbal and adverbial modality (Dossena 2001, 2003), on historical dialectology (e.g. Dossena 2005; Dossena and Lass 2004, 2009), and on the development of languages for special purposes (e.g. Dossena and Fitzmaurice 2006; Dossena and Taavitsainen 2006; Dossena and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). In general, specialized discourse has been a major area of interest for Italian researchers: to the previously mentioned publications of Gotti and Dossena we could add Del Lungo Camiciotti (1997, 2008), Del Lungo Camiciotti et al. (2006), Dury (2006), and quite a few others. It is surely a clear indication of the good health and prestige enjoyed by English diachronic linguistics in Italy that Italian universities have recently hosted several important international conferences. The first and second editions of the International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD) took place at Bergamo in 2003 and 2007, respectively. In 2006 the Bergamo team also organized the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (14 ICEHL), the selected proceedings of which have now been meticulously edited, in three volumes, by Gotti et al. (2008). One year earlier, the Fifth International Conference on Middle English (ICOME5; see Mazzon 2007) had been held at Naples, hosted by Gabriella Mazzon. Mazzon, a former student of Thomas Frank, has successfully combined work on sociolinguistics and varieties of English (e.g. Mazzon 1992a, 1992b; Mazzon and Gray 2009) with diachronic research on topics such as the history of English negation (Mazzon 2004) or the development of address pronouns (Mazzon 2003). Finally, Italian researchers who work in isolation from larger teams but have produced internationally recognized research, include, among several others, Vezzosi (e.g. Rosenbach and Vezzosi 2000; Ko¨nig and Vezzosi 2008) and Broccias (2008).
4 Spain In Spain, the establishment of English Studies was delayed until 1952, when, coinciding with General Franco’s political aspirations for European support, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science sanctioned the first university syllabus of English Philology, initially at the University of Salamanca (1952), and from 1954 also at the Complutense University of Madrid. Degrees in English Philology were soon implemented at the
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Universities of Barcelona (1955), Zaragoza (1957), La Laguna (1963), Valladolid (1964), Seville (1965), Santiago de Compostela (1967), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Granada and Oviedo (1968), and eventually at all Spanish University districts (see Monterrey 2000: 40 for additional details). As pointed out by Conde-Silvestre and Salvador (2006: 38), the existence of a strong philological component in the degree of Spanish language and literature, and the initial connections of English Studies with departments of Romance languages “ensured that the early [English] curricula had a strong philological component. For instance, the very first syllabus at Salamanca […] comprised the linguistic and literary study of Gothic, Old English, Old High German, Middle English and Middle High German, as well as an introduction to Old Norse literature”. Though this was quite exceptional, annual compulsory courses on the history of English, often supplemented by one or more elective courses on Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, formed part of all English degrees offered at Spanish universities. Also responsible for the emphasis on the historical study of English in the English departments created in the 50s and 60s was the fact that the first English chair in Spain was the chair of Germanic Philology (1958) occupied at the Complutense University of Madrid by Emilio Lorenzo, who had been trained in Romance and Germanic philology in Spain and abroad, and who stayed for some time with Professor Ernst Robert Curtius in Bonn (see Bravo et al. 1994: iii). It took a few years, however, for research on English historical linguistics to develop in Spain. One of the pioneers was Juan de la Cruz, whose important work on the origins of the phrasal verb (de la Cruz 1969, 1972, 1975) and on various other topics is well known. A little later (1982), a fully-fledged, 738-page Historia de la lengua inglesa was published by Francisco Ferna´ndez, and soon came to be used as a textbook in many syllabuses. The 1980s also witnessed the defence at the Complutense University of Madrid of some of the earliest dissertations on diachronic topics, namely Tejada (1986) and Larsen (1988), both supervised by Enrique Berna´rdez, a specialist in Icelandic, historical linguistics and text linguistics, who in 1986 had succeeded Lorenzo as professor of English Language at Complutense. Another important development during this period was the founding of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM) and the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (SEDERI), in 1987 and 1988 respectively, as well as the creation of a panel on the history of English at the conferences of AEDEAN, the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies. These organizations served as convenient fora for the presentation of historical research by Spanish scholars. In the early 1990s the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics took place outside Northern Europe for the first time, at the University of Valencia (see Ferna´ndez et al. 1994), which could be taken as an indication that Spanish diachronic linguistics was coming of age. At about the same time, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science significantly increased investment in research and development, a policy that was quickly imitated by the regional governments of the different autonomous communities which make up the modern Spanish state. This enabled Spanish academics to apply regularly for funding to carry out research projects and participate in international conferences and fora. Among the researchers on English historical linguistics that in one way or another have benefited from these changes we could mention Conde-Silvestre and Herna´ndez-Campoy, both based at the University of Murcia. They have published widely on historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Conde-Silvestre 2007;
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Conde-Silvestre and Herna´ndez-Campoy 1999, 2004, 2005; Herna´ndez-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2005, 2012), and also on other more philologically oriented topics, such as textual editing (Va´zquez and Conde-Silvestre 2005); Conde-Silvestre is currently carrying out research on Scandinavian loans in Old and Early Middle English (Conde-Silvestre and Pe´rez-Raja 2008). At the University of La Rioja Javier Martı´nArista coordinates a project which has resulted, among other publications, in a 797-page history of English (de la Cruz Cabanillas and Martı´n-Arista 2001). ´ lvarez and At Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Alonso-Almeida, Rodrı´guez-A ´ Rodrıguez-Gil have carried out research on areas such as historical pragmatics and ´ lvarez 2006; specialized languages (Alonso-Almeida 2007, 2008, 2009; Rodrı´guez-A ´ Domı´nguez-Rodrı´guez and Rodrı´guez-Alvarez 2007), 18th-century grammars and dic´ lvarez and Rodrı´guez-Gil 2006; tionaries (Rodrı´guez-Gil 2002, 2006; Rodrı´guez-A ´ Rodrı´guez-Alvarez 2009; Rodrı´guez-Gil and Ya´n˜ez-Bouza 2009), and the punctuation ´ lvarez 1999; Alonso-Almeida 2002). Earlier of Middle English texts (Rodrı´guez-A punctuation has also been discussed extensively by Calle-Martı´n and Miranda-Garcı´a, two young researchers based at the University of Ma´laga (see, among others, CalleMartı´n 2004; Calle-Martı´n and Miranda-Garcı´a 2005). In Santiago de Compostela a research project coordinated by Iglesias-Ra´bade has led to publications on historical pragmatics (e.g. Sa´nchez-Roura 2002), French influence in Middle English phrasing (Iglesias-Ra´bade 2003a), prepositional usage (Mouro´n-Figueroa 2008) and, in particular, a 628-page Handbook of Middle English (Iglesias-Ra´bade 2003b). At the nearby University of La Corun˜a the team led by Moskowich-Spiegel is developing a very interesting Corpus of English Scientific Writing 1600–1900 (details in Moskowich-Spiegel and Crespo-Garcı´a 2007a); among many other publications, she has co-edited with Crespo-Garcı´a a collection of essays exploring the interaction of language and culture during the Middle English period (Moskowich-Spiegel and Crespo-Garcı´a 2007b). The study of Old English lexis and semantics has attracted considerable attention from Spanish scholars, who have approached this field from different functional and cognitive perspectives. Corte´s-Rodrı´guez and Torres-Medina (2003) have looked at verbs of running, Molina (2005) at terms of suffering, Va´zquez-Gonza´lez (2005) at verbs of giving and granting, and Dı´az-Vera at dimensions such as light (Dı´az-Vera 2004). He has also edited a collection of studies on historical lexicography (Dı´az-Vera 2002). Old, Middle, and Modern English dialectology has been another popular field of research. A project on the history of Northern English coordinated by Ferna´ndezCuesta at the University of Seville has led to publications such as Ferna´ndez-Cuesta and Rodrı´guez-Ledesma (2004, 2008, 2009) and Ferna´ndez-Cuesta et al. (2008). At present the team is compiling the Seville Corpus of Northern English (SCONE; see Amores-Carredano et al. 2008). Other young researchers connected to this group are Carrillo-Linares and Garrido-Anes (2007, 2008, 2009) and Pons-Sanz (2004, 2007). Finally, at the University of Salamanca Garcı´a-Bermejo Giner has meticulously examined earlier features of several regional dialects (e.g. Garcı´a-Bermejo Giner and Montgomery 2001, 2003). At the University of Santiago de Compostela a research unit on “Variation and Linguistic Change” (from 2000 renamed “Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization”) was informally constituted in 1990 by the author of the present chapter, with the aim of undertaking theoretically-informed corpus-based research on grammatical
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change in English and its mechanisms and causes. Since its creation the unit has received funding from both the central and regional governments and has become one of the leading teams in the discipline. Its members have published widely on a varied range of topics, including complement clauses and complementizers (Fanego 1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2004a, 2007, 2010a, etc.; Lo´pez-Couso 2007a; Lo´pez-Couso and Me´ndezNaya 1996, 2001); theory and methods in grammaticalization (Fanego 2004b, 2010b; Lo´pez-Couso 1996, 2010; Lo´pez-Couso and Seoane 2008; Seoane and Lo´pez-Couso 2008); the development of English intensifiers (Me´ndez-Naya 2003, 2006, 2008); information structure and word order change (Seoane 1999, 2000, 2006a, 2009, etc.); the syntax of Early and Late Modern English (Aarts et al., Volume 1, Chapter 54; Seoane, Volume 1, Chapter 39); the evolution of specialized discourse (Seoane 2006b); negative cliticization and negative existentials (Lo´pez-Couso 2006, 2007b); verb categories (Nu´n˜ez-Pertejo 2004, 2007); relativization strategies and dialect variation in Old and Middle English (Sua´rez-Go´mez 2006, 2008, 2009); modal verbs (Loureiro-Porto 2005, ´ lvarez and 2009, 2010); the grammaticalization of adverbial subordinators (Cougil-A Gonza´lez-Cruz 2004; Gonza´lez-Cruz 2007) and of phrasal verbs (Rodrı´guez-Puente 2009); courtesy markers (Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Faya-Cerqueiro 2007; FayaCerqueiro 2009); the editing of Middle English texts (Va´zquez 2009; Va´zquez and Conde-Silvestre 2005). The group is also involved in the expansion of the ARCHER Corpus and has compiled a Corpus of Late Modern British and American English Prose 1700–1889 (for details see respectively Lo´pez-Couso & Me´ndez-Naya forthc.; Fanego 2007: 163–166, 222–228), and has organized several major international conferences, such as the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (11th ICEHL), in 2000 (see Fanego et al. 2002a; Fanego et al. 2002b), and the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG3), in 2005. At the neighboring University of Vigo Javier Pe´rez-Guerra, a graduate from Santiago de Compostela, coordinates the research project ‘Language Variation and Textual Categorization’ and works in close collaboration with Fanego and her group; they are at present carrying out a joint project on constructionalization in the history of English. Pe´rez-Guerra has published widely on information packaging in the clause (Pe´rezGuerra 1999, 2005a; Pe´rez-Guerra and Tizo´n-Couto 2008), Biber’s multidimensional model of register analysis and its application to earlier periods of English (Pe´rezGuerra 2005b, 2006), and the analysis of grammatical variation between Early Modern and Present-day English by means of computational techniques (2004, 2008; Pe´rezGuerra and Martı´nez-Insua 2010). His team has done work on existential sentences (Martı´nez-Insua and Pe´rez-Guerra 2006; Breivik and Martı´nez-Insua 2008), disjuncts ´ lvarez 1996), and the subjunctive in Early and Late Modin earlier English (Gonza´lez-A ´ ´ ern English (Gonzalez-Alvarez 2003). They have also edited a volume (Pe´rez-Guerra et al. 2007) stemming from the Second International Conference on Late Modern English, which they held in 2004. Also connected with this group are two internationally recognized young scholars now working at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester respectively, Victorina Gonza´lez-Dı´az and Nuria Ya´n˜ez-Bouza. Finally, among research produced by Spanish academics working independently from larger teams we could mention the Old English Anthology by Bravo et al. (1992), which includes a comprehensive introduction to the language (113 pages); Alcaraz-Sintes’ (2002) approach to computer-assisted teaching of Old English; Pe´rez-Lorido’s (1996)
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analysis of verbal ellipsis in coordinated constructions; and Castillo’s (1994) study of verb-particle combinations in Shakespearian English.
5 The Future The preceding account has shown that, over the last 15 or 20 years, innovative research on English historical linguistics has been carried out in the countries of Southern Europe, an area which had traditionally been outside the center of gravitation of the discipline. Italian and Spanish scholars have published a significant number of highquality books and articles, both in the more traditional fields of English historical linguistics (historical lexicology and lexicography, dialectology, textbooks, and teaching materials) and in new research fields (grammaticalization and mechanisms of change, corpus linguistics, text types and specialized discourse, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, multidimensional and computational analysis) and periods (e.g. the English of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries). In both Italy and Spain a new generation of researchers has emerged who understand the importance of contributing to international conferences and submitting their work to internationally competitive journals and publishing houses. Not very long ago, the number of Spaniards who participated at international meetings was negligible. By contrast, the 15th edition of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, held at the University of Munich in 2008, featured 14 presentations by Spaniards, a Spaniard co-convened one of the five workshops in the program, and of the four plenary speakers, one was Italian and another Spanish. One can only hope that such concerted activity will continue, serving to consolidate and strengthen research into historical linguistics for the future. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Francisco Alonso-Almeida, Juan Camilo CondeSilvestre, Marina Dossena, Richard Dury, Julia Ferna´ndez-Cuesta, Marı´a F. Garcı´aBermejo, Edurne Garrido-Anes, Maurizio Gotti, Gabriella Mazzon, Isabel ´ lvarez for providing me Moskowich-Spiegel, Nicola Pantaleo and Alicia Rodrı´guez-A with valuable information for the preparation of this chapter. For generous financial support thanks are also due to the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant CN2011/011) and the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (grant HUM2007–60706).
6 References Aitchison, Jean, Thomas Frank, and Nicola Pantaleo (eds.). 1990. English Past and Present. Fasano: Schena. Alcaraz-Sintes, Alejandro. 2002. OE CAI: Computer-assisted instruction of Old English. International Journal of English Studies 2(1): 205–250. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. 2002. Punctuation practice in a late medieval English medical remedy book. Folia Linguistica Historica 22: 207–232. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. 2007. Middle English medical books as examples of discourse colonies: G.U.L Hunter 307. In: Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begon˜a Crespo-Garcı´a (eds.), 55–80. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. 2008. The pragmatics of and-conjunctives in Middle English medical recipes. A Relevance Theory description. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9: 171–199.
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Prost, Antoine. 1992. Education, socie´te´ et politiques: une histoire de l’enseignement en France de 1945 a` nos jours. Paris: Seuil. ´ lvarez, Alicia. 1999. Segmentation of fifteenth-century legal texts: A reconsideration Rodrı´guez-A of punctuation. SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 9: 11–20. ´ lvarez, Alicia. 2006. Oral features in late Middle English legal texts. Neuphilologische Rodrı´guez-A Mitteilungen 107: 187–198. ´ lvarez, Alicia. 2009. ‘With a concise historical account of the language’: Outlines of Rodrı´guez-A the history of English in eighteenth-century dictionaries. In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff (eds.), 183–208. ´ lvarez, Alicia and Marı´a Esther Rodrı´guez-Gil. 2006. John Entick’s and Ann Fisher’s Rodrı´guez-A dictionaries: An eighteenth-century case of (cons)piracy? International Journal of Lexicography 19: 287–319. Rodrı´guez-Gil, Marı´a Esther. 2002. Ann Fisher: First female grammarian. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 2. http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl/rodriguez-gil.htm (last accessed 25 November 2010). Rodrı´guez-Gil, Marı´a Esther. 2006. Deconstructing female conventions: Ann Fisher (1719–1778). Historiographia Linguistica 33: 11–38. Rodrı´guez-Gil, Marı´a Esther and Nuria Ya´n˜ez-Bouza. 2009. The ECEG-database: A biobibliographical approach to the study of eighteenth-century English grammars. In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff (eds.), 141–170. Rodrı´guez-Puente, Paula. 2009. The effects of lexicalization, grammaticalization and idiomatization on phrasal verbs in English: Some combinations with get as a test case. In: Carlos Prado-Alonso, Lidia Go´mez-Garcı´a, Iria Pastor-Go´mez, and David Tizo´n-Couto (eds.), 71–85. Rosenbach, Anette and Letizia Vezzosi. 2000. Genitive constructions in Early Modern English. New evidence from a corpus analysis. In: Rosanna Sornicola, Erich Poppe, and Ariel ShishaHalevy (eds.), Stability, Variation and Change of Word-Order Patterns over Time, 285–307. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sa´nchez-Roura, Teresa. 2002. The pragmatics of captatio benevolentiae in the Cely Letters. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 3: 253–272. Seoane, Elena. 1999. Inherent topicality and object foregrounding in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 23: 117–140. Seoane, Elena. 2000. Impersonalising strategies in Early Modern English. English Studies 81: 102–116. Seoane, Elena. 2006a. Information structure and word order: The passive as an information rearranging strategy. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), Handbook of the History of English, 360–391. Oxford: Blackwell. Seoane, Elena. 2006b. Changing styles: On the recent evolution of scientific British and American English. In: Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt, and Herbert Schendl (eds.), Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500–2000, 191–211. Bern: Peter Lang. Seoane, Elena. 2009. Syntactic complexity, discourse status and animacy as determinants of grammatical variation in English. English Language and Linguistics 13: 365–384. Seoane, Elena and Marı´a Jose´ Lo´pez-Couso (eds.). 2008. Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Phildelphia: John Benjamins. Skaffari, Janne, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wa˚rvik (eds.). 2005. Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sornicola, Rosanna. 1998. Thomas Frank in the Neapolitan environment. In: Dieter Stein and Rosanna Sornicola (eds.), The Virtues of Language: History in Language, Linguistics and Texts. Papers in Memory of Thomas Frank, 11–18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Stephanides, Stephanos and Dionysis Goutsos. 2008. History of English and English Studies in Cyprus. In: Renate Haas and Balz Engler (eds.), 151–160. Ste´vanovitch, Colette. 1997. Manuel d’histoire de la langue anglaise des origines a` nos jours. Paris: Ellipses. Strang, Barbara M. H. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Sua´rez-Go´mez, Cristina. 2006. Relativization in Early English (950–1250): The Position of Relative Clauses. Bern: Peter Lang. Sua´rez-Go´mez, Cristina. 2008. Syntactic dialectal variation in Middle English: Relativizers and relative clauses. In: Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena, and Richard Dury (eds.), Vol. I: 141–156. Sua´rez-Go´mez, Cristina. 2009. On the syntactic differences between OE dialects: Evidence from the Gospels. English Language and Linguistics 13: 57–75. Taille´, Michel. 1995. Histoire de la langue anglaise. Paris: Armand Colin. Tejada, Paloma. 1986. Tematizacio´n y rematizacio´n en Ingle´s Antiguo. Ph.D. dissertation. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and Fa´tima Faya-Cerqueiro. 2007. Saying please in Late Modern ´ lvarez, Jorge L. Bueno-Alonso, and English. In: Javier Pe´rez-Guerra, Dolores Gonza´lez-A Esperanza Rama-Martı´nez (eds.), 421–444. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and Wim van der Wurff (eds.). 2009. Current Issues in Late Modern English. Bern: Peter Lang. Va´zquez, Nila. 2009. The ‘Tale of Gamelyn’ of the Canterbury Tales: An Annotated Edition. Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd. Va´zquez, Nila and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.). 2005. Editing Middle English in the 21st Century: Old Texts, New Approaches. Special issue of International Journal of English Studies 5(2). Va´zquez-Gonza´lez, Juan Gabriel. 2005. Diccionario Conceptual de Verbos para la Donacio´n en Ingle´s Antiguo. Huelva: Universidad de Huelva.
Teresa Fanego, Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
90. History of English Historical Linguistics: Asia 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Japan South Korea China Summary References
Abstract This chapter deals with the history and status of English historical linguistics in Asia, i.e. in Japan, South Korea, and China, where English historical linguistics has been carried out most actively. Japan, for instance, has two major English Linguistic (Philology) Societies: one is The Japan Society for Medieval English Studies (established in 1984 with about 400 members), and the other is The Modern English Association (established in 1983 with about 250 members). In the former, literary and linguistic studies have been carried out in the form of traditional philology; in the latter Early and Late Modern Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1414–1420
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English are target varieties to which linguistic, rather than literary, approaches are taken. In South Korea, The Literary Society for English Language and Literature in Korea was founded in 1955, and The Society for the History of the English Language in Korea was founded in 1992. The latter society in particular contributes much to the development of medieval English studies in Korea. Medieval English studies play a low-profile role in China.
1 Introduction Geographically speaking, Asia is bounded by Japan to the east, Siberia to the north, Indonesia to the south, and Turkey and Arabia to the west. For practical reasons, however, this chapter focuses exclusively on Japan, South Korea, and China, where English historical linguistics has been carried out most actively. Japan, for instance, has two major English Linguistics (Philology) Societies: one is The Japan Society for Medieval English Studies (established in 1984 with about 400 members), and the other is The Modern English Association (established in 1983 with about 250 members). In the former, literary and linguistic studies have been carried out in the form of traditional philology; in the latter, Early and Late Modern English are the varieties of English to which linguistic, rather than literary, approaches are taken. In South Korea, The Literary Society for English Language and Literature in Korea was founded in 1955, and The Society for the History of the English Language in Korea was founded in 1992. The latter society in particular contributes much to the development of medieval English studies in Korea. In the following, I shall provide a brief history of English historical linguistics in Japan, South Korea, and China, with reference to some major figures and outstanding publications that have made important contributions to the field.
2 Japan Studies in English philology in Japan started with those undertaken by Sanki Ichikawa (1886–1970), late Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). His books, An Introduction to Old English and Middle English (Ichikawa 1944) and Studies in English Grammar (Ichikawa 1954), ignited the philological minds of the people at that time. He also established one of the oldest societies in Japan, The English Literary Society (1929), which was based on the Tokyo University English Literary Society devoted to English literature and language studies. At the same time he fostered many disciples who took a lead in English language studies. Fumio Nakajima (1904–1995) is one of his students, and his book A History of English Development (Nakajima 1951 in Japanese) was very influential at that time. Other scholars who were not Ichikawa’s direct students, but who contributed much to English philological studies in Japan, include Shizuka Saito (1891–1970), Takanobu Otsuka (1897–1979), and Tadao Yamamoto (1904–1991). More advances in English historical studies in Japan have been made since the establishment of The Center for Medieval English Studies at the University of Tokyo at the Komaba campus (1969) by three pioneers, Fumio Kuriyagawa (Keio University, 1907– 1978), Michio Masui (Hiroshima University, 1914–1992), and Kikuo Miyabe (Tokyo University, 1915–1981). Their activities eventually led to the foundation of The Japan
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Society for Medieval English Studies (1984), which now has about 400 members. About the same time, another society was founded by Kazuo Araki (Nagoya University, 1921–), Michio Kawai (Hiroshima University, 1929–2011), and Masatomo Ukaji (Tsurumi University, 1931–2011). This was called The Modern English Association (1983), and has the aim of studying Early and Late Modern English, which hitherto had not been studied systematically. Today, the Association has about 240 members. The Society and the Association both publish their own official journals. The society publishes Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature. The No. 21/2006 issue features its 20th anniversary. This special issue, in addition to the usual articles, contains papers on the topics “The Study of Medieval English Language and Literature: Its Significance and Current Status” and “The Study of Medieval English Language and Literature in Japan”. The association publishes the journal Studies in Modern English and launched The Twentieth Anniversary Publication of The Modern English Association, Studies in Modern English, containing 36 papers on phonology, syntax and semantics. The Kenkyusha yearbook has a section on English historical studies and reports the year’s major articles and monographs. Unfortunately, this yearbook is written in Japanese; some books published in English which have come to my notice include (in chronological order and never to be exhaustive): Ando (1976), Fujiwara (1977), Ukaji (1978), Tajima (1985), Manabe (1989), Ono (1989), Ogura (1996, 2002), Yamakawa (1996), Kubouchi (1999), Ogawa (2000), Iyeiri (2001, 2005), Nakashima (2002), Jimura (2005), Kozuka (2006), Nakao (2008), and Matsumoto (2008). As regards some recent trends in English historical linguistics in Japan, see Fisiak and Oizumi (1998). For some representative articles on Old English, most of them originally in Japanese, which were translated into English, see Kubouchi et al. (1988). In the past two decades, the development of electronic corpora, together with historical linguistic theories such as grammaticalization, has made it possible to conduct more exhaustive, diachronic studies of English, such as Akimoto (2002) and Akimoto and Hosaka (2005). Also, English corpus linguistics applied to diachronic studies and stylistics has become a very active area of study. Saito et al. (2002), for instance, includes articles such as “Degree Adverbs in the Corpus of Early Modern English Correspondence Sampler”, “Adverbial Positions and Verb Movement in Middle English and Early Modern English”, and “Development of Any from Middle English to Early Modern English: A Study Using the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts”. Hori (2004) investigates Charles Dickens’s linguistic characteristics through the corpus-based study of collocations, and Kikuchi (2007) discusses the structure of literary texts, based on literary discourse. The works introduced above testify that English historical studies in Japan are very robust and prolific. Every year, young scholars present their research findings at numerous international conferences, which surely is a promising phenomenon (cf. Fanego, Chapter 89, for a similar situation in Southern Europe). At present, the largest English linguistics society is The English Linguistic Society of Japan (established in 1983, with approximately 1500 members), in which generative grammar and cognitive linguistics are two dominant fields of research, although historical studies of English are also included. The Japan Society for Medieval English Studies and The Modern English Association are the two major places for English historical studies. Interestingly, in terms of numbers of specialists in each field, my impression is that the Old English specialists make up the largest group, Middle English specialists are next, and Early and Late Modern English specialists are the third largest group. It seems that this ratio reflects
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the mentality of the Japanese scholars who prefer and cherish the old and enigmatic varieties of English, with slight disdain for practicality. As a matter of fact, many universities have been replacing English historical study courses with culture and communication studies, with more emphasis on the practical knowledge of English. Sadly, the developments in Japan thus mirror academic trends in most other regions around the world (see Wischer, Chapter 85, on German speaking countries; Cable, Chapter 84, on North America; Smith, Chapter 83, on Great Britain). The tug-of-war between these apparently opposite camps will continue for a while in the Japanese universities.
3 South Korea It was during the late 1960s that the study of English language and literature began to be active in Korea. Some pioneering scholars during this period should be mentioned. Cho Sung-Sik (Professor Emeritus at Korea University), Kim In-Sook (Seoul National University), Cheon Sang-Beom (Seoul National University), Chang Suk-Jin (Seoul National University), Min Jae-Ki (Kumkook University), Kim Jin-Man (Korea University), and Kim Seok-San (Seoul National University). Cho studied at Kyung-Sung University (now Seoul National University) in 1942 under Professor Nakajima Fumio, who held the chair of English philology at the University of Tokyo from 1945 to 1965. Cho published A History of the English Language in 1975 (Cho 1997, revised). All of the scholars mentioned above were his students. Since the early 1990s, the field of medieval English studies has tended to move away from philological and bibliographical work to a more theoretical direction. Cho Nahm-Ho and Lee Pil-Hwan are some of those who have combined diachronic linguistics with theoretical linguistics. The Linguistic Society of Korea was founded in 1975 by a group of scholars favoring Chomskyan theories. Because of the popularity of these mostly a-historical theories, medieval English studies were low-profile until the end of the 1980s. Some medievalists that should be mentioned here are: Choi Ik-Hwan, Kim Tae-Jin, and Park Young-Bae. Choi studied medieval English under the direction of James W. Downer and Sherman M. Kuhn at the University of Michigan in the United States. After three years’ study, he returned to Korea and taught at Sung Kyunkwan University in Seoul for nearly thirty years. Kim was his student. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia, and taught at Sung Kyunkwan University. Park is the first to take a PhD degree from Seoul National University in the field of medieval English studies, and now teaches at the Department of English at Kookmin University. His major areas of interest include syntactic change in medieval English and the history of English. The Korean Society for the History of the English Language was founded in 1993 and has published its official journal, The History of English, since 1995. Recently the society has been renamed as The English Language Society of Korea. The Medieval English Association of Korea was also founded in 1992. The association changed its name to The Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea early in 2003 to include the “Early Modern” period and to widen its membership and areas of interest. While extensive studies have been carried out in the field of medieval English, Korean medievalists have had some problems with their in-depth research in medieval
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language and literature. These mostly concern their educational and institutional systems. Very few university libraries have copies of medieval manuscripts. To obtain these materials, scholars and students must go abroad, but their sabbatical leave system has not yet been fully established. It is hoped that, despite these disadvantages, medieval English studies in Korea will continue to make such remarkable progress.
4 China It is regrettable to say that historical studies of English play a low-profile role in China, where synchronic linguistic studies, mostly within the frameworks of structural and generative linguistics and functional grammar, have been more actively carried out. Among the scholars who study the history of English, only Fu-ning Li (1917–2004, late Professor at Peking University) and Guohua Chen (Beijing Foreign Studies University) can be mentioned. Li was the only person in China over the past half century who wrote a course book in Chinese on the history of English. Chen studied Early Modern English at Cambridge University where he received his PhD in English historical linguistics. He has published several articles concerning the grammaticalization of English conditionals, some of which (Chen 1998, 2000) are in English. Other scholars have published a number of journal articles in Chinese on various aspects of Old and Middle English; these articles, however, rarely contain original insights.
5 Summary I have provided a brief history of English historical linguistics in Asia, with a focus on Japan, South Korea, and China, since these can be regarded as the major countries in Asia where English historical linguistics has most actively been worked on. China, however, plays a decidedly smaller role in this domain. Needless to say, more regions should be investigated in the future to grasp an overall picture of the development and current state of English historical linguistics in Asia. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Young-Bae Park and Guohua Chen for providing me with information regarding their own state of affairs in English historical linguistics.
6 References Akimoto, Minoji. 2002. Grammaticalization and Idiomatization. Published in Japanese. Tokyo: Hizuji. Akimoto, Minoji and Michio Hosaka (eds.). 2005. Grammaticalization: A New Development. Published in Japanese. Tokyo: Eichousha. Ando, Sadao. 1976. A Descriptive Syntax of Christopher Marlowe’s Language. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Press. Chen, Guohua. 1998. The degrammaticalization of addressee-satisfaction conditionals in Early Modern English. In: Fisiak Jacek and Marcin Krygier (eds.), Advances in English Historical Linguistics, 23–32. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Chen, Guohua. 2000. The grammaticalization of concessive markers in Early Modern English. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change–Grammaticalization in English, 85–110. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Cho, Nahm-Ho. 2003. The origin of periphrastic DO. English Language and Linguistics 16: 161–188. Cho, Sung-Sik. 1997. A History of the English Language. Seoul: Pyongwha Publishing Co., Revised edn. Seoul: Hankuk Publishing Co. Fisiak, Jacek and Akio Oizumi (eds.). 1998. English Historical Linguistics and Philology in Japan. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fujiwara, Hiroshi. 1977. Collected Papers on Word Order and Infinitive in English. Tokyo: Gakushuin University. Hori, Masahiro. 2004. Investigating Dickens’s Style: A Collocational Analysis. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ichikawa, Sanki. 1944. An Introduction to Old English and Middle English. Tokyo: Kenkyuusha. Ichikawa, Sanki. 1954. Studies in English Grammar. Published in Japanese. Tokyo: Kennkyusha. Iyeiri, Yoko. 2001. Negative Constructions in Middle English. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press. Iyeiri, Yoko (ed.). 2005. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia/Tokyo: John Benjamins/Yushodo Press. Jimura, Akiyuki. 2005. Studies in Chaucer’s Words and his Narratives. Hiroshima: Keisuisha. Kikuchi, Shigeo. 2007. Essays on English Literary Discourse: Medieval and Modern. Belgrade: The Philologia Association. Kim, In-Sook. 1996. Review of Bruce Mitchell’s and Fred C. Robinson’s A Guide to Old English, 5th edn., and Bruce Mitchell’s An Introduction to Old English & Anglo-Saxon England. History of English 2: 172–175. Kim, Seok-San. 1989. A History of English Language. Seoul: Eulyu Publishing Co. Kozuka, Yoshitake. 2006. A Linguistic Study of the Authorship of the West Saxon Gospels. Osaka: Osaka University Press. Kubouchi, Tadao. 1999. From Wulfstan to Richard Rolle: Papers Exploring the Continuity of English Prose. Suffolk: D. S. Brewer. Kubouchi, Tadao, William Schipper and Hiroshi Ogawa (eds.). 1988. Old English Newsletter: SUBIDIA 14, Old English Studies from Japan 1941–81. Binghamton: State University of New York. Lee, Pil-Hwan. 1999. English Historical Syntax: with special reference to word order and verb change. Seoul: Hankuk Publishing Co. Manabe, Kazumi. 1989. The Syntactic and Stylistic Development of the Infinitive in Middle English. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press. Matsumoto, Meiko. 2008. From Simple Verbs to Periphrastic Expressions: The Historical Development of Composite Predicates, Phrasal Verbs, and Related Constructions in English. Bern: Peter Lang. Nakajima, Fumio. 1951. A History of English Development. Published in Japanese. Tokyo: Iwanamishoten. Nakao, Yuji. 2008. Philological and Textual Studies of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthuriad. Tokyo: Eihosha. Nakashima, Kunio. 2002. Studies in the Language of The Cely Letters. Tokyo: Nan’un-do. Ogawa, Hiroshi. 2000. Studies in the History of Old English Prose. Tokyo: Nau’un-do. Ogura, Michiko. 1996. Verbs in Medieval English. Differences in Verb Choice in Verse and Prose. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ogura, Michiko. 2002. Verbs of Motion in Medieval English. Suffolk: D. S. Brewer. Ono, Shigeru. 1989. On Early English Syntax and Vocabulary. Tokyo: Nan’un-do. Park, Young-Bae. 1994. Medieval English Studies in Korea. Medieval English Studies Newsletter 31: 4–7. Park, Young-Bae. 1998. A History of the English Language. Seoul: Hankuk Publishing Co. Park, Young-Bae. 2001. The Anglo-Saxsons: History, Culture and Language. Seoul: Jisiksanupsa. Park, Young-Bae. 2001. Studies in the History of the English Language. Essay Collections. Seoul: Hankuk Publishing Co.
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Park, Young-Bae. 2005. Fifty years of medieval English studies in Korea – retrospect and prospect. Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature 20: 17–34. Toshio, Saito, Junsaku Nakamura, and Shunji Yamazaki. 2002. English Corpus Linguistics in Japan. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Tajima, Matsuji. 1985. The Syntactic Development of the Gerund in Middle English. Tokyo: Nau’un-do. Ukaji, Masatomo. 1978. Imperative Sentences in Early Modern English. Tokyo: Kaitakusha. Yamakawa, Kikuo. 1996. Studies in Historical English Syntax. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
Minoji Akimoto, Tokyo ( Japan)
XII. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods 91. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Historical dialectology 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Historical dialectology and the “Map of Knowledge” What dialectologists (traditionally) do What historical dialectologists do Character of the witnesses Treatment of the witnesses Time and space How does one make an historical linguistic atlas? Envoi References
Abstract In this chapter I offer an outline of the aims and objectives of “historical dialectology”. In particular, I consider the key questions that historical dialectology seeks to answer and methodologies for tackling these questions. The historical dialectological study of English has largely grown out of the linguistic study of texts belonging to the Middle English period, but also separate historical dialectological methods have been developed in the study of Old English (Kitson 1993, 1995), Old French (Dees et al. 1980; Dees et al. 1987) and Middle Dutch (Mooijaart 1992) and 13th- to 15th-century South-West German (Kleiber et al. 1979). I will exemplify mostly from Middle English materials in the discussions that follow, but will also refer to the principles and methodologies as applied to other medieval vernaculars. In any case, principles and methodologies need not be language-specific and techniques of description and analysis might be applied and tested with profit against data from languages other than those for which they were originally created. Indeed, traversing language borders to test principles and methodologies further is an obvious desideratum for the development of historical dialectology as a productive field of linguistic enquiry.
1 Historical dialectology and the “Map of Knowledge” Historical dialectology clearly falls within the boundaries of linguistics conceptualized broadly. Linguistics is not a single discipline, but a collection of overlapping territories of investigation which shade into each other. Each of these territories may formulate different ways of modeling the structure of languages and thereby contribute to the study of language itself in its various aspects. Linguists describe languages, partly as objects to be studied on their own merits, but also as contributions to the goal of describing and understanding the language faculty. One of the main divisions in language study is that between historical linguistics and synchronic linguistics. While much of the foundation work of modern linguistics was based on the historical and dialectal studies Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1421–1438
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of the 19th century, present-day theoretical linguists largely subscribe to the dichotomy formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure (de Saussure 1916: 144) between diachrony and synchrony, and also, if not now to Saussure’s other dichotomy between langue and parole, certainly to Chomsky’s opposition between competence and performance. Indeed, in the Chomskyan paradigm, language becomes an idealized object of study, divorced from any extralinguistic contextual dimensions (de Saussure 1916; Chomsky 1965: 4, 1986: 19–56). Synchronic linguistics engages with linguistic description at some period of time irrespective of any historical developments that led up to the stage when the language is being described (or, if the stage of language being described is a past stage, also of any developments that occurred subsequently). Historical linguistics is concerned with what happened in the history of individual languages or of groupings of languages as “families”, e.g. Germanic or Romance. It is also concerned, at a higher level of analysis, with the nature of linguistic change itself: how and why do languages change? Where does historical dialectology fit into this extensive and diverse continent of thought? What do historical dialectologists do that is different from what dialectologists who study “living languages” do?
2 What dialectologists (traditionally) do Dialectology has traditionally been concerned with collecting linguistic data with a view to discovering and describing how a language varies in its forms across space. Dialectology is in the first instance an empirical and so “real synchronic” enterprise: the linguistic informants are alive contemporaneously and the states of their language before or after the period of investigation are disregarded (Williamson 2004: 108–109). The dialectologist goes out into the field with a questionnaire to interrogate speakers at different localities within the area being surveyed. The speakers at each locality are chosen as representative users of the local speech of their communities – they are the linguistic witnesses of the speech of their community, representing not only themselves but those with whom they speak habitually “the same variety of language”. The questionnaire is a set of predetermined items under each of which is recorded the variant linguistic form(s) observed in the speech community at each location being surveyed. The same questionnaire is applied to each informant. This permits both description and later comparison of the forms elicited from the witnesses in the different communities, whose locations are the survey points. The data elicited at each survey point may be transferred to a set of maps of the area of the survey to present the results as sets of geographical distributions of different features. The set of maps is a linguistic atlas; for example: Der deutscher Sprachatlas, the Atlas Linguistique de la France, The Linguistic Atlas of England.
3 What historical dialectologists do Historical dialectologists apply the principles and methods of dialectological investigation, mutatis mutandis, to the past stages of a language. The mutatis mutandis is important, for to undertake a linguistic survey of the past stage of a language one cannot go about it in quite the same way as for a modern language. If one is dealing with the later Middle Ages – the period on which most historical dialectological activity has been focused – there is the crucial, if obvious, problem that there are no living informants.
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We have no native-speaking witnesses whom we can ask to respond to any questionnaire or who can give us their linguistic intuitions. Our witnesses are in fact an accidental sample of unintentional “witness statements” – the extant texts. The primary evidence is therefore written language and not spoken language. Our objects of study are “text languages” (Fleischman 2000: 34), conserved in the surviving manuscript texts. We are dealing in the first instance with the producers of the manuscript texts as “native writers” rather than as “native speakers”. Of course they were also native speakers of some variety of their native vernacular – e.g. Old French, late Middle English, Early Scots – but we have to approach the investigation of this partly through preliminary analysis of the primary written evidence as offered in the orthographies of the texts. The dialectological interest in these text languages is that they exhibit formal variation at one or more linguistic levels: orthography, phonology (inferably), morphology, lexis, and syntax. A fundamental objective of the historical dialectologist is to discover diatopic patterning in the variants found in the text languages. We want to find out which linguistic features show spatially delimited, yet coherent, diatopic distributions on the map of the area surveyed.
4 Character of the witnesses I have said above that our witnesses are texts. One could think of the texts as “witness statements” rather than as the witnesses themselves since they are the products of the language users, but I will keep matters simple and continue to use the term “witness” for a text. In a modern linguistic survey, the field-worker can venture forth to speech communities with the survey questionnaire and interview living informants face-toface. For the historical dialectologist matters are not so straightforward. The witnesses available are an accidental sample: whatever texts have happened to have survived into our time. Where the modern dialectologist might hope to select sufficient witnesses to provide good representative geographical coverage of the area of survey, the historical dialectologist will be faced with unevenness of coverage in representation across the area of survey. Thus, for Early Middle English there is good coverage of witnesses for the West and East Midlands, a much sparser but uneven coverage for the North and across the South, but nothing representative of the Central Midlands (Laing 2000: 105–109). Such situations may be due in part to accidental survival, but also to the circumstances of manuscript production of vernacular texts at different periods. Worcester, for example, seems to have been an important center for the production of texts written in English in the Early Middle English period. We need to ask if the absence of texts from the Central Midlands is simply because no texts in English were in fact being written in this area in the 12th and 13th centuries. Or were texts being written in English in this region, but much less prolifically than in the West or the East and so their chances of survival would have been much less? In the latter case we can hope that something will yet turn up. Clearly there are socio-cultural factors to consider: who as individuals or as communities in any given place and period was producing texts in Latin, French and English, for what purposes and for what readerships? (For further discussion see Laing and Lass 2008–: Introduction, chapter 1). Where the modern dialectologist has recourse to further questioning of his witness, the historical dialectologist must make do with what is there in the surviving texts. There is no recourse to further information from any witness – unless there should turn up a hitherto undiscovered text written in the same hand as an existing witness
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and the identification is made. Further, the field-worker in a modern survey can reasonably expect to obtain answers to all of the items in the questionnaire and will be able to probe the witnesses further about points of interest in the linguistic forms being recorded. The historical dialectologist seeking to find attestations of the items in a pre-prepared questionnaire will find that in most cases there will be lacunae in the responses: a text simply has no form corresponding to a number of the questionnaire items. A long literary text might be expected to provide more chances of obtaining a response than a short document, but inevitably a fully completed questionnaire from any text will be the exception rather than the rule. Local Documents Charters
Record books
leases excambions of lands wills marriage contracts bonds and alliances letters
court proceedings – ecclesiastical – civic – sheriff local administration – towns and burghs – guilds
Cartularies Protocol books
Literary Texts Poetry Rhymed Alliterative
Religious
Prose
Secular
Fiction History Instructive
Figure 91.1: Types of witnesses available for the study of medieval vernaculars
Figure 91.1 is a schema showing the types of textual witness that we have to deal with in the late medieval period for English. Documents usually occur as individual sheets of parchment or paper. For the most part they are legal texts, such as charters (concerning such matters as leases, grants, marriage contracts, bonds and alliances, testaments, correspondence). Record books contain sets of texts relating to the proceedings of a court, which may be ecclesiastical or lay (e.g. of a town or other administrative area, or of a trade guild), or to the administration of local government (council of a town or a burgh or a sheriffdom). Such texts are valuable for historical dialectology because they are usually dated and contain internal references which allow them to be localized independently of their linguistic forms. For example, where the notary responsible for drawing up a legal agreement in the form of a charter has associations with a particular place and the parties and witnesses to the charter have the same associations (they live in or near that place) and/or the subject of the charter is property in or near that place, then we have good prima facie grounds for assigning the language of the charter to that place. Of course, such an equation of language with extra-linguistic criteria does not follow necessarily: it is an initial working hypothesis. It is possible for the equation to be subsequently revealed as invalid. A record book is likely to be the product of a number of hands contributing to it perhaps over several years. If the record book is associated with a place – i.e. it contains the proceedings of court or council minutes of that place – then we can hypothesize that the language of the contributions can be assigned (again prima facie) to that place. In fact, a record book may prove a more complex matter, since the language of different contributors may vary. We have to consider whether some, at least, of this variation implies that any contributor might have come from
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elsewhere or whether the variation is local. Even within a small area uniformity of language is not to be expected. Note that the text-types document and record-book may intersect where a cartulary, say, contains a copy of what was an original separate document. On the gathering, significance and use of “local documents” as sources in historical dialectology, see Benskin (1977, 1981), Dees et al. (1980: VII–X), Mooijaart (1992: chapter 2). The literary texts by contrast tend to be uninformative about the provenance of their makers. The surviving manuscript texts are usually copies rather than authorial originals. Indeed, a surviving copy may be the result of several intervening copies from the original. However, it is the language of any surviving text that we are interested in. In principle, the authorial version of a text, if it should have survived, would be treated as a text in its own right and should carry no greater or lesser dialectological weight than any subsequent copy-text. Copying strategies are key to understanding this point. Angus McIntosh (1973: 92) identified three potential strategies for a copying scribe: A. He may leave it more or less unchanged, like a modern scholar transcribing such a manuscript. This appears to happen somewhat rarely. B. He may convert it into his own kind of language, making innumerable modifications to the orthography, the morphology, and the vocabulary. This happens commonly. C. He may do something somewhere between A and B. This also happens commonly. The motivation for B might be that the language of the exemplar is in a different scribal language (i.e. written regional variety) than his own. The copyist might then translate the language of the exemplar into a variety he believes will be more familiar to the intended local readership of his copy-text. In that A or B produce consistent (albeit not invariant) scribal languages, there is not a problem: we are interested in the provenance of the language first and foremost. Strategy A seems to have been favored in the transmission of texts in the Early Middle English period (c.1150 to c.1325), where strategy B was the more common practice in the Late Middle English period (c.1325 to c.1475) (Laing 2000: 100; Benskin and Laing 1981; Laing and Lass 2008–: Introduction, chapter 1, section 1.5.6). Strategy C may produce, at least for stretches within a text, a mixed language – or Mischsprache. A Mischsprache might arise where a copyist begins copying closely what he has before him, but then begins to replace the exemplar’s forms in his copy with those of his own customary spontaneous written usage. In doing so he produces a mixed language in his copy. The copying practice may then shift further into more or less full translation, strategy B. A second type of mixed language – or pseudoMischsprache – may arise where a copyist preserved some features of his exemplar, such as rhyming or alliterative forms while translating others. Yet another outcome of copying is the case where an exemplar text was written in more than one hand and regional language, but the different scribal languages were copied by a single scribe making a faithful, or literatim, copy of the linguistic forms which he sees in the exemplar. The appearance in the copy of the same handwriting through the text may suggest at first sight a single scribal language, but a linguistic analysis may reveal forms that have widely differing provenances. However, a linguistic analysis that takes account of the ordering of the variant forms through the text can allow separation of the different linguistic strata into the respective linguistic witnesses carried over by the copyist.
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(See Benskin and Laing [1981] for detailed discussion of Mischsprachen and translation strategies; and for the rare case of a copied text where exemplar and copies have survived see Laing [1989: 75–93] and the follow-up work on these texts in Laing and Williamson [2004]).
5 Treatment of the witnesses However one gathers the data from the textual witnesses, e.g. using a questionnaire or by the transcription-and-tagging method, it is essential in the transference of the manuscript text to a format for diatopic (or any other) linguistic study that the linguistic objects in the texts be conserved so far as possible. By “linguistic objects” I mean not only the spellings of the words as found in the text, including the noting and distinguishing from visible representation of litterae the marks of suspension and abbreviation, but also the manuscript punctuation, line breaks, and spacing, both inter- and intra-word. The best immediate source for the data is of course the original manuscript. However, for practical reasons, when collecting data from the large number of manuscript texts that must form the basis of any historical linguistic atlas, then one may use good facsimiles (microfilms, photographs, photostats, or digitized images). One should preferably avoid printed editions as a source. If, faut de mieux, a printed edition is to be used, it should be a careful semidiplomatically-edited edition which conserves or informs about the details of the manuscript text and in such a way that the linguistic objects of the text might be recovered. Use of an edition with any kind of so-called “normalization” – e.g. of punctuation, of capitalization, of litterae (such as “modernizing” the use of u, v and w) – should not be entertained as a serious linguistic source by the historical dialectologist. (For a trenchant account of the reasons for this essential approach to the witnesses, see Lass [2004]; and see Fleischman [2000] on the damaging editorial practices of editors of Old French texts.)
6 Time and space Dialectology has traditionally been a synchronic enterprise. Although a survey may take some period of time to complete – perhaps a number of years – the informants exist coevally. (On “synchrony” in dialectology see further Williamson 2004: 98–118). The espace de temps (de Saussure 1916: 145) of the language under study is short enough, as embracing a generation (some 20 to 30 years). Sociolinguistic studies are typically carried out over short periods and entail detailed study of much smaller groups. However, such studies commonly include more than one generation of speakers, so implicitly containing time-depth. Because of this they can capture a snapshot of the transition of linguistic features present and lost or occurring in greater or lesser proportions of use among speakers of the different generations. The traditional large-scale linguistic surveys have not always taken into account variables such as age, sex, socio-economic status, educational attainment. Typically such surveys have aimed to gather what were perceived as stable, conservative features of language. These were deemed to be present characteristically in the speech of older, usually male, speakers, long-resident in their communities. Time-depth in the data is not regarded as an issue. In an historical linguistic survey, in gathering sufficient witnesses to provide the necessary geographical coverage, the espace de temps of the witnesses is likely to contain significant time-depth
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extending well beyond one generation. Within this time-depth we must assume the likelihood of linguistic change and be prepared to take it into account. De Saussure (1916: 277) recognized that “[…] en re´alite´ c’est de lui [le facteur temps] que rele`ve la diffe´renciation linguistique. La diversite´ ge´ographique doit eˆtre traduite en diversite´ temporelle”. A linguistic change takes place within a span of time, but in doing so it may spread from speech community to speech community across space. Such spread may be delimited to a greater or lesser extent. As a change spreads, over years or even over decades, the boundaries of the innovation and of the linguistic feature it replaces will look different (if it were possible to observe them) at different periods through the transition. It was noted above that in sociolinguistic studies of modern speakers, language may be observed to vary between the representatives of different generations of speakers, yet coevally. A speaker may deploy both “old” and “new” variants of some linguistic item in different degrees, perhaps conditioned by different contexts. We may also look to the same phenomenon in the written texts of past stages of a language. However, with the written texts of the medieval period, we have the problem of knowing little or nothing about the ages of the writers and copyists, even if we have a date for a text. We may be fortunate to be given this information in a few cases, or be able to work it out. One rare example is Dan Michel, the writer (in fact translator from French) of the late Middle English text Ayenbyte of Inwyt (London, British Library, Arundel MS 57). He refers to himself as “Of zeuenty yer al uol rond” (‘of seventy years all full round’) (f. 2r) and states that “Þis boc is dan Michelis of Northgate y-write an englis of his oȝene hand” (‘this book is Master Michael of Northgate’s written in English by his own hand’). Near the end is: “þis boc is uolueld ine þe eue of þe holy apostles Symon an Iudas of ane broþer of þe choystre of sauynt austin of Canterberi Ine þe yeare of our lhordes beringe 1340” (‘this book is completed on the eve of the holy apostles Simon and Judas by a brother of the cloister of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in the year of our Lord’s birth 1340’) (f. 94r). He also helpfully tells us that “þis boc is y-write mid engliss of kent” (‘this book is written in the English of Kent’) (f. 94r). This is a very rare case where we are given date and place of completion of the manuscript text and the age of the writer and the writer’s description of the provenance of his language. Yet, even if we know the dates of writing or copying two coeval texts, we cannot in most cases tell if the writers were the same age or if the writer of one was young and the other old. Nevertheless, we will want to be able to take account of the distribution of the witnesses in time, even if in a broad way – e.g. in bands of a half-century.
7 How does one make an historical linguistic atlas? Given the kind of data we have and the problems they pose, how does one go about making an historical linguistic atlas? I consider principally here two methods for creating an historical linguistic atlas. In essence, the methods differ in the way that the data are collected and processed. The first method employs a questionnaire: a predetermined set of linguistic items to which are assigned linguistic forms found in the texts. The second method draws on the methodology of corpus linguistics and I will refer to it as the transcription-and-tagging method. The first method parallels that which has been used in linguistic surveys of “modern languages”, e.g. the Atlas Linguistique de la France or the Survey of English Dialects. It was adapted to make A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1350–1450 (LALME, McIntosh et al. 1986).
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The second method has been developed and used for two “daughter” atlases of LALME. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325 (LAEME, Laing and Lass 2008–) and A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, phase 1, 1380–1500 (LAOS, Williamson 2008–).
7.1 The questionnaire method Just as a modern dialectologist formulates a set of linguistic questions – the questionnaire – to ask of a living witness, so one can do the same to “interrogate” a text. The questionnaire comprises a limited set of items the character of which is intended to elicit forms at different linguistic levels. At this point it will be helpful to define formally the notions item and form. An item is a test-unit for linguistic comparison. Each question in a linguistic-survey questionnaire to which the witnesses respond is an item. It is a superordinate for a group of forms, which are functionally equivalent. These can be grouped together as being: “the same word”, e.g. [huːs], [hʌus], [hɛus] = HOUSE or heo, scho, xe = SHE; or “the same morpheme”, e.g. +eþ, +ith, +es, = “3RD PERSON SINGULAR PRESENT INDICATIVE”. In these cases, form is more or less equivalent to “the pronunciation/spelling adopted for the word or morpheme”. But an item may also comprise a group of forms “having the same basic meaning”, e.g. chaffie, shilfie, brichtie = CHAFFINCH or til, fort, unto, þat = UNTIL. In this case, form is the equivalent of “the word chosen to express the meaning”. In order for the questionnaire to yield a set of diatopically significant results, two basic criteria are: (1) that there will be significant variation between the forms attesting an item; and (2) that there will be a high probability of occurrence of attestations of an item across the texts to be examined. Of course, the formulation of a questionnaire implies some previous knowledge of the data and some impressionistic, at least, conception of broad geographical patternings of forms for some items. For example, it might be observed that in Late Middle English texts forms such as kyrk, kirke for CHURCH occur largely in northern texts and that uch, vche for EACH are typical of texts written in the West Midlands. The aim of making the atlas is to try to determine as precisely as possible the shape of the geographical distribution of such “known” diagnostic forms while hoping to reveal others unsuspected. While some pre-knowledge is a prerequisite for formulating a questionnaire, during its early application variation in other words or morphemes not in the questionnaire may be observed. It may seem desirable to add fresh items to the questionnaire. Of course, it then would be necessary to go back and re-examine texts already analyzed using the questionnaire, to supplement their analyses with the new data. Piloting a questionnaire to allow for fresh discoveries is therefore a desideratum in the early stages of a survey (whether “modern” or “historical”). Of course, at some stage the final shape of the questionnaire has to be determined. But as Jules Gillie´ron observed, “L’e´tablissement du questionnaire […] pour eˆtre sensiblement meilleur, aurait duˆ eˆtre fait apre`s l’enqueˆte” (Gillie´ron 1915: 45). From the application of the questionnaire to each textual witnesses for LALME was created a linguistic profile (LP). “Each LP is an inventory, for some specified sample of text, of the forms observed which correspond to the test-items on the questionnaire. Completion of the questionnaire is in effect the selective indexing of the sample text […]” (LALME 3, McIntosh et al. 1986: ix). The result is a collection of LPs.
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7.3 Description and comparison The items in a questionnaire, as a set, are applied to all the witnesses to discover what forms attest each item. In this way, the items elicit a description of the linguistic variation. Because the same items are applied to each witness they provide a framework for comparison of the materials. In a modern survey it is possible to obtain responses to all the items in the questionnaire. By contrast, a medieval text will lack information for many questionnaire items: if any questionnaire item is not attested by any form in a text, then we can have no response. Type of text dictates the measure of response: a long literary text is obviously likely to yield more responses across the items than a single-sheet charter or will. And length of text is not the only factor here: the subject matter inevitably constrains the scope of the vocabulary. The inevitable lacunae across the corpus of LPs compromises the comparability of the data to some degree. That said, in evaluating the lacunae for diatopic purposes it is better nevertheless to follow the maxim that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Table 91.1: Extracts from two LPs in LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986) LP 380
LP 44
Durham, Prior’s Kitchen, Dean and Chapter Muniments: Locellus XXV.18. Letter from Richard Cliff, second vicar prebendal of Hemingbrough, to the prior of Durham. Written at Hemingbrough, 21 Nov [1432]. Cliff ’s family was of Cliff in the parish of Hemingbrough: see T. Burton, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hemingbrough (York: Sampson Bros., 1888), p 259; Emden, Biographical Register, sub nomine ‘Clyff ’; Dobson, , p. 162; Benskin 1982b, Appendix III. Text ed. Burton, p. 383. Analysis from original. LP 380. Conflated for mapping with LPs 472 and 1132 as LP 1355. Grid 468 430. ERY. THE: þe IT: it
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 706. Hand A. ff. 98v-109r: sermons. Marks of ownership, ff. 13 and 181v, John Paunteley, 1412. John Paunteley was a monk of Gloucester; Pauntley is a village west of Gloucester. Fully analyzed. LP 44. Grid 437 319. Leics.
THEY: THEM: THEIR: WHICH: EACH: MAN: ANY: WERE: IS:
þay, þaþ þame þer þe-qwilk ilkane mane any war is
THE: THESE: THOSE: SHE: HER: IT: THEY: THEM: THEIR: SUCH: WHICH:
the (þe) these (this, þis) ((thise, thys)) those ((þo, the sic)) sche, scho her (hure, hur) hit (yt) (hyt, it) they ((þei, the)) hem ((them, ?hom)) here (her) ((?hore)) seche, suche (?soche) the-wheche (theweche) ((the-whech, the-whilk, whilke)) (Continued )
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Table 91.1: Continued LP 380 SHOULD sg: pl: WOULD sg: pl: TO + sb + c: TO + inf + v:
LP 44 suld suld wald walde to, til to
EACH: MANY: MAN: ANY: MUCH: ARE: WERE: IS: WAS: SHALL sg: pl: SHOULD sg: pl: WILL sg: pl: WOULD sg: pl: TO + sb +c: +h: +v: TO + inf +c: +h: +v:
yche, ych, ich mony (many) man ((mon, man-)) ony (any) meche (mekil) ben (be) were ((ware, wore)) ys (is) was schal (schall) schull, schul ((scall)) schuld ((schold)) schuld woll (wol) woll (will) wold wold to to to to to to
Table 91.1 shows extracts from two LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986) LPs. (These data are taken from LALME 3 with the kind permission of the authors). The LPs are (1) LP 380, a document with associations to Hemingbrough (about 6 km East of Selby) in the East Riding of Yorkshire and (2) LP 44, a literary text containing “sermons”, localized in North West Leicestershire close by the border with South East Derbyshire. Included in each case is the manuscript descriptor (MSD), a bloc of information which describes the manuscript source, content of the text analyzed, folio or page references of the portion of the text analyzed, bibliographical information and any information that may have informed the localization of the LP. Given here are the forms elicited for all the items up to “TO + inf” in the LALME questionnaire. It will be apparent that the number of attested items in the document, LP 380, are rather fewer than those attested in the literary text, LP 44. As was noted above, documents tend to be short – in most cases they are less than 1,000 words in length and in many cases less than 500. This and the restricted vocabulary limit their linguistic value to some degree. Nevertheless, a number of words that exhibit formal variation of some interest occur frequently across documents, even if the frequencies of occurrence in a text may not be high. LP 44 offers information about 34 items and sub-items – twice as many as LP 380’s 17 attested items. It will be seen from the MSD in LP 380 that it supplies from the text analyzed information relating to its localization in Hemingbrough. LP 44 gives information about geographical associations of the author of the original work – John Paunteley, a monk of
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Gloucester, whose name seems to have derived from a village in that county. However, the linguistic associations of the material in the LP extracted from manuscript text are to be found on the border of Leicestershire and Derbyshire. LP 44 is a text localized – “fitted” – by a method of linguistic comparison. To attempt to reconstruct the linguistic geography of the late medieval period, we need to be able to use the evidence both of the local documentary texts, such as LP 380, and of the linguistically richer literary texts, such as LP 44. The former type of LP allows a basic geographical “matrix” of linguistic features to be established. The latter type enriches and fills out this matrix.
7.4 The “fit”-technique Those texts which are localizable on non-linguistic evidence provide a matrix of “anchor texts”. The localized LPs form a set of survey points and the linguistic features attested at each survey point as distributed on a series of maps provide information that allow interpolation of the linguistic material from the otherwise unlocalizable LPs. A linguistic feature is a segment comprising all or part of a form, or a set of forms, which realize one or more items: e.g. initial or in forms of WHICH; in THIRD PERSON SINGULAR INDICATIVE INTLFEXIONS; expressing the meaning UNTIL. A form can be analyzed into a set of features, and the variant shapes of the features in the forms for an item can be compared where they occur in paradigmatic relation. For example, given two forms, and , occurring in two different LPs, we can consider them in terms of a segmentation of the item WHICH as “C1–V1–C2–(V2)”, where the element in [ ] is optional. Table 91.2: Feature segmentation of forms of WHICH LP
C1
V1
C2
(V2)
A B
qw qu
e i
ch lk
e e
In Table 91.2 are laid out the comparable feature segments for these two forms. Thus, we can compare with as the realization of C1, with as the realization of V1, and as the realization of the post vocalic consonant cluster, C2, and with as realizing a terminal ‘e’. In this case, we might want to consider and as equivalent and, of course, both forms have final . The differences are in V1 with ~ and in C2 with ~ . By mapping such features in the forms for the attested items, we can establish a set of distributions to determine which features are diatopically diagnostic, i.e. distributions which are coherent, dense and areally delimited. The set of “Dot Maps” in LALME 1 (McIntosh et al. 1986) are essentially a set of “feature maps”, in contrast to the “Item Maps” in LALME 2 (McIntosh et al. 1986), which present the geographical distributions of full forms as attested for each item. We can use the maps of these feature distributions to “fit” an unlocalized text by comparing diagnostic features found in the text with their distributions on the maps. The method of fitting devised by Angus McIntosh, and used in the making of LALME, required as the basic tools a pencil and a sheet of tracing paper. The tracing paper is overlaid on each relevant feature-map in turn and on the tracing paper is shaded out those areas of the map where the feature does not occur. Areas of the
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map are thus progressively eliminated from consideration as the likely location of the text. The goal at the end of the process is some single – preferably small – area which has not been eliminated, where only that set of features from the text being fitted occurs as an assemblage. Whereas each feature may have different, albeit overlapping, distributions, the procedure is aimed at discovering a locality where the features in their areas of distributions all overlap together. (For further discussion of the original ‘fit’technique (FT), see LALME, vol. 1 (McIntosh et al. 1986), and for a detailed worked example of how to apply the FT using the maps in LALME, see Benskin 1991.) Where the individual distributions of sets of linguistic features overlap, they define in the overlap the area of distribution of the assemblage of those features. Thus, any text not yet localized which contains that assemblage is likely to have been written in that area and/or by someone from that area or it is a faithful copy of a manuscript text written in that area and/or by someone from that area. The information from any text localized successfully by the FT is then added to the series of feature maps. It then becomes part of the evidence to be used for fitting subsequent texts. The process is cumulative. For the making of the two “daughter” atlases of LALME, LAEME (Laing and Lass 2008–) and LAOS (Williamson 2008–), the FT has been redeveloped as a computer alogrithm, compFT. This algorithm exploits the empty space that lies between survey points in the maps. We can think of the variant forms distributed on the map as a “continuum” of language. Modern dialectological studies reveal that a language spread over an area changes in an orderly way (if not regular) way across the area. The language of two nearby adjacent communities may differ only in one or two features whereas the language of two communities distant from each other may vary in terms of many features (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 5–7, 137–139; Heeringa and Narbonne 2001). Our dialect matrix comprises a series of points distributed across the map. There is space between the survey points. When we fit a text, we may be able to add a new point by deciding that the new localization must fall in part of the space between a number of nearby points. While we have no direct information about what forms of language might have been in the space between points, we can make a reasonable assumption that any text written in local language from within the geographical area represented by the space shared many forms with the texts attested for the survey points around that area of space. We are inferring, in effect, that the language under investigation changed in a gradual and orderly (albeit not regular) way across space, as is observable in the case of dialectal variation in modern languages. The compFT is premised on this inference. It operates by projecting into the space around each survey point the features attested at that survey point. The map space is divided notionally into a matrix of squares each equivalent to 1 km2. The information from each survey point is projected radially into the adjacent surrounding squares. The radius of the projection can be variably set – 10 km, 15 km or 20 km. The result of the projections from each survey point is that originally empty squares contain information from one or more of the survey points. It creates in each square a new assemblage of features – essentially hypothesized LPs. The area of survey is now made up of a matrix of adjacent squares all containing some information. One can conceive the result of the projection as a “virtual dialect continuum” (Williamson 2004: 129–134). The result is an “enriched matrix” which offers many more LPs – the original and the hypothesized – into which an assemblage of features from an unlocalized text may be fitted. Of course, the virtual dialect continuum is a run-time construct of the computer program and is only created
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as an aid to enhance the localization. The outputs of compFT are (1) a map on which is demarcated one or more “sites of fit” and (2) a file which provides information about the processing of each feature in each square and which allows the site(s) of fit to be further assessed. The principles behind the compFT are outlined in Williamson (2000). The original FT and its computational analogue are not the only methods that might be used to fit texts. In the Atlas de formes linguistiques des textes litte´raires de l’ancien franc¸ais (Dees et al. 1987) a statistical method was deployed to localize literary texts by departement according to the data recorded and published as Dees (1980), the Atlas des formes et des constructions des chartes franc¸aises du 13e sie`cle – an atlas of local documents. By contrast to the method in LALME, Dees and his colleagues kept apart the local documents and the literary texts. The statistical method used to fit the Old French literary texts is described in Dees et al. (1987: XIX–XXX). The Deesian methodology was adopted also for work on the dialectology of Middle Dutch. More recent work on Middle Dutch has seen the development of a more refined statistical measure for the localization of texts, described in van Reenen et al. (2009).
7.5 The “transcription and tagging” method The compilers of LAEME (Laing and Lass 2008–) and LAOS (Williamson 2008–) have developed in new directions the principles and methods used to make LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986). One such development has been the compFT, described in the previous section. A further – and major – departure from the way that LALME was made, has been the abandonment of the questionnaire as the tool used to collect linguistic data. Early work on both LAEME and LAOS began with experimental questionnaires. However, there emerged two basic problems: (1) While there was apparent formal variation in the texts, there was no clear idea of what might be diatopically salient in both the Early Middle English and Older Scots texts; (2) The Early Middle English texts were morphologically much more complex than those analyzed from the later period for LALME. A form might have to be recorded under several potential questionnaire items to be sure that no information was lost. A theoretically “ideal” questionnaire for early Middle English would have to register so many variables that in practice it would be unmanageable. At some point it is necessary to make a rigorous and often ruthless selection, from a large variety of potentially important phenomena, for the purposes of comparison and dialect mapping. But a questionnaire is itself a highly selective tool. The more tractable we make it, the more likely we are to miss valuable information: the simpler the questionnaire the coarser the net. (Laing and Lass 2006: 425)
A new approach was deemed necessary: to compile a corpus of semidiplomatically transcribed and keyed texts and to tag lexico-grammatically each word and morpheme in the text. Everything in a text would then be captured and available for diatopic (and, indeed, other) investigation. The following, (1), is an extract from a text in the LAEME Corpus (the Trinity Homilies in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.52, Hand A). The keyed text would be in the form: (1)
*TO-DAI IS CUMEN dE HOLIE TID y~ ME CLEPEd ADUENT yANKED BE URE LOUERD IHesU Cr^IST yIT HAUEd ISEND
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(This transcription system uses the basic set of ASCII characters and was originally devised for making LALME. Visible letters in the text are keyed in upper-case. Nonroman litterae are rendered by a set of lower-case alphabetic characters: “d” = ‘ð’, “g” = ‘ᵹ’, “w” = ‘ƿ’, “y” = ‘þ’, “z” = ‘ȝ’. Otherwise, lower-case characters represent expansions of manuscript abbreviations and suspensions. “*” indicates a capital or littera notabilior. The above system has been retained for LAEME and LAOS because of its utility for processing and for portability across systems.) The above piece of text might be more conventionally rendered as in (1a): (1a)
To-day today þanked thanked
is is be be
cumen come ure our
ðe the louerd lord
holie holy ihu¯ Jesus
tid tide cist Christ
y’ me that men þit haueð that+it has
clepeð aduent call advent isend sent
The lexico-grammatically tagged version of (1a) is (2). (2)
$today/av_*TO-DAI $be/vps13_IS $come/vSpp_CUM+EN $/vSpp_+EN $/TN_dE $holy/aj_HOLIE $tide/n_TID $/RTI0d_y~ $man/indef_ME $cleopian/vps13K2_CLEP+Ed $/vps13[P]K2_+Ed $advent/n0d_ADVENT {.} {\} $thank/vppK2_yANK+ED $/vpp[K]K2_+ED $be/vsjps13_BE $/P21G_URE $lord/n_LOUERD {=LOUERD underlined by a later hand=} ‘_IHesU $christ/n-t_Cr^IST $/RTA+P130dI_y+IT $P130dI_+IT $have/vps13_HAU+Ed $vps13_+Ed $send/vpp_I+SEND $ge-/xp-vpp_I+ {.}
A tag has two parts, a lexel (lexical element) and a grammel (grammatical element). A simple tag plus text-form in the extract is $lord/n_LOUERD. The start of the tag is flagged by “$”, the end of the tag by the flag “_”, which ties the tag to its textform. The grammel is separated from the lexel by “/”. Here the lexel is “lord”. The lexel is normally a Present-day English (PDE) gloss of the word being tagged, but where there is no suitable PDE equivalent, an Old English, Old Scandinavian, or Old French lemma may be used – cf. the lexel “cleopian” in (2). The grammel records the grammatical category and/or function of the text-form at the point in the
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text where it occurs. This contrasts importantly with a LALME LP, which “[…] attends only to those words, or parts of words, which are elicited by the questionnaire; and the points of text at which a given form is attested are not part of the final record” (LALME 3: ix). Tags may be more complex than “$lord/n”, as for example “$cleopian/vps13K2_CLEP+Ed $/vps13[P]K2_+Ed”. Here not only is the text-form “CLEPEd” tagged, but its inflectional ending is also separately tagged. This allows morphological information to be collected and analyzed at a later stage. In the tagging “cleopian” is identified as “v” = verb “ps” = present indicative “1” = singular, “3” = 3rd person, “K2” = Old English weak class 2. In the tagging of the inflection is added the information “[P]”, recording that the stem ends with
⇒ [p]. What are referred to as “grammatical words” are tagged without a lexel, e.g. “$/P21G_URE”, where “P” = personal pronoun “2” = plural, “1” = 1st person and “G” = genitive. The tagged versions of the texts conserve the running text and include the recording of line-ends, “{/}”, and manuscript punctuation, e.g. “.”. For comparative analysis a “text dictionary” is created, which collates and reorders the tag-form elements, making frequency counts of the forms associated with the same tag. Example (3) shows two parts of the tag dictionary for the text used in (2). (3)
$/P21 Diffusion’ process The actuation process applied historically The real “problem”: providing a rationale for the original innovation(s) Summary: is the actuation problem really a problem? References
Abstract This chapter deals with the so-called “problem” of the actuation of language change. It reviews work on language variation and change by Herold (1997), Blust (2005) and Baker (2008) in which the sigmoidal structure of sound change is linked to demographic factors of a speech community. The potential for innovation emanates largely from individuals that Labov (2001) and Baker call “leaders”, i.e. those who are said to recognize the social significance of sound variation. The sigmoidal structure of sound change is then applied to other areas of language in which change occurs, and a specific problem of English (explaining the shift from inflectional demonstrative determiners to the uninflected definite determiner the) is looked at in a geographical area in which there was contact between the Danish variety of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, the Danelaw area from Lincolnshire to northern Essex. A reconsideration of the mechanism of innovation is suggested, in which it need not be triggered by the social awareness of “leaders”, but can also be set in motion by linguistic creativity. It is governed by what I call the Principle of the Shortest Path or the Path of Least Resistance.
1 Actuation: searching for the “Holy Grail”? The “actuation problem” can be likened to a search for the Holy Grail in historical linguistics. On the reasonable assumption that a language system cannot change without its speakers using it in emergent instances of social practice, we can posit that, consciously or below the level of consciousness, speakers change the language. The Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1490–1509
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language, in other words, does not change on its own. But is it ever possible to gain access to the moment at which a change is initiated? Indeed, is it necessary to be able to access it at all? All explanations of language change are after the fact; we do not know that a process of change has taken place until we can observe the resultant system and compare it with the earlier system. So the Holy Grail nature of the actuation phenomenon resides in the fact that we will never know when a new construction is first used, nor who first used it, nor the social context in which it was first used, nor why it was used in the first place. However, it is certainly possible in present time to observe different parts of the same system being used concurrently to express the same communicative functions, as is evidenced by quotative constructions in adolescent oral English narratives throughout the English-speaking world (“and x said, ‘abc’ ” versus “and x, ‘abc’ ” versus “and x is like, ‘abc’ ”). The same kind of systemic variation in quotative expressions using similar types of lexical construction to x is like occur in a number of different languages, some of them unrelated with respect to language family (see Levey 2006). As soon as we have evidence, in such concurrent systemic variation, that the new construction has emerged, the “problem” appears to fade into insignificance. Why, then, is the actuation of change a “problem”? The term was first introduced in a long seminal article by Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin Herzog in 1968 titled “Empirical foundations for a theory of language change”, a milestone in both historical linguistics and sociolinguistics (Weinreich et al. 1968). Since then, however, it has been largely used in sociolinguistic work (see Herold 1997; Labov 1994, 2001; James Milroy 1992; Watts 2003b; Britain 2005), but rarely in the historical study of language varieties (see Paddock 1988 for a notable exception). This seems rather odd if we accept Weinreich et al.’s (1968: 102) suggestion that the actuation problem “can be regarded as the very heart” of any theory of language change. One possible reason why the actuation process has rarely been used in English historical linguistics is that it is concerned primarily with situations of oral communication, and it is also for this reason that most sociolinguistic work on ongoing changes in English has focused largely on phonological phenomena. Until the onset of sound recordings at the beginning of the 20th century, historical linguists have been compelled to use the available written sources and to extrapolate from them. One other reason might be that too much stress has been placed on the initial stage of innovation, whereas “actuation” refers not so much to the initiation of a change as to its adoption and diffusion over time. I wish to try and rectify this by looking in this chapter at some of the written sources documenting far-reaching changes in the English noun phrase construction from the late 10th to the late 13th century. I shall focus more specifically on the adoption of þe as the all-purpose non-inflected definite article and the interplay of this innovation with the loss of the case and gender systems of the nouns. I shall also restrict myself to texts from the eastern part of England representing a geographical swathe from the north of Lincolnshire around the fenlands and including Norfolk, Suffolk and the northernmost part of Essex, i.e. to the most populous part of the old Danelaw area. My restriction to this area is determined by the fact that this part of England, particularly Lincolnshire down as far as Peterborough, witnessed a language contact situation between Anglian varieties of Anglo-Saxon (or, if one prefers, “Old English”) and Danish varieties of Old Norse. It shows intriguing evidence of a process of koı¨neization (and not creolization) that can be traced back to a typical process of the actuation of change in the past.
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Despite my suggestion above that it is more productive to focus on the adoption and diffusion phases of the process than on the innovation phase I want nevertheless to extrapolate away from the data and present arguments for the introduction of innovations in a contact situation. There is of course a great deal of discussion about what constitutes innovative language use (see, e.g., King 1968; Keller 1994; Haspelmath 1998; Croft 2000). Is reanalysis a form of innovation? Can speakers only innovate at the level of consciousness, i.e. what is the function of the faculty of imagination? I will not deal explicitly with such questions in this chapter, although they must remain on the agenda for further research. But wherever such discussions may lead us in future, the first stage in investigating the actuation of language change must remain the identification of innovative language use, and it is here that the “problem” really begins. Even if it were possible to witness the first use of construction X, how would we ever know that X is in fact an innovation, i.e. something that no-one else has ever uttered before? How conscious must the speaker be of the new construction or the reanalysis for it to constitute an innovation? And how important would it be to know why it was used in the first place? The second part of the “problem”, as we have seen, is that, whatever is ultimately classified as innovative, all assumed innovations are produced in emergent social practice, that is, in the most fundamental of all language contact situations, and may (but very often do not) trigger uptake and adoption by others. In other words, I wish to argue in this chapter for a theory of language change that is rooted in the principle that all emergent social practice in which language is used to construct meaning is the most basic form of language contact, i.e. that language contact is first and foremost the contact of individual lects and only secondarily the contact between different language varieties or languages. I shall first outline this principle in Section 2 and then illustrate in Section 3 how the actuation process may be looked at in this way. This will be followed in Section 4 by my analysis of the data as outlined above. The analysis will necessarily be sketchy, but it aims to display how the actuation process concerns primarily the need to communicate meaning and is thus social rather than individual. Section 5 is devoted to a speculative discussion of what the major innovation was and how and why it may have been introduced.
2 Language contact involves lects in contact I shall first lay down a basic principle that is quite likely to produce disapproving frowns from language contact researchers. My premise is that all social interaction between two or more individuals logically involves social contact with the aim of constructing and negotiating meaning. All individual instantiations of social practice involving language are therefore, by definition, language contact situations. This is of course a truism, but it still needs to be stated explicitly since language contact situations lie on a cline between the (assumed) mutual comprehensibility and the (assumed) mutual incomprehensibility of the interlocutors in the oral interaction. If the linguistic systems reproduced by individuals in social practice are very similar, they will have been constructed through constantly repeated socialization processes in similar types of community. They may, however, display varying degrees of dissimilarity which will require processes of simplification, levelling and regularisation to ensure a maximum degree of communicative overlap. In cognitive terms, each participant in interaction can be assumed to have acquired, through those constantly repeated socialization processes, a complex cognitive
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repertoire of linguistic constructions which have worked in the past and can therefore be assumed to work in future instantiations of social practice. The constructions each speaker has acquired are open to adaptation for future use. The high degree of overlap that is constructed by the individuals in a community allows them to perceive their own individual linguistic system as being shared by others; in other words, a language variety or a lect is socially hypostasized. If the participants have no prior experience of the sociocommunicative situation in which they are involved, they will have two alternatives: they can either break off communication, or they can negotiate and construct a set of practices according to which they can attempt to communicate with one another. Let us assume that the participants in an instantiation of emergent social practice use a high proportion of the same linguistic constructions evoking meanings that they share in common – or rather that they assume they share in common. They might then be said to “speak the same language variety”. But this does not mean that the communicative situation is no longer characterized by language contact. Two interlocutors may use the same linguistic constructions, and yet those constructions may evoke slightly different meanings. From this we can conclude that all instantiations of emergent social practice involving language are characterized by a shared negotiation of meanings and therefore that all human language is reconstructed and reproduced in emergent interaction. Strictly speaking, no two interlocutors ever speak the same language, although they may of course share it. The cline from the total intelligibility to the total unintelligibility of the linguistic constructions used in the contact situation is also determined by non-linguistic factors. The interlocutors may be of a different social status so that power differentials, authority, and types of social control are likely to influence different kinds of linguistic construction used by each of them. If social status between the interlocutors is equal, differences in linguistic constructions between them may be virtually nonexistent. The interlocutors may come from different ethnic groups in the overall population that are demographically strong or demographically weak, and the status of members of these groups may also differ considerably. The type of social interaction in which the interlocutors are engaged may be of a formal or an informal nature and may or may not be institutionally significant. The frequency of the interaction type in which the interlocutors are engaged may also be low or high. Consideration of all these parameters, and many more, leads to an immensely complex set of potential language contact situations, each defined within the overall communicative space within which individuals are able to interact. To illustrate this complexity, imagine the following fictional language contact situation in the 10th-century Danelaw, since it is precisely language contact situations of this kind with which I will be concerned in this chapter. A Danish/Old Norse-speaking farmer in the 10th century is enjoying a jug of some form of alcoholic beverage with his Anglo-Saxon-speaking neighbor after both have been busy at the local cattle market. I would suggest that the likelihood that this fictional representation is a reflection of real interactions is high. The social status of both participants must have been one of relative equality wherever the interaction is placed on the social status cline. The function or type of interaction is decidedly nonformal. The demographic strength of the ethnic groups to which each farmer belongs was probably tipped in favor of the Anglo-Saxon neighbor, although this would ultimately depend on where in the Danelaw area the interaction took place. It can also be shown
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that constructions in Old Norse were linguistically not very distant from those in AngloSaxon (see Dance 2004; Davis 2006), so intelligibility would have been relatively high, particularly with respect to the topics that they might have chosen to talk about. In addition, although they must have been aware that each of them spoke somewhat differently from the other, there would probably have been little consciousness of the one speaking “Old Norse” and the other speaking “Anglo-Saxon”. The main point of interest for both of them was to enjoy one another’s company and to talk. If this kind of situation and other similar everyday situations are multiplied over the whole area of the Danelaw through a period of 150 to 200 years, the resulting forms of language that must have emerged from such extended language contact would be very similar to those resulting from processes of koı¨neization, in which two mutually intelligible language varieties contribute towards a new variety over a period of three to four generations of speakers. Kerswill (2002a, 2002b) refers to two kinds of koı¨ne´, “regional” and “immigrant”. A “regional koı¨ne´” develops when a strong regional dialect comes into contact with dialects of speakers who move into the region. An “immigrant koı¨ne´” emerges in the situation in which speakers of a related language variety settle as immigrants in the territory occupied by speakers of another variety, and this is, in all probability, what happened between Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon from the 9th century on. Kerswill (2002b) refers to “dialects” that are mutually intelligible, whereas I am still referring, perhaps rather loosely, to “Old Norse” and “AngloSaxon”. To take my argument seriously, however, it is important to accept the premise that we are in reality confronted with two closely related Germanic forms of language regardless of whether we refer to them as “dialects”, “varieties”, or “languages” (see also Dawson 2003). In such cases of language contact in the Danelaw we are likely to have had mutual simplification and lexical borrowing on both sides, but with the dice loaded in favor of the demographically stronger ethnic group, speakers of Anglo-Saxon. In Section 4 I shall produce evidence to show that Anglo-Saxon, particularly from the Danelaw part of the country, shows clear signs of simplification before the Norman Conquest, presumably under the influence of the koı¨neization process created by language contact situations involving both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. In addition, texts from the transition period from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English after the Conquest show the relative speed with which these simplification processes progressed without the presence of a standard form of the language. Central to this demonstration will be the historical application of the actuation process.
3 The ‘Innovation > Adoption > Diffusion’ process The actuation process focuses on individual speakers dealing with the cut and thrust of emergent social interaction, and precisely for this reason it is a contact driven social process that frequently takes place below the level of consciousness and also below the level at which codification and functional expansion are in operation. Obviously, not all innovations are made below the level of consciousness. Some are deliberately introduced into communicative situations to see whether and to what extent they will be adopted. Innovative constructions below the level of consciousness are born of pragmatic need in situations of socio-communicative oral interaction. Creativity sets the change in motion and then interacts with aspects of oral interaction (phonetic
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weakening, prosodic patterns such as stress, intonation, rhythm, etc.) to carry the change forward. I propose that the I(nnovation) > A(doption) > D(iffusion) process involves a number of consecutive stages that may ultimately result in change in the socially shared linguistic system, and some of these stages will be familiar from research into grammaticalization processes (Hopper and Traugott 1993; Heine et al. 1991; Heine and Kuteva 2002). The first, unobservable stage – unobservable that is from the point of view of the historical linguist – consists of the introduction of an innovation, a linguistic construction introduced unexpectedly and perhaps also with only marginal grammaticality, as I shall show in the following section. It is, of course, a moot point whether the innovator has to have good reason to innovate in the first place, either out of practical necessity, or for social reasons (see Keller 1994 for a range of other reasons for innovating). The innovative construction may result in the interlocutor deriving some pragmatic inference in an effort to construct meaning from the utterance. In the adoption stage of the process the person making the inference chooses to use the construction her/himself with the intention of co-constructing the same meaning with further interlocutors. At this stage the likelihood of adoption taking place depends on the success of the intended meaning construction, the number of speakers who also adopt the innovative construction and the nature of the socio-communicative context in which it is used. Baker (2007, 2008), for example, maintains that, statistically speaking, if one person in 3,000 in the speech community adopts the change, the entire population will eventually and inevitably adopt it. It also depends on the willingness to adopt, and age factors appear to play a crucial role here. The result of repeated adoption will be semantic extension, i.e. an opening up of the semantics of the original construction to create more and perhaps also different meanings. The innovative construction, however, will go no further if it is not transferred to other members of a community of practice and from one community of practice to another. In the diffusion stage of the process, the two meanings prompted by the construction may diverge even further and produce the beginnings of grammaticalization and lexicalization processes in which, eventually, a reanalysis of the construction takes place. This might mean that the original function of the construction is retained, i.e. that there will be concurrent use of both constructions (see the example of quotative constructions in adolescent oral English narratives given in Section 1), or that the original function is taken over by some other new construction. It might also mean that the original construction is differentiated socially from the new construction. Reanalysis tends to result from diffusion, and it might also include phonological reanalysis, morphological reanalysis and categorial reanalysis, as I shall show in Section 4. Most of the research on language change that focuses on the actuation problem has been carried out on phonological change (Chen and Wang 1975; Labov 1994, 2001; Herold 1997; J. Milroy 1992; Blust 2005; Baker 2008). There are perhaps two reasons for this focus. First, the actuation problem is inextricably associated with Labov’s work, and second – and more generally – the study of phonology yields far more tokens than other areas of language structure and can be more easily put to work in quantitative analysis. At the same time, however, this research, which is not primarily historical in nature, has provided a set of invaluable insights into the working of
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language change through time that can be applied to other forms of linguistic construction, which will be my main aim in the data analysis in Section 4. The first insight is that the adoption and diffusion of sound changes through time always project a sigmoidal (s-curve) structure that displays a slow onset of adoption and diffusion which speeds up after the process has got truly under way and then slows down towards its completion: 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 0
2
4
6
8
10
Figure 95.1: The sigmoidal structure of sound change (x-axis=arbitrary time points, y-axis = percentage of completion)
The first assumption to make is that some innovation has been adopted by an interlocutor, who then uses it in other instantiations of social practice, and the second is that this interlocutor’s use of the innovation is then adopted by others. Under these conditions, Labov makes the following three further assumptions: (1) individuals can only adopt new constructions if they are aged 4–16. (2) the likelihood of a change taking place (LoC) is directly proportional to the prevalence of the change in a community of practice and beyond that in the overall speech community (i.e. the adoption rate of one per 3,000). (3) the LoC is directly proportional to the individual’s propensity to adopt an innovative construction (see Baker 2008). There is a problem here, however. In order to model I>A>D processes we need to consider the nature of the speech community in which they are active, i.e. we have to resort to socio-demographic factors. Any change in those demographic factors, dramatic or otherwise, will automatically effect the period of time it takes for a change to reach its completion. Baker (2008), for example, models a community in which children adopt their mothers’ linguistic habits, so only the linguistic behavior of the mothers is modeled. He assumes that phonetic change is abrupt rather than gradual and that individuals have the option of adopting. From a demographic point of view, Baker sets his variables such that everyone in the community dies at age 85, half the women give birth, there is variation in the age of child-bearing, and each mother has two children. This
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then yields a total time span of roughly 200 years for a phonological change to reach completion, as in Figure 95.2: 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 0
50
100
150
200
Figure 95.2: Likelihood of change in Baker’s (2008) idealized speech community (x-axis=number of years after the first innovation)
However, Baker goes on to show that this time span can change quite dramatically if the value of the variables are changed. What happens, for example, if the period of susceptibility to the adoption of change is extended to include adults older than 16 or if speakers model their language on more people than their mothers? If the age restriction is lifted after the age of 16, for example, the period it would take for the change to be completed would be just over 50 years. If the propensity to adopt innovations drops off over the life span, the length of time to the completion of the change shifts back towards 100−150 years. If the expected lifespan of an individual is 45 rather than 85 years, the overall period of change can be expected to last longer than 200 years. The most important factor of all, however, concerns the originator of the innovation and those who first adopt it and pass it on. For Labov (2001) and Baker (2008) these must be “leaders”, i.e. speakers who recognize social significance in phonetic variation. In Section 5 I shall pick up on the idea of the “leader” and apply the model to the analysis of changes that took place in the noun phrase from Anglo-Saxon from the late 10th century to emergent early Middle English of the late 13th century in the AngloSaxon–Old Norse contact situation, i.e. in a time span of 200–250 years, but I shall argue that, rather than leaders innovating for reasons of social prestige, we find them doing so simply to be able to find ways of communicating – which, of course, does not make them any the less innovative.
4 The actuation process applied historically The aim in this section is to see whether the facts that can be garnered from a very restricted set of written sources still show a sigmoidal structure. If so, then we are justified in assuming that the changes observed represent a typical situation of an I>A>D process. The central constructions within the NP which are significant with respect to the
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disappearance of grammatical gender and the erosion of the case system are the shift from a fully inflected definite article (the old demonstrative determiners se [masculine], seo [feminine] and þæt [neuter]) to the use of the nondeclinable defining relative marker þe used innovatively to express the function of the definite article, and the gradual loss of the dative case of the noun, and then ultimately of the whole case structure of the nouns. The first of these changes led to the disappearance of grammatical gender in the NP and the second to the loss of most of the case distinctions in the noun. I shall trace the development of these two interconnected changes by looking at texts written in the old Danelaw area of England from Lincolnshire to north Essex from the late 10th century to the late 13th century. The restriction to this area of England allows us to focus attention on the contact situation resulting in the koı¨neization of AngloSaxon and Danish Old Norse to yield early forms of Middle English. Before I begin the analysis, an important caveat needs to be made with respect to the inevitable time gap between the first oral instantiations of an innovation and its appearance in the written medium. It is not easy to evaluate with any degree of accuracy how long that time gap is likely to be since it depends on the sociocultural significance and the number of written texts in the speech community. However, we can assume that when it does first appear in the written medium, it has already achieved a certain degree of adoption and diffusion in oral instantiations of social practice. In a situation in which the written form of a language is equivalent to the standard variety of that language, there is likely to be stronger institutional opposition to its introduction in writing than if the written medium is used for a restricted number of sociocommunicative purposes by a restricted number of speakers. If the language variety has lost the degree of sociocultural authority that it once had through the medium of writing but has retained a significant number of writers, the time gap between the adoption of an innovation and its first appearance in the written medium is likely to be considerably reduced. Writing in Anglo-Saxon prior to the Conquest was restricted largely to members of the ecclesiastical orders of the church and the genres of written texts that emerged were also restricted. Obviously, the number of texts that have survived the ravages of time will be much smaller than those that were originally written, and many of these will have been destroyed in Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541. The great majority of the manuscripts were kept in the scriptoria of these monasteries and of the larger ecclesiastical centers such as cathedrals and large churches. The model for writing is assumed to have been the West Saxon dialect, but local varieties containing lexical, phonological, and morphological forms other than those of Wessex are also in evidence. It is thus not particularly appropriate to designate West Saxon as a standard language, and this becomes obvious when we study texts written in the Danelaw area prior to the Conquest. After the Conquest, ecclesiastical texts appeared primarily in Latin, and centrally diffused “official” texts (laws, charters, edicts) tended to be written in Anglo-Norman French or Latin, hardly in Anglo-Saxon. When a written text does appear in Anglo-Saxon after the Conquest, it often displays an abundance of local forms close to those of the oral language of everyday communication, and we can assume that the time gap between the innovation and adoption of a feature and its appearance in writing is reduced considerably. In Watts (2011: Chapter 3) I refer to such local and orally oriented forms as instantiations of inscribed orality.
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4.1 The data The innovation to be discussed is the introduction of a nondeclinable definite article þe in place of the inflected forms of the demonstrative determiner that were regularly used in late Anglo-Saxon as definite articles. Early written evidence of the use of an nondeclinable article þe in the Danelaw area can be found in “The Will of Ælfgar”, which is dated some time between 946 and 951. The probable place of origin of the will can be located geographically somewhere in north Essex or south Suffolk as it includes bequests in the following range of locations: Cockfield, Lavenham, Monks Eleigh, Ashfield, Rushbrook, Stoke-by-Nayland, and Bury St. Edmunds (Suffolk); Baythorne, Colne, Tey, Peldon, West Mersea, Greenstead, Heybridge, and Totham (Essex); Fen Ditton (Cambridgeshire). The reason for locating it as having been written in this area is that it displays a number of phonological features typical of the Anglian dialects of Anglo-Saxon, e.g. the lowering of the short front mid-low vowel [æ] to the short low front vowel [a] (Alfgar in place of Ælfgar; habbe in place of hæbbe; þat in place of þæt), monophthongization and raising of the front diphthong [eo] to [ɪ] (siluer- in place of seolfer-), monophthongization of the diphthong [ea] to the long mid-high vowel [e:] (selde for sealde), the unrounding of the front high rounded vowel [y] to [i] (gingere douhter for gyngre dohtor), vowel weakening in non-tonic syllables to the central vowel [ə] (vre aldre in place of usra ealdra; saule in place of sawla). Focusing on the shift from declinable demonstratives used as definite articles to a new nondeclinable definite article, we find þe being used both in the function of a nondeclinable defining relative marker and as a nondeclinable definite article, cf. the following examples (1), (2) and (3): (1)
Nondeclinable defining relative marker: […] ic wille Bidden suilc louerd so þanne beth for godes luuen and for alle hise halegen. werken min bern þat he werken þat he nefre ne mugen forwerken mine quide þe ic for mine soule cueden habbe. ‘[…]I beseech whoever may then be king, for the love of God and all his saints, that let my children do what they may, they may never set aside the will which I have declared for my soul’s sake.’
(2)
Nondeclinable definite article + nondeclinable defining relative marker: […] gif it wo awende; habbe him wið god gemaene and wið þe holi sanctas þe ic it to becueþen habbe […] ‘[…]if anyone alter it, may he have to account for it with God and the holy saints to whom I have bequeathed my property […]’
(3)
Nondeclinable definite article: And ic an Athelflede mine douhter þe lond at Cokefelð. and at Dittone. and þat at Lauenham. ouer min day. on þe red þat heo be þe bet for mine soule. and hire moder soule 7 for hire brother soule […]
1500
XII. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods ‘And I grant to my daughter Æthelflæd the estates at Cockfield and Ditton and that at Lavenham after my death on condition that she be the more zealous for the welfare of my soul and of her mother’s soul and of her brother’s soul […]’ And þe lond at Colne and at Tigan ic an min gingere douhter […] ‘And I grant the estates at Colne and Tey to my younger daughter […}’ And ic an þat lond at Piltendone and at Mereseye into Stoke. And ic an þat Athelfled bruke þe lond þer wile þe hire lef beth one raða heo it on riht helde. and on þe red þat heo do þan hirde so wel so heo best may into Stoke for mine soule and for ure aldre. ‘And I grant the estate at Peldon and that at Mersea to Stoke. And I grant that Æthelflæd is to have the use of the estates as long as is agreeable to her, on condition that she holds it lawfully, and on condition that she does the best she can for the community at Stoke for the sake of my soul and of our ancestors’ souls.’ [It is also worth noting here that the lexeme þe is also used here as a nondeclinable relative marker in the expression þer wile þe (‘for the period that’).]
The examples in (3) indicate • that the NP þe lond and the PP on þe red may have been open to the introduction of the innovation þe as a nondeclinable definite article in the written medium on the basis of the frequency of occurrence of those constructions in the genre of will-making and because, at least in the case of on þe red, we seem to be dealing with a formulaic expression, • that there is variation between þe and þat in the NP þat/þe lond, with a marked preference for the older form þat lond, i.e. we have a cooccurrence of constructions prompting for the construction of the same meaning in the same text. But the occurrence of þe in the PP wið þe holi sanctas hardly allows for an interpretation along the lines of frequency in this text type or the formulaic nature of the expression. Note also that it occurs within a PP governed by the preposition wið, which would normally trigger the accusative case of the noun. The prepositional phrase on þe red also shows þe in which the preposition would normally govern the dative case (i.e. þare ræd in West Saxon). The next text to be examined is also a will, “The Will of Ketel”, but it was written around a hundred years later than “The Will of Ælfgar”, shortly before the Norman Conquest. For the same reasons as “The Will of Ælfgar”, it too can be located geographically in the same part of the country, i.e. north Essex, but more probably south Suffolk, and it contains bequests of land at Stisted, Coggeshall, and Frating (Essex), and at Harling, Great Melton, Holme, Thorpe, Ketteringham, East Carlton, and Rashford (Suffolk). There are 25 NPs in the text containing a definite article, 16 of these are tokens of the demonstrative determiner used as an article, seven are tokens of þe, and there is one token each of þen and þon (variants of a construction I shall deal with in Section 5). The interesting thing about the occurrences of the non-definable definite article þe in “The Will of Ketel” is that it occurs in six of the seven instantiations in prepositional phrases, all of which obscure the case marking of the overall NP: on þe fre lond, into þe kirke (3x), after þe forwarde, and mid þe oþere. All in all, this
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construction is used in 20–30% of all cases, whereas the declined forms of the demonstrative determiner are used in a little over 60% of all cases, leaving the two oddities þen and þon. We thus have roughly the same percentage of usage for all three types of definite article (including þen and þon/þan) in both wills. However, the occurrences of þe in “The Will of Ketel” have become less formulaic and are, with one exception, all in prepositional phrases in which the Anglo-Saxon preposition governs (or would have governed) the dative case of the noun. The third and fourth texts that I have used for this brief analysis are the First and Second Continuations of the Peterborough Chronicle, the First from roughly 1120 to 1131 and the Second from 1132 to 1154. The first text was a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle copied by the scribe from one or more available copies of the ASC after a fire in 1116 had destroyed the scriptorium of Peterborough Abbey. The scribe took every effort to retain the constructions found in the West Saxon original, although he was somewhat prone to “mistakes”. The continuation of the text was carried out by the same scribe (see Ker 1957 and Clark 1958) in six blocks from 1122 to 1131, and it is in the First Continuation that he begins to diverge from West Saxon. Since West Saxon remains his model, however, we do not see many examples of þe until this part of the text. The following brief extract illustrates some of the confusion evident in case structure and the (by now) natural tendency to introduce þe in place of inflected forms of the article, as in (4): (4)
Đa com se ærcebiscop of Cantwarabyrig and wæs ðære fulle seouenniht ær he mihte cumen to þes Papes spræce: þet wæs forþan þet hit wæs don þone Pape to understanden þet he hæfde underfangen ðone ærcebiscoprice togeanes þe muneces of þe mynstre and togeanes rihte. Ac þet ofercom Rome þet ofercumeð eall weoruld – þet is gold and seolure. ‘Then the Archbishop of Canterbury arrived and was there for a full week before he was able to have an audience with the Pope. That was because the Pope was given to understand that he had received the archbishopric against [the wishes of] the monks of the minster and unjustly. But that which overcame Rome overcomes the whole world – that is gold and silver.’ (my translation, RW)
The scribe uses the old nominative singular of the masculine gender once (se ærcebiscop), the masculine genitive singular once (þes Papes), and what looks like the masculine accusative singular form twice (þone Pape, which should be a dative case þam Pape, and ðone ærcebiscoprice, which should be the neuter accusative singular form þat/þæt ærcebiscoprice) before launching out into two occurrences of þe. I shall deal with the occurrences of þone in the next section, but in general there would appear to be a great deal of confusion with regard to grammatical gender throughout the First Continuation. Why was this so? We can imagine that the scribe would by now have been using roughly 90% of his definite articles in the non-declinable þe form, which, as we saw briefly above, tends to obscure grammatical gender and lead to its erosion. However, the attempt to write a continuation of the Chronicle in Anglo-Saxon compels him to attempt to produce West Saxon constructions. The Second Continuation, written by one scribe, probably in the first year of Henry II’s reign, 1154, is a veritable revelation. No attempt is made to produce a “Chronicle” style. The scribe writes a moving narrative with several examples of inscribed orality, and there is a strong temptation on the part of the reader to assume that he wrote as
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he talked (see Watts 2011: Chapter 3). If we look at the entry for the year 1137 alone, there are no fewer that 30 instantiations of the definite article and only two of these ( þa menn, þa xix winter) are in the old nominative plural form. Everything else is either þe, te or the, and they are no longer restricted to formulaic phrases or prepositional phrases. This is convincing evidence that the diffusion has spread rapidly in this area of the old Danelaw territory to reach 90–100% in oral sociocommunicative interaction. If we finally look at two poetic texts, The Ormulum from roughly 1200 and Havelok the Dane from roughly 1280, we discover a similar ratio of occurrences of þe in The Ormulum to those in the “Second Continuation” and 100% occurrence of þe in Havelok the Dane.
4.2 Plotting the change The change has been completed, and we can plot it into the following rough sigmoidal graph, even with the meager material at our disposal in the texts available from this area of England. The result is exactly what we would expect to find in the process of actuation as studied in sociolinguistic investigations of phonological change, with the exception that the written language tends to skew the situation somewhat in that it gives the impression of a much later completion date than was probably the case (see Figure 95.3 below). For convenience sake I have assumed the first curve to represent the progress of the change from innovation and adoption to diffusion and completion in the oral use of the emerging koı¨ne´, allowing 50 more years to completion on the assumption that some of the demographic variables will be different from those given by Baker (2008) and will result in a longer period of time till completion. The second curve is a rough estimation of the growth in the use of the innovation þe in the old Danelaw area of England on the basis of the data provided by the texts analysed, and the consequent loss of grammatical gender and case associated with it. We can see very clearly from the graph that the oral introduction and diffusion of the innovation will always precede its appearance in the written language, and at points in time when the written language does not exert constraints on what can be written, e.g. in the 12th century, there will be a sharp curve in the direction of the progression of the change in the oral language: 100% Havelok the Dane The Ormulum
90% 80%
“The Second Continuation”
70% 60% 50%
“The First Continuation”
40% 30% 20%
“The Will of Ketel”
10%
“The Will of Ælfgar” 900
950
1000 1050
1100
1150
1200
1250
0% 1300
Figure 95.3: The sigmoidal structure of the change from the inflected definite article (the demonstrative determiner) to the non-inflected definite article þe
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Plotting the data onto a graph as in Figure 95.3 displays convincingly that, at least in the area from which the texts have been chosen, the change from the definite article use of the demonstrative determiners to the nondeclinable definite article þe has been completed in the written texts by 1280, and we can project statistically that the change in oral instantiations of emergent social practice will have been completed by around 1200. Despite the paucity of texts from this area and the consequent restriction on the number of tokens available for analysis, the sigmoidal structure in Figure 95.3 indicates that we do indeed have a case of the actuation process of language change. However, simply establishing this fact is not enough if no attempt is made at least to suggest what the original innovation (or innovations) might have been, and this will be the topic of Section 5.
5 The real “problem”: providing a rationale for the original innovation(s) It is perfectly reasonable to ignore the problem of the source of an innovation and simply to trace the path that the innovation takes until completion, as we have done in Section 4, but one of the reasons for researching into historical linguistics at all has always been the challenge of reconstructing a plausible linguistic scenario in the past. We now have the benefit of being able to reconstruct possible innovations for recent language changes, and it would appear that these reveal a simple strategy, the strategy of what I wish to call the shortest path, or the path of least resistance, which has clear affinities with Keller’s (1994) principle of the invisible hand: Principle of the Shortest Path or the Path of Least Resistance: If you wish to innovate, take the shortest path from a known construction to the new construction that will meet with least resistance from your interlocutor.
Obviously, the innovation should also open up the possibility of allowing the interlocutor to derive a significant inference from what has been said, even if that inference is merely that it is easier to do things this way than that. If we return to the fictional narrative of the Anglo-Saxon-speaking farmer and his Danish Old Norse colleague enjoying a friendly chat after a hard morning’s work trying to sell cattle, either the one or the other can accommodate, but it is more likely that the member of the demographically weaker group will accommodate to the member of the demographically stronger group. The Old Norse definite article was placed as a suffix at the end of the noun. Hence “a man” was mannr and “the man” was mannrinn in the nominative singular case, manninn in the accusative, mannsins in the genitive and manninum in the dative. In Anglo-Saxon, however, the demonstrative determiner was placed before the noun and used in the function of a definite article. The same construction was used in Old Norse, but in the demonstrative function only rather than that of the definite article. The “Principle of the Shortest Path” (PSP) would make it much easier for the Danish farmer simply to use this structure in the same way as he heard it being used in Anglo-Saxon. If we look very briefly at the paradigm for the demonstrative determiner in Old Norse and that for Anglo-Saxon, there would have been few problems in achieving co-constructed meanings apart from certain forms that would in any case have occurred relatively infrequently:
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Table 95.1: Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon demonstrative determiners (Anglo-Saxon determiners are in brackets) Masc.
Fem.
Neuter
N Sg A G D
sa´ (se) þann (þone) þess (þæs) þeim (þæm)
su´ (seo) þa´ (þa) þeir(r)ar (þære) þeir(r)i (þære)
þat (þæt) þat (þæt) þess (þæs) þvı´, þı´ (þæm)
N Pl. A G D
þeir (þa) þa (þa) þeir(r)a (þara) þeim (þam/ þæm)
þau (þa) þau (þa) þeir(r)a (þara) þeim (þam/þæm)
þær (þa) þær (þa) þeir(r)a (þara) þeim (þam/þæm)
Nevertheless, both groups of speakers will have sensed the need to simplify the paradigm, and the way was open for innovation from either the majority group of AngloSaxon speakers or the minority group of Danish Old Norse speakers. The motivation for innovation leaders was social inasmuch as there was a social need for both groups to communicate but not in the sense that the innovation itself would enhance social prestige in any way. As we shall now see, both groups innovated. Guðlaugsson and Þorgeirsson (n.d.) provide evidence that the Gutnish variety of Old East Norse on the island of Gotland generalized the masculine singular accusative form þann in the demonstrative paradigm given above to substitute for the nominative form sa. But they make the mistake of suggesting that “it might be mentioned that the exact same thing happened in English. This pronoun [þone] is the origin of the English definite article, ‘the’ ”. We can safely speculate that immigrants into England speaking eastern varieties of Old Norse had made similar generalizations from the accusative to the nominative in the demonstrative determiner system and that the weakening of the demonstrative determiners when used as definite articles created the need to innovate in the emerging koı¨ne´ to create a new nondeclinable demonstrative pronoun þan(n)/þon (at least for nouns in the singular). Such an innovation is entirely consistent with the PSP and yields an explanation for the occurrences of þon, þone and þen that we find in “The Will of Ketel” and the “First Continuation”. Two occurrences of þone occur alongside two occurrences of þe in one sentence in the extract from the “First Continuation” given in the previous section, which I repeat here, in (5): (5)
þet wæs forþan þet hit wæs don þone Pape to understanden þet he hæfde underfangen ðone ærcebiscoprice togeanes þe muneces of þe mynstre and togeanes rihte.
The two occurrences of þone are now easily interpretable as instantiations of the innovation from the Danish Old Norse þan(n)/þon, i.e. they are two instantiations of the singular demonstrative determiner. In case the first occurrence of þone should provoke opposition, the reader is encouraged to imagine the strong critical connotation of using the form that in Modern English with a noun whose reference is clear to both speaker/writer and hearer/reader. To say that Pope is to appear critical of the Pope, and that is precisely what is intended in the sentence in (5) (cf. the rest of the extract given in example 4). In addition, we also know that þon was common in Anglian dialects, even though it is now
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only to be found in Durham, Northumberland and Lowland Scotland (interestingly enough also in Ulster Scots) (see Upton et al. 1994: 424). Oddly enough, however, in the literature on English dialects, explanations of this form get no further than suggesting it is some sort of mixture between that and yon, see Wakelin (1994: 15): In the north yon, yond, yonder are the most familiar demonstrative pronouns used to indicate an object ‘over there’, but thir ‘these’, tho ‘those’, thon ‘that over there’ and thon ones ‘those over there’ are perhaps less well-known to southerners, likewise thonder ‘yonder’. Perhaps these latter are combinations of yon(d), yonder and the pronouns which begin with th.
The explanation for thon based on the actuation process shows that this is patently wrong. Wakelin’s explanation simply violates the PSP. I now wish to look at the innovation from speakers of Anglo-Saxon, which resulted in the emergence of the nondeclinable definite article the. The PSP states that the speaker should take the “shortest path from a known construction to the new construction that will meet with least resistance from [the] interlocutor”. The known construction in this case can only have been the nondeclinable defining relative marker þe. In “The Will of Ælfgar” we have a number of instances in which þe is used as a defining relative marker, two of which are given in (6): (6)
a. mine quide þe ic for mine soule cueden habbe b. wið þe holi sanctas þe ic it to becueþen habbe
In both examples, the embedded S following þe defines which will or testament is being referred to in (6a) and which holy saints are being referred to (6b). They are thus both to be understood as defining the identity of the testament or the saints for the reader of the will. The linguistic context therefore constructs the identity, and the whole of the embedded sentence with its marker þe is contained within the NP so that the marker itself is a minor syntactic category. If the marker þe is an identity constructor, so also is a definite article, since it assumes that the identity of the noun is already known by speaker/writer and hearer/reader. By the PSP it must then be possible to innovate by inserting þe into the definite article slot (a minor category slot within the NP) which constructs the same meaning for the noun. In (6b) we can see that exactly this has been done. The whole NP is headed by a determiner þe which asserts that speaker/writer and hearer/reader share knowledge about which holy saints are being referred to. Just in case this is not so clear, the embedded S removes all shadow of doubt. The other instances of þe in “The Will of Ælfgar” are NPs with a defining postmodifier, with one exception. The postmodified NPs containing þe are all headed either by the N lond (‘land’, estates’) or by the N red (‘condition’): þe lond at Cokefelð. and at Dittone, þe red þat heo be þe bet for mine soule, þe lond at Colne and at Tigan, on þe red þat heo do þan hirde […] . The one instance in which þe is used as a definite article without any postmodification is the following: ic an þat Athelfled bruke þe lond, in which the identity of the land has been asserted in the immediately previous sentence. Guðlaugsson and Þorgeirsson’s analysis would involve a number of steps in terms of phonological weakening to get from þone to þe, which would violate the PSP. This is evidence to suggest that introducing innovations is sudden rather than gradual, as Baker (2008) suggests. The processes of adoption and diffusion, however, are gradual. In the course of time
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the process of recategorization from a defining relative marker to a definite article, a recategorization of minor categories within the NP with essentially the same semantic function, will weaken the ability of þe to fulfil the former grammatical function, and a new innovation is needed to fill the gap. By the time we reach Havelok the Dane the gap has been filled 100% by þat. Baker (2007; 2008) suggests that innovators and early adopters of sound change are “linguistic leaders” in that they will be on the lookout for an observed correlation between the introduction of a new phonological construction and the social status of the innovator. So we should really be talking only of adopters here rather than innovators. The impression that is gained from this kind of statement, however, is that the actuation problem involves spotting something new that has some social significance. My argument is that in language contact situations – and I would stress that the points made in Section 2 do not restrict language contact to the contact between different varieties of language, but includes speakers of the “same” language variety – there is always social pressure to achieve the co-construction of meanings. This does not mean that everyone will be equally adept at innovation and at spotting and adopting innovations, but it does mean that the social function of innovating and adopting need have nothing to do with social prestige. I have shown in the present chapter that this applies to the innovation and adoption of any linguistic construction, not just to sound change.
6 Summary: is the actuation problem really a problem? Looked at in this light, the only problem with actuation is that we are forced to hazard well-founded guesses at the motivations for introducing new constructions, but we can never actually observe the production of an innovation, particularly when looking at language from a historical point of view. Adopting an innovation is also hard to spot in historical linguistics since beyond the beginning of the 20th century we only have written data to work with. But this should not prevent us from using what we know of the nature of language change in the present and the recent past and the models that have been used to investigate this change and applying them to the written data of the past. The analysis of the actuation process involving the development of the definite article the in a restricted area of England in which we know there was a language contact situation, i.e. the southern part of the Danelaw area, has shown quite clearly that the expected sigmoidal structure of the change can still be traced even though there is a very limited amount of data to rely on. We have also seen that the loss of grammatical gender and the case structure of the noun phrase are intimately bound up with the progress of this change, and we can expect that the progression towards the s-plural construction and the relatively fixed word order of English will also be implicated in it. This provides a rich set of possibilities for research of this kind in these and other areas of English. One example that should intrigue researchers would be to ask what happens to the little word that as a function of the broad set of changes associated with the diffusion of the nondeclinable definite article the. As I mentioned in the previous section, it had clearly taken over from þe as the nondeclinable relative marker by the time we reach Havelok the Dane. It was already in place to mark finite dependent noun clauses and as a demonstrative pronoun standing on its own. Whether or not these and other changes were a result of the contact between two Germanic varieties of language that were almost mutually intelligible, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, is an
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empirical question that can be answered by using the actuation process as outlined here. The chapter also indicates that spurious explanations as to how elements of non-standard varieties of English arose are simply not good enough, but that, if enough care is taken in researching all the sources, their genesis can be revealed. Obviously, all of this cannot be “objectively” observed, but it has always been accepted in historical linguistics that good logical argument, bolstered by what we know about language varieties in the present, can substitute for our lack of objectively verifiable facts. In addition to the broadened scope of the concept of language contact, it has also been necessary for me in this chapter to suggest two new theoretical terms, the I(nnovation)>A(doption)>D(iffusion) process and the Principle of the Shortest Path (PSP) that can be added to the principle of sigmoidal structure to help us assign a greater degree of empirical validity to the analysis. Perhaps, in stepping down the paths of the theory of actuation, more principles will be needed, but this will only emerge if those paths are trodden.
7 References Baker, Adam. 2007. Addressing the actuation problem with quantitative models of sound change. Lecture delivered at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium 31. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~tabaker/ PLC31sc.pdf (last accessed 1 June 2011). Baker, Adam. 2008. Addressing the actuation problem with quantitative models of sound change. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(1). http://repository.upenn.edu/ pwpl/vol14/iss1/3 (last accessed 1 June 2011). Blust, Robert. 2005. Must sound change be linguistically motivated? Diachronica 22(2): 219–269. Britain, David. 2005. Innovation, diffusion, “Estuary English” and local dialect differentiation: The survival of Fenland Englishes. Linguistics 43(5): 995–1022. Britain, David and Jenny Cheshire (eds.). 2003. Social dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chambers, Jack and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Jack, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.). 2002. Handbook of language variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell. Chen, Matthew Y. and William S-Y. Wang. 1975. Sound change: Actuation and implementation. Language 51: 228–281. Clark, Cecily. 1958. The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman/ Pearson Education United. Dance, Richard. 2004. North Sea currents: Old English–Old Norse relations, literary and linguistic. Literature Compass 1 (ME117): 1–10. Davis, Graeme. 2006. Comparative syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic: Linguistic, literary and historical implications. Bern: Peter Lang. Dawson, Hope C. 2003. Defining the outcome of language contact: Old English and Old Norse. OSUWPL 57: 40–57. Dittli, Beat, Annelies Ha¨cki Buhofer, and Walter Haas (eds.). 2003. Go¨mmer MiGro? Vera¨nderungen und Entwicklungen im heutigen Schweizer Deutschen. Fribourg: Universita¨tsverlag Freiburg Schweiz. Fisiak, Jacek (ed.). 1988. Historical dialectology: Regional and social. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ´ skar and Haukur Þorgeirsson n.d. Old Norse for beginners. http://www3.hi.is/~ Guðlaugsson, O haukurth/norse/ (last accessed 1 June 2011).
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Haspelmath, Martin. 1998. How young is Standard Average European? Language Science 20: 271– 287. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi, and Friederike Hu¨nnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization: A conceptual framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herold, Ruth. 1997. Solving the actuation problem: Merger and immigration in eastern Pennsylvania. Language Variation and Change 9: 165–189. Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keller, Rudi. 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London/New York: Routledge. Ker, Neil R. 1957. Catalogue of manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kerswill, Paul. 2002a. Koine¨ization and accommodation. In: Jack Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change, 669–702. Oxford: Blackwell. Kerswill, Paul. 2002b. Models of linguistic change and diffusion: New evidence from dialect levelling in British English. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 6: 187–216. King, Robert D. 1968. Historical linguistics and generative grammar. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change, Vol. 1: Internal factors. Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, Vol. 2: Social factors. Malden, MA./Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lehmann, Winfred and Yakov Malkiel (eds.). 1968. Directions for historical Linguistics: A symposium. Austin: University of Texas Press. Levey, Stephen. 2006. The sociolinguistic distribution of discourse marker like in preadolescent speech. Multilingua 25(4): 413–441. Millar, Robert McColl. 2000. System collapse, system rebirth: The demonstrative pronouns of English 900–1350 and the birth of the definite article. Bern: Peter Lang. Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(4): 530–555. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell. Paddock, Harold. 1988. The actuation for gender change in Wessex versus Newfoundland. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical dialectology: Regional and social, 377–395. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3(2): 215–246. Upton, Clive, David Parry, and John D. A Widdowson. 1994. Survey of English dialects: The dictionary and grammar. London: Routledge. Wakelin, Martyn. 1994. Discovering English dialects. Oxford: Shire Publications Ltd. Watts, Richard J. 2003a. Flexibilita¨t oder Sterilita¨t? Englische Entlehnungen im Schweizerdeutschen und ins schweizerische Standarddeutsch. In: Beat Dittli, Annelies Ha¨cki Buhofer, and Walter Haas (eds.), Go¨mmer MiGro? Vera¨nderungen und Entwicklungen im heutigen Schweizer Deutschen, 131–140. Fribourg: Universita¨tsverlag Freiburg Schweiz. Watts, Richard J. 2003b. Why fuude is not ‘food’ and tsche¨gge is not ‘check’: A new look at the actuation problem. In: David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.), Social dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill, 115–129. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Watts, Richard J. 2011. Language myths and the history of English. New York: Oxford University Press. Watts, Richard J. and Peter Trudgill (eds.). 2002. Alternative histories of English. London: Routledge.
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Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Winfred Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Directions for historical Linguistics: A symposium, 95–195. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winford, Donald. 2003. An introduction to contact linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Richard J. Watts, Tegna (Switzerland)
96. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Corpus linguistics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction English historical corpora and other electronic resources Electronic resources as tools in the study of the history of English The sky is the limit, or? … Summary References
Abstract This chapter discusses the role played by modern corpus linguistics in the study of the history of English. Various types of English historical corpora and electronic text collections will be introduced, among them multipurpose and specialized corpora, electronic text editions, large-scale text collections, and electronic dictionaries. In addition to the size of current English historical corpora, other issues of importance to end-users will be addressed such as corpus annotation and computerized searches. Examples will be given of studies based on the use of corpus linguistics techniques, with special reference to work done within the variationist and historical pragmatics frameworks. While morphosyntactic phenomena and the historical sociolinguistic approach have profited significantly from historical corpora and automated search techniques, work on areas such as register analysis and genre variation has also produced ground-breaking results. The chapter argues that the advantages offered by corpus linguistics outweigh the limitations of the approach.
1 Introduction Texts and text collections have always been among the essential tools for historical linguists: up until the advent of audio-recording devices, it is in written form that specimens of early language varieties have been preserved to us. What we nowadays mean by “corpus linguistics” is a relatively new methodology which involves empirical study of authentic language use with the help of computers and electronic corpora, and which lends itself to applications in many aspects of linguistic enquiry. This approach owes much to the 19th-century developments in comparative and historical Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1509–1531
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linguistics: the idea of collecting empirical evidence from texts in a systematic way is thus nothing new (McEnery and Wilson 2001 [1996]; Biber et al. 1998; Lu¨deling and Kyto¨ 2008). But it was only when it became possible to store texts in machine-readable form in the memory of the computer, and annotate, search and analyse these with the help of computer programs that modern corpus linguistics started to gain momentum. The first corpus intended for linguistic study was the now classic Brown Corpus, which was compiled in the 1960s from texts published in 1961. However, it was in the 1970s and 1980s that there was an explosion in the number and types of texts prepared for computational use (Johansson 2008: 34–35). Among the first textual sources to be computerized were the 52 Augustan English texts that Louis Milic´ included in his 477,410-KB Augustan Prose Sample collection. This early start was quite indicative of what was to follow: since the 1980s, English historical linguistics has developed into an area of exceptionally intensive corpus compilation effort, which in turn has contributed to an ever increasing interest felt for the development of the English language. The attraction of using historical corpora and other electronic resources is that the computer enables one to retrieve vast amounts of data in a relatively short period of time for further processing with database and statistical package programs for both quantitative and qualitative insights. In the case of stratified corpora, where text selection is designed to reflect e.g. certain historical periods and/or representative text-types, the end-user is also able to profit from the controlled parameter scheme underlying the corpus compilation plan, and studies carried out on the materials are not only verifiable but also offer a common basis for comparisons with subsequent studies. In its modern corpus linguistics sense, the term corpus mostly refers to “a collection of texts or parts of texts upon which some general linguistic analysis can be conducted” (Meyer 2002: xi). This holds for both present-day and historical corpora, including variations due to different definitions given to the notion of “a collection of texts” (Meyer 2002: xi). Strictly speaking, a corpus can be expected to be of a certain (planned and finite) size, and, in order to be representative of the language variety in question, to be compiled to reflect a range of extralinguistic parameters such as the provenance of the texts, periodization, region, genre (or text-type) and writers’ socio-historical background. But corpus-like use can also be made of unstratified databases comprising vast amounts of data (e.g. the Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Literature Online (LION) collections, see Section 2.4) and electronic editions and dictionaries. All these resources have proved useful for those working on the history of English, and they will thus be treated in this survey. The present chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2, the types of English historical corpora will be introduced and illustrated with examples. In addition to multipurpose and specialized corpora, attention will be paid to electronic text editions, large-scale text collections and electronic dictionaries (for further materials, see Traxel, this volume; Busse, this volume). The section will conclude with a discussion of the size of current English historical corpora, an issue of importance to any end-user. Section 3 turns to electronic resources as tools in the study of the history of English. To start with, annotation and searchability issues will be considered, as they often set limitations on what one can use a corpus for. In the ensuing section, examples of studies making use of modern corpus linguistics techniques will be given. Of special interest are the areas of variationist study and historical pragmatics. Despite the significant advantages that the corpus linguistics approach has to offer historical linguists, the framework also has its
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limitations. These will be addressed in Section 4. Section 5 will conclude the chapter, summarizing the main points and taking a look at future prospects in the field. For the resources referred to, information on the website addresses and related literature can be found in the references section (Section 6), under electronic corpora and other resources.
2 English historical corpora and other electronic resources 2.1 Language change and the corpus linguistics approach The variationist approach to language change (see e.g. Weinreich et al. 1968; Romaine 1982) started to gain in significance parallel to the rise of modern corpus linguistics methodology. This was to prove providential in view of subsequent studies of language change. Within this framework language change is observed by mapping the paths of development of variant expressions, i.e. the different ways of expressing more or less the same thing (Halliday 1973; Rissanen 2008). For instance, the relativizers who and which with reference to animate antecedents were competing in the Early Modern English period, a rivalry that resulted in the former gaining ground and finally ousting the latter in this context. Various linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influence developments such as these, which enables one to account for language change by examining the roles that these factors play in the change. With corpus linguistics techniques, large amounts of data can be analyzed and organized relatively easily according to the extralinguistic information which can be assumed to have influenced processes of change and which often comes conveniently with the corpus (e.g. periodization, regional background, relationship to speech, level of formality, text-type, and author properties). In this way the rivalry of the variant forms can be mapped systematically and accounted for across the period studied. At the same time, stages of linguistic development can be captured over time in a way that would not be possible by using e.g. anecdotal evidence or haphazardly collected incidental examples. Observations concerning the frequency and co-occurrence of features are thus central to this methodology. It is also important to take into account variation in the use of the linguistic items in question in Presentday English, by way of background to the study of the history of the usage. The results obtained can reveal information about the key periods in the process and rate of change, and the factors that have apparently either promoted or retarded the change. Previous claims based on impressions and anecdotal evidence can also often be confirmed or refuted. Overall, a stratified historical corpus controlled for extralinguistic factors is intended to offer the opportunity to catch and document the details in processes of change. How much attention is paid to which of these factors in corpus compilation very much decides what the resulting corpus can be used for. For instance, a corpus devoted to Early Modern letters by writers whose regional provenance and social background are known can be particularly suited for studies within the historical sociolinguistics framework. Compilation decisions will also have an impact on the potential of the future corpus regarding the research to be carried out on the materials. In what follows, I will look at a number of corpora and databases that have been compiled for the study of the history of English.
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2.2 Multipurpose and specialized corpora A key factor in corpus design is the purpose or purposes the material is intended for. Corpora can be either multipurpose or specialized. An example of the multipurpose type is the first structured computerized historical corpus of English, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. This corpus spans a millennium, from the 700s to 1710, and comprises a varied spectrum of text-types, in order to enable a comprehensive view of the development of English. Among the text-types represented across the Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English sections of the corpus are law, handbooks, science, philosophy, history writing, travelogues, biographies, fiction, and the Bible. Another example of a historical multipurpose corpus is ARCHER (or A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), which covers the period from 1650 to 1990 and comprises e.g. science, travelogues/journals, fiction, drama, and correspondence. This corpus also includes both British and American English. Multipurpose corpora enable one to trace long-term developments in usage for a wide range of linguistic features. Compared with multipurpose corpora, specialized corpora have a narrower focus, often concentrating on an aspect of language use, a certain genre (or genres), or a period in the history of the language. For example, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its extensions are restricted to letters from the early 1400s to 1800. The aim is to enable studies of the development of English from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Similarly, the project entitled Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 1375–1800 focuses on medical treatises, with three corpora devoted to the Middle English, Early Modern English, and Late Modern English periods, and is intended for the study of stylistic change in medical English within the socio-historical framework. A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 was compiled to enable the study of early speech-related language. The rationale behind this corpus design was that one can arrive at hypotheses about the “spoken” interaction of the past by comparing texts which bear a close relationship to authentic or fictive speech situations (as e.g. in trial proceedings and drama; see Rissanen 1999). The corpus is thus aimed at addressing the well-known dilemma in historical linguistics that while most language change has been claimed to actuate in everyday spoken language, specimens of historical language use are preserved to us in written records only. Further examples of specialized corpora on the genre axis are the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1661–1791) and the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640–1740), while A Corpus of Irish English (14th–20th centuries) and the Corpus of Early Ontario English, pre-Confederation section (1776–1850) focus on regional varieties outside Great Britain. A corpus can also focus on only one subperiod in the history of English: the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form comprises all extant Old English texts (each text is represented by one manuscript unless dialect or date definitions require the inclusion of multiple copies). Finally, corpora pooling together the works of an author can also be considered a variety of specialized corpora, e.g. the Electronic Beowulf, or Chaucer’s works in The Canterbury Tales Project.
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2.3 Electronic text editions Electronic text editions form a category of corpus-like resources that aim at rendering original manuscripts more faithfully and in a more user-friendly fashion than do printed editions. Ideally, they also make it possible to compare the transcription to the corresponding manuscript images. That such searchable linguistic editions are desirable has been expressed by e.g. Lass (2004), Bailey (2004), Grund (2006) and Honkapohja et al. (2009). Normalizing or modernizing the text without explicit coding does not come into question in such editions (even though it is of course possible to offer modernized parallel versions of the text to accompany the edition text proper). Instead, the text is transcribed to render the manuscript readings as closely as possible when using modern typography in an electronic environment (Kyto¨ et al. 2007: Section 3; Kyto¨ et al. 2011b: Chapter 1). The advantages of such electronic resources are many: these editions can be used very much like electronic corpora for searching purposes and they can also be annotated simultaneously or subsequently for linguistic and extralinguistic information to allow e.g. hypertext applications (for annotation, see Section 3.1 below). Electronic text editions can focus on single texts or pool together several texts that are representative of a text-type. An example of a single-text edition is the mid-16th century text of Henry Machyn’s Diary, or A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550– 1563, by Henry Machyn, which comprises manuscript images linked with the transcription and a modernized version of the text, with three search options available on the website. An example of an electronic edition devoted to a single text-type with multiple-text representation and drawing on modern corpus compilation methodology is the project An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) (see Kyto¨ et al. 2011b). This edition collects together 900 witness depositions from 30 collections from the North, South, East, and West of England, as well as the London area. To enable better observation of language change, the period of 200 years has been divided into four 50-year sub-periods, and for fuller representation, both criminal and church courts are represented. The witnesses are mostly from the lower strata of society and comprise over 600 men and close to 300 women. The metadata added to accompany each deposition gives information for example on the date of the document, region, and the deponent’s sex, age, and occupation. To further enhance the usability of the edition, a selection of manuscript images, a user guide and a glossary will accompany the transcriptions. Many recent projects that go under the name of a corpus and make use of manuscript material have followed the abovementioned approach characteristic of modern electronic editions. For instance, in the manuscript-based Corpus of Scottish Correspondence covering the period from 1500 to 1730, the diplomatically transcribed manuscript letters will be accompanied by a manual containing information about the theoretical and methodological approach, and annotation practices. Information on languageexternal variables and data retrieval tools are given in separate databases. Similarly, The Middle English Grammar Corpus project collects Middle English texts from 1100 to 1500 transcribed from manuscript or facsimile images. The text selection draws on the documents localised in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Modern English (LALME), and the starting point has been to sample 3,000-word extracts from more than a thousand texts included in LALME. To enhance searchability, texts will be
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annotated to relate linguistic features to various extralinguistic features (e.g. period, region, genre) to allow variationist insights. This will serve the primary goal of the project, which is to arrive at a corpus-based grammar of Middle English.
2.4 Large-scale text collections Recent advances within the corpus linguistics framework have enabled access to unprecedented amounts of computerized material in the form of large-scale text collections such as the Early English Books Online (EEBO), its sequel the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and the Literature Online collection (LION). These text collectionss include both facsimile and plain text material, and even though the accompanying search engines may not always be ideal for linguistic research, the materials nevertheless represent a valuable source of primary and secondary data. Drawing on the bibliographic records included in The Short-Title Catalogue I for 1475–1640, The Short-Title Catalogue II (for 1641–1700), The Thomason Tracts (a compendium of broadsides and other materials from 1640 and 1661) and The Early English Books Tract Supplement, EEBO comprises over 22 million digital page images from “virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700” (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ home). These images are not searchable by means of concordance programs (see Section 3.1 below), but the bibliographical information on the works is searchable and of help when one is e.g. looking for texts from a certain subject area. Some 25,000 books in the collection have so far been stored as searchable plain texts within the massive Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project at the University of Michigan. ECCO, the chronological sequel to EEBO, “delivers every significant Englishlanguage and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas” (http://www.gale. cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/about.htm). The collection currently comprises 26 million digital facsimile pages of text from more than 138,000 titles. While ECCO, in addition to literature and language, covers law, history and geography, social sciences and fine arts, medicine, science and technology, and religion and philosophy, the LION collection is devoted primarily to literature and language. It offers, among other things, “[a] fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 236 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources” from 700 to the 21st century (http://lion.chadwyck.co. uk/). These works can be searched with the accompanying search engine (for limitations, see Section 4). An example of the more specialized databases containing historical English are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913, which comprises “[a] fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court” (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). In addition to the running text, which can be searched with the accompanying search engine, digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings and 4,000 pages of Ordinar’s Accounts, among other things, can be consulted on the website (for limitations regarding searchability, see Section 4).
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The Proceedings of the Old Bailey is freely available on the internet while the other above-mentioned text collections are commercial enterprises and require fairly expensive subscription. But the internet can also offer cost-free electronic resources that can be unearthed with relatively simple Google searches. Among the well-known and valuable websites can be counted the Project Gutenberg, which was launched in 1971 to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks” (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/ Main_Page). Using such sources of course requires more work than using readymade electronic corpora, but when no suitable corpora are available, internet sources can come to the rescue. We also already have access to large-scale corpora compiled from the Project Gutenberg and other internet sources, e.g. the 15-million-word Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (1710–1920) (see Section 2.6).
2.5 Electronic dictionaries A category of electronic resources of major interest for English historical linguists is that of electronic dictionaries. These come in two forms, as databases containing headword entries with citations from the texts excerpted, and as searchable corpora containing dictionaries treated as primary data. Among the first-mentioned are the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online). In these resources, it is the illustrative citation material that is of particular interest to corpus linguists, especially when this material can be searched in the same way as any corpus of running text. The DOE is still underway, based on the above-mentioned Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form already in distribution, but many of the fascicles are available on CD-ROM and online. The printed MED, completed in 2001, draws on a collection of over three million citation slips, and its electronic version “preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary” (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/). The electronic MED is part of the Middle English Compendium, which also includes the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse and other related tools. The printed OED has developed from its first printed fascicle in 1884 into today’s OED Online (second edition) tool offering simple word look-ups and the possibility to carry out more sophisticated searches across any fields in the dictionary. Hoffmann (2004: 18, 21) estimates that the OED Online comprises 33 to 35 million searchable words (with an approximate length of 13 words per each of the 2.4 million quotations), and thus surpasses all available historical corpora in size. However, these materials naturally differ from running text corpora in several respects (for a number of issues raised, see Section 4). Among the electronic dictionaries that contain original printed dictionaries as primary data can be counted e.g. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (several electronic versions of the 1755 and other editions are available). A multidictionary source is the Lexicons of Early Modern English database (formerly Early Modern English Dictionary Database), which “is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopaedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration period” (Lancashire 2006). The idea behind the project is that contemporary comments and the compilers’ lexical
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insights about the use and meaning of words found in the early dictionaries are of great value for those trying to examine early language use. The database currently comprises 175 searchable lexicons (of these 121 are fully analyzed), close to 660,000 word entries (of these over 360,000 entries have been fully analyzed). The database has been annotated to enable simple and advanced searches with the help of the accompanying search engine, which allows one to restrict the searches by date, author, title, type of lexical work, and subject. Both a public and a licensed version are offered.
2.6 The bigger, the better, or can small be beautiful? The size of a corpus is naturally of interest to the end-user, as many corpus linguistics studies aim at quantification and even statistical significance. The problem with smaller corpora, especially if a number of extralinguistic and linguistic parameters are considered, is that the breakdown across the categories distinguished makes representation dwindle away in the data categories. Certain linguistic features (e.g. lexical or syntactic features) can also be relatively rare in the material, which may make it difficult to find sufficient quantities of data. Compared with corpora containing written Present-day English, which can comprise hundreds of millions of words, many stratified historical corpora may appear small, ranging, with a number of exceptions, from some hundreds of thousands of words to some five million words. Having given an idea about the dimensions of the large-scale electronic databases and electronic dictionaries above, I will now turn to the dimensions of the better-known English historical corpora. Among the corpora that remain under 500,000 words in length are A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1861–1919), which amounts to 100,000 words, and the abovementioned Corpus of Early Ontario English, pre-Confederation section (1776–1850), which amounts to c.225,000 words. In the half-a-million-word range we find e.g. the Middle English Medical Texts (1375–1500) collection (500,000 words), A Corpus of Irish English (14th–20th century) (550,000 words), and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (1417–1681) (450,000 words), which is drawn from the 2.6-million-word Corpus of Early English Correspondence (1410–1681). In the one-million-word range, there are the two former “present-day” corpora which are today already perhaps “recent-English” corpora, the Brown Corpus and the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus from the 1960s (for “recent English”, see Mair 2008). Between the one and two-million-word range fall multipurpose corpora such as the Helsinki Corpus and the original ARCHER corpus (1.5 and 1.7 million words, respectively), and specialized corpora such as the Lampeter Corpus (1.1 million words), the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 (1.2 million words) and the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1661–1791) (1.6 million words). The Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of Oz Early English, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, and the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose hit or surpass the two-million-word mark (2, 3.5 and 7.8 million words, respectively). Even larger collections are the extended version of the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (1710–1920) (15 million words), the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (18 million words), the Time Corpus (1923–2006) (100 million words), and the Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009), which reaches 400 million words.
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As regards corpus size, tagged and parsed versions of historical corpora deserve special mention (for an explanation of these terms, see Section 3.1). To give an idea of the dimensions of these corpora, parts of the Old and Middle English sections of the Helsinki Corpus are available in parsed versions, e.g. the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (second edition), and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English amounting to 1.5 million, 1.1 million and 1.8 million words, respectively. The parsed and tagged versions of the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence amount to 2.2 million words. It may be tempting to think that the bigger the corpus, the better. Yet, if frequently occurring linguistic items are analyzed, this may result in the problem of the corpus in question yielding far too much data for subsequent manual screening and postprocessing. Applying random or other sampling methods may then become necessary. This is not to say, of course, that corpora can be too large. On the contrary, considering the potential of the corpus in view of a wide range of queries, there are clear benefits in large-sized corpora. However, smaller corpora should not be set aside as less important. Even when possibly lacking quantitative power, they may be unique in their way and provide insights for critical qualitative observations. Time can also be saved as the researcher need not go through the steps already taken by the corpus compiler when constructing the corpus. This is especially so because getting hold of early texts, storing them in computerized form, and annotating them for linguistic or extralinguistic information is very time-consuming.
3 Electronic resources as tools in the study of the history of English 3.1 Annotation issues and searchability Much valuable research can be carried out on computerized unannotated texts. But the potential of corpus linguistics techniques can be fully exploited only when texts have been annotated with what is known as “markup”. Meyer (2002: 81–83) distinguishes three types of mark-up, i.e. structural, part-of-speech, and grammatical markup. Structural markup (e.g. bibliographic information, information on period, text-type, author properties etc., or paragraph boundaries in written texts) helps the end-user to exploit the properties of corpus texts to e.g. narrow down searches to include only certain sections of the material. Adding part-of-speech markup to texts is called “tagging a corpus” and comprises assigning part-of-speech designations to every word in a corpus. Grammatical markup can be added by an automatic or semi-automatic parser that labels grammatical structures beyond the word level (e.g. clauses, phrases). In addition to these types of annotation, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse tagging have recently become of increasing interest. Texts can also be tagged in a problem-oriented way (Meyer 2002: 97) to mark up certain linguistic features. For instance, in her study of the role of questions and answers in trial proceedings included in the Sociopragmatic Corpus, a sociopragmatically annotated section of the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, Archer (2005) used annotation to classify the different types of questions and answers in her versions of the corpus files.
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Markup can be added by using idiosyncratic encoding schemes or by adhering to principles of an internationally acknowledged standard. The latter method has obvious advantages in view of subsequent exchange of information or transfer of materials from one platform to another. An increasingly popular markup language is XML, or “eXtensible Markup Language” (a derivative of the SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language), which has rapidly developed into a standard within the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). XML allows the user to define the content of a document separately from its formatting and enables the reuse of the content in other presentation environments, which also makes it ideal for the purposes of long-term preservation (it is not certain that the hardware or software available to us today will necessarily be operable in the decades or centuries to come). An example of a corpus of historical English inputted in SGML-compatible format (with features from the web-compatible HTML language) that can conveniently be converted into SGML, XML or HTML encoding is the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus, a one-million-word collection of news text from the 1650s (McEnery and Hardie 2001–2007; for sample data and analysis, see http://www.lancs. ac.uk/fass/projects/newsbooks/data.htm). Annotation can be added directly in corpus text files or in separate entities for multi-layered architectures (Lu¨deling and Zeldes 2008: Section 3.2). For instance, the structural annotation in the Helsinki Corpus follows the former principle (for illustration and discussion, see Rissanen 1992, Rissanen et al. 1993, and more recently, Claridge 2008). The latter method would suit e.g. electronic text editions, where information concerning the condition of the manuscript, scribal hands, linguistic features, and so forth can be added in separate files to accompany the base text by using e.g. XML-based standoff markup (for an illustrative discussion, see Honkapohja et al. 2009). The abovementioned Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus offers a version with original spelling and a version with regularized spelling. In addition to structural differences between present-day and historical varieties of language, a major problem in applying taggers and parsers developed for Present-day English to historical corpora is indeed the spelling variation characteristic of early English (e.g. the spelling the for second person pronoun thee). Recently, significant advances have been made in research on spelling variation, notably the VARD 2 (or Variant Detector 2) program developed at Lancaster University (Rayson et al. 2007; Baron and Rayson 2008; see also http:// ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/VariantSpelling/ for variant spelling research). The possibility to arrive at normalized versions of texts by using automatic or semi-automatic methods will facilitate searches and enable historical corpus linguists to profit from many of the techniques that require normalized spelling across the texts (e.g. keyword analysis, see Scott 2008). Apart from paying attention to spelling variation, the search techniques used for English historical corpora are essentially the same as those used for present-day corpora. Much can be done by using search programs for extracting words, combinations of words, and constructions, and then displaying the results in the form of various types of concordances. The data are then screened to select only relevant instances, which are further analyzed and processed with the help of spreadsheet or database programs for statistical or other insights (for an illustrative discussion of search techniques, see Wynne 2008). There are package search programs available (e.g. WordSmith, Corpus Presenter, Xaira), and some corpora also come with search facilities (e.g. the Penn
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Parsed Corpora of Historical English and the CorpusSearch2 program, for which see http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/, or the Corpus of Irish English and the Corpus Presenter application). These can be used for many basic and even advanced search tasks, but depending on research questions and the type of material one is working on, professional computer programming skills are sometimes needed to extract the kind of data one is after.
3.2 From variationist studies to historical pragmatics and beyond Evidence of language change that can be extracted from historical corpora seldom makes sense on its own, without the support of other disciplines such as historical linguistics, variationist analysis, historical pragmatics, grammaticalization theory, discourse analysis and statistics, to name a few. In this section I will describe some of the ways in which corpus linguistics and these frameworks meet in recent studies carried out on early English texts (for further examples and discussion, see Curzan 2008). Plenty of example studies can be found in the proceedings of the recent International Conferences on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) and the Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL) conference series (e.g. Bermu´dez-Otero et al. 2000; Fanego et al. 2002; Dossena et al. 2006; Lenker et al. 2008; Minkova and Stockwell 2003; Curzan and Emmons 2004) as well as the proceedings of specialized conference series such as the Late Modern English conferences (e.g. Pe´rez-Guerra et al. 2007). The annual ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English) conferences nowadays regularly feature presentations based on English historical corpora (e.g. Facchinetti and Rissanen 2006; Nevalainen et al. 2008). In addition to numerous journal articles and monographs, book series such as Topics in English Linguistics (Mouton), Studies in English Language (Cambridge), Language and Computers – Studies in Practical Linguistics (Rodopi), English Corpus Linguistics (Peter Lang), and Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication (Peter Lang) also feature corpus-based monographs or collected volumes containing corpus-based studies of the history of English. A representative collection of articles is found in the thematic Special Issue of the Journal of English Linguistics (28[1]) dedicated to Historical Corpora (March 2000). Despite our already having access to a number of linguistically tagged and parsed historical corpora of English, studies based on simple word and word string searches tend to dominate in the literature. Variationist studies are a case in point in this respect, and examples of topics treated within this approach are often of a morphosyntactic nature, pertaining to e.g. the history of modal auxiliaries, do-periphrasis, the progressive, adverbs, relativizers, personal pronouns, clause types, negation, and word order issues. Corpus-based variationist studies have yielded impressive results for instance in the field of historical sociolinguistics, and given evidence on the influence of social factors such as gender and rank on the development of a wide range of morphosyntactic features. Thus, women letter writers included in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence have been shown to lead change from below by promoting, among other things, the use of you (vs. thou), its (vs. of it and thereof ), and do-periphrasis in negative statements (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). The results tally with the general understanding in modern sociolinguistics that women promote change “from below”, that is,
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below the level of social awareness (for further discussion, see Curzan 2008). Studies such as these have made clear the benefits of testing the mechanisms of language change in both Present-day and historical English. Overall, phenomena of interest or even controversy in Present-day English can be illuminated from a fresh angle when examined in the context of historical corpus evidence. For instance, it is known that grammatical gender disappeared from English gradually and that it was replaced by the natural gender of the referent. A recent study devoted to this topic and based on extensive historical data drawn from the Helsinki Corpus showed how the historical perspective could inform current debates about “sexist” language use and language reform in Present-day English (Curzan 2003). In addition to social factors, register and genre variation has received considerable attention. Among methodologically ground-breaking studies have been those carried out by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1992, 1997) on the ARCHER corpus. They studied diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers within a multidimensional framework (for principles of analysis, see Biber 1988) and showed that the popular written registers included in ARCHER, i.e. letters, diaries, fiction, and news reportage shifted to become more literate and distinct from conversation in the 18th century, only to become more “oral” again in the 19th and 20th centuries, while specialist expository registers such as medical prose, science prose, and legal prose have consistently continued to develop towards more literate styles (Biber and Finegan 1997: 272–273). To enable data collection along the principles explained in Biber (1988), the corpus was first tagged automatically. One can safely say that this body of research would not have been possible without resorting to modern computer technology and corpus linguistics techniques. Studies adhering to principles of historical pragmatics, a relatively new area within English linguistics, increasingly make use of corpus data (see Taavitsainen, Chapter 93). Examples can be found from the early landmark volume Historical Pragmatics (Jucker 1995) to a recent volume devoted to speech acts in the history of English (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008a). In addition to stratified corpora, large-scale text collections have proved useful. There can be challenges, however, in applying corpus methodology to topics in historical pragmatics. For instance, in form-to-function analysis (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 13–18), it is laborious and time-consuming – and also difficult in terms of traditional corpus linguistics techniques – to identify the functions before the associated forms in current historical corpora of English (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 17). Developing the methodology is thus of great interest to the field, and solutions to various problems are being sought. This is the case in many of the recent studies, e.g. Kohnen (2007) on text-types and diachronic speech act analysis, Taavitsainen and Jucker on the use made of large-scale text collections to study verbal aggression and compliments (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2007; 2008 respectively), and Jucker and Taavitsainen (2008b) on apologies. The nature of research questions may also lead a historical corpus linguist to turn to an eclectic framework where components are drawn from a number of theoretical and empirical frameworks. In her study of second person singular pronouns in trials, depositions and drama comedy sampled from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, Walker (2007) draws on corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics frameworks, and looks into the variation and development in the use
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of the pronouns at macro level (distributions of the forms across the subperiods, texttypes, and the sex, age and rank parameters) and at micro level (pronoun usage from the perspective of close readings). A similar multi-framework approach was adopted by Smitterberg (2005) in his study of the progressive in 19th-century English. In this study based on the Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (Smitterberg 2005: 17–24), applying the variationist approach needed some consideration depending on whether the progressive was to be considered in isolation and/or in a paradigmatic relation with the non-progressive. Further frameworks made use of by Smitterberg were the multidimensional approach, historical pragmatics, and grammaticalization theory. Most of the example studies referred to above have involved quantification in one form or another. However, quantification need not be among the main aims of a study drawing on corpus linguistics techniques. For her recent study on the history of comment clauses in English, Brinton (2008) made use of a varied body of electronic and online sources including stratified historical corpora, large-scale databases and electronic dictionaries across the history of English. Her approach is “primarily qualitative, not quantitative” but where possible, quantitative data have been included (Brinton 2008: 19). A degree of quantification is possible with most sources. Thus, Mair (2006) in his study of complementation patterns of remember from 1700s to present-day, turned to the quotation base of the Oxford English Dictionary. While keeping in mind the limitations of this source when used as a corpus (see Section 4 below), he was able to show that the nineteenth century was a key period in the development of the construction towards present-day usage.
4 The sky is the limit, or? … As we have seen so far, the modern corpus linguistics framework has significant advantages to offer a student of the history of English. One is tempted to think that the sky is the limit, but at a closer look, this may not be quite so. The methodology does have its limitations, and some of them will be discussed in the present section (see also Rissanen 2008: Section 3.3). While various morpho-syntactic, semantic, and even discourse phenomena can usually be treated within the corpus linguistics framework, a number of areas have proved less successful. One such area is historical phonology. After spelling practices had become fairly standardized, few printed texts give clues as to pronunciation practices. Even in texts that reflect informal language use (letters, diaries etc.) and contain idiosyncratic spellings that may tell us something about contemporaneous pronunciation, searching for spelling variants need not be unproblematic (for a discussion on corpus linguistics and historical phonology, see Curzan 2008). Another limitation not only for historical phonology but also for other areas of study can be the provenance of source texts: most large-scale historical corpora draw on modern text editions, which need not always follow the source texts faithfully. Editors, especially if enabling linguistic study of documents was not among their main aims, may have normalized or modernized the text, sometimes even without flagging their revisions in their editorial principles. Such materials lend themselves to certain research purposes but not all (for a discussion of historical corpora and “bad” data, see Kyto¨ and Walker 2003).
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Other problems for a historical corpus linguist can be formed by gaps in textual representation leading to gaps in corpus data. Such gaps may have been caused not only by a clear lack of textual evidence but also by a discrepancy between the time when a text was created and the copy in which it has been preserved to us. In the Old and Middle English periods, in particular, the time distance between the original text and the earliest preserved copy needs consideration. Only a relatively limited number of Early Middle English texts have been preserved to us, so not much evidence from this period is available for corpus compilers and end-users. Even in the Early Modern period, this factor can present problems. For instance, many 16th-century trial proceedings are available only in early 18th-century printed sources, while no manuscript sources of the original versions have survived (see Kyto¨ and Walker 2006; Culpeper and Kyto¨ 2010). Similarly, as regards text-type representation, while the study of specific text-types is possible across the history of English for e.g. history writing, fiction and philosophical treatises, there are also period-specific text-types such as medieval mystery plays (see Helsinki Corpus) that have no direct counterparts in other periods. Nor are texts always clearly of one type only but can merge elements from several types (see 18th-century epistolary novels). A text-type may also change across time as regards stylistic and other conventions, making it difficult to distinguish between different text-types or compare the early and late parts of a period. This can make assigning overall labels to texts misleading in some respects. When analyzing language data, it can also sometimes be difficult to see whether what we have at hand is language change or only change in genre conventions (see, e.g., Nevalainen 1986). Among further gaps in textual representation that hamper corpus compilation and exploitation is the meager number of extant texts by representatives of certain social groups. For instance, texts authored by women in the early periods of the history of English remain few compared to texts by male authors. Women generally lacked opportunities for formal education, and owing to the position ascribed to them in society, were not expected to devote themselves to creative or scientific writing (for details, see Mendelson and Crawford 1998). As for the rank parameter, we have relatively little material produced by the lower levels of society: literacy and writing skills were not within everybody’s reach in past periods. As a consequence of gaps in the materials available, historical corpora can seldom be balanced in structure in all respects. At the same time, definitions adopted for e.g. period divisions and classification of social strata often mean compilers have planted a degree of arbitrariness and over-generalization in the coding plan; the end-users may not always come to think of the consequences of such coding decisions. Also, as compilers of different corpora tend to apply their own definitions when assigning parameter labels (e.g. social rank, age classification), comparisons across corpora can seldom be straightforward, and need further consideration and adjustments on the part of the end-user. A further complicating factor, as mentioned in Section 2.6, is that breakdown figures obtained for distributions of linguistic features in a corpus may remain rather low when several extralinguistic and/or linguistic parameters are combined to categorize the data. As already indicated, searching historical corpora, large-scale databases, and electronic dictionaries is not always as unproblematic as one could wish. Problems caused
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by spelling variation have been referred to above. Some of the search programs that come with large-scale databases are not primarily intended for linguistic study but rather for identifying quotations in literary works, etc. (e.g. LION) or for extracting historical information (e.g. Old Bailey). Electronic dictionaries can also be based on biased collections of source texts excerpted for citation data (for the OED, see Hoffmann 2004 and Mair 2006). Yet the above limitations of the diachronic corpus linguistics framework need not mean it would be best to go back to sorting out index cards manually. On the contrary, instead of worrying about what is not there, there is all the more reason to turn to what is there in historical corpora, and how to make the most of it. As in any methodological framework, it is important to bear in mind the limitations of the materials used and consider carefully to what extent far-reaching conclusions can be drawn in the light of the data gathered. One should not of course interpret evidence from historical corpora without being aware of the features of the historical language form in question and the literary and sociohistorical context of past language users. It is also important to keep in mind that a historical corpus can never represent the whole of the language of the period in question; a corpus can only reflect a small part of this.
5 Summary The present chapter has surveyed the types of English historical corpora, distinguishing multipurpose corpora, specialized corpora, electronic text editions, large-scale text collections, and electronic dictionaries. Attention has been paid to the size of the current English historical corpora and to electronic resources as tools in the study of the history of English. Annotation and searchability issues have been considered, and examples given of studies that have made use of modern corpus linguistics techniques, especially in the areas of variationist study and historical pragmatics. The limitations of the corpus linguistics framework were addressed briefly. The future prospects of the corpus linguistics applications in the study of the history of English look bright. There is a growing interest in corpus compilation and exploitation, and areas attracting further work are many, among them the history of regional varieties, specific text-types, and cross-linguistic issues, just to name a few. Improving access to information on English historical corpora is also important (the CoRD, or Corpus Resource Database underway). Interdisciplinary studies leading to enhanced collaboration with historians, literary scholars, and other fields of expertise are also needed, and there are already vast amounts of digitized material enabling the study of not only the history of the English language and literature but also the study of various aspects of social, political, and cultural history in the English-speaking parts of the world. The use of digital materials has changed and will continue to change the profile of many research areas in the humanities: there is a great attraction in being able to identify and trace various patterns of co-occurrence with the help of computers to the extent that is not possible manually. Acknowledgments: I am indebted to Erik Smitterberg and Terry Walker for valuable comments on the drafts of this chapter.
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6 References 6.1 Electronic corpora and other resources ARCHER = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 3.x. 1990–1993/2002/2007/ 2010/2013. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University) and Edward Finegan (University of Southern California). Modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities are Northern Arizona, Southern California, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Uppsala, Michigan, Manchester, Lancaster, Bamberg, Zurich, Trier, Salford, and Santiago de Compostela. http:// www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/archer/ (accessed 27 April 2011). See Biber et al. (1994); Ya´n˜ez-Bouza (2011). Augustan Prose Sample. 1980. Compiled by Louis Milic´ (Cleveland State University). http://ota. ahds.ac.uk/headers/0401.xml (accessed 27 April 2011). Brown Corpus = A Standard Corpus of Present-day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers. 1964, 1971, 1979. Compiled by W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kucˇera (Brown University). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/BROWN/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). The Canterbury Tales Project. 1989–. By Peter Robinson, Elisabeth Solopova, Norman Blake, and Susan Hockey. Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing. University of Birmingham. http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/ (accessed 27 April 2011). CoRD = Corpus Resource Database. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Corpus of Early English Correspondence. 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena RaumolinBrunberg, Jukka Kera¨nen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-Collin (University of Helsinki). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (1417–1681). 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Kera¨nen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-Collin (University of Helsinki). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/ index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (1375–1800) project. 1995–. Project leaders Irma Taavitsainen and Pa¨ivi Pahta; see also Middle English Medical Texts (2005) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (2010) in the present section, below. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/ CoRD/corpora/CEEM/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011 and 10 June 2012). Corpus of Early Ontario English, Pre-Confederation Section (1776–1850). 2008. Compiled by Stefan Dollinger (University of British Columbia/Vancouver). http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sdollinger/ CONTE.htm (accessed 27 April 2011). A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kyto¨ (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University). http://www.helsinki.fi/ varieng/CoRD/corpora/CED/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). See Kyto¨ and Walker (2006); Culpeper and Kyto¨ (2010). Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009). s.a. Compiled by Mark Davies (Brigham Young University). http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed 24 June 2011). A Corpus of Irish English (14th–20th c.). 2003. Compiled by Raymond Hickey (University of Duisburg-Essen). http://www.uni-due.de/CP/CIE.htm (accessed 27 April 2011). A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1861–1919). 1994. Compiled by David Denison, with the assistance of Graeme Trousdale and Linda van Bergen (University of Manchester). http:// personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/david.denison/lmode_prose.html (accessed 10 June 2012). Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (1710–1920) (extended version) and related corpora. 2006. Compiled by Hendrik De Smet (University of Leuven). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/ corpora/CLMETEV/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011); see also: https://perswww.kuleuven. be/~u0044428/ (accessed 27 April 2011).
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Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. 2006. Compiled by Frances McSparran et al. (University of Michigan). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ (accessed 27 April 2011). Corpus of Nineteenth-century English. Forthc. Compiled by Merja Kyto¨ (Uppsala University) and Juhani Rudanko (University of Tampere). See Kyto¨, Rudanko, and Smitterberg (2006). Corpus of Oz Early English. 2007. Compiled by Clemens Fritz; see http://www.clemens-fritz.de/ australian_english.htm (accessed 27 April 2011). Corpus of Scottish Correspondence. 2007. Compiled by Anneli Meurman-Solin (University of Helsinki). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/csc/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form. 2009. Compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey, Joan Holland, David McDougall, and Ian McDougall, with TEI-P5 conformant-version by Xin Xiang (University of Toronto). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/DOEC/ index.html (accessed 10 June 2012); see, also, http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/pub/corpus. html (accessed 10 June 2012). DOE = Dictionary of Old English. 2009. Compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (University of Toronto). http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/index.html (accessed 10 June 2012). Early Modern English Medical Texts. 2010. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Pa¨ivi Pahta, Martti Ma¨kinen, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr, and Jukka Tyrkko¨; http:// www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEM/EMEMTindex.html (accessed 24 June 2011). See Taavitsainen and Pahta (2010). EEBO = Early English Books Online. 1999–. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home (accessed 27 April 2011). ECCO = Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 2009–. http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenthcentury-collections-online/ (accessed 27 April 2011). Electronic Beowulf. 2003. Edited by Kevin Kiernan (University of Kentucky). http://www.uky.edu/ ~kiernan/eBeowulf/guide.htm (accessed 27 April 2011). An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). 2011a. Edited by Merja Kyto¨, Peter J. Grund, and Terry Walker. See Kyto¨, Grund, and Walker (2011b). Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. 1991. Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja Kyto¨ (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpio¨ (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English) (University of Helsinki). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/ index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). See Rissanen, Kyto¨, and Palander-Collin (1993); Claridge (2008). Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (version 2.4). 2010. Compiled by Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck). http://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/projects/icamet/ (accessed 10 June 2012). Johnson, Samuel; see McDermott, Ann (below). Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640–1740). 1999. Compiled by Josef Schmied, Claudia Claridge, and Rainer Siemund. http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/LAMPETER/ LAMPHOME.HTM (accessed 27 April 2011). Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Tony McEnery (Lancaster University). http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/newsbooks/ (accessed 27 April 2011). Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (original version). 1978. Compiled by Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster University), Stig Johansson (University of Oslo) (project leaders), and Knut Hofland (University of Bergen) (head of computing). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/LOB/index. html (accessed 27 April 2011). Lexicons of Early Modern English. 2006. Compiled by Ian Lancashire et al. http://leme.library. utoronto.ca/ (accessed 10 June 2012). Lion = Literature Online. 1996–. http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/ (accessed 27 April 2011). A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn: Manuscript, Transcription, and Modernization. 2006. Edited by Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore. Ann
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Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press; Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan University Library. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/machyn/ (accessed 27 April 2011). McDermott, Ann (ed.). 1996. Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://xml.coverpages.org/cup-johnson.html (accessed 27 April 2011). MED = Middle English Dictionary. 2001. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ (accessed 27 April 2011). Middle English Compendium. 2006. Compiled by Frances McSparran et al. (University of Michigan). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mec/ (accessed 27 April 2011). The Middle English Grammar Corpus. 2009. Compiled by Merja Stenroos, Martti Ma¨kinen, Simon Horobin, and Jeremy Smith (University of Stavanger and University of Glasgow). http://www. helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/MEG-C/index.html; see, also, http://www.uis.no/research/ humanities/the-middle-english-scribal-texts-programme/ (accessed 10 June 2012). Middle English Medical Texts. Incl. MEMT Presenter by Raymond Hickey (CD-ROM). 2005. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Pa¨ivi Pahta, and Martti Ma¨kinen. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. OED Online = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2010. http://www.oed.com// (accessed 27 April 2011). Old Bailey, see The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913, below. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, parsed version. 2006. Annotated by Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team (University of Helsinki and University of York). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/ CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, tagged version. 2006. Annotated by Arja Nurmi, Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team (University of Helsinki and University of York). http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/ CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. 2004. Compiled by Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEMERELEASE-2/index.html (accessed 10 June 2012). Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (second edition). 2000. Compiled by Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index. html (accessed 10 June 2012). The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913. s.a. http://www. oldbaileyonline.org/ (accessed 27 April 2011); for the Old Bailey Corpus, see http://www.unigiessen.de/oldbaileycorpus/ (accessed 10 June 2012) and Huber (2007). Project Gutenberg. 1971–. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Pag (accessed 27 April 2011). Sociopragmatic Corpus = Sociopragmatic Corpus, a Specialised Sub-section of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2008. See Archer and Culpeper (2003); Culpeper and Archer (2008). TEI = Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml (accessed 27 April 2011); for TEI guidelines, see http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Guidelines/(accessed 27 April 2011). Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project (University of Michigan). http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/ (accessed 27 April 2011). The Time Corpus (1923–2006). s.a. Compiled by Mark Davies (Brigham Young University). http:// corpus.byu.edu/time/ (accessed 27 April 2011). York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. 2003. Compiled by Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths (University of York). http://www-users.york.ac. uk/~lang22/YcoeHome1.htm (accessed 27 April 2011). Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1661–1791), version 1.0. 2004. Compiled by Udo Fries, Hans Martin Lehmann, Beni Ruef, Peter Schneider, Patrick Studer, Caren auf dem Keller, Beat Nietlispach, Sandra Engler, Sabine Hensel, and Franziska Zeller (University of Zurich). http:// es-zen.unizh.ch/ (accessed 27 April 2011); Fries and Schneider (2000).
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6.2 Works cited (in the main text or under ‘Electronic corpora and other resources’) Archer, Dawn. 2005. Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Archer, Dawn and Jonathan Culpeper. 2003. Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics. In: Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson, and Tony McEnery, (eds.), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, 37–58. Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Bern: Peter Lang. Bailey, Richard W. 2004. The need for good texts: The case of Henry Machyn’s Day Book, 1550– 1563. In: Anne Curzan, and Kimberly Emmons (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, 217–228. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Baron, Alistair and Paul Rayson. 2008. VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. In: Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, 22 May 2008. http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/conf_proceedings.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Bermu´dez-Otero, Ricardo, David Denison, Richard M. Hogg, and Chris B. McCully (eds.). 2000. Generative Theory and Corpus Studies: A Dialogue from 10 ICEHL. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1989. Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65(3): 487–517. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1992. The linguistic evolution of five written and speechbased English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 688–704. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan. 1997. Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, 253–275. Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique. Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan, and Dwight Atkinson. 1994. ARCHER and its challenges: Compiling and exploring ‘A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers’. In: Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie, and Peter Schneider (eds.), Creating and Using English Language Corpora, 1–14. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Claridge, Claudia. 2008. Historical corpora. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, 242–259. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Culpeper, Jonathan and Dawn Archer. 2008. Guide to the Sociopragmatic Corpus, a Specialised Sub-section of A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. Lancaster: Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kyto¨. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge/New York/Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Curzan, Anne. 2008. Historical corpus linguistics and evidence of language change. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, 1091– 1109. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Curzan, Anne and Kimberly Emmons, (eds.). 2004. Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Curzan, Anne and Robin Queen (eds.). 2000. Journal of English Linguistics 28(1): 3–99. De Smet, Hendrik. 2005. A corpus of Late Modern English texts. ICAME Journal 29: 69–82. Dollinger, Stefan. 2008. New-dialect Formation in Canada. Evidence from the English Modal Auxiliaries. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dossena, Marina, Richard Dury, and Maurizio Gotti (eds.). 2008. English Historical Linguistics 2006. Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Vol. I: Syntax and Morphology; Vol. II: Lexical and Semantic Change; Vol. III: Geo-historical Variation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Facchinetti, Roberta and Matti Rissanen (eds.). 2006. Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English. Bern/Berlin/Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Fanego, Teresa, Bele´n Me´ndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane (eds.). 2002. Sounds, Words, Texts and Change. Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fries, Udo and Peter Schneider. 2000. ZEN: Preparing the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. In: Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), English Media Texts Past and Present: Language and Textual Structure, 3–24. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fritz, Clemens. 2007. From English in Australia to Australian English 1788–1900. Berlin: Peter Lang. Grund, Peter. 2006. Manuscripts as sources for linguistic research: A methodological case study based on the Mirror of Lights. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2): 105–125. Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Hickey, Raymond. 2003. Corpus Presenter. Software for Language Analysis. With a Manual and a Corpus of Irish English as Sample Data. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2004. Using the OED quotations database as a corpus – a linguistic appraisal. ICAME Journal 28: 17–30. Honkapohja, Alpo, Samuli Kaislaniemi, and Ville Marttila. 2009. Digital editions for corpus linguistics: Representing manuscript reality in electronic corpora. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Daniel Schreier, and Marianne Hundt (eds.), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008, 445–469. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Huber, Magnus. 2007. The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674–1834. Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English. In: Anneli Meurman-Solin and Arja Nurmi (eds.), Annotating Variation and Change. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/huber/. Jacobs, Andreas and Andreas H. Jucker. 1995. The historical perspective in pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, 3–33. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Johansson, Stig. 2008. Some aspects of the development of corpus linguistics in the 1970s and 1980s. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, 33–53. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Journal of English Linguistics 28(1). See Curzan and Queen (2000), above. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.). 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). 2008a. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2008b. Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Speech Acts in the History of English, 229–244. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Kohnen, Thomas. 2007. Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In: Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 139– 166. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kyto¨, Merja, Peter Grund, and Terry Walker. 2007. English witness depositions 1560–1760: An electronic text edition. ICAME Journal 31: 65–85. Kyto¨, Merja, Peter J. Grund, and Terry Walker. 2011b. Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England. Including a CD-ROM containing An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) ed. by Merja Kyto¨, Peter J. Grund, and Terry Walker, with computational support by Gregory Garretson and software by Raymond Hickey. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kyto¨, Merja, Juhani Rudanko, and Erik Smitterberg (eds.). 2006. Nineteenth-century English: Stability and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kyto¨, Merja and Terry Walker. 2003. The linguistic study of Early Modern English speech-related texts: How “bad” can “bad” data be? Journal of English Linguistics 31(3): 221–248. Kyto¨, Merja and Terry Walker. 2006. Guide to A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. LALME = A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 1986. Compiled by Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, with the assistance of Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Lancashire, Ian (ed.). 2006. Introduction. Available at the Lexicons of Early Modern English. http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/public/intro.cfm (accessed 24 June 2011). Lass, Roger. 2004. Ut custodiant litteras: Editions, corpora and witnesshood. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, 21–48. Bern: Peter Lang. Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenker, Ursula, Judith Huber, and Robert Mailhammer (eds.). 2008. English Historical Linguistics 2008. Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich, 24–30 August 2008. Vol. 1: The History of English Verbal and Nominal Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lu¨deling, Anke and Merja Kyto¨. 2008. Introduction. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, v–xii. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lu¨deling, Anke and Amir Zeldes. 2008. Three views on corpora: Corpus linguistics, literary computing, and computational linguistics. In: Jahrbuch fu¨r Computerphilologie 9. http:// computerphilologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg07/luedzeldes.html (accessed 27 April 2011). Mair, Christian. 2006. Nonfinite complement clauses in the nineteenth century: The case of remember. In: Merja Kyto¨, Juhani Rudanko, and Erik Smitterberg (eds.), Nineteenth-century English: Stability and Change, 215–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mair, Christian. 2008. Corpora and the study of recent change in language. In: Anke Lu¨deling and Merja Kyto¨ (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. 1, 1109–1125. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. McEnery, Tony and Andrew Wilson. 2001 [1996]. Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McIntosh, Angus et al. 1986. See LALME, above. Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford. 1998. Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Meyer, Charles F. 2002 English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge/New York/ Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Minkova, Donka and Robert Stockwell (eds.). 2003. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1986. Lexical variation of early modern English exclusive adverbs: Style switching or a change in progress? In: Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem F. Koopman, and Frederike van der Leek (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English
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Merja Kyto¨, Uppsala (Sweden)
97. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Frequency and language change 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction The effects of frequency on sound change and lexical diffusion Frequency and change within a system Frequency in grammaticalization Summary References
Abstract The role of frequency in language change is a complex issue. Depending on the area of the language affected, frequency can yield seemingly opposite results. For example, scholars have long noted that it encourages sound changes that act on the lexicon as a whole while protecting morphosyntactic forms from the forces of regularization; thus frequency is both innovative and conservative. This chapter reviews these seemingly contradictory effects, and in addition, suggests how frequency together with the functional principle of relevancy promotes increased bondedness for emerging morphosyntactic material but decreased bondedness for developing markers of pragmatic stance.
1 Introduction Although figuring prominently in certain linguistic theories in recent years, the relationship between frequency and language change is hardly a recent discovery. Linguists from the 19th and early 20th centuries already understood the importance of frequency in language change. Grimm (1822: 851, quoted in Krug 2003: 8), for instance, remarked on the correlation between the high frequency of auxiliary verbs and their irregularities (e.g. be, and see Nu¨bling 2000). Other 19th century scholars made even more specific observations about the role of frequency in language change, focusing on its apparent contradictory effects of innovation and conservation. Paul (1880), for instance, noted that the more frequent a word was, the more able it was to resist certain kinds of analogical change, while Schuchardt in 1885, quoted and translated by Vennemann and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1531–1546
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Wilbur, remarked that despite the conservative nature of high frequency words in analogical change, the same high frequency words showed the effects of sound change at a faster rate than lower frequency words: The greater or lesser frequency in the use of individual words that plays such a prominent role in analogical formation is also of great importance for their phonetic reduction […] Rarely-used words drag behind; very frequently used ones hurry ahead. Exceptions to the sound laws are formed in both groups. (Vennemann and Wilbur 1972: 58)
In other words, high frequency words are innovative in terms of the diffusion of a given sound change. Essentially Paul and Schuchardt noticed that frequency had different effects when it operated within different domains of language: the lexicon generally versus grammatical systems, e.g. morphosyntax (but Section 2 for frequency effects on the phonological system of historical English as well). This chapter is about frequency effects in various linguistic domains in the history of English. The first half of the chapter reviews innovative and conservative changes in the realms of lexicon, morphology, and syntax, as a means of understanding some of the fundamental issues having to do with frequency and language evolution. Additionally, this study seeks to explain another area in which frequency appears to have contrary effects, specifically concerning questions of directionality of language change. Most of the research having to do with frequency has been carried out within functionalist theoretical frameworks, and even more specifically in studies on grammaticalization. One of the major claims of those working in grammaticalization concerns the unidirectionality of certain types of changes for which frequency has been implicated as causal (see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994 and Bybee 2003, 2010; cf. Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). There has also been some resistance to the notion of unidirectionality and counter examples have been offered as a means of refuting grammaticalization as a distinct diachronic process. However, what will be argued in this chapter is that, in fact, unidirectionality is a highly valid theoretical claim and that some of the apparent counter examples have to do with the differing effects of frequency as it brings about morphosyntactic versus pragmatic change, particularly in terms of bondedness.
2 The effects of frequency on sound change and lexical diffusion As introduced above, if a given sound change is happening in the language, commonly the pattern of change spreads by affecting the most frequent lexical items first. Consulting a reverse dictionary of English, Hooper (1976) established a list of 112 words, the frequency for which she was able to ascertain in Kucˇera and Francis (1967). The list contained words that ended in the phonological sequence [VCəry] where the antepenultimate vowel was stressed and the penultimate unstressed (e.g. every, chicanery, burglary, library). Such words are relevant for the study of frequency and sound change since the penultimate unstressed vowel, a schwa, is sometimes reduced and deleted. Presenting native speakers with the list she had completed from the dictionary and asking them to place each word into one of three categories, “usually”, “sometimes”, or “rarely” deletes, Hooper found highly consistent results: higher frequency items in the list were much more likely to be placed in the “usually” category and items of lesser
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frequency were reported more often as “sometimes” or “rarely” deleting. Extrapolating the categorization task onto actual linguistic behavior, the results indicate, other things being equal, that a relatively higher frequency word like “memory” is more likely to undergo schwa-deletion than a lower frequency word like “armory”. Hooper interprets these data as providing evidence that high frequency of use promotes a given phonological change in progress, which she takes schwa-deletion to be. Bybee (2003) suggests a couple of motivations for this effect of frequency on sound change, noting on the one hand that the second occurrence of a given lexeme in discourse tends to be shorter than the first. An explanation for this is that once a given linguistic form has been deployed, subsequent references to it need not be as explicit since it is already primed in memory. Fowler and Housum (1987) suggest that the reduced form may even indicate that reference is intended for the previously deployed item, while the fuller and more careful pronunciation signals that some other meaning of the item is meant. Obviously higher frequency words have greater occasion for multiple appearances in discursive exchange. Bybee (2003, summarizing a suggestion by D’Introno and Sosa 1986) further points out that the types of reductive changes seen to occur among frequent linguistic items appear first in casual speech situations (see too Browman and Goldstein 1990, 1992) and therefore may also be thought of as an effect of familiarity. In other words, in careful speech, particularly that which aspires to be closer to a written standard, reductive changes are less likely to happen. To this last point, it is interesting to note that the items most likely to undergo reduction from Hooper’s CVəry list (given as an appendix in Hooper 1976) are words commonly found in casual speech, e.g. elementary as in elementary school. Or perhaps even more importantly, those words that are very unlikely to reduce are those which tend to appear chiefly in written English, e.g. sedimentary. The result of the diffusion of this sound change is a pattern of synchronic variation in Present-day English; not all lexical items in the relevant phonetic environment are affected at once. The variation often comes down to different pronunciations of the same lexical item in different contexts, or more specifically, in different constructions. In this way, the realization of –ary in elementary with a schwa or syllabified [r] is more likely in the less frequent expression elementary reading skills while the schwa-less pronunciation is more likely in the relatively more frequent elementary school. While the intersection of frequency and lexical diffusion gives rise to synchronic variation, in other historical cases the change is more “complete”, and therefore there appears to be no variation from a Present-day English perspective. The raising of [a] to [o] before [n] (cf. Old English ban → bone) for instance is no longer operative in Presentday English. However, in Old English (OE) when the change was occurring, we find similar diffusion patterns as those discussed above. That is, from a synchronic view of OE, the change did not affect the entire inventory of words all at once, nor did it appear to affect the inventory randomly. As Phillips (1980) shows from a corpus of OE texts containing 7,871 tokens, words with the lowest token frequency (1–10) show a spelling with only 39% of the time, while those with the highest token frequency (>400) are written with 99% of the time. If we can extrapolate the written evidence onto speech, an OE speaker would have experienced variation in the pronunciation of a word like bone between [ba:n] and [bo:n] at some time across speakers and perhaps constructional contexts (cf. the different pronunciations of elementary above).
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3 Frequency and change within a system 3.1 Change in a phonological system One important thing to note is that the examples of sound change presented in Section 2 are all phonetically motivated, and under such conditions the change tends to affect high frequency lexical material first. One explanation for this pattern is that the sound change potentially operates on the relevant sounds wherever they might occur in the lexicon. However, certain other types of changes, particularly those in morphology or syntax, involve other levels of analysis, such as paradigmatic relationships. Note that in the instance of schwa deletion or [a] → [o] raising, there is no significant change or even reordering of the phonological system: no new contrasts are established nor are there other radical changes to the system of vowels. However when change occurs that has the potential of altering the relationships of members within a system, the change is more likely to affect low frequency items first. Although such reordering changes are observable at all levels of language structure, I will begin with an example from phonology. Phillips (1984) offers data in which the mid vowel [o¨(ː)], often spelled in the Middle English dialect of Lincolnshire, as attested in the Ormulum manuscript, unrounded to [e(ː)], often spelled , in such a way that it affected lower frequency words first. Thus, among nouns, 75% with a token frequency in the Ormulum of less than 10, show the new unrounded vowel spelling , while only 46% of those with a frequency of 11–100 show the new vowel; the most frequent noun heofenn, only shows innovative 6% of the time. In other words, the more frequent nouns lag behind in this particular change (Phillips 1984: 329), which is in the opposite direction from the sound changes discussed earlier. The reason for this apparent contradiction, according to Phillips (1984), is that unrounding in the dialect of the Ormulum is not purely phonetically motivated; that is it does not have the entirety of the lexicon as its potential range of operation. Instead, the change is spurred on by certain pressures within the vowel system such that it works to reorder phonemic contrasts. [o¨(ː)], that is both the long and short mid, front, rounded vowels, were a recent development from [e(ː)ə] in the dialect of the Ormulum and [o¨(ː)] were the only rounded vowels. Apparently the system of vowels, instead of restructuring and allowing a phonemic slot for mid, front, rounded vowels brought this vowel “back” into the existing system, i.e. one without front rounded vowels. In other words, the change is about the potential restructuring of the system of vowels and in such a change lower frequency words are affected earlier. We might note here that only those dialects that kept Old English [y(ː)] allowed [o¨(ː)] to exist for any appreciable time, a fact that supports the system-congruency explanation (Phillips 1984: 332).
3.2 Changes in morphological systems While the example from historical phonology above shows nicely the effects that frequency can have when ordering relationships with the inventory of English vowels, most such system changes have been exemplified on the level of morphology. In morphology, one of the most commonly cited examples of the effects of frequency has to
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do with regular and irregular past tense marking. Regular verbs are those that show past tense through the suffixation of the morpheme {-ed} (morphophonological detail omitted) and irregular verbs show past tense in a number of ways: stem vowel changes, vowel changes and suffixation, and zero-change. Essentially, we can identify a diachronic tendency for irregular verbs to come to inflect morphologically like regular verbs over the history of English. For instance, in OE the verb scieppan ‘create’, ‘shape’ has the third singular past tense sceop (sometimes scop), showing a change in the stem vowel from the present to the past. However, in Present-day English this verb is inflected as a regular verb: shape-shaped. Baugh and Cable (2002: 162–164) report that 81 verbs from OE have become regular (and about half have been lost altogether), leaving just 68 OE strong verbs (qua irregular verbs) morphologically intact. As Bybee (1985: 119–120) shows, verbs that have become regular over the history of English tend to be the less frequent ones while those that have remained irregular show a higher frequency of occurrence. Verbs like be and go even support suppletive paradigms, likely because of their very high frequency (see again the discussion by Grimm in Section 1). The relationship between high frequency and irregularity has to do with memory in so far as those verbs that are used frequently have strong mental representations such that the irregular past forms are stored autonomously and thus accessed independently of the present stem. Such items are said to have become “entrenched” in storage (Bybee 2001: 10). On the other hand, a low frequency form does not necessarily have its past form stored autonomously and does not allow for direct access to that past form. Thus, its use in the past involves access to the present stem and rule application (see below on the productivity of regular suffixation). This does not mean that the past forms of all irregular verbs are formed by rule, however. Some frequent past forms of irregular verbs do seem to have autonomous storage. Losiewicz (1992 [see also Hare et al. 2001]) tested the duration of the past tense suffix for eight rhyming pairs of regular verbs, e.g. kneaded~needed, in which one member of the pair was a highly frequent and the other less so. Based on the fact that final consonants of monomorphemic words were shorter than their multimorphemic homophonic counterpart (e.g. the [s] of lapse is shorter than the [s] of laps), Losiewicz predicted that subjects would pronounce the suffix on the lower frequency member of the homophonic regular verb pairs for a longer time. On average, the suffix on the low frequency regular verb was seven milliseconds longer than that on the high frequency counterpart. Losiewicz interprets these data to mean that the past tense forms of high frequency regular verbs are stored autonomously (i.e. as independent words) and do not involve rule application for deriving the past tense. In contradistinction to such conserving effects, there is another sense in which high frequency will lead to greater regularity in morphology. As we saw above, there has been a tendency for irregular verbs to become regular in the history of English. To understand the productivity of the regular pattern, it is necessary to distinguish between type and token frequency. Token frequency refers to the number of times an item occurs in a given text or collection of texts. Type frequency, however, refers to the number of times that a certain pattern or type occurs. Thus, if one were to look at a random sampling of English texts, a verb like be would occur many times, revealing its token frequency. However, we can also count the number of different verbs that occur within a certain pattern, say regular verb formation, to reveal its type frequency. That is, the
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more different kinds of verbs that appear in the regular pattern, the higher that pattern’s type frequency will be. Given that the very great majority of English verbs are regular, any (normal) sampling of texts will show the regular type to be higher in type frequency (although given the very high token frequency of certain irregular verbs, there is no expectation that regular verbs will outnumber the irregular verbs in the number of absolute tokens). Thus it can be argued that mental storage of linguistic forms involves not only specific lexical items but also the morphological (and perhaps syntactic, see Section 3.3) patterns that those lexical items enter into. In this view then, very high frequency verbs resist regularization due to the fact that their frequent use has built up a strong mental representation. In a similar way the regular past tense suffix {-ed} (and its morphophonological distribution) builds up a strong mental representation as a result of its high type frequency, i.e. due to its occurrence with so many different verbs. One effect of the stronger mental representation of a frequent type is productivity. Not only does the regular verb pattern spread to lower frequency strong verbs, but it also applies to new verbs in the language, e.g. texted.
3.3 Type and token frequency effects in syntax Many models of linguistics maintain a sharp distinction between syntax and morphology, but certain aspects of the way that frequency acts upon syntactic and morphological systems reveals that there is similarity in diachronic structuring (Smith 2001). The facts concerning the productivity of the regular past tense morphological pattern suggested that the pattern itself is stored in ways that are sensitive to its type frequency. In this section, it will be seen that there is good evidence that abstract syntactic patterns also vary with respect to their representation such that syntactic patterns with a greater type frequency are more productive, resulting in their spread in use to involve greater numbers of lexical items. In Smith (2001), I provide evidence for the importance of frequency in the replacement of the be auxiliary by have in the Perfect. Older varieties of English, like German and Dutch, had two auxiliaries for the Perfect, be and have, and the semantic/syntactic criteria for using the one or the other was similar to that in Modern German; that is, be was used with intransitive verbs, particularly those that expressed motion, while have was used everywhere else. Thus even in the earliest stages of English, given the limited class of verbs fitting the intransitive/motion description, have always had a higher type frequency. This higher type frequency made the have perfect more productive and even in Old English, variation between the be and have with intransitive verbs of motion is found (Smith 2001). That this synchronic variation in Old English is the beginning of the replacement of be by have and that it is sensitive to the frequency of the lexical verbs involved in the construction is evidenced by looking at the specific verbs that occur with have or be in subsequent centuries of English. The data in Table 97.1 compares the changes in type and token frequency of the main verbs used with have and be. The data is expressed in percentages of all of the types or tokens collected from the period, and the raw number collected for each is given in parentheses afterward.
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Table 97.1: Type and Token Frequency of Main Verbs with Have and Be. (OE=Old English, EME=Early Middle English, LME=Late Middle English, EModE=Early Modern English, 19thC=19th Century)
OE EME LME EModE 19th C
Type Be
have
16% (11) 11% (12) 11% (9) 8% (10) 3% (8)
84% 89% 89% 92% 97%
(57) (92) (70) (115) (311)
Token Be
have
21% 24% 11% 4% 4%
79% 76% 89% 96% 96%
(18) (69) (12) (13) (38)
(85) (214) (96) (319) (839)
The data show the gradualness of the replacement of the be auxiliary by have and also show the dwindling number of different types of verbs that can occur with be. In fact, by contrasting the be types to the be tokens, we also have evidence of syntactic entrenchment in the 19th century data since only 3% or a total of eight different verbs occur with be, yet that set accounts for 4% or 38 repeated instances of those verbs. Among these eight types occur the verbs go and come, the most frequent and prototypical intransitive verbs of motion, which make up 28 of the 38 tokens used with the be auxiliary in that period. The other verbs used with be are not always high frequency verbs. However, they are synonymous with come and go, e.g. adjourn, as in He is adjourned to his study. It is not to be assumed, however, that a verb such as adjourned regularly occurred with be in the 19th century. The text used to collect data on 19th century English in Smith (2001) was Wuthering Heights, a literary text. Such texts are highly planned and in fact the use of adjourn with be in Wuthering Heights is meant to sound archaic and regal, being spoken by the house butler. This is just an interesting way that speakers’ knowledge of sociolinguistic variation and diachronic change can be used in constructing character identities in literary texts. This syntactic pattern of change looks very similar to the morphological patterns involving the past tense, and in fact, the have and be auxiliaries have been referred to as a “syntactic paradigm” (Ryde´n 1991). The similarities between morphological patterning and this syntactic pattern are even more striking than might appear at first. In the 18th century, the verb come was frequently still used with the auxiliary be. However, in Present-day English, the verb come is used exclusively with have, which is evidence for the very strong force of the spreading have type pattern. Nevertheless, the most frequent intransitive motion verb go, shows the phenomenon of split (Hopper 1991). That is, both the token-induced entrenchment of be gone and the type-induced innovation of have gone exist side-by-side in Present-day English, however with different meanings that provide evidence for the historical periods in which the two constructions developed. Consider the sentences in (1a–b). The meaning in sentence (1a) is resultative; that is it signals a present state as the result of a past action. The meaning of have gone in sentence (1b), however, is anterior; it reports on an activity that was completed in the past but continues to be relevant into the present. Resultative is the older meaning of the have/be auxiliary + Past Participle construction and anterior a later-developed meaning (Carey 1994; Smith 2001; see also Bybee 1985; and Bybee et al. 1994 on the universal tendency for the diachronic regularity of resultative →
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anterior meaning). Thus it would appear that be gone is not only formally older but also semantically older. In other words, the very frequent status of lexical go has resulted in its entrenchment in the older syntactic pattern with the older semantic meaning. (1)
a. Reginald is gone. b. Reginald has gone.
Thus far we have seen that the contradictory effects of innovation and conservation in language change are sometimes both due to the effects of frequency, the former operating on the lexicon at large and the latter on changes to items as they figure in paradigmatic relationships in phonology, morphology and syntax. In Section 4, we will look at another way that the effects of frequency give apparently contradictory results in the development of morphosyntactic material versus the development of pragmatic markers.
4 Frequency in grammaticalization As stated in the introduction, it has been especially in the area of grammaticalization, at least in recent years, that some of the most interesting observations concerning frequency have been uncovered, including the intricate relationship between type and token frequency. In fact, many of the examples discussed in this chapter up to this point have been taken from the grammaticalization literature and it is generally acknowledged that frequent repetition is an important mechanism in the development of grammar (Haiman 1994; Bybee 2003, 2006; Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). Thus, issues such as the ongoing spread of an inflectional morphological pattern like the – ed regular past tense suffix or the have auxiliary fit the definition of grammaticalization as “the development of grammatical from lexical material, including the ongoing shifts that occur as grammatical material continues to develop” (see e.g. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 1). However, the study of grammaticalization, and particularly its theoretical import, has been somewhat hotly debated. Some linguists in fact have denied its unique theoretical status, citing that many of the phenomena observable in grammaticalization are not specific to it (e.g. Newmeyer 1998; and the papers in Campbell 2001). This is not untrue. Certainly some of the reductive changes we saw in the first half of this chapter do not involve grammaticalization; there is nothing particularly grammatical about schwa-deletion in a word like every or elementary. Even typefrequency changes, or changes within a system, are not exclusive to on-going grammatical development within morphology or syntax. For example, in certain kinds of sound change, low frequency items may be affected first in the case that the change is bound up in a change to the entire phonological system, as opposed to operating on the lexicon generally as illustrated in the example of the unrounding of [o¨(ː)] in Section 3.1. Although frequency is not uniquely involved in grammaticalization, and to my knowledge no one makes such a claim, there does exist an important and intimate relationship between frequency and grammaticalization since there is a sharp increase in token frequency as linguistic material grammaticalizes (Bybee 2003: 605). Thus, frequency effects tend to cluster around grammaticalization phenomena.
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The regularity with which certain kinds of changes occur within grammaticalization has led some scholars to assert their central importance in the process, making such changes even definitional of grammaticalization, one of which is structural bondedness: The syntagmatic cohesion or bondedness of a sign is the intimacy with which it is connected with another sign to which it bears a syntagmatic relation. The degree of bondedness of a sign varies from juxtaposition to merger, in proportion to its degree of grammaticality. (Lehmann 1995: 147)
Changes in terms of bondedness follow largely from increased frequency (Hopper and Traugott 2003: Chapter 5 and especially Section 5.6) and indicates structural adjustment, one in which an item becomes more dependent on another. A classic example is auxiliarization; as an erstwhile main verb grammaticalizes into an auxiliary, it loses its status as head within the VP of a matrix clause and becomes structurally dependent on a newly reanalyzed head V, as schematized in (2). (2)
VP V
VP
Complement Structure
Aux
V
VP V
Such reanalysis breaks down major constituent boundaries and allows for specific types of reduction and assimilation at just those places where constituency has changed. Such types of changes are often involved in the fusion of earlier free material to the items it has become more dependent on (see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994: 6 and cf. the inflectional future of Romance). Thus, bondedness has often been expressed in clines such as that in (3). (3)
content item → grammatical word → clitic → inflectional affix (from Hopper and Traugott 2003: 7)
Fusion, involving as it does segment deletion and assimilation, is related to the kinds of reductive sound change that we saw in schwa deletion. In order to understand the complex way that frequency acts in grammaticalization, it is important to note that is not really a single word or lexical item that grammaticalizes, but a particular word (or words) within a construction. As those constructions become more frequent, we observe a lot of fusion as the parts of the construction are reanalyzed in terms of their internal constituency. Consider for instance the oft-cited example of the development of the futurate auxiliary be gonna. Be gonna develops out of the construction be going to, that is, the lexical verb go (in the progressive aspect with be) + the infinitival marker to (see e.g. Hopper and Traugott 2003). At some point the construction underwent a reanalysis whereby the construction with be + lexical go was recategorialized as an auxiliary together with the infinitival marker (see also Smith 2009 on a similar development in
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the recently grammaticalized construction be fixing to). Recategorialization of be going to involved a reanalysis in which the verb in the erstwhile infinitival complement was reanalyzed as the main lexical verb. This reanalysis is schematized in (4). (4)
[VP[aux be] [v going] [inf to + VERB]] > [VP [aux be going to]
v VERB]
Thus, an expression like I am going to stay right here and finish this letter, is not about going but about future intent. As be going to came to serve as a future auxiliary, it became more frequent and the higher frequency along with the structural reanalysis suggested in (4) were accompanied by reductive changes and fusion between the motion verb and the infinitival marker; in other words the blending of these two meanings into a future marker was accompanied by an increased formal bondedness between them. The surface structural results were that the initial [t] of the infinitival marker deleted, thus fusing the two elements of the construction. (This account starts from the participle ending in [n] rather than that in [ŋ].) Concomitantly, the vowel of going reduced to [ə] while the vowel of the infinitive also reduced to [ə]. In Present-day English, be gonna has come to show even more drastic reduction, sometimes appearing as [ə˜ nə] and even simply [ə˜ ]. The mechanism of two (or even more) items undergoing such bondedness effects or fusion has been linked to two specific aspects of frequency: string frequency and transitional probability (Krug 1998; Bush 2001; Jurafsky et al. 2001). String frequency refers to the number of times that a given set of lexical items occurs together in running text. Transitional frequency on the other hand considers the probability that given X, Y will follow. While string frequency works well as a predictor of fusion, see Krug (2003) for an argument of the better predictive power of transitional probability for certain other phenomena. The fusion of gonna is more than a mere reflex of the frequency of the lexical collocation because it is clear that its development also involves split from those same lexical sources, indicating separate storage of the entire be gonna construction from non-futurate, i.e. lexical, instances of be going to. Evidence for the split is found in the fact that homophonous non-futurate pairings of going to do not allow for the types of reduction discussed above, e.g. (5). (5)
I’m gonna leave. *I’m gonna London.
Another aspect of the structural bondedness (and sometimes fusion) that is important in cases such as be gonna has to do with the effects of the reanalysis of the entire construction and the emergent syntactic relationship it has to the rest of the clause. As be gonna is reanalyzed as an auxiliary, it moves into a dependent relationship to the newly analyzed main verb (V), which had been the former infinitival complement. In such a structure, be gonna becomes more bound to that V, an emergent status evidenced by the growing limitation of expressions that can occur within the VP between the new auxiliary and the main verb. In a sentence like that in (6) for instance, an intervening temporal expression forces a lexical reading of the verb go. In other words un-bonding of going and to results in the older non-auxiliary reading. (6)
He is going tomorrow to run the race.
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Indeed if be going to is fused and reanalyzed as a futurate auxiliary, no such temporal expression can occur within the VP at all, as shown by the ungrammaticality of (7), thus underscoring the increasing bondedness across the entire construction as a result of grammaticalization. (7)
*He is gonna tomorrow run the race.
Thus, gonna then emerges as a new grammatical item in the language. While many have referred to such univerbated constructions as new lexical items (e.g. Zeigler 2003), I prefer here to follow the distinction made in Brinton and Traugott (2005) and refer to such items as new grammatical formants, keeping them theoretically distinct from newly lexicalized items, e.g. hussy (OE hus wif ), afire (‘on fire’). The reasons for making such a distinction are several, among them being the fact that lexicalization (cf. Brinton, Chapter 100) results in addition to the major word classes (noun, verb, and adjective), while grammaticalization results in new grammatical words (auxiliary verbs, prepositions, pronouns, etc.). While certain aspects concerning the internal reduction and fusion of new lexical items and new grammatical formants are similar, material within those domains differ precisely in terms of their properties of structural dependency. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives can and are often heads in phrase structure, while grammatical formants depend on such structures. However, in some other cases that look much like grammaticalization, the outcome is not structural bondedness, but not quite lexical headedness either. For example, Bybee and Scheibman (1999) show that the greatest reduction of don’t in American English (as in I dunno) occurs with the most frequent subject “I” and the most frequent lexical verb “know”. They take this to be evidence for a more tightly fused constituent structure within the phrase “I don’t know” and obviously this is quite similar to the fusion involved with gonna discussed earlier, and not unlike the internal fusion involved in newly univerbated lexical items like afire. However, despite reductive effects similar to be gonna, there are some important differences. As we have seen, be going to in its development as a futurate grammatical marker has resulted in a more intimate semantic relationship between be gonna and V as well as increased bondedness within the VP. Traugott (2001) and Brinton and Traugott (2005) have questioned the validity of certain of Lehmann’s parameters including that of bondedness in grammaticalization, noting that in some cases developments that might be labeled “grammaticalization” result in the opposite direction, that of decreased bondedness. To return to the example of “I don’t know”, like be gonna, it shows internal fusion, suggesting some degree of bondedness among the words within the construction. However, while originally a matrix verb occurring sentence initially followed by a subordinate clause, the construction has been reanalyzed as a marker expressive of a speaker’s subjective position relative to the proposition of the erstwhile complement clause. In this sense “I don’t know” can be thought of as “inflecting” a longer stretch of discourse over an entire clause. Also unlike be gonna, which has become more bonded within the syntax of the clause, I don’t know when used as a marker of speaker subjectivity occurs more independently of the clausal syntax, thus showing much syntactic flexibility, as shown in (8 a–b). If the development of this use of “I don’t know” were to be considered an example of grammaticalization, it would run counter to the theoretical claims of increasing bondedness so often cited in the
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literature. In (8a) I don’t know appears to be a hedging device used to further mitigate the assertion of “is…true”, which has already been softened by “maybe”. I don’t know in that sentence also links the hedged “is…true” to the speaker’s subjective qualification that the situation under discussion may only obtain for him/her (and others of his/her group). In (8b), I don’t know works as a kind of repair strategy for an incompletely expressed and then repackaged assessment/judgment on the part of the speaker. (8a)
This is probably true. I don’t know. It’s just the way it works for us.
(8b)
They didn’t – because I don’t know. Those people didn’t come forward. I mean, we were out combing the country trying to find evidence… (Examples from Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://www. americancorpus.org/)
As I pointed out earlier, these seemingly contradictory patterns of bidirectionality in terms of bondedness illustrated by be going to and I don’t know, together with the criticism that frequency effects are not unique to grammaticalization, have been enough for some to completely dismiss grammaticalization as epiphenomenal and uninteresting (see again the papers in Campbell 2001). However, to do so misses an important aspect of linguistic organization since the apparent bidirectional effects are probably not random nor completely unpredictable but may well have to do with the way that frequency affects development of linguistic material in different domains of language. Whereas be gonna has developed into a morphosyntactic marker for future meaning (an auxiliary verb), I don’t know has developed into an utterance that signals speaker subjectivity, qua uncertainty and politeness (Bybee and Scheibman 1999: 587); that is, it marks pragmatic stance. Obviously the semantic relationships involved in each type of development is very different; an auxiliary verb has a close semantic relationship to V, while a pragmatic stance marker sets up a negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer and thus involves meaning relationships that situate the entire utterance. The question then becomes how frequency interacts with such semantic differences and what the effects of such differences in terms of bondedness might be. Bybee (1985) invokes the notion of “relevance” to motivate the ordering of morphemes within the VP in a 50-language sample. Her findings show that the morphemes that affect the stem more directly (e.g. aspect or tense) have a tendency to occur closer to the stem than those morphemes that affect the stem’s meaning less (e.g. person). By the same functional principle, the question of relevance in morphosyntactic versus pragmatic development may be invoked. The development of I don’t know as relevant to the meaning of an entire stretch of discourse motivates its occurrence in positions that abut the entire clause (see also Traugott 2001). Morphosyntactic elements like be going to, however, are motivated to occur more closely to the items whose meanings they affect most directly, e.g. the lexical verb for which be gonna indicates futurity. Thus, frequency has similar reductive effects on the internal constituent structure of both types of constructions and it behaves similarly to the way sound changes act on the lexicon effecting high frequency items at a faster rate. This is not unexpected since internal reanalysis and autonomy have created a new grammatical formant on the one hand and a new marker of pragmatic stance on the other; both however behave as new words in some sense. Nevertheless, the effects of frequency as each univerbating
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construction enters into a different kind of paradigmatic relationship within the language results in opposite bondedness effects. Thus, cases like be gonna versus I don’t know are not indicative of unprincipled bidirectionality in terms of bondedness, but illustrate how frequent repetition of a construction emancipates it from its lexical sources. From there it continues to develop within either the morphosyntactic or pragmatic domains of language. Differing relevancy relationships (also reinforced by frequency) then lead to greater bondedness in the case of grammatical material or the relaxing of earlier bondedness status, allowing for extraclausal reanalysis of pragmatic stance markers.
5 Summary It is becoming increasingly obvious that the role of frequency in language change is extremely complex. As we have seen in this chapter, frequency may well act as a regulator in the direction of change, although in seemingly contradictory ways; it appears to encourage sound changes operating on the lexicon (or within constructions reanalyzed as grammatical formants or markers of pragmatic stance) but it is conserving in terms of morphosyntactic regularization. We also note that frequency is both causal and resultant of grammaticalization (e.g. Pustet 2004) in so far as grammaticalizing items tend to have already a certain level of semantic generality and hence frequency (Bybee et al. 1994). Once such items enter onto grammaticalization paths, they become even more frequent, thus leading to even more changes. While the reductive changes that occur within a grammaticalizing construction follow from general principles of the effects of frequency on linguistic material (Zipf 1965 [1935]), other structural behaviors of that construction as a whole depend on the specific domain of the language in which it is developing. Development within a morphosyntactic system leads to greater bondedness among semantically relevant parts of a construction which in turn may ultimately lead to fusion and affixation. Development into a marker of pragmatic stance, however, leads to broader relevancy relationships which may lead to decreased bondedness, especially involving extra clausal positioning precisely since the pragmatic stance marker serves to situate stretches of discourse, syntactically realized as clauses. We may even find instances where the two seemingly contradictory directions of change affect the same linguistic material over the history of a language. For instance, there appear to be cases in which a morphosyntactic formant has been reanalyzed as a pragmatic marker, which, given the functional principle of relevance discussed above, might explain why such forms have undergone apparent reversal in bondedness. In Estonian the erstwhile bound morphemes -ep and -es were emancipated from their bound status and came to be independent words occurring in sentences initially (Nevis 1984). As Harris and Campbell (1995: 337) point out, this emancipation (“reanalysis” in Harris and Campbell) is partially due to their frequency but also their “salience”, by which I take the authors to mean the clear and circumscribed meanings of the morphemes in question; ep and es are used to mark “emphatic” and “question” clauses respectively. Both meanings function to situate clauses within larger discourse settings, having to do with the speaker’s emotive stance or the overall utterance type. In other words, the functions of ep and es do not have to do with morphosyntactic inflection of some item within the clause but instead they signal meanings
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that “inflect” the entire utterance. Their meanings together with their frequency allows for a reanalysis of their status as independent words and their pragmatic meaning may well encourage them to occur in the syntax at a location where they are the most relevant, i.e. clause initially. In this way, Estonian ep and es may not be counterexamples to unidirectionality, but instead may support the hypothesis that frequency, in so far as it plays several roles in the emergence of linguistic structure, brings about differing outcomes depending on the domain of language in which it operates. Obviously, the claim here is not that all reversals of bondedness have to do with the effects of frequency on mental storage nor that all pragmatic markers will occur in clause-abutting syntactic positions; however the hypothesis merits further testing.
6 References Baugh, Albert and Thomas Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Brinton, Laurel J. and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Grammaticalization in Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browman, Catherine P. and Louis M. Goldstein. 1990. Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In: John Kingston and Mary Beckman (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech, 341–376. Cambridge: University Press. Browman, Catherine P. and Louis M. Goldstein. 1992. Articulatory phonology: An Overview. Phonetica 49: 155–180. Bush, Nathan. 2001. Frequency effects and word-boundary palatalization in English. In: Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure, 255–80. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relations between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bybee, Joan L. 2003. Mechanisms of change in grammaticization: The role of frequency. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 602–623. Oxford: Blackwell. Bybee, Joan L. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4): 711–733. Bybee, Joan L. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bybee, Joan L. and Joanne Scheibman. 1999. The effects of usage on degree of constituency: The reduction of don’t in American English. Linguistics 37: 575–596. Campbell, Lyle (ed.). 2001. Grammaticalization: A critical assessment. Language Sciences 23, Issues 2 and 3. Carey, Kathleen. 1994. The Grammaticalization of the Perfect in Old English: An account based on pragmatics and metaphor. In: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization, 105–117. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. D’Introno, Francisco and Juan Manuel Sosa. 1986. Elisio´n de la /d/ en el espan˜ol de Caracas: aspectos sociolingu¨ı´sticsos e implicaciones teo´ricas. In: Rafael A. Nu´n˜ez Ceden˜o, Iraset Pa`ez Urdaneta and Jorge Guitart (eds.), Estudios sobre la fonologia del espanol del Caribe, 135–163. Caracas: Ediciones La Casa de Bello. Fowler, Carol A. and Jonathan Housum. 1987. Talkers’ signaling of “new” and “old” words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language 26: 489–504.
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Grimm, Jakob. 1822. Deutsche Grammatik .Vol. I. Go¨ttingen: Dietrich. Haiman, John. 1994. Ritualization and the development of language. In: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization, 3–28. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hare, Mary L., Michael Ford and William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2001. Frequency effects and the representation of regular verbs. In: Joan L. Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 181–200. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Harris, Alice C. and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper, Joan B. 1976. Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological change. In: William Christie (ed.), Current Progress in Historical Linguistics, 96–105. Amsterdam: North Holland. Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticization. In: Elizabeth Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I, 17–35. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jurafsky, Daniel, Alan Bell, Michelle Gregory, and William Raymond. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In: Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 229–254. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Krug, Manfred. 1998. String frequency: A cognitive motivating factor in coalescence, language processing and linguistic change. Journal of English Linguistics 26(4): 286–320. Krug, Manfred. 2003. Frequency as a determinant in grammatical variation and change. In: Gu¨nter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, 7–68. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kucˇera, Henry and Nelson Francis. 1967. Computational Analysis of Present-day American English. Providence: Brown University Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Mu¨nchen/Newcastle: Lincom Europa. Losiewicz, Beth L. 1992. The effect of frequency on linguistic morphology. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin. Nevis, Joel A. 1984. A non-endoclitic in Estonian. Lingua 64: 209–305. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language Form and Language Function. Language Speech and Communication. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Nu¨bling, Damaris. 2000. Prinzipien der Irregularisierung: Eine kontrastive Analyse von zehn Verben in zehn Germanischen Sprachen. Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer. Paul, Hermann. 1880. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Niemeyer. Phillips, Betty S. 1984. Word frequency and the actuation of sound change. Language 60: 320–342. Phillips, Betty S. 1980. Old English an~on: A new appraisal. Journal of English Linguistics 14: 20–23. Pustet, Regina. 2004. On discourse frequency, grammar, and grammaticalization. In: Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges, and David S. Rood (eds.), Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories, 143–168. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ryde´n, Mats. 1991. The be/have variation with intransitives in its crucial phases. In: Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English Syntax, 343–354. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Smith, K. Aaron. 2001. The role of frequency in the specialization of the English Anterior. In: Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 361–382. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Smith, K. Aaron. 2009. The history of be fixing to: Grammaticization, sociolinguistic distribution and emerging literary spaces. English Today 97, 25(1): 12–19. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2001. Legitimate counterexamples to unidirectionality (Paper presented at Freiburg University, 17th October 2001). Available at: http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/ papers/Freiburg.Unidirect.pdf (last accessed 9 December 2010).
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Vennemann, Theo and Terence H. Wilbur (eds.). 1972. Schuchardt, the Neogrammarians, and the Transformational Theory of Phonological Change: Four Essays by Hugo Schuchardt. Frankfurt: Athena¨um. Zeigler, Mary Brown. 2003. Fixin(g) to as a grammaticalized form in southern American English. Southern Journal of Linguistics 26(1): 28–39. Zipf, George. 1965 [1935]. The Psycho-Biology of Language. Cambridge: University Press.
K. Aaron Smith, Normal/Illinois (USA)
98. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Lexical diffusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Old English Middle English Early Modern English Summary References
Abstract As a theory of the implementation of historical change by its gradual spread through the lexicon, lexical diffusion has given us a new way of looking at orderly variation in historical corpora. This chapter illustrates how the theory of lexical diffusion has contributed to studies of English historical phonology and how these studies have helped shape the theory in kind. Although discussion is organized by historical period, studies on Present-day English that shed light on a sound change or theoretical issue are incorporated as appropriate.
1 Introduction Lexical diffusion is a theory of the implementation of change by its gradual spread through the lexicon. (Lexical diffusion is also used as a term to describe the areal diffusion through borrowing of lexemes of other languages, as in Bender (2000), but that is not the sense in which it will be used here). As long ago as 1885, Schuchardt noted that more frequent words were in the forefront of change, and in 1969 Wang introduced the term lexical diffusion to describe the gradual progression of a sound change through the lexicon, using as one example the loss of /h/ before the sonorants /n, r, l, w/, begun in Old English and still proceeding in Modern English, with competing and residual forms evident at each stage of the change (1969: 23). Specific examples are provided by Toon (1976a: 616–617) for the Old English Rushworth I, where, for instance, hlaford ‘lord’ exists alongside laford, hwile ‘while’ alongside wile, hraþe ‘quickly’ alongside raþe, etc., just as in modern dialects where the rule has generalized to /hj/ speakers may vary between [hjumərəs] and [jumərəs] for humorous, yet have only [hjumərəs] for Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1546–1558
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humerus (Kenyon and Knott 1953). Toon’s (1976a) study of variant spellings in Old English was to my knowledge the first to apply the theory of lexical diffusion systematically to the history of English, but since then examples of the lexical diffusion of numerous changes in English have been documented, including changes currently in progress. Indeed, recent studies in psycholinguistics have given new insight into lexical storage and the connections between lexical items that allow even fine-grained phonetic changes to spread from word to word, just as morphological and semantic changes do (e.g. Dell and O’Seaghdha 1991; Pierrehumbert 2003; Frisch 2004; Lachs et al. 2003). As Lass (1997: 141, footnote 1) notes about the attempt by Labov (1981) and Kiparsky (1988) to distinguish neogrammarian from lexically diffused changes, “the case is difficult to maintain, and it is more likely that all phonological change starts with lexical diffusion and most ends up Neogrammarian, given enough time”. Less often noted is that there are two kinds of lexically diffused changes. That not all sound changes progress as Schuchardt suggested, i.e., affecting the most frequent words first, was first demonstrated in Phillips (1984), where several changes were documented as affecting the least frequent words first, the difference apparently stemming from how words are processed in the mental lexicon. Changes that affect the most frequent words first typically involve minor changes in the fine-grained phonetic encoding of a word form, without reference to more abstract generalizations regarding, for example, the prosodic and phonotactic structures of the language, segmental constraints, or morphological attributes of the lexeme. Sound changes requiring access to such generalizations typically affect the least frequent words first (Phillips 2006: 94). Thus, it is clear that lexical diffusion is not a haphazard process nor are its residues due to dialect borrowing; rather, lexical diffusion is a central method of implementing language change. That is, changes are simultaneously implemented through social groups, through morphological categories, through phonological environments, and through items in the lexicon (Ogura 1995: 32), and this variation may be found even in the speech of individuals (as noted by Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2003: 717). Since Wang’s (1969) seminal article, not only has the importance of lexical diffusion been documented for sound change, but for syntactic and semantic change as well. For example, in the replacement of third person singular – (e)th by – (e)s, the verbs do, have, and say are most resistant. According to Nevalainen (2006: 186), “in the latter half of the seventeenth century, most other verbs have more than 90 per cent of – (e)s according to the [Helsinki] corpus, do still takes it in only half of the cases, and have in merely one third”. Similarly, Ellega˚rd’s (1953: 201) suggestion that “it is in fact not unlikely that each verb has its own history” led Tottie (1991) to document the retention of no-negation (e.g., I know nothing) with high-frequency words and constructions as the innovative not-negation (e.g., I do not know anything) gained prominence in lower-frequency words and constructions. Similarly, Ellega˚rd inspired Ogura (1993) to demonstrate that high-frequency verbs such as say, mean, do, and think resisted the development of other forms in periphrastic do. Krug (2001) notes the highly frequent verbs going to, have to, want to, and got to form “emerging modals” in English. Since this volume contains a separate chapter by K. Aaron Smith (Chapter 97) on Frequency, and string frequency rather than lexical frequency appears to be the significant factor in syntactic change (Krug 2003), no more will be said about the lexical diffusion of syntactic change in this chapter. Work on the lexical diffusion of semantic change is promising but
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limited. Ogura and Wang (1995: 31), for instance, find that metaphoric transfer is most likely to apply to more frequent words first. This chapter will, therefore, limit itself to the lexical diffusion of phonological changes with the aim of illustrating the impact of lexical diffusion theory on the study of English historical linguistics and vice versa. Section headings will reflect the traditional time period when the changes in question began, or for which the earliest evidence on lexical diffusion has been adduced. Subtitles of the sections reflect the theoretical issue(s) impacted by the studies in question. In deference to the uniformitarian principle, whereby languages in the past are assumed to have behaved as do languages in the present, studies on Modern English that shed light on the sound change or theoretical issue are incorporated into the discussion as appropriate.
2 Old English Since a system of standardized spellings developed in late West Saxon some time after 963 CE, when Æthelwold became bishop of Winchester (Hogg 1992b: 78), evidence of lexical diffusion has mainly been sought in manuscripts that pre-date the standardization or that were written in other dialects. That the spellings in such manuscripts closely mimic the scribes’ actual speech has been argued by Toon (1976a) and Lass (1992) and is supported by their orderly variation. As Toon put it: The strongest argument for taking manuscript variation seriously is certainly the facts of the internal structure of that heterogeneity. On those who will reject the orthographic variation as random lies the onus of otherwise explaining those regularities and their close resemblance to kinds of phonetic conditioning being discovered in contemporary studies of sound [change] in progress. (Toon 1992: 445)
In addition to contributing to our understanding of scribal practice, work on the lexical diffusion of Old English sound changes has furthered our understanding of the gradual versus abrupt nature of different changes, as well as of the spread of changes from one dialect to another.
2.1 Pre-sonorant h-loss: multiple conditioning and scribal practice Toon’s (1976a: 619) investigation of h-loss before the sonorants /l, r, n/ in eight Anglian Old English glosses reveals that, although phonetic environment clearly influences the loss, it is not phonetically predictable: “Taking the Li[ndisfarne] data for /hr/ as an example, it must be noted that in thirteen lexical items the change never occurs. In the remaining cases its occurrence ranges from a frequency of 3% to 100%. […] Only lexical items so marked undergo the alternation. The language is changing one word at a time”. Phillips (2006: 82–83) rearranges Toon’s data by word frequency and finds that for each cluster, the less frequent words lost the initial /h/ first – reflecting the importance of phonotactic constraints for this change. Toon, on the other hand, notes that in the Rushworth 1 Glosses function words resist the loss of /h/ before /w/ (Toon 1976a: 617). Thus, this early study supports current understanding that phonetic conditioning, morphological conditioning, and lexical conditioning influenced by word frequency are not mutually exclusive. All can co-exist in a single sound change.
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Toon (1976a) presciently addresses other issues that are still debated concerning early manuscript data: to what extent is a scriptorium standard affecting the spellings; what level of phonological knowledge are the scribes representing with their orthographic symbols; are the variant spellings of necessity reflecting abrupt changes; and what is the role of dialect contact. As Toon notes, early spellings are not subject to the standardization that occurred in the late West Saxon period, so early manuscripts contain more variable spellings. Such spellings, however, are not random, and thus may be taken as indicative of sound change in progress: “If […] an orthographic variation can be tied to a known historical change (attested by comparative data, etc.), it is reasonable to assume that the orthographic variation reflects, within the stated limits, that sound change” (Toon 1976a: 615). Toon (1976a: 615) noted that the theoretical phonology of the 1970s, which posited a systematic phonemic phonological level and an autonomous phonemic level, was unsatisfactory in answering the question of what scribes were indeed transcribing. Scribes, he said, “learned correspondences between letters of foreign alphabets and the sound system of Old English” (Toon 1976a: 614), but what the scribes were representing must have been “a sub-phonemic level. The level of representation seems in this case to coincide with a phonetic (or near phonetic) level” (Toon 1976a: 620). Modern exemplar theory, as for example outlined in Pierrehumbert (2006), now provides a theoretical framework wherein such orthographic representations make sense (as argued in Phillips 2007). Toon (1976a: 620) also noted that “the phonetic loss of [h] is conceivably gradual”, a position that went beyond Wang’s (1969) position that lexically diffused changes were phonetically abrupt. Now we know that lexically diffused changes can indeed be phonetically gradual (Phillips 2006: 57–59), and Minkova (2003: 342) has noted that evidence for gradient pronunciations in the Lindisfarne Glosses may be found by the “frequent insertion of the sign for spiritus asper (|-) instead of «h» before /-r-, -l-, -n-/”. As for dialect contact, Toon notes that Rushworth 2 is the only Northern manuscript in his database that shows variation in /hw/, possibly connected to the contact between its scribe and the Mercian Farmon, from which he concludes: “Linguistic variation in Old English texts has traditionally been dismissed as dialect mixture. It is time that we begin to take a fresh look at dialect mixture as one of the means by which linguistic change can be actuated” (Toon 1976a: 620). The affect of the spread of a change from one dialect to another becomes even clearer in the case of raising of [a] before nasals.
2.2 Raising of [a] before nasals: spread across dialect boundaries The lexical diffusion of Old English raising of /a/ before nasals was first documented by Toon (1976b), who looked at all of the early manuscripts (700–1000 CE) and found lexical differences in both the initial environment of nasal + a homorganic consonant and in the generalized environment, which did not require the second consonant. That the variation is not random is indicated by the consistency with which, within a manuscript, individual words are spelled (Toon 1976b: 79). As for the question of dialect influence, Toon points out that the Corpus and Erfurt glosses vary in the specific words which appear with a versus o: “This observation is to be emphasized since it is evidence that the variation in these texts represents synchronic alternations in the language of the scribes rather than dialect mixture stemming from the textual tradition” (Toon 1976b: 75). His argument is difficult to refute: “Why should
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scribal practice develop regularly, sensitive to phonetic environment, unless it reflect [sic] some phonological reality?” (Toon 1976b: 79). Phillips (1980) documented that the adoption of this change into West Saxon, as exemplified by spellings in Alfred’s translation of the Pastoral Care (late 9th century), also affected the most frequent words first, just as Sweet (1871–72 [1958]: xxii) had surmised. Thus, the pattern of lexical diffusion remains the same, most frequent words first, despite the adoption of the sound change into a new dialect. This pattern contrasts with the pattern of diffusion after Wessex became the dominant political entity, when the late West Saxon forms – which contained a reinstated in most words – were borrowed back into Mercian by the scribe Farmon of Rushworth 1 (late 10th century). Farmon adopts the spellings in his least frequent words, typical of the pattern for reversed sound changes and for unnatural changes based on the perceived social superiority of those who use such forms (Phillips 2006: 141–142). As Toon concludes: We find then the implementation of a sound change beginning in a small subsegment of the lexicon and spreading word by word, sensitive to an ever more general phonetic environment. Further we find an intersection of two separate aspects of the actuation of a phonetic change: a perhaps natural tendency of a nasalized low vowel to rise (a possible change) and social pressure (a reason to change). Variable data have often been dismissed as dialect mixture when the hows and whys of dialect mixture embody the essence of the implementation and actuation problems. We will better understand linguistic change when we know the reasons and processes of linguistic borrowing – one possible kind of linguistic change. (Toon 1976b: 80)
A more recent borrowed sound change behaves very similarly, namely the “broad a” pronunciation in words such as bath, pass, dance, laugh, etc., which was borrowed into eastern New England speech during the 18th or 19th century. The near-identity of the list of words with [a] versus those with original [æ] makes it clear that the New Englanders were copying the pronunciation of individual words rather than borrowing the sound change as such and applying it to their own lexicon (Phillips 1989 [1993]). This insight supports Trudgill’s (1986: 58) observation that people “modify their pronunciation of particular words” when accommodating to others’ dialects and helps us to understand how changes spread into new communities. Indeed, Trudgill’s (1986: 61) observation of fudged dialects – e.g., ones with traditional [ʊ] which exhibit an intermediate vowel quality [ɤ] when in contact with varieties containing [ʌ] – “force a redefinition of lexical diffusion which is usually characterized as being phonetically sudden but lexically gradual. Fudging is both phonetically and lexically gradual”. Inherent to this view is the recognition that the transmission of a change must of necessity involve imitation of the speech of others. Thus borrowing cannot be regarded as a separate category of change, despite its long tradition as such (e.g. Bloomfield 1933 to Kiparsky 1995). This view of borrowing as a fundamental element of the transmission of a change is also consistent with Labov’s (2007) study of the transmission of the short-a system of New York, with its lexical and morphological exceptions. That is, he concludes that [w]hen language forms are transmitted by contact of single adults or individual families, less regular transmission can be expected. The cases studied here suggest the basic reason why structural borrowing is rare: the adults who are the borrowing agents do not faithfully reproduce the structural patterns of the system they are borrowing from. (Labov 2007: 383)
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If they are borrowing pronunciations of individual words, it is not surprising that eventually the borrowers will form their own generalizations based on those words and create new rules that take the change in a different direction, as have those areas which Labov reports on.
3 Middle English Investigations of lexically diffused changes in Middle English have found a rich source of data in the Ormulum (North-Eastern Midlands, c.1180), with the unique spelling system devised by its author, Orm. The discussion below summarizes the findings from that manuscript, how they inform the theory of lexical diffusion, and how they illuminate spellings in the Continuations to the Peterborough Chronicle (East Midlands, 1122–1154).
3.1 Development of diphthongs: a phonetically gradual change spreading to new environments A clear example of a phonetically gradual sound change in Middle English is the development of diphthongs from vowel-plus-glide sequences. Luick’s (1914–21 [1964]: 88] interpretation of -ʒʒ and – ww after a vowel in the Ormulum as indicators of diphthongs was confirmed by Phillips (1983b) discovery of a regular pattern by word frequency for those sequences which exhibit variation in specific phonological and morphological environments (the following examples have been limited to evidence from the nouns). That is, relatively frequent nouns such as weʒʒe ‘way’ and eʒʒe ‘fear’ show the diphthong, whereas infrequent forrleʒerrnesse ‘adultery’ does not; similarly more frequent þe(o)wwess ‘servants’ and tre(o)wwess ‘trees’ appear with diphthongs, yet the less frequent larewess ‘teachers’ does not. Word-final diphthongization shows the same pattern: more frequent þe(o)ww ‘servant’ (55 tokens) has diphthongized, but not less frequent hew ‘form’. Unsurprisingly, in preconsonantal position, where one would expect diphthongization to occur earlier than in prevocalic or word-final position, only diphthongal spellings appear: maʒʒdenn ‘maiden’, waʒʒn ‘wagon’, fleʒʒl ‘whip’, reʒʒn ‘rain’, clawwstremann ‘monk’, trowwþe ‘truth’, re(o)wwsunng ‘repentence’. A comparison of the progression of diphthongization in the Continuations to the Peterborough Chronicle (1122–1154) with its progression in the Ormulum (c.1180) strengthens the argument for the above interpretation of Orm’s spellings as well as for the reliability of spellings in the Continuations, which were once described as “disordered” (Bennett and Smithers 1968: 374) and whose variability has been attributed to influence from the Schriftsprache (Clark 1970: xlv). If one follows Lass’s (1992: 49) suggestion that spellings such as ei, ai, eu, au, and so forth represent true diphthongs which have developed from forms with the glide, represented by spellings such as eg, ag, ew, aw, and so forth, the following would be the expected path of development since the Ormulum is a later manuscript than the Peterborough Chronicle Continuations: (a) in cases that the Continuations indicate a completed sound change, so should the Ormulum; (b) in cases where the Continuations show variation/lexical diffusion, the Ormulum should either show variation or have completed the change; (c) in cases where the change has not begun in the Continuations, if it has progressed at all, it should be either lexically diffused or complete in the Ormulum. What one should not get is
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evidence of the Continuations being further along diachronically than the Ormulum. In fact, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the spellings in both documents are representing a change in progress. The situation posited in (a) above holds for all diphthongs preconsonantally and word-finally; that posited in (b) holds for [ei] and [ai]/[æi] intervocalically; and that posited in (c) holds for [au], [ou], and [eu] intervocalically (Phillips 1997).
3.2 Unrounding of /ö(ː)/: a change in the segmental constraints of the language Evidence for the progression of the Old English diphthongs /e(ː)o/ to Middle English /e(ː)/, presumably through an intermediate [o¨(ː)] is also found in the Ormulum and the Peterborough Chronicle Continuations. This change was salient enough to Orm for him to attempt to revise his manuscript by going back and scraping off the portion of many of the words. Luckily, it remains clear what the original spellings were, so one can now see which words he wrote originally with and which with . The lexical diffusion of this change contrasts sharply with that of the development of diphthongs discussed above in that the least frequent words show the change to [e(ː)] first. Since the roundedness of the vowel is uninfluenced by the roundedness of contiguous segments, Phillips (1984: 2006) ascribes its motivation and hence its effect on the least frequent words first to its reliance on the segmental constraints of the language, English having earlier lost its only other front rounded vowel [y(ː)]. For the word classes for which enough data exists to judge word frequency effects, then, the following can be seen: for the long vowel, the infrequent verbs (frequency = 2–10) average 69% spellings in versus 52% and 41% for the most frequent verbs, seon ‘seon’ (frequency = 69) and beon ‘be’ (frequency = 355) respectively; again for the long vowel, the infrequent nouns (frequency = 1–8) average 49% spellings in compared with the more frequent nouns (frequency = 21–158), which average 5% spellings in ; among nouns with the short vowel, the least frequent (frequency 1–2) average 75% spellings in versus the more frequent nouns (frequency 26–154) containing on average 36% of the time. The data from the earlier Peterborough Chronicle Continuations reveal the same pattern. Low-frequency verbs (frequency = 1–5) with the long vowel have 92% of the time, on average, compared with be(o)n (freq. = 10) 80% and he(o)lden (freq. = 23) 48%. Low-frequency nouns (freq. = 1–4) with the short vowel have 27% of the time, on average, compared with the high-frequency word eorle(s) (freq. = 53) at 0%. The fact that the spellings in vs. are not random and that the later Ormulum continues to record variation suggests that the sound change was in progress during the years in question (1122–1180). This conclusion is at odds with Clark’s (1970: xlvi) interpretation of inverse spellings that occur in the Peterborough Chronicle Continuations. She interprets the spellings geseogen ‘seen’ and leong ‘long’ as indications that the sound change has come to completion. Yet such interpretations of hypercorrections are fallacious. Hypercorrect pronunciations spellings may occur whenever a change is particularly salient. For instance, the Vespasian Psalter (c.830 CE) contains for Proto Germanic [æ] in all but a few function words and weakly stressed verbs, yet even earlier manuscripts
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contain hypercorrect spellings: three in the Epinal glossary (c.700 CE), three in the Erfurt glossary (c.750 CE), and two in the Corpus glossary (c.800 CE) (Toon 1983: 145).
3.3 Vowel lengthening before -nd, -ld, -rd, etc.: strengthening and word class effects The sound change lengthening vowels before sonorants plus homorganic consonants (-ld, -nd, -ng, -mb, -rd, -rþ, -rn, and/or –rl, depending on the dialect) began in late Old English but is most clearly represented in the Ormulum (c.1180 CE). There one can easily observe what Jones (1989: 31) calls the “patchy” nature of this lengthening. For instance, for the following verbs (each infinitive representing also its inflected forms), Orm writes brinngenn (51 tokens) but ringenn (5 tokens), senndenn (68 tokens) but enden (25 tokens); other words he writes inconsistently, such as wenndenn (34 tokens)/wendenn (13 tokens) (Phillips 1983a). Studies on this sound change have shed light on two issues: the different behaviors of function words and content words, and the phonetic versus the syllable-structure influence on the direction of change. This change is a good example of function words resisting a sound change. Witness consistent spellings for the majority of prepositions and conjunctions, such as annd, biʒonndenn, behinndenn, unnderr, affterrwarrd, frawarrd, towarrd, wollde, shollde/ sollde, etc. This finding would not be surprising if it were not for the expectation that frequent words typically occur on the forefront of change, as originally suggested by Schuchardt (1885: 58). Thus an exception must be made to Schuchardt’s proposal. That is, function words change last in a strengthening sound change, probably because of their low sentence stress (Phillips 1983). The behavior of content words is even more problematic for this sound change. Here too the frequent words, on average, lag behind, yet one cannot appeal to low sentence stress, for even within word classes within each phonetic environment the least frequent words have on average undergone the lengthening first (Phillips 2006: 88–89). If the change is one of gradual lengthening through a low-level process, one would expect the most frequent words to change first, and such a phonetic basis seems plausible. Jones, for instance, citing an experiment by Raphael (1972) on pairs such as bend/ bent, pint/pined, etc., explains: It is clear than when the cluster ends in a voiced segment not only is the stressed vowel’s length markedly increased, but the length of the nasal sonorant grows by a factor of four times: we end up with a long vowel + long nasal output. Perhaps we might therefore look upon late Old English homorganic lengthening not so much as a vowel-lengthening rule, but as a vowel/nasal-lengthening process, a suggestion first proposed by Luick. (1914–21 [1964]: sect. 268, Anm. 4, pp. 2245–6). (Jones 1989: 32)
Yet syllable-structure constraints have also been invoked to explain the behavior of this sound change (Hogg 1992a: 211–214; Murray 2000). Phillips (1981 and 2006: 93) suggests that this change may have had an initial phonetic motivation (as argued by Minkova and Stockwell (1992) for vowel lengthening before -ld in particular), leading however to a reanalysis of the speakers’ syllable template so that later stages of the change, as displayed in the Ormulum, affected the least frequent words first. It remains a fascinating, complex change that challenges our understanding of the actuation of
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change and the role of the mental lexicon in the generalizations speakers make over the forms therein as they implement later stages of the change.
4 Early Modern English One of the most discussed sound changes in the Early Modern English period is the socalled Great Vowel Shift (cf. Krug, Volume 1, Chapter 48), whereby the high long/tense vowels were diphthongized and the other long/tense vowels raised. To see if there were lexical influences on this shift, Ogura (1987) investigated the ultimate developments of the Great Vowel Shift in modern English dialects. The evidence presented there and in Ogura et al. (1991) and Ogura (1995) makes it clear that this change was lexically diffused within fine phonetic categories. In answer to objections raised by Labov (1994), for instance, she demonstrates that for might and fight the number of sites where they are pronounced differently is 125, for might-wright 91, for might-right 126, for might-light 120, might-night 124, for right-light 104, and so forth (Ogura 1995: 44). She also notes that there is not always a neighboring site from which one of the varying pronunciations might have been borrowed (1995: 49). Ogura (1987) had determined that the most frequent words had changed first within narrow phonetic categories in the stage diphthongizing [uː], and Phillips (2006: 72–73) shows that this was also true of the diphthongization of [iː]. Krug (2003) confirms that, as one might expect from its frequency patterning, these early diphthongizations probably had a phonetic basis, as the disappearance of initial glottal stops in English led to the development of glides, especially in frequent strings “I-am”and “Þu-art”. The further development of these diphthongs to [au] and [ai] has been attributed by Stockwell (2002: 269) to “perceptual optimization” dissimilating the initial portion of the diphthong from the final portion. That this further development has not disturbed the fundamental effect of most-frequent-words first Stockwell (2002: 269) attributes to this dissimilation being “a phonetically conditioned low-level drift, not in principle different from the development of intervocalic flapping of /t/ or /d/ in latter-ladder, or of nasalization in can’t and don’t”. Similarly, Hickey’s (1999) investigation of the Dublin Vowel Shift – [ɒː] > [ɔː] (> [oː]), [aɪ] > [ɑɪ], and [ɒɪ] > [ɔɪ] (>[oɪ]) – shows Dubliners applying it to all words, yet outside adopters first shift the vowel in Irish and Ireland, then expand the use of the shifted vowel to common words, such as five and nine, and frequently occurring nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The development of the mid and low vowels has not been as closely tied to word frequency, but lexical diffusion is also clearly part of the answer to why meet and meat rhyme in modern English while greet and great do not. Ogura (1987: 21) points out that the development of Middle English [aː] to [eː] must also have been lexically gradual, with conservative and innovative pronunciations vying during the 17th and early 18th centuries, leading to the following rhymes: “make: snake: speak (Waller), dream: shame (Dryden), gate: eat (Pope), dreame: name, speak: mistake (Swift)”. The lexical diffusion of the different portions of the Great Vowel Shift – which extended over centuries and which some scholars, such as Stockwell and Minkova (1988) and Lass (1997), do not see as a unified process – would not be surprising if it were not for Labov’s (1994, 2006) insistence on the absolute neogrammarian regularity of the Northern Cities Shift of vowels which began with the raising of the low vowel [æ] so that in some dialects Ann is homophonous with Ian. This shift is currently underway
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in United States cities surrounding the Great Lakes, such as Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, etc., and Labov (1994: 534–539) has identified as a central puzzle of neogrammarian/lexical diffusion debate the different behaviors of it and the clearly lexically diffused tensing of [æ] to [Æ] in Philadelphia, which creates minimal pairs such as can (auxiliary verb) with [æ] vs. can (n.) with [Æ] or near-minimals such as sad [æ] vs. glad [Æ]. Labov’s (2007) proposal that different methods of transmission are responsible for those differences clearly has merit. It is also possible, however, that neogrammarian changes are simply changes that have diffused very rapidly across the affected lexicon. In fact, Labov et al. (1972: 93), an early study of the Northern Cities Shift, found, “There is some indication that the word mad is lower than its phonetic class would justify for several speakers. […] Since in other dialects we find that initial m- does have a raising effect, the low position of mad as compared to bad, ads, etc., seems to be lexically determined”. This finding seems to support the view that even the Northern Cities Shift involves words changing one by one, however quickly in succession, a view that is not at odds with Labov’s (1972: 93) summary that “[D]espite some initial oscillations the (æh) word class seems to move upward as a whole, with fine phonetic conditioning in the process”. The phonetic conditioning of the shift has never been in question. Lexical diffusion, indeed, typically occurs inside phonetic environments. The real question concerning the difference between the Northern Cities Shift and the Philadelphia æ-tensing is why one spreads so quickly to affect all words and the other one not. Labov’s (2007) hypothesis – linking the consistency of the Northern Cities shift and the retention of conditions originally pertaining to the Philadelphia shift to transmission through children versus the mutation of the Philadelphia pattern in other speech communities through its transmission by adults – may provide a key to at least part of that puzzle.
5 Summary This chapter has attempted to demonstrate the contributions that lexical diffusion studies have made to English historical linguistics as well as those that studies on the history of English have made to the fields of phonology and historical linguistics. The theory of lexical diffusion has given us a new tool for exploring the orderly variation in historical corpora and databases. Variable spellings in early manuscripts no longer seem haphazard, and explanations based on dialect mixture must include independent evidence of external influence, since even homogeneous dialects may contain variant forms. The relationship between manuscripts and their reflection of the progression of change becomes clearer as we are able to trace the development of a sound change through their lexicons. With a new confidence in the reliability of early spellings comes also a better understanding of hypercorrections, which have been found in even very early stages of a change. Of current models of phonology and the lexicon, connectionist models relying on exemplars seem to best fit the data we find in historical databases, since even within the writings of individual scribes and naive spellers variation is the norm. Typical changes turn out to be not only phonetically conditioned but also dependent upon the frequency of lexical items and their grammatical category. Simultaneously, pronunciations often become associated with particular registers or social indices. Sorting out these competing and overlapping connections remains a challenge for linguists exploring the history of English.
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6 References Bender, Margaret. 2000. Review of Cecil H. Brown, Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages, 1999. New York: Oxford University Press. American Anthropologist 102(3): 643–644. Bennett, Jack A. W. and Geoffrey V. Smithers (eds.). 1968. Early Middle English Verse and Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Carroll, John B., Peter Davies, and Barry Richman. 1971. The American Heritage Word Frequency Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Clark, Cecily (ed.). 1970. The Peterborough Chronicle: 1070–1154. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dell, Gary S. and Padraig G. O’Seaghdha. 1991. Mediated and convergent lexical priming in language production: a comment on Levelt et al. (1991). Psychological Review 98: 604–614. Ellega˚rd, Alvar. 1953. The Auxiliary Do: The Establishment and Regulation of its Use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Frisch, Stefan. 2004. Language processing and segmental OCP effects. In: Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, and Donka Steriade (eds.), Phonetically-Based Phonology, 346–371. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickey, Raymond. 1999. Dublin English: current changes and their motivation. In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, 265–281. London: Arnold. Hogg, Richard. 1992a. A Grammar of Old English. Vol. 1: Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. Hogg, Richard. 1992b. Phonology and morphology. In: Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1: The Beginnings to 1066, 67–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Charles. 1989. A History of English Phonology. London: Longman. Kenyon, John S. and Thomas A. Knott. 1953. A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English. Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam. Kiparsky, Paul. 1988. Phonological change. In: Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Vol. I: Linguistic theory: Foundations, 363–415. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiparsky, Paul. 1995. The phonological basis of sound change. In: John Goldsmith (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 640–670. Oxford: Blackwell. Krug, Manfred. 2001. Frequency, iconicity, categorization: Evidence from emerging modals. In: Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, 309–336. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Krug, Manfred. 2003. Frequency as a determinant in grammatical variation and change. In: Gu¨nter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, 7–67. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William. 1972. The internal evolution of linguistic rules. In: Robert Stockwell and R. K. S. Macaulay (eds.), Linguistic Change and Generative Theory, 101–171. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Labov, William. 1981. Resolving the neogrammarian controversy. Language 57: 267–308. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. I: Internal Factors. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labov, William. 2006. A sociolinguistic perspective on sociophonetic research. Journal of Phonetics 34: 500–515. Labov, William. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83: 344–387. Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger, and Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey. Lachs, Lorin, Kipp McMichael, and David B. Pisoni. 2003. Speech perception and implicit memory: Evidence for detailed episodic encoding. In: Jeffrey S. Bowers and Chad J. Marsolek (eds.), Rethinking Implicit Memory, 215–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lass, Roger. 1992. Phonology and morphology. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language: Vol. II, 1066–1476, 23–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luick, Karl. 1914–21 [1964]. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Vol. 1, part 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minkova, Donka and Robert Stockwell. 1992. Homorganic clusters as moric busters in the history of English: The case of -ld, -nd, -mb. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, and Terttu Nevalainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 191–206. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Murray, Robert. 2000. Syllable-cut prosody in Early Middle English. Language 76: 617–654. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Mapping Change in Tudor English. In: Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 178–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ogura, Mieko. 1987. English Historical Phonology: A Lexical Perspective. Tokyo: Kenkyusha. Ogura, Mieko. 1993. The development of periphrastic do in English: A case of lexical diffusion in syntax. Diachronica 10: 51–85. Ogura, Mieko. 1995. The development of Middle English ¯ı and u¯: A reply to Labov (1992, 1994). Diachronica 12: 31–53. Ogura, Mieko and William S-Y. Wang. 1995. Lexical diffusion in semantic change; with special reference to universal changes. Folia Linguistica Historica 16: 29–73. Ogura, Mieko, William S-Y. Wang, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 1991. The development of ME ¯ı in England: a study in dynamic dialectology. In: Penelope Eckert (ed.), New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change, 63–103. New York: Academic Press. Phillips, Betty S. 1980. Old English an ~ on: A new appraisal. Journal of English Linguistics 14: 20–23. Phillips, Betty S. 1981. The phonetic basis of a late Old English sound change. In: Wolfgang U. Dressler, Oskar E. Pfeiffer, and John R. Rennison (eds.) Phonologica 1980, 337–341. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beitra¨ge zur Sprachwissenschaft. Phillips, Betty S. 1983a. Lexical diffusion and function words. Linguistics 21: 487–499. Phillips, Betty S. 1983b. ME Diphthongization, Phonetic Analogy, and Lexical Diffusion. WORD 34: 11–24. Phillips, Betty S. 1984. Word frequency and the actuation of sound change. Language 60: 320–342. Phillips, Betty S. 1989 [1993]. The diffusion of a borrowed sound change. Journal of English Linguistics 22: 197–204. Phillips, Betty S. 1997. The Peterborough Chronicle diphthongs. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 429–438. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Phillips, Betty S. 2006. Word Frequency and Lexical Diffusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, Betty S. 2007. Æ-raising in the Peterborough Chronicle. In: Alexander Bergs and Janne Skaffari (eds.), The Language of the Peterborough Chronicle, 29–44. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Pierrehumbert, Janet. 2003. Probabilistic phonology. In: Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stephanie Jannedy (eds.), Probabilistic Linguistics, 177–228. Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press. Pierrehumbert, Janet. 2006. The next toolkit. Journal of Phonetics 34: 516–530. Raphael, Lawrence J. 1972. Preceding vowel duration as a cue to the perception of the voicing characteristic of word final consonants in American English. J Acoust Soc Am 51: 1293–1303. Schuchart, Hugo. 1885 (reprinted and translated 1972). On sound laws: Against the Neogrammarians. In: Theo Vennemann and Terence H. Wilbur (eds.), Schuchardt, the Neogrammarians, and the Transformational Theory of Phonological Change, 39–72. Frankfurt: Athena¨um. Stockwell, Robert. 2002. How much shifting actually occurred in the historical English vowel shift? In: Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, 267–281. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Stockwell, Robert and Donka Minkova. 1988. The English vowel shift: problems of coherence and explanation. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Gero Bauer (eds.), Luick Revisited, 355–394. Tu˝bingen: Gunter Narr. Sweet, Henry. 1871–1872 [1958]. King Alfred’s West Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care. London: Tru¨bner. Toon, Thomas. 1976a. The actuation and implementation of an Old English sound change. Proceedings of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States 3: 614–622. Toon, Thomas. 1976b. The variationist analysis of early Old English manuscript data. In: William M. Christie, Jr. (ed.), Current Progress in Historical Linguistics, 71–81. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Toon, Thomas. 1983. The Politics of Early Old English Sound Change. New York: Academic Press. Toon, Thomas. 1992. Old English dialects. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1: The Beginnings to 1066, 409–451. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Lexical diffusion in syntactic change: frequency as a determinant of linguistic conservatism in the development of negation in English. In: Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English Syntax, 439–467. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing changes as a cause of residue. Language 45: 9–25. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 2003. Dialectology and linguistic diffusion. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 713–735. Oxford: Blackwell.
Betty S. Phillips, Terre Haute, Indiana (USA)
99. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Grammaticalization 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Survey of grammaticalization research: changing perspectives Overview of data and methods used in grammaticalization research Critical voices and some vexed questions in grammaticalization research Summary References
Abstract In this chapter we thoroughly discuss the concept of grammaticalization, i.e. a type of language change in which lexical or less grammatical units take on a (more) grammatical status. To this end, we present an overview of the main developments in grammaticalization studies over the past few decades. In addition, we discuss how grammaticalization interacts with other linguistic frameworks/methodologies such as construction grammar and corpus linguistics. Finally, we also focus on a number of controversial issues, e.g. the concept of unidirectionality, and how grammaticalization studies can approach the emergence of discourse phenomena.
Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1558–1576
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1 Introduction Over the last few decades grammaticalization (also sometimes referred to as “grammaticization” or “grammatization”) has become one of the most productive frameworks for studying diachronic change and synchronic variation in language, especially within functional-cognitive linguistics. Any introduction to the topic is necessarily incomplete because of the framework’s prolific output and continual development. This chapter is hence restricted to discussing the main changes in focus that grammaticalization studies have gone through, as well as some recent attempts at joint ventures with other frameworks or methodologies such as construction grammar (cf. Bergs, Chapter 103) and corpus linguistics (cf. Kyto¨, Chapter 96). “Grammaticalization” itself has been defined in many ways, both narrowly and broadly, ranging from “a process that makes less grammatical items or constructions more grammatical” to “change that creates grammar”. In a narrow sense grammaticalization refers to a specific type of language change in which lexical material develops a more grammatical function and status, and less grammatical material develops more grammatical functions. In addition, grammaticalization is generally associated with a set of factors, mechanisms, and parameters that seem to cluster together in a significant way and are often considered to give grammaticalization some sort of independence as a framework (see Joseph 2001; Heine 2003). As a case in point, consider size noun expressions (SNs) like bunch and load(s) in binominal syntagms of the form ‘SN + of + noun phrase (NP)’. Over time the original lexical meanings of SNs (1), which typically designated a particular constellation of the noun following of, developed grammatical quantifier uses (2) similar to quantifiers many/much (see Brems 2003, 2007; Traugott 2010): (1)
…when inhaling the fragrance of a fresh-gathered bunch of roses (Blind 1885: 7)
(2)
Charles Manson had a whole buncha people who believed his every word. (http:// danbern.redacorn.net/lyrics/krautmeyer.html)
The development of quantifier status for these size nouns is accompanied by a number of changes and factors deemed typical of grammaticalization by many authors. It involves reanalysis, i.e. “the grammatical – syntactic and morphological – and semantic properties […] are modified. These modifications comprise changes in interpretation, such as syntactic bracketing and meaning, but not at first change in form” (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 39). The syntactic reanalysis is from an original head noun status of the SN to the SN and of having modifier status. This may be accompanied by phonological erosion in the coalescence of of with the SN, reflected in the buncha spelling in (2). The specific lexical meaning of the SN in examples like (1) has become semantically bleached in the sense that it gave way to a more abstract quantifier meaning. Since there is a loss of lexical meaning this process can also be referred to as delexicalization. It is compensated for by a gain in grammatical meaning. As quantifiers, size nouns show signs of decategorialization, i.e. they have lost properties typically associated with their former syntactic category, i.e. nouns. For some SNs the variability between singular and plural form has become restrained. As a quantifier, bunch for instance is more or less restricted to its singular form, with plural bunches not
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having developed a grammaticalized use. In addition, premodification of the SN quantifiers is mainly restricted to expressions marking degree like whole, as in a whole buncha in (2), which further intensify the quantifier meaning. In their lexical use premodification is largely unrestricted and serves to qualify the entire binominal syntagm, e.g. beautiful bunch in (1). Determiners are likewise restricted in the quantifier use of SNs, viz. typically to the indefinite article a. Finally, most SN expressions, except bunch of and lot(s) of, synchronically also display a layering of coexisting lexical and grammatical uses, as well as ambiguous ones, e.g. He has heaps of vegetables on his plate (CB), which, in the absence of sufficient context, may refer to literal piles or just a great quantity of vegetables. Such synchronic layering is typical of grammaticalization (Hopper 1991), especially when it is ongoing. The exact nature of these grammaticalization features and their status as either causal mechanism, enabling factor, motivation, or parameter in the process of change has been debated by various authors (see Fischer 2007). The hierarchy of such factors as semantic bleaching, syntactic reanalysis, and decategorialization and their criteriality for a change to be labeled grammaticalization are likewise vexed questions in the field. In what follows, we will first – in Section 2 – give a survey of the main changes in focus that grammaticalization studies have gone through. In Section 3, we then consider questions of data and methods available to researchers. Finally, after briefly addressing criticism that has been voiced against grammaticalization research, the bulk of Section 4 will focus on some of the highly debated issues currently discussed in the literature.
2 Survey of grammaticalization research: changing perspectives This section will survey the main paradigm-internal shifts in the range of topics considered and the aspects focused on in grammaticalization research. Changing perspectives are dependent on the theoretical affiliations of individual scholars and their views on what is in the grammar. These give rise to different definitions of grammaticalization and produce or foreground different factors and assign different roles to them. The introduction of new interests furthermore does not mean that older interests disappear. Rather, these trends currently co-exist, with authors participating in different ones, and can be said to display layering, in analogy to grammaticalization phenomena themselves (cf. Hopper 1991).
2.1 Formal, functional, and constructional approaches The 1990s witnessed a surge in grammaticalization studies and generated an important set of articles and monographs which yielded the bulk of grammaticalization definitions and factors still used today, e.g. Lehmann (1995 [1982]), Heine et al. (1991), Hopper (1991), Hopper and Traugott (1993) and Bybee et al. (1994). Oversimplifying matters to some extent, one can say that there has been a general move from a formal focus on morphosyntactic aspects of grammaticalization, reflected in a generally morpheme-based approach to grammaticalization, to an interest in reconstructing the semantico-pragmatic and functional changes involved in grammaticalization processes, which tied in with a functional approach and attention to context and constructions.
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2.1.1 A morphology-based approach to grammaticalization Within the morphology-based approach (“element-based view” cf. Himmelmann 2004: 31) the focus is on describing morphosyntactic change and its parameters, i.e. diagnostics, to measure the degree of grammaticalization. This approach typically focuses on individual words in isolation, rather than strings of words, and tries to retrace their lexical origins along so-called clines, which ultimately describe a trajectory of decrease in substance and autonomy. Lehmann’s (1985) six correlated parameters are a wellknown example of such a “reductive” approach, which remains very influential today. Attrition, paradigmaticization, obligatorification, condensation, coalescence, and fixation all describe degrees of grammaticalization in terms of decrease of substance (“weight”), and internal complexity of grammaticalizing items and loss of their autonomy (“cohesion” and “variability”). The first three parameters pertain to paradigmatic aspects, and the latter three to syntagmatic ones. Table 99.1 charts the parameters and their meaning and gives an example of each: Table 99.1: Lehmann’s (1985) parameters of grammaticalization parameter
explanation
example (cited from Lehmann 1985: 308–310)
Attrition
the loss of semantic and phonological substance
Paradigmaticization
the process of increasingly stronger integration of an item within a paradigm
Obligatorification
the loss of paradigmatic variability
Condensation
a grammaticalizing item combines with structurally increasingly less complex constituents
Coalescence
refers to the increase in bondedness, from juxtaposition to cliticization and beyond
Fixation
grammaticalized signs typically occupy a fixed syntactic slot
Erosion of the consonant in the shift from Latin ad to Romance a. This goes hand in hand with a loss of the local feature in ad (desemanticization) Change from the Latin primary prepositions ad and de to the more tightly integrated French prepositions a` and de, which form the paradigm of oblique cases In Latin de could often be replaced by the other paradigm members ab or ex, but grammaticalized French de can no longer be replaced or omitted Latin habere takes a full NP as its complement, even in its auxiliary use, e.g. habeo epistulam scriptam, whereas French avoir as an auxiliary only has scope over the perfect participle with which it combines, as in J’ai e´crit la lettre (cf. also Ramat 1982) Latin habere becomes suffixal in the Romance future: cantare habet ‘has to sing’ > French chantera ‘will sing’ French de and a` have to precede the NP, whereas Latin de and ad could occupy various positions within it
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The rigidity with which this set of parameters has been used by scholars within the framework has precluded certain types of changes from being considered as cases of grammaticalization, most notably the development of discourse markers – see Section 2.2 below.
2.1.2 Semantico-pragmatic approaches to grammaticalization The morphology-based approach was supplemented by an approach that was centrally concerned with reconstructing semantic changes in grammaticalization processes and the functional motivations behind them. Lehmann’s parameters are then seen as formal reflexes or “concomitants” of these principles (Heine 2003; Himmelmann 2004: 33). Within this line of research the necessity of such parameters as obligatorification, paradigmaticization and increased syntagmatic fixation has been questioned (e.g. Bisang et al. 2004), as has the ‘decrease in scope’ parameter (e.g. Traugott 1995). Within a functional view on grammar, Lehmann’s parameters by their very nature leave a large set of grammaticalization processes undetected. Traugott (1988, 1989, 1995, 2003), and Hopper and Traugott (2003) have especially questioned the simplicity of the semantic model behind Lehmann’s parameters, expressed in the concept of ‘semantic bleaching’. Against a simple loss of concrete and referential lexical meaning, Traugott argues for an increase in pragmatic meaning in the initial stages of grammaticalization. This occurs via pragmatic strengthening or enrichment, which is a mechanism of semantic change that leads to context-induced reinterpretation. For instance, in addition to referring to a cluster of things fastened or growing together, a bunch of flowers/carrots/ parsley also implies information about the typical size of a bunch. Given appropriate discourse contexts, such size implicatures may be reinforced and frequently invited to the point that a quantifier sense develops as a separate conventionalized use. Traugott (1982: 257) formulates a cline for the semantic changes involved in grammaticalization as a unidirectional path from ideational or propositional via textual to expressive meaning. Traugott (1988, 1989) then reformulates this as three semanticopragmatic tendencies: Tendency I: Meanings based in the external described situation > meanings based in the internal (evaluative/perceptual/cognitive) described situation. Tendency II: Meanings based in the external or internal described situation > meanings based in the textual and metalinguistic situation. Tendency III: Meanings tend to become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude towards the proposition. (Traugott 1989: 34–35)
In later studies, such as Traugott (2006) and (2010), the last tendency specifically is rephrased in terms of subjectification, which is argued to intersect with grammaticalization in various ways. In addition, the notion of intersubjectification was added (see Traugott forthc.). Ultimately, then, semantic changes in grammaticalization are argued to amount not to a general loss, but to a redistribution of meaning: the loss of referential lexical meaning is compensated for by an increase in grammatical meaning. Hopper (1991: 22–33) introduces a number of heuristic principles to detect incipient as well as later grammaticalization, which supplement Lehmann’s parameters. These
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include layering, referred to earlier, persistence and decategorialization (see Section 1). Layering in the sense of Hopper (1991) is comparable to Lehmann’s concept of synchronic variation, viz. the idea that a given grammatical concept can be expressed by more or less grammatical means, e.g. many/much versus bunch/load(s)/heap(s) of. In Hopper and Traugott (2003) layering pertains to the fact that older layers of meaning of one construction coexist with newer layers with which they possibly interact, e.g. the present polysemy of SNs (see Section 1). Persistence describes the phenomenon that semantic and/or structural features of the source construction may persist and continue to have an impact on the specific path of a grammaticalizing unit, for instance by constraining semantic generalization and distribution over an increasing number of contexts. An example is the volitional source semantics of the futurity auxiliary will which can resurface in some uses, e.g. I hope he will grant us forgiveness (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 97). Functional and semantic approaches to grammaticalization have recently fed into explicitly constructional ones as a result of a more general awareness of the importance of syntagmatic and discourse context in grammaticalization processes (e.g. Heine 2003; Hopper and Traugott 2003; Traugott 2003 and 2006; Himmelmann 2004; Bisang and Wiemer 2004; Noe¨l 2007 and Trousdale 2005). These approaches make two important points. Firstly, they stress that grammaticalization processes can work on multipleword strings in addition to single words, as was advocated in earlier morpheme-based definitions such as those of Meillet (1912) and Lehmann (1985). Secondly, it is argued that grammaticalization works on (strings of) items in very specific environments. Grammaticalization and its criteria do not apply to all instances of a given construction, but only to instances of this unit in constrained contexts with particular constructional properties. For example, the source of the future auxiliary gonna is not just the verb go in itself, but the entire BE going to-construction, involving progressive aspect and an infinitival clause with purposive meaning (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 87–93). Grammaticalization then becomes “centrally concerned with the development of lexemes in context-specific constructions (not merely lexemes and constructions)” (Traugott 2003: 627). Within functional-cognitive theories of language the motivations for grammaticalization have to be sought in language’s main function, viz. “to communicate successfully” (Heine 2003: 578, but also Lehmann 1985: 315). Traugott (2003: 634) sees speakerhearer negotiation of meaning in discourse as the main motivation for, but also a semantic mechanism of, grammaticalization, based on invited inferencing and semanticizing of conversational implicatures as described above. Haspelmath (1999) makes a similar point when he notes that the interplay between the economy maxim, i.e. “talk parsimoniously”, and the clarity maxim, i.e. “talk clearly”, are insufficient to explain why a language changes (Haspelmath 1999: 1043). Following Keller (1994 [1990]), Haspelmath’s usage-based view sees language change as the result or side-effect of “the cumulation of countless individual actions of speakers” who mainly follow the maxim of extravagance, i.e. “talk in such a way that you are noticed” or attract attention (Haspelmath 1999: 1043, 1055). He prefers “extravagance” to the term “expressivity” used by Hopper and Traugott and others because expressivity in his opinion is too similar to ‘clarity’. In addition, rather than expressing meaning, Haspelmath (1999: 1057) interprets the notion of extravagance in terms of speakers trying to impress hearers by being “imaginative and vivid – they want to be ‘extravagant poets’ ”.
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The first stage in grammaticalization research, which focused on morphosyntactic change, typically undervalued semantic characteristics of grammaticalization as well as general functional-cognitive motivations behind it. The approaches discussed in the present section have enriched the semantic model by such concepts as subjectification, lexical persistence and layering. They have also brought in attention to context, constructions and hearer-speaker interaction.
2.1.3 Construction grammar and grammaticalization research In addition to attention to context and construction-specific grammaticalization, as described in Section 2.1.2, recent studies look at the interaction between the framework of construction grammar and grammaticalization (see Bergs, Chapter 103). In itself, construction grammar is restricted to synchronic analysis. It is not a single unified theory, but is best described as a family of partially overlapping approaches (Goldberg 2006: 3). What they have in common is that they are fundamentally semiotic, or symbolic, in nature: “language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – CONSTRUCTIONS – that integrate form and meaning in conventionalized and often noncompositional ways” (Fried n.d.; original capitalization). Constructions range from maximally substantive, as in the idiom It takes one to know one; over partially schematic, as in [give NP the lowdown] and more schematic, as in the let alone construction, e.g. He doesn’t eat fish, let alone red meat. Finally, there are maximally schematic constructions, such as the ditransitive construction, which is described as [SBJ DITRVERB OBJ1 OBJ2], and instantiated by He gives her a flower. Interpreting Goldberg (2006: 220) positively, lexicon and grammar can be argued to form a continuum of constructions. The ultimate aim of construction grammar is to describe constructionspecific properties in all of their formal and semantic constraints, and relate these to each other. Constructions are also typically looked at vis-a`-vis networks of related constructions. What does a construction grammar approach to grammaticalization in the narrow sense entail for the parameters and factors discussed in the previous sections, both the formal and semantico-pragmatic ones? Various diachronic operationalizations of construction grammar have been proposed, e.g. Trousdale (2005), Diewald (2006), Noe¨l (2007), Traugott (2006: 2). Traugott (2006) distinguishes between different levels of constructional schematicity. At the lowest level of schematicity are fully substantive “constructs”, which are specific empirically attested tokens of a construction that serve as “the locus of innovation”, e.g.: (3)
He threw himself on the floor, he kicked a couple of dishwashers and washing machines and knocked a load of stuff off the top of the washers (CB-UK spoken).
Secondly, there are “micro-constructions” or “individual construction-types”, e.g. a generalized a lot of-construction versus the a bit of-construction (examples adjusted from Traugott 2006). Thirdly, there is the level of “meso-constructions”, or “sets of similarly-behaving constructions”, e.g. generalized kind/sort of constructions as distinct from the set with a bit/lot of constructions. Finally, there are “macro-constructions”, i.e. “high-level schemas, the highest level relevant for the discussion at hand”. With regard to size noun patterns, this level includes the Binominal and Quantifier constructions
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for instance, generalizing all instances of binominal and quantifier expressions respectively into schematic constructions. These distinctions are useful for the study of grammaticalization processes – and the synchronic variation that they give rise to – in several respects. Translated into Traugott’s theory of pragmatic enrichment, one can say that inferences attested frequently in constructs can conventionalize at a micro-constructional level and at increasingly higher levels of schematicity. In addition, grammaticalization can have an impact at different levels of constructional schematicity in the sense that a specific grammaticalization process can affect sets of similarly-behaving constructions. For instance, in the case of SNs we see a whole set of expressions displaying similar processes of grammaticalization as they shift to quantifier status, e.g. load(s)/heap(s)/bunch/pile(s)/lot(s)/shred of. Taken separately, the latter are each micro-constructions with individual “schematic” characteristics, e.g. the SN expression shred of typically appears with non-count abstract nouns (not a shred of evidence), whereas a lot of regularly occurs with both (in)animate concrete and abstract count and non-count nouns. At the meso-constructional level too generalizations can be made, viz. over sets of SN expressions as distinct from other NP of NP-structures, for instance in terms of the different developmental paths and the number of layers of meaning they construe. At the macro-constructional level, generalizations can be made over SN and NP of NP-structures in general, involving for instance shared factors and processes such as pragmatic inferencing, metonymic shifts, delexicalization, decategorialization, etc. Finally, the macro-constructional level is also important in that newly grammaticalizing elements in constructs come to be recruited for the Quantifier construction, analogously to ‘older’ members of these two categories, whose categorial properties and behavior they gradually (or partly) inherit. From this point of view, the macro-constructional level can be interpreted as a prototype category that may serve as a target-model or analog for new members (cf. Goldberg 2006, who considers generalizations or constructions as having a prototype structure, but does not interpret this in terms of a generalization serving as a model for new instances of the schematic category). The macro-constructional level is then affected in the sense that it expands as new members find their way into it. In all this, it should be kept in mind that the original, more lexical meaning of grammaticalizing constructs does not necessarily disappear, as expressions can be polysemous (cf. Hopper’s [1991] notion of layering).
2.2 Grammaticalization and discourse phenomena In conjunction with the increased interest in the semantico-pragmatic aspects of language change in the second stage of grammaticalization research, scholars have also focused on the development of discourse phenomena and their status within a theory of grammaticalization. A suitable example in this context is the development of the complex preposition in terms of, which progresses along a prototypical cline from a fully compositional construction expressing a purely literal meaning in Middle English (e.g. speke in termis of her religion ‘speak using the terms of their religion’, Wycliffe, c.1380) to its much more fixed and abstract use in Present-day English (e.g. You should think in terms of setting yourselves goals, BNC: A0V: 759) – see also Hoffmann (2005: 120–124). In the course of this development, in terms of undergoes many of the processes typical of grammaticalizing constructions (e.g. decategorialization of the nominal element terms, generalization of meaning and concomitant rise in frequency of use,
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broadening of pragmatic function, increase in the expression of subjective speaker attitudes, etc.). In addition, however, in terms of has recently developed a range of communicative functions that suggest that it has acquired the status of a discourse marker. As a case in point, consider examples (4) and (5): (4)
What I will do is emphasize what we you know where you can go in terms of money-wise. (BNC: JA4: 167)
(5)
and we were talking mainly, an elderly, a female elderly client group, let’s be honest you know, in terms of blind you know, and just wait till you see it, it’s lovely (BNC: J8B: 187)
In both cases, the use of in terms of is not compatible with the typical structural and functional properties of a complex preposition, i.e. there is no prepositional complement; instead, both uses could easily be replaced by common discourse markers such as like or you know without any great difference in communicative impact. Furthermore, removing the expression in terms of altogether would have no effect on the propositional content of either utterance. The interesting question in this context is whether the discourse-specific uses of in terms of are the result of a continuation of the grammaticalization processes that started in Middle English, or whether the move into the communicative domain presupposes the impact of completely different influences. As Brinton (1996: 34) notes, discourse markers “occur either outside the syntactic structure or loosely attached to it and hence have no clear grammatical function”. As a consequence, scholars such as Erman and Kotsinas (1993) have preferred to treat their development under the heading of “pragmaticalization”. However, a different approach is favored by others, perhaps most prominently by Traugott (1995, 2003) and Brinton (2007). Thus, Traugott (1995) traces the development of indeed, in fact and besides from clause-internal adverbials (VADV) via sentence adverbials (IPADV) to discourse markers (DM) and concludes that the parallels to other clines of grammaticalization are far too numerous to ignore. In the case of indeed, for example, the originally literal preposition phrase in dede, meaning ‘in action’, developed epistemic modal meanings (‘in action/practice’ > ‘in actuality, certainly’) in contrastive contexts that were often found clause-initially (cf. Traugott 1995: 8). Over time, this use semanticized into an inherently adversative meaning of indeed. In a final step, indeed then acquired the discourse-specific functions of “elaboration [and] clarification of discourse intent” (Traugott 1995: 9). From a structural point of view, however, this development clashes with the observation that grammaticalizing constructions typically exhibit syntactic fixation and scope reduction (cf. Table 99.1). Instead, discourse markers are typically more flexible in their syntagmatic properties than clause-internal adverbials and they also have scope over much longer stretches of text. Traugott (1995: 1) concludes that the evidence in favor of grammaticalization is nevertheless convincing and that syntactic fixation and scope reduction cannot therefore be considered “salient to grammaticalization”. In the case of indeed, in fact, and besides, there is a fairly straightforward correlation between their position in the sentence and their function as VADV, IPADV and DM, respectively: in their DM use, these items are almost invariably clause-initial elements that can be interpreted as occupying an adjunct (or disjunct) slot in the left periphery of
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the sentence structure. As Traugott (1995: 13) argues, this slot has “a very long history, and cannot be ignored or treated as extra-sentential”; elements moving into this slot in a process such as the one described for indeed should thus not be regarded as lying outside of grammar, even though their main functions are no doubt pragmatic. In other words, from a structural point of view, there is no reason why discourse markers should be excluded from grammaticalization. In the case of in terms of, however, such an argumentation is slightly more difficult to uphold as its discourse-specific uses – similar to a whole range of other discoursespecific features of language (e.g. hesitation phenomena, back-channels, etc.) – exhibit more syntactic flexibility, a more variable scope and a greater range of pragmatic functions. In addition to the uses shown in (4) and (5) above, they include instances where in terms of functions as a focusing device (6), uses where in terms of marks a topic change, as shown in (7) and (8), quotative uses (9), and genuine markers of hesitation and discourse planning, as shown in (10): (6) Well, it seems that the criticism is coming from the usual suspects at the moment. In terms of the United Nations Security Council members, the three that were not involved in this airstrike – France , Russia and China – have predictably criticized it. (CNN, CNN Sunday Morning, 2001.02.18, Christiane Amanpour) (7) Sheriff, in terms of your investigation, are you ready to have the FBI come in and assist you yet? Do you feel that this is something that perhaps there is a out-of-state connection? (CNN, Burden of Proof, 2000.06.14, Roger Cossack) (8) Michael, in terms of, you know, we think of this as just a case having to do with Elian Gonzalez, but in fact, these kinds of decisions are much broader than just having to do with Elian Gonzalez. (CNN, Burden of Proof, 2000.04.20, Roger Cossack) (9) It will be the verbiage that goes with it, how hawkish or dovish is the board after the announcement, the fact that it won’t do anything. We expect them to come out with a very hawkish tone in terms of, we’re not raising rates now, but by God we’re ready to do it if it’s needed. (CNN, Ahead of the Curve, 2000.06.27, Alan Kral) (10) Let me ask you something about the proximity that you all are working in. How close are you, say, in terms of like – are you right next to the Republican observer or are you right next to some neutral party in this process or what. (CNN, Morning News, 2000.11.20, Leon Harris) It might be argued that examples (6) and (7) could just as well be instances of straightforward complex prepositions: after all, what follows in terms of takes the form of a typical prepositional complement. While we agree that this is the case from a structural point of view, we would nevertheless like to claim that discourse-specific functions are present here, too. Examples like (7) are thus to some extent ambiguous in their interpretation: frequent uses of the complex preposition in such contexts may have invited hearers to interpret in terms of as a genuine marker of topic change. This in turn will have led to a situation where this type of use can be employed even without a regular prepositional complement present, as shown in example (8).
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A full account of the discourse-specific uses of in terms of must necessarily remain beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the quantitative data presented in Hoffmann and Locher (2004) and Hoffmann (2005) reveals that we are clearly dealing with a gradient from complex preposition to discourse marker. Furthermore, even though the picture is more complex than in the case of indeed, in fact, and besides, the discourse-specific uses exhibit clear regularities. Whether or not we are dealing with a case of grammaticalization ultimately depends on our understanding of grammar (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 129; Traugott 1995 and 2003; Hopper 1991: 19–21 and Himmelmann 2004 on what is ‘in’ the grammar). Traugott’s (1995) emphasis on the grammatical nature of items in the adjunct slot makes perfect sense as part of her argumentation; however, it also indirectly demonstrates the reluctance of linguists to move beyond traditional sentence grammar. If grammar is meant to structure cognitive and communicative aspects of language, discourse markers should be given a place in the system. Within such a ‘communicative grammar’, the development of in terms of from Middle English to today’s discourse-marker use could be seen as an example of continuous grammaticalization, and there would be no need for two distinct sets of processes (i.e. grammaticalization and pragmaticalization) because the features under consideration are held to lie outside traditional sentence grammar.
3 Overview of data and methods used in grammaticalization research Given that scholars working within the framework of grammaticalization theory are primarily interested in tracing and explaining language change, the main source of data for any analysis is likely to be historical and diachronic. However, it is also to some extent possible to investigate grammaticalization from a synchronic perspective, and this is perhaps most easily the case within a morphology-based approach to grammaticalization. Thus, Lehmann (1985) explicitly states that his six correlating parameters can jointly be used to determine the degree to which a particular sign has progressed on the path of grammaticalization. Also, since Hopper’s (1991) concept of layering will manifest itself in synchronic variation, research within the variationist framework may provide interesting insights into the degree of grammaticalization of a construction on the basis of synchronic data. Relevant examples are Poplack and Tagliamonte (2000) on the grammaticalization of BE going to using data from speakers of African American as well as mainstream English, and Schulz (2010) on morphosyntactic features of possession, obligation, and past habituality in British English dialects. However, there are also critical voices who warn against interpreting synchronic variation as too direct a reflection of the rate and direction of grammaticalization processes (cf. Kroch 1989; Andersen 2001; Traugott and Trousdale 2010). For example, items that are furthest on the cline have not necessarily started grammaticalizing first. Furthermore, as Fischer (2000) points out, grammaticalization may progress fully, stop halfway or revert to previous stages. In most cases, therefore, grammaticalization research will benefit from the integration of a historical perspective. Variationist studies of the type mentioned in the previous paragraph have in common that they perform sophisticated statistical analyses on quantitative patterns that emerge from the data. However, even a fairly simple feature such as the (relative)
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frequency of a phenomenon has been shown to be instructive of grammaticalization processes. Thus, Hopper and Traugott (2003: 106) observe that “[t]he more frequently a form occurs in texts, the more grammatical it is assumed to be” and the literature abounds with studies on the interaction between frequency and language change (see e.g. Haiman 1994; Krug 1998; Bybee 2007). Given this prominent role taken by frequency, it comes as no surprise that the use of large-scale electronic text collections – or corpora – has gained in importance within the field of grammaticalization studies. While earlier studies tended to draw their conclusions concerning the grammaticalization paths of individual constructions on the basis of sometimes very limited sets of data, today’s researchers can often rely on evidence gleaned from hundreds of millions of words of historical data available electronically (see Kyto¨, Chapter 96, Traxel, Chapter 72 and also Mair (1994) for an early call for more cooperation between proponents of corpus linguistics and grammaticalization theory). However, sheer volume is not the only advantage of language corpora: rather, they also make it possible to take a more detailed look at language use in various genres or text types, which may reveal informative differential developments that could otherwise be easily missed. At the same time, the application of corpus linguistic methodology to the study of grammaticalization phenomena has also had a theory-building effect. Thus, corpora have revealed that certain linguistic forms which exhibit clear signs of being grammaticalized are in fact exceedingly infrequent – and have never been frequent in the history of the language in question (e.g. complex prepositions like by dint of and size noun expressions such as a scintilla/skerrick of; see Hoffmann 2004 and Brems 2007). Others appear to grammaticalize very abruptly, and without clear evidence of bridging contexts that would offer a suitable environment for a re-interpretation of their structure and function (e.g. complex prepositions like in front of ). These situations are not easily compatible with a view that takes language structure as being the direct result of (or at least being heavily influenced by) language use. One possible solution is that the role of analogy may have to be given a greater role than some theorists assume (cf. also Section 4.2 below). This is also compatible with the constructional view of grammaticalization mentioned in Section 2.1.3 above, in that constructions grammaticalize at a higher level of schematicity (i.e. at the macro- and meso-levels), enabling the establishment of individual – and possibly very infrequent – lexical instantiations of these constructions at the micro-level without the need to develop gradually through a full path of grammaticalization. Many studies on grammaticalization have been based exclusively on English data. However, important insights can also be gained from investigations involving both typologically related and unrelated languages. Such approaches have shown that the evolution of grammar indeed appears to follow cross-linguistically established diachronic paths, and the parallels between developments in different languages are forcefully demonstrated by Heine and Kuteva’s (2002) extensive list of grammaticalization phenomena. At the same time, such studies can also raise interesting questions as to why certain cognate features can be seen to develop differently from each other – or at least at different speeds – in two or several languages (see e.g. Simon-Vandenbergen and Willems (2011) on the discourse markers actually and in fact and their French counterparts actuellement and en fait/de fait/au fait). Other promising avenues of research have been opened by investigating data from pidgins and creoles, where grammatical features can be seen to develop at considerable
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speed under the influence of extreme language contact. One of the main difficulties involved in such studies relates to the separation of the effects of substrate/superstrate transfer from purely language-internal processes. As a case in point, consider the development of (complex) prepositions in Sranan, an English-lexifier creole spoken in Suriname. Here, locative expressions such as tapu and fesi (derived from English top and face, respectively) can be observed in constructions that resemble grammaticalized prepositions in English. However, as convincingly argued in Bruyn (1996), these are in fact not the result of a diachronic, language-internal process but instead can be attributed to substrate influences from local Gbe languages. An interesting approach is also proposed by Plag (2002), who uses deviation from accepted notions of grammaticalization as a heuristic tool for detecting influences of language transfer.
4 Critical voices and some vexed questions in grammaticalization research 4.1 Criticism of grammaticalization research In recent years there has also been some criticism of the grammaticalization framework, for instance in a thematic issue of Language Sciences (Campbell and Janda 2001). The criticism mainly pertains to the independent theoretical status of grammaticalization. Against this, grammaticalization is argued to be derivative and to consist of various grammaticalization-independent mechanisms, common to language (change) as such. Labeling a phenomenon as grammaticalization has no explanatory value whatsoever, since it does not subsume “a distinct set of principles for its explanation”, according to Newmeyer (1998: 226). Other correlations between formal and functional reflexes of grammaticalization are similarly deconstructed as epiphenomena of more fundamental grammaticalization-independent principles. Delexicalization is no independent parameter of grammaticalization but “an artefact of the definition of grammaticalization” as “a shift of lexical or grammatical to more grammatical” (Campbell 2001: 151). Hopper (1991), Heine (2003), Hopper and Traugott (2003) and Bisang, Himmelmann, and Wiemer (2004) among others have noted explicitly that none of the factors they discuss are exclusive to grammaticalization, but common to linguistic change in general. However, they argue that the significant degree to which these related principles co-occur cannot be overlooked.
4.2 Vexed questions in current grammaticalization research Over the years several key issues in grammaticalization have become the focus of debate. Particularly contentious is the notion of unidirectionality referred to earlier, i.e. the idea that grammaticalization always moves from lexical or less grammatical to more grammatical and not the other way around (see Newmeyer 1998; Fischer 2000; Haspelmath 1999 and Fitzmaurice 2000). It goes without saying that in order to assess the relation between grammaticalization and (uni)directionality, both concepts need to be defined clearly. The literature shows that it is almost impossible to define grammaticalization without some reference to directionality. Grammaticalization is “the process whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and,
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once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions” (Hopper and Traugott 1993: xv). Of the two parts of the definition, only the second one depends less explicitly on directionality. It is obvious that (uni)directionality cannot at the same time be part of the definition of a change and act as an independent parameter of it. Defining grammaticalization neutrally as “a subset of crosslinguistically recurring changes that involve correlations across time between semantic, morphosyntactic (and sometimes also) phonological changes”, Traugott (2001: 1) removes the reference to directionality, but also produces a definition that applies equally well to many other types of changes. Yet, incorporating directionality into the definition of grammaticalization does not have to be problematic, as long as the former is interpreted in a specific way. When authors such as Newmeyer (1998: 251) require a directional change to be a deterministic sequence of events in which one step inevitably and predictably leads to the next one, they simply require too much from language change and its theory, and do not take into account its sociocultural aspects (cf. Traugott 2001). As already indicated in Section 3, change, including grammaticalization, is potential; it may, but need not, start, it may stop halfway or revert to earlier stages, and it does not have to go on to completion. The directionality associated with grammaticalization pertains to the fact that the recruitment of new grammatical items typically moves from lexical/less grammatical to (more) grammatical and has to be considered as a strong empirical tendency. By acknowledging that a specific directionality is at least partly criterial of grammaticalization, changes from grammatical to lexical status, or from more to less grammatical are just instances of other types of changes, rather than counterexamples of grammaticalization. For instance, the use of function words as nouns, as in the ifs and buts (van der Auwera 2002: 22 cited in Haspelmath 1999) is simply a case of conversion (see Brinton, Chapter 100). Alternatively, these phenomena can be described within the framework of degrammaticalization (Norde 2009). Norde (2009) distinguishes between various types of degrammaticalization, i.e. the change in which linguistic units in specific contexts become less grammatical. The changes are evaluated against the six parameters of degrammaticalization, the mirror-images of Lehmann’s parameters of grammaticalization: resemanticization, phonological strengthening, recategorialization, deparadigmaticization, deobligatorification, scope expansion, severance (debonding) and flexibilization (increase in syntagmatic variability). For further discussion on the concept of degrammaticalization as proposed by Norde (2009) see Brinton (Chapter 100). Another important debate in the literature is that about the precise nature of reanalysis and analogy and the relation between them. Most of the time reanalysis and analogy are distinguished strictly. As referred to in Section 1, reanalysis is typically considered to be a primary mechanism in various kinds of language change (cf. Harris and Campbell 1995), including grammaticalization, whereas analogy is only secondary. Most authors consider reanalysis criterial for grammaticalization in the sense that each case of grammaticalization involves reanalysis, but not all reanalysis is grammaticalization (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003, but see Haspelmath 1998 for instance for a different view). Analogy has been defined as “the attraction of extant forms to already existing constructions” (Campbell 2001: 63–64), and alternatively labeled “rule generalization”, “generalization”, also in Traugott (2006: 3), and “extension” (Harris and Campbell 1995). An example is the spread of will as a future auxiliary to contexts with all
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kinds of subjects, whereas it was first restricted to contexts with an animate subject (cf. Campbell 2001). Several observations can be made with regard to this traditional distinction between reanalysis and analogy. For one thing, many case studies of grammaticalization look at cases of reanalysis that do not lead to the establishment of radically new categories or structures that were not already part of the grammar. In many cases of reanalysis there is a clear existing model, especially on a rather schematic level, for instance in the emergence of new futurity markers such as going to (e.g. Mair 1997; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994), new semi-modals (e.g. Krug 2000), new complex prepositions (e.g. Hoffmann 2004). This suggests a closer integration of reanalysis and analogy than is traditionally assumed and a more active role for analogy within that interdependent relationship (cf. Fischer 2007). In the case of size noun constructions, the SN expressions are reanalyzed as quantifiers, a category that has already been established in the English grammar. Also, in light of a construction grammar approach to grammaticalization, it is important to note that analogy is well-established in construction grammar as a means of synchronically interpreting and producing structures in terms of their parallels with other, more general, constructions (Goldberg 2006). From this perspective, reanalysis involves the semantic and syntactic reinterpretation of a structure based on similarities with an already existing category, the grammatical meaning and behavior of which it gradually adopts through analogy (cf. Fischer 2007: 122–124). Another vexed question that has been given ample thought is the relationship between grammaticalization and another process of change, viz. lexicalization (e.g. Wischer 2000; Himmelmann 2004 and Brinton and Traugott 2005; see also Brinton, Chapter 100). Lexicalization in its most general sense refers to the process that leads to new conventionalized lexical items or phrases, but it has also been used to encompass phenomena such as idiomatization, splits, blends, syntactic conversion, and degrammaticalization (see Wischer 2000 and Himmelmann 2004 for a more extensive survey and discussion). Part of this terminological profusion and the question of how grammaticalization and lexicalization interrelate arises from the various ways in which ‘lexicon’ and ‘grammar’ have been defined. Some authors present grammaticalization and lexicalization as being in radical opposition to each other, while others, such as Himmelmann (2004) for instance, observe that grammaticalization and lexicalization, as processes of conventionalization, have several mechanisms and formal reflexes in common, e.g. erosion or fusion effects (Himmelmann 2004: 35–38). Himmelmann (2004) restricts “lexicalization” to the “univerbation of a frequently recurring collocation of two or more lexical items”, also called “idiomatization” for longer phrasal units. Ultimately, he sees its non-directionality and abrupt host class reduction as the main differences from grammaticalization, which is directional and gradual. In Trousdale’s (2008) construction grammar terms, lexicalization leads to idiosyncratic micro-constructions, whereas grammaticalization leads to more schematic and productive constructions at meso- or macro-level. Himmelmann (2004: 22) seems to allow for the fact that both grammaticalization and lexicalization can be involved in one and the same change. Wischer (2000: 355) makes this question a central focus, when she looks at the “idiomaticization of syntagms which take on a modal or discourse function”, such as methinks. She decides that the two processes are not contradictory, but “operate on different levels of the language”.
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Lehmann (2004), finally, sees lexicalization in the sense of univerbation as a stage preceding grammaticalization, allowing an expression to detach from regular syntax; in later stages this non-compositional chunk may acquire grammatical meaning.
5 Summary An overview of the type presented in the present chapter must necessarily be selective, and we will no doubt have omitted facts that others would have found to be essential for an understanding of the processes of grammaticalization. Our account will have shown, however, that – for at least the past two to three decades – grammaticalization theory has heavily influenced discussions of language change and thereby given rise to innovative research projects. At the time of writing, the momentum shows no signs of slowing down, with new avenues of research being opened up by the expansion of the theoretical ideas developed in the field to neighboring research frameworks and disciplines. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Gunnel Tottie and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
6 References Andersen, Henning. 2001. Actualization and the (uni)directionality. In: Henning Andersen (ed.), Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress, 222–248. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van der Auwera, Johan. 2002. More thoughts on degrammaticalization. In: Ilse Wischer and Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New Reflections on Grammaticalization, 19–29. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bisang, Walter and Bjo¨rn Wiemer. 2004. What makes grammaticalization? An appraisal of its components and its fringes. In: Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Bjo¨rn Wiemer (eds.), What makes Grammaticalization? A Look from its Fringes and its Components, 3–20. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bisang, Walter, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, and Bjo¨rn Wiemer (eds.). 2004. What makes Grammaticalization? A Look from its Fringes and its Components. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Blind, Mathilde. 1885. Tarantella. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Brems, Lieselotte. 2003. Measure noun constructions: An instance of semantically-driven grammaticalization. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 283–312. Brems, Lieselotte. 2007. The grammaticalization of small size nouns: Reconsidering frequency and analogy. Journal of English Linguistics 34(4): 293–324. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 2007. The development of I mean: Implications for historical pragmatics. In: Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 37–79. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruyn, Adrienne. 1996. On identifying instances of grammaticalization in creole languages. In: Philip Baker and Anand Syea (eds.), Changing Meanings, Changing Functions: Papers Related to Grammaticalization in Contact Languages, 29–46. London: University of Westminster Press. Bybee, Joan. 2007. Frequency of Use and the Organisation of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Bybee, Joan, Revere D. Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23: 113–161. Campbell, Lyle and Richard D. Janda. 2001. Introduction: Conceptions of grammaticalization and their problems. Language Sciences 23: 93–112. Diewald, Gabriele. 2006. Context types in grammaticalization as constructions. In: Doris Scho¨nefeld (ed.), Constructions. Special Vol. 1: Constructions all over – Case Studies and Theoretical Implications. http://elanguage.net/journals/constructions/issue/view/17 (last accessed 2 March 2011). Erman, Britt and Ulla-Britt Kotsinas. 1993. Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know. Studier i modern sprakvetenskap 10: 76–92. Fischer, Olga. 2000. Grammaticalisation: Unidirectional, non-reversable? The case of to before the infinitive in English. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 149–169. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2000. Remarks on the degrammaticalization of infinitival to in presentday American English. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 171–186. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fried, Mirjam n.d. Construction grammar. http://www.constructiongrammar.org (last accessed 2 March 2011). Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Haiman, John. 1994. Ritualization and the development of language. In: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization, 3–28. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Harris, Alice C. and Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haspelmath, Martin. 1998. Does grammaticalization need reanalysis? Studies in Language 22(2): 315–351. Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37(6): 1043– 1068. Heine, Bernd. 2003. Grammaticalization. In: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 575–601. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi, and Friederike Hu¨nnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. Chicago: University of Chicago. Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticization: Opposite or orthogonal? In: Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, and Bjo¨rn Wiemer (eds.), What makes Grammaticalization? A Look from its Fringes and its Components, 21–42. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2004. Are low-frequency complex prepositions grammaticalized? In: Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English, 171–210. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2005. Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions – A Corpusbased Study. London: Routledge. Hoffmann, Sebastian and Miriam A. Locher. 2004. Discourse markers and grammaticalization theory: The case of in terms of. Paper given at the 25th ICAME conference in Verona, 19–23 May 2004.
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Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticization. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. 1, 17–36. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Is there such a thing as ‘grammaticalization’? Language Sciences 23: 163– 186. Keller, Rudi. 1990. Sprachwandel: Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. Tu¨bingen: Francke. Keller, Rudi. 1994. Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language Kroch, Anthony S. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1: 199–244. Krug, Manfred G. 1998. String frequency. Journal of English Linguistics 26(4): 286–320. Krug, Manfred G. 2000. Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-Based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization: Synchronic and diachronic change. Lingua e Stile 20: 303–318. Lehmann, Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Munich: Lincom Europa. Lehmann, Christian. 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In: Ilse Wischer and Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New Reflections on Grammaticalization: Proceedings from the International Symposium on Grammaticalization, 17–19 June 1999, Potsdam, Germany, 1–18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift fu¨r germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 152–187. Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair (eds.). 2004. Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mair, Christian. 1994. Is see becoming a conjunction? The study of grammaticalisation as a meeting ground for corpus linguistics and grammaticalization theory. In: Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie, and Peter Schneider (eds.), Creating and Using Language Corpora, 127–137. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mair, Christian. 1997. The spread of the going-to future in written English: a corpus-based investigation into language change in progress. In: Raymond Hickey and Staninsław Puppel (eds.), Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak, 1537–1543. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Meillet, Antoine. 1912. L’e´volution des formes grammaticales. Scienta (Rivista di Scienza) 12 no. 26: 6. Reprinted in Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale1958, Paris: Champion, 130– 148. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language Form and Language Function. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Noe¨l, Dirk. 2007. Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory. Functions of Language 14: 177–202. Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plag, Ingo. 2002. On the role of grammaticalization in creolization. A reassessment. In: Glenn Gilbert (ed.), Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in the Twenty-first Century, 229–246. New York: Peter Lang. Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 2000. The grammaticization of going to in (African American) English. Language Variation and Change 11: 315–342. Ramat, Paolo. 1982. Ein Beispiel von ‘reanalysis’, typologisch betrachtet. Folia Linguistica 16: 365–383. Schulz, Monika. 2010. Morphosyntactic variation in British English dialects: Evidence from possession, obligation and past habituality. PhD thesis, University of Freiburg.
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Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, and Dominic Willems. 2011. Cross-linguistic data as evidence in the grammaticalization debate: The case of discourse markers. Linguistics 49: 333–364. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982. From propositional to textual and expressive meaning: Some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In: Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics, 245–271. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1988. Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization. In: Shelley Axmaker, Annie Jaisser and Helen Singmaster (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 406–416 Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65: 31–55. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995. The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Paper presented at ICHL XII, Manchester 1995. http://www.stanford. edu/~traugott/papers/discourse.pdf (last accessed 2 March 2011). Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2001. Legitimate counterexamples to unidirectionality. Paper presented at Freiburg University, 17th October 2001. http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/papers/Freiburg. Unidirect.pdf (last accessed 2 March 2011). Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Constructions in grammaticalization. In Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 624–647. Oxford: Blackwell. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2006. Constructions and language change revisited: The concepts of constructional emergence and coercion from the perspective of grammaticalization. Paper presented at Construction Grammar Network Meeting 3, Du¨sseldorf, 1–2 April 2006. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2010. From ideational to interpersonal: A reassessment. In: Hubert Cuyckens, Kristin Davidse, and Lieven Vandelanotte (eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 29–71. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs forthc. Intersubjectification and Clause Periphery. Special issue of English Text Construction 5(1). Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Graeme Trousdale (eds.). 2010. Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trousdale, Graeme. 2005. Words and constructions in grammaticalization: The end of the English impersonal construction. Paper presented at the 4th Annual Conference on Studies in the History of the English Language, Flagstaff, Arizona, 30 September–2 October 2005. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008. Constructions in grammaticalization and lexicalization: Evidence from the history of a composite predicate construction in English. In: Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional Approaches to English Grammar, 33–68. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wischer, Ilse. 2000. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization – ‘methinks’ there is some confusion. In: Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, 355–370. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lieselotte Brems, Leuven and Lie`ge (Belgium) and Sebastian Hoffmann, Trier (Germany)
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Introduction Lexicalization: definitions Lexicalization and/or grammaticalization Degrammaticalization and lexicalization Unified view of lexicalization and (de)grammaticalization Summary References
Abstract Lexicalization has been variously understood as ordinary processes of word formation, fusion of lexical items accompanied by decreased compositionality, and/or splitting of lexical items resulting in increased autonomy. Moreover, lexicalization is often equated with degrammaticalization, the antithesis of grammaticalization. Many of the same phenomena, such as derivational affixes or complex prepositions, are viewed at different times as (de)grammaticalization or lexicalization. This chapter defines lexicalization as a diachronic change that results in the production of new lexical/contentful forms, and typically involves erasure of phrasal or morphological boundaries and reduction of phonological sequences and often involves semantic and pragmatic idiomaticization. Examples include the fusion of syntactic phrases (e.g., make-or-break) or amalgamation of compounds (e.g. werewolf). Lexicalization shares many features with grammaticalization, such as unidirectionality, fusion, coalescence, and demotivation, but differs in crucial respects; it does not involve decategorialization, bleaching, increased productivity and frequency, or typological generality. Lexicalization may also be distinguished from degrammaticalization, a rare phenomenon in English, though the differences are more difficult to articulate.
1 Introduction Lexicalization, broadly speaking the development of new lexical material (see Section 5.1), has been the topic of study in both the context of (synchronic) word formation and (diachronic) grammaticalization; this chapter focuses on the latter (for the former, see, e.g., Kastovsky 1982; Bauer 1983; Lipka 2002 [1990]). Within grammaticalization studies, the question of how lexicalization should be defined and how, or if, it differs from both degrammaticalization and grammaticalization (see Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99) has generated extensive scholarly debate. Is lexicalization equivalent to degrammaticalization (the reversal of grammaticalization), is it encompassed by degrammaticalization, is it the end stage of grammaticalization, or is it a distinct process? Many of the same linguistic developments have been seen as grammaticalization and/or lexicalization. A classic example of such a development is the English ADV today, which arises from OE to (P) + dæge ‘at day (N)-DAT’ (cf. Ger. heuer ‘this year’ < OHG hiu jaru ‘this year-DAT’). Does this represent a case of grammaticalization (of a noun to an adverb), as suggested by Meillet (1958 [1912]: 138–139), who focuses on the change Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1577–1598
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in function? Or are we witnessing the rise of a new lexical item, and hence lexicalization, as suggested by Hopper and Traugott (2003: 24), who focus on the change in morphosyntactic form? The development has also been understood as lexicalization occurring at the end of a process of grammaticalization (see Giacalone Ramat 1998: 121–122), or even as neither lexicalization nor grammaticalization (see Joseph 2003: 477). This chapter is an attempt to sort out these questions (for further entries in the lexicalization/(de)grammaticalization debate, see Moreno Cabrero 1990; Lehmann 1989, 2002; Traugott 1994, 2005; Wischer 2000; Brinton 2002; Brinton and Traugott 2005; Lightfoot 2005). Section 2 discusses definitions of lexicalization, primarily focusing on the grammaticalization literature. Section 3 explores some of the “example confusions” that have been treated alternately as lexicalization and/or grammaticalization. Section 4 presents a brief discussion of degrammaticalization, focusing on its overlap with lexicalization. Section 5 compares the view of lexicalization and grammaticalization presented in Brinton and Traugott (2005) with the view of degrammaticalization presented in Norde (2009). In broad terms, it will be argued that lexicalization is a gradual diachronic process. Processes of word formation, which are instantaneous, synchronic developments, are independent of lexicalization. It will also be argued that both formal and functional changes are relevant to any discussion of lexicalization/grammaticalization. Fusion and coalescence are formal changes that characterize (and hence do not distinguish) lexicalization and grammaticalization, but do serve to distinguish lexicalization from lexical semantic change (change in meaning). Likewise, loss of semantic compositionality is characteristic of both lexicalization and grammaticalization. In functional terms, lexicalization is a change leading towards the lexical pole of the lexical-grammatical continuum, while grammaticalization is a change leading towards the grammatical pole of the continuum. Underlying any discussion of lexicalization and grammaticalization must be an understanding of what is meant by “lexical”/“lexicon” and “grammatical”/“grammar”. While there is no easy answer to this (it has been a matter of debate for many centuries), this chapter will assume that “lexical” describes linguistic forms which are “contentful”, having specific, conceptual, propositional, and generally referential meaning, while “grammatical” describes forms having more abstract, structural/functional/indexical and generally non-referential meaning. In both cases, the forms may range from syntactically free to fixed, from more to less fused, from morphologically autonomous to bound, from more to less conventionalized, and from nonproductive to productive. Thus, grammatical forms encompass affixes (both class-changing derivational and inflectional affixes), semi-bound forms (function words and clitics), and periphrases; lexical forms encompass simplexes and idioms (which are maximally unanalyzable), complex and semi-idiosyncratic forms, and partially fixed phrases. “Grammar” denotes the constraints on, or rules of, the language (both universal and language-specific), and “lexicon” denotes the repository of all units of language stored in long-term memory (whether primarily lexical or primarily grammatical) (see, further, Brinton and Traugott 2005: 9–18, 91–95 on this gradience view of lexical and grammatical).
2 Lexicalization: definitions Among the many definitions of lexicalization in the literature, two fundamental and not entirely compatible conceptions of the process emerge. The first concerns how elements enter the lexicon. In this view, lexicalization is understood as “adoption into the lexicon”.
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For example, Lehmann (2002: 14) describes lexicalization as “a process in which something becomes lexical” or as “a process by which new linguistic entities, be it simple or complex words or just new senses, become conventionalized on the level of the lexicon” (Blank 2001: 1603). The second concerns how elements leave the grammar. In this view, lexicalization is a process that produces items “falling outside the productive rules of grammar” and thus represents the stage when “a lexeme has, or takes on, a form which it could not have if it had arisen by the application of productive rules” (Bauer 1983: 48). More specifically, lexicalization may be understood as: 1) ordinary processes of word formation; 2) fusion of lexical items resulting in a decrease in compositionality; and/or 3) fission of lexical items resulting in an increase in autonomy (see Brinton and Traugott 2005: 32). These views of lexicalization depend on a cline or continuum from relatively free forms obeying the rules of grammar to relatively fixed forms existing in the lexicon (a repository of stored items); placement upon the cline is often a matter of the semantic compositionality of the form.
2.1 Lexicalization: ordinary processes of word formation Lexicalization may be understood most generally as the process which leads to the creation of new lexemes. In this view, lexicalization encompasses synchronic processes of word formation. Four processes of word formation involve fusion which may serve to erase boundaries between independent morphemes and give rise to unified lexemes. As shown in Table 100.1, these include compounding, derivation (but on the status of derivation, see below Section 3.1), blending, and acronyms/initialisms. Most often cited in the context of lexicalization are compounds that show extreme phonological changes, such as boatswain > bosun, or apparently unpredictable semantic changes, such as black market, which is neither ‘black’ nor a ‘market’. Table 100.1: Processes of word formation leading to fusion compounding
derivation
blending
class-maintaining class-changing
holiday waistcoat boatswain
black market cupboard forecastle
warhead breakfast somebody
neighborhood sinful
gangster taxation
misdeed purify
info(rmation) + (com)mercial > infomercial simul(taneous) + (broad)cast > simulcast docu(mentary) + drama > docudrama film + (bi)ography > filmography motor + (caval)cade > motorcade tele(vision) + marketing > telemarketing (we)b + log > blog gu(ess) + estimate > guestimate
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acronyms/initialisms
sonar < so(und) na(vigation) r(anging) SARS < s(evere) a(cute) r(espiratory) s (yndrome) BASE < b(ase) a(ntenna) s(pan) e(arth) OED < O(xford) E(nglish) D(ictionary) GST < G(oods) and S(ervices) T(ax)
Three processes of word formation – conversion, back formation, and clipping – involve no fusion or loss of morphemic boundaries (see Table 100.2). These are typically seen as occurring instantaneously. Conversions (or functional shifts) from more major to more minor parts of speech have generated most interest in discussions of lexicalization (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 58, 134), but note that conversions can work in both directions (“up and down the cline”). Table 100.2: Processes of word formation involving no fusion conversion
down, up, off, thwart, out (PRT > V) ifs, ands, buts, ups, downs, front (PRT > N) upper, downer (PRT > N) in, out, for, through, iffy (PRT > ADJ)
late, now, then (ADV > ADJ) must (V > N ) during, pending, concerning (V > P) given, granted, ago (V > P) thwart (ADV > V)
back formation
orientate < orientation sedate < sedative surveille < surveillance laze < lazy
escalate < escalate sculpt < sculpture intuit < intuition
clipping
porn < pornography rehab < rehabilitation flu < influenza
fan < fanatic burger < hamburger venture < adventure
Lexicalization is the end-stage of such processes of word formation. A three-stage sequence is postulated from nonce formation (the creation of new forms via regular rules of word formation) > institutionalization (acceptance of a form by the speech community as a known lexical item) > lexicalization (involving demotivation, idiomaticization, semantic specialization, and a sense that the item it no longer produced by productive rules) (see Bauer 1983; also Lipka 1994).
2.2 Lexicalization as an increase in fusion The definition of lexicalization as fusion predominates in the literature, e.g.: the phenomenon that a complex lexeme once coined tends to become a single complete lexical unit, a simple lexeme. Through this process it loses the character of a syntagma to a greater or lesser degree. (Lipka 2002 [1990]: 111) the integration of a word formation or syntactic construction into the lexicon with semantic and/or formal properties which are not completely derivable or predictable from the constituents or the pattern of formation. (Kastovsky 1982: 164–165; my translation)
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Working within a grammaticalization framework, Lehmann (2002, 2004) defines lexicalization as the fusion and coalescence of two or more morphemes, which destroys the regular syntactic construction, eliminates internal structure, and leads to irregular internal relations (opacity, idiomaticity). Lexical items, Lehmann (2002: 3) argues, are accessed “holistically”: “Accessing a collocation XY holistically means treating it as an entry of the inventory, as a lexical item”; for example, Lehmann (2004: 169) cites the example of German aufgrund ‘on the basis of ’ as an example of a form that is accessed holistically. He schematizes lexicalization as a process moving from the grammatical to the lexical component, as shown in Figure 100.1.
lexicon holistic opaque irregular
Component grammar analytic transparent compositional lexicalization
Figure 100.1: Lexicalization (Lehmann 2002: 14)
By such definitions, lexicalization encompasses a number of processes of fusion, including the univerbation of a syntagm into a lexeme (see example 1 below), the shift from a complex to a simple lexeme (see example 2 below), “phonogenesis” (see example 3 below), and “phonologization” (see example 4 below). In cases of univerbation, the formation of an inseparable unit is usually accompanied by the loss of morphological boundaries (“fusion”), the loss of phonological content (“coalescence”; see Brinton and Traugott 2005: 27), and/or the loss of semantic compositionality, as exemplified in (1) (cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 49): (1)
each < OE a-gelic ‘ever-like’ (Oxford English Dictionary; Simpson (ed.) 2000–; henceforth OED) either < OE a-hwæþþer ‘each of two’ (OED) willy-nilly ‘whether desired or not, haphazardly’ (< OE will ‘want’ ye/he nill ‘not want’ ye/he [OED]) hobnob < hab nab < OE hab ne-hab ‘have not-have’ (OED) topsy-turvy < top so turvy (< ME terve ‘turn’? [OED]) handicap ‘disadvantage imposed upon superior competitor’ < hand in the cap wherewithal ‘necessary means’ < where with all dyed-in-the-wool ‘inveterate’ more or less ‘somewhat’ out-of-work ‘unemployed’ run-of-the-mill ‘ordinary’ man on the street ‘ordinary person’ has-been ‘person lacking importance’ yes-man ‘person who always agrees’ out-of-pocket ‘paid out in cash’
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XII. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods forget-me-not ‘a flower of the Myosotis family’ lost and found ‘an area where items which have been left behind are kept for reclaiming’
The shift of a complex to a simple lexeme usually involves the amalgamation of a compound, in which one or both parts of the compound cease to have independent existence, resulting in fusion and coalescence. Historically such amalgamations often occur because of the loss or obsolescence of one of the Old English vocabulary items in the compound, as with gar, coppe, wicga, mere, spell, butte, wic, ærn, and hrif in the examples in (2) (cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 50–51): (2)
garlic < OE gar ‘spear’ + leac ‘leek’ cobweb < OE (atter)coppe ‘spider’ + web ‘web’ earwig < OE eare ‘ear’ + wicga ‘one that moves’ mermaid < OE mere ‘sea’ + mægd(en) ‘maiden’ gospel < OE god ‘good’ + spell ‘tidings’ gossip < OE god ‘god’ + sib(b) ‘relation’ halibut < OE halig ‘holy’ + butte ‘flat fish’ lord < OE hlaf ‘loaf ’ + weard ‘guardian’ bailiwick < ME baillif ‘bailiff [officer of the court]’ + wic ‘place’ barn < OE bere ‘barley’ + ærn ‘place’ midriff < OE mid + hrif ‘belly’
Semantic non-compositionality may also result: e.g. bailiwick means ‘a person’s specific area of interest or skill’ not ‘jurisdiction of a bailiff ’. Perhaps also to be included here is what Bauer (1983: 49, 53–54) terms “morphological lexicalization”, unproductive derivational morphology such as warm/warmth, eat/edible, right/rectitude, opus/operation. The non-productive root plus affix is said to be lexicalized because it must be listed separately in the lexicon. (It might be argued that non-productive affixes such as -th are cases of phonogensis; see below.) The process of “phonogenesis” consists in the change by which a morpheme (either grammatical or derivational) loses (most of) its grammatical-semantic contribution and becomes an indistinguishable part of the word; as a result, phonological segments are created out of old morphemes (Hopper 1994). This change falls under what Joseph and Janda (1988: 196) call “demorphologization”, or the movement out of morphology into phonology. As a result of phonogenesis, a morpheme becomes submorphemic, i.e., purely phonological (cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 52), as in (3): (3)
twit < OE æt-witan (van der Auwera 2002: 21) about < OE on + be + utan ‘on/at + by + outside’ besides < OE be + sidan + -es (GEN) handiwork < OE hand + ge + weorc ‘hand + prefix + work’ eleven (cf. Go. ainlif ‘one left’) friend, fiend (containing Grmc. PRES PRTC –ende) forlorn, rotten, shorn, cloven (containing OE PAST PRTC –en)
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In contrast, the process of “phonologization” falls under what Joseph and Janda (1988: 197) term “morphologization”, or the movement out of phonology into morphology. In phonologization, alternations which were originally phonologically conditioned (as in cases of umlaut) cease to be productive. As a result, the condition for the variation becomes morphological rather than phonological. Note that phonologization may also produce morphologically opaque lexical pairs, as in (4): (4)
sit/set (< PGrmc. sat ‘sit-PAST’ + jlie/lay sit/set fall/fell drink/drench stink/stench
CAUSATIVE)
Processes of fusion and coalescence are often associated with “idiomaticization”, or the loss of semantic compositionality. In fact, idiomaticization is often equated with lexicalization. Bauer (1983: 55–59) identifies “semantic lexicalization” in which either semantic information is added or lost (wheelchair vs. pushchair) or there is lack of semantic compositionality (mincemeat ‘a mixture of currants, almonds, suet, etc., which originally contained meat but no longer does’ not ‘meat which is cut up’; townhouse ‘a house in a row of similar houses, a row or terrace house’ not ‘a house in town’). However, Kastovsky (1982: 164–165) distinguishes between idiomaticization, which refers to the semantic changes involved in lexicalization, and “demotivation”, which refers to the formal changes such as fusion and coalescence, and Hohenhaus (2005: 355) concludes that “idiomaticization is only one aspect of lexicalization … ‘lexicalization’ has to be regarded as the cover term for a range of phenomena, semantic and non-semantic”.
2.3 Lexicalization as an increase in autonomy The third view of lexicalization is as “splits” (Himmelmann 2004: 27, 29) which lead to the existence of new lexemes. The most common example of such splits in English is the “liberation” of affixes, when inflectional or derivational affixes attain independent status, as seen in (5): (5)
ade ‘fruit juice’ ism ‘doctrine, theory’ ology ‘subject of study’ ocracy ‘form of rule’ itis ‘sickness’ burger teen ex bi hetero
Decliticization, or the emergence of clitics as independent words, is also cited in this context. In the history of English, decliticization is said to account for the emergence
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of the 2P ending -tow/tou (as in ME wiltow, hastow) as an independent pronominal form thou (but see Brinton 2004 where arguments against decliticization are given, and below Section 4.2).
2.4 Lexicalization: summary of the traditional view Figure 100.2 synthesizes the views of lexicalization presented above, seeing lexicalization as a process of “adoption into the lexicon” from morphology (i.e. bound morpheme > independent lexeme) or from grammar/syntax (i.e. syntax/compound word > simple lexeme). bound morpheme (increasing autonomy) simple lexeme (increasing dependency) syntax
compound/complex word
Figure 100.2: Traditional view of lexicalization
3 Lexicalization and/or grammaticalization As noted above in the case of today in Section 1 above, the same changes are seen by different scholars as either grammaticalization or lexicalization (or both). A number of such cases are reviewed in this section.
3.1 Derivational affixes The rise of derivational affixes from full words (e.g. Ger. -heit, Eng. -hood, Eng. -dom, Eng. -ly, Fr. -mente) has been a particularly problematic case. For some, it represents “a fine example of grammaticalization” (Ramat 1992: 558 n.4; cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 140–142) as it shows decategorialization, morphologization, and phonological reduction. For others, however, it involves fusion and idiomaticization and thus creates new lexemes. In a detailed discussion of German *heid > -heit, Lightfoot (2005) sees the suffix as resulting from both processes, albeit in a restricted sense. It is lexicalization because the shift occurs entirely within the lexical domain, from independent word to derivational suffix, and creates a building block for new lexemes, although there is no increase in “lexicality”. It is grammaticalization because it involves morphologization, or the loss of lexical autonomy, as the suffix becomes an element within a larger construction, although there is no increase in regularity, analyzability, or compositionality (cf. Haas 2007 on the development of each other). In contrast, Himmelmann (2004: 28) sees the development of derivational affixes as “a process sui generis, i.e., neither lexicalization nor grammaticalization” (cf. Haspelmath 2004: 32–33). Norde (2009: 15) observes that it is necessary to distinguish between
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the affix, which is the result of grammaticalization, and the derived form, which is the result either of regular word formation or (subsequent) lexicalization.
3.2 Complex prepositions Complex prepositions such as among (< OE on gemang ‘in crowd’), beside (< OE be sidan ‘by side’), or instead of (< ME in stede of ‘in place of ’) have been seen as resulting from grammaticalization since they involve decategorialization of the noun, generalization to a larger class of complements, and syntactic reanalysis of the construction as a functional item (e.g., Traugott 2003: 636–638). However, Lehmann (2002), discussing Modern Castilian complex prepositions such as bajo ‘below’ (< OldCast. baxo de ‘under from’) and desde ‘since’(< OldCast. des de < Vulgar Lat. de ex de ‘from out of ’), argues that these undergo lexicalization because they lose internal structure, are unified, and accessed “holistically”. Observing that “the boundary between lexical and grammatical units is not neat”, Ramat (1992: 555) considers complex prepositions to result from grammaticalization in that they change from an analytic source to a synthetic target (a grammatical word), but at the same time he notes “they are, however, part of the English lexicon and cannot be considered on a par with other grammatical means like affixes, ablaut, vowels harmony, etc.”. A similarly equivocation is shown by Quirk et al. (1985: 1530), who treat complex prepositions under “phrasal lexicalization”, but recognize that there is a scale of cohesiveness from those which behave “in every way like a simple preposition” (in spite of ) to those that behave “in every way like grammatically separate units” (on the shelf by) (Quirk et al. 1985: 671).
3.3 Phonogenesis and “ghost morphology” Examples of phonogenesis are seen as lexicalization because the morpheme (especially an inflectional morpheme) becomes an unanalyzable part of the lexical item and as a consequence emerges as “more lexical”; the form is accessed “holistically” (see, e.g., Lehmann 1989; Ramat 1992; Traugott 1994, 2005; Giacalone Ramat 1998; Newmeyer 1998; Himmelmann 2004; Brinton and Traugott 2005: 98; Lightfoot 2005: 605). At the same time, the change can be viewed as degrammaticalization (see below, Section 4.2) since the inflectional morpheme loses grammatical function and hence becomes “less grammatical” (see, e.g., Ramat 2001; Heine 2003: 165; Haspelmath 2004: 27–28, 32). Still other scholars argue that phonogenesis represents an end product or “advanced stage” of grammaticalization since it is the natural consequence of an item’s having attained an advanced grammatical status (see, e.g., Hopper 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003: 173–174). (For fuller discussion of these variant views, see Brinton forthc.). Considering cases of phonogenesis termed “ghost morphology”, including comparative forms with -(e)r (near, rather, upper, elder, lower), superlative forms with -(e)st (erst, next, first, last), adverbial datives with -um (whilom, seldom), genitives with -st (against, amidst, amongst, betwixt, whilst), and genitives with -s (e.g. always, else, besides, hence), Brinton (forthc.) ultimately rejects the view that the old inflections are either lexicalized or (de)grammaticalized. On the one hand, as a result of the changes that occur, the inflections become unproductive and are accessed holistically, not analytically; they do not acquire new functional meanings via decategorization. Hence, they cannot be
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seen as grammaticalized, except in the sense of losing grammatical meaning (but this is not a generally accepted definition of degrammaticalization; see Section 4). On the other hand, as Norde (2002: 61) observes, inflections themselves are “very unlikely candidates for lexicalization” since they have little phonological substance, are extensively desemanticized, form part of a paradigm, are obligatory, and modify words or stems. Hence, the inflections cannot be seen as lexicalized either. But what of the forms to which the inflections are bound, their host? While it is true that the hosts may become semantically opaque, idiosyncratic, and formally unanalyzable and come to be accessed holistically, the changes do not lead to new “lexical” (contentful) forms (cf. however, the use of elder, upper, lower as nouns). The changes also do not lead to new “grammatical” forms. In fact, the status of the host, for the most part, is unchanged. Thus, I argue that the loss of meaning in the inflection, its fusion with the host form, and the interpretation of the construct as an “unanalyzable” whole is best understood as a process of “petrification”.
3.4 Composite predicates Composite predicates – forms consisting of a light verb plus a deverbal noun, such as have a bath, take a walk, make a promise, give a response – are an area of language “where grammar and lexis meet” (Algeo 1995: 203). Brinton and Traugott (2005: 130–132; see in more detail Brinton 2011) argue that composite predicates fall into two classes. In cases such as take a look (at), make a vow, have a bit, do a study, the light verbs are semantically very general, the construction is highly productive (deverbal objects increase over time and the construction is expanded to new syntactic contexts), and the occurrence of the indefinite article leads to semantic enrichment (grammatical-aspectual function); these are the result of grammaticalization. In cases such as lose sight of, cast doubt on, get access to, raise objections to, pay heed, the semantic content is highly specified, there is low pattern productivity, the zero-article is associated with idiomaticity, and the semantics is frequently non-compositional; these are the result of lexicalization. Trousdale (2008a) looks at the related give-gerund (e.g. give X a kicking, give X a thrashing, give X a talking to, give X a dressing down, give X a grilling) in a Construction Grammar framework (cf. Bergs, Chapter 103). In this approach, lexicalization is understood as constructions moving from • more to less schematic (more specific, more substantive and contentful; less aligned with “syntax” and “productive morphology”) • more to less productive (less likely to sanction new instances; one-off occurrences) • more to less compositional (lesser amount of internal constituency). Trousdale (2008b) argues that the give-gerunds undergo both grammaticalization and lexicalization. In respect to the former, the construction is generalized over time (the form of the deverbal complement expands), the construction becomes increasingly productive as the number of verbs used in the gerundive increases, and the meaning is bleached. In respect to the latter, fossilization (increased fixedness in the position of
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the indirect object) occurs, the deverbal noun is decategorialized, and the give-gerund is minimally productive.
3.5 V-ing Outside of the progressive periphrasis, where they clearly undergo grammaticalization, some V-ing forms also function as present participial adjectives (amusing, entertaining, fascinating) and prepositions (concerning, following, pending, failing, during) and as a conjunction (considering), as well as in a limited way as degree adverbs (piping). The present participial adjective undergoes word formation. In some cases, there may be subsequent lexicalization, as with knowing ‘cunning, sly, shrewd’ in a knowing look, where the form is both univerbated (no longer analyzed as know + -ing) and has become semantically idiosyncratic (see Brinton and Traugott 2005: 117). The development of P/CONJ forms is treated differently by different scholars. On the one hand, Ramat (2001) suggests that the rise of during as a preposition is “transcategorization” since there is no loss of categorial status, but rather a change in status (but note that in Ramat 1992, he included such forms among his examples of degrammaticalization; see Section 4.1). On the other hand, Kortmann and Ko¨nig (1992) refer to the change as “recategorization”, but seem to see it more as a case of reanalysis or grammaticalization resulting in a set of gradient forms from the lowest degree of recategorization (e.g. succeeding, preceding) to the highest (e.g. during, concerning). Lehmann (2004: 166) likewise treats the development as “recategorization” but argues that the change shares many of the parameters of grammaticalization. Finally, Brinton and Traugott (2005: 117–120) view the shift as a clear instance of grammaticalization because it is a gradual change involving reanalysis in ambiguous contexts and showing decategorialization from verb to preposition/conjunction.
3.6 Comment clauses The concept of lexicalization captures the univerbation that many comment clauses (such as you know, I think, it seems) undergo. Comment clauses become fused, show differing degrees of coalescence (you know > y’know, look you > look), undergo semantic demotivation and idiomaticization, are treated holistically, and are syntactically independent. Again, the treatment of comment clauses has ranged from lexicalization to grammaticalization, and combinations thereof. In a detailed diachronic discussion, Fischer (2007: 297–311) argues that I think type comment clauses result from lexicalization: they become bonded and form one lexical unit, retaining more of their lexical meaning than is usual in cases of grammaticalization. Examining the archaic form methinks (cf. I think), Wischer (2000) argues that it first undergoes lexicalization: beginning as a free and productive collocation, it becomes fossilized and partly demotivated, ceases to be productive, comes to be stored as a whole (as a “symbol”) in the lexicon, and is classified as an “adverb”. She notes, however, that once lexicalized, methinks immediately assumes functions as a disjunct marking evidentiality on the discourse level and can thus be seen as undergoing grammaticalization. In contrast, Brinton (2008), an examination of a large number of comment clauses in English from a diachronic perspective, argues that fossilization – identified by both Fischer and Wischer as central to this development – is not the defining characteristic
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in this instance. Fossilization is common to both lexicalization and grammaticalization. What is significant is that comment clauses undergo decategorialization from fully formed clauses governing complements to syntactically defective (particle-like) parentheticals; they also exhibit Hopper’s (1991) other characteristics of grammaticalization, including persistence and divergence. Semantically, comment clauses begin with verbs of general meaning (verbs of perception and cognition), develop abstract (metalinguistic, metatextual, epistemic/evidential) meaning, undergo (inter)subjectification, and expand both semantically and pragmatically. Comment clauses are functional elements that express non-referential and indexical meanings. They are not contentful (i.e. belong to the major categories) nor do they express referential meaning. They are frequently syntactically and prosodically constrained. Therefore, they are best understood as undergoing grammaticalization.
4 Degrammaticalization and lexicalization Space does not permit a full explication of degrammaticalization, which has been subject to much scholarly dispute – as to its frequency and even to its very existence, or the possibility of a mirror-image reversal of grammaticalization (for discussions of degrammaticalization, see, for example Heine 2003; Norde 2009; for an argument against degrammaticalization, see Kiparsky 2012). However, since lexicalization is one of the eight possible meanings for “degrammaticalization” recognized by Heine (2003: 165, 166–167) and lexicalization is often equated with degrammaticalization, it merits discussion here. Simply put, degrammaticalization follows the reverse cline of grammaticalization. Thus, using two well-known articulations of the grammaticalization pathways, we might conceive of it as follows: • more grammatical > less grammatical > lexical (reversing Kuryłowicz’s [1965] formulation) • inflectional affix > clitic > grammatical word > content word (reversing Hopper and Traugott’s [2003: 7] formulation). Lehmann (2002: 15) schematizes degrammaticalization as shown in Figure 100.3; that is, degrammaticalization involves movement towards increased autonomy, freedom, and contentfulness. Level of Complexity word/morpheme free specific/contentful
morpheme/feature obligatory abstract
grammaticalization degrammaticalization Figure 100.3: Grammaticalization and degrammaticalization (Lehmann 2002: 15)
This section will review arguments for the (partial) overlap of lexicalization and degrammaticalization, and some definitions of degrammaticalization.
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4.1 Degrammaticalization = lexicalization Defining degrammaticalization as involving forms that have become separated from their grammatical rules and have acquired concrete lexeme status with their own autonomous lexical meaning, Ramat asserts: LEXICALIZATION IS THUS AN ASPECT OF DEGRAMMATICALIZATION – or more exactly: degrammaticalization processes may lead to new lexemes. In fact lexicalization has to be seen as a process whereby linguistic signs formed by rules of grammar are no longer perceived (parsed) in this way but simply as lexical entries. (Ramat 1992: 550–551)
Degrammaticalization involves both “demorphologization” (upgrading) and “lexicalization”. Examples of degrammaticalization/lexicalization cited by Ramat include comparative markers that have lost their grammatical status (elder, mayor, Fr. seigneur, Ger. Priester), present and past participles that no longer belong to the verbal paradigm (cloven, shorn, during, Ger. wa¨hrend, Fr. pendant, It. durante), loss of morphology due to umlaut (drink/drench), the “liberation” of morphemes (ism, ade, ology, teen, burger), and the fusion and coalescence of syntactic phrases (per haps > perhaps). Van der Auwera (2002) also sees an overlap between degrammaticalization and lexicalization, but does not consider them coextensive. While both involve movement from a higher degree of grammatical function through a lower degree of grammatical function to no grammatical function, he points out that degrammaticalization (the undoing of grammar) looks at the process from one end, while lexicalization (the making of lexicon) from the other. Furthermore, he distinguishes the two as in Table 100.3. Table 100.3: Degrammaticalization vs. lexicalization (van der Auwera 2002: 22, Tables 3 and 4) Lexicalization song + writer
ifs, buts (ADV > N)
’s (inflection > clitic)
Wide degrammaticalization Narrow degrammaticalization
Thus, the compound songwriter is lexicalization, but not degrammaticalization. The cliticization of inflectional ’s is degrammaticalization, but not lexicalization, that is, “narrow degrammaticalization”; it involves the “undoing of a grammatical formative” into one with a weaker grammatical function. The conversion of if and but are both degrammaticalization and lexicalization, that is “wide degrammaticalization”; it involves both the “undoing of a grammatical formative” and the making of a new lexical item.
4.2 Degrammaticalization: its range and examples from English Some of the types of changes encompassed by degrammaticalization – with the admittedly rare examples from English – are given below: • grammatical word > content word: need/dare (AUX > V) (Beths 1999), gone (PAST PRTC, as in He has gone) > gone (stative ADJ, as in He is gone) (Kuryłowicz 1965: 69; but
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• • • • •
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It is significant that many of these same changes have been cited above as examples of lexicalization. Haspelmath (2004: 27–35) rejects most of these proposed cases as examples of what he terms “antigrammaticalization” (“a change that leads from the endpoint to the starting point of a potential grammaticalization and shows the same intermediate stages” [27–28]), seeing them instead variously as back formation, conversions, phonogenesis or phonologization, loss of inflectional categories (which are “internal to morphology”), and “retractions”.
4.3 Definition of degrammaticalization The most complete work to date on degrammaticalization is Norde (2009). She defines degrammaticalization as the process by which a gram in a specific context gains in autonomy or substance on more than one linguistic level (semantics, morphology, syntax, or phonology). She sees four criteria as essential to degrammaticalization: counterdirectionality (from right to left on the cline: content item ~ grammatical word ~ clitic ~ inflectional affix), novelty, infrequency, and discontinuity (i.e. a single step, not a sequence of steps). She distinguishes between primary degrammaticalization, the process by which a function word becomes a full lexical item, and secondary degrammaticalization, the process by which a bound morpheme (inflection, derivation, enclitic) becomes less grammatical (i.e., less bound or free morphemes). Norde reverses Lehmann’s 1995 [1982] parameters of grammaticalization as shown in Table 100.4. Deparadigmaticization refers to movement from closed to open class in the case of primary degrammaticalization; for secondary degrammaticalization, it refers to “discharge” from the grammatical paradigm. Severance is found only in secondary degrammaticalization, recategorization only in primary degrammaticalization.
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Table 100.4: Reversal of Lehmann’s parameters (adapted from Norde 2009: 127–131)
Weight
Cohesion Variability
Paradigmatic
Syntagmatic
Resemanticization Phonetic “strengthening” Recategorization Deparadigmaticization Deobligatorification
Scope expansion
Severance Flexibilization
Norde (2009) identifies three types of degrammaticalization: 1) degrammation: here, a function word is reanalyzed as a member of a major word class, acquiring the morphosyntactic properties of that class and gaining semantic substance. This type of degrammaticalization is very rare, and Norde rejects many putative examples (e.g. need/dare modal auxiliary > lexical verb [Beths 1999]) because they do not lead to the creation of novel forms. 2) deinflectionalization: here, an inflectional affix gains a new function, while shifting to a less bound morpheme type; this includes shifts from inflection to clitic or from inflectional to derivational affix. The development of the English genitive ’s is an example of the former, though the change in English, because it is complicated by the less clitic-like nature of ’s and by the proposed grammaticalization from the his-genitive (see Janda 1981), is somewhat less clear cut than the comparable development of the Swedish genitive ’s from word marker > phrase marker > clitic. 3) debonding: here, a bound morpheme becomes a free morpheme. Many of the examples of degrammaticalization cited in the literature belong to this category (see Newmeyer 1998; Janda 2001). In English, the increasingly independent status of infinitival to (following its earlier grammaticalization from P to infinitive marker) is shown by scope expansion (e.g. coordination reduction and split infinitives), severance, and flexibilization (see Fischer 2000; Fitzmaurice 2000), but there is no resemanticization (no change in meaning), no phonological strengthening, and no recategorialization.
5 Unified view of lexicalization and (de)grammaticalization This section will attempt to come up with a unified account of lexicalization (following Brinton and Traugott 2005), which distinguishes it from grammaticalization. It will then compare this view of lexicalization with Norde’s (2009) view of degrammaticalization.
5.1 Definition of lexicalization The following discussion is based on Brinton and Traugott (2005: 94–99). A cline of lexicality with respect to degree of fusion in internal structure is postulated: L1 = partially fixed phrases, e.g., lose sight of, agree with L2 = complex semi-idiosyncratic forms, e.g., unhappy, desktop L3 = simplexes and maximally unanalyzable idiosyncratic forms, e.g., desk, over-thehill.
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Lexical items range from fully transparent to less transparent to idiosyncratic. Thus we have a cline ranging from complete formal and semantic opacity, with the results becoming similar in status to unanalysable simplex words (e.g. gospel ), via partial idiomaticization/demotivation, and minor vowel reductions, to even fully transparent forms such as warmth (despite the synchronically non-productive suffix). (Hohenhaus 2005: 356)
Lexicalization is defined as follows: the change whereby in certain linguistic contexts speakers use a syntactic construction or word formation as a new contentful form with formal and semantic properties that are not completely derivable or predictable from the constituents of the construction or the word formation pattern. Over time there may be further loss of internal constituency and the item may become more lexical. (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 96)
5.1.1 Characteristics of lexicalization Lexicalization is a diachronic change that results in the production of new lexical/ contentful forms. Lexicalization is also a gradual and non-instantaneous change that proceeds by very small and typically overlapping, intermediate, and sometimes indeterminate, steps. The input to lexicalization may be anything stored in the inventory, including word formations, syntactic constructions, and even grammatical items. The input tends to be highly specified semantically. The output of lexicalization is a “lexical”, i.e., contentful item that is stored in the inventory and must be learned by speakers. When lexicalization involves changes from grammatical to lexical, the item comes to be semantically contentful. The output of lexicalization can be a form of any complexity (L1, L2, or L3). In the process of lexicalization, items undergo morphological, phonological, and semantic changes from grammatical to lexical, or from “less” to “more” lexical, i.e. leading toward the lexical pole of the lexical-grammatical continuum (L1 > L2 > L3). Lexicalization typically involves fusion (erasure of phrasal or morphological boundaries) and reduction of phonological sequences (coalescence). It often involves semantic and pragmatic idiomaticization, i.e., the semantic components lose their compositionality. The new meanings are often highly idiosyncratic, sometimes more abstract, but sometimes more specific. Finally, lexicalization typically involves decrease in pattern productivity and may involve decrease, or no change, in token productivity In a similar definition, Himmelmann (2004) argues that lexicalization produces fossilization, a decrease in productivity, and a loss of transparency and/or compositionality (Himmelmann 2004: 28). As a result of lexicalization, “an originally compositional expression is treated more and more as a single processing unit, thereby becoming more and more opaque and finally an unanalyzable simple sign” (Himmelmann 2004: 36). Likewise, Andersen (2007) understands lexicalization – the change from non-lexical/less lexical to more lexical – as a matter of continua rather than discrete dichotomies, with movement from transparent to holistic, regular to irregular, full inner structure to reduced inner structure, predictable to unpredictable, and compositional to idiosyncratic.
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Note that lexicalization differs from lexical semantic change in that the former involves changes in both “formal and semantic properties”, while the latter typically involves changes only in semantic properties.
5.1.2 Lexicalization: what it encompasses By this definition, lexicalization encompasses only a few of the changes typically cited in the literature (cf. Brinton and Traugott 2005: 98): • fused syntactic phrases, accompanied by idiomaticization (bread-and-butter ‘necessities of life’), and sometimes the loss of morphological boundaries and phonological change (handicap < hand in cap), • fused compounds, such as mildew < OE mele ‘honey’ + deaw ‘dew’, • phonogenesis, such as neighbor < OE neahgebur, mayor < Lt. major ‘great’ + ‘or’ COMP (but see Section 3.3), • phonologization, such as drink/drench, and • the creation of semantic, non-category-changing affixes, such as -hood < OE had ‘rank’. Lexicalization does not encompass changes that are instantaneous, where the meanings are (more or less) predictable: • word formation processes that are largely transparent and synchronic (compounding, derivation, etc.), including clippings (e.g. ism, ex, ade) and conversions (including those from more to less grammatical as in to off ), and • borrowing (without formal or semantic change). Note that a word borrowed or formed by regular processes of word formation may be subsequently lexicalized. For example, the clipping hood undergoes lexicalization in the ’hood in that it becomes almost entirely fixed in form (definite singular) and acquires a specialized meaning, i.e. ‘an inner city neighborhood’. The conversion of out to a verb could also be seen as leading to lexicalization, involving transitivization and unpredictable semantic change ‘to expose the undeclared homosexuality of (esp. a prominent or public figure)’ (OED), although formal changes are minimal here.
5.1.3 Summary: lexicalization and grammaticalization Table 100.5 summarizes the parallels and differences between lexicalization and grammaticalization (on grammaticalization, see Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). Both are gradual processes of historical change, showing unidirectionality (from grammatical to lexical in the case of lexicalization, and from lexical to grammatical in the case of grammaticalization). Fusion and coalescence are characteristic of both processes, as is semantic demotivation (idiomaticization, or the loss of semantic compositionality). Differences between the two processes are to be found among the other characteristics given in Table 100.5. Most importantly, grammaticalization always involves decategorialization (from major to minor part of speech, from more to less autonomous form [e.g. clitic to inflection], etc.) whereas lexicalization involves movement towards more
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“lexical” or contentful forms. Grammaticalization, at least in its initial stages, often involves bleaching of meaning, but lexicalization involves “concretation” of meaning, and these concrete meanings tend not to be (inter)subjective in nature. Forms undergoing grammaticalization typically begin as general in meaning, whereas those undergoing lexicalization typically begin as specialized in meaning. Grammaticalization leads to increased type and token frequency, whereas lexicalization, which produces unanalyzable forms which are not spread across contexts, reduces pattern productivity and would not be expected to increase the frequency of a form. Cross-linguistically, one finds general grammaticalization paths, such as epistemic > deontic, or motion/ intention > future, or deictic > definite (see Heine and Kuteva 2002). In contrast, lexicalizations are unpredictable, one-off occurrences and will not to be duplicated across languages. Table 100.5: Parallels between lexicalization and grammaticalization (adapted from Brinton and Traugott 2005: 110); [‘+’ characteristic of] [‘–’ not characteristic of]
Gradualness Unidirectionality Fusion Coalescence Demotivation Decategorialization Bleaching Subjectification Productivity Frequency Typological generality
Lexicalization
Grammaticalization
+ + + + + – – – – – –
+ + + + + + + + + + +
5.2 Lexicalization and degrammaticalization If we compare Norde’s (2009) parameters of degrammaticalization, including the eight reversals of Lehmann’s parameters, as well as the characteristics of novelty, counterdirectionality, infrequency, and discontinuity, we find little overlap with lexicalization. The most important feature they share is that of “recategorization”, i.e. “the acquisition of morphosyntactic features of members of major word classes” (Norde 2009: 131). But recall that this applies only to primary degrammaticalization. Also, like degrammaticalization, lexicalization produces novel items, is counterdirectional, and is (relatively) infrequent. Deparadigmaticization and deobligatorification might be expected in cases of lexicalization in which there is a shift from grammatical to lexical (but not in cases of shifts from less lexical to more lexical). In lexicalization, there is typically fusion and coalescence, not phonological strengthening, and fusion would, of course, work against severance. There would also be no expected change in syntactic freedom or scope. Lexicalization involves either loss or gain of semantic substance. Finally, lexicalization is a gradual process that can involve a number of steps, hence is not “discontinuous”.
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Table 100.6: Parallels between degrammaticalization and lexicalization; [‘–’ not characteristic of] [‘+’ characteristic of]
Phonological strengthening Resemanticization Deparadigmaticization Recategorization Deobligatorification Scope expansion Severance Flexibilization Novelty Counterdirectionality Infrequency Discontinuousness a
Lexicalization (Brinton and Traugott 2005)
Degrammaticalization (Norde 2009)
– +/– +/– + +/– – – – + + + –
+ + (–)a + + + + + (–)a + + + + +
Differences depend on whether primary or secondary degrammaticalization is concerned.
6 Summary This chapter has examined lexicalization primarily in the context of (de)grammaticalization. Lexicalization is defined as a gradual diachronic change leading towards the lexical pole of the lexical-grammatical continuum, producing forms that are “contentful” and whose formal and semantic properties are not entirely predictable. It has argued that lexicalization is thus distinguished from ordinary process of synchronic word formation, which are typically transparent and instantaneous. While lexicalization shares with the diachronic process of grammaticalization features of fusion, coalescence, and semantic demotivation, the processes are crucially differentiated in respect of “decategorization”, with grammaticalization producing forms that are functional/indexical/ procedural while lexicalization produces forms that are contentful. Distinguishing lexicalization from degrammaticalization remains a more vexed matter since both are diachronic processes that are have a “counterdirectional” flow (in respect to the lexical > grammatical continuum) and may involve “recategorization”. However, following Norde’s (2009) definition, it was shown that lexicalization differs in most other respects from degrammaticalization; indeed, examples of degrammaticalization are extremely rare in English. Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Muriel Norde and Elizabeth Closs Traugott for very helpful comments on this chapter.
7 References Algeo, John. 1995. Having a look at the expanded predicate. In: Bas Aarts and Charles F. Meyer (eds.), The Verb in Contemporary English: Theory and Description, 203–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andersen, Øivin. 2007. Deverbal nouns, lexicalization and syntactic change. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 30(1): 55–86.
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Asher, R.E. and J.M.Y. Simpson (eds.). 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. van der Auwera, Johan. 2002. More thoughts on degrammaticalization. In: Wischer and Diewald (eds.), 19–29. Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English Word Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beths, Frank. 1999. The history of dare and the status of unidirectionality. Linguistics 37: 1069– 1110. Blank, Andreas. 2001. Pathways of lexicalization. In: Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard Ko¨nig, Wulf Oesterreicher, and Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language Typology and Language Universals, Vol. 2, 1596–1608. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Brinton, Laurel J. 2002. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization reconsidered: On the “late” use of temporal adverbs. In: Teresa Fanego, Marı´a Jose´ Lo´pez-Couso, and Javier Pe´rez-Guerra (eds.), English Historical Syntax and Morphology: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 67–97. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brinton, Laurel J. 2004. Subject clitics in English: A case of degrammaticalization? In: Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English, 227–256. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clauses in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. 2011. The grammaticalization of complex predicates. In: Bernd Heine and Heike Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 559–569. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. forthc. “The ghosts of old morphology”: Lexicalization or (de)grammaticalization? In: Tanja Mortelmans, Kristin Davidse, Lieselotte Brems, and Tine Breban, New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brinton, Laurel J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, Olga. 2000. Grammaticalisation: Unidirectional, non-reversable? The case of to before the infinitive in English. In: Fischer, Rosenbach, and Stein (eds.), 149–169. Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic Change: Formal and Functional Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, Olga, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein (eds.). 2000. Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2000. Remarks on de-grammaticalization of infinitival to in present-day American English. In: Fischer, Rosenbach, and Stein (eds.), 171–186. Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1998. Testing the boundaries of grammaticalization. In: Giacalone Ramat and Paul Hopper (eds.), 107–127. Giacalone Ramat, Anna and Paul J. Hopper (eds.). 1998. The Limits of Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haas, Florian. 2007. The development of English each other: Grammaticalization, lexicalization, or both? English Language and Linguistics 11: 31–51. Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In: Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde, and Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and Down the Cline: The Nature of Grammaticalization, 17–44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd. 2003. On degrammaticalization. In: Barry J. Blake and Kate Burridge (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2001. Selected Papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001, 165–179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticalization: Opposite or orthogonal? In: Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, and Bjo¨rn Wiemer (eds.), What makes Grammaticalization – A Look from its Components and its Fringes, 21–44. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hohenhaus, Peter. 2005. Lexicalization and institutionalization. In: Pavol Sˇtekaner and Rochelle Lieber (eds.), Handbook of Word-Formation, 353–373. Dordrecht: Springer. Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticization. In: Traugott and Heine (eds.), Vol. I, 17–35. Hopper, Paul J. 1994. Phonogenesis. In: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization, 29–45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Janda, Richard D. 1981. A case of liberation from morphology into syntax: The fate of the English genitive-marker -(e)s. In: David Strong and Brenda Johns (eds.), Syntactic Change, 59–114. Ann Arbor: Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan. Janda, Richard D. 2001. Beyond “pathways” and “unidirectionality”: On the discontinuity of transmission and the counterability of grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 265– 340. Joseph, Brian D. 2003. Morphologization from syntax. In: Joseph and Janda (eds.), 472–492. Joseph, Brian D. and Richard D. Janda. 1988. The how and why of diachronic morphologization and demorphologization. In: Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan (eds.), Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistic, 193–210. San Diego: Academic Press. Joseph, Brian D. and Richard D. Janda (eds.). 2003. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 624– 647. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1982. Wortbildung und Semantik. Du¨sseldorf: Pa¨dagogischer Verlag Schwann– Bagel GmbH. Kim, Hyeree. 2001. Remarks on the unidirectionality principle in grammaticalization. Folia Linguistica Europaea XXII(1–2): 49–65. Kiparsky, Paul. 2012. Grammaticalization as optimization. In: Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett (eds.), Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes, 15–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kortmann, Bernd and Ekkehard Ko¨nig. 1992. Categorial reanalysis: The case of deverbal prepositions. Linguistics 30: 671–697. Kroch, Anthony, John Myhill, and Susan Pintzuk. 1982. Understanding do. In: K. Tuite, Robinson Schneider, and Robert Chametzky (eds.), Papers from the Eighteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 282–294. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy. 1965. The evolution of grammatical categories. Diogenes 1965: 55–71. Lehmann, Christian. 1989. Grammatikalisierung und Lexikalisierung. Zeitschrift fu¨r Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 42: 11–19. Lehmann, Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Mu¨nchen and Newcastle: LINCOM EUROPA. Lehmann, Christian. 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In: Wischer and Diewald (eds.), 1–18. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift fu¨r germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 152–187. Lightfoot, Douglas J. 2005. Can the lexicalization/grammaticalization distinction be reconciled? Studies in Language 29(3): 583–615. Lipka, Leonhard. 1994. Lexicalization and institutionalization. In: Asher and Simpson (eds.), Vol. IV, 2164–2167. Lipka, Leonhard. 2002 [1990]. English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics & Word– Formation. Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer. (3rd revised edn. of An Outline of English Lexicology.)
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Meillet, Antoine. 1958 [1912]. L’e´volution des formes grammaticales. In: A. Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Champion. Moreno Cabrera, Juan C. 1998. On the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization. In: Giacalone Ramat and Hopper (eds.), 209–227. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language Form and Language Function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Norde, Muriel. 2002. The final stages of grammaticalization: Affixhood and beyond. In: Wischer and Diewald (eds.), 45–65. Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London/New York: Longman. Ramat, Paolo. 1992. Thoughts on degrammaticalization. Linguistics 30: 549–560. Ramat, Paolo. 2001. Degrammaticalization or transcategorization? In: Chris Schaner–Wolles, John Rennison, and Friedrich Neubarth (eds.), Naturally! Linguistic Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler Presented on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, 393–401. Torino: Rosenbach and Sellier. Simpson, John (ed.). 2000–. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/ Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1994. Grammaticalization and lexicalization. In: Asher and Simpson (eds.), Vol. 3, 1481–1486. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Constructions in grammaticalization. In: Joseph and Janda (eds.), 624–647. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2005. Lexicalization and grammaticalization. In: D. Alan Cruse, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job, and Peter Rolf Lutzeier (eds.), Lexikologie – Lexicology: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Natur und Struktur von Wo¨rtern und Wortscha¨tzen, Vol. II, 1702–1712. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Bernd Heine (eds.). 1991. Approaches to Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008a. A constructional approach to lexicalization processes in the history of English: Evidence from possessive constructions. Word Structure 1(2): 156–177. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008b. Constructions in grammaticalization and lexicalization: Evidence from the history of a composite predicate construction in English. In: Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional Approaches to English Grammar, 33–67. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wischer, Ilse. 2000. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization – ‘methinks’ there is some confusion. In: Fischer, Rosenbach, and Stein (eds.), 355–370. Wischer, Ilse and Gabriele Diewald (eds.). 2002. New Reflections on Grammaticalization – Proceedings from the International Symposium on Grammaticalization, 17–19 June 1999, Potsdam, Germany. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Introduction Case studies Summary References
Abstract This chapter compares the results of research on first language acquisition with the results of research on diachronic change in three domains: phonology, morphology, and syntax. It is shown that there are conspicuous parallels between L1 acquisition and language change, but child language development does not simply mirror diachronic evolution; there are also some striking differences between them, notably in phonology and syntax. Challenging the long-standing hypothesis that errors in child language provide the source for language change, the chapter argues that the similarities between L1 acquisition and diachronic change can be explained by the fact that both child language and adult language are influenced by general psychological mechanisms such as analogy, entrenchment, and categorization.
1 Introduction The relationship between language acquisition and diachronic change has intrigued historical linguists for many decades (for an overview see Baron 1977). At the end of the 19th century, many scholars were convinced that the process of language learning plays an important role in historical development. Hermann Paul, for instance, emphasized the importance of first language acquisition for diachronic change: “es liegt auf der Hand, dass die Vorga¨nge bei der Spracherlernung von der allerho¨chsten Wichtigkeit fu¨r die Erkla¨rung der Vera¨nderung des Sprachusus sind, dass sie die wichtigste Ursache fu¨r diese Vera¨nderung abgeben” [It is obvious that the process of language acquisition is of utmost importance in explaining change in language use; it is the most important cause for such changes] (Paul 1960 [1880]: 34). Paul did not elaborate on this hypothesis, but other scholars made specific proposals as to how language learning accounts for language change. Henry Sweet (1888), for instance, argued that sound change in language history is the result of “defective” imitation in language acquisition: The child learns the sounds of its vernacular language by a process of slow and laborious imitation. This imitation is always defective […] even under the most favorable conditions there is some divergence, for it is impossible for the child to reproduce by mere imitation the exact organic movements of its teachers […]. Even if the changes thus produced in the transmission of a language from one generation to another were imperceptible to the ear, their repetition would be enough to account for the most violent changes, if we only allow time enough. (Sweet 1888: 15)
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Like Henry Sweet, Max Mu¨ller (1890) saw in language learning the primary source of language change. Specifically, he claimed that children are responsible for the regularization of irregular morphology: it is likely, however, that the gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in literary as well as in illiterate language, to the dialect of children. The language of children is more regular than our own […] I have heard children say badder and baddest, instead of worse and worst. (Mu¨ller 1890: 75)
Not all scholars of the late 19th century were convinced that language change is driven by language learning ( Jespersen 1922: 161–162); but child-based explanations of language change have played an important role in historical linguistics until today. In contemporary linguistics, generative linguists like David Lightfoot assume that all profound changes in language history occur in the process of language learning (Lightfoot 1999, 2006; see also Halle 1962; Kiparsky 1968). In Lightfoot’s theory, there are two types of diachronic change that concern different aspects of language. Like other generative linguists, Lightfoot distinguishes between E-language, i.e. the external language which the language users experience in communication and writing, and I-language, i.e. the internal or innate grammatical system of Universal Grammar. E-language is a highly flexible phenomenon that is constantly changing, often in incremental and unsystematic ways, throughout the lifetime of a person; whereas I-language changes more systematically during childhood. Lightfoot makes it clear that while E-language changes are pervasive, the important changes of language history are I-language changes that occur during the critical period of language acquisition. In non-generative linguistics, Henning Andersen (1973) proposed an influential child-based theory of language change. In his model, language learning is driven by a continuous process of inductive and abductive reasoning: children analyze the linguistic data they encounter in the ambient language, postulate hypotheses about the rules that govern linguistic behavior, and test these hypotheses against new data in future language use. Since the cyclic application of abduction (i.e. the postulation of grammatical rules) and induction (i.e. the testing of these rules) is prone to error, a child may end up with a grammatical system that is slightly different from the one of the ambient language. According to Andersen, it is this sort of imperfect learning that accounts for diachronic change. Child-based theories of language acquisition make empirical predictions that can be tested (Croft 2001: 45). Most importantly, they predict that there are parallels between child language and language history: if language acquisition is the source of diachronic change, child language should include the same types of changes and developmental patterns as the diachronic evolution of language. Another important prediction is that changes in child language are maintained into adult language. Only if the child’s innovations survive through childhood and adolescence to adulthood can language acquisition be the source of diachronic change. This chapter reviews a number of case studies that compare the developmental patterns in language history with those in acquisition. The review of the literature reveals that there are striking parallels between the two developments, but there are also differences that are important for understanding the nature of the relationship between them. It is argued that although ontogeny and diachrony are often parallel, children are not
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responsible for historical change; there is no causal link between child language and language history. However, the two developments are often parallel because they are driven by the same principles of usage: adults and children produce similar types of changes because their linguistic behavior is based on general psychological mechanisms such as analogy, entrenchment, and categorization.
2 Case studies 2.1 Sound change When children begin to produce their first words, their pronunciation is highly variable and often deviant from the pronunciation in adult language. There is a general tendency to reduce and simplify the phonetic structure of words in early child language. Interestingly, some of the child’s phonetic changes are similar to common sound changes in language history. For instance, there is a tendency in child language to devoice final obstruents (e.g. [bæt] for ‘bad’) and to reduce consonant clusters to a singleton consonant (e.g. [pat] for ‘spot’) (Menn and Stoel-Gammon 1994: 341). Both the final devoicing of obstruents and the reduction of consonant clusters are also commonly found in historical developments (Hock 1991: 80, 88–89). This has led some researchers to conclude that there are natural processes of pronunciation that affect both the child’s phonetic development and diachronic change (Stampe 1969). However, other researchers have emphasized that the phonetic processes of child language differ from those of language history and that some of the similarities between acquisition and change are spurious on closer inspection (Drachman 1978; Vihman 1980). To begin with, children often substitute particular speech sounds for other types of speech sounds. One of the most common segment changes in early child language involves the substitution of stops for fricatives, for instance, as in [ti] for ‘see’ or [bæn] for ‘van’ (Menn and Stoel-Gammon 1994: 341). Since stops are produced with more articulatory effort than fricatives, this can be seen as a process of phonetic strengthening (i.e. fortition). In diachrony, by contrast, the weakening of consonants is prevalent (a process called lenition): stops, for instance, are frequently replaced by fricatives (e.g. Latin faba → Italian fava ‘bean’) and geminates are often simplified (e.g. Latin siccu → Spanish sicu ‘dry’) (Hock 1991: 80–86; Trask 1996: 55–60). Moreover, the same preference for strong consonants has been observed in children’s simplification of consonant clusters (Vihman 1980). For example, in a cluster consisting of a stop and a fricative, or a stop and a liquid, children are much more likely to omit the fricative or the liquid than the stop (e.g. [dæs] for ‘glass’). It seems that children have a proclivity for using strong consonants, i.e. oral and nasal stops, which contrasts sharply with the diachronic tendency to weaken the articulatory effort for consonants (Vihman 1980: 311–314). Another difference between child language and language change concerns the shortening of long words. Words consisting of multiple syllables are often phonetically reduced, both in child language and language change; but the reduction processes are different. Examining data from 13 children speaking English, Spanish, Czech, Slovenian, and Estonian, Vihman (1980) found that the children of all five languages frequently omitted whole syllables to reduce complex words, as in example (1a–e) from her English database.
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[na:nə] [mato] [ræf] [ʔatobiə] [babu]
‘banana’ ‘tomato’ ‘giraffe’ ‘automobile’ ‘pocket-book’
As can be seen, children usually omit unstressed syllables, preferably at the beginning of a word. In Vihman’s data, 89% of the words with four syllables occur with an omitted unstressed syllable at the beginning of a word and only 6% occur with an omitted unstressed syllable at the end of a word, which is consistent with Slobin’s operating principle that children “pay particular attention to the ends of words” (Slobin 1973: 191). By contrast, adult speakers are more likely to leave out unstressed syllables at the end of a word, as for instance in bio for ‘biological’ or deli for ‘delicatessen’ (cf. Vihman 1980). What is more, while children tend to omit whole syllables, adult speakers are more likely to omit only the vowels of unstressed syllables, as for instance in fam(i)ly [fæmli] or choc(o)late [tʃɔklət]. In other words, while there is a general tendency to shorten multi-syllabic words, children and adults use different strategies to accomplish this: children tend to omit syllables, whereas adult speakers omit only vowels, though often with phonetic adjustments in the retained consonants. Finally, the most conspicuous difference between child language and language history is the differential occurrence of segment harmony. Vowel harmony is a prominent feature of adult language, which can give rise to language change (cf. Hock 1991: 68–71). There is a tendency in adult language to produce vowels of neighboring syllables with similar phonetic properties. The phenomenon is well-known from languages with vowel harmony, like Turkish or Hungarian, in which the stem vowel determines the phonetic properties of vowels in bound morphemes, and from languages with umlaut, like English and German, in which the stem vowel is assimilated to the vowel of an affix (e.g. Old English *mus-iz → mys(-i) ‘mouse-PL’). In child language, vowel harmony is characteristic of babbling, i.e. the early production of sequences of meaningless speech sounds (cf. Kent and Miolo 1994), but it disappears when children begin to produce their first words. However, while vowel harmony vanishes with the onset of language, consonant harmony is pervasive in early child language (cf. Drachman 1978; Vihman 1980; Menn and Stoel-Gammon 1994). In Vihman’s data, an average of 14% of the children’s words contain a consonant that has been altered so that it is phonetically more similar to another consonant of the same syllable from which it is separated by the vowel. Consonant harmony usually involves an altered segment in the onset (cf. examples in 2a–d), but may also affect a consonant in the coda (see examples in 2e) (Menn and Stoel-Gammon 1994). (2)
a. b. c. d. e.
[gʌk] [tæt] [zus] [minz] [dɔt]
‘duck’ ‘cat’ ‘shoes’ ‘beans’ ‘dog’
In language change, consonant harmony is a rare phenomenon. Vihman mentions three examples involving place and sibilant harmony in Moroccan Arabic, Navaho, and
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Alawa; but consonant harmony is very rare in diachronic change (see also Drachman 1978). In fact, Aitchison (1991: 208) points out that there is a mild tendency in historical developments to dissimilate the consonants of neighboring syllables. Consonant dissimilation is especially frequent with liquids, as for instance in the change of Latin arbor to Spanish a´rbol ‘tree’, in which the second [r] has been replaced by an [l] (cf. Hock 1991: 108; see also Trask 1994: 55). In sum, while there are some parallels between the phonetic changes in child language and language history, there are also striking differences between them, making it unlikely that language learning is the major source for diachronic sound change.
2.2 Morphological change One of the most striking parallels between child language and language change concerns the regularization of irregular morphology. A case in point is the development of the English past tense, which has been studied intensively in both child language research and historical linguistics (e.g. Bybee Hooper 1980; Bybee and Slobin 1982a, 1982b; Marcus et al. 1992; Pinker 1999; Maratsos 2000). In Modern English, most verbs form the past tense by the addition of a suffix (i.e. -ed); but there are also “irregular verbs” that indicate the past tense by changing the stem vowel (e.g. sing-sangsung). Old English had more than 300 irregular verbs, but about half of them were regularized over the past 1000 years. For instance, in Old English the past tense of climb was clomb and the past tense of laugh was low, but these forms have been replaced by regular past tense forms with an -ed suffix. Parallel changes occur in the language of preschool children (Bybee and Slobin 1982a; Marcus et al. 1992; Maratsos 2000). The development of the regular past tense proceeds in three stages. The earliest past tense forms comprise both regular and irregular verbs that match the corresponding adult forms; that is, when children begin to use their first past tense forms, usually during the third year of life, they do not produce any errors because these early past tense forms are simply memorized. Then they recognize that there is a systematic relationship between the base form and the past tense form in regular verbs. At this stage, children often supply the regular past tense suffix to irregular verbs, resulting in novel forms such as blowed, hitted, and goed. However, these overregularization errors account for only about 5% of the irregular verbs that children produce at this stage; that is, the majority of the irregular verbs are not regularized during the overregularization phase (Marcus et al. 1992; see Maratsos 2000 for an alternative view). Finally, children recognize their mistakes, eliminate the erroneous forms, and use regular and irregular past tense forms in accordance with the conventions of adult language. The most detailed study comparing the development of inflectional morphology in child language and language history is Bybee and Slobin (1982a). They investigated the formation of regular and irregular past tense forms using data from three age groups, which they compared to data from the history of the English language. The three age groups consisted of preschool children aged 1.5 to 5.0, third-grade children between the ages of 8.5 to 10.0, and university students. The data of the preschool children came from spontaneous child speech and an elicitation task; the data of the third graders were collected in a sentence-completion task; and the data of the university students were elicited in an experiment in which subjects had to supply a past tense form
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for a given base form under time pressure (Bybee and Slobin 1982b). Bybee and Slobin found erroneous past tense forms in all three age groups. The responses were surprisingly similar across groups and paralleled the historical data; but there were also some differences between the preschool children and the two older age groups. The findings can be summarized in five points: First, all three age groups extended the regular past tense to irregular verbs. Infrequent irregular verbs were especially prone to regularization. Correlating the results of their subjects’ responses with frequency data from an adult corpus of spontaneous speech, Bybee and Slobin found a strong negative correlation between the frequency of particular verb types in the adult corpus and the proportion of regularized verb tokens in their data. All three age groups regularized infrequent verbs more often than verbs that occurred with high token frequency in the corpus data. The same tendency to regularize infrequent verbs has been observed in diachronic change (Bybee and Thompson 1997). Second, the regularization rate varied not only with frequency but also with verb class. One irregular verb class that all three age groups regularized more often than average includes verbs such as send-sent-sent or build-built-built. In contrast to other irregular verbs, these verbs do not involve an alternating stem vowel, but form the past tense by devoicing the final stop of the stem. Historically, this class of irregular verbs has lost a large number of types and may soon be eliminated as a class. The high regularization rate of the send-sent-sent verbs in the Bybee and Slobin study is thus consistent with the historical trend towards regularizing the verbs of this class. Third, the verbs of the sing-sang-sung class were often transformed into another class of irregular verbs. Specifically, these verbs were frequently produced in analogy to the sting-stung-stung class, which includes the same stem vowels in the past and participle forms, as in (3): (3)
a. sing-sang-sung → sing-sung-sung b. begin-began-begun → begin-begun-begun c. sink-sank-sunk → sink-sunk-sunk
The subjects’ changes of these verbs parallel their development in history. The stingstung-stung class is a diachronic innovation that evolved from the sing-sang-sung class through the extension of the past participle to the past tense. All verbs of this class originally had a particular vowel in the past tense that was only later replaced by the vowel of the participle (e.g. sting-stang-stung → sting, stung, stung). Thus, once again, the subjects’ treatment of these verbs parallels their historical development. Fourth, the sting-stung-stung class attracted not only members from the sing-sangsung class but also from other verb classes including regular verbs (cf. examples 4a–c). Again, children and adults produced novel forms that are consistent with a historical trend: a significant number of the verbs in the sting-stung-stung class originated from other verb classes including regular verbs (e.g. hang-hanged-hanged → hanghung-hung). (4)
a. clink-clinked → clink-clunk b. streak-streaked → streak-struck c. bring-brought → bring-brung
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Finally, there was one difference between the preschool children and the two older age groups. The difference occurred with verbs of the hit-hit-hit class, which lack a particular past tense form. Like other irregular verbs in the Bybee and Slobin study, these verbs were often used with a past tense suffix (e.g. hitted), but while the third graders and students regularized the verbs of this class more often than average, the preschool children often left them unchanged; that is, they regularized the verbs of the hit-hit-hit class less frequently than other irregular verbs, which Bybee and Slobin (1982a: 35) explain by the hypothesis that young children take the stem final [t] as a cue for the past tense. Historically, these verbs are derived from regular verbs in which the past suffix collapsed with the final [t] of the verb stem (e.g. set-te → set). When the hit-hit-hit class emerged, it first attracted new members from other verb classes and borrowings (e.g. bid, cost), but then it lost its productivity and some of its members were regularized (e.g. fast, start, lift, fret). Bybee and Slobin interpret their subjects’ responses to the hit-hit-hit class as evidence for their hypothesis that children are not the primary instigators of morphophonemic change: if the responses of third-grades and students are more in line with current historical developments than the responses of preschool children, it seems reasonable to assume that adults and older children are responsible for diachronic innovations in the hit-hit-hit class and by analogy for changes in all other verb classes. However, while this argument may be logically sound, one might wonder whether the relatively minor differences in the hit-hit-hit class are really sufficient to draw such a farreaching conclusion. More striking than the differences are the extensive parallels in the performance of child and adult speakers. The subjects of all three age groups produced a large number of novel past tense forms, challenging the tacit assumption that morphological innovations are only produced by children who have not yet mastered the adult forms. Like children, adult speakers produce deviant verb forms that are consistent with diachronic trends, and thus it is conceivable that adults rather than children are the instigators of morphological change.
2.3 Grammatical change That phonological and morphological developments are often parallel in language history and acquisition has been known for a long time; but there are also parallels in the development of grammatical morphemes and constructions that have only been recognized in the recent literature on grammaticalization (Givo´n 1979; Schmidtke-Bode 2009; Slobin 1994; Ziegeler 1997; Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). A number of studies have shown that the development of grammatical markers in child language often takes the same pathway as in diachronic change (for a recent overview see Diessel 2011), suggesting that grammaticalization is not only a historical phenomenon but is also found in child language. On this view, the notion of grammaticalization denotes a general developmental process that occurs in both language history and language acquisition. This section considers a few selected cases of grammaticalization that have been studied in both child language and diachronic change. A classic example of grammaticalization is the development of adpositions from lexical expressions (Heine et al. 1991). For instance, the complex preposition in front of is derived from a nominal expression including a relational noun with spatial meaning. The first adpositions that English-speaking children learn are often used with reference
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to activities (e.g. shoes on) (Tomasello 1992), but there is no evidence that the ontogenetic development of adpositions originates from lexical expressions; children learn the use of adpositions in combination with nouns and verbs as grammatical markers. However, the semantic development of adpositions is similar in child language and diachronic change. Both developments originate from adpositions with spatial meanings that are later often extended to more abstract meanings, in particular, the extension from space to time is very common (Ziegeler 1997: 228–229; see also Clark and Carpenter 1989). Since many adpositions are ambiguous between a spatial and temporal meaning, the development often remains unnoticed. However, sometimes children use a spatial adposition with a temporal meaning that is not conventionalized in adult language, as in the following example from Bowerman (1985: 1292), in which the spatial preposition behind is used with a temporal meaning: (5)
Can I have any reading behind the dinner? (= after)
What this example shows is that children do not simply imitate the various meanings of the ambient language; rather, they recognize the conceptual link between space and time und use this link productively to derive novel meanings. There is a wide range of grammatical markers that originate from expressions with spatial meaning. For instance, existential there is historically derived from a deictic expression. In a recent paper, Lo´pez-Couso (2011) showed that there are extensive parallels between the diachronic and ontogenetic developments of existential there. The developments comprise three stages (Johnson 2001): at the initial stage, there is exclusively used as a deictic expression indicating the location of a person or object in the surrounding speech situation (see example 6a). At the next stage, there is vague or ambiguous between the deictic and existential meanings; at this point, there is commonly combined with other spatial expressions in the same clause inviting a non-spatial interpretation of the initial there (see example 6b). And at the final stage, there has lost its spatial meaning and has turned into an existential marker (see example 6c). Lo´pezCouso shows that the three stages are parallel in child language and diachronic change. (6)
a. There is my house. b. There is a beer on the table for my friend to drink. c. There is no fire.
Another grammatical marker that originated from a spatial source is the be-going-to future (Fleischmann 1989). The semantic side of the development is based on the conceptual relationship between motion, intention, and future. The source construction includes the motion verb go, an agentive subject, and an allative prepositional phrase that indicates the goal of the motion event (see example 7a). Go can also be combined with an infinitive denoting the purpose, rather than the goal, of the motion event (see example 7b). In this bi-clausal structure, the motion sense of go is backgrounded in favor of the semantic feature of intention. If go is routinely used in this context, the motion sense is gradually weakened to the effect that it is eventually no longer perceived as a separate event. At this point, go assumes the function of an auxiliary and the biclausal structure is reanalyzed as a simple sentence denoting a single future event (cf. example 7c). In addition, the expression be going to has been reduced to gonna, though
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the full form, i.e. be going to, can also be used with the new future tense meaning (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 1–3). (7)
a. Peter is going to school. motion b. Peter is going (in order) to help John. intention c. Rain is going to fall. future
The ontogenetic development of the be-going-to future is similar to the development in language change. Using corpus data from two English-speaking children, SchmidtkeBode (2009) showed that the earliest utterances in which go occurs with an implicit future meaning denote a motion event that is combined with some other activity, as in example (8) (adopted from Schmidtke-Bode 2009: 526). (8)
Child: Going wash a hands. [Child goes into kitchen]
These early motion-cum-purpose clauses include the verb going in its literal sense, combined with an activity that is conceptualized as the purpose of the motion event. The motion sense is dominant in the early uses, but it does not take long until the auxiliary use of going outnumbers the motion-cum-purpose sense. Interestingly, although the children’s production of be going to changed from the literal to the metaphorical sense, the children’s parents produced both senses of be going to with the same frequencies throughout the time of the study, suggesting that the changes in child language cannot be attributed to changes in the ambient language (Schmidtke-Bode 2009). While the semantic development of the be-going-to future is similar in child language and diachronic change, the morphosyntactic developments are different. The historical development originates from a bi-clausal construction that is gradually reduced to a simple sentence, whereas the ontogenetic development originates from a monoclausal construction including a simple verb form that is gradually expanded into a more complex structure: the earliest motion-cum-purpose clauses that children produce include the verb going, or the reduced form gon, without the auxiliary be and the infinite marker to, and often lack on overt subject. As children grow older, they gradually elaborate these structures to fully developed clauses (Diessel 2004: Chapter 4). The development from space to time and other abstract concepts is characteristic of both child language and diachronic change, but there are also other semantic changes that can be found in both developments. For instance, Stephany (1986) showed that the acquisition of modal verbs in English and Greek parallels their development in language history. In both languages, children begin to use modal verbs with the deontic meaning prior to modal verbs with epistemic meaning parallel to the development of modals in diachronic change. Another grammatical phenomenon that evolved along a similar semantic path in ontogeny and diachrony is the present perfect (Slobin 1994). Historically, the present perfect is derived from an attributive construction including the possessive verb have and an attributive participle that modified the possessed noun (e.g. I have the enemy bound). Slobin showed that the source construction was often ambiguous between an attributive and a perfect meaning. If the focus was on the state expressed by the participle, the construction had its original attributive meaning, but if the focus was on the action of the subject, the construction invited the perfect meaning. In this interpretation, the sentence expressed the possession of a current state
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that was construed as the result of a past event. In this use, the present perfect occurred at first only with telic verbs denoting a resultant state with an (implicit) consequence for the present and/or future. However, the perfect was later extended to iterative and non-telic verbs in which the resulting interpretation of the original perfect was backgrounded. In these novel uses, which Slobin called the “perfect of experience” and the “continuative perfect” (examples 9b–c), the present perfect does not imply a consequence as in the original “resultant state perfect” (see example 9a). (9)
a. I have eaten lunch [and am therefore not hungry]. resultant state perfect b. I have been abroad several times. perfect of experience c. He has sung in the choir for years. continuative perfect
A parallel development from the resultant state perfect to the perfect of experience and the continuative perfect can be observed in child language. The earliest present perfect forms that children produce involve telic verbs “in contexts in which the completion of one action provides the grounds for a subsequent action” (Slobin 1994: 122). Slobin identified two subtypes of this use. Either the perfect occurs in sentences that children use to “negotiate sequences of activities” (e.g. Can I get more pie when I have picked up my clothes?) or it occurs in sentences that function to “draw the hearer’s attention to a result” (e.g. I have already picked up my clothes so let me play with you) (Slobin 1994: 122–123). In both uses, the construction invites the inference that the situation described by the verb in the present perfect has important consequences for the future. Starting from these early uses, which are semantically similar to the historical origin of the present perfect, children gradually extend the perfect to sentences with iterative and non-telic verbs that are pragmatically less constrained than the early uses with telic verbs.
3 Summary The review of the literature has shown that there are striking parallels between acquisition and change, but child language does not simply mirror diachronic development. There are also differences between the two developments that need to be taken into account in order to assess the role of child language acquisition in language change. The most conspicuous parallels occur in the domain of inflectional morphology. As Bybee and Slobin have shown, children’s over-regularization errors in the production of the English past tense are strikingly similar to the morphological changes of the past tense in language history (see also Dressler 1974; Bybee Hooper 1980; Menzel 2004). There are also parallels in the semantic development of grammatical markers and constructions. The developments of adpositions and auxiliaries, for instance, follow the same conceptual paths in language history and acquisition. The differences between the two developments are especially prominent in sound change. There are phonetic processes that do occur in both child language and language history, but the differences outweigh the similarities. As we have seen, children tend to substitute plosives for weaker consonants, omit syllables to reduce complex words, and make extensive use of consonant harmony, whereas adult speakers tend to weaken strong consonants, omit vowels to shorten long words, and use vowel harmony and
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umlaut rather than harmonic consonants. Aitchison (1991: 209) argues that the differences in sound change are ubiquitous because young children have not yet acquired the motor and processing skills of adult speakers (see also Vihman 1980). The dissimilarities between child language and language history are not confined to phonetic processes; there are also differences in the development of grammatical markers and constructions. While the semantic developments of grammatical markers are often parallel in language acquisition and diachronic change, the morphosyntactic developments are different. There is no evidence that grammatical markers originate from lexical expressions in language acquisition as they do in diachronic change. Moreover, the constructional changes that are involved in the historical development of grammatical markers do not occur in child language. The acquisition of the English present perfect, for instance, does not originate from an attributive construction as in diachronic change; and the be-going-to future is acquired in the context of a simple clause, whereas the historical development originates from a bi-clausal purposive construction. The differences between child language and language history are not consistent with the hypothesis that language acquisition is the primary locus of diachronic change. If children were the main instigators of language change, one would expect a closer match between the two developments. In fact, since the categorical and constructional changes of grammaticalization have no parallels in early child language, we can be fairly certain that grammaticalization processes do not originate from changes in language acquisition. Nevertheless, there are some striking parallels between ontogeny and diachrony, notably the changes in morphology are very similar in the two developments; but even these changes do not have to be initiated by language learners. In the literature it is often assumed that adult speakers cannot be the instigators of diachronic change because adults are assumed to abide by linguistic rules; but this view of adult language is not realistic. There is a great deal of variation in adult language and abundant evidence that adult speakers often deviate from linguistic conventions. As Bybee and Slobin (1982a) have demonstrated, under conditions of pressure and fatigue, adult speakers produce the same types of errors as children who have not yet fully mastered the rules (see also Kerswill 1996). Finally, if children were responsible for diachronic change, their innovations must be maintained through childhood and adolescence into adulthood; but that is not the case. There is no evidence that children’s errors persist into adult language. As children grow older, they eliminate their linguistic errors and conform to the rules (Kerswill 1996). Children create novel forms and novel meanings, but their innovations have no effect on adult language. Neither do children’s errors survive into adulthood, nor do they influence the speech of adult speakers. As sociolinguistic research revealed, the transmission of change is determined by power and prestige (Labov 2001). Since children do not constitute influential groups, their innovations have no effect on adult language. In sum, there is no evidence that children are responsible for diachronic change. This raises the question of why there are similarities between child language and language history. I suggest that the two developments are often parallel because they are driven by similar mechanisms of language use. Leaving aside the motor skills that seem to account for some of the differences in phonetic development, there are at least three
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mechanisms that are involved in the developments discussed in this chapter: (i) analogy, (ii) entrenchment and (iii) categorization. Analogy involves a mapping of information from one particular entity, the source, to another particular entity, the target (Gentner 1983; Holyoak and Thagard 1996). The mapping is based on the recognition of similarity; notably the recognition of structural similarity plays an important role in language development. Structural analogy is the psychological mechanism that underlies the creation of novel forms in both language acquisition and diachronic change (Gentner 1989; McMahon 1995). Entrenchment is determined by token frequency (Bybee 2006; K. Aaron Smith, Chapter 97; Phillips, Chapter 98). In the usage-based approach, mental representations of linguistic entities are associated with activation values determined by the users’ experience with language. Other things being equal, frequent linguistic entities are more deeply entrenched in memory than linguistic entities that are infrequent. The level of entrenchment determines the ease of activation, which may interact with analogy. Linguistic entities that are deeply entrenched and easily activated are less likely to be regularized by analogy than linguistic entities that are only weakly entrenched and more difficult to activate (Bybee and Thompson 1997; see also Diessel 2007). Finally, categorization plays an important role in both child language and historical development. As we have seen, there are striking parallels between the ontogenetic and diachronic developments of grammatical markers and constructions. Some authors have argued that the developments are parallel because they originate from the same “semantic space” (Ziegeler 1997). On this account, there is a limited number of “source concepts” with relatively concrete meanings that determine the development of more abstract concepts in both child language and diachronic change (see also Slobin 1985; Bowerman 1985). However, Slobin (2002) has challenged this analysis (see also Slobin 1994, 1997). He argues that the ontogenetic and diachronic developments of grammatical markers are based on different cognitive processes. In accordance with the grammaticalization literature, Slobin assumes that the diachronic evolution of grammatical markers is based on pragmatic inferences drawn from concrete referential meanings (Traugott and Ko¨nig 1991), whereas the ontogenetic development of grammatical markers is based on the child’s “discovery” of related meanings in the ambient language. Slobin’s analysis reveals an important difference between the two developments: children do not simply recapitulate the pragmatic inferences of diachronic change; but their production of novel forms suggests that the discovery of adult meaning in acquisition is an active process involving the same mappings between conceptual domains as in diachronic change.
4 References Aitchison, Jean. 1991. Language Change. Progress or decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language 49: 765–793. Baron, Naomi S. 1977. Language Acquisition and Historical Change. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Bowerman, Melissa. 1985. What shapes children’s grammars? In: Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. II: Theoretical Issues, 1257–1319. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
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Bybee Hooper, Joan. 1980. Child morphology and morphophonemic change. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical Morphology, 157–187. The Hague: Mouton. Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82: 711– 733. Bybee, Joan and Dan I. Slobin. 1982a. Why small children cannot change language on their own: Suggestions from the English past tense. In: Anders Ahlqvist (ed.), Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Galway, April 6–10, 29–37. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan and Dan I. Slobin. 1982b. Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58: 265–289. Bybee, Joan and Sandra A. Thompson. 1997. Three frequency effects in syntax. Berkeley Linguistics Society 23: 378–388. Clark, Eve V. and Kathie L. Carpenter. 1989. The notion of source in language acquisition. Language 65: 1–30. Croft, William. 2001. Explaining Language Change. An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman. Diessel, Holger. 2004. The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diessel, Holger. 2007. Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change. New Ideas in Psychology 25: 108–127. Diessel, Holger 2011. Grammaticalization and language acquisition. In: Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.), Handbook of Grammaticalization, 130–141. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drachman, Geberell. 1978. Child language and language change: A conjecture and some refutations. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Recent Development in Historical Phonology, 123–144. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1974. Diachronic puzzles for natural phonology. In: Anthony Bruck, Robert A. Fox, and Michael W. LaGaly (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Natural Phonology, 95–102. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Fleischmann, Suzanne. 1989. Temporal distance: A basic linguistic metaphor. Studies in Language 13: 1–50. Gentner, Dedre. 1983. Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7: 155–170. Gentner, Dedre. 1989. The mechanisms of analogical learning. In: Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, 199–241. New York: Cambridge University Press. Givo´n, Talmy. 1979. Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press. Halle, Michael. 1962. Phonology in generative grammar. Word 18: 54–72. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi, and Frederike Hu¨nnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization. A conceptual framework. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Holyoak, Keith J. and Paul Thagard. 1996. Mental Leaps. Analogy in creative thought. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hock, Hans Heinrich. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jesperson, Otto. 1922. Language: Its nature, development and origin. London: Allen and Unwin. Johnson, Christopher R. 2001. Constructional grounding: On the relation between deictic and existential there-constructions in acquisition. In: Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka, and Michael B. Smith (eds.), Conceptual and Discourse Factors in Linguistic Structure, 123–136. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Kent, Ray D. and Giuliana Miolo. 1994. Phonetic abilities in the first year of life. In: Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language, 303–334. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Kiparsky, Paul. 1968. Linguistic universals and linguistic change. In: Robert T. Harms (ed.), Universals in Linguistic Theory, 171–204. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kerswill, Paul. 1996. Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change 8: 177–202. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Language Change. Vol. II: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lehmann, Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Universita¨t Ko¨ln: Arbeiten des Ko¨lner Universalien Projekts. Mu¨nchen: Lincom Europa. Lightfoot, David. 1999. The Development of Language: Acquisition, change, and evolution. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lightfoot, David. 2006. How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lo´pez-Couso, Maria. 2011. Developmental parallels in diachronic and ontogenetic grammaticalization: Existential there as a test case. Folia Linguistica 4(1): 81–101. McMahon, April M.S. 1995. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maratsos, Michael. 2000. More overregularization after all: new data and discussion on Marcus, Ullman, Pinker, Hollander, Rosen and Xu. Journal of Child Language 27: 183–212. Marcus, Gary F, Michael Ullman, Steven Pinker, Michelle Hollander, T. John Rosen, and Fei Xu. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menn, Lise and Carol Stoel-Gammon. 1994. Phonological development. In: Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language, 335–359. Oxford: Blackwell. Menzel, Thomas. 2004. On the relationship between first language acquisition and language change – based on evidence from Russian. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 57: 377–392. Mu¨ller, Max. 1890. The Science of Language. New York: Charles Scribner. Paul, Herrmann. 1960 [1890]. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. 6th edn. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Pinker, Steven. 1999. Words and Rules. The ingredients of language. New York: Basic Books. Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2009. Going-to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development. Cognitive Linguistics 20: 509–538. Slobin, Dan I. 1973. Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In: Charles A. Ferguson and Dan I. Slobin (eds.), Studies of Child Language Development, 175–208. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Slobin, Dan I. 1985. Cross-linguistic evidence for language-making capacity. In: Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. II: Theoretical Issues, 1157– 1249. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Slobin, Dan I. 1994. Talking perfectly. Discourse origins of the present perfect. In: William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspective on Grammaticalization, 119–133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Slobin, Dan I. 1997. The origins of grammaticizable notions: Beyond the individual mind. In: Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. V: Expanding the Context, 265–323. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Slobin, Dan I. 2002. Language evolution, acquisition and diachrony: probing parallels. In: Talmy Givo´n and Bertram F. Halle (eds.), The Evolution of Language and pre-Language, 375–392. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stampe, David. 1969. The acquisition of phonetic representation. Chicago Linguistics Society 5: 443–454. Stephany, Ursula. 1986. Modality. In: Paul Fletcher and Michael Garman (eds.), Language Acquisition, 375–400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweet, Henry. 1888. A History of English Sounds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tomasello, Michael. 1992. First Verbs. A case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trask, Robert Lawrence. 1994. Language Change. London: Routledge.
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Trask, Robert Lawrence. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Ekkehart Ko¨nig. 1991. The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, 189–218. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vihman, Marilyn May. 1980. Sound change and child language. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Rebecca Labrum and Susan Shepherd (eds.), Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 303–320. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ziegeler, Debra. 1997. Retention in ontogenetic and diachronic grammaticalization. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 207–241.
Holger Diessel, Jena (Germany)
102. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Generative approaches to English historical linguistics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction The model: lexical and functional projections V2 in English The story of the modals: grammaticalization Syntactic change References
Abstract This chapter focuses on introducing the most basic tenets of formal generative syntax, sufficient to outline its contribution to the study of the history of English, and to the interpretation of empirical data. As a general thing, generative approaches try to capture the way in which language “make[s] infinite use of finite means” (Chomsky 1965: 8, quoting Humboldt). The modeling of recursiveness in this approach is by tree-structures. The relationship between morphology and syntax can be fairly directly mediated in the generative model by functional categories (a “shell” of functional categories regulating subject-verb-agreement and Tense-Modality-Aspect on top of the VP, a “shell” of functional categories regulating definite/indefinite and number marking on top of the NP). The two main parameters along which languages differ syntactically, and where we also find differences between the stages of a single language are word order patterns, and whether grammatical information is expressed by bound morphemes (morphology) or by free words (syntax). Word order variation is accounted for by movement in a number of constrained ways; this chapter will discuss V2 in the history of English as a case-study. The expression of grammatical information by bound or free morphemes will be exemplified by an account of the loss of subjunctive morphology and the rise of modal verbs in English, which also entails an account of grammaticalization, as new analytic grams are recruited from existing lexical words. The chapter will conclude with a dicussion of the implications of such modeling for syntactic change. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1613–1631
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1 Introduction Generative approaches in linguistics focus particularly on the human language as a combinatorial system that creates an infinite number of different structures by means of combining a finite number of building blocks using a finite number of rules. The rule systems allow for recursiveness: the same rules can be applied over and over again – as far as the system is concerned – to infinity. A noun may be postmodified by a prepositional phrase, which in turn contains a noun, which may also be postmodified by a preposititional phrase, which also contains a noun, etc. A fairly extreme example of such continuous embedding at the level of syntax is provided by languages that allow embedded clauses, as in (1), which was uttered on 8 March 1860 at the 122nd anniversary of the Royal Society of Musicians, which was celebrated in the Freemasons’ Hall, with Charles Dickens in the chair. (1)
When the Grace had been sung, there were the usual loyal toasts; after which the chairman continued: Ladies and Gentlemen, I suppose I may venture to say that it is pretty well known to everybody that all people, whenever they are brought together at dinner in private society for the declared purpose of discussing any particular matter or business, it invariably happens that they never can by any ingenuity be brought to approach that business, and that they invariably make it the one sole object and ground on which they cannot be trapped into the utterance of a syllable. This being the curious concurrent experience of all mankind, it is the cautious custom of this particular dinner to place its business in the very front of the evening’s engagements. It commits it to paper, and places it in black and white before the unhappy chairman whilst he speaks. [Laughter] (The Speeches of Charles Dickens, edited by K.J. Fielding, 1960: 294.)
Two simple rules underpin the long sentences in (1): (i) a lexical verb creates slots for entities with certain thematic roles (agent, patient, etc.); and (ii) these entities can be expressed as NPs, but also as clauses. Such clauses have another lexical verb at their core, which in turn creates slots for more entities, which in turn can be clauses, with at their core another lexical verb, which creates slots for more entities, etc. What constrains the length of a clause is not the system, but working memory. Note that Dickens’s first sentence, (2) the longest of all, does go off the rails midway: (2)
[…] [Clause1[Subject1all people], [Clause2whenever they are brought together at dinner in private society for the declared purpose of discussing any particular matter or business], [Subject2it] invariably happens that they never can by any ingenuity be brought to approach that business […]
If Dickens had been more careful in proofreading (2) before it went into print he would have noted this (minor) violation of the system because of his intuitions about English syntax, his “competence”, as a native speaker. Violations like (2) are characteristic of human speech and classified by generative approaches as “performance” errors occasioned by the constraints imposed by working memory, or, alternatively, by a desire
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of the speaker to make his speech easier to decode by the hearer. The length of the intervening adverbial clause may have made it difficult for both parties (hearer and speaker) to recover the entity all people, a potential subject, which was left dangling in Dickens’s own working memory and that of his audience, who are waiting for the lexical verb to help them process it. Dickens abandons it and instead introduces a new potential subject (it) which is immediately resolved by the following predicate (invariably happens…). It is the overall aim of generative approaches to try and capture the competence of speakers and hearers in encoding and decoding such creative recursiveness, to describe, and possibly explain, how language “make[s] infinite use of finite means” (Chomsky 1965: 8, quoting Humboldt). Performance is regarded as a derivative of competence, the imperfect reality of how an abstract system manifests itself in the hurly burly of many competing levels that all clamor for the speaker’s attention: decisions on what to say and how to say it, the online construction of sound, prosody, syntax. As generative approaches direct their efforts to competence rather than performance, performance – actual language use rather than the underlying system of rules – features only marginally. Performance errors as in (2) tend to be emphasized as support for the idea that much of language is hard-wired, part of the genetic endowment of humans, a blueprint that new speakers use to acquire language. Language is partly an inherited ability, partly a cultural artefact that requires prolonged exposure in its transmission, and the claim is that the input these learners are exposed to, on the basis of which they construct the rule system, is imperfect performance, with hesitations and false starts, like (2). If learners manage nevertheless to become competent speakers, and manage to construct a “perfect” rule system on the basis of these “imperfect” language samples, this means that they are guided by certain hard-wired principles. The assumption is that there is a blueprint specifically for language – “Universal Grammar” or UG – that functions independently of general principles of human cognition. The generative enterprise, then, has always been to model this universal blueprint, and to arrive at a system which, ideally, explains synchronic, crosslinguistic similarities and differences. Amid the infinite variety of how languages construct their morphemes out of phonemes, the underlying syntax tends to cluster in very limited areas of the available space of possibilities, which generativists take to be a sign of the blueprint at work. The brain is still very much a black box with respect to the processes of language acquistion, and crosslinguistic similarities, too, are not conclusive evidence that there is a blueprint specifically for language: the fact that languages overwhelmingly have nouns, verbs, and adjectives, for instance, could also be the result of the general cognitive processes that underlie the way in which the human mind conceptualizes the physical world: as a universe in which entities do things and have certain attributes. That said, the generative enterprise, with its fine-grained analyses, and its eye for generalisations, has yielded insights into regularities and hidden connections in the system independent of the question whether the blueprint is specific to language or not, insights that have been very fruitful in shaping hypotheses and investigations in other areas, like first and second language acquisition and the study of diachronic syntax. This chapter will highlight a number of ways in which such insights have helped our understanding of English diachronic syntax. The two main parameters along which
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languages differ syntactically, and where we also find differences between the stages of a single language, are word order patterns, and whether grammatical information is expressed by bound morphemes (morphology) or by free words (syntax). Word order variation is accounted for by movement in a number of constrained ways; this chapter will discuss V2 in the history of English as a case-study. The expression of grammatical information by bound or free morphemes will be exemplified by an account of the loss of subjunctive morphology and the rise of modal verbs in English. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the implications of such modeling for syntactic change. As many scholars in the field of English historical linguistics do not work in a formal syntactic framework, this chapter will focus on introducing the most basic tenets of formal syntax, sufficient to understand the two case studies in Sections 3 and 4 without any prior knowledge. It does not aim to present an exhaustive overview of the work done in this framework. For such an overview, the reader is referred to Pintzuk et al. (2000), van Kemenade (2007) and Biberauer (2008); a thorough, formal account of syntactic change in the history of English is Fischer et al. (2000).
2 The model: lexical and functional projections The modeling of recursiveness as in (1) in the Chomskyan approach is by tree-structures. Although early machine translation projects had hit on binary branching as the best way to model natural language as early as the early 60s (see e.g Yngve 2000: 617), it was not until Jackendoff (1977) that binary branching, and the more hierarchical structures it generated, was adopted by formal linguists. Jackendoff ’s layered structures assume a maximally simple template that projects from each lexical head and makes available automatic positions for material that is structurally required by that head: a position for a complement, and a position for a “specifier”. A modified version of his original template became popular in the early 80s, with the basic structure of an NP as in (3). Note that Jackendoff ’s bar symbol was quickly transformed into a prime for typographical reasons, but the name “bar” stuck. (3)
NP Specifier
N' N head
Complement
Typical specifier material for N would be determiners, like any, the or all, or possessive pronouns; typical complements would be PPs containing an argument of N (if N is, for instance, a nominalization of a verb, and the erstwhile object of that verb appears in the PP, as in The destruction of Rome). The structure makes available an intermediate ‘bar’ level which can be expanded to accommodate any additional adjuncts; there is only one complement position for every head, however. This allows the status of any given XP to be gauged from its position in the tree: if it is a “sister” of a bar-level, as
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the AP in (4), which is a sister of N’, it is an adjunct; if it is a sister of a head, as the PP in (3) or (4), it is a complement. NP
(4) Specifier
N' AP
N' N'
N
PP PP
Note that complements and adjuncts are also phrases (AP, PP), build on the same template. The structure of the NP in (3) and (4) could be generalized to any lexical category, a generalization as in (5):
(5)
XP Spec
X' X
YP
The result became known as X’-theory (“X-bar theory”). The X’-template was at first restricted to lexical material only. Functional material had been introduced by transformations (Stockwell et al. 1973; see Pullum 1982 for a critique). The introduction of functional material in the X’-format introduced a clearer role for the specifier position in the X-bar structure of (3) as a landing site for moved constituents, as well as the trigger for movement, which was seen to reside in the functional head. Complementizers, accommodated before the advent of the X-bar structure by the creation of a single S’-branch on top of S (for Sentence), as in (6), now came to be lodged in a functional head C (for Complementizer) of a functional projection CP, with an additional Inflection Phrase (IP) encoding the subject-verb agreement features. The simpler structure in (6) was rewritten as (7): (6)
S' that
S NP
VP
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(7)
CP
Spec [wh]
C'
C that if
IP
Spec NP [subject]
I'
I [+ Tense] [Agreement]
VP
Spec
V'
V
NP [object]
The more complex structure of (7) throws up a number of insights: (i) the I-head mediates subject-verb agreement, with the specifier of IP (“Spec,IP”) the landing site for the subject; the subject could be argued to originate in Spec,VP as the VP is the projection where the lexical features of V – including the number of thematic roles/arguments associated with V – are mediated; (ii) Although the CP was initially regarded as specific for subclauses, it was also found to have a role in main clauses: English wh-interrogatives, for instance, translate as a wh-constituent moving to Spec,CP and the I-head moving up to the C-head. The subject-auxiliary “inversion” that is obligatory in direct questions is a result of this head-movement; the subject stays where it is. (iii) The CP level is involved in clause-typing: the C-head can be filled by material that is either moved there from another head (like auxiliaries in I in main clause interrogatives or subclause conditionals) or base-generated in C (conjunctions like if or that). (iv) Wh-words target Spec,CP; whether in indirect questions as in (8) is in Spec,CP, whereas if is in C, explaining the contrast between (8c–d): if in C insists on the subclause being finite (being a head, it can share information with a lower head, which means that it can select a clause with a finite I-head and reject clauses with non-finite I-heads), whereas whether in SpecCP cannot select for a finite or non-finite I-head and hence is OK with either: (8)
a. b. c. d.
I’m not sure if we should stay here. I’m not sure whether we should stay here. *I don’t know if to stay here. I don’t know whether to stay here.
The predicate I’m not sure introduces indirect questions (I’m not sure why/where/when/ how /who/which… etc.) As the conjunction if can also introduce a conditional clause, the generalization appears to be that if expresses uncertainty about the outcome, and that this explains why it overlaps with whether in the indirect yes/no questions of (8a–b). Question-words are associated with Spec,CP in both subclauses (indirect questions) and main clauses (direct questions).
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A system like (7) is also relevant to other changes: the fact that English developed a wh-relative pronoun series (in Spec,CP) alongside an existing th-relative pronoun series (in C) is accounted for by the observation that relativization strategies involve a system in which moved items must be recovered and interpreted that is much like the system required for recovery and interpretation of moved wh-constituents. This functional “shell” of projections like IP and CP on top of the VP is important in the history of English because earlier English, like Dutch and German, exhibits verb movement to I and C not only in interrogatives, but also in main clause declaratives, as we will see in our first case-study.
3 V2 in English Modern Dutch and German have different word orders in main and subclauses: subclauses are verb-final, whereas the finite verb in main clauses is in second position. With the advent of generative theory, this phenomenon called for an explanation in terms of a transformation – but which order should be taken as underlying, and which as derived? Koster (1975) argued persuasively that the underlying order should be assumed to be the SOV order of the subclause. Main clause orders can then be derived by two movement rules: one that puts the finite verb into second position, and a second rule that topicalizes a constituent from the clause into first position. This constituent may be moved from any position in the clause, and may have any syntactic function. With the advent of the functional CP/IP “shell” on top of the VP, this translates as the finite verb moving from V to I to C (the complementizer/clause typing position), and a single constituent from anywhere else in the clause moving to the Spec,CP. Using Koster’s diagnostic tests, van Kemenade (1987) demonstrates that OE has a rule of verb-fronting similar to the one exhibited by Modern Dutch and German, but with an important difference. When the first constituent is a wh-word, the negator ne or a member of a restricted group of adverbs, most prominently þa ‘then’, the finite verb (in bold in example 9) will immediately follow in second position, as it does in Modern Dutch or German, with the subject, whether nominal or pronominal (as he in example 9), in the third position: (9)
Þa gemette he ðær ænne þearfan nacodne then met he there a beggar naked ‘Then he met a poor man, naked’
Note that the reference to an OE text enclosed in follows the system of short titles as employed in Healey and Venezky (1985 [1980]) (in turn based on the system of 1975, 1979). It is identical to the standard TEI (Text-Encoding-Initiative) reference in the Toronto Corpus, which means that line numbers refer to the beginning of the sentence rather than the line in which the relevant structure occurs. However, when the first constituent is not a wh-word, the negator ne or an adverb like þa ‘then’, but a topicalized nominal or prepositional object, or adjunct, like Æfter þysum wordum ‘after these words’ in (10), subject nominals are still in the third position, but pronouns are not: instead, they precede the finite verb, which now looks to be in third place (in bold):
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(10) Æfter þysum wordum he gewende to þam ærendracan After these words he turned to the messenger ‘After these words he turned to the messenger’ Van Kemenade (1987) argues that pronouns are clitics in OE and attach to V, which would explain why they show up to the left of the finite verb in (10); (10) would then also be an example of V2, with the verb still moving to the same position (C) even though it appears to be in third place in surface structure. Pronouns regularly show up in higher clausal positions than full nominals in OE; the problem is that a clitic analysis explains (10) but not (9), which is why Pintzuk (1991) argues for different positions for the finite verbs rather than for the pronouns: the verb does not move as high as C in sentences like (10) but to I. The present concensus appears to be that we need both C and I as the landing site for V, and two positions for subjects: a special high position for pronouns, and a lower position for nominal subjects (van Kemenade 2000; Haeberli 2002; Warner 2007). These positions became available when Pollock (1989) argued, on independent grounds, that the IP projection should be split into separate projections for Subject Agreement (Agr[eement]S[ubject]P) and Tense (TP). The finite verb is in C in (9), and in AgrS, the head of AgrSP, in (10). Subject pronouns are in SpecAgrSP, and nominal subjects in SpecTP. The structure in (12) shows the positions of the various elements of examples (9) and (10), and of a full nominal subject as in (11): (11) And egeslice spæc Gregorius be ðam (; Warner 2007: 88) and sternly spoke Gregorius about that ‘and Gregorius spoke sternly about that’ (12)
CP Spec ða Æfter þysum... Egeslice C gemette
C' AgrSP AgrS'
Spec he he AgrS gewende spæc
TP
Spec Gregorius
T' T
VP Spec
V
The question still remains why the finite verb moves to the higher C position when Spec, CP is filled by a wh-word, the negator ne or an adverb like þa ‘then’, and not when the first position is filled by a first constituent in a declarative. If we see the CP projection
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primarily as one for clause typing, the following answer suggests itself. Gothic, that early East Germanic cousin of OE, shows the remains of an earlier system that indicated clause-type by means of special second-position clitics: -u, for interrogatives (yes/no questions) and -uh ‘and’ (a cognate of Latin -que), as an element introducing foregrounded narrative progression. Both had developed a discourse function by the time of Gothic: -u, which is an optional element, adds an emotional coloring to the question, of suprise or disappointment; -uh, which co-exists alongside a more neutral conjunction jah, introduces a new element in the discourse (Ferraresi 2005). Significantly, -u, -uh and þan are often sandwiched between a verbal preverb (like ga-) and the verb, which has moved to that high position from lower down in the clause. This suggests that one of the original motivations for finite verb movement in main clauses may have been to serve as a host for these second-position clause-typing clitics. Crosslinguistically, such main and subclause asymmetries are a common phenomenon: main clauses are affected by various communicative requirements that have to do with information structure, the positioning of focus and of discourse-old or discourse-new material, and they therefore tend to develop special constructions not found in the subclause (see Bybee 2001; the first position of a main clause is a “cognitively privileged position” for which marked topics and marked foci naturally compete; see Lambrecht 1994: 31–32). Although V2 may at first have been motivated by the presence of a clitic in a high functional head, it may well have become a “stylistic” device at a later stage, an optional rule to draw attention to the special information-structural status of the first constituent, much like the finite verb in Hungarian that moves to second position as a focus marker (Comrie 1989: 63). The different positions for pronominal subjects in (9) and (10) could perhaps be regarded as the outcome of what were originally two different verb-placement rules, one (to C) motivated by a need to mark off a (exhaustive-identificational or contrastive) focus area, which would include verbmovement after first-position elements like question words, negation, and contrastively-focused phrases; and another verb-placement rule (to a lower position, AgrS) to demarcate topics (pronominal subjects, but possibly also “given”, specific nominal subjects – see van Kemenade 2009) and other backgrounded information (like discourse-linking adverbials in first position, see Æfter þysum wordum ‘after these words’ in example 10) from “new” information. It must have become entrenched as a syntactic device later, possibly because functional overlap between questions and negation with clausal modality (interrogative, negative or declarative). Modern Dutch and German could then be argued to represent the final stage of the syntacticization process in which V always moves to C and the difference between the two information-structural motivations has been lost, probably because topics and discourse-links like Æfter þysum wordum ‘after these words’ in (10) can themselves be contrastively focused; see Los (2012) The exceptional status of OE þa, which, as we have seen in (9) above, is aligned with the clause-typing elements (wh-words and negation), may derive from its association with the C-head in its function of introducing foregrounded narrative progression. Although V2 is lost during the fifteenth century, I- to -C movement survives in PE as subject-auxiliary inversion in wh-questions, but also in negation and contexts related to negation and quantification, as shown in (13); first constituent in bold:
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(13) a. Rarely did I hear such overtones of gratitude as went into the utterance of this compound noun. (Green 1980, ex. (32e), cited in Birner and Ward 1998: 157). b. Many a mile did I walk before I saw a light. c. So little time did we have that we had to cut corners. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 96) Such subject-auxiliary inversion is a purely syntactic phenomenon, i.e. entrenched in the syntax and syntactically motivated, as opposed to the type of inversion as in (14) and (15) which is motivated by considerations of information structure (Birner and Ward 1998: 156–158); first constituent in bold: (14) [Performer] offers to cause the card to penetrate the deck and the handkerchief and come out on the table. But when he lifts the bundle, nothing has happened. He tries again and this time, on top of the folded hanky is seen the imprint of the selected card! (Magic Inc. Trick Catalog #25, 71; from Birner and Ward 1998: 157) (15) To the left of the altar one of the big wall panels with rounded tops opens, it is a secret door like in a horror movie, and out of it steps Archie Campbell in a black Cassock and white surplice and stole. (Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 1981: 242, from Birner and Ward 1998: 158). That (14) and (15) do not involve I- to -C movement is clear from the fact that the subject does not intervene between auxiliary and verb in (14) (*… is the imprint of the selected card seen), and the absence of do-support in (15) (* out of it did Archie Campbell step). The rise of do-support belongs to the 16th century (see Warner, Volume 1, Chapter 47), when the lexical verb no longer moves from V to I; as auxiliaries are basegenerated in I rather than V (which shows that they have become a separate category), they can still move up to C, a movement triggered by elements (wh-phrases, negation) in Spec,CP that recalls the motivations both of clause-typing and demarcating a focus domain. If there is no auxiliary, i.e. no overt material in I, the finite features in I (tense and person/number of the subject) are spelled out by the “dummy” auxiliary do, which then moves to C. The subject-auxiliary “inversion” in interrogatives, then, does not really affect the subject, which stays in Spec,IP, but only the auxiliary in I, which moves to C. The rise of do-support in English has been investigated from a generative perspective by Anthony Kroch (1989) and Anthony Warner (2004). Even after the loss of V2, pronouns and nominal subjects continue to show evidence of having distinct positions well into the early Modern English period (Rissanen 1994, 1999). Kiss (1996) has found fairly subtle evidence that there are two distinct subject positions even in Present-day English.
4 The story of the modals: grammaticalization The hypothesis for the rise of V2 in Section 3 – in which the fact that we find clausetyping elements on the finite verb in Gothic was argued to be a smoking gun for the original motivation for this verb-movement to C – builds on the relationship between functional heads and material in the specifier of such heads. A functional head can be expressed by material being base-generated in that head (e.g. conjunctions in C),
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but also by material moving to that head from other (head) positions – like the finite verb moving to C (via I, or, with a split IP, T and AGRS). Languages famously vary between whether they express functional information in the morphology (by bound morphemes) or in the syntax (by free forms). In formal terms, this translates as functional information being expressed in a functional head F either by a free form that is base-generated there (which we will refer to as Option 1), by movement to that head F of a free form from a lower head (Option 2), or by basegeneration of a bound morpheme in F which then requires a free form from another head to move to F in order to pick up the morpheme, because bound morphemes need to attach to a host (Option 3). It is also perfectly possible that a language gets by without expressing that particular information functionally at all, but lexically, by adverbs like probably etc. (which would be Option 4). Such a system does not only accommodate synchonic variation between languages, but is also able to provide an account for historical shifts from synthetic to analytic epression of functional information. If morphological inflections are lost through phonological erosion or language contact, forms may be recruited from fully lexical items to express the information lost in the morphology by a process of grammaticalization (see Hopper and Traugott 2003). Much, possibly all, of the syntactic variation found between languages involves differences in morphology, i.e. in the functional rather than the lexical domain, in the grammatical “glue” of pronouns, definite articles, Tense-Modality-Aspect (TMA) marking, and clause connectives that surrounds the major lexical categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives. If the relationship between morphology and syntax could be fairly directly mediated by functional categories (a “shell” of functional categories regulating subject-verb-agreement and TMA-marking on top of the VP, a “shell” of functional categories regulating definite/indefinite, case and number marking on top of the NP), this allows generalizations over synthetic languages, where the “glue” is encoded in the morphology, and analytic languages, where it is encoded as free words in the syntax. Functional projections as an expression of that functional domain proved to be particularly useful for the description of the long-term drift of English from a synthetic to an analytic language, and the phenomenon known as grammaticalization. The gradual erosion and loss of inflectional morphology meant that some functional information was not expressed, and in time other items were recruited to express it – lexical items that acquired functional meanings. This process is known as grammaticalization, a term due to Meillet who describes it as “le passage de mots autonomes au roˆle d’agents grammaticaux (‘the passage of autonomous words into the role of grammatical elements’)”; Meillet (1948 [1912]: 133). Grammaticalization entails a cluster of changes affecting the lexical item on various linguistic levels: semantically, there is loss of lexical meaning (“bleaching”) but a corresponding gain in functional meaning; there is increased morphological bondedness, with free forms becoming clitics or bound morphemes; and there is loss of stress and a phonological reduction, with full vowels becoming reduced to schwa, and elements becoming monomoraic subminimal words (cf. Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). If null-subject languages develop personal pronouns (in response to a loss in morphology of person and number of the subject on the finite verb), these personal pronouns often develop from more lexical items, emphatic or deictic pronouns, with a resulting split between strong (stressed, with a full vowel) and weak (unstressed, with schwa vowel) forms. If there is a loss of case endings, directional adverbs may develop into
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prepositions to mark e.g. recipients, which would earlier have been marked by a dative; such prepositions, too, develop strong and weak forms (see e.g. Gussenhoven and Broeders 1990 [1987] for Present-day English prepositions and pronouns). Although the gradual nature of the grammaticalization process may seem at odds with a formal framework that recognizes only distinct lexical heads N, ADJ, V and PREP, and no hybrids, and distinct categories of bound, clitic or free morphemes, and that assumes that elements either move from their base-position or stay put, formal descriptions of the difference between lexical and functional categories very neatly tie in with, eg., the grammaticalization parameters proposed by grammaticalization theorists, as in e.g. Lehmann (1995 [1982]), as was noted by Haspelmath (1994) and Roberts and Roussou (1999, 2003). Grammaticalization of a lexical item translates as that item being reanalyzed as the head of a functional projection, and the four options discussed earlier – of base-generation, movement, base-generation and movement, or absence of expression – allow us to break down the grammaticalization process of e.g. the English modals into distinct stages. In the first stage, in OE, mood is expressed by a bound morpheme, a subjunctive ending, in a functional head, which we will assume to be I(nfl) for the purposes of this chapter. The verb in V moves to I to serve as a host for that ending (base-generation and movement, Option 3). There is a set of verbs in OE that will morph into the PDE modals at a later stage, but at this stage they are full verbs rather than auxiliaries, the “pre-modals”. The use of these pre-modals is on the increase in OE as an alternative expression of the subjunctive, but they are still used in their own right rather than as a substitute for eroded subjunctive endings (see e.g. Lo´pez-Couso and Me´ndez-Naya 1996 for a detailed study). Pre-modals are primarily used for clearer and more concrete expression of the required nuance of volition, permission, or obligation that the situation demands (see Standop 1957: 169: “ein Bestreben zur ‘Verdeutlichung’” [‘a striving for clarification’]), and this is confirmed by the findings of Ogawa (1989). The only distributional trend that could be identified for OE was that the ratio of simple subjunctives to premodal periphrases differed greatly depending on the verb in the higher clause. The wider the range of meanings that verb allowed, the greater the probability that the lower clause would contain a pre-modal. A verb like behatan ‘promise’ may encode as many as three different types of promises: the promise of an action on the speaker’s behalf, the promise that a certain state of affairs will obtain, or the promise of a permission (Los 2005: 143). They are disambiguated by pre-modals in the dependent clause: (16)
mid him to ðam ecan wuldre he him behet þæt he cume he himDAT promised that he comeSUBJ with him to the eternal glory a. ‘hei promised himj that hei would enter into eternal glory with himj’ = a promise by the speaker to perform an action b. ‘hei promised himj that hej would be allowed to enter into eternal glory with himi’ = permission granted by the speaker to allow the hearer to perform an action
The actual instance in , on which (16) is based, has cuman moste ‘might come’ rather than cume, which points to interpretation (16b). This explains why the dependent clause after behatan ‘promise’ is far more likely to contain a premodal than the clause after weddian ‘promise’: weddian can only express a single
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type of promise, i.e. a promise on behalf of the speaker to perform a certain action. Similarly, bebeodan with its many meanings requires motan ‘may’ in the subclause to bring out the meaning ‘offer’ rather than ‘command’; see Ogawa (1989: 155–163, 202–204) for more examples. In the second stage, subjunctive morphology is lost, and Mood is expressed by movement only: a pre-modal verb in V moving to I (movement, Option 2); this stage seems to be reached at c.1350, as full equivalence between subjunctive form and modal periphrasis appears not to be reached until then (Lo´pez-Couso and Me´ndez-Naya 1996). In the third stage, in early Modern English, pre-modals have become modals, a category separate from the category of verbs. Modals move from V to I no longer, but are base-generated in I from the start (Option 1). The rise of do-support, around 1550 (Ellega˚rd 1953), demonstrates that by this stage, only auxiliaries, base-generated in I, can move to C in subject-auxiliary inversion, required for interrogatives and negatives (see examples 13a–c above); if there are no auxiliaries, the dummy auxiliary do has to come to the rescue to show movement to C. The story of the grammaticalization of the modals involves lexical heads (V) becoming functional heads (I), but new grammatical elements are not recruited from heads only. The phenomenon of Jespersen’s cycle, in which a negator is first strengthened by the addition of a negative polarity element, but is subsequently lost, with the negative polarity element taking over its function as a sentence negator (cf. French ne … pas, with pas taking over), translates in formal terms into a specifier element being reanalyzed as head. The ne-element cliticizes onto the finite verb, which suggests that ne is itself a head (of a Negation Phrase [NEGP], part of the functional shell on top of the VP) and is picked up by the verb moving first to NEG and then on to I. Ne may be strengthened by a negative polarity item like pas in Spec, NEGP which remains there while ne itself moves up with the verb. But its grammaticalized state (as a functional element, it is unstressed) makes it vulnerable to phonological erosion, and loss; after which pas may take over as the main negator. A similar scenario is possible for OE ne (in the NEG head) and na(wiht) (‘no creature’, the strengthening element in Spec, NEGP), and ME not (the grammaticalized form of nawiht, which is reanalyzed as the head of NEGP rather than as an element sitting in its specifier) (van Kemenade 2000). Jespersen’s Cycle comes full circle when ne disappears and na(wiht)/naht/noht/not takes over as Neg head. Such a structural account of a grammaticalization process also explains other syntactic changes that might otherwise remain simply random occurrences. One is the observation that OV orders survive longest in clauses with a modal followed by a negated or quantified object (Moerenhout and van der Wurff 2000), which makes sense in terms of such objects being in Spec, NEGP, a projection preceding V – which would also tell us that such instances should not be taken as evidence that the genuine OV order of OE is still around at that late date, and that we are right in pinpointing that particular loss as much earlier (see e.g. Kroch and Taylor 2000). The second “random loss” explained the NegP analysis is the loss of the Transitive Expletive Construction as in (17) in eModE, as noted in Ingham (2000), object in bold: (17) There may no lord take up a newe gise, But that a knave shalle the same uptake. ‘Whenever a lord assumes a new fashion, it will always be taken over by people of a lower class’ (1420, Hoccleve De Reg. Princ. 506)
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Like OV orders, the Transitive Expletive Construction is on its way out in Middle English, but remnants remain, restricted, again, to negative objects. It shows the same marked decline towards the end of the fifteenth century as OV orders with negative objects. What this construction and the remnant instances of OV orders with negative objects have in common is that their negated object occur immediately after the finite verb. Ingham argues that this can be accounted for by assuming that these negated NPs move to Spec, NEGP – and there was no NEGP projection higher than the I-head by late Middle English to which a negated object could have moved. The fact that this phenomenon is associated with complex verb phrases becomes clear: negative objects always move to Spec,NEGP but this movement only become visible if there is an auxiliary in I and a lexical verb in V; when there is only a lexical verb that moves to I, the resulting order cannot be distinguished from “genuine” VO orders. With not becoming firmly established in the NEGP head rather than in Spec,NEGP, and constituent negation (as in He eats no meat) becoming increasingly rare as a strategy to negate an entire proposition (cf. He doesn’t eat meat), both OV orders with negative objects and the Transitive Expletive Construction with negative objects became disallowed.
5 Syntactic change How does change come about in a formal approach? Although innovations ultimately come about as a result of a speaker’s desire to impress others, in his or her striving for social success, “for a special communicative effect that gives a short-term advantage to the innovator” (Haspelmath 1999: 1061), formal approaches are more interested in what the next generation of learners, in their critical period with their language acquisition toolkit fully operational, will make of the innovation. The older generation may adjust their output for all manner of social reasons, but the assumption is that their core grammar systems remain unaffected; the innovation is at most a “virus” that only superficially affects the workings of their “operating system” (Lasnik and Sobin 2000). It is the younger generation that may decide to reanalyze, go for an operating system that is crucially different in one respect, and it is here that the locus of change is to be found for formal theorists. For them, language change is abrupt in the sense that speaker’s individual grammars may differ from those of previous generations, but gradual in that not all speakers’ grammars change at the same time. The learning bias in acquisition most consistently hypothesized in all the various fluctuations of the theory is that of economy of derivation and simplicity. In the case of the emergence of the English auxiliaries as a separate class, Lightfoot (1979) argued for a learning bias (“the Transparency Principle”) which would simplify the underlying structure if the derivation from deep to surface structure had become too unwieldy; the premodals had lost so many verbal characteristics that learners preferred to analyze them as a class by themselves rather than as a subcategory of lexical verb with very special properties. Although the data show a long-term drift involving a number of separate stages rather than the cataclysmic single reanalysis originally envisaged by Lightfoot (see e.g. Plank 1984; Warner 1993), the finer-grained scenario proposed by Roberts and Roussou (1999, 2003), presented in the previous section, similarly depends on some notion of economy. The simplest, most economical option is to express modality not in the functional domain at all, but, say, lexically – e.g. by adverbs like probably or possibly; this was referred to as Option 0. Learners will only incorporate a functional
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projection for modality in their deductions if there is some lexical expression in their input that has become sufficiently grammaticalized to warrant postulating a functional projection. They will then have to decide which of the three remaining options obtain. The learning bias postulated by Roberts and Roussou is that some options of the set 1–3 are by definition simpler than others, the least “costly” with respect to computational processing. There is a hierarchy that prefers base-generation (Option 1) over movement (Option 2), and base-generation-and-movement (Option 3, which would be required if the expression is a bound morpheme) over the other two. As soon as the input allows learners to get away with Option 1, they will. The prediction is that synthetic languages will require robust evidence for their bound morphemes to be squeezed through the bottleneck of language acquisition. Any hitch in the transmission, and the tendency will be towards more analytic forms, which will arise through the grammaticalization of lexical items. The same general idea of economy is summarized very lucidly as a principle in van Gelderen (2004): “Be a head rather than a phrase”. If language learners can get away with analyzing a linguistic item as a head, they will – in the functional domain, negative polarity items may start out as phrases in Spec, NegP but are reanalyzed as Neg Heads as soon as that position becomes available through the loss of ne; in the lexical domain, prepositional phrases (OE on weg ‘on one’s way’) may lexicalize into Heads (PDE away) in complex predicate constructions, one of the sources of the English system of phrasal verbs (Los 2008). The idea of economy as a factor in the selection of one grammar over another leads to what has been called “the logical problem of language change” (Clark and Roberts 1993). If one assumes that the “input” will not vary over the generations, it is difficult to see how one generation could arrive at different settings than the previous one. Language systems in real life may of course well be less than optimal, an adequate rather than a perfect system; Andersen (1973: 777), in his detailed account of the strategies available to the language learner to arrive at a grammar as cyclical applications of inductive and abductive reasoning, stresses that the language learner’s goal is any grammar that conforms to the observed input, not a specific optimal grammar. The input may be subtly different from one generation to the next because of changes in language use, or because of language contact situations. Recent research suggests that rich inflectional morphology tends to decline in the presence of large numbers of speakers who learned the language as adults (through conquest or immigration); e.g. Kusters (2003, 2001a, 2001b), Trudgill (2001), and there have of course been many contact situations (of dialects and of languages) in the history of English. Approaches that assume a direct relationship between morphology and syntax tend to emphasize the phonological erosion of inflection as a trigger for change, as it may reach a threshold that obscures or ambiguates the evidence for a particular option (eg. Lightfoot 1999; Roberts and Roussou 2003); postulating such triggers must be backed up by a plausible scenario, however. There is a tradition that correlates loss of morphological case and the development of a more fixed word order in ME (e.g. Jespersen 1894), but the historical details of such developments have proved to be quite resistant to analysis in that such cause-and-effect chains can only be established indirectly; the most we can say is that deflexion promoted the fixing of certain word orders already dominant for pragmatic reasons (see e.g. Allen 2006). However tempting it may be to postulate that the loss of V2 (V-to-C movement) discussed in Section 3 was directly triggered by the
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erosion of verbal endings, it is difficult to see how the language learner would ignore positive word order evidence like (11) (as noted in Fischer et al. 2000: 136). Positive word order evidence could more plausibly be disrupted by contact situations: Kroch et al. (2000) argue on the basis of Northern Old English glosses to Latin texts that the contact situation with Old Norse may well have affected the V2 rule more directly, at least in the Northern dialects, as Old Norse exhibited a V2 rule that was different from the OE rule in a number of crucial respects. This may have led to the simplified version of the rule that is evident from these Northern glosses. A system that shows a preference for simple options will ultimately lead to entropy – the “ease of effort” that has long been recognized as a force in language change. But if certain functional information is not expressed in the functional system at all, the need for communication will give rise to a lexical expression of it. To give a – naturally highly oversimplified – example, a pidgin in which plurals are spelled out with a lexical noun originally meaning, say, fellow (see mipela ‘we’, yupela ‘you (pl)’ in Tok Pisin, Aitchison 2001: 220) and possibly a host of other such nouns, or possession with the lexical verb belong or possibly a host of other such verbs, show conflict between semantic transparency and ease of production and processing; notions like plural and possession are generalizable and context-free and hence candidates for functional expression, which eases the production/processing burden of lexical information. A first move would be to reserve only the noun fellow and only the verb belong for these functions, a generalization that bleaches their lexical content – at which point the grammaticalization process would kick in, with these items reanalyzed as functional heads. The hierarchy proposed by Roberts and Roussou predicts that inflectional morphology is the most costly option (movement and base-generation), which might lead one to wonder why inflectional morphology may arise at all; but language is an uneasy equilibrium of conflicts at various levels of linguistic analysis; bound morphemes may be costly from a computational, syntactic viewpoint, but may represent simplifications in other domains, e.g. prosody, where conflicting demands of aligning such subminimal words into prosodic feet are possibly reduced. Ultimately, human beings need to distinguish themselves from others, to impress and dazzle, and a creative use of language is part of this need for self-expression. This is one of the sources of renewal in both the lexical and the functional domain, but such motivations are outside the scope of formal approaches, whose focus is on what happens when such creative forms are adopted by others and become part of the syntactic and morphological routines of a language.
6 References Aitchison, Jean. 2001. Language change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, Cynthia L. 2006. Case Syncretism and Word Order Change. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 201–223. Oxford: Blackwell. Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language 49: 765–793. Biberauer, Theresa. 2008. Introduction. In: Theresa Biberauer (ed.), The Limits of Syntactic Variation, 1–72. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Birner, Betty and Gregory Ward. 1998. Information Status and Canonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Bybee, Joan. 2001. Main clauses are innovative, subordinate clauses are conservative: Consequences for the nature of constructions. In: Joan Bybee and Michael Noonan (eds.), Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse: Essays in Honor of Sandra A. Thompson, 1–17. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Clark, Robin and Ian Roberts. 1993. A computational model of language learnability and language change. Linquistic Inquiry 24: 299–345. Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell. Ellega˚rd, Alvar. 1953. The Auxiliary ‘Do’: The Establishment and Regulation of its Use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Ferraresi, Gisella. 2005. Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic. Leuven: Peeters. Fielding, Kenneth J. 1960. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fischer, Olga, Aus van Kemenade, Willem Koopman, and Wim van der Wurff. 2000. The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as Economy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gussenhoven, Carlos and Anton Broeders. 1990 [1987]. English Pronunciation for Student Teachers. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff-Longman. Haeberli, Eric. 2002. Observations on the loss of Verb Second in the history of English. In: C. JanWouter Zwart and Werner Abraham (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax: Proceedings from the 15th Workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax, 245–272. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haspelmath, Martin. 1994. Functional categories, X-bar-theory, and grammaticalization theory. Sprachtypologie und Universalforschung 47: 3–15. Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37: 1043–1068. Healey, Antonette diPaolo and Richard L Venezky. 1985 [1980]. A Microfiche Concordance to Old English. Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingham, Richard. 2000. Negation and OV order in Late Middle English. Journal of Linguistics 36: 13–38. Jackendoff, Ray. 1977. X-bar Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1894. Progress in Language with Special Reference to English. London: Swan. van Kemenade, Ans. 1987. Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English. Dordrecht: Foris. van Kemenade, Ans. 2000. Jespersen’s cycle revisited: Formal properties of grammaticalization. In: Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas, and Anthony Warner (eds.), Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, 51–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Kemenade, Ans. 2007. Formal syntax and language change: Developments and outlook. Diachronica 24: 152–169. van Kemenade, Ans. 2009. Discourse relations and word order change. In: Roland Hinterho¨lzl and Svetlana Petrova (eds.), Information Structure and Language Change, 91–120. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kiss, Katalin E´. 1996. Two subject positions in English. The Linguistic Review 13: 119–142. Koster, Jan. 1975. Dutch as an SOV language. Linguistic Analysis 1: 111–136. Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Function and grammar in the history of English: Periphrastic do. In: Ralph Fasold and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Language Change and Variation, 133–172. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 2000. Verb-Object order in early Middle English. In: Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas and Anthony Warner (eds.), Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, 132–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kroch, Anthony, Ann Taylor and Don Ringe. 2000. The Middle English Verb-Second Constraint: A case study in language contact and language change. In: Susan Herring, Pieter van Reenen, and Lene Schøsler (eds.), Textual Parameters in Older Languages, 353–391. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kusters, ChristiaanWouter. 2003. Linguistic Complexity: The Influence of Social Change on Verbal Inflection. Utrecht: LOT. Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lasnik, Howard and Nicholas Sobin. 2000. The who/whom-puzzle: On the preservation of an archaic feature. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 18: 343–371. Lehmann, Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Vol. 1. Mu¨nchen: LINCOM Europa. Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lightfoot, David W. 1999. The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change and Evolution. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Lo´pez-Couso, Marı´a Jose´, and Be´len Me´ndez-Naya. 1996. On the use of the subjunctive and modals in Old and Middle English dependent commands and requests: Evidence from the Helsinki Corpus. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97: 411–422. Los, Bettelou. 2005. The Rise of the To-Infinitive. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Los, Bettelou. 2008. Particles as Grammaticalized Complex Predicates. In: Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena, and Richard Dury (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 2006, Vol. 1: Syntax and Morphology, 157–179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Los, Bettelou 2012. The loss of verb-second and the switch from bounded to unbounded systems. In: Bettelou Los, Marı´a Jose´ Lo´pez-Couso, and Anneli Meurman-Solin (eds.), Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, 21–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McWorther, John H. 2001a. The World’s Simplest Grammars are Creole Grammars. Linguistic Typology 5: 125–166. McWorther, John H. 2001b. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. London: Heinemann. Meillet, Antoine. 1948 [1912]. L’e´volution des formes grammaticales. In: Antoine Meillet, Linguistique Historique et Linguistique Ge´ne´rale, 130–148. Paris: Champion. Mitchell, Bruce, Christopher Ball and Angus Cameron. 1975. Short titles of Old English texts. Anglo-Saxon England 4: 207–221. Mitchell, Bruce, Christopher Ball and Angus Cameron. 1979. Addenda and corrigenda. AngloSaxon England 8: 331–333. Moerenhout, Mike and Wim van der Wurff. 2000. Remnants of the Old Order: OV in the Paston Letters. English Studies 81: 513–530. Ogawa, Hiroshi. 1989. Old English Modal Verbs: A Syntactical Study. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger. Pintzuk, Susan. 1991. Phrase Structures in Competition: Variation and Change in Old English Word Order, Doctoral dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Pintzuk, Susan, George Tsoulas, and Anthony Warner. 2000. Syntactic Change: Theory and Method. In: Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas, and Anthony Warner (eds.), Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plank, Frans. 1984. The modals story retold. Language 8: 305–364. Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365–424. Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1982. Syncategorematicity and English infinitival to. Glossa 16: 181–215.
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Rissanen, Matti. 1994. The position of not in Early Modern English questions. In: Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 339–348. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Isn’t it? or Is it not? On the order of postverbal subject and negative particle in the history of English. In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie, and Wim van der Wurff (eds.), Negation in the History of English, 189–205. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Roberts, Ian and Anna Roussou. 1999. A formal approach to “grammaticalization”. Linguistics 37: 1011–1041. Roberts, Ian and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standop, Ewald. 1957. Syntax und Semantik der modalen Hilfsverben im Altenglischen. Vol. 38. Bochum-Langendreer: Po¨ppinghaus. Stockwell, Robert P., Paul Schachter, and Barbara H Partee. 1973. The Major Syntactic Structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Contact and simplification: Historical baggage and directionality in linguistic change. Linguistic typology 5: 371–374. Warner, Anthony. 1993. English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warner, Anthony. 2004. What drove do? In: Christian Kay, Simon Horobin, and Jeremy J. Smith (eds.),New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics. Vol. I: Syntax and Morphology, 229– 242. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Warner, Anthony. 2007. Parameters of variation between verb-subject and subject-verb order in late Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 11: 81–111. Yngve, Victor H. 2000. Early MT research at M.I.T.: The search for context. In: David G. Lockwood, Peter H. Fries, and James E. Copeland (eds.), Functional Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition: Papers in Honor of Sydney M. Lamb, 593–628. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Bettelou Los, Nijmegen (Netherlands)
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What is Construction Grammar? Constructions and language change Grammaticalization and lexicalization Summary References
Abstract This chapter discusses the potential of a Construction Grammar perspective in diachronic linguistics. After a brief introduction to Construction Grammar it presents some of the current issues and problems in using Construction Grammar in the investigation of linguistic change. Following a number of recent studies, this chapter suggests a distinction between constructional change (which can affect either form or meaning) and constructionalization Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1631–1646
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(which affects both). Constructionalization can be subdivided into either grammatical or lexical constructionalization. A number of case studies from the history of English are used to describe and illustrate both these change processes. A final section addresses the question of how these new approaches relate to well-established language change scenarios such as lexicalization and grammaticalization.
1 What is Construction Grammar? 1.1 Defining constructions Construction Grammar (CxG) as a linguistic framework assumes that languages are systematic arrangements of constructions (cf. Hoffmann forthc.). Constructions are defined as conventionalized form-meaning pairings at all levels of linguistic structure. So, in some sense, they are not unlike the Sausssurean linguistic sign. With these assumptions, CxG departs from the traditional and well-established “items and rules” approach that is being used e.g. in mainstream Chomskyan generativism. The notion of constructions extends way beyond the lexicon as such. One textbook example of a construction is an idiom like shoot the breeze (in the sense of ‘engage in idle conversation’). This, obviously, has a form side, which consists of a verb shoot plus a definite singular NP object the breeze. Note that the form part of this construction does not really allow many modifications. You don’t have a choice of different nouns, number, or definiteness. Shoot some breeze, for example, does not have the same meaning, and neither does shoot the gentle wind (with a near synonym of breeze). Once you substitute any of these elements, you lose the conventional meaning of ‘engage in idle conversation’. Similarly, the form side also does not allow the same kind of transformations that a regular verb plus object noun phrase would allow. The breeze John shot and It was the breeze that John shot are decidedly odd. On the function or meaning side we notice that the combination does not only have a simple, semantic, compositional meaning (roughly ‘execute the mild wind’), but that there is also a non-compositional or holistic meaning, ‘engage in idle conversation’. Some approaches to construction grammar would claim that this is an essential property of constructions, i.e. a holistic, or noncompositional meaning side. Some scholars, however, also include constructions in the inventory which are compositional “as long as they occur with sufficient frequency” (Goldberg 2006: 5, emphasis added; cf. also Goldberg 2006: Chapter 3; Jackendoff and Goldberg 2004; Boas forthc.; Bybee forthc.). Constructions can be found at all levels of linguistic structure and at various levels of granularity, from very simple lexicon-like entries to highly complex structures such as subject-predicate constructions. This can be summarized very neatly as follows: Atomic Complex Abstract: Specific:
noun house
subject-predicate spill the beans
Obviously, this representation is rather oversimplified and there are a number of levels in between atomic and complex, and abstract and specific constructions. How, for example, do we categorize idioms such as give X the boot ‘to terminate an employment
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contract for X’? Obviously, much of the idiom is very specific, and syntactic variability is largely limited. Nevertheless, this construction contains a variable X, which can be filled according to context. For this reason, some frameworks would include a category such as ‘partially filled idiom’ in their schematization of constructions. When we look at the granularity of constructions and their level of abstractness we also need to distinguish between constructions proper as defined above and so-called constructs, i.e. concrete realizations of those constructions. The latter should not be confused with specific constructions mentioned above. These are words or (complex) idioms which, by definition, have a particular non-compositional meaning. Constructs, on the other hand, are predictable realizations of more abstract constructions. One construction of English, for example, is the ditransitive construction, i.e. [[V NP1 NP2] = ‘to cause NP1 to receive NP2’]. This can be realized by the (fully predictable) construct give the boy the book, where the abstract slots are filled by concrete items. While the construct indeed contains a number of individual constructions (i.e. words such as give or boy, which by definition are constructions), the construct as such is fully compositional and predictable. Therefore, it should be classified as a realization, as a construct, and not as a construction. If that were not the case, we’d be forced to classify each and every of the infinite number of sentences of a given language as a construction. This seems neither intuitively plausible nor theoretically desirable. Note, however, that the distinction between construction and construct can also create problematic borderline cases, as constructions may also be fully predictable (i.e. compositional) if they occur with sufficiently high frequency (see above). So it becomes more difficult to decide whether compositional, high-frequency sequences such as no problem or no big deal should count as constructs of some no (adj) N construction, or as constructions in their own right, especially when we consider further more complex developments such as no biggie. This is clearly less transparent and compositional than no big deal – which makes it more construction like in the traditional sense. However, the question remains how frequent exactly a compositional sequence has to be in order to qualify as a construction. Another important approach to the taxonomy of constructions was emphasized by Elizabeth Closs Traugott in her studies on the development of constructions in language change. Traugott (going back to earlier ideas of 1994) distinguishes between micro-, meso-, and macro-constructions. Micro-constructions are individual construction types, such as a bit of or a kind of. Meso-constructions are ‘one level higher up’, i.e. groups of micro-constructions that behave in similar ways (a kind of and sort of versus a bit of and a lot of ). Macro-level constructions form the highest level, e.g. the English partitive construction a/an NP of NP, which subsumes all of the aforementioned. It is important to note that constructional granularity in this approach is not restricted to these three levels. Traugott (2008: 236) points out that as many levels can be developed as one needs “to account for clusterings at various levels of granularity”. Her approach, however, also includes the notion of constructs. Traugott regards these as tokens, whereas constructions at all levels of granularity are seen as types. This, of course, sheds some new light on the question of constructs versus constructions, as it was raised in the previous paragraph. When considering the various levels of granularity introduced here, we are able to say that no big deal, no problem, and no big thing can form micro-constructions. These in turn are related to the meso-construction no (adj) N.
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1.2 Constructional networks Constructions do not exist in isolation. They form a structured inventory with complex relations. This may be demonstrated by the is to construction, identified by Goldberg and van der Auwera (ms., http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/Princeton_Construction_ Site/Publications_files/Thisistocount-final1211.pdf). This construction is illustrated in examples (1) to (4) below. (1)
The match is to begin at 11pm
(2)
Arguments are to be avoided […]
(3)
You are to recall each detail […]
(4)
Junior was to become a lawyer and the chairman […] (all examples taken from Goldberg and van der Auwera forthc.)
Goldberg and van der Auwera show that is to is a non-compositional construction in the strict sense, since it has one peculiar syntactic feature, namely that the copula must be finite. Apart from that, the finite form of be behaves like any other auxiliary. In terms of its semantics, we can see that the copula appears to be subject raising, i.e. the subject of the IS/ARE TO clause is actually the subject of the subordinate clause: (1) means that the match begins at 11pm, (2) means that arguments must be avoided, (3) that you need to recall each detail and (4) that junior became a lawyer. (Note that this is actually not quite true. We can easily develop a sentence like: Junior was to become a lawyer and the chairman, but then he met this Italian girl and moved to Sardinia to become a goatherd!). The construction as a whole can signal prearrangement (1), predetermination (2), indirect command (3), and suitability/advisability (4). Note that all four meanings also share some overlapping areas, as for example in (5). (5)
Your grandfather is to see the doctor next week. (Goldberg and van der Auwera forthc.)
Furthermore, the is/are to construction is also pragmatically constrained and mostly used in specific (more formal or perhaps even archaic) registers and styles. The important point now is that Goldberg and van der Auwera find that the is/are to construction is linked to (or motivated by) a number of related constructions: – the predicative complement (Bob is a kindergarten teacher), – the to infinitive as a possible marker of future orientation (She stopped to go = “in order to go”), – modals such as should/must (She is to see a doctor = “must“/”should”) Note that is/are to of course does not qualify as a core modal (like must), since it has the NICE properties of auxiliaries (Negation, Inversion, Code, Emphasis; see Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 93), but lacks other features of core modals, such as the bare
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infinitival complement and the lack of (proper) inflection and tense marking. However, it surely can be regarded as a semi- or quasi-modal. All this leads Goldberg and van der Auwera to suggest that the is/are to construction can be represented within a default (non-monotonic) inheritance hierarchy […] such that daughter nodes inherit all non-conflicting information from their mother nodes. […] we can understand the inheritance relationship to capture the notion of motivation: the existence of the mother nodes motivates the daughter node, making it more likely to exist and presumably easier to learn and use. (Goldberg and van der Auwera forthc.)
In other words, the is/are to construction forms a particular node in the constructional network. This node in turn has a number of mother nodes (and possibly also daughter nodes, but that is a different question). The is/are to construction as a daughter node inherits all information (form and function) from its mother nodes, as long as they do not conflict with each other. At the same time, the existence of these particular mother nodes motivates the development and existence of this daughter node, i.e. the daughter node does not appear randomly and out-of-the-blue but rather takes its raison d’eˆtre from these mother nodes. For example, they could invite, via pragmatic inference, the meaning of this new construction. Eventually, this fact can be summarized in Figure 103.1 below. Auxiliary construction “NICE” properties [Vaux[VPbare]]vp
Modal Aux construction: [V1Modal[VPbare]]vp
Subj-Pred construction: Syn: [VBE [Predicate]] Sem: Pred (Subj)
Infinitive complement construction [V [VPto]]vp
[SEEM [VPto]]vp [beaux[VP
[ TRY [VPto]]vp
bare]]vp
Is-to construction [OUGHTtense[VP(to)]]vp
[ APPEAR [VPto]]vp
Syntax: [ BEtense [VPto]]vp Semantics: PrIPS Pragmatics: Formal register; I-S >:--|
Figure 103.1: The inheritance network of the is to construction (Goldberg and van der Auwera forthc.)
This example shows that constructions (like words in word fields and semantic networks) do not exist in isolation but form a complex inventory with diverse relations between the single items at various levels. Before we take a closer look at Construction Grammar and the history of English (or, more broadly speaking, language change) there are two more theoretical issues concerning Construction Grammar that we need to address. On the one hand, the
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label Construction Grammar (or CxG) is a very rough short hand form for a whole group of grammatical theories which all share some core ideas and aspects, but which can also differ quite a bit in their details. Goldberg (2006: Chapter 10) and ¨ stman (2004) identify some of the most important lines of research and Fried and O summarize the main coordinates. All CxG frameworks share the assumption that constructions are learned, conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, and that constructions form a non-derivational network. In other words, construction grammars work with a “What you see is what you get” approach that does not include any hidden, deep, or underlying levels or structures. Unification Construction Grammar as developed in Fillmore (1999) and Fillmore et al. (1988), among others, and Sag’s (2011) sign-based construction grammar seem to differ from other frameworks in that they are very formalized with their focus on unification-based models (such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar). They pay least attention to aspects of usage and psychological or cognitive motivation for constructions, but put their main emphasis on “formal explicitness; maximal generalization” (Goldberg 2006: 215). Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001) and Cognitive Construction Grammar (1994, Goldberg 2006; Lakoff 1987), on the other hand, are characterized as usage-based, with an easy and straightforward notation and a heavy emphasis on cognitive motivation and psychological plausibility (Goldberg 2006: 215). Radical Construction Grammar seems to differ from Cognitive Construction Grammar in so far as it focuses rather on typological data and divergences among the languages of the world whereas Cognitive Construction Grammar is more concerned with corpora, experiments, language use, and statistical data from one single language. The following exposition will not be couched in any one particular framework, though it might tend towards the Cognitive Construction Grammar camp. Rather, I will try to work with something that Croft once termed “vanilla construction grammar”, i.e. a framework that is built on the most widely accepted assumptions and that explicitly highlights any peculiarities in its perspectives. Hence, we will also continue to use the alphabetism CxG as the most neutral form. The second point we need to address is notation. Just as we have a number of different CxG frameworks, there are also a number of different notations and formalisms. Unification- and sign-based approaches rather work with boxes and diagrams which, unsurprisingly, look a lot like HPSG notation. Goldberg (1995, less so 2006) uses different lines and fonts to represent the structure of constructions, Croft (2001) sometimes uses lines and boxes, yet other scholars rather work with prose explanations of what they observe or analyze. This is not to be seen as a weakness of the approach as ¨ stman (2004) point out, but rather as one of its strengths. As we such, as Fried and O have said before regarding cognitive construction grammar frameworks, the notation is usually only seen as a tool that helps to clarify certain relevant issues. It is never seen as something worth pursuing independently or with any implicit merit. Thus, the following exposition will also be fairly liberal with regard to the notation that it uses.
2 Constructions and language change Language in CxG can be defined as a network of constructions (see Section 1). Language change therefore means change in the network (cf. Bergs and Diewald 2008). It should be pointed out right at the outset that CxG is often usage-based (see
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Section 1.2) and, therefore, does not put great emphasis on child language acquisition in the development of language – in contrast, for instance, to Chomskyan Generativism (see, e.g., Lightfoot 1999; cf. Diessel, Chapter 101). Language in CxG is based on and influenced by language use, and thus dynamic and potentially changing throughout the lifespan of the individual speaker (cf. Bybee 2006; Tomasello 2002, 2006). One very simple example might help to illustrate this. Idioms such as kick the bucket are obviously prime example of constructions – there is no reason why speakers should not learn and use new idioms in their native language at any given point in their life. Learning and using a new idiom, then, of course adds to the constructional inventory of that speaker and thus, by definition, constitutes language change in the sense just outlined. Note that in CxG such a change is not simply relegated to some change in use or a simple lexical change. CxG does not maintain any distinction between grammar and lexicon, and so changes in idioms are in some sense on a par with changes in syntax, morphology, and phonology. We might see change in CxG as addition, loss, or change of particular constructions within the network. As we have seen Section 1, constructions are defined by a form and a meaning side. This means that constructions may either change as a whole, i.e. including both their form and their meaning side, or only partly, when one of the two sides changes. Traugott (2011) therefore distinguishes between two types of change. Constructional change (CC) is considered language change generally and includes change on either form or meaning side. Constructionalization (Cxzn), in contrast, is regarded as a subset of constructional change and refers to changes that affect both the meaning and form sides. Constructionalization in turn has two subtypes: grammatical constructionalization (GCxzn) and lexical constructionalization (LCxzn). And while both processes are obviously related to traditional language processes, such as grammaticalization and lexicalization, the two viewpoints must not be confused, as we will show in the following sections.
2.1 Constructional change Constructional change (CC) as the general term covering language change in construction grammar subsumes constructionalization (Cxzn). CC refers to changes on only one side, either form or meaning, Cxzn is defined as a special case, i.e. as change in both form and meaning. One example of CC would be the fusion of the future marker going to to gonna. This, obviously, changes the form side of the construction as it phonetically fuses (or univerbates) going with to. This change in form, however, has no correlate in meaning, i.e. both forms, going to and gonna still have a ‘future’ meaning. Similarly, changes in meaning are CC. The adjective cool originally meant ‘relatively low in temperature, refreshing’ (OE col from OHG kuoli). It was only in the early 20th century that it acquired its modern meanings ‘attractively clever, shrewd, stylish’ (see OED, s.v. cool 3. Adj. 8). Still, there was no corresponding change in form to accompany the shift in meaning. Note, however, that CCs may occur in a sequence that can eventually lead to Cxzn, i.e. change on both form and meaning side. One such example would be the development of an item such as goodbye. This originated as a fully compositional, transparent phrase: God be with you. As this phrase is neither non-compositional nor, I believe, extremely frequent initially, it probably does not qualify as a construction in the strict sense, but is rather a construct (i.e. a realization) of
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some more abstract subjunctive subject-predicate construction. Through increased frequency in use, however, both form and meaning were eroded until we find the no longer transparent goodbye. This is indeed highly frequent, no longer transparent or compositional, and of course, part of the English lexicon, and thus by definition a construction. However, we may assume that this change did not happen spontaneously or catastrophically, but rather in a slow, gradual fashion. This, again, can be elegantly captured in CxG. The OED (s.v. goodbye), for example, contains the 1598 Shakespeare quote God be wy you (Love’s Labour’s Lost III.i.146) along with 1623 Hamlet God buy’ ye (II.ii.551). Interestingly, the 1604 version contains a further developed form: God buy to you. The latter is particularly interesting, as it not only lacks with in any form, but also as the prepositional phrase to you is incompatible with some ‘God be with you’ reading, and thus indicates a completed reanalysis of the construction in form and meaning. This perhaps sounded like [go:d bei tə jə] and did not resemble either form or meaning of the original constructions, and therefore counts as Cxzn in the original sense. In how far this is a problem of manuscript transmission and not unlikely a result of some mishearing will have to be seen (though note that even mishearing is often somehow ‘motivated’ and thus rarely random). We may suspect that up to that point we see an interplay of phases where the phrase is left morphosyntactically more or less intact, but shows some eroded meaning, and phases where the morphosyntax/ phonology changes, but the meaning remains constant. These gradual CCs eventually culminated in at least one (or more) lexical Cxzns that resulted in the modern goodbye, which still underwent CCs (clippings, reduplications) that lead to bye and bye-bye. Unsurprisingly, this whole change process is also characterized by what has been termed layering (Hopper 1991), i.e. the coexistence of old and new forms. In the nineteenth century still, speakers seemed to have access to the original meaning and form. The OED (s.v. god) cites 1809 B. H. Malkin tr. A. R. Le Sage Adventures Gil Blas II.iv. viii.180: A profusion of farewells and god-be-with-you’s. Here, the form is still intact (but probably nominalized and in the plural!), but the meaning has clearly shifted to some more modern sense (which, interestingly is still not farewell, as one might expect. Farewell and goodbye can still be used in the same utterance non-synonymously. Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, for example, is the title of the 251st and final episode of the television series M*A*S*H). All this goes to show that for quite some time different forms and meanings of ‘God be with you’ or ‘goodbye’ may have co-existed.
2.2 Constructionalization Traugott (forthc.) defines constructionalization (Cxzn) as change in the form and meaning of a construction. We find both lexical constructionalization and grammatical constructionalization. At first sight, this may sound contradictory, as CxG assumes that there is no difference between lexicon and grammar (i.e. everything is treated as a construction). However, Traugott (forthc.) claims that even in CxG we can identify something like a ‘grammatical pole’ and a ‘lexical pole’ in the language system. This grammatical pole has a ‘procedural function’ and “regulates interpretations of connections between N, V, A, and clauses” (Traugott: forthc.). The lexical pole, in contrast, would then have a more ‘static function’ in the language system, and would be more concerned with the contentful aspects of language (cf. Brinton, Chapter 100).
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2.2.1 Grammatical constructionalization GCxns is the development of a Cxn in the direction of the grammatical pole. At the core of Cxzn we find the reanalysis of both the form and meaning of a particular construction, or even hitherto unrelated linguistic material which thus develops into a new construction. Reanalysis on the morphosyntactic level is usually seen as the new segmentation or re-interpretation of morphosyntatic information. On the meaning level reanalysis means semantic reinterpretation or change. One textbook example of reanalysis is the development of the future construction going to in English (see Hopper and Traugott 2003 for a traditional account couched in the framework of grammaticalization; cf. Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99 and Traugott (forthc.) for an analysis in constructionalization terms). Going to began its life as a regular, transparent expression based on the full verb go which meant something like “physical movement from place A to place B”. Traugott cites one example from 1477, however, where this motion reading is a bit more problematic and at least ambiguous: also ther passed a theef byfore alexandre that was goyng to be hanged…(1477 Mubashir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa’, 11C, Dictes or sayengis of the philosophhers [LION: EEBO], quoted in Traugott forthc.). In brief, the older go construction began to be combined with a (new) progressive construction, with a purposive construction, and in some cases also with the passive construction. Traugott hypothesizes that early in the 17th century semantic constraints on the full verb were also relaxed and that now we start to see verbs and contexts which are actually incompatible with a motion reading, and mostly ambiguous between purpose/future readings. But it is only in the early 18th century, with evidence of raising syntax with going to, that we find complete re-analysis both of form and meaning (Traugott forthc.). We can assume, for example, that to was now seen as bonding with going, hence [going to] V and no longer going [to V]. This reanalysis also forms the source for the later CC that univerbates this structure into gonna. Moreover, the new construction loses concrete meaning aspects and becomes more general or functional (it moves towards the grammatical pole, hence Grammatcial Cxzn) and it begins to occur with much greater frequency and in more syntactic contexts. Note that some of the latter processes can be seen as part of the GCxzn, but that often they themselves belong to CC, as they affect only form or meaning, but not both. It is important to point out here, along with Traugott (forthc.), that such a constructional account is extremely helpful in modeling the very slow, gradual and piecemeal fashion of this development. Even though at one point reanalysis as such must have taken place, this is couched in a number of equally important CCs that on the one hand lead up to reanalysis as a culminating point and on the other follow in the wake of it. Traugott also stresses that analogy, which is commonly seen as a major factor in this change (see Fischer 2007), does not play a key role in this constructional scenario. It is rather “the cluster of atypical uses” which can be seen as the “prime factor” here. One interesting way of capturing these gradual changes like the increased schematicity, greater combinatorial power and atypical uses is the analysis in terms of collostructions (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003; Stefanowitsch 2012). Collostructional analyses investigate the association between lexemes and particular constructions. By using large scale corpora and complex statistical tests we can arrive at the ‘collostructional strength’ of particular combinations, i.e. the strength of the association between particular lexemes and the constructions in which they can occur. In diachronic applications of this technique we
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may actually arrive at a detailed picture of which verbs associated when and how strongly with the going to construction (for some examples, see ). One particularly interesting tool in this respect is Martin Hilpert’s Motion Chart Software (http://omnibus. uni-freiburg.de/~mh608/motion.html), which impressively visualizes various diachronic processes, such as verb-construction collocates. A similar case study can be seen in the development of the modal verbs in English. Apparently, these came into being between the late Old English period (though some date their first single occurrences even earlier; cf. Visser 1963–73: section 1581; Warner 1993: 166–168) and the Early Modern period. In the Old English period verbs such as willan, cunnan, magan, motan, scullan essentially behaved like ordinary finite lexical verbs, i.e. they inflected regularly and had full lexical meaning. In contrast, the class of modal verbs (will, can, may, might, must, should, could, would) in Present-day English shows some peculiar properties: as auxiliaries, they have NICE properties (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 93, 108), i.e. they take negation (He can not go), invert (Can he go?), show code (A: He can go. B: Can he ø?), and can be used emphatically (He can’t go!). Moreover they do not inflect regularly and take bare infinitives as complements. Semantically, they are not completely empty, but are also fairly limited in their meaning potential as modifiers of the lexical verbs they combine with. Note that we can also identify a number of gradient elements, semi-modals, in PDE such as be to, ought to, dare which also show some properties of the core modals, but not all of them (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 108–110). The gradient and ambiguous nature of these elements has caused notorious problems in traditional grammatical analysis, but can be elegantly captured in CxG approaches. While a full picture would have to look at the development of these as well, they will not be further discussed here for lack of space. Two facts in the development of modal verbs in English have been a constant source of theoretical problems. On the one hand, the group did not develop together. Rather, the development probably began with motan and magan (both of which seem to show modal features and meanings in the OE period), followed by cunnan (probably early ME) and finally willan, which very likely changed last (in the later ME period, perhaps around 1400). The modal preterits should, would, could, might, which can be used to signal a certain modal remoteness, also developed at different times, some of them even before their morphologically present counterparts. In other words, we do not see the spontaneous creation of a new (sub-)class of verbs at some point in the Middle English period. Rather, the process seems to have been very slow and gradual and seems to have proceeded in a piecemeal fashion. Moreover, we find both layering (i.e. the coexistence of old and new forms) and various forms of gradience. And in fact, there is reason to believe that hafta, gotta, wanna, gonna and such form a complex continuation of the development in Present-day English (see Krug 2000). Note, however, that this univerbation is again rather CC associated with the general GCxzn of the modals. On the other hand, the properties of this new group of modals did not develop all at once either. They gradually lost their ability to take direct objects, for example. Also, their inflectional properties gradually became more and more opaque. As preteritpresents they, together with some other verbs, had special verbal morphology in OE. Most of the other verbs dropped out of this group and acquired regular morphology, leaving a special group of preterit-presents behind. Consequently, the distinctions between present and past, and indicative and subjunctive were blurred. When the
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to-infinitive gained ground in the ME period, these verbs did not join the trend but kept the bare infinitive. Eventually, they lost most of the usual verbal morphology (i.e. they were no longer available as infinitives and lost their present or past participle forms). It needs to be added that this is not entirely true for the whole group. Some PDE modals (must, may) arguably never had these forms (*musted, *mayed, *musting, *maying), but this is a different question. It is perhaps interesting to note that here the changes are not so much the combination with other, new constructions (as exemplified in Traugott’s analysis of the development of going to), but rather the loss of combinatorial possibilities. The new modals can no longer combine with participle constructions; they cannot combine with the to-infinitive construction like the other verbs. So constructional change can also mean loss of network links, or the strengthening of some links at the expense of others. Together with these individual changes in morphosyntactic form and behavior (all of which can be characterized as CCs) we also see a gradual shift in meaning. The earlier, more concrete lexical meanings are lost, and the modal overtones are foregrounded. And again, this can be seen as CC as we cannot find any evidence that form and meaning changes were logically mutually dependent in any way (though it is clear that certain forms, such as the progressive, are not actually compatible with modal readings; similarly, modality seems to be very closely connected to verbal complements, so that the loss of direct objects is indirectly related to the rise of modal readings). So what can be suggested here is that we see a large number of more or less complex CCs affecting individual micro-constructions (namely the individual verbs). Eventually, each verb is reanalyzed in a GCxzn as modal auxiliary (i.e. there is a new link between the full morphosyntactic behavior as PDE modal and the modal meaning). These new microconstructions can then gradually begin to cluster, i.e. to form a higher level, more abstract meso-construction we could perhaps call Modal Auxiliaries. Note that the latter change is probably not GCxzn as it does not involve changes in form or meaning. A final interesting question is the role of analogy in this process. As with the going to construction it does not seem like analogy would be necessary to account for the development of the modal auxiliaries, though it might be interesting to think about must and may as the ‘crystal nuclei’ around which other verbs have gathered. The development of the individual micro-constructions can also be modeled as following from the increasing use in particular contexts which then led up to the constructionalization of the micro-construction. The formation of the individual micro-construction into the more general, schematic meso-construction may well have been driven by analogical thinking, and it can’t be ruled out that later processes which assimilated other verbs to this group were also affected by analogy as a factor.
2.2.2 Lexical constructionalization Lexical constructionalization (LCxzn) is defined as changes in the form and meaning of a construction that result in the construction moving towards the lexical pole in the linguistic system. In other words, whereas GCxzn generally leads to greater schematicity and higher generality, LCxzn usually leads to a decrease in productivity and schematicity and an increase in opacity, which all “suggest a more holistic access characteristic of lexicalization” (Trousdale 2008a: 60; cf. Trousdale 2008b). Examples include traditional word-formation processes (cf. Brinton, Chapter 100; Brinton and Traugott 2005) such as
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compounding (holy day > holiday), derivation (lone + er > loner), blending (neuter + testicles > neuticles). Note that it is important with the current definition of constructionalization that both form and meaning change, though of course the compositionality of holiday is not the same as that of loner. The latter is much more transparent, but still not fully compositional as lone is not a verb that takes an –er agent suffix such as sing-er-. This, however, still excludes some other traditional word-formation processes such as clipping (hamburger > burger) and acronyms or alphabetisms (local area network > LAN, Value Added Tax > VAT) from LCxzn. The lexical use of formerly syntactic phrases (such as wannabe ‘want to be’ as in wannabe actor or bread-and-butter ‘necessities of life’) may also count as examples, though again we need to be careful to distinguish between CC and LCxzn. So it can be argued that wannabe is actually CC as it only shows morphosyntactic and phonological fusion, but not fundamental change in meaning, whereas bread-and-butter rather counts as LCxzn, and it has a new (and fairly unpredictable) meaning, and despite the fact that the formal change is superficially minimal (the fused, lexicalized form is much more fixed and does not allow for modification or inflection, for example). Like GCxzn, LCxzn leads to new constructions. The former produces new constructions that tend toward the grammatical pole of the linguistic system, the product of the latter rather belong to the lexical pole. Both processes affect form and meaning in existing constructions, or intersections of various existing constructions, and both seem to involve a decrease in compositionality. However, LCxzn rather involves a reduction process in that it reduces abstractness, schematicity, and productivity; GCxzn leads to greater schematicity, a higher level of abstraction, and an increase in productivity. So, despite the fact that CxG does not systematically distinguish between grammar and lexicon, we can identify different processes that affect the constructional system in fundamentally different ways, and thus also lead to different kinds of products, namely more grammatical (abstract) versus more lexical (concrete) constructions. Note, however, that what has been said so far only works perfectly for the end points of the continuum (e.g. the development of monomorphemes like garlic in LCxzn, the development of cleft construction in GCxzn), but that in the middle of the continuum (e.g. derivational mrophology or composite predicates), the clear-cut changes become a little less clear cut. This can be interpreted as support for the notion of the continuum in CxG (Graeme Trousdale, p.c.).
3 Grammaticalization and lexicalization With new approaches and concepts such as constructional change and constructionalization it seems advisable to relate and compare these to established frameworks such as grammaticalization and lexicalization. Grammaticalization has been one of the most widely studied and discussed approaches to linguistic change (cf. Brems and Hoffmann, Chapter 99). This is not the place to rehearse all details and controversies that revolve about this approach and its subtleties, going back even to the very definition of what grammaticalization actually is. For present purposes it seems enough to broadly describe grammaticalization as the process which turns less grammatical into more grammatical structures. Some of the textbook examples include the development of the future marker going to/gonna and the negative particle not. As we have described above already, gonna began its life as a regular lexical verb go (and it is still available as such!) and later gradually developed into the grammatical future marker. Not began as
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OE ne, which was strengthened by additional adverbs such as nawuht, nawt, na(h)t, no (g)ht, naught etc. (from OE nawiht ‘nothing’): ne nawt ‘not nothing’. In this combination, ne gradually wears off until it disappears completely and all that remains is the former adverb which now turns into to grammatical negative marker not. Developments such as these typically follow a cline such as Content Item > Grammatical Word > Clitic > Inflectional Affix > (Zero) (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 7). The details, however, are still a matter of debate. Grammaticalization studies often assume that grammaticalization does not just affect single items, but items in particular context, or ‘constructions’ in a non-technical sense. Grammaticalization is often characterized by a reduction or loss of phonetic substance (cf. going to > gonna; ne > zero), a reduction or loss of morphosyntactic independence (e.g. the cliticization of ’ll in she’ll -’ll grammaticalized out of the independent full verb will ), or a reduction or loss of lexical, propositional meaning (e.g. willan ‘want’ > will as ‘modal future’, go ‘move from A to be B’ > gonna as future marker). These developments are sometimes described as unidirectional, i.e. as proceeding only from more lexical to more grammatical, and not vice versa. Note, however, that this particular feature is still one of the most controversial ones (cf. the discussions in Fischer et al. 2004 and Norde 2009, among many others). Another issue, which is still being subject to debate, is the question whether grammaticalization should be seen as something that leads to reduction and greater dependency (GIRD, as Traugott forthc. termed it, cf. Lehmann 1995; Haspelmath 2004) or whether it is rather something that involves expansion with regard to co-text (GE in Traugott’s terminology, cf. Himmelmann 2004). However, as Traugott (forthc.) shows, both GE and GIRD need not be contradictory. In fact, the increasing frequency and routinization (or entrenchment) of a (new) grammatical item can lead to a reduction in both semantic and phonetic form, but on the other hand it may also entail greater abstractness, generality, and schematicity, as the items becomes less and less compositional and specific. Hence, the two pathways may actually be seen as co-evolutionary. The question now is if and in how far grammaticalization relates to (grammatical) constructionalization. On the one hand, obviously, GCxzn does not directly work with concepts such as ‘more grammatical’ or ‘less grammatical’, but this seems fairly trivial and unimportant, as we have seen that even in a superficially ‘grammarless’ framework such as CxG we can and should distinguish between a lexical and a grammatical pole. On the other hand, many issues and factors in traditional grammaticalization resurface in discussions of GCxzn. These include the role of co(n)text and pragmatics in morphosyntactic change, a usage-based perspective that includes consideration of frequency, gradience and gradualness (cf. Traugott and Trousdale 2010). One of the bottom lines seems to be that all these factors, including pragmatic inferences, frequency, reanalysis and analogy seem to play major roles, but that, on the other hand, CxG approaches seem to differ a lot from traditional frameworks in that they force us to think about form and function simultaneously. In that respect, we do seem to find a substantial difference between the excellent work that has been so far and the new perspectives that enter the fore with Construction Grammar.
4 Summary This paper has presented some ways in which principles and ideas from Construction Grammar can be used in diachronic linguistics. Working with the general distinction
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between constructional change and constructionalization it showed that a constructional perspective can be of particular interest in investigating language change. On the one hand, by introducing constructions at different levels of granularity (constructs, micro-constructions, meso-constructions, macro-constructions etc.), CxG allows for the description and analysis of both minute details and large scale patterns in linguistic change, and of course the interplay between the two. Moreover, we can also see how an agglomeration of small-scale changes can eventually lead to changes on a more general or abstract level. The flexibility of CxG, on the other hand, allows for the modeling of both gradience and gradualness in language structure and use, both of which are intricately linked with language change. Finally, the strong emphasis on language use as the theoretical basis for CxG invites or even necessitates the consideration of factors such as frequency, routinization, entrenchment, pragmatics, and context in linguistic change. In doing so, a CxG perspective can complement and reinforce existing approaches such as lexicalization and grammaticalization. But the most important and novel aspect perhaps is the fact that constructional approaches force us to consider both the form and function side of linguistic change. Constructionalization requires changes in both, whereas constructional change can happen in one of the two. This is where CxG perspectives seem to differ from what we have seen so far and where further developments can be expected. Acknowledgements: My heartfelt thanks go to Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Graeme Trousdale and Thomas Hoffmann for their willingness to share work in progress, their comments on an earlier draft, and for sharing and discussing their exciting ideas on construction grammar and language change. We probably still don’t agree on a number of issues, but this paper surely would not be half as good without their input.
5 References Bergs, Alexander and Gabriele Diewald (eds.). 2008. Constructions and Language Change. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Boas, Hans C. forthc. Cognitive Construction Grammar. In: Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brinton, Laurel and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, Bill. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: the mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4): 711–733. Bybee, Joan forthc. Usage-based theory and exemplar representations of constructions. In: Graeme Trousdale, and Thomas Hoffmann (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fillmore, Charles. 1999. Inversion and constructional inheritance. In: Gert Webelhuth, JeanPierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol (eds.), Lexical and constructional aspects of linguistic explanation, 113–128. Stanford: CSLI. Fillmore, Charles, Paul Kay, and Mary O’Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. The case of let alone. Language 64(3): 501–538. Fischer, Olga. 2007. On analogy as the motivation for grammaticalization. Studies in Language 32: 336–381.
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Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde, and Harry Perridon (eds.). 2004. Up and Down the Cline. The Nature of Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ¨ stman. 2004. Construction Grammar: a Thumbnail Sketch. In: MirFried, Mirjam and Jan-Ola O ¨ stman (eds.), Construction Grammar in a cross-language perspective, jam Fried and Jan-Ola O 11–86. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Adele and Johan van der Auwera forthc. This is to count as a construction. Folia Linguistica (http://webh01.ua.ac.be/vdauwera/Thisistocount%20Fol-12-Aug11.pdf, last accessed 15 November 2011). Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In: Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde, and Harry Perridon (eds), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization, 17–44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hilpert, Martin forthc. Diachronic collostructional analysis meets the noun phrase. Studying many a noun in COHA. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), Rethinking approaches to the history of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilpert, Martin forthc. Dynamic visualizations of language change: Motion charts on the basis of bivariate and multivariate data from diachronic corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16(4): 435–461. Himmelmann, Nikolaus. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticization: opposite or orthogonal? In: Walter Bisang, Nikolaus Himmelmann, and Bjo¨rn Wiemer (eds.), What Makes Grammaticalization- a Look from its Components and Fringes, 21–42. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hoffmann, Thomas forthc. Construction Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, Thomas and Graeme Trousdale (eds.). 2012. Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticalization. In: Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I, 17–36. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackendoff, Ray and Adele Goldberg. 2004. The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80: 532–567. Krug, Manfred. 2002. Emerging English Modals. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Mu¨nchen: Lincom Europa. Lightfoot, David. 1999. The development of language: Acquisition, change and evolution. Blackwell: Oxford. Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sag, Ivan. 2011. Sign-based construction grammar: An informal synopsis. In: Hans C. Boas and Ivan A. Sag (eds.), Sign-based Construction Grammar, 39–170. (http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/ papers/theo-syno.pdf, last accessed 5 November 2011). Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2012. Collostructional analysis. In: Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries. 2003 Collostructions: investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209–243. Tomasello, Michael. 2002. Constructing a Language. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
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Tomasello, Michael. 2006. Construction Grammar for kids. Constructions SV1–11/2006, urn:nbn: de:0009-4-6893 (http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/constructions/article/viewArticle/26, last accessed 5 November 2011). Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2008. Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English. In: Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Ja¨ger, and Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), Variation, Selection, Development– Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change, 219–250. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2011. Toward a coherent account of grammatical constructionalization. Paper presented at Societas Linguistica Europea (SLE) 44, Spain, September 8–11, 2011 (http:// www.stanford.edu/~traugott/styled/index.html, last accessed 23 November 2011). Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Graeme Trousdale (eds.). 2010. Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008a. Constructions in grammaticalization and lexicalization: Evidence from the history of a composite predicate construction in English. In: Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), Constructional Approaches to English Grammar, 33–67. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Trousdale, Graeme. 2008b. A constructional account of lexicalization processes in the history of English: Evidence from possessive constructions. Word Structure 1: 156–177. Visser, Frederikus Theodorus. 1963–73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: Brill. Warner, Anthony. 1993. English Auxiliaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexander Bergs, Osnabru¨ck (Germany)
104. New Perspectives, Theories and Methods: Lexical Functional Grammar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Sketch of Lexical Functional Grammar Diachronic syntax in LFG (Stochastic) Optimality Theory LFG Future directions References
Abstract Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a formal syntactic theory which assumes two parallel syntactic structures and no syntactic derivations. The architecture of LFG makes it a highly suitable framework for historical studies of morphosyntax which are formally explicit but can capture gradualness in syntactic change. The model is also consistent with semantic and pragmatic motivations for change. Changes in English which have been treated in this theory as the result of the accumulation of changes to individual lexical items and/or changes in the frequency of constructions include the loss of “impersonal” constructions and the addition of “indirect passives”. A recent development is Stochastic Optimality Theory (OT) LFG, in which the Optimality Theory approach to syntax is modified by the assumption of a random value which can cause a reversal of Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.2), de Gruyter, 1646–1657
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the more usual ranking in the case of closely-ranked constraints. This approach has been used to model the variability found in constituent order in different periods of English as it gradually lost verb-final constructions.
1 Sketch of Lexical Functional Grammar Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based theory in which syntactic analysis makes use of two parallel syntactic levels, constituent structure (c-structure) and functional structure (f-structure). Particularly important references on the architecture of the theory include Kaplan and Bresnan (1982) and Bresnan (2001). F-structure is the level which encodes (in the language-independent format of a hierarchical attributevalue matrix) abstract morphosyntactic information such as the grammatical relations, e.g. SUBJ(ECT), which are syntactically required by a given PRED(ICATE), and information about grammatical features associated with parts of the structure such as TENSE. Note that I will henceforth use SUBJ when specifically referring to LFG functional structures, but will refer to the “subject” in more theory-neutral uses. Grammatical relations are treated as primitives which mediate between predicate argument structure and surface syntactic structure. C-structure is annotated with information about parts of the f-structure such as grammatical relations. The two structures are independent and subject to different constraints, but are linked by a correspondence relation (ϕ) which maps c-structures onto f-structures. Although the principles governing these structures are formal, they arguably have functionalist underpinnings. The two most important principles applying to f-structures are Completeness, which says that any grammatical function designated by a PRED in a lexical entry must be present in the f-structure of that PRED, and Coherence, which essentially prohibits functions (other than adjuncts, which are not required by a PRED) from appearing in an f-structure unless they are required by the PRED of the f-structure. C-structure is assumed to be highly variable among languages; it may be endocentric, that is with the hierarchical structures familiar from X-bar theory, but flat c-structures are assumed to be appropriate for non-configurational languages and exocentric structures (clauses rooted in S) are also permitted in languages such as Modern English which are for the most part highly endocentric (with clauses dominated by Inflectional Phrase (IP), which has as its head the node I, the position of the inflected verb). This allows for great flexibility in dealing with variation in a given language as well as variation across languages. The lexicon is crucially involved in the construction of f-structures and also makes use of interacting parallel structures. There are no syntactic derivations in LFG, and the lexicon is assumed to be the locus of many systematic relationships between constructions which are dealt with in the syntax in some formal theories. The level of argument structure represents the valency of a predicate (one-place or two-place, etc.). A thematic hierarchy which places Agents at the top and Experiencers higher than Patients etc. is assumed, along with operations on argument structure such as Passivization, which suppresses the highest argument on this hierarchy. By the Lexical Mapping Theory of LFG, the highest argument is associated with the SUBJ function. If the Agent of a transitive verb is suppressed, the second argument (the Patient) will become the subject (and in English the Agent may still be expressed as an adjunct in a by phrase, as in the dog was killed by the truck). In this way, the cross-linguistic similarity of passives in “promoting” what is normally an object to the subject role is captured,
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independently of the particular expression of subjecthood in a given language by case marking or constituent structure. There is limited use of empty categories in LFG. An example where an empty category is allowed is in Topicalization structures like John, we all like. A typical analysis of this structure is that John has the discourse function TOP(IC), the occurrence of which is regulated by principles associating functions with c-structure configurations. Because the PRED of like requires the argument function OBJ, an empty node bearing the OBJ function must be present in the c-structure to ensure that the f-structure does not violate Completeness, and the TOP and the OBJ are linked as co-referential in the f-structure. However, the use of empty categories (as well as functional categories) is strictly limited by principles such as Economy of Expression, which states that all syntactic nodes of c-structure are optional and are not permitted unless they are required to create a well-formed f-structure or to add semantic content, so for example IP will not be used when it only dominates Verb Phrase (VP) (that is, when there is no auxiliary verb to occupy the position of the inflected verb (I)), but a VP is necessary even when it dominates only V, because the VP will be annotated with information contributing to the functional structure of the clause. Lexical entries also supply information about the required complements of a word. So for example the lexical entry for the Old English verb helpan ‘to help’ would include the information that the verb required a subject and an object and also that the object could be in the genitive or dative case. To illustrate how c-structure, f-structure, and the lexicon interact, we may take a simple sentence such as he healp ðara manna ‘he helped the (GEN.PL) men (GEN.PL)’. The lexical entry for healp would provide a statement to the effect that the PRED required two arguments, a SUBJ and an OBJ, and further information that the case of the OBJ could be dative or genitive, and that the value for the TENSE feature was PAST, etc. The functional structure of the sentence would look like (1): (1) PRED
‘help’ you must…] [Informant:] Yes, yes, [e] and [u] > [o] or voicing of voiceless obstruents) and much depends on the assessment of the linguistic situation of Britain, that is, whether Latin was spoken by Britons as an official language or as a language of the upper classes (Jackson 1953: 76–121), or whether it was almost abandoned altogether (Baugh and Cable 1978: 80). Latin loans of this period are not distinguishable from loans of the later continental period, since they concern virtually the same semantic fields – flora and fauna, food and cooking, agriculture, dress and textiles, but also legal terms – and present the sound changes typical of Old English. An excellent study of these early Latin loans is Wollmann (1990), where some loans are newly dated by confronting historical information with the chronology of Late Latin and Old English sound changes. Thus box ‘box-tree’ is grouped with non-continental loans while segn with a pre-Christian meaning is dated back to the third century. Other example of this group are: æbs ‘fir-tree’ < abies, humele ‘hop-plant’ < VLat. humulus, leahtric ‘lettuce’ < lactuca, lufestic ‘lovage’ < VLat. luvestica < ligusticum, senap ‘mustard’ < sinapis, cugle ‘cowl’ < VLat. cuculla, teosol ‘die’ < tessella > tasol ‘mosaic stone’, cocer ‘quiver’ < VLat. cucurum, eced ‘vinegar’ < acetum, lafian ‘wash’ < lavare, panne ‘pan’ < VLat panna < patina), ciest ‘chest’ < VLat cesta < cista, copp ‘cup’ < VLat cuppa, pægel ‘pail’ < VLat. pagella, pott ‘pot’ < VLat pottus, torr ‘tower’ < VLat. turris, catt(e) ‘cat’ < Late Lat. cattus, cocc ‘cock’ < coccus, ceaster < castra, ancor ‘anchor’ < anchora), punt ‘punt’ < ponto), oele > ele ‘oil’ < VLat. oli < oleum, mægester ‘master’ < magister), prafost/profost ‘officer’ < praepositus, sætern-(dæg) ‘satur-day’ < saturni (dies) which is the only day with a non-Germanic name. To these groups a new class was added, i.e. general terms related to religion and learning: græf ‘a style’ < graphium, læden ‘Latin’ < VLat. ladinus < Latinus, munuc ‘monk’ < monachus and mynecen ‘nun’ > VLat. monic-en (fem.suffix), nunne ‘nun’ < nonna), pinsian ‘to reflect’ < pensare, relic ‘relic’ < reliquia), glœsan ‘to gloss’ < glossa, traht ‘text, passage’ < tractus. After about 650, the rate of borrowing from Latin grew substantially, but with a different modality. Now the dominant vehicle for the introduction of loans was the church, and consequently it is not surprising that Latin loans in this sub-period pertained increasingly to religion and learning. Moreover, since the increase of Latin loans was due to the spread of Latin writings and scholarship, new loans derived from Classical Latin rather than Vulgar Latin, and mostly entered the written language before they entered the spoken language, if they ever did. Accordingly, a significant group of loans related to scholarship, learning, culture and science, as well as religion can be found: alter < altar, (a)postol < apostolus, cleric < clericus, creda < credo, cruc < crucem, culpe ‘guilt’ < culpa, graðul ‘mass-book’ < graduale, offrian ‘sacrifice’ < offerre, paradis < paradisus; biblioþece ‘librari’ < bibliotheca, declinian ‘decline’ < declinare, grammatic (-cræft) ‘grammar’ < (ars) grammatica, philosoph ‘philosopher’ < philosophus, ymen ‘hymn’ < hymnus, chor ‘choir’ < chorus, calend < calendae, fers ‘verse’ < versus, paper < papyrus, profian ‘to regard, consider’ < probare and so on. However, several religious terms must have entered through the spoken language, in relation with the monastic life and therefore derived from Vulgar Latin: abbod < VLat. abbadem < abbatem,
108. English in Contact: Latin
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ælmæsse ‘alms’ < VLat. almosina, cumædre/cumpæder ‘godmother/godfather’ < late Lat. commater/compater, messe/mæsse ‘mass’ < VLat. messa < missa, regol ‘rule of religious life’ < VLat. regola < regula. Borrowing in the domain of material culture did not cease and indeed a remarkable number of Latin loans is connected with practical aspects of life, thus indicating a more generalized cultural change: centur < centurion, coorte < cohorta, cubit < cubitum, sescle < sextula, amber < ambra, geaspis < jaspis, calc ‘shoe’ < calceus, sto¯l ‘long garment’ < stola, casse ‘hunting-net’ < cassis, ferele ‘rod’ < ferula), sponge < spangea, torcul ‘wine-press’ < torcular, morað ‘mulberry wine’ < mo¯ra¯tum, ampulle < ampulla, scutel ‘dish’ < scutula, castel ‘small town’ < castellum, columne < columna, fenester < fenestra, caul < caulis, ceder < cedrus, lilie < lilium, persic ‘peach’ < persicum, aspide < aspidis, camel < camelus, tiger < tigris. Latin loans of this third period were still adapted to a certain degree, but not fully integrated because Old English sound changes were no longer operative. The introduction of the Benedictine Reform at the end of the 10th century draws an important dividing line within this period: the newly reformed monasteries became major literary centers both in Latin and in English and gave a great impulse to a general revival of religious life as well as of education. The growing number of bilingual monastics led to a vast increase in Latin borrowings, namely 150 direct loans. However, the character of Latin loans introduced in this context was different. From a linguistic point of view, there was a preference for borrowing rather than loan translation. Latin loans were all drawn from Classical Latin via the written medium; they reflected the scholarly interests of the writers and often did not show even the tiniest attempt at integration, as in firmamentum, terminus, sacramentor(i)um, antiphonaria, capitularia. Some Latin words were re-borrowed, thus forming pairs with the already integrated ones, but with a “learned character”: e.g. corona vs. coren ‘crown’, tabele/tablu vs. tæfl ‘table’, cucurbite vs. cyrfet, turtur vs. turtle ‘turtle-dove’, or cuppe in Ælfric instead of copp. An exhaustive survey of these Classical-derived loans was conducted by Funke (1914), who classified them into three categories from gelehrte Lehnwo¨rter to Fremdwo¨rter, according to the degree of phonological integration and adherence to the Latin model. With the introduction of Christianity and the consequent need to propagate and preach the new faith in the vernacular, native lexical material was also exploited to convey new concepts, leading to the coining of new words on Latin patterns. This resulted into an extension of the vocabulary through indirect borrowing, namely semantic loans and formal calques. While Latin direct loans related to church organization, ranks, and functions, indirect borrowing concerns the concepts of faith. Following Gneuss’s (1955) analysis, which still constitutes the base of any further study, indirect borrowing in Old English includes: (a) semantic loans proper such as synn ‘injury, enmity, feud’, which adopted the additional meaning ‘sin, crime’ from peccatum, or cniht ‘boy, servant’, which took over the meaning of ‘disciple’ on analogy with discipulus (Christi), or getimbran, which rendered aedificare in the transferred meaning of ‘edify’ (other examples of this kind are: þrowung ‘suffering’ meaning Passio ‘Christ’s passion’ or tunge ‘tongue’ indicating also lingua in the sense of ‘speech’); loan translations, such as dælnimend corresponding to participium or godspellboc translating liber evangelii or eft-arisan for Latin re-surgere (or efen-herian ‘praise together’ from col-laudare, un-sceðð-end-e ‘innocent, harmless’ from in-noc-en-s); (b) loan renditions – e.g. gesundfullian for prosperari, restedæg for sabbatum, felasprecolness for loquacitas, nihtsang ‘nightsong’ for nocturnale, gehusscipe ‘family, race, lit.housescip’ for domus or gerechtwisung ‘justification’
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for iustificatio; (c) loan-creations – fulwian ‘consecrate fully’ for baptizare or fahwyrm ‘variegated reptile’ for basiliscus. Although we still lack a full-scale investigation of indirect borrowing, the few existing studies (cf. Gneuss 1955; Kroesch 1929) indicate that it was all pervasive and far outweighed lexical borrowing, thus limiting the number of loans. Most Latin religious terms were actually not borrowed, but developed out of indigenous material.
2 Middle English The socio-linguistic situation changed abruptly during the Middle English period. The Normans established their rule in their Romance dialect and relegated English to the spoken medium. Conversely, Latin was still the language of the Church and learning, but also extended its domain to law, and especially to public records until the significant political changes at the end of the 12th century gradually re-established English as the dominant language. This did not mean, however, that English terms were reinstated for public functions. The dominance of Latin and French in those fields of public and institutional discourse had continued for such a long time and at such a deep level that it would not have been practical or reasonable to resuscitate the Anglo-Saxon terms instead of the established Latin or French ones (e.g. Old English witengemot in place of parliament), or perhaps forge new words out of English material. It was much easier to borrow from French and also from Latin into those many areas where English had acquired semantic vacuums (Scheler 1977; Hughes 2000). In fact, the English vocabulary was enriched in this period by an enormous increase of foreign words: between 1100 and 1500 French and Latin elements increased from 6% to 32% of the entire lexicon (Dekeyser and Pauwels 1989). The onset of the Latin influx has to be located in the last quarter of the 14th century in concomitance with the decrease of French influence, with Latin accounted for 28.6% of all new registrations at the end of the Middle English period (Dekeyser 1986: 260). Although French borrowings seem to have paved the way for Latin loans, because “They had already created in English minds that predilection for foreign words which made them shrink from consciously coining new words out of native material. If French words were more distingue´s than English ones, Latin words were still more so …” (Jespersen 1938: 107), they differ remarkably. Having long ceased to be a vernacular, Latin was the language of litterae or better a language for specialized written purposes, able to lend clarity and richness to the barbarous English. Accordingly, this increase of Latinate lexical content is firstly detectable in literary composition (cf. Chaucer, Gower, and Usk) besides translations of Latin texts, leading up to “macaronic” lyrics in the 15th century (Wright 1992), written in both Latin and English. The tendency of using Latinate lexical content reached its zenith in a self-consciously rarefied Latinized poetic diction, called aureate – itself a high-register word for ‘golden’, probably coined by John Lydgate. Although many of these words have not survived (the notable exception being modern, used here for the first recorded time), historically aureate diction exhibits the highest proportion of classical borrowing (57%) ever achieved in English literary history. Although there are a few Latin borrowings in Middle English (e.g. benedicitee, collation, dirige) which may have entered through spoken language, and quite surely Chaucer’s quoniam ‘female genitals’ represented clerkish slang (Burnley 1992: 432),
108. English in Contact: Latin
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generally the contact between English and Latin concerned learned spheres and regarded a literate minority. In fact, Latin words bequeathed by the practice of religion, law, administration, medicine, and other medieval sciences (e.g. astronomy, botany, zoology, chemistry, etc.), were largely adopted in their original spellings: e.g. client (1320), arbitrator (1424), conviction (1437), executor (1290), implement (1445), proviso (1434), alias (1465), prima facie (1500), memento (1400), limbo (1400), magnificat (1225), lector (1387), collect (1225), diocese (1387), redemptor (1438), abacus (1387), contradiction (1382), explicit (1325), formal (1393), incipit (1400), major (1390), minor (1410), scribe (1200), simile (1400). Sometimes Latin loans were altered and the Latin suffixes replaced by the suffixes common in French loans of similar derivation: thus Latin custodia was anglicized as custodie, then custody. These adapted loans pose a particularly tricky problem because they could be either Latinate words borrowed via French or direct Latin words adopted by using French-based derivational processes. Contrary to the first studies (Baugh and Cable 2002, but also Bliss 1966), based exclusively on the OED – regarded as not completely trustworthy in the distinction between Latin and French (Dellit 1905: 10; Marchand 1969) or even accused of ‘francophilia’ (Ellenberger 1974: 142)–, more recent research (see Culpeper and Clapham 1996; Dedeurwaerder 1986; De Greef 1986; Dekeyser and Pauwels 1989), based on new tools such as the Chronological English Dictionary CED (Finkenstaedt et al. 1970), the Middle English Dictionary (MED; Kurath et al. 1952–2001) and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary SOED (Little and Coulson 1972) re-evaluates the role played by Latin in the extension of Middle English vocabulary, and even notices a slight predominance of Latin over the French component. Their argumentation is supported by historical and cultural events. Even after the Black Death, Latin maintained its prestigious position, being to a very great extent the medium of scholarly matters and the language of learning in all Europe. Furthermore, the education of clerks, the only people capable of literary creation, was built on writing and reading Latin (Legge 1963; Thompson 1939). Therefore, learned and abstract terminologies, such as admit, allegory, conflict, custody, determinate, discuss, infinite, conspiracy, polite, magnify, necessary, secular, subordinate, subscribe, tributary, lunatic, and so on, which are attested in the 14th and 15th centuries and show adaptation, are more likely to be Latin loans modernized via French (Ellenberger 1974: 148). In addition to abstract terms, there are also altered technical terms from: medicine (e.g. diaphragm, digit, orbit, dislocate), alchemy (e.g. dissolve, mercury, aggravate, commixt, concrete, distillation), astronomy (e.g. ascension, eccentric, equal, equinoxium), botany (e.g. cardamom, pine, gladiol, lupin), zoology (e.g. cicade, locust, lacert), and mineralogy (e.g. adamant, jacint, lapidary). In some instances, the same Latin loan, with less phonological alteration, had been previously borrowed through French (e.g. Avrill vs. Aprill, avowterie vs. adulterie). The two forms co-existed during the early Middle English period, but later only the more conservative form survived. The high prestige of Latin is also responsible for respelling of French-derived Latinisms on the Latin pattern (Scheler 1977: 47), a process that culminated in Early Modern English: e.g. debt for dette, doubt for doute, adorne for aorne, or perfect for parfait. The steady infiltration and assimilation of Latin words allowed the language to acquire synonyms on three levels in virtually all semantic fields (e.g. rise-mount-ascend, fair-beautiful-attractive, foe-enemy-adversary) where the English word is generally
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linked to a popular and informal register, the French-derived lexeme is literary, and the Latinism has a “learned” character (Hughes 2000: 144). It also favored the acclimatization of Latin (and French) affixes, introduced together with foreign lexemes: for example, suffixes such as -tion, -ose, or -ous (from Latin -os-), -ate (from Latin -atus), or prefixes like de-/des-, re-, sub-, super- arch-, non- and mal-. To what extent these suffixes and prefixes were productive in Middle English is difficult to judge. Nevertheless, Middle English did record the first instances of “hybrids” (Scheler 1977: 80): for example, Lydgate’s distrust (1439) or Wyclif ’s enthrallen (1347). The thesis that Latin influence over Middle English is limited to lexical loans is weakened by an utter lack of investigation. Even recent studies are predominantly statistical, and generally ignore semantic loans as well as lexical calques, which, if at all, are merely mentioned: only cnight with the acquired meaning of ‘knight’ is often quoted in handbooks of the history of English. Indeed, a comprehensive history of English word-formation has still to be written.
3 Early Modern English and Modern English As already noted in reference to Middle English, social, political, and cultural changes may correlate with linguistic changes, especially in the lexicon. Also, Early Modern English, including the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment, is also a period of important upheavals from a still monolithic medieval society and culture to a modern multifaceted one. This period witnessed the rise of a written and spoken standard, a substantial growth of literacy among the population, and the extension of the vernacular to practically all contexts of speech and writing, including sciences in the latter half of the 18th century – changes closely dependent on the greatest innovation of these times, i.e. the introduction of printing, which can safely be claimed to have been the catalyst of unprecedented linguistic growth. Statistics (Culpeper and Clapham 1996: 209; Go¨rlach 1991: 136–7; Wermser 1976: 22–3) suggest the vocabulary expanded immediately after the introduction of printing (from about 50 new words in 1500 to about 350 in 1600), and it was the fastest vocabulary growth in the history of English with its peak in 1570 to 1630, to continue till 1780, but on a much more modest scale. Printing needed a stable linguistic means of communication, and English was not uniform, since written English was in general the English of the particular locality the user came from. During the 15th century Chancery English had begun to be adopted by writers outside London if often in a form modified by local dialects. However, although there was an incipient feel for a ‘standard’ or ‘best’ English, there was no way that such a perception could be reliably propagated. The Humanist movement rediscovered Classical Latin (Go¨rlach 1997: 97), i.e. a uniformly fixed and regulated language with great international prestige: a sort of lingua franca (Gotti 1996) for international communication, widespread among the learned in both written and spoken forms. Latin therefore represented the model on the basis of which the English vernacular could be regulated, and from which it could derive the technical vocabulary it lacked. The Early Modern English lexical growth hinged on new coinages and borrowings and was the response to both the objective need to express new ideas and the subjective desire to enrich the rhetorical potential of the vernacular. Borrowing was a major factor, corresponding to 40%–50% of the new vocabulary (Wermser 1976: 40). Specifically, from 1560 to 1670 more than half of the loanwords come from Latin (Barber 1993: 177),
108. English in Contact: Latin
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but the peak of Latin influx was around 1610–1624, when Latin loans even correspond to 30% of all the words recorded (Wermser 1976: 45). Latin supplied a ready-made terminology to fill lexical gaps and provided the richness of vocabulary, known as copiousness of synonyms (copia verborum), that was considered the hallmark of a literary language (Jones 1953: 3–31, 68–141). The liberal intake of Latin words was channeled first through translations and later through original English works inspired to Classical Latin works in the fields of discourse where English gradually encroached (e.g. rhetoric, logic, geometry, classical history etc.). Accordingly, these borrowings were on the whole bookish. A large number of the Latin words used in the 16th century are now lost (Sheard 1954: 252): accersited, adepted, annect, charientism, commorse, condisciple, deturpated, discruciating, eximious, fatuate, immorigerous, lubrical, matutine, oblatrant, prorumped, splendidious, suppeditate, temulent, vadimonial. However, nearly two thirds (Barber 1993: 172) have been integrated into the language and are still in use: e.g. relaxation (1526), immaturity (1540), frequency (1553), relegation (1586), involuntary (1531), offensive (1548), relevant (1560), susceptible (1605), invidious (1606), parental (1623), investigate (1510), imitate (1534), imbue (1555), commemorate (1599) and officiate (1641). As a matter of fact, the first dictionaries were a consequence of the wholesale borrowing of Latin and Greek terms: e.g. Thomas’s Latin-English dictionary of 1588, or rather the first ‘traditional’ dictionary, i.e. Table Alphabeticall of hard usuall English wordes by Robert Cawdrey (1604) where the ‘hard words’ are classical terms, John Bullokar’s An English Expositor (1616) and Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623). But the Renaissance also saw the growth of major scientific interest, and this provoked the introduction of Latin terminology related to different scientific fields: theology, philosophy and rhetoric, architecture and art, law, navigation, trade and commerce, crafts and technology, biology, medicine, anatomy, alchemy, cosmography and astronomy, and geography. The earliest specialized terms mostly concern the scientific method and all have now acquired a wider usage: e.g. diagram (1619), exit (1538), fundus (1527), genius (1413), idea (1531), method (1541), peninsula (1538), system (1638), theorem (1551), theory (1597), vertigo (1528). Later, opaque classical nomenclature started to become current in professional and scientific areas, which are now common, but still pertain to scientific discourse: e.g. caesura (1556), radius (1597), torpor (1607), equilibrium (1608), specimen (1610), squalor (1621), vertebra (1615), apparatus (1628), focus (1644). The difference between Middle English and Early Modern English borrowings of this kind is obvious: in contrast to the terms which entered in the late 14th century (e.g. stomach, vein, genitals, artery, colon, palate, intestine, embryo, virus), the new terms (e.g. abdomen, fracture, cavity, skeleton, rectum, pancreas, larynx) allow for a finer specialization and semantic definiteness. In concert with these new terms, professional titles also changed: the ancient native term leech gave way to the Latin doctor. When a Latin word was re-borrowed in Early Modern English and formed a pair with a previous loan introduced via French, the French-derived loan was bound to fall by the wayside unless the Latin-derived one maintained a more specialized meaning: e.g. count vs. compute (1631); graner vs. granary (1570); ray vs. radius (1597); spice vs. species (1551); strait vs. strict (1578); sure vs. secure (1533); or semantically differentiated (e.g. reason vs. ration, dainty vs. dignity). The prestige of Latin was then evident in the increase of Latinization of existing words: thus descrive was remodeled as describe, assaut as assault, verdit as verdict. Sometimes these Renaissance re-spellings were based
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on historically incorrect etymologies: sithe was replaced by scythe as if from scindere instead of cisorium; the form abhominable is due to the false reconstruction from ab homine, and not omen; the modern forms advance and advantage, remodeling the Middle English avance and avantage, arose from the belief that the initial a- represented the Latin prefix ad-, whereas they ultimately derive from Latin ab ante. It was under Latin influence that initial h- was introduced in the spelling of many words where no /h/ was pronounced: such words as habit, harmony, hemisphere, herb, heritage, host, humble and humour. Latin influence resulted in indirect borrowing too, although to a lesser extent than in Old English. Instances of semantic loans (e.g. wit meaning ingenium, washing meaning baptisms, or timber meaning silva), loan translations (e.g. consent of learned from consensus eruditorum, gainbirth ‘regeneration’, hunderder ‘centurion’, onwriting ‘superscription’), loan renditions (e.g. witcraft for logica, or naysay for negation) and loan creations (e.g. dry mock for ironia or backset for predicatum) are often mentioned in histories of Early Modern English (Barber 1976: 91; Go¨rlach 1991: 125), but there is no specific study or analysis of these phenomena. The great potential represented by Latin vocabulary was amply recognized by literary authors, who tended to coin new words using classical elements. Thus in Milton’s works one finds Pandemonium as the literal name of the home of all the demons in Hell (the term took on its present sense of ‘a state of confusion or uproar’ only about three centuries later), gloom in its modern sense of ‘darkness’, and other Latinate neologisms like horrent, impassive, irresponsible for the first time. Sir Thomas Elyot in his The Boke of the Governour (1531) introduced neologisms such as dedicate, animate, encyclopaedia, frugality, metamorphosis, modesty, persist, and many others. Among Renaissance literary authors, Shakespeare is the most paradigmatic exemplar. The Chronological English Dictionary (CED, Finkenstaedt et al. 1970) credits him with around 1,700 neologisms or first attestations. In particular, although, as might be well expected, some of his Latinate neologisms are extremely rare words such as assubjugate, concupy, embrasures, very surprisingly one-fifth of them are common words, such as accommodation, assassination, counterpart, denote, discontent, admirable, amazement, castigate, compulsive, educate, majestic, pious, frugal, manager, negotiate, obscene, posture, reliance, savagery, traditional, tranquil, restoration, and so on (Garner 1982), of which two-thirds have continued in use up to Present-day English. According to Hughes (2000: 180), Shakespeare’s contribution to the English word-stock is assessable to around 10% of the current words and meanings. Shakespeare was not alien to Latin terms, such as autem, item, ergo, and he was the first writer to Anglicize exit (originally ‘he/she/it goes’) in the famous comparison between life and theatre: “They have their exits and their entrances” (As You Like It II.vii.141). Latinate coinage is to some extent indicative of the high degree of productiveness of Latin affixes, i.e. affixes that owe their existence to borrowed lexis during the Middle English period (Marchand 1969: 140–208; Nevalainen 1999: 379–407). Latin-derived prefixes and suffixes entered into the language together with the Latin loans, but in Early Modern English they were largely used to form new words from the borrowed lexis (e.g. asymmetric, dissimilar, infrequent, non-member, subcommittee, curacy, electorate, sectarian, conformist, complementary) and later from Germanic roots (e.g. non-knowledge, non-truth, distrust, discloud, inter-link, sublet, refill, witticism, oddity, betterment, and so on). Latin is in fact the source of the well-integrated affixes: non-,
108. English in Contact: Latin
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in-, dis-, de-, inter-, sub-, trans-, ante-, post-, pre-, re-, anti-, pro-, arch-, proto-, multi-; -acy, -an/-ian, -ant/-ent, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ary, -ate, -afy. Being considered a grammatical model of linguistic perfection thanks to its fixity and uniformity, Latin affected syntax, too, at both sentence and text level in the way of writing and in the process of standardization (Go¨rlach 1997: 155). Stylistically Ciceronian elaboration, splendidly crafted in Hooker, gave way around the 1600s to the terse succinct epigrammatic but still balanced style of the Roman authors Seneca and Tacitus, imitated by Anthony Bacon in his introduction to the first translation of Tacitus in 1591. The perception of standardness as a virtue and therefore the desire for linguistic “normalization” was indirectly dependent on Latin prestige and influence, since Latin as a dead language was no longer subject to the vagaries of usage. Moreover, syntax was an area which similarly underwent a lot of influence from Latin (Sørensen 1957): new constructions arose out of a need to imitate similar sentences in Latin. But in this field much still has to be ascertained. Because of Latin prestige, and the consequent conviction that the use of Latin loanwords was a sign of education or social superiority, far-fetched and pompous Latinate words were used out of “mere brauerie” (Barber 1976: 180), a habit that was frequently ridiculed as in the Arte of Rhetorique by Thomas Wilson (1553) and gave rise to the Inkhorn Controversy in the latter half of the 16th century and early part of the 17th century, where the harmlessly neutral “inkhorn” (first used by the polemicist John Bale in 1543 and well exemplified by Puttenham in 1589) was invoked as an emotive term of scorn to denigrate “hard” or “dark” words and obscure neologisms. Although the consequence of such behavior was the incorrect use of foreign words (malapropisms), several inkhorn terms nevertheless remained in the English vocabulary; Ben Jonson labeled as ridiculous, in his Poetaster, furibond, lubrical, tourgidious, but also defunct, reciprocal, retrograde, spurious and strenuous (Baugh and Cable 2002: 218–223). With the final abandonment of Latin as the only language of scientific writing and its gradual demise as the medium for instruction, the uncritical adoption of Latinate paradigms began to be criticized. Indeed, after 1660 Latin borrowing starts to decline to 16.5% of the total number of words (Culpeper and Clapham 1996: 212). However, this does not mean that Latin was completely displaced. Rather the idea that scholarly texts could be written in English and in a plain style, i.e. a scientific style, was given a sort of official sanction. If Latin as a grammatical model was now rejected, Latin terminology was nevertheless favored because of the lack of exact or equivalent technical terms in English, but also because of Latin’s lack of ambiguity in accordance with the one-form-one-meaning principle openly endorsed by the Royal Society (Nevalainen 1999: 365). The still significant acquisition of Classical loanwords in the Restoration period is associated with the development of modern sciences, especially biology, botany, chemistry, and geology: copula, stamen (1650), album, larva, viscera (1651), complex, desideratum, vortex (1652), pallor (1656), pendulum (1660), nebula, rabies (1662), tedium (1662), lacuna, minimum (1663), afflatus (1665), tuber (1668), corolla (1671), calculus, stimulus (1684), scintilla (1692), lens, status (1693), antenna (1698), momentum (1699). Attempts to fix the language, i.e. formalize it on a rational and scientific basis, continued throughout the Age of Enlightenment, through academies and comprehensive and respected dictionaries – the dictionaries of Bailey (1721) and Johnson (1755) provided the lexical standard up until the late 19th century – which systematized the intake of foreign words in English. On the one hand, this brought the objection to extreme
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Latinate coinage and relaxed intake of foreign lexical material. On the other, they rationalized the vocabulary. For example, according to Reuter (1936: 1; cf. Nevalainen 1999: 361) about two-thirds of all the loan verbs borrowed from Latin had two forms, one based on the present tense and one based on the past participle, but after the 18th century both forms were preserved only if they were semantically differentiated; thus conduce (1471) < Lat. conducere vs. conduct (16th century) < Lat. conductus; confer (1528) < Lat. conferre vs. collate (1558) < Lat. collatus. If no semantic differentiation occurred, only one remained; typically the present stem forms fell out of use: thus captive, exone, retrahe, repone and reverb were all lost (in standard English captive remained as a noun and adjective and reverb as a noun), while the variants formed on the past participle, captivate, exonerate, retract, repose and reverberate were preserved. Reuter (1936: 4–15; quoted in Nevalainen 1999: 366) calculated the ratio of the two forms in individual authors: in Chaucer the ratio was 200 Latinate verbs derived from the present stem to 37 from the past participle; the corresponding ratio in Caxton was 300 to 100, in Shakespeare 200 to 400, and in Cockeram 250 to 850. Contrary to the tendency observed in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the beginning of the 18th century loanwords were outnumbered by derivation and compounds and the relative frequency of borrowed prefixes and suffixes increased steadily – from some 20% at the beginning of the Early Modern English period to 70% at the end of it (Wermser 1976: 64). The triumph of scientific development and innovation demanded specialized terminology, either directly taken from other languages, i.e. Latin: e.g. nucleus (1704), cirrus (1708), inertia (1713), locus (1715), minutia (1751), insomnia (1758), fossil (1661), bonus (n.) (1773), extra, herbarium (1776), via (prep.) (1779), deficit (n.) (1782), tandem (1785), humus (1796), excursus (1803), pupa (1815), incunabula (1824), acquarium (1854), referendum (1882), bacillus (1883); or newly coined items by using naturalized lexical material, both with and without a Latin model (e.g. locomotive 1612 adj. – 1829 n. on the basis of the ablative loco and motivus). Some of Latin terms kept their morphology (e.g. delirium, pari passu, investigator, murex, rostrum) sometimes maintaining even their plural forms such as fungus: fungi, cactus: cacti, minutia: minutiae (Go¨rlach 1991: 176). Such predilection for Latin is also reflected by Johnson’s definitions: for instance, ‘smoke’ is defined as “the visible effluvium, or sooty exhalation from anything burning”. ‘Johnsonese’ is called the style with a high concentration of classical vocabulary (Hughes 2000: 258). The end of the 18th century saw further expansion (Neuhaus 1971), characterized by the preponderance of nouns – 80% after 1800 (Tournier 1985: 329). However, estimating how much borrowing actually contributed is almost impossible, since it was even more common than in the previous century to provide new scientific words by inventing them out of Greek and Latin material. Such neologisms had the advantage of being selfexplanatory: e.g. microscope (1656), oxidation (1791), paleontology (1838). However, these are not genuine loans, but modern artificial creations. This tendency has never ceased and is responsible for the persistent Latin component in current new words. Out of around 1,428 loanwords from 1963 to 1988 (Cannon 1987: 69–97) Greek and Latin proved to be on average the 8th and 9th source languages for new terms, respectively. Although predominantly compounds, the so-called Neo-Classical (Adams 1973) or Neo-Latin (Hatcher 1951) formations (e.g. vibraphone < Lat. vibrare, democracy or chemigraphy) also result in adjectives (e.g. diachronic, executive, communistic, phobic and even cultural ). These compounds are examined in detail by Adams (1973) and
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Hatcher (1951), while Brown (1956: 3) offers “a large reservoir of usable material preceded by a concise, introductory discussion of the methods for creating words”, which provides mainly Latin and Greek formatives to general concepts with extensive crossreferences, so that the user can look up either a classical formative and be referred to the general concept to which it relates, or a general concept and find a list of related formatives. The stock of these words is international, and widely intelligible across language boundaries. Consequently, if the contemporary influence of Classical languages on English cannot be ignored, one cannot possibly talk of foreign words since Latin is no longer used in any field of discourse. They are only new coinages out of etyma of Classical origin. So if “the classical vocabulary of English today is larger than the total known vocabularies of classical Greek and Latin, it is because English has composed so many ‘new’ Greek and Latin words” (Millward 1989: 281).
4 State of the art and problems Latin-English language contact phenomena have received varying degrees of attention according to the different historical phases. One of the reasons for this is the nature of vocabulary itself, which is generally an open-ended system, but not in the Old English period. Accordingly, Old English vocabulary as well as Latin-derived words have been thoroughly investigated. Still lacking, however, is a renewed periodization of Latin loans in the framework applied on the early insular loans by Wollmann (1990). A more comprehensive analysis of indirect Latin loans is also desirable, since the work by Gneuss (1955, 1985), which has not yet been superseded, suffers from an incomplete data base (i.e. psalter glosses) and the limitations intrinsic to the traditional classification. For example, if Old English godspellboc had a model such as liber evangelii, it might be considered a loan translation, but if the model was evangelium, then it is a loan rendition (Gneuss 1985: 110). From the Middle English period onwards, there is a data collection problem. It is not possible even to approximate the actual contents of the lexicon of a language without an extremely large and varied collection of data, and the number of texts on which lexical reconstruction can be based increases with the growth of literacy. Accordingly, most investigations are either restricted to particular semantic fields (e.g. Ka¨smann (1961) concentrating on Latin influence in ecclesiastical terminology), or to particular authors (e.g. Ebin [1977] on Lydgate or Mendenhall [1919] on aureate diction; or Kaplan [1932] on Gower). The tentative identification of Latin vs. French influence on Middle English vocabulary by Ellenberger (1974) has not yet been followed, if one excludes statistical works. Interesting but isolated is the study of Trnka ([1930] 1974) on the verbal pair consisting of a formal calque and a borrowed foreign form (e.g. ineye vs. inoculate). With a relatively recent period such as Early Modern English the data sources are of an entirely different magnitude, and the lexicographers are slowly beginning to come to terms with the actual usage. Scheler (1977) dedicates an attentive overview to the lexical growth in this period, which can be refined by an investigation on the lexicon of individual authors (Garner 1982) and by comparative analyses of French and Latin influx (Colman 1995; Culpeper and Clapham 1996; Wermser 1976). An exhaustive analysis of Latin loans in Early Modern English is still lacking, as the only extant one (Faltenbacher 1907) is often not very reliable due to poor documentation. Reuter (1936)
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continues to be more reliable despite its limitation to verbs, as does Norri (1992) for his treatments of medical vocabulary. Although mentioned in every handbook of history of English, there is only scanty mention of indirect Latin borrowing. As for Modern English, the lack of recordings is even more conspicuous with the exception of Algeo (1991). With regard to Latin borrowings, it would be interesting to deepen the morpho-phonemical analysis as in Ellega˚rd (1963) and separate out the role of Latin intake, which has been made more accessible by newly available lexicographical tools. The influence of Latin on English syntax has constantly been neglected, even though there is no doubt that Old English prose ultimately derived from Latin originals and despite it being implicitly taken for granted that syntactic complexity in Early Modern English was a Latinate feature. With the exception of the recapitulatory work by Sørensen (1957), the extent of Latin influence on the area of syntax still awaits more detailed investigation. The availability of chronological dictionaries besides the OED, such as Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles (SOED, Little and Coulson 1972), Chronological English Dictionary (CED, Finkenstaedt et al. 1970), and the Middle English Dictionary (MED, Lewis and Reidy 2001), as well as electronic tools such as the MED (Kurath et al. 1952–2001) and OED online (Simpson [ed.] 2000–) and Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC, Rissanen et al. 1991) has enhanced lexicographical investigation of the development of English vocabulary with particular attention on its different language components (cf. Durkin, Chapter 73). These studies, although extremely valuable, base their accurateness on the dictionaries’ recordings, which, however, turn out to be uneven. For example, the OED covers some periods (i.e. 14th to 16th centuries) more thoroughly than others, for example from the 19th century onwards. Results can also be distorted by the kind of written sources accessible to the editors. While today there is the difficulty of selecting the right kinds of sources, thus risking insufficient representation, around 1600 less than a quarter of living authors contributed more than two thirds of all new words. Some re-datings have been made (Scha¨fer 1980: 172), but too many periods still need to be revised. In the case of borrowing, the efficacy of any investigation also depends on etymological identification, and Latin words present the greatest difficulties since it is often hard to distinguish between the immediate source and the probable original language. One general complaint is that the available etymological data have rarely been sufficiently differentiated in order to be used profitably in a systematic and computerised study of vocabulary influence (Finkenstaedt and Wolff 1973: 71–73). Therefore, further research is desirable in order to evaluate the cultural influence of languages on each other.
5 References Adams, Valerie. 1973. An Introduction to Modern English Word-Formation. London: Longman. Algeo, John. 1980. Where do all the new words come from? American Speech 52: 47–64. Algeo, John (eds.). 1991. Fifty Years “Among the New Words”: A Dictionary of Neologism 1941– 1991. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Barber, Charles L. 1976. Early Modern English. London: Andre´ Deutsch. Barber, Charles L. 1993. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Baugh, Albert. 1985. The chronology of loan-words in English. Modern Language Notes 50: 90–93. Baugh, Albert and Thomas Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. London: Routledge. Bliss, Alain J. 1966. A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English. London: Routledge. Brown, Roland W. 1956. Composition of Scientific Words. Baltimore: Monotype Composition Co. Burnley, David J. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The History of the English Language. Vol. II: 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cannon, Garland. 1987. Historical Change and English Word-Formation. New York: Peter Lang. Colman, Julie. 1995. The chronology of French and Latin loan words in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 93(2): 95–124. Culpeper, Jonathan and Phoebe Clapham. 1996. The borrowing of Classical and Romantic words into English: a study based on the electronic OED. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1(2): 199–218. Dedeurwaerder, Goedele. 1986. The Middle English lexicon: growth and development between 1100 and 1500. Dissertation, Faculteit letteren en wijsbegeerte, University of Leuven. De Greef, L. 1986. The growth of lexicon: 1100–1500. Thesis at University of Leuven. Dekeyser, Xavier. 1986. Romance loans in Middle English: a reassessment. In: Dieter Kastovsky and Alexander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. Vol. 1: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics, 253–265. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dekeyser, Xavier and Luc Pauwels. 1989. The demise of the Old English heritage and Lexical innovation in Middle English: Two intertwined developments. Dutch Working Papers in English Language and Linguistics 15: 1–20. ¨ ber lateinische Elemente im Mittelenglischen. Marburg: Elvert. Dellit, Otto. 1905. U Ebin, Lois. 1977. Lydgate’s view on poetry. Annuale Medievale 18: 76–105. Ellenberger, Bengt. 1974. On Middle English mots savants. Studia Neophilologica 46: 142–150. Ellega˚rd, Alvar. 1963. English, Latin and Morphemic Analysis. Go¨teborg: University of Gothenburg. Faltenbacher, Hans. 1907. Die Romanischen, speziell franzo¨sischen und lateinischen (bzw. latinisierten) Lehnwo¨rter bei Caxton (1422(?)–1491). Dissertation, Philosophische Fakulta¨t, Ludwig Maximilians-Universita¨t Mu¨nchen. Munich: Mo¨ssl. Finkenstaedt, Thomas, Ernst Leisi, and Dieter Wolff (eds.). 1970. A Chronological English Dictionary: listing 80000 Words in Order of their earliest known Occurrence. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Finkenstaedt, Thomas and Dieter Wolff. 1973. Ordered Profusion: Studies in Dictionaries and the English Lexicon. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Funke, Otto. 1914. Die gelehrten Lateinischen Lehn- und Fremdwo¨rter in der altenglischen Literatur von der Mitte des X. Jahrhunderts bis um das Jahr 1066. Halle: Niemeyer. Garner, Bryan A. 1982. Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologism. Shakespeare Studies 15: 149–170. Gneuss, Helmut. 1955. Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Gneuss, Helmut. 1985. Linguistic borrowing and Old English lexicography: Old English terms for the books of the liturgy. In: Alfred Bammesberger (ed.), Problems of English Lexicography: Studies in Memory of Angus Cameron, 109–129. Regensburg: Pustet. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1997. The linguistic history of English : An Introduction. London: Macmillan. Gotti, Maurizio. 1996. Robert Boyle and the Language of Science. Milano: Guerini. Hatcher, Anna G. 1951. Modern English Word-Formation and Neo-Latin. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Hughes, Geoffrey. 2000. A History of English Words. Oxford: Blackwell. Jackson, Kenneth H. 1953. Language and History in Early Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jespersen, Otto. 1938. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Jones, Richard F. 1953. The Triumph of the English Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jones, Lyle V. and Joseph Wepman. 1966. A Spoken Word Count. Chicago: Language Research Association. Kaplan, Theodore H. 1932. Gower’s vocabulary. Journal of English and German Philology 31: 395–402. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1992. Semantics and vocabulary. In: Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1: The Beginning to 1066, 290–407. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ka¨smann, Hans. 1961. Studien zum kirchlichen Wortschatz des Mittelenglischen 1100–1350. Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer. Kroesch, Samuel. 1929. Semantic borrowing in Old English. In: Kemp Malone and M.B. Rund (eds.), A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, 50–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ (last accessed 2 February 2012). Legge, Dominica M. 1963. Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background. Oxford: Clarendon. Lewis, Robert E. and John Reidy (eds.). 2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Little, William H. and Fowler J. Coulson [rev. and ed. by C. T. Onions] 1972. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles. Oxford: Clarendon. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types of Present-day English Word-formation. Munich: Beck. Mendenhall, John. C. 1919. Aureate Terms. Lancaster: Norwood. Millward, Celia M. 1989. A Biography of the English Language. Fort Worth: Holt Rinehart. Murray, James A.H., Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions (eds.). 1884– 1928. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1st edn. Oxford: Clarendon. Murray, James A.H., Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions (eds.). 1933. The Oxford English Dictionary. Reissued 1st edn. Oxford: Clarendon. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 3: 1476–1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neuhaus, Joachim H. 1971. Towards a diachronic analysis of vocabulary. Cahiers de lexicologie 18: 29–42. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3: 1476–1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norri, Juhani. 1992. Names of Sickness in English 1400–1550. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Pogatscher, Alois. 1888. Zur Lautlehre der Griechischen, Lateinischen und Romanischen Lehnworte im Altenglischen. Straßburg: Tru¨bner. Reuter, Ole. 1936. Verb Doublets of Latin Origin in English. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Rissanen, Matti, Merja Kyto¨, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpio¨, Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. In: ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd edn., Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg, Jørn Thunestvedt (eds.), The HIT Center, University of Bergen, Norway. For manual, see http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/hc/index.htm (last accessed 17 May 2011). Scha¨fer, Jurgen. 1980. Documentation in the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases. Oxford: Clarendon. Scheler, Manfred. 1977. Der Englische Wortschatz. Berlin: Schmidt. Serjeantson, Mary S. 1935. A History of foreign Words in English. London: Routledge.
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Sheard, John A. 1954. The Words We Use. London: Andre´ Deutsch. Simpson, John (ed.). 2000–. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edn. online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/ (last accessed 2 February 2012). Sørensen, Knud. 1957. Latin influence on English syntax. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique du Copenhague 11: 131–155. Strang, Barbara A. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen. Thompson, James W (ed.). 1939. The Medieval Library. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tournier, Jean. 1985. Introduction descriptive a` la lexicoge´ne´tique de l’anglais contemporain. Paris: Champion. Trnka, Bohumi [1930] 1974. On the Syntax of the English Verb from Caxton to Dryden. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Krauss. Wermser, Richard. 1976. Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des Englischen Wortschatzes. Bern: Francke. West, Michael. 1953. A General Service List of English words. London: Longman. Williams, Joseph M. 1975. Origins of the English language. A social and Linguistic History. New York/London: The Free Press. Wollmann, Alfred. 1990. Untersuchungen zu den fru¨hen lateinischen Lehnwo¨rtern im Altenglischen. Mu¨nchen: Fink. Wright, Laura. 1992. Macaronic writing in a London archive, 1380–1480. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes, 762–780. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Letizia Vezzosi, Perugia (Italy)
109. English in Contact: Greek 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction Loanword evidence Effects of English on Greek Summary References
Abstract Although English and Greek are both Indo-European languages, they are not particularly closely related, nor have significant numbers of speakers of the two languages been in close contact in prehistoric or earlier historical times. Still, some contact effects can be discerned involving these two languages, mostly lexical in nature. There are a few relatively old loans in English (as early as Chaucer) and a large number of loans in various lexical domains (e.g. science and sports) in recent decades. Many such loans have entered English via French or Latin though ultimately of Greek origin. In some instances, as with the compounding involving Greek roots that is possible in medical and chemical terminology, Greek has brought a feature into English that is not widely instantiated, if at all, with native vocabulary. Finally, some consideration is given to the effects of English on Greek, including among Greek immigrants to largely English-speaking countries. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1719–1724
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1 Introduction English and Greek share some affinity in that both are members of the Indo-European language family, but within Indo-European, they are not particularly closely related. Nor is it the case that at any point in their respective prehistories were speakers of Greek and speakers of English in close contact with one another, and such is the case throughout most of historical times as well. Thus the story of language contact involving English and Greek is actually a relatively brief one. However, the languages have not been inert over the centuries with respect to one another and some contact effects can be discerned. For the most part, these involve loanwords, as there are essentially no structural effects (though see Section 2) and in many, if not most, instances, as the following discussion shows, the loans are either learned borrowings that do not even necessarily involve overt speaker-to-speaker contact, or ones that only indirectly involve Greek, being ultimately of Greek origin but entering English through a different source.
2 Loanword evidence Most of the loans from Greek that have made their way into English are relatively recent (i.e. post-15th century) learnedisms and technical vocabulary that have generally been coined outside of Greek but draw on Greek morphemes. For instance, many of the so-called inkhorn terms that stirred up usage-related controversy among scholars and language commentators in the 16th and 17th centuries, e.g. Thomas Wilson, who wrote against their use in his 1560 work The Arte of Rhetorique, were classically inspired coinages, e.g. anacephalize ‘to recapitulate’ (from Ancient Greek [AGrk] ana‘again’ + kephal- ‘head’, thus a Hellenized version of re-capit-ulate, from Latin re- and caput- ‘head’). And, in the technical arena, one can cite the word telephone, dating from the first half of the 19th century for various signaling devices (e.g. one that used musical notes), and only later coming to be applied to the electricity-based device invented later in the century, and actually composed in French out of the Greek-derived elements tele- (AGrk te¯le- ‘far’) and phone (AGrk pho¯ne¯ ‘voice, sound’), thus ‘sound from afar’. Note also medical terminology, such as cardiomyopathy (AGrk kardia ‘heart’ + my- ‘muscle’ + path- ‘suffer’), otorhinolaryngologist (AGrk o¯t- ‘ear’ + rhin‘nose’ + laryng- ‘larynx, upper part of windpipe’ + logo- ‘reckoning, discussion’ + -ist‘one-who VERBs’ [agentive suffix]), or electroencephalography (AGrk e¯lektro- ‘electrum (silver-gold alloy)’ + enkephalo- ‘brain’ (from en- ‘in’ + kephal- ‘head’, thus the ‘brain’ as ‘(that which is) inside the head’). See also below for other technical vocabulary from Greek. Even with these recent Greek-based additions to English vocabulary, there are some relatively old loanwords in English that derive ultimately from Greek, but which have, as far as English is concerned, a more proximate source in French, via Latin, or in Latin directly. Among the words of this type still in use in Present-day English are oyster (ultimately from Ancient Greek ostreon), and emerald (ultimately from Ancient Greek smaragdos, itself a borrowing into Greek from some eastern source (cf. Sanskrit marakatam)), both attested in English as early as the 14th century. A similarly early loan, found in Chaucer, is (sal/gum) armoniak ‘Salt of Ammon’, a rock salt used in tin-plating iron and in dyeing / gum of Ammon, a resin used in medicine and as a cement, and its
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later form (sal/gum) ammoniac, both ultimately from Ancient Greek ammo¯niakon ‘having to do with (the Libyan region of) Ammonia’, with the -r- in the Chaucerian forms perhaps due to an unetymological association with Greek harmonia ‘joining, fastening’. In some instances, these loans are now quite restricted in use or even obsolete, e.g. purpure ‘purple’, now found only in heraldic contexts, or pepon ‘watermelon, gourd’, ultimately from Greek pepo¯n ‘ripe (melon)’, or smaragd(us) ‘precious bright green stone’; note that later, altered forms of these particular words remain in use today, specifically purple and pumpkin (whose inner-English source, pompion, is attested first in the 16th century; see the Oxford English Dictionary for details on this and the other words.). It is also the case that immigrant communities of Greeks in some countries have been robust and large enough to bring about the introduction on a local basis of some loanwords, mainly having to do with food items and with entertainment. Tamis notes, for instance, that the significant Greek communities in Australia (numbering more than 300,000 speakers in all) have influenced the local variety of English to the extent that words such as spanakopita [‘spinach pie’], fetta [‘a type of goat’s milk cheese’], souvlaki [‘lamb kebab’], fyllo [‘thin layers of pastry’], kalamari [‘squid’ (usually eaten fried)’], bouzouki [‘a typical Greek stringed instrument’], taramas [‘fish-roe’ (the basis for a spread)], [and] saganaki [‘a fried cheese dish’] … now constitute part of the vocabulary of many Australians. (Tamis 2005: 140–141)
A similar observation can be made about Greek in the United States, where food terms such as feta and musaka (for the typically Greek eggplant-and-ground-meat casserole dish with a be´chamel topping) are commonplace, as is the gyro (shaved lamb or beef wrapped with vegetables in a pita); this last is commonly given the spelling pronunciation [dʒajrow], as opposed to Greek [jiro], but in its Greek pronunciation it may be the source of the American dialectal term (chiefly northeast) hero, as applied to a type of thick sandwich on a long roll. Regarding gyro, this etymology is disputed, but even if hero (sandwich) is instead a metaphorical extension of the common noun hero (i.e., a “heroic sandwich”), then it still has a Greek source, as hero in that sense derives ultimately from the Greek noun he¯ro¯s. Going beyond mere lexical additions, it can be noted that Greek has also provided English with some very productive word-formation affixes, though once again the proximate source is either Latin or French; among these is the suffix -ize, used in forming verbs from nouns (e.g. diphthongize), including some that are not necessarily of Greek origin (e.g. terrorize), and adjectives (e.g. brutalize), ultimately deriving from the Greek verb-forming suffix –iz. Since English has other means of forming such verbal derivatives, e.g. the native –en suffix used to form verbs from adjectives or nouns (cf. quick/ quicken, height/heighten) this suffix did not change anything structurally about English but rather added to the resources that the language already had. In a few instances, though, it can be said that the Greek loans have offered a new structural possibility to English, in the rather limited sense that Greek in certain sectors of vocabulary allows for rather productive compounding with stem forms, as opposed to the productive compounds with whole words found with native elements, i.e. those not of Classical Greek (or Latin) origin. Such constructs are especially common in the names of chemicals and in some of the medical terminology mentioned above.
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For instance, in otorhinolaryngologist, the first three elements form a “copulative” (or “dvandva”) compound, linking a stem X together with a stem Y and creating a compound meaning ‘X and Y’; this is a compound type that is not widely instantiated in English with native material, so this represents an addition to the English compounding repertoire. Further, while English can form long compounds (however odd the semantics might be), from strings of words, i.e. forms that can occur independently, such as telephone book cover designer assistant ‘someone who assists a person who designs the covers of telephone books’, Greek material allows for such compounds from stems, i.e. from forms that are special combining forms of independently occurring words. As a complex example that hints at the productivity that these patterns can take, one can cite a collection of related forms such as encephalograph ‘an image of the brain’ (cf. English [of course, from the Greek] encephalon ‘brain’ [in anatomical usage]), encephalography ‘imaging of the brain’, electroencephalography ‘electronic encephalography’, and electroencephalographologist ‘a specialist who studies electroencephalographs’. The same can be said about chemical names, which adhere to the naming conventions of the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) and can be very long, since they are connected with the chemical’s molecular structure, as can be seen in the following constructed example, where the non-numerical pieces are Greek in origin: 1,3-dimethylamino-3,5-propylhexedrine (cf. Greek di- ‘two’ [combining form], methyl- [coined by a German chemist but based on Greek methy ‘wine’ + hyle¯ ‘wood; substance’], amino- [a modern neologism but based ultimately on Greek ammo¯nia with a suffix that may be Latinate but with a parallel in Greek], propyl- [a modern coinage but based on Greek pro- ‘fore-’], hex- ‘six’, edr[from Greek hedra ‘seat’, but used in chemical names due to the plant ephedra], and –ine [see above regarding amino-]). One might well argue that such a name is not a compound in the strict sense but rather a phrase of some sort, but an actual chemical name that seems clearly to be a single compound word of some complexity and that has parts entirely of Greek origin is bromochloroiodomethane (a carbon that has attached to it a bromine, a chlorine, an iodine, and a hydrogen atom); in this case the Greek elements are, respectively, bro¯mos ‘stink’, chlo¯ros ‘light green’, io¯de¯s ‘violet-colored’, and even the suffix –ane to a certain extent, as it is based in part on a Greek suffix, having been invented as part of a series of chemical suffixes. These compounds occur in highly restricted sectors of the lexicon, but at the same time, it cannot be denied that they represent forms that are available to at least some speakers of English, and in that sense they must be counted as English lexemes that occur and as patterns that must be taken into consideration in any account of the structure of English.
3 Effects of English on Greek Given the focus of this handbook, for the most part the attention here has centered on the effects – which as noted, are mostly lexical – of Greek on English. Still, it is worth noting that there are two areas in which the contact involving the two languages yields cases of the influence of English on Greek.
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First, numerous English loanwords of fairly recent date are to be found in Greek as spoken now in Greece, the country with some 10,000,000 of the roughly 12,000,000 speakers of the language worldwide. The largest number of these loans began to come into Greek during the middle of the 20th century. Some very recent examples from sports and computer terminology include nouns such as gol ‘goal’, faul ‘foul’, basket ‘basketball’, klik ‘a click’, and derivatives such as fasfud-aðiko ‘fast-food restaurant’ (with the suffix – aðiko to indicate an establishment) and verbs, formed with the highly productive verb-forming suffix –ar–, such as klikaro ‘I click (on a webpage button)’, skaiparo ‘I use Skype’, guglaro ‘I google’, and tsetaro ‘I chat (via computer)’, among many others; note the phonological nativization of chat to an initial dental affricate, inasmuch as standard Greek does not have a palatal affricate. In some instances, inflectional material has been incorporated into the loan, as in klips ‘clip’, an indeclinable form in Greek, thus with -s even in the singular, but with the English plural suffix as part of the form, whereas occasionally the English -s is (properly) restricted to the plural in Greek, as with to test ‘the test’ but ta tests ‘the tests’ (as discussed in Joseph 1992). Some of these words are more properly termed “internationalisms” as they are of widespread occurrence in languages of the world so that, even if English might be the ultimate source, it is not necessarily the case that they entered Greek directly from English. Many of these have been nativized morphologically in Greek, so that the plural of the neuter noun sidi ‘CD’ is the perfectly regular sidia (cf. spiti ‘house’, plural spitia). A second way in which English influence can be found on Greek is in the form of immigrant Greek in predominantly English-speaking countries, e.g. in the United States and in Australia. Significant numbers of loanwords, for instance, occur in these varieties of Greek that do not occur in the Greek of Greece, e.g. karpeta ‘carpet’ in the United States. These have been catalogued, as far as the Greek spoken in early-to-mid-20th century America is concerned, by Lontos (1926), Macris (1955), and Swanson (1958). However, there are effects that go beyond the lexical domain. Seaman (1972: 113) notes considerable code-switching in the Greek spoken in America, as well as phonological adjustments in Greek in the direction of English, e.g. occurrence of schwa (Seaman 1972: 128), while Tamis (2005: 141) notes, without giving any specifics, that in Australia “English influences Greek in almost all linguistic subsystems” and terms the resulting variety of Greek an “ethnolect” in that it is “used by an ethnic community in a language contact situation”.
4 Summary Both Greek and English have long and rich literary, scholarly, and cultural traditions associated with them, and thus each in its own way has been at various times in a position to exert some influence on the other. That there has not been more such influence is largely a matter of the accidents of history and geography, so that the fact that there has been any such influence at all is striking. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my son, Adam Clark-Joseph, for help with the chemistry-related material. Dimitra Buganikolou of Ghent University and Giorgos Tserdanelis of Voxify (Inc.) provided some of the recent Greek examples, for which I am grateful.
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5 References Joseph, Brian D. 1992. Interlectal Awareness as a Reflex of Linguistic Dimensions of Power: Evidence from Greek. In: Brian D. Joseph (ed.), Language and Power, Language and Freedom in Greek Society, 71–85. Special issue of Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10(1). Lontos, Sotirios S. 1926. American Greek. American Speech 1: 307–310. Macris, James A. 1955. An Analysis of English Loanwords in New York City Greek. Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University. Seaman, P. David. 1972. Modern Greek and American English in Contact. The Hague: Mouton. Swanson, Donald C. 1958. English Loanwords in Modern Greek. Word 14: 26–46. Tamis, Anastasios M. 2005. The Greeks in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brian D. Joseph, Columbus (USA)
110. English in Contact: Norse 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Introduction Backgrounds Contact in Viking age England The effects of Viking age contact: lexical material derived from Old Norse Effects outside the lexicon Summary References
Abstract This chapter begins by introducing the Scandinavian languages, and considering the Germanic background of their relationship with English. The main focus of the discussion is the contact of speakers of Old English and Old Norse in Viking Age England. I introduce the historical context of this interaction, and discuss its likely nature and the models available for interpreting it. I then go on to its linguistic consequences, beginning with an assessment of the criteria used to deduce the (usually later) English forms/ structures that have been derived from Old Norse (drawing attention to the difficulties involved in the tests that are generally employed and the assumptions behind them). I survey the material in English which is usually reckoned to derive from contact with Norse, considering it diachronically and diatopically, and in terms of the linguistic systems affected (lexis beside morphology, syntax, etc.).
1 Introduction This chapter treats the effects of contact with the Scandinavian language family (“Norse”). This is a phenomenon of very long standing, and considerable significance. Encounters with the Scandinavian languages in the modern period have produced the occasional loan, familiar examples deriving from topography ( fiord, floe, geyser), antiquarianism/folklore (berserk, saga, troll ) and (more recently) cooking and sport (smorgasbord, orienteering; see Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 2071). But the best-known series of Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1724–1737
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interactions between speakers of English and Norse took place in Viking Age England, and these rate amongst the most important instances of linguistic contact in the history of English. Their effects will be my main focus here. In Section 3 I shall introduce the context and likely nature of the Viking Age contacts, including the models of loan transfer which one might use to interpret the resultant borrowing of linguistic material by English. I shall then move on to a survey of the English vocabulary which etymologists generally derive from Old Norse, as recorded in the Old English (OE) textual record (Section 4.2) and in the Middle English (ME) period and later (Section 4.3), preceded by a discussion of the evidence by which these words are identified (Section 4.1); and Section 5 will treat suggested effects beyond the lexicon, especially on morphology and syntax. These matters are nonetheless complicated by the descent of English and Norse from a common Germanic ancestor, the complex interconnection of their early (pre-)histories as distinct “languages”, and their continuing similarity. I shall therefore touch upon these and other aspects of the background to the subject first (Section 2).
2 Backgrounds 2.1 The Scandinavian languages in the early medieval period From their beginnings as an identifiably distinct branch of the Germanic group (c.500 CE) up until the 11th century, the early Scandinavian languages (“Old Norse”) may be treated as a relatively undifferentiated entity. (Note that I adopt here the term “Old Norse” in its broad, conventional usage (by English-speaking philologists) to refer to the Scandinavian languages down to about 1500 CE, in any or all of their dialectal forms. For discussions of terminology and periodization, see Bandle et al. 2002–2005: especially 31–38, 615–619, 691–698). There was undoubtedly variation during this period, but the major (especially phonological) innovations which allow one to classify these languages into something like the modern sub-groups of the Scandinavian family are usually dated no earlier than the millennium (on the history of the Scandinavian languages to c.1100 CE, see e.g. Andersson 2002; Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 615– 619, 649–664, 691–698, 703–745). The main branches usefully recognized during the Middle Ages are Old East Norse (Danish and Swedish) and Old West Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic; this branch later includes Faroese) (on the textual corpora, see Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 793–824). Icelandic is by far the best attested in writing (from c.1100), as well as the most conservative linguistically; for these reasons it is conventional to give Old Icelandic (OIcel) forms when citing suggested Norse etyma for early medieval borrowings into English (noticing earlier or dialectally-different reflexes where relevant).
2.2 English and Norse: pre-Viking age Germanic contexts Reconstructing the interrelations of the Germanic languages for the period prior to their earliest manuscript records is fraught with difficulty. The place of English within the conventionally-posited sub-groupings of the Germanic family is discussed in more detail in Marsh, Volume 1, Chapter 1, but it is pertinent to notice the following. Traditional stemmatic description separates “West Germanic” (including Old English) from
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“North Germanic” (Norse) as descendants of the Germanic parent language. In recent decades it has however become normal to argue for a North-West Germanic “unity” at the start of the “Migration Period”; some regard this common language as effectively witnessed by the very earliest “Scandinavian” runic inscriptions of c.200–500 CE (see e.g. Nielsen 1989: 5–11, 95–100; Townend 2002: 21–25; Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 558– 568). The subsequent division of North Germanic and West Germanic which we hypothesize is on the whole justified by the series of key innovations which distinguish the two groups, but their separation is by no means clean and unequivocal: Old Norse shares a number of phonological and morphological features with one or more of the West Germanic languages (specifically of the Ingvaeonic group), such that it is sensible to allow for ongoing contacts (areal changes) in the regions abutting the North Sea up at least until the period of the Anglo-Saxon migrations, and reasonable to speak in terms of a North-West Germanic dialect continuum in which the nascent English dialects and the language varieties spoken in Scandinavia participated. (For discussions see Nielsen 1985: especially 187–220; Hines 1998; Townend 2002: 25–26, 29; Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 544–572, 770–771.) Special affinities with Norse have occasionally been claimed for particular dialects of Old English, usually Anglian, supposing a closer pre-migration relationship with North Germanic; but the evidence is at best contentious, and normally now approached sceptically (see the conclusions in Nielsen 1985: 65–72, 249–259, and further Hines 1998; Townend 2002: 26–28; Dance 2003: 87–88). Contact with Norse speakers in some parts of England between the AngloSaxon settlement period and the onset of the Viking Age has also occasionally been mooted on non-linguistic grounds; for discussion and references see Townend (2002: 29–31).
3 Contact in Viking age England 3.1 Historical background The historical context for encounters between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in Viking Age England is well documented, not to say infamous. Sea-borne expeditions mounted by Scandinavian raiders (called “Vikings” by later historians) began in the late 8th century and increased in severity, culminating in the full-blown military incursions and conquests of the 850s–870s, and in the ceding of most of northern and eastern England to Danish control. Thereafter large parts of the country participated in the extensive Scandinavian cultural diaspora for the next century and a half, with a second high water-mark in the reign of Cnut and his sons (1016–1042) (for summaries of the relevant historical sources and scholarship, see e.g. Keynes 1997). The numbers of Norse speakers who settled permanently in England during this period remain a matter of scholarly controversy; but the quantity, concentration, and diversity of the Scandinavian place- and personal names recorded, especially from Cumbria, Yorkshire and parts of Lincolnshire, argue compellingly in favor of Norse communities of a very significant total size (see Townend 2002: 47–48). (On the place-name evidence, which is best considered separately from the lexicon proper, see especially the account in Abrams and Parsons 2004.) It is usually (and plausibly) supposed that Old East Norse speakers were in the majority, with West Norse (Norwegian) settlement in the North-West of England, though inevitably this is an over-simplification of the evidence (which must
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reckon with the general difficulty of distinguishing the two branches of Norse at this period; see above). It is hard to assess how long Norse continued to be spoken by Scandinavian communities in England, and the rate of attrition must have differed markedly from place to place; but it is a reasonable assumption that (forms of) Norse remained in use throughout the eleventh century in parts of the north of England (perhaps into the twelfth century in the North-West; see Parsons 2001).
3.2 Contact models and the transfer of linguistic material It is worth stressing that when scholars refer to “the Anglo-Norse contact situation”, this must be understood as shorthand for a long period of contacts in diverse local settings. It would have encompassed the widest possible variety of interactions, from the most superficial (trade, negotiation) to the most intimate (mixed communities, intermarriage), and every shade of relative political/cultural “dominance” by one group of speakers or the other. Accordingly, one should be wary of assuming that all the (putative) effects of this contact arose from a single type of encounter (or a series of encounters on a simple chronological cline of intensity), even if historical distance has effectively turned them into one cluster of phenomena. Even at a conservative estimation, the linguistic material transferred from Norse to English during this period is unusual in its extent, going far beyond the casual “needbased” borrowing of words for new concepts. (See Sections 4.2 and 4.3 below. On loans into Norse from English during the medieval period, see the discussion and references in Bandle et al. [2002–2005: 769, 1034] and Gammeltoft and Holck [2007]). Attempts at characterizing the contact situation have therefore sought to describe the “special” nature of the relations between speakers that these end-products imply. While earlier work on the subject refers somewhat imprecisely to language “mixing” or “blending”, research in recent decades has introduced more sophisticated models, drawn from cross-linguistic evidence for the processes and results of contact-based change in (often) better-documented cases. This principle of comparison is in general terms a sound one, and has produced important advances in our appreciation of the mechanics of how Norse-derived material might have made it into English; but in applying such models one must remain acutely sensitive to the particularities of the Anglo-Norse situation, and to the nature of the evidence for it (including the contentiousness of much of the claimed loaned material, which is not always sufficiently signposted; see Sections 4.1 and 5 below). One of the most important specifics is the sheer similarity of Old English and Old Norse, with their very closely-related (in many ways identical) phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical constituents. The fullest assessment of the implications of this formal closeness is by Townend, who concludes that there was probably mutual intelligibility between speakers of the two languages sufficient at least for pragmatic face-to-face communication (Townend 2002: 181–185; cf. Watts, Chapter 95). It is therefore questionable whether models for contact-motivated change predicated upon more radical differences between the varieties involved are entirely appropriate in this case. The communicative situation here might equally well be labeled a sort of (extreme) “dialect contact”, facilitating a relatively easy transfer of linguistic material; in some instances it put new forms into circulation in the recipient language which effectively acted as variants of native ones (and see Townend 2002: 205–210; Watts, Chapter 95).
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All in all, the linguistic outcomes for English of this long period of contact are probably best read as a combination of two basic processes (whose effects are nonetheless sometimes difficult to distinguish, and would have overlapped). The first, “borrowing” proper (recipient language agentivity), describes the adoption of Old Norse material led by speakers of Old English, and is sufficient to account for common-or-garden lexical importations, especially words for novel concepts or activities associated with the cultural ambit of the Scandinavian incomers. The second process, shift-based interference (source language agentivity), is needed to explain the transfer into English of less patently “necessary” Norse-derived elements, including more fundamental components of the lexicon (basic vocabulary and function-words) and morphosyntactic features; these are likely to have been carried over by Norse speakers switching to speaking English and bringing some of the more basic building blocks of their language with them (see Townend 2002: 201–207). It is questionable to what extent one needs to invoke more extreme models of (especially shift-based) development, and to treat the outcome of Anglo-Norse contact in terms of something classifiable as an essentially “new” language variety, an inter-language or a creole. This issue has been much debated in the scholarly literature (and see Romaine, Chapter 113, for more details). Suffice it to notice that the “creolization” arguments most enthusiastically propounded in the 1970s and 80s have been succeeded by more careful assessments of the grounds for such labels, and a more moderated sense of what is applicable to the Anglo-Norse situation in particular. The consensus now seems to be that, significant though this period of interaction may have been for the development of English (and most supposed effects beyond the lexical remain controversial; see Section 5 below), contact with Norse in the Viking Age should not be regarded as the midwife for the birth of a “new language” – see the summaries of the debate by Townend (2002: 196–201), Dance (2003: 295–298), Bandle et al. (2002–2005: 1032–1033).
4 The effects of Viking age contact: lexical material derived from Old Norse 4.1 On evidence As intimated above and exemplified below, contact with Norse has had significant consequences for English, most demonstrably in the lexicon. But while some instances of Scandinavian input may be identified with reasonable certainty, several even of the most routinely cited Norse-derived words are etymologically debatable, and there are many further suggestions in the scholarly literature that are still less secure. (Note that I shall use the inelegant but unambiguous term “Norse-derived word” to refer generally to lexis borrowed from or influenced by Old Norse in any of the ways that this is possible, i.e. encompassing what conventional taxonomy distinguishes as “loanwords proper” next to “loan shifts” [semantic loans and loan translations].) The difficulties with identifying material drawn from Old Norse are well known in principle, but their implications for the Norse-derived elements conventionally listed by the handbooks are rarely pursued. They stem from two fundamental problems. The first is the genetic closeness and hence similarity of Old English and Old Norse, as discussed above (Section 2.2); this has self-evident consequences not only for the relatively easy transfer of material between the two, but for our capacity to identify it after
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the fact. The second problem is the patchiness of the record of both languages in the periods before and during which contact took place. In the case of Old English this is especially true for the dialectal areas most affected (northern and eastern England); and Old Norse is sparsely attested throughout the Viking Age, the evidence for it largely restricted to runic inscriptions and some skaldic poetry (see Bandle et al. 2002–2005: 698–703). These factors collude to make it difficult to demonstrate that an English word-form or usage first appearing from later Old English onwards must derive from Norse, rather than its being a native item previously unattested in writing, or an instance of parallel (convergent) development in the two languages; see Bjo¨rkman (1900–02: 8–12) for a general account of the issues. Crucially, some formal comparative tests of Scandinavian derivation are available. That is, subject to the confident identification of their Germanic roots, it is possible to state that certain morphemes have undergone phonological changes diagnostic of their evolution in Norse rather than those we would expect to see in English cognates; indeed in the clearest cases native cognates exist with which to compare them (for discussion see Bjo¨rkman [1900–02: 30–185], still the fullest delineation of the principles behind such identifications). Amongst the more reliable phonological discriminators are the following. In each case the Middle English word cited shows characteristically Scandinavian vowel or consonant developments, in contrast to the native equivalents found in (or reconstructed for) Old English: PGrmc */ai/ > ON /εi/, compared to OE /ɑː/. E.g. ME ai ‘always’, cp. OIcel ei, contrast OE a¯; ME heil ‘healthy’, cp. OIcel heill, contrast OE ha¯l; ME nai ‘no’, cp. OIcel nei, contrast OE na¯. PGrmc */au/ > ON ɑu, ɔu/ (usually > ME /oː/), compared to OE /æːɑ/. E.g. ME go¯k ‘cuckoo’ (PDE dialectal gowk, gawk ‘cuckoo, fool’), cp. OIcel gaukr, contrast OE ge¯ac; ME lo¯s ‘loose’, cp. OIcel lauss, contrast OE le¯as. PGrmc */eː/ (NWGmc */aː/) > ON /ɑː/ (> ME /ɔː/), compared to OE (WS) /æː/ (> /oː/ before nasals). E.g. ME loue ‘low’, cp. OIcel la´gr, contrast OE læ¯g- ‘fallow’; ME wo¯n(e) ‘expectation’, cp. OIcel va´n, contrast the related OE we¯n (< *wo¯ni < PrGmc *we¯ni-). PGrmc /ð/ > ON /ð/ (medially or finally), compared to OE /d/. E.g. ME baithen ‘inquire, grant’, cp. OIcel beiða, contrast OE bæ¯dan; ME greith ‘ready’, cp. OIcel greiðr, contrast OE gera¯d ‘disposed, wise’. PGrmc /ɡ/, /k/ > ON /ɡ/, /k/, compared to OE /j/, /ʤ/, /ʧ/ in palatalization environments. E.g. ME ge¯re, PDE gear ‘clothes, equipment’, cp. OIcel gervi, contrast OE gearwe with /j/; ME eggen, PDE egg ‘to incite’, cp. OIcel eggja, contrast OE ecgan ‘to harrow’ with /ʤ/; ME casten ‘throw’, cp. OIcel kasta (would have produced OE (WS) *ceastan with /ʧ/). PGrmc /sk/ > ON /sk/, compared to OE /ʃ/. E.g. ME sca¯th(e) ‘injury’, cp. OIcel skaði, contrast OE sceaða with /ʃ/; ME ske¯t(e) ‘quickly’, cp. OIcel skjo´tt, contrast OE sce¯otwith /ʃ/. Occasionally the evidence for loan consists of identifiably Norse morphological material. Most often cited are the nominal -r (nom. sg. masc a-stem; e.g. ME hauer ‘skilful’,
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cp. OIcel hag-r) and adjectival -t (nom./acc. sg. neuter strong, also used adverbially in Old Norse, as in e.g. ME thwert ‘crosswise’, cp. OIcel þver-t). It is important to recognize that the words identified using these criteria (let us call them collectively “Type A”) are by far the most secure instances of Old Norse input. It is obvious that items containing morphemic material amenable to the available formal tests will account for only a very small proportion of the set of all English words first recorded in late Old English or after, and which resemble the equivalent word in Norse (or which are first then recorded in a novel sense or usage that resembles one in Norse); and it is of course implausible that only the formally testable words should be those that were borrowed or influenced. But, equally, it would be absurd to jump to the opposite conclusion and assume that every such novelty really were affected by contact with Norse. Accordingly, and inevitably, most scholars’ lists of Norse-derived words fall between these minimal and maximal poles. In the case of items for which formal comparative tests are unavailable, etymologists opt to ascribe Scandinavian influence on the basis of whatever other evidence is to hand, and (more or less cautiously) to weigh its value in each individual instance. Classification of these remaining words, where it is essayed at all, tends therefore to reflect relative degrees of conviction in divining Norse input: hence Bjo¨rkman lists them in two groups, those of greater (“tolerably certain”) and lesser likelihoods. Taking into account the characteristics that they present to the etymologist at first blush, I suggest that putative Norse-derived words below Type A consistently divide into three broad categories: B. The (Germanic) root of the lexeme is not recorded (early enough) in Old English, but is found in Old Norse. Loan from Norse has therefore been proposed. Conventionally admitted examples include ME il(le) ‘ill’ (cp. OIcel illr), knı¯f ‘knife’ (cp. OIcel knı´fr), ta¯ken ‘take’ (cp. OIcel taka) and thrı¯ven ‘thrive’ (cp. OIcel þrı´fa(sk)). C. The root of the lexeme is recorded (early enough) in some form in Old English. Some aspects of form/sense/usage are however new, and paralleled in Old Norse. Loan or influence from Norse has therefore been posited, more or less convincingly, to account for these developments. Perhaps the most frequently cited semantic loan is ME dre¯m ‘dream’, whose form clearly derives from OE dre¯am ‘(happy) noise’, but for whose sense cp. OIcel draumr ‘dream’. Scandinavian parallels are also often invoked to explain new compounds or idioms (e.g. for the sake (of), cp. OIcel fyrir sakir) and grammatical/derivational forms (e.g. ME main, adj., is sometimes compared to OIcel megn, since OE mægen is only recorded as a noun); and, more controversially, to account for the sheer frequency in Middle English of some words recorded only very fleetingly earlier on (e.g. ME til ‘to, until’, cp. OIcel til rather than the vanishingly rare OE (early Northumbrian) til ). D. The etymology of the lexeme is obscure. Comparable forms in Norse have sometimes been suggested as sources, but their explanatory ability is at best partial. Examples include ME loupe ‘loop’ (there is perhaps some connection with ON hlaup ‘leap’, but its sense has more in common with Scots Gaelic luˆb ‘a loop, bend’; or cp. MDu luˆpen ‘lie in wait’?) and ME no¯k ‘nook’ (possibly connected to Norw dial no´k ‘hook, person bent with age’ and/or MLG (n)oˆke ‘acute-angled piece of land’, but cp. also ME nok(ke) ‘tip of a bow, notch of an arrow’).
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Clearly, each of these groupings will contain within it a wide range of items more or less plausibly derivable from Old Norse, all of which must ultimately be assessed on their own merits. Just occasionally one can trace some association with a specifically Scandinavian cultural product or practice (e.g. OE marc ‘unit of monetary weight’, cp. OIcel mo˛rk) and/or an early usage tied to references to Scandinavian communities (e.g. OE lagu ‘law’, cp. OIcel lo˛g < *lagu; on these words see Pons-Sanz forthc.). But such traces are very rare. In their absence, etymologists have tended to give most weight to two distributional “tests” of loan: (a) dialectal distribution within English, i.e. whether an item is restricted by and large to northern or eastern dialects in its (early) occurrences; and (b) group distribution within Germanic, i.e. whether an item is confined to English (of a late enough date) and Norse, and not attested otherwise in West Germanic. These criteria are sensible enough in principle, and at times (especially in combination) their implications are compelling: a good example is ill, a word which lexicalizes a fundamental adjectival/adverbial concept expressed by the same root in Old Norse, and which in its earliest occurrences is especially associated with northern and eastern English dialects and nowhere else in West Germanic (where the PGrmc *ubil- root dominates this lexical field, as in Old English [OE yfel]). But not all cases are in practice as straightforward as this. Attractive though it may be (and sometimes it is the best we can do), we must remember that evidence from distribution is ultimately circumstantial. Its value diminishes rapidly, moreover, the less frequent a word’s attestation and the less common the concept it embodies: it is one thing to cite such restricted occurrence as meaningful for ill, and another for a rare, perhaps “ideophonic” Middle English word like glam ‘din, merrymaking’ (cp. OIcel glam[m]), which occurs only a few times in northern/north-western alliterative verse. Though Bjo¨rkman (1900–02: 197) favors English dialect distribution (in particular) as an important criterion, he sensibly concludes that, especially when put next to formal evidence, “Such tests are, however, all more or less unreliable”. Often one is left simply having to weigh how plausible it would be for a given word, if it were indeed native, to have been in spoken use in the period before Norse influence began to be felt, but not to have been attested (at all, or in the required sense/form/usage) in the surviving textual record. In the more finely balanced cases this can be genuinely imponderable, and one sometimes senses that the attribution of a Norse derivation has as much to do with the enthusiasm of the scholar applying the labels as it does anything else (for a sceptical position see Lass 1997: 203–205). I have labored the issues in this section, but they need to be appreciated before any presentation of “Norse-derived” material is attempted. In what follows I have confined myself to relatively uncontroversial (and conventionally accepted) examples, but any figures given must naturally be taken as very approximate.
4.2 The Old English period About 100 different words usually derived from Old Norse are recorded in texts classified as belonging to the Old English period (i.e. down to the early 12th century; see esp. Hofmann 1955; Peters 1981; Hug 1987: 3–5; Kastovsky 1992: 333–336; Pons-Sanz forthc.). It is conventional to list these words by broad conceptual area, since many (including some of the most frequently attested) are confined to one or another of a relatively small set of fields. The most manifest of these can loosely be called “legal”, though it incorporates words not only for aspects of legislation and attendant activities
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but also for relationships definable in law, including matters of social rank, and other ideas recurrent in texts delineating rights and responsibilities. Words in this field generally identified as Norse-derived and most ingrained in textual culture by the end of the Old English period include: lagu ‘law’ (cp. OIcel lo˛g, < earlier *lagu), grið ‘protection, peace, sanctuary’ (cp. OIcel grið), hu¯sting ‘assembly’ (cp. OIcel hu´sþing), ma¯l ‘lawsuit’ (cp. OIcel ma´l), saht ‘agreement, peace’ (cp. OIcel sa´tt < earlier *saht); bo¯nda ‘(free) peasant, farmer’ (cp. OIcel bo´ndi, also the source of the second element of OE hu¯sbo¯nda ‘householder’, cp. OIcel hu´sbo´ndi), fe¯olaga ‘fellow, partner’ (cp. OIcel fe´lagi, with substitution of the English cognate for the first element of the Norse word), hold ‘holder of allodial land’ (cp. OIcel ho˛ldr, hauldr), hu¯scarl ‘member of the king’s bodyguard’ (cp. OIcel hu´skarl), þræ¯l ‘slave, thrall’ (cp. OIcel þræll), u¯tlaga ‘outlaw’ (cp. OIcel u´tlagi) and the semantic loan eorl in the sense ‘earl’ (cp. OIcel jarl, ‘earl’; OE eorl meant ‘nobleman, warrior’). Other conceptual areas containing a number of identifiable Norse derivations include those of seafaring (e.g. barða ‘[beaked] ship’ [cp. OIcel barði], scegð ‘warship’ [cp. OIcel skeið]), measures and coins (e.g. marc ‘mark, unit of [monetary] weight’ [cp. OIcel mo˛rk], o¯ra ‘eighth of a mark’ [cp. OIcel aurar, pl.]) and military activity/accoutrements (e.g. brynige ‘mailcoat’ [cp. OIcel brynja], lið ‘fleet, troop’ [cp. OIcel lið]). Most of these words arguably represent “need-based” loans, that is they reflect the desire to name some newly-imported Scandinavian cultural artefact (whether an object, a practice or an idea) that could not be expressed so precisely or succinctly using existing native vocabulary, or to which a Scandinavian association adhered. Lexical items of this type are usually regarded as the most straightforward, easily adoptable form of borrowed material, and it is hardly surprising that they should be amongst the first to appear and to be accepted in written texts dominated by the language of the South and West of England. But already during this period there are occurrences of Norsederived items marked by no recognizable conceptual novelty, standing for ideas with words for which the English lexicon was well stocked. Examples include nouns like band ‘bond’ (cp. OIcel band), gærsum ‘treasure’ (cp. OIcel gersemi, gørsemi), loft ‘sky, air’ (cp. OIcel loft), scinn ‘skin’ (cp. OIcel skinn); adjectives like dearf ‘bold’ (cp. OIcel djarfr), sto¯r ‘strong’ (cp. OIcel sto´rr); verbs like eggian ‘egg, incite’ (cp. OIcel eggja), hyttan ‘meet’ (cp. OIcel hitta), tacan ‘take’ (cp. OIcel taka); and (making their first appearances in the 12th-century continuations and interpolations in the Peterborough text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) the ‘function-words’ fra¯ ‘from’ (cp. OIcel fra´) and perhaps ba¯ðe ‘both’ (cp. OIcel ba´ðir). Words of this stamp are as yet relatively infrequently recorded, and are sometimes to be associated with northern dialects (e.g. the glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels, the so-called “northern recension” of the Chronicle). But it is important to recognize that Old English texts already exhibit some signs of the diffusion of “basic” Norse-derived vocabulary that comes into its own in the Middle English record; and indeed it is highly probable that the vast majority of Scandinavian derivations first attested in later centuries were in spoken usage somewhere in England before the 11th century was very old (and see Dance 2003: 143–149).
4.3 Middle English and later By the end of the Middle English period, with a vigorous textual culture in the vernacular representing dialects from across England, the Norse influence on the lexicon is
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visible to its full extent (on the Middle English evidence see especially Bjo¨rkman 1900– 02; Rynell 1948; Burnley 1992: 414–423). Figures are, as ever, to be treated with caution, but a recent survey has found some 1500 words cited with a Norse etymon in the Oxford English Dictionary (Hogg and Denison 2006: 2); approximately 600 are usually claimed to be current in general standard Modern English (Hug 1987: 7–9), with several hundreds more in dialect usage. Though these are modest sums compared to the total lexical input from French and Latin, these words encompass a wide range of conceptual areas, and operate at all levels of the vocabulary. A small sample in their Middle English forms (amongst the more securely etymologized, and in addition to the descendants of those already cited) gives: (nouns) anger, bagge, bo¯ne (‘prayer’), club(be), eg(ge), gest, hap (‘luck’), leg, lo¯n(e) (‘loan’), mensk(e) (‘honour’), sco¯r(e), skirt(e), scul(le) (‘skull’), skı¯(e) (‘sky’), want, windou(e), wing(e) (cp. respectively OIcel angr, baggi, bo´n, klubba, egg, gestr, happ, leggr, la´n, mennska, skor, skyrta, Swed dial. skull(a), OIcel sky´, vant, vindauga, vængr [Swed/Dan vinge]); (adjectives) blo¯ (‘black’), boun (‘prepared’), gein (‘direct, beneficial’), greith (‘ready’), heil (‘healthy’), il(le), lo¯s (‘loose’), loue (‘low’), me¯k, odde, scant, se¯r(e) (‘various’), sleigh (‘clever, sly’), thwert (‘crosswise’), ugli (cp. OIcel bla´, bu´inn, gegn, greiðr, heill, illr, lauss, la´gr, mju´kr, oddi [n.], skammt, se´r, slœgr, þvert, uggligr); (adverbs) ai (‘ay, always’), hethen (‘hence’), thethen (‘thence’), whethen (‘whence’) (cp. OIcel ei, he´ðan, þaðan, hvaðan); (verbs) atlen (‘intend, advance’), carpen (‘talk’), casten, flitten, ga¯pen, ge¯ren (‘make’), geten, given, reisen (‘raise’), sca¯then, se¯men, thrı¯ven (cp. OIcel ætla, karpa, kasta, flytja, gapa, gør(v)a, geta, gefa [Dan give], reisa, skaða, sœma, þrı´fa(sk)), and perhaps dı¯en and callen (OIcel deyja, kalla); and ‘grammatical’, ‘closed-class’ items such as (prepositions) again(e)s (‘against’), fro¯, til (cp. OIcel ´ı gegn, fra´, til), (conjunctions) though, sum (‘as, soever’), oc (‘and’) (cp. OIcel þo´ [< *þauh], ODan/Swed sum, OIcel ok), (pronouns) thei, their(e), theim (cp. OIcel þeir, þeira, þeim), the future auxiliary verb monen (‘shall, will’; PDE northern dial. mun) (cp. OIcel munu), and the interjection nai (‘no’) (cp. OIcel nei). The quantity and type of Norse-derived words attested in the dialects of the North and East Midlands are particularly impressive, especially in the Middle English period (before which the language of many of these areas had been nearly or entirely invisible in the textual record). Many of the basic “function-words” drawn from Norse are at first confined to these dialects (including the third person pronouns); and several remain “northern” words throughout their history (e.g. the directional adverbs ME hethen, thethen, whethen, the future auxiliary mun). Scandinavian influence seems to manifest itself most forcefully of all in a core area, “a belt stretching from Cumberland and Westmorland in the west to the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire in the east, often including part of Lincolnshire but excluding the old kingdom of Bernicia in Durham and Northumberland” (Samuels 1985: 269; see also Kolb 1965, and Kries 2003 who would include south-west Scotland). Features confined to this area in Middle English include the peculiarly Norse-looking er(e), ‘are’ (rather than ar(e)), and at to introduce an infinitive (Samuels 1985); and in the modern period a number of Norse-derived words are only current in this “great Scandinavian belt” (e.g. laik ‘play’, brant ‘steep’, slaip ‘slippery’; cp. OIcel leika, brattr [< *brant-], sleipr; Kolb 1965). The dissemination from northern and eastern dialects of some words that have descended into the modern standard (including they, followed by their and them) is well documented, because it is witnessed relatively late in the medieval period (in the case of they it happened in the 14th and 15th centuries). But even by the first
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efflorescence of Middle English literature in the early 13th century, a substantial body of Norse-derived words is already attested well outside the areas principally settled by Scandinavian speakers, including the majority of the nouns, adjectives and verbs cited above (on the South-West Midlands see Dance 2003). The presence of these words is best explained as the result of a diffusion from the areas of primary Scandinavian settlement which began early (it is already evidenced in Old English texts to some extent), rather than as indicative of any meaningful independent loan traffic in the south and west. Even in the earliest Middle English, then, the difference between the Norsederived words recorded in northern/eastern as opposed to southern/western dialects is one of more versus less, not an absolute matter of presence versus absence, and their distribution is not as predictable as sometimes assumed. At its clearest there is a division in lexical type, the more ingrained “grammatical” items including pronouns seemingly being more resistant to dissemination, but this distinction is increasingly undermined as the period progresses. Neither should the occurrence of Norse-derived vocabulary in medieval texts be interpreted solely (or simplistically) in diatopic terms: as for other elements in the Middle English lexicon (including many items labeled as “dialect words”), geographical origin is sometimes less germane than literary-stylistic tradition. The best-known instance is the vocabulary characteristic of alliterative poetry, whose constituents, sometimes with modified senses and in distinctive collocations, could be diffused widely via the alliterative tradition; Norse-derived examples include Middle English busken, carpen, cairen (cp. OIcel bu´ask, karpa, keyra), found not only in northern texts but in southern and western alliterative verse like Piers Plowman and Joseph of Arimathie (see e.g. Turville-Petre 1977: 69–83). But there is a more general principle at work here: the occurrence of Norse-derived lexis in the language of Middle English textual traditions at large stands to be much better understood through the detailed analysis of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic contexts, which is to say the competition between these words and their available synonyms and the stylistic constraints that operate upon it (the classic overview is Rynell 1948; for more focused work see Hug 1987; Dance 2003). Certainly, by the Middle English period (if at all) the simple occurrence of a Norse-derived word in a text from a particular dialect area cannot be regarded as a straightforward index of “Scandinavian influence” on that area, but represents the end-product of a complex series of transmissions. In this light, much work remains to be done collecting and analysing the Norse-derived vocabulary of medieval English (and Scots) texts; despite the inroads made by recent studies such as Dance (2003), Kries (2003), Pons-Sanz (2007 and forthc.), the challenge laid down by McIntosh (1978) to gather this material stands to a great extent unanswered.
5 Effects outside the lexicon Given the influence from Norse noticed above upon the “grammatical” reaches of the English lexicon, it would seem reasonable to expect some effects on morphology (derivational and inflexional) and syntax too. A number of suggestions have been made in the scholarly literature for contact-derived input into the development of these systems, both by the “direct” adoption of Old Norse morphemic material and syntactic features, and as the “indirect” result of simplifications and accommodations brought about by the
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period of intense contact often posited during the Viking Age. (For some [speculative] attempts to attribute changes in the English phonological system to contact with Norse, see also e.g. Samuels 1985: 277–279). A good example of a direct Scandinavian import into the stock of English affixes is ME -laic, -lec (cp. OIcel -leikr, and contrast OE -la¯c), which is used to derive abstract nouns upon adjectives (e.g. go¯dlec ‘goodness’, fre¯olec ‘generosity’) and is recorded from the South-West Midlands as well as northern and eastern dialects from early in the Middle English period. Norse influence on inflexional morphology is more difficult to trace with confidence. Amongst the most convincing candidates is the northern/eastern Middle English present participle ending -ande (cp. OIcel -andi with the usual OE -ende); but few if any other suggestions for this category are so compelling, since almost all lack decisive formal evidence of the sort characterized above (Section 4.1). Arguments in favor of features having been borrowed from Norse, or generated (or even significantly propelled) by the contact situation, tend therefore to be reliant on less secure evidence such as dialect distribution within English, and/or to proceed from their supposed typicality as contact phenomena in the context of cross-linguistic studies of language change. A case in point is verbal -s, in standard Modern English the ending of the third person singular present (indicative), but available as an ending for other persons in certain other periods/dialects. This is a familiar proposal for Norse derivation, and has started to creep into handbook descriptions as if it were an uncontroversial incidence. But though the early northern distribution of -s is suggestive, attempts to derive it directly from Norse morphological material are unconvincing; the most plausible explanation for its earliest recorded usages is as an analogical extension from the native second person singular -s, motivations for which include, but are certainly not confined to, morphological simplifications stimulated by the contact situation (see Miller 2002). With such arguments one finds oneself drawn into the more general matter of the (acceleration of) inflexional leveling and loss at the transition between Old and Middle English, including the reduction in case agreement and the decline of grammatical gender. This whole nexus of developments has itself plausibly been interpreted as exhibiting the hallmarks of contact phenomena, sometimes in the context of creolization and other inter-language hypotheses. But one’s enthusiasm or scepticism in this connexion is dependent to a significant degree on theoretical position, and in some instances on the extent to which one is minded to regard the actuation of reasonably common types of change as in need of specific propulsion beyond the circumstances of “normal” language-internal processes (see Section 3.2 above; and compare Lass [1997: 197–209] on the principles). Much the same issues naturally bear upon the other developments in medieval English morphology and syntax for which contact with Norse has often been invoked as an explanation. These include (see especially the survey in Miller 2004): the marked increase in productivity of the derivational verbal affixes -n- (as in harden, deepen) and -l- (e.g. crackle, sparkle); the rise of the “phrasal verb” (verb plus adverb/preposition) at the expense of the verbal prefix, most persuasively the development of up in an aspectual (completive) function; the development of non-introduced relative clauses; the employment of shall and will as future auxiliaries; certain aspects of V2 syntax (including the development of ‘CP–V2’ syntax in northern Middle English); and the general shift to VO order.
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6 Summary This chapter has focused on the contact between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in Viking Age England, and its substantial consequences for English. The circumstances of the contact, most importantly the similarity of the language varieties involved, mean that it is not always easy to recognize its effects, and their extent continues to be debated. They are clearest in the lexicon where, paying due attention to the difficulties of the etymological evidence, we can identify a significant number of probable loans. These words begin to be recorded in the late Old English period, when they cluster in a few conceptual areas (e.g. legal terminology, seafaring), but when a few items expressing more “basic” ideas are already to be found. In Middle English their number and variety increase dramatically, extending to every part of the vocabulary (including pronouns and prepositions). Words derived from Old Norse are especially densely attested in the north and east of England, where the bulk of the contact took place, but many are widely disseminated by the early Middle English period, and patterns of distribution in terms of literary tradition as well as date and dialect require further study. There have also been many plausible suggestions for contact-induced changes beyond the lexicon, particularly as regards morphology and syntax, though contact influence in these domains is often harder still to pinpoint.
7 References Abrams, Lesley and David N. Parsons. 2004. Place-names and the history of Scandinavian settlement in England. In: John Hines, Alan Lane, and Mark Redknap (eds.), Land, Sea and Home, 379–431. Leeds: Maney. Andersson, Thorsten. 2002. Nordgermanische Sprachen. In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich and Heiko Steuer (eds.), Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde von Johannes Hoops, 2nd edn., XXI, 289–306. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bandle, Oscar, Kurt Braunmu¨ller, Ernst Ha˚kon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann, and Ulf Teleman (eds.). 2002–2005. The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages. 2 vols. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bjo¨rkman, Erik. 1900–02. Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English. 2 vols. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and Semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II: 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dance, Richard. 2003. Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Gammeltoft, Peder and Jakob Povl Holck. 2007. Gemste¯n and other Old English pearls – a survey of early Old English loanwords in Scandinavian. NOWELE 50–51: 131–161. Hines, John. 1998. Archaeology and language in a historical context: the creation of English. In: Roger Blench, and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language II: Achaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses, 283–294. London/New York: Routledge. Hofmann, Dietrich. 1955. Nordisch-Englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard. Hogg, Richard and David Denison. 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hug, Sibylle. 1987. Scandinavian Loanwords and their Equivalents in Middle English. Bern/ Frankfurt am Main/New York/Paris: Peter Lang.
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Kastovsky, Dieter. 1992. Semantics and vocabulary. In: Richard M. Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. I: The Beginnings to 1066, 290–408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, Simon. 1997. The Vikings in England, c. 790–1016. In: Peter Sawyer (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, 48–82. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Kolb, Eduard. 1965. Skandinavisches in den nordenglischen Dialekten. Anglia 83: 127–153. Kries, Susanne. 2003. Skandinavisch-schottische Sprachbeziehungen im Mittelalter: der altnordische Lehneinfluss. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Angus. 1978. Middle English word geography: its potential role in the study of the longterm impact of the Scandinavian settlements upon English. In: Thorsten Andersen and Karl Inge Sandred (eds.), The Vikings, Proceedings of the Symposium of the Faculty of Arts of Uppsala University, June 6–9, 1977, 124–130. Uppsala/Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Miller, D. Gary. 2002. The origin and diffusion of English 3 sg -s. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 38: 353–361. Miller, D. Gary. 2004. The morphosyntactic legacy of Scand-English contact. In: Marcin Krygier and Liliana Sikorska (eds.), For the Loue of Inglis Lede, 9–39. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nielsen, Hans Frede. 1985. Old English and the Continental Germanic Languages, 2nd edn. Innsbruck: Institut fu¨r Sprachwissenschaft der Universita¨t Innsbruck. Nielsen, Hans Frede. 1989. The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations. Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press. Parsons, David N. 2001. How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England? Again. In: James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons (eds.), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997, 299–312. Oxford: Oxbow. Peters, Hans. 1981. Zum skandinavischen Lehngut im Altenglischen. Sprachwissenschaft 6: 85– 124. Pons-Sanz, Sara M. 2007. Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts: Wulfstan’s Works, a Case Study. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Pons-Sanz, Sara M. forthc. The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English. Turnhout: Brepols. Rynell, Alarik. 1948. The Rivalry of Scandinavian and Native Synonyms in Middle English, Especially Taken and Nimen (with an excursus on Nema and Taka in Old Scandinavian). Lund: Ha˚kon Ohlssons Boktryckeri. Samuels, Michael L. 1985. The Great Scandinavian Belt. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 41: 269–281. Townend, Matthew. 2002. Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English. Turnhout: Brepols. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. 1977. The Alliterative Revival. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Richard Dance, Cambridge (UK)
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111. English in Contact: English in contact with other European languages 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Introduction English as a recipient language English in contact with Italian: the case of Malta English in contact with Spanish English in contact with Slavic languages: Russian Summary References
Abstract Language contact between English and other European languages has been present throughout the history of English, especially from the Middle-Ages onwards. For much of this time, English was a recipient language, absorbing mainly lexical influences from Italian, Spanish, and, less strongly, Russian. Recently, the situation has changed, and English has become an acrolect, usually resulting in the development of new language varieties. The main focus of this chapter will be on points of contact between English and Italian, to be illustrated by reference to the linguistic situation of Malta; and between English and Spanish, looking at both American Spanish, with the emergence of Chicano English, and mainland Spanish in Gibraltar. Finally, contact has less frequently been observed in the case of Slavic languages, with the infiltration of English in Russia, which has been a hot linguistic topic at the beginning of this century.
1 Introduction Language contact often leads to a convergence of coexisting language varieties. The most common result of contact is that one of the languages changes under the influence of the other at the lexical, phonological, grammatical and/or pragmatic level. Frequently, the two languages mix to such a degree that a new variety emerges; less often, one of the languages dies. Language contact between English and other European languages has been present along the history of English, and from the Middle-Ages onwards has been especially significant. For much of this time, English was a language which received lexical influences from Italian, Spanish, and, to a lesser degree, Russian (Section 2). In the 20th century, the situation reversed, and English, as the prestige language, has come to act as an acrolect that enters into contact with regional languages, usually resulting in the development of new language varieties. This is illustrated in the present chapter by the contact between English and Italian, reflected in the linguistic situation in Malta and the emergence of Maltese English (Section 3); English and Spanish (Section 4), both American Spanish, as reflected in the emergence of Chicano English (Section 4.1), and mainland Spanish, illustrated with the case of Gibraltar (Section 4.2); and, finally, the contact between English and Slavic languages, in particular, Russian (Section 5).
Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1738–1753
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2 English as a recipient language Contact between Italian and English has a long history. As far back as Middle English, influences from Italian were recorded at the level of lexis (Burnley 1992: 438), and in most cases, they are indirect borrowings that were introduced into English through French (Nevalainen 1999: 372). However it was not until the 16th century that this influence was at its strongest, motivated in part by the commercial relations between Britain and Italy, and also by the prestige attached to Italian at that time. Most of these influences are cultural borrowings, directly borrowed from Italian, related to a number of specific semantic fields: • the arts (16th century) artisan, belvedere, buffoon, cameo, canto, canzone, cornice, cupola, duomo, fresco, frieze, fugue, madrigal, majolica, motto, pastel, pedestal, piazza, pilaster, sonnet, stanza, stucco, zany; (17th century) balcony, bust, cartoon, concerto, grotto, mezzotint, opera, portico, recitative, solo, villa; (18th century) arcade, aria, dilettante, falsetto, fortepiano, mezzanine, oratorio, pianoforte, sonata, soprano, tempo, terracotta, trombone; • life and society (16th century) ballot, bandit, bankrupt, carat, carnival, duel, frigate, lottery, magnifico, ninny, partisan, signor, traffic; (17th century) gala, gambit, ghetto, gusto, incognito, millinery, regatta, umbrella; (18th century) bravo, firm, imbroglio; • military words (16th century) bandolier, cassock, cavalier, escort, garb, manage, musket, pistol, scope, squadron; • geology (17th century) granite, lagoon, volcano; (18th century) bronze, lava, tufa; • food (16th century) artichoke, parmesan; • medicine (16th century) mountebank; (18th century) influenza, malaria. From the 19th century onwards Italian has continued to be an important influence (19th century) confetti, diva, fiasco, intermezzo, mafia, magenta, piano, spaghetti, studio, timpani, vendetta, volt; (20th century) fascist, paparazzi, pizza, scampi (see Serjeantson 1935: 186–189; Nevalainen 1999: 372; Hughes 2000: 151–152, 366; Kastovsky 2006: 267). Contact between English and Spanish was also common from the 16th century onwards, although isolated loans have been recorded as early as Middle English (e.g. cork [1303]; Burnley 1992: 438–439). Later, a substantial number of Spanish loans (from mainland Spanish) were introduced in English, related to specific semantic fields: • military and political issues (16th century) armada, galleon, grenade; (17th century) corvette, embargo, junta; (18th century) capsize, flotilla, stevedore; trade (16th century) anchovy, cask, sherry, tobacco; (17th century) cargo, lime; • people and titles (16th century) don, hidalgo, renegade; (17th century) creole, desperado, matador, toreador; and, finally, a variety of terms belonging to disparate lexical fields (16th century) booby, comrade, peccadillo, sombrero, spade (cards), tornado; (17th century) escapade, explanade, guitar, sierra; (18th century) cigar, marinade, mantilla. During the same centuries, as a consequence of the discovery of America, some American-based Spanish words entered the English language: (16th century) alligator, banana, cannibal, maize, negro, potato, tobacco, tomato; (17th century) ananas, avocado, barbecue, tortilla, vanilla;
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(18th century) pampa. Spanish has continued to be an important source of borrowing into the English language, both from mainland Spanish: (19th century) patio; (20th century) machismo, macho, supremo; and also from the Latino countries, the latter especially in American English: (19th century) bonanza, cafeteria, canyon, lasso, marijuana, mustang, ranch, stampede; (20th century) rodeo, tacos (see Scheler 1977: 64; Hughes 2000: 151, 366; Kastovsky 2006: 259, 267 for further details). The influence of Slavic languages on English, by contrast, has not been as strong as that exerted by Italian or Spanish, and only Russian has left a significant imprint. Sable has been recorded in English as early as 1225, although it seems to be a clear case of an indirect borrowing through Medieval Latin and French (Burnley 1992: 439). Other words from Russian, few in number, have been recorded in English from the 16th century onwards: (16th century) cossack, czar, horde, rouble; (17th century) steppe; (18th century) mammoth, suslik, ukase; (19th century) vodka; (20th century) disinformation, glasnost, intelligentsia, kalashnikov, Molotov, perestroika (see Nevalainen 1999: 375; Hughes 2000: 367).
3 English in contact with Italian: the case of Malta Current situations of language contact between English and Italian are not particularly notable, and little recent research has been published on the influence of English on Italian. Pulcini (1994, 1997) discusses the presence of English within the domain of education and, more importantly, the attitudes towards the spread of English in Italy. She focuses on the reactions in Italy to the incursion of the American culture there, which was at first greeted with hostility and xenophobia, but later, after World War II, came to be positively adopted and accommodated. A more recent study (Griffin 2004) notes that English is now progressively permeating the life of Italians, particularly Romans, as seen in the presence of English in public domains. The situation in Italy is not very different from that of many other European countries, which, with the exception of the Northern countries, belong to the Kachruvian “expanding circle” (Kachru 1986). Here English functions essentially as an international language that is witnessing significant expansion within public domains and in the domain of education. The linguistic situation in Malta, where Italian, English, and Maltese have coexisted, is a particularly interesting case of language contact. Malta is a small Mediterranean island with a population of some 400,000. It has been an independent territory since 1964, with English and Maltese as co-official languages. Prior to this, Italian had for more than four centuries (1530–1934) been the sole official language. As a consequence, vernacular Maltese, originally a Semitic language, was heavily influenced at the phonological, grammatical, and lexical levels by Romance languages, mainly Italian and Sicilian (Aquilina 1959, 1987–90; Mazzon 1993: 195, 198–199; Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander 1997; Brincat 2005). During the years that Italian was the official language, the linguistic situation of the island was of a clearly diglossic nature in the most traditional sense. Italian was the “high” language, spoken in the domains of government, education, and church and was associated particularly with the upper classes. At that time, Maltese was the “low” language, used by the lower classes, a language which has commonly been referred to as the “language of the kitchen” (Camilleri 1992: 14). Although English did not become the official language until 1934, English had already been introduced into Malta as a
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result of British colonization (1813). English became necessary, and the Maltese population began to learn it. At this stage, then, three languages coexisted on the island: Italian and English, languages of prestige, and Maltese, the indigenous language, a situation which has been labeled as schizoglossia by Frendo (1975: 22) or triglossia by Mazzon (1992b: 595); a unique example of a case in which trilingualism became a battle-ground in the successful quest for a national identity. Maltese nationalism rotated in time on this triple paradox: the championing of Italian as a non-Maltese national language, the active promotion of the British Imperial power as a means of expunging Italian; and the gradual emergence of Maltese as a national tongue and as the prime expression of anti-British sentiments. (Frendo 1975: 22)
English was, then, in direct competition with Italian, both of them being “prestige” languages. As Frendo observes, the use of Italian was expunged by using the issue of language as a tool of marking identity and by making Maltese aware of their own nationality. From 1964 onwards, Maltese, alongside English, became official languages. It was at this point that Maltese started to be perceived as part of the national identity of Malta, and indeed to be perceived as the most important language in Malta, flourishing in literature and in the media, used by people from all social strata, and even entering into code-switching with English. The consequences of awarding Maltese official status were immediate, with the standardization of Maltese, the publication of a grammar of Maltese, dictionaries in Maltese, and the emergence of literature written in Maltese. Today, Italian is little more than peripheral, offered as a second language at school and also used in some TV and radio programs, and even this most likely due to the geographical proximity of Italy itself. Since English and Maltese became co-official languages, the previous situation of diglossia became one of bilingualism. An awareness grew in the Maltese people of the importance of having a vernacular language which could serve as a focus for their identity, and Maltese became increasingly used as a language for all situations, not only “in the kitchen”; it came to be considered a tool for the expression of a nation’s identity, and something of which the Maltese people should be proud. In 2004 Maltese became an official language of the EU. Much has been written on the language situation in Malta, especially from a sociolinguistic point of view. Most studies deal with attitudes towards the coexistence of languages and also examine the domains in which each of the languages are used. Two large-scale studies have been conducted by non-Maltese scholars, Kontzi (1983) and Mazzon (1992a). Kontzi’s (1983) study deals with language use among 16-year old Maltese children in three schools (one state school and two Church-run schools, a boys’ school and a girls’ school) and in different domains (home, neighborhood, and school), looking at whether the linguistic situation was different depending on the schools and the domains, as it is often the case in situations of language contact. Students from the state school reported that the use of Maltese dominates in the home domain and generally in most informal settings, whereas their use of Maltese is not so clearly dominant at school, particularly during class. Students from the Church schools, especially girls, favor the use of English, irrespective of the domain, and only when interacting with the neighbors does the degree to which they might use Maltese increase. Actually, a further study, based on linguistic behavior of students of four more schools, reveals that
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interaction within the neighborhood is generally carried out in Maltese, since speakers might otherwise run the risk of being considered snobs. Several years later, Gabriella Mazzon (1992a) conducted one of the most comprehensive studies on the use of English and Maltese. Using questionnaire and interview-based research, she found that Maltese prevails in the home and in transaction domains; however, this prevalence decreases substantially in the written discourse, even among friends, where English is clearly preferred. Whilst extremely interesting, criticisms have been leveled at these studies, in that they are not representative of the whole Maltese population, and the conclusions reached are only partial. More recently, work has been carried out by Sciriha (1993, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004) and Sciriha and Vasallo (2001, 2006). Sciriha (1993) carried out a sociolinguistic survey on the language situation at home and concluded that the family is an important element in the transmission of Maltese, since 90.4% of the population uses Maltese. The use of English increases slightly in conversations between families of higher socio-economic status, particularly within the younger generation. There is also an increase of English when reading or writing (Sciriha and Vasallo 2001). In sum, Maltese is the favored language in Malta for a “Maltese living in Malta”; nevertheless, English is the selected language for those who aspire to be “citizens of the world” (Sciriha 1999), as also noted by Micheli (2001: 129). More recent studies reveal an important increase of code-switching at different levels. This has been observed especially within the domain of education, where the use of English and code-switching English/Maltese increases substantially, particularly in private schools and among children from rural areas. Another domain in which codeswitching is extremely popular is in the media, mainly among Maltese presenters on Maltese channels (Sciriha and Vasallo 2006). Yet is it really code-switching, or rather a new local variety which has arisen as a result of language contact? Does this “local variety of English” (Mazzon 1993: 593) have native speakers? Does it have its own linguistic features (Camilleri 1992: 18)? Can we speak of “Maltese English”? If so, can we consider “Maltese English” as a new institutionalized variety of English? According to Camilleri (1992: 21), there is in fact a “growing awareness of diversity from British English but this is perceived by its Maltese speakers as a manifestation of an interlanguage and not of a new variety of English”. For Mazzon (1993: 194), the status of Maltese English “is debatable and not unanimously acknowledged by the whole community”. In spite of this, peculiar traces of this local variety of English have been pinpointed at different linguistic levels (see Mazzon 1993: 194–201, from which all examples here have been drawn). Grammatically and phonologically, influences from Maltese are observed, in particular in oral speech. Within morphology and syntax, the most relevant aspects are the distribution of the article, both definite and indefinite (e.g. the English, the Maltese [as languages], depends on Ø language I use, etc.); preference of of-phrase indicating possession where British English favors the synthetic form; juxtaposition of two nouns without an explicit genitive marker; confusion in the pluralization of mass/count nouns; use of resumptive pronouns (e.g. These people they don’t understand); omission of pronominal subjects and objects (e.g. For us Maltese people Ø is better in Maltese); double comparatives and different choice of the comparative words (e.g. You can more express yourself ); unexpected introduction, deletion, or choice of prepositions (e.g. British English (BrE) is a language spoken by a British accent); lack of third-person marking in verbs (e.g. he don’t understand); expansion of the use of modal verbs (e.g. with colleagues
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I’m sure could understand Maltese) and of the -ing form (e.g. Are you understanding my point?); lack of subject-verb inversion in questions (e.g. How came he, then?); use of topicalization for non-emphatic purposes (e.g. Maltese English, I do not use a lot); and, less frequently, inconsistency in the use of correlative structures both … and … or not only … but. In terms of phonology, there are several examples of merger, both of vowels (e.g. [a]–[æ] and [ɔ]–[ʌ]) and consonants (e.g. [t]–[θ] and [d]–[ð]); other peculiar features are the pharyngeal production of /h/, flapped /r/ and the devoicing of final voiced consonants. The syllable-timed stress of Maltese is also transferred into the regional variety of English. Whether these features – some of them shared with many New Englishes – are casual interferences from Maltese into English, or whether they are already part of the linguistic repertoire of the variety of English spoken in Malta (so-called Maltese English) is a question in need of further research. Significant insights would be attained from a deeper analysis of current speech – both oral and written. And such work is already under way, in the form of the ongoing project “English-Romance language contact and change in European (pen)insular situations: Malta, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey” led at the University of Bamberg by Manfred Krug, Michaela Hilbert, Heinrich Ramisch, and Anna Rosen.
4 English in contact with Spanish The contact between English and Spanish has become a subject of much research, and indeed heated debate, over the last 20 years, as a consequence of the massive migration of Latinos to the United States. The concentration of these new populations in urban centers is to a great extent composed of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (in California and New York respectively), which together represent the most significant Latino demographic segments in the States. In this chapter, language contact between American English and American Spanish will be illustrated with Chicano English (section 4.1). Nevertheless, contact between English and Spanish cannot be limited to the States, and any discussion must extend to the situation in Europe. A case of special relevance is Gibraltar, a territory whose official language is English but, due to its geographic proximity to Spain and the presence of Spanish speakers there, has adopted features from Spanish (Section 4.2).
4.1 Chicano English Chicano English is a language variety of English used by Chicanos, that is, those living in North America with Mexican ancestry. This variety has emerged as a consequence of a situation of language contact between American English, in particular Californian, and Mexican Spanish. Although contact between Mexico and California has existed for many years, it is surprising to note that an explosion of interest in Chicano language and culture has occurred only in the last 20 years, no doubt concomitant to the growth of the Latino population in the States. California belonged to Mexico until 1848 and in the past 160 years there has been a constant circulation of people between the two regions, sociolinguistic conditions that paved the way for the emergence of a new language variety resulting from the coexistence of English and Spanish. First, an interlanguage was created, which provided the historical basis for the more stable and
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consistent variety to follow. Succeeding generations then transmitted and developed it, becoming native speakers of the new variety, Chicano English. Despite this long tradition, the first sociolinguistic studies of Chicano English did not appear until the 1970s (Metcalf 1974) and 80s (Pen˜alosa 1980; Ornstein-Galicia 1984; Penfield and OrnsteinGalicia 1985). Also of special interest are those studies carried out in the 90s by Mendoza-Denton (1997, 1999) and Santa Ana (1991, 1993, 1996). However, the first comprehensive study of the structure of Chicano, and what Chicano means in terms of the social and cultural identity of the group it represents, was not published until the 21st century (Fought 2003). Recently, further thorough linguistic descriptions of Chicano English have been published (Bayley and Santa Ana 2004; Santa Ana and Bayley 2004). Early accounts of Chicano English were based on the outdated notion that interference from the first language (in this case Spanish) was the primary cause of divergences between the speech of native-speakers and non-native learners of a language. Consequently, for many years Chicano English was not considered a distinct variety of English, and was classified instead as imperfect English (Baugh 1984; Gonza´lez 1984; Torres 1991). In fact, in the introduction to her book, Fought (2003: 3–8) devotes several pages to clarifying what Chicano English is by arguing against the traditional position that it is a non-native variety of English, spoken by Spanish speakers, with a faulty grammar and full of mistakes. Others have compared Chicano English to Spanglish, a fused lect resulting from the contact of English and Spanish in the USA, and some consider it as no more than a jargon spoken only by gang members. By contrast, ethnic contact-dialect models define Chicano English as “a variety of English that is obviously influenced by Spanish and that has low prestige in most circles, but that nevertheless is independent of Spanish and is the first, and often only, language of many hundreds of thousands of residents of California” (Metcalf 1974: 53); in other words, “a nonstandard variety of English, influenced by contact with Spanish, and spoken as a native dialect by both bilingual and monolingual speakers” (Fought 2003: 1) and as such has found its representation in films (American Me, Born in East LA, Mi Vida Loca), literature (Gloria Andalzu´a, Sandra Cisneros) and music (Chicano rap). Influences from Spanish in Chicano English are particularly evident in phonology, and to a far lesser degree in the syntax and semantics. Many of these features cannot be ascribed solely to the influence of Spanish but are shared with other vernacular varieties, in particular African American English and Californian Anglo English. Even with phonology, it is worth noting that, as pointed out by Fought (2003: 63), although many elements reflect the influence from Spanish, “some come from contact with other dialects or from other sources”. The vowel system has been studied by Santa Ana (1991) and Fought (2003: 64–67, from which most examples have been drawn), who observed several differences with respect to the Anglo variety spoken in the area, such as less vowel reduction (e.g. to [thu]), a frequent lack of glides (e.g. ago [əgo]), neutralization of [i] and [ɪ] (e.g. –ing [in]), and merger of the LOT/THOUGHT and BATH/TRAP pairs. Less frequently, but nevertheless evident, some back vowels are fronted, as in the case of [ɑ] shifting towards [a] (e.g. talk [thak]), and [u] to [u]. As regards the consonant system, Fought (2003: 67–70) has reported /t, d/ deletion in final consonant clusters (e.g. least [lis]). This is a very common phenomenon across US varieties, but it also seems to be a distinctive feature of Chicano English, revealing a substratal influence from Mexican Spanish (Bayley 1994: 310; Santa Ana and Bayley 2004: 425; Fought 2003: 69), as does the glottalization of final stops and the pronunciation of stops for interdental fricatives
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(e.g. then [dɛ̪ n]). Prosody has seldom been addressed in the literature on Chicano English, yet it is one of its most salient features (Santa Ana and Bayley 2004: 426). One of the most characteristic aspects of its prosody is the mixture of Germanic and Spanish patterns. For example, it has been described as a syllable-timed (like Spanish) rather than stress-timed language (Fought 2003: 72), and this is reinforced by a tendency to increase the proportion of open-syllables in speech (Fought 2003: 76–77), although further research is needed to confirm this. In terms of intonation, Chicano English is also peculiar in that it shows a distinctive contour described as sentence final “risefall”, “as if [the speaker] is asking a question when he should be making a statement, expressing doubt when he should be certain” (Metcalf 1974: 59), in what seems to be an intonation pattern inherited from Nahuatl (Fought 2003: 75). Unlike its phonology, which shows a strong substratum from Spanish, grammar in Chicano English is very much like in other vernacular varieties of English (Bayley and Santa Ana 2004: 376–378), reinforcing the existence of the so-called vernacular universals (Chambers 2004; Filppula et al. 2008). Therefore, the traditional view that holds that Chicano English grammatical features are due to the simple interference from Spanish is untenable. Chicano English shares with many non-standard varieties the regularization of agreement patterns at different levels, among which the following are the most outstanding (Fought 2003: 94–102 and Bayley and Santa Ana 2004, from which all examples have been taken): variable absence of 3rd person singular -s (e.g. Otherwise, she don’t know Brenda), variable use of is/was with plural subjects (e.g. And the people that live here is…), occasional use of zero copula (e.g. I see so many people dying of diseases and I Ø just like tired of it), regularization of past-tense marking (e.g. she tell him that I had an illegal weapon), regularization of irregular verbs (e.g. it spinned), frequent use of ain’t with present tense be and have (e.g. It ain’t okay, but…), auxiliary deletion (e.g. I Ø been doing dancing for a long time,…), non-standard forms in the pronoun system, especially reflexives (e.g. theirselves, hisself ) and resumptive pronouns in relative clauses (e.g. The guy that they knew he was doing it). Chicano English also makes use of features associated exclusively with African American English (Rickford 1999: 4–9; cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117), as illustrated by Fought (2003: 95), who observes that “the influence of African American English, or at least the overlap between African American English and Californian English, is much greater in the area of syntax than in the area of phonology”. The features generally attributed to African American English are the use of habitual be (e.g. Me and my mom be praying in Spanish) and the substitution of it by there as an empty subject pronoun (e.g. It’s four of us, there’s two of them). There are two features of ambiguous origin (Fought 2003: 97–98), namely the use of negative concord (e.g. None of the girls don’t like her) and subject-auxiliary inversion in indirect wh- questions (e.g. I don’t know what color are we). Finally, a series of features are clearly specific to Chicano English (Fought 2003: 98–102; Bayley and Santa Ana 2004: 381–382): the use of modals in if-clauses with both stative and non-stative verbs (e.g. If he’d be here right now, he’d make me laugh); extension of could to indicate competence (e.g. You could fix anything); use of tell in reported speech and use of that to introduce direct speech following tell (e.g. I told him that I can’t go with you no more); and, finally, variable use of the prepositions in and on, and for instead of so that. In terms of semantics and lexis, research is extremely scarce. Only Fought (2003: 102–107) provides some information on this respect. The problem is that her field study is with adolescents and the lexical peculiarities are probably not necessarily
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related to Chicano English but to adolescent language or slang associated with young people and the construction of their identity (Eckert 2004). In sum, Chicano English has become an important area of research and a fertile field for the study of language contact situations, issues of linguistic identity, language variation and change phenomena, in addition to sociolinguistic matters. Approaches to research include not only the analysis of intra-variation within speakers of the variety itself, but also inter-variation with respect to other varieties that are also emerging as a consequence of the contact between Spanish and English (e.g. Puerto Rican English; see Zentella 1997, etc.).
4.2 The case of Gibraltar Gibraltar has a population of approximately 30,000 and covers an area of some 6 km2 at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. It has been subject to British sovereignty since 1713, when English became the official language. The use of English was at first restricted to the military sphere and among the British themselves, who having arrived in the area, naturally came into contact with Spanish, which had been the official language of Gibraltar since 1462, when the Moors were finally expelled. English soon became the “high” language, the language of administration, government, education, religion, and military issues, and the language, hence, which had to be learnt by anyone with professional aspirations. This was especially the case after attempts by Spain to regain Gibraltar by force, first in the 19th century and then during Franco’s regime (1968), fostering a strong “Hispanophobia” in the territory which persists to this day. Nevertheless, due to Spanish roots of part of the population, as well as for obvious geographic reasons, Spanish remains as one of the languages of Gibraltar, spoken with its own distinct Andalusian accent. Historically, the community of Gibraltar has been defined as “a melting pot of peoples from different cultural backgrounds and with different languages who have settled there throughout the centuries to pursue various military, trade and commercial interests” (Moyer 1998: 216). This situation has a direct effect on the linguistic situation, to the extent that some scholars hypothesized the previous existence of some sort of pidgin language – a mixture of Italian, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew – which disappeared after the British Conquest (Moyer 1993: 85). However, the modern day population of Gibraltar can be described as a very homogeneous ethnic group, relatively competent in both English and Spanish, but who also speak Yanito. This is a local vernacular language which identifies Gibraltarians and which has emerged as a result of code-switching mainly from Spanish and English, but with minor influences – especially on lexis from Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic (Moyer 1998: 216). Interesting as it is, this complex linguistic situation in Gibraltar has been studied only within the last decades (cf. especially West 1956; Ballantine 1983, 2000; Kramer 1986; Lipski 1986; Cal Varela 1996, 2001; Moyer 1993, 1998; Kellerman 2001; Levey 2008), has scarcely been dealt with at all in studies of World Englishes (McArthur 1992: 440–441), and has also been overlooked by Spanish sociolinguistics. The earliest research to document the historical, demographic, and sociolinguistic situation of Gibraltar was West’s (1956) brief overview of bilingualism in the territory. After this it was not until the final years of the 20th century that the topic again attracted interest. The material published on the sociolinguistic situation of Gibraltar
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since then can be divided into two main groups: on the one hand, publications which focus on sociolinguistic issues such as language contact, bilingualism, and language choice (Ballantine 1983; Lipski 1986), code-switching (Moyer 1993, 1998), attitudes towards the languages (Kramer 1986; Fierro Cubiella 1997; Kellerman 2001; Ferna´ndez Martı´n 2003) and domains of use, in particular the home and school domains (Ballantine 1983); on the other hand, several studies have concentrated on purely linguistic matters, but these represent an incomplete picture, covering mainly lexis and phonetics (Kramer 1986; Garcı´a Martı´n 1996; Cal Varela 2001; Kellerman 2001; Levey 2008), and no study has attempted to describe systematically the local variety. The historical linguistic situation of Gibraltar was clearly one of diglossia, typical of many countries and regions with language coexistence. Lipski (1986) observed that Gibraltar was basically a Spanish-speaking community which resorted to English exclusively in formal and public contexts. It is generally agreed that English, as the only official language used by middle and upper-middle social classes, was used in government, in formal situations, and especially in education. In fact, these days most school activities must be carried out in English. It is also generally acknowledged that Spanish and Yanito were favored in student-student or teacher-teacher (but not student-teacher) conversations and also between members of lower social classes. In fact, Spanish and Yanito were the languages of everyday life and family, as well as the languages associated with friendship. This situation was also described in later studies, confirming that in the home domain, in the street, with family and friends – that is, in less formal situations – and in general when the interlocutor speaks Spanish, Spanish and Yanito were by far the favored languages (Moyer 1993: 116; Cal Varela 1996: 41). More recent studies by Kellerman (2001: 91–93) and Levey (2008: 58) confirm this situation; nevertheless, they have also noticed an incipient increase of English at home (inter-parental situation) among young Gibraltarians. This increase of English use has been located within the pre-adolescent generation (9–12 years old), especially boys (contra sociolinguistic studies which coincide in identifying women as the typical innovators in linguistic change; cf. Labov 1990: 205), and is explained in terms of the prestige that English enjoys, making it a requirement for success in the professional sphere. Both Kellerman (2001: 91–100) and Levey’s (2008) studies allow us to trace a diachronic pattern which sums up the linguistic situation in Gibraltar. At the beginning of the century the language of communication of Generation I – grandparents of the preadolescent generation (9–12 years old) – was clearly Spanish, and the Gibraltarian community had little or no knowledge of English. English was soon imposed and, therefore, exposure to English became more intense. As a result, the knowledge of English greatly improved with Generation II, and the language of communication became a code-switched variety of English-Spanish, that is, Yanito. In Generation III knowledge of English is much higher and communication between peers (brothers and sisters in particular) is expected to be held in English. English shifts from being a “high” language to a language for intra-national communication among Gibraltarians, both in formal and informal situations. In the final step of this pattern the adolescents (Generation IV) show a preference for English over Spanish and Yanito. This is particularly evident in the home domain where increasing numbers of children are living a situation of interparental change. This situation seems to be accelerated not only by professional pressures, but also by political and sociological ones, and reinforced by a more intense exposure to English. English, then, seems to be turning into the first language of
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most Gibraltarians. In fact, an emerging variety of English appears to be in the process of becoming nativized, labeled Gibraltarian English (Levey 2008). Little is known about this “new” variety, other than that it closely follows the phonological patterns of the British English system. Unlike Gibraltarian English, of which little is yet known, Yanito has long been the native vernacular variety, emerging as a result of three centuries of language coexistence. It is a variety which, according to Auer (1998: 213), “fits the needs of ‘true’ Gibraltarians, equally competent in English and Spanish but more at ease switching between the two”. Levey notes that it is “an Andalusian Spanish-dominant form of oral expression which integrates mainly English lexical and syntactic elements as well as some local vocabulary” (Levey 2008: 3). Gibraltarians retain some affection for this vernacular variety because it serves as a symbol of local identity both in relation to the Spanish and British population (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 181–182; Appel and Muysken 1987: 11–12; Moyer 1993: 236). Although it is currently the main means of communication of Gibraltar, some ambivalent attitudes towards this local language form also exist (Britto 1993: 85–86; Kellerman 2001: 131–139; Ferna´ndez Martı´n 2003: 188–191; Levey 2008: 82), a language which is subject to social, situational, and equivalence constraints. Surprisingly, there are no systematic analyses of Yanito. Most studies have focused on phonetics and phonology, which is indeed its most distinctive level, and also on lexis. Phonologically, Yanito is very clearly influenced by Andalusian Spanish. The most distinctive traces of this influence, taking first the consonant systems (see Kramer 1986: 81–87; Levey 2008: 133–164 from which examples are drawn), are: the merger between the fricative [ ʃ ] and affricate [tʃ ] (e.g. el tishe ‘the teacher’); epenthesis in post-pausal /s/ + consonant (e.g. small [eˈsmal]); reduction of final consonants and consonant clusters (e.g. tipa´ ‘teapot’ [tiˈpa], apoinme´n ‘appointment’ [apoinˈmen]); [h]-aspiration word-initially (e.g. hambre ‘hunger’ [ˈhambre]) and [s]-aspiration in syllable codas (e.g. asma ‘asthma’ [ˈahma]). Within the vowel system the most common trace is the reduction of the inventory with the KIT/FLEECE, FOOT/ GOOSE, BULL/TOOL, LOT/THOUGHT, TRAT/STRUT, BATH/TRAP and BATH/STRUT mergers (Levey 2008: 99–131). Lexically, Yanito shows the significant influence of English, as well as minor influences from languages such as Italian, Maltese, Hebrew, Portuguese and Calo´ (Cal Varela 1996: 41; Levey 2008: 4). Most of the borrowings represent cultural borrowings related to foodstuffs and daily and working life, and are completely integrated, both morphologically and phonologically, as illustrated in the Andalusian pronunciation and spelling of the following examples (from Levey 2008: 4–6): arishu ‘Irish stew’, chinga ‘chewing gum’, chinchibia ‘ginger beer’, cue´caro/quecaro´ ‘porridge/Quaker oats’, grevi ‘gravy’, liqueriba´ ‘liquorice bar’, londri ‘laundry’, pisup ‘pea soup’, rolipo´ ‘lollypop’, soypen ‘saucepan’, to mention a few (see Cavilla’s [1978] 1990 dictionary for a whole list of Yanito words). Lexical items related to the semantic fields of government (income tax, apoinme´n) and education (e.g. homework) are also present, especially in domains which favor the use of English. A very frequent pattern of borrowing is the periphrastic construction hacer ‘do’ + -ing form (hacer shopping) (Levey 2008: 5). False friends are also extremely common in Yanito, as for example ella siempre saca buenas marcas (‘she always gets good marks’) or darle una apologı´a (‘apologize to him’) (see Ballantine 2000: 112; see Ma˘ciuca˘ 2008 for a similar situation in Romanian). As far as I know, no research has been done on the syntax of Yanito, although there is broad agreement that Spanish forms the backbone (Levey 2008: 4).
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Both inter-sentential and intra-sentential code-switching have been observed, reflected in the presence of many anglicisms (e.g. ‘Estabas ası´ temblando en el meeting de sixth years and feeling nervous y estaban because your doctor’, Moyer 1993: 323), and also less frequently in the insertion of longer stretches of speech (e.g. ‘Que le dolı´a. No, he said my tongue hurts, my ear hurts, my leg…’, Moyer 1993: 317); see Moyer (1993, 1998) for a detailed analysis on the situational constraints, the inherent discourse strategies of its speakers, and the syntactic structures of the switches used by the speakers. In sum, the history of the Gibraltarian people is the history of a people in search of an identity, a language, and a culture (Kellerman 2001: 411). Although English has been the official language of Gibraltar for the last 300 years, Spanish has traditionally been widely spoken there. Spanish and the variety Yanito were used on a daily basis in almost every verbal interaction. Nevertheless, a recent linguistic shift from Spanish and Yanito towards English has been suggested by Levey (2008), who concludes that the variety of English used in this colony is losing Spanish-contact features and moving towards a British norm. Will Standard British English become the only language of Gibraltar, or rather will the emergent Gibraltarian English become consolidated as a variety of prestige? There is need for systematic research here, including formal fieldwork and data collection. If this “new” variety is becoming nativized, will it also become institutionalized? It is too early to tell. As Kellerman (2001: 415) has pointed out “the New English of Gibraltar is still very new”.
5 English in contact with Slavic languages: Russian Language contact between English and Russian – the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages – has recently come under scrutiny, most work dating from the last two decades, perhaps most significantly the publication of a special issue on Russian English in World Englishes (Proshina 2005). This recent interest is undoubtedly linked to the current status of English as a global language and its use as an international language, and the spread of this notion of a global English in post-Communist Russia following the fall of the Iron Curtain. The situation of English in Russia has been described following the Kachruvian approach of concentric circles (Kachru 1986), and it has been hypothesized that English in modern Russia should be placed at the periphery of the Expanding Circle (Ustinova 2005). Although it is considered a foreign language, English has experienced significant expansion in the educational (Leontovich 2005; Lovtsevich 2005; Kolesnikova 2005; McCaughey 2005; Ter-Minasova 2005), business and cross-cultural domains (Leontovich 2005; Yuzefovich 2005). It is also very frequently used in advertising (Ustinova 2006; Ustinova and Bhatia 2005). Nevertheless, the main functions of English in Russia are of an international nature. Intra-national functions are less developed, although they are clearly in the process of developing. Can we, then, talk about a Russian variety of English? Some linguistic features have already been identified at the levels of phonetics (e.g. non distinction between short and long vowels and devoicing of final consonants), grammar (e.g. lack of 3rd person singular verbal agreement, mixing use of simple and perfect tenses and simple and progressive aspects, alteration of word order), lexis, pragmatics, and stylistics (Proshina 2005). Whether we will be able to talk about a Russian variety of English with its own linguistic features is a matter of time, but thus far the contact between English and Russian has not been of sufficient strength to generate a variety with independent status.
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6 Summary The preceding overview reflects only the most outstanding aspects of the situations of language contact between English and Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Although the chapter concentrates on areas of general agreement, various questions for further research have been posed. Most of these are related to the necessity of evidence from the new generations of speakers as to whether language varieties potentially emerging out of language contact will consolidate, as is the case of “Maltese English” and “Gibraltar English”, following the pattern of “Chicano English”. Acknowledgements: For generous financial support thanks are due to the Autonomous Government of Galicia (INCITE grant 08PXIB204016PR) and the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (grant HUM2007–60706 and FFI2011-26693-C02-02). I am also grateful to Teresa Fanego, Manfred Krug, Lucı´a Loureiro-Porto, Lydia Sciriha and Elena Seoane-Posse for providing me with valuable information for the preparation of this chapter.
7 References Appel, Rene´ and Pieter Muysken. 1987. Language Contact and Bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold. Aquilina, Joseph. 1959. The Structure of Maltese: a Study in Mixed Grammar and Vocabulary. Malta: Progress Press. Aquilina, Joseph. 1987–90. Maltese-English Dictionary. 2 vols. Malta: Mildsea Books. Auer, Peter (ed.). 1998. Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. New York: Routledge. Ballantine, Sergius J. 1983. A study of the effects of English-medium education on initially monoglot Spanish-speaking Gibraltarian children. MA dissertation, University of Valencia. Ballantine, Sergius J. 2000. English and Spanish in Gibraltar: Development and characteristics of two languages in Gibraltar. Gibraltar Heritage Journal 7: 115–124. Baugh, John. 1984. Chicano English: The anguish of definition. In: Jacob Ornstein-Galicia (ed.), 3–13. Bayley, Robert. 1994. Consonant cluster reduction in Tejano English. Language Variation and Change 6: 303–326. Bayley, Robert and Otto Santa Ana. 2004. Chicano English: morphology and syntax. In: Bernd Kortmann and Edgard W Schneider (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2, 374–390. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Borg, Albert and Maria Azzopardi-Alexander. 1997. Maltese. London: Routledge. Brincat, Joseph M. 2005. Maltese – an Unusual Formula. MED Magazine Issue 27. Online at http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/MED-Magazine/February2005/27-MED-Magazine-cover. htm (last acessed June 2011). Britto, Joseph J. 1993. An examination of attitudes towards the use of Spanish in the education of bilingual students in Bayside comprehensive school, Gibraltar. MA dissertation, University of Hull. Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In: Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II: 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press. Cal Varela, Mario. 1996. Hacia una concepcio´n prototı´pica de comunidad de habla: Gibraltar. Atlantis XVIII (1–2): 37–52. Cal Varela, Mario. 2001. Algunos aspectos sociolingu¨´ısticos del ingle´s gibraltaren˜o: Ana´lisis cuantitativo de tres variables a nivel fo´nico. Santiago de Compostela: Servizo de Publicacio´ns, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.
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Camilleri, Antoinette. 1992. The sociolinguistic status of English in Malta. Edinburgh Working Papers in Linguistics 3: 14–24. Cavilla, Manuel [1978] 1990. Diccionario Yanito. 2nd edn. Gibraltar: MedSUN. Chambers, Jack K. 2004. Dynamic typology and vernacular universals. In: Bernd Kortmann (ed.), Dialectology meets Typology: Dialect Grammar from a Cross-linguistic Perspective, 127–145. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Eckert, Penelope. 2004. Adolescent language. In: Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA. Themes for the 21st century Books, 361–374. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferna´ndez Martı´n, Carmen. 2003. An Approach to Language Attitudes in Gibraltar. Madrid: UmiProQuest information on Learning. Fierro Cubiella, Eduardo. 1997. Gibraltar: aproximacio´n a un estudio sociolingu¨´ıstico y cultural de la Roca. Ca´diz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Ca´diz. Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto (eds.). 2008. Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts. London: Routledge. Fought, Carmen. 2003. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frendo, Henry. 1975. Language and nationality in an island colony: Malta. Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 3: 22–33. Garcı´a Martı´n, Jose´ M. 1996. Materiales para el estudio del espan˜ol de Gibraltar. Aproximacio´n sociolingu¨´ıstica al le´xico espan˜ol de los estudiantes de ensen˜anza secundaria. Ca´diz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Ca´diz. Gonza´lez, Gustavo. 1984. The range of Chicano English. In: Jacob Ornstein-Galicia (ed.), 32–41. Griffin, Jeffrey L. 2004. The presence of written English on the streets of Rome. English Today 20 (2): 3–8. Hughes, Geoffrey. 2000. A History of English Words. Oxford: Blackwell. Kachru, Braj. 1986. The Alchemy of English: the Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. Vocabulary. In: Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language,199–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellerman, Anja. 2001. A New New English. Language, Politics and Identity in Gibraltar. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Schriften zur Sprache und Kultur. Kolesnikova, Irina L. 2005. English or Russian? English language teacher training and education. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 471–476. Kontzi, Reinhold. 1983. Methodische Probleme des Maltesischen: Faktoren, die in zweisprachiger Situation die Erhaltung einer kleinen Sprache hemmen oder fo¨rdern. In: Peter H. Nelde (ed.), Theorie, Methoden und Modelle der Kontaktlinguistik,347–358. Bonn: Du¨mmler. Kramer, Johannes. 1986. English and Spanish in Gibraltar. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. Labov, Willian. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2: 205–254. Le Page, Robert B. and Andre´e Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leontovich, Olga A. 2005. American English as a medium of intercultural communication. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 523–532. Levey, David. 2008. Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lipski, John. 1986. Sobre el bilingu¨ismo anglo-hispa´nico en Gibraltar. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXXXVIII: 414–427. Lovtsevich, Galina N. 2005. Language teachers through the looking glass: Expanding Circle teachers’ discourse. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 461–469. Ma˘ciuca˘, Gina. 2008. Making or marring language beauty. Contrastive Sketch: English, German, Romanian. In: Carla Vergaro (ed.), Dynamics of language contact in the twenty-first century, 149–161. Perugia: Guerra.
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Mazzon, Gabriella. 1992a. L’inglese di Malta. Naples: Liguori. Mazzon, Gabriella. 1992b. A chapter in the worldwide spread of English: Malta. In: Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taatvisainen (eds.), History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 592–601. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mazzon, Gabriella. 1993. English in Malta. English World-Wide 14(2): 171–208. McArthur, Tom. 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCaughey, Kevin. 2005. The kasha syndrome: English language teaching in Russia. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 455–459. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1997. Chicana/Mexicana Identity and Linguistic Variation: an Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Gang Affiliation in an Urban High School. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1999. Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of U.S. Latinos. Annu Rev Anthropol 28: 375–395. Metcalf, Allan. 1974. The study of California Chicano English. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2: 53–58. Micheli, Silvia. 2001. Language attitudes of the young generation in Malta. VIEWS 10(2): 30–55. Moyer, Melissa G. 1993. Analysis of code-switching in Gibraltar. Ph.D. dissertation, Universitat Auto`noma de Barcelona. Moyer, Melissa G. 1998. Bilingual conversation strategies in Gibraltar. In: Peter Auer (ed.), 215– 234. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. III: 1476–1776, 332–458. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ornstein-Galicia, Jacob (ed.). 1984. Form and Function in Chicano English. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Pen˜alosa, Fernando. 1980. Chicano Sociolinguistics: a Brief Introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Penfield, Joyce and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia. 1985. Chicano English: an Ethnic Contact Dialect. Varieties of English around the World. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Proshina, Zoya G (ed.). 2005. Russian Englishes. World Englishes 24(4). Proshina, Zoya G. 2005. Russian Englishes. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 437–438. Pulcini, Virginia. 1994. The English language in Italy. English Today 10(4): 49–52. Pulcini, Virginia. 1997. Attitudes towards the spread of English in Italy. World Englishes 16(1): 77–85. Rickford, John. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications. Malden: Blackwell. Santa Ana, Otto. 1991. Phonetic Simplification Processes in the English of the Barrio: A Crossgenerational Sociolinguistic of the Study of Los Angeles. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana, Otto. 1993. Chicano English and the nature of the Chicano language setting. Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences 15: 3–35. Santa Ana, Otto. 1996. Sonority and syllable structure in Chicano English. Language Variation and Change 8: 1–11. Santa Ana, Otto and Robert Bayley. 2004. Chicano English: phonology. In: Bernd Kortmann and Edgard W. Schneider (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 1, 374–390. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Scheler, Manfred. 1977. Der englische Wortschatz. Berlin: Schmidt. Sciriha, Lydia. 1993. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Maltese Islands. Cyclostyled. Department of English, University of Malta. Sciriha, Lydia. 1996. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Maltese Islands. Cyclostyled. Department of English, University of Malta.
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Sciriha, Lydia. 1999. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Maltese Islands. Cyclostyled. Department of English, University of Malta. Sciriha, Lydia. 2000. A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Maltese Islands. Cyclostyled. Department of English, University of Malta. Sciriha, Lydia. 2004. Keeping in Touch: The Sociolinguistics of Mobile Telephony in Malta. Malta: Agenda. Sciriha, Lydia and Mario Vasallo. 2001. Malta A Linguistic Landscape. Malta: Socrates. Sciriha, Lydia and Mario Vasallo. 2006. Living Languages in Malta. Malta: IT Printing. Serjeantson, Mary S. 1935. A History of Foreign Words in English. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ter-Minasova, Svetlana G. 2005. Traditions and innovations: English language teaching in Russia. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 445–454. Torres, Lourdes. 1991. The study of U.S. Spanish varieties. In: Carol Klee and Luis A. Ramos-Garcı´a (eds.), Sociolinguistics of the Spanish–speaking World: Iberia, Latin America, United States, 255– 270. Tempe: Bilingual/Bilingue. Ustinova, Irina P. 2005. English in Russia. World Englishes 24(2): 239–251. Ustinova, Irina P. 2006. English and emerging advertising in Russia. World Englishes 25(2): 267– 277. Ustinova, Irina P. and Tej K. Bhatia. 2005. Convergence of English in Russian TV commercials. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 495–508. West, Michael. 1956. Bilingualism in Gibraltar. Oversea Education 27: 148–153. Yuzefovich, Natalia G. 2005. English in Russian cultural contexts. In: Zoya G. Proshina (ed.), 509–516. Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cristina Sua´rez-Go´mez, Balearic Islands (Spain)
112. English in Contact: Native American Languages 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Introduction Pre-contact North America A brief overview of British contact Language attitudes Communication The languages The linguistic effects of contact on English Could there have been further effects? Summary References
Abstract Most authors agree that the native languages of North America had little effect on the English language beyond lexical borrowing. Words from a variety of native languages entered English, sometimes directly and sometimes through other languages such as French. In this paper I briefly examine the history of contact between English speakers and indigenous peoples of the Americas in order to understand the social, political, cultural, and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1753–1767
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linguistic setting in which contact took place. I then review the linguistic effects of contact with languages across North America on English, giving numerous examples of the types of borrowings that occurred. I end with a discussion of how accurate the records are, and what kinds of continuing effects there might possibly be.
1 Introduction At the time of European contact, numerous languages, in many language families, were spoken in North America. Some families included many languages; some just a few. Golla (2007: 2) characterizes the continent as “a multitude of small, distinct language communities”, estimating that, in the classification that he uses, “312 distinct indigenous languages are recognized as having been spoken in the past 500 years in North America” (Golla 2007: 2). While there are different estimates of the numbers of languages (for instance, Marckwardt [1958: 23] says “something like 350 languages belonging to some twenty-five families, which at the least were probably as different as the Germanic and Slavic, or the Celtic and Romance tongues”; Romaine [2001: 154] estimates 350 to 500 languages in twenty-five families; Johansen [2005: 101] suggests that there were 500 to 1,000 languages in North America at the time of contact), it is clear that North America supported many peoples with different languages and cultures. In this chapter I focus on the effect of these North American languages on English, with brief attention to the English of those whose ancestral languages are Native languages of North America. To understand the effects of the North American Native languages on English, it is necessary to consider the linguistic situation in pre-contact North America, as it is understood, as well as the historical and sociopolitical background around encounter and contact, the social uses of the languages, and the languages themselves. I begin with a brief discussion of language use in pre-contact North America.
2 Pre-contact North America Given the size of North America, the number of languages on the continent at the time of contact, the differing social and political conditions in different places over the period of contact, and the long period over which contact and settlement occurred, one would not expect the consequences of contact with respect to language to be uniform across the continent. Micro studies are needed of individual places and times to obtain a nuanced understanding of the consequences of language contact. Nevertheless generalizations can be drawn, and these are the topic of this section. Marckwardt remarks: Estimates place the Indian population of what is now the United States at 846,000 at the close of the fifteenth century. It is not likely that there was any considerable increase during the next 125 years, although some authorities place the number of Indians in 1600 at 1,300,000. […] This means that the total number of speakers of many of the languages was relatively small, and also that the English-speaking settlers came into contact with a large number of different languages. (Marckwardt 1958: 23)
Gray (1999: 16) notes that the population of the North American mainland at contact is estimated at 4,400,000, citing Denevan (1976: 291). Given this, there would be, Gray suggests, fewer than 14,000 speakers for each language; by comparison, in the British
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Isles there were nearly 700,000 speakers per language at the time (Gray 1999: 18). Golla (2007: 2) reinforces these statements, observing the small communities noted above, with clear linguistic boundaries; Golla also notes that traditional alliances were typically multilingual. Silverstein (1996: 118) remarks that “contiguous groups frequently had members who understood the neighboring language”, providing references speaking to chains of communication from one language to another. Silverstein (1996: 118) and Golla (2007: 2) identify the use of lingua francas as a largely post-contact phenomenon, while Romaine (2001: 155) suggests that many groups might have had lingua francas, noting Mobilian Jargon (a pidginized form of Choctaw-Chickasaw present at least from French colonial times) and Plains Sign Language. Romaine cautions that pre-contact use of indigenous lingua francas is not well investigated. In a survey of the North American linguistic situation at the time of British contact, Silverstein (1996: 121) identifies a number of lingua francas, some of which, he comments, probably arose through the fur trade. I return to lingua francas in Section 5. Thus, while there is not full agreement on the language situation before British settlement, it is clear that many languages were spoken in North America, most with small speaker populations. In some areas there was multilingualism, at least by some members of a group.
3 A brief overview of British contact To understand the influence of Native languages on English, a brief sketch of contact history is helpful. Again it must be kept in mind that the history presented here is grossly simplified. There are many historical accounts; see, for instance, Nichols (2003), Dinnerstein et al. (2003), and Johansen (2005) for work that focuses on Native people of North America. Contact history as usually discussed comes from a single perspective. Nichols makes this point, saying: Few Indian accounts of early contacts with the invaders have survived, and some of these come down to the present only in garbled form; but when the Europeans described what happened, they claimed that their presence awed the tribal people. […] A traditional Sauk story described their first encounter with whites rather differently. After dreaming for several decades of meeting a white man, the leader Na-na-ma-kee, met the French. They gave him a medal, shirt, blanket, and other presents, and promised to remain friends. At this first encounter, the Indians were not awestruck or terrorized. (Nichols 2003: 26–27)
See also Mann (2005) for discussion of early contact in New England. Nichols (2003: 27) continues that the peoples brought vastly different thought and custom to the encounter, with European societies operating within guidelines “laid down by centralized governments, authoritarian religious groups, and often well-defined class structures” while most North American groups operated one village at a time with councils of elders that made recommendations but had little power to enforce, although there were some tribal and multi-tribal organizations. Nichols (2003: 27) concludes that “from almost any aspect, tribal life differed from that of the newcomers”, discussing the disruption to groups living far from the Europeans as well as those close by, with new patterns of trade, diplomacy, and warfare, as well as the introduction of new diseases and domesticated animals which greatly altered the land (Nichols 2003: 29).
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Prior to English settlement, there was contact with various European explorers and traders. The English came to North America primarily to settle, with colonists arriving in the late 16th century. In the earliest known settlement, 1584, the Roanoke and Croatan Algonquian people were said to welcome the English visitors cautiously (Nichols 2003: 43). In 1585 six hundred English were sent to the area, but within a short time this colony was abandoned. In 1607 what became Jamestown was settled by the English. There were periods of confrontation and periods of cooperation and peace in the early years, with a relatively peaceful period beginning in 1614. However, as Nichols discusses, the growth of the tobacco industry created increased tensions, and beginning in 1622 there was a decade of sporadic warfare, lasting until 1632, when confederacy leaders accepted colonial terms for peace. A peace agreement was signed in 1677, leaving scattered tribes and dependency on Virginia authorities. In another area of early English settlement, New England, there was depopulation in 1616–1619 through epidemics (Nichols 2003: 46–47) introduced by visiting fishermen and traders, before the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620. The leader of the Pilgrims, William Bradford, appears to have had negative views of the peoples of New England, describing them as “savage people, who are cruel, barbarous and most treacherous” (Nichols 2003: 47). The Pilgrims early on met Native people who had learned English. These contacts led to a treaty between the Wampanoag of the area and the Pilgrims, a treaty that was reasonably successful for 40 years, although the arrival of the Puritans in the 1630s led fairly quickly to greater aggression, with many Pequots, the people in the area that the Puritans settled, killed in 1637. King Philip’s War, in 1675, was devastating to the Native peoples, and Nichols (2003: 52) notes that by the late 1670s surviving people of the area “had to accept colonial domination or slip away to join related groups from the settlements”. Nichols (2003: 53) concludes that “The outsiders who now occupied some of their lands were numerous, dangerous, and here to stay”. By 1700, Nichols (2003: 55) writes, except for Native groups in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast, few people living near the oceans or north of New Spain could escape some contact with the European invaders. He describes various patterns of contact: Some groups gravitated towards the newcomers for trade, defense, and help against their enemies. Others fled from the disease, warfare, and cultural destruction the whites brought to their villages. Whatever their response, Indians faced new issues. […] For much of the eighteenth century, Native groups struggled to absorb these refugees. They also developed ways to protect their own social customs, economic practices, and military-diplomatic alliances. (Nichols 2003: 55)
Nichols enumerates the wars and devastation as settlers moved west across the continent. There were periods of relative peace in places, but, Nichols (2003: 80) stresses, much of the movement west can be characterized as confrontational with forced relocation, with a struggle to maintain identities, customs, and lands. Thus westward expansion of the settlers was, overall, a time of devastation to the Native peoples. I have briefly spelled out this history to provide some understanding of British contact and settlement in North America. While historians deal with this history from many perspectives, in studying the effects of one language on another, language attitudes require investigation, and I turn to this in Section 4.
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4 Language attitudes Silverstein (1996: 117) observes that the earliest records by the newcomers are “highly biased by coeval European cultural views of languages in a period in which Europeans’ own languages had just been emerging as standardized, written vehicles and communicative emblems of crowns, of nation-states, and of aggressive colonial enterprises”. The records sometimes “represent most directly European views of colonizable and colonized ‘primitive’ peoples as humans and as political groups, for example, seeing American peoples as having no discernible ‘language’ at all, or as communicating more with manual signals than with verbal language”. Dorian (1998) too discusses European attitudes towards the languages, introducing a term from Grillo (1989: 173–174), “ideology of contempt” – the notion that “subordinate languages are despised languages” (Dorian 1998: 7). Dorian (1998: 9–10) continues that Europeans carried this ideology of contempt for subordinate languages with them “when they conquered far-flung territories”, leading the Europeans “into doubting the very humanity of peoples whose languages they took to be primitive or underdeveloped”. Gray (1999: 10) focuses on language and religion, noting that European observers of North America were bewildered by the indigenous nations, where there was no “perceived congruence between language and nation”, with no apparent “dominant tongue or lingua franca to facilitate communication among different Native American towns”. Gray (1999: 10) comments that the diversity of languages was incomprehensible to Europeans, who attributed it to “the failure of societies to preserve an original and perfect God-given tongue”. He elaborates that, […] the notion of chaos was all but inadmissible. […] For most of the medieval and early modern eras, this sort of analysis rested on the Christian assumption that all languages were descended from the same original language given by God to Adam […] As most Christians understood it, language change was a process of degradation and decay – whether attributable to a single act of divine retribution or to human negligence and social dissipation. In either case, speech grew further alienated from an original, perfect tongue. (Gray 1999: 23–24)
From early times it was overall agreed that it would be best if Native Americans learned English. Bailey (1991: 73) cites Cotton Mather (1663–1728): “the best thing we can do for our Indians is to Anglicise them in all agreeable Instances; and in that of Language, as well as others”. Thus, from the European perspective, Gray (1999: 199) argues, North America was baffling and disorienting, and could not be understood in the political, social, cultural, and religious context of Europe of the time. The British settlers brought the “ideology of contempt” towards the peoples and languages, with the languages regarded as inferior, reflecting limited thought (Gray 1999: 159). What about attitudes of the North American peoples towards the English language? Just as Nichols (2003) notes that much of history as commonly understood is one-sided, this is also true of language interactions. Romaine (2001: 156) writes that “many Indians used their true tribal languages only among themselves and never in front of Europeans”, suggesting perhaps that there was not much opportunity for interaction between the languages. Many Native languages of North America continued to be
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the primary language until the 20th century (see Golla 2007: 2). Golla (2007: 2) notes that of the 312 languages that he identifies, only 65 became extinct before 1930. While there was clearly interaction between peoples – for instance, Philips and McDougall (2006) outline multilingualism in the Old Northwest and the Oregon Territory as evidence of contact between groups – at the same time it appears that English was not embraced by Native peoples in large numbers as their primary means of communication.
5 Communication As North American Native peoples and Europeans came into contact, means of communication developed. Silverstein sums up early forms of communication: The overall picture starts from a situation in which newcomers are concerned to establish practical communication with North American peoples for specific purposes. […] The communicating presence of ever more powerful newcomers seems inevitably to rearrange the communicative economies of whole regions. Such presence has again and again stimulated the rapid emergence of new lingua francas in the form of pidgins. […] All the initial encounters between Europeans and Indians were carried on either by the use of signs or by interpreters from some group with whom both newly met parties shared a means of communication. (Silverstein 1996: 117–118)
Silverstein) contains a detailed study of the lingua francas that developed across the continent. He observes: One of the clear traces of the transformation of American speech communities is the emergence of forms of communication in situations of trade and European settlement. There are clear recordings of such lingua francas from many parts of the continent, each seeming to have its peak period of usage at some point between first contact across the divide of language communities and the present time. Of course, there are different historical circumstances in the constitution of each of these new contact communities: […] Yet in each of the attested cases, these originally simple forms of communication emerge in the context of social relations across what otherwise would be a linguistic divide. (Silverstein 1996: 121)
Goddard (2003: 62) also notes the use of lingua francas, remarking “[t]he most important means of communication between Native Americans and Europeans in that period [early 17th century] was pidgin languages of varying degrees of development”. Thus, the situation in North America at times of contact appears to be one in which communication between Native peoples and the English came about through trade languages and interpreters, as well as some development of multilingualism through a variety of channels. Silverstein notes that for groups that survived as indigenous language communities, the more general knowledge of English as a language functioning in a secondary, and increasingly primary, communicative role seems to be a late nineteenth- or early twentiethcentury phenomenon. This transformation followed upon schooling associated with resettlement of indigenous people on reservations […] and the increasingly pervasive demands of dealing at some length with an English-speaking bureaucracy and world of commerce. (Silverstein 1996: 135)
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6 The languages As discussed earlier, European settlers in North America found a linguistic situation very different from that of Europe. There were many more languages, with many completely unrelated languages, often spoken side by side. In addition, the languages are quite different structurally from European languages. Thus, not only was there encounter between very different types of cultures, but also between structurally different languages. Marckwardt (1958) treats the effect of Native languages on English, reviewing differences in sound structures between languages of North America and English and commenting on sounds that do not occur in English as well as the existence of consonant clusters that are not used in English. Simpson (1986: 211) cites the lexicographer Noah Webster (1807) as writing that “the harsh gutteral sounds of the native ought not to be retained” as part of the normalization of foreign words into English, speaking to the different sound patterns of the languages. Marckwardt (1958: 24) further comments on morphological differences between the languages, noting “it was inevitable that Indian words would be changed considerably, both in form and meaning, as a result of the borrowing process”. This quote establishes that there was borrowing from Native American languages into English, and I return to this in the following section. Languages of North America are generally characterized as polysynthetic, with highly complex words. I give a few examples here, from Massachusett/Wampanoag, an Algonquian language with which there was early contact in the Plymouth Colony, simply to show the complexity of the words. Examples are from Goddard and Bragdon (1988): (1)
chilluppusseuhtukoom ‘cedar tree’ (486)
(2)
nuttanniskottummau nuttauusatiweonk Caleb Elisha pesuk pwinakit I-bequeath-[it]-to-[him] my-kinsman Caleb Elisha one blanket ‘I bequeath one blanket to my kinsman Caleb Elisha.’ (587)
(3)
butthieh hossueit nuttannuskottunna pasuk nattogk Butthieh Hossueit I-bequeath-[it]-to-[her] one my-dress ‘I bequeath my blanket to Butthieh Hossueit.’ (587)
As Mithun (1999: 37) says, languages package ideas in very different ways, with North American languages being striking in how long words are compared with a language like English. In a review of language contact, Mithun (1999: 311) notes that in early contact situations, borrowings are generally restricted to names for novel items, including place names, and it is with more intimate contact and bilingualism that more pervasive borrowing may occur, including phonological, grammatical, and semantic patternings as well as lexical items. The large structural differences between the languages could serve as a barrier to borrowing of more than lexical items. To summarize: North America can be characterized as having a history of contact of contempt, to use Grillo’s word. This history is an overall history, with times of peace and times of conflict, without a necessary nuancing of individual time and place.
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Nevertheless, general circumstances were not favorable to English speakers readily adopting pieces of the languages that they encountered as they moved west.
7 The linguistic effects of contact on English Most authors writing about the effect of Native languages on English agree that despite years of contact, North American languages had relatively little impact on English; see, for instance, Krapp (1925), Marckwardt (1958), Romaine (2001), Read (2002), and Schneider (2007). For instance, Read (2002: 25) writes “the fascinating American Indian languages cannot be put forward as a substratum, for the relatively small numbers of speakers never influenced American English except to provide a reservoir for items of vocabulary”. As noted above, the earliest effect that one language might have on another is usually lexical borrowing. Some borrowings from languages of the Americas came into English indirectly through other contact languages. These include potato, cacao, tarpon, and quinine, via Spanish, and bayou (Choctaw bayuk ‘stream’), through Louisiana French, pemmican, caribou, and toboggan from Algonquian languages via French; see Cassidy and Hall (2001) and other sources for discussion. Other words came directly from Native languages. The original form of the word is often difficult to establish, as individual words may have various spellings, representing attempts to spell words with sounds not necessarily identical to those of English, and, perhaps, representing speech of different individuals and languages. The original form is often obscure, and I give them where they are available in the sources. There are disagreements about the origin of a number of the words, and I ignore these. Marckwardt (1958) lists about fifty words recognized as borrowings from American Indian languages, noting that he includes those that might be part of the current vocabulary of a large number of English speakers (while noting the regional nature of some words as well as alternative non-borrowed terms). The most familiar examples of loanwords from Native North American languages come from the Algonquian languages that were spoken by the peoples that settlers encountered early on. Marckwardt (1958: 26–27) notes that once these Algonquian terms had been adopted, they tended to remain even when other words for the same thing were encountered later. Pyles (1971: 71) remarks that only Algonquian languages are important in their effect on English. Romaine (2001: 155) says that these early Algonquian loanwords were recognized by the settlers, and called “wigwam words”. John Smith recorded forms of the word “raccoon” as early as 1608 in Jamestown, likely from the Virginia Algonquian language Powhatan: rahaugcum, raugroughcum (Algonquian ‘scratcher’, Romaine 2001: 164); this word was recorded as rarowcun in 1624 and conventionalized as raccoon in 1672 (Romaine 2001: 164). Other words in Smith’s writings include hickory (1618), hominy (1629), moccasin (1612), moose (1603 [Naragansett moosu ‘he trims or cuts smooth’, Romaine 2001: 165]), opossum (1610), pone (1612), and sagamore (1613) (Bailey 1991: 68), as well as persimmon and muskrat, first recorded as musquash (Romaine 2001: 164–165). Other early words that likely come from Powhatan include chinquapin, chum, matchcoat, terrapin (1672), and tomahawk (Powhatan, or some Virginia Algonquian language. tamahaac / tah-mahgan ‘a beating thing’). Marckwardt (1958: 27) further notes that powwow
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(‘he dreams’ 1624), sachem, and wigwam (1628) were in the language before the 1629 founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other Algonquian words found in many early sources include squash (1674, earlier isquouterswuash; isquontersquashes ‘vegetables eaten green’, Narragansett) asku´tasquash; skunk (earlier also squnck, Massachusett); squaw (also squa, 1634 Massachusett) ‘younger woman’ (note change in meaning). The borrowings fall in certain semantic categories, including trees, plants, and fruits; animals; fish; foods; words that Marckwardt (1958) terms Amerindian culture; political terms; and miscellaneous words, similar to borrowings elsewhere around the world (e.g., Schneider 2007). In addition to the words above, Marckwardt (1958) includes the following. Dates of the first citation come from Romaine (2001) and Cassidy and Hall (2001): trees, plants, and fruits:
animals:
fish: foods: Amerindian culture:
political terms:
miscellaneous:
catalpa/catawba (1731, Muskogean), pecan (pacini, Algonquian perhaps through Mobilian Jargon [Romaine 2001: 156]), poke (berry, weed; Algonquian), scuppernong, sequoia (1869, Cherokee), tamarack (1805, Abenaki, Algonquian) cayuse (1841, Romaine (2001) suggests that this came from Chinook Jargon or French cailloux), chipmunk (1841, woodchuck (Cree wuchak ‘fisher, weasel’) menhaden (Algonquian), muskellunge (Algonquian), quahog (Algonquian) hooch (Tlingit?), pemmican (Algonquian), pone (Powhatan, Algonquian), succotash (Narraganset, Algonquian), supawn manitou (Algonquian), potlatch (patshatl ‘gift’, Pacific Northwest; Romaine 2001), skookum (Chinook Jargon), totem (Algonquian), mackinaw (Ojibwe, Algonquian), wampum (1646 wampunpeag ‘shell money’, Algonquian), hogan (Navajo 1871), igloo (Inuktitut), kayak (Inuktitut), tepee (Lakota) caucus (Algonquian caucauasu ‘one who encourages or advises’ probably; Romaine 2001: 167), mugwump (1832, Natick, Algonquian ‘great chief ’ Marckwardt 1958: 30), Tammany (Delaware, Algonquian) chautauqua (Seneca, Iroquoian), Chinook (Salish), Podunk (Algonquian)
To the list of foods, Cassidy and Hall (2001: 189) add ways to grow, prepare, and store corn, including samp, nocake, apoquinimink, and piki, from Algonquian languages, many of which are no longer used. Other words in Romaine (2001) include muckamuck (food, Chinook Jargon) and eulachon (smelt-like fish; Chinook Jargon ulaˆkaˆn). The word mackinaw, perhaps from michilimackinac ‘great turtle’ (Marckwardt 1958: 30), was introduced as a place name; its use for a short jacket worn by lumbermen derives from this (Romaine 2001: 167). Bailey (1991: 66) discusses the existence of early loanwords from North American languages into English, saying “Bookish and obsolete as many of the words surviving from these contacts often now seem, the fact of their borrowing is important for the idea of English as a receptive language for loanwords”, thus noting that more words
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were borrowed than survived. Marckwardt (1958: 26) adds kinnikinnick (Algonquian) and poggamoggan, saying that these words and others were disappearing at the time he wrote. He notes that a list of words from Algonquian languages included 132 words in 1902, but, at the time of his book, only 37 remained in use. He further remarks that there were 67 borrowings in the journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 including wapatoo (Chinook Jargon from Cree, Cutler 1994: 212), carkajou (Montagnais, Algonquian, Cutler 1994: 54), and salal (Chinook Jargon, Cutler 1994: 80), and others that did not remain. Bailey (1991: 67, 2004: 4) makes a similar comment about loss of words, noting that Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) included 76 words, many of which have been lost (e.g., openayk ‘a kind of potato’, sacquenummener ‘cranberry’, metaquesunnauk ‘prickly pear’). Bailey (1991: 71, 2004: 7) also mentions netop, a New England Algonquian word meaning ‘good friend, companion’, matchit ‘bad’ (1638) and peag ‘shells used as money’ (1648). Bailey (1991: 71) concludes “the flow of borrowings at the outset of English migration to North America slowed to a trickle as the Europeans consolidated power and had less need for interaction with the long-resident people”. For the fullest list of borrowings, Cutler (1994) is an excellent resource, listing etymologies, pronunciations, and definitions; he also includes words derived from borrowings. The following is a sampling of words that he adds: abalone (1850, Costanoan aulon), camas (1805, Chinook Jargon kamass), muskeg (1775, Cree maske:k), wickiup (1852, Fox wiikiyaapi). Many words in Cutler are no longer used or are regional. Carney (1997: 189) gives some Alaskan words, including cheechako (Chinook ‘newcomer’), mukluk (Inuit), and muktuk (Inuit). Many North American toponymic terms derive from Native languages. For instance, Mississippi has its origin in an Illinois (Algonquian) word, missisipioui (missi ‘big’ + sipioui ‘river’). Marckwardt (1958: 154) notes the extensive use of place names, suggesting that “the pervasiveness, the extent, and the frequency of their influence upon our place names far exceeds their general effect upon the American lexicon”. He includes, among others, Walla Walla, Waxahachie, Kissimmee, Kalamazoo, and says further: “even the names of twenty-six of the forty-eight states of the Union are Indian in origin”. Romaine (2001: 166) includes Massachusetts ‘place of the great hills’, Monongahela ‘rolls with venison richness on the palate’, Ohio ‘beautiful water’, Shenandoah ‘daughter of the skies’. In the east, early settlements, towns, counties, and states were generally given English names, with Native names often given to rivers, mountains, and other features of the landscape – Allegheny, Rappahannock, Chattahoochee. With westward expansion, many states received Native names (e.g., Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Dakota). In early years, Cutler (1994: 70) remarks, “some settlers found Indian names both uncomfortably alien and uncouth in sound. Yet as time passed, the names became not only acceptable but increasingly admired by some”. In addition to loanwords, authors note loan translations or calques. Richard Owen Cambridge, in The World (1754), cites make the war-kettle boil, scalp, speech-belt, string of wampum, take up the hatchet, noted in Romaine (2001: 165). Other sources add bury the hatchet, firewater, medicine man, paleface (first found in James Fenimore Cooper), peace pipe, speak with a forked tongue, warpath, Great Spirit. Dillard (1985: 45–47) discusses the use of expressions with words such as great and big, as in great water, great white father, and big chief. Bright (2003: 354) notes similar patterns in place names,
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citing Baton Rouge, from French Baton Rouge, a translation of Choctaw itti homma ‘red pole’ from itti ‘stick, tree, wood’ and homma ‘red’. Bailey states: The consequences of reluctance to confront the new linguistic environment are not found in the few loanwords but in the adaptation of the English wordstock to suit […] the experience of the new world. Corn, hitherto a general term for grains of many kinds in Britain, was employed in the combination Indian corn. […] It was planted in corn hills (attested in Massachusetts in 1622), in a corn field (attested in Virginia in 1608), […]; its ears (another adaptation of an existing English term also attested in 1622) twisted from the cornstalk (attested in Connecticut in 1645) […]. (Bailey 1991: 73)
He provides numerous words to show the adaptation of English vocabulary for new concepts. A further example involves the word Indian, including Indian corn, Indian summer, and Indian file; Bailey (1991: 74) lists many more similar examples. Dillard concludes […] the picture of language contact in the formation of American English cannot be handled adequately in terms of a relatively small number of borrowings only. The Indians had a profound effect on the lives of the early European settlers, and the Indians and associated groups had an equally profound effect on at least certain aspects of the language. (Dillard 1985: 47–48)
There are direct borrowings, there are calques, there are compounds formed on the model of Native languages that settlers were exposed to. As others remark, there do not appear to be other effects. In Section 8, I ask if there might have been more.
8 Could there have been further effects? We have seen the overall negative attitude towards Native peoples of North America by British colonizers. Bailey (1991: 70, 2004: 9) discusses attempts by settlers such as Roger Williams and John Eliot to place Native American and English peoples on an equal footing, noting that they were not enduring. Romaine (2001: 168) discusses attitudes of the British towards American English, focusing on the use of borrowed words: “By the eighteenth century, when American English had already become a target of derision by the British, one of its aspects singled out for criticism […] was the borrowing of terms from American Indian languages, which were widely believed to be corruptions”. She observes that there were many new words established in writing in American English in 1755, the year of the publication of Johnson’s English dictionary in Great Britain; Johnson omitted such words from his dictionary. In the literature, the lasting effect of the North American languages on English is argued to be minor. In this section I examine whether there might have been greater influence, influence that did not become accepted as part of what is considered to be Standard English. There is some precedent for questioning the degree of our knowledge. In work on remnant dialects, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2004: 182) discuss the “absence of essential pieces of the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociohistorical puzzle” that would allow for a deep understanding of remnant dialects. Kyto¨ (2004: 122), in work on the emergence of American English, makes a similar remark, noting there is much that is difficult to
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judge about its emergence and raising methodological issues in studying this topic. First is frequent absence of materials. For instance, Kyto¨ notes that texts of the early Virginia period are rare because materials were lost through climate, war, and fire. She further observes that texts printed in Britain might not be an accurate reflection of the language of North America, that there is not direct access to speech of the past, and that records of the speech of the time come from those who wrote diaries and other materials, with the language that they used, reflecting their social status and dialect. She remarks about Colonial American English that “We are thus left with assumptions and inferences about the former stages of the variety” (Kyto¨ 2004: 122). Many of these points raised by Kyto¨ about the emergence of American English are relevant for understanding the effect of North American languages on English. We might ask who wrote in English, what the writers heard, what they chose to write, and what they chose to omit. The records might not be fully representative of all that might have affected English over the time of contact and settlement. The remarks of Silverstein (1996: 117), cited earlier, are worth recalling: if Native languages of North America were regarded as “primitive”, who, other than scholars, would have necessarily attended to what of the languages was used in English? Would scholars have heard day-to-day language? Nevertheless, the conclusion that the overall effect of Native languages on English was minimal is probably correct for several reasons. First, in early stages of contact, cross-cultural communication that was required was handled through interpreters and the use of trade languages. It appears from the records that few Europeans learned North American languages and that relatively few North American peoples learned English. Communication between groups thus appears to have been fairly restricted. Second, considering sociopolitical factors, attitudes towards Indigenous peoples and languages were overall negative. Third, it appears that the settlers and Native peoples lived relatively separately. Schneider (2007: 258) remarks that while relationships between Native Americans and newcomers varied from friendly to hostile, they were never very intimate: they were competing for land and Native Americans were pushed west, with intergroup communication not being extensive. In addition, as quoted above from Romaine (2001), even when Native peoples and settlers were together, people often did not speak their Native languages in the environment of English speakers. Gray (1999: 18) reinforces this, saying that although evidence is scarce, it suggests that American Indians used linguistic difference to retain control over local knowledge, cultural inheritance, and political discourse, employing language much as one might employ a secret code. As time passed, there was pressure on Native peoples to learn English, as an earlier quote from Silverstein (1996) indicates. Schneider (2007: 42), echoing Dillard (1985), points out that features of an indigenous language are often more likely adopted by a lower social stratum and used in informal communication; this might mean that words were used, and that structures were adopted as well, but were not written down and not retained in what was considered standard English. This returns to the point above: what effects might there have been at any particular point of history? We will likely never know. However, in an examination of the development of a number of present-day post-colonial Englishes, Schneider (2007) argues that in situations of similar contact history, with similar sociopolitical and sociolinguistic environments, the effect of the Indigenous languages on the colonizing language is similar, largely
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restricted to lexicon, especially toponymic lexical items, with some structural effects, realized in the compounds. While there might be problems with lack of information, Schneider’s work reinforces that conclusions about the effect of North American languages on English are likely correct in the short-term, and they are correct in terms of the absence of major longer-term effects.
9 Summary What of the present and future? As Golla (2007) details, many Native languages have few speakers today, with language maintenance and revitalization programs for some. In a time when Native American peoples and languages perhaps occupy a different place than they have for much of contact history, is it a time that additional words from these languages might enter into English? It is unlikely that there would be other effects, but one can imagine the adoption of vocabulary. Widely-read writers such as Tony Hillerman, writing of the American southwest, and Dana Stabenow, writing of Alaska, employ words from local languages, and perhaps some will become part of English more generally. In addition, Native American Englishes must not be overlooked in discussing the relationship between Native languages of North America and English. There is increasing work on the structure of Native Englishes – see, for instance, Bertelt et al. (1982), Craig (1991), Leap (1993), Goodfellow (2003), and Rowicka (2005). It is in the study of these Englishes that the possible effects of Native languages might be found. Spack (2002) traces the implementation of English-language instruction for Native students in the United States, arguing that while Native people were displaced, at the same time the English language was transformed by the Native students in order to express their worlds. In conclusion, North American Native languages have had some effect on English, but social, political, cultural, and linguistic factors kept this effect a fairly limited one on what is identified as standard American English. At the same time, Native Englishes have developed, and these are for some symbols of identity, and here deeper phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic effects are identified as well as lexical borrowings.
10 References Bailey, Richard W. 1991. Images of English. A Cultural History of the Language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bailey, Richard W. 2004. American English: its origins and history. In: Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA. Themes for the Twenty-first Century, 3–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertelt, Guillermo, Susan Penfield Jasper, and Bates Hoffer (eds.). 1982. Essays on Native American English. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Bright, William. 2003. Native American placenames in the Louisiana Purchase. American Speech 78(4): 353–362. Cambridge, Richard Owen. 1753–56. The World. 4 vols. Ed. by Edward Moore. Philadelphia: Samuel F. Branford and Joseph Conrad, 1803–04. Carney, Ginny. 1997. Native American loanwords in American English. Wicazo Sa Review 12(1): 189–203.
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Cassidy, Frederic G. and Joan Houston Hall. 2001. Americanisms. In: John Algeo (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI, 184–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Craig, Beth. 1991. American Indian English. English World-Wide 12: 25–61. Cutler, Charles. 1994. O Brave New Words. Native American Loanwords in Current English. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Denevan, William M (ed.). 1976. The Native Population of the Americans in 1492. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dillard, Joey L. 1985. Toward a Social History of American English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dinnerstein, Leonard, Roger L. Nichols and David M. Reimers. 2003. Natives and Strangers. A Multicultural History of Americans. 4th edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Dorian, Nancy. 1998. Western language ideologies and small language prospects. In: Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley (eds.), Endangered Languages. Language Loss and Community Response, 3–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Ives. 2003. The use of pidgins and jargons on the East Coast of North America. In: Edward W. Gray and Norman Fiering (eds.), The Language Encounter. The Americas 1492– 1800. A Collection of Essays, 61–78. New York: Berghahn Books. Goddard, Ives and Kathleen Bragdon. 1988. Native Writing in Massachusett. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Golla, Victor. 2007. North America In: Christopher Moseley (ed.), Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, 1–95. London: Routledge. Goodfellow, Anne. 2003. The development of “new” languages in Native American communities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 27(2): 41–59. Gray, Edward W. 1999. New World Babel. Languages and Nations in Early America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grillo, Ralph D. 1989. Dominant Languages: Languages and Hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johansen, Bruce E. 2005. The Native Peoples of North America. A History. Vol. 1. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. Krapp, George. 1925. The English Language in America. 2 Vols. New York: The Century Co., for the Modern Language Association of America. Kyto¨, Merja. 2004. The emergence of American English. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects,121–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leap, William. 1993. American Indian English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491. New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marckwardt, Albert H. 1958. American English. New York: Oxford University Press. Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichols, Roger L. 2003. American Indians in U.S. History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Philips, Lisa and Alan McDougall. 2006. Before the myth of the melting pot: Multilingualism in 18th–19th century North America. Manuscript. University of Western Ontario. Pyles, Thomas. 1971. Early American speech: adoptions from foreign tongues. In: Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke (eds.), A Various Language. Perspectives on American Dialects, 69–86. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Read, Allen Walker. 2002. Milestones in the History of English in America. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society. Romaine, Suzanne. 2001. Contact with other languages. In: John Algeo (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI, 154–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowicka, Grazyna J. 2005. American Indian English. The Quinault case. English World-Wide 26(3): 301–324.
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Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. Dynamics of language contact. In: Ives Goddard (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 17, 117–136. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Simpson, David. 1986. The Politics of American English, 1776–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spack, Ruth. 2002. America’s Second Tongue. American Indian Education and the Ownership of English. 1860–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Webster, Noah. 1807. The American Spelling Book, Containing the Rudiments of the English Language, for the Use of Schools in the United States. Rev. edn. Boston: John West. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 2004. Remnant dialects in the coastal United States. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects,172–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keren Rice, Toronto (Canada)
113. English in Contact: Pidgins and creoles 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Defining pidgins and creoles Classifying pidgins and creoles Theories of origin and structural features of pidgins and creoles Sociolinguistic dimensions of pidgins and creoles References
Abstract Pidgins and creoles are the outcome of diverse processes and influences in circumstances where speakers of different languages have to work out a common means of communication. Although no one knows how many pidgins and creoles there are, millions of people around the world speak these languages every day. As some of the newest languages on earth, pidgins and creoles present many fascinating challenges to linguists because they raise fundamental questions about the evolution of complex systems and historical change. There is still no consensus on the relationship between pidgins and creoles, or on the extent to which creoles form a structurally well-defined language type, or whether they can be defined only with respect to the special socio-historical circumstances that give rise to them. The focus of this chapter is the so-called English-based (or English-lexicon) pidgins and creoles, whose lexicons are predominantly derived from English.
1 Introduction Pidgins and creoles are the outcome of diverse processes and influences in circumstances where speakers of different languages have to work out a common means of communication. Although no one knows how many pidgins and creoles there are, millions of people around the world speak these languages every day. For a long time many linguists ignored pidgins and creoles in the belief that they were not “real” languages. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1767–1781
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Puristic attitudes worked against the study of language contact and contact languages because linguists were interested in “pure” languages rather than ones that were mixed, and therefore difficult to classify in genetic terms. There are still many problems in drawing firm boundaries between pidgins and creoles as well as between them and different kinds of contact varieties such as the so-called New Englishes widely spoken in places such as India, Singapore, and elsewhere, or mixed languages such as Media Lengua, a mix of Quechua and Spanish spoken in Ecuador. As some of the newest languages on earth, pidgins and creoles present many fascinating challenges to linguists because they raise fundamental questions about the evolution of complex systems and historical change. Many pidgins and creoles emerged around trade routes in the Atlantic or Pacific during the 17th to 19th centuries, and subsequently on plantations, where a multilingual labor force comprising slaves or indentured immigrant laborers needed a common language. Tok Pisin (‘talk pidgin’), for instance, spoken by more than three million people in Papua New Guinea, owes its origins to a pidgin that developed during the 19th century on sugar plantations in Queensland, Australia. Workers recruited from various parts of the Pacific speaking mutually unintelligible languages found themselves living and working together and needing a means of communicating with one another as well as with their English-speaking plantation managers. When the Pacific Labor Trade came to an end in 1905, most of the workers went back to their home countries, taking with them knowledge of this Queensland Plantation Pidgin. In highly multilingual countries such as Papua New Guinea with more than 800 languages, this pidgin served useful internal functions in communicating across ethno-linguistic boundaries. Social conditions were thus ripe not just for the retention and spread of pidgin but also for its stabilization and subsequent nativization. Today Tok Pisin is used across the whole social spectrum, by villagers and government ministers alike. It is the most frequently used language in the House of Assembly, the country’s main legislative body and the constitution recognizes Tok Pisin as one of the national languages. In other parts of the world, however, pidgins were short-lived because local conditions did not sustain their further development for various reasons. Chinese Pidgin English, for example, was a crucial element in 19th century trade based at the port of Canton (today Guangzhou) between European merchants and Chinese selling commodities such as silk and tea. Due to its limited domains of use, Chinese Pidgin English was a more rudimentary pidgin than Tok Pisin. It fell out of use in the 20th century as more and more Chinese learned English. However, the language left its legacy in the form of the word pidgin, derived from English business rendered through Cantonese pronunciation. The term pidgin occurred as early as 1807, where it appeared in the diary of missionary Robert Morrison (Baker and Mu¨hlha¨usler 1990: 93). By contrast, the term creole was used in reference to a non-indigenous person born in the American colonies, and later used to refer to customs, flora and fauna of these colonies. The history of these terms reflects the typical circumstances of origin and contexts of use for many pidgins and creoles. Although European colonial encounters during the 17th to 19th centuries produced the most well known and studied languages, there are numerous examples of indigenous pidgins and creoles predating European contact such as Mobilian Jargon, a now extinct pidgin based on Muskogean, and widely used along the lower Mississippi River valley for communication among native Americans
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speaking Choctaw, Chickasaw and other languages (cf. Rice, Chapter 112). There were probably many more such languages that have disappeared, and/or have not been documented.
2 Defining pidgins and creoles Although the study of pidgin and creoles (sometimes called creolistics) has become an established area of linguistic research since the latter part of the 20th century, linguists are still not agreed about how to define pidgins and creoles or where they come from. Likewise, there is no consensus on the relationship between pidgins and creoles, or on the extent to which creoles form a structurally well-defined language type, or whether they can be defined only with respect to the special socio-historical circumstances that give rise to them (Mufwene 1986; McWhorter 2005; Ansaldo et al. 2007). Nevertheless, after years of treating pidgins and creoles as parasitic (and often debased) versions of other languages, most scholars now agree that there is such a group of languages with recognizable structures of their own independent of the languages involved in the original contact. This chapter will rely on the following working definitions for the moment, but will point out later some of the reasons why they pose problems. A pidgin is a contact variety restricted in form and function and native to no one, which is formed by members of at least two (and usually more) groups of different linguistic backgrounds. Pidgins are simplified languages characterized by a minimal lexicon, little or no morphology, and limited syntax. Although not all linguists agree that creoles need to have a prior pidgin stage, the term “creole” is generally applied to pidgins which have expanded in form and function to meet the communicative needs of a community of native speakers. The conventional view of pidgins and creoles and their relationship to one another found in a variety of introductory texts (e.g. Romaine 1988) therefore assumes a two stage development. The first involves rapid and drastic restructuring resulting in a reduced and simplified language variety. The second consists of elaboration as the functions of this variety expand and it becomes nativized or serves as the primary language of most of its speakers. The reduction in form characteristic of a pidgin follows from its restricted communicative functions. Pidgin speakers, who have another language, can get by with a minimum of grammatical apparatus, but the linguistic resources of a creole must be sufficient to fulfill the communicative needs of its users. The degree of structural stability varies, depending on the extent of internal development and functional expansion the pidgin has undergone at any particular stage in its life cycle. Creolization can occur at any stage in the development continuum from rudimentary jargon to expanded pidgin. The term “jargon” refers to a speech variety with a minimal linguistic system and great individual variation used for communicating in limited situations between speakers of different languages, e.g. trade, while a pidgin has a certain degree of stability. If creolization occurs at the jargon stage, the amount of expansion will be more substantial than that required to make an expanded pidgin structurally adequate. In some cases, however, pidgins may expand without nativization. Where this happens, pidgins and creoles may overlap in terms of structural complexity, and there will be few, if any, linguistic differences between an expanded pidgin and a creole that develops from it. Varieties of Melanesian Pidgin English (a cover term for three English-lexicon pidgins/creoles in the southwest Pacific comprising Tok Pisin,
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Solomon Islands Pijin, and Vanuatu Bislama) are far richer lexically and more complex grammatically than many early creoles elsewhere. Their linguistic elaboration was carried out primarily by adult second language speakers who used them as lingua francas in urban areas. A similar scenario has taken place in parts of West Africa in languages such as Cameroon Pidgin English (also called Kamtok), which has been a lingua franca in Cameroon since the 1880s, and Krio spoken in Sierra Leone by about 90% of the population as a second language, as well as by a small group in and near the capital Freetown who use it as their mother tongue. Creolization is thus not a unique trigger for complexity, and the “same” language may exist as both pidgin and creole. Debate continues about the role of children vs. adults in nativization and creolization. Once creolization has occurred, however, the evolutive changes that take place thereafter may make it impossible to identify a prior creole or pidgin stage, as in the case of African American English in the United States, which some linguists believe to be a creole in the late stages of decreolization (cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117). The term “decreolization” is used to refer to changes that bring a creole closer to its superstrate language, i.e. the language contributing most of its vocabulary.
3 Classifying pidgins and creoles Although there are numerous ways in which pidgins and creoles could be classified genetically, typologically, geographically, and sociolinguistically, the standard view of them as mixed languages with the vocabulary of the superstrate (also called the lexifier or base language) and the grammar of the substrate (the native language(s) of the groups in contact) has provided the conventional primary basis for classifying them according to their lexical affiliation. Thus, in the case of Tok Pisin, English is the superstrate and the indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea are the substrate. It is customary practice to label pidgins and creoles with a three-term formula including their location and their principal lexifier language, e.g. Chinese Pidgin English, Berbice Creole Dutch, Haitian Creole French, etc. These groupings based on lexical affiliation, are, however, distinctly different from the genetically-based language families established by applying the comparative historical method. Pidgins or creoles as a group are not genetically related among themselves, although those with the same lexifier usually are. The focus of this chapter will be the so-called English-based (or English-lexicon) pidgins and creoles, whose lexicons are predominantly derived from English. This group includes, for instance, in addition to languages already mentioned such as Tok Pisin, Kamtok, Krio, and Chinese Pidgin English, numerous others such as Jamaican Creole English, spoken by millions in Jamaica. It will already be evident that linguists’ names for pidgins and creoles are not always widely used by the speakers of the languages themselves, who often have no special name for their languages other than “pidgin” or “creole”. This can cause confusion at times. Tok Pisin has sometimes been referred to by linguists as Neomelanesian or New Guinea Pidgin English, while its speakers call it Tok Pisin, or simply pidgin. Speakers of Torres Strait Creole English call their language “Broken” (i.e. broken English), while speakers of Australian Creole English call their language “Kriol”, speakers of Jamaican Creole English call their language “Patois”, and speakers of Hawai’i Creole English call their variety “Pidgin”, etc.
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Sranan, spoken in Suriname along the northern coast of South America, is sometimes also called “Sranan Tongo” (‘Suriname tongue’) or “Taki-Taki” (‘talktalk’). Creoles with an English lexical affiliation are more numerous than those related to any other language, attesting to the greater spread of English than any other metropolitan European language (cf. Grzega, Chapter 136). Britain’s three and a half centuries of imperialism spread not just varieties of standard and regional English, but also resulted in the creation of hundreds of English-lexicon pidgins and creoles. Holm (1989: xxii) lists 35 contemporary pidgins and creoles lexically affiliated to English, but different sources give different figures due to the lack of unanimity in defining which languages count as pidgins or creoles. This group of languages is sometimes further subdivided into two major geographic groupings: Atlantic and Pacific. The Atlantic creoles were established primarily during the 17th and 18th centuries in the Caribbean and West Africa, while the Pacific group originated primarily in the 19th. The earliest known text of an English-based creole dates from 1718 and is written in Sranan.
3.1 Atlantic pidgins and creoles The Atlantic pidgins and creoles, comprising the largest number, and now spoken by more than 20 million people, were mainly products of the slave trade in West Africa, which dispersed large numbers of West Africans to the Caribbean. These languages share a common substrate in the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa and display many common features. Holm (1989: xxii) identifies 27 English creoles spoken along the west African Coast, throughout the Anglophone Caribbean islands, along the northern coast of South America, in central America, and in coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. The largest group is located in the Anglophone Caribbean with a population of around six million, comprising those territories having English as an official language: in practice, these are countries that are current or former colonies of Britain, i.e. Antigua, Barbados, Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Nevis, the U.S. Virgin Islands, The Turks and Caicos islands, Grenada, and Guyana (Devonish 2006). The majority of the population uses an English-related creole as the everyday medium of communication. The term “Caribbean English creoles” is widely used to refer to these languages, the three largest of which are Jamaican Creole English, Trinidad and Tobago Creole English, and Guyanese Creole English. The West African English-based creoles include Kamtok (Cameroon Pidgin English), Nigerian Pidgin English, and Krio (Sierra Leone Creole English). The so-called Suriname creoles spoken in what was formerly the Dutch part of the Guianas in northern South America include Sranan, Saramaccan, and Ndjuka. Finally, Gullah (Sea Island Creole English) is spoken in the coastal plains of Georgia and South Carolina and the Sea Islands of South Carolina by African-American descendants of slaves.
3.2 Pacific pidgins and creoles Historians interested in tracking the spread of English in the Pacific are fortunate in that the much shallower time depth of pidgin formation here compared to the Atlantic, furnishes a more or less continuous chain of documentation extending from the late 18th century through to the present. By the latter part of the 19th century contacts
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between English speakers and Pacific islanders had led to the formation of Englishbased pidgins spoken in various forms and with differing degrees of stability in almost the entire Pacific basin from New Guinea to Pitcairn island, from the Marshall Islands and Hawai’i to New Caledonia and New Zealand. Today, however, pidgins and creoles are found only in those parts of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Australia, where early pidgins stabilized and subsequently creolized (Romaine 2004). Holm (1989: xxii) lists eight pidgin and creole languages lexically related to English in the region, including Chinese Pidgin English, Tok Pisin, Bislama (Vanuatu Pidgin/Creole), Solomon Islands Pidgin English, Torres Strait Creole English, Australian Creole English, Norfolk Creole English, and Hawai’i Creole English. The linguistic as well as socio-historical and cultural conditions out of which these languages arose were also somewhat different than in the Atlantic. Obviously, different languages formed the substratum. Although the plantation setting was crucial for pidgin formation in both areas, in the Pacific laborers were recruited and indentured servants rather than slaves. While this traditional grouping is geographically convenient, it may obscure a far more complex picture of interrelationships and interactions between Atlantic and Pacific.
4 Theories of origin and structural features of pidgins and creoles Questions regarding genetic and typological relationships between pidgins and creoles and the languages spoken by their creators continue to generate controversy. Pidgins and creoles challenge conventional models of language change and genetic relationships because they appear to be descendants of neither their superstrate languages from which they took most of their vocabulary, nor of the diverse substrate languages spoken by their creators. Scholars have proposed a variety of theories to explain why the structures of pidgins and creoles show more similarities to one another than they do to their lexifiers. It is in the area of syntax that the boldest claims have been made for the distinctiveness of creoles. Some time ago scholars noted that the most striking differences between the deepest varieties of Jamaican Creole and those closest to English lay not so much in phonology and vocabulary as in grammar. Creoles typically display a range of varieties, and speakers’ competence usually spans several varieties, as illustrated in Figure 113.1 for the Jamaican Creole English continuum. More basilectal varieties (i.e. the “deepest” varieties furthest from the superstrate) are often more typically found in rural areas and among the less educated, while the acrolectal varieties closer to the superstrate are more frequent among the more educated and higher social classes. Mesolectal varieties are intermediate. basilect mi a nyam
mesolect mi a eat mi eatin a itin a is eatin
acrolect I am eating
Figure 113.1: “I am eating” across varieties of the Jamaican creole continuum
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The ordering of the varieties presented here makes no claim about their diachronic development since it seems likely that in many cases mesolectal and acrolectal varieties were present even in the earliest phases of creole formation and do not always develop after creolization in adaptation to the superstrate. Thus, acrolectal varieties cannot be regarded as necessarily “later” than basilectal ones. Indeed, some scholars have claimed that early plantation slaves acquired a normally transmitted variety of the lexifier directly from Europeans, but this imperfectly acquired variety was subsequently diluted over time or “basilectalized” as successive generations of slaves learned from other slaves rather than from Europeans (Chaudenson 1992). According to this view, sometimes referred to as the superstrate theory, creoles represent gradual continuous developments with no abrupt break in transmission from their lexifiers. This perspective eliminates the assumption of a prior pidgin history and accepts creoles as varieties of their lexifiers rather than as special or unique new languages. That is, there are no particular linguistic evolutionary processes likely to yield (prototypical) creoles; they are produced by the same restructuring processes that bring about change in any language. Creoles are neither typologically nor genetically unique, but are instead “advanced varieties” of the lexifiers. Nevertheless, the gap between basilectal and acrolectal Jamaican Creole English led other scholars to conclude quite the opposite; namely, that ordinary evolutionary processes leading to gradual divergence over time may not be applicable to creoles. From this perspective basilectal Jamaican Creole could not be regarded simply as a dialect of English, but was instead a new and different language, “born again” via a break in transmission and radical restructuring. Creoles are thus non-genetic languages that emerge abruptly (Thomason and Kaufman 1988). One explanation offered for the non-English character of basilectal creole was that its grammar had African origins. Indeed, African influence can clearly be seen in the word nyam ‘eat’ commonly found in West African languages such as Twi and Wolof. As far as grammar is concerned, however, early scholars such as Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927), generally regarded as the founding father of creole studies, noted striking similarities across creole tense-mood-aspect (TMA) systems. Creoles tend to express the categories of tense, mood, and aspect by means of three preverbal free-standing particles appearing in a fixed order, whose semantics are highly constant (one for completed action, one for durative, and one for futurity/irrealis) as are their etymologies in their respective superstrates. For example, the irrealis mood or future marker typically comes from a verb meaning ‘go’, e.g. Hawai’i Creole English I go leave om outside for you ‘I will leave it outside for you’, the completive marker from a past form of be, e.g. Sranan mi brada ben go ‘my brother went’, and the aspect marker from a word meaning ‘there’ or ‘to be located in a place’, e.g. Saramaccan mi ta´ nya´n ‘I am eating’. Compare Portuguese, which has heavily influenced the lexicon of Saramaccan, where the verb estar is used to express location (e.g. a manteiga esta´ na mesa ‘the butter is on the table’) and as an auxiliary in the formation of the progressive (e.g. eu estou comendo ‘I am eating’). These similarities in TMA marking became a focal point of debate as a result of the bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton 1984), which suggested that creoles held the key to understanding how human languages originally evolved many centuries ago. In this scenario children created the first creoles from the inadequate pidgin input supplied by their parents by relying on universal grammar. Although most creolists reject the
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bioprogram hypothesis in its strongest form (Singler 1990: ix), it led not only to an increase in research on creoles, but also a great deal of attention from scholars in other fields of linguistics such as language acquisition and related disciplines such as cognitive science. Many linguists now find the concept of a common “creole syntax” or “creole prototype” uncontroversial, even though there might still be disagreements about exactly which features are included and why such similarities exist. Do pidgins and creoles share so many common characteristics because they are descended from a common historical ancestor, or did they arise independently but develop in parallel ways because they used common linguistic material and were formed in similar socio-historical circumstances? Was syntax diffused in a way similar to some of the words such as savvy (< Portuguese/Spanish sabir/saber ‘to know’), found in both the Atlantic and Pacific languages? Or do the common elements perhaps reflect biological and cognitive constraints on what constitutes a minimal human language? Substrate influence is clearly responsible for some properties of pidgins and creoles, but it is still unclear why some substrate features appear in some languages and not others, and why some creoles appear to have more substrate features than their pidgin predecessors. Each of these ideas has had its main proponents, but few scholars believe that one theory can explain everything satisfactorily. Most now accept that the various theories of origin are complementary, with each source of influence (i.e. diffusion, substrate, superstrate, and language universals) contributing something to the overall complex picture. Although it is possible to trace the origins of some vocabulary items such as savvy to the movements of people (Baker and Huber 2001), the existence of so many common syntactic features is not so easily explained by diffusion theories. For example, how do we explain the fact that a number of creoles use the same word to mark the grammatical functions of both possession (‘have’) and existence (‘there is/are’)? In most English-lexicon creoles a form of the word get serves this function. Compare, for example, how one would say in Guyanese Creole English, Hawai’i Creole English and Tok Pisin: “There is (existence) a woman who has (possession) a daughter” (Figure 113.2).
Guyanese Creole Hawai’i Creole Tok Pisin
Existence ‘there is’
indefinite noun Relative ‘a woman’ ‘who’
Possession ‘has’
indefinite noun ‘a daughter’
get
one uman
we
get
gyal pikni
get
wan wahine
shi
get
wan data
i gat
wanpela meri
0
i gat
wanpela pikinini meri
Figure 113.2: “There is (existence) a woman who has (possession) a daughter” in Guyanese Creole English, Hawai’i Creole English and Tok Pisin
The common syntactic structure is immediately apparent, with only minor differences. Tok Pisin, for instance, requires a so-called predicate marker i to precede certain verb forms, and does not require a relativizer to connect the two clauses. Similarly, Hawai’i Creole English uses the third person pronoun she to introduce the second clause, while Guyanese Creole English uses we (English ‘where’) as a relativizer. Most of the lexicon is drawn from English, with the exception of Hawai’i Creole English wahine (Hawaiian
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‘woman’), Guyanese Creole English pikni and Tok Pisin pikinini (Portuguese/Spanish pequenho/pequen˜o or pequenin˜o ‘small’). In addition, the word meri ‘woman’ in Tok Pisin may represent a convergence of influence from English ‘Mary’ and Tolai (one of the indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea) mari ‘love/pretty’. This sentence also illustrates another of the many similarities in the source words used to express grammatical distinctions. The indefinite article in English lexicon creoles is usually derived from the numeral “one”. Appealing to substrate or superstrate influence cannot satisfactorily explain the existence of the same grammatical patterns because different substrate languages are involved. Although these three languages have a common superstrate, they have not borrowed this grammatical pattern from English. Moreover, French- and Portuguese-based creoles show a similar construction not found in their respective superstrates French and Portuguese. Compare Papia´ Kristang (Malaccan Creole Portuguese) spoken by a community of mixed Malay-Portuguese descent in Malacca (Malaysia) and Singapore, where forms of the verb tem ‘to have’ are used for both possession and existence, as in (1) and (2): (1)
irmang machu teng na rua sibling male have in street ‘my brother is in the street’
(2)
yo teng irmang machu have sibling male ‘I have a brother’
Note also how the grammatical category of gender is often expressed analytically in phrases such as pikinini meri, gyal pikni, irmang machu, rather than as in the superstrate languages. In Portuguese, for instance, the source for Papia´ Kristang irmang ‘sibling’, all nouns are classified grammatically as masculine or feminine; gender is lexicalized in two separate words, irma˜o ‘brother’ and irma˜ ‘sister’, which fuse the meanings of ‘sibling’ + ‘male’/‘female’ into one word form. Although English no longer has grammatical gender, there are gender-differentiated sets of terms such as sow/boar, cow/bull, mare/stallion, but these are idiosyncratic formations, as compared to the regular Tok Pisin expressions pik meri/pik man, bulmakau meri/bulmakau man, hos meri/hos man, where gender is expressed by means of a separate word meaning male or female. Compare also Jamaican Creole man hag/uman hag ‘boar/sow’, and Kamtok man pikin got/wuman pikin got ‘billy kid (goat)’/ ‘nanny kid (goat)’. Generally speaking, creoles are more regular and do not mark grammatical categories such as gender, case, or number by means of inflectional morphology as their superstrates often do. The more analytical and transparent structure of creoles tends toward expressing one meaning with one form.
5 Sociolinguistic dimensions of pidgins and creoles The sociolinguistic dimensions of pidgins and creoles are also the subject of much debate and scholarly research, especially problems arising from the communication gap between the elite, who speak metropolitan European languages and the masses, who are creole-speaking. Despite many years of scientific research validating the
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linguistic status of these languages, Alleyne’s (1994: 8) remarks about what might be called the double marginalization of creoles are unfortunately still true. One of the general problems that continues to affect creole linguistics in several ways is the extreme marginalization of creole languages relative to the class of natural languages. For instance, creole languages have been ranked with baby talk, child language, foreigner talk, and with other instances of non-natural language that do not serve normal societal communicative needs nor the full cognitive needs of the human species. Consequently, it is not surprising that they have been the most stigmatized of the world’s languages. All this has inhibited any programs that would standardize these languages and lead to the elevation of their status and role in the societies where they are spoken. The advent of political independence from the 1960s onwards in many pidgin and creole-speaking territories around the world was not automatically accompanied by linguistic independence. Most pidgins and creoles are still not written and remain undeveloped for use in public and official domains such as government and education. For example, none of the Caribbean English Creoles has achieved official or public recognition as a language in its own right. In the Pacific only Tok Pisin and Bislama have received some official recognition as national languages of their respective countries, but English is still the most widely used medium of education. Paradoxically, Bislama is actually forbidden in the schools, making Vanuatu perhaps the only country in the world which forbids the use of its national language! Although most people in the Caribbean speak creole languages in their everyday lives, the majority of children throughout the territory continue to be educated in metropolitan languages rather than in their own native creole languages. The disparity between home and school language has contributed to a high rate of educational failure and low rates of literacy. Moreover, many of these problems and the debates surrounding them have impacted the educational systems of Britain and North American due to large-scale ongoing migration from the Anglophone Caribbean, which has brought an influx of Caribbean English-speaking students into schools. As many as 20,000 children from the Anglophone Caribbean enter the school system in New York state every year (Devonish 2006: 2092). Most Caribbean students consider themselves speakers of English, and are surprised and embarrassed when sent to remedial English or English as a second language classes. In some cases, however, recognition of the creole in question as a language distinct from English results in the children’s entitlement to bilingual education. While linguists have generally been strong advocates for standardization, especially in the promotion of vernacular literacy, many pidgin and creole speakers still believe it is not possible to write their languages. This is one of the paradoxes posed by the very notion of writing in pidgins and creoles: for many people only “real” languages are written, and so the written form of a language is assumed to be the “real” language as it should be. Many pidgin and creole speakers write a language they don’t speak and speak a language they don’t write. When asked whether students should be allowed to write in Hawai’i Creole English in the classroom, one woman replied: “That’s why you go to school for, so you don’t write pidgin English” (Romaine 1999: 291). A teacher said that Hawai’i Creole English should not be written because it had no grammar (Romaine 1999: 293). One Bajan speaker explained her discomfort at seeing Bajan
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(Barbados) creole in print by likening it to the experience of looking at a face disfigured by an accident: They say there was this Christ Church woman who face got mash up in a car accident. She looking so ugly they took away al the mirrors so the woman kyaan (could not) see she face. Well, when we see this Bajan writing and thing is like we see [our] language in a broke-up mirror […]. (Fenigsen 1999: 78)
Her reaction can be interpreted at least partly in terms of the almost complete hegemony that standard English exerts over print in Barbados, so that readers almost never see the creole written in any serious context. Fenigsen observes, for instance, that if you wrote someone’s death certificate in Bajan people would think you were joking. The reaction in Hawai’i to such a text would probably be similar. In newspapers, Bajan creole might occasionally appear in isolated phrases in political cartoons or humorous columns. Although politicians may be heard using some Bajan in heated debates on the radio, in print they are represented as if they had spoken in the standard form. The existence of continua between many creoles and their lexifiers poses the question of which variety to choose as the basis for standardization. In Papua New Guinea the standard was based on rural Tok Pisin, which at the time was the variety most widely spoken. This contrasts with the route to standardization followed by the lexifiers, where the varieties of the elite in capital cities such as London and Paris, provided the basis for codification of a standard. Devonish’s (1986: 115) solution for the Anglophone Caribbean creoles is to recognize a range of intermediate forms in wide use as acceptable forms of Creole. This democratic approach attempts to avoid imposing a single variety on everyone in the society. Otherwise, the language planning process is adopting the very model of intolerance and negative attitudes towards the Caribbean creoles that it is trying to reject. Although some have argued for recognition of Jamaican Creole as an official language, public attitudes still tend to be largely negative, particularly among the elite. The late Morris Cargill, for example, opined that “corruption of language is no cultural heritage. Corrupt people speak corrupt languages and that’s that” (Cargill 1989: 8A). Such statements illustrate the way in which negative stereotypes about people are projected onto the language they speak. For most speakers of pidgin and creoles languages it is a revelation that their languages can be regarded as legitimate and that the study of pidgin and creole languages constitutes a recognized academic discipline. Nevertheless, the situation is rendered complex by what has been called the paradox of power and solidarity (Rickford and Traugott 1985). Creoles, like other minority languages and non-standard varieties, are symbolic of familiar, intimate, and solidary relations among in-group members as opposed to the more formal, public, and distant connotations of the colonial or standard language. Although basilectal speech is typically highly stigmatized due to its association with people of low social status and lack of education, at the same time, it is the basilectal and mesolectal varieties that are used to assert Caribbean identity. Across the Caribbean the absence of a high culture expressed through an indigenous language has meant that the voice of the masses and popular culture have generally been expressed through creoles, in both spoken and written forms.
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Although Devonish (1986: 87) has rightly observed that in the Commonwealth Caribbean the “language question never became an important issue in the anti-colonial struggles, in Jamaica, in particular, a strong, black national identity has gone hand in hand with nationalist politics to foster a powerfully vibrant creative arts movement, whose influence has extended far beyond Jamaica and the Caribbean”. Rejecting the term dialect because it suggested inferiority, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1984) argued for the use of what he called “nation language” ( Jamaican Creole English) in poetry as a way of capturing the sounds and rhythm of oral traditions of performance. The very act of writing in a marginalized language whose status as a language is denied by the mainstream is symbolic of the appropriation of the power vested in the written word. Writing in Jamaican Creole English becomes, in Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) terms, “an act of identity”. Brathwaite was one of the founders of the Caribbean Artists Movement in 1966 in London, who fostered the development of a West Indian literature rooted in the languages and experiences of the islands. Through the commercial success of performers such as Bob Marley, Mikey Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah or Mutabaruka, whose music and sound poems were on the British reggae music charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the once historically devalued Caribbean popular culture has become part of multicultural Britain. These artists did much to elevate the status of Jamaican Creole. As early as 1942 Jamaican poet Louise Bennett (Miss Lou) became a household name and icon of popular Jamaican culture. A number of her poems challenged prevailing stereotypes of Jamaican language and culture as inferior, such as this one, where she satirized the prejudice and irony in the colonial perspective that regards Jamaican Creole as a “corrupt” form of English, but English as a language derived from other languages it has borrowed from (Bennett 1993: 1): My Aunty Roachy seh dat it bwile her temper and really bex her fi true anytime she hear anybody a style we Jamaican dialec as ‘corruption of the English language’. For if dat be de case, den dem shoulda call English Language corruption of Norman French and Latin and all dem tarra language what dem seh dat English is derived from. Oonoo hear de wud? ‘Derived.’ English is a derivation but Jamaican Dialec is a corruption! What a unfairity! No massa, noting no go so. We not ‘corrupt’, an dem ‘derive.’ We derive to. Jamaica derive. Gloss: My Aunty Roachy says that her temper boils and that it really makes her angry anytime she hears anyone describe our Jamaican dialect as a ‘corruption of the English language’. If that’s the case, then they should call the English language a corruption of Norman French and Latin and all those other Languages they say English is derived from. Did you (plural) hear the word? ‘Derived.’ English is a derivation but Jamaican Dialec is a corruption!
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How unfair! No sir, that’s not how it is. We’re not ‘corrupt’, and they ‘derived.’ We derive too. Jamaica derives.
By contrasting the ways in which terms corrupt and derived are applied to the two languages, Bennett establishes parity for Jamaican Creole English as a legitimate language with a respectable, albeit mixed lineage, similar to English. Any language that is closely related to another in vocabulary or structure could be said to be a debased or corrupted form of that language when looked at from the perspective of that other language (Romaine 1988: 13). Indeed, English and other European languages were once regarded as corrupted forms of Latin. Sir Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), founder of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, one of the oldest libraries in Europe, would not allow works of English literature in it, dismissing them as “idle bookes and riffe raffes” at a time when the only serious books were in Latin, and a few books in the vernacular languages of Europe such as Italian. Comparisons between pidgins and creoles and their lexifiers are inevitably biased due at least partly to the fact that the former typically have a rather shorter history than their lexifiers and most still remain unwritten. Tok Pisin, one of the handful of pidgins and creoles to be standardized, has been written for only about 100 years (Romaine 1996). By contrast, English has been written for centuries. It can easily be overlooked that highly elaborated languages have been centuries in the making. English was still in many respects stylistically limited in the 16th century by comparison with Latin, and it was not until the end of the 17th century that English replaced Latin as the language of science. The 17th century saw concerted efforts on the part of lexicographers, grammarians, and writers to remedy the perceived inadequacies of English to enable it to meet a continually expanding range of functions. The continuing expansion of standard English into domains once occupied by Latin and French was accomplished partly by heavy borrowing. It would take even longer before people were confident enough about English to deem it worthy of study as a subject for teaching and research. Now that English is so well established as a discipline, we tend to forget that even as late as the 19th century it was not recognized as a legitimate subject. This brings us back to the position that the only thing special about creoles is the socio-historical situation of language contact in which they emerge. Yet even that may not be so special when we consider the history of so-called “normal” languages, most of which are hybrid varieties that have undergone restructuring and borrowing to various degrees depending on the circumstances. Scholars such as Bailey and Maroldt (1977: 21), for example, have suggested that English is a creole because the outcome of mixing was substantial enough to result in a new system separate from the antecedent parent systems, i.e. French and English (cf. Trotter, Chapter 114). They depict Middle English as a language of mixed parentage with Old French acting as a superstrate on an Anglo-Saxon substrate, with additional input from Norse. Linguistic evidence offered in support of the creolization hypothesis consists of a number of grammatical changes that eliminated a great deal of the inflectional morphology of English. Ultimately, the validity of the creolization hypothesis depends on how we define creoles. If all we mean by creole is a mixed language, then most of the world’s languages are creoles and the term creole is rendered useless. There are no clear criteria for
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determining how much mixture or restructuring there must be in any given case of language contact before deciding that we are dealing with pidginization or creolization as distinct from the effects of borrowing or interference. It may be useful to distinguish between the processes of pidginization and creolization on the one hand and pidgins and creoles as outcomes of such processes on the other. That is, many language varieties may at various points in their evolution be affected by processes typical of pidginization and creolization, but not all such varieties result in pidgins or creoles.
6 References Alleyne, Mervyn C. 1994. Problems of standardization of creole languages. In: Marcyliena Morgan (ed.), Language and the social construction of identity in creole situations, 7–18. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. Ansaldo, Umberto, Stephen Matthews, and Lisa Lim (eds.). 2007. Deconstructing creole. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Baker, Philip and Peter Mu¨hlha¨usler. 1990. From business to pidgin. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 1(1): 87–115. Baker, Philip and Magnus Huber. 2001. Atlantic, Pacific, and world-wide features in Englishlexicon contact languages. English World Wide 22(2): 157–208. Bailey, C.J and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. In: Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.) Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles, 21–53. Tu¨bingen: Narr. Bennett, Louise. 1993. Aunty Roachy seh. Kingston: Sangster’s Book Stores, Ltd. Bickerton, Derek. 1984. The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behav Brain Sci 7: 173–221. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1984. The history of the voice: The development of nation language in anglophone Caribbean poetry. London: New Beacon Books. Cargill, Morris. 1989. Corruption of language is no cultural heritage. Sunday Gleaner, 29 October 1989, . Chaudenson, Robert. 1992. Des iles, des hommes, des langues. Paris: L’Harmattan. Devonish, Hubert. 1986. Language and liberation: Creole language politics in the Caribbean. London: Karia Press. Devonish, Hubert. 2006. The anglophone Caribbean. In: Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, and Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society, Vol. III, 2083–2095. 2nd edn. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fenigsen, Janina. 1999. ‘A Broke-up Mirror’: Representing Bajan in print. Cultural Anthropology 14(1): 61–87. Holm, John. 1989. Pidgins and Creoles. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Page, Robert B. and Andre´e Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity. Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McWhorter, John. 2005. Defining creole. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1986. Les langues cre´oles peuvent-elles eˆtre de´finie´s sans allusion a` leur histoire?Etudes cre´oles 9: 135–150. Rickford, John R. and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 1985. Symbols of powerlessness and degeneracy or symbol of solidarity and truth? Paradoxical attitudes towards pidgins and creoles. In: Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), The English language today, 252–262. Oxford: Pergamon. Romaine, Suzanne. 1988. Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Longman. Romaine, Suzanne. 1996. Pidgins and creoles as literary languages: Ausbau and Abstand. In: Marlis Hellinger and Ulrich Ammon (eds.), Contrastive Sociolinguistics, 271–289. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Romaine, Suzanne. 1999. Changing attitudes towards Hawai’i Creole English: Fo’ get one good job, you gotta know ho fo’ talk like one haole. In: John R. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine
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(eds.), Creole genesis, attitudes and discourse. Studies celebrating Charlene J. Sato, 287–301. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Romaine, Suzanne. 2004. The English input to the English-lexicon pidgins and creoles of the Pacific. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of colonial English. Studies in transported dialects, 456–499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singler, John V. (ed.). 1990. Pidgin and creole tense-mood-aspect systems. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Suzanne Romaine, Oxford (UK)
114. English in Contact: Middle English creolization 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Introduction The creolization hypothesis Language acquisition problems Changes in Middle English The post-Conquest language situation Summary References
Abstract This article broadly rejects the creolization hypothesis put forward by Thomason and Kaufman (1977). At the same time, it recognizes deficiencies in standard accounts of the relationship between Middle English and Anglo-French, and reviews the current state of research on this topic. In addition, since at least some of the external circumstances which could have led to creolization existed, and creolization did not take place, the article discusses why that might have been so.
1 Introduction This article will focus on the problem of creolization in Middle English, with particular emphasis on Anglo-French (the traditional term “Anglo-Norman” has here been replaced by “Anglo-French”. “Anglo-Norman” implies that the French brought to England was “Norman” (which it was not in all cases). The use of “Anglo-French” is intended to be diachronically and geolinguistically neutral: it means simply “French as used in England”. The fact that this article does not discuss Anglo-French outside England (i.e., in the rest of the British Isles), should not be taken to mean that the language was not also in use in those areas. For the history of English, though, it is clearly England which is most important). It will reject the hypothesis itself, whilst recognizing that there are also defects in many of the traditional accounts of the relationship between Middle English and Anglo-French, which are only now, belatedly, beginning to be corrected in the standard literature. Some of what has been said about Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1781–1793
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creolization helps to shed light on the processes of language contact which must have occurred after 1066: the creolization hypothesis is still a useful starting-point for an analysis of how the merger between Anglo-French and English took place. In much which is still being written on the history of medieval English, the specialist scholarship from the Anglo-French perspective has not been taken into account. Even in quite recent publications, Middle English scholarship continues to recycle a history of Anglo-French to which Anglo-French specialists would no longer subscribe. A particular example is the persistence of the traditional “serial monolingualism” model (Trotter 2006b), according to which Anglo-Saxon gives way to Anglo-French, pending the revival of Middle English, with each language succeeding the other. Born out of the 19th-century nationalist ideology which accompanied and prompted the emergence of philology in England and elsewhere (Trotter 2006c), this model ignores the reality of the longterm coexistence of languages, and of language contact (cf. Watts, Chapter 95). Prominent amongst the areas in which language contact, going far beyond the limited “cultural borrowing” model, is evident, are (a) wholesale lexical transfer, (b) language mixing, (c) morphosyntactic hybridization, and (d) syntactic/idiomatic influences.
2 The creolization hypothesis The hypothesis that Middle English underwent creolization through contact with Anglo-French is a little over thirty years old. Its classic formulation is in the 1977 article by Bailey and Maroldt. The position adopted has not been generally accepted, and a series of influential studies appear, at least for the time being, to have demolished the idea. Go¨rlach (1986) and Danchev (1997) have written devastating rejoinders. Whilst the creolization hypothesis seems to be, if not dead and buried, at any rate in a state of long-term cryogenic suspended animation, it is perhaps relevant to reflect on why creolization did not in fact take place when at least some of the circumstances existed which could have allowed it to do so. Let us, however, first review the situation which existed after the Norman Conquest. A small number of invaders (numerical estimates vary, but they cannot ever have been more than a very small minority of the total population of England), speaking a different language from that in use amongst the inhabitants of the country, were immediately in contact with the indigenous population, whose language, presumably, the invading army did not speak. By definition, that army, and subsequent reinforcements and colonists, were the social, political, and economic elite. If numerically unimportant, they had sociolinguistic prestige, associated with power, on their side. There is some new DNA evidence, for the Anglo-Saxon period, that an elite incoming group could (in that historical case) have enjoyed an evolutionary advantage over native Britons which would have meant that their influence (both on the gene pool, and possibly on language) might have been disproportionate to their numbers (Thomas et al. 2006). However, such evidence is problematic (it presupposes sufficiently distinct DNA for the groups concerned), and it is not likely to be available for the Anglo-French invasion (since in all probability, the Normans, by virtue of their Scandinavian ancestry, had the same DNA haplogroup as the Anglo-Saxon elite in England). The Normans rapidly took over positions of power and authority, displacing locals, and making their own appointments further down the hierarchy of Church and state alike. Information is limited, but it is clear that (despite a legal distinction between Normans and Englishmen for at least
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the earlier period of the Middle Ages: Garnett 1985), there was intermarriage, typically involving Norman men marrying English women. For this, and indeed daily life, to have been feasible implies one of a number of scenarios: (a) English speakers learnt French, (b) French speakers learnt English, or (c) a creole emerged. The creolization hypothesis depends on the third of these three options, but what occurred was a combination of the first two options. Unless the term “creolization” is used so loosely as to be little more than a synonym for influence because of language contact, certain specific features must be present (cf. Romaine, Chapter 113). These include the type of language situation which obtained in medieval England; but that is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. Creolization often though not always entails, as a preliminary phase, the evolution of a pidgin. Pidgin languages are nobody’s native (mother) tongue; they are (typically) much simplified. Even Bailey and Maroldt do not claim that any such pidgin existed in medieval England; indeed, they explicitly reject it (Bailey and Maroldt 1977: 22, 28–29). The subsequent process whereby a pidgin becomes a creole involves its use as a mother tongue (thus, in the next generation), and, usually but not indispensably, development, normally from the source language, to meet an expanded language’s expanded needs. It is often although not invariably the case that it is some form of the invader’s language which forms the distant startingpoint of the pidgin and hence the creole; another possibility is the emergence of an “interlanguage”, by definition new (Danchev 1997). None of these processes appears to have taken place in medieval England and it is thus hard to argue that creolization (as understood by the experts: see, still, Whinnom 1965, 1971, 1977) ever took place. Ultimately, had French been learnt by the English-speaking population, then English (as the successor of Anglo-Saxon) could have disappeared, a hypothesis memorably and provocatively aired in 1889: Peu s’en est fallu pourtant que l’idiome porte´ en Angleterre par les Normands de Guillaume le Conque´rant ne soit devenu la langue commune du Royaume uni. Si l’effort si manifeste au XIIIe sie`cle et dans la premie`re moitie´ du XIVe sie`cle s’e´tait poursuivi pendant une cinquantaine d’anne´es, si l’effroyable guerre de Cent ans n’e´tait venue diminuer les relations entre la France et l’Angleterre, ou, en tout cas, en modifier la nature, l’anglais, re´duit de´ja` a` l’e´tat de patois, se serait e´teint peu a` peu. Les conse´quences de ce fait, qui paraissait probable au temps ou` e´crivait Higden [Ranulph Higden, author of the Polychronicon, mid-fourteenth century], eussent e´te´ incalculables, et il est a` croire qu’elles eussent e´te´ profitables a` l’humanite´. ‘However, the language brought over to England by the Normans led by William the Conqueror only narrowly avoided becoming the common tongue of the United Kingdom. If the very clear efforts made during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries had been continued for another fifty or so years, if the devastating Hundred Years War had not come along to undermine the relationship between France and England, or at any rate, to change the nature of that relationship, English, already reduced to the status of a dialect, would bit by bit have died out. The consequences of such a development, which seemed likely at the time when Higden was writing, would have been immeasurable, and it may be believed that they would have been to the benefit of mankind.’ (Toulmin Smith and Meyer 1889: lvii).
In most cases, apparently, the incoming Anglo-Normans (not all of whom were necessarily of high social status) clearly learnt English. Some Englishmen, equally, clearly
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learnt French. Not only was Anglo-French of considerable social and economic benefit within England, it was also the means of access to French, to France (where, in the 12th century, the English kings controlled more territory than did their French counterparts), and to the wider, European world. Right through the Middle Ages, French in its various forms was, after Latin, the international language: acquiring Anglo-French was thus a major advantage. It has been aptly described as the “bridge” between England and Europe (Short 2007: 25). A further complication arises, as far as the documentary record is concerned, because, as Clanchy (1993) has so brilliantly explained, there is no necessary connection between the language spoken and the languages of record in use either on a given occasion, or more generally. Anglo-French records of a discussion do not necessarily mean that there was a discussion in Anglo-French. Indeed, it has recently been tantalizingly suggested (Ingham 2009) that in some manorial records, the existence of apparently isolated Middle English words as single-lexeme switches (in Anglo-French embedded in Latin matrix documents) is explicable only if they are interpreted as vestiges of instructions originally delivered in English, but largely (though not unfailingly) transposed into Anglo-French when written down. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon (hitherto a flourishing literary, religious, and indeed documentary language) largely disappears from sight, to be replaced by Anglo-French, although still present in isolated texts and fragments found in a surprising number of manuscripts (Da Rold 2006). The preConquest written languages, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, thus give way, after the Conquest, to Latin and Anglo-French. This state of affairs, in addition to the already considerable difficulties in determining the reality of language use anywhere in the Middle Ages, means that we can infer even less than usual from the extant documentary evidence. And of course, with the emergence in particular of an increasingly documentary society during the 13th century, and with the growing need for written records in (especially) the towns, Anglo-French spread downwards through society, and was used as a language of record at almost all levels at which records were kept. This, in turn, presupposes the development of a class of professional writers, many of whom, already by the end of the 12th century, would no longer have been (if they ever had been) native speakers of Anglo-French. The rapid development of writing is thus, amongst other things, a mechanism whereby a number of Englishmen, who were presumably mainly monoglot in English (Short 2009), not only came into contact with, but in many cases were required to develop some competence in, Anglo-French. This may even have been true in the countryside, where the evidence for the use of French is thinner on the ground and where, indeed, French was probably much less used than in the towns (Short 2009: 245; but cf. Rothwell 2010; and for a discussion of possible AngloFrench influence on English dialects). For a convenient, accessible, and predictably well-informed summary of the sociolinguistic history of Anglo-French, we may turn to William Rothwell, long-standing general editor of the Anglo-French Dictionary and undoubtedly the scholar best qualified to comment. What he has to say (see below) runs directly and consistently counter to the picture painted by the studies of both Bailey and Maroldt (1977), and Thomason and Kaufman (1988) (cf. also the wellinformed introduction in Short 2007). As Rothwell himself points out (1998: 149), those who advocate creolization and those who oppose it contrive to use the same evidence to argue for diametrically opposed positions. This is how Rothwell presents the situation:
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The basic difficulty with Anglo-French is that it was one of the three languages of postConquest medieval England, whose relationship to each other changed imperceptibly but inexorably over nearly four centuries. Anglo-Latin gradually lost ground to AngloFrench in its role as the official language of record at both national and local level, whilst Middle English emerged over time from being a predominantly spoken language to take over from the two others in the fifteenth century as the acknowledged national language, both spoken and written. This simple summary statement, however, hides a complex linguistic interplay brought about by the continuously evolving social situation in Britain and on the continent for many decades after the Conquest. In the first place, the role of Middle English for over two centuries after 1066 cannot be determined with any precision in the absence of an adequate body of surviving recorded evidence before the fourteenth century, although it was there all the time in the background as the spoken vernacular of the majority of the population, despite many of them using French and/or Latin in their writings. Secondly, Anglo-French was not merely the language of the conquerors, destined to decline and eventually wither as the French component of the population dwindled from one generation to the next and was gradually absorbed into an anglophone society. […] The enduring links between France and the offshore island were not broken by the loss of Normandy in 1204, nor did they persist only in the form of military incursions […] French civilization did not stop at Calais or Dieppe, but was carried over into England on parchment and by word of mouth, as is demonstrated by translations of numerous Biblical works into Anglo-French, the production of a range of botanical and medical texts based on European works and the presence in France for long periods of cosmopolitan scholars from England like Adam of Petit Pont, John of Garland and Alexander Nequam, whilst, on the other hand, as late as the fourteenth century, the French chroniclers Jehan le Bel and Froissart were certainly not ignorant of the corresponding lettered class in England. At the same time thriving trade links with the countries on the mainland of Europe were similarly conducted in French, the medieval language of commerce in western Europe. […] Within the confines of England the various aspects of the machinery of government, at both national and municipal level, religious as well as secular, functioned in Britain largely through the medium of French until the fifteenth century. (Rothwell 2005: vi-vii)
To summarize the consensus amongst Anglo-French specialists: for maybe a century or so after the arrival of the Norman invaders, Anglo-French (a conglomerate – better, a variegated mosaic – of a whole range of northern French dialects) would have been in use as a spoken language amongst the elite, and amongst those whom they brought with them (not all of whom were members of that elite: see the Bayeux Tapestry). In parallel, Anglo-Saxon would have continued as the spoken language of the mass of the population. That situation gave way during the course of the 13th century neither to the disappearance of French, nor to a complete severance of England and Normandy, but to a position whereby Anglo-French, fully established as a documentary language, began increasingly to be acquired as a second language by a population whose mother tongue would by then have been almost exclusively English. We should not forget that these processes in fact affected only a small minority of the overall population, which would never have been anything other than monoglot English (and of course completely illiterate) throughout the entire period. There are, then, in this changing situation, several variables. The first concerns the distinction, already alluded to above, between spoken and written language. The second (also already mentioned) concerns the mode of acquisition of the language or languages concerned. In the same
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volume as that in which Bailey and Maroldt’s paper originally appeared, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange published a methodologically interesting discussion of creolization in the emergence of the Romance languages. She emphasized (Schlieben-Lange 1977: 97) the need for distinctions between written and spoken languages, and between different modes of language-acquisition, to be borne in mind (in the case of her study, cautioning against careless comparisons between creolization, for example in the West Indies, and the emergence of Romance vernaculars in Western Europe). The lesson is equally applicable to the position in medieval England, but it is only too rarely applied.
3 Language acquisition problems It is, or should be, self-evident that the acquisition of Anglo-French as a second language for professional purposes, perhaps predominantly for use in writing (although see Ingham 2009), is a different process from the learning of the same language as a mother tongue. It is perfectly possible to imagine a situation where quite competent Anglo-French could have been written by Englishmen incapable of speaking the language. This is precisely how modern languages were taught in Britain until, and in some cases well beyond, the middle of the 20th century. The acquisition process may not have been all that dissimilar: modern languages were taught until relatively recently essentially as though they were classical languages, helped no doubt by the fact that the grammatical terminology deployed was and in some cases still is, substantially that of classical Latin. Medieval municipal officials might well have been educated in a similar way, and indeed the evidence is that (to some extent) they were. They attended grammar schools. From the extant teaching materials, it is clear that Latin was always in the background and often in the foreground of the instructional process. Latin was a language which they were also required to manipulate in writing, although presumably virtually never in speech. So the model was certainly there; the mechanisms for transmitting the language as an essentially written medium were well established; and the process must in many cases have had remarkably little to do with what we think of as normal language contact. Equally different again would have been the process involved in the acquisition of (predominantly, if not exclusively spoken) English by a member of the minor Norman nobility who required competence in the language in order to converse with either his English wife, or his senior local officials.
4 Changes in Middle English A second aspect of the creolization discussion (in addition to the availability of the necessary linguistic, demographic, and social context) is whether we may identify, in Middle English after the Norman Conquest, changes which are compatible with what is normally understood by, and characteristic of, the process of creolization. In other words, does the subsequent linguistic evidence support post factum the hypothesis that creolization took place? Here, unfortunately, as has been pointed out by Rothwell (1996), neither the proponents of the creolization hypothesis nor those who have sought to undermine it display sufficient first-hand knowledge of linguistic and social linguistic realities in medieval England. Nearly all those who have written on the topic are
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specialists either in creolistics, or in the history of English. None has a thorough, firsthand knowledge of Anglo-French, which is clearly one of the languages involved whether (as Bailey and Maroldt 1977 rather curiously suggest) because Middle English is the product of the impact of English on Anglo-French or, a little more plausibly, if Anglo-French is thought to be the source of creolizing influence exerted on English. This second interpretation, of the two, certainly seems better to fit the linguistic facts: overwhelmingly the most important aspect of cross-language influence between AngloFrench and English is the impact of the former on the latter, most strikingly in terms of lexis. In structure, English was not substantially altered, or at least, was only altered in ways consonant with developments which were already under way. The pattern of lexical influence (which includes idioms), but of only restricted impact in syntax and morphology (and for that matter, phonology), seems more consistent with the hypothesis that it was Anglo-French which influenced English, rather than the converse. Significant changes other than to lexis are restricted to the emergence in English of new diphthongs like /oi/ and /ui/ (Diensberg 1985), and perhaps the enormous productivity of French-derived suffixes appended to native English stems to generate new nouns and adjectives on the models of (for example) -age (passage, carriage, poundage, average) or -ity (enmity, charity, parity, sanctity). But if (as seems likely) these suffixes entered English attached to French words, this is less a case of derivational morphology than an aspect of lexical borrowing. It is regrettable that the best-known response to the creolization hypothesis (Thomason and Kaufman 1988) should be so defective in its acquaintance with primary data. For obvious reasons, the study has mainly attracted the attention of Anglicists, and as a result, it was not until Rothwell (1998) that a critique informed by an adequate knowledge of Anglo-French was produced. Thus, the assertion by Thomason and Kaufman that “It can in no way be considered reasonable to suppose that any of the conditions of pidginization, creolization, or language mixture existed between English and French in the Middle Ages” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 309) is likely to raise, at the very least, eyebrows, for anyone with any real knowledge of the historical and sociolinguistic situation (cf. Rothwell 1998: 149). The basis of the assertion appears to be that French began to be given up (by French speakers) by “1235 at the latest”, the date being presumably that just before the arrival of Eleanor of Provence (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 308). It is further claimed that “[t]here is no reason to suppose that any large proportion of native English learned French between 1066 and 1250; after that point they had no reason to do so”. These statements are (as Rothwell observes) unsubstantiated and unsupported, for the simple reason that there is no support for them in the historical evidence: it in fact flatly contradicts them. “French” (i.e., Anglo-French) continued in use and was learnt right through the later Middle Ages – or at any rate, teaching materials exist, which we must assume were used, although regarding whose efficacy we know little. That the statements just quoted are at variance with such facts does not stop them being repeated verbatim by recent scholarship (Fennell 2001: 130). Comments like this also appear to ignore any distinction between spoken and written language and (perhaps of even greater significance) to disregard the difference between a mother tongue and an acquired second or even (conceptually) “foreign” language. Yet none of the discussion about the sociolinguistic situation in medieval England makes any sense unless such fundamental distinctions are borne in mind.
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5 The post-Conquest language situation In terms of the cultural status of the two vernacular languages at the time of the Conquest, we are much better informed about the indigenous language, Anglo-Saxon. It had a long and distinguished tradition of use in all sorts of contexts, and was certainly a fully functional language in its own right, occupying, in parallel with Latin, many of the roles which (in a diglossic model) would be associated with a “high” language. About Anglo-French, we can be much less certain. Its origins are not very well known beyond the obvious assumption that the invaders will have brought with them whatever (varied) northern Gallo-Romance dialects they spoke at home in Normandy, north-eastern, and western France – regions across which we do know that there was, already, significant variation. It is a striking fact, too, that what was in effect the last significant Germanic invasion into Romance-speaking territory (taking the form of sporadic, then more regular military incursions, followed by the subsequent grant to and colonization of Normandy by Duke Rollo) should have been followed by so limited a linguistic impact in France. Indeed, in general terms the contrast between France and England throughout the post-Roman period, and even before, is one which raises some interesting questions (Trotter forthc. b). Just as Latin became universal in Gaul, it had almost no impact in Britain. Anglo-Saxon ousted British, but even Frankish, the most influential Germanic language in Gaul, contributed very little. The Normans, originally Norsemen, established themselves in Normandy, and within a century and a half had apparently so far assimilated some form of Norman Gallo-Romance that they were able subsequently to export it to both Sicily (1063) and England (1066). The Vikings, Norsemen by another name, were meanwhile taking over substantial quantities of northern and eastern England, and contributing extensively (via their influence on certain dialects) to what would in due course become the English language. But that, as far as we can tell, is really all that is known about the pre-history of Anglo-French. It has to be assumed (although medievalists, curiously, often forget this; cf. Rothwell 1998: 149) that the language brought over in 1066 was geographically and socially varied. What we do not have is much in the way of evidence of what that language was like, and even if we did have evidence, it would of necessity be written, and that might well be of limited use. There are no Norman texts much before 1100, and in practice, we have AngloFrench texts almost as early as anything from Normandy, and almost as early as anything from anywhere in France. A high proportion of extant manuscripts of the earliest continental French literary texts are also Anglo-French (the most famous case being that of the Chanson de Roland) and this further complicates the issue, since it means that even apparently straightforward “French” literary evidence survives in AngloFrench scribal garb (Howlett 1996). The number of pre-Conquest documents which are extant in any Northern French variety does not get into double figures. Yet what we do know is that, almost literally as soon as they landed in England, the conquering Normans set about writing in their own language. The reasons include (no doubt) a desire to impose their own culture, to enhance William’s claim to the English throne by emphasizing the continuity of practice with Anglo-Saxon, as well as the simple fact that there already existed (unusually in the Romance world, but common enough in Germanic lands) a tradition in England of vernacular writing. But what the use of Anglo-French does suggest is that, to the invaders, their language was, like Anglo-Saxon, a distinguished and appropriate vehicle for writing, in other words, like
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Anglo-Saxon, a “high” language in diglossic terms. In the case of Anglo-French England, two languages and cultures met, with alongside them a third, which was shared by both sides, namely Latin. Under those circumstances, it was logical that the language of the invaders should become the language of administration, and that the language of the (obviously far more numerous) invaded, should, as it were, go underground, persisting as a spoken (but increasingly low) variety, and only leaving very limited traces in the documentary record of the period between the Conquest and the 13th century.
5.1 Lexical transfer What, then, were the results of this language contact? I mentioned above four main consequences: wholesale lexical transfer, language mixing, morphosyntactic hybridization, and syntactic/idiomatic influences. “Lexical transfer” has been preferred here over the (traditional) term “borrowing”, simply in order to emphasize the extent to which the process cannot readily be described within the parameters of what is typically meant by borrowing. Implicit in that idea is either a deficit in the target language, or the perception that a borrowed, foreign word is desirable and prestigious. It is not at all clear that either of these factors are significant in the history of the transfer of Anglo-French lexis into Middle English. Contrary to what is often implied, and even explicitly stated, in many handbooks of the history of English, we should assume that Anglo-French served as the route of transmission; it would be, to say the least, surprising if English users had looked overseas for words which were readily available at home (Rothwell 1998: 152–153). The proximity of Anglo-French ensured a massive influx of new terminology, in many cases adding to rather than replacing native words. In addition to the relatively well-known examples in the world of administration, law, literature, and so forth, there is a substantial transfer into lower, even vulgar, registers of English of everyday words of Anglo-French origin (bugger, bastard, etc.: Rothwell 1996), suggesting that the process, and indeed the underlying language contact, must have been more thorough, and deeper, than is often supposed. A second, but no less important, process is that whereby Middle English words have developed independently from continental French. This has been copiously documented in an impressive series of substantial articles by Rothwell, and does not need to be rehearsed in extenso here. Examples are the series dungeon ~ donjon, moat ~ motte. The English senses of these words, where dungeon and moat are below ground level (whereas donjon and motte are above) derived from developments which took place in Anglo-French before being carried over into English (see the Ango-Norman Dictionary, AND). In charting the chronology of the process, we are again at the mercy of the documentary evidence. The key period of lexical transfer appears to be the 14th century; but that may be, as much as anything else, because of the explosion of available documentation in both Anglo-French and, more particularly, Middle English at that time. In other words, the real dates of the transfers may not be the dates at which they are documented. Some evidence that this is not so is available in the form of English surnames, of Anglo-French origin (Rothwell 1998: 160), and indeed in the capacity of some early Middle English texts to generate hybrids from Anglo-French and Middle English ( forpreiseð; propreliche; priveiliche from Ancrene Wisse, Trotter 2003a: 97).
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5.2 Language mixing The catch-all term “language mixing” is here used to refer simply to the considerable range of mixed-language documents which survive from the later Middle Ages. In some, the base or matrix language is apparently Latin; in others, Anglo-French, and as time goes on, increasingly, Middle English. These documents clearly, in part, bear witness to the type of wholesale lexical transfer just discussed, which amounts to no less than the wholesale merger of two lexical sets, that of Anglo-French and that of Middle English. But the process goes far beyond that. Quantities of medieval documents survive in (often heavily abbreviated) medieval British Latin, into which have been inserted substantial numbers of Anglo-French or Middle English terms, usually of course substantives; analysis of this material is complicated by the abbreviation system, which may even have been designed to ensure that the language of the documents was flexible, and that words could have been read in more than one language (Wright 1996; Wright 2000: 150–151, quoting the case of the form candel’, amenable to being read in more than one language, as either English or a Latin genitive plural depending on how the final contraction l’ is construed), but also by the fact that in the later period (that is, after around 1350) the distinction between Middle English and Anglo-French is increasingly hard to draw. As is apparent from even a cursory perusal of the Middle English Dictionary (MED, Kurath et al. 1952–2001) it is by no means always clear whether a given word, listed as Middle English but first attested in an Anglo-French context, actually is Middle English, or is perceived as an Anglo-French borrowing. At this distance in time, inevitably, metalinguistic information of this type is hard to come by. It can be exceptionally difficult to determine the exact status of the word in such a context: and indeed, it may be that the modern assumption that we can even try to differentiate between languages which (lexically) were by then so closely related, is misguided. So, for example, a notionally English word of Anglo-French origin (e.g. pendant) may be identified as Middle English, even if it first occurs in an Anglo-French text and would thus (to an Anglo-French specialist) be uncomplicatedly but indisputably Anglo-French: “.ij. yerdropes iij. petitz Ropes febles ij. pendantz pour lez polankrez ij. Junkes febles et en partie wastez un Cranelyne feble un baill’ un Spogeour un Mast pour le Batell’ un Anker pour le Batell” (Trotter 2006a: 79). The decision to allocate pendant to Middle English is essentially arbitrary, and based on a supposition (also arbitrary) that a distinction may be established between “Anglo-French” and “Middle English” at the level of lexis. This seems at best suspect when dealing with Middle English words of Anglo-French provenance. There is a case, too, for arguing that mixed-language documents are the documentary equivalent of bilingual individuals, both evidence of language contact and linguistic transfer, and the mechanism by which they were effected (cf. Vidos 1960).
5.3 Morphosyntactic hybridization This may, in some ways, be regarded as a combination of the two phenomena which have just been examined. Sometimes referred to (Romaine 1995: 56; Trotter 2003a) as “loanblends”, morphosyntactically hybrid forms are those where Anglo-French and Middle English elements combine: taskewerk, for example (Rothwell 2000: 227– 228). Why this phenomenon is of particular importance is because of what it tells us
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about the extent and depth of language contact. Clearly, in order for one language to adopt the morphology of another, a more thoroughgoing level of contact is required than is needed for the simple acquisition of discrete substantives by one language from the other. In terms of derivational morphology, what this amounts to is that (for example) the Anglo-French suffix -age has become productive in English. This implies assimilation (phonetically and conceptually), as well as a sufficient understanding of morpheme boundaries to enable words to be appropriately accommodated to the new suffix. It is difficult to imagine this happening without a sufficient number of sufficiently bilingual individuals. It does not necessarily follow that this bilingualism involved the spoken language, since it is presumably possible to envisage a situation in which adequate familiarity with the written languages would have allowed scribes to acquire and then to apply the morphological rules required.
6 Summary The contact between Anglo-French and Middle English was extensive and the impact of Anglo-French was considerable, particularly on lexis. Contact and impact are part of, but not the same as, creolization. A massive importation of Anglo-French does not make the resulting language any less English and it does not ( just because creoles are relexified) justify the term “creolization”. Nevertheless, what took place is far more than “borrowing”: the process was one of the wholesale mergers of two formerly discrete lexical sets, to the point where it can often be difficult (in e.g. the 14th century) to decide which language a given word embedded in (say) a Latin text belongs to. Creolization did not occur in (or to) Middle English because there was no need for it: medieval England was happily multilingual, and had no need (or incentive) to turn two (or three) languages into one.
7 References Bailey, Charles-James N. and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French Lineage of English. In: Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact, 21–53. Tu¨bingen: Gu¨nter Narr Verlag. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. London/ New York: Routledge. Clanchy, Michael. 1993. From Memory to Written Record. England 1077–1307. 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold. Danchev, Andrei. 1997. The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisited. In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics, 79–108. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Da Rold, Orietta. 2006. English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 and the Making of a Re-source. Literature Compass 3: 750–766. Diensberg, Bernhard. 1985. Untersuchungen zur phonologischen Rezeption romanischen Lehnguts im Mittel- und Fru¨hneuenglischen. Die Lehnwo¨rter mit mittelenglisch oi/ui und ihre phonologische Rezeption. Tu¨bingen: Gu¨nter Narr Verlag. Dor, Juliette. 1994. Langues franc¸aise et anglaise, et multilinguisme a` l’e´poque d’Henri II Plantageneˆt. Cahiers de Civilisation me´die´vale 38: 61–72. Fennell, Barbara. 2001. A History of English. A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Garnett, G. 1985. ‘Franci et Angli’: the legal distinction between peoples after the conquest. Anglo-Norman Studies 8: 109–137.
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Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English – a creole? In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. In Honour of Jacek Fisiak, Vol. I: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics, 329–344. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Howlett, David. 1996. The English Origins of Old French Literature. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Ingham, Richard. 2009. Mixing languages on the manor. Medium Aevum 78: 80–97. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1952–2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ (last accessed 2 February 2012). Pope, Mildred K. 1934. From Latin to Modern French with especial consideration of AngloNorman. Phonology and Morphology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Romaine, Suzanne. 1995. Bilingualism. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Rothwell, William. 1996. The Anglo-French Element in the Vulgar Register of Late Medieval English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97: 423–437. Rothwell, William. 1998. Arrivals and Departures: the Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English. English Studies 79: 144–165. Rothwell, William. 2000. Aspects of lexical and morphosyntactic mixing in the languages of medieval England. In: David A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in later medieval Britain, 213–232. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Rothwell, William. 2005. Preface, Anglo-Norman Dictionary. 2nd edn. London: MHRA. http:// www.anglo-norman.net/sitedocs/main-intro.html (last accessed 18 October 2011). Rothwell, William. 2010. Husbonderie and Manaungerie in Later Medieval England: A Tale of Two Walters. In: Richard Ingham (ed.), The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts, 44– 51. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1977. L’origine des langues romanes – un cas de cre´olisation? In: Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact, 81–101. Tu¨bingen: Gu¨nter Narr Verlag. Short, Ian. 2007. Manual of Anglo-Norman. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society. Short, Ian. 2009. Anglici loqui nesciunt: monoglots in Anglo-Norman England. Cultura Neolatina 69: 245–262. Thomas, Mark, Michael P.H. Stumpf and Heinrich Ha¨rke. 2006. Evidence for an apartheid-like structure in early Anglo-Saxon England. Proceedings of the Royal Society 273: 2651–2657. Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press. Toulmin Smith, Lucy and Paul Meyer. 1889. Les Contes moralise´s de Nicole Bozon. Paris: SATF. Trotter, David. 2003a. The Anglo-French lexis of the Ancrene Wisse: a re-evaluation. In: Yoko Wada (ed.), A Companion to ‘Ancrene Wisse’, 83–101. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Trotter, David. 2003b. Not as eccentric as it looks: Anglo-French and French French. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39: 427–438. Trotter, David. 2006a. Language Contact, Multilingualism, and the Evidence Problem. In: Ursula Schaefer (ed.), The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in FourteenthCentury England, 73–90. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Trotter, David. 2006b. Si le franc¸ais n’y peut aller: Villers-Cottereˆts and mixed-language documents from the Pyrenees. In: David Cowling (ed.), Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron, 77–97. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Trotter, David. 2006c. Une et indivisible: variation and ideology in the history and historiography of French. Revue roumaine de linguistique 51: 359–376. Trotter, David forthc.a Saunz desbriser de hay ou de clos: clos(e) in Anglo-French and in English. In a Festschrift for a colleague. Trotter, David forthc.b Une rencontre germano-romane dans la Romania Britannica. In: Emili Casanova et al. (eds.), Actes del XXVIe´ Congre´s Internacional de Lingu¨´ıstica i Filologia Roma`niques, Valencia, 2010. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Vidos, B.E. 1960. Le bilinguisme et le me´canisme de l’emprunt. Revue de Linguistique romane 24: 1–19. Reprinted in: Vidos 1965: 295–310. Vidos, B.E. 1965. Prestito, espansione e migrazione dei termini tecnici nelle lingue romanze e non romanze. Problemi, metodo e risultati. Florence: L.S. Olschki. Vising, Johan. 1923. Anglo-Norman Language and Literature. London: Oxford University Press. Whinnom, Keith. 1965. The Origin of the European-Based Creoles and Pidgins. Orbis 14: 509–527. Whinnom, Keith. 1971. Linguistic Hybridization and the ‘Special Case’ of Pidgins and Creoles. In: Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginisation and Creolisation of Languages, 91–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whinnom, Keith. 1977. The Context and Origins of Lingua Franca. In: Ju¨rgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact – Pidgins – Creoles – Languages in Contact, 3–18. Tu¨bingen: Gu¨nter Narr Verlag. Wright, Laura. 1996. Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wright, Laura. 2000. Bills, accounts, inventories: everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later medieval England. In: David Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 149–156. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer.
David Trotter, Aberystwyth (UK)
115. English in Contact: African American English (AAE) early evidence 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Introduction Linguistic atlas data Literary dialect Narratives by former slaves Interviews with hoodoo doctors, transcribed from audio recordings Early blues lyrics Letters written by former slaves Present-day enclave communities Future research References
Abstract This article on early evidence of African American English (AAE) tries to survey all sources that have been used in its historical reconstruction, from literary dialect via exslave narratives to blues lyrics. What is of course fascinating about early AAE – and about every kind of historical reconstruction – is that evidence is multifarious and needs to be evaluated in terms of its validity (i.e. if it is trustworthy as a source) and its representativeness (i.e. if it really tells something about the variety under consideration), which will also be attempted here. As is appropriate for a handbook article, a final section will draw attention to future research and indicate sources that have been neglected so far, but may very well enrich our knowledge about the past of AAE.
Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1793–1807
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1 Introduction As is widely known, the history of African American English (AAE – African American English is the preferred term for the varieties under consideration because African American Vernacular English literally only covers the “vernacular” and neglects the fact that this branch of English is in fact a lot more than one monolithic dialect) is very much disputed (see Lanehart, Chapter 117). Two camps are still quarreling about the “truth”, which to a geographical and cultural outsider like the present author, who has also done some (emotionally detached) research on the issue, seems to be founded in stubbornness if not vanity. Therefore, and also in order to return to a welcome degree of objectivity, this article on early evidence of African American English tries to survey many sources that have been used and could be used in its historical reconstruction. In fact, in contrast to Poplack (2006: 453) who contends that we know only little about early stages of AAE, that only “few useful textual records exist”, and that “the utility of most written texts in reconstructing their ancestry is unclear”, the sources that have been used and might be used amount to quite an impressive and heterogeneous body of evidence, the value of which – naturally – needs to be assessed in each case.
2 Linguistic atlas data The earliest scholarly sources used for an assessment of the status of African-American English are linguistic atlas data, the classical tool of dialect geographers. Relevant for AAE are the “regional sub-projects” of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, viz. the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) – for more information on US Linguistic Atlas Projects, see their web site at http://us.english.uga.edu/ (last accessed 5 January 2012). On the basis of this material scholars like, for example, Raven McDavid (McDavid and McDavid 1951) or George Dorrill (1986), concluded that AAE did not differ greatly from the speech of comparable whites and along these lines argued in favor of the hypothesis that AAE is at its core the continuation of white dialects. In this respect, however, some caution is necessary, since the linguistic atlas data are mostly comprised of lexical, phonological, and morphological material. For the determination of the nature of AAE, however, it seems that the “structures most relevant […] are syntactic in nature” (Schneider 1989: 17). Kretzschmar (1999), on the contrary, reports that ongoing work at the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Georgia will provide a good basis for the study of AAE by grouping all African-American data together which were collected by the same methods in LAMSAS. This project has been completed by now and is available as the AFAM subpart of LAMSAS at http://us.english.uga.edu/cgi-bin/ lapsite.fcgi/afam/ (last accessed 5 January 2012). Using an apparent-time approach, it might in fact be possible to go back well into the 19th century. What, in addition, has been suggested by Montgomery (2003) as a very promising project is the analysis of “significant amounts of free conversation” in LAGS which are available in audio format.
3 Literary dialect In their somewhat ideological reply to the findings based upon atlas data from the Eurocentered dialectologists, scholars like William A. Stewart, Beryl Bailey and Joey L.
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Dillard collected a multitude of quotations from travelers’ accounts and literary representations of AAE. These scholars’ ambition was to emphasize the idea that AAE did not derive from British dialects (alone), but rather from pidgins and creoles spoken in West Africa and in the Caribbean. Travelers’ accounts are a very popular source for finding historical attestations in pidgin and creole studies. Dillard and others follow this technique to present early evidence for creolized versions of AAE, with these accounts often reporting “broken” English as well as some approximations to the standard. The broken English examples are often attributed to slaves coming directly from Africa, whose varieties then can hardly be called AAE, and to those living in parts of the US with a strong black majority, under which circumstances the development of a creole is quite likely, even on American soil. On the other hand, attestations of black speakers of near-standard English tend to be found in regions with a white majority, like, for example, Virginia. All in all, travelers’ accounts can only give a very rough impression of the linguistic situation and hardly deliver more than occasional qualitative information about lexical items and salient grammatical features. They will not be treated in more detail here. When it comes to literary dialect, i.e. dialogues or direct speech from fiction written by authors with an at least imaginative command of the respective dialect, as a data source, most linguists are somewhat sceptical: Literary dialect has frequently been the object of scholarly investigation, although linguists, interested, quite naturally, in authentic rather than artistic expression, have tended to regard it as a marginal and only secondary object of investigation. […] From a linguistic perspective, however, literary dialect has typically been regarded as problematic, as it does not record authentic data produced by real-life speakers but represents language constructed by an author of a literary work as quasi-authentic speech uttered by fictional characters. (Schneider and Wagner 2006: 46–47)
Or, in other words, in many works of literature dialect is used for artistic purposes, giving the story a touch of reality without really mirroring linguistic facts. As Krapp’s (1924) analysis has brought forward, these artistic purposes have frequently been used to indicate “amused superiority” (Krapp 1924: 29) towards the characters on the side of the author or narrator. And Ives’s (1950/1971) reorientation of a theory of literary dialect, which resulted in seeing literary dialect exclusively as a stylistic device instead of a linguistic one, has put linguists in a position in which an objective analysis seemed to be prohibited from the outset. This is basically supported by Pederson (1985), the long-term director of The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, who has shown that literary dialect in the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris has nothing to do with syntactic reality. Pederson rather sees the style there as a “carefully developed mode of poetic language” (Pederson 1985: 294). This is not to say that literary dialect is utterly worthless in the description of a variety. In texts in which several characters interact, linguistic variation between characters may very well be observed. Esau et al. (1982), for example, find “polylectal speech outputs” in the fiction of William Faulkner. They also argue that there should not be too much emphasis on accuracy but rather on showing that the author manages to build a socio-economical hierarchy by means of speech variation. And also Schneider and Wagner (2006) have demonstrated the very realistic rendering
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of Jamaican Creole in a novel by Michael Thelwell, who “has succeeded remarkably well in creating a fictive world which reflects the linguistic variation within the Jamaican speech continuum highly accurately” (Schneider and Wagner 2006: 83). However, for linguists on the search for new sources of AAE the question remains, if the written dialect in a certain instance is “realistic or stereotypical” (Minnick 2004: 33) because only realistic ones, i.e. those representative of AAE can ultimately count as useful for linguistic analyses. Still, even this seems to depend very much upon the type of linguistic analysis one envisages. Minnick’s (2004) approach is a case in point here. In her analysis of four novels she does not intend to find new evidence on earlier AAE but rather wants to give a “thorough evaluation of an artist’s work with respect to literary dialect” (Minnick 2004: 149). For that purpose, her data are valuable. For a variationist study, on the other hand, which she has conducted, too, the amount of data might possibly not be sufficient. As regards the features to be used for an evaluation of literary sources, it will be best to focus on morpho-syntactic ones because their variable occurrence will have something to tell about the accuracy of literary dialect. Or, as Bailey and Smith (1994: 19) have rightly posited: “literary dialect often treats quantitative features qualitatively. Many dialect features are, of course, quantitative. Thus, while literary dialect can be useful for documenting the presence or absence of features, it is only useful for establishing the constraints on their occurrence in rare instances”. That is, what one gets at best is the speech of personae from various backgrounds talking in different dialects as imagined by the author. There may be some authors who were very well capable of imagining dialect, but this is something that can by no means be generalized. Once literary dialect is or must be used for the reconstruction of earlier stages of any variety or language, it is momentous for the researcher to assess the quality of its rendering, which means ultimately to “prob[e] into the nature of the author’s pan-lectal competence” (Schneider and Wagner 2006: 49).
4 Narratives by former slaves Ex-slave narratives seem to have been the source most widely used for the historical reconstruction of AAE. Since narratives come in very different fashions it is necessary to distinguish various types and assess their validity for linguistic research. The first part of this section deals with written narratives, the second with original audio material.
4.1 Written narratives The most well-known narratives are those written by former slaves themselves and published in book form, with the most popular example, of course, being Frederick Douglass with his autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845; for a full collection of digitized narratives / autobiographies see the “North American Slave Narratives” of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html, last accessed 5 January 2012). These narratives are usually written in the first person, but the authors always show their good command of English by using standard varieties, which means that this kind of narratives does not lend itself to the description of non-standard structures at all.
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The written records of interviews with former slaves constitute the second type of narratives. These are available in several publications centered around the efforts of the The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). As a result of the Great Depression in the late 1920s the Roosevelt Administration enacted the so-called “Federal Emergency Relief Act” in 1933 and started a series of relief projects that came to be known as the “New Deal”. Its aim was to support people who had become unemployed, and one of the New Deal agencies was called “Federal Emergency Relief Administration” (FERA). It was established in 1933 and two years later after some changes in the overall concept continued as the “Works Progress Administration” (WPA; renamed as “Works Projects Administration” in 1939). One of the subdivisions of the WPA was the FWP, whose most popular project was to yield “a comprehensive and panoramic American Guide, a geographical-social-historical portrait of the states, cities, and localities of the entire United States” (Yetman 1967: 544). Another project of the FWP was to collect ex-slave narratives. This, however, had not been a national or federal project from the outset, but started in 1929 as projects in American History at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Southern University, Louisiana. (The Fisk narratives are available as volumes 18 and 19 in Rawick [1972], which were originally published as God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Negro Ex-Slaves [1945] and Unwritten History of Slavery [1945]. The narratives collected in Louisiana at Southern University [82 interviews conducted by Southern University students and about 400 conducted by Prairie View State College students] remain unpublished [cf. Perdue et al. 1976: xii]). After the FWP was established, the collection of ex-slave narratives started in the local Writers’ Projects in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia. When John Lomax, at that time widely known as a field collector of folk song, was appointed National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP in 1936, the ex-slave narrative collection gained momentum. Quite important for the quality of the data is that he had sent out instructions on conducting interviews and handling dialect to 18 southern states (cf. Perdue et al. 1976: xiii–xv) in which he demanded that speech was to be recorded accurately, but dialect should also be standardized to some extent to provide easy access for the average reader (cf. Rawick 1972: 173–178). Ultimately, over 2,200 narratives from 17 states were sent in and placed in the Library of Congress in 17 bound volumes, a tiny offshoot of which was printed in Botkin (1945). It was only in 1972 that they were re-discovered and published by historian George P. Rawick. Rawick’s (1972) volumes were praised for their unique content, but soon turned out to be highly problematic for two reasons. On the one hand the informant-interviewer relationship may have been heavily skewed; on the other hand, and more importantly, subsequent editing of the transcripts had taken place, which makes this source largely unreliable both for historical and linguistic research. Having discovered this, Rawick’s attempt to collect all extant narratives directly from the state archives yielded another 22 volumes in two Supplement Series of ex-slave narratives, partly published in 1977 (Series I: vols. 1–12) and 1979 (Series II: vols. 1–10) (Rawick 1977/79). As far as the linguistic reliability and the representativeness of these narratives are concerned, on must restrict qualitative and quantitative research to the second set, i.e. Rawick (1977/79). And also Lomax’s instructions need to be taken into account. On the one hand these are a benefit because they encouraged interviewers to preserve the
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dialect in writing; on the other hand, standardisation means that these transcripts are worthless for phonetic studies. Be that as it may, this collection provides three types of narratives: • third person narratives written in reported speech. • first person narratives written in the standard language. • first person narratives that were transcribed by the interviewer while listening or more likely from memory shortly after the interview. Quite obviously, it is only the third type which has been found worth studying. Narratives transcribed from memory or during conversation are used for example in Brewer (1974, narratives from Rawick 1972), Schneider (1989; narratives from Rawick 1972, 1977/79), Kautzsch (2002; narratives from Rawick 1977/79, and from Perdue et al. 1976, see below). A second source of narratives of the same type has been analyzed partly only in Kautzsch (2002). These were collected in Virginia and had not been included in Rawick’s volumes, but published separately in a collection called Weevils in the Wheat (Perdue et al. 1976). This project had started about a year before the national one and was thus finished briefly after the latter really began (Perdue et al. 1976: xx). The Virginia project leader, Roscoe Lewis, sent only 15 out of about 300 narratives to Washington. Lewis’s reasons for holding them back have not become clear, but are possibly connected to differing publication policies (Perdue et al. 1976: xx). These narratives contribute to an improved documentation of earlier African American speech, especially because one female interviewer stood out from the rest as someone who came close to a participant observer in modern sociolinguistic terms, and because almost the entire crew of interviewers were African Americans willing to record the narratives in non-standard orthography. The quality of these, however, has not been assessed to date. From an editorial point of view, great pains have been taken to present the interviews in a form as close to the originals as possible. Thus, the 159 interviews with 157 informants published in Weevils in the Wheat are based on penciled notes, penciled interviews, and typed interviews, depending on what was available from each interviewer, preferably penciled notes because theses might come closest to what the interviewees really said. “[M]isspellings, grammatical errors, errors in capitalization, and errors in punctuation were left unchanged where [the editors] felt no confusion would result” (Perdue et al. 1976: xxxix). Using sources like these, which contain a huge amount of material, always has to entail a conscious decision about which narratives to include. Schneider (1989), for example, tested if interviewers were in fact willing to use dialect by checking the occurrence of non-standard be-forms. Quite differently, Kautzsch (2002) selected the interviewers on the basis of positive statements about the quality of their fieldwork, as found, for example, in reports and letters of FWP officials. Still, the question remains of how well these transcripts reflect natural speech at all. For even if the narratives display a number of nonstandard features, doubts have been raised about their representativeness of Earlier AAE by Maynor (1988), Wolfram (1990), Montgomery (1991), and Dillard (1993). These objections, which apply to written data in general, need to be considered in any interpretation of the data. In this
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context, Schneider’s (1997: 36–37) account of the narratives is quite reasonable, stating that narratives can be seen as being composed of four textual layers: (1) “verbatim notes taken on the spot during the interview”, (2) “statements remembered and taken down accurately after the interview”, (3) “ ‘filling material’ invented by the writer”, and (4) “portions created […] that were never said” (Schneider 1997: 37). Thus, the narratives are at least impressions of natural speech written down during or shortly after a conversation by an interviewer who was willing to record dialect or was likely to have done so.
4.2 Audio recordings The second type of narratives that have been studied are those for which early types of recordings on aluminium cylinders are available. The most popular ones are those known in the field as the “ex-slave recordings” and their transcripts along with a series of research papers have been published in Bailey et al. (1991). They are a very central source because they represent the earliest available spoken evidence of AAE to date. Before their publication statements about Earlier AAE speech could only be made on the basis of written material. These recordings belong to the Recordings of Slave Narratives and Related Material stored at the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, not all items lend themselves to linguistic analysis, the reasons ranging from bad sound quality via the lack of background information to the exaggerated style of an oral performance (cf. Bailey et al. 1991: 4). In addition, for some studies it seems necessary to exclude a native speaker of Gullah from the analyses since Gullah and AAE are not necessarily identical (cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117). As far as the editing process is concerned, it needs to be kept in mind that it is not the transcripts but rather the recordings that should serve as data. Nonetheless, the transcripts went through five stages of auditing. Moreover, Bailey, Maynor and Cukor-Avila do not use “quasi-phonetic spelling” and decided only to indicate the “absence of initial unstressed syllables and final consonants with an apostrophe” as well as “morphological and syntactic variation” (Bailey et al. 1991b: 16). Some problems in terms of reliability and representativeness surround the recordings. First, the sample is quite small. Second, the interviewees may have been people in favor of whites. Third, house servants are overrepresented. Taken together, this might suggest that the ex-slave recordings represent a moderate, less vernacular version of earlier AAE, not displaying the full range and frequency of dialectal features to be found in other segments of the African American speech community. Nonetheless, it might well be the case that one of the various language contact scenarios that existed in the south after emancipation is realistically mirrored here.
5 Interviews with hoodoo doctors, transcribed from audio recordings Another – very amazing – source for earlier AAE are interviews with “hoodoo” doctors and other people involved in these kinds of practices, conducted by a white Episcopalian priest named Harry Middleton Hyatt in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as in
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the 1970s. From his earlier life he was used to doing research about folklore and became interested in the idea of collecting a specific type of folklore, namely superstition and magic, and thus limited the scope of his subsequent undertakings to the witchcraft and rootwork traditions of black people. His efforts resulted in the publication of five volumes between 1970 and 1978, with a total of more than 4,000 pages, containing 1,606 (!) interviews with one white and 1,605 black informants. This collection has been studied to a very limited extent so far: Viereck (1988) uses the interviews only to document the occurrence of invariant be in earlier AAE by providing 49 examples. Ewers (1996) and Kautzsch (2002) – attempting apparent time analyses – restrict their informants to those for whom a minimum length of interview is available and whose ages can be inferred from the text. Since the recording of personal data like age was not at the center of Hyatt’s attention, there remain more than 1,500 interviews with people of unknown ages that have not been studied. The limitations are obvious, but an analysis on a real-time basis might be worthwhile. The data Hyatt published seem to be highly reliable: he collected them as a friend of a friend by hiring a contact person in every community, often a taxi driver, who would then direct Hyatt to the types of people he wanted to get in touch with. Judging from the atmospheres conveyed in written transcripts and judging from his own reports, Hyatt’s field work can be regarded as exceptional. He believed that his earlier experiences in collecting folklore and in working in slums, “helped [him] to understand how to deal with real people in face-to-face situations” (Hyatt 1970–1978: Introduction to Vol. V: I), to accept them as individuals. By meeting the people in private homes or black hotels, he made the situation “as natural and familiar as possible” (Bell 1979: 16). And what is more, he was not a southerner, which made him a lot more trustworthy. A second feature of his technique was to record the interviews by means of early recording machines (ediphone, telediphone). The recordings were later transcribed by an expert transcriber. Hyatt even hid the microphone in order to avoid performances of his informants since he wanted authentic interviews (cf. Hyatt 1970–1978: Introduction to Vol. V: IV). Unfortunately, all but one of the original recordings were destroyed because Hyatt did not have enough storage capacity for the somewhat bulky aluminium disks required by the telediphone. The second series of interviews in the 1970s, in which Hyatt wanted to show that he “could do the work” (Bell 1979: 25; quoted from Ewers 1996: 19), was done with a cassette recorder. The latest information we have about these latter recordings is that they were locked away in a safe-deposit in Quincy, Illinois (Ewers 1996: 19). A final point that additionally increases the value of these data to some extent is their regional diversity, resulting from interview locations in 13 states (New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida; for a detailed and quite anecdotal description of Hyatt’s journey, cf. Hyatt 1970–78: Introduction to vol. I: XIII-XLI).
6 Early blues lyrics A further fairly unique database for the reconstruction of earlier AAE is Miethaner’s (2005) BLUR corpus, a huge electronic collection containing the lyrics of 7,341 blues songs from the 1920s up to Word War II, a total of 1.49 million words.
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The aim of this project was to obtain “maximally authentic texts”, i.e. unbiased by the “demands of the recording industry”. To that end, BLUR is restricted to “early country blues recordings and field recordings that were collected for folkloristic purposes” (Schneider and Miethaner 2006: 236). On the one hand, these texts feed from published material of a blues aficionado, R. R. Macleod, “who systematically transcribed blues lyrics and published several volumes of lyrics” (Schneider and Miethaner 2006: 236). On the other hand, some songs transcribed by Miethaner at the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress were also included (for details, see Miethaner 2005: 115). Being one of the few studies with a theoretical background in electronic corpus creation, issues of text encoding and the facilitation of electronic versions of non-standard material is also broadly discussed and might be beneficial to future studies. This becomes especially apparent where the accuracy of transcription needs to be weighed against the practicability of electronic searches: “A very narrow transcription increases the authenticity of one’s data and the accuracy of possible analyses, but it decreases the successful turnout of electronic searches because of the unpredictable variability encountered”, which ultimately makes “some degree of norming […] and lemmatization […] desirable” (Schneider and Miethaner 2006: 235).
7 Letters written by former slaves Letters are somewhat different sources for the reconstruction of earlier varieties. The fact that they are first-hand accounts of the language of their authors – of course only if they were not written by amanuenses – gives them a certain value that the other secondary sources like transcribed narratives or literary dialect don’t possess. In connection with this, of course, the question arises whether letters can plausibly serve as linguistic data representing spoken language, even when restricting research to semi-literate writers, whose letters clearly display some amount of quasi-phonetic spelling and other features that liken their writing to speech. This issue will be treated after a brief survey of available letter collections. There are three types of letter collections that have been subject to quantitative analyses so far. The first group are letters by former slaves who emigrated to Sierra Leone via Nova Scotia, published in Fyfe (1991) and analyzed, for example, in Montgomery (1999), Montgomery et al. (1993), Montgomery and Fuller (1996), Van Herk (1998, 1999), and Huber (2004). The writers of the letters belonged to the first settler group (after some 300 people from England) and were so-called Black Loyalists, who in order to be freed from slavery fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). After the war was lost, many went to Nova Scotia, but envisaged a great deal of hardship there. As the London-based Sierra Leone Company heard of this, it helped 1,131 people to be sent to Sierra Leone in 1792 (cf. Huber 2004: 70). Fyfe (1991) contains 41 letters of a total of about 12,000 words, and it is both the small sample size and the letters’ formal style, that “limits [their] usefulness” (Huber 2004: 69). The second group consists of letters written in the context of the American Colonization Society (ACS), whose aim was to relocate or “repatriate” former slaves to a newly founded settlement in Liberia. Two edited collections are available: Wiley (1980) contains letters written by a wide range of former slaves who were repatriated to Liberia. Miller (1978) comprises letters of a “slave family” some of whose members emigrated to
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Liberia, while some stayed in the United States. A selection of some 300 letters from these sources is analyzed in Kautzsch (2002), where it is postulated that “the most desirable method for using manuscript letters as linguistic data would be using the original manuscripts” (Kautzsch 2002: 217). In a similar vein, Van Herk and Poplack (2003: 245) argue that “potential departures from original source documents, involving both letter selection and transcription practices, must be taken into account when assessing any work based on published correspondence”. This is why they built their own historical corpus of transcriptions of 427 of the original manuscripts held in the Archives of the ACS at the Library of Congress (Van Herk and Poplack 2003). Unfortunately, this so-called Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC) is not available to the public. The third type of letters comes from a huge collection of Civil War records housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A small fraction of this collection are the records of The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, or Freedmen’s Bureau, for short, part of which was published by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867; for the project’s website see http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/index.html; cf. http://www. archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau/#intro, both accessed 5 January 2012). This seems to be a particularly rich source: “[…] hundreds of letters and statements by former slaves give voice to people whose aspirations, beliefs, and behavior have gone largely unrecorded. […] The written record thus created constitutes an unparalleled outpouring from people caught up in the emancipation process” (Berlin et al. 1982: xviii). As regards the fidelity of the transcripts, the editors seem to have done a good job here, which can be inferred from the fact that “the textual body of each document in this volume is reproduced – to the extent permitted by modern typography – exactly as it appears in the original manuscript” (Berlin et al. 1982: xxiv; italics in original). Three studies (Montgomery et al. 1993; Montgomery and Fuller 1996; Kautzsch 2002) have treated only a total of 39 letters so far because, due to editorial decisions, information about individuals has not been included, which to some degree devalues the data for linguistic analyses. Finally, brief mention needs to be made of The Corpus of Older African American Letters (COAAL; funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, housed at the University of Regensburg). This very promising corpus is currently in the final phase of its compilation. It will ultimately contain 1530 letters, or 442,000 words, written by semi-literate African Americans between 1763 and 1919, thus facilitating quantitative analyses of extraordinary time depth. About half of the letters come from published volumes, the other half are letters collected in U.S. archives by Michael Montogmery (University of South Carolina) and Lucia Siebers (University of Regensburg) (cf. Schneider 2011). From a methodological point of view, a very important concern regarding the linguistic value of letters as such is the question if they truly represent speech, or if the written code follows its own rules. Montgomery (1999: 1) “develops a case for the principled use of manuscript documents for reconstructing earlier stages of colloquial English”, arguing that four issues need to be taken into account when using letters for analysis: • Authorship or “whether such documents actually came from the hands of African Americans” (Montgomery 1999: 23). • The use of models or whether the appearance of literary formula implies that a writer does not use his natural speech patterns. Montgomery argues that the data are valid,
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as long as there is some degree of phonetic spelling or a lack in punctuation, which shows that the writer was “relying on an oral rather than a written model” (Montgomery 1999: 25). • The manipulation of written code, i.e. to “assess [a document’s] general linguistic character in a principled manner, by tabulating nonstandard grammatical items and forms that show the phonetic basis of typical misspellings” (Montgomery 1999: 26). • Representativeness. By means of finding enough evidence for orality with regard to the three issues above the assumption can be weakened that “the writing of the small fraction of African Americans who were literate cannot be taken to represent the language of the larger community” (Montgomery 1999: 26). Van Herk and Poplack (2003) also hold that manuscript letters by semi-literate writers represent speech very well, and in addition they suggest it might be helpful “to eliminate frequent writers” (Van Herk and Poplack 2003: 247). This results from the observation that frequent writers are “sufficiently literate to screen non-standard variants from their writing” (Van Herk and Poplack 2003: 247). Moreover, they claim that “(semi-)literacy may have been more widespread in the antebellum African American community than generally acknowledged” (Van Herk and Poplack 2003: 235), which indicates that letters might in fact be more valuable sources than previously assumed. However, Van Herk and Poplack (2003: 244–245) also concede that “[t]he language of the OREAAC is by no means a perfect representation of the spontaneous oral vernaculars of its authors”. The present author is less optimistic. In Kautzsch (2002) it has been shown that there is a tendency for vernacular features to disappear in writing, which leads to the somewhat sobering conclusion that letters are written language in the first place and need to be treated with great caution. We can definitely glean some insight from semi-literate writing and this insight has considerable time-depth as opposed to other sources, but we still cannot be sure to what extent it represents ordinary people’s speech, especially when considering the low literacy rate of the time.
8 Present-day enclave communities The last source of evidence for earlier AAE comes from sociolinguistic interviews conducted in present-day communities of African-Americans who are descendants of former slaves and whose language is analyzed by means of apparent-time approaches. The first research projects in this context comprise sociolinguistic interviews of black people living in isolated refugee communities in Samana´ in the Dominican Republic and in Nova Scotia in Canada. Here, research teams around Poplack and Sankoff (e.g. Poplack and Sankoff 1987) and later Poplack and Tagliamonte (e.g. Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) study the speech of older community members and, assuming that people’s vernaculars remain stable over time, try to grasp an early picture of the variety. The aim in all their publications so far is to show that the origins of AAE are English in the first place and that creole influence is minor if not negligible (but this is a different topic and is treated elsewhere in appropriate detail; cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117). A second “diaspora variety” is Liberian Settler English, the continuation of the English spoken be former slaves liberated to Liberia (cf. Section 7 above). The sociolinguistic interviews conducted there have been treated in detail by Singler (e.g. Singler
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1986), the results very often favoring the creolist position that there has been substantial creole influence in the genesis of AAE. There seem to be two methodological issues, however, that reduce the generalizability of results obtained by these approaches. The first is the assumption that earlier AAE was monolithic. The second is that in isolated communities varieties are said not to change, which Montgomery (2003: 7), amongst others, finds “problematic”. Especially the issue of linguistic change in “long standing isolated communities” figures prominently in research projects in North Carolina by Wolfram and associates, and Wolfram and Thomas’s (2002: 211) re´sume´ in their latest book-length treatment of the matter is that “[t]hough the ethnolinguistic distinctiveness that emerged from this original dynamic [= early African and European contact] was seemingly superseded by accommodation to regional dialect norms […], the vestiges of the early contact influences were amazingly resilient”. This all boils down to the demand that “[r]esearchers need to be self-critical of their methodologies, their categories, and the generalizability of their findings” (Montgomery 2003: 3), a truism, which sometimes seems hard to fulfil.
9 Future research Finally, as is appropriate for a handbook article, this section will draw attention to desired and welcome future research, indicating fields of study – or rather sources – that have been neglected so far, but may very well enrich our knowledge about the past of AAE. As regards narratives, it might be beneficial to go beyond studying just one interviewer from Weevils in the Wheat. Another volume containing narratives from Louisiana (Clayton 1990) has not been considered, yet, but might turn out quite auspicious, while the WPA collection from Indiana (Baker 2000) unfortunately only contains narratives written in standard English. In terms of original audio recordings, it might be time to go beyond the ex-slave recordings. While publishing Weevils in the Wheat, Perdue et al. (1976) discovered that some of the Virginia recordings were available in the Archive of Folk Song. The sound quality, however, was very bad so that they “were able to transcribe only one additional interview” (Perdue et al. 1976: xxxviii). More than 30 years later, however, modern audio technology is probably capable of retrieving better quality. Moreover, Perdue at al. report that Roscoe Lewis’s son Roger was in possession of 40 to 50 recordings, but was “unwilling to have anyone listen” to them (Perdue et al. 1976: xxxviii, footnote 79). The available pieces of free conversation from LAGS also deserve some closer scrutiny, and so do the surviving recordings of Hyatt’s hoodoo interviews. Hyatt’s published hoodoo volumes are a rich source, but unfortunately we rarely know the age of the interviewees. This, however, should not disqualify these texts as such. Instead, they could be used as two huge synchronic snapshots of the AAE of the 1930s and the 1970s, which would still leave room for diachronic interpretations. In the study of truly written data the Ottawa Repository has collected and analyzed a fair amount of non-standard letters from the Liberia experience, while the Freedmen’s Bureau Collections remains largely under-researched, and the analysis of The Corpus of Older African American Letters (COAAL) lies still ahead. Finally, another souce that has not been used for linguistic investigations so far are the Tennessee War Veterans
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Questionnaires (Dyer and Trotwood Moore 1985). These questionnaires might turn out to deliver interesting results, too, especially since they are, similar to letters, first hand accounts of former soldiers answering questions about war times in writing. In sum, what is presently most fascinating about earlier AAE is that multifariously different sources have been and are being used for its reconstruction and it will be interesting to see which new ones will be discovered and how their representativeness and validity will be evaluated in order to add to our knowledge of this variety.
10 References Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila (eds.). 1991. The Emergence of Black English. Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bailey, Guy and Clyde Smith. 1994. Reconstructing Southern American English. In: Wolfgang Viereck (ed.), Regionalsprachliche Variation, Umgangs- und Standardsprachen/Regional Variation, Colloquial and Standard Languages/Variation des dialectes re´gionaux, langues familie`res et langues standard, 17–26. Stuttgart: Steiner. Baker, Ronald L. 2000. Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless: The WPA Interviews with Former Slaves Living in Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, Michael E. 1979. Harry Middleton Hyatt’s quest for the essence of human spirit. Journal or the Folklore Institute XVI: 1–27. Berlin, Ira, Joseph R. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. 1982. Freedom. A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series II. The Black Military Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Botkin, Benjamin. 1945. Lay my Burden down: A Folk History of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 10th impression 1973. Brewer, Jeutonne P. 1974. The verb be in Early Black English: A study based on the WPA ex-slave narratives. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Clayton, Ronnie W. 1990. Mother wit: the ex-slave narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Dillard, Joey L. 1993. The relative value of ex-slave narratives. A discussion of Schneider’s paper. In: Salikoko S. Mufwene (ed.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, 222–231. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Dorrill, George Townsend. 1986. Black and White Speech in the Southern United States: Evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Dyer, Gustavus W. and John Trotwood Moore. 1985. The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires. Easley, SC: Southern Historical Press. Esau, Helmut, Norma Bagnall, and Cheryl Ware. 1982. Faulkner, Literary Criticism, and Linguistics. Language & Literature 7: 7–62. Ewers, Traute. 1996. The Origin of American Black English. Be-Forms in the HOODOO Texts. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fyfe, Christopher. 1991. Our Children Free and Happy: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Huber, Magnus. 2004. The Nova Scotia-Sierra Leone connection. New evidence on an early variety of African American Vernacular English in the diaspora In: Genevie`ve Escure and Armin Schwegler (eds.), Creoles, Contact, and Language Change. Linguistic and Social Implications, 67–88. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hyatt, Harry Middleton. 1970–1978. Hoodoo – Witchcraft – Conjuration – Rootwork. Vol. 1–5. Washington: The Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation. Ives, Summer. 1971 [1950] A Theory of Literary Dialect. Tulane Studies in English 2: 137–182.
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Kautzsch, Alexander. 2002. The Historical Evolution of Earlier African-American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Krapp, George Philip. 1924. The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2: 190–195. Kretzschmar, William. 1999. A ‘new’ resource for the history of AA(V)E. Paper read at NWAVE 28, Toronto, Canada, October 1999. Maynor, Natalie. 1988. Written records of spoken language. How reliable are they? In: Alan R. Thomas (ed.), Methods in Dialectology: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference Held at the University College of North Wales, 3rd–7th August 1987, 109–120. Cleveland, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters. McDavid, Raven I. and Virginia G. McDavid. 1951. The relationship of the speech of Negroes to the speech of whites. American Speech 26: 3–17. Miethaner, Ulrich. 2005. I Can Look through Muddy Water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Miller, Randall M. 1978. “Dear Master”. Letters of a Slave Family. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Minnick, Lisa Cohen. 2004. Literary representations of African American speech. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Montgomery, Michael. 1991. The linguistic value of the ex-slave recordings. In: Guy Bailey, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila (eds.), 173–189. Montgomery, Michael. 1999. Eighteenth-Century Sierra Leone English: Another exported variety of African American English. English World-Wide 20(1): 1–35. Montgomery, Michael. 2003. The history of American English. In: Dennis R. Preston (ed.), Needed Research in American Dialects, 2–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montgomery, Michael and Janet M. Fuller. 1996. What was verbal -s in 19th century African American English? In: Edgar Schneider (ed.), Focus on the USA,211–230. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Montgomery, Michael, Janet M. Fuller, and Sharon DeMarse. 1993. “The black man has wives and Sweet harts [and third person plural -s] Jest like the white men”: Evidence of verbal -s from written documents on 19th century African American speech. Language Variation and Change 5: 335–357. Pederson, Lee. 1985. Language in the Uncle Remus Tales. Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 82(3): 292–298. Perdue, Charles L., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips. 1992 [1976] Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Poplack, Shana. 2006. How English became African American English. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 452–476. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Poplack, Shana and David Sankoff. 1987. The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean. American Speech 62: 291–314. Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell. Rawick, George P. (ed.). 1972. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. Rawick, George P. (ed.). 1977/79 The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. Schneider, Edgar W. 1989. American Earlier Black English. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Schneider, Edgar W. 1997. Earlier Black English Revisited. In: Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.), Language Variety in the South Revisited, 35–50. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
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Schneider, Edgar W. 2011. Searching for traces of contact: negation patterns in nineteenth-century African-American English – a corpus analysis. Paper presented at the conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Accra, Ghana, 2–6 August 2011. Schneider, Edgar W. and Christian Wagner. 2006. The Variability of Literary Dialect in Jamaican Creole: Thelwell’s The Harder They Come. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 21(1): 45–96. Schneider, Edgar W. and Ulrich Miethaner. 2006. When I Started to Using BLUR: Accounting for Unusual Verb Complementation Patterns in an Electronic Corpus of Earlier African American English. Journal of English Linguistics 34(3): 233–256. Singler, John V. 1986. Copula Variation in Liberian Settler English and American Black English. In: Geneva Smitherman (ed.), Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, 129–164. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Van Herk, Gerard. 1998. Don’t know much about history: letting the data set the agenda in the Origins-of-AAVE debate. Paper presented at NWAVE 27, Athens, Georgia. Van Herk, Gerard. 1999. “Ye was very much Oppress”: 18th-century AAVE texts and the origins debate. Paper presented at Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Los Angeles. Van Herk, Gerard and Shana Poplack. 2003. Rewriting the Past: Bare Verbs in the Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 18 (2): 231–266. Viereck, Wolfgang. 1988. Invariant be in an unnoticed source of American Early Black English. American Speech 63: 291–303. Wiley, Bell I. 1980. Slaves No More. Letters from Liberia 1833–1869. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Wolfram, Walt. 1990. Re-examining Vernacular Black English: Review article of Schneider 1989 and Butters 1989. Language 66: 121–133. Wolfram, Walt and Erik R. Thomas. 2002. The Development of African American English. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell. Yetman, Norman R. 1967. The background of the slave narrative collection. American Quarterly 19: 534–553.
Alexander Kautzsch, Regensburg (Germany)
XIV. Varieties of English 116. Varieties of English: Standard American English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Introduction The purity of American English The contagion of American English American voices Anxiety about American English What is the “standard”? The future of American English References
Abstract Historically considered, American English begins to emerge in the 16th century, even before any English speakers reached the shores of the North American continent. General recognition of American English as a distinct English like that of Scotland or Ireland did not appear until the very end of the 18th century, and when it did, it was judged by both Britons and Americans to have an unusual “purity” and freedom from dialect differences. Before long, however, British speakers began to fear the effect of American English on their own usage, treating it as an “invasion” or “contagion”. In the United States, people began to fear competition from first German and then Spanish and the likelihood that these languages would displace English speakers. Just what constitutes a “standard” of American speech remains a vexed question, but there is certain to be an influence on world English from America in the future.
1 Introduction Conventional histories of English go from origins to outcomes, and in them American English begins when the first American expressions reach England or, less sensibly, when the present-day United States declares independence from the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Political changes have little effect on linguistic events until the political has taken cultural hold (Bailey 2004). In London, innovations from North America and the Caribbean were variously received, sometimes with delight and other times with disdain. In 1619, a prominent London intellectual greeted the addition of maize and canoe to English; in 1754, a reviewer puffing Samuel Johnson’s forthcoming dictionary declared that the book would be of great assistance to those wishing “to ornament [their] discourse with those jewels” from North America like calumet ‘peace pipe’ and wampum ‘belts of beads and shells’ (unfortunately Johnson had not bothered to enter these words; see Read 2002: 8–9, 11–12; Bailey 2009). Objectors to such expressions singled out ordinary ‘tavern’ in 1674 and bluff ‘precipitous descent of land’ in 1735, the latter described as “barbarous English” (Read 2002: 9–10). Even so, though ignorant of many Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1809–1826
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things American, George III (in 1774) knew the word maize (Read 2002: 39) and took no exception to it. Despite additions to (and subtractions from) the stock of English words, America was slow to develop a distinctive linguistic identity. Part of the difficulty in determining when this evolution took place is that we are dependent upon outside observers recognizing and reporting differences. In addition, records of unselfconscious speech are uncommon and often dubiously authentic. Consider this specimen from the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s: Aug. the 11th, 1696. [1692]: It was asked Sarah Carrier by the Magistrates or Justices John Hawthorne Esq; and others: How long hast thou been a witch? A. Ever since I was six years old. Q. How old are you now? A. Near eight years old, brother Richard says, I shall be eight years old in November next. Q. Who made you a witch? A. My mother, she made me set my hand to a book. (Boyer and Nissenbaum 1977: 201)
What would a contemporary in England have seen in this extract that would identify Sarah Carrier as an American? Perhaps nothing. Our own American 21st-century perspective would probably single out only one sentence from this child’s crossexamination as unlike our own English: “How long hast thou been a witch?” The interrogator’s selection of thou shows that the old pronoun system was still in use. (The form thou was used for inferiors, like children and witches, and for selected superiors, like the deity. People on an equal footing used you.) This pronoun system, however, was undergoing change. Early in the 17th century, when the New England settlers were departing for Massachusetts, upper-class speakers in London were giving up thou (and thee, thyself, thine, and thy) except for prayerful and solemn occasions and replacing it with you (and its corresponding forms) among equals. By the end of the century, thou had become dialectal (used in the north of England) and ideological (where it was used by Quakers to assert universal equality). Thus, “How long hast thou been a witch?” would have been largely replaced by “How long have you been a witch?” – especially in East Anglia, the part of England where most Massachusetts colonists had their origins (Kyto¨ 2004: 147–149). American English, consequently, became more conservative than the prestige dialect of London and its environs, leading some historians to speak of “colonial lag”, in that the transplanted variety would have seemed to contemporaries more archaic than the metropolitan dialect. Such terminology, however, oversimplifies a complex process of language change in which, in this case, prestige speakers led the way by adopting an innovation, leaving regional and lower-class groups using the traditional forms just as the colonists were doing. Pronunciation presents similar examples of change at home and stability abroad. When North American settlements began, bath, glass, and dance all had a vowel resembling that of hat but during the late 18th century, upper-class British English speakers adopted pronunciations with a vowel close to that of father. Though at first ridiculed as foppish and affected, these new pronunciation soon became hallmarks of refined London English though not that of the northern part of the country. American English, for the most part, kept the “old” ways of speaking. Similarly, the replacement with a vowel of the consonant r (or the loss of r) after a vowel in the same phrase (or prosodic unit) was regional at the beginning of the 17th century, but the region included the
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home territory of many emigrants to North America. The vowel substitution in clear and first, for instance, made for language change both at home and abroad, but subsequently, in the 19th century, the vocalized alternatives became part of the English prestige dialects while at the same time being relegated to rustic speech in North America (for more details, see Bailey 2011). (The vocalized versions were used by some highstatus Americans in the 20th century before finally merging with the variants with consonantal r.) American English established itself as an independent variety of English in gradual and subtle ways, and the conservative ways of speaking were less noticed because Americans sounded as if they came from the “west country” or “the north” of England – not because they or their forebears had migrated from those places but because the evolution of English had taken the same course in all three regions. In the mid-18th century, American visitors to London were prominent. Benjamin West became portrait painter to the royal family; Benjamin Franklin was celebrated as a scientist and bon-vivant. Anne Fisher, a Loyalist refugee from the Carolinas, set herself up as a schoolmistress specializing in correct English (Fisher 1788). None of these Americans was identified by his or her speech, though all three were surrounded by critics of correct English. They were Americans, to be sure, but nobody observed that they spoke American English. High-status Americans spoke just like high-status Britons. Only on descending the social scale did observers begin to take account of North American English. Among the most distinctive of these low-status Americans were slaves, and in 1776 John Leacock published a provocative play, The Fall of British Tyranny. In it (as in real life) British officers recruit American slaves to military service by promising freedom: “Well, my brave blacks, are you come to list? Cudjo: Eas, massa Lord, you preazee. Kidnapper: How many are there of you? Cudjo: Twenty-two, massa. Kidnapper: Very well, did you all run away from your masters? Cudjo: Eas, massa Lord, eb’ry one, me too” (Leacock 1776: 46). While probably not performed, Leacock’s play was published and widely read. As a piece of propaganda, it was influential on the emerging revolution – George Washington is a prominent figure filled with patriotic zeal. As a representation of American speech, it was plausible. Cudjo and his companions speak a highly distinctive variety of American English, and if Washington’s English is not distinct from the British, certainly Cudjo’s is. In his consular work in France, Thomas Jefferson was expected to supply papers to seamen: “[…] between the American and the English (unless of a particular province) there is no difference sensible even to a native [American]” ( Jefferson 30 April 1791, see Jefferson 2008). Similar evidence appears in notices of runaway indentured servants where ways of speaking are often listed as an aid to identifying them. Scots and Irish are often discovered by their speech but very seldom are the regional dialects of England mentioned. Contact between American and British soldiers in the Revolution and in the War of 1812–1814 led to more recognition of distinctions in English. A clever Briton managed to overpower an American sentry on the Niagara frontier in 1813: The [American] sentry, hearing some one approach, issues from his box, protrudes the upper part of his body though the doorway, and asks ‘Who come there?’
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XIV. Varieties of English [Sgt. Andrew] Spearman, imitating the nasal twang of the American, answers, ‘I guess, Mister, I come from Youngstown,’ quietly introducing at the same time his left shoulder through the half open wicket. The sentry stares at him, perceives by his accoutrements and his actions that he is an enemy, turns round and runs inward exclaiming, ‘The Brit …!’ He says no more, Spearman’s bayonet is in his side. (Cruikshank 1907: 19)
Another example of colonial lag, I guess came to be recognized as a peculiarly American way of commencing an act of speaking. Long-established in English, this use of guess became a stereotype of American speech, and in recent usage I guess is nearly ten times more frequent in American than in British (Algeo 2006: 139). Thus it was that by the beginning of the 19th century, American English had become a recognized variety of the language. Some of its presence was subtle in borrowed words or retention of expressions grown increasingly obsolete in Britain. Some of it was more characteristic of lower-, rather than upper-class, speakers. Some of it was culturally specific in meanings having arisen from new political institutions like senate, president, or township. Most of these were new senses of existing words, but some were not: caucus, sachem, or pow-wow (all three established in American English before the revolution). These developments have been carefully studied and documented from early records. What is less recognized is the emergence of the meaning of “American English” as a distinct language with certain distinctive properties. The remainder of this chapter sketches ideas that are particularly important for understanding the meaning of American English in the 21st century.
2 The purity of American English In 1799, a Scot visiting America reported, “The Anglo-Americans speak English with great classical purity. Dialect in general is there less prevalent there than in Britain, except among the poor slaves” (Read 2002: 56). In this view, he endorsed an idea that most travelers had articulated over the previous century and, indeed, was expressed by Noah Webster: “On examining the language, and comparing the practice of speaking among the yeomanry of this country, with the stile of Shakespeare and Addison, I am constrained to declare that the people of America, in particular the English descendants, speak the most pure English now known in the world” (Webster 1789: 288). But what was meant by “great classical purity”? It did not mean what purism would later denote in discussions of language. The ideology of purism emerged in the 19th century as a result of emergent racial doctrines: that languages were “pure” insofar as they contained words historically connected to a people. Germans were leaders in developing these ideas which led, later in the 19th century, to the idea that race and nation, if not pure, could be purified by the elimination of “foreign words” (Thomas 1991). One 19th-century English writer lamented that English had been spoiled by French expressions introduced with the conquest of England in 1066, and that things would be much improved “by purging it of all words and terms of that descent” (Bailey 1991: 270). Most, however, realized that the task of “purifying” English by extirpating non-Germanic words would be impossible. For these late 18th-century observers of America, such notions connecting etymology and race had not yet fully developed, though Webster had celebrated the fact that
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American English had “hardly a foreign idiom”. “Great classical purity” meant that American English was easily intelligible, particularly in comparison to that of the British Isles. In part, this judgment was based on vocabulary. Americans were in the habit of adopting new expressions that were transparent – statehouse (instead of capitol), firewater ‘liquor’, and garter snake. Many local expressions found in Britain did not survive the migration to North America; these apparently included frimicate ‘to put on airs’ and golder ‘to shout’ (both from East Anglia, the home territory of the New England immigrants). Noah Webster’s speculations about the purity of American English were based on books. Shakespeare (writing two hundred years before Webster’s time) and Addison (writing a century earlier) can hardly have provided much evidence for his claim that they and the American yeomanry spoke in the same way. Webster merely wanted to associate two of the most revered names in English literature with American practice. If spoken American sounded like written Shakespeare, all the better for America. His view was that English had declined in purity from the time between Shakespeare and Addison, and it was the good fortune of Americans that it had declined less in the United States than in the home country. That idea, one shared by many 18th-century intellectuals, was a general principle supporting the claim to the excellence of American English. When Webster turned to more difficult questions – for instance, the pronunciation of deaf – his method became more particular: Deaf is generally pronounced deef. It is the universal practice in the eastern states; and it is general in the middle and southern; though some have adopted the English pronunciation def. The latter is certainly a corruption; for the word is in analogy with leaf and sheaf, and has been from time immemorial. (Webster 1789: 128)
Webster capped his argument by quoting an English poet, a contemporary of Addison’s, who rhymed deaf with leaf. Here he relied on “analogy” to support his claim that deef was the ancient standard and deaf (as rhymed with clef ) the “corruption”. Remarkably, given his youth and lack of scholarly resources, Webster was right. The Early Modern English pronunciation of deaf was deef, and it was used by the first settlers in America. A century after Webster wrote the innovative pronunciation def was still the predominant pronunciation among American rustic speakers all along the Atlantic coast (Kurath and McDavid 1961: 132 and Map 62), though by that time educated and urban Americans had adopted it just as had speakers of the prestige variety of British English living in south and southeast England. Webster endorsed the best of all possibilities, the pronunciation that was both old-fashioned and American: deef. English had been corrupted in Britain, and Webster identified the culprits, those people called by the pronunciation specialist, Thomas Sheridan, the “well-educated natives” of London and the southeast. If those natives, Webster sneered, would pronounce words as they ought, “one half the language at least would be regular” (Webster 1789: 163). Having an obligation to slow if not prevent language change, these people allowed innovations to gain authority, and these were simply wrong: They are wrong, because they are opposed to national practice; they are wrong, because they are arbitrary or careless changes of the true sounds of our letters; they are wrong,
1814
XIV. Varieties of English because they break in upon the regular construction of the language; they are wrong, because they render the pronunciation difficult both for natives and foreigners; they are wrong, because they make an invidious distinction between the polite and common pronunciation, or else oblige a nation to change their general customs, without presenting to their view one national advantage. (Webster 1789: 169)
In this rhetorical tirade, Webster blamed corrupt innovation (like def for deaf ) on the English elite that had so recently attempted to thwart American independence. Since the United States had thrown off allegiance to this foreign elite, it could well claim that it had preserved the ancient purity of English so carelessly abandoned in London. Webster was audacious in seeking solutions to the problem of an American standard. He became famous, of course, for reformed spellings – among them, center for centre, magic for magick, harbor for harbour, tho for though, and traveler for traveller. These innovations, he argued, made English spelling more regular and less wasteful. Most of the new spellings were already used by some in Britain and so did not entirely shock readers with innovation. But these spellings did not affect the way in which the words were pronounced. He wanted to make these spellings “American,” and he did. The problem of pronunciation was separately addressed in Webster’s spelling books. In them, he listed words designed to be memorized and recited chorally by children in school. Webster’s lists gather together words that, for him, had the same vowel sound – for instance fast, mast, lass, and grass. Not long after Webster’s book appeared, some of these words were pronounced in southeastern England with different vowels from the ones Americans continued to use. Similarly, Webster’s lists show that air and heir were pronounced in the same way which was (and is) true of American English, though in Britain purists would strive to make people pronounce them differently. He warned, too, against the pronunciation negur instead of negro, suggesting an 18th-century taboo against the former (Webster 1790: 32). Wound has a “fashionable pronunciation” voond; he preferred analogy in which it rhymes with ground and sound (Webster 1790: 51). Clomb is listed (for climbed; cf. Atwood 1953: 8), and none, stone, and home are all given with “New England short o” (Trudgill 2002). Webster was also firm in teaching that polysyllables should be sounded without reduction or deletion: med-i-cine, prosper-ous, rev-er-end. It would be wrong to conclude that these pervasive lessons kept pronunciations alive that were already on the decline in both Britain and New England. However, the attention given in school to spelling and the belief promoted by Webster that spellings contained valuable information about correct pronunciation did influence American English and contribute to its reputation for purity. Not everyone agreed with Webster’s patriotic view of American English, and there was a persistent belief that Britain was the home of English and that Americans should follow the fashions of London. Writing in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger, an anonymous critic took direct issue with Webster: To speak of pronunciation would be endless. That of the South accords with England’s best orators and dictionaries in all such words as tutor vice tooter – path, wrath, carpet, garden. Yet many sedulous students of Walker never find this out. Dr. Noah Webster would fain have us believe that orthoepy demands such sounds as natur, feature, creatur. We rejoice that even in Connecticut this barbarism is growing into discredit. The learned Doctor would also improve English so as to write Savior for Saviour, Bridegoom for Bridegroom,
116. Varieties of English: Standard American English
1815
Duelist for Duellist, and the like. We humbly crave leave to wait until any one English work can be produced in which these elegancies shall appear. It is an English, not an American language which we are called upon to nurture and perfect. (Borealis 1836: 111)
Early in the 19th century, the reputation of American English had been settled – at least for some. The language was free of regional variation, at least in comparison to Great Britain. And it was remarkable for its purity which had been achieved through the preservation of the good old ways of Shakespeare and Addison and through efforts to regularize it by analogy (so deaf was like leaf ), preservation (continuing to employ air and heir as homophones), or transparency (in a preference for meeting house rather than auditorium). An American reviewer, writing in 1821, could declare: “the corruption of the language has gone so far in no part of America, as in the heart of the English counties” (Everett 1821: 30).
3 The contagion of American English While American patriots were pleasing themselves with the excellence of their English, Britons were raising alarms that American English was corrupting the excellence of English at home. Satisfied over several centuries with ridiculing the Scots and the Irish, English opinion leaders were threatened by the Americans in ways that had not raised such alarm from the English of their nearer neighbors. The Scots and Irish were merely eccentrics with odd ways of speaking, but the elite in London did not imagine that their distinctive English would alter things. There was a chance that Scots might have taken hold when James VI of Scotland became, as James I, the monarch of all of the British Isles in 1603. James and the courtiers he brought south with him sounded Scots, but they seem to have been eager to assimilate to southern ways as soon as possible. A Counterblast to Tobacco, James’s polemic against sot weed published in 1604, shows no traces of Scots influence. The reign of the Stuarts in the 17th century seems not to have altered emerging ideas of what constituted “good” English. The notion that American English was threatening was articulated in the early 19th century. It began with acceptance of the view that Americans had as much right to change English as anybody else. Here is an observation from the 1830s: “[…] there are many Americanisms which in the course of time will work their way into the language of England; as they have as good a right to do, as any other innovations that have force or point to recommend them” (Thompson 1833: 373n.). Doubtless this was a liberal view; the author was an English abolitionist and radical given to democratic opinions. He was a Londoner tolerant of linguistic variety. When in 1839 a Scottish lexicographer, John Ogilvie, began to prepare a new dictionary for the British market, he offered as a justification the fact that Noah Webster’s American Dictionary (1828) was selling well there. His patriotic effort was to “keep the field against American Dictionaries, which are introducing into this country vitiated forms of orthography, and many undesirable novelties of speech” (Ogilvie 1850: V). This anxiety about undesirable English soon hardened into orthodoxy. By the 1860s, English opinion had turned thoroughly against the innovations from across the Atlantic. “Look […] at the process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans” (Alford 1866: 6).
1816
XIV. Varieties of English
Documenting the sustained prejudice against American English over the past century and a half is not difficult since the only alteration in the complaint involves the particular expressions that have come to the attention of reviewers. So we will leap ahead to 21st century examples parallel to most of the complaints of the past. In 2010, the expressions targeted for criticism included ahead of for ‘before’, face up ‘confront’, and fess up for confess (Kahn 2010). A counterargument has often been that these expressions are historically English, but the truths of historical linguistics are seldom persuasive or even seen as germane to the dispute. “Americanisms” are simply bad English in one way or another: slovenly, careless, or sloppy. In the case of these “creeping” Americanisms, they are “lazy, and not very clever”, “slack lazy language”, “a sad example of the desire to be ‘in’ and updated”. “We’re stuck with most of this, but we don’t have to lie down prone, supplicate and accept our inevitable crushing by the juggernaut” (Khan 2010). Similar views have been expressed in India where “call centers” handling U. S. technical support ask employees to “shed rigid language norms,” which can trigger wider change: “Words like wanna be, gotta be, as if, whatever, all that, get a life, babe, are no longer limited to swanky MNCs [Multi-National Corporations] or call centers’ offices. They are contagious and have caught the fancy of college teens these days” (Satyavada 2004). Reports like these seethe with disapproval. The same metaphors are used elsewhere in the English-speaking world. In Australia, new forms of language believed to derive from America are seen as a contagion: “suffering the creeping American disease” is a way to describe a situation the critic deplores (Money 2010). People who fear American innovation imagine a conspiracy, suppose that expressions “creep in” when the linguistic barriers are weak, and believe that the English language as a whole is being vitiated or damaged by imports from America. These ideas were vividly articulated by Ernest Gowers, who, in the 1960s, was invited to revise the celebrated usage guide prepared by Henry Watson Fowler in the 1920s. Fowler said nothing about Americanisms, but Gowers devoted several columns to the subject: “The close association of the two countries in the second world war and the continued presence of the U. S. Air Force among us have done much to promote American linguistic infiltration […]” (Gowers 1965: 23). The metaphors Gowers uses are military: Americanisms infiltrate, they gain a foothold, the victory of aim to do over aim at doing. These usages, he writes, “are cumulatively symptoms of surrender by the older competitor to the younger and more vigorous” (Gowers 1965: 23). The expressions that give rise to such complaints are not such ordinary Americanisms as blood type, laser, or minibus. And some are not Americanisms at all. They share the quality of being racy, informal, and perhaps a little subversive. They are usages that poke fun at pretense and gibe at gentility.
4 American voices Early Americans delighted in the various ways of speaking they heard around them. John Adams, eventually to be America’s second president, created a character he called “Humphrey Ploughjogger” to express ideas that would later lead to the American Revolution. One of his letters, published in 1763, raised the issue of taxation. It begins with this sentence: “Thes fue Lins cums to let you no, that I am very wel at prisent, Thank God for it, hoping that you and the family are so too” (Ploughjogger 1763: 2).
116. Varieties of English: Standard American English
1817
Adams used these letters to raise other issues, for instance the appointment of clergy and the billeting of troops with the civilian population (Saltman 1980). The misspellings in this sentence were not exclusive to American English, but Adams nonetheless strove to express an American voice through the vernacular. Among the first of these explorations of the vernacular in fiction was The Clockmaker (1836–40) by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova Scotian who created the character of Sam Slick, a Connecticut peddler of dubious goods whose pungent and satirical voice poked fun at Yankees. In these tales, Haliburton represented the dialects of African Americans, Native Americans, Dutch people, and others who gave the American vernacular its rich variety. Another such character was David Crockett, an actual frontiersman who was supplied with a fictional biography and a distinctive voice. A major, if forgotten, genre in 19th-century fiction involved local characters (like Hosea Biglow in New England), advocates of social change (like Marietta Holley’s Semantha Allen), and critics of the spirit of the times (like Petroleum V. Nasby or Sut Lovingood). It would be a mistake to consider the mangled spelling and odd-ball grammar of such characters as reflecting real speech. Instead, they spun entertainment from stereotypes which innocent Britons imagined to represent the way Americans talk. Abraham Lincoln, one of the most eloquent Americans of the time, loved Lovingood’s bigoted advocacy of the Confederate cause expressed in a poisonous vernacular. (For specimens of this literature, see Cassidy 1982.) A similar enthusiasm for spoken American English appears in the recollections of John Forney, who served as a clerk in the House of Representatives and then as Secretary of the Senate in the decade before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In recalling those days, he showed a great affection for the way Southern politicians expressed themselves, though not sharing their opinions about the issues of American unity: Henry Clay’s dialect speaking was strongly marked by it [the Southern dialect]. James M. Mason, of Virginia, seemed to delight in the African accent. But there was no better specimen than the late Thomas H. Bayley, for many years of Representative in Congress of the Accomac district [of Virginia]. He was a man of considerable force and education, and I can easily recall his tall form, his expressive face and ringing voice, as, spectacles on nose, he would address ‘Mr. Speakah’, and refer to the honorable member who had just had the ‘flo’. [Laurence Massilon] Kett, of South Carolina, had the same accent and pronunciation. So, too, Linn Boyd, of Kentucky, and Howell Cobb, of Georgia. (Forney 1873–81: 1.197)
The vogue for dialect reached its apex with Mark Twain, but there were lesser writers who explored the sounds of American English. The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) by Edward Eggleston dramatized the triumph of the schoolmaster over the rustic dialects of a community in southern Indiana. The prior schoolmaster had arrived knowing little of local speechways: Twenty year ago, when he come to these ‘ere diggin’s, that air Squire Hawkins was a poor Yankee school-master, that said ‘pail’ instead of bucket, and called a cow a ‘caow,’ and that couldn’t tell to save his gizzard what was meant by ‘low’ and ‘right smart.’ But he’s larnt our ways now, an’ he’s jest as civilized as the rest of us. You would-n know he’d ever been a Yankee. (quoted in Bailey 2006: 170)
The civilizing power of the community did not work its magic on the new schoolmaster who, with his wife, managed to convert the locals to a national standard.
1818
XIV. Varieties of English
The American voices of the 20th century were more austere and more serious. Sherwood Anderson’s characters (in Winesburg, Ohio) are filled with pain and fear; they do not “talk funny”. Dialect writing became a sub-literary genre, though with some popular exponents of the tradition like Montague Glass’s Potash and Perlmutter (with Yiddish inflected characters) and Langston Hughes’s Simple stories (expressed in an urban African American variety of English). Vaudeville thrived on characters expressing stereotypes, varied somewhat by the locale of the performances, with Swedish comedians exchanging snappy dialogue in the Upper Midwest where there were communities of immigrants from Scandinavia. Performers in this tradition found their way into broadcasting, first in radio and then in television and film. Dialect humor thus continued to explore the vernacular while high literature turned to other issues. Television and movies are now the principal vehicles for this trend. When Dallas gained a worldwide audience, a new generation was exposed to American voices. Many films have done the same thing. Here, as an example, is a scene introducing the principal characters in Valley Girl (1983): An area that has numerous fast food restaurants. We FOCUS on this same group of teenaged girls. They seem to embody all the attributes of the famous “Valley Girl.” JULIE RICHMAN, 15, is a pretty blonde, squeakily cute clean. At her side is her best friend, STACEY GARRISON, 15, the ultimate Valley girl. She’s pretty and brunette. She dresses and is coiffed to perfection. SUZI BRENT, 15, fits right in with this pattern. The last girl friend is LORYN LICHTER, 15 going on 25. She’s got a body that would arouse the terminally limp. MOVING IN on their conversation, we hear what every girl talks about and how. STACEY
Barf out. Gag me. How could you? SUZI
For sure! JULIE
I’d be freakinggg out! LORYN
It’s totally outrageous! I don’t want to like start a family. Like I’d get puffed out to the max and all, for sure. I’d be scarfin’ up everything in sight. I don’t know, like … I’d be sooo fat and all. Like, what’d happen to my zits? They can get so grody. Besides, it’s like totally gnarly birth control. (Lane and Crawford 1982: 3)
The linguistic depth sinks to the vivid language of the parents of these girls, who are unreconstructed hippies from the previous generation. The linguistic merriment of these productions should not be confused with the actual speech of Americans. Audiences abroad presumed that Americans talked in the ways the movies depicted them. (So, for instance, in the 1990s, I was told by a young woman in South Africa that all Americans are surfers and talk like surfers. The fact that I did not use surf-speak did not shake her conviction that all Americans talk that way.) The image of American English and the practice of Americans speaking are two quite different things.
5 Anxiety about American English Monolingual Americans tend to believe that there is a causal connection between English and the institutions of democracy and the discoveries of science and technology.
116. Varieties of English: Standard American English
1819
One cannot expect much, they think, from languages with a recent tradition of literacy or what are presumed to be small vocabularies. But even languages with long traditions of high literacy, like German and Spanish, are seen to fall short of the ideals expressed in English. On the basis of such ethnocentric beliefs, one would imagine that everyone speaking some language other than American English would rush to adopt it. There would be no reason to doubt the success of the language once others became aware of its magical properties. Of course these ideas are far more complex than they at first appear. Bold assertions of the superiority of English are often accompanied by fears that immigrant groups will retain their languages and shove English aside. Such anxieties began quite early. In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin wrote often of his concern that Pennsylvania would become more and more German, especially as prosperous German merchants in Philadelphia and nearby Germantown became economically and politically powerful: The Observation concerning the Importation of Germans in too great Numbers into Pennsylvania is, I believe, a very just one. This will in a few Years become a German Colony: Instead of their Learning our Language, we must learn their’s [sic], or live as in a foreign Country. Already the English begin to quit particular Neighborhoods surrounded by Dutch, being made uneasy by the Disagreeableness of dissonant Manners; and in Time, Numbers will probably quit the Province for the same Reason. (Franklin, letter of James Parker, 20 March 1751, see Franklin 1988)
In 1787, when the Pennsylvania legislature ratified the federal constitution, the body ordered that three thousand copies of the document be printed in English and two thousand in German so that the delegates might distribute them in their constituencies. America seemed to be set on a course to lead to a multilingual nation. German remained the focus of American nativists at the end of the 19th century and the expression “hyphenated Americans” was introduced in 1889. Especially in the Midwest, Germans had become successful and had established institutions to support their language and culture (for instance, newspapers, schools, and churches conducted in German). AntiGerman sentiment reached a level of high intensity with the declaration of war on Germany by the United States in 1917, but the linguistic campaigns of “Americanization” were even more sweeping as all sorts of European languages were denounced in an attempt to make English prevail. Foreign language newspapers were shut down; telephone operators were told to disconnect calls where they heard a foreign language in use; and schools were prevented from offering instruction in languages other than English. In 1919, the Nebraska legislature enacted a statute that put into law one of the practices earlier adopted by the Nebraska State Council of Defense to suppress German in religious practice and in schools. The law declared than no school, public or parochial, could permit anyone to “teach any subject to any person in any language other than the English language”. The year following, a teacher, Robert T. Meyer, was discovered teaching a ten-year old to read the Bible in German; he was arrested and convicted of violating the act. When the case reached the U. S. Supreme Court, the law was found to be unconstitutional, though it was acknowledged that such restrictions might be necessary in war time. Since 1923, the year of the decision, was a “time of peace and domestic tranquility”, the law had no justification.
1820
XIV. Varieties of English
Meyer v. Nebraska reflected an acceleration of a trend already taking place: the shift from German to English in communities with historical German settlement. Restrictions on immigration beginning in 1919 cut off the flow of new German speakers to these communities (as well as to other European settlements by Poles and Italians, for instance), so the cultural ties to the “old country” were weakened. The loss of continuity in immigration and institutions meant that by the 1960s, when immigration restrictions were lifted, many were left with the impression that America was a monolingual country. Starting in the last quarter of the 20th century a new fear of foreign languages arose around the increasing numbers of Spanish speakers. Political refugees from Cuba (in the late 1950s) and from Nicaragua (in the 1970s) added prominence to the migrants already present from Mexico and Puerto Rico. Just as the Germans had done earlier, these Spanish speakers settled in tight-knit communities unified by religious practice, newspapers, broadcasting, and community festivals. The response of monolingual Americans was the same: attempts to compel assimilation and force language change to English. In 1981, Senator S. I. Hayakawa of California proposed a constitutional amendment to make English the “official language” of the United States (Baron 1990). After hearings, the Senate concluded that the matter was better treated at the state level, and many states with numerous Spanish speakers adopted such a law, whether as an amendment to the state constitution or as a statute. Most provided no penalties for using Spanish (or other languages); they typically focused on preventing bilingual information for state services such as driver’s license tests or voting information. As in Meyer v. Nebraska, some attempted to limit the use of Spanish in schools, even though studies demonstrated that a bilingual approach to learning improved pupils’ test scores. Since most Spanish speakers sought to learn English or to encourage their children to learn it, these laws were mostly symbolic in effect. Large numbers of undocumented aliens, however, were not allowed to assimilate, being limited in employment or housing by their lack of citizenship or residence papers. What is significant about these fears of German or Spanish is the idea that American English is in danger. Many popular accounts celebrate the “cosmopolitan” nature of the language, with its borrowing of words from “immigrant” languages (particularly in the domain of food such as taco, bratwurst, chow mien, spaghetti, or fricassee). The idea that most people in the world are bi- or multilingual does not match the ideology of American English which celebrates a single language as a norm.
6 What is the “standard”? A vexed question in linguistics concerns just what a “standard” language might be. Like pornography, there is a view that people know what it is when they see it. Others imagine that it is the performance of high-status speakers whose biographies show education, breeding, and civility. When asked to identify persons who speak “standard English”, observers often become cagy. Daniel Jones, the phonetician who codified British Received Pronunciation, admitted that his own speech needed to be amended by certain features that were used by others. The most thoughtful of American linguists, Edward Sapir, offered this view of the standard: “[…] that there is something like an ideal linguistic entity dominating the
116. Varieties of English: Standard American English
1821
speech habits of each group, that the sense of almost unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language, is held in check by a tacitly directing norm” (Sapir 1949: 148). What this means is that anyone is a speaker of “standard English” who believes that he or she is. That is, if the “tacitly directing norm” tells you that can is “standard” in “Can I borrow the car?”, then it is. A century ago there arose the idea of “General American”, the dialect that remained once the speech of New England and the southeast were subtracted. It was “General American” where the “standard” was presumed to lie (McArthur 1992, s. v. General American). This idea has now been discredited, though scholars abroad still make use of the term. In fact, there is no geographical center where the “standard” can be found, and even “broadcast English” (as heard in national television and radio) cannot be confidently held up as representative of the “standard”. There is a “standard”, of course, but it is not easy to locate in a region (though it is not in New York or Houston), register (though it is more likely to occur in writing than in speech), or race (though it is thought to be found more in white speech than in the speech of people of color). Each speaker has an ideal of a “tacitly directing norm”, and this form of English is so idealized that people often wince at the sounds of their recorded voices when their usage does not represent the ideal they imagine. We think our English is better than it is, and that is probably a good thing in helping us maintain our view of ourselves as speakers of “good English”. Yet our usage is nuanced, and we have one style for reading lists of words and another in talking to those closest to us. “Standard English” is not one thing; there is a standard way to admonish children and a standard way of speaking at a memorial service. Standard English is inherently variable, and it makes no sense to ask if an expression is “standard” without considering the context. Fishin is not standard in written English; fishing is not standard among men sitting in a boat, watching their bobbers, and drinking beer. Confusing the issue is the tendency of some critics to associate “standard” with individuals or groups. Thus teenagers are said not to speak Standard English because they are prone to innovation and informality. African Americans rightly resent the imputation that they do not speak Standard English but a dialect. Women have long been accused of garrulous speech, frivolous usage, and shrill tones. All such allegations do not describe the linguistic situation but the tendency of some opinion makers to criticize language when their real targets are groups of people. Careless scape-goating of individuals and groups has led to resentments and to angry rebuttals from critics who wish to defend their usages, often by pointing out that the English in question is used by quite respectable people or was formerly part of the prestige dialect (akst for asked is a frequently adduced example in this argument). Not all assertions of “standardness” are bigoted, of course. The person who says “Can I borrow the car?” may well be aware that some people believe “May I borrow the car?” is seen as the standard alternative. The person may continue to say “Can I borrow the car?”, not so much to e´pate le bourgeois but because it seems “natural” to do so. In American English, the arguments over these matters have developed into acrimonious controversy between “prescriptivists” (advocating attentiveness to correctness) and “descriptivists” (arguing that if more than half the people use a particular form, it is “standard”). These disputes have done little to increase understanding of “standard” American English: prescriptivists seem preoccupied with the persnickety; descriptivists seem indifferent to the questions people have about their language.
1822
XIV. Varieties of English
One of the most ardent of the prescriptivists, Bryan A. Garner, has recently sought a rapprochement with descriptivists. He declares, “I am a prescriber who uses descriptivist methods – in effect, a descriptive prescriber” (Garner 2009: xliv). His approach allows him to continue denouncing nonstandard forms in no uncertain terms: “arrant mistake” (s. v., gladiolus) and “gross error” (s. v., waist). But he does far more than merely acknowledge that English changes over time: he treats expressions on a fivepoint scale ranging from 1 (rejected) to 5 ( fully accepted). These are descriptive statements and can be tested against evidence, as he does in using the Internet to locate and enumerate competing usages. So, for instance, he describes can for may in “Can I borrow the car?” as stage 4 (ubiquitous but …). Another stage 4 usage is data taken to be a mass noun and construed as a singular: thus many data (plural) and much data (singular) may both be used in formal contexts, though perhaps with a slight risk of censure. For media as a mass noun, Garner says it “must be accepted as standard”: “the media are covering the trial as a scandal of great importance”. Media in such sentences he regards as stage 5 ( fully accepted). Garner loves to be persnickety: “persnickety; *pernickety. Although the latter is the older form, persnickety is now about five times as common in print as *pernickety in American English” (s. v., persnickety). (In linguistic discourse, the asterisk is prefixed to hypothetical forms; it is not clear why the asterisk appears with *pernickety.) If Garner wished to make his prescription effective, he would appeal to Microsoft Word to spell-correct it automatically. He does pursue the persnickety: for instance, he distinguishes piebald and skewbald, a nice distinction indeed. Food magazines, he reports, prefer the spelling pimiento and “general interest magazines” pimento. These are descriptive statements and can be challenged with additional investigation into actual usage. Garner’s dudgeon does not come into play here, but it can safely be ignored by those of a descriptivist bent. Of early on, for instance, he writes that the expression is “not the odious locution that some people think” and describes it as stage 5 (fully accepted). One can say valuable things about English without resorting to such labels as “odious locution”. Odium, after all, lies in the mind of the beholder and not in the facts of usage. “Standard American English” is a category that “resists easy definition”. A collection of statements, both British and American, summarizing the problems of defining it has been compiled by Richard Nordquist. Nonetheless, it is a linguistic category that should command scholarly attention free from bias and prejudice. If a handful of people think ill of an expression – hopefully as a sentence adverb is a good example – the descriptivist has the obligation to show just how big the handful is. The idea of an “international Standard English” is even more vexed than the one of defining “Standard British” or “Standard American”. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that nearly all speakers reveal their nationality by the way they use English. British people say windscreen and Americans say windshield. (Parallel word lists distinguishing British from American usage constitute a well-established genre – for instance, Schur 1987.) The Irish drink in a shebeen and Americans in a blind pig. Canadians say hydro and Americans water bill. Kenyans take a dented mudguard to the panel beater; Americans take a dented fender to the body shop. Indians eat tiffin and Americans brunch. South Africans say biltong and Americans jerky. Australians say dinkum and Americans genuine (sometimes pronounced jen-ewe-wine). Malaysians say gostan and Americans back up. New Zealand women wear tights, American women pantyhose. All of these
116. Varieties of English: Standard American English
1823
are markers of national identity and all are standard in their national context. None of them are “international” and there is no hypernym that might encompass the pairs. English is, in short, a constellation of distinct varieties. There is no “international standard English”.
7 The future of American English All we can do to predict the future is to project existing trends from the present. Americans revel in new words and have developed sophisticated methods for archiving them. Almost nothing that has appeared in print has been lost, and virtual texts (like blogs) preserve expressions that, in an earlier time, might have been quickly forgotten. Most new words are formed from existing usage expressing new senses: blue state ‘state likely to vote for the Democratic party’ (2000), water-boarding (2004) ‘interrogation technique’. Often the prefixes and suffixes create novelties: unconstitutionality is such an Americanism, first noticed in a letter from George Washington in 1795. Geocaching (2000) ‘a treasure hunt with clues located through a GPS (1974)’ is another example of creation through affixing. Podcast (2004) is blended from iPod and –cast ( b] in Word-medial Position: Deletion of /b/, /d/, /g/ as First Consonant in Tense-Aspect marker or Auxiliary Verb Reduplicated Suffix -s: Labialization of Interdental Fricatives
bone [bo˜] save [seː]; sane [seː] bad [bæt] bad [bætʔ] computer [kəmpuɾə]; Houston [hustən] street [skrit]; stream [skrim] haven [hebən] Ah ‘on know = “I don’t know”; Ah ma do it = “I’m gon do it”; He ain’t do it = “He didn’t do it” I went and took my tests. [tεsɪz] bath → [bæf]; baths → [bævz]
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Table 117.2: Morphological and syntactic features (examples from Lanehart 2002 unless noted otherwise) Preverbal Markers of Tense, Mood, and Aspect Linguistic feature
Example of feature
1. 2. 3.
Zero Copula Gon Habitual Invariant be
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Invariant be2 (Be + verb + ing) Invariant Future be Aspectual steady Completive, or Unstressed, been Stressed been Completive, or Perfective, done
10. 11. 12.
Future Perfective, or Sequential, be done Future finna or fitna Indignant come
13.
Counterfactual call
14.
Had + Simple Past
15.
Multiple Modals
16.
Quasi Modals liketa and poseta
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
Zero Third Person Singular Suffix -s Generalization of is and was Use of Past Tense Form as Past Participle Use of Past Participle Form as Past Tense Form Use of Verb Stem as Past Tense Form Zero Past Tense or Past Participle Suffix -ed Reduplicated Past Tense or Past Participle Suffix -ed Aspectual Verb -s Suffix
He up in there talking that now. I’m gon fix some grits. He be in the house all summer. (CukorAvila 2001: 105) Do they be playing all day? He be here tomorrow. (Rickford 1999: 6) They steady be laughing. It been raining ever since y’all came here. I been drinking coffee. I knew you was foolin cause I done waited on you before. He be done left by the time we get there. He finna go. (Rickford 1999: 6) He come walkin in here like he owned the damn place. (Spears 1982: 852) They call themselves dancing. (Mufwene et al. 1998: 16) Today I had went to work. (Cukor-Avila 2001: 105) They might should oughta do it. (Mufwene et al. 1998: 33) I liketa drowned. (Rickford 1999: 7); You don’t poseta do it that way. (Rickford 1999: 7) At least he know you have a phone. They is some crazy folk. (Rickford 1999: 7) She has ran. She seen him yesterday. He come down here yesterday. I probably woulda end up keeping it. I likeded that show.
24.
I don’t let it tempt me; I tempts it.
Nouns and Pronouns 25.
Zero Possessive Suffix -s
26.
Zero Plural Suffix -s
27. 28. 29.
Associative Plural (nem or and (th)em) Pronominal Apposition They and Y’all Possessive
I ain’t never seen nobody don’t know they wife phone number. That man done changed car places since then two or three time. Larry nem lef already when I got here. That sausage, it’s nice and hot. Who want to put on they good clothes looking like that? (Continued )
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Table 117.2: Continued Preverbal Markers of Tense, Mood, and Aspect
30. 31. 32.
Linguistic feature
Example of feature
Use of Object Pronouns after a Verb as Personal Datives Bare Subject Relative Clause
Ahma git me a gig. (Rickford 1999: 8)
Less Differentiated Personal Pronouns (pronouns can serve as subject and object form)
That’s the man come here. (Rickford 1999: 8) They should do it theyselves.
Negation 33. 34. 35. 36.
Use of ain’t as a General Preverbal Negator (includes ain’t for didn’t) Negative Concord (Multiple Negation) Negative Inversion of Auxiliary and Indefinite Pronoun Subject But Negative (Use of ain’t but and don’t but for only)
He ain’ here. (Rickford 1999: 8); He ain’ do it. (Rickford 1999: 8) I don’t let myself get in no more habit than I want to get in. Can’t nobody say nothin. (Rickford 1999: 8) He ain’t but fourteen years old. (Rickford 1999: 8)
Questions 37. 38.
Formation of Direct Questions without Inversion Auxiliary Verb Inversion in Embedded Questions (without if or whether)
Why I can’t play? (Rickford 1999: 8) I asked him could he go with me. (Rickford 1999: 8)
Existential, Locative, Complementizer, Quotative, and Other Constructions Linguistic feature
Example of feature
41. 42.
Existential it instead of there Existential they got (as a Plural Equivalent of Singular it is, instead of there are) Here go… or There go… Tell say Constructions
43.
Inceptive get/got to
It’s a lot of it in there. They got some angry women here. (Nina Simone song, Rickford 1999: 9) There go Mister beatin Celie again. They told me say they couldn’t go. (Rickford 1999: 9) I got to thinking about that. (Cukor-Avila 2001: 105)
39. 40.
While the use of these salient linguistic features of AAL is important in AAL scholarship, we must always keep in mind that a language is more than the sum of its parts. This list can be used for good or ill – good in the advancement of our learning and understanding of AAL and language in general; bad when such things are used to further denigrate the legitimacy, logic, and value of AAL. The expectation is that we keep these features in perspective. As we will see below, the other AAL historical and developmental perspectives use these salient features for various purposes and sometimes in contradictory ways to support their arguments. This is most obvious with the research
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on the very contested copula in AAL. Various perspectives use the copula as a pivotal case in support of their argument. As we will see, how one is able to do that depends on the ideologies one holds about AAL from the beginning. You should also note my use of the term African American (Vernacular) Language as opposed to African American (Vernacular) English. I use the former instead of the latter because the latter is fraught with connotations and assumptions that preclude certain discussions. While AA(V)L can instigate contentious discussions as well, at least they have the potential to be new ones. Also, ‘language’ is less restrictive or limiting than ‘English’ in this situation, it allows me to be non-committal about the origins and development of AAL, which I am, and lessen the focus on the origins of AAL and increase the focus on the social and cultural lives of those who use AAL. As we will see next, there are very strong stances with respect to the history and development of AAL that clearly draw lines in the sand.
4 The big dogs in the fight: Anglicists and Creolists The dominant perspectives about the history and development of AAL are held by two distinctive groups: (1) Anglicists, mostly European American scholars who spend much of their time trying to support their claim that AAL is a dialect of British English and that Africans in America who created AAL forgot their native culture and language upon arrival in America; and (2) Creolists, mostly Black scholars who spend much of their time arguing for and trying to support their belief that AAL derived from contact between Blacks and Whites and the cultures and languages they brought to their contact situation. In other words, the latter group believes Africans in America maintained aspects of their languages and cultures in adapting to their oppressive environment while the former believes Africans in America either did not value their cultures enough to preserve at least some aspects of them or they did not have the ability to do so (see Bailey 2001; Baugh 1983; Green 2002; Lanehart 2001, 2007 for an overview of the various positions regarding the origins and development of African American Language). The Creolist position regarding the origins and development of AAL, which emerged in the 1960s in response to the Anglicist position, purports that AAL developed from a prior US creole developed by slaves that was widespread across the colonies and slave-holding areas. The Southeastern US is considered the cradle of AAL given the large number of plantations and the Southeast’s strong support of slavery and the slave trade through the Middle Passage. The economic interest in slavery increased with the dependence on cotton and other crops. Creolists tend to use morphosyntactic features (see Table 117.2), phonological features (see Table 117.1), and lexical features (see Turner 1949; Mufwene 1993; Smitherman 1994) to support their perspective on the history and development of AAL. The most contentious feature used to support the Creolist position is the zero copula. Because many African languages, Gullah, and other Caribbean creoles do not have a copula, the absence of a copula in many circumstances in AAL has been used as a primary connection to creoles. Until recently, there had been no instances of zero copula in British English varieties cited in the literature. However, Poplack (2000) and Poplack and Tagliamonte (2001) make the claim that zero copula is also present in a variety of
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British English. While that claim is contested, I should point out that both Creolists and Anglicists rely heavily on features to support their positions without any extensive recordings for the language of Africans in America at their inception in the Americas (i.e., nascent AAL). While Caribbean creoles are still recognizable creoles in present-day use, such is not the case for AAL – with the exception of Gullah. While there is no dispute that Gullah is a creole, its existence as being widespread in the US during slavery is disputed. Currently, Gullah is found in the islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, though its use is receding due to economic and ecologic conditions. While Gullah’s maintenance in the South Carolina islands seems to be better than in the Georgia islands due to infrastructural and economic supports in South Carolina that are not as prevalent in Georgia. In Georgia, many of the Gullah people have to leave in order to survive – which contributes to the loss of language and culture. The existence of Gullah and the perspective of its speakers (i.e., Gullah speakers say they speak English, not a creole) is a complicating factor, but how complicating depends on how you define AAL. I choose to define AAL in agreement with Mufwene (2001: 21): “African American English (AAE) is English as spoken by or among African Americans” because “[a] language variety is typically associated with a community of speakers and, in many communities, a language means no more than the particular way its members speak”. For example, if we look up “Italian” in a dictionary, it is defined as “of or pertaining to Italy, its people, or their language; a native or inhabitant of Italy, or a person of Italian descent” (http://www.dictionary.com). Mufwene is saying that we can define AAL in the same way: “of or pertaining to African Americans; a person of African American descent”. Given this definition, AAL is the umbrella term for all ways of language use of African Americans – including Gullah and African American Vernacular Language (AAVL). In my classes, I describe AAL as the umbrella covering all its varieties across the US and Canada where African Americans are. That means it covers West Coast AAL, East Coast AAL, Southern AAL, Gullah, AAVL, and everything in between. The Anglicist position purports that Africans in America learned regional varieties of British English dialects from British overseers with little to no influence from their own native languages and cultures. This position emerged in the mid 20th century and is in opposition to the Creolist position. Anglicists use ex-slave recordings and texts (see Bailey et al. 1991) as well as comparisons to other historical texts, British varieties, and slave resettlement in the Americas to support their position. More current is the belief that non-standard varieties of British English are the precursors of AAL as opposed to standard ones since the whites that slaves would have had contact with would have spoken non-standard varieties of British English instead of standard varieties (i.e., Neo-Anglicist). Anglicists, like Creolists, believe they have accounted for all salient linguistic features in some past or current variety of British English, including zero copula. According to Mufwene, to resolve the creolist-dialectologist debate, what is needed is convincing information regarding different kinds of plantations, their settlement history, and the pattern of Anglo-African interaction on them. Although history argues against the creole-origin hypothesis, the literature against it has done a poor job in attempting to refute it. (Mufwene 2001: 315)
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He goes on to say that though Poplack (2000) did a better job of this, there are still contradictions in evidence even with her collection of essays. One of her biggest hurdles is Samana´ English, a variety used in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic by African Americans who sailed from Philadelphia in the 1820s (Mufwene 2001). While Poplack finds Samana´ to be closer to AAL than to Caribbean English creoles, Hannah (1997) and others find that not to be the case. So the fierce debate continues.
5 Substratist, restructuralist, ecological, and divergence theorists Substratists such as Dalby (1972), Dunn (1976), and DeBose and Faraclas (1993) purport that distinctive patterns of AAL are those that also occur in Niger-Congo languages such as Kikongo, Mande, and Kwa. In effect, the view is that AAL is structurally related to West African languages and bear only superficial similarities to general English (Green 2002: 8–9). It is so named because it is argued that the West African or substrate languages influenced the sentence and sound structures of AAL (Green 2002: 9). As Goodman (1993: 65) notes, one characteristic of a substratum “is the subordinate social or cultural status of its speakers vis-a`-vis those of the reference language [i.e., English]” (see Green 2002). Restructuralists and Ecological theorists such as Wolfram and Thomas (2002), Bailey (2001), Cukor-Avila (2001), and Mufwene (2000) support a perspective within the Anglicist position that acknowledges the difficulty of knowing the origins of AAL but propose that we can say something useful about Earlier African American Language (not nascent AAL) given settlement and migration patterns as well as socio-ecological issues. Mufwene (2000: 234) purports: 1. The socioeconomic history of the United States does not support the hypothesis that AAVE developed from an erstwhile creole, either American or Caribbean. 2. However, this position does not preclude influence […] from Caribbean English varieties imported with slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the restructuring of colonial English that produced AAVE. 3. Nor does the recognition of possible Caribbean influence entail that AAVE could not have developed into what it is now without it. 4. Closer examination of sources of the direct origins of slaves during the eighteenth century suggests that influence from African languages was perhaps more determinative than that from the Caribbean. 5. By no means should anyone overlook or downplay the nature of colonial English as spoken by both the English and the non-English in the 17th and 18th centuries, nor its central role as the target language during the development of AAVE, Gullah, and their Caribbean kin. Restructuralists and Ecological theorists are in some ways closer to Neo-Creolist positions. As noted by Mufwene, Creolists’ (namely Rickford 1998: 192) recognition of some merits in assuming that AAVE had an independent development [is quite noteworthy]; i.e., it did not originate as a creole nor does it simply represent
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‘the transfer and acquisition by Africans and African Americans of English dialects spoken by British and other white immigrants to America in earlier times.’ (Mufwene 2000: 254–255)
In other words, AAL likely did not originate from or as a creole, but that absence does not then preclude the influence of native African languages in the subsequent emerging language of Africans in America. Wolfram and Thomas (2002) and Bailey (2001) focus more on settlement patterns of European Americans in relation to settlements of Africans in America and their subsequent resettlements through migration. While no one can go back to the beginning, using these patterns provides a picture of interaction and languages in contact. Over the history of America, Europeans have settled differing areas and brought their different varieties of English and other languages with them. “Variation 101” says that separation from native language speakers and their homeland results in language variation (i.e., variation via physical separation). While the expatriate British English speakers were undergoing linguistic changes, so were the languages of the involuntary immigrants (i.e., slaves) but with a larger pool of varieties that were in contact because, as Mufwene (2000: 255) states, “all varieties of English in North America are contact-based and developed concurrently”. Also, the conditions of contact changed over time as well as the interaction of language varieties. As such, these theorists believe that the language of Africans in American was different when compared to the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries because the social and political and economic realities of those times differed in ways that greatly influenced language. So, for example, moving from colonial indentured servants to colonial slaves to Southern/Southeastern plantation slaves to Southern sharecroppers to Northern industrialist workers to national migrants and then to Civil Rights Activists (all the while with ideas of identity and culture waxing and waning) impacted the language of these involuntary immigrants so that the comparison is more about these factors in relation to one another than about the origin of AAL. The Divergence/Convergence Theorists emerged in the 1980s with the work of William Labov and others. According to Labov and Harris (1986), to pursue this argument, divergence from white varieties has more recently shaped AAL. That is, AAL has diverged from varieties of American English due to racism, segregation, and inequality. As a result, African Americans are actually forming new speech communities with innovative forms, especially with a growth in urbanization (Bailey 2001). According to Labov (as cited in Butters 1987), “the more contact blacks have with whites, the more they move away from the vernacular side, and the more contact whites have with blacks, the more we observe borrowings of black forms”. In other words, when inequities and inequalities in society subside and there is more contact between African Americans and whites, AAL converges toward general American English. When there are increases in inequities and inequalities in society, AAL diverges from general American English. Too bad the same logic is not used with the Anglicists since the Divergence/Convergence theorists by extension imply that when people/society treat you badly you are less inclined to want to associate with or identify with them compared to when people/society treat you humanely, thereby fostering more of an
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inclination to assimilate. However, persistent political, economic, and social issues (i.e., ecological issues) greatly contribute to AAL becoming more divergent instead of convergent with varieties of American English despite so-called desegregation in the 1960s to present. Regardless of the origin of AAL, the current state of it reflects the historical ills of inequity and inequality in the US towards African Americans and their response to maintain their own distinct culture and language. Butters (1987) disputes the Divergence theory because of the few linguistic features studied, but, then again, most of this research and these theories are supported by features as opposed to the system as recommended by Lisa Green (2002) in studying AAL or any other language variety because, as noted above, a language is more than the sum of its parts.
6 Summary My position is that we simply do not have the artifacts and hard evidence (recordings of nascent AAL) to make a definitive assessment about the origin and history of AAL. I would add that we should not rely on “salient” linguist features either since language is more than the sum of its parts or the handy grammar that we all like to turn to (clearly I do not think this point can be overstated). If language could be learned from reading a grammar book, we could all be multilingual. Yet we consistently rely on features to make arguments about the history and origins of AAL in a way we do not for most other linguistic varieties. As Rickford and Rickford (2000) point out, the power of culture and identity leads one to believe that no one would just forget everything about where they came from in order to learn the language of their oppressors at all cost. The work of the late linguistic anthropologist John Ogbu (1978) on involuntary minorities suggests that language and identity are powerful factors in the persistence of motherland language and culture for enslaved people like Africans in America and through the Middle Passage. As I have stated in Lanehart (2007), when I tell people outside of linguistics about AAL, they seem dumbfounded that anyone would believe that AAL is not historically rooted to Africa since the people who speak it are, hence the African Diaspora. Yet, I have tried to convince myself that it matters whether AAL is historically a dialect of British English or an English and African creole by becoming involved in research groups and projects that engage in such questions. Scholars cannot prove that AAL is a creole or a dialect and I fundamentally do not feel the evidence exists that can support either side beyond reasonable doubt. My point is that, today, it does not matter what the outcome of this storied debate is. I know that some believe that given current language policy it might be helpful to prove that AAL is an English and African creole so that it could be classified as a foreign language and receive bilingual education funding, but I do not buy that argument because then I remember that the Gullah speakers have not benefited much from that designation. In fact, during the Oakland Ebonics controversy of 1996–1997 (in 1996 the schoolboard in Oakland, California, passed the very controversial resolution to recognize ‘Ebonics’, i.e. African American English, as a legitimate language), the Gullah people got no publicity at all even though there
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is no controversy among linguists about the origin, status, or nature of their language – it is an English and African creole. If the “great debate” were decided without question today, how would we be better off? Would we be closer to helping AAL-speaking children to learn to read and write? Would we be closer to helping AAL-speaking children learn critical thinking and literacy skills? Would we be closer to helping AAL-speaking children have better schools with better facilities and better funding and better opportunities? I do not think so. That is a problem I cannot get past.
7 References Bailey, Guy. 2001. The Relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars in the American South: A Sociocultural History and Some Phonological Evidence. In: Sonja L. Lanehart (ed.), Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, 53–92. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila. 1991. The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Baugh, John. 1983. Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baugh, John. 1988. Review: Twice as Less: Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science, by Eleanor Wilson Orr. Harvard Educational Review 58(3): 395– 403. Bereiter, Carl and Siegfried Englemann. 1966. Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Butters, Ronald R. 1987. “Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging?” Papers from the NWAVE XIV Panel Discussion [by Ralph W. Fasold, William Labov, Fay Boyd VaughnCooke, Guy Bailey, Walt Wolfram, Arthur K. Spears, John Rickford]. American Speech 62(1). Cukor-Avila, Patricia. 2001. Co-existing Grammars: The Relationship between the Evolution of African American and Southern White Vernacular English in the South. In: Sonja L. Lanehart (ed.), Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, 93–128. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dalby, David. 1972. The African Element in African American English. In: Thomas Kochman (ed.), Rappin and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America, 170–186. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. DeBose, Charles and Nicholas Faraclas. 1993. An Africanist Approach to the Linguistic Study of Black English: Getting to the Roots of Tense-Aspect Modality and Copula Systems in AfroAmerican. In: Salikoko S. Mufwene (ed.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, 364–387. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Dillard, Joe L. 1972. Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: Random House. Dunn, Ernest F. 1976. Black-Southern White Dialect Controversy. In: Deborah S. Harrison and Tom Trabasso (eds.), Black English: A Seminar, 105–122. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Farrell, Thomas. 1983. IQ and Standard English. College Composition and Communication 34: 470–484. Farrell, Thomas. 1984. IQ, Orality, and Literacy. College Composition and Communication 35: 469–478. Goodman, Morris. 1993. African Substratum: Some Cautionary Words. In: Salikoko S. Mufwene (ed.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, 64–73. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
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Green, Lisa J. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannah, Dawn. 1997. Copula Absence in Samana´ English: Implications for Research on the Linguistic History of African-American Vernacular English. American Speech 72(4): 339– 372. Hernstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray. 1996. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: The Free Press. Labov, William. 1969a. Contraction, Deletion, and Inherent Variability in the English Copula. Language 45: 715–776. Labov, William. 1969b. The Logic of Non-standard English. In: John Alatis (ed.), Georgetown Monograph on Languages and Linguistics 22: 1–44. Labov, William and Wendell Harris. 1986. DeFacto Segregation of Black and White Vernaculars. In: David Sankoff (ed.), Diversity and Diachrony, 1–24. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lanehart, Sonja L. 2001. Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American Vernacular English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lanehart, Sonja L. 2002. Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lanehart, Sonja L. 2007. “If Our Children Are Our Future, Why Are We Stuck in the Past?”: Beyond the Anglicists and the Creolists, and Toward Social Change. In: H. Samy Alim and John Baugh (eds.), Talkin’ Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change, 132–141. New York: Teachers College Press. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (ed.). 1993. Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2000. Some Sociohistorical Inferences about the Development of African American English. In: Shana Poplack (ed.), The English History of African American English, 233–263. Malden, Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. African-American English. In: John Algeo (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 6: 291–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, Salikoko, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (eds.). 1998. African American English: Structure, History, and Use. London/New York: Routledge. Ogbu, John U. 1978. Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective. San Diego, California: Academic Press. Ogbu, John U. 1992. Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning. Educational Research 21(8): 5–14. Orr, Eleanor Wilson. 1997 [1987]. Twice as Less: Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Poplack, Shana (ed.). 2000. The English History of African American English. Malden, Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell. Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Malden, Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell. Rickford, John R. 1998. The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English: Evidence from Copula Absence. In: Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (eds.), African American English: Structure, History, and Use,154–200. London: Routledge. Rickford, John R. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, and Educational Implications. New York/London: Blackwell. Rickford, John Russell and Russell John Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Schneider, Edgar W. 1989. American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
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Smitherman, Geneva. 1977. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Smitherman, Geneva. 1994. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Smitherman, Geneva. 2000. Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America. London/New York: Routledge. Spears, Arthur. 1982. The Black English Semi-Auxiliary Come. Language 58: 850–872. Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winford, Donald. 1997. On the Origins of African American Vernacular English – A Creolist Perspective. Part I: The Sociohistorical Background. Diachronica 14: 305–344. Winford, Donald. 1998. On the Origins of African American Vernacular English – A Creolist Perspective. Part II: Linguistic Features. Diachronica 15: 1–55. Wolfram, Walt and Erik R Thomas. 2002. The Development of African American English. Malden, Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Weldon, Tracey L. 2003. Revisiting the Creolist Hypothesis: Copula Variability in Gullah and Southern Rural AAVE. American Speech 78: 171–191. Weldon, Tracey L. 2007. Gullah Negation: A Variable Analysis. American Speech 82: 341–366.
Sonja L. Lanehart, San Antonio (USA)
118. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of American English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Beginnings The American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Atlas of New England Further Linguistic Atlas publications and westward expansion Branching out; social and ethnic dialects The Dictionary of American Regional English The Atlas of North American English and beyond Summary References:
Abstract While regional variation in the English spoken in America existed from the time of the first English speakers on the continent, considerable interest in studying American English did not develop until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the founding of the American Dialect Society. This overview will present major directions of research, starting with the Linguistic Atlas approach, in the development of the field of dialectology or linguistic geography, the preeminant direction in regional studies at the time. Over time, the number of studies concentrating not on regionality but on social factors grew to a critical mass in studies on American English. While such studies were always present, the mood of the country with a push toward social and racial equality, and in linguistics Labov’s work in the 1960s and 70s, led researchers to turn toward studying social factors, e.g. type of community, age, education, gender, race, and ethnicity. Many turned away Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1839–1857
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from dialect geography to the emerging field of sociolinguistics; the two areas drew little from each other’s work. Only in the late 80s did the two areas converge, with researchers beginning to realize mutual benefit in working together, and with a push from the publication of the first volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English. The volumes of DARE were followed by the publication of Labov et al.’s (2006) Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, which immediately had and continues to have a huge influence on the study of social and regional varieties of American English.
1 Beginnings The history of American English began in the early 1600s, when Jamestown was settled by English-speaking immigrants, the first permanent settlement in the New World. The new surroundings with new objects and much that was different from their homeland required changes in the immigrants’ language – new words and new meanings to old words, and at later dates words adopted from the languages of the many other immigrant groups which followed the English to the New World, for example. Mathews, in his book The Beginnings of American English: Essays and Comments, collected some of the early writings, mostly from the latter part of the 1700s into the first half of the 1800s, on the impressions of the English language as it was developing in America, including, for example, passages from John Witherspoon, Noah Webster, Mrs. Anne Royall, James Fenimore Cooper, and John Russell Bartlett. Mathews says of the observations on the differences between American English and British English, the main concern of most of these writers: Some of the observations made by those who have dealt with the subject are quite useless, and show that their authors were not competent to pass any judgment on any phase of the subject they treated. Other observations were made by people who had the background necessary to enable them to have sensible views about the growing divergence between British and American usage. (Mathews 1931: 11)
For a thorough discussion of this early period, see Richard Bailey, Chapter 116 on American English. (American English is referring to English in the United States, for a discussion of Canadian English see Dollinger, Chapter 119).
2 The American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Atlas of New England Not until the late 1800s was there interest in seriously studying the English which had evolved in what was by then the United States, reaching from the original settlement areas on the East Coast across the land mass of the continent to the West Coast. The American Dialect Society (ADS) was founded in 1889 with the idea that something like Joseph Wright’s (1895–1905) English Dialect Dictionary for England could be produced for the United States.
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Work which had been done on regional dialects traditionally focused on geographical distribution of vocabulary and pronunciation and some points of grammar at that time, and indeed, the six volumes of the first publication of the ADS, Dialect Notes (1890–1939), consisted in large part of lists of words jotted down by members, mostly professors, of the Society. With members/scholars turning from the idea of a dictionary to an atlas, the plan for The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada was developed in the 1920s. In preparation for this, Hans Kurath, who was appointed director of the project, compiled “A Bibliography of American Pronunciation 1888–1928” in the journal Language, pointing out how much work remained to be done in pronunciation alone: This bibliography was compiled primarily for the purpose of making the rather scattered bits of more or less reliable information regarding the pronunciation of English in the various parts of the United States more readily accessible, but also to show how little actual work has been done and how much remains to be done before we shall have even an imperfect picture of American pronunciation. […] With the exception of Nebraska, the country to the west of the states bordering on the Mississippi is entirely unexplored, and Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are no better off. (Kurath 1929: 155)
Forerunners of the U.S. project included Georg Wenker in Germany, who started work in 1876 on what later became the Deutscher Sprachatlas, mapping the pronunciation of spoken dialects (Wrede et al. 1926–56); Wenker sent a list of 40 sentences in standardized German to schoolmasters throughout Germany, asking them to respond with (a written version of) how they would say the sentences in their local speech. This was followed by Jules Gillie´ron’s work, with his single trained fieldworker Edmond Edmont interviewing in 600 communities, published as the Atlas Linguistique de la France (Gillie´ron and Edmont 1902–10); and by Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud’s (1928–40) Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Su¨dschweiz. (Interestingly, Jud helped train the first group of fieldworkers for the American Linguistic Atlas project; see McDavid and O’Cain 1973: 143). The first project covering an English-speaking area, however, was not in the British Isles, but the project boldly undertaken by the members of the Linguistic Atlas project; it was decided to start with a scaled-down undertaking, focused on New England states. Fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) began in 1929, with the resulting volumes, focusing on lexical and phonetic information but also including morphology to a lesser extent, published in the format of large maps (Kurath et al. 1939– 43). As explained in the interpretive companion volume Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England, 416 informants in 213 communities were interviewed (Kurath et al. 1939: 39). Worksheets, the contents of which are shown in Chapter V of the Handbook, contained 814 words and phrases which were to be elicited, but not by set questions: “The form of the questions by which these responses were to be secured was left largely to the ingenuity of the individual field workers, although the topical setting and the context provided in the work sheets often served as pointers” (Kurath et al. 1939: 148). The Handbook also contains extensive information on the methodology of the project and the training of the fieldworkers, background on the settlement of New England, and descriptions of the communities and the informants (see also O’Cain
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1979). Social elements were included in this fieldwork: the informants were grouped by types, thus acknowledging the interaction of social class and regional variation in language use: Type I: Little formal education, little reading and restricted social contacts. Type II: Better formal education (usually high school) and/or wider reading and social contacts. Type III: Superior education (usually college), cultured background, wide reading and/or extensive social contacts. Type A: Aged, and/or regarded by the field worker as old-fashioned. Type B: Middle-aged or younger, and/or regarded by the field worker as more modern. (Kurath et al. 1939: 44)
3 Further Linguistic Atlas publications and westward expansion Following the publication of LANE and its Handbook, fieldwork was done for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS, covering New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and parts of Florida and Georgia), also under Kurath’s direction. Two further major publications resulted from the data of LANE and LAMSAS. The first was A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Kurath 1949), which established the dialect divisions of the Eastern U.S., both major and minor. The major regions were determined by the data collected and analyzed to be the North, the Midland, and the South, in opposition to the earlier divisions of North, South, and General American, or Eastern, Southern, and General American. Kenyon, for example, in the fourth edition of American Pronunciation (1930) used the term “General American” defining it as basically everything but the South and the East (Lance 1994: 346–7). And the concept of General American did not die easily. Baugh, for example, in the 2nd edn. of his History of the English Language, after stating in the preface that “The pages concerned with the dialect areas in the United States have been entirely rewritten, and a new map has been drawn to accompany the discussion” (Baugh 1957: vii) (which shows two-thirds of the country under the label ‘General American’), states: Such a threefold division has the virtue of simplicity, and when the evidence is all in it may prove a valid classification for the country as far west as the Mississippi. As for the region farther west it would be rash to hazard an opinion, since this area contains a greater mixture of people from different parts of the country than does the eastern third of the United States. The classification has the weakness of suggesting a greater homogeneity for the Northern type than it has, containing as it does the dialect of eastern New England, which must be recognized as a distinct variety of American English, and that, let us say, of most of the state of New York, which on the basis of pronunciation is a part of General American. But such inconsistencies between lexical and phonological criteria are probably inevitable, since words are more easily transferred than regional types of pronunciation. (Baugh 1957: 439)
Baugh continues, “In the present state of our knowledge it seems best to recognize seven regional dialects in the United States” (he had undoubtedly become aware of
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Kurath’s findings – see below). His list: 1. Eastern New England, 2. New York City, 3. Middle Atlantic, 4. Western Pennsylvania, 5. Southern Mountain (mostly within Southern), 6. Southern, and 7. General American (Baugh 1957: 439–42). McDavid says of Kurath’s regions: The concept of the Midland group of dialects, spreading westward and southward from the Philadelphia area, is perhaps the most fruitful contribution Kurath has made to the study of American dialects. The division into Northern, Midland, and Southern types is generally a better explanation of the historical facts and the present distribution of vocabulary items than the older grouping of Eastern, Southern, and ‘General American,’ and is at least as good a framework for an analysis on the basis of phonetic types. (McDavid 1948: 197)
Map 118.1, from A Word Geography of the Eastern United States, shows the subdivisions Kurath made in each of the three areas, North, Midland, and South. While these divisions were based on regional word usage, lexical items, as shown in Map 118.2 below, creek (which shows usage of brook, run, branch, and -kill), this map of speech areas was also found to hold true for the pronunciations in words mapped in the second publication, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Kurath and McDavid 1961), where it was also published, without change. Indeed, Labov in the preface to the 2006 Atlas of North American Phonology says, “Almost every chapter of the Atlas refers to the work of Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid. The fundamental divisions they made into North, Midland and South and the connections they made with settlement history, stand up well in the light of current developments” (Labov et al. 2006: iv). Map 118.3 from The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States shows pronunciation of the vowel of the word creek, namely chiefly /ɪ/ in the North and the northern part of the Midland, and /i/ in the South. The maps of The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States frequently also include small-scale inserts, as in Map 118.3, showing the pronunciation of cultivated speech, or pronunciation in England (e.g. see figure 42 poor in The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, Kurath and McDavid 1961). While publications covering all states for a Linguistic Atlas of the United States have not been completed, fieldwork for many of the states was carried out over a 50 year period. Direct comparisons of lexical items usage or pronunciation in various parts of the country can unfortunately not be made using this data, since the time period of collection was so extended, from the 1930s in New England, into to the 1990s in other parts of the country. Extensive material was published for the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest (Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota) by Harold Allen 1973–76, and for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and parts of Georgia and Texas) by Lee Pederson 1988–90. For a short overview of the complete project of work done and states/ regions covered, see Labov et al. (2006: 6). More detail is also provided on the Linguistic Atlas Projects website, http://us.english.uga.edu/ (last accessed 7 January 2012), by clicking on any of the abbreviations on the map. Further research works based on and/or inspired by the early linguistic atlas work, leading to similar dialect fieldwork studies, are numerous, starting with E. Bagby Atwood’s (1953) A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States, and continuing, for example, to cover parts of Texas (Atwood 1962), the Ohio River Valley (Dakin
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WORD GEOGRAPHY OF THE EASTERN STATES
1 4 2 5
3
6
10 8 7 11
The Speech Areas of the Eastern States
9 14
12
THE NORTH 1 2 3 4 5 6
15
Northeastern New England Southeastern New England Southwestern New England Upstate New York and w. Vermont The Hudson Valley Metropolitan New York THE MIDLAND
16
13
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
The Delaware Valley (Philadelphia Area) The Susquehanna Valley The Upper Potomac and Shenandoah Valleys The Upper Ohio Valley (Pittsburgh Area) Northern West Virginia Southern West Virginia Western North and South Carolina THE SOUTH
17
18
0
25 50
14 Delamarvia (Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, and Southern Deleware) 15 The Virginia Piedmont 16 Northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle sound and Neuse valley) 17 The Cape Fear and Peedee Valleys 18 South Carolina
Scale in miles
Map 118.1: The Speech Areas of the Eastern States, from A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Figure 3) (Kurath 1949)
1966), California and Nevada (Bright 1971), and southern states (Wood 1971). Many works appeared as part of the PADS series (Publication of the American Dialect Society), e.g. Colorado (Hankey 1960), Illinois (Shuy 1962), and Chicago (Pederson 1965). The extension of Kurath’s dialect divisions has been carried beyond the East Coast, across the country, with frequent refinements (still continuing), but his original basic boundaries remain intact and significant. (Indeed, for example, the map for the
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WORD GEOGRAPHY OF THE EASTERN STATES
BROOK RUN BRANCH KILL
0
25 50
Scale in miles
Map 118.2: Creek from A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Figure 93) (Kurath 1949)
pronunciation crick (at the entry creek n1 A) in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) (Cassidy and Hall 1985–2012) (see Section 5) is labeled “esp Inland Nth, N Midl, West”. And as A Word Geography of the Eastern United States showed usage of the four terms in Map 118.2 above, DARE’s labeling still shows these areas of usage: brook is listed as “orig chiefly NEng, now widespread but esp common NEast”, run is “scattered, but chiefly wPA, OH, WV, MD”, branch is labeled “chiefly Sth, S Midl”, and kill “esp NY, in Du settlement areas”).
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THE PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH IN THE ATLANTIC STATES
Incidence of vowels in creek /t / /i/ Southern boundary of the area in which /t / predominates
0
25
50
Miles
Map 118.3: Creek from The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Map 97) (Kurath and McDavid 1961), showing cultivated speakers in insert
4 Branching out; social and ethnic dialects Dialect geography, linguistic geography, dialectology – all names for working with regional varieties of a language, as discussed here of American English. Concentration was on regional variation, settlement history, older forms of the language up to the present (as witnessed in the preponderance of older informants questioned during fieldwork). But from the very beginning, social characteristics were considered, as described in Section 2.
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In 1948 McDavid wrote his classic “Postvocalic /-r/ in South Carolina: A Social Analysis”, which made a clear connection between pronunciation and social factors (in communities where postvocalic /r/ occurs with constriction, certain variables work against it; he shows that the more urban, younger, better educated speakers use less constriction). But it was not until the mid-1960s that such research dealing with social influences on variation became more common. In 1963 the journal Word published William Labov’s “The Social Motivation of a Sound Change”, dealing with the shift in the phonetic position of the initial elements of /ay/ and /aw/ on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he showed that centralization had the meaning of positive orientation towards Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1963). This was the first of his many articles and books working with sound change, considering social variables such as age, occupation, ethnic group, education, and social aspirations. It was followed by The Social Stratification of English in New York City, published in 1966. The former and parts of the latter were published together with results of several other of Labov’s studies in 1972 in Sociolinguistic Patterns. This was a major force in establishing research in social and ethnic dialects, indeed, in establishing the field of sociolinguistics which superseded the interest in more traditional regional dialect geography basically through the end of the century. Labov says of Social Stratification in the Preface to the second edition in 2006, 40 years later: SSENYC introduced a number of concepts that have proved useful in the study of change and variation: the linguistic variable; social and stylistic stratification; the cross-over pattern; apparent time; covert prestige. It also introduced a number of procedures that were new to linguistic studies: the creation of a representative sample; the sociolinguistic interview and the control of style-shifting within it; subjective reaction tests to measure the effect of particular linguistic variables; self-report and linguistic insecurity tests. (Labov 2006: xi)
Added to that can be listed refinements to phonological theory, the development of better tape recorders and their more refined successors, computers able to handle large amounts of data and software to analyze the data, leading to the development of acoustic analysis. Along with many studies in urban areas (chapter 15 of Labov’s 2006 2nd edition of Social Stratification contains a list of 37 such studies, done on speech communities world-wide 1966 to 2006), new journals sprang up starting in the 1960s, such as Journal of English Linguistics (1967), Language in Society (1972), and Language Variation and Change (1989). This shift in emphasis to sociolinguistics from dialect geography relegated the latter to being deemed “old-fashioned”, outmoded, by many scholars during the latter part of the 20th century. The beginnings of sociolinguistics in America had strong influence from various fields – linguistics, of course, but also anthropology, sociology – and occurrences – e.g. attention turning to social and racial equality, including attention being given to schoolchildren who speak English but a different variety than standard, and how the field of education should deal with this. In spite of the common ground – both work with language variation – relations between linguistic geography and sociolinguistics were not always smooth. McDavid and O’Cain recognized in their 1973 article the
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influence of linguistic geography on sociolinguistics, as well as the areas of agreement and disagreement, of common purpose and difference, in the two fields. But at that time they claimed that the information from the linguistic atlases and other linguistic geography publications, “ – to say nothing of the unpublished materials in the archives which have always been open to scholars – have rarely been used in American sociolinguistics. Only Labov (1963, 1966, 1972) has made serious use of what linguistic geographers have done” (McDavid and O’Cain 1973: 139). Trudgill (1982: 237–238), in “The Contribution of Sociolinguistics to Dialectology” mentions other uses/projects, positive and negative. But there has been extensive work starting in the 1960s–1970s and still continuing on both urban and more rural dialects, on single cities and larger regions, from varieties including social and ethnic groups, and varieties of English in contact with other languages; and sociolinguistics and dialectology now realize that they can work together. See PADS (Publication of the American Dialect Society) and American Speech for many examples of such studies, as well as the much younger journals with sociolinguistics and its sub-fields as their main concern. Schneider says: Some thirty years ago, traditional camp affiliations were strong – so-called “dialect geographers” and so-called “sociolinguists” would have held conflicting opinions on question such as principles of informant selection, the nature of reliable data, or the origin of what then was coming to be called “Black English”. Today, boundaries between sub-fields have become blurred, as can be observed in matters such as attendance at meetings, data and methods chosen, or submission to journals and other publication outlets […].What we see emerging is a complex research continuum, with sub-disciplines influencing and fertilizing each other. (Schneider 1996: 1)
See Shuy (1990) for more of an overview of the development of American sociolinguistics. Koerner also presents “a modest attempt to come to grips with the task of presenting the sources and early development of sociolinguistics, an area of research generally and erroneously thought to have arisen in the mid-1960s” (Koerner 1991: 58). He discusses earlier sources, listed as, among others, Whitney, Saussure, Meillet, Martinet, and Uriel Weinreich (the latter was Labov’s major professor). Indeed, Koerner quotes Whitney from 1867: “Speech is not a personal possession, but a social; it belongs, not to the individual, but to the member of society …. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community” (Koerner 1991: 59). This is most similar to Labov’s comment c.140 years later: “The common understanding that unites the field – what I have called the central dogma of sociolinguistics – is that language is located in the speech community, not the individual” (Labov 2006: 380). But Koerner goes back to the scholarship and thought upon which could be and were built, culminating in the tipping point for Labov’s work and influence to lead to the establishment of this new branch of linguistics.
5 The Dictionary of American Regional English After the significant shift in dialectology towards social and ethnic dialects, there has more recently, chiefly in the last two decades, been a rebirth of interest in regional variation in dialects (hinted at by Schneider in Section 4), brought about especially by the publication of the volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
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(Cassidy and Hall, 1985–2012) and the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Labov et al. 2006), which is discussed in Section 6. (Indeed, one of the major names in sociolinguistics, who once shared the opinion that atlas-type work was a thing well-relegated to the past, told DARE staffers after publication of two volumes of DARE that he was very impressed with it and found it most useful in his work.) The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has finally brought to fruition the dream of the founding members of the American Dialect Society to produce a dictionary for America like Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (but even better, taking advantage of advances in lexicography as demonstrated by the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries). Chief editor Frederic Cassidy was appointed in 1962. The first volume appeared in 1985, with the last text volume, Volume V, appearing in 2012 under the editorship of Joan Houston Hall. Cassidy used the Atlas materials, including his own fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States; the word lists in Dialect Notes and the Publication of the American Dialect Society series; and his Wisconsin English Language Survey (see Cassidy 1948) to develop a questionnaire of over 1,600 questions (originally there were over 1,800 questions, but after a trial run in several states, over 200 questions were dropped and a handful were added) in wide-reaching semantic fields (e.g. vehicles and transportation, fishing and hunting, religion and beliefs, farm buildings, children’s games, entertainments and celebrations, emotional states and attitudes, with questions on verb forms interspersed throughout). Dieth (1948) criticizes the LANE worksheets, “alarmingly modern”, for containing questions on girl friend, theater, and emanciated, not real dialect words (Dieth 1948: 76–7). In contrast, these types of words and questions are indeed the strong point of DARE’s questionnaire, while questions dealing with nigh horse or off ox, for example, elicited frequent answers of conflicting definition, since the terms are no longer commonly known. Used by fieldworkers who completed interviews for 1,002 questionnaires between 1965 and 1970, for which communities were chosen by settlement history and population (at least two questionnaires were done in each state, with over 80 done in a populous state such as New York), the questionnaire materials yielded an incredibly rich database of responses, including many terms which had not previously been found in written sources. This database is what makes DARE truly unique, beyond any of the earlier linguistic atlases or dictionaries. The questionnaire material was supplemented by written sources – diaries, travel reports, regional novels, government documents, biographies, donated collections, etc. – to form the basis of DARE, which as a historical dictionary shows with its citations as much is as known about the history of each word or phrase entered. In later volumes electronic sources were a rich source of additional materials. Maps, based on the responses to the questionnaires, demonstrate regionality on a proportional basis, based on population and settlement history, so that density of use in various regions can be seen, beyond what an actual geographic map would show, as shown in Map 118.4, with a comparison of a conventional U.S. map with the DARE version demonstrating usage of mud wasp, mud dauber, and dirt dauber ‘wasp’. Maps are included in the text with entries, such as Map 118.5 below, the DARE map of run (mentioned in Section 3).
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mud wasp mud dauber dirt dauber
Map 118.4: Comparison of DARE (Cassidy and Hall, 1985–2012) map and conventional U.S. map, mud wasp, mud dauber, and dirt dauber. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Dictionary Of American Regional English: Volume I – A-C, edited by Frederick G. Cassidy, p. xxix, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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run n 1a + varr (Qq. C1, C4a, b)
Map 118.5: run from DARE (Cassidy and Hall, 1985–2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Dictionary Of American Regional English: Volume IV – P-Sk, edited by Joan Houston Hall, p. 670, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
While mostly lexical, DARE also includes items on pronunciation, morphology, and syntax. Statements on usage by age, gender, education, race, and type/size of community are included in the entries where applicable (e.g. at togs ‘clothes’, “Of all Infs responding to the question, 65% were old, 60% female; of those giving this response, 83% were old, 71% female”; at icky, “36 of 47 total Infs female, 28 young or mid-aged”; at waste ‘to spill’, “21 of 34 total Infs Black”). And DARE provides a synchronic study of the whole nation, not only from the questionnaire materials, but from audiotapes of the informants. These tapes, now digitized, of both free conversation and a reading passage, Arthur the Rat, containing all phonemes of major varieties of American English, have been used in studies of various types of phonological analysis. Sample sound clips from the audio files can be found at American Languages: Our Nation’s Many Voices Online, (http://csumc.wisc.edu/AmericanLanguages/english/eng_us.htm, last accessed 7 January 2012). Over 800 clips of Arthur the Rat are posted at American Languages: Our Nation’s Many Voices (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/AmerLangs/, last accessed 7 January 2012).
6 The Atlas of North American English and beyond The publication of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change in 2006 was a major event in the study of regional varieties of American English (Labov et al. 2006), igniting renewed interest in linguistic geography. Indeed, a great deal of the research in regional dialects since 2006 has been inspired by this publication. Richard Bailey, in his review entitled “The Greatest Atlas Ever”, starts by
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stating, “The Atlas of North American English (ANAE) is a remarkable achievement and the most important work in American linguistic geography ever published” (Bailey 2007: 292). This volume is a record of the sounds of English as spoken in urban areas of the U.S. and Canada. As Labov states in his Introduction: It provides the first comprehensive view of the pronunciation and phonology of English across the North American continent. The Atlas builds on the work of American dialectologists from 1933 to the present, particularly on the work of Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid in the Atlantic States. A N E A represents new departures in American dialectology in several respects: it provides information on perception as well as production, on acoustic measurements as well as impressionistic ratings, on the realization of phonemic categories as well as phonetic forms, and on phonological systems as well as individual phonemes. Most importantly, it provides a view of the systematic sound changes in progress that are responsible for increasing diversity among the regional dialects of North America. (Labov et al. 2006: 3)
The basis of the Atlas is a telephone survey (Telsur) carried out in (mostly) urban areas of 50,000 population or more from 1992 to 1999; “the first two local residents to answer their telephones – people who were born or raised in the speech community – could be taken to represent adequately the linguistic pattern of that community” (Labov et al. 2006: 3). Four hundred thirty-nine of 762 total samples (a total of 297 speech communities), with a somewhat elevated number of women between 20 and 40 represented, since that group has been shown to be at the forefront of change, were selected for acoustic analysis. Although not the exclusive focus, stressed vowels are primarily studied, “since it is the vowel patterns that differentiate regional dialects of English on this continent” (Labov et al. 2006: 4). The ANAE presents a discussion of its methodology, an introduction to the North American vowel system, and an overview of its dialects, based on pronunciation; after discussion of the latter, a representation is shown on its Map 11.15 “An overall view of North American dialects”, reproduced here as Map 118.6, with its breakdown of regions shown. (Throughout the major reference works discussed in this article markers of the various dialect regions are discussed. Wolfram and Schilling-Estes [2005: 361–84] add as an appendix An Inventory of Distinguishing Dialect Features, discussing phonological and grammatical features. See also Schneider [2008] for more extensive discussions of some of the regions). The ANAE discusses the principles of chain shifting and mergers and goes into detail on mergers and shifts presently ongoing (see below). As mentioned in Section 3 above, the fundamental divisions of dialect regions based on lexical findings from Linguistic Atlas materials by Kurath and McDavid (1961) are basically similar to what is presented in the ANAE. A work by Craig Carver in 1987, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, using materials from the Dictionary of American Regional English, also shows agreement of the major regional divisions for the most part. While Carver does not include the Midland, the boundary of what other studies show between the North and Midland coincides with Carver’s boundary between what he terms Upper North and Lower North. ANAE’s Midland/South border is similar for most of its length to Carver’s Lower North/Upper South border. See the ANAE (Labov et al. 2006: 149– 151) for further analysis of agreement and differences of sub-areas, including a map of the two works superimposed on each other.
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Canada
Atlantic Provinces
North Central ENE Inland North
The North Inland North
The West
WNE Providence NYC
W.Pa
Mid-Atlantic
The Midland
St. Louis Corridor
Inland South
Texas South
The South
Charleston
El Paso
Florida Corpus Christi
Map 118.6: Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Labov et al. 2006) Map 11.15, An overall view of North American dialects
The criteria ANAE uses to establish dialect boundaries “are based on the systematic study of phonological relations in the vowel system and the activation of general principles of chain shifting”. Labov continues: [T]here will appear a high degree of convergence between isoglosses based on regional vocabulary and the patterning of phonological isoglosses. Some major divisions will depart from those based on lexical and grammatical evidence, to a large extent the result of current changes in progress. Yet others will show a satisfying coincidence with the lexical boundaries established by the Dictionary of American Regional English [DARE] and the Linguistic Atlas studies that preceded it. Confidence in the phonologically based dialect boundaries displayed here is not based only on coincidence with previous studies. It is founded on two types of correlation between geography and linguistic structure. In one, isoglosses for the various elements of a chain shift coincide in an isogloss bundle, the end result of a completed series of linked changes. In the other, the successive stages of a chain shift are nested one within the other, with the oldest showing the widest domain and the most recent the most restricted application, producing a display of incomplete changes in progress. (Labov et al. 2006: 119)
Three of the sound changes which Labov considers important here are: 1) The low back merger, where the vowels of cot and caught and Don and Dawn merge; this merger has occurred in eastern New England, the West, and western Pennsylvania into Kentucky and West Virginia.
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2) The Northern Cities Shift, taking place in the Inland North, first noticed in Detroit, Chicago, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo; the chain shift, as shown in Figure 118.1, starts with the vowel in bat moving up and forward, marked with 1. At step 3, the shift presents resistance to the low back merger, since the vowels mentioned above as caught (bought) and cot (pot) must remain distinct in this system. 3) The Southern Shift shows upward and fronting movement of vowels in words like bed and bid (and the addition of a glide), movement in the opposite direction of the Northern Cities Shift (see Figure 118.2). The shift starts with the deletion of the glide in /ay/ in words like guy, my. The South is also resistant to the low back merger due to its vowel system.
bit bit
i
6. bet e 1.
bat
4.
5. oh 3.
bat
o, ah 2.
bought
pot
Figure 118.1: Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Labov et al. 2006) Northern Cities Shift
iy beat bit
i ey bet
e bat
bait
I.
ah
ay II.
bite
Figure 118.2: Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Labov et al. 2006) Southern Shift
7 Summary The study of American regional dialects has come a long way since the founding of the American Dialect Society in 1889. Most recently, the publication of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Labov et al. 2006) was a huge advance to the field, presenting the first nationwide study of the phonology of the
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United States (and Canada) to complement the Dictionary of American Regional English’s (Cassidy and Hall 1985–2012) nationwide study of lexical items. Labov’s focus throughout his studies has been one of understanding linguistic change. The ANAE provides a view of the systematical sound changes that are in progress; it underscores the validity of the early Linguistic Atlas work of Kurath, McDavid, and others; and it helps to re-establish links between dialect geography and general linguistics. Frequently the opinion is expressed by speakers of American English that the language is becoming more homogenous, that uniformity will take over the language. As DARE has shown with its nationwide survey of the lexicon, this is not the case. Older lexical items may be lost, such as ones queried in earlier Linguistic Atlas worksheets, but new ones develop. Labov has backed up these results with the findings of the ANAE. He says, “The most surprising finding of current studies of linguistic change in progress in North America is that regional dialects are becoming increasingly differentiated from each other”. He continues: This increasing diversity does not apply to smaller units within the major regions. Within most of the regional boundaries, linguistic changes in progress have the effect of solidifying and developing the regional pattern. Many local dialects are indeed disappearing, but they are assimilating to larger regional patterns rather than to a national or continental model. (Labov et al. 2006: 119)
Both DARE and ANAE did nationwide surveys, as mentioned, but with DARE’s 1,002 communities and ANAE’s 439 acoustic samples analyzed, neither work provides a great coverage of the U.S. – certainly adequate for the purposes of each, but not a dense enough network to account for many language questions which remain. Indeed, Labov states in his introduction that the total number of speakers represented by the samples in North America is 68% (Labov et al. 2006: 3 and 149); even that 68% is covered sparsely with the low number of samples. But Labov makes it clear that the ANAE is defining regions by major urban areas; that the small towns and rural areas, as well as the transition areas, areas near borders, are where further studies are needed (Labov et al. 2006: 119, 303). This is part of the future of studies on American dialects.
8 References: Algeo, John (ed.). 2001. English in North America. The Cambridge History of the English Language VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, Harold B. 1973–76. The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. 3 vols. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Allen, Harold B. and Michael D. Linn (eds.). 1986. Dialect and Language Variation. Orlando FL: Academic Press. Atwood, E. Bagby. 1953. A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Atwood, E. Bagby. 1962. The Regional Vocabulary of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bailey, Richard W. 2007. The Greatest Atlas Ever [Review of The Atlas of North American English]. American Speech 82: 292–300. Baugh, Albert C. 1957. A History of the English Language. 2nd edn. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts.
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Bright, Elizabeth S. 1971. A Word Geography of California and Nevada. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cassidy, Frederic G. 1948. On Collecting American Dialect. American Speech 23: 185–193. Cassidy, Frederic G. and Joan Houston Hall (eds.). 1985–2012. Dictionary of American Regional English. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Dakin, Robert Ford. 1966. The Dialect Vocabulary of the Ohio River Valley. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. Davis, A. L. 1948. A Word Atlas of the Great Lakes Region. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. Dieth, Eugen. 1948. Linguistic geography in New England. English Studies 29: 65–78. Finegan, Edward and John R. Rickford. 2004. Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillie´ron, Jules, and Edmond Edmont. 1902–10. Atlas Linguistique de la France. Paris: Honore´ Champion. Glowka, A. Wayne and Donald M. Lance (eds.). 1993. Language Variation in North American English: Research and Teaching. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Hankey, Clyde T. 1960. A Colorado Word Geography. Durham: Duke University Press. Jaberg, Karl and Jakob Jud. 1928–40. Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Su¨dschweiz. Zofingen: Ringier. Koerner, Konrad. 1991. Toward a History of Modern Sociolinguistics. American Speech 66(1): 57–70. Kretzschmar, William A. Jr., Virginia G. McDavid, Theodore K. Lerud, and Ellen Johnson. 1994. Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurath, Hans. 1929. A Bibliography of American Pronunciation 1888–1928. Language 5(3): 155– 162. Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kurath, Hans, with the collaboration of Marcus L. Hansen, Bernard Bloch, Julia Bloch. 1939. Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England. Providence RI: Brown University. (A second edition was published by Arrangement with the American Council of Learned Societies in 1973 by AMS Press, “with a new introduction, word-index and inventory of LANE maps and commentary by Audrey R Duckert, and a reverse index of LANE maps to worksheets by Raven I McDavid, Jr.”) Kurath, Hans, dir. and ed.; Miles L. Hanley, Bernard Bloch, Guy S. Lowman, Jr. and Marcus L. Hansen. 1939–43. The Linguistic Atlas of New England. 3 vols. Providence RI: Brown University. Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. Kurath, Hans, and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. 1961. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Labov, William. 1963. The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. Word 19: 273–309. Reprinted in Sociolinguistic Patterns as Chapter 1, 1–42. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Vol. 1: Internal Factors, 1994; Vol. 2 Social Factors, 2000. Labov, William. 2006. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. 2nd edn. New York: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Lance, Donald M. 1994. Variation in American English. In: John Samuel Kenyon, Donald M. Lance, and Stewart A. Kingsbury (eds.), American Pronunciation. 12th, expanded edn. Ann Arbor MI: George Wahr Publishing Co. Linn, Michael D. (ed.) 1998. Handbook of Dialects and Language Variation. 2nd edn. San Diego: Academic Press. Mathews, Mitford M. (ed.). 1931. The Beginnings of American English: Essays and Comments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McDavid, Raven I., Jr. 1948. Postvocalic /-r/ in South Carolina: A Social Analysis. American Speech 23: 194–203. McDavid, Raven I., Jr. 1958. The Dialects of American English. In: W. Nelson Francis (ed.), The Structure of American English,480–543. New York: Ronald Press Company. McDavid, Raven I., Jr. and Raymond K. O’Cain. 1973. Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Geography. Kansas Journal of Sociology 9(2): 137–156. O’Cain, Raymond K. 1979. Review: Linguistic Atlas of New England. American Speech 54(4): 243–278. Murray, James A. H. et al. (eds) 1933. Oxford English Dictionary. 13 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pederson, Lee A. 1965. The Pronunciation of English in Metropolitan Chicago. Publication of the American Dialect Society 44. Pederson, Lee A. 1988–90. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States [General Index, Technical Index, and Regional Matrix]. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press. Preston, Dennis R. (ed.). 1993. American Dialect Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.). 1996. Focus on the USA. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schneider, Edgar W. (ed.). 2008. Varieties of English 2: The Americas and the Caribbean. Berlin:/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Shuy, Roger W. 1962. The Northern-Midland Dialect Boundary in Illinois. Publication of the American Dialect Society 38. Shuy, Roger W. 1990. A Brief History of American Sociolinguistics 1949–1989. Historiographia Linguistica XVII (1/2):183–209. (A shortened version is reprinted in: Christina Bratt Paulston and G. Richard Tucker (eds.). 2003. Sociolinguistics: the Essential Readings, 4–16. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.) Tarpley, Fred. 1970. From Blinky to Blue-John: A Word Atlas of Northeast Texas. Wolfe City, TX: University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1982. The Contribution of Sociolinguistics to Dialectology. Language Sciences 4(2): 237–250. Wolfram, Walt and Ralph W. Fasold. 1974. The Study of Social Dialects in American English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 2005. American English: Dialects and Variation. 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Wood, Gordon R. 1971. Vocabulary Change: A Study of Variation in Regional Words in Eight of the Southern States. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Wrede, Ferdinand, Walther Mitzka, and Bernard Martin. 1926–56. Deutscher Sprachatlas: auf Grund des von George Wenker begru¨ndeten Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches, und mit Einschluss von Luxemburg unter Leitung von Ferdinand Wrede, fortgesetzt von Walther Mitzka und Bernhard Martin. Marburg (Lahn): N. G. Elwert. Wright, Joseph. 1898–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. 6 vols. London: Henry Frowde.
Luanne von Schneidemesser, Madison (Wisconsin, USA)
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119. Varieties of English: Canadian English in real-time perspective 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
The study of Canadian English and historical Canadian English Settlement: demographic and linguistic input Evidence, data, and methods in the historical linguistics of CanE Features of Canadian English in long-term perspective Desiderata and outlook References
Abstract The study of Canadian English (CanE) has undergone phases of considerable activity in the 20th century and must today be considered a field in its own right. The purpose of this overview is to present the research on CanE from a diachronic, and, wherever possible, real-time perspective. Given the lack of a consistent historical research tradition in CanE linguistics, the present chapter aims to link real-time studies of CanE with the most relevant apparent-time approaches. The following pages are intended as a spring board to CanE for those approaching it from a historical and sociohistorical linguistic perspective. The structure of this overview begins with the notions of Standard CanE and CanE regional varieties (Section 1). Section 2 provides basic demographic and settlement information over time for linguistic purposes. Section 3 introduces methods that have been applied in the study of the development of CanE varieties, while Section 4, organized along linguistic levels of description, aims to introduce the reader to major variables in historical CanE linguistics. Section 5 closes with some research desiderata. The overall focus of this chapter will give preference – in keeping with the traditions in historical English linguistics – to real-time approaches of linguistic change. This foregrounding is taken (for more synchronic summaries, see Boberg 2010; Levey 2010; Chambers 2010, 1998; Dollinger 2008a: 9–62; Bailey 1982), to highlight the historical linguistic approach to CanE.
1 The study of Canadian English and historical Canadian English Commencing with the foundation of the Canadian Linguistic Association in 1954, the decades since have witnessed considerable research activity. Boberg (2010: 48), in his ground-breaking monograph overview of CanE, classifies these activities into six domains, illustrated with examples below (for more detail, see Boberg 2010: 48–54; Dollinger 2008a: 23–62; Chambers 2010; Avis 1973): 1. Lexicographic work on Canadian and regional CanE (e.g. Avis et al. 1967; Story et al. 1990; Pratt 1988; Dollinger et al 2006–; Dollinger 2011b; Dollinger and von Schneidemesser 2011) 2. Alternation among American, British, and Canadian forms, with an accompanying discussion of the historical origins and development of CanE (e.g. Avis 1954, 1955, 1956; Scargill 1977) Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1858–1879
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3. Documentation of traditional speech enclaves (e.g. Emenau 1975 [1935]; Hamilton 1975 [1958]; Paddock 1982; Clarke 1991, 1993b, 2010; Wilson 1958; Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) 4. Microsociolinguistic studies of variation in urban Canadian English (e.g. Clarke 1982; Gregg 2004 [1984]; Woods 1999 [1979]; Walker 2007; Poplack et al. 2006; De Wolf 1992; Nylvek 1992; Childs and Van Herk 2010; Chambers and Hardwick 1986; Hoffman and Walker 2010; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2009; Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009) 5. Sociophonetic research on regional and social variation in the articulation of vowels of CanE (starting with Chambers [1980] on Canadian Raising; starting with Clarke et al. [1995] work on the Canadian Shift, e.g. Hoffman 2010) 6. Macrosociolinguistic studies of the use of English and other languages in Canada, particularly Quebec (e.g. Chambers 1979; Edwards 1998; Falk and Harry 1999; Heller 2010) Boberg’s domains characterize well the available work. Striking in this six-item list is the absence of a diachronic, real-time perspective. It is, with the exception of an addendum to area 2 (comparative studies), and to area 1 (lexicography), hardly present at all. Boberg (2010: 54) expressly acknowledges this desideratum and assesses that, until now, an approach that uses “historical written material for evidence of earlier stages of Canadian English […] falls outside the main traditions of work on Canadian English”. The first full-length, real-time historical study (Dollinger 2008a) was published only recently, and such work remains scarce. While until the late 1970s the literature on CanE was “quite manageable” (Chambers 1979: 168), research output has exploded in the past two decades. The majority of contributions on the development of the variety has been carried out from five methodological perspectives: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
language-external reasoning historical lexicographical and lexicological approaches self-report surveys apparent-time sociolinguistic studies incorporating a long-term perspective. historical corpus linguistics
Studies from the first four areas are readily available, while the budding field of historical corpus linguistics is still under-developed in CanE.
1.1 Canadian English: the notion of a standard CanE is sometimes pitted against the most distinct variety found on Canadian territory, Newfoundland English (see, for instance, Brinton and Fee 2001 and Kirwin 2001). In this chapter, CanE will be used, as it is increasingly so, as a hyperonym including Newfoundland English, Prairie English and so forth; the term “mainland CanE” (usually including Prince Edward Island) is used in opposition to Newfoundland. The concept of Standard Canadian English plays a role that is somewhat different socially when compared to other standard dialects. Expanding from the original description as pertaining to phonetics and phonology, “Standard Canadian English”
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(StCanE) is a pervasive dialect, of “urban, middle-class English as spoken by people who have been urban, middle-class, anglophone Canadians for two generations or more” (Chambers 1998c: 252). The Standard dialect, not to be confused with “General Canadian English” (in Labov et al. 2006 it is called “Canadian”), covers the entire area of mainland Canada today (Boberg 2008), and is increasingly influencing urban Newfoundland varieties (Clarke 2010, 1993). StCanE has been the focus of most work on CanE. It is claimed to be a “uniform variety” spoken by “the majority of anglophone Canadians” (Boberg 2010: 107), by many speakers, but not necessarily a majority (Chambers 1998c: 253). Applying some social criteria for standard speakers according to Chambers (1998c: 252), those of the second generation (those born in the country), Anglophone (not Francophone), urban, and middle-class, would produce a category of speakers of more than one third, or more than eleven million of the population as (potential) speakers of StCanE (Dollinger forthc.). As more and more detailed studies become available (e.g. Boberg 2005a, 2008; Hoffman 2010), the focus on the standard variety, which has been considered as being remarkably homogenous across mainland Canada, from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia since at least the 1950s (Chambers 1998c: 253; Woods 1999; Priestley 1968 [1951]), may have, perhaps underplayed subtle regional variation even within StCanE (see Dollinger and Clarke, forthc.). The causes for this homogeneity are usually linked to the historical roots of the socially dominant Canadian dialect, which can be found in the first major immigration of English speakers in the wake of the American Revolution and the subsequent peopling of the country from Ontario westwards. With the increasing socioeconomic importance of Ontario within Canada and strong east-west links across the country Ontarian forms often provided the input for the standard (Chambers 2009: 70–73).
1.2 Regional and non-standard Canadian Englishes Descriptions of non-standard varieties of English within Canada are faced with the lack of a complete national dialect survey, which prevents the situating of any variety within the larger picture. This desideratum resulted in the postulation of dialect boundaries based on settlement history and geographical features. Labels such as “Prairie English”, “Western Canadian English”, “Saskatchewan English”, “Toronto English” or “Maritimes English” are often used, but are based on pragmatic necessity rather than on linguistic data. Within these regions, research focus in general has not been evenly distributed in general. While we know a lot about Ontario English, especially its urban lects, little data exists of Maritimes English (but see, e.g. Wilson 1958; Kiefte and Kay-Raining Bird 2010) or English in Saskatchewan (but see Nylvek 1992), the English in (or close to) the territories – most likely more an ethnic than a regional variety per se – is hardly studied at all (see Ball and Bernhardt 2008). Recent national surveys based on self-reports (see Section 3.2) allow insights into dialect boundaries based on linguistic evidence. Boberg (2005b), for instance, concludes that the traditional dialect zones, inspired by geographical units (e.g. provinces or regions) are not borne out in his lexical data set, as Table 119.1 shows (right column) – please note, however, that this study focuses on “marked” lexical items:
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Table 119.1: Canadian dialect regions – three approaches Scargill 1974 geographical
Bailey 1991 language-external reasoning
Boberg 2005b lexis (44 items)
10 Canadian provinces: Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia. The provinces were taken as the geographical independent variables (a choice not rationalized).
Atlantic (incl. Newfoundland)
Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island)
Quebec (with Montreal and Eastern Townships as focal areas)
Newfoundland
Ottawa Valley
Montreal (by extension Quebec)
Toronto westwards
Central and Western Canada (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia)
West (British Columbia) Arctic North Prairies Southern Ontario
Boberg’s study is the first quantification of isogloss strengths in CanE, both within the country and in comparison to the United States. He concludes that “[i]n Canada, the strongest lexical boundaries were found to divide the English-speaking community of Montreal from neighboring regions to the east and west,” “followed in importance by the bundle of isoglosses that divides Newfoundland from the Maritimes” (Boberg 2005b: 53). Recent evidence suggests that CanE linguistic autonomy (Clarke et al. 1995; Boberg 2004a, 2010) is maintained, as “regional linguistic variation remains one of the few ways in which Canadians can still be reliably distinguished from Americans, at least in most parts of the continent” (Boberg 2010: 250). The evidence for dialect diversification is split, with communities in Montreal (Boberg 2005a) showing ethnic dialect features, but not in Toronto (Hoffman 2010; Hoffman and Walker 2010), which perhaps reflects different degrees of network densities.
2 Settlement: demographic and linguistic input Settlement information is crucial for an understanding of the formation of CanE: Boberg (2010: 55–105) offers one of the best concise demographic accounts for the entire country, Clarke (2010: 10–15) describes Newfoundland and Labrador and Dollinger (2008a: 63–98) Ontario. Chambers’s (1998c [first proposed in 1991]) concept of classifying immigration into four major waves, which can be supplemented with a current, ongoing fifth immigrant wave, is a useful way to present the complex settlement streams in one concise account: I. Refugees from the Thirteen Colonies (to become the USA) entered Canada starting in 1776 and peaking in the early 1790s. These “United Empire Loyalists” moved mostly to Ontario, where more than 7,000 were counted in 1784; by 1812 there were 85,000 (Dollinger 2008a: 67–78).
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II. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the “British Isles” (mostly Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland) arrived in Canada between 1815 and 1867, as a result of large-scale recruitment by the British government to counteract suspected pro-American sentiments. 80
Percentage of all immigrants
70 60 50 40 30 20 10
England %
Ireland %
Europe %
Maritimes %
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1853
1851
1849
1847
1845
1843
1841
1839
1837
1835
1833
1831
1829
0
Scotland %
Figure 119.1: Arrivals at the Port of Quebec 1829–1859 (Dollinger 2008a: 81, based on Cowan 1961)
Figure 119.1 shows 19th-century arrivals in Quebec and their provenance. The English arrivals are, to more than 90%, from northern English areas, bringing with them a nonsouthern English dialect. The Scottish contingent is notable, while the Irish were the biggest group, whose role on historical CanE remains yet to be fully explored (see Clarke 1997b: 108). In total, about 470,000 Irish immigrants are counted in Figure 119.1, an average of more than 15,000 a year for the Irish alone. III. Immigrants from diverse European homelands, such as Germany, the AustrianHungarian Empire, Italy, Scandinavia, the Ukraine, and including Scotland and Ireland, settled the Prairie Provinces and worked in the industrial centers in the East (c.1890–WWI). IV. A highly diverse immigrant population of European, South-East Asian, and American provenance arrived as a result of the post-World War II developments, peaking in the 1960s (Chambers 2010). V. Ongoing immigration from all areas of the world, with a numerical focus on SouthEast and South Asia (China, Hong Kong, Pakistan, India), but including other areas such as Africa (e.g. Somalia), Latin America (Chile, Brazil, El Salvador), and the Caribbean (e.g. Jamaica) (Chambers 2010).
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Developmental scenarios can generally be grouped in two camps: first, and representing the majority view (e.g. Bloomfield 1948; Avis 1973; Chambers 1998c; Dollinger 2008a), the first wave of immigrants are thought to have, by and large, set the speech patterns for the budding variety. This view is in accordance with the linguistic “founder principle” (Mufwene 1996). Second, an opposing view argues exclusively from numbers, maintaining that the large post-1815 British influx re-shuffled the developing speech ways and exerted linguistic influence. While the former is known as the Loyalist Base theory (Bloomfield 1948) and the more prominent theory today, the latter (Scargill 1957) is best labeled Numerical Swamping. While renewed interested has spurred work on the genesis of colonial dialects, questions of dialect formation remain disputed (see Dollinger 2008a: 122–127), with the historical role of dialect speakers (most notably the Irish, Clarke 1997b) still in need of study. The importance of the second wave, i.e. immigration from the British Isles, is central in the Canadian context where pro-British sentiments have been felt. Today the phenomenon termed “Canadian Dainty” (Chambers 2004), i.e. the appreciation of BrE norms and fashions, including linguistic ones, died down after the mid-20th century (see also Section 4.6). The influence of waves III–V is of differing, but usually lesser degrees. In connection with the second wave, the question of Canada’s linguistic enclaves comes to the fore. In accordance with the founder principle, only places that were founded – in relative isolation – by second wave immigrants (and possibly later ones) preserved linguistic characteristics for some time. For the second wave, examples are found in the Ottawa Valley (Padolsky and Pringle 1981, which contains demographic information from a linguistic perspective), in Peterborough, Ontario, and in the Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (Emenau 1975 [1935]; Trudgill 2001). Padolsky and Pringle (1984: 268–271), combine external information with mostly phonological variables in the Ottawa Valley, while Chambers and Lapierre (2011) use self-reports within a national sample. Lastly, Newfoundland and Labrador warrants separate treatment. Its settlement history documents an interesting mix of mostly South-East Irish and South-West English immigration (see Clarke 2010; Kirwin 2001 for an overview; Paddock 1982 for case studies). Since joining Canada in 1949, Newfoundland has undergone drastic economic changes (Clarke 2010: 9) which make it a highly interesting site for apparent-time study (e.g. Childs and Van Herk 2010; Thorburn 2011). This work is of relevance for the genesis of mainland CanE, as the relatively minor role of Irish English in CanE today needs to be explained in light of Figure 119.1 (e.g. Clarke 1997a).
3 Evidence, data, and methods in the historical linguistics of CanE As we have seen in the previous section, there is a long tradition in developmental scenarios of CanE to argue exclusively from the external history. In the absences of realtime data, the existence of two extreme camps (M. Bloomfield 1948 and Scargill 1957) is not surprising. Early accounts were almost void of linguistic data and Scargill (1956) epitomizes the state of affairs, as his paper, entitled “Eighteenth-century English in Nova Scotia”, one page in length, contains no linguistic analysis. The best early studies on historical data interpret literary representations, to which we turn in Section 3.1.
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3.1 Literary representations of language While a long tradition exists in using literary representations to infer historical linguistic stages, this approach has fallen in disfavor given the advent of sociolinguistics. The most famous example of an early Canadian literary character is Yankee pedlar Sam Slick from Connecticut. Invented and penned by Nova Scotian judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton in the 1830s, Sam Slick’s direct speech passages are fictional, contemporary representations of early 19th-century “Yankee” (American English) talk. With enormous commercial success, and a reported good ear, Haliburton depicted Eastern Seaboard dialects. Walter S. Avis studied Sam Slick novels in a historical linguistic/ philological tradition and reconstructed Sam Slick’s phonemic vowel system in his unpublished M.A. thesis (Avis 1950, see Avis 1969, much abbreviated), which is still of considerable interest today but under-utilized. However, Bailey (1981) looks at the Nova Scotian characters in the same work, while Dollinger (2010a) uses 19th-century literary representations to trace the origin and spread of the low-back vowel merger in early Canada. Bengtsson (1956) studied Sam Slick apparently independently of Avis in the same tradition, but somewhat less innovatively. Pringle (1981) analyzes the English depictions in early 20th-century Ontarian writer Ralph Connor for the Gaelic-influences. The use of written evidence, including literary sources, has recently seen a small revival (e.g. Hickey 2010; Minnick 2004; for CanE, see Dollinger 2010a: 192–194).
3.2 Self-report surveys It is fair to say that Canadian dialect study has been largely carried out via self-report surveys. Starting with Avis (1954, 1955, 1956), self-reports have been used to describe CanE. In 1970, the national Survey of Canadian English (SCE) polled 16,000 grade 9 students and their parents on their use of linguistic variables. Supported by the Canadian Federation of Teachers results were published in Scargill and Warkentyne (1972), and, in slightly different form, in Scargill (1974). The SCE provides a real-time window into the early 1970s, and, via the students’ parents, to the mid-1950s. As such, the SCE is an indispensible benchmark for historical comparisons. Attempts to collect fieldwork data for a North American linguistic atlas have usually stopped at the Canada-U.S. border, apart from early beginnings (by Henry Alexander in Nova Scotia), and occasional fieldwork in the 1930 and 1940s (in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick). These unpublished data are accessible at the Linguistic Atlas Projects in Athens, Georgia, and are the best real-time data available (see Thomas 1991; Dollinger 2010a: 209–212 for details). In sociolinguistics, Chambers (and graduate student Christine Zeller, Chambers 1994) reclaimed self-reports as a serious sociolinguistic method (Chambers 1998a; for a comparison of self-reports with acoustic phonetics, see Dollinger 2012). Chambers’s revival of self-reports, in his instantiation called “Dialect Topography”, led to the collection of sociolinguistic self-reports from seven Canadian areas and four adjacent American locations available to everyone (The Dialect Topography data can be accessed at http://dialect.topography.chass.utoronto.ca/, last accessed 7 January 2012). A more recent application of self-reports is Boberg’s (2005b) North American Vocabulary Survey, which used a webform to gather data on some 50 lexical items across the North
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American continent, allowing, for the first time in Canada, a statistically validated, data-driven establishment of dialect zones. Self-reports are of extreme importance in CanE. They reach, via their older speakers, back to the early part of the 20th century (e.g. Chambers 2002) and can be compared to previous self-reports, such as SCE or Avis’s or Gregg’s surveys from the 1950s (e.g. Chambers 1998b: 20, 2002: 357; Boberg 2004b). Beyond the 1920s, however, apparent-time approaches offer no help.
3.3 Corpus linguistics Historical corpus linguistics in the strict sense of linguistic computing goes back to the Helsinki Corpus from the mid-1980s (Kyto¨ 1996). This continental-European research methodology has been taken up with some delay in North America, with Canada lagging further behind. As recently as 2010, the Corpus of Historical American English (http:// corpus.byu.edu/coha/, last accessed 7 January 2012) was made available (a large corpus from 1810 onwards). In Canada, experience with the Corpus of Early Ontario English (CONTE) (Dollinger 2006, corpus design in Dollinger 2008a: 99–120) has shown that some of the best material are manuscript sources which need to be transcribed manually. The labour-intensive task of historical corpus compilation proper has not yet been addressed for CanE. There are, however, workarounds via digitized data and citations databases from lexical research. For historical CanE, a compact but tidy database is the Bank of Canadian English (BCE). The BCE is the online citations database behind the revision of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Avis et al. 1967; Dollinger et al. 2006–) and currently comprises 2.4 million words of running text of CanE from 1555 to 2011 (Dollinger 2010b) of texts excerpts (see http://www.dchp.ca, last accessed 7 January 2012, for access details). The BCE allows the longitudinal tracing of frequent forms, such as shown in Figure 119.2: 70 60 50
%
40 30
BE TO 20
MUST HAVE TO
10
GOT TO
0 1624–1775
1776 –1849
1850 –1899
1900–1949
1950–2009
Figure 119.2: Deontic Obligation Markers (Bank of Canadian English, see Dollinger 2010c)
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Real-time data such as in Figure 119.2 are rare and complement existing apparent-time studies in important ways (e.g. Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007a for deontic modals). CONTE (125,000 words) (http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sdollinger/CONTE.htm, last accessed 7 January 2012) or the BCE can be complemented with other non-linguistically oriented data from print sources. Two of the best are The Globe and Mail (Canada’s Heritage) with a range from 1844 to the present and the Toronto Star (Pages from the Past), from 1894 to 2004. Canadiana.org (http://www.canadiana.ca/en/home, last accessed 7 January 2012), a notable digitization project funded by the Canadian government, includes material in pdf-format throughout Canada’s history until 1920, including novels, parliamentary reports, and travel reports. On the other end of the temporal spectrum, the 60 million-word the Strathy Corpus of present-day Canadian English (since 1985) (http://www.queensu.ca/strathy/projects. html#scorpus, last accessed 7 January 2012) has served as a research tool comparable in size (but not annotation) to the British National Corpus. It has recently been complemented by ICE Canada, a one million word corpus containing both written and spoken data from the early 1990s, edited by John Newman and Georgie Columbus (http:// ice-corpora.net/ice/index.htm, last accessed 7 January 2012).
3.4 Apparent-time approaches via sociolingustic interviews Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic interviews as a methodological tool dovetail in some areas. The Strathy and ICE Canada corpora are complemented by various sociolinguistic corpora of transcribed speech today, such as Tagliamonte’s Toronto Corpus (e.g. Tagliamonte 2008), or Hoffman and Walker’s datasets (e.g. Hoffman and Walker 2010), Poplack’s Quebec English Corpus (e.g. Poplack et al. 2006), among others. From a historical perspective the most impressive apparent-time data is Poplack and Tagliamonte’s (2001) collection for the African American diaspora in Nova Scotia, Canada (see Section 4.3).
3.5 Contact scenarios: historically-informed modeling Recent developments in contact linguistics and the discussion around the formation of dialects in colonial settings have shifted the focus to a highly detailed integration of social history with linguistic history. One such model, Trudgill’s (2004) New-Dialect Formation theory takes an extreme point of view with its focus on numerical input strength and its relegation of social factors to the sidelines in the first two generations after initial settlement. While provocative (see the discussion in, e.g., Trudgill 2008; Schneider 2008), Trudgill (2004) is a falsifiable model that can and should be put to scrutiny. Schneider (2007) is often pitted against Trudgill (2004), where, in fact, it is a model of entirely different scope. Trudgill is more specific, Schneider is more general in its focus and only superficially they seem to contradict one another. The bone of contention is the role of identity in the formation of a new dialect in new colonies (Hickey 2003; Schneider 2007: 30). Whatever the consensus will be, all approaches consider that demographic situations need to be integrated as fully as possible into linguistic modeling, addressing questions such as which groups of people, speaking which dialects, moved when to where and with what binds of contacts with other groups.
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The current discussion over the role of identity factors in the formation of postcolonial Englishes has also touched CanE (see, Schneider 2007: 238–50; Dollinger 2008a: 267–83 for two approaches). Real-time data suggests the following ranking of influences on Early Ontarian English prior to 1850: first, drift/parallel development in varieties of English; second, Loyalist base input; third, independent Canadian developments; and fourth, British influence (Dollinger 2008a: 279), while its interpretation remains open for dispute. With this renewed focus on the external language history, it seems advisable to comb the archives to reconstruct the social historical record more fully. Perhaps the best resources, and best-practice example for historical linguistic work on any Canadian region can be found for Newfoundland and Labrador at the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive (see http://www.mun.ca/folklore/munfla/ and http://www.mun.ca/elrc/, both last accessed 7 January 2012, with some resources available online). Sister disciplines, such as rhetoric studies, may offer interesting insights, e.g. Giltrow (2009) on the Hudson’s Bay Company in the west, as historical census data will only be one starting point to such enquiry (see, e.g. Boberg 2010: 81; Dollinger 2007 for British Columbia).
4 Features of Canadian English in long-term perspective In the remainder of this chapter, features of CanE that have been explored with significant diachronic data will be highlighted. Where possible, a preference will be given to real-time data. Although this section cannot claim completeness, it is hoped to reflect the state of the art of historical CanE. The situation today is significantly different to only a decade ago, when studies of the long-term development of the variety did “not yet exist” (Brinton and Fee 2001: 426).
4.1 Historical lexis Lexis has traditionally been one of the most thoroughly studied areas in CanE. The work at Memorial University has led to the publication of a magnificent historical Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story, Kirwin and Widdowson 1990, 1982), which is available online in open access (see http://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/, last accessed 7 January 2012). Another project in Atlantic Canada, the Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English (Pratt 1988) is much smaller in scope, but equally ambitious in detail. In Canada, lexicographcial work in general has been spearheaded by the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-1) (Avis et al. 1967; Lovell 1955), which is an early and much celebrated scholarly historical dictionary of the variety. DCHP-1, as a true milestone, triggered the first fully-Canadianized dictionary series, the Gage Canadian series, which exists to this day, inspiring later developments such as the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998, 2004) and the ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary (1997). DCHP-1 is now available online for researchers (Dollinger 2011b). Overviews of Canadian lexis exist in Gregg (1993) and, more recently in Dollinger and Brinton (2008) and Dollinger and von Schneidemesser (2011). Perhaps the most striking characteristic of CanE lexis is its reliance on noun compounding, which takes a dominating role as a word-formation device. Since 1800, when the majority of Canadianisms was first formed by noun compounds, this process has been dominant. Today about 70% of all Candianisms are compounds, such as grow op, seat sale, butter tart or
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video lottery terminal (Dollinger and Brinton 2008: 52). We distinguish four basic types of Canadianisms. Table 119.2 shows that the majority, or 57% of lemmas, are Type 1 Canadianisms, i.e. forms originating in Canada, which suggests a bias in the existing lists with historical and obsolete items: Table 119.2: Types in CanE lexis (Dollinger and Brinton 2008: 52) in lemmas J, K, and L (Data analyzed by Breanna K. Laing in the spring of 2007). Lemmas J, K, L
Type 1: Origin
Type 2: Preservation
Type 3: Semantic change
Type 4: Cultural saliency
TOTAL
Absolute Relative
114 57 %
37 18.5 %
36 18 %
13 6.5 %
200 100 %
Table 119.2 shows a small number for Type 4, “culturally salient terms” (6.5%), such as (ice) hockey terms, forestry and mining terms. Of the 37 tokens that are Type 2, preservations from input varieties, 26 come from BrE, and 11 from AmE.
4.2 Historical phonetics and phonology The most-widely known phenomenon of varieties of CanE is Canadian Raising (so named in Chambers 1973). Though not unique to Canada, it is a shibboleth that has found entry into popular culture. Noted in the 1930s, Canadian Raising was first described by Joos (1942), commented on by Avis (1956) and Gregg (1957), and studied by Chambers and collaborators who have traced the development of this feature over four decades, yielding a unique body of evidence in terms of diachronic real-time depth. Chambers (2006) is a recent summary and outlook on this phenomenon, which results in a raising of the onsets of the diphthongs /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ (Wells’s MOUTH and PRICE sets) in voiceless contexts. Labov et al. (2006) identify CR as a Canadian feature, but as one whose sociophonetics are yet to be fully explored. Boberg (2010: 156–157) shows in a national sample that raised /aʊ/ (more so than raised /aɪ/) in voiceless contexts is one indicator for Canadian vowel systems when compared to American ones. Chambers and Hardwick (1986) noticed variation in raising of /aʊ/, which included a fronting process. Initially thought as declining Canadian Raising prevails today from Toronto to Vancouver and Victoria (Hung et al. 1993; Chambers 2006: 117). Canadian Raising (CR) has also produced a genuine real-time perspective, opening a discussion on its origins. Chambers (e.g. 1973: 122, 2006: 107) has long considered CR as a Canadian innovation, and Thomas (1991: 162), using unpublished 1930s linguistic atlas data, provides good evidence for this view, backdating CR to the 1880s. Gregg (1973: 141, 143) has argued from the background of vowel changes since the Great Vowel Shift that raising of /aɪ/ is not necessarily the result of contact phenomena in Canada, but, in the historically bigger picture, a “failure to lower” vowel onsets, which was carried out in StBrE and StAmE. Trudgill (1986: 154–156, 159), who offers perhaps the best summary on existing views on the origins of CR, proposes yet another scenario that is based on dialect mixing and reallocation of features in Canada (Trudgill 2004: 88). The majority opinion today points towards CR as a Canadian innovation, but settling this scholarly dispute is, perhaps, one of the most prized puzzles in historical CanE. Acoustic phonetics has recently provided a more precise picture of CR, which
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“does show clear regional differences, in terms of both its application and its phonetic output” (Boberg 2010: 204). The sceptre of the one phonetic “pan-Canadian development” (Boberg 2008: 136), at least among middle-class speech, goes to another phonetic process, however, the Canadian Shift. First documented by Clarke et al. (1995), who identified it, roughly speaking, as a lowering and retraction in the front vowels, the Canadian Shift runs in the opposite direction than the American Northern Cities Shift (see Labov et al. 2006), and as such promotes the linguistic autonomy of Canada at least in Canadian areas adjacent to the US “Inland North”, such as in southwestern Ontario (see Boberg 2008; also Roeder and Jarmasz 2010; Hoffman 2010). Perspectives of historical phonology are also found in the literature, starting with the structuralist approaches by Avis (1956) and Gregg (1957). Labov et al. (2006) provide the continental perspective, while Boberg (2010: 125–137) assigns the CanE vowel system its place in the historical development since Middle English times, largely based on the lowback vowel merger (LOT, THOUGHT, and PALM) and the mid and low front vowel merger before /r/. The low-back vowel merger is an interesting case historically, as it is currently spreading in some parts of North America, while it has long attained categoricity in Canada, turning cot and caught, stock and stalk or caller and collar into homophones. As the phonologically most salient feature in CanE (shared with some U.S. regions), its origins are of particular interest. Chambers (1993: 11–12) from historical evidence and Dollinger (2010a: 217) with a broader database suggest its importation from merged U.S. regions prior to 1830. Boberg, however, does not rule out language contact from Scotland or Northern Ireland as a source or independent Canadian development (Boberg 2010: 128, 102). A solution of this conundrum is, just like the origin of Canadian Raising, another important desideratum. Glide deletion, also called yod-dropping, has received substantial attention. Clarke (2006) uses data from Newfoundland from the past 30 years for comparisons with data by Woods (1999 [1979]) and Gregg (2004) to chart the highly complex picture of identity constructions of yod, whether people pronounce, e.g., news as /njuːz/ or /nuːz/. While these variants are, superficially, constructed as British [yod-ful] vs. North American [yod-less] variants, Clarke (2006) disentangles such issues working with indexicalization and reindexicalization of social meaning in the Canadian and North American contexts. As a widely noticed variable, earlier reports are available (e.g. Pringle 1985). In the bigger picture of yod-dropping historically, Chambers (2002) describes the variable context in the long-term perspective.
4.3 Origins of African American English in Canada An impressive body of research on the historical development of one ethnic variety that warrants separate treatment is the case of Nova Scotian African American speakers. Nestled in the greater discussion of the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) (cf. Lanehart, Chapter 117), Poplack and Tagliamonte (e.g. 2001) gathered apparent-time data from two African communities in Nova Scotia, North Preston and Guysborough. The data are recordings of Canadian black descendants of ex-slaves who left with the “underground railway” for freedom in Canada (e.g. Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991, 2001; Poplack 2000). Dealing with morphosyntactic features that can be used as diagnostic features with parallel corpora in the Caribbean and the UK, the authors reconstruct
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the spread of AAVE and go far beyond the usual relevance of apparent-time studies for historical linguistics. Variables include copula deletion, past tense marking (e.g. Poplack and Tagliamonte 1991), and verbal -s marking (e.g. Poplack and Tagliamonte 1994, 1989; Van Herk and Walker 2005 provide real-time, non-Canadian evidence, see Tagliamonte et al. 2005 for a methodological discussion).
4.4 Historical morphosyntax Today, one can find an impressive range of studies from apparent-time perspectives. Studies are found for relative pronoun variation (e.g D’Arcy and Tagliamonte 2010), complementizers (e.g. Tagliamonte and Smith 2005), intensifiers (e.g. Tagliamonte 2008), non-standard -s marking (e.g. Childs and Van Herk 2010), negation (e.g. Thorburn 2011), definite article variation (Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009), past tense variation, and variation in existentials (e.g. Walker 2007) and beyond. Five variables will be discussed representatively for similar grammatical variables: three for their importance as diagnostic features (after perfect, going to future tense and positive anymore) and two for their import in variationist studies (deontic modals and quotative be like). An interesting Irish relic feature is the after perfect, in sentences as I’m after doing the dishes for ‘I (have) already finished the dishes’, which is found most prominently in Newfoundland, but presumably less frequently in other parts of Canada (see Chambers 1986: 9 for some other regions). In Newfoundland, however, this construction has been spreading over the past century (Clarke 2010: 149). Another particularly interesting variable is the use of going to as a future marker, which can serve as a diagnostic to establish historical lineages based on English-descendant rural Nova Scotia English (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2000). Positive anymore has been noticed at least since the 1950s (Avis’s files, Queen’s University Archives, http://www. queensu.ca/strathy/, last accessed 7 January 2012), and Chambers (2007) summarizes the findings in the Ontarian context. Anymore, as in Harry likes rock music anymore, has a complex rule governing system which makes it a perfect diagnostic feature (though a near-extinct one today) for the settlement of Ontario with speakers from the American midlands (Wave I from Section 2). Somewhat less diagnostically indicative but more widely studied are (sets of) the modal auxiliaries, with a focus on deontic markers of obligation and necessity (must, have to, got to and so forth, as seen in Figure 119.2 from a real-time perspective). Tagliamonte (2006b) and D’Arcy (2004), among others, approach the variables with an apparent-time approach, for which Dollinger (2006) provides a real-time perspective. Dollinger (2008a) is a diachronic study of 11 modal auxiliaries in real-time, tracing distributions back to the time immediately after the American Revolution in Trudgill’s New-Dialect Formation theory. Jankowski (2004) also offers real-time data in a transatlantic comparison. Internationally considerable attention has been given to quotative be like and Canadian data is also plentiful. Constructions as in She’s like, “Geez, what are you talking about?” have been explored in a wide range of papers, for instance Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2007b), Tagliamonte and Hudson (1999), which are of particular Canadian relevance. Overall, the sheer multitude of variationist studies since about 1990, spearheaded by Shana Poplack, Sali Tagliamonte and their students, is staggering. Monograph-
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length treatments have appeared (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) or are in preparation (Tagliamonte forthc.), most of which making contributions to various aspects of historical CanE where the apparent-time data allow.
4.5 Historical pragmatics Pragmatics as a relative newcomer has not yet produced a solid amount of studies for CanE. Anecdotal evidence of Canadian politeness abounds and includes a number of core pragmatic phenomena. The most obvious pragmatic device associated with CanE is doubtless pragmatic marker eh. Occurring in sentences as diverse as Nice day, eh? or What a game, eh? or even fixed expression such as Thanks, eh! it has numerous meanings (Gold 2008; Columbus 2010). In an early paper on the variable, Avis (1972) took a real-time approach leading him to conclude, since eh had had currency in many national varieties of English, that it cannot be considered Canadian. Consequently, DCHP-1 (Avis et al. 1967) does not list an entry for it. From today’s perspective, one needs to say that some, if not many, Canadians have come to embrace eh as an linguistic identity marker. Shedding its substandard connotations since the time when Avis carried out his studies, eh is today considered “a marker of both the Canadian English dialect and of Canadian national identity” (Gold and Tremblay 2006: 247). By and large, however, work on pragmatic markers in real time has only begun. Brinton (2008) is one of the first pragmatic real-time studies that include CanE data. Based on robust quantitative data, Canadian characteristics of metalinguistic comments may appear to emerge, e.g. for I think, if you will, as it were, as shown in Figure 119.3: 80.0 168 68
%
60.0
BNC Strathy
40.0 35
20.0
40 30 10 1
0.0 non-parenthetical
parentheticalliteral
parentheticalmetalinguistic
1
parentheticalmention
Figure 119.3: If you will in the British National Corpus and the CanE Strathy Corpus (percent and n) (Brinton 2008: 164)
The pragmatic uses of if you will in the meaning of ‘if you’d like’, the “parentheticalmetalinguistic” function, is used differently in terms of frequency in BrE (BNC, see http://www.dchp.ca, last accessed 7 January 2012, for access details) and CanE (Strathy,
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http://www.queensu.ca/strathy/, last accessed 7 January 2012). These solid data suggest that parenthetical if you will “is more fully grammaticalized as a pragmatic marker in Canadian English than in British English” (Brinton 2008: 164). Previous studies have, mostly in asides, also referred to pragmatic functions distinctive of CanE (e.g. Woods 1991: 145–147). Recent theories on the origin of the politeness marker please, initiated by the lower strata of society, have been corroborated for CanE data with a first attested use in 1794 (and thus 6 years after the first occurrence in BrE) by a lower-class writer (Dollinger 2008b: 275).
4.6 Historical language attitudes: Canadian Dainty and Yankee twang Hultin (1967) opened the field with a qualitative study on Canadian attitudes toward AmE, while Chambers (1993 [1981]) is perhaps the first historical CanE attitude study. Rev. Geikie’s 1857 condemnation of “Canadian English” as a “corrupt dialect” gave rise to comments, and is the first known attestation of Canadian English (Avis 1973). An area closely linked with language attitudes is spelling. Pratt (1993) is one of the best overviews, Ireland (1979) an interesting (unpublished) monograph with both a real-time and a present-day component that shows the varying and apparently classification-defying spelling practices across the country. Gold (2004) and Dollinger (2007, 2008a: 124–127, forthc.) characterize 19th-century spelling practices. Spelling practices continue to attract attention with new analyses from various traditions, e.g. Meyer (forthc.). More generally speaking, Canadian language attitudes (e.g. Warkentyne 1983) have been defined, for the longest time, by a slow emancipation of CanE in relation to the King’s or Queen’s English. Two phenomena are important in this context: first, Canada’s slow progression toward independence (not until after World War I). One of the most profound attitude changes in the history of CanE has been documented by Chambers (2004) with the decline of “Canadian Dainty”, i.e. a speaking style (until the mid-20th century) that was so Anglophile (as in British Standard English – cf. Peters, Chapter 120) that it made, in the joking words of Canadian poet Irving Layton, listeners “wince and feel/unspeakably colonial” (Layton 1992 [1956]: 87).
5 Desiderata and outlook Throughout this short overview various desiderata have been pointed out. Two projects of prime importance come to mind, due to their potential as catalysts for historical research. A complete synchronic dialect survey of Canada would provide stimulus for diachronic research. While such a goal may be as yet illusory, more immediate and realistic aims are the creation of historical corpora that are fully stratified and thus go beyond the BCE. Theoretically, the most profound dispute in the development of CanE centers on the assessment of its input varieties and feeds into the bigger discussion of overseas dialect development. Any such approach in CanE must integrate the Loyalist Base with Numerical Swamping in the long-overdue “more balanced view” (Chambers 1975: 2), for which some suggestions have already been offered (e.g. Dollinger 2008a: 275–283). Acknowledgements: I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for reading a 2008 draft of this chapter, going well beyond the usual level of analysis.
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6 References Algeo, John (ed.). 2001. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. VI: English in North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avis, Walter S. 1950. The speech of Sam Slick. MA Thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Avis, Walter S. 1954. Speech differences along the Ontario-United States border. I: Vocabulary. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 1: 13–18. Avis, Walter S. 1955. Speech differences along the Ontario-United States border. II: Grammar and syntax. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 1: 14–19. Avis, Walter S. 1956. Speech differences along the Ontario-United States border. III: Pronunciation. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 2: 41–59. Avis, Walter S. 1969. A note on the speech of Sam Slick. In: Reginald E. Watters and Walter S. Avis (eds.), The Sam Slick Anthology, . Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co. Avis, Walter S. 1972. So Eh? is Canadian, Eh? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 17(2): 89–104. Avis, Walter S. 1973. The English language in Canada. In: Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics. Vol. 10/1, 40–74. The Hague: Mouton. Avis, Walter S., Charles Crate, Patrick Drysdale, Douglas Leechman, Matthew H. Scargill, and Charles L. Lovell (eds.). 1967. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: Gage. Bailey, Richard W. 1981. Haliburton’s eye and ear. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 26: 90–101. Bailey, Richard W. 1982. The English language in Canada. In: Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.), English as a World Language, 134–176. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bailey, Richard W. 1991. Dialects of Canadian English. English Today 27: 20–25. Ball, Jessica and Bernhardt B. May. 2008. First Nations English dialects in Canada: Implications for speech-language pathology. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 22: 570–588. Bengtsson, Elna. 1956. The Language and Vocabulary of Sam Slick. Part 1. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Bloomfield, Morton W. 1948. Canadian English and its relation to eighteenth century American speech. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 47: 59–66 [reprinted in Chambers (ed.). 1975, 3–11]. Boberg, Charles. 2004a. Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(4): 538–568. Boberg, Charles. 2004b. Real and apparent time in language change: late adoption of changes in Montreal English. American Speech 79(3): 250–269. Boberg, Charles. 2005a. The Canadian Shift in Montreal. Language Variation and Change 17(2): 133–154. Boberg, Charles. 2005b. The North American Regional Vocabulary Survey: new variables and methods in the study of North American English. American Speech 80(1): 22–60. Boberg, Charles. 2008. Regional phonetic differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of English Linguistics 36(2): 129–154. Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinton, Laurel J. and Margery Fee. 2001. Canadian English. In: Algeo (ed.), 422–440. Chambers, Jack K. 1973. Canadian raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18(2): 113–135. Chambers, Jack K. (ed.). 1975. Canadian English: Origins and Structures. Toronto: Methuen. Chambers, Jack K. (ed.). 1979. The Languages of Canada. Montreal: Didier. Chambers, Jack K. 1980. Linguistic variation and Chomsky’s ‘homogeneous speech community’. In: A. Murray Kinloch and A. B. House (eds), Papers from the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, 1–31. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick.
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Chambers, Jack K. 1986. Three kinds of standard in Canadian English. In: William C. Lougheed (ed.), In Search of the Standard in Canadian English, 1–19. Kingston, Ont.: Queen’s University. Chambers, Jack K. 1993. ‘Lawless and vulgar innovations’: Victorian views on Canadian English. In: Sandra Clarke (ed.), 1–26. Chambers, Jack K. 1994. An introduction to dialect topography. English World-Wide 15: 35–53. Chambers, Jack K. 1998a. Inferring dialect from a postal questionnaire. Journal of English Linguistics 26(3): 222–246. Chambers, Jack K. 1998b. Social embedding of changes in progress. Journal of English Linguistics 26(1): 5–36. Chambers, Jack K. 1998c. English: Canadian varieties. In: John Edwards (ed.), Language in Canada, 252–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Jack K. 2002. Patterns of variation and change. In: Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 349–372. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Chambers, Jack K. 2004. ‘Canadian Dainty’: the rise and decline of Briticisms in Canada. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects, 224–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Jack K. 2006. Canadian Raising retrospect and prospect. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2 and 3): 105–118. Chambers, Jack K. 2007. A linguistic fossil: positive any more in the Golden Horseshoe. In: Peter Reich, William J. Sullivan, Arle R. Lommel, and Toby Griffen (eds.), LACUS Forum XXXIII: Variation, 31–44. Houston, TX: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Chambers, Jack K. 2009. Sociolinguistic Theory. 3rd revised edn. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Chambers, Jack K. 2010. English in Canada. In: Elaine Gold and Janice McAlpine (eds.), Canadian English: A Linguistic Reader, 1–37. Kingston, ON: Queen’s University [Strathy Language Unit Occasional Papers, 6]. http://www.queensu.ca/strathy/apps/OP6v2.pdf (last accessed 26 October 2011). Chambers, Jack K. and Margaret F. Hardwick. 1986. Comparative sociolinguistics of a sound change in Canadian English. English World-Wide 7: 124–146. Chambers, Jack K. and Andre´ Lapierre. 2011. Dialect variants in the bilingual belt. In: France Martineau and Terry Nadasdi (eds.), Papers in Honour of Raymond Mougeon, 35-50. Que´bec: Presses de l’Universite´ Laval. Childs, Becky and Gerard Van Herk. 2010. Breaking old habits: Syntactic constraints underlying habitual effects in Newfoundland English. In James A. Walker (ed.), Linguistic Variation and Verbal Aspect, 81–93. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clarke, Sandra. 1982. Sampling attitudes to dialect varieties in St. John’s. In: Harold J. Paddock (ed.), Languages in Newfoundland and Labrador, 2nd edn., 90–105. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland. Clarke, Sandra. 1991. Phonological variation and recent language change in St. John’s English. In English around the world. Sociolinguistic perspectives, Jenny Cheshire (ed.), 108–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Sandra (ed.). 1993a. Focus on Canada. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clarke, Sandra. 1993b. The Americanization of Canadian Pronunciation: a survey of palatal glide usage. In: Sandra Clarke (ed.), 85–108. Clarke, Sandra. 1997a. English verbal – s revisited: the evidence from Newfoundland. American Speech 72(3): 227–259. Clarke, Sandra. 1997b. The role of Irish English in the formation of New Englishes: the case from Newfoundland. In: Jeffrey Kallen (ed.), Focus on Ireland, 207–225. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Dollinger, Stefan and Laurel J. Brinton. 2008. Canadian English lexis: historical and variationist perspectives. Anglistik 19(2): 43–64. Dollinger, Stefan and Sandra Clarke. forthc. On the autonomy and homogeneity of Canadian English. World Englishes 31(4). Special issue: Autonomy and Homogeneity of Canadian English. Ed. by Stefan Dollinger and Sandra Clarke. Dollinger, Stefan and Luanne von Schneidemesser. 2011. Canadianism, Americanism, North Americanism? A Comparison of DARE and DCHP. American Speech 86(2): 115–151. Edwards, John (ed.). 1998. Language in Canada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emenau, Murray B. 1975 [1935]. The dialect of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Language 11: 140–147. [reprinted in J. K. Chambers (ed.), 1975, 34–39]. Falk, Lilian and Margaret Harry (eds.). 1999. The English Language in Nova Scotia: Essays on Past and Present Developments in English Across the Province. Lockeport, N.S.: Roseway Publishing. Giltrow, Janet. 2009. ‘Curious gentlemen’: the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Royal Society, business and science in the eighteenth century. In: D. Starke- Meyerring, A. Pare´, N. Artemeva, M. Horne and L. Yousoubova (eds.), Writing (in) the Knowledge Society. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Gold, Elaine. 2004. Teachers, texts and Early Canadian English: Upper Canada 1791–1841. In: Sophie Burelle and Stana Somesfalean (eds.), Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. CD-ROM, 85–96. Montreal: Universite´ du Que´bec a` Montre´al. Gold, Elaine. 2008. Canadian Eh? From Eh to Zed. Anglistik 19(2): 141–156. Gold, Elaine and Mireille Tremblay. 2006. Eh? and Hein?: Discourse particles or national icons? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2and3): 247–264. Gregg, Robert J. 1957. Notes on the pronunciation of Canadian English as spoken in Vancouver, British Columbia. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 3: 20–26. Gregg, Robert J. 1973. The diphthongs əi and ai in Scottish, Scotch-Irish and Canadian English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18(2): 136–145. Gregg, Robert J. 1993. Canadian English lexicography. In: Sandra Clarke (ed.), Focus on Canada, 27–44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gregg, Robert J. 2004 [1984]. The Survey of Vancouver English. A sociolinguistic study of urban Canadian English. In: Gaelan Dodds de Wolf, Margery Fee, and Janice McAlpine (eds.), Strathy Language Unit Occasional Papers 5. Kingston: Queen’s University. Hamilton, Donald E. 1975 [1958]. Notes on Montreal English. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 4(1): 70–79 [reprinted in Chambers (ed.). 1975, 46–54]. Heller, Monica. 2010. Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hickey, Raymond. 2003. How do dialects get the features they have? In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for Language Change, 213–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickey, Raymond (ed.). 2010. Varieties of English in Writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoffman, Michol F. 2010. The role of social factors in the Canadian Vowel Shift: evidence from Toronto. American Speech 85(2): 121–140. Hoffman, Michol F. and James A. Walker. 2010. Ethnolects and the city: ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22: 37–67. Hultin, Neil C. 1967. Canadian views of American English. American Speech 42: 243–260. Hung, Henrietta, John Davison and Jack K. Chambers. 1993. Comparative sociolinguistics of (aw)-fronting. In: Sandra Clarke (ed.), 247–268. Ireland, Robert J. 1979. Canadian spelling. An empirical and historical survey of selected words. PhD Thesis: York University, Toronto, Ontario. Jankowski, Bridget. 2004. A transatlantic perspective of variation and change in English deontic modality. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 23(2): 85–113. Joos, Martin. 1942. A phonological dilemma in Canadian English. Language 18: 141–144.
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Pringle, Ian. 1981. The Gaelic substratum in the English of Glengarry County and its reflection in the novels of Ralph Connor. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 26: 126–140. Pringle, Ian. 1985. Attitudes to Canadian English In: Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), The English Language Today, 183–205. Oxford: Pergamon. Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriella Jarmasz. 2010. The Canadian Shift in Toronto. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 55(3): 387–404. Scargill, Matthew H. 1956. Eighteenth century English in Nova Scotia. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 2/1: 3. Scargill, Matthew H. 1957. Sources of Canadian English. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 56: 611–614 [reprinted in Chambers (ed.). 1975, 12–15]. Scargill, Matthew H. 1974. Modern Canadian English Usage: Linguistic Change and Reconstruction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Scargill, Matthew H. 1977. A Short History of Canadian English. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis. Scargill, Matthew H. and Henry J. Warkentyne. 1972. The Survey of Canadian English: a report. English Quarterly 5(3): 47–104. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Edgar W. 2008. Accommodation versus identity? A response to Trudgill. Language in Society 37: 241–280. Story, G. M., W. J. Kirwin and J. D. A. Widdowson (eds.) 21990 [11982] Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. http://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/ (last accessed 26 October 2011). Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006a. “So cool, right?”: Canadian English entering the 21st century. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2 and 3): 309–332. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006b. Historical change in synchronic perspective: the legacy of British dialects. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of the History of English, 477–506. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2008. So different and pretty cool: Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–394. Tagliamonte, Sali forthc. Roots of English: Exploring the History of Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagliamonte, Sali and Rachel Hudson. 1999. Be like et al. beyond America: the quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(2): 147–172. Tagliamonte, Sali and Jennifer Smith. 2005. No momentary fancy! The zero complementizer in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9(2): 1–12. Tagliamonte, Sali, Jennifer Smith, and Helen Lawrence. 2005. Disentangling the roots: the legacy of British dialects in cross-variety perspective. In: Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjattea Palander, and Esa Penttila¨ (eds.) Dialects across borders: Selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI). 87–117. Joensuu: Joensuu University Press. Tagliamonte, Sali and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2007a. The modals of obligation/necessity in Canadian perspective. English World-Wide 28(1): 47–87. Tagliamonte, Sali and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2007b. Frequency and variation in the community grammar: Tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation and Change 19: 199–217. Tagliamonte, Sali and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2009. Peaks beyond phonology: adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language 85(1): 58–108. Tagliamonte, Sali and Rebecca V. Roeder. 2009. Variation in the English definite article: Sociohistorical linguistic in t’speech community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(4): 435–471.
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Thomas, Eric R. 1991. The origin of Canadian Raising in Ontario. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 36: 147–170. Thorburn, Jennifer. 2011. “There’s no place like Petty Harbour”: negation in a post-insular community. RLS – Regional Language Studies … Newfoundland 22(1): 8–17. Torres Cacoullos, Rena and James A. Walker. 2009. The present of the English future: grammatical variation and collocations in discourse. Language 85(2): 321–354. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Sociohistorical linguistics and dialect survival: a note on another Nova Scotian enclave. In: Magnus Ljung (ed.), Language Structure and Variation, 195–201. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-Dialect Formation: the Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2008. Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: on the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation. Language in Society 37: 241–254. Van Herk, Gerard and James A. Walker. 2005. S marks the spot? Regional variation and early African American correspondence. Language Variation and Change 17: 113–131. Walker, James A. 2007. “There’s bears back there”: Plural existentials and vernacular universals in (Quebec) English. English World-Wide 28(2): 147–166. Warkentyne, Henry J. 1983. Attitudes and language behavior. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 28: 71–76. Wilson, H. Rex. 1958. The dialect of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia. A study of the English of the county, with reference to its sources, preservation of relics, and vestiges of bilingualism. PhD Thesis, University of Michigan. Woods, Howard B. 1999 [1979]. The Ottawa Survey of Canadian English. Kingston: Queen’s University. Woods, Howard B. 1991. Social differentiation in Ottawa English. In: Jenny Cheshire (ed.), English Around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, 134–152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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120. Varieties of English: Standard British English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction Emergence of a national standard in England, 16th to 18th century British English in the colonial and postcolonial era, 18th to 20th century Linguistic features of Standard British English in the 20th century British English as an international standard References
Abstract This chapter examines the notion of “standard British English” from several perspectives. It discusses the emergence of British English as a national standard through canonical stages, like those postulated by Haugen ([1966] 1972), and by Schneider (2007) for the Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1879–1899
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evolution of postcolonial Englishes. Its status as an international standard, achieved through colonial expansion, is set in counterpoint to the rise of American English in the 19th and 20th centuries. The status of “British English” as a regional standard is then discussed with reference to recent models of “world English”, and contrasted with perceptions of it within Great Britain, in the tug-of-war between local identity and the ideology of the standard (Milroy 2000). Its multiple roles help to make British English linguistically more pluralistic than American English in the 21st century. How this will affect the place of British English in any putative “world standard English” remains to be seen.
1 Introduction The term British English and understandings of it have both evolved over centuries. At least four different definitions were found by Hansen (1997: 59–61), all current in the last two decades of the 20th century and giving it narrower and broader scope, and a certain ambiguity in many contexts. At the narrow end of the scale it refers to (i) the language of England, or (ii) the language of Great Britain, or (iii) the language of the British Isles. At its broadest (iv) it may refer to the variety of English used in British Commonwealth countries where there was a sufficiently large community of British settlers to establish it as the national language (e.g. Canada, Australia). Hansen also noted (along with others e.g. McArthur 2001) the use of “British English” to refer to one of the two international standards of printed English, used in Commonwealth countries and others where English is an auxiliary official language, which makes a fifth definition (v) of “British English”. In actual use there is often some indeterminacy about which meaning(s) are in play. In this article, the second of those definitions for British English will generally be assumed: that it denotes the national language of Great Britain, without reference to dialect variation within it and as used for all government and institutional purposes. As the reference standard for education, it is associated with canonical forms used especially in writing. In these ways it meets the criteria of a national standard as articulated by Haugen ([1966] 1972: 107–110), i.e. the language with the maximal range of functions and minimal variation in form for the country. Haugen’s model is useful in benchmarking the evolution of a national language, but was not designed to explain its extended jurisdiction beyond national borders. So for British English we will need to consider functions beyond the “maximal” which it envisaged. The emergence of the national standard language in Britain can be traced back to the threshold of Early Modern English, and its codification is very clearly associated with the “age of correctness” in the 18th century. However the term “British English” was not used until the latter decades of the 19th century, with the Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation in 1869. Fuller recognition of the status of British English as a major regional variety of world English is a relatively recent (20th century) development. It comes from outside Britain rather than within it. In what follows we shall review the evolution of British English to the point where both at home and abroad it is perceived as a regional standard. Its wider role as an international standard (= definition (v)) will be discussed in Section 5 of the article. The evolutionary model for new varieties of English articulated by Schneider (2007) will be used as a framework for discussing the evolution of British English below. Its five stages are: (1) Foundation, (2) Exonormative stabilization, (3) Nativization,
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(4) Endonormative stabilization, (5) Differentiation. Just how applicable those stages and the accompanying parameters (historical context, identity construction, sociolinguistic functions, linguistic structure) are to what is conventionally seen as the “old” variety will be explored below.
2 Emergence of a national standard in England, 16th to 18th century 2.1 Foundations The roots of Standard English can be traced to several written dialects of late Middle English whose morphology anticipated that of the Early Modern English standard. They were the dialects of the Central Midlands, East Anglia, and the Greater London area, and then from the Midlands and North Midlands through the so-called “Chancery standard” (Smith 2008: 204–205). It originated as the medium of administrative and government writing, replacing the Latin of previous centuries. Its reach was greatly extended by the advent of Caxton’s printing press (1476), set up under the walls of Westminster Abbey, a strategic location for handling government printing business. But Caxton and his 16th century successors printed a very wide range of publications, including fiction as well as nonfiction publications, so that the official variety of the language became the general medium for publishing in English. In the Tudor period, it was used in popular pamphlets as well as books in numerous technical domains: on health and medicine (Nevalainen 2008: 213), agriculture (The Booke of Husbandry 1598), as well as domestic topics such as cookery and carving. During the 17th century, English became the vernacular medium for science, in volumes of essays by Bacon, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in theological treatises such as Donne’s Essays and Sermons, published posthumously, and Milton’s ecclesiastical pamphlets of the 1640s. The Royal Society endorsed the use of plain English for scientific purposes through Sprat’s famous statement (1667), quoted below (Section 2.3). The establishment of what had been the “Chancery standard” in all these domains of communication is analogous to the foundation of a new variety for a (colonial) nation, although the language had had a thousand years of grassroots use in England. It also represents its “acceptance” (Haugen [1966] 1972: 109–110) as the national standard for ever-increasing public and intellectual purposes. Its establishment in Tudor England coincides with that of other “vernaculars” as the official national languages elsewhere in Europe, e.g. France and Italy. Comparisons between English and French in this role were very explicitly made by contemporary men of letters: “Our tong is as copious, pithie, and significative as any other tongue in Europe […] as fluente as the Latine, as courteous as the Spanish, as courtlike as the French […]” (Camden 1605; quoted in Tucker 1961). Though Camden notes some criticisms of the mixed character of English and the instability of its orthography, he expresses unqualified satisfaction about it being the national language. English reasserted itself as England’s national language after centuries of displacement by Norman French and Latin. It affirmed an English national identity in tandem with the establishment of the English Church, which marked England’s ecclesiastical and cultural independence from Catholic Europe and more than a millennium of Latin-based traditions. The monastic institutions which had traditionally provided
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lower education in Latin were dissolved; and a rising merchant class created a demand for secular schooling in English, and the development of an English curriculum. The earliest English schoolbooks-cum-dictionaries (Mulcaster’s Elementarie, 1582; Coote’s The English Schoole-maister, 1597) were published to meet this need.
2.2 Exonormative stabilization: the Latin component Though Standard English gained acceptance as the national language and the medium for general and technical communication, the written language was steeped in Latin through the participation of English scholars in the European Renaissance (cf. Vezzosi, Chapter 108). The rediscovery of classical scholarship took English writers back to Latin texts, on which they modeled their style (Gordon 1966: 105–111), and from which they borrowed countless words. Their use of “inkhorn terms”, i.e. barely assimilated Latin words, helped to mediate newly encountered philosophical concepts and cultural values, and suggests the challenge of expressing them in ordinary contemporary English. Approximately 7,000 Latin words were added to the English language during the peak period of borrowing from 1600 to 1675 (Culpeper and Clapham 1996: 207, 215). The linguistic debt to Latin is very conspicuous on the pages of 17th century dictionaries, which are stocked with Latinisms (“inkhorn terms” and other “hard words”, often technical terms) that an English person might encounter in wider reading. The practice or habit of borrowing from Latin makes an interesting analogue with the borrowing from indigenous languages by settlers in colonial territories, associated with Stage 2 of varietal evolution (cf. Rice, Chapter 112), although the context of lexical borrowing is intellectual rather than environmental. Apart from this large-scale borrowing of Latin words, Latin grammar was used to frame pioneering accounts of English. Jonson’s English Grammar (1640) uses the classifications of Latin to explain all the syntactic structures of English. The Latin paradigms are preserved for English parts of speech in later grammars by Wallis (1653) and Cooper (1685), both written in Latin under the title Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae. These indications of a tendency to keep referring back to Latin contrast with the general acceptance of Standard English in the 17th century, but they are analogous to the exonormativity found in the evolution of new varieties of English (Schneider 2007: 56), which looks back to the English of the mother country for linguistic benchmarks. The staple of great 17th century prose writers such as Raleigh and Milton was the Ciceronian periodic sentence (Gordon 1966: 106–107). In his poetry too, Milton makes his stylistic mark through weighty Latinate loanwords and the use of the Latin rather than English sense of words long-since assimilated into English, e.g. respect used in the sense “look back”. The Latin language remained an exonormative reference for 17th century English literary stylists, and continued to exert its power in the 18th century, in the neoclassical prose of Johnson. It cast a long shadow even over bureaucratic/ formal English style of the 20th century, though the Latin borrowings are now thoroughly assimilated.
2.3 From nativization to codification The polarization of English society in civil wars of the 17th century has its counterpart in contrastive movements in English prose style. In counterpoint to the humanists’
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preference for Latinate styles, we find communities of writers and institutions affirming the virtue of English plain style. Speech-based prose was favored by the Puritans, modeled so powerfully in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1676), though it was also the natural choice for everyday topics, e.g. Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653). The movement was paralleled within scientific community for science writing, as the Royal Society so clearly affirmed in Sprat’s history of the Society (1667), preferring “a close, naked natural way of speaking” and specifically rejecting “inkhorn” terms as well as all kinds of linguistic affectation. This endorsement of plain English correlates with a radical change in English dictionary-writing tradition from the 17th to the 18th century. Midcentury dictionaries such as Blount’s Glossographia (1656) and Phillips’s New World of English Words (1658) consisted almost entirely of “hard words”, especially Latinate ones from specialized fields such as medicine and law. In later 17th century editions, the list amounted to 17,000 words (Starnes and Noyes 1946: 56), still with little or no coverage of ordinary English words. But from the beginning of the 18th century, English dictionaries made it their business to cover everyday English as well, starting with the New English Dictionary (1702) attributed to Kersey, which comprised about 28,000 words, many of them everyday words extracted from lists in school books. The coverage of the “generalitie of words in the English tongue” increased with Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) to about 40,000 words, in keeping with the title. The nativization of English dictionaries follows close behind the nativization of its prose style, based on English speech rather than classical rhetoric. In Schneider’s model for new Englishes, this stage normally involves consolidation of the speech community in its colonial location, which clearly does not apply to British English. Yet the beginning of the 18th century saw some kind of consolidation of British identity, through the Act of Union with Scotland in 1701, by which Great Britain itself was formed. Southern English attitudes to Scots English and Scottish mores remained rather haughty, as seen in some of Johnson’s famously ironic definitions, e.g. the definition of oats “a grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people”. There was nevertheless increasing awareness in England of Scottish literature, of Burns and Scott. The later 18th century saw fresh uses of English as a literary medium, in new genres – such as novels, and discursive and lyric poetry. This coincides with the steady growth of literacy in England during the 18th century, allowing increasing proportions of the population to participate in the literary culture. The literacy rate (for women and men respectively) rose from 15% and 30% in 1660, to 50% and 67% in 1750 (McIntosh 2008: 230). With an expanding population of readers, the use of standard written English is embedded more deeply in the community. The nativization of a new variety often ushers in a type of “sociolinguistic cleavage” between innovative and conservative users of the language (Schneider 2007: 56). This is very evident during the 18th century with conservative and frequently critical commentaries on contemporary English grammar and idiom, giving the period its byname “Age of Correctness”. It reflects the then ongoing quest for a language authority, like the Academie Franc¸aise and the Italian Accademia della Crusca, which had been established in France and Italy to act as arbiters on controversial aspects of the “vernacular”. Though there were repeated calls for a similar language academy for English, it never quite gained sufficient support and patronage. The void was filled by many self-declared (ipse dixit) experts on grammars and usage, who produced 187 prescriptive grammars between 1700 and 1800 (Fitzmaurice 2000: 201). Most noteworthy were the Short Introduction to English
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Grammar published in 1762 by Lowth (bishop of London) and Murray’s English Grammar (1795), which set out grammatical rules and illustrated them with typically negative examples from established writers and their own contemporaries (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2010). Their commentaries form a “complaint tradition”, like that associated with the nativization stage of a new variety of English (Schneider 2007: 56) – the public debate over which forms of the “standard” language were to be regarded as “correct”. Debates about correctness spring out of normative thinking about language (Cameron 1995: 7), where homogeneity is assumed, and there is little tolerance of variation. This also provides the context for the codification of a new variety (= endonormative stabilization in Schneider’s model), and a key stage in the forging of a standard national language (Haugen [1966] 1972: 107–110). Typical instruments of codification are comprehensive dictionaries and grammars, some of which have already been mentioned. Large English dictionaries (such as Bailey’s) appeared in the first half of the 18th century, but it was Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) which was accepted by British public as ultimate codification of the language. It was no doubt helped by Lord Chesterfield’s declaration (1754): that he would “make a total surrender of all [his] rights and privileges in the English language […] to Mr Johnson during the term of his dictatorship”; as well as the fact that the Dictionary was published without editorial change for 70 years (Reddick 1990: 176). Johnson did not identify his content in regional terms: it is projected as a reference form of English (i.e. Standard English) rather than British English. The same goes for the grammars of English published by Lowth and Murray, which were used for reference in England and the American colonies (Baron 1982: 140). In 1775, the jurisdiction of this now codified, Standard English was uncontroversial. It was the national language of Great Britain, and could also claim some sovereignty overseas (a dimension beyond Haugen’s 1966 model). Its sociocultural functions were now taken for granted, in government, education, science, literature, and as the language of literacy throughout the land. English, like French and Italian, was the standardized vernacular in which the nation expressed itself, negotiated with other nations, carried on its colonial activities. It was coincidentally a regional variety, associated with Great Britain including Wales and Scotland, yet it was not seen as a local set of norms, as in stage 4 of Schneider’s model for new varieties of English. For the British it was still “the English language” flagged in the title of Johnson’s dictionary, not British English per se.
3 British English in the colonial and postcolonial era, 18th to 20th century 3.1 Colonial expansion and contraction Successive waves of British settlers with their various regional dialects created an English language matrix in North America, which took on local characteristics through distinctive usages and loanwords from native American languages. The independence of American English as regional alternative was affirmed from the late 18th century by the American Philological Society in terms of “Federal English”. Its principles were articulated especially by Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789), where he urged Americans to seize the opportunity of “establishing a national language and giving it uniformity and perspicuity” (quoted in Baron 1982: 43–44). He
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argued for spelling to be reformed in line with common pronunciation, so as to facilitate literacy and a relatively uniform way of speaking accessible to Americans of every rank. Federal English was thus a means of avoiding the “sociolinguistic cleavage” seen in Britain, and an opportunity to create a unique American orthographic system more regular than the British. This emphasis on language reform was also a strategic defense against the persistent British view that American English was simply corrupt form of Standard English, and their disinclination to accept the “inevitability of colonial Englishes”, to borrow Trudgill’s (2004) title. The American War of Independence in 1776 was the seminal event (Event X) which marked the separation of American English from the parent variety (triggering stage 4, endonormative stabilization [Schneider 2007: 274]). In fact it entailed totally new political perspectives for speakers of the old variety as well as the new. In Great Britain the impact of the war was registered immediately in terms of realpolitik. No longer could it take the American colonies for granted as a source of commodities or a trading partner, or as a recipient of convicts (this was the reason for turning to the newly acquired Australian territory for their resettlement). In the same way, the English implanted in the American ex-colonies could no longer be regarded as an outgrowth of universal Standard English rooted in Great Britain. Yet the reciprocal, that the reach of “British English” was now more circumscribed than before, and might indeed be more strictly identified with Great Britain (Hansen’s second definition), did not come quickly. The first recorded British use of the term “British English” occurs almost a century after the American war of Independence. The Oxford English Dictionary lists just two citations from the later 19th century, both from linguistic commentators: Ellis (1869), comparing British and American pronunciation, and Sweet (1892), commenting on the influence of Cockney on British and Australasian English. But neither seems to entail a conception of British English itself as a regional variety. Fowler in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) uses “British English” in very straightforward contrasts of usage, e.g. British v. American understanding of billion, trillion (page 52 column 2). But elsewhere (-our/-or spellings, page 415 column 1), he speaks more ironically of the British English reaction to -or: “ ‘Yankee’, we say, and congratulate ourselves on spelling like gentlemen”. It suggests that when discussing usage differences, the British public was still inclined to foreground social rather than regional judgments. For the British at large, the notion that English of Great Britain might be a circumscribed regional variety was masked by fact that it was still the reference language of other settlements/colonies within British Commonwealth: Canada, Africa, and in the Asia-Pacific region. British English would therefore be understood in terms of Hansen’s fourth definition (see Section 1 above). Until the later 20th century, citizens of the Commonwealth typically shared in this compact, and were themselves exonormative in thinking about Standard English. This was clearly so in case of those Australians who regarded the British Received Pronunciation (RP) accent as their model, and who even up to World War II still tended to speak of a trip to Britain as “going home”, as if they were still expatriates (Moore 2008: 59). Following World War II, there was an increasingly strong sense of national identity in Australia, and the first moves to codify Australian English with Australian Government Style Manual (1966), and the Macquarie Dictionary (1981). Yet through the efforts of the British Council, British English remained the model for ESL teaching in Asia and Australia (Phillipson 1992: 173–181).
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This coincides with the publishing phenomenon noted by (Clyne 1992: 459–460) in connection with pluricentric languages, that the “dominant” variety (= British English) with its greater publishing resources can easily disseminate its “standard” usage within the jurisdiction of “other” varieties overseas, to challenge their regional norms. In Australia this power was reinforced by publishing cartels which were deconstructed only quite recently, with changes to the Australian Copyright Act in 1991. Until then British agencies managed the export of books to Australia (both which ones and when), and the interests of the local market/speech community were not paramount.
3.2 New models of World English Quasi-imperial notions of British English began to be challenged later in the 20th century in fresh descriptive models of world English, produced by speakers from the Commonwealth or outside the borders of England per se. The most influential has been Kachru’s “three circles” model which created an “inner circle” consisting of British English and American English along with Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English. It thus accords the same status to all native-speaker varieties, whereas the newer varieties in ex-colonial regions (e.g. India, Singapore, Malaysia) spoken by indigenous people as an alternative official language, form the “outer circle”. Beyond them, in the “extending” circle (now called the “expanding circle”) are countries such as China, Indonesia, USSR, in which English is used for auxiliary functions which may lead to its becoming officially recognized. In Kachru’s conception of world English (Figure 120.1), British English loses its historical advantage as the first form of English and the input language to the British Empire. Instead it becomes one set of native speaker varieties, each characteristic of and dominant within its region. Kachru does not apply the word “standard” to these varieties, though others such as McArthur (1987) did so. In McArthur’s model, “British [Standard English]” and “American Standard English” are represented as two of a larger set of regional standards which form a ring around a notional “World Standard English”, set at the heart, as shown in Figure 120.2.
THE ‘INNER CIRCLE’ 242,200,000 USA 56,458,000 UK 25,625,000 Canada 15,763,000 Australia 3,305,000 New Zealand
THE ‘OUTER’ (OR EXTENDED) CIRCLE e.g., 104,204,000 Bangladesh 13,552,000 Ghana 783,940,000 India 21,044,000 Kenya 15,820,000 Malaysia 105,448,000 Nigeria 101,855,000 Pakistan 58,091,000 Philippines 2,584,000 Singapore 16,638,000 Sri Lanka 22,415,000 Tanzania 7,054,000 Zambia
THE ‘EXTENDING CIRCLE’. e.g., China Egypt Indonesia Israel Japan Korea Nepal Saudi Arabia Taiwan USSR Zimbabwe
Figure 120.1: The “three circles” model, proposed by Kachru (1988)
1,045,537,000 50,525,000 176,764,000 4,208,000 121,402,000 43,284,000 17,422,000 11,519,000 19,601,000 279,904,000 8,984,000
p ilip
Ph n pa
Ja
s
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es e
nd
lian E
nglish Austr a
h
w
gli En
Q
Abo
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sc aba
Ath
Inuit E
nglish
Antipodean English
Ukrainian English etc.
East Asian English
lish
sh
gli
g En
lis
h
Nicaraguan etc
sin Pi
tc.
re
a aM
Ind
k uth glish hl ac sh To As et e li ian c. lish ish ian Australian, a/B ng ng En m E E En ngl a Pak New Zealand glis gli East Asian isl itish BBC lish E nglish ista h B s r E g h ni E and South Pacific B Standardizing En ottish Bang ngli c Standard sh lade S English ts shi E Sco English nglis h o rn Nepale h N se Eng Englis British and South Asian lish Weish ts o c Irish Standard Standard(izing) Sri Lankan Ulster S English lish etc. English English Hiberno-Eng WORLD Burmese English etc. Irish English STANDARD African English American English Netwo ENGLISH West, East and rk Stan Nigerian English American dard South(ern) African North English n ia a n ern a h Standard G h s Standard(izing) li M g n i E d n l o a ro English nd English Came Leone Krioin Sou the Sierra ican Pidglish B r n l r f ac Caribbean Canadian tA Eng sh kE Wes Gu yan ngli n Standard Standard g Ken dan E nglish h lish Ap llah n E is English English Ca Ve pa Uga anian Engl lish . rna ish na Ind l l g c n z a t n n a g i i c cu e a d E n b Ta h nE ian lar m n ish E i a a a Z ng n an ge En we ngl e b a l a b ish E g u b b i l n ish r etc ng Zim rica Ca . La Af n h ut tio o a S N n ca i a m Ja
En
ng
E ian
So
se
lish
Eng ian
glis l En
Ne
lay
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Beliz
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Ma
Englis
se
ala Ze
sh
sh gli
Sin Kong
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Hong
Guyane
Ch ine
120. Varieties of English: Standard British English 1887
gl
gli
jan
Ba
ian /
ad
rb
en
Ba
n
dia
ida
M
Fr
Tri n
ec
am
ian
Bah
b ue
En
ish
sh
n /fra
gla
is
w Ne
fou
nd
d lan
En
an E
glis h
ngli
sh
Figure 120.2: The concentric circles model of world English, proposed by McArthur (1987)
McArthur’s concentric circles model goes further than Kachru’s in constructing regional or emerging regional standards, and in leveling the status of all varieties of English in the outermost circle, where he juxtaposes subregional “settler” varieties alongside indigenized varieties, pidgins, and creoles. Yet both models illustrate changing views about the status of British English, in a world where it and American English are seen as regional rather than world standards. Both views emanate from outside: outside
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Great Britain in Kachru’s case, and beyond the borders of England (i.e. Scotland) in McArthur’s case. They project British English within the broader notion of English as a pluricentric language, and take for granted the existence of multiple regional standards of equal status. Less egalitarian views of world English have been projected by European commentators, including Leitner (1992: 225–227) – one of Clyne’s contributors – who constructs a more abstract three-tier model for the varieties of world English. It puts the “Common Norm” on the top tier (cf. “Common English”, Sections 4.2 and 5.1 below), with the British English and American English “typological clusters” of L1 Englishes on the middle tier, and individual “Englishes” on the third tier. The model privileges the British English and American English features of L1 varieties, and seems to downplay their distinctive regional properties as lower-level considerations. As sketched, the model is unclear whether (Standard) British English and American English are both supra-regional and “individual” varieties, or just the first. This is however the pervasive ambiguity affecting the status of British English over the last two centuries.
3.3 Role of British English within Great Britain Perceptions of British English inside Great Britain and the British Isles have always been somewhat ambivalent. Though it might serve as a unifying label, British English is not universally embraced. For some British citizens, this is because it seems to imply a broader base of usage than it actually includes. The “standard” forms as written and spoken are mostly those of southern dialects: where there are contrasting regional usages, British English has tended to privilege southern usages over northern, e.g. got rather than gotten for the past participle of get, and the suggestion that mad is not properly used to mean “angry” (Peters 2004: 229, 333). Recent research (Kortmann 2008: 491–492) has identified multiple morphosyntactic features on which there is a clear North-South divide, including the lack of inversion in wh-questions in the North, and much higher usage of multiple negation used in the South. The southern bias of standard British English underlies the suggestion of Trudgill and Hannah (2002: 2) that it might be more aptly labeled “EngEng”. Yet even “EngEng” suggests that it embraces dialectal material all the way from the West Country to the North Midlands and Tyneside, which is far from reality. Loyalty to one’s local dialect is still strong within British speech communities, and the local accent, especially in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland is rated more highly than the prestige British accent (RP), in terms of prestige as well as social attractiveness (Coupland and Bishop 2007). The notion of “British English” does not yet correlate with a shared linguistic identity throughout Great Britain. On the positive side, there is probably more acceptance of regional divergences at the turn of the millennium. Regional voices reading BBC news has helped to give them higher profile, as well as the special BBC project “Voices 2005” which produced a set of television programs featuring language diversity within Great Britain (Crystal 2006: 187–188). These developments show that RP with its exclusive overtones is no longer the prestige accent, and is probably now spoken by less than 3% of the British population (Hughes and Trudgill 1979: 3). Among younger British people of middle and higher social class, RP has been eclipsed by a London-based accent widely known as “Estuary English”, which is radiating out from the Thames estuary and southeastern England to other parts of the country: “south of a line from the Wash to the Avon”
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(Rosewarne 1994: 4; Altendorf, Chapter 122). The centuries-old regional dialects of Britain are in decline, through their speakers’ exposure to the mass media and through urbanization of much of rural England, as city workers commute long distances to and from affordable homes in the countryside. British-dialect speakers from everywhere are in daily contact with each other. At the same time British English has been taking on new dialect elements from overseas varieties of English since World War II. American servicemen brought their alternative terms for everyday realia (e.g. long-distance (telephone call) for “trunk (call)”, raincoat for “mackintosh”), and by 1970 these terms were established in Great Britain (Strang 1970: 37). Post-war consumption of American movies and other media has also familiarized the British with numerous American words and idioms now current in British English (Peters 2001: 307). The decades following World War II also saw the immigration into Britain of speakers of various Commonwealth varieties of Englishes, for example those from Pakistan into Birmingham and Bradford, and those from Jamaica creating a “British Creole” in London (Sebba 2008). There are thus ethnic dialects within the British English community, like those found within new regional varieties after endonormative stabilization (=differentiation, stage 5 in Schneider’s model). The difference is that the sociolinguistic diversification within Great Britain is not self-generated, but implanted by immigrants from Commonwealth countries, especially the Caribbean islands and the Indian subcontinent, returning with their postcolonial varieties of English. There are mixed communities of both in larger cities, especially London, as conjured up by novelist Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth (2000). An admixture of English interlanguage, spoken by immigrants and workers from countries associated with the European Union is also increasing the diversity. Thus external varieties of English, and of English as spoken by second-language users, are new forces within British English on the threshold of the 21st century, though not canvassed within Schneider’s or Haugen’s models.
3.4 The ideology of the standard With greater ethnic and social diversity in Great Britain than ever before comes the prospect of greater diversification of British English, and conservative reactions are probably to be expected. Yet public movements to defend “standard British English” in the late 20th century may have more to do with the need to reaffirm national identity than affirming the regional status of British English. The idea or ideology of the “standard” language (Milroy 2000: 17) was debated very publicly in Britain following the 1996 BBC Reith lectures (“The language web”), broadcast by linguist Jean Aitchison. Her strategy, to begin by discussing language prejudices, reaped the whirlwind from BBC Radio 4 listeners (Aitchison 1997: 99, 102). A vehement attack on Aitchison and other descriptive linguists was published in the same year by Honey, declaring its position upfront in the title Language is Power: the Story of Standard English and its Enemies. This latter-day conservative reaction in Britain reflects the same concern for authority in language as when language is codified for the first time, taking for granted the need for homogeneity in usage. It has fostered a public “grammar crusade” to maintain language standards in education, and feeds a kind of “moral panic” about the state of the language (Cameron 1995: 78–85). The humorous demagogy of Truss’s very popular book on punctuation Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) capitalized on this public
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sentiment, especially under the emotive banner of The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (meaning no tolerance of incorrect punctuation, rather than no punctuation at all!). Combative publications such as those of Honey and Truss serve to fuel the ideology of the standard and enlist citizens in the “fight for English” (Crystal 2006). They reflect the “complaint tradition” noted in the nativization/codification stage (see above Section 2.3), although resurfacing at a late stage in the evolution of British English as a regional variety. It has not so far been indicated for stage 5 in the evolution of new varieties (Schneider 2007: 56). In the development of British English before and after the American War of Independence, we see some of the sociolinguistic features associated with the evolution of new varieties of English. But they are not so strictly confined to particular stages, and the resemblances to Schneider’s model are sometimes coincidental rather than intrinsic, as with the burgeoning of ethnic dialects in British English in the late 20th century. The public controversy prompted by the rhetoric of maintaining the standard may seem to reflect a kind of sociolinguistic cleavage like that of 18th century England. Yet this millennial linguistic controversy does not align itself with social class distinctions, like those against which Webster’s Federal English was reacting (see above Section 3.1). That apart, the largest single difference for British English is the fact that it was (especially during the 19th and earlier 20th century) the language of empire. That international role, and the contact between it and American English, the other regionalcum-international English, have ensured that there are external forces continually impacting on British English and contributing to linguistic changes within it. These will be the focus of the following section.
4 Linguistic features of Standard British English in the 20th century 4.1 Pluralism in British English: orthography The criteria for a national standard language, noted in the introduction, are that it may be expected to show minimal variation in form alongside a maximal range of functions (Haugen [1966] 1972). Normative processes are associated especially with Schneider’s stage 4 in the evolution of new Englishes, with the emphasis on standardization and the codification of the language. They were particularly noteworthy in the formative stages of American English, with Webster’s emphasis on systematizing it (see above, Section 3.1, and below), and they are part of the current controversy in British English. Standard British English is less homogenous and less standardized than American English in its orthography – as well as its morphology and aspects of syntax, as reported in Rohdenburg and Schlu¨ter (2009: 5–6). A plurality of grapheme-phoneme correspondences was embedded in its orthography from the start, partly because of the conservation of graphemes from Old and Middle English within Chancery English (see above, Section 2.1), and also because of interventions by Tudor orthoepists, sometimes adding diacritic letters, e.g. the e in the plurals of words ending in –o, and at other times subtracting “superfluous letters” such as the unhistorical k from words like magic(k), optic(k), traffic(k) although it returns in inflected forms such as trafficking. Alternation paradigms like these were added in Johnson’s Dictionary for other words, e.g. the removal of the final l from distil(l), fulfil(l), instil(l), which is returned to the inflected forms
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(distilled, etc.) – whereas in American English the base and inflected forms of the stem are the same. Johnson extended the practice of doubling the final l in suffixed forms of other verbs, e.g. level(ler), model(ler), revel(ler), which by their stress on the first syllable belong to a different orthographic paradigm (cf. differed, deferred). These adhoc additions to modern British orthography, and the alternation between -our and -or in the humour/humorous paradigm were among the spelling practices which Webster sought to reform in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). For many British English users they have become the hallmarks of their variety. Paradoxically the greater pluralism of British English orthography makes some of its England-based users more accommodating of “American” spellings than vice versa. This emerged in international surveys of spelling preferences (the Langscape surveys) conducted in 1998–2000 through the magazine English Today. There were marked differences in the responses of “English” and Americans on variable points of spelling and morphology, as in Table 120.1a and Table 120.1b below, extracted from Peters (1998). Table 120.1a: Responses by “English” and Americans on variable points of spelling and morphology, extracted from Peters (1998)
anaemia anemia leukaemia leukemia mediaeval medieval palaeolithic paleolithic septicaemia septicemia
England %
USA %
86 14 73 27 34 66 52 48 60 40
0 100 0 100 2 98 2 92 2 98
Table 120.1b: Responses by “English” and Americans on variable points of spelling and morphology, extracted from Peters (1998)
banjoes banjos flamingoes flamingos frescoes frescos haloes halos mottoes mottos
England %
USA %
24 76 33 67 37 63 25 75 17 83
9 91 5 95 7 93 4 96 0 100
Though the number of “English” respondents to this survey was larger than the American (n = 331 v. n = 56), the returns suggest that the British community is far less monolithic about these spelling and morphological variants. Users of ae and e spellings can be
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found in Britain, sometimes in almost equal proportions (as with pal(a)eolithic), whereas the American community hardly accepts the ae alternative at all. Likewise the accommodation of both -os and -oes plurals by British respondents contrasts with the American commitment to the former. This pluralism allows international publishers to market American versions of books in the UK, but not British versions in the US. British punctuation practices are also pluralistic on many points where those of American writers and publishers are unitary. One example is the regular use in American English of double quotation marks, whereas both single and double quote marks are in use in British English, depending on the publishing house and the domain of use. They differ further over the location of the final full stop relative to the quote marks (Peters 2004: 454–455). In British English punctuation subclasses of shortened forms are marked so as to distinguish “true” abbreviations from contractions (the first set are given stops and the second not: Peters 2004: 126). The fact that American punctuation practices are more standardized than British owes something to their early codification through the Chicago Manual of Style (1906). There was no similar manual for British English until the first edition of Butcher’s Copy-Editing (1975), which notes alternative practices like those just mentioned.
4.2 Pluralism in British English: grammar and corpus research Pluralism in British English grammar can be seen from the first attempts to lay it out in the 17th century, e.g. in Wallis’s (1653) alternative expressions for the future tense laid out in same paradigm, with will attached to second and third persons and shall to the first. It was probably not in line with facts of 17th century English, as Fries (1940: 153–161) found in his research on a corpus of Early Modern English drama. But it was perpetuated by 18th and 19th century grammarians, and left its mark in continuing use of shall as an alternative to will for expressing the future in current British English. Meanwhile in American English, shall is almost obsolete, in corpus data analysed for the Longman Grammar (Biber et al. 1999: 488). Different regional patterns have emerged in modal verb negation, where once again British English is more pluralistic, using both contracted forms (mayn’t, mightn’t, mustn’t, needn’t, shan’t) as well as the uncontracted ones (may not, might not etc). American English meanwhile relies very much on the latter (Algeo 2006: 22–24). The pluralism of British English usage also comes to light in the greater variety of question forms which it uses: do you have any…?, have you any…?, have you got any …?, though the second and third occurred more frequently than the first in British English data from the Longman corpus used by Biber et al. (1999: 216). By contrast, do you have any…? predominated in all the American English data, with very low use of the others. The Longman corpus data showed that the British alternatives were in fact closely associated with particular registers and types of discourse, so that have you got any…? was most common in British conversation, while the more “conservative” have you any…? appeared most often in fiction writing. Stylistic differentiation thus helps to support alternative forms in British English. Corpus research on collocational patterns has also confirmed the greater pluralism of British English. Comparative studies based on digital archives of newspapers (see Hundt 1998; Levin 1998) have shown this in relation to agreement with group nouns such as government; here British English uses both singular and plural, and American
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English almost always the singular. Very large heterogeneous corpora (British National Corpus [BNC], The Bank of English, The Cambridge International Corpus [CIC]) have helped to substantiate divergences in less frequent features of grammar and usage, both new arrivals and late survivals (cf. Kyto¨, Chapter 96). Comparative data from the BNC and CIC showed that the recent use of reticent to mean “reluctant” is formulated as reticent about or reticent to in British English, but only as reticent to in American English (Peters 2004: 474). The longer-term aspects of British English pluralism are considered below in relation to world English (Section 5.2)
4.3 Linguistic and stylistic changes in 20th century British English Dual and divided usage is often associated with linguistic change, through changes in relative currency of the alternatives over a period of time (Aitchison 2001). This phenomenon comes to light in many longitudinal studies of British English, e.g. relative usage of the mandative subjunctive and modal paraphrases (especially with should) from 1900 to 1990 (Overgaard 1995). This recovery of the mandative from the brink of extinction in British English during the course of the twentieth century probably reflects American influence, as Gowers (1976: 211) noted. Changing relationships between grammatical alternatives have been found even in a 30-year period, as shown by their relative frequencies in the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (LOB) (=1960s data) and its 1990s counterpart FLOB (Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus) (Mair and Leech 2006). Among various changes to the verb phrase in British English, they noted the gradual replacement of the canonical modal verbs, e.g must, should with quasimodals have to, ought to. This too may reflect American influence on British English grammar (Collins 2009). The grammar of speech is more pluralistic than that of writing, as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) abundantly shows. Speech accepts variant usages more readily than writing, as with “nonstandard” uses of pronouns, including me in coordinated subject phrases (Quinn 2009), and I in coordinated non-subject phrases especially following prepositions (Peters 2009). The Cambridge Grammar of English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 463) indicates that the latter usage must now be regarded as a “standard variant”. This example also suggests that spoken usages now pass more quickly into writing, helped by changing stylistic norms. Greater colloquialization of written usage has been found in relation to numerous syntactic variables, though this is typically less advanced in British English than American English (Rohdenburg and Schlu¨ter 2009: 366–407). British English however does participate in this trend on variables such as increasing use of quasi-modals, of contractions (Mair 2006: 189–190), and of the accusative with postverbal gerunds (Peters 2006: 774). All these help to create oral effects within writing, and suggest greater acceptance of spoken usage in less formal prose. In any case, the boundaries between different registers are not immutable, but recalibrated over the course of time. Research on texts in the ARCHER corpus (Biber et al. 1994: 9–12) showed for example that journals and diaries became less information-oriented and more interactive between 1750 and 1990, and that this change was more marked in American than British texts. These changes in the character of registers take place in the context of cultural and social change, e.g. the greater or lesser value put upon formality, and on isolating formal discourse from the everyday.
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A potent sociocultural force of the late 20th century is the emphasis on youth style (Mair 2006: 185–186), whose impact on British English pronunciation and usage is of no small interest. It seems likely to accelerate the take up of younger people’s usage within the speech community, in advance of the natural generational change illustrated in Labov’s (1972: 196–197) research on linguistic innovation in the city of New York. There were generational differences in British data returned in the Langscape survey reported above (Section 4.1), showing much greater acceptance of -os plurals by the younger generations, i.e. those under 25, and/or aged 25–44 (Peters 1998: 7–8), which would prefigure faster take up of the streamlined plural forms for words ending in -o than might otherwise happen. Likewise from the generational differences found in British National Corpus data for expressing the future, e.g. very strong endorsement by the 15–24 age group of using gonna for going to (Mair 2006: 99–100), we could predict rapid assimilation of gonna among the quasimodals of standard British English. The contexts of language change in 20th century British English are essentially social – and thus broadly in keeping with the pattern for new Englishes – although the examples discussed in this section are not primarily related to the differentiation of new social groups within Great Britain. Rather they occur through the intersection of British English with external forces and external varieties of English, especially American English. This returns us to the question of how newer and older varieties relate to each other, and especially the changing role of British English as an international standard. Both these take us beyond the evolutionary model for new regional varieties to the question of supra-regional standards of English.
5 British English as an international standard 5.1 British English as a world standard alongside American English The jurisdiction of British English as an international standard has changed continually since 1775, with the processes of colonial expansion and postcolonial contraction. This fluidity would help to explain the dearth of references to its international role before the 20th century. A rare indication is in the title chosen by Ogilvie for his two-volume Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, a British adaptation of a one-volume Webster’s dictionary, published in Glasgow (1847–50). The Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson and Weiner [1884–1928] 1989) does not refer either to “British English” or “international English” in its compass-like diagram of the various types of English. Instead it uses the term “common English”. Yet its positioning is essentially “Britocentric” (Simpson 2001: 276); and though it represents the “Empire of Words” (Willinsky 1994), it does not explicitly identify its content as “imperial” or “international”. Meanwhile the strategic title of Webster’s New International Dictionary (1909) flags the first linguistic challenge from American English to supply the international standard for English. With the new mass media of the 20th century came the first opportunity to disseminate spoken British English as a reference or standard outside Great Britain. Starting in 1932, the BBC Empire Service was able to broadcast British speech in its shortwave radio programs. In its own terms it was a British broadcasting voice – certainly not as used socially within Great Britain, but one which could be used abroad as a reference
120. Varieties of English: Standard British English
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accent (Leitner 1982: 100–104). The notion of “BBC English” as a standard form of British English is first recorded from 1932 on, according to the Oxford Dictionary, though its status in McArthur’s model (Figure 120.2 above) is strictly regional. It was nevertheless invoked in the title of HarperCollins’s BBC English Dictionary (1992), in a partnership between the publisher and the BBC. BBC World continues to broadcast British English voices (with a wider range of accents) in widely accessible TV newscasts. Again these initiatives have been matched for American English speech, first in radio broadcasts with Voice of America (from 1942 on), and from 1980 through the ubiquitous CNN, providing television news and entertainment. In 20th century publishing, British English has shared with American English the role of being “dual” print standards (McArthur 2001: 6–7). Regional publishing cartels often require book rights to be separately negotiated for the British and American markets, and separate British English/American English versions produced for each. For example, the Encarta World Dictionary (1999) was published in two regional versions, one with headwords spelled as for British English (and other Commonwealth countries), the other in American English spelling. Morphological variants e.g. dial(ling) tone, heteronyms e.g. duvet/comforter, and the divergent semantics of words such as wrangler were indicated for the other variety within individual entries. Of course these linguistic elements are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of regionally identifiable aspects of any text. They are also embedded in regional institutions e.g. Congress v. Parliament, alternative measurement systems, in the geographical perspective (east v. west) etc., where the L1 reader’s regional knowledge can be taken for granted. But the regionalized spelling, morphology, and lexicosemantics of the two “print standards” now serve to flag the publication’s orientation as British or American, without explicit labeling. The most explicit and thorough-going recognition of British English as an international language standard, in parallel with American English, can be found in the context of ELT publishing. Though the terms British English and American English are rough linguistic generalizations for their primary speech communities, they are valuable for L2s when focusing on specific learning targets – essential where spoken norms being taught, and helpful in flagging contrastive lexicogrammatical content in language teaching materials. They were used systematically in the “big four” ESL dictionaries published in 1995 (Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Collins Cobuild Dictionary [2nd edn.], Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [3rd edn.] and the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary [5th edn.]), to alert L2 readers to British English pronunciations, spelling, morphology and usage alongside their American counterparts. Apart from their use and application in the print medium, the terms “British English” and “American English” (or flags representing them) are now regularly used worldwide in software tools for editing, as well as in the DVD options for English-language dubbing and subtitles, and the various global positioning devices. All these examples show how recognition of British English as an international standard language has happened in tandem with the recognition of American English. There is little to document the role of British English as the sole international standard, as it might have been seen by Englishmen of the 18th and 19th century. It has effectively shared the role throughout the 20th century.
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5.2 British English in the context of World Standard English The equivalence of British English and American English as world standards is well established, allowing other nations and institutions to select one or the other for official communication and education, according to their past history and/or present realpolitik. British English may be preferred to American English in most of Western Europe and in academic Europe, according to Algeo (2006); whereas in Asia (apart from Hong Kong), the reverse probably holds. Linguistic duality like this is typically asymmetrical, in Clyne’s (1992: 455–457) account of the pluricentric languages of the world. It is especially so where there is no central language academy to stabilize regional variation, as in the pluricentric world of Arabic, and where a new world variety challenges that of the old world. English is more generally challenged by the now enormous numbers of L2s (Crystal 1997: 60–61). With new, economically advantaged centers of publishing in India and China, there are greater economic incentives to find an international print standard which could be used throughout the world: the “World Standard English” of McArthur’s model (Figure 120.2 above). L2 writers, editors and publishers are well placed to create it, and because they do not have a particular commitment to either British or American English, it may well be an amalgam of both. A foretaste of such amalgams can be found in the mix of regional spelling and regional usages in Chinese publications (Peters 2003: 36–37), e.g. in the China Daily newspaper’s combination of spellings such as British English -our and American English -ize (which is used in British English in the ratio of about 2:3 alongside -ise, but not by the British press [Peters 2004: 298]). The Chinese use of -ize probably reflects American English influence in the region, as well as the fact that -ize is the sole American spelling. In general we might expect L2s to prefer the greater uniformity of American English orthography and morphology (see above, Section 4.1), which makes it the more straightforward reference standard. When it comes to regularity in syntactic constructions, the scales may be more evenly balanced, at least on the set of variables investigated by Rohdenburg and Schlu¨ter (2009: 421). Yet their concluding comment is that British English seems to be more receptive to American English syntactic innovations than vice versa (Rohdenburg and Schlu¨ter 2009: 422). Whether this take-up of American English innovations within British English will reinforce their use within “World Standard English” is a further question. The future role of British English in “World Standard English” presents us with open-ended questions, yet its current status as a major regional variety of English is secure. Its role as the national language of Great Britain is not in contention, despite the counterpoint between the ideology of standard and the cultural and linguistic diversification of the British population in the 20th century. With its inherent pluralism, it readily absorbs linguistic elements from other varieties, yet maintains its own identity for its users at home in Great Britain and overseas.
6 References Aarts, Bas and April McMahon (eds.). 2006. Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Aitchison, Jean. 1997. The Language Web: the Power and Problem of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Aitchison, Jean. 2001. Language Change, Progress or Decay. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Algeo, John. 2006. British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baron, Denis. 1982. Grammar and Good Taste. New Haven: Yale University Press. Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan, and Dwight Atkinson. 1994. ARCHER and its challenges: compiling and exploring a representative corpus of historical English registers. In: Udo Fries, Gunnel Tottie, and Peter Schneider (eds.), Creating and Using English Language Corpora, 1–15. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Biber, Douglas, Geoffrey Leech, Stig Johansson, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Butcher, Judith. 1975. Copy-Editing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Clyne, Michael. 1992. Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Collins, Peter. 2009. Modals and quasi modals. In: Pam Peters, Peter Collins, and Adam Smith (eds.), Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English. Grammar and Beyond, 73–88. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Coupland, Nikolas and Hywel Bishop. 2007. Ideologized values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 74–103. Crystal, David. 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David. 2006. The Fight for English: How the Pundits Ate, Shot and Left. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan and Phoebe Clapham. 1996. The borrowing of classical and romance words into English: a study based on the electronic Oxford English Dictionary. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1(2): 199–218. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2000. The Spectator and the politics of social networks. In: Laura Wright (ed.), 195–218. Fowler, Henry W. 1926. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fries, Charles. 1940. American English Grammar. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Gordon, Ian. 1966. The Movement of English Prose. London: Longman. Gowers, Ernest [1954] 1976. The Complete Plain Words. 2nd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hansen, Klaus. 1997. British English and International English – two debatable terms. In: Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), Englishes around the World: Studies in Honor of Manfred Goerlach, 59–70. Vol. 2. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Haugen, Einar [1966] 1972. Language, dialect, nation. In: John Pride and Janet Holmes (eds), 97–111. Honey, John. 1997. Language is Power: The Story of Standard English and its Enemies. London: Faber and Faber. Huddleston, Rodney D. and Geoffrey K Pullum. 2002. Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Arthur and Peter Trudgill. 1979. English Accents and Dialects. London: Edward Arnold. Hundt, Marianne. 1998. New Zealand English Grammar: Fact or Fiction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kachru, Braj. 1988. The sacred cows of English. English Today 16(4): 3–8 Kortmann, Bernd. 2008. Synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in the British Isles. In: Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), 478–496. Kortmann, Bernd and Clive Upton (eds.). 2008. Varieties of English I: the British Isles. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William. 1972. The study of language in its social context. In: John Pride and Janet Holmes (eds.), 180–202. Leitner, Gerhard. 1982. The consolidation of “Educated Southern English” as a model in the early 20th century. International Review of Applied Linguistics 20(2): 91–107.
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Leitner, Gerhard. 1992. English as a pluricentric language. In: Michael Clyne (ed.), 179–237. Levin, Magnus. 1998. Concord with collective nouns in British and American English. In: Hans Lindquist, Staffan Klintborg, Magnus Levin, and Maria Estling (eds.), The Major Varieties of English: Papers from MAVEN 97, 193–204. Vaxsjo¨: Vaxsjo¨ University Press. McArthur, Tom. 1987. The English Languages. English Today 11(3): 9–13. McArthur, Tom. 2001. World English and world Englishes. Language Teaching 34:1–20. McIntosh, Carey. 2008. British English in the Long Eighteenth Century 1660–1830. In: Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (eds.), 228–234. Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mair, Christian and Geoffrey Leech. 2006. Current changes in English syntax. In: Bas Aarts and April McMahon (eds.), 318–342. Milroy, James. 2000. Historical description and the ideology of the standard language. In: Laura Wright (ed.), 11–28. Momma, Haruko and Michael Matto (eds.). 2008. A Companion to the History of the English Language. Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Moore, Bruce (ed.). 2001. Who’s Centric Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Moore, Bruce. 2008. Speaking our Language: the Story of Australian English. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2008. Early Modern English (1485–1660). In: Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (eds.), 209–215. Overgaard, Gerd. 1995. The Mandative Subjunctive in American and British English in the 20th Century. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Peters, Pam. 1998. The extra letter: a report on the LANGSCAPE 1 questionnaire. English Today 14(4): 6–12. Peters, Pam. 2001. Varietal effects: the influence of American English on Australian and British English. In: Bruce Moore (ed.), 297–309. Peters, Pam. 2003. What is international English? In: Pam Peters (ed.), From Local to Global English. Sydney: Dictionary Research Center. Peters, Pam. 2004. Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, Pam. 2006. English usage: description and prescription. In: Bas Aarts and April McMahon (eds.), 759–780. Peters, Pam. 2009. Personal pronouns in spoken English grammar. In: Mats Moberg and Rhonwen Bowen (eds.), Corpora and Discourse and Stuff. Papers in Honour of Karin Aijmer. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds.). 2009. Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pride, John and Janet Holmes (eds.). 1972. Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Quinn, Heidi. 2009. Pronoun forms. In: Pam Peters, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (eds.), 31–48. Reddick, Allen. 1990. The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1747–1773. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rohdenburg, Gu¨nter and Julia Schlu¨ter (eds.). 2009. One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosewarne, David. 1994. Estuary English: tomorrow’s RP? English Today 10(1): 3–8. Schneider, Edgar. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebba, Mark. 2008. British Creole: morphology and syntax. In: Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), 463–477. Simpson, John. 2001. Queen’s English and people’s English. In: Bruce Moore (ed.), 269–283.
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Simpson, J.A and E.S.C. Weiner [1884–1928] 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Jeremy. 2008. Varieties of Middle English. In: Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (eds.), 198–206. Starnes, De Wit and Gertrude Noyes. 1946. English Dictionaries from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604– 1755. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Strang, Barbara. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2010. The Bishop’s Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Dialect Formation: the Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah. 2002. International English. 4th edn. London: Arnold. Truss, Lynne. 2003. Eats, shoots and Leaves. London: Profile Books. Tucker, Susie. 1961. English Examined: Two Centuries of Comment on the Mother-Tongue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willinsky, John. 1994. Empire of Words: the Reign of the OED. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wright, Laura (ed.). 2000. The Development of Standard English 1300 to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pam Peters, Sydney (Australia)
121. Varieties of English: Received Pronunciation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Defining Received Pronunciation: an overview Antecedents: supra-regional attitudes Received Pronunciation: belief and behavior Modern RP: the crisis of definition Summary References
Abstract This chapter explores the history and identity of ‘Received Pronunciation’ or RP, spanning the 18th century, when comment on a non-localized British accent first appears, to contemporary discussion in terms of both usage and attitudes. Charting early attempts to disseminate and foster a reference model for spoken English, and the social meanings which could also thereby be cultivated, it also uses archive material to examine particular case-histories of its adoption and use. New archive material is also used to explore its role (and explicit fostering) in institutions such as the early BBC. Changes in modern RP (and attendant crises of definition and identity) are given careful consideration in order to evaluate the question of its continued validity, either as label or linguistic reality.
1 Defining Received Pronunciation: an overview 1.1 Controversy and consensus Both the identity and role of Received Pronunciation (RP) have been the subject of considerable discussion. It is “an anachronism in present-day democratic society”, Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1899–1913
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Abercrombie (1965: 14) declared; “old-fashioned and misleading”, Roach (2000: viii) later concurred. Intentionally displaced by other terms (“BBC Pronunciation” [Roach 2000], “non-regional pronunciation” [Collins and Mees 2003], “Reference Pronunciation” [Rosewarne 1984]), its claims as automatic reference model in dictionaries and in foreign language teaching have likewise recently been contested. “If we had a completely free choice of model accent it would be possible to find more suitable ones”, Roach (2000: 5) argues, advocating Scottish or Irish accents instead. Traditional images of RP nevertheless continue, foregrounding both social evaluation and supraregionality as salient elements in its construction (“A prestige way of speaking […] the speech of educated people, not restricted to any area of England” (Kreidler 1997: 4), “the accent spoken throughout England, by the upper-middle and upper classes […] widely used in the private sector of the education subsystem” [Giegerich 1992: 43]). Other writers actively contest the viability of socially-orientated (and especially class-based) meanings. It is “impossible actually to identify the accent under discussion in social terms”, Ramsaran (1990: 178) avers, not least since “it is no longer possible to talk in […] clear-cut terms of social classes; nor is there any longer so straightforward a correlation between social background and profession or type of education in presentday society”. Elsewhere the demise of RP is predicted – or already described – in favor of another variety of speech, widely labeled “Estuary English” (see e.g. Ballard 2001: 188). This, however, attracts its own elements of controversy: it is “a putative variety of Southern British English located in the Home Counties” (Przedlacka 2000: 19); “in reality there is no such accent, and the term should be used with care” (Roach 2000: 4). This lack of consensus indicates something of the complexity involved in understanding RP. Like language itself, its meaning is open to flux and shift, while the socio-historical construction of this speech variety can, as we will see, still impact on how it is perceived and described, especially in attitudinal terms. History is also important in underscoring fundamental changes in its composition and identity; what “received pronunciation” signified in the 18th or 19th centuries clearly does not correspond to 21st century debates on its role and use (especially in the levels of socio-cultural resistance which such debates can reveal). Both social and linguistic change influences what RP is, or is conceived to be. Early 20th-century definitions, for example, engaged with hierarchical and socially evaluative meanings with apparent ease; for Wyld (1934: 605), RP was “the best type of English”, distinguished by the “marked distinctiveness and clarity of its sounds” and firmly embedded in models of emulation and aspiration: “a type of English which is neither provincial nor vulgar, a type which most people would willingly speak if they could, and desire to speak if they do not”. “Received Standard Spoken English” was, moreover, the proper object of academic study (“the main object of our solicitude”); Wyld’s (1914) Short History of English hence focused on “the origin and development of that form of English which is now spoken by educated and well-bred people” (Wyld 1914: 25), largely excluding the regional voice from consideration (“the great majority of the English Dialects are of very little importance as representatives of English speech” [Wyld 1914: 24]). This chapter will also examine the origins and development of “received spoken English” (and its current use), if from a somewhat different perspective. Central aspects of its historical formation – in terms of both constituent features and ideological matrices – will be explored in detail (especially with reference to traditional notions of “standardness”, “prestige”, or “educatedness”). Emphasis will, however, be placed
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on its pluralism and diversity; if RP suggests, for some, a monolithic and largely invariant form, linguistic reality remains at some remove. As Trask (1996: 301) confirms, RP embraces not merely “a certain accent of British English” but “more precisely a group of closely related accents” operating along a spectrum of more or less advanced/ conservative. Wells’s (1982) U-RP (upper-class RP), general RP, and Adoptive RP, as well as “near-RP” confirm a similarly pluralist identity. As we will see, the precise identity of what is deemed to be “general” or mainstream RP can, however, also occasion considerable debate.
1.2 Speaking ‘without an accent’ It was Alexander Ellis, dubbed “the creator of the scientific study of English phonetics” (Anon. 1890: 419), who provided the first formal specifications of RP, noting that “[i]n the present day […] we may recognise a received pronunciation all over the country” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume I: 23). Basing his comments on empirical observation (and detailed transcription), Ellis went on to explore the characteristics of speakers who typified such usage; if markers of geographical origin were absent, other associations – of education or status – were marked. “Received English pronunciation” was, for example, in evidence in the speech of “men of undoubted education” such as Benjamin Jowett (the President of Balliol College, Oxford), Sir G. B. Airy (President of the Royal Society), Dr Hooker (President of the British Association), as well as in the observed usage of politicians and “men of science” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume IV: 1208–1213). Ellis (1869–89: Volume V: 6) was also first to deploy the initialism by which Received Pronunciation would often later be known: “rp., received pronunciation, or that of pronouncing dictionaries and educated people”. It was likewise Ellis’s definition of accent which appeared in the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, Murray et al. 1884–1928). As Ellis explained, speaking “with an accent” was, by this time, assumed to be a signifier of regional marking (and implicit “deviation” from a norm): “This utterance consists mainly in a prevailing quality of tone, or in a peculiar alteration of pitch, but may include mispronunciation of vowels and consonants, misplacing of stress, and inflection of a sentence. The locality of a speaker is generally marked by this kind of accent”. “Received pronunciation” was, in contrast, already participating in that shift by which paradoxical (if popular) images of the “accentless” – what Lippi-Green (1997: 41) terms “the myth of non-accent” – surrounded this mode of speech. Ellis’s work in the late 19th century isolated a number of distinctive features about the identity of this particular speech variety. Earlier writers had stressed that “in every province there are peculiarities of dialect, which affect (…) the pronunciation” (Campbell 1788: 353). Ellis’s “received pronunciation” was significantly different, its use, as his definition of accent within the OED specifies, transcending regional boundaries “all over the country”. Supra-local in this distributional sense, it was, Ellis makes clear, a variety which could also be defined in terms of a particular social distribution. In an era in which a general education system was instituted only in 1870, the notion of “educatedness” operated as a telling marker of status, often used with euphemistic intent (not least given the existence of non-localized models of elite education; see further Honey 1988; Mugglestone 2007: 212–257). Equally pertinent in modern attempts to define RP is therefore Ellis’s (1869–89: Volume IV: 1215) assertion that “there is no such thing as educated English pronunciation. There are pronunciations of English
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people more or less educated in a multitude of other things, but not in pronunciation”. If Ellis’s “received” (“Generally adopted, accepted, approved as true or good”, OED s. v.1) intentionally suggested widespread recognition (as well as a certain validation) for this form of speech in the late 19th century, his use of “educated” simultaneously confirmed its social restriction. It is, and was, the voice of a minority (usually estimated as being used by somewhere between 3–5% of the population [Trudgill 2001]).
2 Antecedents: supra-regional attitudes 2.1 ‘Received English’ in the 18th and 19th Centuries The idea of the “received” – and the perceived unacceptability of that not so judged – has a long history in English. “Received” English was, for example, carefully placed against that which must be “rejected” on the opening page of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755). While Johnson’s concern was with lexis and semantics (and the usage of “polite writers”), the extension of such ideas to pronunciation was apparent elsewhere. John Walker, author of a highly influential pronouncing dictionary (in print throughout the 19th century), had sought to determine what he already termed “received pronunciation”. This, he stated (Walker 1774: 17), provided the best illustration of the proper enunciation of vowels in unaccented syllables. “Those sounds […] which are the most generally received among the learned or polite […] are the most legitimate”, he added (Walker 1791: viii). Notions of “received pronunciation” are nevertheless significantly different at this time even if, on closer examination, important continuities also emerge. The “received” English speech of the 18th century remained largely localized, though it was self-evidently part of the prescriptive purpose of many writers (including Walker) to widen access and assimilation to this chosen norm. Contemporary definitions of a reference accent at this point cluster around specifications of both geography and status – “THE PRESENT PRACTICE OF POLITE SPEAKERS IN THE CITY OF LONDON”, Perry (1775: dedication) states. Evidence of language attitudes, however, reveal that regional accents were already framed in a range of supra-local evaluative paradigms. Writers such as Johnston, Walker, and Sheridan provide instructions for the “remedy” of Irish, Scots, Cockney, or south-western pronunciation (see e.g. Johnston 1764: viii). As Buchanan (himself a Scot) noted of educational desiderata in this matter, “It ought to be, indispensably, the care of every teacher of English, not to suffer children to pronounce according to the dialect of that place of the country where they were born or reside, if it happens to be vicious” (Buchanan 1757: xli, Note). “Viciousness” was a recurrent element in such negative positioning, as was “uncouth” with its suggestion of a type of pronunciation which was literally not “known”, or “received”. As for Perry, “proper” pronunciation was elsewhere, founded in the “London standard” and a “metropolitan” habit of speech. What is noteworthy is the pervasive and overt privileging of one speech variety in ways which are already (a) semantically and ideologically removed from regionality (the notion of the “provincial” and “vicious”) and (b) strongly marked in social terms. The “London” speech commended is that of the upper strata: as Sheridan (1762: 30) noted, while “two different modes of pronunciation prevail” in the capital, “polite pronunciation” must be distinguished – and preferred – to that “current in the city, and […] called the cockney”. A highly specific engagement with the socio-phonetic associations
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of different speech varieties was also apparent: “Surely every gentleman will think it worth while, to take some pains, to get rid of such evident marks of rusticity” (Sheridan 1762: 33). “Polite pronunciation”, framed by a different metalanguage (“polished”, “pure”), was conversely “a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people, or members of the beau monde” (Sheridan 1762: 30). As here, social and linguistic hegemonies intentionally unite, proving a long history for the notion of an elite model in English pronunciation, as well as attendant language attitudes.
2.2 Constructing a reference model What is revealed by such discourses is the assimilation of issues of accent within ideological manifestations of standardization, as well as the polarized social (and evaluative) meanings of different forms of speech. In essence, this already provides compelling evidence of the existence for pronunciation of what Lippi-Green (1997) terms a “language subordination model”. A further important element within the ideological remit of many works on language at this time was, however, the intended supra-regional dissemination of one form of pronunciation. While contemporary dictionaries and grammars provided non-localized reference models for spelling, lexis, and grammar, the absence of a national reference model for pronunciation remained conspicuous. Buchanan’s 1766 Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation typifies the thrust to resolve such uncertainties. Significantly unlike the meanings which later frame a supra-regional variety, however, Buchanan’s ideal of a shared and “standard” mode of speech (to “obviate a vicious provincial pronunciation”) also intentionally constructed a new equality of communication for all British speakers, “joining them into one social family” and aiding to “remov[e] national prejudice, which has too long subsisted, and been chiefly fostered […] from their different forms of speech” (Buchanan 1766: xii). Sheridan too presented the nationwide (and top-down) assimilation of a form of speech based on a metrocentric elite as an instrument of egalitarian reform – a means by which “all natives of these realms” will, literally and metaphorically, “speak the same language”: Thus might the rising generation, born and bred in different Countries, and Counties, no longer have a variety of dialects, but as subjects of one King, like sons of one father, have one common tongue. All native of these realms, would be restored to their birthright in commonage of language, which has been too long fenced in, and made the property of a few. (Sheridan 1761: 36)
Such texts set the ideological stage, as it were, for the notion of a supra-regional speechvariety and its stated desirability, prestige, and social value. Accent is, in effect, constructed as a commodity to be acquired or eliminated, with one accent in particular being made the focus of statusful accommodation. In terms of the establishment of a reference model for pronunciation (often seen as a salient aspect of modern RP) it is important to recognize that, at this point, it became the accepted (and “received”) convention that one accent alone – founded in the discourse of a social elite, and framed by discussions of explicit and overt prestige – was codified and transcribed in the pronouncing dictionaries which, courtesy of writers such as Sheridan, Walker, and Buchanan,
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emerged as an important new genre. Johnson’s (1755) decision to mark merely word stress was deemed inadequate; instead increasingly complex notational systems encoded, for a national audience, an /h/-full, increasingly non-rhotic accent characterized by the presence of the FOOT-STRUT split, by the phonemic (rather than allophonic) status of /ŋ/, by a clearly differentiated pattern of sounds in words such as moor and more, as well as by the (at times controversial) tendency to deploy the BATH-TRAP split. Supra-regional in intended dissemination and use, such features also importantly confirm a localized bias for this reference model in southern rather than northern or midlands varieties of English. Transcriptions in Walker (1791) hence establish /ʌ/ rather than /ʊ/ in words such as cut; those whose habitual language habits were /h/-less were likewise encouraged to read relevant sections of the dictionary aloud until, as Sheridan (1762: 35) stated, “an habit is obtained of aspirating strongly”. Other desirable features – the presence of the “delicate” palatal glide in words such as garden or kind (/gj-/, /kj-/) could be acquired in the same way. While the “non-localized” or “non-regional” therefore form constituent parts of many later definitions of RP, 18th-century lexicographical practice (and the early development of a supra-regional reference model for pronunciation) nevertheless already indicate certain typological problems in the unqualified use of this term.
3 Received Pronunciation: belief and behavior 3.1 Variation and norms Case histories such as that of the scientist Michael Faraday (who shed his low-status – and “non-received” – cockney accent in a course of instruction with the elocutionist Benjamin Smart [Mugglestone 2011]) illustrate, of course, the kind of top-down modeling envisaged as salient in the establishment of a national “received” pronunciation. As Smart (1836: xl) explained, “the common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place of birth are lost, and nothing appears to indicate any other habits of intercourse than with the well-bred or well-informed, wherever they may be found”. Here, if the formal diction of RP is absent, the identity of this linguistic variety – defined by both supra-regional and social practice – is again unmistakable. While transcriptions within Smart’s dictionary again encode this accent as a national reference model for all, issues of accent prejudice (and their consequences) are, however, palpable, displaying clear affinities with the “accent-bar” which Abercrombie (1965: 13) later censured as part of the social patterning of 20th-century RP (see further Section 4.1). “A man displaying either [“cockney” or “rustic” pronunciation] must have large portion of natural talent or acquired science, who surmounts the prejudice it creates”, Smart (1836: xl) noted. Smart, working within an often prescriptive remit, can articulate this supra-regional norm with categorical intent. Ellis, just over 20 years later, would, however, strive to engage with the same subject with descriptive clarity, and as part of the philological revolution of the late 19th century. The distance between the two is significant. Particularly important is Ellis’s careful distinction between the existence of RP as part of language “belief ”, and as its status as an actual variety of speech (see e.g. Fabricius’s [2006] similar distinction of RP as praxis and RP as ideology). “Belief ”, Ellis points out, underpins assumptions that RP is a “standard” of the language in evaluative and pragmatic senses:
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there prevailed, and apparently there still prevails, a belief that it is possible to erect a standard of pronunciation which should be acknowledged and followed throughout the countries where English is spoken as a native tongue, and that in fact that standard already exists, and is the norm unconsciously followed by persons who, by rank or education, have most right to establish the custom of speech. (Ellis 1869–89: Volume I: 624)
Against this, Ellis placed a more complex description which excludes the endorsement of RP as a standard of speech founded on either uniformity or “correctness”: “At present there is no standard of pronunciation” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume I: 630). “Nothing approaching to real uniformity prevails” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume I: 626); instead “there are many ways of pronouncing English correctly according to the usage of large numbers of persons of either sex in different parts of the country, who have received a superior education” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume I: 630). That “educated people, born and bred in Northern England” had patterns of speech which could and did command prestige was stressed by Lloyd (1899: preface). If RP was codified (the accent of “pronouncing dictionaries” Ellis [1869–89: Volume V: 6] specified) and was arguably a “standard” in this sense (see Milroy 2001), it was, however, the variability – as well as the social restriction – of late 19th-century RP which Ellis repeatedly emphasized. Containing within it the cross-currents of conservatism and innovation, RP was, in reality, far from uniform – age, gender, and register all impacted on the precise realizations used. Words such as name, same, go, know could be pronounced with monophthongs or diphthongs, the latter more apparent in younger speakers. Instability in palatal glides was widely in evidence; while the presence of /j/ in words such as Tuesday (/tjuːz–/), tulip (/tjuːlip/) was then seemingly secure, its use in words such as kind was “rapidly dying out”; though /gj/ (in regarding) was “common” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume IV: 1214). Still greater variability attended the pronunciation of vowels in words such as fast, bath, lost, off, revealing some of the complexity – and social undercurrents – of speech at this time. While the move away from the TRAP/CLOTH vowels is not found in regional accents north of the Trent, the fact that fully lengthened and retracted vowels in words such as fast were strongly associative of Cockney seems to have acted as a socio-phonetic deterrent for some RP speakers throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; Ellis (like phoneticians such as Ripman and Ward in the early 20th century) notes a gender-specific preference within RP for /æ/ by “some ladies”, as well as the use of a variety of other possible realizations (see Mugglestone 2007: 79–82). The use of a lengthened sound in words of the CLOTH set, as in off [ɔːf ] could attract similar resistance across the RP spectrum (though it became characteristic of U-RP). As such variabilities indicate, the fact that RP was, and is, far from monolithic remains an important – but often forgotten aspect of its identity. Ideological and well-established associations of RP with “correctness” could, however, already lead to attitudinal resistance to certain features which were nevertheless also characteristic markers of its use. Non-rhoticity in post-vocalic and final position was, for example, popularly proscribed as well as being, in reality, a descriptive feature of a supra-regional accent in which, as Ellis (1869–89: Volume I 593) affirmed, words such as farther: father, stalk: stork were regularly homophonous. Similar was the formal resistance to the shift of /hw/ to /w/ in words such as where. As both Ellis and Henry Sweet stressed, the presence of /hw/ confirmed the speech-conscious (and the domains of adoptive RP) rather than the speech-patterns of general RP. Ellis’s “actual observations on
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unstudied pronunciations”, as he recognized, thereby provided “a new datum in phonology, because they enable us to estimate the real amount of floating diversity of pronunciation at any time” (Ellis 1869–89: Volume IV: xvii). Scrutinizing these, we can, for instance, note the continuity within late 19th-century RP of conservative forms such as humour with initial /j-/ (/jumə/), the rise of diphthongal enunciations in words such as me /miɪ/, and, in “young educated London”, the increasing consolidation of the lengthened retracted /ɑː/ in ask. Improved communication – and especially the extension of a system of elite and significantly non-localized education in the form of the British public schools – led to a further strand in the supra-regional accent as a particular mark of social identity. The phonetician Daniel Jones was explicit on the socio-phonetic modeling of this form of speech; transcriptions and articulatory description in his writings from the early decades of the 20th century detail “the pronunciation […] of Southern Englishmen who have been educated as the great public boarding schools” or “that most generally heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools”. It was, he noted, “also used by a considerable proportion of those who do not come from the South of England but who have been educated at these schools” (Jones 1917: viii). Jones here redefined RP once more; it was now “PSP” (“Public School Pronunciation”) – a term which gave a very specific social construction to the notion of “educated” speech, as well as further underpinning enduring associations of privilege, prestige, and class. Jones’s influential role as probably the foremost British phonetician in the first half of the 20th century was to be of critical importance in reifying the role of RP in language teaching.
3.2 “BBC Pronunciation” Jones had an additional role as a founder member of the BBC’s Committee on Spoken English in 1926. The BBC, however, would give a new reality to the notion of “received” English. Those equipped with “receivers” (or with access to one) could now, quite literally, receive “BBC pronunciation” via this new supra-regional form of communication. While initial notions of “BBC pronunciation” were distinctly liberal in their composition, the rise of the announcer as a specialized role and, increasingly, the sense that announcers should undertake formal speech-training which, at least on the national program, meant the eradication of regionally-marked forms, meant that “BBC pronunciation” was ultimately to become yet another synonym for RP (see Mugglestone 2008). “B.B.C. English, standard English as maintained by B.B.C. announcers; so B.B.C. pronunciation”, the OED later explained (s.v. B.B.C. English). That this notion of a “standard” was not misplaced in the interpretative slant adopted by the OED is clear from internal BBC documentation: “The B.B.C. is concerned only with questions of pronunciation, and the standard of pronunciation adopted by its official speakers is regarded more and more […] as a standard of currency to be aimed at”, one which aims “to steer a course midway between the lapses of the uneducated, and the affectations of the insufficiently educated”. Moreover, “by constantly repeating one alternative it will give that one greater currency, and so tend to bring about the disuse of others. This will be a boon to many of us” (BBC Written Archives Center, WAC S259/1). In the light of recent debates on the labeling of RP, history here offers a few timely reminders of the prescriptive – and conservative – associations of “BBC Pronunciation”.
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The first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926 discussed Item 5 extensively: “Attitude of the Committee towards the modern tendency of slovenly speech” (BBC WAC [BBC Written Archives Center, Caversham] R6/201/1: Minute Book 1926–33). Representative of such “slovenliness” were mergers resulting from non-rhoticity, the loss of distinctiveness between /hw/ and /w/, as well the on-going merger (attested already in the 19th century) by which words such as shore: sure, more: moor were homophones. Announcers were instructed to rectify such features in their use of English on the airwaves. Reintroducing /hw/ was deemed to be a lost cause, even in the highly idealized forms of RP endorsed in principle (even if not always adhered to in practice). Detailed examination of the issues which surrounded broadcast English can further illuminate the divide between belief and behavior in terms of RP. While the attempt to set up a normative reference model for the nation was gradually abandoned, notions of “BBC English” as an evaluative standard remained prominent. Responses by listeners are, in this context, highly useful in indicating something of the reality of the constituent features of RP at this time. A prevalent fiction (with its legacies in modern language attitudes, as well as 19th-century comment [Mugglestone 2007: 91–94]) was the absence of intrusive /r/ from modern RP. “I know as a fact that most educated speakers of Southern English insert an r in idea(r) of, India(r) Office […] yet they all obstinately deny it”, Sweet (1890: viii) had expostulated. Early listeners to the BBC maintained a healthy complaint tradition on this matter (it was a “solecism”, an “abomination”, a “cockney illiteracy”), though the frequency of their letters provides a useful index to the currency of the form itself. Similar resistance was directed at the smoothing evident in words such as power, at the loss of /ʊə/ as in sure (a change in progress since the mid-19th century) as well as, in an interesting precursor of what is often adjudged to be a defining feature of “estuary English”, to the use of allophonic glottal stops where “proper English” demanded [t]. Such complaints also indicated the extent to which, as Cruttenden (1994: 78) confirms, RP “often became identified in the public mind with ‘BBC English’”. That this public – and often conservative – image (popularly bound up with notions of “correctness” and “proper standards”) could conflict with the more complex reality of spoken English on the BBC (and of RP per se) should, of course, also be remembered.
4 Modern RP: the crisis of definition 4.1 Distance and resistance By 1963, even the BBC had abandoned the “public school voice” as a socio-phonetic norm; “red-brick” accents were now desirable. The BBC needed to “break away” from the “public-School voice” (BBC WAC [BBC Written Archives Center, Caversham] R34/587/4 Policy Presentation Pronunciation, 1963–64). Jones (1950: 3) too abandoned “PSP” as an accentual norm; his revised Pronunciation of English rejected the idea of a “standard” accent, or that speakers should strive to accommodate to this as a normative reference model. Jones stressed instead the pragmatic utility (and sense of compromise) by which he would deal with “widely understood pronunciation” or “what may be termed ‘Received Pronunciation’ […] This is not a particularly good term, but it is doubtful whether a better one can be found” (Jones 1950: 4). A sense of critical unease with the connotative values – and social meanings – of RP would henceforth be a prominent strand in linguistic comment. Abercrombie (1965: 13)
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forcefully argued against the perpetuation of a system by which, in a form of phonetic apartheid, speakers were, in effect, segregated by an “accent-bar” which engendered both prejudice and discrimination: “your social life, your career, or both, may be affected by whether you possess [RP] or not”. The analogies with race (and racism) stress the danger of distinctions founded on differences which are inherently superficial. Ideologically, the maintenance of RP was, for Abercrombie, already seen as productive of intolerance, and a dangerously subjective sense of inequality. Subsequent decades have witnessed the further attitudinal distancing of RP – as “plummy”, “lah-di-dah” or, as verified in subjective reaction tests, as resonant of coldness (if intelligence) and lack of friendliness. Many regionally marked accents have, in turn, moved into more positive attitudinal areas (trustworthiness, integrity, warmth). Sheridan’s (1762: 30) selected images of regional “disgrace” would now be seen as unacceptably discriminatory while 18th-century images of a single “received” accent for all seem impossibly naı¨ve. Popular comment has, if anything, tended to suggest that it is RP (or more particularly U-RP, “Refined RP”) which is now potentially a social handicap or impediment, not least given the persuasive power of covert prestige for many speakers. Easy equations of upper class and “prestige” are also problematic. Instead, given popular modern rhetorics of equality and egalitarianism, the very notion that the speech of certain speakers is “received” and that of others not, is judged “invidious” (Lewis 2004: 223) especially when, as Milroy (2001: 17) notes, “it may not be clear exactly WHO does the permitting and receiving”. As in Ellis, however, “belief ” and “behavior” must be kept apart. As a label, RP can clearly evoke a range of negative associations, bound up with traditional images of class and privilege, and uncomfortably resonant of elitism (and the validation of such). On the other hand, it has to be remembered that the essentially pyramidal image of British society remains in place, while the stratificational patterns of accent which accompany this, with those at the bottom of the social pyramid exhibiting the greatest regional marking, likewise endures. RP speakers are, conversely, still located at its apex, even if this apex in social terms now includes non-RP and especially near-RP speakers. The search for a less loaded, more neutral, designation for the speech of those who do not reveal their regional origins by means of accent has, as we have seen, prompted a proliferation of alternative labels. Some of these have already been listed (see Section 1.1), though more could be added: e.g. “BR”, denoting “British English” (Upton et al. 2001), “General British” (Lewis 1972, 2004). These can, however, raise further problems, apart from the obvious lack of consensus among different writers. Can “nonregional pronunciation” serve as an effective label if the forms described still maintain a typological bias towards southern rather than northern phonologies and, indeed, as many writers argue, also reveal a far greater presence in distributional terms in southern rather than northern Britain? Likewise, in an era in which the BBC is actively extending the accents used upon the airwaves, including in authoritative domains such as the news (and the traditional bastions of RP, on BBC Radios 3 and 4), the label “BBC pronunciation” can also create problems. Given the fact that “[t]he number of native speakers of this accent who originate in Ireland, Scotland and Wales is very small and probably diminishing, and it is therefore a misnomer to call it an accent of BRITISH English” (Roach 2004: 239), Lewis’s favored “GB” (“General British”) is equally liable to dissent. Controversy points in three main directions. First, the attempt to find a label with less ideological baggage remains a significant issue for many writers. Second is the precise
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identity of what is, in effect, being denoted by this proffered range of terminological equivalents. Outside the undeniable elements of semantic engineering (“because of the dated – and to some people objectionable – social connotations, we shall not normally use the label RP” [Collins and Mees 2003: 3]), it is, for example, clear that “BR”, “GB”, “Reference pronunciation” et al. all denote a supra-regional accent spectrum, operating in a continuum in the upper regions of the socio-phonetic accent pyramid. RP is also embedded in a temporal continuum. Jones (1950) and Abercrombie (1965) describe – as might be expected – what is now seen as “Conservative RP” or “Traditional RP” (Cruttenden’s “Refined RP”, Wells’s “U-RP”). While the latter now generates perhaps the greatest degree of attitudinal resistance, modern supra-regional reference models are often located in a different generational space. Upton et al. (2001: xii) select “a younger unmarked RP […] that accent which will be most widely acceptable as well as most intelligible to native BR speakers”, stressing both its modernity and its avoidance of the negative connotations which surround “marked” or upper-class RP. A similar age-shifted preference is evident in Collins and Mees (2003: 4): “educated middle and younger generation speakers in England who have a pronunciation which cannot be pinned down to a specific area”. As the 21st century counterparts of Ellis’s “young educated London”, such younger speakers are in the process of redefining mainstream RP, revealing the consolidation of features which were marginal (or “advanced”) within traditional and older models. “RP, unlike Standard English, appears to be changing quite rapidly”, observes Kerswill (2007: 480). Age can thereby become a particularly important variable in differentiating modern trends within RP, as in the increasing use of an affricate in tulip, Tuesday with /tʃ-/ rather than conservative /tj/-) – a feature already detected by Ellis in his “unstudied pronunciation” of the 19th century, and condemned as a disturbing tendency in the RP of the early 20th century by the highly conservative Robert Bridges (who also chaired the BBC Advisory Committee). Here too is the increased presence of allophonic syllable-final glottals, or yod-coalescence in words such as suit (/suːt/ rather than /sjuːt/). That RP changes, like all other forms of speech, is unsurprising. That a new designation is felt to be required for such changes might, however, have surprised Ellis (who stressed the importance of realising that, within “the floating diversity of pronunciation […] the pronunciation of a future generation crystallizes, only to be dissolved by a fresh mentruum” [Ellis 1869–89: Volume IV: xvii]). As Fabricius (2006) points out, “if we start using a completely new label, we lose the link with past forms of the variety”. While some linguists have advocated that this is precisely what is desired – and that a new variety is perceptible (see Milroy 2001) – others are less convinced. RP is necessarily “an evolving mode of pronunciation in its phonological system, its phonetic realization, and the incidence of its phonemes” (Cruttenden 1994: 272). Moreover, as Maidment argues with reference to “estuary English”, often seen as RP’s more meritocratic successor, whether this exists – or is in fact merely a more informal and advanced RP – is a further important consideration. Features such as [l-] vocalization (as in milk), once categorized as “near-RP” or “non-RP” (Wells 1997) and often used to hallmark “Estuary English” (see Altendorf, Chapter 122), can readily be located in the supraregional speech of younger RP-speakers. Notions of RP (and the accent spectrum it encompasses) in this sense need to keep pace with change in progress, and the import of both situational and speaker variation. The third aspect of controversy centers on the desirability of retaining RP as a reference accent for English as a foreign language (EFL), given its minority status in terms
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of speaker demographics. Counterarguments here tend to stress RP’s status as the most fully documented accent of English, as well as the importance of a teaching a realistic, and modern, set of features (and awareness of concurrent variants). The conflicted sense of what RP is – ideologically and phonetically – can nevertheless be disturbingly prominent in this context. As Collins and Mees (2003: 179) note, in words such as tune, duke the presence of /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ is widespread though this “still starts alarm bells ringing for many speakers of traditional RP”. “I like to think of the avoidance of this development as a touchstone of RP (as against Estuary English (EE), which clearly accepts it); but I am not sure that this claim can really be maintained”, Wells (1997) admits, likewise revealing the legacies of RP as model of correctness versus RP as evolving language practice. What, precisely, the learner should acquire can thereby be open to dispute. If intrusive /r/ is “disliked and disapproved of ” by the “speech-conscious” while also “objectively […] part of RP”, should this too be endorsed or avoided? “For EFL we might […] agree that the learner should be aware of it receptively, but ignore it in production” (Wells 1997), Wells tentatively concludes, though this too, in reality, merely affirms the divide between what RP is in objective or, conversely, in subjective/ ideological senses.
5 Summary 5.1 RP in the 21st-century: ideology, identity, and language praxis These levels of ongoing controversy confirm that, as yet, there are no easy solutions to issues of this kind. Whatever RP is, it is clearly not neutral in social terms, and its supraregional use permeates the upper levels of society. Near-RP can, Upton (2004) argues, moreover be seen to characterize an expanding social base (even if one which remains to be quantitively confirmed). The fact that RP was not, and is not, monolithic means nevertheless that a certain polysemy in its definition(s) is, of course, to be expected; it operates in a continuum within which, as many phoneticians have concurred, discrete boundaries are ultimately impossible, not least perhaps between “RP” and “NearRP”. Important here is, however, the need to distinguish ideological meanings from linguistic – or sociolinguistic – ones (and ideological reservations from linguistic fact). Notions of the “best” English, the most “correct”, the “most acceptable” or “the most widely understood” are, in their lack of quantification, all subjective. Socially constructed euphemisms (“educated accent”) are, as Ellis indicated so long ago, by no means satisfactory (and arguably now even less so, given that university education extends to some 37% of school leavers). Social labels are also open to contention; “class” permits no easy definition and social boundaries (“upper”, “middle”, “upper-middle” encompass a wide range of permutations). The fact that “class” is formally an economic determinant leads to further disparities; shared levels of income may co-exist with very different socio-linguistic identities. Models of definition based on “prestige” may fare no better; like “received”, this too now tends to generate unease, especially given the fact that prestige is by no means unilinear, is covert as well as overt, and can certainly no longer be unquestionably assumed for conservative models of RP. “You can tell the Receivers where to go (and not aspirate it)”, as Tony Harrison (1984: 123) famously declared. On the plus side, RP can no longer be defined by its participation in an “accent-bar”. Non-RP and especially Near-RP speakers now frequently appear in prominent public roles (a feature which seems, in fact, to have contributed to assumptions that RP is
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itself in decline [see Trudgill 2001: 10]). “It is nowadays necessary to define RP in a rather broader way than was once customary”, states Wells (2000: xiii). Some level of semantic – and definitional – splitting (“refined” or Wells’“U-RP”; “general” or “mainstream”; “advanced”) is nevertheless clearly essential in order to engage with the polysemies, and fuzziness which “RP” embraces, especially if “Regional RP” is also to come within this umbrella-term (see Cruttenden 1994 and, for counterarguments, Trudgill 2001). How “broad” this definition will need to be in future years remains an interesting – and undoubtedly challenging – proposition. Even the Royal Family exhibits a spectrum of accents (with Prince Harry often convicted as an “estuary speaker”, though, in reality, merely exhibiting the features of a younger and more advanced RP). Beal’s (2008) evidence of a resurgence in demand for “accent reduction” offers, however, a timely reminder of the continued significance of the supra-regional voice in both socio-phonetic and linguistic terms, while headlines such as “Brummie accent worse than silence” (The Times, 04/04/08) suggest that models of negative accent evaluation – as well as accommodation to supra-regional models – can remain prominent, as in the recommendation that “ambitious West Midlanders may want to consider losing their accent if they want to get on in life” (The Times, 04/04/08). Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the BBC written Archives Center for permission to cite archival material within this chapter.
6 References 6.1 Unpublished Archival Material BBC Written Archives Center (WAC), Caversham WAC/R6/201/1 Advisory Committees. Spoken English Advisory Committee Minute Book 1926–33 WAC/R34/587/4 Policy Presentation Pronunciation (1963–64) WAC/5259/1 Special collections: Lloyd James, 1934–40
6.2 General References Abercrombie, David. 1965. Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Anon. 1890. ‘Alexander J. Ellis’. The Academy 38: 419–420. Ballard, Kim. 2001. The Frameworks of English. Houndmills: Palgrave. Beal, Joan. 2008. “Shamed by your English?”: the Market Value of a “Good” Pronunciation. In: Joan Beal, Carmela Nocera, and Massimo Sturiale (eds.), Perspectives on Prescriptivism, 21–40. Bern: Peter Lang. Buchanan, James. 1757. Linguae Britannicae vera Pronunciatio: or, a New English Dictionary. London: A. Millar. Buchanan, James. 1766. An Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation of the English Language. London: Edward and Charles Dilly. Campbell, George. 1788. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: W. Strahan. Collins, Beverley and Inger Mees. 2003. Practical Phon Phonol. London: Routledge. Cruttenden, Alan (ed.). 1994. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. Rev.edn. London: Edwin Arnold. Ellis, Alexander. 1869–89. On Early English Pronunciation. 5 Vols. Vol. I: 1869; Vol. III: 1871; Vol. IV: 1875; Vol. V: 1889. London: Tru¨bner. Fabricius, Anne. 2006 “What is Modern RP?”. http://www.akira.ruc.dk/~fabri/modrp.pdf (last accessed 6 January 2011). Giegerich, Heinz. 1992. English Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Harrison, Tony. 1984. “Them & [uz]”. In: Selected Poems. London: Penguin. Honey, John. 1988. “Talking Proper”; Schooling and the Establishment of English “Received Pronunciation”. In Graham Nixon and John Honey (eds.), An Historic Tongue: Studies in English Linguistics in Memory of Barbara Strang, 209–227. London: Routledge. Johnston, William. 1764. A Pronouncing Spelling Dictionary. London: W. Johnston. Jones, Daniel. 1917. An English Pronouncing Dictionary. 4th edn. London: Dent. Jones, Daniel. 1950. The Pronunciation of English. Rev. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerswill, Paul. 2007. Standard and Non-Standard English. In: David Britain (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 34–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kreidler, Charles. 1997. Describing Spoken English. An Introduction. London: Routledge. Lewis, Jack. 1972. A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English. London: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Jack. 2004. Review of Upton, Clive, Kretzschmar, William, and Konopka, Rafa (2001). The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34: 220–226. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge. Lloyd, Richard. 1899. Northern English. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Milroy, James. 2001. Received Pronunciation: who “receives” it and how long will it be “received”? Studia Anglia Posnaniensia 36: 15–34. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2007. Talking Proper. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2008. BBC English. In the Beginning. In: Ju¨rg Rainer Schwyter, Didier Maillat, and Christian Mair (eds.), Broadcast English, 197–215. Tu¨bingen: G. Narr. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2011. Benjamin Smart and Michael Faraday; The Principles and Practice of Talking Proper in Nineteenth-Century England. In: Michael Adams and Anne Curzan (eds.), Contours of English and English Language Studies: In Honor of Richard W. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 87–107. Murray, James A.H., Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions (eds.). 1884– 1928. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1st edn. Oxford: Clarendon. Perry, William. 1775. The Royal Standard English Dictionary. Edinburgh: David Willison. Przedlacka, Joanna. 2000. Estuary English: Glottaling in the Home Counties. Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology, & Phonetics 5: 19–24. Ramsaran, Susan. 1990. RP: fact and fiction. In: Susan Ramsaran (ed.), Studies in the Pronunciation of English: A Commemorative Volume in Honour of A. C. Gimson, 178–190. London: Routledge. Roach, Peter. 2000. English Phoetics and Phonology. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roach, Peter. 2004. British English: Received Pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34: 239–245. Rosewarne, David. 1984. Estuary English. Times Educational Supplement. 19 October 1984 http:// www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/rosew.htm (last accessed 3 February 2012). Sheridan, Thomas. 1761. A Dissertation on the Causes of Difficulties, Which Occur, in Learning the English Tongue. London: R. and J. Dodsley. Sheridan, Thomas. 1762. A Course of Lectures on Elocution. London: W. Strahan. Smart, Benjamin. 1836. Walker Remodelled. A New Critial Pronouncing Dictionary. London: T. Cadell. Sweet, Henry. 1890. A Primer of Spoken English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trask, Robert. 1996. A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London: Routledge. Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Received Pronunciation: Sociolinguistic Aspects. Studia Anglica Posnaniensa 36: 3–13. Upton, Clive. 2004. Received pronunciation. In: Edgar Schneider and Clive Upton (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. I: Phonology, 217–230. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Upton, Clive, William Kretzschmar, and Rafal Konopka. 2001. The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, John. 1774. A General Idea of a Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language on a Plan Entirely New. London: T. Becket. Walker, John. 1791. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson. Wells, John. 1982. Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, John. 1997. “Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation?” http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/ home/wells/rphappened.htm (last accessed 6 January 2011). Wells, John. 2000. Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow: Pearson. Wyld, Henry. 1914. A Short History of English. London: John Murray. Wyld, Henry. 1934. The Best English. A Claim for the Superiority of Received Standard English S. P. E. Tract No. XXXIX. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lynda Mugglestone, Oxford (UK)
122. Varieties of English: Estuary English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
The early years of Estuary English Regional variation of variants associated with EE in the south-east (trend 1) Regional variation of variants associated with EE beyond the south-east (trend 5) Social variation of variants associated with EE (trend 2) Estuary English as a style (trend 3 and 4) What is EE? References
Abstract The present chapter reviews the different stages in the history of research into the notoriously difficult notion of Estuary English. It begins with the classic texts by the first authors, the founder of the term and concept David Rosewarne (1984) and the author of the first book(let) on Estuary English, Paul Coggle (1993). The chapter goes on to discuss the dissemination of the term by journalists and literary authors and then proceeds to look at the work of expert linguists on Estuary English itself and related issues. It is argued that the popularity of the term with non-linguists is one of the major reasons for the skepticism with which linguists view both term and concept. Another reason for this skepticism is the rather indiscriminate use of the term as a shorthand for a number of related but divergent trends. The chapter explores the results of linguistic research into these trends and relates them to the notion of ‘Estuary English’, even if the researchers themselves refrain from mentioning the term.
1 The early years of Estuary English 1.1 David Rosewarne and Paul Coggle on Estuary English Estuary English (henceforth referred to as EE) has by now become a term with a history. This history bears all the hallmarks of miscommunication between experts Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1913–1927
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and the public. In the case of EE, the two opposing camps have mainly been expert linguists and the media. As if in accordance with this pattern, the first article ever published on EE appeared in the London edition of The Times Educational Supplement (see Rosewarne 1984) and not in a renowned linguistic journal. To make matters worse from an academic point of view, the concept was rather loosely defined as an accent somewhere between Cockney and Received Pronunciation (henceforth referred to as RP): “Estuary English is a variety of modified regional speech. It is a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation. If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at either end, Estuary English speakers are to be found grouped in the middle ground” (Rosewarne 1984: 29, 1994: 5). This definition raises a number of questions that will be discussed in the course of this chapter. The two major problems from the very beginning have been (a) to determine the defining characteristics of EE and (b) to justify coining a new name. Rosewarne himself characterizes the difference among EE, Cockney, and RP, as one of frequency or degree: “As would be expected, an Estuary English speaker uses fewer glottal stops for t and d than a London speaker, but more than an RP speaker. Vowel qualities in Estuary English are a compromise between unmodified regional forms and those of general RP” (Rosewarne 1984: 29). As to the necessity of coining a new name, Rosewarne does not address this question directly. It is possible that he derives this necessity from the increasing currency of what he identifies as EE variants: “For large and influential sections of the young, the new model for general imitation may already be Estuary English, which may become the RP of the future” (Rosewarne 1984: 30). The term and concept of EE was taken up several years later by Paul Coggle, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Canterbury. Coggle’s (1993) booklet, titled Do you Speak Estuary? The New Standard English – How to Spot it and Speak it, presents the topic in an entertaining way but is far from what linguists consider to be a serious study in social dialectology. Nevertheless Coggle addresses some of the major problems, among them the problem of varietal distinction. Even less so than Rosewarne, he does not consider EE to be a clearly delineated variety but rather a continuum on a continuum. Like Rosewarne, he is still optimistic that EE speakers can be clearly identified, in his case on the basis of a characteristic combination of uncharacteristic variants: It should now be clear that Estuary English cannot be pinned down to a rigid set of rules regarding specific features of pronunciation, grammar and special phrases. A speaker at the Cockney end of the spectrum is not so different from a Cockney speaker. And similarly, a speaker at the RP end of the spectrum will not be very different from an RP speaker. Between the two extremes is quite a range of possibilities, many of which, in isolation, would not enable us to identify a person as an Estuary speaker, but which when several are present together mark out Estuary English distinctively. (Coggle 1993: 70)
Although this approach may be more realistic, it does call into question the status of EE as a “variety” in the linguistic sense of the term (for a more detailed discussion, see Sections 2 and 6).
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As to coining a new name, Coggle does not address this question either. Like Rosewarne, he stresses the increasing currency of EE (“The New Standard English”) but also its limitations: “I was told in no uncertain terms by an informant that he would not allow brain surgery to be performed on himself by an Estuary English speaker” (Coggle 1993: 74).
1.2 Journalists and literary authors on Estuary English A new stage in the history of EE began when newspaper journalists and occasionally novel writers picked up the term. In particular in the 1990s, these writers used EE as shorthand for a number of different and divergent trends: (1) socio-phonetic changes within the accents of south-eastern England in the direction of a supra-local regional accent: “His wasn’t a Suffolk voice, rather the accent dubbed in the eighties Estuary English”. (Vine 1998: 155) (2) the social spread of London working-class variants into higher social classes, including the advanced version of RP: “ ‘Got friends’, Leo said to his milk glass. He said it in that irritating Estuary English that was becoming so fashionable, a glottal stop in place of the t in got. Thank God public school would soon breed that out of him as well”. (George 1996: 244) (3) the situation-related use of London working-class variants by speakers who are otherwise speakers of RP: “It’s the way he tells ’em. Prime Minister wades into Estuary English for O’Connor chat show”. (Ward 1998) (4) the retention of south-eastern regional accent features by speakers who would otherwise have been expected to become speakers of adoptive RP: “Among those who speak it [Estuary English] are Lord Tebbit, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and a leading Euroskeptic, and Ken Livingstone, who as a Labor Member of Parliament is on the opposite end of the political spectrum”. (Darnton 1993) (5) the occurrence of variants which are – rightly or wrongly – associated with the south-east accents in which they were not used before: “Estuary English has taken the high road. A new form of Glaswegian dialect which borrows from the television soap EastEnders is flourishing in Scotland”. (Corbidge 1998) The trends described in these excerpts – with the exception of (5) – are in principle not disputed by linguists. What linguists object to is the indiscriminate use of the same term for phenomena as different as the occasional (over-)use of the glottal stop by Tony Blair in a London chat show and the regular use of the labio-dental instead of the dental fricative by young speakers in Glasgow. In addition, it is the origin of these theories that has been detrimental to their image and the image of EE. After all, expert linguists do not like laypersons, including journalists, to do their work for them. Apart from hurting their professional pride, journalists have a reputation of not applying as much precision to their work as academics. The following mutation of EE-founder David Rosewarne into the teacher Rose Warne can be cited as evidence supporting this concern: “Ten years later, in 1984, an English teacher called Rose Warne would find a name for this hybrid southern speak: Estuary English, after the Thames Estuary” (Smith 2000).
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1.3 John Wells on Estuary English Among the first to take a linguistically informed look at EE was John Wells. His handout for a talk given in 1992 and posted on his webpage on EE in 1998 was the first attempt to “pin down” EE in terms of linguistic variants and varietal distinction. Unlike Rosewarne (1984) and Coggle (1993), Wells (1998) defines EE as an accent and thus excludes allegedly EE-related variation at the level of lexis and morpho-syntax. He also cuts down on the list of variants proposed by Rosewarne and Coggle and attempts at defining the boundaries between EE on the one hand and RP and Cockney on the other. Table 122.1 provides an overview of Wells’s working definition of EE as an accent: Table 122.1: Phonetic and phonological features of EE according to Wells (1998) – the terms used in this table were adapted to those used throughout the chapter Variable (Wells 1998)
Example
RP
EE
Cockney
H Dropping TH Fronting MOUTH vowel monophthong T Glottalling in intervocalic position HAPPY Tensing T Glottalling finally etc. L Vocalization Yod Coalescence (in stressed syllables) (?) diphthong shift in FACE, PRICE, GOAT (?) striking allophony (phoneme split?) in sold
[and] for hand [fɪŋk] for think [ma:f] for mouth [ˈbʌʔə] for butter [ˈhæpi] for happy [ˈðæʔˈɪz] for that is [miok] for milk [ˈtʃu:zdeɪ] for Tuesday [fʌɪs], [prɑɪs], [gʌʊʔ] [gʌʊt] vs. [gɒʊɬ] for goat vs. goal
− − − − − − − − − −
− − − − + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
The variables identified by Wells were to become the point of departure of many linguistic studies of EE when the academic discussion finally set in the late 1990s. It was probably inspired and certainly accompanied by the EE webpage run by John Wells at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary (last accessed 25 March 2011).
2 Regional variation of variants associated with EE in the south-east (trend 1) The majority of empirical studies of EE set out to investigate the claim that EE was a supra-local south-eastern regional variety (see Section 1.2, trend 1). From a theoretical and methodological point of view, most of these studies followed the Labovian sociolinguistic approach. Many of them were MA theses, such as Torgersen (1997), Parsons (1998), Haenni (1999) and Hilgers (2000), a great number of which are published on Wells’s UCL webpage on EE. Around the same time Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill conducted two research projects on dialect leveling in the south-east of England, the Milton Keynes Project on “A new dialect in a new city: children’s and adult’s speech in Milton Keynes” (e.g. Kerswill 1996) and the Dialect Levelling project on “The role of adolescents in dialect levelling” (Williams and Kerswill 1999). They were followed by the publication of two PhD theses on EE by Joanna Przedlacka (2002) and the author of this chapter (Altendorf 2003). It is these four latter studies that will be discussed in more detail in the following. Tables 122.2 and 122.3 provide an overview of the extra-linguistic and linguistic variables investigated in these studies.
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Table 122.2: Extralinguistic variables Town/County
Age of speakers/ number of speakers
Social class
Gender
Style
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire (Kerswill 1996) Milton Keynes and Reading (Williams and Kerswill 1999) Buckinghamshire, Kent, Essex and Surrey (Przedlacka 2002) London, Colchester, Canterbury (Altendorf 2003)
4, 8, 12 yo/ 48 speakers
working class
male and female
informal to formal
14 to15 yo/ 64 speakers
working and middle class
male and female
informal to formal
14 to 16 yo/ 16 speakers
working and middle class
male and female
word elicitation modeled on the SED questionnaire
16 to 17 yo/ 6 speakers
middle class
female
interview style, reading styles, word list style
Table 122.3: Linguistic variables
H Dropping TH Fronting L Vocalization T Glottalling P, K Glottalling ST Palatalization STR Palatalization Yod Dropping R: labio-dental [ʋ] MOUTH FLEECE GOOSE (Fronting): [u¨: ~ ʉ: ~ i: ~ ɪ:] SCHOOL GOAT GOAL FOOT
(Fronting) [ɵ]
TRAP STRUT THOUGHT FACE PRICE KIT, DRESS, CLOTH, BATH, NURSE, PALM, CHOICE, NEAR, SQUARE, START, NORTH, FORCE, CURE, HAPPY, LETTER, COMMA, HORSES
Kerswill 1996
Williams and Kerswill 1999
Przedlacka 2002
Altendorf 2003
Britain 2005
+ + + + + − − − + + + +
+ + + + + − − − + + + +
− + + + − − + + − + + +
+ + + + − + + + − + + +
− + + − − − − − + − − +
− + + + + + + + + +
− + + + + + + + + +
− + − − + + + + + −
+ + − + − − − − − −
− + − + − + − − + −
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Williams and Kerswill (1999: 149) as well as Przedlacka (2002: 94, 97) conclude from their results that convergence has indeed been taking place in the south-east of England. However, they consider local variation to be still too marked to justify subsuming local accents under the same regional variety. Kerswill (1996: 299) finds a different situation in Milton Keynes but draws the same conclusion. He points out that in Milton Keynes “every one of the Milton Keynes children’s pronunciation features, both old and more recent, is also found in London and elsewhere in the south-east” (Kerswill 1996: 295) and concedes that it is “tempting to suppose that what we have observed in Milton Keynes is a form of Estuary English” (Kerswill 1996: 299). However, he considers this to be “misleading” (Kerswill 1996: 299) since the sociolinguistic situation in a new town, such as Milton Keynes, involves “much more intensive dialect contact than in other parts of the south-east” (Kerswill 1996: 299). The Dialect Levelling Project and Przedlacka’s study provide evidence for this hypothesis. My own research does not point in the same direction. The female middle-class speakers from London, Colchester, and Canterbury show a high degree of similarity with regard to the majority of my linguistic variables (see Altendorf 2003: Chapter V.). The discrepancy between the results of my study and those of the three other studies may be due to the small number of speakers in my sample. The results reported by Przedlacka (2002: 60–65) show a high degree of individual variation in each cell that I may have missed because of the small size of the sample. On the other hand, the number of tokens for each speaker in my study is high since the interviews took up to one hour and have the advantage of covering three different styles. The results for stylistic variation, in turn, show a similarly high degree of variability within each cell. In addition, it is often not possible to identify a pattern of variation which would be in line with any of the patterns known from other sociolinguistic studies. Such deviations from identifiable patterns are also reported by Przedlacka for correlation by gender and class. Only very few variables were significant by class (2 out 14) followed by gender (7 out of 14). The clearest correlation in her study is correlation by county (8 out 13). However, with 8 out of 13 variables, we are still left with 5 variables for which such a correlation cannot be shown. It seems that the patterns of variation found in the south-east with regard to variables associated with EE are “diffuse” rather than “focussed” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) for a discussion of the implications of these findings (see Sections 6.2–6.3).
3 Regional variation of variants associated with EE beyond the south-east (trend 5) There are a number of studies on socio-phonetic changes in accents outside the southeast (see Section 1.2, trend 5). From a theoretical and methodological point of view, these studies follow the Labovian sociolinguistic approach. Few of them explicitly refer to EE but many include or focus on variables that are classified as characteristics of EE, such as TH Fronting, T Glottalling, L Vocalization and GOOSE Fronting (for a more detailed discussion of these variables, see Altendorf 2003: Chapter IV). In the late 1990s, a number of these studies were assembled in Urban Voices – Accent Studies in the British Isles, edited by Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (1999). One of them is the Dialect Levelling Project by Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill, already cited above,
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which also includes data on Hull as an example of a town outside the south-east. A study of regional accents outside the south-east that explicitly refers to EE is David Britain’s (2005) study of dialects in the Fen country. These two studies and two studies on the spread of T Glottalling and L Vocalization in Scotland will be discussed in more detail in the following. An overview of the extra-linguistic variables in these studies can be found in Table 122.4. The linguistic variables investigated by Williams and Kerswill (e.g. 1999) in Hull and Britain (2005) in the Fens can also be found in Table 122.3 above. Table 122.4: Extralinguistic variables Town/County
Age of speakers/ Number of speakers
Social class
Gender
Style
Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull (Williams and Kerswill 1999)
14 to 15 yo/ 96 speakers (32 speakers in Hull)
working and middle class
male and female
informal to formal
The Fens: Spalding, Wisbech/March and Terrington (Britain 2005)
14 to 17 yo/ 6 speakers
0
0
elicitation
Huntley (Marshall 2003)
8 to 60+ yo, subdivided in four age groups
0
male and female
interview style, narrative and elicitation
10 to 66+ yo, subdivided in five age groups/ 62 speakers 13 to 14 yo 40 to 60 yo/ 32 speakers
working class
male and female
0
working and middle class
male and female
spontaneous conversation, wordlist style
Glasgow (Stuart-Smith 2006) • corpus 1984/1985
• corpus 1997
Williams and Kerswill (1999: 149) as well as Britain (2005: 1016) conclude from their results that convergence has indeed been taking place between accents in and beyond the south-east of England, in particular with regard to those variables associated with EE. However, they consider the local characteristics of the accents spoken outside the south-east as too distinct to even contemplate classifying these non-south-eastern accents as instances of EE. Williams and Kerswill (1999: 157–158) report that young speakers in Hull differ from their counterparts in Milton Keynes and Reading by retaining H Dropping and an allophonic split of the PRICE vowel (Williams and Kerswill 1999: 157–158). Britain (2005: 1016) reports that young speakers in the three different Fen towns differ from each other and from their southern counterparts by retaining, for example, the MOAN-MOWN Split in Terrington, “Canadian Raising” in Wisbech and the quasi-absence of the FOOT-STRUT Split in Spalding (Britain 2005: 1016). However, some variants associated with EE have either been recently introduced to or are on the increase in both Hull and the Fens, in particular TH Fronting, intervocalic T Glottalling and labio-dental [ʋ] (for Hull, see Williams and
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Kerswill 1999: 160, 147; for the Fens, see Britain 2005: 1016). L Vocalization is on the increase in the Fens (Britain 2005: 1009), but not in Hull (Williams and Kerswill 1999: 148). The spread of these variants beyond the south-east has also been reported for many other towns and areas. Marshall (2003: 97), for example, shows that T Glottalling has increased dramatically among 14- to 17-year-old speakers in the north-eastern Scottish town of Huntley. For Glasgow, Stuart-Smith (1999: 209) reports a “significant increase in glottalling” and – more recently – the “incorporation of innovative L-vocalization” of the London type which coexists and continues to increase alongside the old “Scots L-vocalization” (Stuart-Smith 2006: 71). These and other studies have empirically corroborated the claim made in the media (see Section 1.2 trend 5) that some variants associated with EE are indeed on the increase outside the south-east of England. However, this is not true for all alleged EE variants but only for a recurring set, mostly TH Fronting, T Glottalling and labio-dental [ʋ] and to a lesser extent L Vocalization and GOOSE Fronting. In addition, these variants do no necessarily co-occur in the accents affected by this development. As to whether they have actually “taken the high road” from London and were “borrowed from the television soap EastEnders”, as Corbidge (1998) and other journalists claim, is still unclear and subject to considerable debate (see e.g. Williams and Kerswill 1999: 161–162; Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2002–05).
4 Social variation of variants associated with EE (trend 2) Only very few empirical studies dealing with socio-phonetic changes extend them to changes affecting RP. Fewer still explicitly refer to EE (see Section 1.2, trend 2). As a result there is little empirical evidence for or against the claim made by Rosewarne (1984: 29) that EE “may now and for the foreseeable future be the strongest native influence on RP”, indeed “may become the RP of the future” (Rosewarne 1984: 30). In an article titled The Cockneyfication of RP?, Wells (1994) discusses a similar hypothesis and shows to which extent variants associated with non-standard London English are now “resisted by” and “accepted into” RP. In their work on EE, Przedlacka (2002) and Altendorf (2003) provide a small-scale empirical investigation of the same question. In addition, they take a closer look at the social accent continuum in London and the south-east in order to investigate the state of social differentiation in this area. A third empirical study by Fabricius (2000) differs from these two studies in that the author confines herself to T Glottalling and RP. She does, however, provide an indepth study of the status of the glottal variant in the speech of RP speakers from London, the Home Counties, and the rest of England. A synopsis of the extralinguistic variables investigated in the three empirical studies can be found in Table 122.5. The linguistic variables studied by Przedlacka (2002) and Altendorf (2003) were listed in Table 122.3.
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Table 122.5: Extralinguistic variables Town/County
Age of speakers/ number of speakers
Social class
Gender
Style
London, Home Counties, rest of England (Fabricius 2000)
24 speakers
upper middle class
male and female
interview style, reading style, discrimination test similar to a word list style
Eton College (Przedlacka 2002, 2001)
13 yo/ 2 speakers
students of Eton College
male
word elicitation modeled on the SED questionnaire
London (Altendorf 2003)
16 to 17 yo/ 6 speakers
working class, middle class, upper middle class
female
interview style, reading style, word list style
As in the case of accent convergence in and beyond the south-east, the results of the three empirical studies show that convergence has been taking place across the social accent continuum ranging from Cockney to RP. However, the authors agree that the accents are (still) too distinctive to be subsumed under the same regional variety, called “Estuary English”. Although results for the individual variables are complex and diverse, certain trends can be identified: (1) There are variants which are confined to the lowest of the three classes investigated in these studies. In accordance with Wells (1998), H Dropping and the MOUTH vowel monophthong are confined to working class London English (Przedlacka 2002: 63; Altendorf 2003: 79, 102). (2) Some variants are on the verge of “seeping” into middle-class and even uppermiddle-class English in London and the south-east. Members of this group are in particular TH Fronting and intervocalic T Glottalling. Wells (1998) classifies them as Cockney variants which are not part of EE let alone of RP. With regard to TH Fronting, the results of my study are in line with this prediction. TH Fronting is confined to my London working-class speakers (Altendorf 2003: 81). However, in an earlier pilot study a few instances of TH Fronting were found in the speech of a different set of middle-class and upper-middle-class speakers (Altendorf 1999: 10). A similar result is reported by Przedlacka (2002: 59), who has found instances of TH Fronting in the speech of one of her two Eton informants. Intervocalic T Glottalling has also spread further than Wells (1998) suggests. In my data, it occurs in the speech of middle-class speakers in London as well as in Colchester and Canterbury (Altendorf 2003: 86). However, intervocalic T Glottalling still displays the distributional pattern of a vernacular variant in that it is absent from the more formal reading style (Altendorf 2003: 84, 87). As to RP, intervocalic T Glottalling is absent from the upper-middle-class data of all three studies. (3) A number of variants follow Rosewarne’s prediction in that they occur in all classes but differ with regard to relative frequency and degree. This is in particular true for L Vocalization and non-intervocalic T Glottalling. In my own data, the glottal and the vocalized variant occur in all three classes with decreasing frequency from the working to the upper middle class (Altendorf 2003: 83, 91). Przedlacka (2002: 59,
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5 Estuary English as a style (trend 3 and 4) The situation-related use of London working-class variants by speakers who are otherwise speakers of RP (see Section 1.2, trend 3) is frequently mentioned in the media but not yet the object of serious linguistic research. The same is true for trend 4, the retention of south-eastern regional accent features by speakers who would otherwise have been expected to become speakers of adoptive RP. One of the reasons for this “neglect” may be that these two trends are often hard to separate from each other and from trend 2, the social spread of London working-class variants into higher social classes, including the advanced version of RP. In order to be able to do so, one would have to know the speaker’s vernacular. Outside this particular situation, the speaker may be a speaker of (mainstream) RP (trend 3) or of advanced RP (trend 2) or actually a speaker with a London or south-eastern accent (trend 4). In the latter two cases, situational EE may be the public version of the speakers’ vernacular, modified to fit the occasion but not totally “out of character”. In the following example it is, for instance, hard to decide whether the speakers in question are putting on a show (trend 3), are simply indulging in their advanced version of RP (trend 2) or both (trend 2 and 3): They [the stage, television] are now the careers of choice for legions of well-brought-up, well-educated, well-born young things. Every branch of the media now boasts more silver spoons than the Harrods cutlery department, and a private education is fast replacing an Equity card as the guarantor of a show-business career. […] They may speak in the everyman argot now called Estuary English and dress in ubiquitous and genderless urban baggies, but these are people who, 30 years ago, would have been expected to trade in their expensive education for the professional security of law or medicine. (O’Brien 1999: 11)
Instead of trying to separate these three trends, researchers follow a different policy. They study the presence of variants associated with EE in the speech of those who appear in the media. Hilgers (2000), for example, investigates, as part of his MA thesis, the occurrence of EE variants in the news presented on different British radio stations, BBC Radio 1, Radio 4 and Radio 5 as well as Virgin Radio. He concludes that EE variants occur frequently, in particular on stations addressed to young people, such as BBC Radio 1 and Virgin Radio. They also occur in the news of the most prestige-oriented station BBC Radio 4 but are less frequent here (Hilgers 2000: 93). The project Is television a contributory factor in accent change in adolescents? by Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2002–05) is another example of a study which does not explicitly refer to EE but investigates aspects of language use which are at least indirectly relevant to EE. In the context of their project, Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2005) also look at “Media Cockney”, i.e. the use of variants associated with London and the south-east (EE), such as T Glottalling, L Vocalization and GOOSE/FOOT Fronting, in the speech of actors in soap operas, such as EastEnders and The Bill. Results are complex. They show, for example, that the language used in contemporary drama is “more like Southeast England” than Cockney “even in the soap supposedly set in the East End
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of London” (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2005: 49). In addition, the “most popular characters” in EastEnders “also have the frontest GOOSE/FOOT vowels” (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2005: 42). Providing that one accepts the existence of EE, this could be interpreted as an argument to support its prevalence in the popular media. Note, however, that Stuart-Smith and Timmins do not draw this conclusion.
6 What is EE? 6.1 What EE cannot be Despite the many studies on EE or EE-related aspects of language use and change in London, the south-east of England and beyond, linguists have not yet been able to agree on a definition of the concept and on assigning a linguistic category to the phenomenon. They have, however, been prolific in describing what EE cannot be: (1) Most linguists agree that EE is not a south-eastern variety. Their major argument is that a variety needs to display a sufficient degree of internal homogeneity and external distinction. This is seen as not to be true for EE. Internally, the local accents of the south-east have been shown to be too heterogeneous to form a common variety (see Section 2). Externally, many of the core variants ascribed to EE, such as TH Fronting, T Glottalling and L Vocalization, are too wide-spread to mark the external boundaries of a putative south-eastern variety (see Section 3). (2) Most linguists also agree that EE is not a new phenomenon and that coining a new name is therefore not justified (e.g. Wells 1997: 47; Kerswill 1996: 299; Trudgill 1999: 80). Trudgill (1999: 80) is even of the opinion that “Estuary English” is the wrong name. The following short comment on EE summarizes the major misgivings expressed by the majority of linguists: “This [‘Estuary English’] is an inappropriate term which, however, has become widely accepted. It is inappropriate because it suggests that we are talking about a new variety, which we are not; and because it suggests that this is a variety of English confined to the banks of the Thames Estuary, which it is not” (Trudgill 1999: 80). On the plus side, most linguists accept the existence of two trends that are, rightly or wrong, associated with EE: (1) They accept that there is a group of variants, such as TH Fronting, T Glottalling, L Vocalization and GOOSE Fronting, that are growing more frequent in Great Britain and even beyond (see Section 3). (2) Some linguists also accept that these formerly non-standard variants are socially more acceptable than they used to be (see Sections 4 and 5). These two trends, on which most linguists have come to agree, should be taken as a point of departure for a definition of EE. Przedlacka (2002) takes the first step in this direction when she remarks that EE is not a variety but a more general trend: The extent of geographical variation alone allows us to conclude that we are dealing with a number of distinct accents, not a single and definable variety […] At the same time, what is
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In my opinion this remark contains the heart of the matter. One could rephrase it by saying that EE is less and more than a variety. Thus it is the (traditional) concept of “variety” which is not suitable to categorize EE.
6.2 Traditional sociolinguistic conceptualization as a problem for EE So far linguists have considered EE to be a problem because it does not fit the established sociolinguistic and dialectological categories. However, one could also take the opposite view and consider the established sociolinguistic and dialectological categories to be the problem. After all, if a phenomenon that exists cannot be described in academic terms, the problem needs to be solved at the level of the academic discipline. The phenomenon cannot be changed to fit the existing conceptualization. It cannot be abolished either. At best its existence can be ignored or deplored, which some linguists have been trying to do since 1984. Hence the rare occurrence of the term ‘EE’ in studies on EE-related topics (see Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5). However, the term keeps coming back, which speaks for the existence of the phenomenon. Wells, for example, grudgingly concedes: Many of our native-speaker undergraduates use a variety of English that I suppose we have to call Estuary English, following Rosewarne 1984, 1994, Coggle 1993, and many recent reports on press and television […] This means that their accent is located somewhere in the continuum between RP and broad Cockney […] As with the equally unsatisfactory term Received Pronunciation, we are forced to go along. (Wells 1995: 261)
Instead of feeling forced to go along with this unsatisfactory term, I propose to reconsider the sociolinguistic concepts applied to EE. It is not EE but the concept of “variety” and the theory of variation behind it that constitute the problem. The concept of “variety” is a system-based ideal. In requiring varieties to be sufficiently internally homogeneous and externally distinct, theorists of language variation ideally aim at categorical variation or at least at a categorical co-occurrence of less categorical variants. Although they concede that in linguistic reality such categorical variation is hard to encounter (e.g. Berruto 1987: 265; Wunderli 1992: 182), they still require as much internal homogeneity as possible as “Verdichtungspunkte in einem Kontinuum” [‘centers of gravity on the continuum’] in Berruto’s (1987: 265) terminology, and as “centers ou points de gravitation” [‘centers or points of gravity’] in Wunderli’s (1992: 182) terms. If the theorists are sociolinguists, they are prepared to accept more quantitative variation as long as it yields quantitatively significant patterns. Hence the significance tests in many sociolinguistic studies, including Przedlacka’s study of EE (see Section 2). Behind this search lies a dichotomous theory of language and a system-based ideal. Even though Labov (e.g. 1972: 186) claims to have overcome the Saussurian notion of langue, his approach and the approach of those who work within his paradigm is still rather system-oriented. It is true that his methodological approach is “the direct
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study of language in its social context” (Labov 1972: 202). However, at the theoretical level, he aims at abstracting away from individual language use to the language system. It is at this level that sociolinguists are to “be concerned with the forms of linguistic rules, their combination into systems, the coexistence of several systems, and the evolution of these rules and systems with time” (Labov 1972: 184). In order to deserve a place at this abstract level of the system, patterns of variation need to be relatively robust. This is why current studies of the social dialectology of English accents, whether they mention the term EE or not, keep identifying the same variables, i.e. TH Fronting, T Glottalling, L Vocalization, labio-dental [ʋ] and more recently GOOSE and FOOT Fronting. The new variants have become frequent enough to survive abstraction to the system. It is also with regard to these “youth norms” (Williams and Kerswill 1999: 159) that some linguists now seem to find it easier to accept the existence of EE (see Przedlacka 2002: 97). However, EE is more than a few youth norms that have been “taking the high road” (Corbidge 1998). It is a complex result of complex processes which consist in the reallocation of stigma and prestige as shown by Fabricius (2000) for T Glottalling in RP. These sophisticated processes are small-scale and often performance-related and therefore do not fit into the classic conceptualization of the Labovian approach. This is also one of the reasons why EE-related patterns of variation sometimes seem “diffuse” (see Section 2). And they are not alone. The quantitative-correlational approach in the Labovian tradition has problems accommodating small-scale and performance-related patterns of variation. Mair (2003) provides an in-depth discussion of this problem in general and with regard to the international variation of English in particular.
6.3 In search of a new sociolinguistic conceptualization It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to develop a new or thoroughly revised theory of variation although such a theory would be necessary to do justice to different types of variation including EE (for a revised notion of “variety”, see Altendorf forthc.). Mair (2003: xiii) suggests a “discourse-based and dynamic model”. As a first step in this direction, he draws attention to the model of variation proposed by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and their notion of “acts of identity”. Although I agree with Mair (2003: xii) that the authors “have fallen short of providing a fully elaborated theoretical model”, their notion of “acts of identity” is already a helpful tool to describe EE-related patterns of variation that often seem “chaotic” from a traditional sociolinguistic point of view. It would be a step forward to accept that we cannot account for EE within our established quantitative-correlational sociolinguistic framework. As an interim solution I propose to consider EE as “a pool of variants” from which speakers select different variables in different ways to express different “acts of identity”. These acts of identity are complex processes of affiliation and distancing which have to be identified for each variable (see Altendorf 2003: Chapter VII) and for each trend ascribed to EE (see Section 1). It is also possible that there is a motivational common core for all variables and trends, as for example finding a balance between tradition and modernity as suggested by Altendorf (2004) and between stigma and prestige as suggested by Fabricius (2000) for T Glottalling in RP. The pool-ofvariants approach would also be able to account for the high degree of internal variability and the lack of external distinction, which is otherwise cited as counter-evidence for classifying EE as a variety.
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7 References Altendorf, Ulrike. 1999. Estuary English: Is English going Cockney? Moderna Spra˚k XCII(1): 1–11. www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/altendf.pdf (last accessed 20 March 2011). Altendorf, Ulrike. 2003. ‘Estuary English’: levelling at the interface of RP and south-eastern British English. Tu¨bingen: Narr. Altendorf, Ulrike. 2004. Language change and changing ideologies in and around RP. In: Martin Pu¨tz, JoAnne Neff van-Aertselaer, and Teun A. van Dijk (eds.), Communicating Ideologies: Language, Discourse and Social Practice, 203–225. Frankfurt am Main/New York/Paris/ Bern: Peter Lang. Altendorf, Ulrike forthc. Where does the notion of ‘variety’ start and end? – A proposal for a prototype approach to language variation. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Gitte Kristiansen (eds.), Proceedings of the 34th International LAUD Symposium on ‘Cognitive Sociolinguistics’. Berruto, Gaetano. 1987. Varieta¨t. In: Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, and Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics/Sociolinguistik, 263–267. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Britain, David. 2005. ‘Estuary English’ and local dialect differentiation: the survival of Fenland Englishes. Linguistics 43(5): 995–1022. O’Brien, James. 1999. The popping up of class acts: James O’Brien spots a hitherto unnoticed trend in mass entertainment. The Spectator, 29th May 1999: 11–12. Coggle, Paul. 1993. Do you Speak Estuary? The New Standard English – How to Spot it and Speak it. London: Bloomsbury. Corbidge, Rob. 1998. It’s the way you tell ‘em, me old Jock sparrer. Sunday Times, 29th March 1998: 3. Darnton, John. 1993. The English are talking funny again. The New York Times, 21st December 1993. Fabricius, Anne. 2000. T-glottalling between stigma and prestige: a sociolinguistic study of modern RP. PhD thesis, Copenhagen Business School. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/home. htm (last accessed 20 March 2011). Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty (eds.). 1999. Urban Voices–Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold. George, Elizabeth. 1996. In the Presence of the Enemy. London/New York/Toronto: Bentam. Haenni, Ruedi. 1999. The case of Estuary English: supposed evidence and perceptual approach. University of Basel Dissertation. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/haenni1999.pdf (last accessed 20 March 2011). Hilgers, Lothar. 2000. Estuary English – Entwicklung, linguistische Beschreibung und sozialer Hintergrund. University of Trier Master’s Dissertation. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/ hilgers.doc (last accessed 20 March 2011). Kerswill, Paul. 1996. Milton Keynes and dialect levelling in south-eastern British English. In: David Graddol, Dick Leith, and Joan Swann (eds.), English: history, diversity and change, 292–300. London/New York: Routledge. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell. Le Page, Robert B. and Andre´e Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity. Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: CUP. Mair, Christian. 2003. Linguistics, literature and the Postcolonial Englishes: an Introduction. In: Christian Mair (ed.), The Politics of English as a World Language. New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ix–xxi. (ASNEL Papers 7). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Marshall, Jonathan. 2003. The changing sociolinguistic status of the glottal stop in northeast Scottish English. English World-Wide 24(1): 89–108. Parsons, Gudrun. 1998. From “RP” to “Estuary English”: the concept of “received” and the debate about British pronunciation standards. University of Hamburg. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/ home/estuary/parsons_ma.pdf (last accessed 1 May 2011).
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Przedlacka, Joanna. 2001. Estuary English and RP: some recent findings. Studia Anglia Posnaniensia 36: 35–50. Przedlacka, Joanna. 2002. Estuary English? A socio-phonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties. Frankfurt/Berlin/Bern: Peter Lang. Rosewarne, David. 1984. Estuary English: David Rosewarne describes a newly observed variety of English pronunciation. Times Educational Supplement, 19th October 1984. Rosewarne, David. 1994. Estuary English: tomorrow’s RP? English Today 37 10(1): 3–8. Smith, Andrew. 2000. Where did you find that voice?The Observer, 12th March 2000. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 1999. Glasgow: Accent and voice quality. In: Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Doherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles,201–222. London: Arnold. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Claire Timmins. 2002–2005. Is accent a contributory factor in accent change in adolescents? http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/sesll/EngLang/phonetics/index.html (last accessed 1 May 2011). Stuart-Smith, Jane and Claire Timmins. 2005. Analysing the language of television: the case of media-Cockney. Paper presented as part of Seminar fu¨r Medienlinguistik, University of Hanover, 15 November 2004. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/phonetics/contributory/ mediaCockney.pdf (last accessed 1 May 2011). Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins, and Fiona Tweedie. 2006. Conservation and innovation in a traditional dialect: L Vocalization in Glaswegian. English World-Wide 27(1): 71–87. Torgersen, Eivind 1997. Some phonological innovations in south-eastern British English. Unpublished MA Dissertation, Department of English, University of Bergen. Trudgill, Peter. 1999 [1990]. The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell. Vine, Barbara. 1998. The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy. London: Penguin. Ward, Lucy. 1998. It’s the way he tells ‘em. Prime Minister wades into Estuary for O’Connor chat show. The Guardian, 15th June 1998. Wells, John. 1994. The cockneyfication of RP? In: Gunnel Melchers and Nils-Lennart Johannesson (eds.), Nonstandard Varieties of Language, 198–205. Stockholm: Amquist & Wiksell. Wells, John. 1995. Transcribing Estuary English: a discussion document. Speech Hearing & Language 8: 261–267. Wells, John. 1997. What is Estuary English. English Teaching Professional: 46–47. www.phon.ucl. ac.uk/home/estuary/whatis.htm (last accessed 20 March 2011). Wells, John. 1998. Estuary English?!? http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/ee-screech.pdf (last accessed 21 June 2011). Williams, Ann and Paul Kerswill. 1999. Dialect levelling: change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In: Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty (eds.), Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, 141–162. London: Arnold. Wunderli, Peter. 1992. Le proble`me des entite´s diastratiques. Communication et Cognition 25(2–3): 171–190.
Ulrike Altendorf, Hannover (Germany)
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123. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of British English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction Phonetic and phonological variation Morpho-syntactic variation Summary and outlook References
Abstract This chapter provides an outline of the major patterns of variation in contemporary British English on both the phonological (Section 2) and the morpho-syntactic level (Section 3). In Section 2 it will be shown that although rich patterns of variation exist on the consonant system, these are mainly a function of socioeconomic factors as well as speech style rather than regional distribution. On the other hand, major regional stratifications are found in the vowel system. On the morpho-syntactic level we can differentiate between pan-British features (outlined in Section 3.1) and regional features (Section 3.2). It will be shown that the major North-South distinction that holds in terms of the phonology of British English is also reflected in the morpho-syntactic data.
1 Introduction Right from the beginning of dialectological studies in the 19th century there has been a strong link between historical linguistics and the study of regional variation, and up to this day it has been a fascinating enterprise within (both historical and modern) dialectology to discuss dialect features at a given stage in history from the point of view of whether they constitute continuities of older language periods or rather innovations (cf. e.g. Wagner, Volume 1, Chapter 57). This is true in particular for the dialects of England which, evidently, have not only the greatest time-depth of all varieties of English around the world but which, to this day, display the richest range of structural variation (including the very number of varieties) observable across all L1, i.e. mothertongue, varieties of English. This general pattern has been pointed out succinctly by Schneider (2004: 1127) as a result of a large-scale comparative approach to phonological variation in the Anglophone world, and can be extended to syntactic and, especially, morphological variation: The amount of variability found in a given area seems to correlate with the historical depth of the independent evolution of the respective variety of English. A very large amount of minute detail characterizes the dialectal landscape of England, and the British Isles in general. In North America, there is still a fairly wide range of pronunciation details to be observed. In contrast, the pronunciations of AusE and NZE are relatively homogeneous… African and Asian varieties seem to be relatively more homogeneous […]. (Schneider 2004: 1127)
It is the latter, large-scale perspective which will be taken in the present chapter: we will offer a snapshot of present-day structural variation, concerning both phonetics and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1928–1950
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phonology and morpho-syntax, adopting a comparative, to some extent typology-style perspective, as has become the hallmark of the Freiburg take on the mapping and study of morpho-syntactic variation among the non-standard varieties spoken in the Anglophone world, in general, and the regional dialects of the British Isles, in particular. In doing so the focus will be both on regionally most distinctive features and on dialect features with a wider, pan-Northern, pan-Southern, or even pan-British reach. We will partly draw on survey accounts (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty 1999; Kortmann and Upton 2008) and, for morpho-syntactic variation, on survey data (cf. Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2011). Among other things, this comparative approach will allow us to identify larger geographical patterns among the grammars of regional varieties of the British Isles than previously assumed, and to put in perspective observable dialect features in the British Isles against those found in L1 varieties spoken in other parts of the Anglophone world. Given this ambitious scope, it is necessary to be selective and to dispense with in-depth discussions of individual dialects or features.
2 Phonetic and phonological variation Regional accent variation in contemporary Britain is rather complex and has been a fruitful area of research in dialectology, sociolinguistics and sociophonetics over the last decades. In what follows, we will outline the general patterns of pronunciation differences in different areas of Britain. Note that the focus is on shibboleths distinguishing the major accent divisions in Britain, which implies that the list of regionally distinctive phonetic / phonological features is far from exhaustive (for more detailed overviews and feature lists of specific varieties of British Englishes, see Wells 1982; Hughes et al. 2005; Foulkes and Docherty 1999; as well as the contributions by various authors in Kortmann and Upton 2008). Following the approach adopted in Kortmann and Upton (2008), the different “types” of British English will not be compared relative to Received Pronunciation (RP) since, on the broad level of phonological variation which we will be concerned with, RP is one of many varieties of the Southern type (cf. Mugglestone, Chapter 121). Although there exist a number of regional differences in terms of the consonant system, the major accent divisions in contemporary Britain hold in terms of the vowel system. These differences are a matter of both the phonetic realization of specific vowels as well as the distribution of vowels across different “lexical sets” (cf. Wells 1982; his terminology will be adopted in this chapter). In very broad terms, we can identify three major areas with radically different vowel systems: Southern England, Northern England, and Scotland.
2.1 Consonants On the whole, the English consonant inventory has remained relatively stable over the evolution of the language in terms of the overall segment inventory apart from a number of phonotactic simplifications, especially in Early Modern English, which brought about the omission of initial consonants in words such as knight, pseudo, and so on. In contemporary British English, the major patterns of variation involve the phonetic realization of intervocalic /t/, intervocalic dental fricatives /ð θ/, and the phonotactics of /r/, /h/ and /l/. However, the regional differences between some of these variables
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have recently blurred considerably, since the variants that were traditionally associated with the South (especially London) are now spreading to other varieties of English, as well, in the wake of the spread of so-called “Estuary English” (Rosewarne 1984; Wells 1997; Altendorf and Watt 2008; Altendorf, Chapter 122). It needs to be pointed out that there is a lively debate among scholars whether ‘Estuary English’ is a reality. As was pointed out by Wells (1997), the spread of features from London (working class) English to other areas in Britain has been going on for more than 500 years, so this is hardly a process that warrants the special status it has been receiving by both linguists and the media over the last decades. On the other hand, it is a convenient cover term for features that have recently spread across Britain so we will adhere to this terminology here. In other words, although we would agree that ‘Estuary English’ is inappropriate as a label covering the overall process of the spread of linguistic features originally associated with London per se, there is some justification in adopting it as a shorthand for the current instantiation of that process (i.e. a specific feature or feature bundle). To use a historical analogy: just because large-scale movements of people from Asia to Europe have recurred repeatedly over the last c.5000 years doesn’t invalidate the concept of ‘Hungarian incursion’ (i.e. a subset thereof). What needs to be demonstrated in order to invalidate the concept of ‘Estuary English’ as a separate identifiable subset of the overall process is not the spread per se, but a steady rate of spread of London features to other areas over the course of history. We are not aware that this has been empirically demonstrated.
2.1.1 /t/ To many speakers of English outside the UK, the phonetic realization of /t/ between vowels may very well be the most iconic feature of an English accent. Many speakers of contemporary British English pronounce intervocalic /t/ with a glottal stop [ʔ] in words like butter, matter, litter, etc. Originating in early 20th century London, the glottal stop variant has rapidly spread across England since. It is therefore arguable whether this is still a feature that in any way defines regional varieties of British English rather than a pan-British pronunciation which sets off British English from other varieties of English. A related process, which is referred to as “glottal reinforcement”, is especially prominent in the British South-West, where speakers commonly insert a glottal stop in VC transitions if the consonant is a voiceless stop in words like sit, kick, nip. In Tyneside English, on the other hand, glottal stops can substitute any voiceless stop in word-final position and before unstressed vowels (Foulkes and Docherty 1999).
2.1.2 /ð θ/ (th-fronting) Similar to glottaling of medial /t/, “th-fronting” is another process which used to be strongly associated with working class London English but seems to have been spreading towards other varieties in recent decades (cf. Trudgill 1974 for an account of the rapidness of the change in Norwich). The process itself can be described as a merger between the dental fricatives and the labio-dentals on the latter, so that thin and fin are both pronounced /fɪn/. Unlike the glottalization of /t/, however, there seems to be a higher degree of stigmatisation/awareness associated with the merged variant.
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2.1.3 /h/ A further feature which has traditionally been associated with urban working class London English (“Cockney”) is the omission of the initial /h/ in stressed syllables. This is sometimes accompanied by a complementary process of h-insertion in words that have no etymological initial /h/. It should be pointed out that there is some evidence that h-dropping may be a rather old process, since we find epenthetic (i.e. nonetymological) h as far back as Early Middle English, e.g. in the poem “The Owl and the Nightingale”, (1), which was written around 1200: (1)
Iherde ich holde grete tale An hule [i.e. ‘owl’] and one niʒtingale (Cotton Caligula A. ix)
It has been argued (Lass 1999) that the presence of initial h in contemporary standard English seems to be the result of conscious restoration by language purists in Early Modern English and that the h-less pronunciation may have been present in colloquial speech from Early Middle English times onwards.
2.1.4 /l/ In “English English”, there are two phonetically distinct laterals which are in complementary distribution, whereby [l] is found in syllable onsets (e.g. lie), whereas [ɬ] (socalled “dark l”) is found in codas (e.g. kill ). However, this phonotactic distribution seems to be restricted to England: Welsh English, Irish English (as well as Tyneside English) have [l] across the board, while Scottish English has dark l in all positions. In addition, Cockney English has been undergoing vocalization of coda-l to a mid-high back vowel [ɤ].
2.1.5 /r/ From the 18th century onwards, English underwent a sound change which dropped /r/ in pre-consonantal and word final position (in words like car and cart). This development seems to have originated in the South-East of England, and the r-less (also called “nonrhotic”) pronunciation is now found in all of England except the South-West as well as in the late extraterritorial derivatives of English such as South African English, Australian English, and most of New Zealand English, among others. The original pronunciation is retained in the South-West of England, parts of central Lancashire, Scotland, parts of Northumberland bordering on Scotland, Ireland, and most North American varieties of English. It is worth noting that the loss of pre-consonantal /r/ had repercussions in the vowel system as well, since short vowels underwent lengthening before dropped /r/ (so-called “compensatory lengthening”), which is the only source of long /aː/ in Northern varieties of British English (the so-called START vowel, see below).
2.2 Vowels Unlike the consonant system, the English vowel system has been subject to comprehensive changes which have affected both the phonetic realization of specific elements of
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the system as well as the phonological shape of the system as a whole. Examples of the former include the Great Vowel Shift as well as a number of vowel shifts affecting the short vowel system in many varieties of contemporary English. Systemic changes include the repeated allophonic readjustment of vowel length (Lass 1974) as well as a number of mergers and splits. In contemporary Britain, the most reliable phonological cues to regional origin of a given speaker stem from differences in the pronunciation and/or phonological distribution of vowels. We can discern two major isoglosses on the basis of systematic differences in the vowel system: a Southern English system, a Northern English system, and a Scottish system.
2.2.1 South vs. North – The
FOOT-STRUT
split and the “Broad A” rule
The main difference between the South of England and the North in terms of the distribution of vowels across different lexical sets is defined by the absence of the STRUT vowel in the Northern system, which is a result of a split of Middle English (ME) short /u/ in the South, although the change was by no means regular: in general, the relevant conditioning factor is a preceding labial stop. Examples include push, pull, bull, bush, etc. However, there are a number of words such as button, putt, but, etc., where the new variant occurs in post-labial environments. On the other hand, there are a small number of lexical items which retain the original variant in non-post-labial-stop environments (cf. cushion with FOOT). Thus, it is the Northern varieties that show the more conservative system with regard to this element. In the Southern varieties, the split subsequently brought about fronting of /æ/ (i.e. TRAP) followed by lengthening of TRAP in a number of words. This so-called “broad-A rule” is to a large extent phonologically conditioned and mostly affects vowels before /s θ n f/ (e.g. class, bath, laugh, etc., which all have a long central/back low vowel in broad-A varieties), but shows a considerable number of lexical idiosyncrasies. For example, “flat-A” (i.e. the TRAP variant) is found in mass, math, cancel. Note that there are only a very small number of (near)-minimal pairs such as ant (with TRAP) vs. aunt (with START) and math (with TRAP) vs. aftermath (with START). These idiosyncrasies also hold within derivational paradigms, cf. class and classy with broad A vs. classic with flat A. The lengthened allophones then underwent backing to [a:] ~ [ɑː], so that the vowel in bath, dance, start is usually much backer than the vowel in trap, mass, etc. in these varieties. In combination with the processes affecting pre-consonantal and word-final /r/ as discussed in Section 2.1.5, we arrive at a rather different distribution of /aː/ across the two systems: whereas both systems have a long low vowel, this element is restricted to formerly pre-rhotic vowels in words like start in the Northern varieties. In the South, on the other hand, /aː/ is also found in words like bath and dance. The overall development in the TRAP vowel in different varieties of English is shown in Figure 123.1 below. Table 123.1 shows the distribution of broad A and flat A as well as STRUT and FOOT in the two systems with American English included as a standard of comparison of a variety which has not undergone non-prevocalic r-dropping, but has a phonemic STRUT vowel.
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reflected in current /a/
Northern British
//
some Scottish
(1) fronting
(2) allophonic lengthening/split
[]
(3) backing (a) before /r/
[:]
[:] / __ /r/ (START)
GenAm
(b) before fricatives [a:] / __ [+str] (BATH)
AusE
(c) before nasals [a:] / __ [+nasal] (DANCE)
Southern British English/NZE
Figure 123.1: Different stages of development of Middle English short /a/ (adapted from Langstrof 2006: Chapter 5) Table 123.1: Distribution of broad A and flat A in different varieties of English
strut, cut, but push, pull, cushion bad, trap dance, bath
Southern English
Northern English
American English
/ʌ/ /ʊ/ /æ/ /ɑː/
/ʊ/ /ʊ/ /a/ /a/
/ʌ/ /ʊ/ /æ(ː)/ /æ(ː)/
Note that the table simplifies the actual state of affairs drastically, in that the TRAP vowel is subject to complex allophonization in American English. For an in-depth discussion, see Labov (1994, 2001).
2.2.2 The Scottish Vowel Length rule The Scottish vowel system is mainly defined on the basis of what has been termed the Scottish Vowel Length rule. In very general terms, we can say that vowel length in Scottish English is subject to allophonic conditioning not found in other varieties of English: most vowels are long before /r v ð z #/, and short otherwise (“Aitken’s Law”, for details see Aitken 1981; Lass 1974). This implies that, for example, the vowels in beat and bit are equally long as they occur in the same phonological environment. A further corollary of the Scottish Vowel Length rule is that there are a number of new minimal pairs not found in varieties which do not have this rule: since “morpheme boundary” (/#/) is a lengthening factor, pairs such as heed and he’d show different length in Scottish English, but not in other varieties. It should be pointed out that all major extraterritorial varieties of English show the Southern English vowel typology rather than the Northern or the Scottish one in terms of the number of phonological contrasts, i.e. the American Englishes as well as the
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XIV. Varieties of English
Southern Hemisphere varieties (South African English, Australian English, New Zealand English) have a phonemically distinct STRUT vowel. However, not all of them have undergone the broad A rule: most varieties of North American English except the New England ones retain flat A across the board, some speakers of Australian English retain flat A in pre-nasal environments.
2.2.3 Diphthong mergers Although most varieties of British English have two phonemically distinct front centering diphthongs NEAR and SQUARE, this distinction has become neutralized in a number of varieties of English. In East Anglia there is a merger of the two vowels on the lower variant, which implies that both cheer and chair can be pronounced /tʃɛə/. In Liverpool English, SQUARE sometimes merges with NURSE. In addition to these systemic differences, there also exist a number of phonetic differences which distinguish different varieties of British English. We will outline each of these separately.
2.2.3.1
FACE/GOAT
Another phonetic variable which stereotypically distinguishes the Northern and the Southern varieties of contemporary British English is the degree of diphthongization in the FACE and GOAT vowel. In brief, both the Northern English varieties as well as Scottish English have a monophthongal variant ([eː] and [oː], respectively), whereas the Southern varieties have an upgliding diphthong in both cases. The RP vowel is traditionally transcribed with a mid onset (/eɪ/), although more open variants are also common, especially in London English. The history of these vowels (especially FACE) is rather complex. It should be noted that FACE derives from an Early Middle English short central low monophthong /a/ and that the lengthening, raising and diphthongization are historically disparate processes.
2.2.3.2 /æ/ The pronunciation of TRAP has been rather volatile both within and across different varieties of English showing a number of see-saw patterns and non-directionalities. In contemporary Britain, realizations ranging from a (low)-mid element [ɛ] to central [a] can be found subject to both regional variation and change in progress. In the North, the vowel seems to be relatively stable since it has never been the subject of the miniature chain shift which fronted TRAP as a result of the emergence and lowering of STRUT (see Section 2.2.1 above). In the Northern system, TRAP is realized as a low central vowel [a]. In the South, however, matters are rather more complex. The RP realization of the vowel is usually [æ], i.e. a low front vowel. Traditional Cockney (cf. Fox, Chapter 128) has a closer variant, a fact which has given rise to some debate as to whether the Cockney variant is an innovation or a retention of an earlier value (see Trudgill 2004). Nowadays, however, TRAP undergoes (re)-lowering in London English, a process which seems to spread to “Estuary English” as well (cf. the formant frequency plots in Torgensen et al. 2006).
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2.2.4 Upgliding diphthongs The upgliding diphthongs PRICE and MOUTH are a result of the Great Vowel Shift diphthongizing Middle English high monophthongs and are usually transcribed with an identical nucleus for RP, namely a low central vowel /a/. The offglide is a high front vowel and a high back vowel, respectively. Unlike the FACE/GOAT vowels, which can be either monophthongal or diphthongal in different varieties of British English (see Section 2.2.3.1), both PRICE and MOUTH are realized as diphthongs. However, a number of differences can be found in different accents with regard to the phonetic quality of the onset. In the South (including “Estuary English”) there is a process which essentially “crosses over” the nucleus and the offglide of the two vowels in phonetic space. That is, the nucleus of the vowel with the front offglide (PRICE) undergoes backing, whereas the nucleus of MOUTH undergoes fronting. This process is especially prominent in the Southern Hemisphere varieties of English, but can be found in London English as well and has been argued to constitute a logical extension of the Great Vowel Shift (Bauer 1979). In Scottish English, on the other hand, the nuclei of these two elements diverge from RP in the opposite direction in that they are realized with low-mid nuclei. Thus, there seems to be a correlation between the degree of diphthongization of FACE/GOAT and the diphthongization of PRICE/MOUTH: varieties such as Scottish English which have monophthongal FACE also have a PRICE nucleus that is nearer the offglide in phonetic space, and vice versa.
2.3 Summary We have seen that the phonological variables that define the major accent divisions in contemporary Britain are found in the vowel system. Although there is a great deal of variation to be found in the consonant system as well, these differences are best defined in terms of style and sociolect rather than geographical origin of a given speaker. This is mainly due to the spread of “Estuary English”, which brings about the adoption of a number of consonant variables originally restricted to London English (such as thfronting, glottal stop) by speakers in other parts of the UK. Since the spread of these variables is a relatively recent phenomenon, we are faced with a situation where such variables can be regarded as “partially regional”: if we sample older speakers born before the popularization of Estuary English, we can state a variable such as th-fronting as being defined in terms of region. However, this would not be the case in the speech of younger speakers, assuming that the sociolinguistic stratification of “Estuary English” variables is similar in different regions of Britain (which may very well be a somewhat simplistic assumption). A case in point would be the subjects sampled by Trudgill (1974) in Norwich, where th-fronting was virtually absent in the speech of subjects born before the 1960s, while there was a sharp increase in frequency of use of fronted variants in the speech of younger speakers. If we look at the vowel system, we find rather more well-defined and less volatile accent divisions across Britain. We have seen that there are three systems that differ in terms of both the phonological inventory as well as the phonetic realization of different vowels. The Scottish system is a distinct type due to the systemic effects of the Scottish Vowel Length rule, which renders phonemic length predictable in all contexts. The
1936
XIV. Varieties of English
Northern English system is marked by the absence of a phonemically distinct STRUT vowel. A further iconic difference between the South and the North (including Scotland) is the degree of diphthongization of the FACE/GOAT vowels where the South has a diphthong, while monophthongal realizations are the norm in the North, including Scotland. It is worth pointing out that there seems to be some super-regionalization happening with regard to the vowel system as well. For example, the typical realization of the FACE vowel in contemporary Newcastle English is a long front monophthong [eː], which has ousted the traditional variant [ɪə]. It therefore seems that different regions converge on a “pan-Northern” type in regard to the vowel system, which unlike the developments in the consonant system (where previous accent areas become increasingly blurred due to the spread of “Estuary English”) serves to solidify large-scale accent divisions in Britain.
3 Morpho-syntactic variation Especially since the turn of the 21st century there has been a rapidly growing number of studies on the dialect grammar, especially the dialect syntax, of a wide range of Romance and Germanic dialects (cf. Kortmann 2010; Murelli and Kortmann 2011), including the dialects of the British Isles (e.g. the corpus-based studies in Kortmann et al. 2005; Hernandez et al. 2011). This section will be primarily informed by the survey data of a currently ongoing dialect atlas project, the World Atlas of Variation in English (henceforth WAVE; Kortmann and Lunkenheimer 2011; Kortmann 2012). Its database was assembled at the University of Freiburg in a follow-up on research conducted for the Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann et al. 2004) and for the interactive CD-ROM accompanying that handbook (in some publications informally labeled WAMVE – The World Atlas of Morpho-Syntactic Variation in English). WAVE includes information on 235 morphosyntactic features in 74 varieties of English from eight different Anglophone world regions. The ten regional varieties sampled from the British Isles, among them the four socalled Celtic Englishes, are the following, with the expert informants and abbreviations used in this chapter given in brackets: Channel Islands English (ChIsE; Anna Rosen), East Anglian English (EA; Peter Trudgill), Irish English (IrE; Markku Filppula), Manx English (ManxE; Jennifer Kewley Draskau), English dialects in the North of England (North; Graeme Trousdale), Orkney and Shetland English (O&SE; Gunnel Melchers), Scottish English (ScE; Jennifer Smith), English dialects in the Southeast of England (SE; Lieselotte Anderwald), English dialects in the South-West of England (SW; Susanne Wagner), and Welsh English (WelE; Robert Penhallurick). In terms of Trudgill’s proposal for a new dialect typology (the “true typological split” according to Trudgill 2009), six of these qualify as low-contact L1 varieties (SW, SE, EA, North, ScE, O&SE) and four as high-contact L1 varieties (ChIsE, IrE, ManxE, WelE), with SW, EA, and the North as clearly the three English dialect areas with a time depth and, in part, feature stability dating back to medieval times. The distinction between high- and low-contact varieties, relevant as it has been shown to be for the large-scale morphosyntactic profiles of varieties and entire variety types of English around the world (cf. e.g. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009; Kortmann 2010), will not play a role in the present survey, though.
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The data and informant judgments for these ten varieties form the basis of the present section. These judgments relate to the frequency with which each of the 235 features can be encountered in the relevant variety, i.e. whether the relevant feature is pervasive or obligatory (category A), neither pervasive nor extremely rare (category B), or whether it does exist, but simply is very rare (category C). The 11th British Isles variety represented in WAVE (British Creole; Mark Sebba) falls outside the scope of regional L1 varieties, even though certain South(east)ern (clearly non-creole) features have made it into this variety, as will briefly be shown in Section 3.2.
3.1 Pan-British features In a questionnaire-based grammar survey at British schools conducted some 20 years ago, Cheshire et al. (1993) identified (out of a total of 196 features) a set of non-standard forms used by a majority of people in England (more concretely, forms which showed in 80% or more of the questionnaires returned in the survey), without displaying any regional restrictions: (1) Top pan-British features according to Cheshire et al. (1993) • them as a demonstrative (e.g. in them days) • absence of plural marking on nouns of measurement (e.g. five pound of flour) • what as subject relativizer (e.g. The film what was on last night) • never as a past tense negator (e.g. in No, I never did that) • regularized reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself/yourself/hisself ) • there’s/there was with notional plural subjects (e.g. there’s three dogs in the garden) • perfect participles sat and stood with progressive meaning (e.g. She was sat over there…, He was stood in the corner) • adverbs with the same form as adjectives, i.e. without -ly (e.g. Come quick! ) • indirect object preceding direct object in pronominal double object constructions (e.g. Give me it! ) • ain’t/in’t (e.g. That ain’t/in’t working) • non-standard was (e.g. We was singing) All of these clearly qualify as candidates for so-called areoversals (cf. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009) for the British Isles, with some of them possibly even making it into spontaneous spoken standard British English within a couple of generations. Now let us see which set of morpho-syntactic features WAVE yields as top candidates for British areoversals, defined as features which occur in at least 80% (i.e. eight of the ten) regional varieties sampled. We will first present these in three groups (according to whether they are found in all ten, in nine, or only in eight varieties), and then ask which of them can truly be called highly distinctive of the British Isles when comparing them with the most frequent non-standard morpho-syntactic features in (a) the whole Anglophone world and (b) in all mother-tongue (i.e. L1) varieties of English sampled in WAVE. The exclamation marks in (2) below indicate pan-British Isles features also included in the list by Cheshire et al. (1993) in (1) above:
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XIV. Varieties of English
(2) Candidates for areoversals of the British Isles a. found in all 10 regional varieties: • ! existential / presentational there’s/there is/there was with plural subjects • ! adverbs have the same form as adjectives (i.e. no StE adverb-forming -ly) • me instead of I in coordinate subjects (My brother and me) • myself/meself instead of I in coordinate subjects (This is Jenny and myself ). • was for conditional were b. found in 9 regional varieties: • ! them instead of demonstrative those • ! never as preverbal past tense negator • ! was/were generalization (You was hungry, but he was thirsty) • ! either order of pronominal objects in double object constructions (He couldn’t give her it) • use of us + NP in subject function (Us kids used to pinch the sweets like hell ) • there with past participle in resultative contexts (There’s sth. fallen down …) • multiple negation / negative concord (He won’t do no harm) • like as a focusing device (How did you get away with that like?) • she/her used for inanimate referents (she was burning good [about a house]) • leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: regularization of irregular verb paradigms (e.g. catch-catched-catched) • leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: unmarked forms (frequent with give and run) • zero-relativization in subject position (The man Ø lives there is a nice chap) c. found in 8 regional varieties: • ! absence of plural marking only after quantifiers (e.g. thirteen year) • ! regularized reflexives paradigm (hisself, theirselves/theirself ) • no inversion/no auxiliaries in main clause yes/no questions (You get the point?) • as what/than what in comparative clauses (He’s bigger than what I am) • object pronoun forms serving as base for first and/or second person reflexives (e.g. meself for ‘myself ’) • object pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: first person singular (I’ve lost me bike) • forms or phrases for the 2nd person plural pronoun other than you (e.g. IrE youse) • proximal and distal demonstratives with here and there (e.g. this here book vs. them there books) • double comparatives and superlatives (e.g. That is so much more easier to follow) • regularized comparison strategies: extension of analytic marking (e.g. in one of the most pretty sunsets) • leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: past tense replacing the past participle (e.g. He had went) As we can see, there is a quite remarkable overlap between the WAVE-based feature set and the one by Cheshire et al. (1993) in (1). Eight out of the 11 features on the
123. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of British English
1939
latter’s list are among the top 80% in the British Isles sample in WAVE. In fact, did we define “pan-British” less strictly than “occurring in at least eight of all British Isles varieties in WAVE”, the three remaining features of Cheshire et al.’s list (‘be sat/stood with progressive meaning’, ‘ain’t as the negated form of be’ and ‘relativizer what’) would figure as immediate runners-up in the WAVE list since they are found in seven British Isles varieties. In other words, the list of top pan-British features in morpho-syntax identified by Cheshire et al. (1993) practically turns out to be a proper subset of the corresponding WAVE set. This convergence of the survey results is reassuring given the fact that they have been arrived at by very different methodologies, with Cheshire et al.’s informants reflecting in the first place non-standard usage among adolescent native speakers. Whichever list of widespread or even pan-British dialect features is taken, survey data as in the WAVE make it possible to put in perspective such candidates for areoversals as identified above. For it may turn out upon widening the scope to structural properties of non-standard varieties of English around the world, that what strikes us as noteworthy because a given dialect feature is found in all or most British regional varieties, should not be interpreted as a specific “dialectal Briticism”, but rather as part of a larger pattern. On the one hand, the relevant feature may be found in the vast majority of all non-standard (L1, L2, Pidgin and Creole) varieties of English around the world, thus qualifying as a vernacular angloversal which, of course, is also found in the regional varieties of the British Isles. On the other hand, the relevant feature may be found in the vast majority of all non-standard mother-tongue varieties of English around the world, thus qualifying as an L1 varioversal and, again, to be expected as a pan-British feature in the regional varieties spoken in the British Isles (for a detailed discussion of (criteria for) vernacular angloversals, varioversals and areoversals, cf. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009). So what is the situation for those 28 dialect features found in a minimum of eight regional British varieties listed in (2)? To begin with, six of them turn out to be true angloversals, i.e. features attested in at least 80% of all 74 varieties sampled in WAVE. These are: • • • • • •
me instead of I in coordinate subjects adverbs have the same form as adjectives multiple negation use of never as preverbal past tense negator no inversion rule in yes/no questions forms or phrases for the 2nd person plural pronoun other than you (youse, you ones, you lot).
Recall: the first two were found in all ten British Isles varieties, the two negation features in nine, and the last two angloversals in eight regional varieties of the British Isles. If we look at the next most widely found features in the grammars of varieties of English around the world, we immediately come across ‘was for conditional were’ (78% of 74 varieties) and ‘existential/ presentational there’s/there is/there was with plural subjects’ (72%) – the other two truly pan-British features as they are found in all ten varieties, and rather pervasively in every one of them at that. Two more
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XIV. Varieties of English
“near-angloversals” listed in (2) are non-standard comparison strategies for adjectives: double comparatives and superlatives (73%), and regularized comparison strategies via the extension of analytic marking (70%). In sum, then, ten of our candidates for British Isles areoversals turn out to be vernacular angloversals or near-angloversals. What about the remaining 18 features – are they also part of a more widely occurring morpho-syntactic pattern, more concretely also regularly found in vernacular L1 varieties of English spoken outside the British Isles? In order to answer this question, we only need to check the set of pan-British Isles features against the set of L1 varioversals, i.e. those features found in at least 80% of all 31 L1 varieties sampled WAVE. On the whole, there are 20 such features which are highly characteristic of English mother-tongue vernaculars (as compared with L2 varieties of English and English-based Pidgins and Creoles). For reasons of space the complete list cannot be given here. Suffice it to state the following: more than half (18 to be exact) of the pan-British Isles features are L1 varioversals. For instance, of those five features documented in all ten British Isles varieties, one is found in 29 (out of 31) L1 varieties of English around the world, one in 30 L1 varieties and the other three even in all (!) of the 31 L1 varieties. So this leaves us with ten candidates for, weird as it may sound, distinctively British pan-British Isles areoversals. Even of these, four lose in distinctive Britishness if we look immediately below the 80% threshold for L1 varioversals: about 75% of all L1 varieties of English worldwide exhibit regularized reflexives paradigms, was/were generalization, absence of plural marking after quantifiers, and leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms via the past tense replacing the past participle. Ultimately, then, we are left with the following six truly uniquely British Isles areoversals: • • • • • •
object pronoun forms serving as base for first and/or second person reflexives proximal and distal demonstratives of the type this here, that there there with past participle in resultative contexts either order of pronominal objects in double object constructions zero relativization in subject position object pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns.
The first two of these areoversals are found in eight British Isles varieties, the other four in as many as nine of the ten British Isles varieties sampled in WAVE. Table 123.2 summarizes the discussion of pan-British Isles features presented in this section (note the following convention: ‘+’ indicates a feature rated ‘A’ (= ‘pervasive’) in at least five British Isles varieties, and ‘-’ a feature C-rated (‘extremely rare’) or non-existent in five or more British Isles varieties).
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Table 123.2: The pan-British Isles features vis-a`-vis (near-) angloversals and (near-) L1 varioversals Top in WAVE (8 or more varieties)
Angloversal Near-angloversal L1 varioversal Near-L1 (≥ 80% of 31 varioversal (≥ 70% of (≥ 80% of (≥ 70% of varieties) 74 varieties) 74 varieties) 31 varieties)
Also in Cheshire et al.’s (1993) top list
+ me instead of I in coordinate subjects
√
√
+ other adverbs have the same form as adjectives
√
√
√
never as preverbal past tense negator
√
√
√
– forms or phrases for the 2nd person plural pronoun other than you
√
√
multiple negation/ negative concord
√
√
no inversion/no auxiliaries in main clause yes/no questions
√
√
+ existential / presentational there’s/ there is/there was with plural subjects
√
√
+ was for conditional were
√
√
double comparatives and superlatives
√
√
– regularized comparison strategies: extension of analytic marking
√
√
+ them instead of demonstrative those
√
– myself/meself instead of I in coordinate subjects
√
– she/her used for inanimate referents
√
use of us + NP in subject function
√
+ like as a focusing device
√
√
√
(Continued )
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XIV. Varieties of English
Table 123.2: Continued Top in WAVE (8 or more varieties)
Angloversal Near-angloversal L1 varioversal Near-L1 (≥ 80% of 31 varioversal (≥ 70% of (≥ 80% of (≥ 70% of varieties) 74 varieties) 74 varieties) 31 varieties)
as what/than what in comparative clauses
√
leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: regularization of irregular verb paradigms
√
leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: unmarked forms
√
Also in Cheshire et al.’s (1993) top list
was/were generalization
√
√
absence of plural marking only after quantifiers
√
√
regularized reflexives paradigm
√
√
leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: past tense replacing the past participle
√
either order of pronominal objects in double object constructions + object pronoun forms serving as base for first and/or second person reflexives + object pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: first person singular zero relativization in subject position – proximal and distal demonstratives with here and there there with past participle in resultative contexts
√
123. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of British English
1943
From a comparative perspective, it may be interesting to note at this point what the North American areoversals are according to the WAVE data (i.e. not only in the L1 varieties of English spoken in the US but also in Newfoundland English as well as in Chicano English and Gullah, the two non-L1 US varieties sampled in WAVE): special forms (e.g. yall) or phrases (notably you guys) for the second person plural, proximal, and distal demonstratives of the type this here vs. that there, invariant don’t in the present tense, and the use of ain’t as the negated form of have and be (I ain’t had a look at them yet; they’re all in there, ain’t they?). All of these meet the hard criterion for unrestricted areoversals, i.e. they are attested in more than 90% of the non-standard varieties spoken in North America, but in no more than 60% of the varieties world-wide (cf. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann 2009).
3.2 Regional features For each of the ten regional varieties considered, this section lists all those features that, within the British Isles, solely occur in one variety (ordered by A, B, and C rating), or are highly distinctive of a certain regional variety and found (typically with a lower rating) in only one other British Isles variety. Irish English, the dialects of the North, and the dialect of East Anglia stand out as those with the largest number of such pervasive (i.e. Arated) or at least moderately frequently used (i.e. B-rated) highly local features, with East Anglian English as the most distinctive of these three varieties given its high number of A-rated features. At the opposite end of these three regional varieties we find Channel Islands English and, especially, the dialect of South-East England, both of which exhibit exclusively features which are hardly used by speakers of these dialects. In general, it is interesting to note that C-rated features, which are of particular interest from the continuities vs. innovations perspective (i.e. as prime candidates for remnants of the past or spearheads of a new development) are far outnumbered in this list, showing that the vast majority of such regionally distinctive features are going strong in their homelands. When consulting the following list, the reader should keep in mind again that the WAVE set of 235 morpho-syntactic features forms the basis for this chapter. This set was selected from a total of almost 350 features which the authors and their team had compiled over the years from the dialect literature – but which can’t possibly all be included in a survey questionnaire. Especially features known to be restricted to a single nonstandard variety in the anglophone world (and in many cases recessive) were not included into the feature pool of WAVE. What this means is that there clearly do exist even more highly local features in the regional British varieties than those listed below. ManxE
A-feature: B-features: C-features:
O&SE
A-feature: B-features:
existential construction to express possessive (a house at him); present perfect for StE simple past (I’ve done it years ago), a-prefixing on elements other than ing-forms (and me a cuddled up); singular it for plural they in anaphoric use (with non-human referents) (ye can get it anywhere, diseases), attributive adjectival modifiers follow head noun (usually only in Manx words used in an English context: they waved theer ‘Oie-vies’ = nights good = ‘goodnights’) no number distinction in demonstratives (dis ( yon) horses pulls ( poos) weel ); as/to as comparative markers, variant forms of dummy subject there in existential clauses (they were a coo lowse in the byre)
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XIV. Varieties of English
ScE
B-features:
North
C-feature: B-features:
C-features:
IrE
A-feature:
B-features:
C-features:
SW
B-features:
C-features:
SE
C-feature:
EA
A-features:
subject pronoun drop: dummy pronouns, go-based future markers, use of gotten and got with distinct meanings, amn’t in tag questions; found in only one more regional variety: alternative forms/phrases for referential (non-dummy) it, plural forms of interrogative pronouns: using additional (free or bound) elements, insertion of it where StE favors zero, use of gotten and got with distinct meanings (dynamic vs. static); non-standard use of modals for politeness reasons subject pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: first person plural, object pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: first person plural, use of zero article where StE has definite article, use of zero article where StE has indefinite article, agreement sensitive to position of subject; subject pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: third person singular, object pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: third person singular, is for am/will with 1st person singular after-perfect (another equally distinctive IrE feature (but not part of the WAVE feature set) is subordinating and, as in He seen a boat passin’ along and him cuttin’ oats.); emphatic reflexives with own, specialized plural markers for pronouns, subject pronoun drop: referential pronouns, invariant be as habitual marker, other non-standard habitual markers: analytic, perfect marker already, present tense forms of modals used where StE has past tense forms, deletion of auxiliary be: before progressive, relativizer where or a form derived from where, deletion of stranded prepositions in relative clauses, deletion of to before infinitives, too; too much; very much ‘very’ as qualifier, other possibilities for fronting than StE, doubly filled COMP-position with wh-words; emphatic reflexives with own; indefinite article one/wan, do as unstressed tense marker (without habitual or other aspectual meanings), superlative marker most occurring before head noun non-coordinated subject pronoun forms in object function (they always called I ‘Willie’), non-coordinated object pronoun forms in subject function (us got in the train), use of postpositions (they’d come in dinner time); use of indefinite article where StE has definite article, for-based complementizers (I’ve got a one, but ‘tis a job for keep up wi’ ‘em [archaic]) double determiners (e.g. demonstrative/article + possessive pronoun, with possessive pronoun preposed or postposed) subject pronoun forms serving as a base for reflexives (he done it hisself), a-prefixing on ing-forms (where are you a-goin?), invariant present tense forms due to zero marking for the third person singular (he like it), invariant be with non-habitual function (there it be!); note two further A-features which are highly regionally distinctive
123. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of British English
ChlsE
C-features:
WelE
A-feature: B-feature: C-features:
1945
of East Anglian English, each of them being found only in one other regional variety of British English: alternative forms/ phrases for dummy it (also in O&SE; Thass raining) and distinction between emphatic vs. non-emphatic forms of pronouns (also in SW; I don’t like it, thass no good) present tense forms for neutral future reference (I go cycling tomorrow), invariant don’t for all persons in the present tense (I said I ain’t go), no subordination; chaining construction linking two main verbs (motion and activity) (You can live here, you can live anywhere) other possibilities for fronting (Singing they were) substitution of that-clause for infinitival subclause subject pronoun forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: third person plural, comparatives and superlatives of participles, zero past tense forms of regular verbs, special negative verbs in imperatives
An earlier grammar survey based on only 76 morpho-syntactic features (Kortmann 2008: 490–492) yielded a North-South divide among the regional varieties of the British Isles. It turns out that this divide also emerges, with a partially different composition of characteristically (pan-)Northern and (pan-)Southern features, when looking at the geographical patterning of the 235 WAVE features, with Scottish English, Irish English, and Manx English patterning with the North (see Table 123.3), while Welsh English patterns with the South (see Table 123.4). In both tables, features with a strong regional bias, i.e. found in four or even all five relevant regional varieties, can be distinguished from features with a weaker regional bias (found in no more than three varieties). As is easy enough to see, the number of characteristically Northern features is much longer than the corresponding one for the South. In both tables the rightmost column identifies the “outlier(s)” in the relevant other region. Here it is to be noted that it is especially the three most traditional English dialect areas which figure as outliers, i.e. the Southwest and East Anglia exhibiting the odd typical Northern feature, and the North (as well as Irish English) with the odd typical Southern feature.
3.2.1 North Table 123.3: Morpho-syntactic features found exclusively or predominantly in the northern regional varieties of the British Isles Feature wider range of uses of progressive be + V-ing than in StE: extension to stative verbs use of definite article where StE has indefinite article be as perfect auxiliary
O&SE
ScE
North
IrE
ManxE
in South only in
!
!
√
√
!
WelE
!
√
!
!
!
SW, WelE
!
√
√
√ (Continued )
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Table 123.3: Continued Feature agreement sensitive to subject type (nominal vs. pronominal) forms or phrases for the 2nd person singular pronoun other than you use of definite article where StE favors zero yon/yonder indicating remoteness Northern Subject Rule relativizer at loosening of sequence of tenses rule epistemic mustn’t want/need + past participle relativizer that or what in non-restrictive contexts for (to) as infinitive marker presence of subject in imperatives
O&SE
ScE
North
IrE
!
√
√
√
!
!
√
!
√
!
! √
√ √ √
√
! ! √
√
√
√ √
√ ! √ !
√ √ √ √ √ ! √
√ √
√
ManxE
in South only in
SW ChIsE
SE EA √ !
EA
√ attested, but not frequently used (B rating) ! pervasive (A rating)
3.2.2 South Concerning the South, it is worth mentioning that British Creole also exhibits three of the Southern features, notably ain’t as the negated form of be and the invariant nonconcord tag innit/in’t it. These two features, in particular, together with the Southeastern and East Anglian feature ‘ain’t as the negated form of have’ show the impact of intensive contact with regional Southeastern English upon British Creole, since none of these three morpho-syntactic features is to be found in Jamaican Creole or Jamaican English. Table 123.4: Morpho-syntactic features found exclusively or predominantly in the southern regional varieties of the British Isles Feature
SW
SE
EA
ChIsE
WelE
in North only in
as what / than what in comparative clauses invariant non-concord tags (e.g. innit) leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: past participle replacing the past tense form gapping/zero-relativization in subject position ain’t as the negated form of be relativizer what or a form derived from what regularized comparison strategies: extension of synthetic marking
√ √
√ √
!
√ !
√ !
North, IrE
√
√
!
√
ScE, North
! √
√ √ √
! !
√
√
√
√
√ attested, but not frequently used (B rating) ! pervasive (A rating)
√
ManxE, IrE North
123. Varieties of English: Regional varieties of British English
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So it looks there is sufficient evidence for claiming the existence of a morpho-syntactic counterpart of the well-known North-South split in the accents, more exactly the vowel systems, of the British Isles (recall Sections 2.2.1. and 2.3). At least there is evidence strong enough to merit further (quantitative and qualitative) exploration on the basis of a wider range of morpho-syntactic features and their use in regional British varieties (as documented, or still to be documented, in more fine-grained survey data, informant interviews, and natural discourse data).
4 Summary and outlook Despite the descriptive nature of this chapter, it should have emerged that the scientific study of regional British varieties is very much alive and has added many fascinating new perspectives to what is typically associated with traditional English dialectology. There are many avenues along which both phonetic and phonological variation and morphosyntactic variation are currently being pursued. In conclusion, and primarily as an appetizer for the readership, the following cursory remarks on some of the most promising of these new avenues of dialectal research shall suffice. There is, for example, the rich and sophisticated sociolinguistic take on structural variation in the British Isles (including studies on the perceptual salience of dialectal features; cf. e.g. Montgomery 2006, in press), along with the strong interest in morpho-syntactic variation which has developed within different theoretical frameworks since the 1990s (cf. e.g. Kortmann 2010). For these approaches, and even more so for ongoing and future research most closely in line with the approach adopted in this chapter, it is obvious that they rest (or are bound to rest) in large part on the availability of new data sources (survey data like in WAVE, electronic corpora like FRED, the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus; cf. Anderwald and Wagner 2007), and the application of new or updated methodologies to large bodies of corpus or aggregated data. Take, for instance, Szmrecsanyi (forthc.) for what a statistically sophisticated corpus-based dialectometry for the British Isles may look like. Or consider new approaches to measuring linguistic similarities among languages and, most recently, among English dialects, in which statistical tools known from bio-informatics (phenetic networks, or phenograms) are applied to aggregated phonological and morphosyntactic data (for phonetic similarities cf. McMahon et al. 2007, forthc.; for morphosyntactic similarities, cf. Wichmann and Urban 2012; or Szmreczanyi and Wolk forthc.). All of these studies help putting in perspective what we know about the regional varieties of the British Isles (and other anglophone world regions, for that matter), both from a synchronic, but also from a historical point of view. Varieties-based studies have, for example, called into question such well-entrenched claims and dictums in (English) historical and general linguistics that there is a trade-off between syntheticity and analyticity (to the effect that if a language, or variety thereof, loses in one, it necessarily gains in the other), or that all languages (and by implication also all varieties and variety types of a language) exhibit equal degrees of structural complexity (cf. Szmrecsanyi 2012; Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2009). Wichmann and Urban (2012), in applying their automatic similarity judgments program not just to the classification of thousands of languages, but (using the WAVE data set) also to regional British dialects, reach results confirming the existence of larger regional patterns in the British Isles and are even able to identify, via the development of statistical diversity measures, the (historical) centers of innovation and dispersal among the regional British varieties,
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most notably the dialects of the North of England. Finally, large survey data sets like WAVE, with the relevant small-scale and particularly large-scale patterns that they reveal, also allow us to learn more about processes and effects of language change (both in contact and non-contact situations), such as grammaticalization processes (cf. Kortmann and Schneider 2011), and thus serve as a window not only to the past, but also to the future. Angloversals and L1 varioversals – some, admittedly, more than others – are candidates for structural properties becoming part of spontaneous spoken Standard English in the long run; some areoversals may well make it into the standard variety/ies of English spoken in a given Anglophone world region (e.g. British vs. American vs. Caribbean vs. Pacific vs. Southeast Asian vs. South Asian vs. African English). But whichever changes in English around the globe we are bound to witness, the regional varieties of the British Isles will undoubtedly continue to exhibit the largest array of (in part highly regionally restricted) distinctive phonetic/phonological and morphosyntactic features of non-standard varieties in the Anglophone world. In a continually globalizing world, there will be an increasing need for the local, not least via the vernacular variety spoken (cf. e.g. Johnstone 2010). The regional British varieties will continue to offer the richest choice in this respect. In this chapter, we barely sketched the outermost layer of the British Isles’ regionalisms. Much still remains to be discovered, for example, on the level of (often highly locally restricted) syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on the use of the individual WAVE features (and other features not included in WAVE).
5 References Aitken, Adam Jack. 1981. The Scottish vowel length rule. In: Michael Benskin and Michael L. Samuels (eds.), So meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English presented to Angus McIntosh, 131–157. Edinburgh: The Middle English Dialect Project. Altendorf, Ulrike and Dominic Watt. 2008. Dialects in the South of England: phonology. In: Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), Handbook of Varieties of English: The British Isles, 194–222. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Anderwald, Lieselotte and Susanne Wagner. 2007. FRED – The Freiburg English Dialect corpus. In: Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan, and Hermann Moisl (eds.), Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora. Vol. 1: Synchronic Corpora, 35–53. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderwald, Lieselotte and Bernd Kortmann in press Typological methods in dialectology. In: Manfred Krug and Julia Schlueter (eds.), Research Methods in Language Variation and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauer, Laurie. 1979. The second Great Vowel Shift? Journal of the International Phonetic Association 9: 57–66. Britain, David. 2010. Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. In: Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 30–82. London/New York: Routledge. Cheshire, Jenny, Viv Edwards, and Pamela Whittle. 1993. Non-Standard English and Dialect Levelling. In: John Milroy and Lesley Milroy (eds.), Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, 53–96. London/New York: Longman. Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty (eds.). 1999. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold. Hernandez, Nuria, Daniela Kolbe, and Monika Schulz. 2011. A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects. Vol 2: Modals, Pronouns, Complement clauses. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill, and Dominic Watt. 2005. English Accents and Dialects – An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Arnold. Ihalainen, Ossi. 1994. The dialects of England since 1776. In: Robert Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5: English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development, 197–274. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnstone, Barbara. 2010. Indexing the local. In: Nicolas Coupland (ed.), Handbook of Language and Globalization, 386–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kortmann, Bernd. 2008. Synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in the British Isles. In: Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), Handbook of Varieties of English: The British Isles, 478–495. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd. 2010. Variation across Englishes. In: Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 400–424. London: Routledge. Kortmann, Bernd (ed.). 2012. World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Kerstin Lunkenheimer (eds.). 2011. The Electronic World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar (eWAVE). Mu¨nchen and Berlin: Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Agnes Schneider. 2011. Grammaticalization in non-standard varieties of English. In: Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 263–278. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Kortmann, Bernd and Edgar Schneider with Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie and Clive Upton (eds.). 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 1: Phonology, Vol. 2: Morphology, Syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2004. Global synopsis: Morphological and syntactic variation in English. In: Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider with Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie and Clive Upton (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology, Syntax, 1142–1202. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2009. World Englishes between simplification and complexification. In: Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers (eds.), World Englishes: Problems – Properties – Prospects, 265–285. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kortmann, Bernd and Clive Upton (eds.). 2008. Handbook of Varieties: The British Isles. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Susanne Wagner. 2005. The Freiburg English Dialect Project and Corpus. In: Bernd Kortmann, Tanja Herrmann, Lukas Pietsch, and Susanne Wagner (eds.), A Comparative Grammar of British English Dialects: Agreement, Gender, Relative Clauses, 1–20. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kortmann, Bernd and Susanne Wagner. 2010. Changes and continuities in dialect grammar. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change, 269–292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Langstrof, Christian. 2006. Vowel change in New Zealand English – Patterns and Implications. PhD thesis, University of Canterbury. Lass, Roger. 1974. Linguistic orthogenesis? Scots vowel quantity and the English length conspiracy. In: John M. Anderson and Charles Jones (eds.), Historical Linguistics: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh, September 1973, 311–352. Amsterdam: North Holland. Lass, Roger. 1999. Phonology and morphology. In: Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3: 1476–1776, 56–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMahon, April, Paul Heggarty, Robert McMahon, and Warren Maguire. 2007. The sound patterns of Englishes: representing phonetic similarity. English Language and Linguistics 11: 113–142.
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McMahon, April forthc. Computing linguistic distance between varieties. In: Manfred Krug and Julia Schlu¨ter (eds.), Research Methods in Language Variation and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy (eds.). 1993. Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London/New York: Longman. Montgomery, Chris. 2006. Northern English dialects: A perceptual approach. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Unpublished PhD Thesis. Montgomery, Chris forthc. Mapping the perceptions of non-linguists in Northern England. In: Sandra Hansen, Christian Schwarz, Philipp Stoeckle, and Tobias Streck (eds.), Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space – Current Methods and Perspectives in Sociolinguistic Research on Dialect Change. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Murelli, Adriano and Bernd Kortmann. 2011. Non-standard varieties in the areal typology of Europe. In: Bernd Kortmann and Johan van der Auwera (eds). The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide, 525–536. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rosewarne, David. 1984. Estuary English: David Rosewarne describes a newly observed variety of English pronunciation. Times Educational Supplement, 19th October 1984. Schneider, Edgar. 2004. Global synopsis: phonetic and phonological variation in English worldwide”. In: Bernd Kortmann, Edgar Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: Phonology: 1111–1138. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt forthc. Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of English. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), Handbook on the History of English: Rethinking Approaches to the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szmrecanyi, Benedikt forthc. The Geolinguistics of Grammatical Variability in Traditional British English Dialects: A Large-Scale Frequency-Based Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Bernd Kortmann. 2009. Vernacular universals and angloversals in a typological Perspective. In: Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto (eds.), Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond, 33–53. London/New York: Routledge. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Christoph Wolk forthc. Holistic corpus-based dialectology. Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Torgersen, Eivind, Paul Kerswill and Susan Fox. 2006. Ethnicity as a source of changes in the London vowel system. In: Frans Hinskens (ed.), Language Variation: European Perspectives, 249– 263. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-Dialect Formation. The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2009. Vernacular universals and the sociolinguistic typology of English dialects. In: Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto (eds.), Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond, 304–322. London/New York: Routledge. Upton, Clive. 2008. Synopsis: phonological variation in the British Isles. In: Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), Handbook of Varieties: The British Isles, 269–282. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, John. 1997. What is Estuary English. English Teaching Professional: 46–47. www.phon.ucl. ac.uk/home/estuary/whatis.htm (last accessed 20 March 2011). Wichmann, Søren and Matthias Urban forthc. Towards an automated classification of Englishes. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), Handbook on the History of English: Rethinking Approaches to the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernd Kortmann Christian Langstrof, Freiburg (Germany)
124. Varieties of English: Scots
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124. Varieties of English: Scots 1. 2. 3. 4.
Modern Scots and Scottish English External history Present and future prospects for Scots References
Abstract Scots is unique in being an “English” dialect other than Standard English which was used as the early modern language of state (in Scotland) and of high literature. It also demonstrates how a language can be dialectalized without losing features associated with languages. This chapter gives the historical background to these developments: the spread of Old English into what is now Scotland; its triumph over Gaelic; the foundation of the burghs with northern English immigrants; the presence of Low German speakers; the French alliance. The language’s decline was caused by changes in religious affiliation, the unions of 1603 and 1707 and the embrace of (spoken) English by the middle classes. High literature continued to be written in Scots, although the concentration on rural dialects when most Scots are urban provoked identity issues for many speakers. Political recognition for Scots at the start of the 21st century appears ineffectual.
1 Modern Scots and Scottish English The present linguistic ecology of Scotland is more complicated than most other regions in the English-speaking world. It is an English-speaking country, in the sense that the main working language in writing, and for many people in speech, is Scottish Standard English (SSE), discussed in Section 2.5 below. But a Q-Celtic language, Scottish Gaelic, is also spoken, by fewer than 60,000 people out of a population of around 5.2 million. This is a disastrous decline from even a hundred years ago, however, when possibly a million people could speak the language. In 2005, Gaelic was given special legal status in Scotland by an act of the Scottish Parliament. This suggests a bipolar relationship between Gaelic and SSE in Scotland similar to that between Irish and English in Ireland. This is not the case. In non-Gaelic Scotland, several highly distinctive dialects are spoken. The normal sociolinguistic rules partially apply: rural and older speakers are more likely to speak traditional dialects than are either urban working class people (who speak modified local dialects which differ from the standard more in phonology than in lexis or structure) or middle class speakers. But these dialects do not fit the routine patterns of dialects in the English-speaking world entirely, however. Firstly, the dialects involved are in many senses those least like Standard English of any in the “English”-speaking world (with the exception of English-lexified creoles). It is difficult for outsiders to understand dense (McClure 1979) southern or central dialects without considerable exposure. The northern and insular varieties are almost impenetrable; in the case of the dialects of Shetland, even other Scottish people have some difficulty following conversations without practice (see, for instance, Millar 2007). But, despite the differences between the dialects, all speakers agree that their Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1951–1960
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varieties shared more with each other than any non-Scottish dialects (with the exception of the Scots dialects of the northern counties of Ireland). But there are many highly distinctive groups of English dialects. The Germanic variety of Scotland goes further than this: it has a long written history which includes near-standardization and a continuation – unique among the “English” dialects – as a language of state and literature well into the age of print. Despite its displacement by Standard English in many domains in the early modern period, Scots has continued to be used in literature, not merely, as is the case with many other dialects, in sentimental or comic verse, but in “high” literature, including prose. At the same time, however, traditional rural varieties are considered by many to be in terminal decline. This chapter will describe how the present situation came about. In the following, I will attempt an external history of Scots. Many points have been covered by scholars in the past (I would particularly recommend Macafee [2002] for the early period; the essays contained in Jones [1997] also present a great deal and evidence and analysis of different aspects of the language); many interpretations are mine, however.
2 External history 2.1 The early period Speakers of Anglian dialects first began to infiltrate south-east Scotland in the 6th century CE. At the time, most of the inhabitants of northern Britain spoke P-Celtic languages (Forsyth 1997). At around the same time as Old English began to be spoken in Scotland, however, a people called the Scotti by Roman writers, speaking a Q-Celtic language, gradually shifted their center of gravity from north-east Ireland to the southern islands and mainland of Scotland. These Gaelic speakers became associated early on with a form of Christianity which was transported into the Pictish heartland. Gaelic, for whatever reason, followed so that, in the union of the kingdoms of Picts and Scots in the mid-9th century, while it was the Picts who assimilated the Scots’ territory, it was Gaelic which eventually overcame Pictish and the northern British dialects of south-west Scotland (Smyth 1984). Thus the binary linguistic nature of Scotland – Gaelic and Scots; Celtic and Germanic – has been present for centuries. In a sense, the linguistic history of Scotland is the history of the geographical and social conquest of originally Celtic territory and linguistic domains by Germanic. The Anglian dialects carried north in the 6th and 7th centuries were probably already somewhat different from those spoken in more southern areas. In its earliest records, Northumbrian, the ancestor of Scots, appears archaic in comparison with southern dialects. A flavor of this can be sensed in the only Old English inscription found in Scotland, a runic version of part of The Dream of the Rood, carved on a cross at Ruthwell, near Dumfries. This conservatism was largely obliterated by the effects of the Scandinavian invasions of the 8th to 11th centuries, however.
2.2 The incorporation of northern Bernicia into Alba Northumbria had a natural tendency in times of stress to divide into two regions: Deira, roughly equivalent to modern Yorkshire and County Durham; and Bernicia,
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the Northumbrian lands north of the Tyne. Deira was hit severely by the Viking invasions. Bernicia, where the effects of the Norse invasions and settlements were rather more limited, was somewhat cut off from the rest of the English-speaking world for a significant period. Certainly it only marginally participated in the construction of a new “England” under the control of the West-Saxon monarchy, whose center of gravity was the Thames Valley, in the course of the 10th century. Bernicia north of the river Tweed gravitated towards the Kingdom of Picts and Scots, Alba. Alba had also been affected by the Scandinavian incursions. Indeed, the original Gaelic-speaking heartland of the western and southern isles was removed from Scottish control for a number of centuries: many among the Gaelic-speaking aristocracy gradually focused on the lands to their east and south. By the middle of the 11th century this move was complete, with royal power remaining thereafter in the hands of a family whose power base was centered on the southern valleys of the central highlands. Inevitably, northern Bernicia, with its fertile soils and relatively dry and sunny climate, would have been attractive to the northerly kingdom (Barrow 1989). It was not inevitable, however, that the Anglian dialects of Bernicia should have overcome Gaelic. Indeed, some Bernician landholders, such as the Douglas family, adopted Gaelicized or Gaelic names. What guaranteed the success of Scots throughout the Lowlands was a combination of this Bernician dialect and one from an unexpected source.
2.3 Anglicization and Normanization In the early 11th century, the previously stable English monarchy came under attack from both internal and external forces. In 1066, King Edward was succeeded not by the legitimate heir, his great-nephew Edgar Atheling, a boy at the time, but by his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinsson. Following William of Normandy’s usurpation of the throne that year, Edgar and his sister Margaret fled to Scotland. This was by no means unprecedented. The King of Scots, Malcolm III, had spent a number of years in exile at the English court and is likely to have been both Anglophile and Anglophone. Margaret eventually married Malcolm. Their children could speak Gaelic; English was their mother tongue. It was during the reigns of Margaret and Malcolm’s sons that Edinburgh, situated in Anglian-speaking Lothian, became increasingly important as a royal center. Inevitably, this change in linguistic and cultural associations by the monarchy would have encouraged similar changes in those near the center of power. As Kings of Scots, and legitimate claimants to the English throne, it is strange that the Margaretsons and their descendants should have become such great advocates of the innovations in governance and war technology brought by the Normans to England. But this was indeed the case, with good reason. In order to compete with more developed states, Scotland had to create a cash-based economy associated with trade. Moreover, the relatively diffuse nature of government in Scotland in comparison to the rigid hierarchies of Norman feudalism meant that royal power was circumscribed. For both personal and national reasons the king wished to redress this perceived imbalance. There was no Norman Conquest of Scotland, but there was an infiltration. Norman and other noblemen, largely settled in the northern counties of England, were invited into Scotland by the monarchy, in order, among other things, to set up burghs, fortified
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markets – later, market towns – upon which the transformation to a cash economy was to be based. Inevitably, these French-speaking nobles and gentry did not come alone. They brought their servants and potential citizens for the burghs: people who understood the economic necessities. Most of these immigrants were from the north of England, and would have spoken heavily Norse-influenced Anglian dialects. Modern Scots is the result of the combination of the original Bernician dialects of Lothian and these new colonial dialects. Thus, although Scots has a considerably greater Norse element in its lexis than has Standard English – kirk for ‘church’, gar ‘to make, do, impel’, speir ‘ask (an impolite question)’ – this is not as overwhelming as is the case with the dialects of, say, Yorkshire, where words like lake ‘play’, unknown in Scotland, are commonplace. Primary contact between Old English and Old Norse took place in Deira (Samuels 1989); only secondary contact, with people bringing Scandinavian borrowings from their own primary contact regions, took place in Scotland (the Scots dialects of Caithness, Orkney, and Shetland are primary Norse contact dialects. But this represents a much more recent contact – Shetland Norn only died out in the mid 18th century [Knooihuizen 2006]).
2.4 Spread and development When the burghs were first set up, largely in the more fertile lowlands, most Scots would have been monolingual Gaelic speakers. But because of the economic and social clout, which the people of the burghs had, along with the forging of Scottish nationhood during the Wars of Independence in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Anglian dialect, at the time called Inglis, gained considerable prestige. It is likely that, in the hinterlands of the burghs, unequal bilingualism would have quickly developed. The Inglis-speaking inhabitants of the towns (as we can now begin to term them) might have been able to understand and speak some Gaelic (perhaps a form of “kitchen Gaelic”), but the Gaelic-speaking peasantry would inevitably have had to know more Inglis. Gaelicspeakers who wanted to get on (or were ambitious for their children) would have switched to the dominant language as much as they could. In these areas Gaelic was, in a sense, colonized. By the 15th century, very few, if any, speakers of that language would have remained in the Central Belt, although the language was preserved rather longer in the uplands of Fife and Galloway, and in the country north of the Tay (Millar 2009). Given that Scots and Gaelic have been spoken in close proximity for a millennium and a half, we might expect there to be considerable Gaelic influence upon Scots. This is not the case, however. With the partial exception of the Northern dialects, most Scots varieties have only a smattering of Gaelic vocabulary, largely dealing with topographical features – such as loch ‘substantial body of standing fresh or salt water’ or glen ‘narrow valley, defile’ – or cultural peculiarities, such as tocher ‘bride-price’ (the money, goods or estate that a woman brings to a marriage). Some dialects spoken on the fringe of the formerly Gaelic-speaking region, such as the west central one, have a few more Gaelic words, such as taunel ‘bonfire’, but these are not numerically striking. We could compare this to the situation in other colonial or post-colonial environments. The colonizer generally feels no need to learn much of the language of those being dispossessed, with the exception of words for environmental or cultural peculiarities. This is
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particularly striking in the case of Scotland because the people choosing not to use Gaelic words in their new language were themselves mainly descendants of Gaelic speakers. To function properly, the new burgh economies required trade specializations. Trained workers were in short supply and the patrons of the burghs – whether local landowners or the crown – regularly looked outwards from Scotland for potential skilled immigrants. In the later Middle Ages, many were Low German and Dutch speakers. Surnames such as Bremner ‘native of Bremen’, and Fleming ‘native of Flanders’, still common in Scotland, demonstrate the length and depth of this connection. Their dialects were also relatively near relatives of Scots, sharing many basic vocabulary elements. At the same time, the great cities of northern Germany – such as Bremen, Hamburg, Lu¨beck, and Danzig (modern Gdansk) – had formed themselves into the Hanseatic League, probably the first multinational corporation. Hanseatic influence is omnipresent on the east coast of Scotland – in the style of architecture, in the food, even in the leisure activities. But the language of the League, Low German, also contributed to the distinctiveness of these dialects. Low German or Dutch words found in all or almost all Scots dialects include puggie ‘a “kitty” where money is kept’, bonspiel ‘curling match’, cruisie ‘oil lamp’, and gowf ‘golf ’. On the east coast, we still find words such as loon ‘boy, young man’, as well as the habit, particularly in the dialects of the north-east, of adding a diminutive -ie to almost all nouns, a trait similar to that found in the dialects of particularly northern Holland. Because of the generally poor relationship Scotland had with England in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was inevitable that the former found itself in the same political camp as France. Naturally, this meant that Scots was influenced by the highly prestigious French language. Like Standard English, Scots contains many Norman French words borrowed as that language died out in Britain. Scots, however, is the only British dialect of “English” which has borrowed French words independently of Standard English due to this Auld Alliance. The words borrowed during this period were generally Central French, particularly Parisian, in character, unlike the earlier Norman borrowings. This can be illustrated by the name of a street in Old Aberdeen. In Standard English, a senior priest in a cathedral is known as a canon. The street in Old Aberdeen which leads to St Machar’s Cathedral is The Chanonry, with the archetypal Norman /k/ dispreferred for late medieval Central French /tʃ/. French borrowings peculiar to Scots include peirie ‘child’s whipping top’, ashet ‘large dish’ and perhaps even Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year festival.
2.5 Scots an independent language During the same period, Inglis gained status within the kingdom, replacing French and to some extent Latin as the main working language of government. The first major literary works began to appear, including John Barbour’s Brus, an epic life of King Robert I, written two generations after the liberation of Scotland as a call to arms and national unity. In the last decades of the 15th and the first of the 16th century, Scots went through a particularly productive literary phase, producing makars of the caliber of Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. It was the last of these, in his outstanding translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, who self-consciously declared independence for Scots, using the term Scottis (previously largely used for Gaelic) for his own language, using
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Inglis for the language of England. At the same time, a number of ambassadors to Scotland noticed the distinction between Scots and English, comparing the difference as being similar to that found between Catalan and Castilian (Spanish), for instance. The language began to go through circumstantial standardization (Joseph 1987) towards the metropolitan norm of Edinburgh, using a highly distinctive spelling system which was at least as systematic as that used at the time for English. As befitted a national language, many words were borrowed from Latin and Greek into high register usage. A number of these, such as propone instead of propose, are still found in the language of Scots Law.
2.6 Decline and dialectalization But social, economic and political currents were already at work in Scotland which meant that Scots would be dialectalized (Kloss 1984) under Standard English by the end of the 17th century at the very latest. For most writers from around 1600 on, Standard English was the default written variety, with Scots being used largely for effect (see the discussion in, for instance, by Macaulay 1991: 185–6) or due to a momentary loss of concentration, as the present writer can attest. Why should this have happened? In the first place, Scotland went through a series of political and economic disasters in the course of the 16th century. Scottish armies were annihilated by the English at Flodden (1513) and a generation later at Solway Moss (1542). On both occasions, a large part of the Scottish aristocracy was destroyed; King James IV was killed in the first battle; King James V died not long after the second. Both battles caused longterm minorities in a country with a powerful and independent aristocracy. These were merely the most destructive of a number of unlucky encounters between the countries. Inevitably, social cohesion suffered. Equally inevitably, the precocious literary renaissance of the court of James IV was largely stifled. In an age when the effects of printing were only beginning to make themselves itself felt, writers could not survive without aristocratic patrons; these were now in short supply. Moreover, when the Protestant Reformation arrived rather late in Scotland, it arrived in a radical Calvinist form. This of itself might not have had any deleterious effect on Scots at all; indeed the Reformation held as a central tenet that the Bible should be available in the language of the “common man”, a view which undoubtedly helped some vernaculars become national languages. But an English Bible was used as a vernacular text in Scotland. Why should that have been the case? In the first place, Bible translations, even bad Bible translations, need a period of relative social and economic stability to complete. This was not possible in Scotland. Moreover, a number of the early reformers, most notably John Knox, had lived with English speakers for a large part of their adult life either in Geneva or England. Finally, the economics of text production meant that someone writing in Scots could not hope to have the same size of audience as someone writing in English. This meant that most, probably all, literate Scots speakers were also able at least to read and probably to write English. Those who were writing in the Protestant cause would also have been tempted to use English in order to reach a range of people otherwise unavailable. In 1603 King James VI became King of England. Too much can be made of the effect the Union of the Crowns had upon Scots; the removal of the Court from Edinburgh to London did inevitably lead to a further lessening in the number of patrons for writers.
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Thus we can state that, by the mid-17th century, most Scottish people who did not speak Gaelic wrote largely or solely in English, but spoke almost exclusively in their local dialect of Scots, except when reading Standard English aloud (see Meurman-Solin 1993 for evidence). This situation, not dissimilar to the diglossia found in German-speaking Switzerland or the Arabic-speaking world today, lasted for some 100 to 150 years in Scotland. In 1707, the parliaments of Scotland and England united; while the Scottish Church and Law were protected by the Union settlement, practically all governmental functions for Scotland were carried out in Westminster. A significant part of the urban middle classes, particularly in Edinburgh, began to trim their linguistic sails towards this new order. Throughout the 18th century, English was taught as essentially a second language throughout Scotland. Self-help manuals abounded, listing Scotticisms to be avoided. These were largely lexical, but also included a considerable number of grammatical and morphological features (Dossena 2005). By the end of the century, a new variety, Scottish Standard English (SSE), had come into being. Standard English in grammar, morphology, and (largely) lexis, speakers of this variety generally use a (sometimes altered) version of their local accent (there is no standard accent in Scotland), although with a basic representation of the southern English rather than Scots phonological pattern. In SSE there are both overt Scotticisms, words associated with Scottish culture and heritage, used consciously to mark identity, and covert Scotticisms, words which the speaker thinks are English, but are actually Scots, or merely a Scots word which has been Anglicized phonologically (Aitken 1981). Thus a wedge was forced into the Scots-speaking population, with the rural and the poor (the overwhelming majority, of course) using Scots, while the upper middle classes used English. Since these upper middle classes were the arbiters of literary style and controlled both publishing and education to a considerable degree, it was their views on the national vernacular which were carried into print and action: Scots was associated with old and barbaric times, English with a progressive future (Millar 2003). As an urban lower middle class developed through industrialization, they largely assimilated these views. It is striking that while those areas of Gaelic Scotland which were Scotticized in the early modern period, such as the North-East, have retained forms of Scots as a local vernacular, those areas where Gaelic culture was attacked in the wake of the rebellion of 1745–1746 took on a form of SSE as their new variety: Highland English.
2.7 The “vernacular revival” It might seem strange, therefore, that it was precisely during this period, when Scots appeared to be in decline as a spoken variety and irretrievably dialectalized, that literature in Scots of considerable quality began to reappear. Robert Burns (1759–1796) is only the most famous of a number of 18th and early 19th century poets using Scots. But how he wrote that variety was unlike how it was used in its heyday: I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen-icker in a thrave ’S a sma’ request:
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Note the use of apostrophes in particular. In a sense they were an economic necessity, telling English-speaking readers where Scots and English phonology diverge. But they also have the unfortunate side effect of making Scots look like “deformed English”. With a few exceptions in the last fifty years, this is the way that Scots has been portrayed ever since, encouraging the idea that it is an imperfect variant of Standard English. More important, however, is the way that Burns uses Scots in relation to subject matter. In the previous passage he is referring to emotional concerns; in this passage, however, he is discussing a philosophical point: I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion An’ fellow-mortal! (http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/toamouse.htm)
On this occasion, the language he uses is, with a couple of exceptions, mainstream Augustan Standard English. Scots is the language of high emotion, often framed in terms of the traditional countryside (Burns’s native landscape, of course). It is only a very small step from this use to an association of the language with sentimentality. From the third quarter of the 18th century, Scotland went through rapid social and political change. A movement towards capitalist agriculture coupled to the economic exploitation of the country’s considerable coal and iron ore deposits led to exponential growth in the size of urban areas. By the end of the 19th century, the overwhelming majority of Scottish people lived in these centers. Naturally, along with the opportunities came many problems caused by the industrialization and urbanization process: poverty, crime, pollution, and disease. But the political radicalism which the changes engendered among the newly educated working classes probably scared the Scottish middle classes most. Many of the latter yearned for a rural, conservative utopia where everyone knew their place but where relations between the classes were friendly and perhaps even to some extent fluid. In this vision, local working people were seen as (rural) Scots-speaking worthies who were given the privilege of speaking in a direct and free manner to their “betters”, since what they had to say was both humorous and apposite. It could be argued that the fact that this advice and commentary was delivered in Scots made the speakers seem honest and homespun. A literary genre, the kailyard, ‘cabbage garden’, grew out of these dreams: sentimental to the point of mawkishness and often (not always) ill-written (Millar 2004). But although Scottish literary tastes changed rapidly in the early 20th century, the overwhelming majority of written Scots available to the general public was, and remains, of this type. We need only look at a highly popular Scottish newspaper, The Sunday
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Post, where conservative (social) values are tied to an “honest” use of Scots to see how much this is still the case.
2.8 Scots in the modern era All this leaves Scots speakers in something of a bind. Until recently, speakers of rural dialects were officially encouraged to maintain their speech in appropriate places at school, for instance. Those who spoke urban dialects – the majority – were mocked for their “corrupt” and “slovenly” English. I have seen children physically punished for using local words and phrases in the classroom. Many rural speakers would agree with this judgement upon the urban dialects. As with all other dialects of English, Scots has not maintained its vocabulary as well as its phonology. In a study of the language use of Glasgow’s East End, Macafee (1994) found that, while older informants had a fair knowledge of traditional dialect vocabulary, younger people were less confident in distinguishing between Scots vocabulary and non-standard colloquial usage and “slang”. In those areas which are relatively remote from the Central Belt or where traditional occupations have been the primary source of employment until relatively recently, however, traditional dialects are being passed on to children (Macafee 1997). This is particularly the case in Shetland, where many young Shetlanders take great pride in their local identity and speech. Yet even there, large-scale immigration, particularly associated with the recent exploitation of local oil deposits, has meant that many children of primary school age do not come from Shetland-speaking households. In many places English has become the language of the playground. The Scots language appears to be in terminal decline, at least as an entity separate from Scottish English. Scots has continued to be used in literature. Indeed, in the figure of C.M. Grieve (alias Hugh McDiarmid, 1892–1978), Scotland produced one of the truly great literary modernists, actively avoiding – if not actually abusing – the kailyard tradition: yet Grieve rarely used the urban experience of most Scots as his primary stimulus (he himself came from a rural background). It was only from the 1960s on that “serious” urban writers began to use their own speech patterns in their writing, a process which was crystallized in the considerable commercial success of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1994).
3 Present and future prospects for Scots From the 1930s on, there have been attempts at language planning for Scots. These have been generally unsuccessful. Indeed, at present there are two spelling systems being touted by different groups. Central government has become gradually less opposed to Scots since the 1970s, probably part of the general move towards Scottish autonomy. Indeed, as part of its ratification of the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2001, the United Kingdom Government has recognized Scots as a language worthy of preservation. The practical results of this recognition have been extremely limited, however (Millar 2006). Scots continues to be dialectalized and homogenized. As this proceeds, its position as a separate language will become increasingly questionable.
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4 References Aitken, Adam J. 1981. The good old Scots tongue. Does Scots have an identity? In: Einar Haugen, J. Derrick McClure, Derick Thomson, and Adam J. Aitken (eds.), Minority Languages Today, 72–90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barrow, G.W.S. 1989. Kingship and Unity: Scotland, 1000–1306. 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dossena, Marina. 2005. Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary. Edinburgh: John Donald. Forsyth, Katherine. 1997. Language in Pictland. Utrecht: de keltische Draak. Jones, Charles (ed.). 1997. The Edinburgh History of Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and Power. The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages. London: Frances Pinter. Kloss, Heinz. 1984. Interlingual Communication: Danger and Chance for the Smaller Tongues. Scottish Studies 4: 73–77. Knooihuizen, Remco. 2006. The Norn to Scots Language Shift: another look at the evidence. Northern Studies 39: 5–16. Macafee, Caroline I. 1994. Traditional Dialect in the Modern World: A Glasgow Case Study. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Macafee, Caroline. 1997. Ongoing change in modern Scots. In: Charles Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scots, 514–548. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Macafee, Caroline. 2002. A History of Scots to 1700. In: A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue 12, xxi–clvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macaulay, Ronald K.S. 1991. Locating dialect in discourse: the language of honest men and bonnie lasses in Ayr. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McClure, J. Derrick. 1979. Scots: Its Ranges of Uses. In: Adam J. Aitken and Tom McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland, 26–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meurman-Solin, Anneli. 1993. Variation and Change in Early Scottish Prose. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Millar, Robert McColl. 2003. “Blind attachment to inveterate custom”. Language use, language attitude and the rhetoric of improvement in the first Statistical Account. In: Marina Dossena and Charles Jones (eds.), Insights into Late Modern English, 311–330. Bern: Peter Lang. Millar, Robert McColl. 2004. Kailyard, conservatism and Scots in the Statistical Account of Scotland. In: Christian J. Kay, Carole Hough, and Irene´ Wotherspoon (eds.), New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics. Vol. II: Lexis and Transmission, 163–176. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Millar, Robert McColl. 2006. “Burying alive”: unfocussed governmental language policy and Scots. Language Policy 5: 63–86. Millar, Robert McColl. 2007. Northern and Insular Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Millar, Robert McColl. 2009. The Origins of the Northern Scots Dialects. In: Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang. Samuels, M.L. 1989. The Great Scandinavian Belt. In: Margaret Laing (ed.), Middle English Dialectology. Essays on Some Principles and Problems, 106–115. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Smyth, Alfred P. 1984. Warlords and Holy Men. Scotland AD 80–1000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Robert McColl Millar, Aberdeen (Scotland)
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125. Varieties of English: English in Ireland 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction Establishing an Irish English History and variation in Irish English Summary References
Abstract This chapter examines the English language in Ireland by looking both at the spread of English in relation to Irish from the 12th century onwards and at the changes which English has undergone in the context of language contact and bilingualism with Irish. The linguistic focus is largely on traditional dialects as described in the 19th and 20th centuries, yet attention is also paid to medieval Irish English and to more standardized forms of the contemporary language as evidenced in the International Corpus of English (ICEIreland). Structural evidence from syntax and phonology, as well as lexical development, suggests that Irish English shows a complex mix of influence from British English dialects, Scots, and Irish, as well as participating in linguistic standardization and occupying a position as a national variety of English which can be compared to other English varieties.
1 Introduction The historical analysis of the English language in Ireland (here referred to as Irish English, though sometimes also known as Hiberno-English or Anglo-Irish) relies on two complementary approaches. One, usually referred to as external history, traces the use of Irish English from its introduction as the relatively low-status language of a small but powerful group of colonists in the 12th century to its present-day use as the mother tongue of the vast majority of the Irish population. The rise in the status and usage of English in Ireland since that time has not been a steady, uniform process, but rather one which has been influenced both by settlement and population movements that have favored the establishment of English (and, to a lesser degree, Scots), and by native-language speakers of Irish who, especially in the 19th century, adopted the English language. If we see this history as a struggle between two languages for dominance at the levels of prestige and everyday language usage, we could see English as the ultimate ‘victor’ in the struggle. Yet in today’s Republic of Ireland, Irish retains a special place as the constitutionally-designated ‘first official language’, with an established position in education and official usage, support for Gaeltacht areas where Irish is retained as a community language, and a population of first- and secondlanguage speakers who use Irish on a daily basis for a variety of purposes. Language relations in Northern Ireland have favored English much more, yet here too we can find Irish-language education, official use at certain levels of government, and communities of speakers. For many mother tongue speakers of Irish English, the Irish language retains a special position as a medium of expression and national heritage. Thus, in what may seem paradoxical at first, any history of the English language in Ireland must also Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 1961–1976
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examine the historical relation with Irish, since the changing relationships between the two languages have provided the social, political, and demographic context for the development of a uniquely Irish English. A second approach, which we may call the internal history of Irish English, looks at the structure of the language itself and takes account of two interacting factors: the role of dialects of British English and Scots in providing a linguistic basis for English as transplanted to Ireland, and the role of the Irish language, through language contact and over varying periods of Irish-English bilingualism, in giving a specific shape to Irish English. The first of these factors shows Irish English as relatively conservative in relation to many developments in British English, and demonstrates strong (though not exclusive) links with English in Scotland and the North of England. The dominant theme from the second factor is the possibility not only of contact-based structural change (influencing phonological systems as well as grammar), but of large-scale lexical borrowing which often reflects important cultural elements. Though these factors weigh heavily in any linguistic account of Irish English, it would be wrong to focus on these two exclusively. Not only do innovations occur in Irish English independently of antecedents in British English or Irish, but we can also find cases which prove to be too complex for analysis in terms of one language or the other. In Kallen (1997a: 145–146), for example, I have argued that Irish English gombeen, which now includes meanings as diverse as ‘usurer’, ‘fool’, and ‘lump, especially of tobacco’, represents a convergence of word formation from both English and Irish with origins going back over several centuries. In recent years, too, it has become realistic to understand Irish English not just in terms of the traditional dialects which inspired most research in the 19th and 20th centuries, but as a national standard language, different from, but sharing features with, other national Englishes. The International Corpus of English for Ireland (ICE-Ireland), compiled by Kirk et al. (2011) is based on this assumption, and will be discussed below. With the foregoing concerns in mind, Section 2 of this chapter examines the external history of Irish English, giving an overview of the initial contacts between Irish and English and examining the ultimate rise of English as the dominant language in Ireland. Section 3 examines the internal history at the levels of lexicon, syntax, and phonology. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to give definitive answers to complex questions of historical origin for specific features, a variety of evidence is considered to give a picture of the linguistic development of Irish English.
2 Establishing an Irish English 2.1 The introduction of English It is impossible to know when the first contacts with English speakers took place in Ireland, but it is customary to attach particular importance to the arrival of a small and socially mixed group of people in the 12th century, described by Richter (1986: 41– 42) as “Cambro-Normans, that is descendants of Norman nobles who had settled in Wales” and their associated forces from Wales and the southwest of England. The arrival of this socially mixed and linguistically diverse group, first in a short temporary visit in 1167, but in full force in several ships during the year 1169, initiated what is usually referred to as the Anglo-Norman period in Irish history. An abrupt dating of this kind, however, exaggerates the discontinuity entailed by the arrival of Anglo-Norman
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forces. As Richter (1985: 329) also points out, “small though significant groups” of clerics and aristocrats were already involved in “horizontal loyalties” that drew them into European society as a whole; Martin (1987: 53), too, notes the development of “substantial trade between Dublin and the Normans in Wales, England, and France” beginning in the late 11th century. These and other political and religious connections (on ´ Cro´inı´n (1995: 287), which see also Flanagan 1989), underline the point made by O that “the arrival in 1170 of Robert FitzStephen […] marks a new era in Irish history, though contemporaries could scarcely have seen it that way”. We can best understand the first centuries after the coming of the Anglo-Normans in terms of what Fasold (1984: 53) calls “extended diglossia”. For the relatively small but politically powerful Anglo-Irish colony, Latin and French occupied the high-prestige or H domains of language use. Anglo-Irish law of the 12th and 13th centuries shows the predominance of Latin, with French appearing in legal documents of the 14th century (see Gilbert 1889). Literary, legal, and administrative material in French from this period is also detailed by Picard (2003). As in England, English occupied the lowprestige or L domains of ordinary speech, though as McIntosh et al. (1986: 270–279) document, miscellaneous Irish legal, literary, and private materials in English can also be found from the 14th to the 16th centuries. A small body of poetry dating from the early 14th century is the most substantial of these works; these poems, found in the British Library MS Harley 913 and sometimes referred to as the Kildare Poems, have been most recently edited by Lucas (1995). For the much larger native Irish society of the time, a standard literary form of Irish existed alongside Latin in the H domains, while it can only be assumed that a non-standard Irish, of which we have no record, occupied the L domains of everyday language use. Though the status of English rose in the 14th and 15th centuries, this development coincided with concern in the Anglo-Irish colony that English was on the verge of extinction due to an overly-close association between colonists and the native Irish majority. This fear is expressed as early as 1297 (Berry 1907: 211), and legislation at various points in the 14th century was aimed at arresting this trend. Ethnographic insight into close communication between the Anglo-Irish community and native Irish speakers, which could only have arisen in conditions of bilingualism, is seen in a statute which forbids any “Irish minstrels, that is to say, tympanours, pipers, story tellers, babblers, rhymers, harpers, or any other Irish minstrels” to “come amongst the English” (Berry 1907: 447). Ordinances of this kind, discussed in Kallen (1997b: 10–11) and Crowley (2005: 4–5), are significant for the insight which they offer into the maintenance of social boundaries: exhortations to use English apply not to the native Irish population, but to those of English descent.
2.2 Social change and the rise of English Henry VIII showed a particular interest in Irish affairs, and when a picture of the “state of Ireland” was presented to him in 1515 (State Papers 1834: II, iii: 8), it portrayed a country in which only six counties could be counted as loyal to the King. Even in these counties, it was alleged, disloyalty was widespread among ordinary people. The bill of kingship by which Henry VIII was designated as King of Ireland at the Irish Parliament of 1541 is part of what Bradshaw (1979: 238) describes as “a milestone in Irish constitutional history”. The Parliament is of interest for linguistic historians, because a
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statement in praise of Henry, as well as the bill of kingship, was read out in Irish by the Earl of Ormond to the assembled House of Lords. Most modern observers (e.g. Cahill ´ Cuı´v 1951; Hickey 2007) are in accord with the position, as O ´ Cuı´v (1951: 13) 1938; O puts it, that the use of Irish at this event “was […] sheer necessity, for it seems that the Earl of Ormond alone of the Anglo-Irish lords knew English”. Contemporary records, reviewed in Kallen (1994: 153–154), however, do not support this interpretation. There is no evidence that Irish was used for any other purpose during the Parliament of 1541; there is ample evidence that Irish had national significance for the Irish nobility to whom this reading of the proclamation was addressed; and there are signs from this time of a growing awareness among some of the native Irish nobility of political advantages to be gained from knowing at least some English. The events of 1534, then, are not a demonstration of the complete Gaelicization of the Anglo-Irish nobility, but, rather, a political recognition of the importance of the Irish language for sections of Irish society in the effort to bring about what Maginn (2007: 955) terms “the eventual incorporation of Ireland’s English and Gaelic populations into an expanding English state”. The 16th century can thus be seen as pivotal in the establishment of Irish English. The so-called Tudor plantations, which were designed to subdue and anglicize parts of the country, had limited success relative to their objectives, but brought new contacts with English. Plantation schemes in today’s Counties Laois and Offaly under Queen Mary in the middle 16th century, and in parts of Munster beginning in 1587 under Elizabeth I, brought English into parts of the countryside in new political and social arrangements. Plantations in Ulster had more far-reaching consequences, settling large numbers of people from Scotland and England in Counties Antrim and Down in 1605; after the Irish “flight of the Earls” in 1607, more settlers came to other parts of Ulster in plantation schemes that were established from 1609 onwards. By the middle of the 17th century, the social and demographic upheavals of the Cromwellian Commonwealth had settled new English speakers in different parts of the country and dislocated many Irish speakers to poorer lands in the west. The Census of 1659 (Pender 2002 [1939]), though not a modern census and not intended as a language census per se, gives a glimpse of the perceived language loyalties of much of the country at the time. This evidence reviewed in Kallen (1994: 157–159) shows a network of urban areas with an English-speaking nucleus, surrounded by suburban districts where Irish is dominant, leading into rural districts where, apart from Ulster, Irish greatly outweighs English (for detailed discussion of the census and its value as a source of data, see also Smyth 1988). Within the model of diglossia, English was increasingly established in most of the H domains in the newly-emergent society. Even within the Irish literary tradition, as documented by Mac Mathu´na (2007), there is at this time a growing reflection, through loanwords, code-switching, and inter-language wordplay, of the increasing importance of English in Irish life. While the 17th and 18th centuries saw continued growth of Irish-English bilingualism and the use of English in many geographical areas and social domains (Crowley 2005), the 19th century provides the turning point in the popular shift to English. A parish-by-parish study of, among other things, language habits in many parts of Ireland was published by Mason (1814–19); this report shows language shift already in progress, demonstrated in a pattern of transitional bilingualism in which the younger generations turn to English with increasing frequency (see Mac Aodha 1985–86 and Kallen 1994: 160–161 for analyses). This language shift was further accelerated by events such as
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the establishment of the National School system in 1831 and the Famine of the late 1840s. English was used almost exclusively in the national schools, and the death and emigration arising from the Famine had a disproportionate effect in the Irish-speaking west and south of Ireland. Modern census data provide an overview of the outcome of language shift in Ireland. Fitzgerald’s (1984) analysis of the 1881 census estimates, for example, that while 45% of the generation of people born in Ireland between 1771 and 1781 were Irish speakers, this figure declined successively to as little as 13% for those born in the 1861–1871 period. In counties Kerry in the southwest and Mayo in the northwest, the percentage of Irish speakers in the 1771–1781 period is as high as 93% and 95% respectively, dropping to 45% and 60% at mid-century. Current estimates in the Republic suggest that no ´ Riaga´in more than 5% of the population “use Irish as their first or main language” (O 2007: 229), though Census data show that slightly more than 40% of the population over the age of three are returned as being able to speak Irish (Central Statistics Office 2007: 12). In Northern Ireland, where official policy has been much less supportive of Irish and where the 17th century Plantation brought in large numbers of speakers of English and Scots, the use of Irish is considerably lower. Nevertheless slightly more than 10% of the population are reported in the 2001 census as having some knowledge of the Irish language (NISRA 2000–03).
3 History and variation in Irish English 3.1 Lexicon The Irish English lexicon has, since the earliest records, exemplified the mixture of Irish-language material, retentions, and developments from earlier and dialectal sources of English, and local innovations which form the main themes in studying Irish English more generally. The Viking presence in Ireland, which dates roughly from the 9th to the 11th century, played a significant linguistic role. The Norse and Danish influence on ´ Muirithe (2010), words such as hagIrish was not overwhelming, but, as detailed in O gard ‘stackyard’ and many placenames (e.g. Skerries and Ireland’s Eye, both near Dublin) are based on loans from these languages. Irwin (1935: 205–330) identified nearly 200 words which have special significance in the study of early Irish English. Of these, the largest category is that of Irish loanwords, some of which reflect local institutions, conditions, or practices. Examples include galloglass, referring to mercenary soldiers, for which Irwin cites an example from 1496, thus predating the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) earliest usage in 1515; cosher (from Irish co´isir ‘feasting’), which in the 16th century denotes feasting and hospitality as an important social institution; and bog ‘wet spongy ground’, for which Irwin (1935: 286) cites an Irish usage from 1450, well before the earliest citation in the OED. The review by Lucas (1995: 41–42) shows few such loanwords in the poems of MS Harley 913, though examples such as capil ‘horse’, which is the earliest-noted use of this word in the OED, and tromchery ‘liver’ may be cited. Irwin (1935: 224–234) also notes words from this period which appear to have Old English etymologies but which are only found in Irish writings of this time, e.g. alewyk ‘alehouse’ and bredwik ‘breadshop’, based on Old English wick ‘dwelling’. It is difficult to know if particular words of Old English or French etymology, which are first recorded in Irish English texts, came into being in Ireland, or if their only
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or first appearance in Irish material is simply a matter of chance. Words of this kind, though, include folkmele ‘indiscriminately’, horyness ‘filth’ (based on hory ‘foul, filthy’, but only cited in the nominal form by the OED from a 15th century Irish English text), and tripes ‘entrails’ (occurring in MS Harley 913, in this form much earlier than the first English citation in the OED, from Caxton, c.1483). A continuation of the mix in medieval Irish English is suggested by analyses of the archaic dialect of Forth and Bargy in Co. Wexford. The Forth and Bargy dialect attracted antiquarian interest from the late 18th century, and the 19th century glossary ´ Muirithe 1996) demonstrates both compiled by Jacob Poole (edited by Dolan and O ´ Muirithe an archaism and language mixture that make the dialect unique. As O (1990) demonstrates, some salient features are retained in the local English of the present day. Words treated in the OED as archaic and found in Poole’s glossary include attercop ‘a spider’, hence also a ‘small, insignificant person’, hachee ‘cross, ill-tempered’, and poustee ‘power, ability, bodily strength’. Innovations cited by Poole include paughmeale ‘the harvest home’ (derived from Irish po´g ‘kiss’ and mael Old English ‘time’, hence literally ‘kissing time’) and craueet ‘danger of choking for want of a drink in eating’, for which no etymology has been suggested. The Ulster vocabulary which derives from Scottish and Northern English dialects and from Scots is surveyed by Macafee (1996), though Braidwood’s (1964) historical introduction and the more recent survey of Smyth et al. (2006) are also particularly relevant. Some elements of Ulster vocabulary are specific to Ulster, e.g. diamond ‘town square’ (not necessarily diamond-shaped), yet a larger proportion of the Ulster lexicon reflects more general affiliations to Scotland and Northern England (e.g. ferntickles ‘freckles’ and skelf ‘splinter’). Gregg (1972: 113) pays particular attention to the differentiation between Ulster Scots and Ulster English, suggesting, for example, a contrast between Ulster Scots bag and Ulster English elder, both meaning ‘udder’. The separation between Ulster dialect and that of other Irish English varieties, however, is by no means abrupt or absolute. ICE-Ireland (Kirk et al. 2011) provides a database of English usage in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which facilitates cross-border comparisons (see Kallen and Kirk 2008 for details). Kallen and Kirk (2007: 137) point out that these two dialect zones show significant, though not necessarily categorical, differences on the use of Scottish features in the corpus. The word aye ‘yes’, for example, occurs 354 times in the face-to-face conversations of ICE in Northern Ireland, and 15 times in comparable material from the Republic of Ireland. Such a difference, while not absolute, would be highly salient for members of both speech communities. For further discussion of Scottish influence in ICE-Ireland, see Kirk and Kallen (2010). Irish-language material in Irish English is dealt with in several recent dictionaries, ´ Muirithe (1996). Much of this lexicon reflects notably those of Dolan (2004) and O the absorption of Irish vocabulary into English in the absence of any competing English term: words such as curach, a traditional type of boat; duileasc (anglicized as dillisk or dulse, with cognate forms in Scotland and Wales), a type of edible seaweed; and poitı´n (anglicized as poteen), a traditional illicit distilled alcoholic drink, are long-established words of this type. Many other words do not fill such lexical gaps, but instead form part of a broader linguistic repertoire that includes, to various degrees, active codeswitching by bilingual speakers; an inventory of what Wigger (2000: 187) terms “interlingual lexemes” which are neither strictly English or Irish for speakers but demonstrate the
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“coexistence and mutual infiltration” of the two languages; and long-term linguistic transfers comparable to Allsopp’s (1980: 93) concept of apports, i.e. “slips, shifts, and innovations” which reflect “intimate […] cultural survivals” in situations of language contact. Though it is hardly possible to do justice to this vocabulary here, we note certain common themes: (a) the use of Irish-based words for close observations of people (e.g. cioto´g ‘left handed person’; straoill (anglicized as streel ) ‘slovenly girl’ (noun), ‘trail about’ (verb); and flaithiu´lach ‘generous, good-hearted’), (b) aspects of conversation (e.g. canran ‘complain, grumble’, cogar ‘whisper’, pla´ma´s ‘smooth talk, flattery’), and (c) other aspects of everyday life (e.g. cruibı´n, anglicized as crubeen, ‘small foot, hoof ’, frequently used in English to refer to boiled pig’s trotters prepared for eating; glanto´ir ‘duster’ used for cleaning blackboards in school; and gra´ ‘love, affection’). The English dialect lexicon is also well represented in Ireland. Some common terms, e.g. press ‘cupboard’; mot ‘girlfriend, girl’; cog ‘cheat in school, examinations’; delph ‘china, crockery’; grogram ‘a coarse fabric’, extended in meaning to refer to a shade of grey; and airy ‘lively, fond of pleasure’ have a well-established history in English, but are either dialectally restricted or more generally obsolete in British English. Other words represent innovative meanings relative to their antecedents, including the long-established yoke ‘a thing in general’, also used as a mildly derogatory term for a person; hames ‘mess [of something]’; and tallyman, referring in the Republic of Ireland specifically to observers in the counting of election ballots. Slang vocabulary, ´ Muirithe (2004), documented, for example, by Beecher (1991), Share (2003), and O shows even more possibility for lexical development. Irish vernacular words for which no clear etymology can be demonstrated include cat ‘bad, terrible’; gur cake, a kind of cake made of fruit and bread scraps baked between two layers of pastry; bazzer ‘a blow, act of striking’, particularly associated with Cork; and grush, grushie ‘scramble for money, food, or other small items or gifts’.
3.2 Syntax 3.2.1 Introduction The grammar of Irish English before the 16th century has not attracted much scholarly attention. Much of what remains from this period is of a formal or legalistic nature, and the relative insulation of the Anglo-Irish colony allowed for less distinctive influence from Irish than might have been the case in lexicon or phonology. The material discussed in this section thus focuses on particularly salient features of traditional dialect and the standard language. Material from spoken language which is not otherwise attributed comes from my data files, based on observed language in use, or from the ICE-Ireland corpus (Kirk et al. 2011).
3.2.2 Clause-level syntax Complex sentences pose questions about the distinctiveness of Irish English. Here we may consider two features: (a) the structure commonly referred to as “subordinating and”, as in They got married there and the house not finished yet (Hickey 2007: 65), and (b) auxiliary inversion in embedded clauses, seen in I don’t know are they getting the lads from the town to do the band (Kirk et al. 2011). Filppula (1999: 196–208)
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reviews historical and linguistic evidence on the origins of subordinating and, concluding that while Irish has had an influence on the development of the Irish English pattern, it is “of the reinforcing rather than the direct kind, since none of the H[iberno] E[nglish] patterns appears to be unique to HE” (Filppula 1999: 217). Commenting on inversion in clauses introduced by ask, don’t know, see, and wonder, Kirk and Kallen (2006: 108) show a stark contrast between ICE-Ireland and ICE-GB, in that the ICEIreland sample under analysis contains 24 examples of inversion, with only three such examples in ICE-GB (1998). Arguments can be adduced in favor of an Irish origin for such constructions, especially with the lexical patterning found illustrated here, but the precise origins of this pattern and its relation to inversion in other varieties of English have yet to be established.
3.2.3 The verb system The verb phrase is without a doubt the topic that features most prominently in treatments of Irish English. First we consider the existence of a generic or habitual category, exemplified using (a) do alone, as in He does come when he hears the noise (Henry 1957: 171), (b) inflected be, shown in We get, Mrs Cullen to leave us in … She be’s going, and she leaves us in, too (Filppula 2004: 79), and (c) do plus be, where the latter is either a main verb or an auxiliary, e.g., The grapefruits do be in full bloom in Israel in September (Kallen 1986: 135). Debate on this verbal category centers on the history and geographical distribution of forms with do versus those using be alone. The dialectal uses cited above are all of a type that does not become clear in our existing records until the 19th century. As discussed in Kallen (1986: 139), the evidence of an Irish grammar from 1815 in which do be, etc. is used to translate habitual meaning in Irish is equivocal, as is that of the only do be combination in Bliss’s (1979) collection of texts up to 1750. Hickey (2007: 224– 225) turns to 19th century dialect literature to show the first clear evidence of do be constructions, while Montgomery and Kirk (1996: 316) also date the earliest clear evidence of inflected habitual be to the middle of the 19th century. The late emergence of this form may be surprising, given that the two commonly-adduced sources for it – the aspectual distinction between punctual vs. extended or habitual categories in Irish and the use of what is generally referred to as periphrastic do in English – are of long standing. Filppula’s (1999: 136–150) review of the evidence concerning periphrastic do in dialects of the southwest of England, universal grammatical features, and the existence of such forms in other Celtic Englishes (cf. Filppula and Klemola, Chapter 107) suggests multiple causation for the patterns of Irish English. Various categories of verbal use which may be roughly grouped under the notion of perfect aspect have featured prominently in discussions of Irish English since the 19th century: overviews can be found in, for example, Harris (1984), Kallen (1989), Filppula (1999), Hickey (2000, 2007), Corrigan (2010), and Amador-Moreno (2010). In this section, we will consider three particular elements of the system: the after perfect, the “medial object” or pseudo-perfect, and the use of past tenses with current relevance. The after perfect (e.g. A man came over to us and said “Oh, he’s after falling”) has long attracted attention as a distinguishing feature of Irish English. Recent debate has focused on two main issues: (a) understanding uses of the form in earlier literature which refer to events in the future rather than to events in the non-remote past, and
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(b) accounting for the modern use of this form according to semantic, grammatical, and social factors. Bliss’s (1979) collection of texts contains many examples of after used with temporal reference, yet Bliss (1979: 300) noted that only one of these resembles the after perfect as it is known today: all the others, as in You vill [will] be after being damn’d and Well, fat [what] will you be after Drinking? refer to events in the future. After in English generally can sometimes denote desire or prospective intent (as Yee shall not goe after other gods in a Biblical translation from 1611 cited by the OED), but, bearing in mind the satirical nature of many of the Bliss (1979) texts, it is tempting to dismiss these future references as inaccurate representations of the after perfect. McCafferty (2003: 311–316), however, has demonstrated a wide range of such uses in literary sources stretching into the 18th century. McCafferty (2006) further demonstrates an overlapping period of usage, so that forms with future reference (Och then, whisht with you, if you’ve no more to say, you’ll be after killing her intirely, honey! from 1885) co-exist with the modern perfective functions. McCafferty’s (2006: 147) view that the older future references died out in favor of perfective uses dur´ Corra´in’s ing the later stages of the shift to English is given additional support by O ´ (2006: 157–166) study of comparable material in Irish. O Corra´in (2006) points out that iar or ar ‘after’ had relatively extensive verbal reference in Early Modern Irish, including future, subjunctive, and perfective uses, but became more focused towards stative perfect reference from the 16th century onwards; later developments saw the displacement of iar by markers such as tar e´is ‘after’, which lack future reference. The evidence thus suggests that the change from early Irish English prospective readings of after to the later perfective uses, while perhaps incorporating an element of ambiguity inherent in English after generally, reflect a contemporaneous development in Irish grammar. The second of these issues concerns the development of semantic restrictions on the use of after. Harris’s (1984) adaptation of the phrase “hot news past” to denote the semantic domain of the after perfect provides a significant point of debate. In Kallen (1989: 10–11) it is argued that while a Dublin-based sample of spontaneous speech does provide examples which can be classed as “hot news” (e.g. as quoted above), other examples could not be so described, since they refer to states of affairs which are extended in time (e.g. We’re after bein’ livin’ there for the past 21 years), involve significant distance between the time of the event and the moment of speaking (e.g. a university lecturer referring to his university’s decision to grant staff concessions, We’re just after – in Nottingham – granting this), and refer to the existence of events, rather than to their immediacy (e.g. He’s after carrying down a bloody urn, referring to an earlier event whose existence is used to justify giving a reward to the man who has carried down a coffee urn). McCafferty (2006: 135–139) also argues that in historical usage from 1670 to 1800, “hot news” uses of the after perfect, while comprising 44 of 72 examples, also share in the distribution with existential, resultative, and other uses. Ronan (2005: 262–263) provides further reason not to equate after perfects with “hot news”, noting, for example, that while “hot news” uses of after perfects are the most common, at 12%, in her sample of 37 tokens from 28 speakers, “resultative” and “experiential” uses are also common. Adding a new dimension, Ronan (2005: 264–265) further suggests that the use of standard have perfects interacts with the semantics of after perfects, such that those speakers in her sample who only use after perfects for hot news are also those who use the standard have perfect in other functions; for those who do
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not use standard have forms in the regular present perfect, after perfects take on a wider range of semantic functions. Pragmatic effects are also attributed to the after perfect: Kallen (1991) notes frequent occurrences of the after perfect in chastising within family or friendly circles, while Hickey (2000: 107) sees the reproaching use of the after perfect as an “extension of the relevance element”. O’Keeffe and Amador-Moreno (2009) go so far as to see uses of the after perfect largely in terms of pragmatic functions which include (in addition to the marking of immediacy) narration, “news marking”, and “scolding”. Thus the precise historical relationship between after perfects as markers of the recent past and their more extended uses remains a question for research. Further complications in the Irish English perfect are seen in examples such as Have you your tea taken? (Henry 1957: 177) and I have it already drawn on a piece of yellow crepe paper (Kirk et al. 2011). The sequence of elements in the Irish English construction – have + object + V -en – leads Filppula (1999: 107–116) to refer to it as the “medial object perfect”. Not all analyses, however, see the form as a monoclausal perfect verb form. Henry (1957: 177–179), for example, argues that this form shows “a clear preoccupation with state”, in which “the sense of action is practically absent from the participial form”, while Harris (1985: 50) maintains that this construction is not a reordering of the general English perfect sequence have + V -en, but represents “a looser expression consisting of two underlying subjoined clauses”. In this way of thinking, have is seen as the main verb, and the construction as a whole focuses on the state which results from the action referred to in the second clause. This analysis is used by Kirk and Kallen (2007: 278–282), who call the construction a “pseudo-perfect” which resembles the English perfect, but has a fundamentally different structure. This analysis is partly motivated by data in ICE-Ireland, in which some sentences resemble perfects because the subject of the main (have) clause is also the agent of the conjoined clause (e.g. I thought I had them paid for), yet others differ in structure because the main clause subject is not the agent of the second clause. Examples include (a) I’ve two daughters married today and they are carrying on that tradition and (b) the Taoiseach hadn’t the full information requested. The Kirk and Kallen (2007: 282) analysis invokes reference to the “stative and possessive nature of comparable forms in Irish”, complementing Filppula’s (1999: 116) conclusion that despite the superficial similarity between the Irish English form and historical English models, the phasing out of the English “split perfect” and the strong similarity of Irish resultative constructions give “evidence for a significant, and not merely reinforcing, role played by Irish”. The relationship between past and perfect forms in English also provides a comparative note for Irish English. Citing uses of the past tense in Irish English such as I never saw a gun in my life nor never saw a gun fired, Harris (1984: 313) lists the preterit as an Irish English marker of “indefinite anterior” time, contrasting with a “standard English” system which requires the perfect in such cases. The form-based approach in Kallen (1989), however, treats preterits as a separate category from the perfect, and Hickey (2007: 195) gives only a brief consideration of the “indefinite anterior” category, suggesting that it is better seen as “just one means of expressing the past”. Filppula (1999: 91–98), however, pursues the issue by looking at the examples of reference to indefinite anterior time in his material and noting (Filppula 1999: 95) that, of 487 references to indefinite anterior situations, 430 (88.3%) use the past tense, as opposed to a mere 57 using the have perfect. In a diachronic perspective, Kortmann (2006: 607–608) observes that the distinction between past and perfect is “increasingly getting blurred”
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in English around the world, both by the use of simple past forms to refer to events in the recent past and by the increasing use of perfects with definite time adverbials. We may therefore suggest that while use of the past tense form to refer to states of affairs holding at an indefinite time in the past but viewed with current relevance is not a distinctive feature of Irish English, it may be more statistically frequent, and may occur with a wider range of adverbials and other temporal markers, than in some other varieties.
3.3 Phonology 3.3.1 Consonants Labial consonants in Irish English show intra-linguistic variation and contrast with British English since the earliest records. McIntosh and Samuels (1968: 5) cite spellings such as yewe ‘give’ and ewill ‘evil’ in Irish Middle English as characteristic departures from Middle English in England at the time. The modern dialectological record gives us a more precise phonetic insight into this area of variation: Henry’s (1957) study of traditional dialect in Roscommon (1968: 60) attests forms such as [ɸɑr] ‘for’, [ˈkɑɸən] ‘coughing’, and [loːɸ] ‘loaf ’ and notes that since [ɸ] is also used for /hw/, homophones arise in words such as [ɸoit] ‘fight, white’ and [ɸoil] ‘file, while’. By the same token, Henry (1957: 60) notes the use of [β] (or a palatalized variant) rather than [v] in [βɑːis] ‘voice’ and [ˈbreːβɪʃt] ‘bravest’ and reports (Henry 1957: 36) that forms such as [tβelβ] ‘twelve’ and [dβelː] ‘dwell’ “have been occasionally heard from good dialect speakers”. Though Henry (1957: 59) observed that much of the bilabial pattern noted ´ Baoill (1990: 160) here was at the time receding among the younger generation, O notes the continued use of [ɸ] rather than /hw/ in Irish-speaking districts. Dental and alveolar sounds also display a lengthy history of variation in Irish English, leading into modern developments in traditional dialect and vernacular speech. Middle English in Ireland shows spellings such as tis ‘this’, tred ‘third’, set ‘seethe’, and dynge ‘thing’ alongside thyme ‘time’, rathel ‘rattle’, and onther ‘under’, while early modern sources include trone ‘throne’ and wordy ‘worthy’ but oathes ‘oats’ and thell ‘tell’. In traditional dialects of the modern era, the use of phonetic [θ] or [ð] is often seen as diagnostic of the North-South dialect split, with fricatives only used regularly in Ulster English. Alternatives to [θ] or [ð] are phonetically varied, including alveolar stops, pure dental stops, and dental stops which include a secondary non-strident fricative element, as in [t̪ θ] and [d̪ ð]. The phonetic realization of /t/ and /d/ provides a rich source of variation in Irish English. Traditional dialects often use dental stops, particularly in the environment of unstressed vowels followed by /r/, as in [ˈsplɪnd̪ ər] ‘splendor’ and [ˈmɑd̪ əʀn̩ ] ‘modern’ (Henry 1957: 57). More distinctive in Irish English is the use of alveolar fricative realizations of alveolar stops in syllable-final positions. The voiceless fricative, sometimes referred to as “lenited /t/” or a “slit fricative” has been described phonetically by Pandeli et al. (1997), who note approximately 20 different transcription symbols for it. Fol´ Baoill (1990: 161), the sound is treated here as a lowered version of /t/ and lowing O transcribed as [t̞]. Though it is difficult to read the literary record with certainty in any attempt to date the origins of [t̞ ], a review of dialectal evidence in Ireland, Newfoundland (Clarke 1997), and elsewhere suggests that it is a long-standing feature of
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many, though not all, traditional dialects outside the Ulster dialect zone. Yet [t̞] is not the only realization of /t/ that has significance for variation in Irish English: the full range of sounds includes [h], [ʔ], and [ɾ], as well as [ts] and [θ] (which can also occur in syllable onsets). Henry’s (1958: 123–127) picture of traditional dialects in the mid20th century captures the variation well, citing examples such as [sθrəɑː] ‘straw’, [but̞ər], [bʋhər] ‘butter’, [ˈnɔhəɒːl] ‘not at all’, and [suts] ‘soot’. Though the patterns of contemporary urban vernaculars are not identical to those of traditional dialects, the data files from the urban working class study reported in Kallen (2005) include examples such as [æʔ eɪʔəklɑk] ‘at eight o’clock’, [gəɾˈɪnt̞ə] ‘get into’, [ˈwantɪɾə] ‘wanted to’, [nɑh] ‘not’, [a’baʊh] ‘about’, and [strih] ‘street’. As discussed in Kallen (2005), the search for the origins of this variation can lead in many directions: convergence with Irish (where the sound [t̞ ] does not exist, but where the occurrence of [h] in syllablefinal position is well-formed), convergence with other English dialects which use [ʔɾ], [ɾ], and [ts], and universal features may all be implicated.
3.3.2 Vowels The most salient features of the syllabic phonology of Irish English taken as a whole are those associated with the division between Ulster dialects and those found elsewhere. Ulster English displays many affinities with Scottish English and Scots, particularly in the use of central or front vowels in the GOOSE and FOOT lexical sets as defined by Wells (1982). The precise realization of categories in Ulster can be quite variable, but Harris (1985: 150–151), for example, defines three distinct classes in Belfast vernacular English: BOOT, categorically taking [u] as in boot, food, goose; BUT, categorically taking a central rounded vowel [ɔ¨ ] as in cut, blood, fuss; and PUT/FOOT, which alternates between [u] and [ɔ¨ ] on the basis of lexical and sociolinguistic features. Outside of the Ulster dialect zone, the picture is different: GOOSE words are a well-defined class with [u], but the boundaries between the FOOT and STRUT groups are less clear, where [ʊ], [ʌ], and intermediate vowels such as [ɔ¨ ] can occur in words such as bush, push, pudding, foot, love, soot, stood, and cushion. We may also note alternations between [ɛ] and [ɪ] in words of the DRESS set. Henry (1958: 111) cites raised realizations such as [bɪnʃ ] ‘bench’, [nɪkst] ‘next’, [tɪn] ‘ten’, and [kɪtl] ‘kettle’ from a range of data points, noting in mid-Ulster, however, a contrary tendency of lowering as in [nak] ‘neck’. The history of English shows fluctuation on this point, with raising especially common before nasals, as seen in ‘gentle´ Baoill (1990: 159), man’ and ‘sensible’ cited by Wyld (1927: 189–190); O however, points out that similar patterns are also shown in Irish-language variations such as teine ~ tine ‘fire’. The gradual participation of Irish English in what Wells (1982: 194–195) calls the FLEECE merger, by which words with Middle English /ɛː/ merged with /eː/ words and came to be realized with /iː/, is well documented, in part because it is still in progress. Patterson (1860) noted over 100 words from Belfast (such as leave, grease, and scheme) in which [eː] was commonly used instead of the later [iː]; representations of [eː] in words such as beast, meat, please, and speak also feature prominently in 19th century literary depictions of Irish English. Henry (1958: 110) lists a variety of such words, as in [teˑ] ‘tea’, [kreˑm] ‘cream’, [bɛˑɘt] ‘beat’, [hweˑət] ‘wheat’, and [meˑlz] ‘meals’. Harris (1985: 149) notes the decline of these realizations in Belfast since Patterson’s day,
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but nevertheless lists 21 words of this type in which [eː] is available as a variant. Despite the pace of phonological change, some unshifted realizations have taken on an independent existence: bate ( U. > H. bilayati, wilayati ‘foreign’), mufti (‘civilian clothes’, from U. mufti ‘Muslim cleric’ or ‘freedom’), dekko (H. dekho ‘see’, imperative verb), cushy (H. khushi ‘comfort, pleasantness’), doolally (‘crazy’, from Deolali, site of a British Indian transit camp) (Yule and Burnell 1886). Across classes, the arrival of British officers’ families and the establishment of convent schools led to a massive increase in contact between colonists and Indians. Indian loans into British English extended to domains such as domestic items, food, export items, social personae, religion, clothing, and architecture, e.g. bearer, bazaar, verandah, chintz, chutney, loot, thug, bangle, bandana, saffron, polo, jute, indigo, cummerbund (Lewis 1991). With the increased scale of contact, inexpert uses of Indian languages by lower class British residents in India even became a recognized discourse style, mocked by the domestic British public. A novel from 1900 parodies this style, mixing working class British dialect with inexpert, fragmented use of Hindi: “Decko, you want this admi abhi, but you ain’t goin’ to get ’im. Tumhara nahin. He’s mine, mehra admi, sumja? If you want to lurro, come on.” (‘Look, you want this man now, but you ain’t goin’ to get ’im. Yours not. He’s mine, my man, understood? If you want to fight, come on.’) (Lewis 1991: 12). Remarkably, the widespread British use of imperative orders such as decko and lurro during this period may well have formed the basis of the most productive loan template for contemporary Hindi-English code-switching among Indian English speakers, namely use of the imperative as a base form for verbs with code-switched inflection: e.g. College principal ghera-o-ed. (‘surround-IMPERATIVE-ed’, headline from The Hindu, 12 January 2008). Native Hindi-English bilinguals consulted on variants of this construction rejected alternatives, such as use of the infinitival stem: *College principal ghera-ed.
3 English and the independence movement (19th–20th century) 3.1 Historical developments The comprehensive implementation of English in India via Macaulay’s Minute was a transformative moment in India’s linguistic history. The 19th century witnessed a steady increase in English use in education, press, printing, and bureaucracy. However, particularly after World War I, the National Swadeshi (‘self-reliance’) Movement emerged as
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an opposing force, bringing with it ideologies of vernacular resistance such as Mahatma Gandhi’s argument that “real education is impossible through a foreign medium” (Mehrotra 1998: 5). As with his knowledge and exploitation of British law, Gandhi’s uses of the English language were skilful, calculated inversions of a norm. He used English to make the case for independence to British and Indian audiences but always promoted vernacular medium education as central to his policies of non-cooperation and self-rule: The only education we receive is English education […] I hold it to be as necessary for the urban child as for the rural to have the foundation of his development laid on the solid work of the mother tongue. It is only in unfortunate India that such an obvious proposition needs to be proved. (Gandhi, cited in Ramanathan 2006: 236)
Nehru’s landmark words at the moment of Indian independence were nevertheless in English, using the metaphor of speech for freedom. Gandhi and Nehru as individuals embody the conflicted place of English in early 20th century India. Gandhi, born in a small Gujarati town in 1869, initially struggled with English at school and in early public speaking. It was only when he was studying law in London that he recognized the political benefits of a command over English rhetoric and style and began to take elocution lessons and read widely (Khilnani 2003). Gandhi’s first book, Hind Swaraj (1909), was written in Gujarati en route to South Africa but translated by Gandhi into English (Indian Home Rule) and published in 1910. An immediate British ban on grounds of sedition remained in place until 1938, but this and subsequent writings by Gandhi – some in English, some in Gujarati, and some translated – nevertheless formed the key texts for the independence movement in the intervening period. Nehru, born 20 years after Gandhi into a powerful family in the colonial administrative center of Allahabad, received English tuition very early and spent years at Harrow and Cambridge. Unlike Gandhi’s works, Nehru’s three major books and collections of letters were all written in English, in prison. Writings by these two leaders, more than any other in the independence movement, represent the transformed role of English in India by the 20th century: “English made the empire, but they showed how it could be used to unmake it – how the language could be a tool of insubordination and, ultimately, freedom” (Khilnani 2003: 136). The political equivocation over whether a new nation should eschew or exploit the colonial language is apparent in the final decades of the independence movement. During the 1920s and 1930s a critical stance was widely adopted, and Gandhi amended the Indian National Congress party constitution in 1925 to reduce the role of English. Nehru too suggested that continued reliance on the language would cause Indians to “remain slaves to British thought”. However, once independence (which came in 1947) was imminent, more pragmatic views resurfaced, with Gandhi acknowledging “the rule of the English will go because it was corrupt, but the prevalence of English will never go” (Khilnani 2003: 154). Despite the persistence of English, by the mid-20th century many Indians no longer aspired to a British acrolectal standard. This is the crucial point at which endonormative stabilization of a variety in a multilingual setting takes root and progresses, leading to a divergence of stable, indigenized, non-native Englishes from regular second-language speech (Schneider 2003).
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3.2 Linguistic structure Detailed historical analyses dating the origins of Indian English features do not yet exist and are complicated by second language variability; however, Mehrotra (1998) shows that many contemporary Indian English features, discussed later, appear in 19th century letters and other texts. By the late 19th and early 20th century many contemporary features of Indian English are evident in newspaper texts and lexical loans from Hindi into Indian English are already becoming unmarked in press usage. A leading Englishlanguage newspaper, The Hindu, uses quotation marks to signal a loan in the headline “A general ‘hartal’ was observed in the town to-day” (1 July 1950), yet the resumed story lower on the same page states “A hartal was being observed in the town markets to-day”, with no quotation marks around the word hartal (‘strike’), a word used freely in Indian English today.
4 English in independent India: planning and use (20th century) 4.1 Historical developments The languages of India today form a complex multilingual hierarchy of local, state, regional, and national codes, within which Hindi and English are the two major languages of wider communication in the country, despite extremely low numbers of native English speakers. A conservative estimate of the number of languages in India is 415 (Gordon 2005). The Indian Constitution, written in 1950 with subsequent amendments, currently lists 22 official major regional languages and designates Hindi as the official language of central government with English as a co-official language. The North Eastern states of Meghalaya, Manipur, and Nagaland designate English as their state language. The Constitution lists slightly different official roles for Hindi and English: for instance, both are official languages of parliamentary proceedings and national administration, but English is the official language of the Supreme Court and of laws. Extensive provisions for exceptions and translation are provided and states are given the authority to regulate official language designations at the state level. Immediately after independence, Indian languages were initially favored as the medium of instruction, and the Congress party supported efforts to re-introduce them at the university level. English was seen as a necessary presence, but one that might soon be phased out: “The English language shall continue to be used for a period of 15 years from the commencement of this Constitution for all official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement” (Indian Constitution, 1950, Article 343). “It shall be the duty of the Commission to make recommendations to the President as to: (I) the progressive use of the Hindi language for the official purposes of the Union; (II) restrictions on the use of the English language for all or any of the official purposes of the Union” (Indian Constitution, 1950, Article 344). However, pragmatic and political concerns arose almost immediately. In pragmatic terms, ceasing widespread English use in newspaper production, universities, and government was unfeasible. Politically, the choice of the Northern, Indo-Aryan lingua franca Hindi as a national language was far from neutral. Antagonism to the imposition of Hindi and to potential benefits to Hindi speakers was fierce, particularly in the South, where Dravidian languages are spoken. Tamil Nadu eventually witnessed language riots
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in the 1960s in which 70 people were killed and Hindi and English were both temporarily banished from the state (Kachru 1983: 90). Very early in the debate, the government was forced to offer a more generous re-interpretation of the post-independence role of English: We do not recommend that any restriction should be imposed for the present on the English language for any of the purposes of the Union […] It is not suggested that English be rejected merely because it is a foreign language for we entirely agree that a language is not the property of any particular nation, and obviously it belongs to all who can speak it. (Official Language Commission, 1956)
In the field of education, distinct pressure groups emerged early in the debate, variously championing English, Hindi, or regional languages. The Council for Secondary Education (1956) ultimately settled on a three-language formula for education, still in place today, whereby non-Hindi speakers would learn Hindi, English, and their mother tongue, while Hindi speakers would learn Hindi, English, and another Indian language. A modified version in 1966 proposed that the mother tongue or regional language would be studied for 10 years, the official language (Hindi or English) for a minimum of 6 years, and a modern Indian or foreign language for a minimum of 3 years. Ambiguities in the three-language formula were left open to determination by each state, and these have been resolved very differently. Hindi states frequently fill the modern Indian language slot with Sanskrit, while some non-Hindi states (e.g. West Bengal) have sometimes replaced the Hindi slot with Sanskrit. In contentious non-Hindi regions, the three-language formula has often been reduced to two languages or even one. In others, in which minority languages are not identical to the regional language, there is an effective four-language policy in place (see Khubchandani 1978). English is taught as a subject in almost all schools, and English-medium education exists in private schools as well as via government initiatives in state schools. State governments change English-medium teaching provisions regularly; for example, West Bengal abolished English-medium teaching in government schools in 1984 but were forced through popular protest to bring back and expand the provision from 1992 onwards. Aside from perceived economic benefits, English-medium schools are sought after as preparation for university study, which is largely in English. Along with other major languages such as Hindi and Tamil, English now dominates domains such as administration, law, national politics, the armed forces, business, entertainment, mass media, and publishing. English newspaper production began in Calcutta in the 1780s, at the same time that newspapers were first being established in Britain; the current top-selling English daily in India, The Times of India, was founded in 1838. The figures in terms of print media have shifted in recent decades: in 1978, out of 16,000 newspapers and magazines, 27% were Hindi and 20% English (Mehrotra 1998: 10). In 2006, the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI) recorded 62,000 total registered newspapers and magazines, of which 2,130 were daily newspapers, 44% Hindi and 9% English. These figures indicate the central position of the two languages in India, but also the faster growth of Hindi. Despite its popularity, English has not displaced indigenous languages extensively. In 1971, the Indian Census reported 192,000 mother tongue speakers for English and 202 million for Hindi. Thirty years later, the 2001 Census reported a
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similar absolute number for English – 227,000 – but a doubled figure of 422 million for Hindi. As the population of India also doubled during this time, the relative proportion of Hindi speakers has remained steadily close to 40%. By contrast, the lack of change in the extremely low numbers of native English speakers suggests a decrease in reporting of English as a native language. These numbers do not accurately reflect regular English use, however, which is true for a much larger proportion of the population (Pingali 2009). At present, English in India is best described as existing alongside other languages playing an awkward, functional role; certainly at this stage Hindi has greater replacive potential in relation to minority languages than English. However, census figures belie the dramatic change taking place in urban areas such as Delhi and Bombay, where intensive code-switching by balanced bilinguals has become the norm among many segments of the younger generation, possibly presaging language shift for some. English has thus become an indigenized element – an Indian language in some sense – yet still remains an alien code at the very top of the scale, supporting class asymmetries (Dasgupta 1993).
4.2 Linguistic structure As English has filtered into informal genres, the range in bilingual competence and indigenized uses has continued to expand. The contemporary newspaper extracts below illustrate some widespread uses and ongoing changes, discussed in more detail in Section 5: – loanwords: ‘A dais was erected, from which, the safai netas using hailers, did their best to incite the safai karamcharis to keep up their dharna’ (safai ‘cleaning’, netas ‘leaders’, karamcharis ‘workers’, dharna ‘strike’, Times of India, April 2003) – article use: ‘On the economic affairs, the party now has virtually endorsed the 1991 reforms but clarifies that it remains committed to Ø mixed economy; Mr. Kapoor said the applications were being scrutinised on Ø priority basis.’ (The Tribune, September 1998). – verb and modal usage: ‘The Foreign Secretary-level talks had bogged down after the third round’ (past perfect form with simple past meaning; Hindustan Times, September 1998); ‘We believe they would be taking instructions from their leader’ (modal would with simple future meaning; The Tribune, September 1998). Despite continuing indigenization of the variety, pedagogical norms for the type of English taught in schools remain conservative except in pronunciation, where indigenous norms have prevailed for some decades.
5 Variation in Indian English While political decisions and language planning have played a key role in determining the uses of English in India, organic social and cognitive processes have over time determined the precise traits of the transformed language. A few features of English in India are conservative retentions from British source dialects – e.g. non-rhoticity in acrolectal varieties (many varieties of Indian English are rhotic), [a] in the PATH lexical set, archaic
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phrasing, and idioms (see also Anglo-Indian English, discussed in Section 2.2) – but none of these are entirely consistent across regions. Native substrate languages are a much greater influence in Indian English, which today forms a “cline of bilingualism” (Kachru 1983), exhibiting a dramatic range of variation determined by the key factors of first languages, region, socio-economic positioning, mode of acquisition, register of use, and attitude. After an overview of variation in contemporary Indian English and its sources, this final section concludes with a review of changing theoretical orientations towards the analysis of this variation.
5.1 Regional and social variation in speech Phonetic variation in Indian English varieties takes markedly different forms according to region and is sensitive to first language systems (Wiltshire and Harnsberger 2006; Pingali 2009). Typical phonetic characteristics of Northern Indian English varieties, many of which are shared with South Indian varieties, include: • inventory substitutions (e.g. substitution of retroflex consonants for the alveolar series, monophthongs for diphthongs, dental stops for interdental fricatives, trilled /r/ for approximant or silent /r/) • phonemic differences (e.g. lack of phonemic difference between /v/ and /w/) • phonotactic differences (e.g. repair of sC- clusters with vowel epenthesis, e.g. [ɪskul] ‘school’) • addition or loss of allophonic rules (absence of stop aspiration, absence of vowel reduction in unstressed positions, absence of /l/-velarization) • prosodic differences (e.g. syllable-timed rather than stress-timed prosody, idiosyncratic lexical stress often driven by spelling or analogy). South Indian English, influenced by substrates such as Tamil and Malayalam, has certain distinct features such as glide epenthesis in vowel-initial words (e.g. [ jɛvəri] ‘every’) and unaspirated stop replacement of voiceless interdental fricatives (e.g. [t̪ɜ:ɖ ] as opposed to North Indian [t̪hɜ:ɖ ] for British English [θɜ:d]). Wiltshire and Harnsberger (2006) note differences in aspiration between Northern and Southern varieties based on differences in phonemic contrast in the L1 systems. Similarly, varieties in Western India have selected regional features; for instance, the Bengali English phonemic inventory replaces English /v/ variably with /bh/ rather than the /w/ substitute in North Indian varieties. Grammatical divergence in Indian English is less regionally variable, possibly due to greater convergence in substrate systems in the domain of morphosyntax. Some commonly observable grammatical features in Indian English varieties include (see Bhatt 2008): • • • • •
invariant tags (You’re English, isn’t it?) lack of auxiliary inversion (Where she’s going?) innovative verb-particle constructions (They dismissed off any objections.) reduplication (We had four four mangoes. ‘We had four mangoes each.’) innovative discourse markers (She was there only. ‘She was in fact there.’)
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• stative progressives (He is knowing science very well.) • extension of would and could (I would be sending it to you tomorrow. ‘I will send it to you tomorrow.’) • extension of perfect to simple past contexts (Last week my parents had visited me.) • variable article omission and insertion (I need to get license.) • count use of mass nouns (I have passed on the informations.) The source of most of these features is transfer from the first language systems (e.g. reduplication, focus only, lack of auxiliary inversion) but can also be system-internal regularization (e.g. count use of mass nouns) or an emergence of cognitively unmarked systems (e.g. verb-particle constructions). The latter two sources may account for the occurrence of these features across unrelated dialects. The first source accounts for regional differences; for instance, this, that, and some are used more frequently by South Indian speakers in place of English articles a and the as Dravidian languages permit the use of demonstrative and quantifier forms in these contexts. Similarly, particular pragmatic choices (e.g. Will you give me water? with polite rather than direct meaning) can be traced to a mapping from parallel constructions in the first languages of speakers (see Sridhar 1991). Lexical indigenization can also range from region-specific to cross-regional, depending on the source and register of the form. Lexical change in Indian English has derived historically from a number of distinct processes, including the following (see Kachru 1986: 42, 152–153): • register-specific loanwords: lathi (‘stick, police baton’), bandh (‘strike’, lit. ‘closed’) • hybrid loans: lathi charge (‘armed charge for mob control’), goondaism (‘hooliganism’), policewala (‘police person’) • loan translations or calques: open hair (‘hair worn down or untied’), to stand on someone’s head (‘to supervise closely’) • innovations: eve-teasing (‘euphemism for sexual harrassment’), prepone (‘bring forward’), revert back (‘respond to a message’) • archaisms: donkey’s (y)ears, evil-doers, dastardly deeds, thrice, stepney (‘spare tyre’) • reduplication (with genericizing function): acting-wakting (based on the Hindi reduplication template), court-kacheri (hybrid reduplication, similar to historical Old English-Norse contact doublets such as kith and kin) Media usage facilitates the transmission of these forms across communities, but lexicon can also vary regionally (e.g. military hotel ‘restaurant’ in South India) or culturally (e.g. zakat ‘alms-giving’ in Muslim communities). Indigenous sociolinguistic norms have not stabilized in India to the extent that they have in native colonial varieties, particularly from a pedagogical point of view. No single standard variety is shared across the country, but educated bilingual speech in urban centers have begun to focus towards regional norms to some extent (Sedlatschek 2009). Many upper class, and increasingly middle class, urban families are balanced bilinguals and many of the best known Indian writers in English represent a relatively focused Northern variety, with a highly distinctive set of indigenized phonetic norms but relatively few grammatical divergences from British English (e.g. invariant tags, focus only). Most such speakers command a native-like style range and code-switch
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regularly, a practice widely referred to as “Hinglish”, or “Tamlish”, “Benglish”, and other regional variants (Krishnaswamy 2009). This tiny proportion of highly educated, fluent English users have constituted a recognizable group since long before independence. On hearing a speech by the politician Krishna Menon in the 1930s, H. G. Wells reported, with a note of irony: “A very eloquent man! I can’t speak as well as he does, I am a mere Kentish man; once a haberdasher’s assistant; learnt to speak and write English the hard way. But you fellows speak very clearly, and for all to hear. We mumble, bumble, grumble” (Skinner 1998: 33). Social class broadly determines an individual’s mode of acquisition, which may range from exclusively formal educational settings to exclusively informal spoken interaction, or any combination. The prominence of British-influenced school curricula and the high prestige of functional literacy in English (without language shift) perpetuates a characteristic conservatism, formal style, spelling pronunciations, and widespread prescriptivism in Indian English. The high prestige of British English in relation to American English has waned slightly in recent years however, with evidence of American style markers (e.g. rhoticity and idioms) in popular media, call centers, and casual speech (Cowie 2007; Chand 2009; Pingali 2009; Sedlatschek 2009).
5.2 Register variation in texts Recent American influences notwithstanding, British-influenced conservatism has long defined the style of written prose in Indian English, which often tends towards a dense bureaucratic style or a highly elaborated style. The bureaucratic style favors acronyms, passives, nominalizations, and the omission of function words (e.g. CT3 certificate is required to be obtained from the Range Superintendent of Central Excise, Indian government tax website, http://www.cbec.gov.in/faq. htm, last accessed 13 January 2012). The central role of the government in English use in India and seepage among registers has caused this bureaucratic style to influence journalistic and other prose as well (e.g. The Gautam Budh Nagar district Congress has demanded CID enquiry, Hindustan Times, 4 September 1998). Indian English writing can also favor a highly wordy style, marked by a lack of contracted forms, frequent Latinization (e.g. demise rather than death), and florid phrasing (e.g. most respected sir, for your kind attention, your good self). This may derive from bookish prescriptivism and conservatism, but also draws on traditional Indian textual genres which involve elaborate politeness and honorific marking. Despite considerable formality, even relatively standard written registers are firmly indigenized in certain respects. All the grammatical and lexical traits described in the previous section are prevalent in the Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English (1 million words of written Indian English; created in 1971, see Shastri 1996), existing comfortably alongside British archaisms and highly standard style. This balance between convention and change is particularly apparent in Indian literature in English. As in many former colonies, the presence of English has profoundly affected the literary world as well, and India has developed a rich tradition of English writing, beginning as early as the 18th century. While some early Indian prose and poetry mimicked the British canon, from the very beginning Indian writers have experimented with Indian imagery and meanings. Some writers have specifically employed vernacular lexicon and rhythm in their English (e.g. Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao) and
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almost all rely on indigenous cultural knowledge and postcolonial experience, built into linguistic choices, narrative styles, and actors’ voices (e.g. Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh). For example, in Rushdie’s (1995: 165–166) The Moor’s Last Sigh, a drunken monologue uttered at the moment of Indian independence articulates the awkwardness of English speakers in India: “bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen! […] Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group members. Square-peg freaks. You don’t belong here.” (see discussions in Mehrotra 2003; Skinner 1998).
5.3 Theoretical debates The diversity in types of English used in India, varying according to regional language, education, nativeness, and register, raises the question of whether a single entity – either “Indian English” or “standard Indian English” – exists at all, and if so, what its status is. In practical terms, “Indian English” tends to be used to refer to acrolectal or mesolectal Indian English, but certainly no single variety or standard is shared across the North or the South, much less across the entire country. However, given the long history of English in India, the shared move away from a British standard, and the clear lectal continuum of uses, many favor the use of the term “Indian English” as a useful umbrella term for these related varieties. Kachru (1986: 19) was among the first to characterize Indian English as a variety in its own right and characterizes it as a type of “non-native institutionalized variety”. Others (e.g. Mufwene 2001: 108) view the term “non-native” as disenfranchising and favor “indigenized”. This terminological debate fundamentally addresses the more important question of how to classify Indian English. The variety is cited in a number of early typologies of language contact and change. Fishman (1967) considered English in India to be a case of diglossia without bilingualism, arguing that access to English is reserved for urban elites. Thomason and Kaufman similarly focused on elite usage: especially where use of the target language is confined to educated people who write it regularly, interference is very slight or nonexistent in the morphosyntax but more extensive in the phonology […] The English spoken by Indians in India is a classic example, with Standard English syntax but phonological features. (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 129)
In fact English use has spread far more broadly than Fishman or Thomason and Kaufman’s descriptions suggest (see D’Souza 2001), and English in some parts of India has moved towards a state of diglossia with bilingualism. Individuals are tied into personal networks based in local languages, but they participate daily in English-based institutional or informal domains composed of other bilingual speakers. In a parallel debate over classification, opinion has been divided on the theoretical question of whether the “divergences” described in Section 5.1 constitute learner errors or dialect innovations. Early studies of Indian English tended to be restricted to prescriptive or pedagogical descriptions based on deficiency- or error-oriented approaches. This early work was founded on the exo-normative principle that appropriate norms for use were to be determined by a variety outside the context of use, such as British English (Quirk 1990). More recently, endo-normativity has been argued to distinguish postcolonial varieties from incomplete second language learning (see Kachru’s 1991
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rebuttal to Quirk 1990). Factors such as the absence of a native target, heterogeneous modes of transmission, and a stable, functional role for English have led to attitudinal shifts in the direction of indigenization: Sahgal (1991) has shown evidence of a developing preference among Indians for “Ordinary Indian English” accents over American or British English, in contrast to Kachru’s findings 20 years earlier that a majority of English users in India favored a British model. Sharma (2005) also offers quantitative evidence that stable “indigenized” features – both structural and attitudinal – can indeed be distinguished from generic non-native learner features in Indian English. It is becoming clear that English in postcolonial regions can neither be straightforwardly subsumed under models of individual second language learning nor under models of native variation. Evidence from patterns of linguistic variation as well as attitudinal behavior both indicate that Indian English is still at an intermediate stage of nativization. A detailed understanding of the sociohistory of this variety is still hampered by a lack of historical studies of Indian English and the complications of studying a second language variety. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that, under Schneider’s (2003) dynamic model of the formation of New Englishes, Indian English falls between Stage 3 and Stage 4 (depending on the region and social class of a given sub-community), undergoing a shift from exonormative to endonormative stabilization but not as fully nativized and diversified as native varieties.
6 References Bhatt, Rakesh M. 2008. Indian English: Syntax. In: Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Varieties of English: Africa, South and Southeast Asia, 546–562. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Chand, Vineeta. 2009. [v]at is going on? Local and global ideologies about Indian English. Language in Society 38(4): 393–419. Coelho, Gail. 1997. Anglo-Indian English: A nativized variety of Indian English. Language in Society 26(4): 561–589. Cowie, Claire. 2007. The accents of outsourcing: the meanings of ‘neutral’ in the Indian call center industry. World Englishes 26(3): 316–330. Cutts, Elmer H. 1953. The background of Macaulay’s minute. The American Historical Review 58 (4): 824–853 Dasgupta, Probal. 1993. The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications. D’Souza, Jean. 2001. Contextualising range and depth in Indian English. World Englishes 20(2): 145–159. Fishman, Joshua. 1967. Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23(2): 29–38. Gordon, Raymond G. Jr. (ed.) 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/ (last accessed 5 September 2011). Hosali, Priya. 2005. Butler English. English Today 21(1): 34–39. Kachru, Braj. 1983. The Indianization of English: The English language in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kachru, Braj. 1986. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes. London: Pergamon Press. Kachru, Braj. 1991. Liberation linguistics and the Quirk concern. English Today 7(1): 3–13. Khilnani, Sunil. 2003. Gandhi and Nehru: The uses of English. In: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.), A History of Indian Literature in English,135–156. London: Hurst and Company.
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Khubchandani, Lachman M. 1978. Language planning processes for pluralistic societies: A Critical Review of the Indian Scene. Language Problems and Language Planning 2(3): 141–161. Krishnaswamy, Subashree. 2009. Mind it! We are in Chennai, Machan! Paper presented at Chutnefying English Conference, 10–11 January 2009, Mumbai, India. Lewis, Ivor. 1991. Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of Words of Anglo-India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna (ed.). 2003. A History of Indian Literature in English. London: Hurst and Company. Mehrotra, Raja Ram. 1998. Indian English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mufwene, Salikoko. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pingali, Sailaja. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Quirk, Randolph. 1990. Language varieties and standard language. English Today 6(1): 3–10. Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 2006. Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, and Socio-civic Education in Gujarat, India: Harnessing the Vernaculars. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 5(3): 229–250. Rushdie, Salman. 1995. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Random House. Sahgal, Anju. 1991. Patterns of language use in a bilingual setting in India. In: Jenny Cheshire (ed.), English Around the World, 299–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Edgar. 2003. The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79(2): 233–281. Sedlatschek, Andreas. 2009. Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sharma, Devyani. 2005. Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2): 194–225. Shastri, S. V. 1996. Using Computer Corpora in the Description of Language with Special Reference to Complementation in Indian English. In: R. J. Baumgardner (ed.), South Asian English: Structure, uses, and users, 70–81. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Skinner, John. 1998. The stepmother tongue: An introduction to new Anglophone fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sridhar, K. K. 1991. Speech acts in an indigenised variety: sociocultural values and language variation. In: Jenny Cheshire (ed.), English Around the World, 308–318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Widdowson, H. G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiltshire, Caroline and James Harnsberger. 2006. The influence of Gujarati and Tamil L1s on Indian English: A preliminary study. World Englishes 25(1): 91–104. Yule, H. and A. C. Burnell. 1886. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discursive. London: J. Murray. Zastoupil, L. and M. Moir (eds.). 1999. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843. Richmond: Curzon Press.
Devyani Sharma, London (UK)
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133. Second-Language Varieties: English in Africa—a diachronic typology 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Introduction – many shapes and sizes Pidgins Creoles Contemporary language mixing L1 Englishes L2 Englishes in Africa Summary References
Abstract Although the historical linguistics of English in Africa is not a heavily studied area, this overview attempts to show that it is not without considerable interest in its own right. Moreover, for two L1 varieties comparisons with similar varieties outside the continent can be historically illuminating. The first is White South African English, for which the main debates in the field are covered, showing some large scale recent changes in the era of globalization, notably a reverse chain shift of the short front vowels. The other L1 variety with a rather different history is Liberian English, which is discussed in relation to syntactic retentions from early times in this repatriated creole, which still shares similarities with AAVE and Afro-Caribbean creoles. Even pidgin Englishes appear by virtue of their historicity in Africa to be amenable to study via appropriate modifications of the traditional family tree or wave models of relations. Finally the chapter shows how the L2 English syntaxes and phonologies lend themselves to internal African comparisons from which future developments can be monitored.
1 Introduction – many shapes and sizes English is an important but far from homogeneous language in Africa as in any other terrain. The form and functions of English on the continent have long diversified depending on the history of particular regions and the nature of the contacts with speakers of English. Those contacts become even more interesting if islands off the mainland of Africa are included: Mauritius, Tristan da Cunha, and St Helena. Africa evinces the full gamut of historical variation in English from pidgin to L2 to creole and “transplanted” L1. On the mainland the earliest significant presence of English is in West Africa, then Southern Africa, next East Africa and North Africa. English is to be found in all inhabited parts of the continent, with areas that were under French, Portuguese, or German influence now all finding it hard to resist the linguistic globalization of the planet via English (cf. Grzega, Chapter 136). The historical account in this section is a summary and modification of Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008: 1–17), with special focus on Africa. According to Spencer (1971: 8) English (in its Elizabethan form) was probably first heard in Africa in the 1530s when William Hawkins the Elder passed there on his way to Brazil. This was not the first European language to be used there, that honour going to Portuguese and its simplified contact varieties. A regular trade in spices, ivory, and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 2092–2106
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slaves began in the mid 1500s when British ships sailed along the Guinea coast (Schmied 1991: 6). European forts were built along the West African coast. As British supremacy in trade gradually grew, English became established. During this time West Africans were taken in small numbers to Europe to be trained as interpreters. An account in Hakluyt (1927 [1598–1600]: Vol. VI) cited by Spencer (1971: 8) suggests that by 1555 five West Africans had been taken to England for over a year for this purpose. In South Africa a similar development took place centuries before the formal settlement of the English. The Cape was seen as a stopping place for European ships en route to the East Indies before the 17th century. Trade and barter with the local coastal Khoesan inhabitants led to a small lexicon of words developing that included Dutch, Portuguese, and English words (Den Besten 1989). Moreover a few Khoesan people were taken to England to learn English; others were taken on ships bound for the East with the intention of being forced to learn English and serve as interpreters (Malherbe 1990). The earliest recorded English sentence (in 1613) uttered by a South African was probably Couree home go, by one such person in England, showing Khoekhoe SOV syntax (‘Couree wants to go home’; Den Besten 1989). It is of linguistic significance that in Africa as elsewhere, these earliest contacts between English speakers and the locals were informal and sporadic. There was no expectation of a permanent settlement or of colonization (and therefore formal education) until centuries later. In this early phase pidgins and “broken English” (i.e. earlyfossilized interlanguages) were the outcomes of contact (cf. Romaine, Chapter 113). These would not necessarily be ephemeral: West African Pidgin English whose roots lie in the 17th and 18th century is today more widespread (in the Cameroons, Ghana, and Nigeria) than is English as a second language. Pidgin English was not the only code used, as the African interpreters returning from training in England would probably have used a variety that was an L2 rather than pidgin. St. Helena English, described by Schreier (2008: xi) as the oldest variety of Southern Hemisphere English, has its roots in the 17th century when the East India Company began its reign there, taking over from the Portuguese and Dutch. The island, up till then unpopulated, was soon stocked with English settlers, West African and Malagasy slaves, French Huguenots, and still other settlers, and served as a stopping point in midAtlantic for ships traversing half the world. In a careful and detailed assessment of the status of English on the island, Schreier (2008: 246) proposes that “when taking everything into consideration [i.e. history of contacts and typological features], it is not exaggerated to say that St. Helena English is an English-based creole after all”. Two varieties that gained significance in west Africa (from about 1787 onwards) were the forms of creole English spoken by manumitted slaves who were repatriated from Britain, North America and the Caribbean. Krio was the name given to the English creole of slaves freed from Britain who were returned to Sierra Leone, where they were joined by slaves released from Nova Scotia and Jamaica. Liberia was established in 1821 as an African homeland for freed slaves from the U.S. The creole English that the returnees brought with them was most likely related to African American Vernacular English (Hancock and Kobbah 1975: 248, cited by Todd 1982: 284; cf. both Lanehart, Chapter 117, Kautzsch, Chapter 115). Today, American rather than British forms of English continue to dominate in Liberia (see Singler 2004a, 2004b). Todd describes four types of English in West Africa today: pidgin; ESL; standard West African English (mostly oriented to the UK, with the exception of places like Liberia) and francophone West African English.
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English settlement in East Africa was different. English ships began making trips along the east coast of Africa by the end of the 16th century, prior to the formation of the British East Africa Company. An alliance was formed with the British government in India in 1810, resulting in Mombasa becoming a protectorate of the Crown. Whereas in West Africa local people had very little exposure to native speakers of English, giving prominence to pidgin English, in east Africa “native speakers were present in considerable numbers, had great influence in government and filled a higher percentage of teaching posts” (Hancock and Angogo 1983: 306). North Africa was generally less under Anglophone English, with Arabic being the language that dominated. However, given that places like Egypt had “protectorate” status in the British Empire, English was not entirely foreign even here, and with globalization continues to spread after the age of empire. South Africa provides the largest mother-tongue base for English in Africa, though even here the percentage was never more than 10%. The settlement was relatively late, first of administrators and military personnel in 1795 (in Cape Town) and then of a civilian population in the Eastern Cape, called the 1820 Settlers.
2 Pidgins There are many reasons why pidgin Englishes in Africa should be taken seriously, and not as mere transient forms, associated with incomplete mastery of a target language. As suggested in Section 1, pidgins in Africa have historicity, going back to the era of contacts with European traders, sailors, and slavers. For example, trading contacts in the Gold Coast (later called Ghana) go back to 1471, and this phase lasted for almost 400 years before formal colonization by Britain in 1844 (Huber 2004: 842). Menang (2004: 903) states that by the 18th century Pidgin English was firmly established throughout the West African coast. Some pidgins appear to have been influenced in their vocabulary by the English-lexified creoles brought back by manumitted slaves from the Caribbean and US South (in the 18th and 19th century). Another reason to take pidgins seriously is that they fulfill a range of functions. One of these is as a lingua franca when no other language is available for the purpose. Thus pidgin can play a vital role in the multilingual urban marketplaces of West Africa (see Menang 2004: 905 for Cameroon). Where new plantations were established within Africa, a pidgin variety proved useful in uniting a diverse labor force. It is also an important medium when young people gather, especially in schools and now at universities (Huber 2004: 869– 870). Menang elaborates four functions for Pidgin English (a.k.a. Kamtok) in the Cameroons: an ecclesiastical function (in evangelization and liturgy), a commercial function (as in the marketplaces), a technical function (for technological and knowledge transfer), and a lingua franca function. For the latter he reminds us that in highly multilingual countries (like Cameroon with over 200 languages), it is important to analyse the territory in terms of lingua franca zones. Of the four lingua franca zones in the country (French, Fulfulde, Pidgin English, and possibly a Fang-Beti zone), Pidgin English is a major player, “matched only by the French zone in the size of its population” (Menang 2004: 905). Although Pidgin English is often associated with lack of an advanced education in English, it carries an increasing symbolism of youth, especially maleness and urban modernity. Not being able to speak pidgin in Ghana makes one not “one of the boys”. Huber (2004: 870) proposes that Pidgin English is slowly
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becoming more acceptable within the universities of Ghana, where previously it was proscribed: “This is because unlike their senior and linguistically more conservative colleagues, young male Ghanaian lecturers did speak Pidgin at the time they were students”. All of these considerations mean that pidgins are likely to grow in West Africa, in a kind of complementary functional allocation to languages associated with traditional culture, formal education and higher echelons of employment. Finally, it is necessary to stress that the boundary between pidgin and creole is not very clear-cut since (a) the creoles of the area (like Krio) exerted an influence on the growth of pidgins, (b) pidgins are becoming acceptable as one of the languages of the home in territories like Nigeria and Ghana, and (c) there is considerable overlap between pidgins in extended use and a creole in the sense of an L1. For reasons of space it is not possible to discuss structural features of pidgins and their historical evolution. However, my impression is that whereas West African pidgins show great overlaps phonologically with the L2 English in their area, this is less true of the syntax (see Mesthrie 2004a, 2004b).
3 Creoles Two later influential varieties in West Africa (from about 1787 onwards) were the forms of Creole English spoken by manumitted slaves who were repatriated from Britain, North America, and the Caribbean. Krio was the English Creole of slaves freed from Britain who were returned to Sierra Leone, where they were joined by slaves released from Nova Scotia and Jamaica. Liberia was established in 1821 as an African homeland for freed slaves from the US. The Creole English that the returnees brought with them was most likely related to African American Vernacular English (Hancock and Kobbah 1975: 248, cited by Todd 1982: 284; Singler 2004a, 2004b). Today, American rather than British forms of English continue to dominate in Liberia. Singler (2004a, 2004b) distinguishes between modern developments of Liberian Settler English and Vernacular Liberian English. The former is the language of the Settler ethnic group in which the role of formal education is discernible. Nevertheless, it can still be considered a direct descendant of 19th century African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that the immigrants brought to Liberia. The latter, Vernacular Liberian English, “had at first been a variety of the pidginized English that developed along the West African coast more generally, the influence of Settler English upon it caused it to diverge sharply from pidgin English in the rest of West Africa” (Singler 2004a: 875). Singler shows how an analysis of the Settler variety can illuminate debates about the early history of AAVE. The debates revolve around an Anglicist position that the core features of AAVE can be found in British English dialects of earlier times (McDavid and McDavid 1951) and the Creolist position that AAVE began as a creole evolving features that were maximally distinct from the superstrate (Rickford 1975) – cf. both Lanehart, Chapter 117, Kautzsch, Chapter 115. The Anglicist position appears to be reinforced from two independent approaches. Poplack and Tagliamonte (2001) studied two expatriate African American communities in the Dominican Republic and two Afro-Nova Scotian communities in Canada. They conclude that the language of these two varieties is closer to White varieties of North American English than is AAVE, which they propose has diverged gradually since its inception. Likewise Myhill (1995)
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presented features of AAVE that he proposed were relatively recent, i.e. post-Civil War: omission of verbal -s and possessive -s; copula absence, ain’t for ‘didn’t’ and forms like be done, semi-auxiliaries come and steady and stressed been. Singler’s studies (see 1994a, 1994b) of the Sinoe Settler community show that all these features occur in Liberian Settler community of Sinoe. A small selection follows: (1) Because that one I ain’t see with my own eye. (ain’t for ‘didn’t’). (2) You be done crack you palm nut […] then you make you palm butter […] (use of be done). (3) We talking about ending the war, and you come talking about Sinoe Defense force. (semi-auxiliary come to express disapproval). (4) […] When the teacher beat me, I run, man, I (be) steady holling all the way home. (auxiliary steady; [holling = ‘hollering’]). Singler distinguishes positive features of AAVE from negative features: the former involve non-standard forms, the latter involve the absence of a standard form. He concludes (Singler 2004b: 893) “Inasmuch as the positive features occur in Liberian Settler English and AAVE but do not occur in Samana´ English, the most parsimonious account is that they are old and Samana´ English has either lost them or never had them”. Singler explains the differences between Samana and Sinoe in terms of origins in the US: whereas the Sinoe settlers emigrated directly from the Lower South of the US, the Samana´ settlers had come from Philadelphia, which was an important city in postemancipation movements. Furthermore Singler is able to posit that Liberian Settler English is more conservative than AAVE even, given that the frequency of the diagnostic features is greater in Liberia.
4 Contemporary language mixing There is another aspect to the ontology of English in Africa, viz. its intertwining with local languages. Two types of contact effects are relevant here: (a) code-switching and (b) relexicalization in language mixing. The use of English in H(igh) contexts in colonial times over local languages has resulted in a new resource in many African contexts. The seminal work of Carol Myers-Scotton (1993) has shown how code switching is strategically used in East Africa to negotiate power relations between speakers. Notions like status versus solidarity, rights versus obligations of interlocutors, and the marked versus unmarked use of different languages come into play as speakers uses their multilingual resources in delicate ways. English is often used in code-switched discourse to stress status and education, rather than local solidarity (see Myers-Scotton 1993). For urban youth English tends to be a good source for slang lexis, and there are claims that new urban varieties have arisen based on the syntax of a local language (like Swahili in East Africa) and salient lexis from English. Sheng is the name given to this variety, and Engsh, to its polar opposite that draws on English syntax with salient Swahili slang (Kiessling and Mous 2004). While these are vibrant forms of expression amongst young peoples, and hence labeled “youth languages”, hard evidence that these are fully fledged languages used in autonomous contexts (rather than anti-linguistic ones) has yet to be produced. Whether the youth language will grow up or continue to live an age-graded existence is a fascinating issue.
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5 L1 Englishes The main L1 English in Africa is the variety spoken by descendants of 19th century English settlers in South Africa, though the speech community has obviously diversified considerably beyond this base. This variety, called White South African English, is an important one on the continent, since it provided the input or was an influential model to L1 varieties that gelled in neighboring countries in southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, etc.) and East Africa (especially Kenya). As Lass (2002) observed, although the origins of 19th century British settlers in South Africa was diverse, the variety that emerged in South African showed the influence of the southern majority: in being largely non-rhotic, in distinguishing TRAP from BATH, and STRUT from FOOT, and having lengthened [æ] before voiced stops, including /m/ and /n/ (as in bad, bag, man). Within South Africa there were originally three strands that merged into a continuum: (a) Cape Town English dating to 1795, spoken by largely an administrative, sailing and military segment; (b) Eastern Cape English dating to 1820, spoken by a class of settlers of mainly upper-working class origins from the Home Counties (Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Essex, etc.); and (c) Natal English dating to the 1840s, comprising a mixture of origins with a middle class segment perhaps dominating and a mixture of people from the North and South (Lanham and Macdonald 1979). The Eastern Cape variety would have been the most similar to other Southern Hemisphere varieties in the Antipodes: the 1820 settlement was a mere 32 years after the first British settlements in Australia and 20 years before formal British colonial rule in New Zealand. The Natal variety is perhaps closer to the other “Southern variety” – that of the USA (settled from the 17th century on), with which it shares some prominent phonological rules: glide weakening of PRICE, fronting of the nucleus of the MOUTH diphthong, fronting and lowering of the nucleus of the GOAT diphthong, and lowering and retraction of the nucleus of the FACE diphthong – see Tillery and Bailey (2004: 333) for the Southern US values; Lass (2002) and Bowerman (2004) for the South African ones. To these can be added prominent GOOSE fronting, which within the US may have originated in the south and which has long been present in South African English (Hopwood 1928: 22). Lanham and Macdonald (1979) argued that whilst they were once initially distinct, the Eastern Cape and Natal varieties have become more similar because of the opening up of the mines in the northern interior of the country, which drew people from the coastal provinces (and from other territories world-wide). This resulted in the rise of the more prestigious Natal variables (like PRICE weakening) as a counterforce (or substitute in Lanham’s thinking) for the more prestigious, but less available RP-like varieties in the mining houses and elsewhere. And as White English speakers returned to the coastal areas a more homogeneous South African English spread, which today remains hard to describe purely in terms of regional variation. Bekker (2008) provides a recent acoustic study with a detailed historical overview and an important new historical account of the dialect around Johannesburg, arguing – contra Lanham – for its relative autonomy from other centers in the country both historically and currently. I focus on three chain shifts discernible in some varieties of South African English.
5.1 Chain shift 1 South African English shares with other Southern Hemisphere varieties, especially New Zealand, a front vowel shift. As in New Zealand (cf. Hundt, Chapter 127) the BIT vowel
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is centralized (with some complications with the KIT allophone in velar environments), DRESS is accordingly raised to a position just short of high front and TRAP is raised to a position closer to mid-front. Lass and Wright (1986) argued convincingly that this was a systemic selection from a range of variants found in working-class Victorian English. The complications with the KIT allophone have been called the KIT-split (Wells 1982). The realization of /ɪ/ in the environment of velars and /h/ remains a short front vowel [ɪ] in South African English. In a preliminary account, Schreier (2008: 243) notes that St. Helenian English also has variation in this short front vowel set, whose “places of articulation tend to be closer rather than more open”. South Africa is not as “advanced” as New Zealand in the chain shift, where to South African ears the degree of raising of DRESS and TRAP is greater, and where front allophones of KIT are rare (Bauer and Warren 2004: 586). In fact there is evidence that some South Africans might now be reversing the shift, as I discuss below.
5.2 Chain shift 2 Since around the year 2000 young, middle class White South Africans have been showing signs of adopting features that go contrary to the front short-vowel chain shift. At first sporadic and “experimental” versions of TRAP lowering and retraction appeared, in my experience mainly among young middle-class female speakers. It had been my impression at the time that these were ephemeral tokens, but since then more and more attestations have turned up amongst young teenage children and young women in “expressive” styles within peer groups and in the media, mainly television. Bekker and Ely (2007) and Bekker (2008), show that the phenomenon was quite widespread among White females in Johannesburg; but it appears to go beyond this as a big city phenomenon, judging from its appearance in Cape Town and Durban in the last decade. I have not encountered them in my ongoing fieldwork in the smaller cities of Port Elizabeth and Kimberley. Bekker (2008) has in fact linked TRAP lowering in South Africa with developments in London and south east England (Torgersen and Kerswill 2004), where a reverse chain shift is evident with the fronting of FOOT, the extreme fronting of KIT, and lowering of DRESS and TRAP. This is a reversal and opposing trajectory to an older Cockney tendency of vowel raising (keb, kittle and git spellings occur in 19th century spellings for standard cab, kettle and get) that was the pre-cursor to Southern Hemisphere raising. Although Bekker (2008: 63) ties TRAP lowering in South Africa to this vernacular-driven shift in the south of England by invoking colonial lag, it is more likely to be a change from above, since as noted previously there is a middle-class, prestigious, experimental, or innovative aspect to it. Bekker (2008: 437) in fact also raises this as a possibility. In Cape Town DRESS is also lowering incipiently (to [ε]) and KIT is being lowered and retracted (to a centralized [e¨]), especially in velar and glottal environments (in words like kit and hit). Again these are variants found in young middle-class female “expressive” styles. Whereas around 2000, it was customary in my undergraduate second-year sociophonetics class to find many White students with vowel raising and almost none with the counter shift, by my class of 2009 the numbers were dramatically reversed. A word of caution is necessary, though, that these were in citation, rather than vernacular, styles.
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In considering the origins of (incipient) chain shift 2, the comparative method is illuminating. Here the options are embarrassingly rich, and both supported by external historical considerations. The first possible solution arises from recent social history. Although these lowered values had been noted by Lass (1990) they have only taken off around 2000. This date is not arbitrary. It is the time about which political uncertainty and increased global (rather than local) opportunities for White South Africans saw many young, middle-class, White South Africans take a gap year between school and university to travel to England and live for a year, earning a modest living and achieving a degree of independence before returning to South Africa. They would have been immersed in an environment in which non-raised tokens for DRESS and BIT were common and in which RP itself was indulging in TRAP lowering and backing, as is reasonably well established now. This is how Upton describes the TRAP vowel in RP: Associated with the general tendency of the modern RP front vowels to lower articulation (see also KIT and DRESS), the movement by younger speakers from traditional RP [æ] to RP [a] is arguably one of the most striking changes that has taken place in the accent group in recent years. (This “classical” chain shift, it should be noted, is being recognized in the accents of some non-standard dialects too, as in Ashford, by Kerswill [2002: 201].) It is also undoubtedly a most controversial matter. This is seemingly at least in part because the newer form corresponds with what is perceived by many to be a “Northern” sound […]. (Upton 2004: 222)
Lowered TRAP can be heard among “posh” newsreaders (now of diverse backgrounds) on South African television, probably in imitation of RP. However, there are competing sources of origin. I first cite two phenomena that are unlikely to have influenced South Africa, but which must be considered important parallel developments: Australia and Canada. Horvath (2004: 640) lists lowered and retracted TRAP as one of several changes that occurred in Australian English between 1960 and 1990. The Canadian Shift was first described by Clarke et al. in 1995, involving the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP sets being lowered and/or retracted to respectively [ε], [æ] and [a]. It would appear that chain shift 2 in South Africa, TRAP lowering in Australia and the Canadian Shift are parallel responses to some earlier prime mover. That prime mover might for the first two appear to be RP, but as RP is less likely an influence in Canada, it is time to look for a new source. For this we turn to Gordon’s account of the lowering of lax front vowels in California: In California, the vowels of KIT and DRESS may undergo lowering, and the vowel of TRAP may undergo both lowering and backing which results in realizations near [ε], [æ] and [a] respectively. Impressionistic descriptions of this trend suggest six sounds like sex, sex sounds like sax, and sax like socks. This lowering appears to be a recent development and may be a change in progress. It was not noted in earlier studies of California English and seems to have come to the attention of linguists only in the mid-1980s. It is reported to be especially characteristic of the speech of young urban women – a pattern that is consistent with its interpretation as an active change. The geographical extent of this lowering is not known, but it has been documented in both Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area [references omitted – RM]. (Gordon 2004: 347)
Chain shift 2 is thus an intriguing phenomenon for the historical linguist. To bring the discussion back to Africa, California is a more likely source for influencing young
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people via the popularity of Hollywood and Valley-speak sitcoms, which far outnumber RP or other-British accented programs. However, if we are to accept Chambers’s (1998) conviction that sounds do not pass from one dialect to another via television, then we may have to accept a multiple influence scenario. Chain shift 2 in South Africa may well show colonial lag, not from below as suggested by Bekker (2008: 195) but from above. More intriguingly we can conjecture that the direction of influence could well be from Hollywood to RP, though if we take the datings seriously then it could just as intriguingly be from RP to Hollywood.
5.3 Chain shift 3 A third chain shift occurs not so much in White communities of South Africa as in its “colored” communities, who speak a variety of L1 or L2 English that has features inherited from the more broad White varieties (Wood 1987) and many innovations including those arising out of bilingualism with Afrikaans (Finn 2004). My fieldnotes as a student in 1978 indicate salient vowel raising, this time of the long back vowels. Here are some transcriptions of words from natural conversation that I have noted over the years in Cape Town: [wu:tә] ~ [wo̝ :tә] [bru:dә] ~ [bro̝ :dә] [ku:l] ~ [ko̝ :l] [spɔ:ks] [kɔ:nt]
‘water’ ‘broader’ ‘call’ ‘sparks’ ‘can’t’
(Note: [ ̝] indicates vowel raising) Data such as that above shows a chain shift of / aː/ > /ɔː/ > /o̝ ː/ ~ /uː/. Such systematic raising is a chain shift probably initiated by the raising of BATH (which is particularly backed in this sociolect, and slightly rounded and raised), which probably triggers the raising of THOUGHT. The encroachment on GOOSE has not yet been studied, and GOOSE has in fact remained a back vowel among working class speakers of the sociolect. The chain shift has not been carried to fruition, it is most perceptible among young working-class children, but is subject to less-raised values in other subgroups and styles. For reasons of space it is not possible to discuss other changes in South African English phonetics: the standard sources are Lanham and Macdonald (1979) and Lass (2002), with Bekker (2009) being an important new voice.
6 L2 Englishes in Africa The second language varieties of English in sub-Saharan Africa (SSE) have been studied mostly form a synchronic perspective, within the paradigm of language contact and transfer from the substrates, which are mostly languages of the Niger-Congo family. As with their syntax, these varieties share significant structural similarities in their phonologies. These phonological similarities are discussed in this section.
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6.1 Effects of contact in SSE phonology Among the salient phonetic/phonological tendencies in Bantu languages that are relevant to SSE phonetics and phonology is the prevalence of five or seven vowel systems in which length is not distinctive and diphthongs absent (Clements 2000: 135). Furthermore, African languages tend to have few instances of vowel reduction to schwa. Accordingly, most of the varieties of SSE, especially those spoken by people with lower levels of formal education and fewer contacts with native speakers, display a five vowel system, with few or no diphthongs and few traces of schwa. There is internal differentiation in the three broad areas of SSE: East Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa, shown in Figures 133.1 to 133.4 below, using Wells’s (1982) lexical sets for monophthongs. At this stage, taking into account vowel-length neutralization, we have the following monophthongal systems: KIT/FLEECE
FOOT/GOOSE
DRESS/NURSE
LOT
TRAP/STRUT/BATH
Figure 133.1: 5-vowel system – type 1 (Southern Africa – idealized) KIT/FLEECE
FOOT/GOOSE
DRESS
LOT
TRAP/STRUT/BATH/NURSE
Figure 133.2: 5-vowel system – type 2 (East Africa) KIT/FLEECE
FOOT/GOOSE
DRESS/NURSE
LOT/STRUT
TRAP/BATH
Figure 133.3: 5-vowel system – type 3 (West Africa) KIT/FLEECE
FOOT/GOOSE
DRESS
LOT/STRUT/NURSE TRAP/BATH
Figure 133.4: 5-vowel system – type 4 (Cameroons, Central Africa)
Type 1 is Southern African; Type 2 is East African and Type 3 is West African. In the Cameroons (the western edge of Central Africa) we have a further type, distinguished by the treatment of NURSE, which is usually [ɔ], though some words in this set take [ε] (Simo Bobda 2004).
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Despite the broad similarities owing to neutralization of length, the four types are distinguishable as follows: East Africa has [a] for NURSE in contrast to the others; West Africa has [o] for STRUT, unlike the others; Southern Africa has [e] for some realizations of TRAP (i.e. a TRAP split between [e] and [a]); while Cameroons has [o] for NURSE, unlike the others. Taking Black South African English data as an example of the TRAP split, TRAP1 (a raising to [e] or [ε]) can be found in words like have, trap, fat, back, happy, and bat. Words of this subset tend to be monosyllables or occasionally disyllables. On the other hand, the following polysyllabic words of Well’s TRAP set have TRAP2 (a central low [a]): salaries, analyst, adamant, academic, etc. The diphthongs of SSE lend themselves to fewer generalizations. A noticeable tendency is to monophthongize FACE and GOAT. These are given as [e] and [o] respectively in East and West Africa, the Cameroons, and South Africa. It would be interesting to see whether these are phonemically distinct as /e/ and /o/ from the other sets which might be conceived of as /ε/ and /ɔ/. This appears to be the case in Southern Nigeria (Gut 2004: 819), and for South Africa (Van Rooy 2004: 947). Finally, although vowel length is not a distinctive feature in SSE, there is a regular phonological rule that lengthens vowels in heavy final syllables (CVC or VCC) or else in the penultimate syllable (see Van Rooy 2004: 950).
6.2 Effects of dialect input in SSE phonology This substrate driven vowel typology might not give much leeway for observations of a more traditional historical linguistic nature. However, there are some relevant diachronic facets. Two scholars who have taken such a historical perspective are Harris (1996) and Simo Bobda (2003), proposing that not all influences are automatically attributable to substrate influence. Some of the variation in realizations of individual lexical sets might have been due to differential input. Simo Bobda (2003) provides a long list of possible phonetic links between SSE and British English dialects that are masked if one were to use the modern standards (or prestige varieties – RP or “General American”) as the yardstick. Some of his examples are convincing: the monophthongal realizations of the FACE and GOAT diphthongs may well be linked to the older forms of these diphthongs ([e] and [o]) in Northern English, the Celtic Englishes and the Caribbean. Harris (1996: 7–8) points out that even where interlingual phonemic identification between substrate and L2 English appears to indicate substrate influence “lock, stock, and barrel”, the very fact that the L2 lexis comes almost entirely from the superstrate means that “on the basis of shared lexical stock, it is still possible to establish regular phonological correspondences between the contact variety and its lexical donor”. He proposes that the realization of TRAP and STRUT as [a] and [ɔ] respectively in West Africa and [e] or [ε] and [a] in Southern Africa is due to such differences in superstratal values in the 17th century for West Africa and 19th century for Southern Africa. This is a plausible argument, except that the Southern African realizations of TRAP are (as pointed out in Section 6.1) more complex than an examination of just the (monosyllabic) token trap indicates. A large number of tokens in the set have [a] which is more likely to favor the substrate pattern, rather than the shape of the superstrate in 19th century South Africa (showing raising of the TRAP vowel). As Simo Bobda points out, there is also a convincing case that links the realization of STRUT as a rounded back vowel in West Africa and the Caribbean, two territories whose
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historical connections in the era of slave trading are strong. Other examples of parallels that Simo Bobda (2003) cites (e.g. l-vocalization, fronted variants of NURSE) are less compelling, though his overall position that these parallels should not be entirely ignored is a valid one.
6.3 Contact in L2 SSE syntax My assessment that contact between substrates and superstrate played a far larger role in the phonologies of L2 Englishes in Africa is reinforced by findings regarding the syntax. Here, there is large-scale agreement about the influence of the substrates and the effects of psycholinguistic processing in second language acquisition. For reasons of space only a sketch list is provided, and a selection at that: for further details see Mesthrie (2004b), which is an overview of the recurrent features of L2 varieties in Africa and Asia. (a) Tendency to use resumptive pronouns inside relative clauses: This is the kind of person that I would like to give an award to them. (b) Extension of the progressive into stative contexts, thus allowing be + -ing with verbs like love, understand, know, have. (c) High use of left dislocation in topic-focus constructions: The children – they are facing many challenges. (d) Occasional conflation of gender in pronouns, especially among less advanced speakers of the L2: My wife hurt himself. (e) A different system underlying presupposition concerning and responses to yes/no questions couched in the negative: Q: Aren’t you a doctor? A: Yes (I’m not a doctor). (f) Tendency to extend plural -s to non-count or mass nouns (staffs, machineries, luggages). (g) Regularization of comparative and superlative forms (He is one of the radical students that you can ever find; He loves his car than his children). (h) Use of prepositions with verbs like mention (about), discuss (about). Here the claims for historical continuity are slim, even though one might come across occasional similarities in the history of English: e.g. resumptive pronouns in Chaucerian English (He was a man that he loved chivalrye – Prologue to the Canterbury Tales). On the other hand, contact with substrates is alone not a convincing explanation, since many of these features – all the above except (d) and (g) – are in fact also reported in Asian L2 varieties of English. The case for universals of L2 psycholinguistic processing is therefore strong.
7 Summary The historical linguistics of English in Africa is not a heavily studied area; but it is hoped that this overview shows that it is not without interest in its own right. This applies to the ways in which the L2 English syntaxes and phonologies lend themselves to internal African comparisons from which future developments can be monitored. Moreover, in two areas comparisons with similar varieties outside the continent can
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be historically illuminating. This was shown by the significance of Liberian English syntactic retentions and in chain shifts in South African Englishes. Even pidgin Englishes would appear by virtue of their historicity to be amenable to study via appropriate modifications of the traditional family tree or wave models of relations.
8 References Bauer, Laurie and Paul Warren. 2004. New Zealand English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 580–602. Bekker, Ian. 2009. The Vowels of South African English. Unpublished PhD thesis, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. Bekker, Ian and Georgine Ely. 2007. An acoustic analysis of White South African English monophthongs. Southern African Journal of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 25(1): 107–114. Boberg, Charles. 2004. English in Canada: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 351–365. Bowerman, Sean. 2004. White South African English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 931–942. Chambers, Jack K. 1998. Myth 15: TV makes people sound the same. In: Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Language Myths, 123–131. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clarke, Sandra, Ford Elms, and Amani Youssef. 1995. The third dialect of English: some Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change 7: 209–228. Clements, George N. 2000. Phonology. In: Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse (eds.), African Languages – an introduction,123–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Den Besten, Hans. 1989. From Khoekhoe foreigner talk via Hottentot Dutch to Afrikaans: the creation of a novel grammar. In: Martin Pu¨tz and Rene Dirven (eds.), Wheels within Wheels, 207–254. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Elugbe, Ben. 2004. Nigerian Pidgin English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton (eds.), Vol. 1: 831–841. Finn, Peter. 2004. Cape Flats English: Phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 964– 984. Gordon, Matthew. 2004. The West and Midwest: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 338–350. Gut, Ulrike. 2004. Nigerian English – phonology. In: Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English, 813–830. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hakluyt, Richard. 1927 [1598–1600] The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. London: Dent and Sons. Hancock, Ian F. and Rachel Angogo. 1983. English in East Africa. In: Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.), English as a World Language, 306–323. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hancock, Ian F. and Piayon E. Kobbah. 1975. Liberian English of Cape Palmas. In: Joey L. Dillard (ed.), Perspectives on Black English, 248–271. The Hague: Mouton. Harris, John. 1996. On the trail of short u. English World Wide 17: 1–40. Hopwood, David. 1928. South African English Pronunciation. Cape Town: Juta and Co. Horvath, Barbara. 2004. Australian English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 625–644. Huber, Magnus. 2004. Ghanaian Pidgin English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 866–873. Kiessling, Roland and Maarten Mous. 2004. Urban youth languages in Africa. Anthropological Linguistics 46(3): 303–341. Lanham, Leonard W. and Carol Macdonald. 1979. The Standard in South African English and its Social History. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.
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Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26: 79–102. Lass, Roger. 2002. South African English. In: Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Language in South Africa, 104–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Roger and Susan Wright. 1986. Endogeny versus contact; ‘Afrikaans influence’ on South African English. English World Wide 7(2): 201–223. Malherbe, Vertrees C. 1990. Krotoa called ‘Eva’ – a Woman Between. Cape Town: UCT African Studies. McDavid, Raven and Virginia McDavid. 1951. The relationship of the speech of American Negroes to the speech of Whites. American Speech 26: 3–17. Menang, Thaddeus. 2004. Cameroon Pidgin English (Kamtok): phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol.1: 902–917. Mesthrie, Rajend. 2004a. Synopsis: the phonology of English in Africa and South and Southeast Asia. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 1099–1110. Mesthrie, Rajend. 2004b. Synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in Africa and south and southeast Asia. In: Bernd Kortmann et al. (eds.), Vol. 2: 1132–1141. Mesthrie, Rajend and Rakesh M. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes – the study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Code-Switching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Myhill, John. 1995. The use of features of present-day AAVE in the ex-slave recordings. American Speech 70: 115–147. Poplack, Shana. 2000. The English History of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell. Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell. Rickford, John. 1975. Carrying the new wave into syntax: the case of Black English been. In: Ralph W. Fasold (ed.), Analyzing Variation in the Form and use of Languages, 162–183. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Schmied, Josef. 1991. English in Africa: an Introduction. London: Longman. Schmied, Josef. 2004. East African English (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania): phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 918–930. Schneider Edgar W., Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton (eds.). 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1: Phonology. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Schneider Edgar W., Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton (eds.). 2004b. A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Schreier, Daniel. 2008. St. Helenian English: Origins, Evolution and Variation. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Simo Bobda, Augustin. 2000. Research on New Englishes: a critical review of some findings with a focus on Cameroon. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 25: 53–70. Simo Bobda, Augustin. 2001. East and southern African English accents. World Englishes 20(3): 269–284. Simo Bobda, Augustin. 2003. The formation of regional and national features in African English pronunciation – an exploration of some non-interference factors. English World Wide 24(1): 17–42. Simo Bobda, Augustin. 2004. Cameroon English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 885–901. Singler, John. 2004a. Liberian Settler English: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 874–884. Singler, John. 2004b. Liberian Settler English: morphology and syntax. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 879–897.
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Spencer, John. 1971. West Africa and the English language: In: John Spencer (ed.), The English Language in West Africa, 1–34. London: Longman. Tillery, J. and G. Bailey. 2004. The urban south: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 325–337. Torgersen, Eivind and Paul Kerswill. 2004. Internal and external motivation in phonetic change: dialect leveling outcomes for an English vowel shift. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 23–53. Todd, Loreto. 1982. The English language in West Africa. In: Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Go¨rlach (eds.), English as a World Language, 281–305. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Upton, Clive. 2004. Received Pronunciation. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 217–230. Van Rooy, Bertus. 2004. Black South African English: Phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), Vol. 1: 943–952. Wells, John Christopher. 1982. Accents of English. Vol. 1: Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Tahir. 1987. Perceptions of, and attitudes towards, varieties of English in the Cape Peninsula, with particular reference to the ‘Coloured Community’. Unpublished M.A. thesis. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.
Rajend Mesthrie, Cape Town (South Africa)
134. Second-Language Varieties: Second-language varieties of English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction ESL development: the common denominator Linguistic features of ESL varieties Two cases in point: South Africa and Hong Kong Summary References
Abstract This chapter looks into the formation and function of so-called second-language varieties of English. It discusses the contribution of factors such as social history, population demographics, identity, language use in education, and type of bilingualism to the emergence of these varieties. While it provides examples from English around the world, it concentrates on two varieties in detail, South African English and Hong Kong English. Reference is made to classical models in the field (especially Kachru 1985), more recent work on colony types in general as well as to the role, function, and overall presence of English in the various local sociolinguistic landscapes. Finally, the chapter lists and exemplifies some characteristic features of second-language varieties and draws parallels between their manifestations in distinct settings.
1 Introduction Over the last decades, the development of English around the world has received a lot interest from linguists in domains as distinct as sociolinguistics, language variation and Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 2106–2120
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change, genetic linguistics, typology, etc. Some of the main issues were how to come up with a classification of English as a world language that would account for the spread and diversification of the language and what criteria one would have to select to justify a taxonomy of Englishes. Was this predominantly an extralinguistic decision, so that one should focus on role and function of the language, or was it a linguistic one, i.e., would the new Englishes undergo similar linguistic processes and thus share a set of features? The discussion received a major boost by Braj B. Kachru’s (1985, 1986) suggestion that English(es) can be grouped into three largely concentric circles: an Inner Circle, i.e. countries of historical continuity which in a sense represent the traditional bases of English (the UK, USA, Australia, etc.), where the language is spoken natively (English as a Native Language, or ENL), all in all with a total number of c.380 million native speakers, the Outer Circle, which includes countries where English is important for historical reasons and where it is spoken mostly as a second language (e.g. as the legacy of political expansion or colonization by the British Empire) and where it plays a part in the nation’s institutions (English as a Second Language (ESL) countries include India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya, Singapore, etc.; total speaker numbers between 150 to 300 million), and finally the Expanding Circle, in which we find those countries where English plays no historical or governmental role but where it is widely used as a foreign language or lingua franca (English as a Foreign Language (EFL) countries include China, Russia, Japan, much of continental Europe, etc.). The total number of English speakers in this circle is most difficult to estimate for obvious reasons (lack of population statistics, degree of proficiency as a guideline, specificity of purposes for using English) but estimates range from 500 million to over one billion (Crystal 1997). McArthur (1987) and Go¨rlach (1990) developed alternative models, both taking for granted that varieties of English were classified into first- (or native), second- and foreign-speaker groups. Though Kachru’s was by far the most influential approach, a number of problems were singled out with all these models, and these have given rise to extensive discussion in the literature (see Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008 for an overview). For one, Kachru’s model is static rather than dynamic (not leaving room for transition from one circle to the other), it was based on geography, history, and ancestry rather than on perceptions of identity (e.g. Singapore) or shared linguistic features, and it also failed to account for linguistic diversity within these varieties (e.g., would African American English be a variety of American English – thus inner circle – or should one take into account its origins and language contact history and place it elsewhere, and if so, in which circle?). There were also debates as to whether (and to what extent) the inner circle (UK, USA, New Zealand) should be “norm-providing”, meaning norms are developed in these countries since English is a first language, the outer “norm-developing” and the expanding circle “norm-dependent”, thus relying on the standards set by native speakers. The latter point in particular has given rise to a debate and bitter controversy on the role and function of ENL, ESL, and EFL countries, with a strong ideological undercurrent. The most prominent example is certainly the Quirk-Kachru controversy, led publicly in the journal English Today in the early 1990s, which started with Quirk’s (1990) claim that there were parallels between non-native and non-standard varieties of English and that both needed access to a (native) standard variety: […] no one should underestimate the problem of teaching English in such countries as India or Nigeria, where the English of the teachers themselves inevitably bears the
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Consequently, ESL varieties of English (Indian or Nigerian English) were considered as norm-dependent on British English and native varieties were assumed to hold a given advantage over non-native ones, which were considered as little more than deficit deviations of the norm, just like vernacular varieties of inner-circle varieties. These (in my opinion misguided) views were even embraced by sociolinguists, such as Trudgill (2002: 151), who claimed that “[t]he true repository of the English language is its native speakers, and there are so many of them that they can afford to let non-natives do what they like with it so long as what they do is confined to a few words here and there” (my emphasis), which was criticized extensively and considered as condescending or derogatory, particularly since Trudgill failed to set out what L1 competence was in the first place and what differentiated it from ESL or EFL competence. Extremist “pro-native speaker” views a` la Quirk and Trudgill have seen intense debates on the linguistic competence of speakers (both of monolingual and bilingual ones) and issued a general controversy as to what it takes to be classified as a “native speaker” in the first place (which, by the way, some would deny as a valid concept altogether, as evidenced by Paikeday’s [1985: 14] equally extremist claim that “the native speaker is dead”) or what sets native speakers apart from second- or foreign speakers of the language (see discussion in Seidlhofer 2005). Leaving the thorny question of competence aside, the real question is probably whether the usage of English around the world is a promising criterion for classification or not. This is by no means easy to answer since a number of factors are involved: nonlinguistic ones such as social history, population demographics, or educational politics, sociological ones such as identity construction and access to power and education, psychological and psycholinguistic ones such as language acquisition and learning, and sociolinguistic ones such as societal bilingualism and diglossia. Indeed, it would seem that any model of English as a global language would to some extent have to integrate these factors, which makes it such a difficult task and leaves any effort open to criticism of some sort. In the remainder of the chapter, then, I focus on the interplay of some these issues and the consequences that arise thereof, particularly for the classification of English(es) in a coherent model using labels such as ENL, ESL and EFL. I will explore this further by tracing the development of English in two proto-typical, wellresearched ESL countries (of South Africa and Hong Kong) and then reaching some tentative conclusions.
2 ESL development: the common denominator The role and function of English around the world hinges on historical, social, and linguistic criteria. A first point to consider is which of them matters most, i.e. whether the assignment of ESL status should be made with reference to one particular factor. Social history is an often-cited criterion, also for the impact of colony type (plantation vs. exploitation, e.g. in Africa or in the Caribbean) and the relationship between ESL varieties and the formation of contact varieties (pidgins and creoles; cf. Mufwene 2001; Romaine, Chapter 113). ESL countries have a historical, often colonial or post-colonial,
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relationship with Great Britain or the USA (i.e., with classical “inner-circle” varieties). Very often, the exportation of the English language originated in political expansionism and commerce when trade contacts were established in Africa and India from the early 1600s onwards. As a consequence, the language gained a foothold via the administration of the developing colonies, first used among the expatriate community and then as a lingua franca with the local population when the infrastructure was built up and trade patterns intensified. English was first spoken in bridgeheads along the coast (often ports, such as Surat, Madras, and Bombay in India or Fort Cormantine in Ghana), from where it diffused into the neighboring areas and became subsequently used by the communities in contact (as a lingua franca). English was present in everyday life since a part of the community consisted of native speakers of British or American English (clergy, clerks, teachers, missionaries, etc.). This meant that population demographics is an important criterion as well, since the English-speaking group represented a minority and English was one language amongst many, spoken by a newcomer community that almost exclusively developed economic interests. At a later stage, this changed due to social and political developments. English became the major medium in political discourse, education, and administration and was often maintained for these purposes when the former colonies (in Africa, Asia, or in the Caribbean) gained independence. This meant that English was used for all official correspondence, for advertisement and in literature. Today, the role of English in administration and education is paramount in ESL countries such as Kenya, Sri Lanka, or Nigeria. Often, it was by no means uncontroversial whether one should keep the language of the former colonizing power for official purposes or opt for a local one instead (this is expressed in the writing of Derek Walcott, St Lucian Nobel Laureate for Literature: “It’s good that everything’s gone, except their language, which is everything” in his poem North and South). Conflicts of this kind are typically at the root of ideological issues behind language choice in post-colonial settings. They go hand in hand with the construction of identity; does the community orient itself towards the “mother country” and its values and standards or does it focus on itself and strive towards the development of independent norms? In fact, identity has been singled out by Schneider (2007) as the single most important factor in the evolution of Englishes around the world. In addition, English was often enshrined in the educational tier as well and secondary and tertiary education was offered in English only. The advantages for education are obvious (access to a world language, historical legacy, availability of teaching materials, international audience, and readership, higher chances of placing publications in scientific journals, etc.), but the disadvantages are, again, that ideological issues are often not resolved and that not all sections of the population have equal access to and competence of English (in India, for instance, one of the most influential ESL countries, English is still spoken by a minority of the populace only, Hindi being more widespread (see Sharma, Chapter 132). Another cornerstone of ESL development is societal bilingualism (and one of its sociolinguistic correlates, diglossia). Here a difference is typically made between the (indigenous) home language and the language used for official purposes and administration. The addition of languages changes the societal equilibrium of language usage and typically entails that one language is considered more prestigious and beneficial for economic welfare and advancement, even to the extent that such an imbalance fosters social inequality. Consequently, ESL often features in a context of additive
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bilingualism, which is the addition of a language to the sociolinguistic repertoire of a speech community and the functional specialization of the varieties used that results from this. Conversely, the exportation of English may lead to subtractive bilingualism, i.e., the gradual disappearance of other languages via shift or death. Typically, though, ESL operates in stable conditions, used within a set number of domains in official usage (administration, education, media, etc.). Taking all these criteria into account, it is striking to find that ESL conditions resemble the conditioning factors of the so-called “New Englishes”, a term introduced by Platt et al. (1984), in that they share the following characteristics: (1) development via a local education system, not primarily as a home language; (2) adoption of the language in an environment where English is spoken natively by a minority of the population only; (3) usage for a range of functions and skills (letter writing, administration, literature, advertisement, etc.) and (4) indigenization, the development of distinctive local features (cf. also Schneider 2007). The bottom line is that the discussion of ESL development has a strong ideological component (particularly in the debate of native vs. non-native speakers) and its definition has traditionally drawn on criteria by nature sociological, educational, or historical. It is only much more recently that the question has been approached from a more linguistic point of view. As Sand (2004) suggests, if history, identity, sociodemographics or the combination of all these factors poses problems for definition, maybe it is beneficial to look into shared structural features and classify ESL varieties along such principles.
3 Linguistic features of ESL varieties A linguistic analysis of ESLs centers on the question whether linguistic features are shared or not and the factors that can be offered to account for resemblances between the varieties (substratum effects, interference, founder effects, etc.). Whereas the first is mostly a descriptive task, the second involves more general issues in linguistic theory, e.g. contact-induced change, universals, language learning and interlanguage development. In the following, I list a representative selection of prominent and widespread features, providing examples from the literature for each case (examples come from Schneider 2007 and Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008, unless specified otherwise). First of all, the definite article is variably absent or substituted by one, often within the same variety, as in (1a, b). (1)
a. I want to buy Ø bag. (Singapore English [SgpE]) b. Here got one stall selling soup noodles. (SgpE)
There is a tendency to conflate demonstratives this and these, and singular forms are commonly used with plural reference (“this worms, they get into your body” in Native American English [NatAmE]), as in (2). It can occur in this context as well.
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Those books are very informative. It can be obtained at Dillons. (Malaysian English [MalE])
Mass nouns often undergo plural -s suffixation and are treated as count nouns. Many varieties of African or Asian English have plural forms such as staffs, furnitures, fruits, equipments, etc. This is reported in NatAmE as well (alphabets, homeworks, etc.; Leap 1993: 54). Personal pronouns may be absent, as in (3). (3)
Ø must buy for him; otherwise he not happy. (SgpE)
Existential it is absent so that a copula form is used for the existential construction, as in (4a, b): (4)
a. But when I move into the flat, is OK. (Philippine English) b. Here is not allowed to stop the car. (Hong Kong English [HKE])
Alternatively, one finds get in existentials as a substitute, as in (5a, b): (5)
a. Here got very many people. (SgpE) b. Got one ghost over there. (Black South African English [SAfrE])
As for the verb phrase, the past tense suffix -ed is absent, so that past tense is not overtly marked, as in (6). (6)
We stayØ there whole afternoon and we catch one small fish. (SgpE)
Present tense -s suffixation is typically reduced and sentences such as “she singØ very well” are reported in nearly every ESL variety. Copula forms of be are commonly absent, as in (7). (7)
The house Ø very nice. (SgpE)
In the case of irregular verbs, sometimes the bare root (or infinitival form) is used instead of the preterit or past participle form, as in (8a, b). (8)
a. Last time she come on Thursday. (SgpE) b. He already go home. (MalE)
Past tense reference is then very often denoted by an (unstressed) did before the main verb, as in (9a, b): (9)
a. She did take the book. (Swaziland English) b. I did go to town yesterday. (East African English [EAfrE])
ESL varieties also have a tendency for have +ed to refer to punctual and/or completed events, as in (10a, b).
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(10) a. I have read this book last month. (Indian English [IndE]) b. It has been established many years ago. (Ghanaian English [GhanE]) Futurity is often expressed without a preverbal marker will or shall, so that present tense expresses future reference as well. As for modality, will is often used instead of would; sentences such as the following are reported from Black SAfrE, Nigerian English, GhanE, Indian SAfrE and MalE, as in (11a, b): (11) a. I will like to go right now. b. I will like to see him. (both from GhanE) The extension of progressives is characteristic as well. StdE makes a distinction between progressives according to verb type (non-stative verbs that denote actions, e.g. hike, dream, buy, can take an -ing progressive whereas stative ones, smell, know, like, etc., can’t). ESL varieties typically allow progressives with both verb types, so that we find examples as in (12a–c): (12) a. I am having a cold. (SgpE) b. I am smelling something. (NigE) c. She is owning two luxury apartments. (MalE) There is also creativity and flexibility in what regards transfer of part of speech and compound verbs. On and off are used as verbs in Indian SAfrE or MalE (with the meaning of ‘to switch on/off ’), as in (13): (13) I told her to on the stove but she offed it. (Indian SAfrE) There is also considerable creativity in morphological conversion and word-formation. New compound verbs include “by-heart v.” (‘to learn sth. by heart’) or “back-answer v.” (‘to answer back, to reply’), as in (14a–c): Morphological conversion and word-formation: (14) a. She was by-hearting her work. (IndE) b. He’s always back-answering me. (Indian SAfrE) c. He look-aftered his children very well. (Indian SAfrE) Finally, there also is variation in the usage of prepositions. Of may be used where StdE would have by, for instance (15): (15) He got fired of the church. (Native AmE) Alternatively, prepositions may be absent, as in (16a–c): (16) a. He lives that second house. b. You wanna go bathroom? c. They live New York. (all NatAmE)
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Mesthrie (1987) reports what he refers to as “quasi-postpositions” in basilectal Indian SAfrE: night-time ‘at night’, Telugu way ‘in Telugu’; Fountain Head side ‘towards Fountain Head’; morning part ‘in the morning’. To sum up, it has been suggested that ESL varieties share a set of common properties in phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and language usage (Kasper 1992). According to Platt et al. (1984), Sand (2004), and Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008), these include the following features: • in phonetics and phonology: monophthongs instead of diphthongs in FACE and GOAT; reduction, perhaps even loss, of length-quality contrasts as a result of phonological mergers (e.g. ship-sheep, full-fool ); TH-stopping (dental fricatives being realized as plosives /t, d/); a strong tendency to reduce consonant clusters via deletion of the last consonant (Schreier 2005); stress changes in polysyllabic words (dedica´ted, fina´nce); and syllable-timing • in morphosyntax: various processes of morphological and/or syntactic regularization: loss of third-person singular -s, past tense -ed or copula verbs; extension of the progressive; overuse of the present perfect; idiomatic use of prepositions and article use; reclassification of count-nouns as non-count ones and vice versa (as evidenced by pluralization); alternative fronting or focus constructions • in general usage and pragmatics: register clashes, excessive formality, invariant tags: no?, isn’t it?, is it?, true?, true or not?; differential conversational routines or turn-taking strategies: A: Hi, just come ah. B: So o.k. lah. (SingE) A: Hasn’t the President left yet? B: Yes, he hasn’t. (SingE, EAfrE) A: Would you like to come to my house for dinner on Tuesday? B: I don’t mind. (SingE, MalE) (examples from Platt et al. 1984: 158–159).
Whereas it is not contested that these features make an appearance in ESL varieties, it is debated as to whether (and if yes, to what extent) they are diagnostic. It has been pointed out that nearly all of them make an appearance elsewhere too. In pidgin and creole linguistics, for instance, feature lists of this kind have enjoyed particular popularity, to name but Bickerton’s twelve feature list (Bickerton 1981). An analysis of the Handbook of Varieties of English (Schneider et al. 2004) shows that these features make an appearance in varieties around the world and that they show up regardless of whether the variety has ENL, ESL, or EFL status. Copula absence (she Ø nice person) or reduced tense or person affixation (they walkØ out on me las’ night) are extremely common in English-derived pidgins and creoles as well, for instance, and FACE and GOAT monophthongs manifest themselves in ENL varieties of British English (e.g. in Scotland or the English South West), to give but two examples. Whereas some features are certainly diagnostic for a single variety (for example the discourse particles mah, leh or lor in SgpE), there is probably no single feature that characterizes the class of ESL varieties exclusively, i.e. that is found in all ESL varieties and not in others. Consequently, linguistic features are helpful for analyzing the development and origins of ESLs (substratal effects, transfer) but they are not a reliable criterion for the assignment of language
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status, simply on account of the fact that these features make an appearance in EFL or ENL varieties, pidgins and creoles, etc., also. An important study in this context is Sand (2004). Based on data from the International Corpus of English (ICE), she analyzed article use (both definite and indefinite ones) in a variety of Englishes: ENL (Great Britain, New Zealand) and ESL (India, Singapore, and Kenya). She found some differences between ENL and ESL varieties (as exemplified above) but considerable variation in all three ESL varieties also, irrespective of the local substrates and contact scenarios, which ruled substratum influence out as a determining factor in their development. Rather, the most important factor to condition variability was text type and style. In spoken text types, articles were used least often in informal contexts and spontaneous conversations, and most often in formal settings such as public speech or lectures. This led her to conclude that variation in article usage in ESL varieties such as IndE, SgpE and KenyE “must be chiefly due to individual speakers’ or writers’ level of competence or stylistic preference” (Sand 2004: 294).
4 Two cases in point: South Africa and Hong Kong According to McArthur, the list of ESL countries includes (in alphabetical order) Bangladesh, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Cook Islands, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, Zambia, Zimbabwe. (McArthur 1992: 353)
Whereas this is by no means the definite list of all ESL varieties (South Africa is missing, for instance, and there are countries such as Papua New Guinea, Tanzania or the Seychelles where such a claim would in all likelihood not meet general approval), it is clear that we are dealing with a rather heterogeneous group of varieties. They all developed under different circumstances and in distinct settings (at different periods of time, in varying sociodemographic conditions, in distinctive sociolinguistic scenarios, etc.), and such heterogeneity and complexity of ESL development accounts for the fact that neither sociohistorical nor linguistic criteria can be advanced for their classification as an exclusive category. I would like to conclude this chapter by concentrating on two ESL varieties that have been subject to extensive research, South Africa and Hong Kong, by means of an illustration of how they develop and in what context(s) they are used. South Africa has a rich settlement history and archaeologists have uncovered human settlements that are approximately three million years old (Thompson 2001). European involvement started some five centuries ago, when navigators explored and developed the East Indies trade routes. The first European navigator to circumnavigate the Cape was the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and until the late 1600s, the Portuguese set up small fishing settlements and trade forts along the coast, without making efforts toward colonization, however. This changed in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a permanent residence in Cape Town. Jan van Riebeeck established a station and fort and formally declared Table Bay a Dutch possession. Indentured laborers and slaves were soon brought from Indonesia, Madagascar, and India, and this group of slaves merged into the so-called “Cape Malays”. The local populace
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was joined by Huguenots and Germans who arrived in considerable numbers from the late 17th century onwards, merging with the Dutch to form the population group soon referred to as “Boers” or “Afrikaners”. In 1795, the British began their military presence at the Cape. They seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1797 and established permanent residence. When the Dutch East India Company declared bankruptcy, Great Britain formally annexed the Cape Colony in 1805. At first a politics of limited settlement was pursued but this changed in the 1820s: the local infrastructure was built up and new settlers and soldiers arrived (Ross and Anderson 1999). As a result, the Boers migrated to the interior and thousands of families left between 1835 and 1848 (the “Trekker” movement), their primary motivation being the escape from British rule (Worden 2000). The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 encouraged economic growth and led to a further expansion of the British Empire which culminated in the two Boer Wars (Pakenham 1979). The first one (1880–1881) was won by the Boers, the second one (1899–1902) by the British. As a result, the Union of South Africa (a dominion) was created in 1910 from the former Cape and Natal colonies, the republics of Orange Free State and the Transvaal. In 1934, the South African Party and National Party merged to form the United Party, seeking reconciliation between Afrikaners and English-speaking Whites, but split up in 1939 over the question whether or not to enter World War II. This paved the way for the National Party. In 1948, it was elected to power and began implementing a series of segregationist laws collectively known as apartheid, which lasted until 1990 (Beinart 2001). The end of the 20th and the early 21st centuries saw the implementation of democracy and an opening of the country. The language situation is as follows. South Africa currently has a total of 11 official languages (second in number only to the 23 national languages of India): Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu. Two are Indo-European, English and Afrikaans, while the other nine are languages of the Bantu family (of Africa’s largest phylum, the Niger-Congo languages). Furthermore, South Africa recognizes eight non-official languages as “national languages” (among them Fanagalo, an unusual contact-derived variety with Zulu as a major lexifier, and South African Sign Language). According to the 1996 National Census, the four most frequently used home (or first) languages are: Zulu (9.8 million), Xhosa (7.5 million), Afrikaans (6.9 million) and English (5.7 million). The three most spoken second home languages are: English (2.2 million), Afrikaans (1.1 million) and Zulu (0.5 million). This illustrates the social significance of English; though it is not among the top three first languages, it is by far the most widely spoken second language in South Africa, and it is the language of government, trade, and commerce as well (Mesthrie 2002). The settler populations that derive from the European settlers speak either English or Afrikaans, whereas a substantial segment of the indigenous population has ESL. One concludes that there is a range of varieties of English, not only as first or second ones but also in each of these categories. According to Lanham (1985), there are at least three varieties of White SAfrE: “conservative” SAfrE which strongly resembles British Received Pronunciation (RP) and is an expression of cultural ties to Britain; “respectable” SAfrE, which goes back to the urban middle classes of 19th century Natal, and “extreme” SAfrE, formed and spoken by early 19th century cape settlers, the urban working class (characterized by “masculinity, independence, physical toughness, a disdain for proprieties, and a commitment to the typically SA [South African] identity”, Lanham 1985: 245–246),
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and White SAfrE has given to more recent research (Bowerman 2004). English is also spoken by other ethnic groups, Indian, blacks, Cape Coloreds, most of whom speak it as a second language alongside their native language (Zulu, Xhosa, Hindi, etc.). Hong Kong provides an altogether different scenario of ESL development. The islands have a total population of 8 million and the two most populated islands, Kowloon and Hong Kong Island (88km2 of a total of 1,046km2), are among the most densely populated areas in the world. The presence of English in this part of the world is fairly recent. Although Hong Kong was of utmost strategic and commercial importance, there was nothing more than a small Chinese fishing population until the mid-19th century (Buckley 1997). Only in 1841 did British merchants start using the harbor for opium trade. Following the first Opium War between Britain and China (1839–1842), China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain and Kowloon came under English authority after the second 1856–1860 Opium War (when Britain and France united against China). The territory was extended further and in 1898, the so-called “New Territories” were leased to Britain for 99 years. The harbor was used for free trade in South Asia and Hong Kong saw a massive influx of immigrants following the Chinese Revolution (1912), the Sino-Japanese War (1937) and during World War II. When the British lease expired in 1997, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was established. The Chinese government pursued a “one country, two systems” policy. On the one hand, the Chinese central government subsumed direct control of the territory but granted at the same time a (comparatively) high degree of political autonomy (except for foreign policy and defence). A western-oriented capitalist economy was maintained, also due to the fact that Hong Kong had limited natural resources, thus being very much dependent on imports for almost all requirements (including raw materials, water, food, consumer and capital goods, petrol and the like; Buckley 1997). It was given unique status as international free port (there were no import taxes, for instance) and to the present day keeps its prominent role in trade, shipping, and freight forwarding, in manufacturing and light industries, as an international financial center. All in all, it is estimated that the service sector earns c.80% of the gross domestic product. The economic success of Hong Kong depends on trade, commerce, and financial services, which means that international communication is extremely important and that English must be used and maintained to fulfil such purposes (Bolton 2003). The language situation reflects the sociodemographic set-up of the community. Ninety five per cent of the total population are Chinese, though mostly born in Hong Kong, 4.2% are from other Asian countries, and only about 0.5% are from Europe, the USA or Australasia (Great Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, thus “inner-circle” countries), the remaining 0.3% from elsewhere. During the British administration, the only official language was English; since 1997, English and Chinese share that function. Mandarin is one of the main written Chinese varieties locally and it has been gaining in importance since the reintegration with China. It has the status of a standard language and is used for most official purposes (Pennington 1998). Cantonese is the common and most widely used language in the public, it is understood almost universally and the main spoken variety. In contrast, only about 25% of the population understands some English and there is a wide range in terms of proficiency. English is the main language of business correspondence and social advancement and essential for all higher paid positions in larger firms, including secretaries. Chinese with little education on occasion use English as a lingua franca but Cantonese is the common
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and most widely used language in shops and markets. Code mixing is common (Bolton 2003) but using English within the Hong Kong Chinese community is valued negatively. As for education, there is a choice between English or Chinese, the other language being taught as a foreign language, and the most common curriculum involves Chinese at primary and English at secondary school. The language of media and entertainment is predominantly Chinese, but English is used also. By and large then, English and Chinese have undergone refunctionalization. Both have official status and are used in education, but Hong Kong English is very much the language of power and international communication, whereas (Cantonese) Chinese is the language of solidarity and a symbol of ethnicity in the local community. To sum up, the most important criteria in ESL domains relate to social history, population demographics, identity, language use in education, and type of bilingualism. There exist similarities between these two ESL countries but there are also some considerable differences as well. The differences concern the timing of English and the major thrust of settlement (South Africa in the early 1800s, Hong Kong in the second half of the 19th century), the sociolinguistic environment into which English was embedded, local migration patterns and population movements as well as the presence of and contact with other European languages and the degree of societal bilingualism. The similarities between South Africa and Hong Kong are such that a community of speakers of British English have at all times been in the minority; the majority of the population, in contrast, never spoke English as a home language. Moreover, the role and function of English is restricted to commerce, trade, politics and public discourse, and it is typically taught as the first foreign language in the curriculum.
5 Summary The concept of ESL countries is well-established in the literature by now. It overlaps with Kachru’s outer circle and integrates a number of historical and sociolinguistic criteria. Notwithstanding, the concept remains problematic for several reasons. Leaving aside the ideological debate surrounding norm-providing authorities and native vs. non-native competence (ESL being no more than a deviation of ENL norms, as Trudgill [2002] and Quirk [1990] claim), these differences include the delimitation of ESL vis-a`-vis other functions of English around the world, the stability of ESL countries and the linguistic development they undergo. First of all, the historical account of South Africa has made it clear that it should be classified as an ESL country since the majority of the population (black, colored, and white) speak English as a second and Zulu, Xhosa, or Afrikaans as a first language. This has not always been the case, since, during Apartheid, the ethnic groups were segregated as much as possible following the National Party’s active policy to bar access to English for blacks. Indeed, the riots were caused by the government’s decision to make Afrikaans the medium of instruction instead of English. In the words of Mesthrie and Bhatt, [a]lthough ESL was the general outcome of language contact in South Africa, it is a moot question whether in some parts of the country English was till recently virtually a foreign language […] Should we then change our definitions to allow ESL to operate even in EFL territories (to describe the competence of, say, a few speakers who have been to an Englishspeaking country) and to allow EFL pockets in an ESL territory? (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 8)
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The case of South Africa is exemplary; it would be misguided to assume that English serves as a second language in all sections of the total population. In contrast, there are ENL speakers (though in a minority) and also ESL speakers and a sizeable group (usually those without access to education) who do not speak English at all. Labels such as ESL or EFL thus suggest conformity and homogeneity that in reality does not exist. A second question mark concerns social demographics and integration. For instance, it is not clear at all how high the total percentage of a group of BrE speakers must be in the total population so that we can speak of an ESL variety. Is there a cut-off point and a critical mass or alternatively, should one not with benefit look at social integration? Community workers, for instance, are much more “on the ground” and engaged in face-to-face interaction (and thus likely to spread English via direct communication) than high-court judges, chief administrators or governors, and this would enhance the usage of English considerably. One would thus certainly benefit from filtering in sociolinguistic information on the regional-specific contexts of language usage and the social relationships between individual speakers and adopt a more micro-oriented perspective. Last but not least, the distinction between inner, outer, and expanding circles transition, ENL, ESL, and EFL is by no means rigid and boundaries are (indeed have been) fuzzy at all times. To give but one example: Irish English formed in a context of language contact and bilingualism, which led to language shift and the endangerment of Irish, so at one stage it must have met all the criteria to be classified as an ESL variety. Today, however, it ranks among the “inner-circle” varieties (Hickey 2004). Scandinavia or the Netherlands may well be in the process of shifting from EFL to ESL countries since they changed their educational policies (Preisler 2003; Phillipson 1992). A similar process may occur on a non-national level in Switzerland. Each of the 26 cantons is in charge of its curriculum and several cantons (among them Zurich and Appenzell Ausserrhoden) have recently opted for English as a first foreign language at school, at the expense of French. This decision has given rise to bitter debates since French is one of the national languages of Switzerland. The case of “Fru¨henglisch” in Switzerland thus provides an extreme case of ESL vs. EFL, with some cantons favoring ESL policies in education and others EFL, and it remains to be seen what this means for the function of English as a lingua franca in Switzerland. An opposite scenario is found as well. A government may opt to leave the circles and thwart the role of English altogether. The case of Tanzania is a well-known example. English was the language of colonial administration during the era of British rule, a situation very much akin to Kenya (see Sections 2 and 4 above). After gaining independence, Tanzania opted for Swahili for all public and administrative functions so that English is now no longer used in administration, parliament or for government and public discourse. Though no language is de jure official, Swahili is the de facto official national language, used for inter-ethnic communication and all official matters. Consequently, Tanzania is one of the few African states in which a local language gained importance to the disadvantage of the ex-colonial language. English has not vanished altogether, however; according to the official linguistic policy of Tanzania, as announced in 1984, Swahili is the language of the social and political sphere as well as primary and adult education, whereas English is used in secondary education, universities, technology, and higher courts. Though the British government financially supports the use of English in Tanzania, its usage in the Tanzanian society has diminished over the past decades. According to McArthur (1992), Tanzanian university students in the 70s used to
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speak English with each other on a regular basis whereas now they almost exclusively use Swahili outside the classroom. As a result, Tanzanian English has a rather special status among the varieties of English around the world. I conclude that ESL status is determined by a number of factors, such as minority of settlers from “inner-circle” countries, the official usage of English in administration and education and historical legacy of British (post-)colonialism. At the same token, there is considerable variability within the territories classified as ESL countries, for political, sociolinguistic, sociopsychological and historical reasons, which stands in the way of delimiting them as a homogeneous category as opposed to ENL or EFL varieties.
6 References Beinart, William. 2001. Twentieth-Century South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers. Bolton, Kingsley. 2003. Chinese Englishes. A Sociolinguistic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowerman, Sean. 2004. White South African English: Phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider et al. (eds.), 931–942. Buckley, Roger. 1997. Hong Kong: The Road to 1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1990. Studies in the History of the English Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Hickey, Raymond. 2004. Development and diffusion of Irish English. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English, 82–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the Outer Circle. In: Randolph Quirk and Henry Widdowson (eds.), English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literature, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, Braj B. 1986. The Alchemy of English. The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native English. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kasper, Gabriele. 1992. Pragmatic transfer. Second Language Research 8: 203–231. Lanham, Leonard W. 1985. The perception and evaluation of varieties of English in South African society. In: Sidney Greenbaum (ed.), The English Language today, 242–251. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Leap, William. 1993. American Indian English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. McArthur, Tom. 1987. The English languages? English Today 11: 9–11. McArthur, Tom (ed.). 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Mesthrie, Rajend. 1987. From OV to VO in language shift: South African Indian English and its OV substrates. English World-Wide 8: 263–276. Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.). 2002. Language in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mesthrie, Rajend and Rakesh M. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Variables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paikeday, Thomas M. 1985. The Native Speaker is Dead ! Toronto/New York: Paikeday Publishing Inc. Pakenham, Thomas. 1979. The Boer War. New York: Random House. Pennington, Martha C. (ed.). 1998. Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press Platt, John, Heidi Weber and Mian Lian Ho. 1984. The New Englishes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Preisler, Bent. 2003. English in Danish and the Danes’ English. In: Tore Kristiansen and Normann Jørgensen (eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Denmark and Danish, 109–126. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Quirk, Randolph. 1990. Language varieties and standard language. English Today 21: 3–10. Ross, Robert and David Anderson. 1999. Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sand, Andrea. 2004. Shared morpho-syntactic in contact-derived varieties of English: Article use. World Englishes 23: 281–298. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial Englishes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Edgar W., Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton, (eds.) 2004. Handbook of Varieties of English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Schreier, Daniel. 2005. Consonant Change in English Worldwide: Synchrony meets Diachrony. Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2005. Language variation and change: the case of English as lingua franca. In: Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk and Joanna Przedlacka (eds.), English Pronunciation Models: A Changing Scene, 59–75. Bern: Peter Lang. Thompson, Leonard. 2001. A History of South Africa. 3rd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2002. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Worden, Nigel. 2000. Making of modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid. Oxford: Blackwell.
Daniel Schreier, Zu¨rich (Switzerland)
135. Second-Language Varieties: English-based creoles 1. 2. 3. 4.
English-based creoles: a survey Linguistic features of English-based Creoles Summary References
Abstract Most English-based creoles developed in colonial settings and are therefore linked to the age of British colonial expansion from the 17th to the 19th century. In the following survey, all English-based creoles will be listed, but special attention will be given to three typical representatives of different types of English-based creoles in the form of three case studies. This is followed by a brief discussion of the most characteristic phonological and morpho-syntactic features shared by a large number of creoles.
1 English-based creoles: a survey Due to their regional distribution, historical background, and linguistic features, the English-based Creoles are divided into two major groups, the Atlantic Creoles spoken in the Caribbean, North and Central America, and West Africa, and the Pacific Creoles, spoken in Australia and various islands and archipelagos in the Pacific. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 2120–2134
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1.1 Atlantic Creoles The Atlantic Creoles arose out of the slave trade across the Atlantic and the formation of plantation colonies in the New World in the 17th and 18th century. In West Africa, mostly pidgin varieties developed due to the rather limited contact between the local population and the English-speaking traders. But two Creoles developed when freed slaves were brought back to Africa in the 18th and 19th century. In 1787, the first exslaves arrived in what was to become Sierra Leone, and their English developed into Krio, which had a strong influence on the development of the pidgin varieties spoken in the region (cf. Sandred 1996; Ehret 1997). In the 1820s, a similar colony was established in Liberia, leading to the emergence of creolized Liberian Settler English (cf. Singler 2008a, 2008b). Two very similar Creoles developed in North America, as the Bahamas and Carolina formed a single colony between 1670 and 1720. Bahamian Creole English (cf. Holm 1989: 488–491; Hackert 2004) and Gullah, which developed on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, (cf. Weldon 2008; Mufwene 2008) are believed to have played a strong influence in the formation of African American Vernacular English (Hackert and Huber 2007; Lanehart, Chapter 117). An 18th century offshoot of Gullah is Afro-Seminole, a variety that emerged when runaway slaves in Florida went to live among the American Indian Seminoles (cf. Holm 1989: 494–498). The largest number of Atlantic Creoles is spoken in the Caribbean. Barbados, which was first settled in 1627, was to play the most important role in the spread of English in the region, and its development can be regarded as typical for the region in many ways: in the first decades after the settlement, the colonists grew tobacco, relying on indentured laborers from Britain and Ireland. The colony prospered, and by 1642 the population had grown to 37,000. However, it was soon to be diminished by the plague and an important change in the island’s economy when sugar replaced tobacco as the main crop. To be profitable, sugar had to be cultivated on large plantation estates and the work in the fields and in the mills was so grueling that the indentured servants were gradually replaced by African slaves. This led to a great change in the island’s population, and by 1685, a total of 46,000 slaves greatly outnumbered the 20,000 white inhabitants of Barbados, thus leading to the typical demographic situation favoring the creolization of English (cf. Holm 1989: 446–450; Blake 2008). On the Commonwealth Windward Islands, Creole English is spoken in Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines, where English also co-exists with French and French-based Creoles. Similarly, on Trinidad and Tobago, Spanish and a French-based Creole predominated until the advent of English in the 19th century (cf. Winer 1993). Other, lesser-known Eastern Caribbean creoles with rather small populations include the varieties spoken on St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Anguilla, Barbuda, St. Eustatius, Saba, Carriacou, and the Virgin Islands (cf. Holm 1989: 450–459; Aceto and Williams 2003; Aceto 2008a, 2008b). In the Western Caribbean, the most important variety of Creole English is spoken in Jamaica, which will be the topic of the case study in Section 1.1.2 below. Lesser-known varieties with much smaller speech communities include the Islander Creole of Providencia and San Andre´s off the coast of Nicaragua (cf. Bartens 2003; Washabaugh 1983), and the creoles from Rama Cay off the coast of Nicaragua (cf. Holm 1989: 475–477; Young-Davy 1994), the Cayman Islands and the Bay Islands (cf. Washabaugh 1983; Holm 1989: 479–482).
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On the Central and South American mainland, English-based Creoles are spoken in Suriname, Guyana (Rickford 1987; Holm 1989: 461–466), Belize (Escure 1997; Holm 1989: 477–479), the Miskito Coast in Nicaragua (cf. Holm 1983; Holm 1989: 473– 475), Panama (cf. Holm 1989: 482–484; Snow 2004) and the province of Limo´n in Costa Rica (Herzfeld 1983; Holm 1989: 484–485). Many of these varieties are spoken by small Afro-Caribbean populations in a predominantly Spanish-speaking environment. However, as Snow (2004) points out, tourism may be a factor which will favor language maintenance among these Creole speakers. Unique among the Creoles in this region are the three varieties spoken in Suriname, which have been of special interest to creolists because of their development with minimal contact to English. They are discussed in more detail in the case study in Section 1.1.1 below. A special case of a transplanted Caribbean Creole from the other side of the Atlantic is London Jamaican, also called British Creole or British Black English, a variety spoken by the descendants of Caribbean immigrants in Great Britain with strong admixtures from non-standard British English (cf. Sebba 1997: 225–233, 2008; Patrick 2008).
1.1.1 Case study: Suriname Creoles In 1651 the governor of Barbados sent 100 men to the Guiana coast of South America, where they established the colony of Suriname. Shortly thereafter, about 200 Portuguese-speaking Jews from Brazil settled with their slaves, and in 1667 Suriname became a Dutch colony. A decade later, most Englishmen had left the colony, migrating mainly to Jamaica, but the Dutch continued to use the English-based Creole which had developed during the English reign to communicate with their slaves. The resulting language, Sranan, therefore evolved without direct contact to Standard English after the end of the 17th century (cf. Migge 2003: 28–35). It is thus of special interest to creolists, especially since missionaries began documenting the language as early as 1735, which allows for a diachronic perspective rare in creolistics. In addition to Sranan, runaway slaves in the interior developed their own varieties of the Creole, Saramaccan and Ndjuka, which are only partially intelligible to speakers of Sranan. The Surinamese Creoles are sometimes called “radical creoles”, because their early separation from Standard English has preserved many conservative and extreme Creole features, such as a rigid ConsonantVowel syllable-structure and vowel harmony, as illustrated by woo´ko ‘work’ and taa´nga ‘strong’ in the following sample sentence (from Veenstra 1996: 16): (1)
Mi sı´ ta´a i ta´ woo´ko´ taa´nga po´i. I see say you ASP work strong spoil ‘I see that you are working very hard.’
Other phonological and morpho-syntactic features shared by Sranan and other Englishbased Creoles, such as the use of preverbal aspectual markers or the reduction of consonant clusters, will be discussed in Section 2 below. More detailed information about the origins of the three Surinamese Creoles can be found in Migge (2003), Arends (2002) and N. Smith (2002), while excellent accounts of their structural properties are given by Bruyn (2002) and Veenstra (1996). Various theoretical issues connected to different degrees of re-structuring in Creoles, ranging from the extreme end in the case of
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the Suriname Creoles, to relatively minor changes in the so-called semi-Creoles, such as Bajan, are discussed in Schneider (1990), Baker (2000) and Winford (2002).
1.1.2 Case study: Jamaican Creole Jamaica is the most populous state in the anglophone Caribbean, and is a strong influence in terms of culture and language throughout the region. It therefore lends itself as an example of those islands where an English-based Creole language continued to co-exist with Standard English, leading to the emergence of intermediate varieties which combine Creole and Standard English features. This situation is called “creole” or “post-creole continuum”. The term “post-creole” rather than “creole” is used by those adhering to the so-called “life-cycle theory” propagated by Hall (1966: 126–130) which claims that Creoles cease to exist when they are continuously in contact with their lexifier language, as is the case for Jamaican Creole and English. However, current evidence does not support the hypothesis of complete decreolization. In fact, there are also instances of recreolization (cf. Sebba 1997: 225–227). Jamaica had been settled by the Spanish in the 16th century and was taken over by the English in 1655. Most Spaniards were evacuated, but some of their slaves fled into the mountains and became Maroons. Maroons are run-away slaves who established their own settlements, isolated from white society. Their customs and language were more influenced by African traditions than those of plantation slaves. They maintain their distinct characteristics to this day, speaking a more conservative Creole with many African elements, sometimes also called Maroon Spirit Language (cf. LePage and DeCamp 1960: 97–103; Holm 1989: 471–472). Most English settlers came from Nevis, Barbados, and Suriname, bringing their slaves – and their creolized English – with them. In Jamaica, sugar cane soon became the main crop, and large numbers of additional slaves were brought in from Africa. After the defeat of the Spanish in 1655, Jamaica remained under British rule until it gained political independence in 1962. The British settlers and their slaves brought with them their varieties of English – various regional forms and an early creolized English which developed into Jamaican Creole. Jamaican Creole is very well documented; a first grammar appeared in 1896, and a large number of linguistic analyses have been published since, among them such important pioneering works as LePage and DeCamp (1960), Cassidy (1961), Bailey (1966) or Cassidy and LePage (1980). It was David DeCamp who first accounted for the fact that Jamaicans did not simply alternate between Jamaican Creole and Standard British English, the language of the former colonial power. In his seminal article Towards a generative analysis of a postcreole continuum (DeCamp 1971), he described the linguistic situation he encountered as follows: The varieties of Jamaican English themselves differ to the point of unintelligibility; but some Jamaican English is mutually intelligible with standard English. […] Further, in Jamaica there is not a sharp cleavage between Creole and standard. Rather there is a linguistic continuum, a continuous spectrum of speech varieties ranging from the “bush talk” or “broken language” of Quashie to the educated standard of Philip Sherlock and Norman Manley. […] Each Jamaican speaker commands a span of this continuum, the breadth of the span depending on the breadth of his social contacts […]. (DeCamp 1971: 350)
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“Bush talk” would be the most conservative variety of Jamaican Creole also called “basilect” in linguistic analysis, while the educated Standard English, generally spoken with a Jamaican accent, is called “acrolect”. The great variety of forms between these poles is commonly referred to as “mesolect”. It is, of course, not an easy task to define the cutoff points between these lects (cf. Sand 1999: 55–59). In summary, we can state that these terms are theoretical constructs applied to a non-discrete situation and are therefore arbitrary to a certain extent. However, there is some evidence that the speakers at least tend to perceive a binary division between what they consider “Jamaican Creole” and “English”. To account for the features used by speakers operating within the different lects of the continuum, DeCamp introduced the method of implicational scaling. In his 1971 article, he used six variables to illustrate the nature of the continuum. Rearranged by Rickford (1987: 20) for greater clarity, DeCamp’s scale looks like this: Table 135.1: DeCamp’s Implicational Scale Speaker number
i ii iii iv v vi vii
Variable a
b
c
d
e
f
1 1 1 1 1 1 2
1 1 1 1 1 2 2
1 1 1 1 2 2 2
1 1 1 2 2 2 2
1 1 2 2 2 2 2
1 2 2 2 2 2 2
The variables and speakers have been reordered: speaker i = DeCamp’s 4, ii = 3, iii = 7, iv = 2, v = 6, vi = 1, vii = 5/ variable a = DeCamp’s D, b = C, c = A, d = F, e = E, f = B. Index: a: 1 = d, 2 = [d]~[ð] b: 1 = t, 2 = [t]~[θ] , c: 1 = pikni, 2 = child; d: 1 = no ben, 2 = didn’t; e: 1 = nanny, 2 = granny; f: 1 = nyam, 2 = eat.
Speaker (i) represents the basilectal end of the continuum, speaker (vii) the acrolectal pole. Accordingly, feature (a), the replacement of [ð] by [d], as in de for the, is least stigmatized, feature (f), the use of nyam for eat most stigmatized. The ranking of the variables shows that, in most cases, lexical items such as nyam and salient grammatical markers such as the Creole aspect marker ben, which marks the anteriority of an event in relation to the speech event or other events, are first to disappear in more acrolectal speech. The phonological features change last since they are usually only selectively perceived, i.e. only a few serve as stereotypical markers of the Creole. While implicational scaling can account for some aspects of the variation encountered, there are also drawbacks to this method, which are discussed at length by Sebba (1997: 213–225). What the scaling of binary features does not show, for example, is the large degree of variability within the mesolectal range. To illustrate this, let us take a closer look at the past tense. The basilectal Jamaican Creole form is either an unmarked verb form or the verb preceded by the preverbal marker ben as shown in Table 135.1 above. This is considered rural, backward or old-fashioned by younger urban speakers (cf. Patrick 1999: 198). The acrolectal form is, of course, the standard -ed past tense form, including irregular forms like was or shone. In addition to these, one can also find mesolectal
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variants with the preverbal markers did, dida or, in negative contexts, neva, unmarked verbs and inflected verbs with final consonant-cluster reduction (cf. Patrick 1999: 230– 231; Meade 2001). Compare the variants of example (2a) in (2b–f ) (adapted from Patrick 1999: 198–199): (2)
a. b. c. d. e. f.
he went down there he wen dong de (h)im go dong de (h)im dida go dong de (h)im neva go dong de (negative only) im ben go dong de
All of these variant forms may, in extreme cases, occur in the speech of one single speaker. The variation is not completely random, but governed by the setting, the topic, and the participants in the speech event (cf. Patrick 1999: 209, 215–218). Some speakers will only use a segment of this continuum, but understand at least the neighboring form(s), if not all of them. Only a few decades ago, it would have been unthinkable for a speaker in a formal setting, e.g. in a speech or on the radio, to shift into Jamaican Creole or even a mesolectal speech style. That this is commonly found today is also an indicator for a changed attitude towards Jamaican Creole, from “bush talk” to “Jamaican language”. The linguistic situation in Jamaica is thus becoming even more variable, since – at least mesolectal – Jamaican Creole has become acceptable in domains formerly reserved to Standard English, such as the media or the education system. At the same time, the Standard English spoken by educated Jamaicans is moving away from the British standard of the early post-colonial days. In fact, the disappearance of Standard English in favor of Jamaican Creole has been predicted, a complete reversal of DeCamp’s assessment of the relationship between Jamaican Creole and Standard English (cf. ShieldsBrodber 1997: 64–65). Most likely a Jamaican variety of Standard English will continue to co-exist with a number of mesolectal and basilectal varieties of Jamaican Creole, providing Jamaicans with a rich repertoire of codes (cf. Sand 1999: 68–75). For similar cases in the Caribbean, see the pioneering studies by Bickerton (1975) and Rickford (1987) of the Creole continuum in Guyana, the large number of oral and written texts illustrating the situation in Trinidad and Tobago found in Winer (1993) and the excellent discussion of the Creole-standard continuum in Belize in Escure (1997: 25–122).
1.2 Pacific Creoles In the Pacific region, contact varieties of English emerged in the 19th century, mostly as pidgins used as lingua franca in multi-ethnic and multilingual settings involving Europeans and indigenous ethnic groups speaking Austronesian languages. In some cases, these pidgins became the first language of certain social groups and thus creolized. One well-known example is Hawai’ian Creole English (cf. Holm 1989: 517 – 526; Vellupillai 2003; Roberts 1998), which developed after many immigrants from Asia and Europe came to Hawai’i to work on the sugar plantations. Australian Kriol (cf. Holm 1989: 541–544; Malcolm 2008a, 2008b) is spoken by Aborigines in Australia’s Northern
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Territory and Queensland, and Torres Strait Creole (cf. Holm 1989: 544–546; Shnukal 1991) by the inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands located between Queensland and Papua New Guinea. Both varieties developed after the first contact with whites in the 19th century and became L1s for at least some of their speakers. The descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian women developed Pitkern/Norfolk (cf. Holm 1989: 546–551; Mu¨hlha¨usler 2008), which is still spoken by the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Norfolk Island. Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New Guinea, is a special case, because it is on the one hand the most widely spoken expanded Pacific pidgin used as a lingua franca in a country with several hundred indigenous languages, but, on the other hand, is also spoken as an L1 by a growing number of speakers especially from urban, multiethnic backgrounds. It will thus be discussed in more detail in the case study in Section 1.2.1 below.
1.2.1 Case study: Tok Pisin In the 19th century, Papua New Guinea was divided into three parts by the European colonial powers. While the Dutch had claimed the western part of the main island, which is today Irian Jaya, a part of Indonesia, already in 1828 the eastern part was divided between Great Britain and Germany in 1884. The European colonizers introduced indentured workers from China and Malaysia on their newly established copra plantations, who brought a pidginized variety of English with them. During the time under German rule before World War I, the newly developed pidgin also began to spread outside the plantations, into administration, the police force or in communication between Europeans and their servants. The former German colony became a United Nations mandate in 1921, while the former British colony was put under Australian rule. The Australian government tried to eradicate the use of the pidgin, as they considered it an inferior means of communication, but especially in the former German colony in the south it had become too firmly entrenched to be extinguished again. The Japanese occupation of New Guinea then became a linguistic turning point, as the Australians realized that their own country depended also on the efforts of the Papuans and New Guineans, and they used Tok Pisin to communicate with them. Tok Pisin expanded considerably, especially in the urban centers of Rabaul and Port Moresby. Many of the German and indigenous loanwords are being replaced by English words nowadays, due to the influence of Standard English, while the spread of Tok Pisin as an L2 lingua franca into the more remote areas of the country continues. Increasing creolization since the 1970s has led to considerable phonological and structural changes and variation (cf. Holm 1989: 529–534; Smith 2002: 12–22). For example, the originally adverbial expression baimbai ‘by and by’ to indicate future time, first developed into the preverbal marker bai for unreal time, but has been further reduced and cliticized by urban Creole speakers, as illustrated in the example (3) from b. Smith (2002: 127): (3)
Sapos ol i gutpla, em b’ol i stap If they PRED good they FUT-all PRED stay (in hospital) ‘If they are in good condition, they will stay (in hospital)’
The example also illustrates two features which set Tok Pisin apart from other Englishbased Creoles: the adjective ending -pela, in (3) contracted to -pla, and the predicate
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marker i, which is placed before the predicate in a clause (cf. Smith 2002: 62, 115–123). Both features are considered substrate influences from Austronesian languages by some linguists, but there is evidence that -pela originates from -fellow and is widespread in all Pacific pidgins, regardless of their substrate languages (cf. Mu¨hlha¨usler 1997: 143–145). Note also that adjectives can function as predicates, as is the case in most Creoles.
2 Linguistic features of English-based Creoles In the following two sections, a selection of the most typical features of English-based Creoles will be highlighted. A more comprehensive comparative account can be found in Holm (2000). The examples in this section are taken from Holm (2000), Mu¨hlha¨usler (1997) and Sebba (1997) or are my own.
2.1 Phonology and suprasegmentals English-based creoles have a smaller inventory of phonemes than standard English. For example, the dental stops /ð/ and /θ/ are replaced by /d/ and /t/ respectively, as illustrated in example (2) above and DeCamp’s implicational scale in Section 1.1.2. There are also a number of phonological processes which are very widespread, in most cases to reduce syllable-complexity. As was mentioned in Section 1.1.1 on the Surinamese Creoles, canonical Creole syllable structure is Consonant-Vowel, and the more basilectal Creoles tend to adhere to this model quite closely. Therefore, consonant clusters are reduced, as in (4a–c) (4)
a. Sranan tan ‘stand’ b. Sranan sisa ‘sister’ c. Krio tret ‘straight’
In other cases, consonant clusters are broken up by epenthetic vowels, as in (5a,b) (5)
a. Jamaican Creole filim ‘film’ b. early Tok Pisin tiret ‘straight’
or final consonants are followed by a paragogic vowel, as in (6a–c) (6)
a. Jamaican Creole gladi ‘glad’ b. Sranan be´ni ‘bend’ c. Krio dede ‘dead’
in order to maintain Consonant-Vowel syllable structure.
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With regard to suprasegmental features, many Atlantic Creoles exhibit at least residual lexical tone, most likely due to substrate influence from African tone languages. Examples are minimal pairs like (7a–d) (7)
a. Guyanese Creole turkey ‘turkey’, the bird b. Guyanese Creole Tu´rkey ‘Turkey’, the country c. Jamaican Creole cyaan ‘can’ d. Jamaican Creole cya´an ‘cannot’
which are only differentiated by a difference in pitch. Similarly, Jamaican Creole uses tone to disambiguate certain syntactic groups, as in (8a,b) (8)
a. di man ha´as ‘the man’s horse’ b. di ma´n ha´as ‘the stallion’
where a possessive construction and a compound are distinguished by tone. Very generally speaking, English-based creoles have a somewhat reduced phonemic inventory and a stronger tendency towards CV syllable structure than Standard English, especially in the more basilectal varieties. There are, however, also instances of phonemic and phonetic realisations which are not found in English, such as the co-articulated stops /kp/ and /gb/, which are clearly of African origin and often occur in archaic borrowings from African languages, such as in (9a,b) (9)
a. Saramaccan kpası´ ‘vulture’ b. Saramaccan gbono-gbono ‘moss’
in more conservative Atlantic Creoles. Such features are not shared by all varieties, however.
2.2 Morphosyntax There are a number of morpho-syntactic features which characterize Creole languages in general (cf. Bickerton 1981), therefore I will highlight only those features in which the English-based Creoles exhibit the most striking similarities. In the verb phrase, the use of the unmarked verb is common both for present and past events, often depending on the semantics of the verb. While stative verbs tend to be used more in non-past contexts, punctual verbs are more likely to refer to past
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events. Further information is encoded with the help of preverbal markers. Anteriority, that is past or past-in-the past depending on the context, is often expressed by a form based on English been, as in (10): (10) Jamaican Creole mi ben go ‘I went/had gone’ Similarly also Sranan (b)en, Gullah bin or Tok Pisin bin. Progressive aspect tends to be expressed by a marker based on a locative expression, often based on English there or stay/stop, e.g. Jamaican Creole de, da or a, Sranan de or e, or Tok Pisin i stap. All English-based creoles have a marker for irrealis, which can be used for future events and in combination with the anteriority marker for counterfactuals. These markers are often based on English will, shall or go as illustrated in (11a–c): (11) a. Sranan Mi sa taki ‘I will talk’ (less certain) b. Sranan Mi go taki ‘I will talk’ (more certain) c. Sranan Mi ben sa taki ‘I would have talked’ Some creoles also have a habitual and a completive marker, as Tok Pisin, (12b), or Sranan, (12a), but these categories are not as wide-spread: (12) a. Sranan
Mi taki kaba. I talk COMPL ‘I finished talking.’ (completive) b. Tok Pisin Mi sa(ve) wokabaut go wok I HAB walk go work ‘I always walk to work’ (habitual)
The habitual markers precede the verb, while the completive marker may also follow it as in example (12a). All English-based creoles have various relativizers, the most common of which is based on English where, as in (13a,b) (13) a. Australian Kriol alpalhe where dey cut’m from rabbits they cut from rabbits fur string REL ‘fur strings which they cut from rabbit(skin).’ b. Jamaican Creole we have a place weh we call Atom Hole we have a place REL we call Atom Hole ‘we have a place which we call Atom Hole’ Other relativizers may be based on interrogative pronouns or demonstratives and vary between the different varieties. In many English-based creoles, a complementizer etymologically related to for, but functioning more like Standard English to is used, (14a,b):
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(14) a. Jamaican Creole
Another common complementizer is based on English say and introduces indirect speech, hearsay and other subordinate clauses if following verbs of communication, perception and cognition, as in (15a,b): em i tok se em i laik kam He PRED talk COMP he PRED like come ‘He said that he would like to come.’ b. Jamaican Creole Him all swear seh him go tell mi he even swear COMP he go tell me ‘He even swore that he was going to tell me.’
(15) a. Tok Pisin
Patrick (2004: 627) points out, that the complementizer se(h) is most likely derived from a serial verb construction with the verb say. Serial verb constructions are common in all English-based creoles, especially to indicate direction in motion verbs or to express instrumentals, as in (16a–c) (16) a. Jamaican Creole Im tek naif kot mi he take knife cut me ‘He cut me with a knife.’ b. Sranan A tyari a nyan gi mi he carry the food give me ‘S/he brought the food for me.’ c. Tok Pisin Kisim plet givim mi get plate give me ‘Give me the plate.’ Many linguists, e.g. Veenstra (1996), consider serial verbs a feature strongly influenced by the African substrate of the Atlantic creoles, but the fact that they also occur in Pacific Creoles, such as Tok Pisin, seems to point at a more universal grammaticalization strategy, as prepositions and complementizers may develop out of these constructions (cf. Mu¨hlha¨usler 1997: 218–219). Negation is generally expressed by placing a negator before the verb. In the Englishbased creoles, this negative particle is based on English not, as in (17a–c) (17) a. Jamaican Creole im na kam b. Tok Pisin im no i kam c. Miskito Coast Creole shi no kom she not come ‘She didn’t come.’
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In more mesolectal varieties, the negator may also be based on English don’t, as in mesolectal Jamaican Creole duont. Negative concord may also occur, as in (18a, b) (18) a. Guyanese Creole non dag na bait non kyat No dog not bite no cat ‘No dog bit any cat.’ b. Jamaican Creole Don’t me done tell yuh seh me na go do nutten don’t I COMPL tell you COMP I not FUT do nothing ‘Haven’t I told you that I’m not going to do anything?’ With regard to the noun phrase, number marking is not obligatory in English-based creoles. However, it is possible to add a plural marker before or after the noun in question, as in (19a, b) (19) a. Jamaican Creole di buk dem the book (plural) ‘the books’ (specific) b. Tok Pisin ol pikinini (plural) children ‘the children’ (specific) As in example (19), the plural marker tends to be based on the third person plural pronoun. In many Creoles, the plural marker can be used with proper names and nouns referring to people to form an associative plural, as in Jamaican Creole Mieri dem ‘Mary and her friends/family/classmates, etc.’, depending on the context. The personal pronoun is one area of morpho-syntax in which English-based Creoles exhibit more regularity than standard English, as there usually are different forms for second person singular and plural, e.g. Jamaican Creole second person singular yuh versus second person plural oonoo, but – at least in the case of the more basilectal varieties – no gender distinction in the third person, e.g. Jamaican Creole im ‘he, she, it’. Some varieties exhibit also greater complexity than Standard English, distinguishing between stressed and unstressed forms, or between singular, dual, and trial, as well as inclusive and exclusive forms, as is the case in Tok Pisin. Such categories are clearly substrate-influenced and not widespread. To indicate possession, English-based Creoles usually offer two alternative strategies. On the one hand, possession may be expressed by juxtaposition, as in (20a–c) (20) a. Jamaican Creole
di man cyar ‘the man’s car’ b. Miskito Coast Creole di uman biebi ‘the woman’s baby’ c. Tok Pisin haus man ‘men’s house’
Note the differences in word order of possessor and possessed between the Atlantic creoles and Tok Pisin. On the other hand, possession may be expressed with the help of a preposition or possessive adjective, as in (21a–c)
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(21) a. Sranan
konu ala en moni king all his money ‘all the king’s money’ b. Jamaican Creole di pikni fi Mieri the children POSS Mieri ‘Mary’s children’ c. Tok Pisin haus bilong Mapu Mapu house POSS ‘Mapu’s house’
While the Atlantic creoles usually use a preposition based on English for, Tok Pisin has another grammaticalized verb, namely English belong. Creole speakers of Tok Pisin tend to contract the form to blo, thus emphasizing the functional shift.
3 Summary Due to their large number and complex individual histories, it is difficult to do all English-based Creoles justice in one chapter. However, I hope it has become clear that despite their differences with regard to colonial history and present-day social status, varying substrate languages and thus resulting linguistic differences, they nevertheless share a large number of features. Similar processes of structural and functional expansion, as well as similar processes of grammaticalization can be observed in those cases in which we have reliable historical sources of the early stages of creolization, as in the case of the Suriname Creoles, Jamaican Creole or Tok Pisin. Of course, there are also shared features with other creoles, as can be gleaned from Romaine (Chapter 113).
4 References Aceto, Michael and Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.). 2003. Contact Englishes in the Eastern Caribbean. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins. Aceto, Michael. 2008a. Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), 290–311. Aceto, Michael. 2008b. Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: morphology and syntax. In: Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), 645–660. Arends, Jacques. 2002. The history of the Surinamese creoles I. In: Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends (eds.), 115–130. Bailey, Beryl L. 1966. Jamaican Creole Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Philip. 2000. Theories of creolization and the degree and nature of restructuring. In: Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, 41–63. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins. Bartens, Angela. 2003. A Contrastive Grammar of Islander-Caribbean Standard English-Spanish. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Bickerton, Derek. 1975. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bickerton, Derek. 1981. The Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma. Blake, Renee. 2008. Bajan: phonology. In: Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), 312–319. Bruyn, Adrienne. 2002. The structure of the Surinamese creoles. In: Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends (eds.), 153–182.
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Andrea Sand, Trier (Germany)
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136. Second-Language Varieties: Global English 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Terminological and other introductory remarks Language-external aspects The position of Global English among varieties of English: classificatory approaches The analysis of Global English Political and pedagogical implications References
Abstract The chapter first outlines language-external aspects of the evolution of Global English from the 16th to the 20th centuries and the present-day situation: the spread of English through permanent settlements and the spread of English as a language of choice. It then looks at different classificatory approaches to Global English (Braj Kachru, Marko Modiano, Edgar Schneider). The subsequent section presents the corpora and the ethnographic and data-eliciting methods used to observe and analyze Global English as well as the features of Global English on the various linguistic levels (phonology, lexis, morphology and syntax, pragmatics). Finally, some relevant political and pedagogical implications of the observations on Global English are highlighted.
1 Terminological and other introductory remarks This chapter covers two large aspects, or definitions, of Global English. Sociohistorically, it is about the evolution of English as a means of communication around the world. Structurally, it sheds light on the set of common features of communicatively successful, intelligible forms of English around the world (particularly when used between interlocutors from different nations with at least one interlocutor being a non-native speaker of English). For this structural definition of Global English, we also find the terms World English, World Englishes, International English, Lingua Franca English and English as a Lingua Franca in the literature. To give the definition here is important as some works use Global English, World English, World Englishes and International Language only with countries where English is a single or co-official language. It seems advisable to restrict English as a Lingua Franca only to a concrete functional situation. The terms Lingua Franca English and English as a Lingua Franca do not relate to conversations between native interlocutors only. The term English as an International Language is occasionally used synonymously with English as a Lingua Franca. In some works these two terms are applied more restrictively, to situations where all interlocutors are non-native speakers. The chapter will first outline language-external aspects of the evolution of Global English (from the 16th to the 20th century and the present-day situation). Subsequently, it will look at different classificatory approaches to Global English. The following sections will briefly introduce methods to observe and analyze Global English and then list the results of these analyses, namely the features of Global English on the various linguistic levels. Finally, there will be a brief outlook on some political and pedagogical issues. Alex Bergs and Laurel Brinton 2012, Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1), de Gruyter, 2135–2150
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2 Language-external aspects 2.1 A sociopolitical and sociolinguistic chronology from the 16th century to the 20th century A first look at the period from Queen Elizabeth I to Queen Elizabeth II reveals three phases of English dominance: (1) in the 17th and 18th century as the language of the leader of colonization (Britain); (2) in the 18th and 19th century as the language of the leader of the industrial revolution (Britain); (3) in the late 19th and 20th century as the language of the leader of global economy (the US). In each phase, we can observe developments of two major types: the spread of English through permanent settlements and the spread of English as a language of choice.
2.1.1 The spread of English through permanent settlements First signs of the globalization process of English can be spotted in the 16th century. It is then that English is no longer only the language of England, but also becomes the language of Wales (annexation in 1536) and is carried to West Africa, particularly Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, within the frame of slave trading (triggering the development of pidgins and, ultimately, creoles). In the early 17th century, Scotland (1603) and Ireland (1601) become Anglophone territories, too. In 1607, the overseas expansion of English is heralded with the foundation of Jamestown at the eastern coast of the North-American continent, although the more intense settlement does not begin until the 1620s (after the Mayflower landing). The 1620s are also the decade of the first Anglophone settlers in the Caribbean. At the same time, the British conquer the Indian subcontinent (from 1624 onwards), after missionaries had started the first contact between English and indigenous people in the early 17th century (the English East India Company was founded in 1600). India’s official colonization starts in 1765, with English also becoming the dominant language in education. The history of the East African settlement from the 1850s on somehow resembles the Indian Anglicization: contacts between English and indigenous people are more intense than in West Africa – particularly in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, where English becomes a crucial language of the government, education, and the law. British influence in South-East Asia and the South Pacific begins in the late 18th century: James Cook explores the coastline of New Zealand in 1769 and the east coast of Australia in 1770, but he also lands in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. In 1788 the first crown colony is founded: Australia is invaded by English voluntary settlers and a considerable number of convicts. More dominantly than in India and East Africa, but less than in Australia, the English settle in South Africa, too (from 1795 onward). In 1840 the British Crown declares sovereignty of New Zealand (in the 1850s immigrants also come from Australia and Ireland). As a result, in Northern America and Oceania the number of settlers from south and east England is large enough to develop new national mother-tongue varieties, while Asia and Africa are rather British exploitation areas which see the development of second-language varieties with more features that go visibly to the contact with the indigenous populations. Finally, it should not be forgotten that light settlement in the form of an administrative community makes some originally non-English colonies English-speaking countries
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after World War I (with the foundation of the League of Nations and the composition of the Treaty of Versailles).
2.1.3 The spread of English as a language of choice The choice to learn English as a foreign language is a very individual one up to the 16th century. In the late 16th century, though, English turns into a slightly more prominent object of learning in trading towns along Europe’s coasts. In the second half of the 17th century, teaching English gradually becomes popular all over western Europe, due to the works by Protestant theologians and the activities of the order of the Sisters of Loreto in the Catholic areas of Europe (cf. Schro¨der 2000: 727). During the American War of Independence, 1775–1783, America breaks away from Britain (1776 Declaration of Independence), but keeps the English language – though searching for separate norms, as indicated by Noah Webster’s lexicographical work (cf. Bailey, Chapter 116). Some historians consider these years the transition from the first to the second British Empire (cf., e.g., Canny 1998: 92). In the 19th and 20th centuries, English is expanded and institutionalized as an object of learning in Europe and beyond. Already in the mid-19th century, English sometimes serves as a third neutral contract language aside from Latin and French, for instance in the 1887 treaty between China and Portugal. The English language’s real triumph as a lingua franca europaea and lingua franca globalis is tied to the Treaty of Versailles, composed in both French and English. The English language’s growing role is enhanced by the role that the US plays toward and after World War II: English becomes the language of international aviation, international seafaring and international disaster services; during the second half of the 20th century, the US also achieves an important role in the realms of economy, politics, popular culture, and science (Grzega 2006: 102– 104; Grzega 2012: 105–107). In many schools and school curricula of western European countries, the status of English increases after World War II at a relatively quick pace. By the 1980s, English is already compulsory in most countries of the European Union (European Community) (Grzega 2011a). In the EU and beyond, the British Council, founded by the British government in 1935, seeks that English play a dominant role in the educational sector – a policy that appears to Philipson (1992) like another sort of imperialism. In the 1990s, an estimated 80% of scientific journals and 70% of linguistic journals are entirely in English; about 95% of the solo vocalists and almost 100% of the pop groups listed in the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music perform predominantly or even entirely in English (Crystal 2003: 93, 103). English plays a major role on the radio and on TV, in the movie industry and on the internet.
2.2 The status of English in the early 21st century In the early 21st century, English is the most widespread language on the globe. English is assumed to be a native language for 320 to 380 million speakers (Crystal 2003: 62). An estimated 300 to 500 million people use it as an institutionalized second language (Crystal 2003: 62). The native speakers form the majority in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. All in all, though, English is a single official or co-official language in over 50 countries. In Namibia and Rwanda, for example, the number of English native speakers is practically zero. In
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these cases, the installation of English as an official language did not have historical reasons, as these are no former British colonies or the like; here, psychological-diplomatic and/or economic reasons were at play. Namibia wanted to use a historically and emotionally “neutral” language when it became independent in 1990. Rwanda, originally only using Kinyarwanda and its colonizer’s language, French, as official languages, added English as an official language in 1994, due to the many refugees from neighboring countries; for economic reasons, though, Rwanda determined English as the major language of instruction in 2009 (McGreal 2009). In 2003, Malaysia re-introduced English as a language of instruction (after nearly 50 years of merely an object of instruction, with Bahasa Malaysia being the medium of instruction). In addition, English is the official language of an estimated 85% of the international organizations (Crystal 2003: 87), among them: • • • • • • • • •
the the the the the the the the the
United Nations (UN) European Union (EU) Commonwealth of Nations Council of Europe North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) African Union World Trade Organization (WTO).
The numbers of native speakers and speakers of English as a second and official language were already mentioned. To determine the number of further speakers of English is difficult, as it depends on how speaker of English should be defined, in other words: what someone’s degree of competence should be to call them a speaker of English. Notwithstanding these definitory problems, English is, without a doubt, currently the most learned and most used language globally. To give but a few illustrations of the global status of English: • In 2007, Europe’s oldest psychology journal (founded in 1890) changed its purely German name into the bilingual version Zeitschrift fu¨r Psychologie / Journal of Psychology. • According to the UNESCO Index Translationum, the index that lists the number of book translations since 1979, English is among the top five of both original languages and target languages: books translated from: English 1,032,456; French 189,064; German 172,940; Russian 94,714; Italian 56,368; books translated into: German 271,085; Spanish 207,825; French 203,633; Japanese 124,542; English 116,646) (http:// portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=7810&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html, last accessed 10 October 2011) • The English Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia with respect to both number of articles and number of contributors, with 3,517,702 articles and 13,654,871 named accounts as of 1 January 2012 (accessed on 1 January 2012, 11:11 CET). A statistical analysis of the edits made in the English Wikipedia (or rather its main space) by 7 September 2006 revealed that about one fifth of the edits were made from computers not located in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, nor New Zealand;
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1.8% were made from computers in Germany, 1.6% from computers in the Netherlands, and 1.0% from computers in France (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_ project_and_country_of_origin, last accessed 10 October 2011) • School curricula list English as a compulsory foreign language in Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, and Sweden (cf. Eurydice 2008: 45). (On the spread of English in European schools see also Grzega 2011a). In a 2005 survey, 24% of the EU citizens rated their competence as “very good”, 45% as “good” (TNS Opinion and Social 2005: 6). The competence of some non-native speakers can be considered even richer than those of some native speakers (cf., e.g., Jenkins 2003: 17). All in all, the number of people who know English as a first language, as a second language, or as a foreign language at a level that allows them to participate in a conversation is estimated between 0.5 and 1.8 billion worldwide (cf. Crystal 2003: 62; Gnutzmann and Intemann 2008: 13).
3 The position of Global English among varieties of English: classificatory approaches The use of English in countries all over the world has led to the development of several classificatory models. The first one seems to have been provided by Strevens (1980). His model only includes countries where English has the status of an official language, though; their national varieties of English are then classified into two major types: the British English branch and the American English branch. Similarly, McArthur’s (1987) “Circle of World English” and Go¨rlach’s (1990) “Circle Model of English” only respect countries where English is an official language. The first model to integrate countries where English is used not as an official language is Braj Kachru’s (1985 and, in a revised version, 1992; cf. Peters, Chapter 120). He distinguishes: • the “inner circle”, which embraces countries where English is spoken as a native language by the majority of users; the “inner circle” is seen as norm-providing; • the “outer circle”, which embraces countries where English is used as a second and (co-)official language by the majority of users; the “outer circle” is seen as normdeveloping; • the “expanding circle”, which embraces countries where a large part of the population has learned or is learning English as a foreign language; the “expanding circle” is seen as norm-dependent and a collection of “performance” varieties. Although Kachru’s model is one of the most accepted and cited ones, some have also raised criticism against it (summarized, for instance, in Jenkins 2003: 17–21). These points of criticism have led to the establishment of alternative models, such as Modiano (1999) and Schneider (2007). Marko Modiano (1999) proposes a model in which a core consists of the features which are intelligible to most native and competent non-native speakers. Around this
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core is a layer which consists of the features which may become either internationally common or extinct. Around this layer, there are five circles representing features peculiar to American English, British English, other major varieties, local varieties, and foreign varieties respectively, unlikely to be understood by most members of the other four groups. More recently, Edgar Schneider developed a classificatory system of five phases for (originally) “outer Englishes” which is based on four parameters: (a) history and politics, (b) identity construction, (c) sociolinguistics of contact/use/attitudes, (d) linguistic developments, or structural effects – all with respect to both the settlers and the indigenous people. The five chronological phases are (with examples of linguistic features and examples of countries; cf. Schneider 2007, esp. Table 3.1): (1) foundation: structurally characterized by toponymic borrowing and beginning pidginization; socially characterized by minority bilingualism among indigenous people; (2) exonormative stabilization: structurally characterized by borrowing especially from fauna and flora, by advanced pidginization and beginning creolization; socially characterized by spreading bilingualism (e.g. Fiji); (3) nativization: structurally characterized by heavy lexical borrowing as well as phonetic and lexico-grammatical innovations initiated by indigenous speakers and in part also adopted by settlers; socially characterized by the first L1 speakers among indigenous population and an opposition of those settlers who stick to the original norm and those who accept indigenous speakers’ forms (e.g. Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nigeria); (4) endonormative stabilization (= stepping into the “inner circle”): structurally characterized by stabilization/homogenization/codification; socially characterized by literary production as well as by acceptance and positive attitude of local norms (e.g. South Africa, Jamaica, Singapore); (5) differentiation (= having stepped into the “inner circle”): structurally characterized by new social/regional dialect birth; socially characterized by dense group-internal interactions (Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). This model can, of course, not include where there were no real settlements or hardly any native speakers, such as Ruanda, Namibia and the Englishes of the “expanding circle”. In the realm of psycholinguistics Selinker (1972) bracketed learner Englishes by the term interlanguage: he defined this as an idiosyncratic system developed by a learner who has not (yet) fully reached the proficiency of a native speaker of a target language. That morphosyntactical features of such learner Englishes all follow a certain path was later shown by Pienemann (2005).
4 The analysis of Global English Among the first works that illustrate awareness of national differences and normative motives are those by Noah Webster (1789, 1826) for American English and Robert Goffin (e.g. 1934) for Indian English. In the 1970s, Braj Kachru called for an intensive investigation of (post-)colonial Englishes (e.g. Kachru 1976) and he has been a leading figure since.
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Since the 1980s, linguists have been investigating whether there are typically European or even global forms of English, i.e. forms that are accepted on a European or even global level despite their deviations from standard American or English English (cf. both Bailey, Chapter 116 and Peters, Chapter 120, respectively). Many of these studies appeared in the journals English Today, European English Messenger, ELT Journal, and World Englishes. Large monographs are the results of studies by Melchers and Shaw (2003), Jenkins (2003), Rubdy and Saraceni (2006) and Brumfit (2002). A more in-depth report on the state-of-the-art is given by Seidlhofer (2007). The analysis of Asian Lingua Franca English is focused on by Kirkpatrick (e.g. 2007).
4.1 Methodological approaches There is a number of corpora on natural spoken non-native English: • VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English; cf. the bibliography at http://voice.univie.ac.at, last accessed 10 October 2011) • ELFA (Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings, cf. the bibliography at http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/index.html, last accessed 10 October 2011) • AAC (Alpine Adriatic Corpus, cf., e.g., James 2000) • ICE (International Corpus of English, cf. Greenbaum 1996 and the bibliography at http://ice-corpora.net/ice/, last accessed 10 October 2011) • LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage; cf. the bibliography at http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lindsei.html, last accessed 10 October 2011) • L2C by Prodromou (2008) • Corpus of Euro-English by Mollin (2006). Apart from many ethnographic collections (which also form the basis of Selinker’s 1972 and Pienemann’s 2005 observations), some linguists have gathered Lingua Franca English through the use of discourse completion and discourse production tasks (e.g. Trosborg 1995; Geluykens 2007). Occasionally, semantic differentials have been used as well (cf. Grzega 2009). Written non-native English is collected in the ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English; http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-icle.html, last accessed 10 October 2011). (For a list of smaller learner corpora, see the website of the Center for English Corpus Linguistics at the Universite´ catholique de Louvain [Belgium] under http:// www.uclouvain.be/en-258636.html, last accessed 10 October 2011). The collection edited by Swan and Smith (2001) offers mostly qualitative chapters on typical errors, or deviations from standard English, made by learners, or speakers, of various mother tongues: Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, Polish, Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi-Urdu, Dravidian languages, West African languages, Swahili, Malay-Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai.
4.2 Results The phonological, grammatical and lexical levels of English in Kachru’s “inner circle” and “outer circle” have by now been quite well investigated (cf., e.g., the volumes of the
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Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg et al. 1992–2001); Kortmann and Schneider 2004; Kortmann et al. 2008). The comparison of pragmatics of synchronic and diachronic varieties of a language, in other words: variational and historical pragmatics, has entered the scope of linguistics comparatively recently. A specific Journal of Historical Pragmatics was founded by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (cf. Taavitsainen, Chapter 93). English variational pragmatics is currently particularly focused on by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron for “inner circle” varieties (Schneider and Barron 2008) and by Yamuna Kachru (2001) for “outer circle” varieties. The following paragraphs list features of Englishes in Kachru’s “expanding circle”, many of which, though, are also found in non-standard varieties of the “inner circle” and in national varieties of the “outer circle”. Among these characteristics is the phenomenon of inherent variability: for many linguistic variables, both “outer circle” Englishes and “expanding circle” Englishes, as well as non-standard varieties of the “inner circle”, allow a larger set of (individually selectable) variants than standard British or standard American English. The following sections basically aim at listing features that are considered generally distributed in Global English. Additional illustrations on more restricted Englishes in the “expanding circle” can be found in chapters 15 to 20 of the Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (Kirkpatrick 2010). In fact, Yano (2001), in principle, conceives Global English as appearing in six regional Englishes, or intra-regional standard Englishes: Anglo-American English, Asian English, Euro-English, African English, Latin English, and Arab English. Within each region, there would be national varieties of English with their local particularities, which, however, would be intelligible within a region (“Glocal English” in Pakir’s [2000] terminology).
4.2.1 Phonological aspects Jennifer Jenkins (2000, 2002, 2003: 126–127, 2007) tried to define a “lingua franca core” of successful pronunciation. This core consists of the following features (for contrastive information on post-colonial Englishes cf., e.g., Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 118–130; Platt et al. 1984): • the distinction of consonantal phonemes must agree with the phonemic inventory of standard Englishes, except for substitutions of /θ/ and /ð/. Allophonic variation is permissible with the following restrictions: (1) There is no overlap with another phoneme (e.g. Spanish [β] for [v] is often perceived as [b] by other speakers); (2) initial /p/, /t/, and /k/ should be aspirated (otherwise they are often perceived as [b, d, g]. (3) /t/ should always stay /t/ (like British English rather than American English). (This makes Global English clearly differ from post-colonial Englishes, where quite a number of phonemes overlap, e.g. /v/ and /f/ can fall together in northern Nigeria, /v/ and /w/ can fall together in Indian English; as far as initial plosives are concerned, though, all post-colonial Englishes have aspirated sounds at least as co-variants in their repertoires.) • vowel quantity should agree with standard British or American English rules, including the length difference between pre-lenis and pre-fortis position. (This makes Global English differ from most post-colonial Englishes in Africa and South-East Asia.)
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• the quality of /ɜː/ should agree with standard British or American English rules, while other vowels allow deviations from British English and American English vowel quality as long as they are consistent. (This makes Global English differ from postcolonial Englishes with their wide range of variants, such as [a] in East Africa and parts of Nigeria, [aː] in northern Nigeria and parts of India, [ɛ] in southern Nigeria and Ghana, [ʌ] in parts of India, [ɔ] in Cameroon and [ə] in Singapore and parts of India; in addition, there is not always consistency, but inherent variability.) • stress should be nuclear (tonic). • rhotic pronunciation (like American English) is more successful than non-rhotic pronunciation (like British English). (This, however, is challenged by Osimk [2009].) • consonant clusters may be simplified only in mid- and final position according to native English rules of syllable structure (e.g. for factsheet [-kʃ-] is permissible, but not [-tʃ-] or [-kt-]). • the use of svarabhakti vowels is permissible. • “weak forms” should be avoided. (It is noteworthy that in this instance the set of successful Global English forms does not include the standard English forms.) In other words, for the phoneme /θ/, for example, typical non-native (and in part native) pronunciations are allowed: • [t], which is frequent among natives of Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Tamil (in some positions of a word), Swahili, Malay-Indonesian, Chinese, Thai and West African languages, • [f], which is frequent among natives of French, Polish and Chinese, • [s], which is frequent among natives of Dutch, Danish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Swahili, Japanese (in some positions of a word), Chinese, Korean, Thai. For /ð/, typical non-native (and in part native) substitutions are allowed, too: • [d], which is frequent among natives of Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Tamil (in some positions of a word), Swahili, Malay-Indonesian, Chinese, Thai and West African languages, • [v], which is frequent among natives of French and Polish, [z], which is frequent among natives of Dutch, (north) German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Swahili, Japanese (in some positions of a word), Chinese (some dialects), Thai (some speakers), • [s], which is frequent among speakers of south German, Thai (some speakers) and Chinese (many dialects), • [t], in Farsi and Thai (some speakers) (For these substitutions see the contributions in Swan and Smith 2001). Many of these substitutions also occur in the post-colonial Englishes, which practically never use [θ] and [ð] (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 126). The contributions in Swan and Smith (2001) also reveal that some non-standard intonation patterns may appear too impolite to native speakers of British English (Greek,
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Russian, Polish, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, and in part Portuguese). As far as Global English is concerned, such consequences have not been observed.
4.2.3 Lexical aspects Concerning vocabulary, Modiano (1996) observes a global preference for American words over British words. This, however, does not include idiomatic expressions. Interlocutors’ unequal knowledge of figurative expressions quite frequently leads to communicative breakdown. A lexical lingua franca core would therefore exclude culture-bound figurative expressions. Similarly, Jenkins et al. (2001: 16) point out the relative frequency of communicative breaks due to “unilateral idiomaticity”, i.e. the fact that the speaker uses an expression not literally interpretable that the hearer does not understand. Moreover, the lexis of Global English, too, shows inherent variability. This is evident, for instance, in the acceptance of word-formational variants aside the standard variant (e.g. true derivational nouns vs. zero-derivational nouns, verbs in -ate ~ -Ø, adjectives in -y ~ -ful; Seidlhofer and Widdowson 2007 speak of an “open-choice principle”). One can also observe the existence of European pseudo-Anglicisms (i.e. words that do not exist in native English, at least not from a synchronic point of view). Among these seem to be autostop (for E. hitchhiking), happy end (for E. happy ending), matchball (for E. matchpoint) and smoking (for E. dinner jacket, tuxedo) (cf. Grzega 2005: 52).
4.2.4 Morphological and syntactic aspects Other researchers work on the definition of a grammatical lingua franca core. Several analyses by Barbara Seidlhofer and her team (cf. the summaries in Seidlhofer 2004, 2007, and the bibliography at the VOICE website) as well as other studies on the grammar of lingua franca English (e.g. Johnson and Bartlett 1999; Meierkord 2004; Bjo¨rkman 2008) show that there are very few deviations from standard English that impede intelligibility, but that there are no deviations either that could be termed European, let alone global. This is paralleled by features in post-colonial Englishes (e.g. different use of articles, absence of nominal plural suffix, mass nouns as countable nouns, the use of the progressive form with stative verbs, the substitution of standard prepositions by other prepositions or zero, and the transfer of non-prepositional verbs into prepositional verbs). While most morphological and syntactical deviations from standard English are unproblematic, the following categories seem to require attention, however: • questions should be clearly marked, either by using the standard English pattern of interrogatives or by choosing the word-order of the declarative sentence pattern with a raising intonation at the end (cf., e.g., Bjo¨rkman 2008). (This also seems to be paralleled by most post-colonial Englishes, which do not necessarily invert, but use an intonation pattern in which there is a clearly rising element [Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 80].) • the omission of a past tense marker (regular or irregular) may be irritating and confusing if there is otherwise no time adverbial in the context and if it is not very clearly a conversational historic present (cf. Grzega 2011b). (A number of post-colonial
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Englishes as well as some L1 varieties commonly know a conversational historical present and absence of past-tense markers when there is a time adverbial, but, beyond this, some also have the rule that subordinate clauses do not have to show a past-tense marker if they follow a main clause with a past-tense marker [cf. Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 58–59].)
4.2.5 Pragmatic aspects As regards pragmatic aspects of Global English, studies have shown that non-native speakers use communicative patterns distinct from those of British and American native speakers and yet successful in intercultural communication, such as (cf., e.g., Schwartz 1980; Varonis and Gass 1985; Yule 1990; Firth 1996; House 1999, 2003, 2010; Meierkord 1996; Lesznya´k 2002 and 2004, and several contributions in Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 2005; Kraft and Geluykens 2007; Mauranen and Ranta 2009; Mauranen 2010): • less variation in introductory and final phases • less variation in requests, with a preference for the strategies “mood derivable” (= directness signaled by grammatical mood of the verb, e.g. Go to sleep!) and “preparatory” (= preparing the hearer for the ensuing request, e.g. I have a request to make.) • non-native speakers use less gambits than native speakers • a higher frequency of please as politeness marker • the use of I think as marker of subjective opinion rather than as the native pragmaticalized form • the use of you know as a marker of ideational relations, often in combination with but, because and and, rather than as an interpersonal, hedging marker • the use of so as a text-structuring and self-supporting element, rather than as an other-oriented interpersonal element • fast and abrupt changes in topics (with a preference for safe topics, topics related to the here and now) • repetition and paraphrasing as means to pre-empt problems of understanding • acceptance of a relatively high degree of vagueness as long as a certain degree of understanding is reached (Firth 1996 calls this the “let-it-pass principle”). Among pragmatic aspects we can also count connotations. In two preliminary studies (cf. Grzega 2009: 323–325), it could be shown that speakers of different mother tongues may have different associations with English words. The first study was carried out among Europeans. One of the striking differences is that, except for the Swiss, other European informants frequently associated earth with ecological problems. Another one was that a third of the Danish and a quarter of the Norwegian informants had positive associations with taxes, while other Europeans had purely negative or neutral associations with them. In a second study, 240 informants from Austria (9), Belgium (15), France (76), Hungary (6), the Netherlands (14), North Italy (35) and South Italy (5), Spain (12), Sweden (5), Australia (5), Brazil (44) and Canada (14) had to rank English words on semantic differentials. Some of the results are: • the informants from Hungary were the only ones to connect democracy more strongly with chaos than with order.
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• the informants from Canada were the only ones to connect monarchy more strongly with chaos than with order. • the informants from Australia and Brazil were the only ones to connect taxes more strongly with individuality than with community. • the informants from Australia and Spain were the only ones to connect work more strongly with chaos than with order. More than on the other linguistic levels, the field of Global English pragmatics still leaves a lot to be analyzed by researchers, including comparisons to findings from pragmatic studies on “outer circle” Englishes (cf. Smith 1987; Y. Kachru 1987, 2001).
5 Political and pedagogical implications The development of a typical European and/or global variety of English is regarded as possible by some researchers (e.g. Chambers 2000; Jenkins et al. 2001; De Swaan 2001; Meierkord and Knapp 2002; Murray 2003) and improbable by others (e.g. Gnutzmann 1999b; Go¨rlach 1999; McCluskey 2002; Mollin 2006; Prodromou 2008). There are even advocates of purposefully developing and norming a Euro-English variety, who argue that this would meet the needs of non-natives who live and work in the European Union (e.g. Modiano 1996, particularly 37; Graddol 2001; Piette 2004). In South East Asia some families obviously rather prefer to send their children to New Delhi than to New York. One reason, according to Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008: 27), is that they feel a stronger cultural affiliation to Indian English. This would transfer “Global English” from its interlanguage, or second-language acquisition character of high inherent variability into a more stable system. Irrespective of norm discussions, the status and the analysis of Global English lead to the issue of transforming observations on Lingua Franca English into concepts of Teaching English as a Lingua Franca. There are both opponents and advocates of the idea to respect typical Lingua Franca English in TEFL classrooms (cf. the overview in Grzega 2010). Despite the relatively high number of proponents of a better consideration of Global English studies in the English language classroom, as of yet, the only encompassing concept for teaching English as a global language, or Teaching Global English, seems to be Basic Global English (BGE) (cf., e.g., Grzega [2008 and 2011b] or http://www.basicglobalenglish.com, last accessed 10 October 2011).
6 References Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen and Beverly S. Hartford (eds.). 2005. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk. Mahwah/London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bjo¨rkman, Beyza. 2008. “So where we are?” Spoken Lingua Franca English at a Technical University in Sweden. English Today 24(2): 35–41. Brumfit, Christopher. 2002. Global English and Language Teaching in the Twenty-First Century. Southampton: University of Southampton. Canny, Nicholas. 1998. The Origins of Empire. The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, J. K. 2000. World Enough and Time. Global Enclaves of the Near Future. American Speech 75: 285–287. Crystal, David. 2003. English as a Global Language. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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De Swaan, Abram. 2001. Words of the World. The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press. Educational, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency. 2008. Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe: 2008 Edition. Brussels: Eurydice. Firth, Alan. 1996. The discursive accomplishment of normality: On “Lingua Franca” English and conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 26: 237–259. Geluykens, Ronald. 2007. On methodology in cross-cultural pragmatics. In: Bettina Kraft and Ronald Geluykens (eds.), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics and Interlanguage English, 21–72. Mu¨nchen: LINCOM. Gnutzmann, Claus (ed.). 1999a. Teaching and Learning English as a Global Language. Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg. Gnutzmann, Claus. 1999b. English as a global language. Perspectives for English Language Teaching and for Teacher Education in Germany. In: Claus Gnutzmann (ed.), Teaching and Learning English as a Global Language, 157–169. Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg. Gnutzmann, Claus and Frauke Intemann. 2008. Introduction: The globalisation of English. Language, politics, and the English language classroom. In: Claus Gnutzmann and Frauke Intemann, The Globalisation of English and the English Language Classroom, 9–24. 2nd edn. Tu¨bingen: Narr. Goffin, Robert C. 1934. Some notes on Indian English. Society for Pure English 41: 14–16. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1990. Studies in the History of the English Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Go¨rlach, Manfred. 1999. Varieties of English and language teaching. In: Claus Gnutzmann (ed.), 3–21. Graddol, David. 2001. The future of English as a European language. The European English Messenger 10(2): 47–55. Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.). 1996. Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grzega, Joachim. 2005. Reflections on concepts of English for Europe: British English, American English, Euro-English, Global English. Journal for EuroLinguistiX 2: 44–64. Grzega, Joachim. 2006. EuroLinguistischer Parcours: Kernwissen zur europa¨ischen Sprachkultur. Frankfurt am Main: IKO. Grzega, Joachim. 2008. Lingua Franca English as a way to intercultural and transcultural competence: Basic Global English (BGE) and other concepts of English as a Lingua Franca. Journal for EuroLinguistiX 5: 134–161. Grzega, Joachim. 2009. Wie kann die Eurolinguistik zur sozioo¨konomischen Entwicklung Europas beitragen? In: Uwe Hinrichs, Norbert Reiter, and Siegfried Tornow (eds.), Eurolinguistik: Entwicklungen und Perspektiven, 315–333. Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz. Grzega, Joachim. 2010. Mehrsprachigkeitskonzepte und Global English. In: Uwe Hinrichs (ed.), Handbuch der Eurolinguistik, 795–804. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Grzega, Joachim. 2011a. Language and the school: European perspectives. In: Bernd Kortmann and Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Europe, 655–667. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Grzega, Joachim. 2011b. Putting English for global communication into teaching practice: The concept of basic Global English (BGE) at primary school. In: Ines Busch-Lauer and Sabine Fiedler (eds.), Sprachraum Europa – Alles Englisch oder …?, 107–141. Berlin: Frank & Thimme. Grzega, Joachim. 2012. Europas Sprachen und Kulturen im Wandel der Zeit: Eine Entdeckungsreise. Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg. Hogg, Richard M., Norman Blake, Roger Lass et al. (eds.) 1992–2001. Cambridge History of the English Language. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. House, Juliane. 1999. Misunderstanding in intercultural communication: Interaction in English as a lingua franca and the myth of mutual intelligibility. In: Claus Gnutzmann (ed.), 73–89. House, Juliane. 2003. Teaching and learning pragmatic fluency in a foreign language: The case of English as a lingua franca. In: Alicia Martı´nez Flor, Esther Uso´ Juan, and Ana Ferna´ndez
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Schwartz, Joan. 1980. The negotiation for meaning: Repair in conversations between second language learners of English. In: Diane Larsen-Freeman (eds.), Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research, 138–153. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2004. Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24: 209–239. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2007. Common property. English as a lingua franca in Europe. In: Jim Cummins and Chris Davison (eds.), International Handbook of English Language Teaching, 137–153. New York: Springer. Seidlhofer, Barbara and Henry Widdowson. 2007. Idiomatic variation and change in English: The idiom principle and its realizations. In: Ute Smit, Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hu¨ttner, Ursula Lutzky, and Gunther Kaltenbo¨ck (eds.), Tracing English Through Time: Explorations in Language Variation, 359–374. Wien: Braumu¨ller. Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10: 209–241. Smith, Larry E. (ed.). 1987. Discourse Across Cultures: Strategies in World Englishes. London: Prentice Hall. Strevens, Peter. 1980. Teaching English as an International Language. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Swan, Michael and Bernard Smith. 2001. Learner English: A Teacher’s Guide to Interference and Other Problems. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. TNS Opinion and Social. 2005. Europeans and languages. Special Eurobarometer 237, http://ec. europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_237.en.pdf (last accessed 10 October 2011). Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Varonis, Evangeline and Susan Gass. 1985. Non-Native/Non-Native conversations: A model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics 6: 71–90. Webster, Noah. 1789. An essay on the necessity, advantages, and practicality of reforming the mode of spelling and of rendering the orthography of words correspondent to pronunciation. Dissertations on the English Language, Boston. 391 & 393–398 & 405–406. Webster, Noah. 1828. An American Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Converse. Yano, Yasukata. 2001. World Englishes 2000 and beyond. World Englishes 20: 119–131. Yule, George. 1990. Interactive conflict resolution in English. World Englishes 9: 53–62.
Joachim Grzega, Eichsta¨tt-Ingolstadt (Germany)
Index
A AAC (Alpine Adriatic Corpus), 2:2141 Aaron, Jane, 2:1989 Aarts, Bas, 1:70, 1:875 Abbott, Edwin A., 1:809 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), 1:1090, 1:1097–1100 Abcedarium (Howlet), 1:1052 ABC Weekly, 1:1099 Abercrave, 2:1985 Abercrombie, David, 2:1900, 2:1907–1908, 2:1909 Aberdeen, 2:1955 Aberdeenshire, 1:673 Aberystwyth, 2:1983 Abingdon, 1:343, 1:344 AB-language, 1:348, 1:383, 1:523–524, 1:528, 2:1345 ablaut – in Germanic, 1:140, 1:143 – in Indo-European, 1:11, 1:15, 1:129–130, 1:132, 1:133, 1:138–139, 1:289 – loss of, 1:145, 1:432 – in Old English strong verbs, 1:289–292 – in Proto-Indo-European, 1:277, 1:286, 1:290 – of the verb to eat, 1:749 Aboriginal English, 2:2006 Acade´mie de Poe´sie et de Musique, 2:1218 Acade´mie Franc¸aise, 1:941, 1:1008, 2:1883 Accademia della Crusca, 1:639, 1:941, 2:1883 Acts of Union (1536 and 1542), 2:1978–1979 actuation, 2:1490–1507, 2:2063 Adam de la Halle, 1:536 Adam of Petit Pont, 2:1785 Adams, James, 1:894 Adams, John, 2:1816–1817 Adams, Michael, 2:1185 Adams, Valerie, 2:1714 Adamson, Sylvia, 1:798, 1:804, 1:810, 1:811, 1:813, 1:816 Addison, Joseph, 1:74, 1:882, 1:1009, 2:1291, 2:1447, 2:1812–1813 Adelaide, 2:2007, 2:2036 Adger, David, 1:149 Adolph, Robert, 1:245
Aduancement of Learning (Bacon), 1:645, 1:795 Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham – biography, 1:343 – discourse effects with on-/beginnan, 1:336 – effect on writing vs. speech, 2:1249 – Grammar, 1:334, 1:371, 1:382 – grammatical terminology, 1:380 – Homilies, 1:302, 1:395, 2:1624, 2:1652 – influence of Latin on, 1:364, 1:371 – Lagamon’s Brut and, 1:556 – letter to Sigeweard, 1:395 – letter to Wulfsige, 1:332 – Lives of the Saints, 1:154, 1:295, 1:298, 1:301, 1:302, 1:311, 1:382, 2:1619 – preface to Genesis, 1:299 – translation of Latin pluperfect tense, 1:304 – transmission of writings through 13th century, 1:437 – use of Latin loans, 2:1707 – see also Catholic Homilies (Ælfric); Winchester Group Ælfric’s Colloquy, 1:326 Æthelberht, King of Kent, 1:240, 1:326, 1:349, 1:368 Æthelred II (the Unready), King of England, 1:29, 2:1673 Æthelstan, King of England, 1:27, 1:378 Æthelwold, Saint, Bishop of Winchester, 1:27, 1:343, 1:347, 1:356, 1:375, 1:379, 1:380, 2:1548 Aeneid (Virgil), 2:1955 Africa, 1:693, 1:1060, 2:2092–2104 African American English – attitudes toward, 1:1022, 1:1033–1034, 1:1096 – in Canada, 2:1869–1870 – Chicano English and, 2:1744, 2:1745 – early evidence for, 2:1793–1805 – grammaticalization of BE going to, 2:1568 – Gullah and, 2:2121 – language contact and, 1:156, 1:693 – Liberian English and, 2:2093, 2:2095–2096 – linguistic features, 2:1829–1832 – ritual insults in, 1:329 – sociolinguistic studies of, 2:1317–1318 – theories of origins of, 2:1826–1837
2152 Africanderisms (Pettman), 1:1059 African Union, 2:2138 Afrikaans, 2:1661, 2:2100, 2:2115, 2:2117 Afro-Seminole, 2:2121 Ahlqvist, Anders, 2:1697 Aijmer, Karin, 1:191 Airy, G. B., Sir, 2:1901 Aitchison, Jean, 2:1169, 2:1603, 2:1609, 2:1628, 2:1889 Aitken, A. J., 2:1152 Akimoto, Minoji, 1:184, 2:1416 Alabama, 2:1800, 2:1843 Alabanc¸as de las lenguas … catellana y valenciana (Viziana), 1:984 Alaska, 2:1756, 2:1765 Alawa, 2:1603 Alba, 2:1953 Albany, NY, 2:2040 Alcaraz-Sintes, Alejandro, 2:1404 Alcuin of York, 1:394, 2:1218 Aldhelm, Saint, 1:29 Aldred, 1:343, 1:346, 1:348 Alexander, Caleb, 1:1012 Alexander, Henry, 2:1864 Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle, 1:394 “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, 2:1385 Alford, Henry, 1:1012 Alfred, King of England – education reform, 1:25, 1:26, 1:343, 1:364, 1:371, 1:394 – effect on writing vs. speech, 2:1248, 2:1249 – “father of English prose”, 1:343 – Meters of Boethius authorship and, 1:359 – notion of literary canon, 2:1210–1211 – preface to translation of Cura pastoralis, 1:395–396 – standardization and, 2:1250 – Vikings and, 1:24–25 – Wulfstan’s dialect and, 1:358 Alfredian translations – Anglian forms in, 1:386 – Augustine’s Soliloquia, 1:26, 1:298, 1:347 – Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica – original Mercian dialect of, 1:345, 1:348, 1:394 – passive constructions, 1:307 – subordinate clauses, 1:309, 1:310 – textualization of the vernacular and, 2:1281 – use of subjunctive, 1:305 – verb tenses, 1:303 – word order in, 1:296, 1:301
Index – Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, 1:26, 1:298, 1:306, 1:347 – Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis – brace construction, 1:296 – case assignment in, 1:299 – impersonal constructions in, 1:154 – perfect in, 1:304 – raising of /a/ before nasals in, 2:1550 – standardization and, 1:378 – Sweet’s edition, 1:375, 2:1184 – syntax, 1:154, 1:296, 1:299, 1:304 – textualization of the vernacular and, 2:1281 – Gregory’s Dialogi, 1:302, 1:345, 1:348, 1:394, 2:1119 – in the OED, 2:1150 – Orosius’ Historiae adversus paganos – impersonal constructions, 1:297, 1:298 – Latin loans in, 1:371 – passive constructions, 1:307 – subjunctive mood in, 1:306 – subordinate clauses, 1:309 – use of progressive aspect, 1:304 – word order, 1:295, 1:297, 1:301 – Paris Psalter, 1:347, 1:1040 – “standardization” in Old English and, 1:375, 1:377–378, 1:999–1000 – subjunctive mood in, 1:305–306 – texts of, 1:26, 1:347 Algeo, John, 1:257, 1:889, 1:1097, 2:1319, 2:1716 Algonquian, 1:126, 1:693, 2:1759, 2:1760, 2:1761, 2:1762 Algonquian people, 2:1756 Al Jazeera English, 1:1101 Allahabad, Treaty of, 2:2078 Allan, Kathryn, 1:321 Allen, Cynthia L., 1:605, 2:1652 Allen, Harold B., 2:1843 Alleyne, Mervyn C., 2:1776 Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Forkel), 2:1226, 2:1227 Allingham, Marjory, 1:82 Alliterative Morte Arthure, 1:121 Allsopp, Richard, 1:1060, 2:1967 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 1:625 Alonso-Almeida, Francisco, 2:1403 Alston, Robin, 1:639 Altenberg, Bengt, 1:183, 2:1363 Altendorf, Ulrike, 1:81, 2:1916, 2:1920, 2:1925
Index Die altenglische Kleidernamen (Stroebe), 2:1329 Altenglisches Elementarbuch, 1. Teil: Lautlehre (Bu¨lbring), 2:1333 Altenglisches etymologisches Wo¨rterbuch (Holthausen), 2:1328 Altick, Richard D., 1:954 Alvearie (Baret), 1:1007 Amador-Moreno, Carolina P., 2:1968, 2:1970 AMA Handbook of E-Learning, 2:1191 American College Dictionary, 1:1058 American College of Sofia, 2:1388 American Colonization Society (ACS), 2:1801 American Dialect Society (ADS), 2:1316, 2:1840–1841, 2:1849 American Dictionary of the English Language (Webster) – headwords, 1:943 – ignorance of new linguistics in, 2:1313 – in lexicographical history, 1:897, 1:1012, 1:1056 – sales in Britain, 2:1815 – spellings in, 1:68, 1:943, 2:1891 – Webster’s patriotism and, 1:971 American English, 2:1809–1824 – in Australia and New Zealand, 2:1997, 2:2000, 2:2003 – in the Bank of English corpus, 1:1015 – as beginning Late Modern period, 2:1250 – beginnings, 1:49, 1:68, 1:693, 1:699, 2:1247, 2:1884 – British attitudes to – of prejudice against, 1:895, 1:967–968, 1:1012, 2:1763, 2:1809–1810, 2:1815–1816 – in realm of popular music, 1:1081 – receptivity to spelling and punctuation norms, 2:1891–1892 – with Scots as model, 1:893 – Canadian English and, 2:1317, 2:1868, 2:1872, 2:2051 – Chicano, 2:1743–1746 – codification – linguistic patriotism and, 1:893 – prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, 1:1014, 1:1058 – of regional varieties, 2:1156 – of slang, 2:1157 – of spelling, 1:942 – of vocabulary, 1:943 – Webster and, 1:68, 1:944, 1:1012, 1:1056– 1057
2153 – contact with Native American languages, 2:1753–1765 – development, 2:1444–1445 – dialect contact and, 2:2049–2051 – dialects, 1:99, 1:153, 1:772, 1:1057, 2:1550, 2:1817, 2:1839–1855 – “General American”, 2:1821, 2:1842 – Greek loans in, 2:1721 – High Rising Terminal (HRT), 2:2000 – international status, 2:1816, 2:1886–1888, 2:1894–1895, 2:1896, 2:2088, 2:2093, 2:2144 – the Internet and, 1:1111 – Irish English and, 2:2050 – linguistic corpora of, 2:1140, 2:1141, 2:1195 – morphology, 1:845, 1:846, 1:847, 1:851, 1:857, 1:862 – native speakers’ attitudes towards, 2:1818– 1820, 2:1855 – Network Standard, 1:1096–1097, 2:1821 – orthography, 1:234, 1:971, 1:978, 2:1814, 2:1890–1892 – phonology – ban on initial clusters with /j/, 1:109, 1:598 – BATH/TRAP split in, 2:1933 – development of /ɒ/, 1:598 – diphthongization of /i:/, 1:770 – FOOT/STRUT split in, 2:1932, 2:1933– 1934 – monophthongization of /aɪ/ in South, 1:772 – Northern Cities Shift, 1:81, 2:1554–1555 – preservation of /æ:/, 1:602, 2:1810 – rhoticity, 1:71, 1:593, 1:1027, 2:1810–1811, 2:1847, 2:1931 – t-flapping, 2:2000 – portrayal in fiction, 2:1816–1818 – pragmatics, 1:93, 1:201, 2:1542, 2:1812 – problems in the study of Early, 2:1763–1764 – pronunciation, 2:1153 – prosody, 1:81, 1:126, 1:591 – provincial status, 1:1013 – punctuation, 2:1892 – Salem Witchcraft Records and, 1:716 – Spanish loans in, 2:1740 – “standard”, 2:1821, 2:1822 – syntax – complementation, 1:852 – concord with collective nouns, 1:859 – double modals, 1:153, 2:2050 – future tense, 2:1892 – group nouns, 2:1892–1893
2154 – indirect questions, 1:85 – modal verbs, 2:1362 – past tense + just/ever, 1:89 – progressive aspect in, 2:1690 – reduction in don’t, 2:1541 – reflexive structures, 1:846–851 – subjunctive, 1:853–857, 1:879 – that as relative pronoun in, 1:79 – in the teaching of history of English, 2:1169 – Ulster Scots and, 1:693 American Enterprise Institute, 2:1828 American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), 1:968, 1:975–976, 1:977, 1:978, 1:1058, 2:1173 American Heritage Dictionary of IndoEuropean Roots, 2:1173 The American Language (Mencken), 2:1316 American Languages: Our Nation’s Many Voices Online, 2:1851 American Philological Society, 2:1884 American Pronunciation (Kenyon), 2:1842 American Regional Dialects (Carver), 2:1852 American Speech ( journal), 2:1316, 2:1848 American Spelling Book (Webster), 1:942, 1:1012, 1:1056 Amos ’n’ Andy (TV program), 1:1096 Amsterdam, 1:1065 Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (Thorpe), 2:1305 analogy, 1:160–161, 2:1571–1572, 2:1610 Anand, Mulk Raj, 2:2088 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 2:1881 Ancrene Riwle, see Ancrene Wisse Ancrene Wisse – AB-language, 1:348, 1:523–524 – anonymity of author and scribe, 1:536–537 – Corpus manuscript, 1:437–440, 1:523–524 – EETS edition, 1:37 – effect on writing vs. speech, 2:1249 – French influence in, 2:1681 – literary language of, 1:557–558 – plural forms in, 1:417 – prosody in, 1:404 – in studies of religious communication, 2:1366 Anders, Heidi, 1:190 Andersen, Gisle, 2:2027 Andersen, Henning, 2:1600, 2:1627 Andersen, Øivin, 2:1592 Anderson, Benedict, 2:1260, 2:1262 Anderson, Earl R., 1:323 Anderson, John M., 1:9, 1:155, 1:221 Anderson, Sherwood, 2:1818 Anderwald, Lieselotte, 1:93, 1:923, 1:931, 1:933
Index Andreas, 1:118, 1:121, 1:335, 1:393 Angelsa¨chsische Grammatik (Sievers), 1:255, 2:1333 Angelsa¨chsische Laut- und Formenlehre (Ko¨rner and Socin), 2:1333 Anglia ( journal), 2:1329, 2:1330, 2:1338 Anglicanism, 1:57, 1:1043, 1:1044, 2:1979, 2:1982 Anglistische Forschungen, 2:1328 Anglo-Dutch Relations (Bense), 2:1663–1664 Anglo-French Dictionary (Rothwell), 2:1784 Anglo-French Wars, 2:1675 Anglo-Frisian, 1:2, 1:8 Anglo-Norman – in British parliamentary formulae, 1:33 – contact with English, 2:1672–1673 – functions, 1:463, 2:1443, 2:1444 – influence on versification, 1:121, 1:568 – in mixed-language varieties, 1:686–687 – oversimplification in accounts of, 2:1663– 1664 – phonology, 1:512–513, 1:596 – prosody, 1:123, 1:124 – scribal influence, 1:102 – vs. Anglo-French, 2:1781 Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND), 2:1135 Anglo-Norman Online Hub (ANH), 2:1135 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – A (Parker), 1:296, 1:299, 1:300, 1:301, 1:304, 1:306, 1:309, 1:310 – Alfred and, 1:26, 1:347 – C (British Library MS. Cotton Tiberius B.I), 1:300 – E (Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 636), 1:295, 1:297, 1:309, 1:310 – as early vernacular text, 2:1280–1281 – fore- and backgrounding in narrative, 1:336 – French phrasal influence in, 2:1681 – as literary text, 1:394, 1:395 – parataxis in, 1:307–308 – Peterborough – diphthongs in, 2:1551–1553 – First Continuation, 2:1504 – Late West Saxon standard and, 1:382 – loss of grammatical gender in, 1:418 – Norse loans in, 2:1732 – Second Continuation, 2:1126, 2:1281–1282, 2:1501–1502 – Worcester, 1:29, 1:394 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition (Irvine), 2:1124
Index Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth-Toller), 2:1134, 2:1144, 2:1149–1150, 2:1378 Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Project (website), 2:1134 Anglo-Saxon England ( journal), 2:1122, 2:1125 “Anglo-Saxonism”, 1:894 Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey (ASPNS), 1:323 Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR), 2:1143, 2:1145, 2:1316 Anglo-Saxon Primer (Sweet), 2:1305, 2:1308 Anglo-Saxon Reader (Bright), 2:1134 Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet), 2:1304–1305 Anglo-Saxons – coins, 1:220, 1:221 – continental origins, 1:341–342, 1:346 – conversion to Christianity, 1:20, 1:23–24, 1:232, 1:315, 1:362, 1:363, 1:368 – emergent identity, 1:20–21, 1:22–23 – multiglossia, 2:1442 – origin of term, 2:1237–1238 – personal names, 1:217–218, 1:219, 1:220 – settlement in Britain, 1:2, 1:19, 1:22–23 – swearing, 1:544 – vocabulary for landscape features, 1:215 Anglo-Welsh Review ( journal), 2:1988 Angol filolo´giai tanulma´nyok ( journal), 2:1380 Anguilla, 2:2121 Angus, 1:673 Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 1:985 Anne Boleyn, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, 1:726 ANSAX-L, 2:1145 anthroponymy, 1:213–222 Antigua, 2:1771 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 1:817, 1:819 Antrim, County, 2:1964 Antwerp, 1:689 Antwerpen glossary, 1:29 ANZUS treaty, 2:1997 Apollonius of Tyre (Old English), 1:301, 1:310, 1:326, 1:394 Apple iPhone, 1:1016–1017 Arabic – English loans from, 1:173, 1:514 – in Gibraltar, 2:1746 – on the internet, 1:1112 – Middle English translations from, 1:469 – in North Africa, 2:2094
2155 – prescriptivism and, 1:968 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – scientific texts in, 1:474 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – Thomas Babington Macaulay on, 2:2080 – Wallis on relation of Welsh to, 2:1299 Araki, Kazuo, 2:1416 Arakin, Vladimir D., 2:1383 The Arcadian Rhetorike (Fraunce), 1:794 Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 2:1261 ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of English Historical Registers) – adjectival comparison in, 1:607 – American vs. British English, 2:1893 – Australian English in, 2:2005 – in corpus linguistics, 1:249, 1:870, 1:945, 2:1138–1139 – coverage, 2:1512 – expansion, 2:1404 – get passive in, 1:872 – newspaper language in, 1:1064 – oral vs. literate styles, 2:1276 – progressive in, 1:874 – size, 2:1516 – study of promises in, 1:654 – subjunctives in, 1:947 – thou vs. you in, 1:704 Archer, Dawn, 1:206, 1:240, 1:653, 1:654, 1:655, 1:656, 1:659, 2:1450 Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress, 2:1799, 2:1801, 2:1804 Archytas of Tarentum, 2:1216 Ardenne, S. R. T. O. d’, 1:523, 1:524, 2:1345 Arend, Johannes Pieter, 2:1342 Arend, Zygfryd M., 2:1376, 2:1377 Arends, Jacques, 2:2122 Argentina, 2:1982 Argyllshire, 1:673 Arista, Javier Martı´n, 2:1132 Aristotle, 1:225, 1:968, 2:1216, 2:1221, 2:1222 Aristoxenos of Tarent, 2:1216 Arizona State University, 2:1343 Arkansas, 2:1800, 2:1843 Armagh, County, 2:2071 Armenia, 2:1381 Armstrong, Louis, 1:1096 ´ rnason, Kristja´n, 1:110 A Arnaud, Rene´, 1:873, 2:1399, 2:1449
2156 Arnovick, Leslie K. – on Chaucer’s use of the “book curse”, 1:472 – history of English textbook, 2:1167, 2:1168, 2:1169 – study of verbal performatives, 1:329–330 – work on promises and curses, 1:331, 1:333, 1:542, 1:910, 2:1459 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 1:791, 1:989, 1:1051 Arte of Rhetorique (Wilson), 1:618, 1:623, 1:792–793, 2:1713, 2:1720 Arthur, Jay Mary, 2:2006 Arthurian material, 2:1282, 2:1359 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2:1127 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1:1041 Arundel Prayers, 1:356 Ascham, Roger, 1:54, 1:736, 1:1007 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 2:2138 Asian Englishes beyond the Canon (Kachru), 2:1317 Asian Lingua Franca English, 2:2141 Association for the Higher Education of Women, 2:1307 Astley, Katherine, 1:53 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 2:1712 Atkinson, Dwight, 1:906 Atlas de formes et des constructions des chartes franc¸aises du 13e sie`cle, 2:1433 Atlas de formes linguistiques des textes litte´raires de l’ancien franc¸ais, 2:1433 Atlas Linguistique de la France, 2:1427, 2:1841 Atlas of North American English (ANAE), 2:1849, 2:1851–1855 Attridge, Derek, 1:805 Atwood, Elmer Bagby, 2:1317, 2:1843 Aubin, Penelope, 1:879 Auer, Anita, 1:947–948, 2:1343, 2:2048 Auer, Peter, 2:1748 Augustan Prose Sample, 2:1510 Augustine, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1:23, 1:368 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 1:26, 1:347, 2:1219 Aurelianus Reomensis, 2:1218 Auschwitz, 2:1376 Austen, Jane, 1:865 Austin, J. L., 1:199, 1:325, 1:331
Index Australasian Supplement to Webster’s International Dictionary, 1:898 Austral English (Morris), 1:1059 Australia – attempt to eradicate Tok Pisin, 2:2126 – attitudes toward American English, 2:1816, 2:1997 – education in, 1:954 – historical linguistics in, 2:1314 – history, 2:1996–1997 – immigrant communities in, 2:1721, 2:1723, 2:2006 – place-names, 2:2001–2002 – plantation pidgin in, 2:1768 – relations between natives and settlers in, 2:1444 – settlement, 1:68, 2:2097, 2:2136 – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145, 2:2146 Australian Aboriginal languages, 2:2001–2002 Australian Creole English, 2:1770, 2:2125, 2:2129 Australian English, 2:1995–2008 – in the Bank of English corpus, 1:1015 – Cockney English and, 2:1885, 2:1998, 2:1999, 2:2053 – codification, 1:897–898, 1:1059–1060, 2:1156, 2:1885, 2:2000–2001 – dialect contact and, 2:2053–2054 – Greek loans in, 2:1721 – linguistic corpora of, 2:1997 – loans from aboriginal languages, 1:890 – in models of World English, 2:1886, 2:1887 – morphology, 1:82 – in the OED, 1:943 – phonology – accent, 2:1998–1999, 2:2000 – BATH/TRAP split in, 2:1933, 2:2099 – differentiation from British English, 1:81–82 – diphthongs, 1:759, 1:765, 2:1935 – FOOT/STRUT split in, 2:1933–1934 – L-vocalization, 2:2036 – non-rhotic nature, 2:1931 – RP and, 2:1885 – quotative go, 1:1095 – radio and, 1:1090, 1:1097–1101 – relative homogeneity, 2:1928 – social stratification in, 1:960 – stigmatization of, 1:893, 1:1022 – syntax, 1:88, 1:90, 1:93 Australian National Dictionary (AND), 2:1156, 2:1157, 2:2000, 2:2002
Index Austria, 2:2061, 2:2145 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 2:1376, 2:1862 Automatic Morphological Analyzer of Old English, 2:1378 Autonomous University of Barcelona, Granada and Oviedo, 2:1402 Auwera, Johan van der, 2:1589, 2:1634–1635, 2:1688 auxiliary verbs – as “avertive” markers, 1:469 – be vs. have – in Early Modern English, 1:609: 1:624–626 – frequency and, 2:1536–1538 – in Late Modern English, 1:876–877, 2:1361–1362 – in Middle English, 2:1537 – in Old English, 1:287, 1:303–304, 2:1536 – in Present Day English, 1:287, 2:1537– 2:1538 – language contact and, 1:161 – in Old English brace constructions, 1:296 – in passive constructions, 1:307, 1:872 – in the perfect and pluperfect, 1:609, 1:624– 626, 1:876–877 – in the progressive, 1:304, 1:626–628 – strengthening of category, 1:153 – in the subjunctive, 1:305 – transitivity and, 1:303 – in use of you vs. thou, 1:704 – weorðan, 1:287, 1:307 – see also do periphrasis; modal verbs Auzon Casket, 1:348, 2:1125, 2:1280 Avis, Walter S., 2:1317, 2:1864, 2:1865, 2:1868, 2:1869, 2:1871 Avison, Charles, 2:1228 Ayenbite of Inwyt (Dan Michel of Northgate), 1:42–43, 1:417, 1:485, 1:559, 2:1427 Ayres, Alfred, 1:973, 1:975 Ayrshire, 1:673, 1:680
B Babes¸-Bolyai University, 2:1385 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 2:1228 Bacon, Anthony, 2:1713 Bacon, Edward, 1:722 Bacon, Francis, 1:245, 1:644, 1:645, 1:647, 1:795, 2:1226 Bacon, Nathaniel, 1:657, 1:722 Bacon, Nicholas, Sir, 1:657
2157 Bacon, Roger, 2:1219 Bacon Letters, 1:657 Bacquet, Paul, 2:1398, 2:1399 The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers (Moon), 1:1012 Bagby, Benjamin, 2:1146 Bahamas, 2:1771, 2:2049, 2:2052, 2:2121 Bahamian Creole English, 2:2121 Bahasa Indonesia, 2:2141, 2:2143 Bahasa Malaysia, 2:2138, 2:2141, 2:2143 Baı¨f, Jean-Antoine de, 2:1218 Bailey, Beryl, 2:1794, 2:2123 Bailey, Charles J., 2:1262, 2:1682, 2:1782, 2:1784 Bailey, Guy, 2:1796, 2:1799, 2:1835, 2:2037, 2:2097 Bailey, Nathan – booksellers and, 1:1010 – dictionary, 1:943, 1:970, 1:1054, 1:1057, 2:1713, 2:1883 – on happy tensing, 1:829 – on intrusive [r], 1:839 – Irish pronunciation of onion, 2:2064 – on MAT/MET merger, 1:831 Bailey, Richard W. – on 19th-century attitudes to grammar, 1:960 – on ANAE, 2:1851–1852 – collection of additions and antedatings to OED, 1:639, 1:641 – on histories of English, 2:1174, 2:1175 – on Native American languages, 2:1757, 2:1761–1762, 2:1763 – on “purity” theme in history of English, 1:1022 – on the symbolic power of words, 1:888 – volume on 19th-century English, 1:64 – work on literary representations of Canadian English, 2:1864 – work on World English, 2:1317 Bajan, 2:1776–1777, 2:2123 Baker, Adam, 2:1495, 2:1496–1497, 2:1502, 2:1505, 2:1506 Baker, Peter, 2:1144, 2:1316 Baker, Philip, 1:694, 2:2123 Baker, Sidney, 1:1059 Bækken, Bjørg, 2:1361 Bald’s Leechbook, 1:303, 1:311, 1:329, 1:394 Bale, John, 1:752 Ball, Catherine N., 1:778, 1:779, 1:882, 2:1695, 2:1698 Bambas, Rudolf, 1:703
2158 Bammesberger, Alfred, 1:432, 2:1158 Bang-Kaup, Willi, 2:1346 Bangladesh, 2:1886, 2:1984, 2:2015–2016, 2:2020, 2:2114 Banham, Debby, 1:323 Bank of Canadian English (BCE), 2:1865, 2:1866 Bank of English corpus, 1:1013–1014, 1:1015, 2:1893 Banks, David, 2:1399 Bantu languages, 2:2101, 2:2115 Baptists, 2:1979 Barbados, 1:693–694, 2:1771, 2:1777, 2:2121, 2:2122, 2:2123, see also Caribbean English Barber, Charles – on chronology of Early Modern English, 1:699 – on Early Modern English lexicon, 1:125, 1:610, 1:709, 1:710 – on forms of the comparative, 1:863 – on his vs. its, 1:734 – on Late Modern English, 1:64 – on multiple negation, 1:706, 1:707 – on my/thy vs. mine/thine, 1:735 – outline of Early Modern English, 1:49–50, 1:732 – on Shakespeare’s language, 1:813, 1:816, 1:817–818 – textbook of history of English, 2:1167, 2:1169 – on third person plural pronouns, 1:733 – on ye vs. you, 1:737 Barbour, John, 2:1127, 2:1955 Barbuda, 2:1771, 2:2121 Barcelona, Antonio, 1:167 Bardi, Giovanni de’, conte di Vernio, 2:1218 Bardsley, Dianne, 2:2004 Baret, John, 1:638, 1:1007 Barlow, William, 1:709 Barritt, C. Westbrook, 1:9, 2:1291, 2:1315 Barron, Anne, 2:2142 Barron, Caroline, 2:1659, 2:1664 Barron, Julia, 2:1652 Barros, Joa˜o de, 1:984 Barry, 2:1984 Barry, Jonathan, 1:716 Bartlett, Christopher, 2:2007 Bartlett, John, 1:809 Bartlett, John Russell, 1:1013, 2:1840 Barzun, Jacques, 1:1026 Basque, 2:1181
Index Batchelor, Thomas – on [a]/[æ] contrast, 1:830 – on diphthongal pronunciations, 1:72, 1:833, 1:835 – on glide insertion, 1:836–837 – on [hw-]/[w-] alternation, 1:838 – on [i]/[ɪ] contrast, 1:828 – on pronunciation of u, 1:832 – on [r]-insertion, 1:840 Bath, 1:344 Battle of Maldon, 1:328, 1:359, 1:387, 1:393 Baudisˇ, Jozef, 2:1379 Baudoin de Courtenay, Jan Niecisław, 1:98, 1:229, 1:230 Bauer, Gero, 2:1336 Bauer, Laurie – on changes in word stress, 1:127 – on comparison in Present Day English, 1:863 – on count vs. mass, 1:82 – on the High Rising Terminal (HRT), 1:81 – on lexicalization, 2:1582, 2:1583 – on New Zealand English, 1:89, 2:1998, 2:1999, 2:2001 – on suffix -ation, 1:615 Baugh, Albert C., 1:709, 1:734, 2:1167, 2:1169, 2:1184, 2:1314, 2:1678, 2:1842, see also History of the English Language (Baugh and Cable) Baugh, John, 2:1828 Baumann, Ida, 2:1329 Bax, Marcel, 1:329 Bayard, Donn, 2:1998, 2:2000, 2:2003 Bay Islands, 2:2121 Bazerman, Charles, 1:903, 1:904, 1:905, 1:906 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) – accents and, 2:1888, 2:1894–1895, 2:1907, 2:1908 – Committee on Spoken English, 2:1906–1907, 2:1909 – Estuary English and, 2:1922 – influence on Australian broadcasting, 1:1097, 1:1098 – Learning English section of website, 1:1015 – non-native speaker audience, 1:1101 – policy of standardization and codification, 1:1089, 1:1090–1094 – Received Pronunciation and, 1:1090, 1:1092, 1:1093, 2:1900, 2:1908 – Reith lectures, 2:1889 – use of non-standard syntax, 1:80 BBC English Dictionary, 2:1895 Beaken, Michael A., 2:2022
Index Beal, Joan C. – on demand for “accent reduction”, 2:1911 – on prescriptive guides and grammars, 1:917, 1:946, 1:957 – on pronunciation of BATH, 1:959 – textbook on history of English, 2:1167, 2:1185 – volume on Late Modern English, 1:64, 1:66 Beattie, James, 1:798, 1:800, 1:1057 Beaumont, Francis, 1:803 The Beaux’ Stratagem (Farquhar), 2:2063 Bech, Kristin, 1:336 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 2:1211 Bede, the Venerable, Saint – Death Song, 1:343, 1:345, 1:348, 1:358 – in the Dictionary of Old English corpus, 2:1119 – inclusive use of gens anglorum, 1:21 – life and writings, 1:343 – on regional varieties of English, 2:1264 – on the settlement of Britain, 1:22, 1:341, 1:363, 2:1280 – as source of personal and place-names, 1:344 – in study of Northumbrian, 2:1123 Bedfordshire, 1:838 Beecher, Sea´n, 2:1967 Beggar’s Bush (Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massiner), 1:804 Beginnings of American English (Mathews), 2:1840 Beijing Foreign Studies University, 2:1418 Beireiter, Carl, 2:1828 Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur ( journal), 2:1331 Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der englischen Gutturallaute (Horn), 2:1335 Bekker, Ian, 2:2097, 2:2098, 2:2100 Belarus, 2:1381, 2:1384 Belfast, 1:690, 2:1972, 2:2033, 2:2056, 2:2064 Belgium, 2:1345–1347, 2:2139, 2:2145 Belgrade University, 2:1386, 2:1387 Belize, 2:1771, 2:2121, 2:2125 Bell, Alexander Melville, 1:834 Bell, Allan, 1:907, 1:1081, 2:2003 Bell, W. H. S., 1:1059 The Bell Curve (Hernstein and Murray), 2:1828 Benedictine Reform, 1:326, 1:327, 1:343, 1:378, 1:1000, 2:1707 Benedictine Rule, 1:27, 1:356 Bengal, 2:1444
2159 Bengali, 2:2079 Bengtsson, Elna, 2:1864 Bennett, Louise (Miss Lou), 2:1778–1779 Bennett, W. H., 2:1376 Bense, Johan F., 2:1660, 2:1663–1664, 2:1666 Benskin, Michael, 1:39–40, 1:525, 1:526, 1:578, 1:1002, 2:1127, 2:1445 Benson, Larry D., 1:566 Bentinck, William Henry Cavendish, Lord, 2:2079 Benz, Brad, 2:1175 Beowulf – alliterative translations of, 2:1332 – canonical status, 2:1210 – dialect, 1:359 – electronic resources, 2:1143, 2:1145, 2:1146 – as a fictional text, 2:1205 – hapax legomena in, 1:119, 1:391 – “hero on the beach” theme, 1:566 – homonymy of gæst in, 1:320 – Hoops’s commentary on, 2:1328 – iambic feet in, 1:121 – insults in, 2:1462 – i-stem genitive plurals, 1:389 – Latin loans in, 1:364, 1:365, 1:366–367, 1:370 – Neogrammarians and, 1:255 – poetic compounds, 1:318, 1:430, 1:558 – prosodic reconstruction and, 1:115, 1:117, 1:118, 1:120, 1:121 – speech acts in, 1:328–329, 1:333, 1:335, 1:392, 1:393–394 – style, 1:386 – syntax, 1:389–391 – Thorkelin and, 2:1290, 2:1302, 2:1356 Bergen, Linda van, 1:889 Bergner, Heinz, 1:475–476 Bergs, Alexander, 1:473, 1:538, 1:539, 1:542, 2:1439, 2:1447, 2:1449 Berkeley, Gloucs., 1:43 “Berlin School”, 2:1330 Bermuda, 1:693, 2:2049, 2:2052 Bernard, John R., 2:2053 Berna´rdez, Enrique, 2:1402 Berndt, Rolf, 2:1335, 2:1337, 2:1677 Berners, John Bourchier, Lord, 1:736 Bernicia, 2:1733, 2:1952–1953 Bernstein Ser, Melissa, 2:1143 Berruto, Gaetano, 2:1924 Bertelt, Guillermo, 2:1765 Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella, 1:331 Bestiary, 1:121
2160 Bhatt, Rakesh M., 2:2113, 2:2117, 2:2146 Biber, Douglas – ARCHER and, 1:249, 2:1520 – on genre differentiation, 1:905, 1:961, 1:962 – on inserts, 1:201 – multidimensional text-type analysis, 1:903, 1:906, 1:908, 2:1404 – on newspaper language, 1:907 – on oral vs. literate styles, 1:243–244, 1:245, 2:1276, 2:1278 – study of stance devices, 1:910 Bible, 1:1039–1050 – attacks by grammarians on, 1:1009 – Authorized Version, 1:1044–1045 – association of -eth ending with, 1:607 – influence on style, 1:245, 1:803, 1:808, 1:1048 – later versions of, 1:87, 1:1045, 1:1047 – number of lexemes in, 1:643 – other versions and, 1:1042, 1:1044 – periphrastic do in, 1:749 – preceding monolingual dictionaries, 1:639 – rendering of Greek and Hebrew terms, 1:1046, 1:1047, 1:1048 – standardization and, 1:242 – syntax, 1:87 – use of his vs. its, 1:605 – you and ye in, 1:736 – Bishops’, 1:1043, 1:1044 – Coverdale, 1:1042, 1:1044 – exclamations in, 1:202 – Geneva, 1:1043, 1:1044, 1:1045, 1:1047 – Great, 1:1043, 1:1044 – King James version, 2:1169 – Latin loans and, 1:513 – Matthew’s, 1:1043, 1:1044 – misprints in, 1:1045 – number of words needed to read, 1:643 – Old English translations, 1:1039–1040 – personal names from, 1:218 – printing and, 1:983 – religious register and, 1:239 – Rheims-Douai, 1:1043–1044, 1:1045 – in Scotland, 2:1956 – Tyndale, 1:609, 1:642, 1:736, 1:784, 1:1041– 1042, 1:1044, 1:1046 – use of who as relativizer, 1:781 – Vulgate, 1:563–564, 1:1040, 1:1041, 1:1042, 1:1045 – Welsh, 2:1979 – Wycliffe, 1:88, 1:560, 1:563–564, 1:1040–1041
Index Bibliography of English Etymology: Sources and Word List, 2:1173–1174 Bibliography of the English Language […] to 1800 (Alston), 1:639 Bibliotheca Eliotae (Elyot), 1:1007 Bibliotheca scholastica (Rider), 1:1052 Bibliothek der Angelsa¨chsischen Poesie (Grein), 2:1332 Bibliothe`que Nationale, 1:35 Bickerton, Derek, 2:1773–1774, 2:2113, 2:2125 Bierbaumer, Peter, 1:323 Bies, Ann, 2:1484–1485 Biewer, Carolin, 1:822 Biggam, C. P., 1:323 Bijkerk, Annemieke, 1:903, 1:911 bilingualism – Celtic-English, 1:2, 2:1442 – contact-induced change and, 1:506 – in the Danelaw, 1:44, 1:464 – in the development of postcolonial Englishes, 2:1444, 2:1445 – in India, 2:2085–2086 – in individuals, 1:152 – in Ireland, 2:1964–1965 – lexical borrowing and, 2:1759 – in post-Conquest England, 1:507, 1:508, 2:1676, 2:1783–1784 – societal, 2:2109–2110 – in South African English, 2:2100 – in Wales, 2:1980–1981, 2:1983, 2:1987, 2:1989–1990 The Bill (TV program), 1:1082, 2:1922 Bilynskiy, Mykhaylo, 2:1384 Biography of the English Language (Millward), 2:1164, 2:1167, 2:1235 biomusicology, 2:1215 bioprogram hypothesis, 2:1773–1774 Birch, Walter de Gray, 2:1122 Birmingham, 2:1889, 2:1982 Birner, Betty, 2:1475, 2:1478 Bisang, Walter, 2:1570 Bislama, 2:1770, 2:1776, 2:1887 Bjo¨rkman, Erik, 2:1730, 2:1731 Black, Merja, 1:523 Blackboard educational software, 1:1113– 1114 Black Death, 2:1269–1270 Black Talk (Smitherman), 2:1827 Blair, Hugh, 1:1011 Blair, Tony, 2:1915
Index Blake, Norman F. – on Alfredian “standard”, 1:378 – on biblical translations, 1:564 – on identifying literary language, 1:552, 1:553 – influence of Neogrammarians on, 1:130 – on Lagamon’s Brut, 1:556 – on the MED, 2:1127 – on periodization schemes, 2:1234, 2:1249– 1250, 2:1251 – on the role of translation, 2:1281 – on Shakespeare’s language, 1:809, 1:810, 1:811, 1:813, 1:819, 1:820 – on Skeat’s claim for thou vs. ye, 1:473 – on standard vs. standardized language, 1:376 – textbook on history of English, 2:1185 – on variations across editions, 2:1468 – work on discourse markers, 1:662 Blakemore, Diane, 1:198 Blanchardyn and Eglantine, 1:561 Bliss, A. J., 1:41, 2:1968, 2:1969 Bloch, Bernard, 1:760 Blockley, Mary, 2:1171, 2:1173, 2:1174, 2:1175 Blommaert, Jan, 1:1113, 2:1261 Bloomfield, Leonard, 1:225, 1:970, 1:973, 2:1165, 2:1185, 2:1291, 2:1317 Bloomfield, M. W., 1:64 Blount, Thomas, 1:638, 1:646, 1:647–648, 1:1007, 1:1008, 1:1054, 2:1883 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, 1:655 BLUR Corpus, 2:1800–1801 Boberg, Charles, 2:1858, 2:1860, 2:1861, 2:1864, 2:1868, 2:1869 Bodleian Library, 1:35, 1:695, 1:1064, 2:1342, 2:1779 Bodley, Thomas, Sir, 2:1779 Boece (Chaucer), 1:457, 1:586 Boersma, Paul, 2:1655 Boer Wars, 2:2115 Boethius, 1:26, 1:347, 1:704, 2:1218, 2:1222, see also Alfredian translations Bohata, Kirsti, 2:1989 Boke Named the Governour (Elyot), 1:54, 1:631, 1:633, 2:1225, 2:1712 Bokenham, Osbern, 1:474 Boleyn, Anne, see Anne Boleyn, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England Bolinger, Dwight, 1:85, 1:225, 1:1025 Bolton, Edmund, 1:648 Bonel-Elliott, Imelda, 2:1397 Bono, 2:1829 Book of Common Prayer, 1:242, 2:1979
2161 Book of Husbandry (Fitzherbert), 1:56, 1:623 Book of Margery Kempe, 1:475, 1:559 “Book of Philip Sparrow” (Skelton), 1:984 Book of the Duchess (Chaucer), 1:568, 1:582 Bopp, Franz, 2:1182, 2:1302, 2:1303, 2:1306, 2:1313, 2:1330 Border counties, 1:673, 1:680 Borneo, 1:694 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2:1385 Boston News Letter, 1:1065 Bosworth, Joseph, 2:1134, 2:1149, see also Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth-Toller) Botkin, Benjamin, 2:1797 Botswana, 2:2114 Boucicault, Dion, 2:2063 Boulonnais, Dominique, 2:1399 Bourcier, Georges, 2:1398 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1:663 Bousfield, Derek, 1:659 Bowdler, Thomas, 1:815 Bowerman, Melissa, 2:1606 Bowerman, Sean, 2:2097 Boychuk, Ben, 1:1016 Boyer, Abel, 1:658 Boyle, Robert, 1:709–710, 1:905 Braaten, Bjorn, 2:1691, 2:1692, 2:1699 Bracton, 1:547 Bradbrook, Muriel C., 1:810 Bradford, 2:1889 Bradford, William, 2:1756 Bradley, David, 2:1997–1998, 2:2007 Bradley, Henry, 2:1334 Bradley, Maya, 2:1997–1998 Bradshaw, Brendan, 2:1963 Bragdon, Kathleen, 2:1759 Braidwood, John, 2:1966 Brandl, Alois, 2:1330, 2:1334 Branford, William, 1:1059, 2:2053 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 2:1778 Braune, Wilhelm, 2:1331, 2:1333 Brazil, 2:1862, 2:2145, 2:2146 Bre´al, Michel, 1:165 Breconshire, 2:1979 Bredehoft, Thomas, 1:116 Breeze, Andrew, 1:316 Breivik, Leiv Egil, 2:1361 Bremen, 2:1955 Bremmer, Rolf H., 2:1343 Brems, Lieselotte, 2:1347 Bresnan, Joan, 1:933, 2:1647, 2:1654, 2:1655 Breton, 2:1181
2162 Breton, Nicholas, 1:865 Brewer, Charlotte, 2:1133 Brewer, Derek, 1:191 Brewer, Jeutonne P., 2:1798 Brewer’s Guild, 1:982, 1:983 Bridewell, London Court of, 1:693 Bridges, Robert, 1:1091, 2:1909 Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Harriot), 2:1762 Brigham Young University, 2:1140, 2:1145–1146 Bright, James W., 2:1134 Bright, William, 2:1762 Brightland, John, 1:828, 1:829, 1:835, 1:836 Brink, Bernhard ten, 2:1329, 2:1333 Brinton, Laurel J. – on Canadian English, 2:1317, 2:1867, 2:1871 – on composite predicates, 2:1586 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1292 – on the Germanic perfect, 1:303 – on “ghost morphology”, 2:1585–1586 – on historical discourse analysis, 1:199, 1:908, 2:1468 – on Middle English gan, 2:1479 – neo-Gricean framework, 1:903 – on new grammatical formants, 2:1541 – on Old English hwæt, 2:1478–1479 – on the placement of discourse markers, 2:1566 – textbook on history of English, 2:1167, 2:1168, 2:1169 – on the uniformitarian principle, 2:1462 – on V-ing forms, 2:1587 – volume on discourse markers, 2:1459 – work on comment clauses, 2:1521 – work on historical pragmatics, 2:1292 – work on phraseology, 1:184 – work on pragmatic markers, 1:202, 1:335, 1:470–471, 1:475, 1:660, 1:661, 1:909 Brisbane, 2:2007 Bristol Channel, 2:1981 Britain, David, 1:682, 2:1919, 2:2007, 2:2038, 2:2040, 2:2054 British Academy/Royal Society Anglo-Saxon Charters project, 2:1122 British Council, 2:1885, 2:2137 British Creole, 2:1889, 2:1946, 2:2122 British Empire, 1:68, 1:75, 1:888, 1:889–890, 2:2115, 2:2137 British English, 2:1879–1896 – African American English and, 2:1833 – American English and, 1:68, 1:71, 1:153, 1:234, 1:601–602, 1:843, 2:1889, 2:1890–1893
Index – areoversals, 2:1937–1943 – Canadian English and, 2:1317, 2:1868, 2:1871–1872 – “Canadian Raising” in, 2:2054–2055 – international status, 1:1015, 2:1880, 2:1886– 1888, 2:1894–1896, 2:2088, 2:2144 – Irish English and, 2:1967 – linguistic corpora of, 2:1140 – Maltese English and, 2:1742–1743 – morphology, 1:80, 1:845, 1:846, 1:857 – Northern – BATH/TRAP split, 2:1932–1933, 2:2038 – distinctive features, 2:1943, 2:1944 – features shared with South, 2:1946 – FOOT/STRUT split, 2:1932, 2:1936 – long /a:/, 2:1931 – pronunciation of FACE/GOAT, 2:1934 – supraregional features in, 2:2070–2071 – verbal-noun construction, 2:1692 – orthography, 2:1890–1892 – phonology – backing to /ɑː/, 1:601 – postvocalic /r/, 1:593 – pronunciation of a, 1:830 – syllable-initial sonorant + /j/ clusters, 1:108 – TH-fronting, 2:1935, 2:2022–2023, 2:2036, 2:2039 – pragmatics, 1:93, 1:201, 1:655, 1:1095 – pronunciation, 2:1153, 2:1813, 2:1929–1936, 2:2023 – prosody, 1:81, 1:126, 1:591 – punctuation, 2:1892 – regional varieties, 2:1928–1948 – Southeast, 2:1936, 2:1943, 2:1944, 2:1946 – Southern, 2:1932, 2:1933, 2:2038, 2:2050 – Southwest, 2:1936, 2:1944, 2:1945, 2:1946, 2:1985 – sub-Saharan English and, 2:2102 – syntax, 2:1691–1694 – complementation, 1:852 – double modal constructions, 1:153 – information structure and, 2:1360 – middle construction, 1:85 – progressive, 1:88 – subjunctive revival, 1:855, 1:857, 2:1360 – vs. Australian and New Zealand English, 1:82 – vs. Celtic Englishes, 2:1688–1691 – West Midlands, 2:1985 – work on grammaticalization in, 2:1568
Index – see also Cockney English; Estuary English; Irish English; London; Received Pronunciation; Scots; Welsh English British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 1:1066 British Library, 1:35, 2:1142, see also under manuscripts British Library Newspaper Collection, 1:1064 British Mercury, 1:56 British National Corpus (BNC), 1:928, 1:932, 1:1014, 2:1140, 2:1866, 2:1871, 2:1893, 2:1894 Britnell, Richard H., 1:547 Britton, Derek, 2:1446 Brno Studies in English ( journal), 2:1378 Broadcast English: Recommendations to Announcers, 1:1091, 1:1098 Broadcast over Britain (Reith), 1:1090 Broecke Hoekstra, Albert ten, 2:1342 Brome, Richard, 1:803 Bromhead, Helen, 1:171 Bronstein, Arthur J., 2:1187 Bronte¨, Anne, 1:850 Bronte¨, Charlotte, 1:890, 1:989 Brook, George L., 1:444, 1:810, 1:812, 1:814, 1:816, 2:1185 Brooke, Frances, 1:879 Brooklyn-Geneva-Amsterdam-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (Brooklyn Corpus), 2:1140 Brooks, Christopher, 1:716 Brorstro¨m, Sverker, 1:877 Brown, Goold, 1:225–226, 1:971–972, 1:1012 Brown, Keith, 1:90, 1:93 Brown, Penelope, 1:327, 1:328, 1:392, 1:656– 659, 1:663, 1:820 Brown, Roger W., 1:203, 1:656, 1:662, 1:739, 1:820, 2:1186, 2:1198 Brown, Roland W., 2:1715 Brown Corpus of American English, 1:875, 1:1064, 1:1072, 2:1510, 2:1516 “Brown Family” of corpora, 2:1138 Brownlees, Nicholas, 1:208, 1:1065, 1:1072 Broz, Vlatko, 1:172 The Bruce (Barbour), 2:1127, 2:1955 Bruges, 2:1664 Brugmann, Karl, 2:1307, 2:1330 Brumfit, Christopher, 2:2141 Brunei, 2:2114 Brunner, Karl, 1:2, 1:130, 1:255, 1:283, 1:344, 1:428, 2:1290, 2:1333 Brussels Aldhelm Glosses, 1:29, 1:356 Brussels Cross, 2:1345
2163 Brut (Lagamon), 1:553–556 – hybrid versification of, 1:121 – language of, 2:1249 – “literalization” of period and, 2:1282 – manuscript transmission, 1:537 – new genre of, 1:467 – syntax, 1:444–446 – vocabulary, 1:21, 1:430 – Wace’s Roman de Brut and, 2:1282, 2:1682 Bruyn, Adrienne, 2:1570, 2:2122 Bryant, William Cullen, 1:1014 Buchan, John, 1:878 Buchanan, James, 1:990, 1:1011, 1:1056, 2:1902, 2:1903 Buchanan, John, 1:828 Buchstaller, Isabelle, 1:93 Buck, Carl Darling, 1:166, 1:170 Buckley, 2:1984 Bueno Alonso, Jorge L., 1:66 Buffalo, 1:81 Bu¨lbring, Karl D., 1:255, 2:1290, 2:1326, 2:1332, 2:1333, 2:1334, 2:1342 Bulgaria, 2:1387–1388 Bullokar, John, 1:645, 1:710, 1:1007, 1:1053, 2:1711 Bullokar, William, 1:225, 1:639, 1:701, 1:969, 1:1008 Bunyan, John, 2:1883 Burchfield, Robert, 1:80, 1:92, 1:1057 Burchfield Report, 1:1093 Burckhardt, Jacob, 2:1211 Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 2:1802, 2:1804 Burger, Harald, 1:183, 1:189 Burghley, William Cecil, Baron, 1:647 Burgundy, 1:561, 1:562 Burke, Peter, 1:984 Burmeister, Joachim, 2:1225 Burness, Edwina, 1:810, 1:811, 1:816, 1:819 Burney Collection of Newspapers, 1:1064 Burnley, David – bibliography of Middle English texts, 1:557 – on Chaucer, 1:204, 1:456, 1:585 – on French loans, 2:1679 – on French “supra-dialectal lexis”, 1:529 – identification of “curial” style, 1:522 – on Lagamon’s Brut, 1:430 – on periodization schemes, 2:1252 – on the use of English in schools, 1:546 – work on pronoun choice, 1:204, 1:473, 1:542
2164 Burns, Robert, 2:1883, 2:1957–1958 Burton, Dolores M., 1:816 Burton, Robert, 2:1881 Burton, Thomas L., 2:1127 Bury St. Edmunds, 1:344 Busse, Beatrix, 1:739, 1:811, 1:820, 1:822 Busse, Ulrich, 1:204, 1:653, 1:656, 1:662, 1:739, 1:821 Butcher, Judith, 2:1892 Butler, Charles, 1:701–702, 1:705, 1:708, 2:1227 Butler, Susan, 2:2003 Butt, Miriam, 2:1650 Butters, Ronald R., 1:1095, 2:1836 Butterworth, Charles C., 1:1042, 1:1044 Bybee, Joan L. – on child language and language history, 2:1603–1605, 2:1608–1609 – on cognitive linguistics, 1:169 – on frequency, 2:1533, 2:1535, 2:1541 – hypotheses on development of futures, 1:170 – on image-schema preservation, 1:167 – on “relevance”, 2:1542 Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 1:28, 1:343, 1:347, 1:358
C Cable, Thomas, 1:316, 1:709, 1:734, 2:1167– 1168, 2:1169 Cædmon’s Hymn, 1:343, 1:345, 1:348, 1:358, 2:1142 Caesar, Julius, 1:2 Caithness, 2:1954 Calcidius, 2:1218 Calcutta, 2:2084 Calcutta Madrassa, 2:2079 Calepino, Ambrogio, 1:1052 California, 2:1743, 2:1744, 2:1844, 2:2099–2100 Callcott, John Wall, 2:1220 Calle-Martı´n, Javier, 2:1403 Calo´, 2:1748 Cambridge, Richard Owen, 2:1762 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 1:83 Cambridge “Apostles”, 2:1303 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 1:699, 2:1475, 2:1893 Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL) – on Australian and New Zealand English, 2:1996
Index – on Early Modern English, 1:49, 1:622, 1:699 – focus on phonology, 1:38, 1:344, 1:813 – on historical pragmatics, 2:1458–1459 – international contributors, 2:1314, 2:1367 – LALME and, 1:484 – on Late Modern English, 1:66, 1:843 – as milestone of the discipline, 2:1310 – periodization scheme, 2:1250–1251 – synchronic linguistics and, 2:1308 Cambridge International Corpus (CIC), 2:1893 Cambridge International Dictionary of English, 1:1059 Cambridgeshire, 1:497, 2:1267, 2:1499 Cambridge University, 1:546, 2:1291, 2:1418, 2:2082 Cambridge University Library, 1:35, see also under manuscripts Cambridge University Press, 1:1015 Camden, William, 2:1265, 2:1881 Camerata Fiorentina, 2:1218, 2:1224 Cameron, Deborah, 1:988 Cameroon, 2:1887, 2:2102, 2:2114, 2:2136, 2:2143 Cameroon Pidgin English, 2:1770, 2:1771, 2:1775, 2:2093, 2:2094 Camilleri, Antoinette, 2:1742 Campbell, Alistair – addition to Bosworth-Toller, 2:1149 – on difficulty of tracing writing traditions, 1:383 – grammar of Old English, 1:2, 1:255, 1:344, 2:1291, 2:1307 – Henry Sweet and, 2:1122 – on Old English dialectal material, 2:1121 – on Old English phonology, 1:346 – on the syntax of verse and prose, 1:281 – on the West Saxon standard, 1:375 Campbell, George, 1:185, 1:905, 1:990, 1:1011 Campbell, Lyle, 1:155, 1:156, 2:1301–1302, 2:1543 Campion, Thomas, 2:1218 Canada – African American diaspora in, 2:1833, 2:1866, 2:2095 – Ernest Klein and, 2:1376 – former slaves in, 2:1801, 2:1803 – French in, 2:1671, 2:1676 – historical linguistics in, 2:1314 – immigration into, 2:1861–1862 – Loyalists in, 1:68 – settlement of Newfoundland, 1:693
Index – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145, 2:2146 Canadiana.org, 2:1866 Canadian English, 2:1858–1872 – American English and, 2:1317, 2:1868, 2:1872, 2:2051 – in the Atlas of North American English, 2:1852 – in the Bank of English corpus, 1:1015 – “Canadian Dainty”, 2:1863, 2:1872 – Canadian Raising, 2:1868, 2:1919, 2:2051– 2052 – Canadian Shift, 2:1869, 2:2099 – codification, 1:897, 1:1015–1016, 1:1059, 2:1156 – dialect contact and, 2:2051–2052 – High Rising Terminal (HRT), 1:81, 2:2000 – linguistic corpora of, 2:1140, 2:1512, 2:1865– 1866 – main influences on, 2:1317 – in models of World English, 2:1886, 2:1887 – quotative constructions, 1:1081, 1:1095 – regional varieties, 2:1860–1861 – rhoticity, 1:593, 2:1931 – Standard, 2:1859–1860 – see also Newfoundland English Canadian Federation of Teachers, 2:1864 Canadian Linguistic Association, 2:1858 Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2:1867 Cannon, Christopher, 1:583, 2:1207 Canterbury – archbishopric, 1:342 – Ayenbite of Inwyt manuscript and, 1:42 – dialectal influences, 1:346, 1:356, 1:358 – immigration in Early Modern period, 1:688, 1:689 – local Schriftsprache, 1:383 – manuscript production, 1:344, 1:356 – middle-class speakers in, 2:1918, 2:1921 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) – Canon Yeoman’s Tale, 1:169 – Clerk’s Tale, 1:569, 2:1397 – in electronic corpora, 1:585–586 – Franklin’s Tale, 1:404, 1:472, 1:580–581, 1:584–585 – French loans in, 1:123–124 – Friar’s Tale, 1:123, 1:192–193, 1:402 – General Prologue, 1:123, 1:125, 1:460, 1:568, 2:1673, 2:2103 – idioms and fixed expressions in, 1:191
2165 – insults and verbal aggression in, 1:471–472, 1:542 – Knight’s Tale, 1:123, 1:125, 1:402, 1:542, 2:1212 – manuscripts, 1:538, 1:578 – Merchant’s Tale, 1:125 – Miller’s Tale, 1:192, 1:585 – modality in, 1:474 – online resources, 2:1132, 2:1142 – Pardoner’s Tale, 1:123, 1:542–543 – Parson’s Tale, 1:584 – pronouns of address in, 1:192 – Reeve’s Tale, 1:35, 1:125, 1:538, 1:546, 1:577, 1:580 – scribe of, 1:537 – Second Nun’s Tale, 1:405, 1:584 – Summoner’s Tale, 1:124 – Tale of Melibee, 1:564 – Tale of Sir Thopas, 1:456–457, 1:581 – versification in, 1:569 – Wife of Bath’s Tale, 1:123, 1:125, 1:402, 1:407, 1:585 Canterbury Tales Project (CTP), 1:37, 2:1142, 2:1512 Cantonese, 2:2116–2117 Cape Town, 2:2094, 2:2098, 2:2114 Cape Town English, 2:2097, 2:2100 Cardiff, 2:1979, 2:1983, 2:1984, 2:1985, 2:2037 Cardiff University College, 2:1988 Carew, Richard, 1:638, 1:644, 2:1265 Cargill, Morris, 2:1777 Caribbean Artists Movement, 2:1778 Caribbean English – codification, 1:898, 1:943, 1:1016, 2:1156 – Creoles, 2:1776, 2:1829, 2:1832, 2:1833, 2:1834, 2:2094 – influence on London English, 2:2027 – in models of World English, 2:1887 – origins and development, 1:693–694, 2:1444 – prejudice against, 1:1022, 1:1023 – realization of STRUT vowel, 2:2102–2103 – study by North American scholars, 2:1317 – see also Jamaican Creole English Carlyle, Thomas, 1:872 Carmarthen, 2:1987, 2:1990 Carney, Edward, 1:232 Carney, Ginny, 2:1762 Carpenter, David, 2:1676 Carr, Charles T., 2:1667 Carriacou, 2:2121 Carrillo-Linares, Marı´a Jose´, 1:502, 2:1403
2166 Carroll, Clare, 1:1007 Carroll, Jayne, 2:1125 Carroll, Lewis, 1:200 Carroll, Ruth, 2:1366 Carruthers, Leo, 2:1399 Carter, Ronald, 1:80, 1:93 Carvalho, Ana Maria, 1:1083 Carver, Craig, 2:1852 Cassidy, Frederic G., 2:1156, 2:1316, 2:1319, 2:1761, 2:1849, 2:2123 Castel of Helth (Elyot), 1:1007 Castiglione, Baldessare, 2:1224 Castillo, Concha, 2:1405 Catalan, 1:1112, 2:2141 Cathedral Chapter Library (Lincoln), 1:42 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), 2:2063 Catholic Homilies (Ælfric) – adjective stacking, 1:302 – Ælfric’s correcting hand in MSS of, 1:381– 382 – conjunctions, 1:154, 1:311, 1:312 – determiners, 1:160 – impersonal constructions, 1:298 – it-cleft constructions in, 2:1695 – occurrence of phrase on leoðwison, 1:395 – prepositions, 1:301 – subjunctive, 1:305 – syntax of behofian, 2:1651–1652 – verb tenses, 1:303, 1:304 – as vernacular texts, 2:1281 – word order, 1:295, 1:296 Catholicon Anglicum, 1:640 Catholics, 1:53, 1:57, 1:648, 1:1007, 1:1041 Caution to Gentlemen who use Sheridan’s Dictionary, 1:833 Cavendish, George, 1:736 Cavendish, Margaret, see Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Cawdrey, Robert, 1:645, 1:969, 1:1008, 1:1053, 2:1711, see also A Table Alphabeticall (Cawdrey) Cawley, A. C., 1:570, 1:574 Caxton, William – choice of dialect for printing, 1:546 – edition of Morte d’Arthur, 2:1359 – editions of Canterbury Tales, 2:1142 – effect on orthography, 2:1248–1249 – employment of foreign compositors, 1:702 – introduction of metrical romance form, 1:562 – mimicry of manuscript letters, 2:1283–1284 – periphrastic do in, 1:746
Index – – – – – –
range of publications, 2:1881 style, 1:244, 1:563 syntax, 1:634 third person plural -en, 1:607 use of Latinate vocabulary, 2:1714 on varieties of English, 1:546, 1:560–561, 1:643, 1:982–983 – see also printing Cayman Islands, 2:2121 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 1:1094 Cecil, Robert, 1:632 Celtic – Brythonic, 2:1694, 2:1696 – comparative philology and, 2:1301 – contact with English, 2:1687–1700 – contact with Germanic, 1:2, 2:1186 – family of languages in Britain, 1:687 – in formation of Anglo-Saxon identity, 1:22 – influence as substrate language, 1:510, 1:515, 1:517, 1:687–688, 1:747 – it-cleft construction, 2:1694–1698 – Latin and, 1:23, 1:367 – loans in Old English, 1:316, 1:319, 1:367 – Northern Personal Pronoun Rule and, 1:42, 1:444 – periphrastic do and, 1:688, 1:747, 2:1687 – progressive aspect and, 1:687–688, 2:1688– 1694 – in sociolinguistic approaches, 2:1441 – survival in Middle English and Early Modern periods, 1:57, 1:507 – toponyms, 1:213, 1:316, 2:1687 Celtis, Conradus, 2:1218 Cely Letters, 1:473, 1:749, 2:1450 Central Press, 1:1066 Centre d’Etudes Me´die´vales Anglaises (CEMA), 2:1398 Centre for Manuscript Studies, 2:1385 Centre for Medieval English Studies (Tokyo), 2:1415 Century Dictionary (Whitney), 1:1014 Century of Prose Corpus (COPC), 1:870, 1:874 Cercignani, Fausto, 1:813, 2:1400 Cˇerma´k, Jan, 2:1378 Cerne Abbas, 1:343 Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, 2:1139, 2:1466 Chafe, Wallace L., 1:242, 2:1278, 2:1475 Chalcidius, 2:1218 Challoner, Richard, 1:1045 Chamberlain, John, 1:623, 1:691
Index Chambers, Ephraim, 1:74 Chambers, Jack K., 1:1095, 2:1861, 2:1863, 2:1864, 2:1868, 2:1870, 2:2051, 2:2100 Chambers, R. W., 1:524 Chancery writings – administrative register of, 1:242 – as basis for Standard English, 2:1283 – mixed dialect of, 2:1270 – Northernisms in, 2:1446 – “standard”, 1:525–526 – criticism of notion of, 1:493, 1:526, 1:1001– 1002, 2:1445 – Samuels’s Type IV, 1:538 – in the standardization of English, 1:546, 1:969 – use outside London, 1:521, 2:1710 – structure of letters, 1:246–247 Chang Suk-Jin, 2:1417 Chankova, Yana, 2:1388 Channel 4 News, 1:83 Channel Islands English, 2:1936, 2:1943, 2:1945, 2:1946 Chanson de Roland, 2:1204, 2:1788 Chapman, Don, 1:333–334 Chapman, George, 1:638, 1:782, 1:784, 1:788 Chapman, James, 2:1221 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury), 1:939 Charles, Prince of Wales, 1:967–968 Charles II, King of England, 2:1299 Charles University in Prague, 2:1290, 2:1377– 1378 Charlton, Kenneth, 2:1284 Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe), 2:1959 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1:576–587 – Eustache Deschamps on, 2:1206 – lexicon, 1:582–586 – of dreaming, 1:456–557 – Early Modern glossary, 1:646 – of emotion, 1:457 – French loans, 1:582–585, 2:1675 – Greek loans, 2:1720 – Latinate verbs, 2:1714 – use of clepe and calle, 1:528 – use of conceit, 1:169 – use of unclose, 1:462 – Lydgate and, 1:567 – mixed dialect of, 2:2047 – morphology
2167 – agentive noun phrases, 1:461 – final -e, 1:418, 1:443, 1:579 – forms of third person plural, 1:515, 1:581, 1:733 – noun and pronoun paradigms, 1:579–580 – verbal inflections, 1:581–582 – notion of literary canon, 2:1211 – in periodization schemes, 2:1249 – pragmatics, 1:194, 1:203, 1:204, 1:420, 1:542 – representation of dialectal speech, 1:35, 1:538, 1:546, 1:577 – resumptive pronouns in, 2:2103 – Samuels’s Type II and, 1:524, 1:525, 1:538 – scribe of, 1:537 – style, 1:244, 1:569–570 – use of set phrases, 1:181 – versification, 1:115–116, 1:121–122, 1:418, 1:568 – word stress in, 1:401–402 – see also individual works Chaucernet, 2:1145 Chaucer Society, 1:37, 1:1013 Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary (Mersand), 1:582 Chaucer Studio, 2:1145–1146 Cheke, John, Sir, 1:1008, 2:1291, 2:1298, 2:1300 Chen Guohua, 2:1418 Cheon Sang-Beom, 2:1417 Cherokee, 1:227, 1:890 Cheshire, 1:495, 1:577, 2:2046 Cheshire, Jenny, 1:80, 2:1937–1942 Chester, 2:1981 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, Earl of, 1:902, 1:1010, 1:1055, 2:1884 Chester-le-Street, 1:343, 1:344 Chester “mystery” plays, 1:570 Chetham Library, 1:35 Chicago, 1:81, 2:1844 Chicago Manual of Style, 2:1892 Chicano English, 2:1743–1746 Chickasaw, 2:1755, 2:1769 children and youth – acquisition and language change, 2:1599– 1610 – acquisition of specific varieties, 1:149, 1:156 – contrast recognition, 1:109 – in creolization process, 2:1770, 2:1773–1774 – dictation software and, 1:1017 – Estuary English and, 2:1919–1920 – in history of English textbooks, 2:1186 – hypocoristics, 2:2004
2168 – impact of style on British English, 2:1894 – media influence and, 1:1078, 1:1079, 1:1080, 1:1082, 1:1095, 2:1922–1923 – mothers’ language and, 2:1496 – in Optimality Theory, 2:1655 – pidgin English in Africa and, 2:2094, 2:2096 – quotative constructions, 2:1491 – ritual insults, 1:329, 2:1462 – simplification of consonant clusters, 1:104 – Standard English and, 2:1821, 2:1824 – in studies of Chicano English, 2:1746 – TH-fronting, 2:2023, 2:2039 – use of English in Gibraltar and, 2:1747 – use of intensifiers, 1:173 Chile, 2:1862 China, 1:52, 2:1862, 2:1886, 2:2116, 2:2126, 2:2137 China Daily (newspaper), 2:1896 Chinese – as analytic type, 1:41 – in Hong Kong, 2:2116–2117 – on the internet, 1:1112 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – semantic typology, 1:174 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – writing system, 1:38, 1:227, 1:228 Chinese Pidgin English, 2:1768 Chinese Revolution (1912), 2:2116 Choctaw, 2:1755, 2:1760, 2:1763, 2:1769 Choi Ik-Hwan, 2:1417 Chomsky, Noam, 1:761, 2:1229, 2:1297, 2:1309, 2:1314, 2:1315, 2:1422, see also generative linguistics Cho Nahm-Ho, 2:1417 Cho Sung-Sik, 2:1417 Chre´tien de Troyes, 2:1204, 2:1282 Chronological English Dictionary (CED) – on expansion of lexicon, 1:173, 1:641, 1:709, 1:813, 1:955 – on non-native suffixes, 1:610 – on Shakespeare, 2:1712 – SOED and, 1:73, 1:611, 2:1679 – in study of French loans, 2:1679, 2:1680, 2:1683 – in study of Latin loans, 2:1704, 2:1709, 2:1716 Churchill, Caryl, 2:1198 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 2:1221–1222 Cincinnati, 2:2040 Circolwyrde (website), 2:1132
Index Clanchy, Michael T., 2:1278, 2:1443, 2:1784 Claridge, Claudia, 1:184, 1:248, 1:653 Clark, Brady, 2:1655–1656 Clark, Cecily – on “linguistic archaeology”, 2:1165–1166, 2:1170, 2:1175 – on loss of grammatical gender, 1:418 – on onomastics, 2:1123 – on spelling in the Peterborough Chronicle, 2:1552 – study of bynames, 1:218 – translation of Bourcier’s textbook, 2:1398 – on vocabulary in the Peterborough Chronicle, 2:1282 Clark, John W., 1:960 Clarke, Gillian, 2:1989 Clarke, Sandra, 2:1317, 2:1861, 2:1869, 2:2099 Cleanness, 1:564 Cleveland, 1:81 Cleves, 1:690 Clift, Elizabeth, 1:882 Clockmaker (Haliburton), 2:1817 Cloud of Unknowing, 1:559 Cluniac reform, 1:27–28 Cluny, 1:27 Clyne, Michael, 2:1888, 2:1896, 2:2006 CNN, 1:1101, 2:1895 Cnut I, King of England, 1:240, 1:332, 1:391, 2:1726 Coates, Jennifer, 1:960, 1:961 Coates, Richard, 1:221 Cobbett, William, 1:942, 1:1011 Cochrane, George R., 2:2053 Cocker, Edward, 1:1010 Cockeram, Henry, 1:618, 1:643, 1:710, 1:969, 1:1007, 1:1053, 1:1054, 2:1711 Cockney English, 2:2013–2029 – Australian and New Zealand English and, 2:1998, 2:1999, 2:2053 – consonants, 2:1931, 2:2022–2024 – Estuary English and, 2:1914, 2:1916, 2:1920 – in the media, 1:1079, 1:1081–1082, 2:1922 – “remedies” for accent, 2:1902 – rhyming slang, 2:2027–2029 – [r]-insertion, 1:840 – South African English and, 2:2098 – stigmatization of, 1:917, 1:944, 1:957, 1:958 – vowels, 1:765, 1:834, 2:1905, 2:1934, 2:2016– 2021 Cockneyfication of RP? (Wells), 2:1920
Index code-switching – in African Englishes, 2:2096 – in American Greek, 2:1723 – among Indian English speakers, 2:2081 – in Early Modern English, 1:57, 2:1448 – in Gibraltarian speech, 2:1746 – in Middle English, 1:474–475, 1:508–510, 1:686, 2:1443 – between Old English and Old Norse, 2:1267 – in Wales, 2:1987 Codifiers and the English language project, 2:1343 Coetsem, Frans van, 1:2 Coggle, Paul, 2:1913–1915, 2:1916 cognitive linguistics – categorization in, 1:159–160 – corpus linguistics and, 1:161 – cyclical model of fixation and, 1:188–189 – grammaticalization and, 2:1559, 2:1563 – semantics vs. pragmatics in, 1:166, 1:168 – study of idioms and fixed expressions, 1:183 – theory of semantic change, 1:165–174, 1:320– 321 – as “usage-based” theory, 1:169 Cohen, Gerald, 2:1175 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 2:1206 Colchester, 1:688, 2:1918, 2:1921 Coleman, Julie, 1:803, 2:1678 Coleridge, Herbert, 1:1013 Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth, 1:848 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2:1450 Coles, Elisha, 1:643, 1:1007, 1:1053 Collection of English Words not Generally Used (Ray), 1:1009, 1:1057 Collins, Beverley, 2:1909, 2:1910, 2:1984, 2:2037 Collins, Peter, 1:82, 1:88 Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 1:1059 Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, 1:187 Collins Contemporary Dictionary (Austr. and NZ edn.), 1:1059 collocation, 1:169–170, 1:188, 1:191–192, 1:455–457 collostructional analysis, 1:169–170, 2:1639–1640 Colman, Fran, 1:220, 2:1125 Cologne Corpus, 2:1465 Colorado, 2:1844 Columbian Dictionary (Alexander), 1:1012
2169 Columbia University, 1:1014, 1:1026, 1:1064, 2:1331, 2:1377 Comenius University, 2:1379 Commonwealth of Nations, 2:2138 comparative frame analysis, 1:329 Comparative Grammar (Bopp), 2:1302 comparison – double, 1:607, 1:943, 1:960 – in Early Modern English, 1:606–607, 1:706 – in Late Modern English, 1:863–864, 1:943 – in Middle English, 1:606 – in Old English, 1:282 – pan-British forms, 2:1938 – in West Germanic, 1:14 Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and XVI Century (Pound), 2:1329 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (Webster), 1:1056 Compleat Angler (Walton), 2:1883 The Compleat Gentleman (Peacham), 2:1226 A Compleat Melody (Tans’ur), 2:1219 Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (Spevack), 1:809 Complete Mendicant (Defoe), 1:804 Complexity Principle, 1:859, 1:880 Complutense University of Madrid, 2:1401, 2:1402 Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al.), 1:700 computer-assisted language learning (CALL), 1:1113 Computerised Linguistic Atlas of England (CLAE), 1:924 computer-mediated communication (CMC), 1:1105–1118 Computus Fragment, 2:1696 Comrie, Bernard, 1:89, 1:657 Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Clark Hall), 1:316, 1:318, 2:1134, 2:1144, 2:1150 Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 2:1158 Concise Scots Dictionary, 1:673, 1:1059 Concise Ulster Dictionary, 2:1156 Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo, 2:1402, 2:1403, 2:1445, 2:2034 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 1:456, 1:528, 1:566–567 Congreve, William, 1:784 Connecticut, 2:2050 Connolly, John H., 2:1985 Connor, Ralph, 2:1864
2170 Conran, Tony, 2:1988 Considine, John, 1:639, 1:642, 2:1175 Consolation of Philosophy (Chaucer), 1:537 Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS), 2:1143 Constant Rate Effect, 1:158, 1:750–751, 1:754 Constitutions of Oxford (1407–1408), 1:1041 Construction Grammar (CxG), 2:1294, 2:1564–1565, 2:1586, 2:1631–1644 Contemporary English, see Present Day English Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154 (Nielsen), 2:1180 Conversational Routines in English (Aijmer), 1:191 Conway, Ann, 1:53 Cook, James (Captain), 2:2136 Cook Islands, 2:2114 Cooley, Arnold James, 1:829, 1:833 Coombes, Bert, 2:1988 Cooper, Christopher, 2:1299, 2:1882 Cooper, Helen, 1:561, 1:563, 2:1203 Cooper, James Fenimore, 1:876, 2:1762, 2:1840 Cooper, Thomas, 1:638, 1:1052 Co-operative Principle of Grice, 1:392, 1:663, 2:1198 Coote, Edmund, 1:639, 1:645, 1:710, 1:836, 1:1053 Copy-Editing (Butcher), 2:1892 Corbett, John, 1:320, 1:889 Corbidge, Rob, 2:1920 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 1:653, 1:663, 1:821 Cork, County, 2:1967 Cornell University, 2:1291, 2:1314 Cornish, 1:671, 1:687, 2:1151 Cornwallis, Charles, 2:2079 Cornwell, John, 2:1306 Corpus Glossary, 1:348, 1:350, 2:1124, 2:1549, 2:1553 corpus linguistics, 2:1509–1523 – Chaucer’s vocabulary and, 1:585 – cognitive linguistics and, 1:161 – collostructional analysis and, 1:169–170 – data collection, 1:936 – developments, 1:37–38 – discourse analysis and, 1:208, 1:912 – general language vs. genre-specific, 1:901 – of global English, 2:2141 – historical pragmatics and, 1: 208, 2:1465– 1466
Index – historical sociolinguistics and, 2:1439 – historical syntax and, 1:157, 1:158, 1:436, 1:448–449 – idioms and fixed expressions and, 1:180, 1:182, 1:187 – Late Modern English studies and, 1:66, 1:889 – Lexical Functional Grammar and, 2:1657 – limitations, 2:1521–1523 – media language and, 1:1081 – methods, 1:65, 2:1436 – Old English studies and, 1:334 – Randolph Quirk and, 1:1015 – “real usage” and, 1:889 – Shakespeare’s language and, 1:821 – in study of semantic change, 1:165 – in study of standardization, 1:377 – in study of style and register, 1:249 – see also Helsinki Corpus (HC) Corpus of 19th-century Scottish Correspondence, 1:948 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 1:857, 2:1140, 2:1195 Corpus of Early American English (CEAE), 2:1141 Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) – CEECS and, 2:1138 – do periphrasis in, 1:708, 1:748, 1:753, 1:754, 2:1362 – Early Modern English dialectology and, 1:672 – encoding of texts, 1:640 – extension, 1:945 – historical pragmatics and, 2:1465 – importance for linguistic study, 1:37, 1:67, 1:250, 1:622, 1:663, 1:669, 1:716, 2:1357 – inadequate size for fine-grained analysis, 1:721 – parsed corpora of, 2:1140, 2:1357 – second person pronouns in, 1:718–719, 1:728, 1:737 – size, 2:1516 – in social network analysis, 2:2034 – sociolinguistic studies on, 2:1364, 2:1442 – as specialized corpus, 2:1512 – in studies of diffusion, 2:2036 – studies of politeness and, 1:658 – studies of relative pronouns, 1:677 – third person singular endings, 1:607–608, 1:728 – women’s language in, 2:1519–1520
Index Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS), 2:1138, 2:1516 Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM), 1:250, 2:1139, 2:1366, 2:1512 Corpus of Early Ontario English (CONTE), 2:1512, 2:1516, 2:1865, 2:1866 Corpus of English Dialogues (CED) – annotation, 2:1517 – “bad data” problem and, 2:1276 – in corpus linguistics, 2:1139, 2:1512 – historical pragmatics and, 2:1466 – historical sociolinguistics and, 1:622, 1:716, 2:1442 – size, 2:1516 – study of hedges in, 1:660 – study of relativizers in, 1:777 – study of second person pronouns in, 1:656– 657, 1:704, 2:1520 – in teaching history of English, 2:1195 – text types, 1:653, 2:1275 Corpus of English Novels (CEN), 2:1139 Corpus of English Religious Prose, 1:208 Corpus of English Scientific Writing 1600– 1900, 2:1403 Corpus of Euro English, 2:2141 Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2:1140, 2:1195, 2:1516, 2:1865 Corpus of Irish English (CIE), 2:1139, 2:1512, 2:1516, 2:1519 Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (CLECP), 1:67, 1:945, 1:948, 2:1139 Corpus of Late Modern British and American English Prose 1700–1889, 1:870, 2:1404 Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (CLMEP), 1:870, 1:945, 2:1139, 2:1516 Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET), 2:1139, 2:1515, 2:1516 Corpus of Late Modern English Texts Extended Version (CLMETEV), 2:1139, 2:1346 Corpus of Middle English Medical Texts, 2:1358, 2:1516 Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CME), 2:1134–1135, 2:1515, 2:1516 Corpus of Nineteenth-century English (CONCE), 1:870, 1:873, 1:909, 1:945, 2:1521 Corpus of Older African American Letters (COAAL), 2:1802, 2:1804 Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE), 2:1516, 2:1997
2171 Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC), 1:37, 1:672, 1:675, 1:678, 1:681, 2:1358, 2:1442, 2:1513 Corpus Presenter, 2:1140 Corpus Resource Database (CoRD), 2:1523 Corrigan, Karen P., 2:1968 Corte´s-Rodrı´guez, Francisco J., 2:1403 Coseriu, Eugenio, 1:538, 1:995–996, 1:997, 2:1335 Cosijn, Peter J., 2:1342 Costa Rica, 2:2121 Cotgrave, Randle, 1:648, 1:1052 Cotter, Eugene, 2:1136 Cotton, Robert, Sir, 1:35 Council of Europe, 2:1959, 2:2138 Council of Trent, 1:1043 A Counterblast to Tobacco ( James I), 2:1815 counterhierarchical model of diffusion, 2:2037 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Sidney), 1:794, 1:798 Coupland, Nikolas, 1:1081, 2:1983, 2:1984, 2:1985, 2:1987 Cours de Linguistique Ge´ne´rale (Saussure), 2:1307–1308, 2:1335 Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus (Thelwall), 2:1221 Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (Priestley), 1:970 Coverdale, Miles, 1:1042 Cowell, John, 1:647 Cowie, A. P., 1:180, 1:183, 1:184, 1:187, 1:1007 Craig, Beth, 2:1765 Craigie, William A., Sir, 1:46, 2:1149, 2:1152, 2:1153, 2:1156, 2:1309 Craik, George Lillie, 2:1182 Cranmer, Thomas, 2:1298 creoles, 2:1767–1780, 2:2120–2132 – in Africa, 2:2095–2096 – Atlantic, 1:693–694, 2:1771, 2:2121–2125, 2:2130, 2:2131 – classification of, 2:1770–1772 – features, 2:2127–2132 – legal language as, 1:240 – Pacific, 2:1771–1772, 2:2125–2127, 2:2130 – progressive form in, 2:1690 – spread of English and, 1:156 creolization – in African American English, 2:1318 – in Australia, 2:2006 – defined, 2:1769–1770 – grammaticalization and, 2:1569–1570
2172 – of Middle English, 1:508, 2:1247, 2:1682, 2:1781–1791 – of Old English, 2:1262, 2:1267, 2:1443 – in slavery contexts, 1:694 Cre´pin, Andre´, 2:1398, 2:1399 Crespo-Garcı´a, Begon˜a, 2:1403, 2:1666 CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), 2:1989 Crewe, 2:1981 Crist, Sean, 2:1134 Critical (review journal), 1:1009 Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (Walker), 1:71, 1:833, 1:917, 1:941, 1:1011, 1:1056, 2:2015, see also Walker, John Critical Review, 1:1010 Croatia, 2:1385, 2:1386 Croft, Bill, 2:1636 Croll, Morris W., 1:245 Crowley, Joseph P., 2:1120, 2:1121, 2:1125 Crowley, Tony, 1:941, 1:943, 1:1058, 2:1271, 2:1963 Cruse, Alan, 1:198 Cruttenden, Alan, 2:1907 Cruz, Juan de la, 2:1402 Crystal, Ben, 1:809 Crystal, David – on H. W. Fowler, 1:973 – on Internet English, 1:1109 – on the language of the Bible, 1:643, 1:1041, 1:1042, 1:1047 – narrative style, 2:1174 – on non-standard forms in literature, 1:918 – on periodization schemes, 2:1251–1252 – on text-messaging, 2:1824 – work on Shakespeare, 1:809, 1:810, 1:813 Cuba, 2:1820 Cukor-Avila, Patricia, 2:1799, 2:1834 Culioli, Antoine, 2:1398 Culpeper, Jonathan – Corpus of English Dialogues and, 1:716 – on drama as linguistic evidence, 1:475 – range of investigative foci, 1:208 – work on courtroom discourse, 1:206, 1:653, 1:654, 2:1451 – work on directives, 1:654, 1:655 – work on discourse strategies, 1:659–660 – work on fictional texts, 2:1451 – work on impoliteness, 1:659, 1:820 cultural hearth model of diffusion, 2:2036 Cultural Materialism, 2:1212 Cumberland, 1:39, 1:495, 1:497, 1:672, 2:1733
Index Cumbria, 2:1726 Cumbrian, 1:687 Cunliffe, Richard John, 1:809 Cura Pastoralis (Pope Gregory I), 1:26, see also Alfredian translations Curme, George O., 1:70 Current Intelligence (newspaper), 1:1065 Cursor Mundi, 1:421, 1:559, 1:982 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 2:1402 Curtius, Georg, 2:1330 Curzan, Anne, 2:1169, 2:1170–1171, 2:1172, 2:1173, 2:1185, 2:1297 Cutler, Charles, 2:1762 Cuyckens, Hubert, 2:1346 Cyclopedia (Chambers), 1:74 Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, 2:1990 Cynewulf, 1:343, 1:359 Cyprus, 2:2139 Czech, 2:1378, 2:1601 Czechoslovakia, 2:1376, 2:1379 Czech Republic, 2:1290, 2:1377–1379
D Daily Advertiser, 1:1066 Daily Courant, 1:1065–1066 Daily Express, 1:1067 Daily Gazetteer, 1:1066 Daily Herald, 1:1067 Daily Mail, 1:1067 Daily Mirror, 1:1067 Daily Sketch, 1:1067 Daily Universal Register, see The Times (newspaper) Dal, Ingerid, 2:1691, 2:1692 Dalby, David, 2:1834 Dall’antico al medio inglese (Frank), 2:1400 Dallas (TV program), 2:1818 Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, 1:431, 2:1187, 2:1681 Dalzell, Tom, 2:1157 Dance, Richard, 1:502, 2:1159 Danchev, Andrei, 1:468, 2:1388, 2:1782 Danelaw – bilingualism in, 1:464 – language contact in – effect on inflectional morphology, 1:515 – fictional scenarios illustrating, 2:1268, 2:1493–1494 – koı¨neization process, 1:508, 2:1491, 2:1494, 2:1498
Index – place-name evidence of, 2:1267 – type of lexical borrowing, 1:527 – third person plural pronouns, 1:733 – toponyms and, 1:216, 1:217, 2:1267 – Treaty of Wedmore and, 1:25 Danet, Brenda, 1:1112 Danielsson, Bror, 1:125 Danish, 1:752, 2:1725, 2:2141, 2:2143 Danker, Otto, 2:1334 Dante Alighieri, 1:984, 2:1211, 2:1298 D’Arcy, Alexandra, 1:93, 2:1870 Dareau, Marace, 2:1152 Darwin, Charles, 1:768, 2:1297 Dasher, Richard B., 1:199–200, 1:661, 2:1459 Daunt, Marjorie, 1:9, 1:259 Davies, Dan Isaac, 2:1982 Davies, Mark, 1:889, 2:1140 Davies, Norman, 1:90 Davis, Glenn, 2:1168–1170 Davis, Norman, 1:247, 1:568–569 Davy, Derek, 1:1047 Dawes, William, 1:898 Dawson, Hope C., 1:508, 2:1267 Death’s Jest Book (Beddoes), 2:1211 DeBose, Charles, 2:1834 Debrecen University, 2:1381 DeCamp, David, 2:2123–2124 decliticization, 2:1583–1584 De consolatione philosophiae (Boethius), 1:26, 1:347, 1:704, see also Alfredian translations Dedeurwaerder, Goedele, 2:1704 Dees, Anthonij, 2:1433 Deffense et illustration de la langue franc¸aise (Du Bellay), 1:984 Defoe, Daniel, 1:804, 1:864, 1:907, 1:940, 1:1009 De Fructu (Pace), 2:1222 De gestis Pontificum Anglorum (William of Malmesbury), 2:1264 degrammaticalization, 2:1571, 2:1577, 2:1585, 2:1588–1591 De institutione musice (Boethius), 2:1218 De Interpretatione (Aristotle), 1:225, 1:968 Deira, 2:1952–1953, 2:1954 Dekeyser, Xavier, 1:778, 1:779, 1:780, 1:858, 2:1187, 2:1346, 2:1678 Dekker, Thomas, 1:703, 1:803 De laude virginitatis (Aldhelm), 1:29 Delbridge, Arthur, 1:1098 Delbru¨ck, Berthold, 2:1331
2173 De lingua polonica praestantia et utilitate (Rybinski), 1:984 Delius, Nikolaus, 2:1331 Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella, 1:474, 2:1401 De Montfort University, 2:1142 De Musica (Augustine), 2:1219 De musica cum tonario ( Johannes Afflighemensis), 2:1222 Denevan, William M., 2:1754 Denis, Derek, 1:1109, 1:1110 Denison, David – on collective nouns, 1:859 – on the determiner in early English, 1:159, 1:160 – on errors and linguistic change, 1:80 – on F. Th. Visser, 1:875 – on indirect questions, 1:85 – on Late Modern English syntax, 1:65, 1:66, 1:69, 1:843 – linguistic corpora, 1:889, 2:1139 – on passive construction with transfer verbs, 1:91 – on progressive constructions, 1:871, 1:873 – social network analysis, 2:1450 – on the suffix -age, 1:82 – treatment of morphological structure, 1:130 – on use of don’t, 1:960 Denmark, 1:2, 1:342, 1:363, 2:1266, 2:1355, 2:2139, 2:2145 Dennis, Leah, 1:873 den Otter, Alice G., 2:1661, 2:1666–1667 Denton, Jeannette M., 1:10, 2:1169, 2:1173 De origine et effectu musicae (Anon.), 2:1223 deparadigmaticization, 2:1590 Deppe, Ulrike, 2:1337 Derby, 1:213, 2:1266, 2:2036 Derbyshire, 1:497, 2:1267, 2:1430, 2:1431 Derolez, Rene´, 2:1345 Derrida, Jacques, 2:1207 Deschamps, Eustache, 2:1206 De Schryver, Gilles-Maurice, 1:1016 Description of Britain (Caxton), 1:607 Description of England (Camden), 2:1265 Destruction of Troy, 1:630, 2:1142 Detroit, 1:81 Deuchar, Margaret, 2:1987 Deuschle, E. L., 2:1342 De utraque verborum ac rerum copia (Erasmus), 1:798 Deutsche Grammatik (Grimm), 2:1302 Deutscher Sprachatlas, 2:1841
2174 Deutschmann, Mats, 1:203 Deverson, Tony, 2:2001 Devon, 1:497, 1:691, 2:2046 Devonish, Hubert, 1:1016, 2:1777, 2:1778 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 1:984 Diachronex project, 2:1346 Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), 1:875 Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) conference, 2:1292 Diachronic Internet Corpus of English (DICE), 2:1140–1141 dialect contact, 2:2044–2057 – in Early Modern English, 1:691–692 – education and, 1:67 – geographical mobility and, 1:51, 1:67–68, 1:525 – in history of English, 1:156 – in Middle English, 1:506, 1:525 – in Old English, 2:2045–2046 – Present Day English and, 2:1446 Dialect Levelling project, 2:1916–1918 Dialect Notes ( journal), 2:1316, 2:1841, 2:1849 dialectology, 2:1421–1436 – of American English, 2:1839–1857 – of British English, 2:1928–1950 – DARE and, 2:1156 – of Early Modern English, 1:668–685 – foundations in Late Modern English period, 2:1446 – historical vs. general, 2:1422–1423 – Joseph Wright and, 2:1155, 2:1307 – language contact and, 2:1359–1360 – of Late Modern English, 1:915–938 – making of linguistic atlases, 2:1427–1436, 2:1841–1842 – mapping techniques, 2:1234–1235 – methods, 2:1841–1842, 2:1849, 2:1852 – of Middle English, 1:480–505 – of Old English, 1:340–361 – research strands, 2:1358–1359 – synchronic linguistics and, 2:1308, 2:1421– 1422 – vs. sociolinguistics, 2:1426–1427, 2:1847–1848 – see also Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME); Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland (Murray), 2:1239 Dialogi (Pope Gregory I), 1:26, 1:343, 1:345, see also Alfredian translations
Index Dialogo della lingua (Speroni), 1:984 Dias, Bartolomeu, 2:2114 Diatriba de Europaeorum Linguis (Scaliger), 2:1299 Dı´az-Vera, Javier E., 2:1403 Dickens, Charles, 1:846, 1:852, 1:871, 1:880, 1:893, 2:1614–1615 Dictionarie of French and English Tongues (Cotgrave), 1:1052 Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tongue (Ridley), 1:640 dictionaries, 1:1050–1062, 2:1149–1163 – American English and, 1:68, 1:893, 1:895 – dating of citations, 2:1133, 2:1150, 2:1151, 2:1154 – in determining lexicon size, 1:173 – dialect, 1:1057 – earliest monolingual English, 1:710 – in the Early Modern period, 1:638–639, 1:642–643, 1:644–646 – etymologies in, 2:1151, 2:1158, 2:1173 – French-English, 1:546 – hard-word, 1:640–641, 1:643, 1:710, 1:896, 1:1003, 1:1053–1054 – of idioms and proverbs, 1:184 – as language data, 1:187, 1:889 – online, 1:1016, 1:1059, 2:1132–1136, 2:1194– 1195 – ordering of senses in, 2:1154–1155 – orthographic standardization and, 1:233–234 – prescriptivism and, 1:969–970 – pronouncing, 1:71, 1:827–842, 1:917, 1:1011, 1:1056, 2:1903 – pronunciations in, 2:1153–1154 – of regional varieties, 2:1155–1157 – of Scots, 1:894–895 – of World Englishes, 1:1015 – see also Dictionary of Old English (DOE); Dictionary of the English Language ( Johnson); Middle English Dictionary (MED); Oxford English Dictionary (OED); individual dictionaries Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (Kersey), 1:1054 Dictionarium Britannicum (Bailey), 1:970, 1:1054 Dictionary of All the Words Commonly Used in the English Tongue (Dyche), 1:1054 Dictionary of American English, 2:1156 Dictionary of Americanisms (Bartlett), 1:1013, 2:1156
Index Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), 2:1156, 2:1158, 2:1319, 2:1845, 2:1848–1851, 2:1852 Dictionary of Australian Words (Lake), 1:898 Dictionary of Bahamian English, 2:1156 Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Avis), 1:897, 2:1156, 2:1317, 2:1865, 2:1867, 2:1871 Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Allsopp), 1:1060, 2:1156 Dictionary of Jamaican English, 2:1156 Dictionary of Lowland Scots (Mackay), 1:895 Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Fowler), 1:944, 1:973, 1:975, 2:1885 Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2:1156, 2:1867 Dictionary of New Zealand English (DNZE), 2:1156, 2:1157, 2:2000 Dictionary of Old English (DOE) – corpus, 2:1515, 2:1516, 2:1619 – glosses in, 2:1124 – A to G online, 1:314, 1:315 – lexicographic advances in, 1:314 – methodology, 2:1150, 2:1309 – ongoing work at, 2:1319 – online resources, 2:1119–1120, 2:1133 – onomastics in, 1:215–216 – spelling of headwords, 1:321 Dictionary of Old English Plant Names, 1:323 Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, 1:326 Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English, 2:1867 Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE), 2:1156 Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot (Elyot), 1:638, 1:1051 Dictionary of the English Language ( Johnson) – aims, 1:895–896, 1:1055–1056 – choice of sources for, 1:943, 1:1009 – definition of rob, 1:92 – electronic versions, 2:1515 – Lord Chesterfield on, 2:1884 – on received vs. rejected language, 2:1902 – spellings in, 2:1890–1891 – standardization of English and, 1:943, 1:970 – see also Johnson, Samuel Dictionary of the Low-Dutch element in the English vocabulary (Bense), 2:1660 Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), 2:1127–1128, 2:1136, 2:1149, 2:1152–1153, 2:1154, 2:1309
2175 Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), 2:1136, 2:1153, 2:1309 Dictionnaire de l’Acade´mie Franc¸aise, 1:639, 1:1055 Diensberg, Bernard, 1:463 Dieth, Eugen, 1:920, 2:1849 Dietrich, Gerhard, 2:1337, 2:1338 Dietz, Klaus, 1:483 diffusion, 2:2031–2041 Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics (DECL), 2:1141 Digital Medievalist (web community), 2:1145 Digitising the Middle Ages (website), 2:1143 diglossia, 1:507, 1:545 Dik, Simon C., 2:1346 Dillard, Joey L., 2:1762, 2:1764, 2:1794–1795, 2:1798 Diller, Hans-Ju¨rgen, 1:238, 1:239, 1:457, 1:473 Dilworth, Thomas, 1:1012, 1:1023 Di Martino, Gabriella, 2:1400 Dinnerstein, Leonard, 2:1755 Dion, Nathalie, 1:1081 Directions for Speech and Style (Hoskyns), 1:795 discourse analysis – approaches used in, 1:199 – deixis, 1:248 – dialogue in, 1:204–205 – information structure and, 2:1477–1480 – of Internet language, 1:1109–1110, 1:1114 – of performative utterances, 1:330 – vs. pragmatics, 1:197, 1:904, 2:1468–1469 – vs. sociolinguistics, 1:541, 1:904 discourse markers – in Cockney English, 2:2027 – Early Modern English, 1:659, 1:662 – functions, 1:197, 1:659, 2:1478 – grammaticalization and, 2:1365, 2:1565– 1568 – historical pragmatics and, 1:202, 1:208 – identification of, 1:660 – as inserts, 1:201 – Late Modern English, 1:909–910 – Old English, 1:330, 1:334, 1:335 – as oral features, 1:475 – Shakespearean, 1:820–821 – subjectification and, 1:169 The Discovery of France (Robb), 2:1181 dissociation, 2:2068–2069 Dixon, Robert M. W., 2:2001, 2:2002
2176 Dobson, E. J. – Charles Barber on, 1:813 – Fausto Cercignani and, 2:1400 – influence of OED on, 2:1291 – on loss of rhoticity, 1:839 – on Middle English vowels, 1:597, 1:828 – treatment of Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:763, 1:765, 1:766 Docherty, Gerard, 1:81, 2:1918 Dock Leaves ( journal), 2:1988 Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700–1800 (Leonard), 1:75, 1:945 Dodsley, Robert, 1:1010 Dolan, Terence P., 2:1966 Đolic´, Slobodanka, 2:1386 Dollinger, Stefan, 1:889, 2:1861, 2:1864, 2:1867, 2:1870 Dolomieu, De´odat de, 1:890 Dombrovszky, Jo´zsef, 2:1381 Domesday Book, 2:1123, 2:1126, 2:1282 Dominica, 2:1771, 2:2121 Dominican Republic, 2:1803, 2:1834, 2:2095 The Dominion (newspaper), 2:2005 Donaldson, E. T., 1:585, 1:586 Donatus, Aelius, 1:38, 1:229 Donne, John, 1:793, 1:797, 2:1206, 2:1881 Dons, Ute, 1:706 do periphrasis, 1:743–756 – avoidance of, 2:1448 – be+ing and, 2:1364 – Celtic influence and, 1:688, 1:747, 2:1687 – in corpus linguistic studies, 1:708, 1:748, 1:753, 1:754 – in Early Modern English, 1:60, 1:692, 1:707– 708, 1:720–721, 1:743–756, 2:1236 – frequency and resistance to, 2:1547 – gender and, 1:748 – generative linguistic approach to, 2:1625 – in Irish English, 2:1968 – in Late Modern English, 1:688, 1:877–878 – in Middle English, 1:517, 1:744, 1:747 – in periodization schemes, 2:1245 – possible origin, 2:1362 – in Scots, 1:721, 1:748, 1:754 – in Shakespeare, 1:621, 1:751, 1:818 – spread in constructions, 1:818 – in Welsh English, 2:1986 Dorian, Nancy, 2:1757 Dorrill, George, 2:1794 Dorset, 1:688 Dossena, Marina, 1:66, 1:889, 1:901, 2:1401
Index Douglas, Gavin, 2:1955 Douglas, James, 1:830 Douglas, Sylvester, 1:830, 1:837 Douglass, Frederick, 2:1796 Dove, Mary, 1:1040 Down, County, 2:1964, 2:2072 Downer, James W., 2:1417 Do you Speak Estuary? (Coggle), 2:1914 The Dragon has Two Tongues ( Jones), 2:1988 Dravidian languages, 2:2083, 2:2084, 2:2086, 2:2087, 2:2141 Dream of the Rood, 1:335, 1:348, 2:1952 Drout, Michael, 2:1145 Dryden, John, 1:608, 1:1009 Dryden, traducteur de Chaucer et de Boccace (Culioli), 2:1398–1399 Du Bellay, Joachim, 1:984 Dublin, 1:759 Dublin English, 2:2062, 2:2064, 2:2067–2070 Dubois, Marguerite-Marie, 2:1398 Ductor in Linguas (Minsheu), 1:638, 1:646, 1:647, 1:1052 Dudley, Robert, see Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of Dumfries and Galloway, 1:673 Dunbar, William, 2:1955 Dunn, Ernest F., 2:1834 Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1:378 Dunton, John, 2:1698 Durban, 2:2098 Durham, 1:344, 1:446, 1:495, 1:497, 1:656, 2:1505, 2:1733, 2:1952 Durham, 1:121 Durham Ritual gloss, 1:28, 1:343, 1:348, 2:1124 Durham University, 1:35 Durkheim, Emile, 2:1308 Dury, Richard, 1:889, 2:1401 Dutch – in Africa, 2:2093 – characterizations of, 1:987 – collostructional analysis of verbs, 1:170 – contact with English, 1:688–689, 1:690, 2:1659–1669 – defense of, 1:984 – influence on Scots, 2:1955 – Middle, 2:1433, 2:1462, 2:1660 – in mixed-language texts, 2:1448 – northern Middle English and, 1:42 – phonology, 1:103, 1:104, 1:106, 1:109, 1:110, 1:269
Index – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – supraregionalization, 2:2061 – syntax, 1:294, 2:1483, 2:1536, 2:1619, 2:1621, 2:1691, 2:1700 – traders’ knowledge of, 1:57 Dutch East India Company, 2:2114, 2:2115 Dutch Revolt, 2:1668 Dyboski, Roman, 2:1376 Dyche, Thomas, 1:1010, 1:1054
E Eagleson, Robert D., 1:739 Earle, John, 2:1122 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 1:639– 640, 1:641, 2:1144, 2:1514 Early English Books Tract Supplement, 2:1514 Early English Text Society (EETS), 1:36, 1:37, 1:640, 1:1013, 2:1304, 2:1331, 2:1383 Early Modern English – change into analytic language, 1:621–622 – chronological delimitation, 1:48–49, 1:699, 2:1233–1254 – codification, 1:1003 – dialects, 1:668–685 – cant, 1:803–804, 1:815 – East Anglian, 1:689, 1:725, 2:2035 – geographical mobility and, 1:51–52 – lack of textual representation of, 2:1446 – London, 1:724 – Midlands, 1:598, 1:607 – Northern, 1:598, 1:721, 1:723–724, 1:725, 1:803, 2:2035 – Royal Court, 1:720, 1:724–725 – Southern, 1:593, 1:601 – drama, 2:1146 – elaboration of function, 1:55–56, 1:57–58, 1:708–710, 1:711, 1:969, 1:1003, 1:1007 – evidence for the spoken language, 2:1276 – in the Helsinki Corpus, 2:1138 – knowledge of Middle English and, 1:40 – legal writing in, 1:240 – lexicon, 1:637–652 – degree adverbs, 1:171, 1:469 – Dutch loans, 2:1667 – elaboration of function and, 1:708–710, 1:711 – exclamations in, 1:201–202
2177
– – – – – –
–
– – – –
– expansion, 1:49, 1:59–60, 1:242–243, 1:709, 2:1710–1711 – experimental word-formation, 1:610–611 – loans, 1:610, 1:643, 1:701, 1:709, 1:799, 2:1683, 2:1684, 2:1710–1715 – rate of borrowing, 1:125, 1:709 – rate of expansion, 1:641, 1:709 – resources for studying, 1:639–640, 1:646–648 literary language, 1:791–807, 1:808–826 – see also Shakespeare, William nationalism and, 1:800–803 online resources, 2:1135, 2:1138, 2:1139, 2:1144 origin of the standard in, 2:1880 orthography, 1:107, 1:233, 1:700–702, 1:711, 1:738 phonology, 1:589–604 – consonants, 1:107, 1:592–594, 2:1929 – multiple phoneme systems of, 1:710–711 – reduction of unstressed syllables, 1:591–592 – vowels, 1:118, 1:594–602, 2:1813 – word-final , 1:590 – word stress and, 1:590–591 pragmatics and discourse, 1:652–667 – as/so long as in, 1:200 – courtroom dialogue, 1:205–206 – gender and, 1:718–719 – medical dialogues, 1:205 – social deixis in second person, 1:204, 1:606, 1:656, 1:703–704, 1:723 proposal for dictionary of, 2:1153 prosody, 1:125–126, 1:590–591 sociolinguistic approaches to, 2:1441 syntax, 1:621–637 – auxiliaries be vs. have, 2:1537 – complementation, 1:628–631, 1:878 – conjunctions in, 1:248 – do periphrasis, 1:707–708, 1:720–721, 1:743–756 – elaboration, 1:242 – expression of futurity, 1:608, 1:627 – future tense, 2:1892 – genitives, 1:604–605, 1:622–623 – high literary style and, 1:796–800 – Latin influence, 2:1713 – loss of impersonal constructions, 1:623–624 – negation, 1:631–632, 1:706–707, 1:719–720 – perfect be/have + past participle, 1:624– 626, 1:876 – progressive, 1:626–628, 1:688 – relative pronouns and, 1:708, 1:776–790
2178 – word order, 1:60, 1:624, 1:632–634, 1:737, 2:1361, 2:1486 – trial proceedings, 2:1522 – see also Early Modern English morphology Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD), 1:639, 2:1135 Early Modern English Lexicography (Scha¨fer), 1:641 Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT), 2:1465 Early Modern English morphology – adjectives, 1:60, 1:606–607, 1:706 – adverbs, 1:60 – affixation, 1:609–618 – nouns, 1:605 – pronouns, 1:731–743 – disappearance of thou, 1:60, 1:718–719 – first and second person possessive, 1:735– 736 – gender, 1:605 – his vs.its, 1:704–705, 1:733–735 – relative, 1:60, 1:776–790, 2:1511 – second person, 1:606, 1:703–704, 1:736– 741 – she, 1:674 – third person plural, 1:733 – standardization of, 1:703–706 – verbs – auxiliary, 1:60, 1:876, 2:1537 – modal, 1:134, 1:608 – periphrastic do, 1:60 – person and number, 1:607–608 – progressive aspect, 1:60 – tense, mood, and aspect, 1:608–609 – third person singular present indicative, 1:703, 1:721–722 East Africa Company, 2:2094 East African English, 2:1140, 2:2111, 2:2136, 2:2143 East Anglia – contact with Old Norse in, 1:689 – diphthong merger, 2:1934, 2:2039 – distinctive features, 2:1943, 2:1944–1945, 2:1946 – emigration to London from, 1:492 – in LALME, 1:500 – New England English and, 2:1810, 2:1813, 2:2050 – smoothing processes in, 2:2037 – a spellings in, 1:220
Index East Asia, 1:1060 EastEnders (TV program), 1:1082, 1:1084, 2:1915, 2:1920, 2:1922–1923 Eastern Cape English, 2:2097 East India Company, 1:52, 1:57, 1:694, 2:1302, 2:1444, 2:2077, 2:2078–2079, 2:2136 East Indies, 1:52 Eastward Ho! ( Jonson), 1:744t Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Truss), 1:967, 2:1889– 1890 Ebbitt, Wilma R., 2:1319 Eble, Connie, 1:382 Ebook and Texts Archive (website), 2:1144 Eckardt, Regine, 1:468 L’eclaircissement de la langue franc¸aise (Palsgrave), 1:640, 1:642, 2:1195 Ecuador, 2:1768 Edgar, King of England, 1:378 Edgar II (the Ætheling), King of England, 2:1953 Edinburgh, 1:82, 1:87, 1:699, 1:759, 2:1953, 2:1956 Edinburgh Medical Journal, 1:906 Edinburgh Select Society, 1:1011 Edmont, Edmond, 2:1841 education – Bologna Process, 2:1179, 2:1385 – compulsory, 1:942, 1:954, 1:990 – English as Foreign Language in, 2:2139 – gender and, 1:53, 1:956–957, 1:1052, 2:1522 – in Hong Kong, 2:2117 – in India, 2:2080, 2:2081, 2:2082, 2:2084 – influence of classical rhetoric, 1:242 – introduction of English in, 1:546 – in Ireland, 2:1965, 2:2063 – Kingman report, 1:1026 – literacy and, 1:49, 2:1284 – medieval translation exercise, 2:1282–1283 – the Polychronicon on, 2:1264, 2:1282 – prescriptivism and, 1:910–911 – Received Pronunciation and, 1:959, 2:1902, 2:1906 – secularization, 1:53 – shared backgrounds and, 1:56 – social stratification and, 1:717, 2:1283 – standardization and, 1:67 – in Wales, 2:1981, 2:1982, 2:1989–1990 – see also teaching of history of English Education Act (1870), 2:1981 Education Act (1988), 2:1989
Index Edward (the Confessor), King of England, 2:1673, 2:1953 Edward (the Elder), King of England, 1:381 Edward III (Shakespeare?), 1:799 Edwards, A. S. G., 1:562 Edwards, Ifan ab Owen, Sir, 2:1982 Edwards, O. M., 2:1982 Edward VI, King of England, 1:644 Eggleston, Edward, 2:1817 Egypt, 2:1886 Egyptian, 1:228 Ehlers, Klaas-Hinrich, 2:1335 EHL Project (website), 2:1196 Ehrensperger, E. C., 1:457 Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), 1:68–69, 1:75, 1:945, 2:1154, 2:1514 Eighteenth-Century English Grammars (ECEG), 1:946 Eighteenth Century Fiction (ECF), 1:654, 1:870 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 1:749 Einenkel, Eugen, 2:1290, 2:1329 Ekwall, Eilert, 1:216 Eleanor of Provence, Queen, consort of Henry III, 2:1787 Electronic Beowulf, 2:1143, 2:1512 Electronic Boethius, 2:1143 Electronic Canterbury Tales, 2:1132 electronic resources, 2:1131–1148 Electronic Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, 2:1143 Electronic Text Center (website), 2:1139 Electronic Text Edition of Depositions (ETED), 2:1513 Elemente der Phonetik und Orthoepie des Deutschen, Englischen und Franzo¨sischen (Vie¨tor), 2:1333 Elements of Armories (Bolton), 1:648 Elements of Style (Strunk and White), 1:975 Elenbaas, Marion, 2:1485, 2:1486 Elene, 1:118 ELFA (Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings), 2:2141 Eliot, John, 2:1763 Eliot, T. S., 2:1211 Elizabeth, Queen, consort of Frederick I, King of Bohemia, 1:727 The Elizabethan World Picture (Tillyard), 2:1208 Elizabeth I, Queen of England – Edmund Spenser and, 1:802 – education, 1:53 – OED and, 1:647
2179 – reign as golden age of English, 1:941, 1:987 – Sir Nicholas Bacon and, 1:657 – use of third person -s, 1:728 – use of thou vs. you, 1:704, 1:737 Ellega˚rd, Alvar, 1:707, 1:746–754, 2:1547, 2:1716 Ellenberger, Bengt, 2:1715 Ellis, Alexander John – on diphthongization, 1:833–834 – On Early English Pronunciation, 1:919–920, 1:923, 1:944 – on glide insertion, 1:837 – on [h]-dropping, 1:838 – influence of OED on, 2:1291 – on loss of rhoticity, 1:839–840 – on palatalization, 1:836 – presidency of Philological Society, 2:1303– 1304 – Received Pronunciation and, 1:944, 1:1014, 1:1092, 2:1901–1902, 2:1904–1905, 2:1910 – use of Norman Conquest as boundary date, 2:1247 – on variety in London speech, 1:1090 – on vowel contrasts, 1:829, 1:830 El Salvador, 2:1862 Elsness, Johan, 1:89, 1:90, 1:626 ELTE SEAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 2:1380 ELT Journal, 2:2141 Ely, 1:492, 1:497 Ely, Georgine, 2:2098 Elyot, Thomas, Sir – dictionary, 1:638, 1:645, 1:647, 1:710, 1:1051– 1052 – on education, 1:54 – Latinate neologisms, 2:1712 – Latin-English dictionary, 1:1007 – on music and dance, 2:1224–1225 – on speakers’ misunderstanding of own tongue, 1:646 – use of multiple negation, 1:631 – use of relativizers, 1:778, 1:780, 1:784, 1:787 – word order, 1:633 Elze, Karl, 2:1331 Emerson, Oliver F., 2:1291, 2:1314 Emma, Queen, consort of Cnut I, 1:29, 2:1673 Emmons, Kimberley, 2:1297 Emrys ap Iwan (Reverend), 2:1982 Encarta World Dictionary, 2:1895 Enchiridion (Byrhtferth), 1:28, 1:343
2180 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2:1239, 2:1240, 2:1241, 2:1242, 2:1243 Eneydos (Caxton), 1:546, 1:643 England – Civil War, 1:50, 1:52, 1:728, 1:1064, 2:1675 – cross-Channel contacts, 2:1663–1665 – demographic factors, 1:51, 1:67, 1:508, 1:642 – emigration from, 1:52 – “north-south” divide in accents, 1:72 – Revolution, 1:728, 1:987 – social structure, 1:717 Englemann, Siegfried, 2:1828 ENGLISC (online list), 2:1145 Đa Engliscan Gesiðas (online forum), 2:1145 Englisch-deutsches, deutsch-englisches Wo¨rterbuch (Wildhagen), 2:1337 Englische Studien ( journal), 2:1328 Englische Textbibliothek, 2:1328 Englisc Onstigende Wordboc (EOW), 2:1134 English and Celtic in Contact (Filppula et al.), 2:1688 English as a Foreign Language (EFL), 1:1101, 1:1113, 2:1909–1910, 2:2137, 2:2146 English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), 1:1015, 1:1113, 2:2135, 2:2141, 2:2144, 2:2146 English as a Second Language (ESL), 2:2106– 2119 – in Africa, 2:2093 – broadcasting for, 1:1015, 1:1089, 1:1101 – dictionaries for, 1:1059 – future directions for research, 1:127 – reference varieties for, 2:1885, 2:1895 English Corpus Linguistics, 2:1519 English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) – cost to Wright of, 1:1013 – digitization, 1:915–916, 1:936, 2:1136, 2:1155 – English Dialect Society and, 1:67 – geographical bias, 1:921 – importance, 2:1155 – as landmark in English dialectology, 1:943, 1:1057 – as model for American Dialect Society, 2:1840, 2:1849 – in studies of lexical borrowing, 2:1666 – Wright’s ideas about dialects and, 2:1307 English Dialect Grammar (Wright), 1:921, 2:1307, 2:1310 English Dialect Society (EDS), 1:67, 1:919, 1:935, 1:943 English Dictionarie (Cockeram), 1:710, 1:1053, 2:1711
Index English Dictionary (Coles), 1:1053 English Expositor ( J. Bullokar), 1:710, 1:1053, 2:1711 English Grammar ( Jonson), 1:703, 1:708, 2:1882 The English grammar (Mie`ge), 2:1265 English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners (L. Murray), 1:970, 1:975, 2:1884 English Grammar on Historical Principles (Lees), 2:1334 English Grammar Past and Present (Nesfield), 2:1334 English Historical Grammar (Mincoff), 2:1387 “English Historical Linguistics” (website), 2:1197 The English Language: A Historical Introduction (Barber), 2:1167 English Language and Linguistics ( journal), 2:1688 English Language Arts (NCTE), 1:973 English Language in America (Krapp), 1:1014 English Language: Its History and Structure (Low), 2:1334 English Language Society of Korea, 2:1417 English Linguistic Society of Japan, 2:1416 English Literary Society ( Japan), 2:1415 English Place Name Society, 1:214 English Place Name Survey (EPNS), 1:214 English Poetry (online corpus), 2:1139 English Pronouncing Dictionary ( Jones), 1:945, 1:1099 English Pronunciation 1500–1700 (Dobson), 2:1291, 2:1307 English School-maister (Coote), 1:639, 1:710, 1:1008, 1:1053 English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), 2:1144 English Studies ( journal), 2:1344 English Today ( journal), 2:1891, 2:2107, 2:2141 English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 1:752 Engsh, 2:2096 Enkvist, Nils Erik, 1:335, 2:1365 Enlightenment, 1:66, 1:171, 2:1302, 2:1303, 2:1713 Entick, John, 1:828, 1:829, 1:1010, 1:1012 Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd University, 2:1380, 2:1381 Epicoene ( Jonson), 1:744–745 ´ pinal-Erfurt Glossary, 1:348, 1:350, 2:1124, E 2:1549, 2:1553 eponyms, 1:74, 1:890
Index Erasmus, Desiderius, 1:643–644, 1:798, 1:1042 Erie Canal, 2:2050 Erman, Britt, 2:1566 Errors in Speech and Writing Corrected, 1:840 Esau, Helmut, 2:1795 Escure, Genevieve, 2:2125 Esposito, Anthony, 1:314–315 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 1:171, 1:644 An essay on musical expression (Avison), 2:1228 An Essay on Musical Harmony (Kollmann), 2:1220 Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Wilkins), 1:1009 Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation (Buchanan), 2:1903 An Essay towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (Steele), 2:1220–1221 Essentials of English Grammar ( Jespersen), 1:973 Essex – dialectal features, 1:496, 1:497, 1:498, 1:500 – immigration from Low Countries, 2:1664 – inclusion in “East End”, 2:2013 – Little Domesday survey and, 2:1123 – texts from, 2:1498, 2:1499 Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837, 1:948 Estienne, Robert, 1:639, 1:1052 Estonia, 2:1384 Estonian, 2:1543–1544, 2:1601 Estuary English, 2:1888–1889, 2:1900, 2:1909, 2:1911, 2:1913–1925, 2:1930, 2:1934, 2:1935 Ethelbert, King of Kent, 1:240, 1:326, 1:368 Eton College, 2:1921 Ettmu¨ller, Ludwig, 2:1332 Etymological Dictionary (Skeat), 2:1666 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language ( Jamieson), 1:894, 1:895, 1:896– 897, 2:1302, 2:1309 Etymologicum Anglicanum ( Junius), 2:1342 etymology, 1:894, 1:896, 2:1135–1136, 2:1145, 2:1151, 2:1158–1159, 2:1173 Euphues (Lyly), 1:737, 1:797 Euphuism, 1:244 European Association for Lexicography, 2:1343 European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), 2:1191 European Economic Community, 2:1997
2181 European English Messenger ( journal), 2:2141 European Historical Thesaurus (EuroHiT), 2:1137 European Journal of English Studies, 1:238 European Society for the Study of English, 2:1388 European Union, 2:1889, 2:2137, 2:2138, 2:2146 Eustace, Sinclair S., 1:920 Evans, G. Blakemore, 1:809 Evans, Gwynfor, 2:1983 Evans, Ifor, 1:811 Evans, John, 1:642 Evelyn, John, 1:626, 1:629 Evening Post, 1:1066 Even Yearbook, 2:1380 Every Man out of his Humour ( Jonson), 1:744–745 Ewers, Traute, 2:1800 Examining the OED (website), 2:1133 “Excellency of the English Tongue” (Carew), 1:638, 2:1265 exemplar theory, 2:1549 Exeter, 1:344, 1:358 Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (DVD), 2:1143 Exodus, 1:179, 1:304, 1:335, 1:393 Exposiciones Terminorum Legum Anglorum (Rastell), 1:647, 1:1051 Eynsham, 1:343
F Faber, Heinrich, 2:1225 Fabricius, Anne, 2:1909, 2:1920, 2:1925 Fachinetti, Roberta, 2:1401 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 1:557, 1:639, 1:802 Fairman, Tony, 1:903, 1:936, 1:955, 1:956 Faiss, Klaus, 1:432, 1:596, 1:863 Falkland Islands English, 2:2052, 2:2053 Fall of British Tyranny (Leacock), 2:1811 Fall of Princes (Lydgate), 1:567 Family Shakespeare (Bowdler), 1:815 Fanagalo, 2:2115 Fanego, Teresa, 1:629, 1:630, 1:879, 1:881, 2:1293, 2:1404 Fang-Beti, 2:2094 Faraclas, Nicholas, 2:1834 Faraday, Michael, 1:890, 2:1904 Farmon, 1:343, 1:348, 2:1549, 2:1550
2182 Faroese, 2:1725 Farquhar, George, 1:787, 2:2063 Farsi, 2:2141, 2:2143 Fasold, Ralph, 2:1963 Fates of the Apostles, 1:335 Faulkner, William, 2:1795 Faya Cerqueiro, Fa´tima Marı´a, 1:911 Feagin, Crawford, 1:772 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 2:1797 Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), 2:1797 Fee, Margery, 2:1317 feminine pronoun (she), 1:44–45, 1:420, 1:492, 1:493, 1:495, 1:674, 2:1267, 2:1269 Fenigsen, Janina, 2:1777 Fennell, Barbara, 2:1185, 2:1439 Fens, 2:1919–1920, 2:2054–2055 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 2:1303 Ferna´ndez, Francisco, 2:1402 Ferna´ndez-Cuesta, Julia, 2:1403 Ferrier, Susan, 1:853 Fest, Sa´ndor, 2:1380 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 2:1183 Field, John, 1:214 Fielding, Henry, 1:846, 1:871 Fife, 1:673, 1:680, 2:1954 Fife, James, 2:1245, 2:1246 Figueiro, Vasco, 1:1052–1053 Fiji, 2:2114 Fijn van Draat, Pieter, 2:1342 Filipovic´, Rudolf, 2:1386–1387 Fillmore, Charles, 2:1636 Filppula, Markku – on Irish English syntax, 2:1967–1968, 2:1970 – on the progressive in English, 1:517, 1:687– 688 – volume on Celtic contact, 2:1688 – work on Celtic-English bilingualism, 2:1442 – work on Celtic progressives, 2:1690 – work on “focus-first” syntax, 2:1359–1360 – work on it-cleft constructions, 2:1695–1696, 2:1698 Finegan, Edward – ARCHER and, 2:1520 – on effects of standardization, 2:1447 – on genre differentiation, 1:905, 1:961 – on liberal, descriptive attitudes, 1:1014 – multidimensional text-type analysis, 1:903 – on oral vs. literate styles, 1:245, 1:962 – on reception of Webster’s Third, 1:1026
Index – on Swift and Johnson, 1:1024 – on variation of styles, 1:907, 1:908 Finell, Anne, 1:909 Finkenstaedt, Thomas, 1:610 Finland, 2:1314, 2:1355 Finnish – Germanic loans in, 1:270 – linguistic typology, 1:41, 1:130, 1:264 – literature, 2:1462 – vowel contrast in unstressed syllables, 1:270 – vowel system, 1:257, 1:258 – writing system, 1:227 Finno-Ugric, 1:140 Finucane, David, 2:1134 Firbas, Jan, 2:1379 The First Forty Years: Some Notes on Anglo-Welsh Literature ( Jones), 2:1988 First Grammatical Treatise (Old Icelandic), 1:35 First Part of the Elementarie (Mulcaster), 1:702, 1:800–801, 1:1008 Firth, John R., 1:229 Fischer, Andreas, 1:323, 1:457, 1:463, 1:661, 1:1073 Fischer, Olga – academic affiliation, 2:1343 – acceptance of contact-induced syntactical change, 1:515 – on accusative with infinitive constructions, 1:156, 1:306 – on fossilization, 2:1587 – on grammaticalization, 1:160, 2:1568 – handbook on early English syntax, 2:1344 – on the noun phrase, 1:159 – on the progressive, 1:517 Fish, Harold, 1:245 Fish, Stanley E., 1:819 Fisher, Anne, 1:1010, 2:1811 Fisher, John, Saint, 1:752 Fisher, John H., 1:525–526, 1:528, 1:578, 1:1001–1002 Fishman, Joshua A., 1:996, 2:2089 Fisiak, Jacek – career, 2:1290, 2:1377 – on English historical linguistics in Japan, 2:1416 – on external history, 2:1439 – on periodization schemes, 2:1234, 2:1235, 2:1237, 2:1244, 2:1246, 2:1253 Fisk University, 2:1797 Fitzgerald, Edward, 2:1303
Index Fitzgerald, Garret, 2:1965 Fitzherbert, Anthony, 1:56, 1:623 Fitzmaurice, Susan M., 1:656, 1:658, 1:889, 1:903, 1:911, 1:917, 2:1195 Flanders, 2:1664 Flasdieck, Hermann, 2:1338 Fleischer, Wolfgang, 1:183 Fleisher, Nicholas, 1:872 Fleming, J. B. Montgomerie, 1:897 Flemings, 1:688–689, 2:1663–1664, 2:1955, 2:1978, 2:2061 Flemish, 2:1660, 2:1661, 2:1668 Fletcher, Anthony, 1:716 Fletcher, John, 1:803 Fleury, 1:27 Flint (Wales), 2:1989 Flint, Mather, 1:835, 1:839 F-LOB (Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) Corpus, 1:875, 2:1893 Flodden, Battle of, 2:1956 Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (FEEN), 1:1064 Florida, 2:1797, 2:1800, 2:1842, 2:1843, 2:2052, 2:2121 Florio, John, 1:645, 1:648, 1:734, 1:1052, 2:1195 Flying Post, 1:1065 Fogg, Peter Walkden, 1:831 Foligno, Cesare, 2:1400 Folkerth, Wes, 1:813 folk etymology, 1:221–222 Follett, Wilson, 1:1058 Foote, Samuel, 1:873 Ford, Marguerite, 1:820 Forest of Varieties, A (North), 1:795–796 Forkel, Nikolaus, 2:1226, 2:1227 Form of Living (Rolle), 1:559, 1:561–562 Form und Funktion des Verbums im no¨rdlichen Spa¨taltenglischen (Berndt), 2:1335 Forney, John, 2:1817 Forrest, Stephen, 2:1134 Forth and Bargy dialect, 2:1966 fossilization, 2:1587–1588 Foucault, Michel, 2:1206, 2:1261 Fought, Carmen, 2:1744, 2:1745 Foulkes, Paul, 1:81, 2:1918 Four Sons of Aymon, 1:561 Fowler, Carol A., 2:1533 Fowler, Frank G., 1:902 Fowler, H. W., 1:858, 1:902, 1:944, 1:973, 1:975, 2:1816, 2:1885
2183 Fox, Susan, 2:2020, 2:2025 France – Ancrene Wisse author and, 1:437, 1:439 – Chaucer’s awareness of pronoun use in, 1:473 – colonies in North America, 2:1675 – English historical linguistics in, 2:1397–1399 – influence on English prescriptivism, 1:1008– 1009 – language academy in, 1:173, 1:941 – Opium Wars and, 2:2116 – Revolution, 1:888, 2:1296 – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145 – use of English Wikipedia in, 2:2139 Francis, W. Nelson, 1:231, 2:1532 Franco, Francisco (General), 2:1401 Franconian, 2:1661 Frank, Thomas, 2:1400, 2:1401 Frankish, 2:1788 Franklin, Benjamin, 2:1811, 2:1819 Franks Casket, 1:348, 2:1125, 2:1280 Fransson, Gustav, 1:220 Franz, Wilhelm, 1:809 Fraser, Bruce, 1:470, 1:660, 1:662 Fraunce, Abraham, 1:794 Freeborn, Derek, 1:64 Freedmen and Southern Society Project, 2:1802 Freedmen’s Bureau, 2:1802, 2:1804 Freeman, E. A., 2:1314 Free University of Amsterdam, 2:1342 Free University of Berlin, 2:1338 Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), 1:922–923, 1:926, 1:927, 1:928, 1:932, 1:933, 1:935, 2:1947 French – in Africa, 2:2092, 2:2094, 2:2138 – Anglo-, 2:1151, 2:1781–1791 – contact with English, 2:1671–1684, 2:1704 – as contract language, 2:2137 – creoles, 2:2121 – influence on Scots, 2:1955 – as intermediary for other European loans, 2:1739, 2:1740 – in Ireland, 2:1963 – in mixed-language texts, 2:1448 – Modern – campaigns to save, 1:546 – characterizations of, 1:987, 1:1024 – contact with Early Modern English, 1:689, 1:690
2184 – defense of, 1:984 – dictionaries of, 1:639, 1:640, 1:647, 1:1051, 1:1052, 1:1057 – English backlash against, 1:894, 1:896, 1:982 – medical writing in, 1:906 – “minority” status within France, 2:1181 – mute [h] in, 1:837, 1:838 – Norman – earliest loans from, 1:45 – influence on Scots, 2:1955 – as language of record, 1:56, 1:536, 1:994, 2:1300 – literary works, 2:1282 – oversimplification in accounts of, 2:1663– 1664 – period of influence, 1:33 – in pre-Conquest England, 1:29 – Scandinavian influence on, 2:1672–1673 – see also Anglo-Norman – Old – functions in Britain, 1:528, 2:1282, 2:1283 – influence on Old English, 1:28–30, 1:315 – influence on pronoun choice, 1:515–516 – initial voiced fricatives, 1:107 – legal, 1:240, 1:507, 2:1282, 2:1673 – linguistic atlases of, 2:1433 – loanwords, 1:124, 1:129, 1:315, 1:366 – Middle English diphthongs from, 1:596 – mute initial /h/, 1:592 – personal names and, 1:219 – prefixes from, 1:611 – prestige status, 1:475, 1:507, 1:528 – prosody, 1:123 – as superstrate on Middle English “creole”, 2:1779, 2:1781–1791 – vs. Latin, 1:28–29, 1:512 – Parisian Central, 1:512, 2:1672, 2:1955 – pronoun choice and, 1:203, 1:738–739 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – in southeastern United States, 2:1676, 2:1760 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – supraregionalization, 2:2061 – in Switzerland, 2:2118 – traders’ knowledge of, 1:57, 1:643 – varieties, 1:33 – vowel quality, 1:828, 1:833 – in westlich-atlantischer Sprachbund, 2:1697 French Influence in English Phrasing (Prins), 1:190
Index Frendo, Henry, 2:1741 frequency, 2:1531–1544, 2:1547, 2:1552 Fried, Mirjam, 2:1636 Friedrich, Jesko, 1:189 Friends (TV program), 1:1081 Fries, Charles Carpenter, 1:738, 1:863, 1:973, 2:1892 Fries, Udo, 1:248 Frieshammer, Johann, 2:1333 Frisian, 1:103, 2:1661, see also Old Frisian Fritz, Clemens W. A., 1:954, 1:960, 2:1997, 2:2005 Fritz, Gerd, 1:204, 1:205 Froissart, Jean, 2:1785 From “95 Theses on Philology” (Hamacher), 2:1165 From Dialect to Standard: English in England 1154–1776 (Nielsen), 2:1180 Frown (Freiburg-Brown) Corpus of American English, 1:875 Fuchs, Leonhart, 1:74 Fudge, Eric, 1:127 Fulfulde, 2:2094 Fulk, Robert D., 1:2, 1:280, 2:1170, 2:1297, 2:1315 Fuller, Janet M., 2:1801 Functional-Lexematic Model, 1:322 Furnivall, Frederick J., 1:37, 1:1013, 2:1383 Futhorc, 1:24, 1:232 Fyfe, Christopher, 2:1801
G Gaaf, Willem van der, 2:1290, 2:1342 Gabelentz, Georg von der, 2:1305–1306 Gabrielatos, Costas, 2:2025 Gaelic, 2:1182, see also Celtic Gaffurio, Franchino, 2:1223 Gainsborough, 2:1268 Gallagher, Catherine, 2:1208–1209 Gallicus, Johannes, 2:1228 Galloway, 2:1954 Galsworthy, John, 1:70, 1:90 Galvani, Luigi, 1:890 Gambia, 2:2114, 2:2136 Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., 1:3 Gandhi, Mahatma, 2:2082 Garcı´a-Bermejo Giner, Marı´a F., 2:1403 Garlick, Raymond, 2:1988 Garner, Bryan A., 2:1822, 2:1824
Index Garrett, Peter, 2:1987 Garrido-Anes, Edurne, 1:502, 2:1403 Gascoigne, George, 1:800 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 1:858 Gaul, 1:370 Gaule, John, 1:873 Gawdy, Philip, 1:691, 1:727 Gbe languages, 2:1570 G. & C. Merriam Company, 1:968, 1:1012 Gdansk, 2:1955 Gebauer, Jan, 2:1378 Geddes, Alexander, 1:894 Gee, Thomas, 2:1982 Geeraerts, Dirk, 1:999 Geikie, A. Constable (Reverend), 2:1872 Geis, Michael L., 1:168, 1:200 Geisler, Christer, 1:909 Gelderen, Elly van – academic affiliation, 2:1343 – on economy in syntax, 2:1627 – generative linguistics and, 2:1344 – on periodization schemes, 2:1252 – textbook of history of English, 2:1167, 2:1168, 2:1170, 2:1185 – volume on reflexive pronouns, 1:732 – website, 2:1197 gender (biological/cultural) – Anglo-Saxon naming tradition and, 1:217 – authorship and, 1:534, 1:536 – be/have auxiliaries and, 1:877 – code-switching and, 2:1448 – conservatism vs. innovation in, 2:1318–1319, 2:1364, 2:1747, 2:2006 – do periphrasis and, 1:748 – education and, 1:53, 1:956–957, 1:1052, 2:1448, 2:1522 – Estuary English and, 2:1918 – language use and, 1:537, 1:718–721, 1:960– 961, 1:1028, 1:1082 – language variation and, 2:1447 – linguistic stereotypes, 2:1821 – literacy and, 1:54, 1:534–535, 1:642, 1:718, 1:955, 2:1447 – multiple negation and, 1:707, 1:719–720, 2:1448 – Received Pronunciation and, 2:1905 – Scottish women’s use of she, 1:674 – second person pronouns and, 1:718–719, 2:1448 – sociolinguistic studies of, 2:1318–1319 – supraregionalization and, 2:2070
2185 – third person singular present indicative ending and, 1:608 gender (grammatical) – Anglo-Saxon naming tradition and, 1:217 – in his vs. its, 1:705, 1:733–735 – in Indo-European and Germanic, 1:12, 1:273, 1:279 – in Modern English, 1:133–134 – in Old English adjectives, 1:282 – in the Peterborough Chronicle, 2:1501 – replacement by natural gender, 1:416, 1:418, 1:579, 1:604, 1:705, 2:1520 – vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and, 1:415 Genee, Inge, 2:1688 General Advertiser, 1:1066 General Electric, 1:1094 Generative Lexicon theory, 1:165 generative linguistics – English historical syntax and, 1:150 – focus on synchrony, 2:1292 – focus on written language, 2:1276 – grammar competition, 1:158 – grammaticalization and, 2:1622–1626 – historical linguistics and, 2:1308, 2:1613–1628 – in the Netherlands, 2:1343 – parametric change in, 1:156–157, 1:752, 1:754 – philology and, 2:1314 – phonology, 2:1315 – in South Korea, 2:1417 generic pronouns, 2:1448–1449 Genesis (Old English), 1:302, 2:1342 Genesis B, 1:359 genitive forms – of, 2:1363 – his vs. its, 1:605, 1:704–705, 1:733–735, 1:734 – my/thy vs. mine/thine, 1:735–736, 2:1448, 2:2036 – object pronoun, 2:1938, 2:1940 – of, 1:516, 1:527, 1:604, 1:622 – -s, 1:145, 1:527, 1:604, 2:1363, 2:1591 genre – defined, 1:238 – historical linguistic approaches to, 1:246, 1:715 – historical sociolinguistics and, 2:1439, 2:1441 – language change and, 1:249, 1:725–726, 2:1366 – literary language and, 1:791
2186 – pragmatics and discourse analysis and, 1:473–475, 1:903 – societal change, 1:961–963 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2:1282 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, 1:1109 George III, King of England, 2:1810 Georgia (country), 2:1381 Georgia (U.S. state) – in American dialectology, 2:1817, 2:1842, 2:1843 – “Canadian Raising” in, 2:2052 – creoles in, 2:1771, 2:1833, 2:2121 – ex-slave narratives in, 2:1797 – hoodoo doctor interviews in, 2:1800 Geraghty, Paul, 1:1060 German – in Africa, 2:2092 – aspect vs. mode of action in verbs, 1:139 – Austrian, 1:1079 – cognates in Old English, 1:315 – contact with English, 2:1667 – dictionaries of, 1:1051 – English pronunciation of /kn/ in, 1:108 – Internet English and, 1:1112 – linguistic atlas of, 2:1841 – Low, 2:1660, 2:1661, 2:1691, 2:1955 – northern Middle English and, 1:42 – phonology – ablaut in, 1:145 – [c¸]/[x] alternation in, 1:261 – initial /sk/ clusters in, 1:103–104 – postvocalic /ft/, 1:106 – pronunciation of [h], 1:838 – voiced vs. voiceless stops, 1:109 – vowel quality, 1:833 – phraseological study of, 1:187 – pronoun choice, 1:203 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – supraregionalization, 2:2061 – Swiss, 1:109 – syntax – auxiliaries, 2:1536 – generative linguistics and, 2:1619, 2:1621 – Lexical Functional Grammar and, 2:1654 – object “scrambling”, 2:1483 – parallels with Dutch and Old English, 1:294 – progressive, 2:1700 – word order, 1:44, 1:389, 1:440
Index – in Tok Pisin, 2:2126 – translations of the Bible, 1:1043 – in the United States, 2:1819 – word-formation, 1:135 Germani, 1:1–2 Germanic – comparative philology and, 2:1302 – contact with Celtic, 1:2, 2:1186 – contact with Latin, 1:362 – contact with non-IE languages, 1:11 – emergence of Anglo-Saxon dialects from, 1:22 – morphology – inflected infinitives, 1:15 – interrogative pronouns, 1:14 – nouns and adjectives, 1:13, 1:274–278 – perfect construction, 1:303 – personal pronouns, 1:14–15 – preterit-present verbs, 1:16–17 – shift to stem-based, 1:132 – strong verbs, 1:5, 1:139 – synthetic passive, 1:307 – variation in nominal paradigms, 1:12–13 – weak adjectival declension, 1:13 – weak verbs, 1:16, 1:139, 1:141, 1:286 – word-formation processes, 1:11, 1:135 – Neogrammarians and, 1:100, 1:255 – personal names, 1:217, 1:218 – phonology – ablaut patterns, 1:11, 1:139, 1:140, 1:143 – irregular English noun plurals and, 1:129 – umlaut, 1:268 – Verner’s Law, 1:4 – vowel system, 1:5–6, 1:8 – shift from aspectual to tense system, 1:15, 1:140 – stress, 1:10–11, 1:30, 1:115, 1:129, 1:140, 1:143 – see also Germanic Stress Rule (GSR) – syntax, 1:17, 1:296, 1:303, 1:747 – toponyms and, 1:215 – tribal distribution, 1:2 Germanic Lexicon Project (GLP), 2:1134 Germanic Stress Rule (GSR), 1:115, 1:123, 1:124, 1:126, 1:138, 1:399–401, 1:515 German Shakespeare Society, 2:1330 German University in Prague, 2:1326 Germany – distribution of Germanic tribes in, 1:2, 1:341, 1:363 – emigration to Canada from, 2:1862
Index – historical linguistics in, 1:449, 2:1293, 2:1305, 2:1314 – Papua New Guinea and, 2:2126 – teaching of English in, 2:2139 – use of English Wikipedia, 2:2139 – written standard, 1:346 Gerrand, Peter, 1:1111 Geschichte der Ablaute der starken Zeitwo¨rter innerhalb des Su¨denglischen (Bu¨lbring), 2:1334 Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Grimm), 2:1182 Gessner, Conrad, 1:1051, 1:1052, 2:1301 get-passive, 1:871–873 Getty, Michael, 1:116 Ghana, 2:1886, 2:2093, 2:2094, 2:2095, 2:2114, 2:2136 Ghanaian English, 2:1887, 2:2112, 2:2143 Ghosh, Amitav, 2:2089 Giancarlo, Matthew, 2:1169, 2:1174 Gibraltar, 2:1746–1749 Giegerich, Heinz, 1:119, 1:127, 1:132 Gieszinger, Sabine, 1:908 Gil, Alexander – on English dialects, 1:792, 1:803 – English grammar, 1:639 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 – on lexicographers, 1:1053 – preface, 2:1298–1299 – as source for historical phonology, 1:762 – spelling and, 1:225, 1:701 Gilbert, A. J., 1:793 Gildon, Charles, 1:828, 1:829, 1:835, 1:836 Giles, Howard, 1:1026 Gillie´ron, Jules, 2:1127, 2:1428, 2:1841 Gilman, Albert, 1:203, 1:656, 1:662, 1:739, 1:820 Gilman, Don E., 1:1095–1096 Gilman, E. Ward, 1:1014 Giltrow, Janet, 2:1867 Gimson, A. C., 1:945, 1:1092 Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), 1:1022 Girvan, Ritchie, 2:1342 Gissing, George, 1:881 Givo´n, Talmy, 1:871, 1:872–873, 2:1277 Glamorgan, 2:1979, 2:1980, 2:1989 Glanvill, Joseph, 1:245, 1:605 Gla¨ser, Rosemarie, 1:179, 1:181, 1:183 Glasgow, 1:81, 1:1079, 2:1915, 2:1920, 2:1959
2187 Glasgow Media Project, 1:1079, 1:1081–1082, 1:1083–1085 Glasgow University, 1:315, 1:323 Glass, Montague, 2:1818 Glastonbury, 1:344, 1:379 Glastonbury Abbey, 1:378 global English, 2:2135–2146 – American Declaration of Independence and, 1:699 – American English and, 2:1886–1888 – beginnings in Early Modern period, 1:1003 – British English and, 2:1880, 2:1886–1888 – codification of, 1:1015–1016 – ESL dictionaries and, 1:1059 – in Gibraltar, 2:1746–1749 – the Internet and, 1:1111, 1:1112–1113 – Kachru’s concentric circles model, 2:1186– 1187, 2:1740, 2:1749, 2:1886–1888, 2:2107 – McArthur’s concentric circles model of, 2:1886–1888, 2:1895, 2:1896, 2:2107 – phonological study and, 1:111 – pragmatics of, 2:2142 – prosody and, 1:127 – protests against, 1:992 – Schneider’s model of postcolonial, 2:1444– 1445 – supranational standard, 2:1187, 2:1822–1823, 2:1896 – terms and definitions, 2:2135 Globe and Mail (newspaper), 2:1866 Globe Theatre, 1:813 Globish, 1:1015 Glossarial Data-Base of Middle English, 1:585–586 Glossary of Colonial English (Lentzner), 1:898 Glossographia (Blount), 1:638, 1:1008, 1:1054, 2:1883 Glottalic Theory, 1:3 Gloucestershire, 1:43, 1:497, 1:498, 1:688, 2:2046 Gneuss, Helmut – catalogue of Old English manuscripts, 2:1124 – on dialectal difference in suffixes, 1:353 – on French loans in Old English, 2:1679 – on German philology, 2:1336–1337 – historical sociolinguistics and, 1:534 – on Latin loans in Old English, 2:1707, 2:1715 – study of Latin influence on Old English phraseology, 1:190 – on Winchester “standard”, 1:28, 1:375, 1:377, 1:378, 1:1000
2188 Goblirsch, Kurt Gustav, 1:4 Goddard, Ives, 2:1758, 2:1759 Godden, Malcolm, 1:322, 1:344 God Struck Me Dead, 2:1797 Goffin, Robert, 2:2140 Goffman, Erving, 1:329, 1:656, 1:659 Gold, Elaine, 2:1872 Goldberg, Adele, 2:1564, 2:1634–1635, 2:1636 Golding, Arthur, 1:752 Golla, Victor, 2:1754, 2:1755, 2:1758, 2:1765 Gonza´lez-Dı´az, Victorina, 1:432, 1:863, 1:947– 948, 2:1404, 2:2048 Good English (Gould), 1:1012 Goodfellow, Anne, 2:1765 Good Housekeeping, 1:1095 Goodspeed, Edgar J., 1:1045 Google Book Search, 2:1144 Goose, Nigel, 1:688 Goossens, Louis, 2:1345 Gordon, Elizabeth, 2:1271, 2:1998, 2:1999, 2:2006, 2:2007 Gordon, George, 1:609–610 Gordon, Ian A., 1:242, 1:245 Gordon, Matthew, 2:2099 Go¨rlach, Manfred – on advertising language, 1:907–908 – on the Bible, 1:1047–1048 – on the “democratization of styles”, 1:962 – on Early Modern English, 1:49–50, 1:607, 1:640, 1:646, 1:699, 1:732 – on language choice in Middle English period, 1:545 – on Late Modern English, 1:64, 1:889, 1:916– 917, 1:954 – on Middle English creolization hypothesis, 2:1782 – on my/thy vs. mine/thine, 1:735 – on Old English creolization theory, 2:1267 – on periodization schemes, 2:1234, 2:1244, 2:1246, 2:1248 – on regional vs. local varieties, 1:669–670 – on scientific writing in English, 1:57 – on sociolectal interpretation, 1:955 – textbook for history of English, 2:1166–1167, 2:1168, 2:1184 – on Welsh and Cornish, 1:671 – on women’s language, 1:957, 1:961 – work on genre, 1:238, 1:246 – work on World English, 2:1317, 2:2107, 2:2139
Index – on written vs. spoken language, 1:961 – on ye vs. you, 1:737 Gothic – absence of umlaut in, 1:268 – comparative philology and, 2:1301 – dual pronouns, 1:14 – OE weak verb stem formatives in, 1:140 – origins of Pictish in, 1:894 – syntax, 2:1621 – Verner’s Law and, 1:4 – vowel and consonant length, 1:264 – weak preterit suffix, 1:16 Goths, 1:2 Gotland, 2:1504 Gotti, Maurizio, 1:207, 1:468, 1:474, 2:1401 Gould, Edward, 1:1012 Gove, Philip B., 2:1319 Gower, 2:1978, 2:1984 Gower, John, 1:456, 1:457, 1:462, 1:528, 1:566– 567, 2:1204, 2:1283 Gowers, Ernest, 2:1816, 2:1893 Graddol, David, 1:1101 Graff, Harvey J., 1:535 Gramich, Katie, 2:1989 Grammaire historique de l’anglais (Cre´pin), 2:1398 grammar competition, 1:157–158 Grammar of English Grammars (Brown), 1:971, 1:1012 Grammar of Late Modern English (Poutsma), 1:63, 2:1342 Grammar of Old English (Hogg), 1:376, 2:1307 Grammar of Scots (Grant and Main-Dixon), 1:93 Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Wright), 2:1307 Grammar of the English Language (Cobbett), 1:942 Grammar of the English Language (Wallis), 2:1299 Grammatica brevis (Niger), 2:1220 grammatical constructionalization, 1:161, 2:1639 Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (Cooper), 2:1882 Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (Wallis), 2:1882 grammaticalization, 2:1558–1573 – of articles, 1:159–160 – of auxiliary verbs, 1:441
Index – of because, 1:530 – child language and, 2:1605–1608 – cognitive linguistics and, 1:165, 1:167, 2:1559, 2:1563 – collostructional analysis and, 1:170, 1:171– 172 – Construction Grammar and, 2:1642–1643 – corpus linguistics and, 2:1569 – decategorialization and, 2:1559–1560, 2:1593 – defined, 1:436, 2:1365, 2:1559 – of discourse markers, 1:202 – of former present participle, 1:530 – frequency in, 2:1538–1543, 2:1569 – generative linguistics and, 2:1622–1626 – of the get passive construction, 1:871–873 – of IE weak adjectival suffix, 1:13–14 – innovation–adoption–diffusion process and, 2:1495 – Lehmann’s parameters, 2:1541, 2:1561, 2:1562, 2:1568, 2:1571 – of lexemes as compound constituents, 1:136 – Lexical Functional Grammar and, 2:1657 – lexicalization and, 2:1572–1573, 2:1577–1578, 2:1586, 2:1591–1595 – of methinks, 1:624, 2:1364, 2:1572, 2:1587 – non-exemplar based analogy and, 1:161 – of of course, 1:909 – of Old English nawiht, 1:632 – in origin of dental preterit, 1:16, 1:140 – of perfect, 1:304 – of periphrastic do, 1:747 – in pidgins and creoles, 2:1569–1570 – of plus as conjunction, 1:92, 1:93 – of progressive, 1:69–70, 1:609, 1:626–627, 1:873 – of quotative like, 1:93 – reanalysis and, 1:157, 1:158–159 – of in terms of, 2:1565–1568 – theory of unidirectionality and, 2:1180, 2:1532 – of the transitive construction, 1:155 Gramsci, Antonio, 1:992 Grancharov, Christo, 2:1388 Granovetter, Mark S., 2:2033 Grant, Charles, 2:2079 Grant, William, 1:93 Grave, The, 1:121 Gray, Edward W., 2:1754, 2:1757, 2:1764 Great Complement Shift, 1:851, 1:878 Great Depression, 2:1797 Great Famine, 1:68
2189 Great Typo Hunt (Deck and Herson), 1:967 Great Vowel Shift, see under phonological changes Greece, 2:2139 Greef, L. de, 2:1704 Greek – in the Bible, 1:1042, 1:1046 – characterizations of, 1:1024 – comparative philology and, 1:1011, 2:1301, 2:1302 – contact with English, 2:1719–1723 – demonstrative pronouns, 1:14 – dictionaries of, 1:639 – Earl of Shaftesbury on, 1:939 – Early Modern English prosody and, 1:126 – Homeric, 1:386 – the Internet and, 1:1112 – loans to English, 1:370, 1:514, 1:956, 2:1704, 2:1705, 2:1711, 2:1714 – loans to Scots, 2:1956 – metalinguistics, 1:968 – modal verbs in, 2:1607 – musical notation, 2:1217 – mute [h] in, 1:838 – origin of -ize, 1:618 – progressive aspect in, 2:1693 – pronunciation, 1:1007–1008 – in scientific vocabulary, 1:74, 1:695 – scientific writing in, 1:241 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – weak adjectival suffix, 1:13 – word-formation processes, 1:136, 1:137, 1:612, 1:618 – writing system, 1:227 Green, Eugene, 1:472, 2:1173 Green, Jonathon, 1:1013, 2:1157 Green, Lisa J., 2:1836 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2:1208–1209 Greenwood, James, 1:69, 1:75, 1:835, 1:839 Gregg, Robert J., 2:1865, 2:1867, 2:1868, 2:1869, 2:1966 Gregory, Derek, 2:2037–2039 Gregory, Michelle L., 2:1477, 2:1479 Gregory I, Pope, 1:23, 1:26, 1:343, 1:368, 1:375, 2:1119 Grein, Christian W. M., 2:1332 Grenada, 2:1771, 2:2121 Gretsch, Mechthild, 1:378, 1:379–380, 1:381, 1:382, 1:1000 Grieve, C. M., 2:1959 Grijzenhout, Janet, 1:109
2190 Grillo, Ralph D., 2:1757, 2:1759 Grimm, Jakob – on frequency and language change, 2:1531 – influence, 1:1012, 2:1182, 2:1330 – Kemble and, 2:1303 – periodization scheme for Germanic languages, 2:1237 – Schlegel’s influence on, 2:1302 – Webster’s ignorance of, 2:1313 – see also under phonological changes Gronemeyer, Claire, 1:872 Grose, Francis, 1:1057 Groten Recken, 1:690 Grund, Peter, 1:240, 1:672 Grundmann, Herbert, 2:1280 Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Brugmann), 2:1307 Grundzu¨ge der Lautphysiologie (Sievers), 2:1333 Grzega, Joachim, 1:331 Guarani, 1:75 ´ skar, 2:1504, 2:1505 Guðlaugsson, O Guianas, 1:694 Guide to the English Tongue (Dyche), 1:1054 Guide to the Pronunciation of Australian Place Names, 1:1098 Gujarati, 2:2082 Gukhman, M. M., 2:1381 Gullah – African American English and, 2:1799, 2:1829 – geographical distribution, 2: 1771, 2:1833, 2:2121 – in models of World English, 2:1887 – morphosyntax, 2:1832, 2:2129 – official recognition, 2:1836–1837 Gundel, Jeanette K., 2:1477 Gunn, John S., 2:1997 Guthrum, King of East Anglia, 1:25, 2:1266– 1267 Guyana, 2:1771, 2:2122 Guyanese Creole English, 2:1771, 2:1774– 1775, 2:2128, 2:2131 Guy of Warwick, 1:738 Guysborough, NS, 2:1869 Gwent, 2:1978 Gwyddoniadur, 2:1982 Gwynedd, 2:1986, 2:1990
Index
H Haas, William, 1:231 Ha¨cki Buhofer, Annelies, 1:183 Hadley, James, 2:1313 Haenni, Ruedi, 2:1916 Hagen, Ann, 1:323 Ha¨gerstrand, Torsten, 2:2037 Hakluyt, Richard, 2:2093 Halbertsma, Joast, 2:1342 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 2:1817, 2:1864 Hall, Fitzedward, 1:972 Hall, Joan Houston, 2:1761, 2:1849 Hall, John R. Clark, 1:316, 1:318, 2:1134, 2:1150, see also Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Clark Hall) Hall, Robert A., Jr., 1:974, 2:2123 Halle, Morris, 1:761, 2:1297, 2:1315, 2:1316 Halliday, Michael A. K., 1:227, 1:241, 2:1478 Hamacher, Werner, 2:1165 Hamburg, 2:1955 Hame´lius, Paul, 2:1345 Hamlet (Shakespeare) – auxiliary + past participle in, 1:818 – double comparison in, 1:607 – form of goodbye in, 2:1638 – modals as main verbs in, 1:817 – non-use of progressive, 1:69, 1:609 – periphrastic do in, 1:621 – popularity in its time, 2:1210 – pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches to, 1:656, 1:820 Hammarstro¨m, Go¨ran, 2:2053 Hammond, Gerald, 1:1047 Hammond, Samuel, 1:831 Hamonie universelle (Mersenne), 2:1228 Hampshire, 1:495, 1:498 Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Brinton), 2:1468 Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (Herna´ndez-Campoy and Conde Silvestre), 2:1439 Handbook of Middle English (IglesiasRa´bade), 2:1403 Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England, 2:1841 Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC (Herring), 1:1114 Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann), 2:1936, 2:2113 Handke, Ju¨rgen, 2:1196
Index Handlyng Synne (Mannyng), 1:559 Handover, Phyllis Margaret, 1:1065 Hanna, Ralph, 1:561, 1:562, 1:565 Hannah, Jean, 2:1834, 2:1888 Hanneman, Knut, 2:1196 Hanseatic League, 1:689, 2:1955 Hansen, Klaus, 2:1880 Hanslick, Eduard, 2:1229 Hardie, Kim, 1:83 Harding, Vanessa, 2:1664 Hardwick, Margaret F., 2:1868 Hardy, Thomas, 1:849 Harland, S., 1:831 Harley, Brilliana, Lady, 1:722 Harmer, Florence E., 2:1122 Harold, King of England, 2:1953 Harper, Douglas, 2:1135 HarperCollins, 1:1013 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (Morris and Morris), 1:975 Harrington, Susanmarie, 2:1169 Harriot, Thomas, 2:1762 Harris, Alice C., 1:155, 1:156, 2:1543 Harris, George, 1:986 Harris, James, 1:970, 1:987 Harris, Joel Chandler, 2:1795 Harris, John, 1:108, 2:1968, 2:1969, 2:1970, 2:1972, 2:2102 Harris, Roy, 1:1058 Harris, Wendell A., 1:1095, 2:1835 Harrison, Tony, 2:1910 Harrow School, 2:2082 Hart, Alfred, 1:642 Hart, John, 1:605, 1:607, 1:701, 1:762, 1:1008, 2:1284 Hartlib, Samuel, 1:53 Harvard University, 2:1386 Haspelmath, Martin, 2:1563, 2:1590, 2:1624 Hastings, Francis, Sir, 1:727 Hastings, Warren, 2:2079 Hatcher, Anna G., 2:1715 Haugen, Einar, see under standardization Havelok the Dane, 1:536, 1:558, 1:747, 2:1502, 2:1506 Havet, L., 1:97 Hawai’i Creole English, 2:1770, 2:1773, 2:1774–1775, 2:1776, 2:2125 Hawkins, William (the Elder), 2:2092 Hawthorne School, 2:1828 Hayakawa, S. I., 2:1920 Haydn, Joseph, 2:1229
2191 Hayes, Mary, 2:1185 Haywood, Eliza, 1:859, 1:879 Head, Richard, 1:846 Heal, Felicity, 1:716 Healey, Antonette diPaolo, 1:319, 2:1120, 2:1319, 2:1619 Hebrew – characterizations of, 1:1024 – in Gibraltar, 2:1746, 2:1748 – phonology, 1:108 – in translations of Bible, 1:1042, 1:1044, 1:1046–1047, 1:1048 – Wallis on relation of Welsh to, 2:1299 Hebridean English, 2:1689, 2:1694, 2:1699 Heidermanns, Frank, 2:1158 Heine, Bernd, 1:167, 2:1569, 2:1570, 2:1588 Heinemann New Zealand Dictionary, 1:1059 Heliand, 1:346 Helsinki Corpus (HC) – chronological coverage, 1:936, 2:1138, 2:1357, 2:1512 – comparative forms in Early Modern English, 1:607, 1:706 – as comprising edited texts, 2:1468 – encoding of texts, 1:239, 1:248, 1:640 – genre in, 1:725–726 – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:772 – historical pragmatics and, 2:1465 – historical sociolinguistics and, 1:622, 1:716, 2:1439 – historical syntax and, 2:1476 – his vs. its in, 1:705 – importance, 2:1357 – material not included in, 1:335, 1:918 – Middle English material in, 1:467, 1:534, 1:535–536 – negation in, 1:726 – Old English material, 1:327 – other corpora derived from, 2:1140, 2:1357– 1358 – periphrastic do in, 1:753, 1:754 – progressive in, 1:626, 1:874 – register and, 1:249 – second person pronoun choice in, 1:704, 1:725–726 – size, 2:1516 – in studies of lexical borrowing, 2:1716 – in study of exclamations and interjections, 1:201–202, 1:326 – in study of French suffixes in Middle English, 1:431
2192 – in study of participial adjectives, 1:248 – subgenre classification, 1:473 – subjunctive, 1:947 – in teaching history of English, 2:1195 – third person singular present indicative -s in, 1:725–726 Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS), 2:1138, 2:1357 Heltveit, Trygve, 1:732 Henderson, Leslie, 1:231 Henry (Harry), Prince, grandson of Elizabeth II, 2:1911 Henry, Alison, 1:85 Henry, Patrick L., 2:1970, 2:1971, 2:1972 Henry I, King of England, 2:1126 Henry II, King of England, 2:1501, 2:2046 Henry III, King of England, 2:2047 Henry IV, King of England, 1:509 Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare), 1:659 Henry IV Part 3 (Shakespeare), 1:662 Henryson, Robert, 2:1955 Henry V (Shakespeare), 1:623, 1:633 Henry V, King of England, 1:526, 1:528, 1:982, 2:1270 Henry VI (Shakespeare), 1:735 Henry VII, King of England, 2:1248, 2:1252, 2:1978 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 1:626 Henry VIII, King of England – attitudes to English during reign of, 1:643– 644 – dissolution of monasteries, 2:1498 – education during reign of, 1:53, 1:1006–1007 – Ireland and, 2:1963–1964 – letters, 1:726 – in social network analysis, 1:728 – Wales and, 2:1978–1979 Herbarium, 1:394 Herbert, John, 1:1090, 1:1098 Hereford, 1:344, 2:2047 Hereford, Nicholas, 1:1040 Herefordshire, 1:437, 1:495, 1:498, 2:1247, 2:2046, 2:2047 Hermes: A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (Harris), 1:970, 1:987 Hermogenes, 1:968 Herna´ndez-Campoy, Juan Manuel, 2:1402, 2:1445, 2:2034, 2:2036 Hernstein, Richard J., 2:1828 Heroic Age (online journal), 2:1145
Index Herring, Susan C., 1:207, 1:1106, 1:1107, 1:1111, 1:1112 Herrmann, Tanja, 1:928 Hertel, Johannes, 2:1331 Herzen Institute, 2:1381 Herzfeld, George, 2:1485 Herzog, Marvin, 2:1491 heteronymy, 2:2071 Heuser, Wilhelm, 2:1327 Hewitt, Roger, 2:2027 Hickes, George, 1:374, 2:1298 Hickey, Raymond, 2:1197, 2:1554, 2:1687– 1688, 2:1968, 2:1970, 2:2007, 2:2070 Hieronymus of Moravia, 2:1222 Higden, Ranulph, 1:43, 1:560, 1:562, 1:982, 2:1263–1265 Highland English, 2:1957 Hilbert, Michaela, 2:1743 Hildebrandslied, 2:1332 Hilgers, Lothar, 2:1916, 2:1922 Hillerman, Tony, 2:1765 Hilmes, Michele, 1:1095 Hilpert, Martin, 1:170, 2:1640 Hiltunen, Risto, 1:184, 1:206, 1:239, 1:240, 1:326, 1:472, 2:1365, 2:1366 Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., 2:1570, 2:1572, 2:1584, 2:1592 Hindi, 2:2081, 2:2083, 2:2084, 2:2085, 2:2109, 2:2141 Hind Swaraj (Gandhi), 2:2082 The Hindu (newspaper), 2:2083 Hiroshima University, 2:1415, 2:1416 Hispanic English, 1:1022 Histoire de la langue anglaise (Bourcier), 2:1398 Historia de la lengua inglesa (Ferna´ndez), 2:1402 Historiae adversus paganos (Orosius), 1:26, 1:347, see also Alfredian translations Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (Bede), 1:21, 1:26, 1:341, 1:344, 1:345, 1:348, see also Alfredian translations Historia Regum Britanniae (Geoffrey of Monmouth), 2:1282 Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS), 2:1157 Historical English Grammar (Pinsker), 2:1336 Historical Linguistics List (Histling-L), 2:1145 Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English ( Jucker), 2:1459, 2:1460, 2:1520
Index Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics (online journal), 2:1145, 2:1343, 2:1439 historical syntax, 1:148–164, 2:1475–1487, 2:1613–1628 Historical Syntax of the English Language (Visser), 2:1342 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) – example of entry, 1:451–453 – onomasiological principle, 1:166 – research potential, 1:46, 1:315, 1:646, 2:1133, 2:1157, 2:1194, 2:1309 – TOE and, 2:1137 Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache (Kaluza), 2:1333 Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache (Luick), 2:1333 Historische neuenglische Grammatik, Teil I, Lautlehre (Horn), 2:1333 History of English ( journal), 2:1417 History of English (van Gelderen), 2:1197 History of English (Wyld), 2:1332 History of English Development (Nakajima), 2:1415 History of English Poetry (Warton), 2:1182 History of English Sounds (Sweet), 2:1238, 2:1240, 2:1305 History of English Words (Hughes), 2:1172 History of Foreign Words in English (Serjeantson), 2:1666 History of Jason, 1:561 History of Modern Colloquial English (Wyld), 2:1291, 2:1307 History of the English Language (Baugh and Cable) – on American dialect geography, 2:1842 – bibliographic inclusiveness, 2:1187 – on French loans, 2:1679 – internal vs. external history in, 2:1167, 2:1439 – periodization, 2:1251 – on regularization of verbs, 2:1535 – time of writing, 2:1291, 2:1314 History of the English Language (Blake), 2:1181 History of the English Language (Cho), 2:1417 History of the English Language (Lounsbury), 2:1334 History of the English Language (Mugglestone), 2:1174
2193 History of the English Language (Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade), 1:700 History of the English Language (Peyton), 1:987 History of the English Language (website), 2:1132 History of the English Language List (HEL-L), 2:1145 History of the Royal Society (Sprat), 1:795 Hittle, Erla, 2:1329 Hladky´, Josef, 2:1379 HMS Bounty, 2:2126 Hoby, Thomas, 1:631 Hoccleve, Thomas, 1:524, 1:578, 2:1625 Hock, Hans Heinrich, 1:761 Hockett, Charles F., 1:132, 2:1236, 2:1248– 1249, 2:1253, 2:1315 Hodges, Richard, 1:1008 Hodson, Jane, 1:946 Hoey, Michael, 1:459 Hoffmann, Arnold, 2:1334 Hoffmann, Michol F., 2:1866 Hoffmann, Sebastian, 1:910, 2:1515, 2:1565, 2:1568 Hofstetter, Walter, 1:356–357, 1:378–379 Hogg, James, 1:93 Hogg, Richard M. – editorship of CHEL, 2:1310 – on Mercian literary language, 1:383 – on Neogrammarians, 2:1307 – on Northumbrian dominance, 1:20–21 – on Old English adjectives, 1:280 – on Old English compounds, 1:317 – on Old English dialectology, 2:1120–1121 – on Old English dialects, 1:321, 1:344 – on Old English diphthongs, 1:260 – on periodization in CHEL, 2:1251 – on “standardization” in Old English, 1:374, 1:376, 1:381, 1:383 – treatment of Germanic, 1:2 – treatment of morphological structure, 1:130 – work on charters, 2:1122 – work on suppletion, 1:432 Hohenhaus, Peter, 2:1583 Hollmann, Willem, 1:158–159 Holloway, Anne, 2:2023 Holly, Werner, 1:1079 Holm, John, 2:1771, 2:2127 Holmes, Clive, 1:716 Holthausen, Ferdinand, 2:1158, 2:1290, 2:1328, 2:1334
2194 Holyoake, Francis, 1:1052 Holyoake, Thomas, 1:1052 homogeneity/heterogeneity paradox, 2:1258, 2:1259 Honegger, Thomas, 1:203, 1:473, 1:542 Honey, John, 1:988, 2:1889, 2:1890 Honeybone, Patrick, 1:148 Hong Kong, 1:1060, 2:1862, 2:2114, 2:2116– 2117, 2:2136 Hong Kong English, 2:1140, 2:1157, 2:1887, 2:2111, 2:2117 Hooke, Robert, 1:632 Hooker, Jeremy, 2:1988 Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 2:1901 Hooker, Richard, 1:200, 1:202 Hooper, Joan B., 2:1532 Hoops, Johannes, 2:1328, 2:1329 Hoosier Schoolmaster (Eggleston), 2:1817 Hope, Jonathan, 1:656, 1:700, 1:733, 1:739, 1:809, 2:1446, 2:2048 Hopper, Paul J., 1:3, 1:336, 2:1562–1563, 2:1568, 2:1569, 2:1570, 2:1578, 2:1588 Hori, Masahiro, 2:1416 Horn, Wilhelm, 2:1332, 2:1333, 2:1335 Horobin, Simon, 1:38, 1:578 horror aequi principle, 1:848, 1:880–881 Horrox, Rosemary, 1:547 Hortrop, Iob, 1:734 Horvath, Barbara M., 1:81, 2:2000, 2:2007, 2:2099 Horvath, Ronald J., 2:2000, 2:2007 Hosaka, Michio, 2:1416 Hosali, Priya, 2:2078 Hoskyns, John, 1:795, 1:798, 1:804 Hough, Carole, 1:320 House, Juliane, 1:655 House of Fame (Chaucer), 1:472, 1:568 Houston, John Porter, 1:816 Housum, Jonathan, 2:1533 Howarth, Peter, 1:183, 1:184 Howe, Nicholas, 2:1132 Howe, Stephen, 1:738 Howell, Robert B., 1:9–10, 1:269 Howlet, Richard, 1:1052 Huber, Magnus, 1:672, 1:695, 2:1801, 2:2094 Huchon, Rene´, 2:1397 Huddleston, Rodney, 1:132 Hudson, Jean, 1:188–189 Hudson, Rachel, 2:1870 Hudson, Richard A., 2:1447, 2:2023 Hudson’s Bay Company, 2:1867
Index Hughes, Arthur, 2:2021, 2:2022, 2:2023, 2:2024 Hughes, Geoffrey, 1:243, 2:1172, 2:1712 Hughes, John, 2:1988 Hughes, Langston, 2:1818 Huguenots, 1:688, 1:689, 1:690, 2:1675, 2:1679, 2:2093, 2:2115 Hulk, Aafke, 1:297 Hull, 2:1919 Hu¨llen, Werner, 1:245 Hulme, Hilda M., 1:810 Huloet, Richard, 1:638, 1:645 Hultin, Neil C., 2:1872 Humber River, 1:411, 1:490 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 1:130 Humboldt University in Berlin, 2:1326, 2:1337 Hume, Alexander, 1:225 Hume, David, 1:892, 1:1009, 1:1010 Hundred Years War, 1:507, 1:982, 2:1783 Hundt, Marianne, 1:84–85, 1:859, 1:872, 1:873, 1:875, 1:876, 1:962, 2:2005 Hungarian, 2:1602, 2:1621 Hungarian Royal University, 2:1380 Hungarian Studies in English, 2:1380 Hungary, 2:1380–1381, 2:2145 Hunterian Collection, 1:35 Huntingdonshire, 2:1267 Huntington Library, 1:35 Huntley, 2:1920 Hussey, Stanley S., 1:810, 1:816 Hutcheson, Bellenden Rand, 1:121 Hutterer, Claus J., 2:1381 Hyatt, Harry Middleton, 2:1799–1800, 2:1804 hypercorrection, 2:2066–2067 hyperdialectalisms, 2:2041
I Iaith Pawb: A National Action Plan for a Bilingual Wales, 2:1991 Iarovici, Edith, 2:1385 ICAMET (Innsbruck Letter Corpus), 1:622 Iceland, 2:1355 Icelandic, 1:103, 1:110, 2:1652, 2:1725, see also Old Icelandic Ichikawa, Sanki, 2:1415 ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English), 2:2141 Iconicity Research Project, 2:1344 idioms and fixed expressions, 1:178–193, 1:462, 1:902
Index Idiom Structure in English (Makkai), 1:183 Idler, 1:902 Idley, Peter, 1:548 IELO (“Introduction to English linguistics online”), 2:1197 Iglesias-Ra´bade, Luis, 2:1403 Ihalainen, Ossi, 1:921, 1:923, 1:924, 1:935, 2:1359 Illinois, 2:1841, 2:1844 Ilyish, Boris A., 2:1382 Imperial Dictionary of the English Language (Ogilvie), 2:1894 impersonal constructions – Chaucer’s dream vocabulary and, 1:456–457 – Early Modern English loss of, 1:623–624 – episode-marking and, 1:470–471 – in Middle English, 1:43, 1:469 – in Old English, 1:153–155, 1:297–298, 1:299 – passive voice and, 1:307 Incredulity Response Construction, 1:181 India, 2:2077–2090 – attitudes to American English in, 2:1816 – East India Company and, 1:52, 1:694 – emigration, 2:1862, 2:2015 – English colonization of, 2:1444, 2:2136 – in models of World English, 2:1886, 2:2107, 2:2109, 2:2114 – Mutiny of 1857, 2:2079 Indiana, 2:1804, 2:1817, 2:1841 Indiana University, 2:1320 Indian English, 2:2077–2090 – in comparative study of article use, 2:2114 – difficulty of classifying, 2:1768 – earliest recognition as distinct variety, 2:2140 – evolution of, 2:1444–1445 – in Glossary of Colonial English, 1:898 – international status, 2:2146 – lack of dictionary of, 2:1157 – linguistic corpora of, 1:1015, 2:1140 – in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 – phonology, 2:2086, 2:2142, 2:2143 – terms and varieties, 2:2078, 2:2081 – use of perfective, 2:2112 – word order, 1:152 Indian National Congress, 2:2082, 2:2083 Indo-European (IE) – in ancestry of English, 1:1–2, 1:11 – cognitive semantics and, 1:166, 1:174 – morphology
2195 – – – –
case system, 1:12, 1:30, 1:273 demonstrative pronouns, 1:14 gender system, 1:12 Germanic preterit-present verbs and, 1:16 – nouns and adjectives, 1:12, 1:143 – second person pronouns, 1:203 – weak adjectival suffix, 1:13 – word-formation, 1:135 – “onomastic dialect”, 1:216 – optative mood, 1:15 – phonology – ablaut, 1:11, 1:15, 1:129–130, 1:132, 1:133, 1:138–139, 1:289 – Grimm’s Law and, 1:100–101 – Proto-Germanic phonology and, 1:3–6 – vowel system, 1:4–5 – prosody, 1:3–4, 1:13, 1:264 – syntax, 1:17 – typology, 1:130, 1:132, 1:138–139 Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (IEED), 2:1135 Indonesia, 2:1886, 2:2114, 2:2126 Industrial Revolution, 1:67, 1:68, 1:888, 1:941, 1:953, 1:1025, 2:1250 information structure, 2:1475–1487 Ingham, Richard, 2:1625 Ingvaeonic, 1:2, 1:5, 1:6, 1:8, 1:11, 1:15 inkhorn controversy, 1:709, 1:799, 1:813, 1:969, 2:1713, 2:1720, 2:1882 Innsbruck Computer Archive of MachineReadable English Texts (ICAMET), 2:1138 Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, 2:1516 Inns of Court, 1:54 Institute for Historical Dialectology (IHD), 1:669, 1:682 Institute for Name-Studies, 2:1136 Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, 2:1142 Institute of English Philology, 2:1376 Institute of Historical Dialectology, 2:1142 Instructions for Christians, 1:393 International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), 2:1138, 2:1140, 2:1347, 2:1519 International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG3), 2:1404 International Conference on English Historical Dialectology (ICEHD), 2:1401
2196 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) – in Amsterdam, 2:1344 – in Bergamo, 2:1401 – in Munich, 2:1405 – in Poland, 2:1388 – proceedings, 2:1519 – SHEL and, 2:1320 – in Spain, 2:1402, 2:1404 – in Zurich, 2:1293 International Conference on Late Modern English, 2:1404 International Conference on Middle English, 2:1388 International Conference on the English Language in the Late Modern Period 1700– 1900, 2:1344 International Corpus of English (ICE) – Australian corpus, 1:80, 1:93 – British corpus, 1:875, 2:1690, 2:1968 – Canada corpus, 2:1866 – as corpus of global English, 2:2141 – coverage and accessibility, 1:1015, 1:1064, 2:1140 – Ireland corpus, 2:1690, 2:1962, 2:1966, 2:1968 – New Zealand corpus, 1:87 – in study of article use, 2:2114 Internet, 1:79, 1:83, 1:1016, 1:1101 Internet Archive: Wayback Machine (website), 2:1132 The Interpreter (Cowell), 1:647 Interrelation between Form and Function in the Development of the English Language (Lehnert), 2:1335 Introduction to Old English (Baker), 2:1316 Introduction to Old English and Middle English (Ichikawa), 2:1415 Inventory of Distinguishing Dialect Features (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes), 2:1852 Inventory of Script and Spellings in EleventhCentury English, 1:382, 2:1141 Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC), 1:168, 1:200 Iowa, 2:1841, 2:1843 IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), 1:760, 1:763, 1:919, 1:920, 1:944–945, 1:1004 Ireland – attachment to local accent in, 2:1888 – emigration patterns, 1:51, 1:52, 1:68, 1:694, 2:1862 – English constructions of, 2:1271
Index – English in, 1:992, 2:1962–1965, 2:2062–2073, 2:2136 – English invasion of, 2:2046 – historical linguistics in, 2:1314 Ireland, Robert J., 2:1872 Irish Church, 1:23, 1:24 Irish English, 2:1961–1973 – accent, 2:1900, 2:1902 – American English and, 2:2050 – Canadian English and, 2:1863, 2:1869, 2:1870 – in the Caribbean, 1:694 – codification, 2:1156 – corpus of, 2:1139, 2:1140 – distinctive features, 2:1943, 2:1944 – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:759 – lexicon, 2:1965–1967 – in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 – Medieval, 2:2046–2047 – Newfoundland and, 1:693 – Northern English and, 2:1945–1946 – phonology, 2:1931, 2:1971–1973, 2:2062, 2:2063, 2:2064 – pronunciation, 1:71, 1:593, 1:831 – Stage, 1:670 – stages of evolution, 2:2118 – stigmatization of, 1:944, 1:1023 – supraregionalization processes and, 2:2062– 2073 – syntax, 2:1967–1971 – “focus first”, 2:1360 – indirect questions, 1:85 – it-cleft constructions, 2:1694, 2:1697, 2:1698 – progressive forms, 2:1689–1691 – relative markers, 1:928 – Welsh English and, 2:1985 Irish Gaelic, 1:9, 1:24, 1:232, 1:687, 1:693, 2:1691, 2:1964–1965, 2:2046 Irish Spelling Book, 1:832 Irvine, Judith, 1:1022 Irwin, P. J., 2:1965 Island Carib, 1:167 Islander Creole of Providencia and San Andre´s, 2:2121 Isle of Man, 2:1688 Isle of Wight, 1:342 Israel, 2:1886 Is television a contributory factor in accent change in adolescents?, 2:1922 Is there an Anglo-Welsh literature? (Lewis), 2:1988 Le istitutioni harmoniche (Zarlino), 2:1224
Index Italian – characterizations of, 1:987, 1:1024 – codification of, 1:639, 1:647, 1:1051 – defense of, 1:984 – in Gibraltar, 2:1746 – loans to English, 2:1739 – in Malta, 2:1740–1743 – merchants’ knowledge of, 1:57, 1:643 – in mixed-language texts, 2:1448 – music terminology, 1:695 – mute h in, 1:838 – pronoun choice in, 1:203 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – work on media influence on, 1:1083 Italy – emigration from, 2:1862, 2:1980 – English historical linguistics in, 1:449, 2:1290, 2:1399–1401 – forms of address in, 1:473 – language academy in, 1:941 – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145 – teaching of English in, 2:2139 Ithaca, NY, 2:1314 ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary, 2:1867 IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), 2:1722 Iva˘nescu, Gheorghe, 2:1385 Ivanhoe (Scott), 2:1300 Ivanov, Vjacheslav V., 1:3 Ives, Summer, 2:1795
J Jaberg, Karl, 2:1841 Jackendoff, Ray, 2:1616 Jackson, Andrew, 2:1444 Jackson, George, 1:840 Jacobs, Andreas, 2:1459 Jacobsson, Bengt, 1:633, 1:653, 1:656 Jagellonian University in Cracow, 2:1376 Jakobson, Roman, 1:98, 1:101, 1:105, 1:109 Jamaica, 1:1016, 1:1023, 2:1771, 2:1862, 2:2015, 2:2093, 2:2123 Jamaican Creole English, 2:2123–2125 – British Creole and, 2:1889, 2:1946, 2:2122 – complementation, 2:2130 – gender in, 2:1775 – innit as discourse marker in, 2:2027
2197 – lectal continuum, 2:1772 – native speakers’ name for, 2:1770 – negation, 2:2131 – phonological features, 2:2127–2128 – possession, 2:2132 – relativizers, 2:2129 – size of speaker community, 2:1770, 2:1771 – status, 2:1778–1779 – see also Caribbean English Jamaican English, 2:1140, 2:1156, 2:1946, 2:2125, see also Jamaican Creole English James I, King of England, 1:643, 1:647, 1:708, 1:721, 1:748, 1:1044, 2:1815, 2:1956 James IV, King of Scotland, 2:1956 Jamestown, VA, 1:693, 2:1756, 2:1760, 2:1840, 2:2136 James V, King of Scotland, 2:1956 Jamieson, John, 1:894, 1:896–897, 2:1302, 2:1309 Janda, Richard D., 2:1582–1583 Janecka, Joanna M., 1:432 Janko, Josef, 2:1377 Jankowski, Bridget, 2:1870 Janson, Tore, 2:1183 Japan, 1:52, 1:449, 2:1290, 2:1378, 2:1415–1417, 2:1886, 2:2126 Japanese, 1:173, 1:227, 1:228, 2:2141, 2:2143 Japan Society for Medieval English Studies, 2:1415–1416 jargon, defined, 2:1769 Jary, Mark, 2:1479 Java, 1:694 Jefferson, Thomas, 2:1176, 2:1811 Jenkins, Jennifer, 2:2141, 2:2142, 2:2144 Jenkyns, Joy, 2:1120 Jerome of Moravia, 2:1222 Jespersen, Otto – on British-American contrasts, 1:847 – on the Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:761, 1:768 – on H. W. Fowler, 1:858 – influence, 2:1290, 2:1332, 2:1333, 2:1355 – on the loss of impersonal verbs, 1:624 – on paucity of Celtic influence, 2:1687 – Sonority Sequencing Principle, 1:107 – on the “speech-instinct”, 1:787 – study of Middle English lexicon, 2:1187, 2:1678 – use of term “prescriptive”, 1:973 – on word-formation, 1:82, 1:83 Jespersen’s Cycle, 2:1625 La Jeu de Robin et Marion (Adam de la Halle), 1:536
2198 Johannes, Afflighemensis, 2:1222 Johannesburg, 2:2098 Johannesson, Nils-Lennart, 2:1356 Johansen, Bruce E., 2:1754, 2:1755 John of Cornwall, 1:546 John of Garland, 2:1785 John of Salisbury, 2:1217 John Rylands Library, 1:35 Johnson, John, 1:719 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 2:1778 Johnson, Mark, 1:320, 2:1230 Johnson, Sabine, 1:719 Johnson, Samuel – aids to pronunciation, 1:944, 2:1904 – comparative forms, 1:607 – on English, 1:894, 1:941, 1:985 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 – Frances Burney and, 2:1450 – influence, 2:1713 – on language change, 2:1300–1301 – MA degree, 1:1010 – neoclassical prose style, 2:1882 – Noah Webster and, 1:1012, 1:1057 – non-recognition of term definition, 1:644 – omission of Native American words, 2:1763, 2:1809 – as one-man academy, 1:970, 1:971 – on periphrastic do, 1:877 – preface to dictionary, 1:1024–1025 – on purpose of dictionary, 1:895–896, 1:1055 – on received vs. rejected language, 2:1902 – Scots English and, 1:894, 1:896 – spelling and, 2:1890–1891 – on the subjunctive, 1:947, 1:948 – use of Latinate vocabulary, 2:1714 – use of literary sources, 1:647, 1:1009 – on working-class language, 1:990 – see also Dictionary of the English Language ( Johnson) Johnston, William, 1:830, 1:1056, 2:1902 Jones, Charles, 1:64, 1:66, 1:832, 1:839, 1:1011, 2:1553 Jones, Daniel – attempts at system for ESL learners, 1:110 – BBC Advisory Committee and, 1:1091, 1:1092 – on his own speech, 2:1820 – increasingly liberal attitude, 1:1014 – on origin of phoneme, 1:97
Index – Received Pronunciation and, 1:72, 2:1906, 2:1907, 2:1909 – success and influence, 1:945 Jones, Glyn, 2:1988 Jones, Gwyn, 2:1988 Jones, Lewis, 2:1988 Jones, Michael D. (Reverend), 2:1982 Jones, Richard Foster, 1:245, 1:639, 2:1184 Jones, William, 2:1220, 2:1227 Jones, William, Sir, 1:1011, 2:1291, 2:1297, 2:1301–1302, 2:2079 Jonson, Ben – adjectival comparison, 1:607 – distaste for [ʧt] cluster, 1:749 – English Grammar, 1:703, 1:708, 2:1882 – periphrastic do, 1:744–746 – ridicule of inkhorn terms, 2:1713 – on style, 1:796, 1:986 – third person present indicative endings, 1:703 – use of his over its, 1:705 – word order, 1:633 Jonson, James, 2:1134 Joos, Martin, 2:1868 Jordan, Richard, 1:38, 1:353, 2:1127, 2:1307 Jordanes, 1:2 Joseph, Brian D., 2:1582–1583 Joseph, John Earl, 1:939, 1:941, 1:1050–1051 Joseph of Arimathie, 2:1734 Josquin, Des Prez, 2:1223 Jost, Karl, 1:358 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1:1106 Journal of English Linguistics, 2:1316, 2:1519, 2:1847 Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1:901, 2:1459, 2:1460, 2:2142 Journal of Psychology, 2:2138 Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1:1109 Journal Storage ( JSTOR), 2:1145 Journal to Stella (Swift), 1:746 Journey through the History of the English Language in England and America (Nielsen), 2:1180 Jovial Crew or the Merry Beggars (Brome), 1:803 Jowett, Benjamin, 2:1901 Joyce, Patrick, 1:962 Joyce, P. W., 2:2064 Jucker, Andreas H. – in English historical linguistics, 2:1292 – on historical discourse analysis, 2:1468
Index – suggested approaches to speech acts, 1:331, 1:655–656, 1:821, 1:903, 1:910, 2:1195, 2:1365 – use of the OED, 2:1194 – volume on historical pragmatics, 1:208, 1:663, 2:1459 – volume on speech acts, 2:1459 – work on apologies, 1:654 – work on Chaucer, 1:203, 1:471–472, 1:473, 1:542–543 – work on insults, 1:205 – work on well, 1:661 Jud, Jakob, 2:1841 Judgement Day II, 1:335, 1:393 Juliana, 1:359 Julian of Norwich, 1:536, 1:537, 1:559 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 1:607, 1:817, 1:819 Junicode, 2:1143 Junius, Franciscus, 1:35, 2:1289, 2:1341, 2:1342 Junius Psalter, 1:381 Jutronic´, Dunja, 2:1387
K Kachru, Braj B. – call for study of postcolonial Englishes, 2:2140 – career and scholarship, 2:1317 – on Indian English, 2:2089 – model of World English, 2:1186–1187, 2:1740, 2:1749, 2:1886–1888, 2:2107, 2:2139 Kachru, Yamuna, 2:2142 Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena, 1:206, 1:432, 2:1363 Kaiser, Rolf, 1:501 Kakietek, Piotr, 1:819 Kalbotyra ( journal), 2:1385 Kalevala, 2:1462 Kallen, Jeffrey L., 2:1962, 2:1963, 2:1964, 2:1966, 2:1968, 2:1969, 2:1970 Kaluza, Max, 2:1315, 2:1333 Kaluza’s Law, 2:1315 Kamell, Georg Joseph, 1:74 Kamtok, 2:1770, 2:1771, 2:1775, 2:2093, 2:2094 Kaplan, Ronald M., 2:1647 Kaplan, Theodore H., 2:1715 Karcevskij, Sergej, 1:98 Kastovsky, Dieter, 1:28, 1:316, 1:317, 1:322, 1:431, 1:432, 2:1583 Kate, Lambert ten, 2:1342
2199 Katherine Group, 1:348, 1:523, 1:558 Katsnel’son, S. D., 2:1381 Kaufman, Terrence – on creolization of Middle English, 2:1784, 2:1787 – on Early Modern English word-formation, 1:611 – on elite Indian English, 2:2089 – on language contact, 2:1159, 2:1677 – on pre- vs. attested Old English, 1:20 – on pronominal transfer from Flemish, 2:1668 – theory of Norsification, 1:508 Kaunas University, 2:1385 Kautzsch, Alexander, 2:1798, 2:1800, 2:1802, 2:1803 Kawai, Michio, 2:1416 Kay, Christian, 1:320, 1:646 Kay, Paul, 2:1277 Keene, Derek, 2:1269, 2:2048 Keio University, 2:1415 Keller, Rudi, 1:200, 1:472, 2:1503 Keller, Wolfgang, 2:1691 Kellerman, Anja, 2:1747, 2:1749 Kellner, Leon, 1:809, 2:1383 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 1:564 Kemble, Charles, 2:1303 Kemble, John M., 1:1012, 2:1122, 2:1291, 2:1303, 2:1306 Kemenade, Ans van – academic affiliation, 2:1343 – on “expletive pro-drop”, 1:297 – handbook on early English syntax, 2:1344 – on move to hypotactic structures, 1:467 – on Old English verb-fronting, 2:1619–1620 – on word order in Old English, 1:336 – work on anaphoricity, 2:1485, 2:1486 – work on Old English adverbs, 2:1480, 2:1481–1483 Kemmer, Suzanne, 2:1196 Kempe, Margery, 1:536, 1:537, 1:559–560 Kennedy, Graeme, 2:2003 Kenrick, William, 1:831, 1:837, 1:944 Kent, 1:42, 1:43, 1:45, 1:342, 1:495, 1:500, 2:1664, 2:1668 Kent, Roland, 2:1166 Kentucky, 2:1817, 2:1853 Kenya, 2:1886, 2:1887, 2:2107, 2:2114, 2:2136 Kenyon, John S., 1:736, 2:1316, 2:1842 Ker, Neil R., 1:344, 2:1124 Kermode, Frank, 1:810
2200 Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (Mattheson), 2:1228 Kerry, County, 2:1965 Kersey, John, 1:642, 1:943, 1:1008, 1:1057, 2:1883 Kerswill, Paul, 2:1494, 2:1909, 2:1916, 2:1918, 2:1919, 2:2036, 2:2039, 2:2056 Keyser, Samuel J., 2:1315 Keywords (Williams), 1:989 Khoesans, 2:2093 Kibbee, Douglas A., 2:1673, 2:1675 Kidd, Colin, 1:894 Kiernan, Kevin, 2:1134, 2:1143 Kikongo, 2:1834 Kikuchi, Shigeo, 2:1416 Kildare Poems, 2:1963 Kilian, Jo¨rg, 1:204, 1:208 Killigrew, Thomas, 1:786 Kilpio¨, Matti, 1:248, 2:1362 Kimberley, South Africa, 2:2098 Kim In-Sook, 2:1417 Kim Jin-Man, 2:1417 Kim Seok-San, 2:1417 Kim Tae-Jin, 2:1417 King, Robert D., 2:1292, 2:1316 King, Tracy Holloway, 2:1650 King Horn, 1:467, 1:558, 2:1283 King Lear (Shakespeare), 1:625, 1:627, 1:653, 1:656, 1:739, 1:815–816, 1:820, 1:821 King’s College London, 1:972 King’s English (Fowler and Fowler), 1:902, 1:944 Kingsley, Charles, 1:871 King’s Lynn, 1:218 Kinyarwanda, 2:2138 Kiparsky, Paul, 1:104, 1:156, 1:160, 1:161, 2:1316, 2:1547 Kiribati, 2:2114 Kirk, John M., 2:1690, 2:1962, 2:1966, 2:1968, 2:1970 Kirkman, Francis, 1:846 Kirkpatrick, Andrew, 2:2141 Kisbye, Torben, 2:1366–1367 ´ ., 2:1622 Kiss, Katalin E Kitson, Peter, 1:217, 1:354, 1:379, 1:483, 2:1122, 2:1245, 2:1247–1248 Kivimaa, Kirsti, 2:1363 Klapper, Joseph T., 1:1077 Klein, Ernest, 2:1376 Klein, Lawrence E., 1:658–659 Klemola, Juhani, 1:687, 1:688, 2:1362, 2:1688
Index Kleparski, G. A., 1:321 Kluge, Friedrich, 2:1158, 2:1331, 2:1333 Knappe, Gabriele, 1:184, 1:185, 1:192 Kniezsa, Veronika, 2:1380 Knight, Stephen, 2:1989 Knott, Thomas A., 2:1316 Knox, John, 2:1956 Knox, Ronald A., 1:1045 Knyghthode and bataile, 2:1376 Knyvett, Thomas, 1:627 Koch, Peter, 1:206, 1:521, 1:522, 1:995, 1:997, 1:1108, 2:1278–1279 Koerner, Konrad, 2:1848 Kohnen, Thomas – on approaches to historical texts, 1:245, 2:1195 – on genre and linguistic change, 1:249 – on the “period of text types”, 1:474 – on structured vs. illustrative eclecticism, 1:654 – work on Old English directives, 1:202, 1:327– 328, 1:331, 1:332–333 – work on oral vs. literate features, 1:248 – work on syntax, 2:1360 koı¨neization, 2:1267–1268, 2:1491, 2:1494, 2:2007, 2:2054, 2:2055 Koivisto-Alanko, Pa¨ivi, 2:1364 Ko¨keritz, Helge, 1:233, 1:810, 1:813 Kolb, Gwin J., 2:1313 Ko¨lbing, Eugen K., 2:1328 Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, 2:2088 Kollmann, Augustus F. C., 2:1220 Ko¨nig, Ekkehard, 2:1587 Kontzi, Reinhold, 2:1741 Kookmin University, 2:1417 Koopman, Willem F., 2:1119, 2:1125, 2:1343, 2:1344 Kopytko, Roman, 1:820 Korac´, Gordana, 2:1386 Korean, 2:2141 Korean Society for the History of the English Language, 2:1417 Korea University, 2:1417 Korhammer, Michael, 1:346 Ko¨rner, Karl, 2:1333 Kornexl, Lucia, 1:1000 Korte, Werner, 2:1229 Kortmann, Bernd, 1:79, 1:923, 2:1187, 2:1587, 2:1929, 2:1970–1971 Kosovo, 2:1385 Koster, Jan, 2:1619
Index Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt, 2:1566 Kovatcheva, Mira, 2:1388 Koziol, Herbert, 2:1336 Krahe, H., 1:2 Krapp, George Philip, 1:1014, 2:1316, 2:1795 Kretzschmar, William A., 1:448, 2:1168–1169, 2:1174, 2:1794 Krifka, Manfred, 2:1478 Krio, 2:1770, 2:1771, 2:1887, 2:2093, 2:2095, 2:2121, 2:2127 Kristensson, Gillis, 1:482, 2:1359 Kroch, Anthony, 1:750, 1:753, 1:754, 2:1622, 2:1628, 2:1655 Krohn, Marie, 2:1330 Krug, Manfred G., 1:469, 2:1540, 2:1547, 2:1554, 2:1743 Krygier, Marcin, 1:432 Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara, 1:659, 1:662 Kucˇera, Henry, 2:1532 Kufner, Herbert L., 1:2 Kuhn, Hans, 1:389–390 Kuhn, Sherman M., 2:1315, 2:1417 Kuhn, Thomas, 2:1296 Kuhnau, Johann, 2:1228 Kultur und Sprache im neuen England (Spies), 2:1336 Kumkook University, 2:1417 Kurath, Hans – on Canadian Raising in the South, 2:2052 – MED and, 1:458, 2:1127 – on mixed dialect base of American English, 2:2049 – on the progressive passive, 1:70 – work on American dialectology, 2:1316– 1317, 2:1841, 2:1842, 2:1843 Kuriyagawa, Fumio, 2:1415 Kuryłowicz, Jerzy, 1:269, 2:1290, 2:1376, 2:1383 Kusters, Christiaan Wouter, 2:1627 Kuteva, Tania, 1:167, 2:1569 Kwa, 2:1834 Kyd, Thomas, 1:816 Kyoto University, 1:449 Kyto¨, Merja – Corpus of English Dialogues and, 1:716, 2:1358, 2:1451 – on Early Modern English dialectology, 1:672 – on education in the New World, 1:954 – investigative foci, 1:208, 2:1451 – Nineteenth-century English corpus, 1:889 – on speech-related texts, 1:475, 1:716 – on studying American English, 2:1763–1764
2201 – volume on corpora, 2:1138 – work on auxiliaries, 1:468, 1:469, 1:474, 1:625, 2:1362 – work on comparison in adjectives, 1:706, 1:864 – work on hedges, 1:659–660
L L2C Corpus, 2:2141 Labour Party (UK), 2:1989, 2:1991 Labov, William – the actuation problem and, 2:1491, 2:1495– 1497 – on the ANAE, 2:1852, 2:1853, 2:1855 – attempt to counter racist perspectives, 2:1828 – on British pronunciation of a, 1:830 – on Canadian English phonology, 2:1868, 2:1869 – on diffusion and simplification, 2:2040–2041 – Divergence/Convergence Theory, 2:1835 – on historical linguistics, 1:538, 1:541, 2:1275, 2:1310 – ideas on language change, 1:377, 1:691, 1:726, 1:728, 1:765, 1:771, 1:1095 – language regard terminology, 1:1021 – on lexical diffusion vs. Neogrammarian change, 2:1547, 2:1554, 2:1555 – limitations of approach, 2:1924–1925 – linguistic geography and, 2:1843, 2:1847– 1848 – on Northern Cities Shift, 2:2050–2051 – resistance to term sociolinguistics, 2:1185– 1186 – self-evaluation test, 1:1028 – seminal work, 2:1847–1848 – on social network theory, 2:2034–2035 – sociolinguistic experiments, 1:1026–1027 – on women and language change, 1:718, 1:961, 2:1747 – work on generational change, 2:1894 – work on London English, 2:2020, 2:2021 – work on urban sociolinguistics, 2:1317, 2:1550–1551 Labyrinth Library (website), 2:1143 Lacnunga, 1:200, 1:329, 1:394 Laet, Johannes de, 2:1342 Lafayette College, 2:1164 Lagamon, see Brut (Lagamon) Lahiri, Aditi, 1:111
2202 Laing, Margaret, 2:1126, 2:1127, 2:1275, 2:1445 Laitinen, Mikko, 2:1448–1449 Lake, Joshua, 1:898 Lakhota, 1:75 Lakoff, George, 1:320, 2:1230 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, 2:1318 Lambrecht, Knud, 2:1475, 2:1477 Lameli, Alfred, 1:1079 Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, 1:250, 1:622, 1:1064, 2:1138, 2:1465, 2:1512, 2:1516 Lamy, Bernard, 1:794, 1:795 Lanarkshire, 1:673, 1:680 Lancashire, 1:45, 1:490, 1:497, 1:672, 2:1931, 2:1981, 2:2046 Lancashire, Ian, 1:1007, 2:1135 Lancaster Newsbook Corpus, 1:250, 1:1064, 2:1518 Landor, Walter Savage, 1:871 Langenhove, George van, 2:1345 Langland, William, 1:456, 1:457, 1:537, 1:564, 2:1675 LangScape database, 2:1123 Language (Bloomfield), 1:970 Language ( journal), 2:1841 Language and Computers – Studies in Practical Linguistics, 2:1519 Language and Style (website), 2:1198 Language and the Internet (Crystal), 1:1109 Language and Woman’s Place (Lakoff), 2:1318 language-as-a-property paradox, 2:1259 language change – above vs. below level of consciousness, 1:377, 1:765 – actuation problem of, 2:1490–1507, 2:2063 – bilingualism and, 1:506 – Construction Grammar and, 2:1636–1642 – dialect hopping and, 1:724 – diffusion, 2:2032–2041 – Early Modern understanding of, 1:643–646 – entropy and, 2:1628 – errors and, 1:80 – frequency and, 2:1531–1544 – gender and, 1:718, 1:961 – generative linguistics and, 2:1626–1628 – genre and, 1:249, 1:725–726, 2:1366 – in individuals, 1:541, 1:691, 1:726–727, 2:1547, 2:1626 – innovation–adoption–diffusion process, 2:1494–1497 – language acquisition and, 2:1599–1610
Index – language contact and, 2:1266, 2:1270, 2:1491– 1497, 2:1627, 2:1677, 2:1738 – lexical diffusion and, 2:1547 – linguistic level and, 1:726 – the media and, 1:1078, 1:1080, 1:1095 – metaphors for, 2:1182–1183 – Neogrammarians on, 1:110 – periodization in the history of English and, 2:1236 – pragmatic perspectives on, 2:1461 – Samuel Johnson on, 2:1300–1301 – social networks and, 1:691, 1:728 – sociolinguistic perspectives on, 1:715, 2:1441, 2:1609 – supraregionalization as process of, 2:2063– 2064 – time-depth of study and, 2:1426–1427 – variationist approach to, 2:1461–1462, 2:1511 – vowel harmony and, 2:1602 – see also semantic change Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Aitchison), 2:1169 language contact – between Celtic and Germanic, 1:11, 2:1186 – between Celtic and Old English – loanwords, 1:316 – period of, 1:362, 1:363 – recent studies on, 2:1359–1360, 2:1442 – syntactical borrowing, 1:156, 1:510, 1:687– 688 – word stress, 1:515 – co-construction of meaning in, 2:1506 – between English and French, 1:21, 1:28–30, 1:506, 1:686–687, 1:689, 2:1443, 2:1671–1684 – between Germanic and non-IE languages, 1:11, 1:140 – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:771 – historical syntax and, 1:149, 1:155–156, 1:161 – instability of linguistic features and, 1:110 – language change and, 2:1266, 2:1270, 2:1491– 1497, 2:1627, 2:1677, 2:1738 – language death and, 1:507 – between Latin and English, 1:362–373, 1:686–687 – between Latin and Germanic, 1:23 – between Latin and Middle English, 1:506 – between Latin and Old English, 2:1124– 1125, 2:1705–1708 – lexicography and, 2:1151, 2:1159 – with Low German and Dutch, 1:506, 2:1659– 1669
Index – with non-European languages, 1:692–695 – between Old English and Old Norse – creolization theory of, 2:1359, 2:1442–1443, 2:1728 – in East Anglia, 1:689 – fictional situations illustrating, 2:1268, 2:1493–1494, 2:1503, 2:1727 – koı¨neization process, 2:1491, 2:1498 – loanwords, 1:25, 1:316, 1:527 – loss of inflections and, 1:150, 1:515 – place-name evidence, 2:1266–1267, 2:1359 – southward spread of changes from, 1:511 – word order and, 2:1628 – simplification and, 1:695 – speaker vs. textual, 2:1672 – see also creolization; dialect contact language death, 2:1182, 2:1183, 2:1738, 507 language identity, sociolinguistic approaches to, 2:1441 Language in Society ( journal), 2:1847 Language Instinct, The (Pinker), 1:967 Language is Power (Honey), 1:988, 2:1889 Language of Shakespeare’s Plays (I. Evans), 1:811 Language Sciences ( journal), 2:1570 Language Variation and Change ( journal), 2:1847 Lanham, Leonard W., 2:2053, 2:2097, 2:2115 Laois, County, 2:1964 Lapierre, Andre´, 2:1863 La Rana, Silvana, 2:1400 Large dictionary in three parts (T. Holyoake), 1:1052 Larsen, Mariann, 2:1402 Laslett, Peter, 1:716 Lass, Roger – on the “age of harmony”, 1:268 – on breaking, 1:9 – on concept of “middle” in Germanic languages, 2:1244, 2:1245 – on Conrad Gessner, 2:1301 – on Early Modern English diphthongs, 1:596, 1:597 – on Early Modern English verbs, 1:608 – on -ed vs. -t participial forms, 1:857 – on English varieties, 1:34 – on the Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:766, 1:769, 1:770 – on language vs. social context, 1:50 – on Late Modern English, 1:66
2203 – on lexical diffusion vs. Neogrammarian change, 2:1547 – on Middle English /i/, 1:598 – on mixed base of Standard English, 2:2048 – on “motivation” in language change, 2:1461 – on periodization schemes, 1:476, 1:699, 2:1234, 2:1244 – on philology vs. linguistics, 2:1334 – on scribal practice, 2:1548 – on Shakespeare’s language, 1:812–813 – on “social milieu”, 2:1445 – on South African English, 2:2053, 2:2097, 2:2098, 2:2099 – on the spelling of Middle English diphthongs, 2:1551 – on surnames, 1:220 – on the term “Middle English”, 2:1238 – on types of textual evidence, 2:1127 – on the uniformitarian principle, 1:759 – on written language, 2:1275 – on ye vs. you, 1:738 Lasso, Orlando di, 2:1225 La structure de la phrase verbale a` l’e´poque alfre´dienne (Bacquet), 2:1398 Late Modern English – as age of prescriptivism, 1:64, 1:75, 1:940, 1:945, 1:1003 – chronological delimitation, 1:64, 1:699, 1:916, 2:1233–1254 – contact with non-European languages, 1:693 – effects of standardization on, 1:863 – Indian English and, 2:2080 – on inflecting–analytic continuum, 1:863, 1:864 – lexicon, 1:73–75, 1:887–900, 1:955–956, 1:958, 2:1683, 2:1684 – literary language, 1:892 – modern English dialectology and, 2:1446 – morphology, 1:69, 1:842–869, 1:878–881, 1:924–927 – online resources, 2:1139 – origin of term, 1:63 – orthography, 1:956 – pragmatics and discourse, 1:901–915 – scholarship on, 1:64–66 – syntax, 1:69–70, 1:628, 1:869–887 – see also Late Modern English dialects; Late Modern English phonology Late Modern English dialects, 1:915–938 – Central Midlands, 1:928 – East Anglia, 1:921, 1:928, 1:930, 1:933
2204 – Midlands, 1:929, 1:930, 1:932 – Northern – [æ] over [a] in, 1:958 – in dialectological sources, 1:921, 1:935 – failure of [ʧ] to centralize, 1:832 – negative concord, 1:931–932 – preservation of monophthongs, 1:833 – relative markers, 1:927, 1:928, 1:929 – periphrastic do in, 1:688 – South, 1:833–834, 1:839, 1:840, 1:931–932 – Southeast, 1:924, 1:929 – Southwest – bain’t, 1:933, 1:934 – dialectological sources on, 1:921, 1:935 – pronoun exchange, 1:924 – relative markers, 1:927, 1:928, 1:929 – West Midlands, 1:921, 1:924 Late Modern English phonology, 1:827–842 – consonants – “dropping” of and , 1:71–72, 1:837–838, 1:957–958 – glide insertion, 1:836–837 – [hw]/[w] alternations, 1:838–839 – loss of rhoticity, 1:71, 1:839–840, 1:958 – palatals, 1:835–836 – T-glottaling, 1:917 – TH-fronting, 1:917 – vowels, 1:829–835, 1:917 – dialect contact and, 2:2048 – sources for studying, 1:827, 1:953, 2:1446 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 1:736 Latin – alphabet, 1:20, 1:24, 1:232 – Anglo-, 2:1785, 2:1790 – association with Catholic Church, 1:984–985 – characterization of, 1:1024 – in charters, 2:1121, 2:1122 – cognitive semantics and, 1:169, 1:174 – comparative philology and, 1:1011, 2:1301, 2:1302 – contact with English, 2:1704–1716 – as contract language, 2:2137 – dictionaries of, 1:639, 1:1051–1052 – emergence of Romance languages, 2:1181 – French vernacular vs., 1:28–29 – functions, 1:51, 1:57, 1:475, 1:528, 2:1282, 2:1442, 2:1443 – as intermediary for Greek loans, 2:1705, 2:1720 – as intermediary for Russian loans, 2:1740 – in Ireland, 2:1963
Index – legal, 1:240, 1:613 – literature, 2:1207 – loans, 1:3, 1:315, 1:512, 1:956, 2:1705–1715, 2:1956 – Medieval, 1:241, 1:244, 1:686–687, 2:1740 – medieval English officials’ competence in, 2:1786 – in mixed-language texts, 1:474–475, 1:476, 1:686, 2:1448 – model for grammar writing, 1:700–701, 1:916–917 – morphology, 1:13, 1:136, 1:137, 1:706 – phonology, 1:104, 1:125, 1:256 – prescriptive linguistics and, 1:968 – prestige status, 1:33, 1:474, 1:507, 1:528 – progressive aspect in, 2:1693 – prosody, 1:124, 1:264 – in scientific vocabulary, 1:74, 1:695 – scientific writing in, 1:51, 1:66, 1:206, 1:240– 241, 1:474, 1:905 – in sociolinguistic approaches, 2:1441 – Swift on, 1:986 – syntactical influence on English, 1:60, 1:156, 1:306–307, 1:362, 1:396, 1:517 – as a synthetic language, 1:41 Latin Stress Rule, 1:124, 1:126 Laud, William, 2:1298 Laut- und Flexionslehre der mittelkentischen Denkma¨ler (Danker), 2:1334 Laut- und Formenlehre (Hoffmann), 2:1334 Laut und Leben (Horn), 2:1333, 2:1335 Lay-Folks Mass Book, 1:560 Layton, Irving, 2:1872 Leacock, John, 2:1811 League of Nations, 2:2137 Leap, William, 2:1765 Learning with the Online TOE (website), 2:1137 Leave Your Language Alone! (Hall), 1:974 Le Bel, Jehan, 2:1785 Leech, Geoffrey, 1:79, 1:80, 1:88, 1:94, 1:392, 1:659, 1:875, 2:1187 Lee Pil-Hwan, 2:1417 Lees, John, 2:1334 legal English, 1:57, 1:239–240, 1:244, 1:322, 1:530, 1:647, 1:672, 1:889 Legend of Good Women (Chaucer), 1:191, 1:568, 1:569 Legendys of Hooly Wummen (Bokenham), 1:474
Index Lehmann, Christian – on degrammaticalization, 2:1588 – grammaticalization parameters, 2:1541, 2:1561, 2:1562, 2:1568, 2:1571, 2:1590, 2:1594 – on lexicalization, 2:1573, 2:1579, 2:1581, 2:1585 – on multiple-word strings, 2:1563 – on V-ing forms, 2:1587 Lehmann, Winfred P., 2:1195 Lehnert, Martin, 2:1333, 2:1335, 2:1337 Leicester, 2:1266 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, 1:720 Leicestershire, 1:499, 2:1267, 2:1268, 2:1430, 2:1431 Leiden Riddle, 1:348 Leipzig School, 2:1330–1331 Leisi, Ernst, 1:610, 1:809 Leith, Dick, 1:953, 2:1172, 2:1181, 2:1439 Leitner, Gerhard, 1:1091, 1:1098, 1:1099, 2:1888, 2:2000, 2:2002 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 2:1308 Leningrad school of grammar, 2:1382 Lenker, Ursula, 1:378, 1:471, 1:534, 2:1338, 2:1449, 2:1479 Lennox, Charlotte, 1:860 Lentzner, Karl, 1:898 Leonard, Sterling A., 1:64, 1:68, 1:75, 1:76, 1:945, 1:973, 1:1010 Le Page, Robert B., 2:1778, 2:1925, 2:2123 Lerer, Seth, 2:1251, 2:1252 Leskien, August, 2:1330 Leslie, R. F., 1:444 Lesotho, 2:2114 Letter to Wulfsige (Ælfric), 1:202 Leuven English Old to New (LEON), 2:1346 Levey, David, 2:1747, 2:1749 Levin, Magnus, 1:858, 1:859 Levins, Peter, 1:640 Levinson, Stephen C. – on discourse vs. conversation analysis, 1:204 – Face Threatening Act, 1:392 – politeness theory, 1:327, 1:328, 1:656–659, 1:663, 1:820, 2:1198 – Pragmatics textbook, 2:1466 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 2:1207 Lewis, C. S., 1:1048, 2:1173, 2:1203–1204 Lewis, Diana M., 1:909 Lewis, Gwyneth, 2:1989 Lewis, Jack, 2:1908 Lewis, Robert E., 1:458 Lewis, Roger, 2:1804
2205 Lewis, Roscoe, 2:1798, 2:1804 Lewis, Saunders, 2:1988 Lewis and Clark expedition, 2:1762 lexical constructionalization, 2:1641–1642 lexical diffusion, 2:1546–1555 Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), 2:1646– 1657 lexicalization, 2:1572–1573, 2:1577–1595, 2:1642–1643 Lexicon Anglo-Saxonicum (Ettmu¨ller), 2:1332 Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), 1:639, 1:641, 1:647, 1:648, 2:1135, 2:1194– 1195, 2:1515–1516 Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain, c.700– 1450, 1:323, 1:451 Libellus de re herbaria novus (Turner), 1:640 Liberal Party (UK), 2:1982 Liberia, 2:1801–1802, 2:2093, 2:2121 Liberian Settler English, 2:1803, 2:2095, 2:2121 Liberman, Anatoly, 2:1159, 2:1173, 2:1382 Library of Congress, 2:1797, 2:1799, 2:1801 Libro del Cortegiano (Castiglione), 2:1224 Lichfield, 1:344 Lieberman, Philip, 2:1186 Liedtke, Ernst, 1:858 Life of Juliana, 1:523 Life of St Chad, 1:348, 1:383 Li Fu-ning, 2:1418 Lighter, Jonathan E., 1:1095 Lightfoot, David W., 1:306, 2:1292, 2:1344, 2:1600, 2:1626 Lightfoot, Douglas J., 2:1584 Lily, William, 1:1007 Lily-Colet Latin grammar, 1:639, 1:644, 1:645 Lincoln, 2:1266 Lincoln, Abraham, 2:1817 Lincolnshire dialect, 1:491, 1:492, 1:495, 1:497, 1:498, 1:499, 2:1534 – farming land in, 2:1268 – language contact in, 2:1491, 2:1498, 2:1733 – migration to the Fens from, 2:2054 – Scandinavian place-names in, 2:1267, 2:1726 – Thornton manuscript, 1:42 Lindelo¨f, Uno, 2:1359 Lindisfarne, 1:24, 2:1266 Lindisfarne Gospels – date of glosses, 1:345, 1:1040 – earliest attestation of sunset, 1:354 – errors in, 2:1387 – as evidence for Northumbrian, 2:1124
2206 – irrealis in, 1:311 – loss of /h/ before sonorants in, 2:1548 – Norse words in, 2:1732 – Rushworth Gospels and, 1:343 – as witness for Northumbrian, 1:27, 1:348, 1:355 Lindner, Felix, 2:1334 LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage), 2:2141 Lingua Britannica Reformata (Martin), 1:1055 Linguae Britannicae vera pronuntiatio (Buchanan), 1:1056 Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) – chronological scope, 2:1142 – feature maps, 1:490 – geographical coverage, 1:484 – historical sociolinguistics and, 2:1442 – many vs. mony in, 1:495 – methodology, 1:488–489, 2:1126, 2:1428, 2:1432, 2:1433–1436 – M. L. Samuels and, 1:524 – online, 1:502, 2:1436 – precursors to, 2:1126 – as a resource, 1:37, 1:437, 1:482, 1:671–672 – theoretical basis, 2:1121 – version of Lagamon’s Brut, 1:444–445 Linguistic Atlas of England, 2:2055 Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) – ben vs. ar, 1:497–498 – “daughter” projects, 2:1142 – diachronic skewing, 1:484 – diffusion of supraregional features in, 1:1001 – evidence for she, 1:492, 1:493, 1:495 – focus on written mode, 1:39 – historical sociolinguistics and, 2:1442 – importance to dialectology, 1:482, 1:671–672, 2:1292, 2:1309 – limitations for morphosyntactic study, 1:918 – localization of MS Tokyo, Takamiya 63, 1:441 – manuscript sources, 1:37 – many vs. mony vs. meny, 495–496 – mapping techniques, 1:490, 2:1181, 2:1431– 1432 – MED and, 2:1151 – methodology, 1:485–488, 2:1126, 2:1127, 2:1427, 2:1429–1433 – Middle English Compendium and, 2:1128 – Middle English Grammar Corpus and, 2:1513
Index – M. L. Samuels and, 1:524 – Northern features, 1:490–492 – online version, 1:37, 1:502, 2:1436 – present indicative endings, 1:499–500 – reflex of Old English y, 1:500–501 – scribes’ centrality to, 1:38 – in studies of lexical borrowing, 2:1662 – theoretical basis, 2:1121 – variants of be, 1:497–498 Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE), 2:1841 Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS) – chronological scope, 2:1142 – feature maps, 1:490 – historical sociolinguistics and, 2:1442 – methodology, 2:1126, 2:1428, 2:1432, 2:1433 – online, 1:37, 1:502, 2:1436 – tagging method, 1:486 Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), 2:1794, 2:1795, 2:1804, 2:1843 Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), 2:1794, 2:1842 Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States, 2:1849 Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, 2:1316, 2:1320, 2:1794, 2:1841 Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest, 2:1843 Linguistic Atlas Projects, 2:1864 Linguistic Data Consortium (website), 2:1140 linguistic evidence, types of – advertisements, 1:907–908, 1:1069 – audio recordings, 1:67 – books, 1:56 – charters, 2:1122–1123 – Kentish, 1:348, 1:383, 2:1121 – language of, 1:354, 1:379, 1:483 – Middle English, 1:485 – production of, 1:377 – coins, 2:1125 – court records, 1:205–206, 1:326, 1:656, 1:659, 1:716, 1:740 – see also trial proceedings – critical editions, 1:36 – diaries, 1:326, 1:626, 2:1450 – dictionaries, 1:187, 1:889 – documents, 2:1424 – drama – comedy, 1:740, 1:777, 1:910, 1:961 – corpora, 1:778, 1:909 – Early Modern English, 1:609, 1:740, 1:786 – Late Modern English, 1:874, 1:909, 1:910
Index
– – – – – – – – – – – –
– – –
– –
–
– medieval, 1:536, 1:569–574, 2:1459 – as representation of speech, 1:326, 1:475–476, 1:716, 1:777, 1:874, 1:961, 2:1467 “ego documents”, 1:49, 1:55 examination scripts, 1:89 fiction, 1:909, 1:962 forgeries, 2:1281 glosses and glossaries, 1:29, 1:353, 1:364, 1:394, 1:644, 2:1124–1125 handbooks, 1:55 for historical dialectology, 2:1423–1426 for historical pragmatics, 2:1466–1468 history, 1:909 Internet, 1:79, 1:83, 1:1016, 1:1101, 1:1105–1118 journals, 1:55–56 letters – colloquial nature, 1:326, 1:961 – corpora, 1:67, 1:250, 1:936, 1:948 – in Early Modern period, 1:55, 1:657, 1:716, 1:781 – Henry V’s, 1:982 – in Late Modern period, 1:874, 1:909, 1:910, 1:911 – linguistic innovation and, 1:70, 1:726 – in Middle English period, 1:473, 1:509 – to newspapers, 1:1068–1069 – Penny Post and, 1:67, 1:962 – register variation in, 1:726, 1:910 – social deixis in, 2:1450 – women’s, 1:674, 1:947 – see also Cely Letters; Paston Letters; Stonor Letters literary texts, 2:1201–1212, 2:1425, 2:1449 “local documents”, 1:485 medical texts – corpus of, 1:250 – discourse styles, 1:240–241, 1:906 – genre type, 1:205, 1:207 – Greco-Roman tradition, 1:206 – historical stylistics and, 2:1469 – Old English, 1:329–330 – stance devices in, 1:910 for Middle English, 1:35–38, 1:467, 1:475– 476, 1:485 mixed-language or “macaronic” texts, 1:474–475, 1:508–510, 1:686–687, 2:1448, 2:1661–1662, 2:1790 news, 1:1063–1075 – corpora, 1:250, 1:1064
2207 – pragmatic and discourse-analytic studies of, 1:207–208, 1:907–908, 1:910 – printing and, 1:56 – regional standardization and, 1:1015 – style, 1:962, 1:1071–1072 – non-runic inscriptions, 2:1125 – for Old English phonology, 1:256 – pamphlets, 1:55, 1:205, 1:207, 1:250, 1:1064 – parliamentary debates, 1:909, 1:942 – photographic images, 1:37 – for pragmatics and discourse, 1:326–327 – printing and, 1:55 – for pronunciation, 1:232–233 – radio, 1:1089–1104 – record books, 2:1424–1425 – rolls, 1:482, 1:530 – runic inscriptions – Northwest Germanic, 1:1, 1:17 – Old English, 1:346, 1:348, 2:1125, 2:1280 – Old Norse, 2:1726, 2:1729 – saints’ lives, 1:474, 1:558 – scientific writing, 1:904–906, 1:909, 1:961, 1:962 – sermons, 1:509 – television, 1:1075–1088 – textbooks, 2:1467 – translations, 1:353 – travelogues, 1:52 – trial proceedings – absolute genitive in, 1:623 – in CONCE, 1:909 – discourse markers in, 1:662 – lack of original manuscripts of, 2:1522 – negative raising in, 1:632 – relativization in, 1:777–778, 1:780–788 – sociopragmatic studies of, 2:1450–1451 – wills, 2:1499–1503 – witness depositions, 1:672, 1:716, 1:725, 1:740, 1:955 – writs, 1:377 – written texts, 2:1274–1285, 2:1297 – see also Bible; onomastics Linguistic History of English (Go¨rlach), 2:1166–1167 Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, 2:1519 Linguistic Society of America (LSA), 1:967, 1:973, 1:974, 1:977, 2:1320 Linguistic Society of Korea, 2:1417 Linguistics of Speech (Kretzschmar), 2:1168– 1169
2208 Linguistics Research Center, 2:1195 linguistic tests – elicitation, 1:81, 1:927 – Ellis’s dialect, 1:920 – grammaticality judgments, 1:90, 1:436 – self-evaluation, 1:1028 – speaker prestige, 1:1026–1027 linguistic typology – analytic vs. synthetic languages, 1:41 – foreground- vs. background-signaling languages, 1:247–248 – grammatical function and, 1:130–131 – lexicon and, 1:174 – logo- or morphographic vs. phonographic languages, 1:38, 1:227–229 – quantity languages, 1:264 – spoken vs. written language, 1:87 – subject-prominent vs. topic-prominent languages, 1:87 – word- vs. stem- vs. root-based morphology, 1:131–132 linguistic units – dialects, 1:668–669, 1:670 – lemmata, 1:172 – phonemes, 1:97–99 – sentences, 1:436 – syllables, 1:114–115 – words, 1:172, 1:436 Linke, Angelika, 1:189 Lippi-Green, Rosina, 2:1901, 2:1903 Lippius, Johannes, 2:1225 Lipski, John, 2:1747 Lisle, Alice, 1:662 Listener, The, 1:1093 Listenius, Nicolaus, 2:1225 List of Two Hundred Scoticisms (Beattie), 1:1057 literacy – in Early Modern period, 1:49, 1:50–51, 1:54–55, 1:125, 1:642 – elaboration of functions of English and, 1:1001 – gender and, 1:54, 1:534–535, 1:642, 1:718, 1:955 – Internet “grassroots”, 1:1113 – language attitudes and, 1:902 – language contact and, 1:506 – in Late Modern English period, 2:1446 – of medical practitioners, 1:207 – in Middle English period, 1:534–535, 1:1001, 2:1443
Index – in Old English period, 2:1442 – proliferation of text types and, 1:55, 1:902, 1:907, 1:962 – social stratification and, 1:718, 1:953–954, 2:1522 – vs. orality, 1:243–244, 2:1274–1285, 2:1365 Literary History of England (Baugh and Malone), 2:1314 Literary Society for English Language and Literature in Korea, 2:1415 literary studies, 2:1201–1212 Literature and Language under the AngloSaxons (Wright), 2:1238 Literature Online (LION), 1:873 Lithuania, 2:1384–1385 litteral substitution sets (LSS), 1:230 Little Domesday, 2:1123 Liuzza, Roy M., 1:229, 1:233, 1:520, 2:1281 Liverpool, 1:68, 2:1981, 2:1982, 2:1985 Liverpool English, 2:1934, 2:1984 Lives of Saints (Old English), 1:299, 1:301, 1:306 A Living Language: A Language for Living, 2:1991 Livingstone, Ken, 2:1915 Ljungberg, Christina, 2:1344 Lloyd George, David, 2:1982 Lloyd James, Arthur, 1:1091 LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) Corpus, 1:875, 1:1064, 2:1516, 2:1893 Locher, Miriam A., 2:1568 Locke, John, 1:171, 1:644 Lockwood, William Burley, 1:303 Lo¨ffler, Marion, 2:1987 Logeman, Henri, 2:1345 Logic of Nonstandard English (Labov), 2:1828 Logonomia Anglica (Gil), 1:639, 1:1053 Lollard movement, 1:242, 1:538, 1:547, 1:577, 1:1041, 2:1366, 2:1449 Lomax, John, 2:1797 Lomonosov University (MGU), 2:1382 London – Auchinleck Manuscript and, 1:40, 1:538 – book trade, 1:56, 1:643, 1:1065 – Confessio Amantis and, 1:566 – dialect – Australian English and, 2:1999 – cant, 1:803–804, 1:815 – Chaucer and, 1:568, 1:577
Index – Estuary English and, 2:1888, 2:1915, 2:1918, 2:1921, 2:1922 – Late Modern English pronunciation, 1:836, 1:837, 1:838, 1:839, 2:1810 – L-vocalization, 1: 81, 2:1920 – merger of vowels before /r/, 1:600 – mixed nature, 2:1359, 2:1446, 2:2047, 2:2049 – as model for pronunciation, 1:71, 1:944, 1:959 – Northern Pronoun Rule and, 1:687 – as prestige variety, 1:720, 1:724 – pronunciation of TRAP, 2:1934 – Received Pronunciation and, 1:60, 2:1902, 2:1906 – Samuels’s Types II and III, 1:524–525, 1:527, 1:577–578, 1:1002 – second person pronouns, 2:1446, 2:1810 – spread of features associated with, 2:1930 – standardization of, 1:359, 1:492–493, 1:940, 1:957, 1:989 – studies of lexical borrowing in, 2:1661– 1662 – suppletive forms of the copula, 1:430 – upgliding diphthongs in, 2:1935 – you vs. thou in, 1:725 – see also Cockney English – impact of the plague, 1:51–52, 2:1269–1270 – internal immigration into, 1:525, 1:647, 1:688–690, 1:692, 2:1446 – Jamaican creole in, 2:1889 – linguistic influence of, 2:2037 – literacy rates in, 1:642 – literary discourse communities, 1:911 – Lydgate and, 1:567 – newspapers, 1:907, 1:1064 – overseas immigrants in, 2:1664–1665, 2:2015 – paucity of Old English manuscripts from, 1:344 – population, 1:51, 1:643 – printing industry, 1:792 – production of texts, 1:35, 1:482, 1:578 – reception of American English in, 2:1809 – social networks in, 2:1450 – street names, 1:213, 1:214, 1:216–217, 1:221 – television programs based in, 1:1082, 1:1084 – Wales and, 2:1982 – weak-tie networks in, 1:728 – William Caxton and, 1:546 London Bridge House Estate, 1:686
2209 London Chronicle, 1:970 London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 1:1066 London Gazette, 1:56, 1:1065, 1:1069 London-Lund Corpus (LLC), 1:875 A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1560–1563, by Henry Machyn, 2:1513 Long, Mary McDonald, 1:432 Longacre, Robert E., 2:1478 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1:1059 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al.), 2:1892, 2:1893 Longman Publishing, 1:1014 Lontos, Sotirios, 2:1723 Lo´pez-Couso, Marı´a Jose´, 1:70, 2:1606 Lorenzo, Emilio, 2:1402 L’orthographe de la langue anglaise (Bourcier), 2:1398 Los, Bettelou, 1:306, 1:336, 1:467–468, 2:1343, 2:1344, 2:1486 Losiewicz, Beth L., 2:1535 Loss of the prefix ge- in the modern English verb (Fijn van Draat), 2:1342 Lothian, 1:673, 2:1954 Louisiana, 2:1676, 2:1760, 2:1797, 2:1800, 2:1804, 2:1843 Lounsbury, Thomas R., 1:973, 2:1291, 2:1313– 1314, 2:1334 Louvor de nossa linguagem (de Barros), 1:984 Lovell, C. J., 2:1317 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 1:804, 1:815, 1:819, 2:1638 Low, Walter, 2:1334 Lowe, Kathryn A., 2:1121 Lowth, Robert – definition of grammar, 1:970–971 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 – on King James Bible, 1:1047 – negative model, 1:942, 1:1009 – norm derivation, 1:1010 – on periphrastic do, 1:878 – popularity of grammar, 1:941, 1:1025, 2:1884 – as a prescriptivist, 1:75, 1:945 – William Cobbett and, 1:1011 – on you vs. thou, 1:69 Łozowski, Przemysław, 1:456–457 Lu¨beck, 2:1955 Lucas, Angela M., 2:1965, 193 Luhmann, Niklas, 2:1230
2210 Luick, Karl – call for focus on modern language, 2:1337 – on diphthongs in the Ormulum, 2:1551 – focus on phonological change, 1:255 – grammar of Middle English, 1:38, 1:484 – on the Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:758, 1:768–769, 1:770 – influence, 2:1333 – Neogrammarian movement and, 2:1307 – on phonological change, 1:270, 2:1335 – Pogatscher and, 2:1326 – treatment of Germanic, 1:2 Lunenburg, NS, 2:1863 Luther, Martin, 1:526, 1:1042 Lutz, Angelika, 1:107, 1:738, 2:1182, 2:1677 Luu, Lien Bich, 1:688, 1:689–690, 2:1664 Luxembourg, 2:2139 Lydgate, John, 1:243, 1:462, 1:567, 1:799, 2:1708, 2:1710, 2:1715 Lyell, Charles, 1:989 Lyly, John, 1:605, 1:736, 1:781, 1:784, 1:797 Lyon, 1:370 Lyons, John, 1:131
M Macafee, Caroline I., 2:1959, 2:1966 Macalister, John, 1:83, 2:1997, 2:2003 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 2:2080 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 1:606, 1:656, 1:814, 1:820 Mac Coisdealbha, Pa´draig, 2:1696 Mac Cone, Kim Robert, 2:1696 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 1:894 Macdonald, Carol, 2:2097 Macedonia, 2:1385 Macˇek, Dora, 2:1387 Mac Eoin, Geroid, 2:1696 Macha´cˇek, Jaroslav, 2:1379 Machan, Timothy, 2:1443, 2:1447 Machyn, Henry, 1:749, 2:1446, 2:1513 Mackay, Charles, 1:894 Mackie, Alexander, 1:892 Macleod, R. R., 2:1801 MacMahon, Michael, 1:70–71, 1:72 Mac Mathu´na, Liam, 2:1964 McArthur, Tom, 1:1096, 2:1886–1888, 2:1895, 2:1896, 2:2107, 2:2114, 2:2118–2119, 2:2139 McCafferty, Kevin, 2:1969 McCarthy, John J., 1:102
Index McCarthy, Michael, 1:80, 1:93 McDavid, Raven, 2:1794, 2:1843, 2:1847–1848, 2:2049, 2:2052 McDermott, Anne, 1:641 McDonald, Russ, 1:810 McDougall, Alan, 2:1758 McGrath, Alister, 1:1047, 1:1048 McIntosh, Angus – autonomistic viewpoint, 1:225 – on dialectology of the lexis, 1:502 – on Irish Middle English, 2:1963, 2:1971 – LALME and, 2:1292, 2:1431 – on need for study of Norse vocabulary, 2:1734 – on scribal strategies, 2:1425 – students, 2:1387 McIntosh, Carey, 1:244, 1:903 McIntosh, Marjorie K., 1:463 McKean, Erin, 1:1016 McKinley, Richard, 1:220 McLaughlin, John C., 1:225, 1:231, 2:1315 McMahon, April, 1:34–35, 1:757–758, 1:766 McSparran, Frances, 2:1128 McWhorter, John, 1:625, 2:1442 Macquarie Archive, 1:80 Macquarie Dictionary, 1:1059–1060, 1:1099, 2:1885, 2:2001 Macquarie Dictionary of English for the Fiji Islands, 1:1060 Macris, James A., 2:1723 MacSpeech Dictate, 1:1017 Macworld, 1:1016 Madagascar, 1:694, 2:2114 Maginn, Christopher, 2:1964 Magnan, Sally Sieloff, 1:1114 Magneticall Aduertisements (Barlow), 1:709 Magnusson, Lynne, 1:663, 1:810, 1:811, 1:820 Maidment, J. A., 2:1909 Maidstone Corpus, 1:948 Mailhammer, Robert, 1:15 Main-Dixon, James, 1:93 Maine, 2:2050 Mair, Christian – on colloquialization, 1:79, 1:962 – on “discourse-based and dynamic model”, 2:1925 – on Network English, 1:1096–1097 – on the progressive, 1:88, 1:875, 1:876 – use of the OED, 2:1194, 2:1521 – on variation vs. change, 1:80 – on whom, 1:94
Index Makin, Bathusa, 1:53 Ma¨kinen, Martti, 1:207 Making of English (Bradley), 2:1334 Makkai, Adam, 1:183 Makovsky, Mark M., 2:1383 Malaccan Creole Portuguese, 2:1775 Malawi, 2:2114, 2:2136 Malaya, 1:694 Malayalam, 2:2086 Malaysia, 2:1775, 2:1886, 2:2114, 2:2126, 2:2136, 2:2138 Malaysian English, 2:1887, 2:2111, 2:2112 Malcolm, Alexander, 2:1220 Malcolm, Ian G., 2:2006 Malcolm III, King of Scotland, 2:1953 Mallet, Paul, 2:1299 Malmesbury, 1:344 Malone, Kemp, 2:1243–1244, 2:1245, 2:1247, 2:1314, 2:1398 Malory, Thomas, 1:443, 1:561, 1:563, 1:564, 2:1359 Malta, 2:1740–1743, 2:2114, 2:2139 Maltese, 2:1740, 2:1748 MANCASS C11 Database, 2:1141 Manchester, 1:217, 2:1981 Manchester Guardian, 1:1070 Manchester University, 1:82 Mandarin, 2:2116 Mande, 2:1834 Mandeville’s Travels, 1:441–444, 1:561, 2:1345 Manipulus Vocabulorum, 1:640 Manitoba, 2:1864 Manley, Delarivier, 1:780, 1:781, 1:782 Mann, Charles C., 2:1755 Mann, Michael, 2:1978, 2:1979 Mannyng, Robert (of Brunne), 1:417, 1:559 Manual of the Writings of Middle English (Hartung and Burke Severs), 1:557 Manuel de l’anglais du Moyen Age des origines au XIVe sie`cle (Mosse´), 2:1398 manuscripts – Auchinleck, 1:40, 1:524, 1:538, 1:577–578 – Beowulf, 1:358, 1:386, 2:1243 – Bodleian Library, Bodley 180, 2:1143 – Bodleian Library, Junius 11, 2:1143 – Bodleian Library, Junius 12, 2:1143 – Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 706, 2:1429– 1430 – British Library, Add. MS 25013, 1:486–487 – British Library, Arundel 57, 1:485
2211 – British Library, Cotton Caligula A. xi, 1:444– 446 – British Library, Cotton Cleopatra C. vi, 1:440 – British Library, Cotton Nero A. x, 1:564 – British Library, Cotton Nero A. xiv, 1:440 – British Library, Cotton Otho A. vi, 2:1143 – British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, 1:348 – British Library, Cotton Tiberius D. vii, 1:43 – British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. VI, 1:348 – British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. vi, 2:1121 – British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, 1:394 – British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, 2:1143 – British Library, Egerton 3309, 1:446–448 – British Library, Harley 913, 2:1963, 2:1965 – British Library, Harley 2253, 2:1283 – British Library, Harley 2390, 1:486–487 – Cambridge, Bradfer Lawrence 7, 1:441 – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 2:1298 – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61, 1:578 – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201(F), 1:537 – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402, 1:437, 1:523 – Cambridge, Trinity College B.14.52, 2:1433– 1436 – catalogues of Old English, 2:1124 – digital reproduction of, 2:1467–1468, 2:1513 – Dublin, Trinity College 10,435/8, 2:1698 – Durham, Prior’s Kitchen, Dean and Chapter Muniments, Locellus XXV.18, 2:1429–1430 – Ellesmere, 1:538, 1:578 – Exeter Book, 1:358, 1:386, 2:1143, 2:1243 – Harvard MS English 530, 1:537 – Hengwrt, 1:578, 2:1142 – Junius, 1:358, 1:386, 2:1243, 2:1342 – Leeds University, Brotherton Library 500, 1:486–487 – online resources, 2:1142 – Oxford, Bodley 34, 1:523 – places of collection and storage, 2:1498 – scribes and, 2:1425–1426, 2:1548–1549 – Textus Roffensis, 1:349 – Thornton, 1:42 – Tokyo, Takamiya 63, 1:441 – Vercelli Book, 1:348, 1:358, 1:386, 2:1243 Manx, 1:687, 2:1691 Manx English, 2:1689, 2:1694, 2:1699, 2:1936, 2:1943, 2:1945–1946
2212 Maori, 1:75, 1:126, 2:2002–2003 Maori Pidgin English, 2:2006 March, Francis A., 2:1164, 2:1172 Marchand, Hans, 1:132, 1:135, 1:190, 1:461, 1:611, 1:615 Marckwardt, Albert H., 1:859, 1:973, 2:1316, 2:1754, 2:1759, 2:1760, 2:1762 Ma˚rdh, Ingrid, 1:1070 Marenco, Franco, 2:1399–1400 Marett, Bekie, 2:1134 Margaret, Queen, consort of James IV, King of Scotland, 1:719 Margaret, Queen, consort of Malcolm III, King of Scotland, 2:1953 Marie de France, 1:536, 2:1204 Marija, Stansfield-Popovic, 2:1386 Markham, Gervase, 1:629, 1:631 Markus, Manfred, 1:418 Marley, Bob, 2:1778 Marlowe, Christopher, 1:797 Maroldt, Karl, 2:1262, 2:1682, 2:1782, 2:1784 Maroon Spirit Language, 2:2123 Marryat, Frederick (Captain), 1:854 Marsh, George, 2:1181, 2:1182–1183 Marshall, Jonathan, 2:1920 Martha’s Vineyard, 2:1847 Martin, Benjamin, 1:1055, 1:1056 Martin, Francis X., 2:1963 Martı´n-Arista, Javier, 2:1403 Martinet, Andre´, 1:772, 2:1848 Marvell, Andrew, 1:800 Marvels of the East, 1:394 Mary I, Queen of England, 1:1043, 2:1964 Maryland, 2:1800, 2:1842, 2:2052 Masaryk University, 2:1290, 2:1378 Mason, William Shaw, 2:1964 Massachusetts, 1:206, 2:1847 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 2:1761 Massey, W. A., 2:1377 Massinger, Philip, 1:803 Masui, Michio, 2:1415 Materialen zur Kunde des a¨lteren Englischen Dramas, 2:1346 Mather, Cotton, 2:1757 Mathesius, Vile´m, 2:1290, 2:1378 Mathews, Mitford M., 2:1840 Mathias, Roland, 2:1988 Mattaire, Michael, 1:839 Mattheson, Johann, 2:1225, 2:1228 Matthew, Thomas, 1:1043 Matthews, Brander, 1:973, 1:1014
Index Matthews, David, 2:1238, 2:1239 Matthews, Peter, 1:131 Matthews, William, 2:2022, 2:2024 Matto, Michael, 2:1167, 2:1174–1175, 2:1185 Maurice, Frederick, 2:1303 Maurice of Sully, Bishop of Paris, 1:439 Mauritius, 2:2092, 2:2114 Maximal Differentiation Principle, 1:772 Maximal Onset Principle, 1:114 Maxims I, 1:296 Maya, 1:228 Mayflower, 2:2136 Maynor, Natalie, 2:1798, 2:1799 Mayo, County, 2:1965 Mazzon, Gabriella, 1:203, 2:1400, 2:1401, 2:1741, 2:1742 Meautys, Thomas, Sir, 1:722 Media Lengua, 2:1768 Medicina de quadripedibus, 1:394 Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea, 2:1417 Medieval English Association of Korea, 2:1417 Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI), 2:1144 Meechan, Marjory, 2:1987 Mees, Inger, 2:1909, 2:1910, 2:1984, 2:2037 Mehrotra, Raja Ram, 2:2083 Meid, W., 1:2 Meillet, Antoine, 1:157, 1:160, 1:161, 2:1180, 2:1563, 2:1577, 2:1623, 2:1848 Melanesian Pidgin English, 2:1769 Melchers, Gunnel, 2:1660, 2:2141 Mel’cuk, Igor, 1:183 Memorial University, 2:1867 Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive, 2:1867 Menang, Thaddeus, 2:2094 Mencken, H. L., 1:1024, 2:1316 Mendenhall, John C., 2:1715 Me´ndez-Naya, Bele´n, 1:70, 1:470 Mendoza-Denton, Norma, 2:1744 Menon, Krishna, 2:2088 Mercia, 1:24–25, 1:342, 1:386, 2:1977 Mercurius Politicus, 1:1065 Meredith, George, 1:849, 1:851 Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries, 1:976–977, 1:1015, 1:1016, 2:1135, see also Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Mersand, Joseph, 1:582 Mersenne, Marin, 2:1228
Index Mesthrie, Rajend, 2:1271, 2:2113, 2:2117, 2:2146 metaphor – in cognitive semantics, 1:166–167, 1:168, 1:320–321, 1:453 – frequently used words and, 2:1548 – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:765–767 – music and, 2:1230 – phraseology and, 1:183 Meters of Boethius, 1:359, 1:386 A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned (Hart), 1:1008 Methodism, 2:1979 Method of the Philological Study of the English Language (March), 2:1164 metonymy, 1:166, 1:167–169, 1:320–321, 1:453 Metrical Life of St Cuthbert, 1:446–448 metronymics, 1:219 Meurmann-Solin, Anneli, 2:1310, 2:1358 Meurman-Solin, Anneli, 1:668, 1:673 Mexico, 2:1743, 2:1820 Mey, Jacob, 2:1469 Meyer, Charles F., 2:1517 Meyer, Robert T., 2:1819–1820 Meyerhoff, Miriam, 2:2003 Michael, Ian, 1:941 Michaelis, Laura A., 2:1477, 2:1479 Michel, Dan, of Northgate, 1:42, 1:485, 1:559, 2:1427 Michelau, Erich, 1:432 Micheli, Silvia, 2:1742 Michigan, 1:1029–1033, 2:1841 Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), 2:1138, 2:1140 Michigan Early Modern English Materials (MEMEM), 2:1138 Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary, 1:1058 Middle English – “bad data” problem, 2:1276 – chronological delimitation, 1:21, 1:33, 1:520, 2:1233–1254 – code-switching in, 2:1443 – creolization theory of, 1:508, 2:1247, 2:1682, 2:1735, 2:1779–1780, 2:1781–1791 – elaboration of function, 1:526, 1:546 – in the Helsinki Corpus, 2:1138 – on inflecting–analytical continuum, 1:30, 1:44, 1:483, 1:515, 1:527 – lexicography, 2:1150–1152 – literary language
2213
– – – – –
–
–
– Alliterative Revival, 1:553–557, 1:564–566 – Continental forms, 1:557 – discourse tradition and, 1:529 – in drama, 1:569–574 – new verse forms, 1:121–123, 1:568 – non-alliterative verse, 1:566–569 – notion of, 1:552–553 – see also Chaucer, Geoffrey literature, 2:1204, 2:1205–1206, 2:1211, 2:1675 multilingualism during period, 1:507–508 online resources, 2:1134–1135, 2:1142, 2:1144, 2:1145–1146, 2:1194 origin of term, 2:1238 orthography – Anglo-Norman scribal influence, 1:102, 1:232, 2:1248, 2:1681 – Chancery, 1:521, 1:590 – dialectal variation and, 1:481 – evidence for diphthongization and, 1:413 – high degree of variation, 1:34 – of Latin loans, 1:512 – litteral substitution sets and, 1:230 – in the Ormulum, 1:558 – phonological representation, 1:267 – pronunciation and, 1:39–41 pragmatics and discourse, 1:466–480 – as/so long as, 1:200 – code-switching and macaronic usage, 1:474–475, 1:476 – degree modifiers and focus particles, 1:469–470 – discourse particles, 1:470–471 – evidence for studying, 1:327 – expression of modality, 1:468–469, 1:474 – language choice, 1:544–545 – medical discourse, 1:205, 1:207 – second person pronoun choice, 1:203, 1:473, 1:515–516, 1:542, 1:547–548 – sociolinguistic approaches, 1:534–551 – speech acts, 1:471–472 prosody – Germanic Stress Rule and, 1:124, 1:399– 401, 1:403, 1:515 – Latin Stress Rule and, 1:124 – lexical borrowing and, 1:123–125, 1:129 – new verse forms and, 1:121–123 – Romance Stress Rule and, 1:400–401, 1:403, 1:515 – suffixes and, 1:118, 1:122 – unstressed ge-, 1:115
2214 – utterance rhythm, 1:403–405, 1:409 – in the Wakefield plays, 1:570–574 – word stress, 1:401–403 – social prestige, 1:33–34, 1:507 – sociolinguistic approaches to, 2:1441 – standardization in, 1:377, 1:519–533, 2:1250 – textual resources, 2:1125–1128, 2:1522 – in triglossic situation, 2:1443 – see also Middle English dialects; Middle English lexicon; Middle English morphology; Middle English phonology; Middle English syntax Middle English Compendium (MEC), 1:37, 1:46, 1:586, 2:1128, 2:1134, 2:1144, 2:1515 Middle English dialects, 1:480–505 – AB-language of the Katherine Group, 1:348, 1:383, 1:523–524, 1:528 – Central Midlands, 1:538, 1:577, 1:578, 2:1881 – concept of “dialect” and, 1:481–482 – East Anglian, 1:39, 2:1668, 2:1881 – East Midland, 1:419, 1:421, 2:1733, 2:2048 – Kentish, 1:41, 1:419 – Midlands, 1:43–44, 1:523–524, 2:1881 – modal verbs in, 1:152–153 – Northeast Midland, 2:1534, 2:1551 – Northern – demonstrative pronouns, 1:421 – exemplified by Rolle, 1:42 – geographical boundaries, 1:490 – graphemic evidence, 1:39 – infinitive marker at, 1:516 – innovativeness, 1:41 – loss of inflections, 1:143, 1:423, 1:443 – ordinal forms of first, 1:419 – Personal Pronoun Rule, 1:42, 1:444, 1:687 – present indicative endings, 1:499–500, 1:516 – reflex of OE y, 1:500 – Scandinavian loans and, 1:511 – she, 1:495 – suppletive forms of the copula, 1:430, 1:497, 1:516 – syntax, 1:517 – th- type third person plurals, 1:496–497, 1:498, 1:499, 1:733 – a-type spellings as diagnostic, 1:490–492 – use of , 1:441, 1:497 – zero relative, 1:448 – North Midland, 1:508, 2:1733, 2:1881 – Ranulph Higden on, 2:1264–1265 – reconstruction of, 1:485–489
Index – Samuels’s Types I–IV, 1:524–526 – Southern – Chaucer’s poetry and, 2:2047 – conservatism, 1:41 – demonstrative pronoun, 1:421 – final -e, 1:443 – forms of the copula, 1:430, 1:497 – French loans in, 1:511 – initial fricative voicing, 1:515 – present indicative endings, 1:499 – third person plural pronouns, 1:733 – South West, 2:2046, 2:2047 – Southwestern, 1:419, 1:495 – Southwest Midland, 1:43–44, 1:523–524, 2:1735 – toponyms and, 1:217 – Western, 1:421 – West Midland – attempts to define, 1:482 – feminine pronoun, 1:495 – introduction of -ing(e), 1:423 – Irish English and, 2:2046, 2:2047 – ordinal form of first, 1:419 – present indicative endings, 1:499 – richness of evidence for, 1:494–495 – witnesses for, 2:1423 – see also Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME); Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) Middle English Dictionary (MED) – Celtic loans, 1:514 – Chaucer’s vocabulary and, 1:583 – clepien vs. callen, 1:527–528 – dating for bagpipe, 1:460 – definition of unclose, 1:462 – editorial policies, 1:458, 1:464 – French loans, 2:1678, 2:1790 – half-century of work in, 2:1319 – Latin loans, 2:1709, 2:1716 – methodology, 2:1127–1128, 2:1150–1152, 2:1158–1159, 2:1309 – Middle English Compendium and, 1:37, 1:46 – number of lexemes listed, 1:511 – the OED and, 2:1154 – online resources, 2:1134–1135, 2:1144, 2:1515 – semasiological study and, 1:451 – study of phraseology and, 1:187, 1:189 – treatment of polysemy, 1:454 Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), 1:37, 1:437, 1:441, 1:446, 2:1513
Index Middle English Grammar Project (MEG), 2:1127, 2:1442 Middle English lexicon – Celtic loans, 1:514 – Dutch and Low German loans, 1:514, 2:1660, 2:1666–1667 – exclamations in, 1:201–202 – French loans – affixes, 2:1680–1681 – effect on phonological system, 1:107 – effect on prosody, 1:123–124, 1:400–401 – effects on spelling and syntax, 2:1681–1682 – quantity and type, 2:1678–1680, 2:1683– 1684 – semantic structure and, 1:45–46, 1:431, 1:463 – waves of borrowing, 1:512–513, 2:1789 – Greek, Arabic, and Persian loans, 1:514 – in history of English textbooks, 2:1187 – Latin loans, 1:124, 1:512, 1:513, 1:1041, 2:1704, 2:1708–1710 – non-European loanwords, 1:34 – occupational terms, 1:217, 1:219, 1:220 – Old Norse loans – effect on phonology, 1:104, 1:105, 2:1729 – language contact theory and, 2:1159 – quantity and type, 1:25, 1:45, 1:513–514, 2:1732–1734 – standardization and, 1:527–528 – personal names, 1:218–219, 1:220 – proportion of Romance items, 1:123 – rate of borrowing, 1:125, 1:463 – scholarly approaches to, 1:451–452 – size compared to Old English, 1:463 – toponyms, 1:216–217 – word-formation, 1:430–431, 1:459–462 – word geography, 1:501–502 Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), 2:1129, 2:1465 Middle English morphology, 1:415–434 – adjectives, 1:145, 1:418, 1:419 – adverbs, 1:419–420, 1:527 – loss of gender, 1:416, 1:418, 1:579, 1:604 – loss of inflectional categories, 1:30 – new compound type, 1:146 – nouns – cases, 1:416–418 – -en plurals, 1:417 – generalization of -s genitive, 1:145, 1:527, 1:604 – generalization of -s plural, 1:145, 1:416
2215 – gerundial -ing, 1:614 – mutated plurals, 1:417–418 – numerals, 1:419 – pronouns – demonstrative, 1:421, 2:1506 – interrogative, relative, and indefinite, 1:422, 1:517 – possessive, 1:421 – reflexive, 1:421–422, 1:470 – second person singular and plural, 1:203, 1:420, 1:547, 1:703, 1:737 – she, 1:44–45, 1:420, 1:492, 1:493, 1:495 – third-person plural, 1:42, 1:44, 1:420–421, 1:496–99, 1:515, 1:527, 1:540–541 – verbs – anomalous, 1:430 – copulative, 1:430, 1:497–598, 1:500 – loss of inflections, 1:422–423 – loss of the infinitive ending, 1:143 – modal, 1:468–469 – present indicative endings, 1:499–500, 1:703 – present participle, 1:423, 1:516, 1:525, 2:1735 – preterit-present, 1:134, 1:429–430 – strong, 1:140, 1:426–429, 1:432 – subjunctive, 1:853 – weak, 1:423–425 – word-formation, 1:142, 1:430–431 – see also third person plural th- forms; third person singular -s ending Middle English phonology, 1:399–414 – consonants – initial /h/, 1:592 – initial voiced fricatives, 1:107, 1:515 – labialization of [x], 1:106 – loss of geminates, 1:133, 1:142, 1:270, 1:484 – reduction, 1:408, 1:413 – reduction of onset clusters, 1:108, 1:593 – /r/-loss, 1:593 – voiced vs. voiceless fricatives, 1:410 – disintegration of ablaut system, 1:432 – French loans and, 1:512–513, 1:515, 1:596 – onomastics and, 1:221 – overview, 1:34 – phoneme inventory, 1:408–409 – reduction in unstressed syllables, 1:405– 408 – sources for understanding, 1:40 – vowels
2216 – /a/ in face, 2:1934 – deletion, 1:143, 1:145, 1:406–407, 1:410, 1:484 – diphthongs, 1:108, 1:412–413, 1:596–597, 2:1551–1552 – FLEECE merger, 2:1972 – FOOT/STRUT split and, 2:1932 – lengthening before -nd, -ld, -rd etc., 2:1553–1554 – long, 1:758, 1:760 – lowering and centralization of /i/, 1:598 – Northern Fronting, 1:484, 1:492 – Old English diphthongs and, 1:259 – Open Syllable Lengthening, 1:258, 1:270, 1:410, 1:484, 1:769 – quality, 1:411–412, 1:828 – Trisyllabic Shortening, 1:411, 1:484 – unrounding of /o¨(:)/, 2:1552–1553 Middle English syntax, 1:435–450 – auxiliaries, 1:153, 1:876, 2:1537 – causative have, 1:159 – Celtic influence, 2:1691 – complementation, 1:851, 1:878, 1:879 – for … to-infinitive constructions, 1:630, 1:881 – it-cleft construction, 2:1695 – language contact and, 1:516–518 – Latin influence, 1:156, 1:517 – “long passives”, 1:468 – loss of inflections and, 1:440 – negation, 1:440, 1:446, 1:631, 1:706, 1:726, 1:931 – of genitive, 1:516, 1:527, 1:604, 1:622 – Old Norse influence on, 1:150, 2:1735 – parataxis vs. hypotaxis, 1:439, 1:443, 1:444, 1:445–446, 1:467 – perfect, 1:625 – periphrastic do, 1:517, 1:744, 1:747 – phrasal verbs, 1:460–461, 1:462 – progressive, 1:444, 1:517, 1:626, 2:1691 – in prose, 1:437–444 – subjunctive mood in, 1:440–441, 1:446, 1:853 – verbalization of the gerund, 1:629 – wh- relative pronouns, 1:517, 1:785 – word order – information structure and, 1:467, 1:468 – SV order, 1:443, 1:448, 2:1360–1361 – Transitive Expletive Construction, 2:1625– 1626 – verb-adverb order, 1:752 – VO/OV order in, 1:517, 2:1485–1486
Index Middle English Syntax (Mustanoja), 2:1682 Middlesbrough, 1:68 Middleton, Thomas, 1:803 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 1:812 Mie`ge, Guy, 1:705, 2:1265 Miethaner, Ulrich, 2:1800 Migge, Bettina, 2:2122 Milan Glosses, 2:1696 Milic´, Louis, 2:1510 Milic´ev, Tanja, 2:1386, 2:1481–1483 Miller, Gary, 1:431 Miller, Jim, 1:80, 1:86, 1:89, 1:90, 1:94 Miller, Randall M., 2:1801 Mills, Sarah, 1:659 Millward, Celia, 2:1164, 2:1167, 2:1168, 2:1169, 2:1170, 2:1185, 2:1235 Milnes, Richard Monkton, 2:1303 Milroy, James – on the Alliterative Revival, 1:524 – on change vs. innovation, 2:2032 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1292 – on the fixation on Standard English, 2:1257, 2:1445 – on the importance of sociolinguistics, 2:1310 – inferences about Middle English data, 2:1276 – on language ideologies, 2:1661 – model of standardization, 1:700, 1:940, 1:995, 1:997, 1:998, 1:1004, 2:1446 – on myths about English, 2:1262–1263 – on the origins of standardized languages, 2:1180 – on race in language regard, 1:1023 – on Received Pronunciation, 2:1908 – social network analysis, 1:539, 1:691, 1:728, 2:2033, 2:2034–2035 – on “suppression of optional variability”, 1:377 – work on Belfast English, 2:2056 Milroy, Lesley – model of standardization, 1:700, 1:940, 1:997, 1:998 – on pronunciation, 1:1092 – on race in language regard, 1:1023 – social network analysis, 1:539, 1:690, 1:691, 1:728, 2:1449, 2:2033 – on “suppression of optional variability”, 1:377 – work on Belfast English, 2:2033, 2:2056
Index Milton, John – Classical coinages, 2:1712 – compounding, 1:800 – double comparison, 1:607 – Latinate style, 1:244, 1:793–794, 2:1882 – nephew Edward Phillips, 1:648 – phraseology, 1:179 – use of do not, 1:749 – use of English for ecclesiastical writing, 2:1881 Milton Keynes Project, 2:1916–1918 Mincoff, Marco, 2:1387 Minhinnick, Robert, 2:1989 Minimalist theory of language structure, 1:157 Min Jae-Ki, 2:1417 Minkova, Donka – on Early Modern English lexicon, 1:709 – on gradient pronunciations in Lindisfarne Glosses, 2:1549 – on the Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:771, 2:1554 – on Middle English /æ/, 1:598 – on Middle English alliterative poetry, 1:553, 1:556, 1:557, 1:565 – on Middle English final -e, 1:418 – on Open Syllable Lengthening, 1:410 – organization of SHEL conference, 2:1293 – on philology and linguistics, 2:1166, 2:1320 – on Present Day English borrowing, 1:83 – on prosody of phrasal stress, 1:123, 1:124 – on stress and affixation, 1:118, 1:119, 1:263 – teachers of, 2:1388 Minnesota, 2:1841, 2:1843 Minnick, Lisa Cohen, 2:1796 Minor, W. C., 1:972 Minsheu, John, 1:638, 1:646, 1:647, 1:1052 Minsk State Linguistic University, 2:1384 Minute on Indian Education (Macaulay), 2:2080 Miranda-Garcı´a, Antonio, 2:1403 Miskito Coast Creole, 2:2122, 2:2130, 2:2131 Mississippi, 2:1800, 2:1843 Mississippi River Valley, 2:1676, 2:1768 Mistakes of Daily Occurrence of Speaking, Writing, and Pronunciation Corrected, 1:840 Mitchell, Alexander G., 1:1098–1099, 2:1999 Mitchell, Bruce, 2:1125, 2:1308, 2:1316, 2:1694 Mitford, William, 1:829–830 Mithun, Marianne, 2:1759 Mittelenglische Grammatik (Morsbach), 2:1328, 2:1333
2217 Die Mittelenglischen Legenden von St. Editha und St. Ethelreda (Heuser), 2:1327 Mittendorf, Ingo, 1:687, 2:1688, 2:1693, 2:1700 Miyabe, Kikuo, 2:1415 MLA International Bibliography, 2:1320 Mobilian Jargon, 2:1755, 2:1768 modal verbs – in American English, 2:1362 – auxiliaries, 2:1641 – be going to, 2:1539–1541, 2:1568, 2:1606– 1607, 2:1639, 2:1894 – child language acquisition and, 2:1607 – competition with subjunctive, 1:60, 1:305, 1:441, 1:609, 1:853–857 – Construction Grammar perspectives on, 2:1640–1641 – in Early Modern English, 1:818–819, 2:1625 – epistemic uses, 1:58, 1:60, 1:333 – frequency and emergence of, 2:1547 – inflection, 1:608 – middle constructions and, 1:84 – Old English preterit-present verbs and, 1:134, 1:292, 1:429–430, 2:1640 – origins and grammaticalization, 1:134, 1:152– 153, 1:157, 1:167, 1:608 – pragmatic approaches to, 1:468–469, 1:474, 1:656, 1:658, 1:819, 1:910 – Present Day regional developments, 1:90–91, 1:153 – in progressive constructions, 1:70, 1:873, 1:875 – retaining lexical force, 1:443, 1:817 – semi- or emerging, 1:79, 1:166, 1:870, 1:910 – strengthening of category, 2:1626–1627 – will with inanimate subjects, 2:1571–1572 Modern American Usage (Follett), 1:1058 Modern English Association ( Japan), 2:1415, 2:1416 Modern Language Association (MLA), 2:1164, 2:1176, 2:1316, 2:1320, 2:1329 Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB), 2:1144 Modern Language Notes, 1:974 Modern Standard English Dictionary, 1:1059 Modiano, Marko, 2:2139–2140, 2:2144 Moessner, Lilo, 1:1041 Moffatt, James, 1:1045 Mohr, Friedrich, 2:1327 Mold, 2:1984 Moldova, 2:1381 Molina, Clara, 2:1403
2218 Mollin, Sandra, 2:2141 Mombasa, 2:2094 Momma, Haruko, 2:1167, 2:1185 Moˆn, 2:1990 Monaghan, County, 2:2071 Mondorf, Britta, 1:850 Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, 1:343 Monmouthshire, 2:1979, 2:1980 Montagu, Elizabeth, 1:947, 2:1450 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 1:880 Montaigne’s Essays (Florio), 1:734 Montenegro, 2:1385 Montgomery, Michael, 2:1794, 2:1798, 2:1801, 2:1802, 2:1804, 2:1968 Monthly (review journal), 1:1009 Montreal, 2:1861 Montserrat, 2:2121 Moon, George Washington, 1:1012 Moon, Rosamund, 1:182, 1:183, 1:187 Moore, Bruce, 2:2002, 2:2007 Moore, Marilyn Reppa, 1:456 Moore, Samuel, 1:418, 1:431, 1:482, 2:1316 The Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie), 2:2089 Moralejo Ga´rate, Teresa, 1:184 More, Hannah, 1:853 More, Henry, 1:797 More, Thomas, 1:605, 1:606, 1:634, 1:726, 1:736, 1:1041, 2:1222 Moreville, Heloise de, 1:544–545 More Word Histories and Mysteries: From Aardvark to Zombie, 2:1173 Morgan, Mihangel, 2:1989 Morgan, William (Bishop), 2:1979 Moriscos, 1:688 Morley, Henry, 2:1332 Morley, Thomas, 2:1226 Morning Post, 1:1066, 1:1068 Morokhovsky, Olexandr, 2:1384 Morris, E. E., 1:1059 Morris, Marmeduke C. F., 1:67 Morris, Mary, 1:975 Morris, William, 1:975 Morrison, Robert, 2:1768 Morsbach, Lorenz, 2:1290, 2:1328, 2:1332, 2:1333 Morte d’Arthur, 2:1359 Mosaic (web browser), 1:1106 Moscow, 2:1382–1383 Moscow State Linguistic University, 2:1382– 1383 Moskowich-Spiegel, Isabel, 2:1403
Index Mosse´, Fernand, 2:1276, 2:1290, 2:1398, 2:1678, 2:1691 Mosser, Dan, 2:1132 Motion Chart Software, 2:1640 Mouchon, Jean-Pierre, 2:1398, 2:1399 Mount Gambier, 2:2007 Mowntayne, Thomas, 1:633 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 2:1229 Mubashshir ibn Fatik, Abu al-Wafa’, 1:469, 2:1639 Mucedorus (Anon.), 2:1210 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 1:817 Mufwene, Salikoko, 2:1833–1834, 2:1835 Mugglestone, Lynda, 1:71, 1:957, 1:961, 1:995, 1:1003, 1:1090, 2:1174, 2:1251 Mugler, France, 1:1060 Mu¨hlha¨usler, Peter, 2:2127 Muhr, Rudolf, 1:1079 Muir, Bernard J., 2:1143 Muir, Kenneth, 1:810 Mulcaster, Richard – on English, 1:645, 1:800–801, 1:984 – estimate of size of lexicon, 1:642, 1:643 – on need for dictionary, 1:642, 1:710, 1:1053 – Positions, 1:54 – spelling reform and, 1:702, 1:1008 – stance on teaching English, 1:638 – on women’s education, 1:53 Mulholland, Joan, 1:819 Mu¨ller, Max, 2:1307, 2:1600 Multicultural London English (MLE), 2:2016 Munkelt, Marga, 1:822 Munster, 2:1964 Murcia, 2:2036 Muris, Johannes de, 2:1219 Murray, Charles, 2:1828 Murray, James A. H. – on diversity of English lexicon, 2:1704 – inclusion of Scots in Northern dialect, 1:897 – OED and, 1:895, 1:943 – periodization of history of English, 2:1234, 2:1237, 2:1239–1243 – Philological Society and, 2:1304 – in teaching history of English, 2:1197 Murray, James M., 2:1664 Murray, Lindley, 1:970, 1:971, 1:975, 1:1011, 1:1012, 1:1025, 2:1884 Murray, Robert, 1:102 music, as language, 2:1214–1230
Index Musica disciplina (Aurelianus Reomensis), 2:1218 “Musica enchiriadis”, 2:1218 The Musical Grammarian (North), 2:1219 Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien (Kuhnau), 2:1228 Musica poetica (Burmeister), 2:1225 Le Musiche Sopra L’Euridice (Peri), 2:1224 Musique mesure`e a` l’antique, 2:1218 Musk, Nigel, 2:1987 Muskogean, 2:1768 Mustanoja, Tauno F., 2:1290, 2:1355, 2:1362, 2:1682 Mutabaruka, 2:1178 Mutt, Oleg, 2:1384 Myers-Scotton, Carol, 2:1987, 2:2096 Myhill, John, 2:2095–2096
N ´ da´m, 2:1381 Na´dasdy, A NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 2:2138 Nagoya University, 2:1416 Nagy, Andrea R., 1:969 Nahuatl, 2:1745 Nakajima, Fumio, 2:1415, 2:1417 Nakayasu, Minako, 1:819 Nama, 1:75 Namibia, 2:2114, 2:2137–2138, 2:2140 Napier, Arthur, 2:1328 Napoleonic Wars, 1:888, 1:916 Narayan, R. K., 2:2088 Nares, Robert, 1:836, 1:837 Naro, Antony, 1:1083 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 2:1796 Nash, Thomas, 1:607, 1:633, 1:641 Natal English, 2:2097 Nathan, N., 1:204 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 1:973, 1:1014, 1:1026 National Library of Scotland, 1:35 National Library of Wales, 2:1983 National Museum of Wales, 2:1983 National Party (South Africa), 2:2115, 2:2117 National Swadeshi Movement, 2:2081–2082 Native American English, 2:2110–2111, 2:2112 Native American languages, 2:1753–1765, 2:1884
2219 native speakers, 1:114, 1:150, 1:436, 2:2107– 2108 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 2:2138 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 2:1229 Nauru, 2:2114 Navajo, 1:174, 2:1602 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 1:1089, 1:1094, 1:1096 Ndebele, 2:2115 Ndjuka, 2:1771, 2:2122 Nebraska, 2:1819–1820, 2:1841, 2:1843 negation – in Cockney English, 2:2025 – in creoles, 2:2130–2131 – development of not, 2:1642–1643 – Early Modern English, 1:631–632, 1:706–707, 1:719–720 – frequency and retention of no-, 2:1547 – Middle English, 1:440, 1:446, 1:631, 1:706, 1:726, 1:931 – multiple, 1:75, 1:631, 1:706–707, 1:931, 1:943, 1:960, 2:2048–2049 – Old English, 1:298, 1:310, 1:632 – in Scots, 1:932 Nehls, Dietrich, 1:626 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 2:2082 Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Viscount, 1:1069 Neogrammarians – context-free sound changes and, 1:759–760 – deduction of Grimm’s Law, 1:100–102 – focus on Germanic phonology, 1:255–256 – Henry Sweet and, 2:1305 – influence on dialectology, 1:918 – on linguistic change, 1:110, 2:2063 – Open Syllable Lengthening and, 1:411 – scientific laws and, 2:1305–1306 – treatment of morphological structure, 1:130 – vs. Berlin School, 2:1330 Neophilologus ( journal), 2:1344 Nepal, 2:1886, 2:2114 Nequam, Alexander, 2:1785 Nerrie`re, Jean-Paul, 1:1015 Nesfield, J. C., 2:1334 Nesselhauf, Nadja, 1:875 Netherlands – as an ESL country, 2:2118 – English historical linguistics in, 1:449, 2:1314, 2:1341–1344 – in Germanic settlement of Britain, 1:2, 1:363 – Papua New Guinea and, 2:2126
2220 – refugees from Spanish persecution in, 1:688 – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145 – teaching of English in, 2:2139 – use of English Wikipedia in, 2:2139 Netherlands Society for English Studies, 2:1344 Network of Eighteenth-Century English Texts (NEET), 2:1442 Neuhaus, H. Joachim, 1:810 Nevada, 2:1844 Nevala, Minna, 1:657, 1:658, 1:740, 1:911, 2:1450 Nevalainen, Terttu – on chronology of Early Modern period, 1:699 – on codification of RP, 1:1003–1004 – on Early Modern English lexicon, 1:709, 1:1048, 2:1679 – on his vs. its, 1:705, 1:734 – on languages covered under “Dutch”, 2:1661 – on lawyers’ role in language change, 2:2034 – on medieval social history, 1:547 – on models of diffusion, 2:2035, 2:2036 – on my/thy vs. mine/thine, 1:736 – on periphrastic do, 1:818 – on second person pronouns, 1:726, 1:737, 1:740 – on Shakespeare’s language, 1:816 – on spelling reform debate, 1:701 – on standardization in English, 1:374, 1:700, 1:999–1000, 2:1446 – on supra-localization, 1:527, 1:997, 1:1001 – textbook on Early Modern English, 1:49–50, 1:732, 2:1185 – on third person plural pronouns, 1:733 – work in historical sociolinguistics, 1:65, 2:1367 – work on affixes, 1:611, 1:618 – work on Cely Letters, 2:1449–1450 – work on Early Modern English lexis and semantics, 2:1367 – work on focusing adverbs, 2:1363 – work on gender and language change, 2:1447, 2:1448 – work on language change in individuals, 1:691–692 – work on letter-writing conventions, 1:247, 1:474 – work on multiple negation, 1:75, 1:707 – work on subject–verb agreement, 1:678–679, 2:1449
Index – work on third person singular present indicative, 1:703, 2:1446, 2:1547 – work on which vs. the which, 1:676–677 Nevanlinna, Saara, 1:471 Newbery, John, 1:1010 New Brunswick, 2:1864 Newcastle, 1:68 Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1:658 Newcastle English, 2:1936, 2:2037, 2:2061 New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Stephens), 2:1989 New Criticism, 2:1205–1206 New Delhi, 2:2085, 2:2146 Newdigate Newsletters, 2:1138 New England – “broad a” pronunciations in, 2:1550 – East Anglia and, 2:1810, 2:1813, 2:2050 – education in, 1:954 – in linguistic atlases, 2:1841, 2:1843 – low back vowel merger, 2:1853 – Northern Cities Shift and, 2:2050 – settlement history, 1:693, 2:1756 New England Courant, 1:1065 The New English (Oliphant), 2:1237 New English Dictionary (Kersey), 1:941–942, 1:1054, 2:1883 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, see Oxford English Dictionary (OED) New Englishes, 1:85, 1:161, 1:693, 1:695, 1:1015–1016, 2:2110, see also global English Newfoundland and Labrador, 2:1861, 2:1863, 2:1867 Newfoundland English – Canadian English and, 2:1859, 2:1861, 2:2051 – dictionaries of, 2:1156, 2:1317, 2:1867 – glide deletion in, 2:1869 – Irish English and, 2:1870, 2:1971–1972 – in models of World English, 2:1887 A New Grammar of English (Sweet), 2:1242, 2:1291, 2:1334 New Guide to the English Tongue (Dilworth), 1:1023 New Hampshire, 2:2050 New Haven, CT, 1:897 New Historicism, 2:1203, 2:1204, 2:1208, 2:1209, 2:1211–1212 New Jersey, 2:1800, 2:1842 Newman, John G., 1:432 Newmark, L., 1:64
Index Newmeyer, Frederick J., 2:1570, 2:1571 A New Musical Grammar (Tans’ur), 2:1219 New Orleans, 2:2040 News Corporation, 1:1013 New Shakespeare Society, 1:1013 News of the World, 1:1066 New South Wales, 2:1997 Newspaper, The, 1:907 Newspaper Digitisation Project of British Newspapers, 1:1064 Newton, Isaac, 1:66 New World of English Words (Phillips), 1:648, 1:1008, 1:1054, 2:1883 New York City, 1:1026–1027, 1:1076, 2:1462, 2:1550, 2:2040, 2:2050, 2:2146 New York Journal, 1:1067 New York State, 2:1743, 2:1776, 2:1842, 2:1849, 2:2050 New York Times, 1:181 New York Times Annotated Corpus, 2:1140 New York University, 2:1377 New York World, 1:1067 New Zealand, 1:68, 1:83, 2:1314, 2:1996–1997, 2:2097, 2:2136 New Zealand English, 2:1995–2008 – accent, 2:1998–1999, 2:1999–2000 – in the Bank of English corpus, 1:1015 – Cockney English and, 2:1998, 2:1999, 2:2053 – codification, 1:1059, 2:1156, 2:2000–2001 – linguistic corpora of, 2:1140, 2:1997 – Maori loans in, 1:83 – in the media, 1:1081, 1:1100 – migration and contact in, 2:1271 – in models of World English, 2:1886, 2:1887 – in the OED, 1:943 – phonology, 1:81–82, 1:759, 2:1931, 2:1933, 2:1934, 2:1935, 2:2007–2008 – relative homogeneity, 2:1928 – stigmatization of, 1:1022 – syntax, 1:85, 1:88–90, 1:92, 1:93, 2:2005, 2:2114 New Zealand Herald, 1:90 New Zealand Listener, 1:89 New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, 2:2001 New Zealand Slang (Baker), 1:1059 Ngu˜gı˜ Wa Thiong’o, 1:992 Nicaragua, 2:1820, 2:2122 Nichols, Roger L., 2:1755, 2:1756, 2:1757 Nicolaisen, Wilhelm F. H., 2:1234, 2:1237, 2:1245, 2:1247 Nicot, Jean, 1:1057
2221 Nielsen, Hans F., 1:346, 2:1180, 2:1359, 2:1660, 2:1662, 2:2045, 2:2056 Niger, Franciscus, 2:1220 Niger-Congo languages, 2:1771, 2:1834, 2:2100, 2:2115 Nigeria, 2:1886, 2:1887, 2:2093, 2:2095, 2:2102, 2:2107, 2:2114, 2:2136 Nigerian English, 2:2112, 2:2142, 2:2143 Nigerian Pidgin English, 2:1771 Niles, John D., 2:1205 Nineteenth-century Fiction (NCF), 1:870 Noelle, H., 2:1327 Nomoi (Plato), 2:1216, 2:1221 Norde, Muriel, 2:1571, 2:1584–1585, 2:1586, 2:1590–1591, 2:1594 Nordquist, Richard, 2:1822 Norfolk – Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and, 1:580 – in the Danelaw, 2:1491 – dialectal features, 1:486–487, 1:492, 1:497, 1:498 – Fens dialect and, 2:2054 – immigration from Low Countries, 2:1664 – in Little Domesday survey, 2:1123 – Philip Gawdy and, 1:691 – place-names in, 2:1267, 2:2045 – pronunciation of room, broom etc., 2:2055– 2056 – Samuels’s Type II and, 1:578 – smoothing in, 2:2037 – witness depositions from, 1:672 Norfolk Islands, 2:2126 Norman Conquest – as beginning point of Middle English, 1:33, 1:1001, 2:1247, 2:1252 – change in language of administration and, 1:536 – effect on education, 2:1264 – effect on Wales, 2:1978 – effect on writing vs. speech, 2:1248, 2:1249 – as end point of Old English, 1:21, 1:1000 – end point of West Saxon dominance, 1:342 – English personal names and, 1:218, 1:219 – French influence on English and, 1:28–30, 2:1674 – interruption of literary tradition, 1:121, 1:552 – legal language and, 1:240 – social and political impact, 2:1782–1783 – spelling conventions and, 1:232 Normandy, 1:507, 2:1677, 2:1785, 2:1788 Norn, 2:1954
2222 Norri, Juhani, 2:1366, 2:1716 Norrick, Neal R., 1:183 North, Dudley North, Baron, 1:795–796 North American Vocabulary Survey, 2:1864 North Carolina, 2:1800, 2:1842, 2:2052 North Dakota, 2:1843 Northern Antiquities (Paul Mallet), 2:1299 Northern Arizona University, 2:1139 Northern Ireland, 2:1961, 2:2071–2072 Northern Personal Pronoun Rule, 1:42, 1:444, 1:679, 1:680, 1:687 Northern Soto, 2:2115 North Germanic, 1:5, 1:10, 2:1725–1726 North Preston, NS, 2:1869 North Sea Germanic, 1:2, 1:5, 1:6, 1:8, 1:11, 1:15 Northumberland, 1:495, 1:672, 2:1505, 2:1733, 2:1931 Northumbria, 1:20, 1:24, 1:342, 1:386, 2:1952 Northwestern University Library, 1:810 Northwest Germanic, 1:1, 1:4, 1:14, 1:17, 1:216 Norway, 2:1355, 2:2036, 2:2145 Norwegian, 1:752, 2:1725, 2:2141, 2:2143 Norwich, 1:688, 1:689, 1:1028, 2:1269, 2:1930, 2:1935, 2:2036, 2:2055 Nottingham, 1:213, 1:217, 1:221, 2:1266 Nottinghamshire, 1:497, 2:1267, 2:1268 Nova Scotia, 2:1801, 2:1803, 2:1863, 2:1864, 2:1866, 2:2093, 2:2095 Nova Scotia English, 2:1869–1870 Noveck, Ira A., 1:198 Novosibirsk, 2:1383 Novosibirsk National Research State University, 2:1383 Novosibirsk State Pedagogical Institute, 2:1383 Nowell, Laurence, 1:640 N-town “mystery” plays, 1:570 Nucius, Johannes, 2:1225 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 1:973 Nu´n˜ez-Pertejo, Paloma, 1:873 Nurmi, Arja, 1:708, 1:716, 1:721, 1:748, 1:753–754, 2:1362, 2:1448
O Oakden, J. P., 1:482, 1:495 Oakland Ebonics controversy, 2:1836 Oaths of Strasbourg (842), 1:28 ´ Baoill, Do´nall P., 2:1971, 2:1972 O
Index Observations Upon the English Language in a Letter to a Friend (Harris), 1:986 Observer, 1:1066 O’Cain, Raymond K., 2:1847–1848 Occitan, 1:1057 Occupy Wall Street, 2:1829 O’Connell, Daniel, 2:2063 ´ Corra´in, Ailbhe, 2:1969 O OCP (Obligatory Contour Principle) effect, 1:103, 1:109 ´ Cro´inı´n, Da´ibhı´, 2:1963 O ´ Cuı´v, Brian, 2:1964 O Odington, Walter, 2:1218 Odyssey (Homer), 1:638 Oesterreicher, Wulf, 1:521, 1:522, 1:1108, 2:1278–1279 Of ðe Ornaments of melodi and harmoni (Butler), 2:1227 “Of English Verse” (Waller), 1:985 Offaly, County, 2:1964 Offa’s Dyke, 2:1977 Ogawa, Hiroshi, 2:1624 Ogbu, John, 2:1836 Ogilvie, John, 2:1815, 2:1894 Ogura, Mieko, 2:1547, 2:1548, 2:1554 Ohio River Valley, 2:1843 ´ hU ´ rdail, Roibea´rd, 2:1698 O Oizumi, Akio, 2:1416 Okasha, Elisabeth, 2:1125 O’Keeffe, Anne, 2:1970 Oklahoma, 2:2037 Okulska, Urszula, 1:247 Old Bailey Proceedings, 1:672, 1:915, 1:936, 2:1139, 2:1294, 2:1442, 2:1514–1515 Old English – “Anglo-Saxon” as term for, 2:1237–1238, 2:1262, 2:1314 – “bad data” problem, 2:1276 – chronological delimitation, 1:19–21, 1:256, 2:1233–1254, 2:1280 – creolization theory of, 2:1262, 2:1267 – in di- and multiglossic situation, 2:1442 – in the DOST, 2:1152 – earliest surviving texts, 1:20 – electronic resources, 2:1133–1134, 2:1137, 2:1140, 2:1141, 2:1143, 2:1145 – as a foreground-signaling language, 1:247 – grammars, 1:2–3, 1:255, 1:374, 1:375–377, 1:646 – in the Helsinki Corpus, 2:1138 – lexicography, 2:1149–1150
Index – linguistic ancestry, 1:1–2 – literary language, 1:385–397 – alliteration in, 1:116–117, 1:261, 1:387, 1:391–392, 1:395 – Anglo-Saxon personal names and, 1:217 – dative ending and, 1:145 – demise with Norman Conquest, 1:121, 1:552, 1:553 – dialect of, 1:345, 1:358–359, 1:386–388 – diphthong length contrast and, 1:258 – flyting, 1:328–329 – iambic feet in, 1:121 – kennings, 1:172, 1:318 – poetic vocabulary, 1:359, 1:383, 1:391–392 – prosody and, 1:263, 1:387–388 – registers, 1:386 – strong and weak adjectives in, 1:281 – syntax, 1:389–391, 1:395–396 – literature, 2:1125 – in the OED, 2:1133, 2:1150 – orality vs. literacy in, 2:1280–1281 – orthography – Anglo-Saxon coins and, 1:221 – characters from Futhorc, 1:24, 1:267 – conservatism, 1:263 – graphotactics and graphophonemics of, 1:232 – identification of Old Norse loans and, 1:25–26 – impact of French on, 2:1681 – Irish influence, 1:9, 1:24, 1:232 – Latin alphabet and, 1:24, 1:232, 2:1280 – phonological representation, 1:9, 1:263, 1:266–267 – Tironian sign 7, 1:308 – of Winchester group, 1:380–382, 2:1548 – pragmatics and discourse, 1:200, 1:326–337, 1:392–394, 2:1478–1479 – prosody – alliterative verse and, 1:116–117, 1:120– 121, 1:263 – influence on phonology, 1:30, 1:115 – phrasal stress, 1:120–121 – Sievers’ Rule of Precedence, 1:117 – suffixation and, 1:127 – word stress, 1:117–120, 1:262–263 – size and nature of corpus, 2:1119–1120 – sociolinguistic approaches to, 2:1441 – as a stress-based quantity language, 1:264 – as a synthetic/inflecting language, 1:30, 1:41, 1:294, 1:483, 1:515
2223 – teaching of, 2:1164–1165, 2:1170, 2:1171, 2:1181, 2:1185 – textual resources, 2:1119–1125, 2:1522 – Welsh and, 2:1977 – see also Old English dialects; Old English lexicon; Old English morphology; Old English phonology; Old English syntax Old English Anthology (Bravo et al.), 2:1404 Old English dialects, 1:341–359 – Anglian – Canterbury manuscripts and, 1:346 – links with Old Frisian, 1:2 – literary language and, 1:386, 1:388, 1:394, 1:395 – loss of /h/ before sonorants, 2:1548–1549 – Old Norse and, 1:45, 2:1491, 2:1726 – Old Saxon and, 1:346–347 – personal pronouns, 1:285, 1:352 – pronoun þon, 2:1504 – retraction in, 1:8 – smoothing, 1:10 – strong verbs, 1:352 – tribal origins, 1:342 – typical features, 2:1499 – vocabulary, 1:355, 1:395 – contact among, 2:2045–2046 – Kentish – evidence for, 2:1120, 2:1121 – links with Old Frisian, 1:2 – local Schriftsprache, 1:383 – Mercian influence, 1:386 – strong adjective genitive plurals, 1:281 – transmission, 1:348–349 – tribal origins, 1:342 – vocabulary, 1:356 – key phonological changes, 1:9 – Mercian – evidence for, 2:1120, 2:1121, 2:1124 – influence of West Saxon on, 2:1550 – loss of /h/ before sonorants, 2:1548–1549 – Present Day English and, 1:26, 1:256 – progressive aspect in, 2:1692 – reflexes of PGrmc. *eu and *iu, 1:8 – survival of [ø], 1:257 – transmission, 1:348 – Winchester “standard” and, 1:26, 1:28, 1:375 – nature of evidence for, 1:321, 1:344–345, 1:483 – Northumbrian
2224 – definite article the, 1:421 – evidence for, 2:1120, 2:1124 – genitive plural of comparative forms, 1:282 – lack of influence from West Saxon, 1:346 – links with Old Frisian, 1:2 – loss of /h/ before sonorants, 2:1548–1549 – reflexes of PGrmc. *eu and *iu, 1:8 – representative texts, 1:27–28 – retraction in, 1:8 – survival of [ø], 1:257 – transmission, 1:348 – velar palatalization, 1:105 – verbal inflections, 1:353 – vocabulary, 1:355–356 – phonology, 1:349–352 – standardization and, 1:345–346 – study of, 2:1120–1121 – toponyms and, 1:217, 1:220 – West Saxon – adjectival genitive plurals, 1:281, 1:282 – breaking, 1:9 – Canterbury manuscripts and, 1:346 – Class 2 o-stem nouns, 1:275 – Early vs. Late, 1:28 – key phonological changes, 1:10, 1:350–352 – Late, 2:1120 – [ø] in early, 1:257 – Old Saxon and, 1:346–347 – personal pronouns, 1:352 – poetic language and, 1:386 – prose, 1:394 – rarity of “pure” texts, 1:28 – reflexes of PGrmc. *eu and *iu, 1:8 – Schriftsprache, 1:27, 1:380–382 – syncope in strong verbs, 1:352 – transmission, 1:347 – tribal origins, 1:342 – umlaut in, 1:268–269 – use in grammars and dictionaries, 1:321, 1:375 – velar palatalization, 1:105 – verbs, 1:292, 1:353 – vocabulary, 1:354 – see also West Saxon literary “standard” Old English Grammar (Campbell), 2:1291, 2:1307 Old English Grammar (Wright), 2:1308 Old English Heptateuch, 2:1484, 2:1485 Old English lexicon – calques, 1:318–319, 1:368, 1:369 – Celtic loans, 1:316
Index – Christianization and, 1:23, 1:315, 1:319 – dialectal variations, 1:354–356 – French loans, 1:29, 1:315, 1:354, 1:366, 2:1673, 2:1679, 2:1684 – hapax legomena, 1:119 – insults, 1:333–334 – interjections, 1:334 – kinship terms, 1:278, 1:322–323 – Latin loans, 1:362–373 – continental Germanic, 1:315, 1:364–366 – conversion to Christianity and, 1:23–24, 1:367–369 – percentage formed by, 1:511 – Proto-Germanic phonology and, 1:3 – replacement of native terms with, 1:317 – legal terms, 1:240 – longevity, 1:21 – Old High German cognates, 1:364–366 – Old Norse loans, 1:316, 1:358, 2:1728–1732 – personal names, 1:217–218 – poetic, 1:359, 1:383, 1:391–392 – proportion of non-native items, 1:123 – resources for studying, 1:314–315, 1:322–323 – size, 1:511 – speech act verbs, 1:202, 1:332–333 – toponyms, 1:213, 1:217, 1:316 – Winchester vocabulary, 1:354, 1:356–358, 1:375, 1:378–380 – word-formation processes, 1:316–318 – word geography, 1:353–354, 1:379 Old English Made Easy (website), 2:1134 Old English Martyrology, 1:26, 1:394, 2:1484, 2:1485, 2:1692 Old English morphology – adjectives, 1:12, 1:14, 1:145, 1:280–283 – adverbs, 1:14, 1:283 – case system, 1:12, 1:13t, 1:14, 1:30, 1:134, 1:144–145 – definite article þe, 2:1498, 2:1499–1503 – gender, 1:12, 1:30, 1:133–134 – nouns, 1:13, 1:144, 1:269, 1:273–280, 1:879 – numerals, 1:283 – pronouns – demonstrative, 1:12, 1:14, 1:44, 1:284, 1:300, 2:1498 – dual, 1:14 – interrogative, 1:12, 1:14, 1:286 – personal, 1:285–286, 1:352, 1:733 – relative, 1:15, 2:1498 – shift to word-based type, 1:132, 1:144, 1:145 – verbs, 1:286–293
Index – ablaut and suffixation in strong, 1:15, 1:289–292 – copulative, 1:293, 1:303 – dental preterit, 1:287, 1:353 – inflected infinitive, 1:15 – mood, 1:31, 1:286, 1:853 – passive, 1:15, 1:307 – person in, 1:31 – preterit-present, 1:16–17, 1:152, 1:292 – strong, 1:5, 1:10, 1:140, 1:290, 1:291, 1:292 – strong vs. weak, 1:31, 1:140–141, 1:286, 2:1535, 2:1603 – weak, 1:10, 1:16, 1:140, 1:141–142, 1:287– 288, 1:289 – West Saxon vs. Anglian strong, 1:352 – word-formation, 1:136, 1:145–146, 1:353 Old English Newsletter, 1:322, 2:1132, 2:1133, 2:1144, 2:1145 Old English Online, 2:1195 Old English phonology – Closed Syllable Shortening (CSS), 1:270 – coins as evidence for, 2:1125 – consonants, 1:7, 1:104, 1:105–106, 1:106, 1:260–262, 1:267 – dialectal variation and, 1:9 – evidence for studying, 1:256, 1:263 – generalizations on, 1:265–266 – Germanic initial stress and, 1:30, 1:262–263, 1:515 – Neogrammarians and, 1:102, 1:255–256 – onomastics and, 1:221 – orthography and, 1:266 – Sonority Sequencing Principle and, 1:107 – vowels, 1:257–258 – breaking, 1:9–10, 1:259, 1:261 – diphthongs, 1:258–260 – Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, 1:258, 1:270 – Latin loanwords and, 1:256–257 – Pre-Cluster Shortening, 1:133, 1:411 – raising of [a] to [o], 2:1533, 2:1549–1550 – reduction in unstressed positions, 1:144, 1:263–264, 1:406 – umlauted, 1:268–269 – weakening of initial /h/, 1:592, 2:1546–1547 Old English syntax – adjectives and adjective stacking, 1:301–303 – auxiliaries be and have, 1:876, 2:1536, 2:1537 – case assignment, 1:299–300 – complex sentences, 1:307–312 – determiners, 1:300
2225 – impersonal constructions, 1:153–154, 1:297– 298, 1:307 – infinitives, 1:306–307 – it-cleft construction, 2:1694–1696 – Latin influence on, 1:306–307, 1:362, 1:396 – Lexical Functional Grammar and, 2:1651– 1652, 2:1653 – in literary texts, 1:389–391, 1:395–396 – mood, 1:305–306, 1:853 – negation, 1:298, 1:310, 1:632 – parataxis vs. hypotaxis, 1:294, 1:307–308, 1:311 – perfect aspect, 1:625 – periphrastic constructions, 1:303–304 – pre- and postpositions, 1:301 – progressive aspect, 1:873 – questions, 1:301 – simple tenses, 1:303 – speech-based style and, 1:245 – “splitting of heavy groups”, 1:44, 1:301 – use of the genitive, 1:622 – verb phrase, 1:303–307 – word order – characteristic patterns, 1:17, 1:151, 1:295– 297, 1:300–301 – early work on, 2:1360–1361 – glosses and, 2:1124 – information structure and, 1:336, 2:1480– 1486 – left dislocation in, 2:1278 – with þa, 1:335 – in transition to Middle English, 1:467 – with verbs lician and behofian, 2:1651– 1652 Oldest English Texts (Sweet), 2:1305 Old Frisian, 1:2, 1:7, 1:9, 1:215, 1:342, 2:1343, 2:1660 Old High German, 1:264, 1:268, 1:269, 1:331, 1:363, 1:364–367, 1:368, 1:370–371 Old Icelandic, 1:35, 1:103, 1:391, see also Old Norse Oldireva Gustafsson, Larisa, 1:906 Oldmixon, John, 1:987 Old Norse – branches, 2:1725 – contact with English, 2:1724–1736 – in creolization theories of Middle English, 1:508, 2:1247, 2:1779 – dialectal distribution of influence, 1:511 – disappearance in England, 1:507 – earliest evidence, 2:1726, 2:1729
2226 – evidence of influence in Middle English, 1:44 – Gutnish variety, 2:1504 – influence on Irish, 2:1965 – insults, 2:1462 – lexicon – Chaucer’s vocabulary and, 1:582 – legal terms, 1:240 – loans, 1:25, 1:45, 1:358, 1:456, 1:469, 1:502 – personal names and, 1:219 – toponyms, 1:213, 1:216, 1:217, 1:220, 2:1267 – morphology – English perfect tense construction and, 1:625 – infinitive marker at, 1:516 – phrasal verb development and, 1:514 – present participial endings, 1:516, 1:521 – present plural are, 1:516 – th- forms in third person plural, 1:42, 1:44, 1:420–421, 1:496–497, 1:515, 1:521, 1:733 – third person singular present -s, 1:516 – phonology, 1:9, 1:45, 1:104, 1:105, 1:268 – Scots and, 2:1152, 2:1954 – in sociolinguistic approaches, 2:1441 – survival in York, 2:1268 – theories of language contact and, 2:1159 Old Saxon, 1:7, 1:346–347, 2:1660 Olexa, Jozef, 2:1379 Oliphant, T. L., 2:1237 ´ Muirithe, Diarmaid, 2:1965, 2:1966, 2:1967 O On Early English Pronunciation (Ellis), 1:919– 920, 1:922–923, 1:935, 1:944 O’Neill, Wayne, 1:431 Ong, Walter J., 2:1274, 2:1278 Onions, Charles T., 1:809 Online Corpus of Old English Poetry (OCOEP), 2:1143 Online Etymological Dictionary, 2:1135 Only Fools and Horses (TV program), 1:1082 onomastics, 1:212–223 – as evidence of language contact, 2:1359 – in the evolution of new Englishes, 2:2001 – Kentish, 2:1121 – in the MED, 2:1151 – Old English, 2:1123 – online resources, 2:1136 – place-names in the Danelaw, 2:1267 – place-names in the United States, 2:1675, 2:1762 – in the teaching of history of English, 2:1175 On Paleotype (Ellis), 1:829, 1:833
Index On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (Trench), 1:897, 1:943, 1:972, 1:1013 Ontario, 2:1860, 2:1861, 2:1864 Ontario English, 2:1860 On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, 1:524 Oper und Drama (Wagner), 2:1229 Opium Wars, 2:2116 Optimality Theory (OT), 1:99, 1:102, 1:150, 1:771, 2:1654–1656 Opus tertium (Bacon), 2:1219 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Ong), 2:1274 orality-literacy continuum, 1:242, 1:243–244, 1:475, 2:1274–1285, 2:1365 Ordered Profusion (Finkenstaedt), 1:641 Ordinar’s Accounts, 2:1514 Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts, 2:1139 Orduna Nocito, Elena, 1:911 Oregon Territory, 2:1758 Oresˇnik, Janez, 2:1386 Original Rhythmical Grammar of the English language (Chapman), 2:1221 Origin of Species (Darwin), 1:768, 2:1297 Origins of New Zealand English Project (ONZE), 2:1998–1999, 2:1999–2000, 2:2006, 2:2008 Orkney, 2:1954 Orkney and Shetland English, 2:1936, 2:1943, 2:1945–1946 Orm, 2:1284, 2:1551, 2:1552 Orme, Nicholas, 1:1006, 2:1281 Ormond, James Butler, Earl of (1490?–1596), 2:1964 Ormrod, W. Mark, 1:526, 1:547 Ormulum – compounding in, 1:460 – definite article, 2:1502 – iambic meter, 1:122 – phonology, 1:407, 1:410, 1:420, 1:558, 2:1534, 2:1551–1554 – th- forms of third person plural pronoun, 1:421 Ormulum Project, 2:1356 Orosius, Paulus, 1:26, see also Alfredian translations Orr, Eleanor Wilson, 2:1828 Orsman, H. W., 1:1059, 2:2001 Orsza´gh, La´szlo´, 2:1380 Orthoe¨pist, The (Ayres), 1:973
Index Orthographie (Hart), 1:607, 1:1008 orthography, see writing systems Orton, Harold, 1:919, 1:923 Orton, Peter, 1:390 Orwell, George, 1:989 Osborne, Dorothy, 1:53 Osmun, Thomas Embly, see Ayres, Alfred Osselton, N. E., 1:956, 2:1343 Osthoff, Hermann, 2:1306, 2:1307 ¨ stman, Jan-Ola, 2:1636 O Otago, 2:1997 Othello (Shakespeare), 1:627, 1:653, 1:656, 1:662, 1:663, 1:817, 1:820 Otsuka, Takanobu, 2:1415 Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence (OREAAC), 2:1802, 2:1803, 2:1804 Ottawa Valley, 2:1863 Outline of English Phonetics ( Jones), 1:945 Outlines of the History of the English Language (Toller), 2:1334 Owen, John, 1:829, 1:831, 1:839 Owen-Crocker, Gale R., 1:323 Owl and the Nightingale, 1:21, 1:122, 1:407, 1:558 Owun, 1:343, 1:348 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 1:1059 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE), 2:1158 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 1:647 Oxford English Corpus, 1:1013 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – American English in, 1:82 – “British English” and, 2:1880, 2:1885, 2:1894 – Burchfield’s Supplement, 1:1057–1058 – categorization of entries, 1:83, 1:136 – choice of sources, 1:641, 1:647, 1:798, 1:799, 1:1004, 2:1661–1662, 2:1669 – Chronological English Dictionary and, 1:641 – chronological skewing, 1:610 – Cotgrave’s dictionary and, 1:1052 – criticisms of, 1:1058 – current revision, 2:1153–1155 – DARE and, 2:1849 – dating of citations, 1:641–642, 2:1133, 2:1150, 2:1154 – derivations vs. loans in, 1:615 – descriptive focus, 1:972 – DOE and, 1:314 – DOST and, 2:1152
2227 – – – –
– – – – – –
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
EEBO-TCP index and, 1:640 18th-century vocabulary in, 2:1154 in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 entries – accent, 2:1901 – B.B.C. English, 2:1906 – decimate, 1:988–989 – kibosh, 1:179 – landscape, 1:648 – orthography and spelling, 1:226 – prescriptivist and prescriptivism, 1:973–974 – standard, 1:939 etymologies, 1:611 his genitives in, 1:605 Irish loans, 2:1965 MED and, 2:1154 occupational terms and, 1:220 online version – in corpus linguistics, 2:1515 – functionality, 2:1309 – HTE and, 2:1137 – number of lemmas, 1:642 – ODNB and, 1:647 – progress, 2:1132–1133 – replacing print version, 1:1016, 2:1187 – search functions, 1:641, 1:646, 2:1133, 2:1135, 2:1194 – in teaching history of English, 2:1173, 2:1194, 2:1197 – treatment of etymology, 2:1158 as originator of other period dictionaries, 2:1149 publication, 1:639, 1:895, 1:943, 1:1013 semasiological study and, 1:451 spurious words in, 1:1054 in studies of Chaucer’s vocabulary, 1:582– 583 in studies of French loans, 2:1678, 2:1679, 2:1683 in studies of historical phraseology, 1:184, 1:187, 1:189 in studies of Latin loans, 2:1704 in studies of lexical borrowing, 1:125 in studies of lexical innovation, 1:73, 1:74, 1:610–611, 1:889, 1:890, 1:955–956 in studies of Low German and Dutch loans, 2:1661–1662, 2:1666 in studies of Middle English, 1:46, 1:88 in studies of Norse loans, 2:1733 in studies of toponyms, 1:217 treatment of Old English, 1:314–315, 2:1149
2228 – treatment of polysemy, 1:454 – Webster’s Third and, 2:1319 Oxford Gazette, 1:1065 Oxford-Prague Medieval Workshop, 2:1378 Oxfordshire, 1:672 Oxford Text Archive (OTA), 2:1132, 2:1138, 2:1139. 1140 Oxford University, 1:546, 1:989, 1:1011 Oxford University Press, 1:943, 1:973, 1:1013, 1:1015, 1:1016, 2:1239
P Pace, Richard, 2:1222 Padolsky, Enoch, 2:1863 Page, Raymond I., 2:1124, 2:1125 Pahta, Pa¨ivi, 1:207, 1:241, 1:471, 1:474, 1:475, 2:1448 Paikeday, Thomas M., 2:2108 Pajares Tosca, Susan, 2:1192 Pakistan, 2:1862, 2:1886, 2:1889, 2:2015, 2:2107, 2:2114 Pakkala-Weckstro¨m, Mari, 1:472, 1:542 Palace of Profitable Pleasure (Evans), 1:642 Palacky´ University, Olomouc, 2:1379 palaeography, 2:1122, 2:1141, 2:1181, 2:1298 Palander-Collin, Minna, 2:1365, 2:1450 Palsgrave, John, 1:640, 1:642, 2:1195 Panama, 2:2121 Pandeli, Helen, 2:1971 Pantaleo, Nicola, 2:1400 Papahagi, Adrian, 2:1385 Papia´ Kristang, 2:1775 Papua New Guinea, 2:1768, 2:1770, 2:1775, 2:1777, 2:2114, 2:2126 Paradise Lost (Milton), 1:793 Paris and Vienne, 1:561 Paris Psalter, 1:347, 1:1040 Parker, Matthew, 2:1291, 2:1298 Parkvall, Mikael, 1:694 Park Young-Bae, 2:1417 Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), 1:530 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer), 1:568, 1:569 Parliament of the Three Ages, 1:564 Parry, David, 2:1691, 2:1984 Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 1:622, 2:1517 Parsons, Gudrun, 2:1916 Partridge, Astley Cooper, 1:810
Index Partridge, Eric, 2:1157 passive voice – analytic, 1:294 – auxiliary verbs in, 1:303, 1:625–626, 1:854 – get construction, 1:79, 1:871–873 – idioms and fixed expressions and, 1:180 – impersonal, 1:154, 1:307 – indirect, 1:155 – “long”, 1:468 – passival and mediopassive constructions, 1:84–85, 1:628, 1:871 – progressive, 1:70, 1:88, 1:628, 1:870–871, 1:978, 2:1450 – style and, 1:243, 1:244, 1:906 – subjunctive, 1:854 – synthetic, 1:15, 1:307 – to-infinitive construction, 1:468–469 – with transfer verbs, 1:91 – word order and, 2:1486–1487 Paston family – John, III, 1:539–540 – Katherine, 2:1668 – Margaret, 1:540, 1:630, 2:1447 – social network approach to, 2:1449 Paston Letters – artes dictaminis and, 1:522 – auxiliary verbs, 1:469 – for NP to-infinitive construction, 1:630 – linguistic change in an individual and, 1:539– 541 – pronoun choice in, 1:473, 1:548 – spelling in, 1:420 – word order, 1:468 Patagonia, 2:1982 Patience, 1:564 Patrick, Peter L., 2:2130 patronymics, 1:219 Patterson, Arthur J., 2:1380 Patterson, David, 2:1972 Patterson, Lee, 2:1212 Paul, Hermann, 2:1305, 2:1306, 2:1331, 2:1531, 2:1532, 2:1599 Paulasto, Heli, 2:1688 Paunteley, John, 2:1429–1430, 2:1430–1431 Pawley, Andrew, 2:1277 Peacham, Henry (1546–1634), 1:798, 1:804 Peacham, Henry (the Younger), 2:1226 Pearl, 1:564, 1:565–566 Pearsall, Derek, 1:556 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 1:547 Pecock, Reginald, 2:1334
Index Pedersen, Holger, 2:1696 Pederson, Lee, 2:1795, 2:1843 Peeters, Christian, 2:1345 Peikola, Matti, 1:206, 2:1366 Peking University, 2:1418 Pelteret, David A. E., 2:1126 Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of, 1:797 Pembrokeshire, 2:1978, 2:1979, 2:1984 Pendle witches trials, 1:660 Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 2:2137 Penhallurick, Robert, 2:1984, 2:1985 Pennanen, Esko V., 2:1678 Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), 1:622, 1:754, 2:1140, 2:1517 Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 1:754 Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edn. (PPCME2), 2:1140, 2:1517, 2:1695–1696 Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), 1:754–755, 2:1140 Pennsylvania, 2:1819, 2:1842, 2:1853 Pennsylvania State University, 2:1387 Penny Magazine, 1:1066 Penzl, Herbert, 1:232 Pepys, Samuel, 1:90, 1:625, 1:626, 1:628, 2:1450 Pequots, 2:1756 Percy, Thomas, 2:1299 Perdue, Charles L., 2:1804 Pe´rez-Guerra, Javier, 2:1404, 2:1480 Pe´rez-Lorido, Rodrigo, 2:1404 perfect aspect/tense – in cognitive linguistics, 1:167 – in Early Modern English, 1:609, 1:624–626 – in Germanic, 1:140, 1:303 – infinitive, 1:306, 1:852, 1:877, 1:880 – in Late Modern English, 1:852, 1:876–877, 1:880 – in Middle English, 1:474 – in Old English, 1:303–304 – Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European stems, 1:16, 1:139 – referring to past events, 1:89–90 performance phenomena, 1:201 performative formulae, 1:330, 1:331–332 Peri, Jacopo, 2:1224 Pericles (Shakespeare), 1:735
2229 periodization schemes, 2:1233–1254, 2:1261– 1263 Perry, William, 1:1011, 1:1012 Perseus Project, 1:810 Persian, 1:514, 2:1301 Person, Gobelinus, 2:1222 Person, William, 1:693 Perthshire, 1:673 Pervaz, Draginja, 2:1386 Peterborough, 2:1491, 2:2054 Peterborough, ON, 2:1863 Peters, Hans, 1:171 Peters, Pam, 1:82, 1:88, 2:1891, 2:2001, 2:2004 Peters, Robert A., 1:432 Pettie, G., 1:734 Pettman, Charles, 1:1059 Peyton, V. J., 1:987 Philadelphia, 2:1555, 2:1819, 2:1834, 2:2034, 2:2096 Philip (the Good), Duke of Burgundy, 1:562 Philippine English, 2:1140, 2:1887, 2:2111 Philippines, 2:1886, 2:2114, 2:2136 Philips, Lisa, 2:1758 Philipson, Robert, 2:2137 Phillips, Betty S. – on raising of /a/ before nasals, 2:1550 – on spellings in the Ormulum, 2:1551, 2:1552 – teaching strategies, 2:1169, 2:1170, 2:1173 – work on frequency, 2:1316, 2:1533, 2:1534, 2:1548 – work on lexical diffusion, 2:1547 – work on the Great Vowel Shift, 2:1554 Phillips, Edward, 1:646, 1:648, 1:1008, 1:1054, 1:1056, 2:1883 Phillips, John B., 1:1045 Philological Society, 1:63, 1:375, 1:897, 1:919, 1:943, 1:1012, 1:1013, 2:1303–1304 philology – computational, 2:1310 – in Germany, 2:1305, 2:1327 – historical linguistics and, 2:1289, 2:1463– 1465 – historical pragmatics and, 2:1467 – literary studies and, 2:1201 – music and, 2:1229 – nationalism and, 2:1782 – Sir William Jones and, 2:1302 – synchronic linguistics and, 2:1314–1315 – vs. linguistics, 2:1165–1166, 2:1320, 2:1334 Philosophical Transactions, 1:207, 1:245, 1:904–905, 1:906
2230 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2:1145 Philosophy of Rhetoric (Campbell), 1:185 Phoenix, 1:390 phoneme theory, 1:97–99 phonogenesis, 2:1585–1586 phonological changes – a-umlaut, 1:5, 1:268, 1:351, 1:387 – actuation and, 2:1495–1497 – alveolar palatalization, 1:103–105, 1:108, 1:261–262, 1:364, 1:367, 1:512, 1:836 – Anglian smoothing, 1:10, 1:352, 1:387 – Anglo-Frisian (or Second) fronting, 1:351, 1:367 – Anglo-Frisian brightening, 1:8, 1:9 – BATH/TRAP split, 1:829–830, 2:1744, 2:1748 – breaking, 1:9–10, 1:259, 1:261, 1:350, 1:351– 352 – Canadian Raising, 2:1868, 2:1919, 2:2051– 2052 – Canadian Shift, 2:1869, 2:2099 – child language acquisition and, 2:1599–1600, 2:1601–1603 – Closed Syllable Shortening, 1:270 – cluster reduction, 1:593–594, 2:1245 – consonant gemination, 1:6, 1:7, 1:16, 1:102, 1:104, 1:262 – consonant reduction, 1:408, 1:413 – corpus linguistics and, 2:1521 – COT/CAUGHT, LOT/THOUGHT merger, 2:1744, 2:1748, 2:1853–1854, 2:1869 – degemination of consonants, 1:6, 1:106, 1:133, 1:142, 1:270, 1:484 – Diphthong Shift, 2:2052, 2:2053 – Dublin Vowel Shift, 2:1554 – epenthesis, 1:104, 1:108, 1:275, 1:281 – FOOT/STRUT split – in Cockney English, 2:2018–2019 – dating and evidence, 1:72, 1:832 – in the Fens, 2:1919 – in Irish English, 2:1972 – in pronouncing dictionaries, 1:72, 2:1904 – in Southern American dialects, 2:2050 – South vs. North and, 2:1932–1933 – frequency and, 2:1532–1533, 2:1534, 2:1553 – fronting of FOOT vowel, 1:81 – Glide Weakening, 2:2052 – Great Vowel Shift, 1:756–776 – Canadian Raising and, 2:1868, 2:2051 – changes following, 1:601 – date and duration, 1:34, 1:60, 1:595, 1:596
Index – diphthongization and, 1:72 – in Early Modern English, 2:1236 – frequency of word form combinations and, 1:192 – as last major phonological shift, 1:64 – in late Middle English, 1:484 – lengthening before /ld/ and, 1:105 – lexical diffusion and, 2:1554–1555 – Middle English diphthongs and, 1:597 – palatal [c¸] and, 1:106 – in periodization schemes, 2:1245, 2:1247, 2:1252 – postvocalic /r/ and, 1:593, 1:599–600 – regional variation and, 2:1932, 2:1935 – supervowel [i] and, 2:1186 – Grimm’s Law, 1:3–4, 1:100–102, 2:1169, 2:1170, 2:1303, 2:1308 – /h/-dropping, 1:71, 1:837, 1:957 – High Rising Terminal (HRT), 1:81, 2:2000 – High Vowel Deletion (Sievers’ Law), 1:142 – Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, 1:258, 1:270, 2:1553–1554 – i-umlaut – in Germanic, 1:16 – in Old English, 1:268, 1:269, 1:276, 1:289, 1:291, 1:351, 1:352 – in poetic koine, 1:386 – in Pre-Old English, 1:10, 1:14 – in Proto-Germanic, 1:5, 1:282 – velar palatalization and, 1:105 – labialization of [x], 1:106 – late West Saxon smoothing, 1:352 – lexical diffusion and, 2:1546 – loss of /h/ before sonorants, 2:1546–1547, 2:1548–1549 – loss of rhoticity, 1:71, 1:593 – L-vocalization, 1:81, 2:1909, 2:1920, 2:2036 – MAT/MET merger, 1:830–831 – metathesis, 1:104 – nasal loss and compensatory lengthening, 1:7 – Neogrammarians on, 2:1306 – Northern Cities Shift, 1:81, 2:1554–1555, 2:1854, 2:1869, 2:2050–2051 – Northern Fronting, 1:484, 1:492 – Open Syllable Lengthening, 1:258, 1:270, 1:410–411, 1:484, 1:769 – palatal diphthongization, 1:351 – in periodization schemes, 2:1243, 2:1245, 2:1247 – Pre-Cluster Shortening, 1:133, 1:411 – prosody and, 1:115
Index – prosthesis, 1:104–105 – reduction of unstressed syllables, 1:10–11, 1:13, 1:30, 1:405–407, 1:415, 1:591– 592 – restoration of a, 1:8–9, 1:10, 1:268 – retraction, 1:8, 1:9, 1:10, 1:350, 1:386 – [r]-intrusion, 1:99, 1:839–840, 1:958 – schwa deletion, 1:142–143, 1:406–407, 1:410, 1:484, 1:605, 2:1532–1533 – Scottish Vowel Length rule, 2:1933–1934, 2:1935 – simplification, 1:104, 1:107–108 – Southern Shift, 2:1854 – Southern voicing, 1:43 – stigmatization of variants and, 1:71–72 – supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT) normalization, 2:1186 – syncope, 1:275, 1:352, 1:608 – in teaching history of English, 2:1170–1171, 2:1196 – t-glottalization, 1:81 – Trisyllabic Shortening, 1:411, 1:484 – unrounding of /o¨(:)/, 2:1552–1553 – velar palatalization, 1:6–7, 1:105–106, 1:261– 262 – Verner’s Law, 1:4, 1:7–8, 1:13, 1:14, 1:15, 2:1169, 2:1308 – voiced vs. voiceless fricatives, 1:34, 1:106– 107, 1:410 – West Germanic Consonant Lengthening, 1:141 – see also phonology of individual periods Phraseologie der englischen Sprache (Gla¨ser), 1:183 Phraseologie/Phraseology, 1:182 Picard, Jean-Michel, 2:1963 Pickett, Joseph, 1:977 Pictish, 1:894 Picts, 1:363, 1:368, 2:1952 pidgins, 2:1767–1780 – in Africa, 2:2093, 2:2094–2095 – defined, 2:1769 – in Glossary of Colonial English, 1:898 – grammaticalization and, 2:1569–1570 – in the history of English, 1:156 – in Middle English creolization hypothesis, 2:1783 – in post-Contact North America, 2:1758 – process of formation, 1:506, 1:689 – unintelligibility to speakers of lexifier language, 1:695
2231 Pierpont Morgan Library, 1:35 Pierrehumbert, Janet, 2:1549 Piers Plowman – in the Alliterative Revival, 1:121, 1:564 – Athlone edition, 1:36 – digitized version, 2:1142 – manuscripts, 1:524, 1:537 – Norse vocabulary in, 2:1734 – “social awareness” of, 1:547 – use of dremen, 1:456 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 2:1883 Pinker, Steven, 1:967 Pinkhurst, Adam, 1:537 Pinsker, Hans Ernst, 2:1336 Pintzuk, Susan, 1:158, 2:1140, 2:1484–1485, 2:1620 Pitcairn Islands, 2:2126 Pitkern, 2:2126 Pitman, Isaac, 1:1014 Plag, Ingo, 2:1570 Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, 2:1983, 2:1991 A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (Morley), 2:1226 Plains Sign Language, 2:1755 Plank, Frans, 1:111 Plassey, Battle of, 2:2078 Plato, 1:645, 1:968, 2:1216, 2:1218, 2:1221, 2:1222 Platt, John, 2:2110, 2:2113 Plea for the Queen’s English (Alford), 1:1012 Plotkin, Vulf Y., 2:1383 Plumpton Letters, 1:473, 1:632 Plymouth Colony, 2:1759 Poema Morale, 1:416 Poetaster ( Jonson), 1:749 Poetry 1900–2000 (Stephens), 2:1989 Poetry Wales ( journal), 2:1988 Pogatscher, Alois, 2:1326, 2:1705 Pohl, Muna, 1:109 Pokorny, Julius, 2:1158, 2:1196, 2:1377 Poland, 2:1376–1377, 2:1980 Poldauf, Ivan, 1:863 Policraticus sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum ( John of Salisbury), 2:1217 Polish, 1:984, 2:2141, 2:2143 Politeia (Plato), 2:1221 Political Discourses (Hume), 1:892 Political Register, 1:1011 “Politics and the English language” (Orwell), 1:989 Pollock, Jean-Yves, 2:1620
2232 Polychronicon (Higden), 1:43, 1:560, 1:562, 1:982, 1:989, 2:1263–1265 Polynesian languages, 1:174 polysemy, 1:165, 1:170, 1:319–320, 1:320–321, 1:322, 1:453, 1:700 Pons, Emile, 2:1398 Pons-Sanz, Sara M., 2:1403 Poole, Jacob, 2:1966 Pooley, Robert C., 1:973 Pope, Alexander, 1:1009 Poplack, Shana – on evidence for early African American English, 2:1794, 2:1802 – impact on field, 2:1870–1871, 2:1987 – Quebec English Corpus, 2:1866 – refutation of creole hypothesis, 2:1833–1834 – on social evaluation of variation, 1:960 – work on grammaticalization of be going to, 2:1568 – work on Nova Scotian African American English, 2:1869, 2:2095 – work on quotative constructions, 1:1081 – on the zero copula, 2:1832–1833 Popovic´, Vladeta, 2:1386 Poppe, Erich, 1:687, 2:1688, 2:1693, 2:1700 Popular Errors in English Grammar, particularly in Pronunciation ( Jackson), 1:840 Port Elizabeth, 2:2098 Porter, Joseph A., 1:819 Porter, Roy, 1:66 Port Talbot, 2:1985 Portugal, 2:2137 Portuguese – in Africa, 2:2092, 2:2093 – in creoles, 2:1773, 2:1775 – defense of, 1:984 – historical corpora of, 2:1140 – in India, 2:2078 – loans to English, 2:1159 – pronunciation of English by speakers of, 2:2143 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – in studies of media influence, 1:1083 – use by rebelling slaves, 1:694 – in westlich-atlantischer Sprachbund, 2:1697 – Yanito and, 2:1748 Poruciuc, Adrian, 2:1385 Positions (Mulcaster), 1:54 Postal, Paul, 2:1316 Post Boy, 1:1065
Index postcolonial theory, 2:1205–1206 Post Man, 1:1065 poststructuralism, 2:1211 “Postvocalic /-r/ in South Carolina” (McDavid), 2:1847 Potash and Perlmutter (Glass), 2:1818 Pott, August Friedrich, 2:1331 Pound, Louise, 1:432, 2:1329 Poussa, Patricia, 2:1267, 2:1442–1443, 2:1687 Poutsma, Hendrik, 1:63, 2:1290, 2:1342 Powell, George, 1:871 Power, Henry, 1:709 Powhatan, 2:1760 Practica Musicae (Gaffurio), 2:1223 Praetorius, Michael, 2:1225 pragmaticalization, 2:1460, 2:1566 pragmatics, 1:197–212, 2:1457–1470 – address terms, 1:203–204, 1:328, 1:656, 1:657, 1:911 – see also second person pronouns – corpus linguistics and, 2:1520 – definitions and boundaries, 1:325, 1:541, 1:904, 2:1458, 2:1469–1470 – directives, 1:202, 1:327–328, 1:331, 1:332–333, 1:653, 1:654, 1:655 – focus on social contacts, 2:1310 – general vs. historical, 2:1461, 2:1464, 2:1466– 1467 – goals, 2:1469 – Gricean, 1:165, 1:331, 1:392, 1:471, 1:472, 1:663 – implication, 2:1462 – inference, 2:1462, 2:1464 – information structure, 2:1475 – insults, 1:329, 2:1462, 2:1463 – neo-Gricean, 1:168, 1:903 – politeness theory, 1:327–328, 1:392, 1:656– 659, 1:663, 1:820, 1:903, 2:1198 – semantic change and, 1:455 – sociolinguistics and, 2:1469 – speech act theory, 1:197, 1:199, 1:325, 1:655– 656, 1:663, 2:1365 – state of the field, 2:1458–1459 – study of phraseology and, 1:183 – in teaching history of English, 2:1197–1198 Pragmatics (Levinson), 2:1466 Prague Linguistic Circle, 2:1335, 2:1377–1378 Prairie View State College, 2:1797 Pratt, Lynda, 2:1450 Pratt, Terrence K., 2:1872 pre-Celtic peoples, 1:213
Index Pred, Allan R., 2:2038 Pre-Old English – linguistic ancestry, 1:1–2 – morphology, 1:11–17, 1:140, 1:141, 1:143 – phonology, 1:3–11, 1:142, 1:268, 1:269, 1:270, 1:346 – syntax, 1:17 – vs. Old English, 1:20 prescriptive linguistics, 1:967–980 – complaint tradition and, 1:980–994, 2:1890 – on double comparison, 1:943, 1:960, 2:2048 – education and, 1:910–911 – elocution movement and, 1:71, 1:827–842 – grammarians and, 1:75–76 – on human which, 1:882 – the Internet and, 1:1110, 1:1112 – Late Modern period as the age of, 1:64, 1:75, 1:945, 2:1446–1447 – linguistic insecurity and, 1:68 – on multiple negation, 1:75, 1:931, 1:943, 1:960, 2:2048 – on non-discriminatory language, 1:977–978, 2:1520 – phraseological units and, 1:189 – on possessive vs. objective NPs before gerunds, 1:858, 1:880 – on preposition stranding, 1:943, 1:947 – on the progressive passive, 1:871 – on punctuation, 1:967, 2:1889–1890 – racial/ethnic biases and, 1:1022–1023 – regional varieties and, 1:669–670 – revival of the subjunctive and, 1:879, 1:944, 1:947–948, 1:960 – on semantic change, 1:988–989 – on shall vs. will, 1:943 – on style, 1:902–903 – in the United Kingdom, 2:1889–1890, 2:1907 – in the United States, 2:1821–1822 Present Day English – as an analytic language, 1:30, 1:41 – “colloquialization” in, 1:79 – development of, 2:1446 – dialects – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:758–759, 1:768 – Midland, 1:831 – Northern, 1:1080 – “north-south” divide, 1:72 – Southern, 1:1081, 1:1091 – South-Western English, 1:43 – future directions, 2:1246 – historical corpus evidence and, 2:1520
2233 – lexicon, 1:83, 1:173, 1:240, 1:371, 1:513, 1:615 – Mercian dialect and, 1:26 – morphology – collective nouns, 1:859–860 – modal verbs, 2:1640–1641 – overview, 1:82–83 – pronouns, 1:45, 1:734 – regular vs. irregular inflections, 1:132–133, 1:142 – suffixes -ee and -ize, 1:614, 1:618 – typological ancestry, 1:129–130, 1:132 – verbs, 1:134, 1:139, 1:152, 1:855, 2:1535 – new regional standards in, 1:1059–1060 – online resources, 2:1138, 2:1140 – orthography, 1:38, 1:39, 1:228, 1:231–232, 1:578 – phonology – across “inner circle” varieties, 1:81–82, 2:1931 – alternation of /hj/ and /j/, 2:1546–1547 – of “media Cockney”, 1:1082 – palatal glides, 1:108 – residual effects of i-umlaut, 1:269 – schwa deletion, 2:1533 – in studying Great Vowel Shift, 1:761, 1:770 – pragmatics and discourse – analogues to flyting, 1:329 – compared with Old English, 1:330 – directives, 1:332 – media influence, 1:1081 – please, 1:911 – quotative like, 1:93 – in terms of, 2:1565–1568 – ‘t form of it, 1:734 – prosody, 1:81, 1:114, 1:115, 1:118, 1:119, 1:120, 1:127 – Standard English and, 1:699 – syntax – argument structure of transfer verbs, 1:91–92 – auxiliaries, 2:1537–1538, 2:1540 – causative have, 1:159 – complementation, 1:851 – conjunctions and sentence adverbs, 1:92–93 – direct object NP + complement clauses, 1:87–88 – impersonal constructions, 1:154, 1:624 – indirect questions, 1:85–86 – is/are to construction, 2:1634–1635
2234 – Latinate prefixes with Germanic particles, 1:90 – left dislocation in, 1:86–87, 2:1278, 2:1477, 2:1479 – Lexical Functional Grammar and, 2:1653, 2:1654 – middle construction, 1:84–85 – multiple negation, 1:631 – “passival” constructions in, 1:628 – subject positions, 2:1622 – tense and aspect, 1:88–90 – with verb like, 2:1651 – word order, 1:633, 2:1476, 2:1483, 2:1487 – zero relative, 1:779 – see also global English; Standard English Press Association, 1:1066 Prestatyn, 2:1984 Preston, Dennis R., 1:1029, 1:1033 preterit-present verbs, 1:16–17, 1:134, 1:152, 1:292, 1:429–430 Preusler, Walther, 2:1691, 2:1692 Price, Angharad, 2:1989 Price, Jennifer, 1:1099 Priestley, Joseph, 1:185, 1:945, 1:946, 1:947, 1:948, 1:970, 1:1055 Prince, Alan S., 1:102, 2:1654 Prince, Ellen F., 2:1475 Prince Edward Island, 2:1859 Princeton University Library, 1:35 Principia (Newton), 1:66 Principle of the Shortest Path (PSP), 2:1503, 2:1505 Principles of English Etymology (Skeat), 2:1334 Principles of Music (Butler), 2:1227 Principles of Pronunciation (Smart), 1:833 Pringle, Ian, 2:1863, 2:1864 Prins, Anton A., 1:184, 1:190, 2:1343, 2:1681 printing – consolidation of state bureaucracy and, 1:983 – dissemination of news and, 1:207 – as end point of Middle English, 1:33, 2:1252, 2:1675 – influence on Early Modern English, 1:49, 1:638, 1:640 – lexical loans after introduction of, 2:1710 – literacy and, 1:50 – proliferation of textual types and, 1:55 – standardization and, 1:56, 1:107, 1:638, 1:674, 2:1881
Index – in starting point for Late Modern period, 1:916 Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Paul), 2:1305 Priscian, 1:38 Proble`mes de grammaire historique (Cre´pin), 2:1398 Proclamation of Henry III (1258), 2:2047 Prodromou, Luke, 2:2141 Proe¨mial Essay (Boyle), 1:709–710 Professor and the Madman (Winchester), 1:972 Prognostics, 1:297 progressive aspect – in Celtic Englishes, 2:1688–1691 – child acquisition of, 2:1186 – in creoles, 2:2129 – in Early Modern English, 1:60, 1:69, 1:609, 1:626–628 – genre and, 1:961 – with get-passive, 1:872 – language contact and, 1:517, 1:687–688 – in Late Modern English, 1:69–70, 1:873–876, 1:880, 1:909 – middle construction and, 1:84 – in Middle English, 1:88, 1:444, 1:609 – in Old English, 1:304, 1:609 – passive, 1:70, 1:870–871, 1:978 – in Present Day English, 1:88–90 – rise in English, 2:1691–1694 – typological change and, 1:622 Project Gutenberg (website), 2:1144, 2:1515 Prokosch, Eduard, 1:2, 2:1317 Promptorium Parvulorum, 1:640, 1:1007, 1:1051 Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary ( Johnston), 1:830, 1:1056 Pronunciation of English ( Jones), 2:1907 Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Kurath and McDavid), 2:1843, 2:1846 Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (Swift), 1:800, 1:939, 1:941, 1:985, 1:1009, 1:1024 Les propositions relatives en vieil-anglais (Bourcier), 2:1398 ProQuest, 1:639–640, 1:1064 prosody, 1:113–127 – in American vs. British English, 1:126, 1:591 – in Anglo-Norman, 1:123, 1:124 – in Early Modern English, 1:125–126, 1:127, 1:590–591 – in Indo-European, 1:3–4, 1:13, 1:264
Index – in Latin, 1:124, 1:164 – in Middle English, 1:115, 1:118, 1:121–125, 1:129, 1:399–405, 1:409, 1:515 – in Old English, 1:30, 1:115–121, 1:127, 1:262–263, 1:387–388 – in Present Day English, 1:81, 1:114, 1:115, 1:118, 1:119, 1:120, 1:127 Protestantism, 1:983, 1:984, 2:1979, 2:2137 Protestants, 1:52, 1:1043 Proto-Celtic, 1:101–102 Proto-Germanic (PGrmc.) – athematic nouns, 1:279 – comparative and superlative suffixes, 1:282 – dental stem nouns, 1:280 – Grimm’s Law, 1:101–102 – ja-stem nouns, 1:275 – phonology, 1:3–11, 1:12 – postpositions, 1:301 – relative pronoun, 1:15 – stress distribution, 1:129, 1:269 – strong verbs, 1:290 – as a syllable-based quantity language, 1:264 Proto-Indo-European, 1:30, 1:273, 1:277, 1:283, 1:286, 2:1184, 2:1185, 2:1196 Provenc¸al, 2:1181 proverbs, see idioms and fixed expressions Proverbs of Alfred, 1:121, 1:553, 1:558 Provincial Glossary (Grose), 1:1057 Przedlacka, Joanna, 2:1916, 2:1918, 2:1920, 2:1921, 2:1923–1924 Psalmes of David and others, with J. Calvin’s commentaries (Golding), 1:752 psycholinguistics, 1:183, 2:1547, 2:2140 Public Advertiser, 1:1066 Publications of the American Dialect Society, 2:1316, 2:1844, 2:1848, 2:1849 Puerto Rico, 2:1820, 2:2114 Pulcini, Virginia, 2:1740 Pulgram, Ernst, 1:231, 2:1248 Pullum, Geoffrey K., 1:132 punctuation – American vs. British, 2:1892 – apostrophe, 1:417, 1:604 – medieval, 1:436–437, 1:439, 1:440, 1:442–443, 1:445, 1:447 – as part of writing system, 1:231 – prescriptivism on, 1:967, 2:1889–1890 Puritans, 1:53, 1:57, 1:206, 1:218, 1:1043, 1:1044, 1:1045, 2:1756 Pu¨schel, Ulrich, 1:1079 Pustejovsky, J., 1:165
2235 Puttenham, George, 1:590, 1:791, 1:801, 1:989, 1:991, 1:1051, 2:1713 Pwllheli, 2:1983 Pygmalion (Shaw), 1:111 Pyles, Thomas, 1:257, 2:1319, 2:1760 Pythagoras, 2:1216
Q Quakers, 1:57, 1:69, 2:1810 Quebec, 1:1081, 2:1671, 2:1676, 2:1862 Quebec English Corpus, 2:1866 Quechua, 2:1768 Queen Anna’s New World of Words (Florio), 1:1052 Queensland Plantation Pidgin, 2:1768 Querolus (Vitalis de Blois), 1:536 Quintilian, 1:225, 2:1221–1222 Quirk, Randolph – collaboration with Sherman Kuhn, 2:1315 – on comparatives, 1:863 – descriptive linguistics and, 1:1014 – on ESL teaching, 2:2107–2108 – on indirect questions, 1:85 – on left dislocation in NP-clauses, 1:86 – on lexicalization, 2:1585 – on Shakespeare’s language, 1:810–811, 1:813, 1:817 – on Standard English, 1:700 – on status of plus, 1:92 quotative constructions, 1:93, 1:1081, 1:1095, 2:2026
R Radboud University Nijmegen, 1:449 Rae, John, 1:1025 Raja Rao, 2:2088 Raleigh, Walter, 1:691 Rama Cay, 2:2121 Ramat, Paolo, 2:1585, 2:1587, 2:1589 Ramisch, Heinrich, 2:1743 Rammohun Roy, Raja, 2:2080 Rampton, Ben, 1:1096 Ramsaran, Susan, 2:1900 Ramsey, 1:343 Ramson, William Stanley, 2:2000 Rankova, Maria, 2:1388 Raphael, Lawrence J., 2:1553
2236 Rask, Rasmus, 1:1012, 2:1183, 2:1302, 2:1303, 2:1313 Rastell, John, 1:647, 1:1051 Rastorgueva, Tatiana A., 2:1382 Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena – on choice of address forms, 1:658 – on his vs. its, 1:705 – on Labovian vs. Milroyian views of networks, 2:2034–2035 – on linguistic change in Early Modern period, 1:65 – on models of diffusion, 2:2035, 2:2036 – outline of reciprocal pronouns, 1:732 – outline of social change in Britain, 1:547 – textbook on historical sociolinguistics, 2:1367 – on -th/-s variation, 1:703 – work on Cely Letters, 2:1449–1450 – work on Early Modern English syntax, 2:1363 – work on gender and language change, 2:1447, 2:1448 – work on linguistic change in individuals, 1:691 – work on multiple negation, 1:75 – on you vs. ye, 1:726, 1:737 Rauschenbach, Boris, 2:1383 Rauschenbach, Viktor E., 2:1383 Ravillac Redivivus, 1:894 Rawick, George P., 2:1797, 2:1798 Ray, John, 1:185, 1:646, 1:1009, 1:1057 Raymond, Joad, 1:207 Read, Allen Walker, 2:1760 Readex Collection, 1:1064 Reading, 2:1919 Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (Hoops), 2:1328 reanalysis, 1:156–160, 2:1543, 2:1571–1572, 2:1639, 2:1651 Reay, Barry, 1:955 Received Pronunciation, 2:1899–1911 – American Network English vs., 1:1097 – in Australia, 2:1885, 2:1999 – BBC and, 1:1090, 1:1092 – beginnings of, 1:60, 1:71 – coining of term, 1:944 – “de-focusing” of, 1:1093 – Estuary English and, 2:1914, 2:1916, 2:1920, 2:1922 – features, 2:1904, 2:1907, 2:1909 – Hollywood influence and, 2:2100
Index – minority status, 2:1181, 2:1888, 2:1902, 2:1908 – non-rhotic nature, 1:958 – pronunciation of TRAP, 2:1934 – public schools and, 1:68, 2:1906 – as reference point for Great Vowel Shift, 1:758 – regional accents vs., 2:1888 – selection and codification, 1:1003, 2:1820 – South African English and, 2:2099, 2:2115 – as Southern variety, 2:1929 – supra-localization of, 1:959 – vowels in, 1:72, 1:81, 1:596, 1:770, 1:832, 1:958 – vs. Cockney, 2:2019, 2:2020, 2:2021 – Welsh English and, 2:1984, 2:1985, 2:1986, 2:1990–1991 – [w] over [hw] in white etc., 1:838 Recent Exemplifications of False Philology (Hall), 1:972 reception theory, 1:1077 Reckow, Fritz, 2:1219 Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 1:561 Reddy, Michael J., 1:167, 1:321 Reden an die deutsche Nation (Fichte), 2:1183 Reflections on Dr Swift’s Letter (Oldmixon), 1:987 Reformation – the Bible and, 1:49, 1:1042 – effect on social networks, 1:50, 1:728 – literacy and, 2:1284 – preoccupation with uniformity in, 1:1007 – in Scotland, 2:1956 – study of French and, 2:1675 – use of vernacular and, 1:33, 1:57 register – administrative, 1:242, 1:526, 1:529 – colloquial, 2:2065–2066 – defined, 1:238–239 – dialect and, 1:670 – genre and, 1:475–476 – Internet, 1:1107, 1:1109 – legal, 1:530 – literary, 1:791–792 – onomastic, 1:216 – religious, 1:239, 1:1047 – scientific, 1:240–242, 1:521 – semantic change and, 1:455 – standardization and, 1:241–242 – see also ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers)
Index Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI), 2:2084 Reinhart, Tanya, 2:1477 Reith, John, 1:1090, 1:1100 relativizers, 1:776–790 – in Cockney English, 2:2026 – contact with French and Latin and, 1:517 – in creoles, 2:2129 – in Early Modern English, 1:708, 1:776–790, 2:1511 – in Late Modern English, 1:927–930, 1:931, 1:932 – in Middle English, 1:422, 1:448, 2:1431 – in Old English, 1:15 – pan-British, 2:1938, 2:1940 – in Scots, 1:675–678, 1:715 Renaissance, 1:49, 1:52, 1:60, 1:794, 1:968 Renascence Editions (website), 2:1143 Renaud de Louens, 1:564 Repressor (Pecock), 2:1334 Restless Natives (film), 1:83 Restoration, 1:185, 1:186, 1:245, 1:987, 2:1250, 2:1675, 2:1713 Reszkiewicz, Alfred, 2:1290, 2:1376 Reuter, Ole R., 1:191, 2:1714, 2:1715–1716 Reuters, 1:1066 Revelations of Divine Love ( Julian of Norwich), 1:559 Revelation to the Monk of Evesham, 1:468 Review (Defoe), 1:907 Reykjavik University, 2:1386 Rheingold, Howard, 1:1106 rhetoric, 1:242, 1:569, 1:794–796, 1:904 Rhetorical Grammar (Sheridan), 2:2065, 2:2067 Rhode Island, 2:2050 Rhondda Valley, 2:1985, 2:1986 rhoticity – in American English, 2:1810–1811, 2:1847, 2:1931 – in broadcast English, 1:1091, 1:1097 – distribution in British Isles, 2:1931 – loss of, 1:71, 1:72, 1:593, 1:839–840 – in New Zealand English, 2:1931, 2:2007– 2008 – phonological effects, 1:593, 1:599–601, 1:830, 1:831, 1:833 – in “settler” varieties, 2:1931 – stigmatization of, 1:71, 1:593 – stigmatization of absence of, 1:71, 1:958, 1:1026–1027
2237 Rhyl, 2:1984 Rhys, Keidrych, 2:1988 Ribble River, 1:491 Rice University, 2:1196 Richard II (Shakespeare), 1:819 Richard II, Duke of Normandy, 1:29 Richard III (Shakespeare), 1:624, 1:817 Richardson, Charles, 1:1013 Richardson, Malcolm, 1:246 Richardson, Samuel, 1:69, 1:1055 Richter, Michael, 2:1962, 2:1963 Rickford, John Russell, 2:1836, 2:2124, 2:2125 Rickford, Russell John, 2:1836 Rider, John, 1:638, 1:646, 1:1052 Ridley, Mark, 1:640 Riebeeck, Jan van, 2:2114 Ringe, Don, 1:2 Ringler, Richard N., 2:1316 Rissanen, Matti – on changes from above and below, 2:1276 – on the effects of grammaticalization, 2:1365 – Helsinki Corpus and, 1:716 – list of historical corpora, 2:1132 – on multiple negation, 2:2048 – on the progressive, 1:609 – work on affirmative do, 1:754 – work on Early Modern English syntax, 2:1363, 2:1367 – work on English in trilingual settings, 1:526 – work on Middle English legal language, 1:726, 2:1279 – work on Salem witch trials, 1:206 Ritus Canendi (Gallicus), 2:1228 Riverside Chaucer, 1:585, 2:1468 Riverside Shakespeare, 1:809, 2:1468 Roach, Peter, 2:1900 Roaring Girle (Dekker and Middleton), 1:803 Robb, Graham, 2:1181 Robert I, King of Scots, 2:1955 Robert of Gloucester, 2:1674 Robert of Jumie`ges, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1:29 Roberts, Chris, 1:1081, 1:1082 Roberts, Ian, 1:157, 2:1624, 2:1626–1627, 2:1628 Roberts, Jane, 1:322 Robertson, Agnes J., 2:1122 Robertson, D. W., Jr., 2:1208 Robins, R. H., 1:968 Robinson, Fred C., 2:1124, 2:1316 Robinson, Ralph, 1:605
2238 Rochester, 1:344 ´ lvarez, Alicia, 2:1403 Rodrı´guez-A Rodrı´guez-Gil, Marı´a Esther, 1:946, 2:1403 Rodrı´guez-Ledesma, Nieves, 2:1403 Roedler, Eduard, 1:432 Rogers, John, 1:1043 Roget’s Thesaurus, 1:187 Rohdenburg, Gu¨nter, 1:847–848, 2:1890, 2:1896 Rolle, Richard, 1:42, 1:559, 1:561–562, 1:564 Rollings, Andrew G., 1:232 Rollo, Duke of Normandy, 2:1788 Romaine, Suzanne – in English historical linguistics, 2:1292 – on Native American languages, 2:1754, 2:1755, 2:1757, 2:1760, 2:1761, 2:1762, 2:1763 – seminal work in historical sociolinguistics, 1:65, 1:715, 2:1439 – on the uniformitarian principle, 1:814, 1:821 – work on be/have like to, 1:469 – work on comparison, 1:706, 1:864 romance genre, 2:1203, 2:1207 Romance Stress Rule (RSR), 1:400–401, 1:515, 1:591 Roman de Brut (Wace), 2:1282, 2:1682 Roman Empire, 1:739 Romania, 2:1376, 2:1385 Romantic movement, 1:902–903, 1:987 Romaunt of the Rose (Chaucer), 1:457, 1:568 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 1:644 Ronan, Patricia, 2:1969 Roots of English (downloadable app), 2:1136 Roper, Margaret, 1:53 Roper, William, 1:634 Roscommon, 2:1971 Rose, Michael, 1:67 Rosen, Anna, 2:1743 Rosenau, William, 1:1048 Rosenbach, Anette, 1:622–623 Rosewarne, David, 2:1913–1915, 2:1916, 2:1920, 2:1921 Ross, Alan S. C., 1:190 Ross and Cromarty, 1:673 Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC-1), 1:1064 Rot, Sa´ndor, 2:1380 Rothwell, William, 1:513, 2:1784, 2:1786, 2:1787, 2:1789 Roussev, Roussi, 2:1387 Roussou, Anna, 1:157, 2:1624, 2:1626–1627, 2:1628
Index Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 2:2142 Rowicka, Grazyna J., 2:1765 Rowlands, Samuel, 1:804 Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 2:1301, 2:2079 Royall, Anne, 2:1840 Royal Psalter, 1:379 Royal Society – as discourse community, 1:207, 2:1366 – endorsement of English for scientific writing, 2:1881 – expansion of English lexicon and, 1:643, 1:709 – genre and, 1:904–905 – idea for an English academy and, 1:1009 – linguistic study and, 1:185, 1:646, 1:1009 – one-form-one-meaning principle, 2:1713 – scientific method and, 1:644 – style and, 1:66, 1:244–245, 1:905, 2:1883 Royal Society of Musicians, 2:1614 Rubdy, Rani, 2:2141 Rudanko, Juhani, 1:472, 1:653, 1:663, 1:820, 1:821 Rudiments of English Grammar (Priestley), 1:946, 1:970 Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition (Derolez), 2:1345 Rushdie, Salman, 2:2089 Rushworth Gospels, 1:343, 1:348, 1:382, 1:1040, 2:1124, 2:1546, 2:1548–1549, 2:1550 Russia, 2:1381–1383 Russian, 1:1112, 2:1738, 2:1740, 2:1749, 2:2141, 2:2143 Russian Academy of Sciences, 2:1383 Russom, Geoffrey, 2:1174 Ruszkiewicz, Piotr, 1:229 Ruthwell Cross, 1:348, 2:1125, 2:1280, 2:1952 Rutland, 1:499 Rutskaya, Valentina F., 2:1384 Rwanda, 2:2137, 2:2140 Rybinski, J., 1:984 Ryde´n, Mats, 1:778, 1:780, 1:784, 1:788, 1:877, 2:1363, 2:1366
S Saba, 2:2121 Sag, Ivan, 2:1636
Index Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research, 2:1191 Sahgal, Anju, 2:2090 Sailer, Manfred, 1:187 Saint-Benoıˆt-sur-Loire, 1:27 St. Eustatius, 2:2121 St Helena, 1:694 St Helena English, 2:1271, 2:2052, 2:2053, 2:2093, 2:2098 St Kitts, 1:693–694, see also Caribbean English St. Kitts and Nevis, 2:1771, 2:2121, 2:2123 St. Lucia, 2:1771, 2:2121 St. Margarete, 1:528 St Vincent and the Grenadines, 2:1771, 2:2121 Sairio, Anni, 1:947, 2:1450 Saito, Shizuka, 2:1415, 2:1416 Saladino, Rosa, 1:1083 Salager-Meyer, Francoise, 1:906 Salem Witchcraft Records, 1:206, 1:240, 1:716, 2:1356, 2:1366, 2:1810 Salmon, Joseph C., 1:269 Salmon, Vivian, 1:810, 1:811, 1:816, 1:819, 1:820, 1:1008 Salvador, Mercedes, 2:1402 Samana´ English, 2:1834, 2:2096 Sambrook, Richard, 1:1094 Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte (Braune), 2:1333 Sam ‘n’ Henry (TV program), 1:1096 Samuels, M. L. – coinage of term “Chancery English”, 1:1001 – on Early Modern English texts, 2:1446 – on Flemish influences, 2:1668 – on forms of each, 2:2046–2047, 2:2062 – on Irish English, 2:2046 – on mixed base of Standard English, 2:2048 – outline of development of London English, 1:492 – on “spoken chain” vs. “system”, 1:448 – Types of written standard, 1:521, 1:577–578 Sand, Andrea, 2:2110, 2:2113, 2:2114 Sandved, Arthur O., 1:520–521, 2:1359 Sandwich, 1:688, 1:689 Sanskrit, 1:14, 1:968, 1:1011, 2:1301, 2:1302, 2:1720, 2:2080, 2:2084 Santa Ana, Otto, 2:1744 Sapir, Edward, 1:98, 2:1820–1820 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 2:1179 Saraceni, Mario, 2:2141 Saramaccan, 2:1771, 2:1773, 2:2122, 2:2128 Sarrazin, Gregor, 1:809, 1:814
2239 Saskatchewan, 2:1864 Saudi Arabia, 2:1886 Sauer, Hans, 1:353, 1:430, 2:1338 Saussure, Ferdinand de – bias towards speech, 1:225 – bias towards synchronic linguistics and, 2:1165, 2:1292 – chess analogy, 1:767 – continuing influence, 2:1422 – Cours as foundation of structuralism, 2:1307–1308 – in Germany, 2:1335 – on language change, 2:1427 – langue vs. parole, 1:448 – phoneme theory and, 1:98 – sociolinguistics and, 2:1848 Savage, W. H., 1:830, 1:835, 1:836 Sawles Warde, 1:472 Sawyer, Peter H., 2:1122 Scaliger, Josephus Justus, 2:1299 Scandinavian, see Old Norse Scargill, Matthew H., 2:1317, 2:1863, 2:1864 Schabram, Hans, 1:353–354, 1:359 Schaefer, Ursula, 1:1001, 1:1002 Scha¨fer, Ju¨rgen, 1:243, 1:639, 1:640–641, 1:814 Schama, Simon, 2:1296 Schegloff, Emanuel, 2:1478 Scheibman, Joanne, 2:1541 Scheil, Andrew, 2:1180–1181 Scheler, Manfred, 1:810, 1:812, 1:813–814, 1:816, 2:1715 Schendl, Herbert, 1:475, 1:687, 1:736, 2:1443 Scherre, Maria Marta Pareira, 1:1083 Schick, Joseph, 2:1331 Schiffrin, Deborah, 2:1478 Schilling-Estes, Natalie, 2:1763, 2:1852 Schipper, Jakob, 2:1331 Schlauch, Margaret, 2:1290, 2:1376, 2:1377 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 1:130 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1:100, 1:130, 2:1302 Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte, 1:331–332, 1:653, 1:654, 2:1279, 2:1786 Schlu¨ter, Julia, 1:597, 1:844, 1:845, 2:1890, 2:1896 Schmidt, Alexander, 1:809, 1:814 Schmidt, Johannes, 2:1330 Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten, 2:1607 Schneider, Edgar W. – on interview transcripts, 2:1798–1799 – on literary representation of Jamaican English, 2:1795–1796
2240 – model of New English development – applied to AusE and NZE, 2:2007 – applied to British English, 2:1880–1881, 2:1883, 2:1890 – applied to Indian English, 2:2090 – described, 2:1444–1445, 2:1880–1881, 2:2140 – toponymic loans in, 2:2001 – vs. Trudgill, 2:1866 – on relations between Native Americans and settlers, 2:1764 – on the role of identity, 2:2109 – on sociolinguistics vs. dialectology, 2:1848 – on variation in mother-tongue varieties, 2:1928 – Varieties of English, 1:79 – work on creoles, 2:2123 Schneider, Klaus P., 2:2142 Schneider, Kristina, 1:1067, 1:1072 Schoenbaum, S., 1:810 Scholar’s Lab (website), 2:1139 Schoolmaster (Ascham), 1:54 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 1:897–898 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 2:1228 Schreier, Daniel, 2:1271, 2:2006, 2:2008, 2:2052, 2:2053, 2:2093, 2:2098 Schreuder, Hindrik, 2:1343 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 2:1228 Schuchardt, Hugo Ernst Mario, 2:1531–1532, 2:1546, 2:1553, 2:1773, 2:2078 Schu¨cking, Levin Ludwig, 2:1338 Schulz, Monika, 2:1568 Schu¨mann, Michael, 1:192 Schwenter, Scott A., 1:661 Schwyter, J. R., 1:322 Sciriha, Lydia, 2:1742 Scolar Press, 1:640 Scotland – attachment to local accent in, 2:1888 – border with England, 1:483 – emigration, 1:51, 1:52, 2:1862 – legal system, 1:896 – linguistic ecology, 2:1951–1952 – move to English in, 2:1688, 2:2136 Scots, 2:1951–1959 – accent, 2:1900 – anglicization of, 1:671 – Canadian English and, 2:1869 – closeness to “Saxon”, 1:894–895 – codification, 1:1059
Index – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
– – – – –
– – – – – –
– –
dialectology of, 1:672–683 dictionaries of, 1:639 distinctive features, 2:1944 English attitudes to, 2:1883 French influence on, 2:1955 Gaelic and, 2:1954 Great Vowel Shift and, 1:758–759, 1:768 Irish English and, 2:1962 kailyard movement, 2:1958, 2:1959 lexicography, 2:1152–1153, 2:1155–1156 lexicon, 1:83, 1:896, 2:1954 Low German and Dutch influence on, 2:1955 in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 morphology – demonstrative pronouns, 1:680, 2:1505 – form of verb be, 1:497 – modal verbs, 1:90, 1:94 – personal pronouns, 1:42 – relative pronouns, 1:675–678, 1:715, 1:928 in northern counties of Ireland, 2:1952 Northern English and, 2:1692, 2:1945–1946 in the OED, 2:1154 online resources, 2:1136, 2:1138, 2:1142 phonology – BATH/TRAP split in, 2:1933 – distribution of mony, 1:495 – L-vocalization, 2:1920 – rhoticity, 1:593, 2:1931 – Shug as form of Hugh, 1:45 – THOUGHT/LOT merger, 2:2050 – upgliding diphthongs, 2:1935 – Vowel Length Rule, 2:1933–1934, 2:1935 – vowel quality, 1:828–829, 1:829–830, 1:831 Samuel Johnson and, 1:894, 1:896 “standard”, 1:679, 1:681, 1:1011 standardization, 2:1956 status as dialect or language, 1:669, 2:1956– 1957 stigmatization of, 1:891–893, 1:944, 1:1010– 1011, 1:1057 syntax – do periphrasis and, 1:721, 1:748, 1:754 – indirect questions in, 1:86 – negation, 1:932 – Personal Pronoun Rule, 1:444, 1:679, 1:680, 1:687 – progressive, 2:1682, 2:1692 Ulster, 1:693, 2:1505, 2:1966, 2:2056 Ulster English and, 2:1972
Index – use by Scottish Parliament, 1:84 – use of , 1:497 Scott, John, 1:829 Scott, Robert Falcon, 1:907 Scott, Walter, 1:93, 1:854, 1:872, 2:1300, 2:1883 Scotticisms Corrected, 1:892 Scottish English – decline of Scots vs., 2:1959 – FACE/GOAT monophthongs, 2:1934 – history as distinct variety, 2:1444 – pronunciation of [l], 2:1931 – Standard, 2:1951, 2:2064 – Ulster English and, 2:1972 – upgliding diphthongs in, 2:1935 – see also Scots Scottish Gaelic, 1:687, 2:1691, 2:1951, 2:1952, 2:1954 Scottish National Dictionary (SND), 1:673, 2:1136, 2:1153, 2:1155–1156, 2:1158, 2:1309 Scottish Standard English, 2:1957 Scottish Text Society (STS), 1:36 Scragg, Donald G., 1:232, 1:382, 1:701 Scriftboc, 1:394 Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), 2:1144 Seafarer, 1:153 Seaman, P. David, 2:1723 Searle, John, 1:331, 1:655 Sebba, Mark, 2:2127 Second Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet), 2:1305 Second Life, 1:1114 second person pronouns – avoidance of you, 2:1448 – in Early Modern English, 1:605–606, 2:1363 – French influence on, 1:580 – genre and, 1:740, 1:803 – in London, 2:1446 – loss of case marking, 1:737 – loss of singular forms, 1:69 – in Middle English, 1:579–581 – in Old English, 1:285 – pan-British plural, 2:1938, 2:1939 – social deixis – use of ye vs. you, 1:719 – ye/you vs. thou, 1:60, 1:473, 1:606, 1:656, 1:703–704, 1:723 Seebold, Elmar, 1:358, 1:379, 1:383, 2:1158 Seidel, Kurt Otto, 2:1337 Seidlhofer, Barbara, 1:1015, 2:2141, 2:2144 Selinker, Larry, 2:2140 Sells, Peter, 2:1654
2241 semantic change – actuation problem and, 2:1495 – cognitive theory of, 1:320–321, 2:1364 – in the complaint tradition, 1:988–989 – “invited inferences” and, 1:199–200 – lexical diffusion and, 2:1547 – processes of, 1:453–455 – semasiological vs. onomasiological, 1:165, 1:463 Semino, Elena, 1:206 Seminoles, 2:2121 Semitic languages, 1:174 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 2:1713 Seoane, Elena, 1:468 Seoul National University, 2:1417 Serbia, 2:1385, 2:1386 Serjeantson, Mary S. – on French loans, 2:1678, 2:1679, 2:1680, 2:1683–1684 – on Latin loans, 1:371–372, 2:1705 – on Low German and Dutch loans, 2:1660, 2:1661–1662 – volume on loans in English, 2:1666 – work on West Midland dialect, 1:482, 1:495 Seth, Vikram, 2:2089 Sethe, Kurt, 2:1248 Seven Deadly Sinns of London (Dekker), 1:703 Severn Estuary, 1:43 Severn Tunnel, 2:1981 Sˇevic´, Radmila B., 2:1386 Seville Corpus of Northern English (SCONE), 2:1403 Seward, Anna, 1:876 Seychelles, 2:2114 Seymour, M. C., 1:441 Sgall, Petr, 1:225, 1:229 Shadwell, Thomas, 1:623 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (1671–1713), 1:658, 1:939 Shakespeare, William, 1:808–826 – canonical status, 2:1210 – different editions of, 2:1468 – expansion of the lexicon and, 1:173, 1:243, 2:1712 – on himself as vernacular playwright, 1:638 – modern spelling and pronunciation versions, 2:1142, 2:1146 – morphology – double comparison, 1:607, 1:706 – his genitive, 1:605 – my/thy vs. mine/thine, 1:735
2242 – third person singular present indicative endings, 1:607 – word-formation, 1:610, 1:638, 1:816 – Noah Webster and, 2:1812–1813 – in the OED, 2:1154 – online resources, 2:1142 – orthography, 2:1250 – in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1:647 – phonology, 1:108, 1:812–813 – satire on ornate style, 1:804 – second person pronoun choice, 1:548, 1:737, 1:739, 1:819 – size and composition of lexicon, 1:642, 1:813–814 – studies of pragmatics in, 1:653, 1:659, 1:662, 1:663 – syntax – impersonal constructions, 1:624 – negation, 1:631, 1:707 – Northern Pronoun Rule, 1:687 – perfect with past-time adverbs, 1:90 – periphrastic do, 1:621, 1:751 – progressive, 1:626–627 – with verb like, 2:1651 – zero relative, 1:787 – theory of semantics, 1:644 – use of address terms, 1:204, 1:656 – use of Latinate vocabulary, 2:1712, 2:1714 – use of proverbs, 1:191 – see also individual works Shakespearean Sentences (Houston), 1:816 Shakespeare Database Project (SDB), 1:810, 1:814, 2:1142 Shakespeare-Grammatik (Franz), 1:809 Shakespeare-Lexicon, 1:814 Shakespeare reader in the old spelling and with a phonetic transcription (Vie¨tor), 2:1329 Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style (Burton), 1:816 Shakespeare Thesaurus (Spevack), 1:809 Shakespearian Grammar (Abbott), 1:809 Shaposhnikova, Irina V., 2:1383 Share, Bernard, 2:1967 Sharma, Devyani, 2:2090 Shaw, George Bernard, 1:110–111, 1:978, 1:1091, 1:1100, 2:1198 Shaw, Philip A., 2:1167, 2:2141 she (feminine pronoun), 1:44–45, 1:420, 1:492, 1:493, 1:495, 1:674, 2:1267, 2:1269 Sheng, 2:2096 Shepard, Alan B., 1:1095
Index Shepheardes Calender (Spenser), 1:802, 1:803 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 1:69, 1:804, 1:882 Sheridan, Thomas – on declining standards in speech, 1:944 – fame, 1:1011 – on Irish pronunciations, 2:2063, 2:2065, 2:2066, 2:2067 – Noah Webster and, 2:1813 – on non-prestige accents, 2:1902, 2:1904, 2:1908 – on pronunciation of [h], 1:838 – on “provincials”, 1:990 – Savage on, 1:830 – as source of phonological evidence, 1:71, 1:917 – on standardization, 1:1056, 2:1903 Shetland, 2:1936, 2:1943, 2:1945–1946, 2:1951, 2:1954, 2:1959 Shippey, T. A., 1:392 Shirley, John, 1:537 Shorrocks, Graham, 1:920 Short, Ian, 2:1677 Short, Mick, 2:1198 Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (Withals), 1:1052 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), 1:73, 1:246, 1:611, 2:1135, 2:1709, 2:1716 Short Introduction to English Grammar (Lowth), 1:941, 1:970, 1:1009, 2:1883– 1884 Short-Title Catalogue (STC), 1:639, 1:641, 2:1514 Shropshire, 1:41, 1:437, 1:495, 1:498, 2:2046 Shuy, Roger W., 2:1848 Sicilian, 2:1740 Sicily, 2:1788 Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1:634, 1:638, 1:794, 1:798 Siebers, Lucia, 2:1802 Siege of Thebes (Lydgate), 1:567 Sieloff, Inke, 2:2002 Sierra Leone, 2:1770, 2:1801, 2:2093, 2:2095, 2:2114, 2:2121, 2:2136 Sierra Leone Creole English, 2:1770, 2:1771, 2:1887, 2:2093, 2:2095, 2:2121, 2:2127 Sievers, Eduard – career, 2:1330, 2:1331 – Henry Sweet and, 2:1305 – Old English grammar, 1:255, 1:344, 2:1332, 2:1333 – on Sonority Sequencing Principle, 1:107 – work on Old English meter, 1:116
Index Sievers’ Law, 1:142 Signet Office, 2:1445 Sijmons, Barend, Rheinische Friedrich– Wilhelms–Universita¨t Bonn Sikorska, Liliana, 1:475 Silesian University, 2:1379 Silverstein, Michael, 2:1755, 2:1757, 2:1758, 2:1764 Sˇimko, Ja´n, 2:1379 Simo Bobda, Augustin, 2:2102–2103 Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, 1:1070, 2:1569 Simplified Spelling Board, 1:1014 Simpson, David, 2:1759 Simpson, James Young, Sir, 1:890 Simpson, Jane, 2:2004 Simpson, John, 1:641 Sinclair, John, 1:192 Singapore, 1:1015, 2:1444, 2:1775, 2:1886, 2:2107, 2:2114, 2:2136 Singapore English – classification, 2:1768, 2:2114 – features, 2:2110, 2:2111, 2:2112, 2:2113, 2:2143 – in the International Corpus of English (ICE), 2:1140, 2:2114 – in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 – potential for codification, 2:1157 Singh, Ishtla, 2:1184 Singler, John V., 2:1803–1804, 2:2096 Sinoe Settler community, 2:2096 Sino-Japanese War, 2:2116 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1:121, 1:458– 459, 1:462, 1:564, 1:566, 1:577, 2:1210, 2:1447 Sir Orfeo, 1:40–41, 1:467, 1:558 Sisam, Kenneth, 1:358–359 Sisters of Loreto, 2:2137 Sivertsen, Eva, 2:2018, 2:2019, 2:2021, 2:2022, 2:2024 Skaffari, Janne, 2:1359, 2:1366, 2:1678 Skeat, Walter W., 1:473, 1:943, 2:1334 Skelton, John, 1:804, 1:984 Skinner, Stephen, 1:646 Skye, 2:1699 Slack, Thomas, 1:1010 slang, 1:956, 1:1016, 2:1157 Slang Beggars’ Songs (Rowlands), 1:804 slavery, 1:954, 2:1796–1799, 2:1801–1803 Slavic, 1:126 Sledd, James, 2:1313, 2:1315, 2:1319
2243 SLIN (Storia della Lingua Inglese), 2:1400 Slobin, Dan I., 2:1602, 2:1603–1605, 2:1607– 1608, 2:1609, 2:1610 Slocum, Jonathan, 2:1195 Slovakia, 2:1379–1380 Slovenia, 2:1385, 2:1386 Slovenian, 2:1601 Smart, Benjamin Humphrey, 1:833, 1:834, 1:838–839, 1:840, 2:1904 Smet, Hendrik de, 1:879, 2:1139 Smirnitsky, Aleksandr I., 2:1382, 2:1383 Smith, Bernard, 2:2141, 2:2143 Smith, Bruce R., 1:813 Smith, Clyde, 2:1796 Smith, Geoff P., 2:2126 Smith, Henry Lee, Jr., 1:760, 2:1315 Smith, Jeremy – on AB-language, 1:523 – on cause of Great Vowel Shift, 1:771 – on Old English dialect evidence, 1:321 – outline of Middle English, 1:38 – on Samuels’s Types, 1:525, 1:538, 1:1002 – on semantic change, 1:453 – on “standard/fixed” vs. “standardized/ focused” codes, 1:376, 1:521, 1:1000 – on students’ attitude to history of English, 2:1172 – textbook on history of English, 2:1174, 2:1185 – on variation in Middle English, 1:552 Smith, John, 2:1760 Smith, K. Aaron, 2:1171, 2:1536 Smith, Mikey, 2:1778 Smith, Nicholas, 1:875 Smith, Norval, 2:2122 Smith, Thomas, 1:1007 Smith, William, 1:72, 1:838 Smith, Zadie, 2:1889 Smitherman, Geneva, 2:1827 Smitterberg, Erik, 1:88, 1:873, 1:875–876, 1:909, 2:1521 Smolensky, Paul, 1:102, 2:1654 Smollett, Tobias, 1:1010 Smyth, Anne, 2:1966 Snow, Peter, 2:2121 “Social Motivation of a Sound Change” (Labov), 2:1847 social network theory, 1:690–691, 1:903, 1:911, 2:1449–1451, 2:2033–2035 Social Stratification of English in New York City (Labov), 2:1847
2244 Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), 2:1142 Society for Pure English, 1:978 Society for the History of the English Language in Korea, 2:1415 Socin, Adolf, 2:1333 Sociolinguistic Patterns (Labov), 2:1847 sociolinguistics, 2:1438–1451 – apparent-time model and, 1:726–727 – of computer-mediated communication, 1:1107, 1:1109–1110, 1:1111–1112 – correlational, 1:537–541 – dialect geography and, 2:1847–1848 – dialectology and, 1:671 – discourse analysis and, 1:904, 1:909 – gender and, 1:537, 1:718–721, 1:960–961, 1:1028, 2:1519–1520 – at Helsinki, 2:1363–1364 – historical, 1:66, 1:534–535, 1:537, 1:538, 1:715 – in history of English textbooks, 2:1185–1185 – interactional, 1:541–544, 1:1080 – Labov’s seminal work in, 2:1847 – major paradigms, 2:1440–1442 – models of diffusion, 2:2035–2039 – notion of “dialect” and, 1:668–669 – online learning about, 2:1197 – orthography and, 1:233–234 – in periodization schemes, 2:1236, 2:1244, 2:1254 – phonological change and, 1:762 – pragmatics and, 2:1469 – pronoun choice and, 1:420 – quantitative methods, 1:65 – scribes vs. authors, 1:536–537 – self-reports as method of, 2:1864 – social class and, 1:72, 1:547, 1:721 – social network theory and, 1:690, 1:727–728 – standardization and, 1:520–521 – synchronic linguistics and, 2:1308 – syntactic theory and, 1:149 – television and, 1:1076, 1:1078, 1:1080 – use of term “actuation”, 2:1491 – vs. dialectology, 2:1426–1427 Sociopragmatic Corpus, 1:653, 1:654, 1:655, 2:1517 sociopragmatics, 2:1441 Sofia University, 2:1387 Soliloquia (Augustine of Hippo), 1:26, 1:347, see also Alfredian translations Solomon and Saturn, 1:335, 1:394 Solomon Islands, 2:2114
Index Solomon Islands Pijin, 2:1770 Solway Moss, Battle of, 2:1956 Somalia, 2:1862, 2:1984 Somerset, 1:672, 1:688, 2:2046 Sommerville, John, 1:207 Somner, William, 1:646, 2:1298 Sonority Sequencing Principle, 1:107 Sontheim, Kurt, 1:184, 1:190 Sopplimenti musicali (Zarlino), 2:1223 Sorbonne University, 2:1397, 2:1398, 2:1399 Sørensen, Knud, 2:1716 Sornicola, Rosanna, 2:1400 Soul’s Address to the Body, 1:121, 1:553, 1:555, 1:558 Sources of London English (Wright), 2:1661 South Africa, 1:68, 2:1314, 2:2093, 2:2094, 2:2114–2116, 2:2117–2118, 2:2136 South African English – attitudes towards, 1:1022 – Black, 2:2102, 2:2111, 2:2112 – codification, 1:558, 1:898, 1:943, 2:1156 – FOOT/STRUT split in, 2:1934 – Indian, 2:1271, 2:2112, 2:2113 – in models of World English, 2:1887 – non-rhotic nature, 2:1931 – upgliding diphthongs, 2:1935 – vowel chain shifts, 2:2097–2100 – White, 2:1997, 2:2097, 2:2115 South African Legal Dictionary, 1:1059 South African Party, 2:2115 South African Pocket Oxford Dictionary (Branford), 1:1059 South African Sign Language, 2:2115 Southampton, 1:688 South Asia, 1:943 South Asian English, 1:1023, 1:1060 South Carolina, 2:1771, 2:1797, 2:1800, 2:1817, 2:1833, 2:1842, 2:2052, 2:2121 South Dakota, 2:1843 South East London Regional Standard, 2:2018 Southern Hemisphere English, 1:694–695, 1:857 Southern Literary Messenger ( journal), 2:1814–1815 Southern Passion, 1:629 Southern Soto, 2:2115 Southern University and A&M College, 2:1797 Southey, Robert, 1:871, 1:872, 2:1450 South Korea, 2:1290, 2:1415, 2:1417–1418, 2:1886
Index Southwark, 1:690 Spack, Ruth, 2:1765 Spain – English historical linguistics in, 1:322, 1:449, 1:502, 2:1290, 2:1401–1405 – expulsion of Moriscos, 1:688 – studies of diffusion in, 2:2036 – in studies of semantic associations, 2:2145, 2:2146 Spalding, 2:1919 Spaniards Monarchie (Figueiro), 1:1052–1053 Spanish – in the Caribbean, 2:2121 – in child language acquisition experiment, 2:1601 – contact with English, 2:1738, 2:1739–1740, 2:1743–1749 – in creoles, 2:1768 – defense of, 1:984 – diffusion of standard forms in, 2:2036 – English characterizations of, 1:987, 1:1024 – in Gibraltar, 2:1746, 2:1747, 2:1748 – historical corpora of, 2:1140 – lexicalization in, 2:1585 – loans to English, 1:173, 1:643 – Mexican, 2:1744 – Native American languages and, 2:1760 – pronunciation, 1:838 – spelling system, 1:228 – in studies of common EFL errors, 2:2141 – in the United States, 2:1820 Spanish-American War, 2:1445 Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (SEDERI), 2:1402 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), 2:1402 Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM), 2:1402 Spectator, 1:74, 1:911, 1:1009 Speed project, 1:915 spelling reform, 1:701–702 Spencer, John, 2:2092–2093 Spenser, Edmund, 1:557, 1:639, 1:801, 1:802, 1:816, 2:1298, 2:1300 Sperber, Dan, 1:198 Speroni, Sperone, 1:984 Spevack, Marvin, 1:733, 1:808, 1:809, 1:811, 1:814, 2:1142 Spies, Heinrich, 2:1336 Die Sprache der Urkunden aus Yorkshire im 15. Jahrhundert (Baumann), 2:1329
2245 Die Sprache des Altenglischen Gedichts. Von der Eule und Nachtigall (Noelle), 2:1327 Sprachform und Sprachfunktion im “Orrmulum” (Lehnert), 2:1335 Sprachko¨rper und Sprachfunktion (Horn), 2:1335 Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu den mittelenglischen Legenden aus Gloucestershire (Mohr), 2:1327 Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Su¨dschweiz, 2:1841 Die Sprachwissenschaft (Gabelentz), 2:1305– 1306 Sprat, Thomas, 1:244–245, 1:795, 2:1881 Spufford, Margaret, 2:1284 Sranan, 2:1570, 2:1771, 2:1773, 2:2122, 2:2127, 2:2129, 2:2130, 2:2132 Sri Lanka, 2:1886, 2:2114 Stabenow, Dana, 2:1765 Staffordshire, 1:498 Stamford, 2:1266 Stammers, Jonathan, 2:1987 Standard English – branches and sub-branches, 1:1059–1060 – Chancery English and, 2:1283, 2:1881 – class and, 1:991 – as combination of dialects, 2:1446, 2:1881 – comparative lack of variation in written, 1:695 – dialect contact and, 2:2047–2048 – difficulty of defining, 1:699–700, 1:991 – dominance from 1400 onwards, 1:545 – in “funnel view” of linguistic history, 2:1257, 2:1259, 2:1662 – increase in progressive forms, 2:1690 – inherent variability of, 2:1821 – “international”, 2:1187, 2:1822–1823, 2:1896 – it-cleft constructions, 2:1698 – may vs. might, 1:91 – OED and, 1:1058 – origins, 1:692 – personal correspondence and, 1:936 – pronoun system, 1:732, 1:741 – sociolinguistic agents of, 2:1447 – southern English model, 1:893, 1:1051 – variation in spoken, 1:711 – vowels, 1:828, 1:831 – vs. Scots, 1:681, 1:891–893 standardization – as an ideology, 1:940, 1:997–999 – codification and, 1:916, 1:1010
2246 – codifiers of English and, 1:1006–1020 – dialectal features and, 1:672, 1:953 – in Early Modern English, 1:49, 1:61, 1:242, 1:590, 1:1002–1003 – education and, 1:67 – elaboration of function and, 1:700, 1:996 – elaboration vs. codification, 1:474, 1:522 – Geeraerts’s cultural models, 1:999 – Haugen’s four-stage model – applied across history of English, 1:940 – applied to British English, 2:1880 – applied to Middle English, 1:522, 1:526, 1:527, 1:546 – applied to Old English, 1:376–377, 1:381, 2:1445 – explained, 1:996–997 – process of Ausbau in, 2:1277 – supraregionalization and, 2:2061 – histories of English and, 1:151 – language regard and, 1:1020–1038 – in Late Modern period, 1:68–69, 1:939–952 – Latin as benchmark of, 2:1181 – the media and, 1:1078 – in Middle English, 1:377, 1:483, 1:519–533, 2:1445–1446 – Milroys’ seven-step model, 1:700, 1:940, 1:997 – in Old English, 1:27–28, 1:342, 1:345–346, 1:356–358, 1:374–383, 1:999–1000 – orality vs. literacy in, 2:1276 – periodization and, 2:1249–1250 – printing and, 1:56, 1:107, 1:638, 1:674, 1:902 – register and, 1:242, 1:521–522 – religious texts and, 1:242 – rise of nation-state and, 1:996, 2:1261–1262 – sociolinguistic approaches to, 1:520–521, 2:1441 – sociopragmatic dimensions of, 1:520 – stylistic effects, 1:242–243 Stanford University, 2:1320 Stanley, E. G., 1:41 Stansfield-Popovic´, Mary, 2:1386 Starkey, Thomas, 1:784 Statute of Pleading (1362), 1:240, 1:528, 1:536, 1:546, 1:981–982, 2:1282, 2:1675 Statutes of the Realm, 1:631 Steblin-Kamensky, M. I., 2:1381, 2:1382 Steele, Felicia Jean, 2:1171 Steele, Joshua, 2:1220–1221 Stein, Dieter, 1:703, 1:739, 1:748, 1:749–750, 1:751, 1:818
Index Stein, Gabriele, 1:640, 1:1007 Stenbrenden, Gjertrud F., 1:770 Stenroos, Merja, 1:233 Stephanov, Constantine, 2:1387 Stephany, Ursula, 2:1607 Stephen, King of England, 2:1126 Stephens, M., 2:1989 Steponavisˇius, Albertas, 2:1384 Stern, Gustaf, 1:170, 1:190 Sterne, Laurence, 2:1180 Stetson, Raymond H., 1:225 Stevens, Martin, 1:570, 1:574 Stevenson, James A. C., 2:1152 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1:846 Stevin, Simon, 1:984 Stewart, Dugald, 2:1302, 2:1306 Stewart, William A., 2:1794 Stirlingshire, 1:680 Stochastic Optimality Theory, 2:1655, 2:1656 Stockwell, Robert P. – in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 – on the Great Vowel Shift, 1:757, 1:771, 2:1554 – on Old English digraphs, 1:9 – organization of SHEL conference, 2:1293 – on Present Day English lexicon, 1:83 – on prosody, 1:118, 1:123 – synchronic approach, 2:1315 – on vowel contrasts, 1:257 – on word-formation, 1:709 Stoffel, C., 1:469 Stoic grammarians, 1:229 Stolova, Natalya I., 1:174 Stonor Letters, 1:473, 2:1447 Storia della lingua inglese (Frank), 2:1400 Stories of English (Crystal), 2:1174 Story, George M., 2:1317 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, 1:877 Strang, Barbara M. H. – on dialect contact in London, 2:2048 – on get passive, 1:871 – on Late Modern English, 1:64 – on mine and thine, 1:736 – on move from synthesis to analysis, 1:44 – present-to-past order in textbook, 2:1187, 2:1246 – on the second person pronoun, 1:737 – two-hundred-year periodization structure, 2:1234 Strathy Corpus, 2:1866, 2:1871 Straumann, Heinrich, 1:1070
Index Strevens, Peter, 2:2139 Strite, Vic, 1:322 Stroebe, Lilian Luise, 2:1329 Strohm, Paul, 2:1283–1284 structuralism, 1:165, 1:225–226, 1:259 structural linguistics, 2:1165, 2:1291, 2:1308, 2:1314, 2:1319, 2:1320, 2:1334 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 2:1296 Strunk, William, Jr., 1:975 Strype, John, 1:628 Stuart-Smith, Jane, 1:81, 1:93, 1:1095, 2:1920, 2:1922–1923 Studer, Patrick, 1:208, 1:1067 Studien zum System und Gebrauch der ‘Tempora’ in der Sprache Chaucers und Gowers (Bauer), 2:1336 Studies in English Grammar (Ichikawa), 2:1415 Studies in English Language, 2:1519 Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature ( journal), 2:1416 Studies in Modern English ( journal), 2:1416 Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL) conference, 2:1293, 2:1320, 2:1519 Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English (online journal), 2:1145 Studies in Words (Lewis), 2:1173 Sturtevant, Edgar, 2:1166 style – classical models, 1:794–796, 2:1882 – clergial, 1:244 – computerized studies of, 2:1468–1469 – conversational, 1:670 – curial, 1:522 – defined, 1:239 – “high”, 1:792–794, 1:796–800 – historical survey of, 1:244–245 – levels of, 1:561, 1:569 – newspapers and, 1:907–908, 1:1071–1072 – oral vs. literate, 1:243–244, 1:902–903, 1:962 – plain vs. Latinate, 2:1882–1883 – standardization and, 1:242–243 – syntactical choices in British English and, 2:1892 – in the Wakefield plays, 1:574 subjunctive mood – in Early Modern English, 1:609–737 – functions, 1:286, 1:288, 1:294 – in Germanic, 1:15
2247 – Late Modern English revival, 1:853–857, 1:878–879, 1:947 – in Middle English, 1:422–423, 1:440–441, 1:443, 1:446, 1:448 – in Old English, 1:31, 1:305, 1:310, 1:330 – prescriptivists vs. descriptivists on, 1:943– 944, 1:947–948, 1:960 – in Present Day English, 1:441 – replacement by modal auxiliaries, 1:60, 1:152 sub-Saharan African English (SSE), 2:2110– 2103 Sudbury, Andrea, 2:2052 Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung, 1:181 Suffolk – dialectal features, 1:492, 1:495, 1:496, 1:498, 1:578 – immigration from Low Countries, 2:1664 – Little Domesday survey and, 2:1123 – migration to Norwich from, 2:2055 – place-names in, 2:1267 – texts from, 2:1499 – witness depositions from, 1:672 Sumatra, 1:694 Sumerian, 1:227, 1:228 Summa de speculatione musicae (Odington), 2:1218 Sunday Post (newspaper), 2:1958–1959 Sunday Times, 1:1066 Sundby, Bertil, 2:1359 Sung Kyunkwan University, 2:1417 supraregionalization, 2:2060–2073 Suriname, 1:694, 2:1570, 2:1771, 2:2122, 2:2123 Surrey, 2:1664, 2:1668 Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, 2:1985 Survey of Canadian English (SCE), 2:1864, 2:1865 “A survey of Cornwall” (Carew), 2:1265 Survey of English Dialects (SED) – age of informants in, 1:920 – compared to other resources, 1:916, 1:919, 1:922–923, 1:928, 1:935 – contact with Dutch in, 2:1662, 2:1668 – dictionary and grammar, 2:1155 – on negative concord, 1:933 – on pronoun exchange, 1:926, 1:927 – on pronunciations of room, broom etc., 2:2055–2056 – questionnaire method, 2:1427 Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States (Atwood), 2:1843 Sussex, 1:495, 1:498, 2:1668
2248 Sutherland, 1:673 Svartvik, Jan, 2:1187 Svoboda, Alesˇ, 2:1379 Swaen, Adriaan E. H., 2:1343 Swaffham, 2:2045 Swahili, 2:2096, 2:2118, 2:2141, 2:2143 Swan, Michael, 2:2141, 2:2143 Swan, Toril, 1:862, 2:1363 Swansea University, 2:1989 Swanson, Donald C., 2:1723 Swati, 2:2115 Swaziland, 2:2114 Swaziland English, 2:2111 Sweden, 2:1355, 2:2139, 2:2145 Swedish, 1:170, 1:752, 1:1112, 2:1591, 2:1654, 2:1725, 2:2141, 2:2143 Sweet, Henry – career, 2:1304–1305 – on child language acquisition and sound change, 2:1599 – claims for West Saxon dialect, 1:375 – on Cockney, 2:1885 – codification of RP, 1:945 – edition of Alfredian Pastoral Care, 2:1184 – influence of OED on, 2:1291 – on intrusive /r/, 2:1907 – on Late Modern English phonology, 1:829, 1:834 – on Modern English, 1:69 – Neogrammarian influence on, 1:255 – on Old English inflectional system, 1:30 – periodization of history of English, 1:63, 1:699, 2:1181, 2:1234, 2:1237, 2:1238–1240, 2:1242–1243, 2:1247 – on pronunciation of /hw/, 2:1905 – on raising of /a/ before nasals, 2:1550 – on terms “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English”, 2:1238, 2:1314 – on variation in speech, 1:1090 – work on charters, 2:1122 – work on Old English dialects, 1:344 Sweetser, Eve, 1:166, 1:167, 1:320 Swift, Jonathan – on abbreviated words, 1:800 – attacks by grammarians, 1:1009 – call for English academy, 1:941, 1:969–970, 1:971, 1:1003, 1:1009 – complaint on English, 1:985, 1:987, 1:1024 – on the decay of Latin, 1:986 – in English historical linguistics, 2:1291 – Journal to Stella, 1:746
Index – linguistic conservatism, 1:74, 1:940 – rhymes, 2:2063 – Thomas Sheridan and, 1:1011 – use of term standard, 1:939 Swiss German, 1:109 Switzerland, 2:1957, 2:2118 Syder, Frances Hodgetts, 2:1277 Sydney Morning Herald, 1:1098 Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (SCBI), 2:1125 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon), 2:1226 Syntactic Structures (Chomsky), 2:1297, 2:1309 Szenczi, Miklo´s, 2:1380 Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, 2:1947, 2:2005
T Taavitsainen, Irma – in English historical linguistics, 2:1292 – suggested approaches to speech acts, 1:655– 656, 1:821, 1:903, 1:910, 2:1195, 2:1365 – use of the OED, 2:1194 – volume on speech acts, 2:1459 – work on apologies, 1:654 – work on diachronic speech act analysis, 1:208, 1:821 – work on discourse markers, 1:662 – work on exclamations, 1:201, 2:1365 – work on genre and pronoun choice, 1:740 – work on genres of secular instruction, 1:247 – work on insults, 1:203, 1:331 – work on medical/scientific register – classical and Arabic models, 1:241, 1:474, 1:521–522 – corpus of texts, 1:663, 2:1358, 2:1366 – delineation of genre, 1:205, 1:207, 1:663 – elaboration of English and, 2:1279 – “house style” of Royal Society, 1:245 – work on subgenre identification, 1:473 – work on swearing in Old English period, 1:544 A Table Alphabeticall (Cawdrey), 1:640, 1:710, 1:969, 1:1053, 2:1711 Table of Words written different from their Pronunciation (Bailey), 1:829 Tabouret-Keller, Andre´e, 2:1778, 2:1925 tachygraphs, 1:231 Tacitus, Cornelius, 1:2, 2:1713
Index Tagliamonte, Sali – Toronto Corpus, 2:1866 – on the use of must, 1:90 – work on African American English, 2:1803, 2:1833, 2:1869, 2:2095 – work on BE going to, 2:1568 – work on instant messaging, 1:1109, 1:1110 – work on media influence, 1:1081, 1:1082 – work on quotative like, 2:1870 Taiwan, 2:1886 Tajima, Matsuji, 1:557 Takamiya Collection, 1:35 Talmy, Leonard, 1:174 Tamawski, Władysław, 2:1384 Tamil, 2:2084, 2:2086, 2:2143 Tamil Nadu, 2:2083–2084 Tamis, Anastasios M., 2:1721, 2:1723 Tannen, Deborah, 2:1319 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa, 2:1366 Tans’ur, William, 2:1219 Tanzania, 2:1886, 2:1887, 2:2114, 2:2118, 2:2136 Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, 2:1384 Tatler, 1:74, 1:902 Taylor, Ann, 1:158, 2:1484–1485 Taylor, John, 1:747 Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool (Bereiter and Englemann), 2:1828 Teaching Materials: The History of the English Language (TM), 2:1169 teaching of history of English – declining enrollments, 2:1294 – internal vs external history in, 2:1167, 2:1179–1180, 2:1438–1439 – strategies and approaches, 2:1163–1176 – textbooks, 2:1166–1168, 2:1178–1190, 2:1438–1439 – web-based resources, 2:1190–1198 Teagle Foundation, 2:1176 Tebbit, Norman, 2:1915 Teeuw, Renske, 2:1485, 2:1486 Tejada, Paloma, 2:1402 Telegdi, Zsigmond, 2:1381 Telegraph, The, 1:180, 1:1017, 1:1066 Tempest (Shakespeare), 1:631, 1:706 Tench, Paul, 2:1985 Tengvik, Go¨sta, 1:218 Tennessee, 2:1800, 2:1843 Tennessee War Veterans Questionnaires, 2:1805 Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 2:1303
2249 Tent, Jan, 1:1060 Terrington, 2:1919 Texas, 2:1843 Textbase of Early Tudor English (Waite), 1:640 textbooks – as data, 2:1467 – for history of English, 2:1166–1168, 2:1178– 1190, 2:1438–1439 Text Creation Partnership (TCP), 1:640, 1:641, 2:1145, 2:1514 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 2:1132 text-messaging, 2:1824 textual criticism, 1:36–37, 1:38 Textus Roffensis, 2:1280 Thackeray, William, 1:850 Thai, 1:259, 2:2141, 2:2143 Thelwall, John, 2:1221 Thelwell, Michael, 2:1796 thesauri, 2:1136–1137, 2:1157–1158 Thesaurus linguae romanae et britanniae (Cooper), 1:1052 Thesaurus of Middle English (TME), 2:1137 Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) – calculations of size of OE lexicon, 1:315 – expressions for ‘ship, boat’ in, 1:318 – glosses in, 2:1124 – Go¨rlach’s study of genre terms and, 1:246 – online version, 1:46, 2:1136–1137 – problem of unrepresentativeness, 1:321–322 – synchronic approach, 2:1309 Thetford, 2:1266, 2:1268 Thim, Stefan, 2:1184 Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 2:1301 third person plural th- forms – in Chaucer, 1:421, 1:515, 1:581 – diffusion of, 2:2036 – in the Midlands, 1:421, 1:733 – Norse origins, 1:44, 1:420, 1:496, 1:515 – in northern Middle English, 1:42, 1:420, 1:497, 1:498, 1:733 – similarity to Old English demonstratives, 1:44 – spread to South, 1:421, 1:496–497, 1:499, 1:733, 2:1267 third person singular -s ending – in Chicano English, 2:1745 – contact with Norse and, 1:516, 2:1267, 2:1735 – lexical diffusion and, 2:1547 – in the North, 1:499 – in periodization schemes, 2:1245
2250 – spread of usage, 1:607–608, 1:703, 1:721–722, 1:725–726, 1:728, 1:846 – zero suffix forms, 2:1446, 2:1668 Thomas, Alan R., 2:1699 Thomas, Dylan, 2:1988 Thomas, Erik R., 2:1804, 2:1834, 2:1835, 2:1868 Thomas, Keith, 1:642 Thomas, Thomas, 1:638, 1:645, 1:1008, 2:1711 Thomason, Sarah G. – on creolization of Middle English, 2:1784, 2:1787 – on Early Modern English word-formation, 1:611 – on elite Indian English, 2:2089 – on language contact, 2:1159, 2:1677, 2:1691 – on pre- vs. attested Old English, 1:20 – on pronominal transfer from Flemish, 2:1668 – theory of Norsification, 1:508 Thomason Tracts, 2:1514 Thompson, Rick, 1:1101 Þorgeirsson, Haukur, 2:1504, 2:1505 Thorkelin, Grı´mur Jo´nsson, 2:1290, 2:1302, 2:1356 Thorpe, Benjamin, 1:1012, 2:1291, 2:1303, 2:1305 Thorpe, Bernard, 2:1122 Thresor de la langue franc¸oyse (Nicot), 1:1057 Thuresson, Bertil, 1:220 Thurlow, Crispin, 1:1109 Thurneysen, Rudolf, 2:1696 Tichy´, Ondrˇej, 2:1378 Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid – corpus of 18th-century letters, 1:889 – fields of interest and achievement, 2:1343 – on periphrastic do, 1:708, 1:877–878 – on standardization, 1:374, 1:700, 1:999–1000, 1:1010 – on supra-localization, 1:997 – on women’s language, 1:961 – work on Late Modern English, 1:66, 1:76, 1:901 – work on please, 1:911 – work on Robert Lowth, 2:1447 – work on social networks, 2:1450 – work on you was, 2:1449 Tiffin, William, 1:827 Tillery, Jan, 2:2097 Tillotson, John, 1:629 Tillyard, E. M. W., 2:1208 Timaeus (Plato), 2:1218 TIME Corpus, 2:1140, 2:1516
Index The Times (newspaper), 1:908, 1:968, 1:1066, 1:1070, 2:2005 Times Educational Supplement, 2:1914 Times Like These ( Jones), 2:1988 Times of India (newspaper), 2:2084 Timmins, Claire, 2:1922–1923 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 1:663, 1:735, 1:820 Tiree, 2:1699 Tissari, Heli, 2:1364 Titus Cyberbit Font, 2:1144 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 2:1296 Todd, Loreto, 2:2093 Tok Pisin – features, 2:1628, 2:1774–1775, 2:2126–2127, 2:2129, 2:2130, 2:2131, 2:2132 – in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 – official status, 2:1776 – origins, 2:1768, 2:2126 – related creoles, 2:1769–1770 – standardization, 2:1777, 2:1779 Tokyo University, 2:1415, 2:1417 Tolai, 2:1775 Tolkien, J. R. R., 1:437, 1:523, 1:577 Toller, T. Northcote, 2:1149, 2:1334 Tollfree, Laura, 2:2018, 2:2021, 2:2022, 2:2023, 2:2024 Tomaschek, Karl, 2:1332 Tooke, John Horne, 1:972 Toon, Thomas E. – CHEL chapter on Old English dialects, 1:344 – on literacy in Anglo-Saxon England, 2:1442 – on loss of /h/ before sonorants, 2:1546, 2:1548–1549 – on raising of /a/ before nasals, 2:1549–1550 – on scribal practice, 2:1548 – work in historical sociolinguistics, 1:534 – work on lexical diffusion, 2:1316, 2:1547 Topics in English Linguistics, 2:1519 toponymy, 1:213–217, 1:316, 1:687, 1:894, 1:898 Torgersen, Eivind, 2:1916 Torkington, Richard, 1:628, 1:631, 1:707 Toronto Corpus, 2:1866 Toronto Star (newspaper), 2:1866 Torres-Medina, Dolores, 2:1403 Torres Strait Creole English, 2:1770, 2:2126 Tottie, Gunnel, Alvar, Ellega˚rd Towards a generative analysis of a post-creole continuum (DeCamp), 2:2123 Tower Hamlets, 2:2013, 2:2015, 2:2020, 2:2025
Index Towneley “mystery” plays, 1:570 Townend, Matthew, 1:25, 2:1159, 2:1442, 2:1727 Trafalgar, Battle of, 1:1069 Trager, George L., 1:760, 2:1315 Transformation du syste`me modal en anglais me´die´val (Culioli), 2:1398 The transition from the impersonal to the personal construction in Middle English (van der Gaaf), 2:1342 translation, as literary endeavor, 2:1206–1207, 2:1281 Trask, Robert Larry, 1:80, 1:82, 1:91, 1:92, 2:1901 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs – on complex tenses, 1:303 – on composite predicates, 2:1586 – on Construction Grammar, 2:1564, 2:1633, 2:1637, 2:1638, 2:1643 – definition of grammaticalization, 2:1571 – definition of pragmatics, 1:198 – on the development of discourse markers, 1:661, 1:662, 2:1566–1567, 2:1568 – on frequency, 2:1569 – on historical pragmatics, 2:1461 – on “invited inferences”, 1:199–200 – on it-cleft construction, 2:1695 – on layering, 2:1563 – on Lehmann’s parameters, 2:1562 – on lexicalization, 2:1578 – on new grammatical formants, 2:1541 – on V-ing forms, 2:1587 – volume on historical syntax, 2:1292 – volume on semantic change, 2:1459 – work on history of speech act verbs, 1:331 Trautmann, Moritz, 2:1332 A treatise of musick, speculative, practical, and historical (Malcolm), 2:1220 A Treatise on the Art of Music ( Jones), 2:1220, 2:1227 Treatise on the Astrolabe (Chaucer), 1:584, 1:586 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 1:74, 1:897, 1:943, 1:972, 1:1013, 2:1303, 2:1304 Trevisa, John – Caxton’s publication of, 1:560 – in development of scientific register, 1:241 – dialect of BL Cotton Tiberius D.vii, 1:43 – on Northern speech, 1:982, 1:989 – translation of agrestibus, 2:1265 – translation techniques, 1:562
2251 – updating of Higden’s remark on education, 2:1282 – Wycliffe Bible and, 1:1040 Trier, 1:370 Trim, Richard, 1:320 Trimmer, Sarah, 1:1011 Trinidad and Tobago, 1:1016, 2:1771, 2:2015, 2:2121, 2:2125 Trinidad and Tobago Creole English, 2:1771, see also Caribbean English Trinity College Dublin, 1:35 Trinity Homilies, 1:404, 1:405, 2:1433 Tristan da Cunha English, 2:1271, 2:2052, 2:2053, 2:2092 Tristram, Hildegard L. C., 1:687, 2:1688, 2:1693, 2:1696 Trnka, Bohumil, 2:1378, 2:1715 Trobevsˇek-Drobnak, Francˇisˇka, 2:1386 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 1:609 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer) – dialect of, 1:578 – in electronic corpora, 1:586 – gan as discourse marker in, 2:1479 – prosody in, 1:123, 1:124, 1:125 – sententiousness of, 1:191 – use of second person pronoun in, 1:581 – versification in, 1:569 – vocabulary, 1:456, 1:457, 1:461, 1:585 Trollope, Anthony, 1:862, 1:865, 1:960 Trosborg, Anna, 1:198 Trotter, David A., 2:1443 Trousdale, Graeme, 1:149, 1:184, 2:1572, 2:1586 Troy Book (Lydgate), 1:567 Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj Sergeevicˇ, 1:98 Trudgill, Peter – on adopted accents in popular music, 1:1081 – on “alternative histories of English”, 2:1195, 2:1257, 2:1662 – on Australian and New Zealand English, 2:2001, 2:2007 – on Canadian Raising, 2:1868, 2:2051–2052 – on changes in pronunciation, 2:1550 – on Cockney English, 2:2021, 2:2022, 2:2023, 2:2024 – on dialect contact, 2:2039, 2:2044–2057 – on dialect hopping, 1:724 – on East Anglian dialect, 1:689 – on Estuary English, 2:1923 – on loss of inflections in contact situations, 2:1627, 2:1668 – on media influence, 1:1083
2252 – on models of diffusion, 2:2035, 2:2036, 2:2037, 2:2040, 2:2041 – on multiple negation, 2:2048 – on native vs. non-native speakers, 2:2108 – New Dialect Formation theory, 2:1866, 2:1870 – on performance vs. conscious self-report, 1:1028 – on sociolinguistics and dialectology, 2:1848 – on Standard British English, 2:1888 – WAVE and, 2:1936 – work on th-fronting, 2:1935 Truelove, Alison, 2:1447 Truss, Lynne, 1:967, 2:1889 Tsonga, 2:2115 Tsurumi University, 2:1416 Tswana, 2:2115 Tudor, Margaret, see Margaret, Queen, consort of James IV, King of Scotland Tufts University, 1:810 Tuite, Thomas, 1:839 Tupi, 1:74, 1:75 Turkish, 1:130, 2:1602, 2:2141, 2:2143 Turks and Caicos, 2:1771 Turner, George W., 2:2000 Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 2:1317 Turner, William, 1:640, 1:646 Turning Tides: Contemporary Writing from Wales (Minhinnick), 2:1989 Turnpike Trusts, 1:67 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 1:566 Tuvalu, 2:2114 Twain, Mark, 2:1817 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 1:605, 1:707 Twi, 2:1773 Twice as Less (Orr), 2:1828 Twitter, 1:1016 Two Bookes of Ayres (Campion), 2:1218 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare), 1:662 Two Sermons Upon Part of S. Judes Epistle (Hooker), 1:200, 1:202 Tyler, Jo, 2:1172, 2:1173 Tyndale, William, 1:642, 1:1041–1042, 1:1046 Tyneside English, 1:153, 2:1930, 2:1931 Tynyanov, Yury, 1:791
U Udall, Nicholas, 1:625, 1:633 Uganda, 2:1887, 2:2114, 2:2136
Index Ukaji, Masatomo, 2:1416 Ukraine, 2:1383–1384, 2:1862 Ullmann, Stephen, 1:165 Ulster, 2:1964, 2:2071–2073 Ulster English, 1:85, 2:1966, 2:1971, 2:1972, 2:2056, see also Irish English Ulster Scots, 2:1505, 2:1887, 2:1966, 2:2056 Under Milk Wood (Thomas), 2:1988 Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (Rask), 2:1302 UNESCO Index Translationum, 2:2138 Ungerer, Friedrich, 1:207, 1:1070 Unicode Standard, 2:1143–1144 unidirectionality principle, 2:1180, 2:1462, 2:1532, 2:1544, 2:1570–1571, 2:1593 uniformitarian principle – Great Vowel Shift and, 1:759, 1:770 – in historical phonology, 1:259 – in historical pragmatics, 1:331, 2:1462 – in historical sociolinguistics, 1:814, 1:821, 2:1439, 2:1447–1448 – Lass’s account of, 1:759 – in lexical diffusion, 2:1548 – Strang’s account of Late Modern English and, 1:64–65 Uniform Probabilities Principle, 1:759 Union of Parliaments (1707), 1:896, 2:1957 unique distinguishability paradox, 2:1259 United Kingdom – Acts of Union (1536 and 1542), 1:1023, 2:1978–1979 – colonization and spread of English, 2:2126, 2:2136 – historical linguistics in, 2:1314 – language regard in, 1:1023 – Opium Wars and, 2:2116 – recognition of Scots, 2:1959 – ties with Australia and New Zealand, 2:1997 – War of 1812, 2:1811 – see also British English; England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales United Nations, 2:2138 United Party (South Africa), 2:2115 United States – Boston Tea Party, 2:1444 – British language references in, 1:1012 – Declaration of Independence, 1:699, 1:942, 2:1250, 2:2137 – Department of Commerce, 1:1094 – Department of Defense, 1:1106 – English historical linguistics in, 2:1313–1320
Index – – – – – – – – – – – – –
French in, 2:1675, 2:1679, 2:1760 German in, 2:1819 Greek in, 2:1721, 2:1723 growth in international status, 2:2137 introduction of television, 1:1076 King Philip’s War, 2:1756 Latino community, 2:1743–1746, 2:1820 McCarthy era, 2:1377 nationalism, 1:1024 Native American place-names in, 2:1762 New Deal, 2:1797 newspapers, 1:1065, 1:1067 perceptions of varieties within, 1:1022, 1:1023, 1:1029–1033 – radio, 1:1089, 1:1094–1097 – relations with Australia and New Zealand, 2:1997 – Revolution, 1:68, 1:916, 2:1801, 2:1811, 2:1860, 2:1885, 2:2137 – slave populations, 2:1796–1803 – Spanish-American War, 2:1445 – teaching history of English in, 2:1164–1165, 2:1179 – War of 1812, 2:1811 – Welsh immigration to, 2:1980 – see also African American English; American English An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (Bailey), 1:943, 1:1054, 2:1883 Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1763), 1:1056 University of Alberta, 2:1175, 2:1320 University of Amsterdam, 1:449, 2:1342, 2:1343 University of Antwerp, 2:1345, 2:1346 University of Bamberg, 2:1743 University of Barcelona, 2:1402 University of Bari, 2:1290, 2:1400 University of Basel, 2:1197 University of Bergamo, 2:1290, 2:1400, 2:1401 University of Berlin, 2:1334 University of Birmingham, 1:1014, 2:1142 University of Bonn, 2:1326, 2:1331, 2:1332, 2:1338 University of Breslau, 2:1326, 2:1328, 2:1337, 2:1376 University of British Columbia, 2:1320 University of Brussels, 2:1345 University of Calgary, 2:1143 University of California, Berkeley, 2:1144, 2:1320
2253 University of California, Los Angeles, 2:1320 University of Canterbury, Kent, 2:1914 University of Chernivtsi, 2:1383 University of Cluj, 2:1385 University of Cologne, 1:208 University of Copenhagen, 2:1290, 2:1355, 2:1386 University of Duisburg-Essen, 2:1139 University of Du¨sseldorf, 2:1196 University of Edinburgh, 1:669, 1:893, 2:1142, 2:1387 University of Eichsta¨tt, 2:1125, 2:1137 University of Frankfurt, 2:1144 University of Freiburg, 1:923, 2:1331, 2:1936 University of Geneva, 2:1307 University of Georgetown, 2:1143 University of Georgia, 2:1320, 2:1417, 2:1794, 2:1864 University of Ghent, 2:1289, 2:1345 University of Gießen, 2:1331 University of Glasgow, 2:1136, 2:1141, 2:1157, 2:1304 University of Go¨ttingen, 2:1328 University of Graz, 1:323, 2:1326, 2:1333 University of Groningen, 2:1326, 2:1342, 2:1343 University of Halle-Wittenberg, 2:1331, 2:1337, 2:1338 University of Heidelberg, 2:1304, 2:1306, 2:1328, 2:1329, 2:1338 University of Helsinki – chair of English language studies at, 2:1355 – computational philology at, 1:37, 2:1293, 2:1309, 2:1356–1357 – corpus linguistics and, 1:250, 1:436, 1:716, 2:1137–1138, 2:1141 – historical linguistics journals, 2:1145 – study of Middle English and, 1:449 – work on historical sociolinguistics at, 2:1363– 1364 University of Huelva, 1:502 University of Iceland, 2:1290, 2:1355 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2:1317 University of Innsbruck, 1:915, 2:1136, 2:1155 University of Jena, 2:1331, 2:1338 University of Kentucky, 2:1134 University of Kiel, 2:1328, 2:1334 University of La Corun˜a, 2:1403 University of La Laguna, 2:1402
2254 University of Lancaster, 1:716, 2:1139, 2:1198, 2:1518 University of La Rioja, 2:1403 University of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, 2:1290, 2:1403 University of Leeds, 1:923 University of Leiden, 2:1135, 2:1145, 2:1289, 2:1343 University of Leipzig, 2:1305, 2:1308, 2:1326, 2:1330, 2:1334, 2:1338, 2:1342 University of Leuven, 2:1139, 2:1345, 2:1346 University of Lie`ge, 2:1289, 2:1345, 2:1347 University of Lille, 2:1397 University of Liverpool, 2:1404 University of Ljubljana, 2:1386 University of London, 2:1377 University of Lund, 2:1355 University of Lviv (Ukraine), 2:1376, 2:1383 University of Lyons, 2:1397 University of Ma´laga, 2:1403 University of Manchester, 1:449, 2:1139, 2:1141, 2:1404 University of Marburg, 2:1196, 2:1328, 2:1338 University of Maribor, 2:1387 University of Michigan, 1:37, 1:640, 2:1138, 2:1153, 2:1309, 2:1320, 2:1417, 2:1514 University of Milan, 2:1400 University of Minnesota, 2:1320 University of Missouri – Rolla, 2:1175 University of Munich, 1:323, 2:1331, 2:1405 University of Mu¨nster, 1:810, 2:1142, 2:1329, 2:1338 University of Murcia, 2:1402 University of Naples, 2:1290, 2:1400 University of Nebraska, 2:1329 University of Newcastle, 2:1343 University of Nijmegen, 2:1342, 2:1343 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2:1796 University of Northern Arizona, 2:1320 University of Notre Dame, Indiana, 2:1376 University of Nottingham, 2:1136 University of Oslo, 2:1290, 2:1355 University of Osnabru¨ck, 2:1336 University of Ostrava, 2:1379 University of Oxford, 2:1142, 2:1143, 2:1299, 2:1304, 2:1307, 2:1779 University of Pennsylvania, 1:449, 1:716, 2:1140, 2:1320, 2:1357 University of Poznan´, 2:1290, 2:1376, 2:1377 University of Presˇov, 2:1379
Index University of Prishtina, 2:1386 University of Regensburg, 2:1802 University of Rome, 2:1400 University of Rostock, 2:1337 University of Rzeszo´w, 1:321 University of Salamanca, 2:1401, 2:1402, 2:1403 University of Santiago de Compostela, 2:1290, 2:1293, 2:1402, 2:1403 University of Seville, 2:1290, 2:1402, 2:1403 University of South Carolina, 2:1802 University of Southern California, 2:1139 University of Stavanger, 2:1141 University of Strasbourg, 2:1326, 2:1329, 2:1337 University of Tampere, 2:1141 University of Texas, Austin, 2:1195, 2:1320 University of Toronto, 1:314, 1:449, 2:1135, 2:1319, 2:1320 University of Toronto Press and Libraries, 1:639 University of Turin, 2:1400 University of Turku, 2:1366 University of Uppsala, 2:1139, 2:1141, 2:1358 University of Utrecht, 2:1342, 2:1343 University of Valencia, 2:1402 University of Valladolid, 2:1402 University of Vienna, 2:1326, 2:1331, 2:1333, 2:1376 University of Vigo, 2:1290, 2:1404 University of Virginia, 2:1139, 2:1144 University of Wales, 2:1983 University of Wales Press, 2:1988 University of Washington, 2:1320 University of Western Brittany, 2:1399 University of Wrocław, 2:1326, 2:1328, 2:1337, 2:1376 University of York, 1:449, 2:1357 University of Zagreb, 2:1386 University of Zaragoza, 2:1402 University of Zu¨rich, 2:1997, 2:2005 Untersuchungen zur neuenglischen Lautgeschichte (Horn), 2:1333, 2:1335 Unwritten History of Slavery, 2:1797 Uppsala University, 1:716 Upton, Clive, 1:81, 2:1154, 2:1155, 2:1909, 2:1910, 2:1929, 2:2099 Urban, Matthias, 2:1947 urban dialects, 1:67, 1:68, 1:956, see also under London Urban Dictionaries, 1:1016
Index urban hierarchy model of diffusion, 2:2035– 2036 Urban Voices – Accent Studies in the British Isles (Foulkes and Docherty), 2:1918 Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 2:1982 Urdu, 2:2141 USSR, 2:1886 U.S. Supreme Court, 2:1819 Utopia (More), 1:605, 2:1222
V Vachek, Josef, 1:225, 2:1290, 2:1378–1379 Vainglory, 1:335 Vale of Glamorgan, 2:1978 Valkonen, Petteri, 1:654 Valla, Lorenzo, 1:644 Valle, Ellen, 1:906, 2:1366 Valley Girl (film), 2:1818 Van Herk, Gerard, 2:1801, 2:1802, 2:1803 Vanuatu, 2:1770, 2:1776, 2:2114 VARIENG project, 1:37, 2:1293, 2:1309, 2:1357, 2:1358 Varieties of English (Kortmann and Schneider), 1:80 Vasallo, Mario, 2:1742 Va´squez-Gonza´lez, Juan Gabriel, 2:1403 Veenstra, Tonjes, 2:2122, 2:2130 Venda, 2:2115 Venezky, Richard L., 1:225, 1:232, 1:234, 2:1619 Vennemann, Theo, 1:11, 2:1159, 2:1531, 2:1688, 2:1693 Verbal Hygiene (Cameron), 1:988 Verbalist, The (Ayres), 1:973, 1:975 Vercelli Homilies, 1:334 Vereniging voor Oudgermanisten, 2:1344 Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, etc. (Bopp), 2:1330 Vernacular Liberian English, 2:2095 Verner, Karl, 2:1308, 2:1316 Vernon, Alex, 1:1016 Versailles, Treaty of, 2:1997, 2:2137 Verstegan, Richard, 1:1022 Vespasian Psalter gloss – AB-language and, 1:523–524 – spellings for Proto-Germanic [æ], 2:1552 – Junius Psalter and, 1:381 – Mercian dialect, 1:348, 1:383, 2:1124
2255 – reflex of Germanic *a before nasals, 1:350 – second fronting in, 1:351, 1:352 – suffix -nis in, 1:353 Vezzosi, Letizia, 1:470, 1:622 Vices and Virtues, 1:460, 2:1485 Victor, Terry, 2:1157 Victoria (Australia), 2:1997 Viereck, Wolfgang, 2:1800 Vie¨tor, Wilhelm, 2:1328, 2:1333 Vihman, Marilyn May, 2:1601–1603 Vikings, 1:24–26, 1:156, 2:1672, 2:1726–1727, 2:1788, 2:1953, 2:1965, 2:1978 Vincent, Nigel, 2:1650 Vine, Bernadette, 2:2003 Virgil, 2:1955 Virginia – in American dialectology, 2:1817, 2:1842 – black speakers in, 2:1795 – “Canadian Raising” in, 2:2052 – ex-slave narratives in, 2:1797, 2:1798 – hoodoo doctor interviews in, 2:1800 – settlement history, 1:693, 2:1756 Virginia Tech, 2:1132 Virgin Islands, 2:1771, 2:2121 Virgin Radio, 2:1922 Virtual Linguistic Campus, 2:1196 Vis¸an, Ruxandra, 2:1385 Visser, F. Th., 1:875, 1:882, 2:1127, 2:1290, 2:1342, 2:1695, 2:1697 Vitalis Blesensis (de Blois), 1:536 Viziana, Rafael Martı´n de, 1:984 Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca, 1:639, 1:1055 Vocabularium Saxonicum (Nowell), 1:640 Vocabulary, Consisting Principally of Accidental Errors in Pronunciation (Batchelor), 1:830 Vocabulary of English Place-Names (VEPN), 2:1136 Vocabulary of the Language of New South Wales in the Neighbourhood of Sydney (Dawes), 1:898 Vocˇadlo, Otakar, 2:1379 VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), 2:2141 Voice of America (VOA), 1:1015, 1:1101, 2:1895 voice recognition software, 1:1016 Voitl, Herbert, 1:189 Volta, Alessandro, 1:890 Vom Musikalisch-Scho¨nen (Hanslick), 2:1229
2256 Von Schneidemesser, Luanne, 2:1823, 2:1867 Vortigern, 1:363 Vosberg, Uwe, 1:852 Voyles, Joseph B., 1:143 Vulgarities of Speech Corrected, 1:831, 1:839, 1:840, 1:892 The Vulgar Tongue (Ducange), 2:2028
W Wace, 2:1282, 2:1682 Wagner, Albrecht, 2:1331 Wagner, Andreas, 1:331 Wagner, Christian, 2:1795–1796 Wagner, Heinrich, 2:1691, 2:1693, 2:1697 Wagner, Richard, 2:1218, 2:1229 Wagner, Susanne, 1:923 Waitangi, Treaty of, 2:1996 Waite, Greg, 1:640 Wakefield Master, 1:570–574 Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play, 1:35 Wakelin, Martyn, 2:1505, 2:1662, 2:1666, 2:1667, 2:1668 Walcott, Derek, 2:2109 Wales, 2:1977–1992 – attachment to local accent in, 2:1888 – border with England, 1:483, 1:495, 2:1977 – in Celtic language family, 1:213, 1:671 – compulsory schooling in, 1:954 – conquest of, 2:1978 – immigration and emigration, 2:1980, 2:1983, 2:1984 – Laws of Union and, 1:1023 – loss of initial /h/ in, 1:592 – move to English in, 2:1688, 2:2136 – population, 1:67 Wales, Katie, 1:736, 2:1266–1269 Walker, James A., 2:1866 Walker, John – aids to pronunciation, 1:944, 2:1904 – on Cockneys, 2:2015 – on diphthong ei, 1:833 – on glide insertion, 1:836 – on [h]-dropping, 1:837–838 – on Irish pronunciation, 2:2064, 2:2066 – Joseph Worcester and, 1:1012 – on MAT/MET merger, 1:831 – on MEET/MEAT contrast, 1:828 – on “received pronunciation”, 2:1902 – on STRUT/FOOT split, 1:72
Index Walker, Terry – on speech-related texts, 1:716 – on studying Early Modern English dialect, 1:672 – work on second person pronouns, 1:656–657, 1:704, 1:723, 1:725, 1:740–741, 2:1363, 2:1520 Wall, Arnold, 2:2053 Waller, Edmund, 1:985 Wallis, John, 1:225, 1:226, 1:1009, 2:1291, 2:1298–1300, 2:1301, 2:1882, 2:1892 Walloons, 1:688–689, 2:2061 Walters, J. Roderick, 2:1985, 2:1986 Walton, Izaak, 2:1883 Wampanoag, 2:1756, 2:1759 Wanderer, 1:393 Wang, William S.-Y., 2:1315–1316, 2:1546, 2:1548, 2:1549, 2:2063 Warburton, William, 1:1055 Ward, Gregory, 2:1475, 2:1478 Warden, John, 1:1011 Wærferth, Bishop of Worcester, 1:343, 1:345, 1:348, 1:394 Warkentyne, Henry J., 2:1864 Warner, Alan, 1:245 Warner, Anthony, 1:152–153, 1:748, 1:754, 2:1622 Warner, William, 1:777 Warren, Paul, 1:81 Warton, Thomas, 2:1182 Wa˚rvik, Brita, 1:247 Warwickshire, 1:41, 1:498 Wash, The, 1:492 Washington, DC, 2:1800, 2:1802, 2:1828, 2:1842 Washington, George, 2:1811, 2:1823 Watkins, Calvert, 2:1173 Watling Street, 2:1267 Watt, Dominic, 1:81 Watt, James, 1:890 Watts, Isaac, 1:831, 1:836, 1:839 Watts, Richard J., 1:205, 1:657–658, 1:911, 1:1010, 1:1022, 2:1195, 2:1257, 2:1662 Waugh, Linda R., 1:98 wave model of diffusion, 2:2035 Weber, Beatrix, 1:530 Webling, Wessell, 1:690 Webster, John, 1:245 Webster, Noah – American pronunciation and, 1:944 – American spelling and, 1:942, 2:1814, 2:1890–1892 – etymological aims, 1:895
Index – fame, 1:897 – lack of knowledge of linguistic currents, 2:1313 – as linguistic patriot, 1:893, 1:895 – on Native American languages, 2:1759 – on need for distinct American language, 1:68, 1:971, 2:1884–1885, 2:2137 – on purity of American English, 2:1812–1815 – use of British sources, 1:1012, 1:1023 Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2:1894 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary – as betrayal of Webster, 1:1023 – definition of unique, 1:976 – descriptive aims, 1:1058 – NCTE and, 1:973 – newspaper headlines about, 2:1319 – reception, 1:974, 1:1014, 1:1026, 1:1058 Wedmore, Treaty of (878), 1:25 Weerdigheyt der duytsch tael (Stevin), 1:984 Weevils in the Wheat (Perdue et al.), 2:1798, 2:1804 Wehr, Barbara, 2:1697 Weinert, Regina, 1:86, 1:94 Weinreich, Uriel, 2:1461, 2:1491, 2:2032 Weinstock, Horst, 1:184, 1:191 Wells, H. G., 2:2088 Wells, J. C., 1:829, 1:958 Wells, John – on Cockney, 2:2018, 2:2019, 2:2020, 2:2021 – defining of RP, 2:1901, 2:1911 – on Estuary English, 2:1916, 2:1924 – on features of working-class London English, 2:1921 – on the importance of London, 2:2037 – on Irish English, 2:1972 – on Late Modern English pronunciation, 2:2048 – on Northern English identity, 2:2038 – on RP vs. Estuary English, 2:1910, 2:1920 – on spread of London features, 2:1930 – on Welsh English, 2:1984 Welna, Jerzy, 1:130, 1:232, 1:432 Welsh – codification, 1:639 – decline of, 2:1981 – in family of Celtic languages, 1:687 – on the internet, 1:1112 – John Wallis on, 2:1299 – Old English loans in, 2:1977 – size of speaker community, 2:1984 – syntax, 2:1691, 2:1693, 2:1696, 2:1699
2257 Welsh English, 2:1977–1992 – Celtic substratum, 2:1360 – distinctive features, 2:1945 – features shared with South, 2:1946 – indirect questions in, 1:85 – Irish English and, 2:1985, 2:2046 – in McArthur’s model of World English, 2:1887 – media influence in, 1:1081 – multiple negation in, 1:932 – progressive forms in, 2:1689 – pronunciation of [l], 2:1931 – Sheridan’s attempt to correct errors of, 1:944 The Welsh Industrial Novel (Williams), 2:1988 Welsh Intermediate Education Act (1889), 2:1981 Welsh Language Act (1993), 2:1990 Welsh Language Board, 2:1990 Welsh Language Society, 2:1990 Welsh National Party, 2:1983, 2:1991 Welte, Werner, 1:183 Wenisch, Franz, 1:354, 1:359 Wenker, Georg, 1:920, 2:1841 Wermser, Richard, 1:610–611, 1:709 Wessex, 1:24, 1:342 West, Benjamin, 2:1811 West, Michael, 2:1746 West Africa, 1:52, 1:694, 1:695 West African English, 2:2093, 2:2102, 2:2136 West African languages, 1:693, 2:1318, 2:1771, 2:1834, 2:2141, 2:2143 West African Pidgin English, 2:1887, 2:2093 West Bengal, 2:2084 Western Samoa, 2:2114 West Germanic – case system, 1:12 – comparative suffixes, 1:14 – effects of stress accent on, 1:11 – emergence of English from, 1:20 – loss of passive forms, 1:15 – northern Middle English and, 1:42 – Old English dialectal differentiation and, 1:350, 2:1731 – phonology – consonant gemination, 1:6, 1:262 – Consonant Lengthening, 1:141 – Indo-European *o and *a, 1:5 – initial /sk/ clusters, 1:103 – i-umlaut, 1:10 – Luick on, 1:270
2258 – rhotacism of IE *s, 1:7–8 – a-umlaut, 1:268 – prosody, 1:120 – relation to North Germanic, 2:1725–1726 – strong verbs, 1:15 – toponyms, 1:216 – tribal migrations, 1:2 West Indies, see Caribbean English; individual islands Westinghouse, 1:1094 Westminster, 1:546 Westmorland, 1:495, 1:497, 1:672, 2:1733 Westphalia, 1:690 West Saxon Gospels – John, 1:303, 1:311 – late West Saxon dialect, 1:347 – Luke, 1:296, 1:299, 1:300, 1:305, 1:310 – Matthew, 1:304 West Saxon literary “standard” – Ælfric and, 1:346, 1:394 – corpus of texts, 1:26, 1:345–346 – English vernacular literacy and, 2:1281 – Middle English and, 1:520 – standardization criteria and, 1:375–377, 2:1445 – vocabulary, 1:354, 1:356–358, 1:1000 West Virginia, 2:1842, 2:1853 Wexford, County, 2:1966 Weydt, Heinrich, 1:653 Weyhe, Hans, 2:1337 Wheaton College, 2:1145 Whitby, 1:343 White, David L., 1:9, 1:259, 1:687 White, E. B., 1:980 White, Richard Grant, 1:972–973, 1:978 Whitelock, Dorothy, 2:1122 White Teeth (Smith), 2:1889 Whitney, William Dwight, 1:1014, 2:1291, 2:1313, 2:1848 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 1:99 Whythorne, Thomas, 2:1227 Wichmann, Søren, 2:1947 Widdowson, H. G., 2:2081 Wiemer, Bjo¨rn, 2:1570 Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Englischen Philologie, 2:1333 Wierzbicka, Anna, 1:171, 1:654 Wigger, Arndt, 2:1966 Wikberg, Kay, 1:816 Wikipedia, 2:2138–2139 Wiktionary, 1:1016 Wilbur, Terence H., 2:1532
Index Wilcockson, Colin, 1:204 Wildhagen, Karl, 2:1336–1337 Wiley, Bell I., 2:1801 Wilkins, John, 1:185, 1:245, 1:644, 1:1009, 2:1291, 2:1299 Willems, Dominic, 2:1569 William I, King of England, 1:21, 1:29, 2:1126, 2:1300, 2:1663, 2:1788, 2:1953, see also Norman Conquest William II, King of England, 2:1126 William of Malmesbury, 2:1264 William of Palerne, 2:1142 William of Shoreham, 1:417 Williams, Ann, 2:1916, 2:1918, 2:1919 Williams, Chris, 2:1989 Williams, Raymond, 1:989, 2:1988 Williams, Roger, 2:1763 Williams, Tara, 2:1170, 2:1176 “Will of Ælfgar”, 2:1499–1500, 2:1502, 2:1505 “Will of Ketel”, 2:1500–1501, 2:1502, 2:1504 Wilson, Thomas, 1:618, 1:623, 1:645, 1:792–793, 2:1713, 2:1720 Wilton, David, 2:1145 Wiltshire, 1:495, 1:498, 1:688, 2:1247 Winchester, 1:26, 1:27, 1:343, 1:344, 2:1269 Winchester Group – dialect, 1:26, 1:342 – English literacy and, 2:1442 – social network approach to, 2:1449 – standardization in, 1:26, 1:345–346, 1:375– 377, 1:381–382, 1:1000 – vocabulary, 1:354, 1:356–358, 1:1000 Windeatt, Barry, 1:191 Windisch, Ernst, 2:1330 Winer, Lise, 2:2125 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 2:1818 Winford, Donald, 2:2123 Wisbech, 2:1919, 2:2036 Wischer, Ilse, 2:1572, 2:1587 Wisconsin, 2:1841 Wisconsin English Language Survey, 2:1849 Wiseman, Nicholas, 2:1303 Withals, John, 1:642, 1:1052 Witherspoon, John, 1:893, 2:1840 Wodtko, Dagmar S., 2:1158 Wojtys´, Anna, 1:432 Wolfe, Patricia M., 1:233, 1:761 Wolff, Dieter, 1:432, 1:610 Wolfram, Walt, 2:1763, 2:1798, 2:1804, 2:1834, 2:1835, 2:1852 Wollmann, Alfred, 2:1706, 2:1715
Index Wolof, 2:1773 women, see gender (biological/cultural) Wood, Johanna L., 2:1447 Woods, Howard B., 2:1869 Wooing of our Lord, 1:558 Worcester, 1:343, 1:344, 2:2047 Worcester, Joseph, 1:1012 Worcestershire, 1:41, 1:444, 1:486–487, 1:498 Word ( journal), 2:1847 word-formation – affixation – in Contemporary English, 1:82, 1:136 – derivational, 2:1584–1585 – French loans, 1:45, 1:514, 2:1680–1681, 2:1790–1791 – Latin loans, 2:1710, 2:1712–1713, 2:1714–1715 – in Middle English, 1:461–462, 1:514 – Norse loans, 2:1735 – in Old English, 1:316–317, 1:353 – in scientific terminology, 1:74–75 – back-derivation, 1:135, 1:141, 1:430 – base invariancy and, 1:145 – blending, 1:137–138 – calques, 1:318–319, 1:368, 1:369 – closed-class words and, 1:731 – compounding, 1:135–136, 1:317–318, 1:460, 2:1867–1868 – concept of productivity, 1:461 – defined, 1:435 – in Germanic, 1:11 – language typology and, 1:138 – as “lexeme-formation”, 1:131 – lexicalization and, 2:1578, 2:1579–80 – prosody and, 1:118–119, 1:122, 1:123, 1:125, 1:127, 1:129 – vs. inflectional morphology, 1:132 – in Winchester vocabulary, 1:380 – zero-derivation, 1:82, 1:136–137, 1:142, 1:638 Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Kurath), 2:1842, 2:1843, 2:1844, 2:1845 Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus, 2:1173 Wordhoard, 1:810 Wordnik, 1:1016 word order – corpus linguistics and, 2:1361 – diachronic study of, 2:1360–1361 – discourse structure and, 1:467–468, 2:1344, 2:1476, 2:1480–1486 – glosses and, 2:1124 – language contact and, 2:1628
2259 – passive voice and, 2:1486–1487 – in regional and contact varieties, 1:85, 1:152 – see also under syntax of individual periods Word order and information structure project, 2:1344 Words and Their Uses (White), 1:972–973 Words and Ways of American English (Pyles), 1:974 Words in English Website, 2:1196 Wordsworth, William, 1:877 WordWeb Software, 1:1016 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 2:1797 The World (Cambridge), 2:1762 World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), 2:1936, 2:1937–1943, 2:1947, 2:1948 WorldCat (website), 2:1144 World English, see global English World Englishes ( journal), 2:1749, 2:2141 Worlde of Wordes (Florio), 1:1052 Worlde of Words (Florio), 2:1195 World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, 1:167 World War I, 1:888, 2:1250 World War II, 1:1092, 2:2116 Worlidge, John, 1:646 Worms, 1:1042 Wrenn, Charles L., 1:233, 1:375 Wright, Elizabeth Mary, 1:2, 1:38, 1:255, 1:421 Wright, Joseph – Alexander Ellis and, 1:920 – dialect residualisms and, 1:41, 1:43 – English Dialect Dictionary, 1:67, 1:915–916, 1:943, 1:1013, 1:1057 – interest in social setting of language, 2:1310 – Middle English grammar, 1:38, 1:421 – Neogrammarians and, 2:1306–1307 – the OED and, 2:1155, 2:1291 – Old English grammar, 1:2, 1:255 – see also English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) Wright, Laura, 1:240, 1:475, 1:526, 1:530, 2:1446–1447, 2:1660, 2:1661–1662, 2:1675 Wright, Roger, 2:1181, 2:1234, 2:1236, 2:1246, 2:1253 Wright, Susan, 1:875, 2:2098 Wright, Thomas, 2:1238 Wrightson, Keith, 1:716 Writing Lesson (Le´vi-Strauss), 2:1207 Writing Scholars Companion (Ekwall), 1:832 writing systems – allophonic variation and, 1:260 – classification, 1:38, 1:227–229 – doctrine of littera, 1:229–230
2260 – history and, 1:234 – musical notation, 2:1217 – non-alphabetic symbols in, 1:231–232 – online resources for, 2:1141 – sociolinguistics of, 1:233–234 – speech and, 1:224–226, 1:232–233, 2:1248 – standardization and, 1:521, 1:523, 1:621 – terminology, 1:227, 1:229–231 – vernacular features and, 2:1803 Wroth, Mary, Lady, 1:796, 1:865 WTO (World Trade Organization), 2:2138 Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, 1:343, 1:345, 1:347, 1:358, 1:394, 1:395, 1:437, 1:556 Wulfstan Homilies, 1:298, 1:303, 1:305, 2:1620 Wu¨lker, Richard Paul, 2:1330, 2:1334 Wunderli, Peter, 2:1924 Wurff, Wim van der, 1:66, 1:159, 1:515, 1:517, 2:1343, 2:1344 Wuthering Heights, 2:1537 Wyatt, Thomas, 1:726, 1:805 Wycherley, William, 1:627 Wycliffe, John, 1:421, 1:538, 1:577, 1:1040, 2:1449, 2:1710, 2:2048 Wycliffite texts, 1:524, 1:538, 1:577 Wyld, Henry Cecil – on BBC Advisory Committee, 1:1092 – contributions to historical linguistics, 2:1291, 2:1307 – on Early Modern use of second person pronoun, 1:736 – on German scholarship, 2:1332–1333 – interest in regional pronunciation, 2:1439 – on modern English phonology, 1:828 – on Proclamation of Henry III, 2:2047 – on raising, 2:1972 – on Received Pronunciation, 2:1900 – on routine formulae, 1:190 Wynn, M., 2:1988 Wynnere and Wastoure, 1:564
Index Yale University Library, 1:35 Yallop, Colin, 2:1999 Yamamoto, Tadao, 2:1415 Yamazaki, Shunji, 2:2003 Ya´n˜ez-Bouza, Nuria, 1:75, 1:946, 2:1404 Yang, Lynne, 1:871, 1:872–873 Yanito, 2:1746, 2:1747, 2:1748 Yano, Yasukata, 2:2142 Yartseva, Viktoria N., 2:1381 Yates, Simeon, 1:1111 Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English, 2:1989 Yes-No Questions and Answers in Shakespeare’s Plays (Wikberg), 1:816 York, 1:213, 1:217, 1:342, 1:343, 1:344, 1:358, 2:1266, 2:1268 York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), 2:1140 York “mystery” plays, 1:570 York-Newcastle-Holland Symposia on the History of English Syntax, 2:1344 Yorkshire – “Canadian Raising” in, 2:2055 – Deira and, 2:1952 – deontic obligation in, 1:90 – dialects, 1:68 – language contact in, 2:1268 – Norse influence on dialect, 2:1954 – Norse place-names in, 2:1267, 2:1726 – North and East Ridings, 1:495, 2:1430, 2:1733 – sat/stood for sitting/standing, 1:80 – West Riding, 1:68, 1:441, 1:486–487, 1:491 – witness depositions from, 1:672 Yorkshire Folk-Talk (Morris), 1:67 York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE), 2:1484, 2:1517, 2:1695–1696 Ypey, Annaeus, 2:1342 Yugoslavia, 2:1385
X Xekalakis, Elefteria, 1:1070 Xhosa, 2:2115, 2:2117
Y Yale Book of American Verse, 2:1314 Yale University, 1:1014, 2:1291, 2:1313, 2:1316, 2:1376
Z Zachrisson, Robert Eugen, 1:233, 2:1333 Zambia, 2:1886, 2:1887, 2:2114, 2:2136 Zambrano, Nahirana, 1:906 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 2:1223, 2:1224 Zeitschrift fu¨r Psychologie, 2:2138 Zeller, Christine, 2:1864 Zephaniah, Benjamin, 2:1778
Index Zettersten, Arne, 2:1359 Zgusta, Ladislav, 1:1051 Zhirmunsky, V. M., 2:1381, 2:1382, 2:1383 Zimbabwe, 2:1886, 2:2114, 2:2136 Zulu, 1:41, 2:2115, 2:2117 Zupitza, Julius, 2:1326, 2:1330
2261 Zur Geographie des mittelenglischen Wortschatzes, 1:501 Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN), 1:208, 1:249, 1:1064, 1:1072, 2:1139, 2:1465, 2:1512, 2:1516 Zwicky, Arnold M., 1:168, 1:200