Early Modern English Period Research Articles

On the history of ephemeral conditional subordinators: Evidence from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English

This article discusses the history of a selection of ephemeral adverbial subordinators (Kortmann 1997, 301), i.e., those that mainly originated in the Early Modern English period (16th -17th centuries) but whose subordinating function, however, either became obsolete rather quickly or was subject to further restrictions beyond this period. This phenomenon was particularly frequent in the CCC relations, these are: causality, conditionality and concessivity. The present article analyses a selected number ephemeral conditional subordinators and compares them with the prototypical conditional subordinator if. The methodology is corpus-based, and I examine the data in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. The examples discussed reveal that ephemeral conditional subordinators are scarce and serve as a clear illustration of the concept of ephemerality in the realm of adverbial subordinators.

Illuminating the problem of blue verditer synthesis in the early modern English period: chemical characterisation and mechanistic understanding

We present a study into early modern English production of blue verditer, an early synthetic copper-based blue pigment chemically analogous to azurite. Verditers have been identified in numerous wall and easel paintings. While initial documentation occurs in the mid 1500s and production recipes were documented by the 17th c., the synthesis was known to be unreliable. This study replicates historical and recent scientific work on blue verditer and represents a significant advance in our understanding of verditer production and its challenges. Procedures for verditer synthesis are drawn from both 17th c. documentation and 20th c. replication work. The effects of temperature, copper and carbonate sources, solution stirring, copper ion concentration, and atmospheric composition are studied in order to elucidate the mechanism of synthesis and explain its unreliability in early modern refineries. Products are characterised by polarised light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and powder X-Ray diffraction. Rouaite, a green basic copper nitrate, is for the first time confirmed as a product of the refiners’ synthesis and a precursor to blue verditer in laboratory syntheses. This result problematises the blanket identification of green verditer as basic copper carbonate and provides important clues to the mechanism for blue verditer synthesis. Solution chemistry and ion equilibria allow us to explain the route by which rouaite is first formed and then converted to blue verditer. Conditions favouring blue verditer production are also clarified further. Although it is commonly stated that low temperatures are required for blue verditer production, blue verditer is produced here at a range of ambient temperatures. The reaction is found instead to be controlled by solution equilibria and heavily favoured by high partial pressures of carbon dioxide. Alongside archival materials about refining and verditer production, these results are contextualised and explanations for the unreliability of historical synthesis are proposed.

Some notes on negated and quantified objects in Middle English and Early Modern English

AbstractIn this paper, I present a novel corpus investigation of quantified and negated objects in the Middle English and Early Modern English period, which is embedded within the wider language change scenario from linear OV to linear VO in the history of English. It will be shown that evidence for preverbal positioning of such objects is mostly limited to translated texts in Middle English in the PPCME2 corpus, and that by late Middle English, most of the hits consist of negated elements, as shown in the PCEEC corpus, which consists of native texts. The different constraints governing spell out of positive objects in Old English and Middle English are discussed and compared to the licensing of negated and quantified objects. The data provided in this paper constitute further evidence for Ingham's (2000, 2002, 2007) analysis of preposed negated objects in late ME and their correlation with the Negative Cycle, and complement previous investigations on negated and quantified objects in Middle English and Early Modern English.

INVOLUTION OF NEGATIVE CONCORD IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECT

The paper studies the history of multiple negation in English. The historical development of negation markers follows Jespersen’s Cycle and includes five completed stages that cover the transfer from the [+NC] model in Old English via [-NC]/[+NC] in Middle English and Early Modern English to [+NC] in Present-Day English. The loss of negative concord in the Early Modern English period was due to a change in the deep structure of the propositional negation. Northern dialects, where contacts with the Scandinavian languages were the most intensive, are a possible source of accelerating the emergence of the rule for non-use of multiple negation in English. However, in the Early Modern English period there is a shift in the leaders of language change, the proponents of the rule being men occupied in professional activities at the royal court in London, especially those who tried to improve their social status, so the involution of multiple negation is a language change ‘from above’. The process was completed in the newly created English standard before the end of the 17th century, although in some non-standard variants, multiple negation continues to be the norm even at present. Prescriptive grammars of the 18th century, therefore, required the use of forms that had already become the usual means for negation marking for the speakers of “standard” English in the previous two centuries.

The particle forth during the Early Modern English period: Linguistic interferences with the particles on and out

ABSTRACT Phrasal verbs formed with forth spread within the linguistic system up to the Early Modern English (EModE) period when they started to decrease in use as a result of internal mechanisms of change and linguistic competition with other particles such as on and out (Brinton 1988; Hiltunen 1994; Akimoto 2006; Thim 2006; De Smet 2010). Despite widespread knowledge, no studies have examined quantitatively the single steps forth followed over the years or questioned the role performed by productivity and processes of semantic specialisation of single instances in the processes of replacement. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap. The study has been undertaken on the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), which is a multi-genre corpus covering the EModE period and, specifically, the years 1560–1760 (Kytö & Walker 2006). The analysis proves that the particle forth shows limited productivity, which created the conditions for processes of interference and replacement. The lexical context favoured the semantic specialisation of the particles on and out which stimulated the retraction of forth.

The Emergence and Loss of the English Minor Complementizerstillanduntil

This article examines the development of the subordinators till and until as minor complementizers in the Late Middle English and Early Modern English periods. An analysis of data obtained from a number of sources shows that till/ until underwent a process of secondary grammaticalization, emerging as complementizers introducing clauses governed by the desiderative predicate long. The findings further suggest that the use of till/ until-clauses with long was the result of a process of lexical diffusion from the semantically related pattern think ( it) long till/until-clause (in the sense of ‘to seem or appear long, to be wearisome (to a person) (until something happens)’). In Late Modern English, till/until-clauses following long were lost and replaced by competing patterns with to-infinitives and for. . .to-infinitives, the latter emerging at the time as a new complement type. The article discusses the motivations and broader implications of the obsolescence of till/until-complements, which failed to spread to other members of the class of verbs of “desire,” such as desire, thirst, or yearn, and thus remained at the margins of the English system of complementation.

New methods for analysing diachronic suffix competition across registers

AbstractThis paper tracks stylistic variation in the use of two roughly synonymous suffixes, the Romance -ityand the native -ness, during the Early Modern English period. We seek to verify from a statistical viewpoint the claims ofRodríguez-Puente (2020), who reports on a decrease of -nessin favour of -ityin registers representative of the speech-written and formal-informal continua at that time. To this end, we develop new methods of statistical and visual analysis that enable diachronic comparisons of competing processes across subcorpora, building upon an earlier method bySäily and Suomela (2009). Our results confirm that -itygained ground first in written registers and then spread towards speech-related registers, and we are able to time this change more accurately thanks to a novel periodisation. We also provide strong statistical support indicating that the proportion of -itywas significantly higher in legal registers than in other registers.

Functional Transposition of ‘ON’ from a Diachronic Perspective

The paper represents a distinctive attempt to trace the development of the preposition and the adverb ‘on’ as the initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on their evolution throughout 16 historical time spans – since 850 and up to the present time. The research is based on 7 954 Old English, 2 368 Middle English, 4 251 Early Modern English examples, which have been obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and analyzed without applying any corpus software; 174 581 examples of Late Modern English from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, which have been processed by means of the Lancsbox software tool; and the statistical data on 7 118 454 examples of Present-Day English retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The paper attests that ‘on’ is formed at the first stage (before 850) of the Old English period as the preposition and at the next stage (850–950) is transposed into the category of the adverb, which is characterized by a further slight increase in the statistics and stabilization of its correlation with the preposition ‘on’. Correlation between the categories had remained stable up to the Early Modern English period, when the category of the adverb has started its sustainable growth, which is currently being observed in the English language. The paper proves that in Early Modern English the process of functional transposition is superseded by an utterly new stage of lexicalization which leads to formation of phrasal verbs.

Functional Transposition of After from a Diachronic Perspective

The paper aims at tracing the origin of the preposition, adverb, and conjunction after, starting with the first examples registered before 850; distinguishing the primary and transposed categories; and reconstructing the process of functional transposition in general. The analysis is undertaken on the basis of the examples, which have been manually selected from the HCET and the CLMET and have undergone the following PoS tagging, and the statistical data retrieved from the COHA and the BNC. It is proved that after emerges as the preposition and transposes into the adverb and conjunction. The preposition, which predominates throughout Old English, loses its position in favor of the adverb in the second half of the Middle English period. Later, it stabilizes the correlation, which remains more or less consistent up to now. The adverb reaches its peak in Early Modern English, then it starts rapid declension, and now its quantity is close to null. The conjunction, being neglected up to the middle of the Early Modern English period, starts its increase and is at the peak in Present-Day English. It testifies that functional transposition, which is undeservingly disregarded in linguistics, is still remaining in progress for fundamental and newly-coined lexical units.

The sociopragmatic nature of interjections in Early Modern English drama comedy

Abstract Interjections have been studied for all periods in the history of English, ranging from the study of Old English exclamations such as hwaet (Brinton 2017) to the pragmatic functions of forms such as oops in Present Day English (Lutzky and Kehoe 2017). The Early Modern English (EModE) period represents a turning point as it witnessed an increase in dialogic and speech-related text types, including drama comedy and trial proceedings. Nevertheless, despite recent advances in the compilation and especially the sociopragmatic annotation of corpora, EModE pragmatic markers have not been studied extensively over the last decade. This article addresses this gap by offering an investigation into the sociopragmatic nature of interjections in EModE drama comedy. It is based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus which includes a total of 242,561 words from the period 1500 to 1760. Taking a data-driven, form-to-function mapping approach, this study explores the use of interjections in the Drama Corpus with a focus on their distribution according to sociopragmatic variables. The aim of this study is to contribute to reaching a more comprehensive understanding of pragmatic marker use in EModE.

Loss of intersective gradience as the lifeboat of a dying construction. An analysis of the diachronic change of causativebring

AbstractThis paper focusses on diachronic processes which lead to the disambiguation between different constructions involving the same verb. It follows the development ofbringas a periphrastic causative over the course of the Early Modern and Late Modern English periods and compares it to the development of otherbringconstructions. In a corpus-based analysis, it utilizes measures of cue strength as well as collostructional analysis to determine whether reflexive objects, negation, modals or the passive are cues strongly associated with the dying periphrastic causative XbringcauseYto-inf. Results indicate that the construction indeed increasingly attracts reflexive objects in combination with a modal or negation. This finding is interpreted as an indication that non-prototypical verbal properties developing into strong cues for a construction may serve to make a rare construction more salient and thus easier to recognize and process. Furthermore, the construction’s restriction to reflexive patients vastly reduces variability in the object slot.

Etymological Spellings in William Caxton’s Translations

ABSTRACT A number of Latinate words in English experienced the etymologising of spelling in the Early Modern English period: <doute> and <dette> in Middle English, for example, obtained <b>, resulting in <doubt> and <debt> respectively. With the aim of exploring the initial process of, and the motives behind, the etymologising of English spelling forms, this study investigates William Caxton’s Paris and Vienne and Reynard the Fox, together with their probable source texts in French and Dutch. It appears that English was already immersed in the environment of etymological respelling in Caxton’s age. Although some of his spellings were etymological and others were non-etymological, he does not seem to have hesitated to introduce etymological ones when he faced corresponding etymological forms in the French source. On the whole, however, the tendency is not yet consistent in late Middle English, indicating how important it is to discuss different lexical items one by one.

Prepositional verb/simplex alternation in the Late Modern English period: evidence from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey

ABSTRACT The present study aims to describe the prepositional verb/simplex alternation in the Late Modern English period (LModE) and, specifically, in the period 1750-1850. The intention is to examine the semantic prosody exhibited by verbs that bear a synonymous relationship interpreting the results by accounting for the contents of courtroom discourse. Many studies have examined the prepositional verb/simplex alternation and their occurrence explained by considering various factors such as the degree of formality of the texts and stylistic choice. Diachronically, instead, during the Early Modern English period, the relation between prepositional verbs and their simplex counterparts has been linked to the need for emphasis on specific aspects of narration or associated with the different degrees of expressiveness. Yet in no case, has prepositional verb/simplex alternation been examined by accounting for the semantic prosody and their occurrence linked to the speaker’s evaluation of narrated events, nor have other periods been taken into account. The present study is a corpus-based investigation conducted on the Late Modern English - Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a corpus covering the period 1750-1850, which has been compiled by selecting texts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court.

Intensificatory Tautology in the History of English: A Corpus-based Study

This paper explores the development and establishment of intensificatory tautology (specifically, size-adjective clusters, e.g., “ great big plans,” “ little tiny room”) in the history of English. The analysis suggests that size-adjective clusters appear in the Late Middle English period as a result of the functional-structural reorganization of the English noun phrase. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern English period that they start to become (relatively) productive in the language, and in Present-Day English that they acquire a wide(r) intensifying functional range (i.e., adjective modifier, emphasizer, degree intensifier) and become associated with informal, spoken-based registers. More broadly, the paper suggests that more research is needed as regards the role of collocation in processes of intensifier creation in the noun phrase and, more generally, as regards how collocation interacts with word-formation processes in this context.

Pronouns: The Importance of Our Everyday Language

We use language to create and maintain relationships. So, it is only natural that language can offer clues to our connection to the people around us and social status. Pronouns more than other words can be used to explain relationships. During the Middle English period, English used the pronouns “you” and “thou” when addressing people of different social position. “You” was used by members of the upper class when talking to each other and used by members of the lower class when addressing a superior. “Thou” was used by members of the lower class when addressing each other, by close family members, and addressing God in prayer. These distinctions continue into the Early Modern English period and we see them used in Shakespeare. I investigated pronouns “you” and “thou” in Shakespeare’s Othello by looking at every occurrence of these pronouns used by Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. It became evident that Shakespeare uses pronouns conventionally until moments of extreme anger and at the end of the play. Modern English has lost the pronoun “thou”, but we still use pronouns to indicate social status. According to James W. Pennebaker, people of a low social status tend to overuse the pronoun “I”. People of higher social status rely more on pronouns “we” and “you”. I explore this usage of pronouns in Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles. I draw conclusions about correlation between pronouns and social status in Early Modern English and Modern English by comparing pronouns in Othello and Trifles. My research shows that even though language changes, human relationships remain the same and looking at pronouns helps us understand these relationships better when doing literary analysis.

The growth of the transitivising Reaction Object Construction

Abstract This paper explores the growth of the Reaction Object Construction (ROC) as in Pauline smiled her thanks, offering new insights into its characterisation and historical development from the perspective of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006, 2019) and its application to patterns of language change (Hilpert 2013; Traugott &amp; Trousdale 2013). It is argued that the modern ROC qualifies as a traditional form-meaning pairing and, at a deeper level, as a polysemous construction that follows the path of development of other transitivising constructions such as the way-construction (Israel 1996), and of processes of constructionalisation in general. Once the ROC imposes a coreferential constraint on its object argument, acquiring in this way its status as a form-meaning pairing over the Early Modern English period (1500–1700), the construction increases its productivity and schematicity; at the same time it decreases its compositionality since the link between the form/syntax and the overall meaning of the construction becomes less transparent, as in The door jingled a welcome. The ROC can thus be argued to be part and result of a broader development in the grammar of English, namely the historical trend towards transitivisation.

Standardization Process in its Final Stages

This study concerns the development of the determiners mine/my and thine/thy in the Early Modern English period. The -n forms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell into disuse before words starting with initial vowels and h. While the rise of the n-less variants has been the object of several previous studies, the present investigation aims at accounting for the fate of the declining n-variants in the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, a data source comprising speech-related texts. We look into the chronological stages of development for the declining mine and thine forms, the genres that maintained these forms longest, and the speaker groups that were the last to use the forms. Comparisons are made with the results obtained in previous studies on mine/my and thine/thy variation.

Supralocalisation Processes in Early Modern English Urban Vernaculars

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500–1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural zero. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.

Register Variation in Word-formation Processes

This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance -ity and the native -ness. The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing processes of standardization and vernacularization may have affected their diachronic evolution. To this purpose, the type frequencies and rates of aggregation of new types of the two suffixes were analyzed in seventeen different registers distributed along the formal-informal and the speech-written continua. Results indicate that -ness tends to lose ground in favor of -ity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, a change which seems to have begun in formal written registers and spread towards ‘oral’ ones, probably aided by a general trend in written registers for the adoption of a more learned and literate style during the eighteenth century.

The &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;v&amp;gt; Alternation in the History of English

In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;v&amp;gt; went through a change from a positionally constrained system (i.e., initial &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;, medial &amp;lt;u&amp;gt;) to a system based on phonetic value, with &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; marking vowels and &amp;lt;v&amp;gt; consonants. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a data set of 3,801 examples from 107 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;v&amp;gt; usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between &amp;lt;u&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;v&amp;gt;, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.