Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change by Richard J. Whitt

Abstract

REVIEWS Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change. Ed. by R J. W. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, ) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. . viii+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. Over the last forty years ‘genre’ has been one of the most important concepts in historical linguistics, at least in historical sociolinguistics (see Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, ‘Historical Sociolinguistics: Origins, Motivations, and Paradigms’, in e Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. by Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Malden: Blackwell, ), pp. – (p. )). It is thus the laudable aim of this volume to provide a state-ofthe -art overview of the study of genre as an influence on language change as well as the locus of language change, and to supplement other collections of papers on this topic. e book consists of fourteen chapters originally presented at a conference at the University of Nottingham in April . e collection is divided into three sections: Part  on ‘Methods in Diachronic Corpus Linguistics’; Part  on ‘Genre and Diachronic Corpora’; and Part  on ‘Genre-Based Analyses of Linguistic Phenomena’. A richly referenced and intellectually comprehensive introduction by the book’s editor offers a readable and insightful definition of genre in general and the particular challenges faced by addressing these issues in the compilation and mining of diachronic corpora. at the very concept of genre is still under discussion is demonstrated by the fact that, despite the remarks in the general introduction, most papers give their own definition as well. Following on from the general introduction, the first part begins with a contribution by Konstantin Niehaus and Stephan Elspaß, who introduce their corpus project on nineteenth-century German, a project with a special focus on the balance of regional variation and register variation. ey illustrate the benefits of their corpus with a case study of three German grammatical features, one from syntax, one from derivational morphology, and one from inflectional morphology. Because of their corpus design, they can provide evidence that regional variation in German was rather pluriareal than pluricentric and that the view ‘from below’ uncovers more variation for research into the history of modern German. e next chapter, by Bryan Jurish, introduces the formal bases of DiaCollo, an open-source tool for diachronic collocation profiling. ird, Eric Atwell presents a range of corpus resources and their applications developed for classical and modern Arabic, and how they are used despite their different genres and variants to train machine learning of modern texts. e second part consists of two papers, the first by Irma Taavitsainen on the change in genre in English medical writing between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the second by Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber, who show with convincing detail how language change actually happens in the genre of academic writing, a genre that is generally seen to be ‘resistant to change’ (p. ). e grammatical changes under scrutiny by the authors did not originate in speech, as  Reviews their cross-genre comparison shows. is contribution leads into the third part, starting with Georgia Fragaki and Dionysis Goutsos tracking the actual language use between H variety katharévousa and L variety dhimotikí in Greek over nine decades in different genres, showing the changes and their dependence on genre. It is followed by Florian Haas on the increase of the impersonal use of ‘you’ independent of the overall use of second-person pronouns in different genres in English. Ole Schützler maps out the frequencies and semantics of the concessive conjunctions ‘although’, ‘though’, and ‘even though’ in American English. Karolina Rudnicka traces the relation between sentence length, genre, and the syntactic usage of ‘in order to’ in English. Whereas up to this point the third part presents sound studies on linguistic features in corpora and their dependence on genre, the second half of Part  focuses a little more on corpus design itself. e preferred use of single-genre over multigenre corpora is discussed in Carola Trips and Achim Stein’s paper on the rise of the recipient passive in English in the contact situation of Middle English and Old French, an approach similar to that of Andrés Enrique-Arias, who tests the pros and cons...