Historical English Research Articles

The origin of English clause-initial quotative inversion

Abstract This study is a corpus-based investigation of the development of English clause-initial quotative inversion, i.e. the construction in which a reporting clause with SV inversion is placed before the quoted message. The analysis makes use of various corpora of historical and contemporary English in order to document quantity and quality changes in the investigated construction in all stages of English. The study shows that the construction observed in Present Day English has developed in a continuous way since the period of Old English, although it has been a low-frequency pattern in each historical period. Moreover, the construction has developed differently in British and American English. In the former variety, the clause-initial quotative inversion is still quite rare and limited to newspapers, mostly tabloids; in the latter, it is quite widespread in magazines, where it shows an exceptionally high frequency and a growing collocational range.

Lay Perceptions of Historical English as Portayed in Rolahnd Joffé’s Screen Adaptation of The Scarlet Letter

Lay Perceptions of Historical English as Portayed in Rolahnd Joffé’s Screen Adaptation of The Scarlet Letter

Lay Perceptions of Historical English as Portayed in Rolahnd Joffé’s Screen Adaptation of The Scarlet Letter

espanolEste articulo toma como objeto de analisis una adaptacion cinematografica de un clasico literario estadounidense, La Letra Escarlata (1850) de Nathaniel Hawthorne, desde el punto de vista del lenguaje. La pelicula examinada es la adaptacion libre de Roland Joffe de la novela de Hawthorne (Joffe 1995). La presente contribucion sugiere un enfoque diferente para el analisis del lenguaje de las peliculas de epoca al que normalmente se adoptaria en el marco de la dialectologia. Esta perspectiva implica un cambio de paradigma de representacion (objetiva) a percepcion (subjetiva): en particular, propongo centrarme en el discurso metalinguistico de los criticos de cine, tanto en el de los escritores profesionales como en el de los no profesionales (que colaboran en periodicos y blogs), con especial referencia a sus comentarios sobre los fenomenos linguisticos en La Letra Escarlata de Joffe, a saber: acento, caracteristicas sociopragmaticas y morfologia verbal. EnglishThis paper takes as its object of analysis a cinematic adaptation of an American literary classic, i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), from the point of view of language. The film under scrutiny is Roland Joffe’s free adaptation of Hawthorne’s novel (Joffe 1995). The present contribution suggests a different approach to the analysis of the language of period movies than one would typically adopt within the framework of dialectology. This perspective involves a paradigm shift from representation (objective) to perception (subjective): in particular I propose to focus on the metalinguistic discourse of film reviewers, both professionals and lay writers (writing for newspapers and blogs), with particular reference to their commentaries regarding linguistic phenomena in Joffe’s The Scarlet Letter, namely accent, socio-pragmatic features and verbal morphology.

Co-occurrence and iteration of intensifiers in Early English

This article focuses on an aspect of intensification which has not, so far, received due attention in the extensive literature on the topic: intensifier iteration (very very hot) and co-occurrence (very extremely hot), with a special focus on Old, Middle and Early Modern English as represented in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. The results show that in earlier English, intensifier iteration is less frequent than co-occurrence; that while the former is clearly associated with emphasis, the latter also intersects with grammaticalization and renewal; and that co-occurrence is particularly salient in periods of instability when the competition of intensifiers is at its height. Iteration and co-occurrence of intensifiers are analysed in this article as cases of the widespread cross-linguistic phenomenon of accretion.

Contraception and the Demographic Transition

Inspired by the historical English experience, we modify the Beckerian paradigm of fertility by incorporating costly, societal influence on contraception. Heterogeneous, generationally-linked households choose between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ contraception. The modern has a higher fixed but lower variable cost of averting childbirths. Initially the rich adopt the modern, which unleashes society-wide diffusion. Eventually everyone switches, lowering fertility further and across households. Hastening the switch is falling child mortality. Quantitative experiments suggest contraception was a vital link between the historical mortality and fertility transitions, though not the latter's proximate cause. Implications for more recent transitions are discussed.

Finding ordinary meaning in law: The judge, the dictionary or the corpus?

AbstractCourts in the U.S. frequently apply a rule of statutory construction that calls for the words in laws to be given their “ordinary meaning.” The rule is based on the presumption that legislatures are most likely to have intended the language to be understood in their ordinary sense and on the value that people subject to such laws will more likely comprehend the rights and obligations granted to them. Courts are not, however, in accord when it comes to determining which of a term’s available meanings is the “ordinary” one. This article describes three methods for making this determination: the judge’s linguistic intuitions, dictionary definitions, and reference to linguistic corpora. We argue that the use of corpus analysis enhances the legal system’s ability to rely on actual distributional facts about word usage, thus enhancing the accuracy of ordinary meaning analysis.We apply the three methods to a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court,Shaw v. United States, at the time this article is written. The issue inShawis whether the expression “defraud a financial institution” applies to a situation in which the defendant tricked a bank into releasing to him the funds of another depositor, when the bank suffered no loss. We look first at linguistic literature based largely on intuition, then at dictionary definitions, and finally at a corpus. Examining hundreds of examples from the Corpus of Historical English (COHA) developed at Brigham Young University, we find that the verb “defraud” is virtually always used to describe a situation in which the object of the fraud is also the target of the ultimate loss.Analyses based on the intuitions of linguists and on dictionary definitions are consistent with this result, although less robust. We conclude that if the Court wishes to be faithful to the ordinary meaning of the statutory language, it should rule that the statute does not apply to this situation.

The HeliPaD

This short paper introduces the HeliPaD, a new parsed corpus of Old Saxon (Old Low German). It is annotated according to the standards of the Penn Corpora of Historical English, enriched with lemmatization and additional morphological attributes as well as textual and metrical annotation. This paper provides an overview of its main features and compares it to existing resources such as the Deutsch Diachron Digital version of the Old Saxon Heliand as part of the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch. It closes with a roadmap for planned future expansions.

Tracking down phrasal verbs in the spoken language of the past: Late Modern English in focus

This article analyses the formal and stylistic features of phrasal verbs in theOld Bailey Corpusand compares them with results obtained from the speech-related genres of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), namely diaries, drama, letters and sermons. Phrasal verbs tend to be associated with spoken colloquial registers both in PDE and previous stages of the language, although this statement has been challenged by Thim (2006a, 2012), who argues that in EModE the (non-)occurrence of phrasal verbs in a particular text seems motivated by its contents, rather than its degree of formality. The results in this study show that phrasal verbs were a feature of the spoken language already in LModE, since their frequency is remarkably higher in trial proceedings, arguably the closest representation of the spoken word of the past. However, in contrast to other speech-related text types, the frequency of phrasal verbs in trial proceedings decreases over time, which seems to point towards a decolloquialisation of this genre over time. The study also shows differences at the formal level across genres, demonstrating that sermons display more formal and archaic characteristics, whereas trial proceedings contain features which bring them closer to the spoken language.

Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English

AbstractWhereas the alternation between thes-genitive (the New Year's message) and theof-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (sversusof, NN versusof, NN versuss, and NN versussversusof ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from theRepresentative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation.

The Split Infinitive in Middle English

A split infinitive construction denotes a type of syntactictmesisin which a word or a phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive markertoand the verb. The early instances of the split infinitive in English date back to the 13th century, when a personal pronoun, an adverb or two or more words could appear in such environments (Visser 1963-1973 II: 1038-1045). This paper investigates the split infinitive in Middle English with the following objectives: a) to trace the origin and development of the construction; b) to analyse the nature of the splitting adverb in terms of its etymology and lexico-grammatical features; and c) to examine the prosodic patterns contributing to the acceptance of particular splitting combinations. The source of evidence comes from the following corpora:Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English, Middle English Medical Texts, Middle English Grammar Corpus, and the Malaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose.

The expression of impersonals in Middle English

This article contributes to continuing work on the information structural function of passivization, and how quantitative changes in the implementation of a syntactic strategy may be tied in with the acquisition or loss of comparable strategies. Seoane (2006) outlines a proposal that suggests that the passive construction is used more extensively in English than in the other Germanic languages in order to compensate for the lack of unmarked object topicalization found in languages with verb-seconding (V2). We reconsider this hypothesis from a quantitative perspective and find that, upon further examination, the claim does not hold.We compare parallel New Testament translations along two dimensions: one set across three stages of historical English, and one set across three Germanic languages. We find that the reported change in the rate of passivization between stages of English, and between English and other Germanic languages, is in fact not directly related to the presence or absence of a V2 grammar, but rather due to the availability (or absence) of different strategies of forming impersonal clauses.The current article focuses in more detail on one of the findings of an ongoing study into phenomena linked to the change in passivization in English. While the New Testament translations provide evidence that the overall rate of passivization remains stable across the history of English in one context, we find, in contrast, a significant difference in the rate of passivization between three translations of the Rule of St Benedict. These translations represent an Old English (OE) translation and two Middle English (ME) translations: one Northern, and one Southern. The data reveal a dialect distinction in ME: the Northern translation passivizes at a significantly lower rate.Unlike the New Testament, which is primarily a narrative, the Rule of St Benedict text is written as a set of instructions, and passivization is primarily a strategy for expressing clauses in which no agent can be specified. We find that where the Southern translation of the Rule of St Benedict uses a passive, the Northern translation frequently expresses the same content via an active clause with impersonal man in the subject position. While clauses with impersonal man can be found in both the Northern ME and OE translations of this text, it is wholly absent from the Southern ME translation.This reveals a dialect difference in the ME period: the Southern dialect appears to entirely lack a historically attested strategy for forming impersonal clauses. This, in turn, becomes one factor leading to a rise in the rate of passivization, as passive clauses are used to compensate for the missing strategy.

Killer Cities: Past and Present.

The industrial cities of the 19th century were incredibly unhealthy places to live. How much progress has been made in reducing these negative health effects over the past 150 years? To help answer this question, we compare mortality patterns in 19th century England to those in Chinese urban areas in 2000. We document that substantial improvements have been made in improving health in cities over this period. Unlike historical English cities, large cities in China have lower mortality than less populated areas. However, we also provide evidence that in China a substantial relationship between industrial pollution and mortality remains.

Inferring Human Behaviors from Isotopic Analyses of Rat Diet: a Critical Review and Historical Application

Rat (Rattus spp.) bone collagen stable isotope values are often assumed to reflect an average of food stuffs that were available to archaeological populations. This paper considers the feasibility of using stable isotope evidence from rat remains as a source of proxy information for human food-related social, economic, and sensorial behaviors. First, a literature review of archaeological and modern ecological rat isotope work reveals that, while rat dietary signatures are often a reasonable proxy for human food waste, they will not always record an unbiased average of foods which are available in a given environment. Second, an overview of ethological, biological, and environmental factors that can influence rat diets is given from the perspective of archaeological bone chemistry, to help identify factors that require explicit and critical consideration when rat stable isotope data is taken as a proxy for human food-related behaviors. Finally, rat stable isotope values are considered to provide new evidence about the social and economic responses of an important historical English fishing community at Ferryland (CgAf-02) to conflict and political turmoil at the turn of the eighteenth century. These results also highlight how information on rat diets can provide a counterpoint to other common faunal isotope approaches that focus on dogs and pigs as a proxy for human dietary behaviors.

Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect

This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.

Quirky quadratures: on rhythm and weight as constraints on genitive variation in an unconventional data set

This article explores measures, operationalisations and effects of rhythm and weight as two constraints on the variation between thes-genitive and theof-genitive. We base the analysis on interchangeable genitives in the news and letters sections of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), which covers the period between 1650 and 1999. Thus, we are ultimately concerned with the applicability of two factors that have their roots in speech (rhythm: phonology; weight: online processing) to an ‘unconventional’, written data set with a historical dimension. As for weight, we focus on the comparison of simple single-constituent and more complex multi-constituent measurements. Our notion of rhythm centres on the ideally even distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. We find that in our data set, both rhythm and weight show theoretically unexpected quadratic effects: rhythmically better-behaveds-genitives are not necessarily preferred overof-genitives, and short constituents exhibit odd weight effects. In conclusion, we argue that while rhythm is only a minor player in our data set, the quadratic quirks it exhibits should inspire further study. Weight, on the other hand, is a crucial factor which, however, likewise comes with measurement and modelling complications.

Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian and Carla Jonsson (eds) (2012) New York: Routledge. Pp. x + 280 ISBN: 978-0-415-87946-0 (Hrdbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-13613-3 (eBook)

Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian and Carla Jonsson (eds) (2012) New York: Routledge. Pp. x + 280 ISBN: 978-0-415-87946-0 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-203-13613-3 (eBook)Reviewed by Aleksi MakilahdeIn the past few decades, studies on multilingualism have become central especially in the field of sociolinguistics. The majority of the earlier studies have focused on spoken language and code-switching in conversation, but it is clear that for millennia and even today multilingualism is present also in written discourse. Some researchers have previously applied theories of multilingualism and code-switching to written data, but the theoretical and methodological discussion has centred especially on spoken data. To some extent, the existing theories and models can be applied to written material, but the written medium itself poses questions and problems that the researchers have to take into consideration.Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed- Language Written Discourse sets out to answer some of these questions, but more importantly it takes as its goal to draw attention to them and the multiple methods and data sources available for researchers. The book consists of thirteen articles (or chapters), each presenting one type of data source for written multilingualism. The first chapter is a theoretical and methodological introduction, and each chapter includes specific discussion on these topics. I shall briefly summarise the contents of each article and conclude with an overall review of the book.The first chapter by Mark Sebba (pp. 1-26) discusses some of the methodological and theoretical issues in studies on multilingual texts. Sebba argues that there should be a coherent framework for researchers working with multilingual written data, but since one of the aims of the book is to present several different research methods, the framework relates mostly to questions of how multilingual texts are produced and read, or in other words the literary practices which form the context for the texts. In addition to the well-established features of written discourse (e.g. its permanence compared with spoken interaction), Sebba dedicates a major part of the chapter to the discussion of the visual features of mixed-language texts and texts as images. This move from text as merely text to text as a written whole seems especially fruitful, and it has been adapted in many of the following chapters.Chapter 2 by Herbert Schendl (pp. 27-43) is one of the two historical studies in the book. Schendl presents a survey both of the general phenomenon of medieval mixed-language texts and of previous research. His case study comprises of analyses and comparison of two very different genres: Old English charters and Middle English sermons (both surviving in manuscript format). The analyses include discussion on both formal and functional features of the texts, but the main contribution of this chapter is that it shows how multilingualism in writing was a widely used and non-stigmatised discourse strategy in medieval Britain.Chapter 3 by Arja Nurmi and Paivi Pahta (pp. 44-67) is the other historical study. Even though they, too, analyse multilingualism in historical English (between the years 1400 and 1800), they focus on one specific text type: correspondence written by women. The chapter includes a lengthy discussion of the socio-historical context of the texts and the corpus methods that were used in the analysis. However, the main part of the text is dedicated to the analysis of the functions of the switched passages with qualitative methods. Nurmi and Pahta show that code-switching has several different functions, some of which are more textual (e.g. genre-specific conventions) and some more pragmatic (e.g. expressing identity).In Chapter 4 (pp. 68-88), Cecilia Montes-Alcala studies code-switching in three U. …

Discourse patterns in the development of discourse markers in English

The role of discourse frequency in the development of two English connectives is explored, in the context of recent work emphasizing the role of syntagmatic relations in language change and suggesting that it is constructions, rather than lexical items, which grammaticalize. The development of sub-constructions within factandat leastare traced in a quantitative study based on corpora of formal and informal historical English. Each case involves an adverbial undergoing functional split as the clausal structure in which it is used becomes aligned with different discourse (sub-)constructions.In factbecomes both contrastive and elaborative;at leastbecomes evaluative and reformulative. It is shown how the adverbial expression in each case becomes compressed and more abstract, so that its informational weight is reduced, and how the English principle of end focus pushes it increasingly towards clause-initial position, resulting in alignment with the connective construction.

The Extremes of Insubordination

In present-day colloquial English, exclamatory as if denies an expressed or implied state of affairs, as in He thinks you’ll be impressed. As if. This usage is often attributed to a speech style of the 1980s and a popular television program, but OED-3 gives a 1903 instance from dialogue in an American novel. After undertaking a corpus study of exclamatory as if in present-day and historical English, this article explores the association of exclamatory as if with monoclauses or insubordinated clauses such as As if I was the one at fault. The occurrence and meaning of such clauses in present-day English are described. The article then examines the postulated derivation of as if monoclauses from full adjunct conditional clauses via processes of insubordination. Finally, the article considers an alternative development of monoclausal as if (and exclamatory as if) involving ellipsis of complement clauses in it is/ looks/ seem as if. . . structures rather than directly from adjunct adverbial clauses.

Community engagement in forest resource protection in Sri Lanka dry zone A success story

The objective of this study is to introduce the public trust doctrine and to examine its application inrelation to sustainable development. To facilitate this study judgments of the superior courts of SriLanka, India, the United States and several other countries are referred to.The international instruments relating to environment demonstrate the concern of the internationalcommunity for a healthy environment for all life forms including human beings through sustainabledevelopment. Sustainable development according to Bruntland Report (1987) is the development thatmeets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meettheir O\:n needs. The public trust doctrine is an essential element of judicial process to facilitatetowards sustainable development.The public trust doctrine in essence means that powers vested in public authorities are not absolute orunfettered but are held in trust for the public, to be exercised for the purposes for which they havebeen conferred and that their exercise is subject to judicial review by reference to those purposes.Administrative acts and decisions contrary to the public trust doctrine and\or violative of human rightswould be in excess or abuse of power and therefore void. The Court expressed the view that in suchjudicial review the historical English law limitations on prerogative writs are no longer applicable,because now Sri Lankan courts not courts of the Crown but are bound by the public trust doctrine andare subject to fundamental rights.Undoubtedly the State has the right to exploit its own resources pursuant, however, to its ownenvironmental and developmental policies and laws. Rational planning constitutes an essential toolfor reconciling any conflict between the needs of development and the need to protect and improvethe environment. Human beings are at the centre of concern for sustainable development. In orderto achieve sustainable development, decision making process must also comply with public trust doctrine.

The public trust doctrine and sustainable development An aspect of environmental law

The objective of this study is to introduce the public trust doctrine and to examine its application inrelation to sustainable development. To facilitate this study judgments of the superior courts of SriLanka, India, the United States and several other countries are referred to.The international instruments relating to environment demonstrate the concern of the internationalcommunity for a healthy environment for all life forms including human beings through sustainabledevelopment. Sustainable development according to Bruntland Report (1987) is the development thatmeets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meettheir O\:n needs. The public trust doctrine is an essential element of judicial process to facilitatetowards sustainable development.The public trust doctrine in essence means that powers vested in public authorities are not absolute orunfettered but are held in trust for the public, to be exercised for the purposes for which they havebeen conferred and that their exercise is subject to judicial review by reference to those purposes.Administrative acts and decisions contrary to the public trust doctrine and\or violative of human rightswould be in excess or abuse of power and therefore void. The Court expressed the view that in suchjudicial review the historical English law limitations on prerogative writs are no longer applicable,because now Sri Lankan courts not courts of the Crown but are bound by the public trust doctrine andare subject to fundamental rights.Undoubtedly the State has the right to exploit its own resources pursuant, however, to its ownenvironmental and developmental policies and laws. Rational planning constitutes an essential toolfor reconciling any conflict between the needs of development and the need to protect and improvethe environment. Human beings are at the centre of concern for sustainable development. In orderto achieve sustainable development, decision making process must also comply with public trust doctrine.