English Historical Linguistics Research Articles

Special issue on verse structure and linguistic modelling: introductory notes

Verse was first.Verse and its forms have always held the attention of linguists and other humanists. Just over the last seven years there have been meetings spotlighting metrics at the University of Essex (2015), the University of Tallinn (2017), the University of Stockholm (2018), the University of Padua (2022) and most relevant to this special issue, a full session on historical metrics at the 2021 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICHEL 21) in Leiden. Academic publishers, too, have over the same span brought out major new titles devoted to matters historical and metrical – Neidorf et al. (2016), Weiskott (2016), Cornelius (2017), Russom (2017), Gunkel & Hackstein (2017), Donoghue (2018), Duffell (2018), Putter & Jefferson (2018) and Ryan (2019) would here be representative – and it does not seem coincidental that in the UK, the Poet Laureate has been busy of late translating The Owl and the Nightingale into contemporary English (Armitage 2021) – a work that accompanies the same writer's earlier re-rendering of Gawain and the Green Knight (2009). The English language, with its intricacies, its long history of use as a literary medium and its spectacular formal developments in both verse and prose, figures largely in many of these renewed descriptions and analyses.

Developments in English historical morpho-syntax ed. by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös

Reviewed by: Developments in English historical morpho-syntax ed. by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös Kristin Bech Developments in English historical morpho-syntax. Ed. by Claudia Claridge and Birte Bös. ( Current issues in linguistic theory 346.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. Pp. vi, 312. ISBN 9789027203236. $149 (Hb). This volume was published in the aftermath of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, which took place in Essen in 2016. It thus represents a cross section of the research going on in the field of English historical morphosyntax. Since the book covers different topics, the introduction is not a state-of-the-art overview, but very briefly situates the contributions within the larger field of English historical linguistics. The thirteen contributions are grouped under three headings: nominal constructions, verbal constructions, and adverbs and adverbials, and the editors provide short summaries of each article. In the following I also summarize each article, but focus on providing some information about data, methods, and results as well. Obviously, the summaries do not do justice to the complexities of the research, but are meant as an aid to understanding how research is carried out in the field. At the end I provide some general comments. Elżbieta Adamczyk's contribution concerns changes in the nominal morphology of Old English. Old English nouns belonged to declensional classes that depended on the original stem type, but the system was unstable. Adamczyk proposes three factors that led to the restructuring of the nominal morphology. The first is frequency of occurrence, and a correlation is shown between the level of innovation in the Old English nominative and accusative plural and the proportion of plurals: the declensional classes that are less frequent in the plural show a high level of innovation in their plural paradigms. The second factor is morphophonological salience: the more salient inflectional markers resist analogical pressure. Salience is defined according to certain criteria such as zero marking, suffixation, and consonant and vocalic stem modulation. The third factor is the analogical pressure on neutral forms in the paradigms, analogy being triggered by cross-paradigmatic similarities: the higher the percentage of neutral forms in the paradigm, the higher the percentage of innovation. Adamczyk also considers how the interaction between frequency [End Page 414] and morphophonological salience shapes the system. Her approach is usage-based, so analogy is viewed as a functional mechanism resulting in functional forms being favored over less functional forms. Nouns and case are also the topic of Kirsten Middeke's chapter, in which she considers the instrumental case in Old English and the issue of whether it is a separate case or subsumed under the dative. After an initial discussion of 'vestigial' case, she provides a distributional analysis of frequencies and collexemes (e.g. Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003), comparing the dative and the instrumental cases. She looks at which nouns occur with the instrumental and dative determiners, and with instrumental-case adjectives. The finding is that the Old English instrumental expresses time in particular, but also manner and place, and importantly that it fulfills functions that are distinct from the dative. Middeke then moves on to a discussion about the productivity of the functional differences observed, in view of the fact that the instrumental on the one hand is never obligatory, and on the other hand is semantically restricted. Here she concludes that the instrumental is partially productive. The overall conclusion is that the opposition between the instrumental and the dative is 'vestigial', since the instrumental-dative opposition was optional. However, the instrumental contributes functions that are distinct from those of the dative, which means that the instrumental case is a separate category in the case system. Jerzy Nykiel studies the pronouns one and other with initial th- and t- in Middle English, that is, thone, thother, tone, tother. After presenting corpus data showing the distribution, Nykiel discusses the origin of the pronouns and the two possible ways in which they could have arisen, either by reduction of the definite article or by misanalysis due to incorrect syllable division. He finds that reduction was responsible for the formation of thone and thother, while the formation of...

Special Issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics: Introduction

The advent of ever-larger and more diverse historical corpora for different historical periods and linguistic varieties has led to the impossibility of obtaining simple, direct-and yet balancedrepresentations of the core patterns in the data. In order to draw insights from heterogeneous and complex materials of this type, historical linguists have begun to reach for a growing number of data visualisation techniques, from the statistical, to the cartographical, the network-based and beyond. An exploration of the state of this art was the objective of a workshop at the 2018 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, from whence most of the materials of this Special Issue are drawn. This brief introductory paper outlines the background and relevance of this line of methodological research and presents a summary of the individual papers that make up the collection.

History of English as punctuated equilibria? A meta-analysis of the rate of linguistic change in Middle English

AbstractIn this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time. Our study is based on a meta-analysis of existing corpus research, which is made available through a new linguistic resource, the Language Change Database (LCD). By aggregating the rates of 44 individual changes, we provide a critical assessment of how well the theory of punctuated equilibria (Dixon, Robert M. W. 1997.The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) fits with our results. More specifically, by comparing the rate of language change with major language-external events, such as the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, we provide the first corpus-based meta-analysis of whether these events, which had significant societal consequences, also had an impact on the rate of language change. Our results indicate that major changes in the rate of linguistic change in the late medieval period could indeed be connected to the social and cultural after-effects of the Norman Conquest. We also make a methodological contribution to the field of English historical linguistics: by re-using data from existing research, linguists can start to ask new, fundamental questions about the ways in which language change progresses.

Book Review: English Historical Linguistics: Approaches and Perspectives

Book Review: <i>English Historical Linguistics: Approaches and Perspectives</i>

Актуализация концепта “Home” через понятийные лексемы в английской культуре Позднего Средневековья

The article deals with the study of the relevance of the concept “Home” as an integral part of the daily communication of English people during the Late Middle Ages. The purpose of the article is the etymological analysis of the concept and its nominee — “home” and “house”, as well as highlighting the key conceptual lexemes, which formed fixed combinations with the concept in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the study, the authors used descriptive and comparative-historical methods in a diachronic approach. According to A. Jucker’s theory of “Collective Characteristics of the Concept”, each historical period includes a set of concepts capable of revealing both the social structure and the linguistic norms of the culture studied. This confirms the practical significance of the study: by revealing one of the most significant concepts of medieval society, it is possible to immerse deeper into its customs and informal laws. The authors have examined the etymology of the concept on the basis of ancient English, ancient German and Gothic languages. Thanks to this, it is possible to establish the cultural and linguistic field of the concept. The concept “home’’ includes lexemes of figurative, conceptual and value aspects, but it is conceptual that allows, even with a severe lack of material, to observe the verbalization of the concept. By producing an analysis of “home” and “house” based on Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries, the modern meaning of words has been identified. Next, the lexemes applied to the concept in the 14th and 15th centuries, namely, nouns, verbs, and adjectives have been examined and the significance of the diachronic approach to the study of language concepts was confirmed. The study was supported by examples from A. Jucker’s medieval legal and artistic works — “The History of English language and English Historical Lin-guistics” and J. Firbas’ — “On Defining a Theme in Functional Analysis of Proposals”. The perspective of the study is to make a comparison between all concepts in the English culture of the Late Middle Ages and to fully disclose the social dynamics of this historical period.

Exploring Meta-analysis for Historical Corpus Linguistics Based on Linked Data

Empirical work on English historical corpus linguistics is plentiful but fragmented, and some of it is hard to come by. This paper proposes a solution for making it more accessible and reusable for meta-analysis. We present an online Language Change Database (LCD), which provides comparative, real-time baseline data from earlier corpus-based studies. LCD entries summarize the findings and include numerical data from the articles. We discuss the LCD from the perspective of database design and linked data management. Furthermore, we illustrate the reuse of LCD data through a meta-analysis of the history of English connectives. For this purpose, we have developed an application called the LCD Aggregated Data Analysis workbench (LADA). We show how researchers can use LADA to filter, refine and visualize LCD data. Thus we are paving the way for a future where both research results and research data are regularly available for verification, validation and re-use.

Register in historical linguistics

AbstractMerja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University. In this article, she provides a detailed accounting of the role of register in research on the historical development of language. Her substantial body of work has focused on both the historical development of specific registers, as well as how historical change has been mediated by register. Her research has encompassed a range of time periods (from Early Modern English to the 19th century) and registers (for example, depositions, Salem witchcraft records, and dialogues). Her many edited collections have brought historical linguists together into comprehensive and rigorous volumes, including theCambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics(Kytö &amp; Pahta 2016, Cambridge University Press),English in Transition: Corpus-Based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles(Rissanen, Kytö, &amp; Heikkonen 1997, De Gruyter), andDevelopments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence(Taavitsainen, Kytö, Claridge, &amp; Smith 2014, Cambridge University Press). She has been a key contributor to the development of principled historical corpora, such as theHelsinki Corpus of English Textsproject, which represents a range of registers from Old and Middle English to Early Modern English. Merja Kytö has long been a leader in demonstrating how systematic attention to register can result in rich profiles of historical development, and in addressing the inherent challenges involved in utilizing historical documents for linguistic research.

Brinton, Laurel J.: English Historical Linguistics. Approaches and Perspectives

Brinton, Laurel J.: English Historical Linguistics. Approaches and Perspectives

Review of English Historical Linguistics 2010. Selected Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23–27 August 2010

Preview this article: Hegedűs & Fodor, eds. (2010). English Historical Linguistics 2010, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/nowele.70.1.06war-1.gif

How do corpus-based techniques advance description and theory in English historical linguistics? An introduction to the special issue

How do corpus-based techniques advance description and theory in English historical linguistics? An introduction to the special issue

Translating and Glossing Nouns in the Old English Gospels: A Contrastive Study

The translation of the Gospels into Old English has been a text edited on several occasions since the sixteenth century, from Parker’s edition (1571) to that by Skeat at the end of the nineteenth century (1871-1887) and, more recently, the one carried out by Liuzza in the second half of the twentieth century. [1] The Old English Gospels have received attention from many scholars working in the field of English historical linguistics. Although the lexical level has been partially analysed (see for instance Liuzza 1994-2000), it is still an under-researched area. This article aims to examine three versions of the Gospels, namely West Saxon, Lindisfarne and Rushworth, in order to analyse the various mechanisms used by the translator(s) and glossators [2] when rendering lexical items from the original Latin text into the different dialects. The analysis focuses on the study of nouns from an interdialectal perspective, since they are collated in the three different versions, so as to establish dialectal changes. A cross-linguistic approach is also pursued by assessing how the translator(s)/glossators interpreted nouns from Latin. [1] The Anglo-Saxon Gospels have also been edited by Marshall and Junius (1665), Thorpe (1842), and Bosworth and Waring (1865). [2] The scribes copying the text of the manuscript could have also had an active role by introducing modifications.

English Historical Linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich 24–30 August 2008. Vol. I:The history of English verbal and nominal constructions, ed. Ursula Lenker, Judith Huber & Robert Mailhammer

English Historical Linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich 24–30 August 2008. Vol. I:The history of English verbal and nominal constructions, ed. Ursula Lenker, Judith Huber & Robert Mailhammer

Julie Coleman and Christian J. Kay (Eds.). Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography: Selected Papers from the Fourth G.L. Brook Symposium, Manchester, August 1998.

NVolume 194 of the series Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, entitled Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography, comprises a selection of eleven academic contributions that were originally presented at the Tenth International Conference of English Historical Linguistics. The disciplinary focus of this volume of texts is the diachronics of English vocabulary, and the representation thereof in dictionaries. From a theoretical point of view prototype theory assumes a central position, and the methodological approach is mainly corpus-analytical.

Towards a history of register in Spanish

Although the significance of many other dimensions of variation in the data of Spanish historical linguistics is well recognised, the importance of studying variation in register has been underestimated and its feasibility questioned. This is in striking contrast to English historical linguistics, in which the study of register on the basis of electronic corpora is comparatively far advanced. This paper is a small-scale investigation of a 15th-century Spanish text, Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho (hereinafter referred to as Corbacho), whose author is clearly making an attempt to represent, perhaps stereotypically, different contemporary registers. It shows how, through a combination of statistical analysis and philological sensitivity, register-based linguistic variables can be recovered from a relatively short, multi-register text.

English Historical Syntax and Morphology: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 2000, vol. 1 (review)

Reviewed by: English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 1 ed. by Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couzo, and Javier Pérez-Guerra Alexander Bergs English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 1. Ed. by Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couzo, and Javier Pérez-Guerra. (Current issues in linguistic theory 223.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 297. ISBN 158811192X. $131 (Hb). This companion volume to Sounds, words, texts and change from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics contains twelve papers focusing on morphology and syntax. [End Page 172] Minoji Akimoto discusses ‘Two types of passivization of “V+NP+P” constructions in relation to idiomatization’ between 1600 and today. He points out that a distinction must be made between suffixed and nonsuffixed nouns. In ‘On the development of a friend of mine’, Cynthia Allen looks into the origin and expansion of the so-called ‘double-genitive’ construction. She demonstrates that the construction went through three different stages between early Middle English and today. Douglas Biber and Victoria Clark also examine developments in the noun phrase in ‘Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures’. They focus on more recent developments and stress that changes in noun-modifying structures have gained momentum during the last 50–100 years. For Laurel Brinton, it is ‘Grammaticalization versus lexicalization reconsidered: On the late use of temporal adverbs’. Brinton shows that changes in the use of temporal adverbs as attribute adjectives pose serious problems for concepts such as lexicalization and (de-)grammaticalization. Dieter Kastovsky contributes a paper on verbal derivational morphology: ‘The derivation of ornative, locative, ablative, privative and reversative verbs in English’. He argues that many of the items in question share a cognitive-semantic basis which in turn accounts for similar and highly productive derivational patterns. Lucia Kornexl’s ‘From gold-gifa to chimney sweep?’ probes the problem of morphological (un)markedness of agent nouns in Modern English from a diachronic perspective. One of her key findings is that zero-derivation of agentives has never been as productive as is commonly assumed. The development of volitional modality is at the heart of Manfred Krug’s ‘A path to volitional modality’. Incorporating corpus findings and grammaticalization theory, Krug traces the development of want and want to from the Early Modern period to the present day. Ursula Lenker asks: ‘Is it, stylewise or otherwise, wise to use -wise?’. She shows that -wise in sentence adverbials appears to be a recent innovation in English. Bettelou Los is not interested in innovations but rather in ‘The loss of the indefinite pronoun man’. She identifies the loss of V2, the use of passive constructions, and the competition of to-infinitives and subjunctives as contributing factors to the loss of man. Anneli Meurman-Solin presents a corpus-based description of development and use of ‘The progressive in Older Scots’. She focuses on systematic factors in idiolectal grammars and the corresponding discourse-specific, text-typological distributions of the variants. ‘Detransitivization in the history of English from a semantic perspective’ is the topic of Ruth Möhlig and Monika Klage’s paper. On the basis of selected verb pattern developments, Möhlig and Klage demonstrate that a range of semantic factors played a crucial role in this complex syntactic change. Julia Schlüter’s ‘Morphology recycled: The principle of rhythmic alternation at work in Early and Late Modern English grammatical variation’ presents extensive corpus studies which exemplify the interaction of factors such as rhythmic alternation, standardization pressure, the horror aequi principle, semantics, and phonology in the use of four different morphosyntactic variables. Like its companion volume, this book is scrupulously compiled and edited; it belongs on the shelf of every scholar of English historical linguistics, right next to its sister volume. Alexander Bergs Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Sounds, Words, Texts and Change: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 2000, vol. 2 (review)

Reviewed by: Sounds, words, texts and change: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 2 ed. by Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane Alexander Bergs Sounds, words, texts and change: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, vol. 2. Ed. by Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya, and Elena Seoane. (Current issues in linguistic theory 224.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. viii, 301. ISBN 1588111962. $131 (Hb). This is one of two volumes of conference proceedings from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. It contains thirteen papers on text typology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, suprasegmental phonology, etymology and lexicography, discourse analysis, and orthography, as well as more theoretical, metalinguistic matters. Randy Bax’s paper on historical sociolinguistics discusses linguistic accommodation in the correspondence between Samuel Johnson and Hester Lynch Thrale. In ‘Style evolution in the English sermon’, Claudia Claridge and Andrew Wilson describe the evolution of sermons as a text type from the seventeenth century onwards on the basis of Douglas Biber’s dimensions of register variation. They come to the conclusion that Biber’s factor analysis needs to be expanded in order to work for the observed changes in sermon style. In ‘Lexical bundles in Early Modern English dialogues’, Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö look at constructions such as in order to and investigate their grammatical properties, pragmatic and discourse functions, and distribution across text types. Philip Durkin takes a metalinguistic point of view in ‘Changing documentation in the third edition of the Oxford English dictionary’ and warns against uncritical use of (statistical) dictionary data. ‘A linguistic history of advertising’ is the focus of Manfred Görlach’s contribution. Görlach shows that there were interesting changes in style, content, and purposes of advertising between 1700 and 1890. Another more technical contribution comes from Raymond Hickey’s ‘Ebb and flow: A cautionary tale [End Page 173] of language change’. Having considered structural and sociolinguistic factors in some (sound) changes in British and Irish English, Hickey cautions against the assumption that the presence of one feature at two times allows for an inference of unbroken transmission. In ‘Wreak, wrack, rack, and (w)ruin’, Christian Kay and Irené Wotherspoon investigate the development of (un-)etymological spelling variants of the <wr> type from the Old English period to the present day. Angelika Lutz asks, ‘When did English begin?’. She argues that the common tripartite division might work only in terms of morphosyntax; the lexical and cultural development calls for a bipartite division into ‘Anglo-Saxon’ up to around 1300 and ‘English’ after that. Chris McCully contributes a paper on ‘What’s afoot with word-final C? Metrical coherence and the history of English’ in which he eventually demythologizes the idea of the ‘Germanic foot’. John Scahill discusses Dan Michel, the alleged author/copyist of the Ayenbite of Inwyt, and his role as orthographic fossil or innovator. Irma Taavitsainen’s ‘Historical discourse analysis: Scientific language and changing thought-styles’ examines the transition from scholastic to empirical science. She exemplifies her case with speech-act verbs of reporting vs. private verbs. In ‘Key issues in English etymology’, Theo Vennemann presents new ways of looking at English etymologies. He stresses that ‘English’ was in language contact situations long before historical times and that sometimes even Vasconic and Semitic languages may have to be considered. Finally, Keith Williamson discusses the geographical and temporal distribution of four different morphosyntactic/orthographic features in ‘The dialectology of “English” north of the Humber, c. 1380–1500’. The papers in this volume have been carefully selected, reviewed, and edited. They mostly represent new and exciting approaches to a wide range of both old and new questions and make this volume a valuable addition to the tradition of ICEHL proceedings. Alexander Bergs Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Explorations in English Historical Linguistics

Explorations in English Historical Linguistics

Review of Jucker (2000): History of English and English Historical Linguistics

Review of Jucker (2000): History of English and English Historical Linguistics

English Historical Linguistics and Philology in Japan

English Historical Linguistics and Philology in Japan