Corpus Of Early English Correspondence Research Articles

Usage and precept in eighteenth-century English object-clause complementisers

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the use of zero and that as connectors for object clauses in eighteenth-century English. Previous approaches have shown that the use of zero increased in late Middle English and became well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in speech-based text-types. Our own research, based on the evidence of The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, has shown that in the mid-seventeenth century zero was well beyond the mid-range stage of lexical diffusion (73%) with the five high frequency verbs to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope. Chronologically, it has been shown that progress of the zero innovation was thwarted in the eighteenth century, which has been attributed to the effect of prescriptivism. In this paper, we intend to throw light on this issue by tracking the courses of zero and that during the eighteenth century in both usage and precept. With this purpose we rely on two sources of information. On the one hand, a precept corpus containing a selection of grammars published in Britain in 1681–1800. Usage, on the other, has been surveyed in light of the evidence of The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler. Our aim is to assess the existence of a correlation between usage and precept in the expression of object clauses in this period with the following objectives: i) to analyse the use and distribution of zero and that clauses among grammarians; ii) to evaluate the incidence of the phenomenon in correspondence, as an input mirroring the vernacular; and iii) to assess the role of the grammarians’ statements in the propagation of the marked conjunction over the period.

Prescriptivist attempts at a spelling reform in Early Modern English: sociolinguistic and stylistic routes and rates of adoption

ABSTRACT Some late Renaissance scholars, like Smith (1568); Hart (1569; 1570); Bullokar (1580); Mulcaster (1582), attempted to reform English spelling to reflect the pronunciation changes resulting from the Great Vowel Shift. Their goal was to align letters and phonology by devising a more stable and predictable new system. This study explores the impact and diffusion of these spelling proposals. It examines texts from 1300 to 1700, written by authors from different socio-demographic and biological backgrounds, and across various genres, registers and text-types. The sources used as linguistic materials are the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, an archival data source of prose pieces representing different genres from 1150 to 1500 and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a collection of 4,970 authored documents written from 1410 to 1681 by informants from different social ranks. This study may allow us to trace the sociolinguistic and stylistic route and rate of adoption (if any) followed by these attempts at reforming the English spelling system within processes of diffusion of linguistic innovations at the level of orthography, as well as to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in past communities.

Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling Markedness

Abstract Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.

Charting orthographical reliability in a corpus of English historical letters

Abstract Research into orthography in the history of English is not a simple venture. The history of English spelling is primarily based on printed texts, which fail to capture the range of variation inherent in the language; many manuscript phenomena are simply not found in printed texts. Manuscript-based corpora would be the ideal research data, but as this is resource-intensive, linguists use editions that have been produced by non-linguists. Many editions claim to retain original spellings, but in practice text is always normalized at the graph level and possibly more so. This does not preclude using such a corpus for orthographical research, but there has been no systematic way to determine the philological reliability of an edited text. In this paper we present a typological methodology we are developing for the evaluation of orthographical quality of edition-based corpora, with the aim of making the best use of bad data in the context of editions and manuscript practices. As a case study, we apply this methodology to the Early Modern and Late Modern English sections of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence.

“Now to my distress”

AbstractIt is argued that shame has become increasingly important as a mechanism of social control in Western societies while our awareness of shame has simultaneously decreased. This paper explores the functions of the lexemesshame,disgraceandignominyin the eighteenth-century section of theCorpus of Early English Correspondenceand investigates how shame-inducing situations were discussed in letter-writing. Direct expressions of shame emerge particularly as formulaic apologies and reflect breached social conventions, honour, inadequacy and immorality. Shame discourse in the two case studies, however, proved to be context-dependent, evasive and euphemistic, and shame was expressed through a range of negative emotions. An element of discomfort in eighteenth-century shame discourse indicates that shame had taboo connotations, but the formulaic presence of shame and its connection to the cultural keyword of honour underlines its role as a mechanism of social control.

Royal language and reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence

Abstract This paper investigates the formal and functional dimensions of reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence. It focuses on how letter-writers report the utterances – spoken, thought and written – of high-status sources (namely, the king or queen), in order to assess how the early modern reporting system compares with the present-day equivalent. The early modern values of authenticity, verbatim reporting and verbal authority are examined. The results taken from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) suggest that early modern writers prefer to present royal language using indirect reports with semi-conventionalised linguistic features that clearly mark the authority of the source. Only an elite few, associated with the Court, use direct speech. The paper suggests that reporting practices distinguish between speech and writing, with the latter showing nascent signs of anxiety over verbatim reporting. I argue that these trends arise from the larger cultural shift from oral to written records taking place throughout the early modern period.

Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence

The paper introduces our new project on diachronic sociolinguistics, focusing on the problems of compiling a representative corpus for this purpose. We study long-term linguistic change in the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods (1420-1680) in a computer-readable corpus of personal letters, which is designed specifically for the purposes of sociohistorical research. When completed, the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence will comprise some 1.5 million running words representing all the literate social ranks of the time, both sexes, and different ages and occupations. In our case, the issues that a corpus compiler must deal with include the coverage of all the sociolinguistically relevant categories of data, authenticity of extant materials, and the quality of editing.

Zero that-clauses in the history of English. A historical sociolinguistic approach (1424–1681)

AbstractThe present paper traces the history ofzeroandthatas competing links for object clauses in the history of English from chronological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Even though the zero link is sporadically attested in Old English, the rise of the zero complementizer takes place in late Middle English and is well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, becoming more frequent in speech-based text types (trials, sermons) or in texts representing the oral mode of expression (fiction, comedies). The use of this construction is then observed to diminish drastically in the eighteenth century, plausibly as a result of the prescriptive bias of grammarians (Warner 1982; Fanego 1990; Rissanen 1991, Rissanen 1999; Finegan and Biber 1995). Our analysis is based on five high frequency verbs,to know,to think,to say,to tellandto hope, and their syntactic behaviour in theParsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, especially in the periods 1424–1499, 1500–1569, 1570–1639 and 1640–1681. Our approach aims at showing progress of the zero link along the S curve in these four periods, before it became thwarted in the eighteenth century. We also aim at plotting the diffusion of zerothat-clauses against the social hierarchy of the period in order to detect (i) the existence of social stratification for this variant, and, if such be the case, (ii) the social group or groups that were leading the diffusion of the change in the different chronological stages, thus (iii) tracing the social origin and direction of the change as diffusingfrom beloworfrom abovein sociolinguistic terms.

Measuring productivity diachronically: nominal suffixes in English letters, 1400–1600

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such ashapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay & Baayen (2002) – to provide quantitative and qualitative descriptions of changes in the productivity of native -nessand borrowed -ity, -cion, -ageand -mentin Early Modern English. Ultimately, the study argues that diachronic productivity is best evaluated with a multifactor analysis, including measures of suffixal decomposability, aggregation of new derivatives and evidence of hybridization. It also suggests that increased use of neologisms with borrowed suffixes in Early Modern English might be explained by the increasing transparency of these suffixes in derivatives during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

“That thought never ytt entered my harte”: Rhetoricalities of Sincerity in Early Modern English

That the first documented appearance of the word “sincerity” in English comes from the sixteenth century is related to ideological developments in court culture, theatre and (most importantly) the Reformation. Orientating itself at the intersection of current developments in rhetorical theory and historical linguistics, this study investigates how these macro-cultural factors had implications for the “everyday” language of early modern England. Using material extracted from the 2.2 million-word Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence , several “rhetoricalities” are located and described as evidence for the ways in which sincerity was performed, not in prescriptive manuals, but in actual period letter-exchanges.

Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English

Many corpus linguists make the tacit assumption that part-of-speech frequencies remain constant during the period of observation. In this article, we will consider two related issues: (1) the reliability of part-of-speech tagging in a diachronic corpus, and (2) shifts in tag ratios over time. The purpose is both to serve the users of the corpus by making them aware of potential problems, and to obtain linguistically interesting results. We use noun and pronoun ratios as diagnostics indicative of opposing stylistic tendencies, but we are also interested in testing whether any observed variation in the ratios could be accounted for in sociolinguistic terms. The material for our study is provided by the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), which consists of 2.2 million running words covering the period 1415–1681. The part-of-speech tagging of the PCEEC has its problems, which we test by reannotating the corpus according to our own principles and comparing the two annotations. While there are quite a few changes, the mean percentage of change is very small for both nouns and pronouns. As for variation over time, the mean frequency of nouns declines somewhat, while the mean frequency of pronouns fluctuates with no clear diachronic trend. However, women consistently use more pronouns than men, while men use more nouns than women. More fine-grained distinctions are needed to uncover further regularities and possible reasons for this variation.

The diffusion of language change in real time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change

AbstractA major issue in the study of language change is the degree to which individual speakers participate in ongoing linguistic changes as these progress over time. In this study, we examine the hypothesis, suggested by research based on the apparent-time model, that in any given period most people are neither progressive nor conservative with regard to ongoing changes, but rather fall between these polarities. Our data come from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which spans over 270 years. A computational model was developed to establish which language users were progressive and which conservative with respect to several ongoing changes that progressed in real time between the early 15th and late 17th centuries. The changes studied ranged from morpheme replacements to more abstract structural patterns. Our results indicate that the degree to which language users participated in changes in progress depended on the type of language change analyzed, the stage of development of the change, and the rate of diffusion of the process over time. The model also enabled the identification of groups of leaders of linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart England.

“Positive Appraisal” as a Core Meaning of well: A Corpus-Based Analysis in Middle and Early Modern English Data

This article unravels the complexity of the historical development of the pragmatic marker well. Using data from three historical corpora (Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Corpus of Early English Correspondence and Corpus of English Dialogues) a detailed description is provided of the contextualised semantic-pragmatic meanings of well in different periods. The study shows how the use of well in specific contexts allowed the form to gradually adopt increasingly pragmatic meanings from the Middle English period onwards. A detailed overview provides evidence for the thesis that interpersonal and textual functions were intertwined from the beginning and hence that the linear view of an evolution from propositional over textual to interpersonal meanings oversimplifies reality.

Variation and change in patterns of self-reference in early English correspondence

The pronoun I indexes the speaker or writer in place and time but also situates him or her in the moral order as the person responsible for what is uttered (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990). Consequently, this paper asks (1) what gentlemen of the Early and Late Modern England could say about themselves in the first person and (2) whether there were any register or diachronic differences in typical self-reference. This study relies on integrationist social theory and employs a set of quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of recurrent word clusters extracted from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. The results point to increasing self-reference and the prominence of mental verb clusters that often serve interpersonal functions.

The speaker’s voice

In present-day English, well and now function as pragmatic markers with a wide range of text-structuring and interpersonal meanings. Both markers are used as topic-changers and serve as a means to signal speaker-attitudes or to gain a shared level of understanding between speaker and addressee on the interpersonal level. Whereas well is generally back-looking, now directs the hearer to the upcoming topic (e.g. Aijmer 2002). Because well and now have developed from a similar — adverbial — origin, this paper will examine to what extent the propositional source of the two markers serves a role in their later semantic-pragmatic development. Our aim is to examine, by means of a historical corpus study, to what extent the development of well and now has been directed by underlying theories of grammaticalisation — implying semantic bleaching and pragmatic strengthening — and (inter)subjectification (Traugott 1999). Specific attention will be paid to contexts in which speaker and addressee have diverging views and where the use of a pragmatic marker can help in expressing personal stance and in creating interpersonal ties with the addressee. The material for this paper is taken from three historical corpora which contain speech-based data, viz. the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Sampler) (CEECS), and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED).

Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England

Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education, 2003. Pp. xvi, 266.Historical sociolinguistics is another outcome of the long-term endeavor by Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, from the English Department at the University of Helsinki, to “put sociolinguistics to the test of time” (p. 202) by reconstructing the English language in some of its social and historical contexts, here in the Tudor and Stuart periods (Early Modern English). This enterprise has also allowed the authors to refine the methodology of historical sociolinguistics: first by confronting both the fragmentary nature of historical materials and the difficulties of socially reconstructing the past – the “bad data problem,” in the words of Labov – and second by looking for the solutions afforded by ancillary disciplines like corpus linguistics and social history. In fact, the authors' research is built, on the one hand, upon the Corpus of Early English correspondence, a collection of personal letters (nearly 2.7 million words from 1410 to 1681) compiled specifically for historical sociolinguistic research, which ensures the reliable reconstruction of both linguistic and extralinguistic variables, as well as the commonsense use of the findings of social history, which facilitates access to period-specific information in the process of reconstructing the sociohistorical circumstances that may have affected linguistic variation and change in the past. Corpus linguistics and social history, in the view of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, scientifically legitimate historical sociolinguistics by conferring upon it “empirical” and “historical” validity.

How to Handle Small Samples: Bootstrap and Bayesian Methods in the Analysis of Linguistic Change

Estimating the relative frequencies of linguistic features is a fundamental task in linguistic computation. As the amount of text or speech that is available from a given user of the language typically varies greatly, and the sample sizes tend to be small, the most straightforward methods do not always give the most informative answers. Bootstrap and Bayesian methods provide techniques for handling the uncertainty in small samples. We describe these techniques for estimating frequencies from small samples, and show how they can be applied to the study of linguistic change. As a test case, we use the introduction of the pronoun you as subject in the data provided by the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c. 1410-1681).

Terttu nevalainen. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Pp. x + 176. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, Pb £12.00, Hb £40.00.

This is an exceptional textbook from one of the leading scholars of Early Modern English. Well-structured, clearly written, using an outstanding range of carefully chosen literary and non-literary examples, the book's 10 chapters would perfectly fit a 10-week undergraduate or taught MA course given to students with some prior linguistic training. More literary-minded students, such as those who are likely to be encountered in an Anglophone context, would probably need more time, and some informed teaching, to get the most out of the riches on offer here. Terttu Nevalainen is a professor at Helsinki University, which for the past two decades has been one of the places for the historical study of the English language. Helsinki's particular specialism has been the study of linguistic variation via the use of computer corpuses. The resources of the main Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, subsidiary corpuses on early American and Older Scots and Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg's recent Corpus of Early English Correspondence, lie behind this work, giving it a depth and authority rare in teaching texts.

Language change in adulthood

This article, based on the electronic Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), argues that adults change their language, at least in quantitative terms. By studying the shift from -th to -s of the third person singular suffix in Early Modern English, the author shows that the relative frequencies of the two variants underwent changes within individual lifespans. The article also claims that the shift followed both the communal and generational patterns of change. Historical letters are shown to be excellent material for the study of language change from a longitudinal perspective, because many such letters have survived for long periods of time. On the whole, letters form good data for research in historical sociolinguistics, since the backgrounds of the people involved (both as writers and as recipients) can be traced and used for analysis.

The diffusion of subject YOU: A case study in historical sociolinguistics

Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), this study describes how the second-person object form you diffused among the population of England during the late middle and early modern period (1350–1710). After the take-off in c. 1480, you replaced the old subject form ye very rapidly, in about three generations of speakers. This article shows that this was a change from below in terms of social awareness, because you was preferred in oral genres and informal registers in the earliest stages of its use. The study suggests that the social origin of you was among the middle ranks, and women led the change in its critical period of diffusion. No specific region has been found as the origin of this change, but London and the Court adopted it before the North and East Anglia.The research reported here was supported in part by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence funding for the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.