Historical English Research Articles

`Historic English Churches: A Guide to their Construction, Design and Features` by Malcolm Hollis

`Historic English Churches: A Guide to their Construction, Design and Features` by Malcolm Hollis

Tudor: What's in a Name?

AbstractThe ‘Tudor’ name for the royal family was hardly known in the sixteenth century. The almost obsessive use of the term by historians is therefore profoundly misleading about how English people of the time thought of themselves and of their world, the more so given the overtones of glamour associated with it. The royal surname was never used in official publications, and hardly in ‘histories’ of various sorts before 1584. Monarchs were not anxious to publicize their descent in the paternal line from a Welsh adventurer, stressing instead continuity with the historic English and French royal families. Their subjects did not think of them as ‘Tudors’, or of themselves as ‘Tudor people’. Modern concepts such as ‘Tudor monarchy’ are misleading in suggesting a false unity over the century. Subjects did not identify with their rulers in the way ‘Tudor people’ suggests. Nor did they situate themselves in a distinct ‘Tudor’ period of history, differentiated from a hypothetical ‘middle ages’. While ‘Tudor’ is useful historian's shorthand we should use the word sparingly and above all make clear to readers that it was not a contemporary concept.

Retrieving relatives from historical data

Variation and change in relativization strategies has been well documented (e.g. Ball 1996: 46, Biber and Clark 2002, Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999, Johansson 2006, Lehmann 2002). Certain types of relative clause, namely that-relatives and zero relatives, were difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora. Studies therefore either relied on manual extraction of data or a subset of possible relativization strategies. In some text types, however, the zero relative is an important member of the class of possible relativizers. Recent advances in syntactic annotation should have made that-relatives and zero relatives more accessible to automatic retrieval. In this article, we test precision and recall of searches on a modest-sized corpus, i.e. scientific texts from ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), as a preliminary to future work on the large corpora which are increasingly becoming available. The parser retrieved some false positives and at the same time missed some relevant data. We discuss structural reasons for both kinds of shortcoming as well as the possibilities and limitations of parser adaptation.

Walter Bentley (1928–2010)

Born in Crossgates on 2 April 1928, Walter spent most of his life in the Leeds area. On leaving school he started work with a firm of Chartered Accountants, and left only to do his National Service, when he served in North Africa. On demobilisation, he returned to the Accountants, where he worked until his retirement as a partner. He had developed an interest in cycling and spent most of his spare time touring both nationally and locally. In more recent times, he loaded his bicycle into his car which allowed him to travel further afield, often to historical sites, castles, battle sites, National Trust and English Heritage properties. One particular interest was old maps and books, and he had a sizeable collection. He was cycling well into 2010, not so long before he died. His favourite site was St. Oswald’s church at Heavenfield. He became a Friend of St. Oswald’s and his ashes are buried there. In retirement, he also travelled extensively abroad on holiday, and visited the First World War battlefields in France and Belgium. He was a member of the YAS and the Roman Antiquities Section for many years, and following the retirement of Mr. Brookes, he took over as Honorary Treasurer, a post he held for eleven years. He subsequently joined the Conservation Group, based at Claremont, and became a very proficient member — assisting in repairing and maintaining our collection of historic volumes. He loved these books and took great delight in restoring them to good condition. As he made an impact on many members, there follow some comments from past Presidents and Chairmen who worked with him, as well as members he met on a regular basis. These sum him up well:

Methodological Aspects and Concepts in Approaches to Historical English

The article aims at shedding old and new light on approaches to historical English. An opening view of the numerous and varying aspects and concepts, methods and patterns serves to visualize, equal...

Count-mass coercion, and the perspective of time and variation

In an earlier study (Ziegeler 2007), it was emphasised that it was redundant to discuss construction coercion in the face of more transparent mechanisms of cognitive pragmatics such as metonymy, and within the sphere of grammaticalisation studies. The present paper extends such arguments, including examples of (apparent) coercion of count-to-mass nouns in Colloquial Singaporean English, and, comparing the data with examples of noun referentiality in earlier historical English, illustrates that what on the surface may appear to be coercion is just a sub-type of metonymy, involved in the metaphorical generalisation of constructions across lexical-syntactic boundaries. Comparison with retention and unresolved mismatch in grammaticalisation is also considered.

The development of future time expressions in Late Modern English: redistribution of forms or change in discourse?

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the development of the future time expressions will, ’ll, shall, be going to, progressive with future time reference, and be to in the course of the late modern period. The article focuses on possible reasons for the considerable changes that have taken place in the past few centuries. To what degree can the changes be described as certain forms having been (partially) replaced by others? To what degree have general or register-specific changes in discourse affected the use of future time expressions? These questions are investigated on the basis of the British part of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers).The analysis reveals that it is a complex interaction of both types of processes that is responsible for the recent evolution of future time expressions. Redistribution processes turn out to be highly complex in themselves, going far beyond the frequently described replacement of shall by will and probably proceeding in chains. With respect to discourse change, one result is an unexpected overall decrease in the tendency of writers (and speakers) to refer to their own plans, intentions, etc. Partly responsible for this development is a discourse change in science writing, where the author has increasingly disappeared from the text, so that text structure is much less frequently expressed in terms of the author's intention. A further register-specific discourse change that the investigation brings to light is a development in diaries from an earlier restriction to reporting past events to the expression of more personal views, including hopes and fears for the future.

The first Plymouth: pictorial element and destination image

The historic English city of Plymouth is not a primary tourist destination although it has much to offer. This study examines the construct of destination image in relation to the views of 209 visitors interviewed in 2007. Respondents were shown images from the current Visitors Guide and presented with bi-polar adjectives in order to ascertain their impressions. Visitors had a low level of advertising awareness, in relation to Plymouth yet were conscious that one of the images shown was somewhat dated; nonetheless, the picture was considered to portray that area as exciting, familiar and affordable but not peaceful, surprisingly.

Foucault and the Architecture of Surveillance: Creating Regimes of Power in Schools, Shrines, and Society

Michel Foucault's critical studies concerning regimes of power are of special interest when applied to architecture. In particular, he warned of the hazards of building surveillance into architectural structures for the purpose of monitoring people and took as his historical exemplar English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's “Panopticon,” a structure originally used to assist in rehabilitating prisoners. He felt this kind of regulatory control resulted in maintaining power of one group over another. This article discusses what Foucault called the general ordering of the visible and the invisible by examining architecture as he viewed it—as an operation of power, control, and domination. More to the point, it places this belief in the context of power constructions in both sacred and school architecture and how this, in turn, creates a carceral society. This article also puts forward some of Foucault's thinking on architecture and connects this to his ideas of perceptual visibles and invisibles. The suggestion of schools as institutions of conformity and how their built environment functions as a regulatory force for this conformity is also explored.

The Colour Washing and Pencilling of Historic English Brickwork

This paper examines the long-standing traditional bricklayers' craft practice of applying a colour wash over the façades of external brickwork, including on some internal elements of brickwork, then re-emphasizing and delineating the bonding by the application of thin distempered lines upon the ochred mortar, in contrast to the original, wider, joint sizes. This may have been an integral part of the finishing phase of the building process on a large percentage of significant historic brick properties, and in parts of England carried on well into the first half of the eighteenth century.

Animacy, agentivity, and the spread of the progressive in Modern English

One aspect of the grammaticalization of the progressive is its spread in Modern English. Previous studies suggest that the progressive was initially restricted to animate or agentive subjects and spread to inanimate or nonagentive subjects only during the later stages of grammaticalization in Modern English. The article discusses the contextual variables – animacy and agentivity – that have been used in previous research. ARCHER – A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers – is then used (a) to verify the hypothesis that progressives increasingly co-occur with inanimate/nonagentive subjects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (b) to test the reliability and comparability of previous research, (c) to verify whether the weakening of the contextual constraint was a condition for or a result of the spread of the progressive form in the nineteenth century, and (d) to find out whether there are any regional differences between American and British English in the loss of the contextual constraint.

Historical English: On the occasion of Karl Brunner's 100th birthday Ed. by Manfred Markus (review)

BOOK NOTICES 197 Magnus Ljung. Stockholm: Bokf örlaget Trevi, 1988. Pp. 193. This book is largely based on two studies of English borrowings in the Swedish print media carried out by the author in 1983-84 and 1985. The first of these was part of a larger investigation which also tested speakers' acceptance of particular English borrowings and their pronunciation of English loanwords. The investigations showed the computer field as the most receptive area (four to five times as many borrowings as any other field), followed by popular music and technical fields, with film, economics , 'general culture', etc., trailing far behind. L sampled two different computer magazines in the 1983-84 study but excluded computer publications from his later study in order to include other specialized areas of interest (music, film, and economics) as well as weeklies and other publications of more general interest. Predictably , his lists of the most frequent English loanwords in Swedish (99-101) reflect the categories of publications sampled, thus leaving open to doubt the degree to which his findings represent the overall state of affairs with respect to English influence in contemporary Swedish. L provides a conventional taxonomy of types of loans (60) around which the book is largely organized. The most significant aspect of this classification is the broad division into direct and indirect loans and L's discussion of construction loans as a subcategory of the latter. Among the more interesting of the English influences reported are those which show reanalysis ofEnglish forms and meanings. Examples include the loanword city used generically to mean 'city center, particularly of a big city' as in Stockholms city, and lama ankor 'lame ducks', which results from a partial loan translation and an extension in the meaning of the Swedish adjective lam, originally 'paralysed'. In construction loans L detects changes in Swedish syntax which follow English models. The verb innehâlla 'contain' (in the primary sense of holding something) now has the additional sense 'restrain, hold back', as in holjen som kan innehâlla en hardsmalta 'the shielding which can contain a meltdown'. Similarly, the verb sälja 'sell', which formerly had only a straightforward active meaning ('She sells books'), now also occurs in constructions with a middle sense, e.g. Boken scdjer bra 'the book is selling well.' Instances of the use of the second -person singular pronoun du in an impersonal sense (instead of usual Swedish man 'one') are also reported. Since Sweden is a country with a long history of sensitivity to foreign linguistic influences and of substantial receptivity to them as well, L is careful to point out that, although some fields may be very much affected by an influx of English borrowings, the effect on Swedish as a whole is not particularly great, the average level of borrowing for all texts sampled being only 0.05%. The greatest degree of receptivity to most borrowings is exhibited by younger speakers . In a section of his concluding chapter L attempts to reassure Swedish purists that the language is in no sense impaired by the loans and that there is no impending creolization or language death. The bulk of English borrowings in Swedish are, according to this study, indirect rather than direct loans. These more subtle influences do not disturb Swedish sensibilities with respect to orthography or pronunciation and are, for L, analogous to internal semantic changes in the language. The book consists of six chapters, notes, bibliography , and a listing ofmany ofthe loanwords identified in L's studies. The principal findings of L's research are reported in the chapters entitled 'English in Swedish' (56-85), 'How much English is there?' (86-101), and 'Who approves of English borrowings?' (102-135). L has produced a useful if somewhat selective study of English influence on Swedish in the past decade . This is a good example of a genre often seen in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, a book about linguistic phenomena which is accessible both to specialists and to laypersons. The book is written in Swedish. [Ronald H. Southerland , The University of Calgary.] Historical English: On the occasion of Karl Brunner's 100th birthday. Ed. by Manfred Markus. (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Anglistische Reihe...

Historical English: On the Occasion of Karl Brunner's 100th birthday

Historical English: On the Occasion of Karl Brunner's 100th birthday

Historical Change and English Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary

Historical Change and English Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary

“How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness": Spenser’s Ruines of Time

The main speaker of The Ruines of Time, the genius of Verlame, is not a mouthpiece for Spenser but a character in her own right. The enemy of such historic English worthies as Pendragon and Boadice...

Questioned Documents and the Law: Handwriting Evidence in the Federal Court System

Abstract It is probably wise to define at the outset exactly what material this paper intends to discuss and, perhaps more importantly, what it will not discuss. At the very least, this practice should save the time of readers who already know (or don't care about) what is offered, and of those who search for information which is absent here. This paper does cover the origins, development, and present status of handwriting evidence in courts of the United States. What is not discussed includes the historical English precedents (except insofar as the English common law doctrines were adopted and explicated in U.S. court decisions), nor is there any discussion of developments in courts of the various states, nor is there any specific discussion of questioned document problems other than handwriting. These are all deserving topics, and let us hope they will be subjects of future research, but for now the topic will be limited strictly to the law of handwriting evidence applicable in the federal court system. Historical discussions, collections of citations, and surveys can be found in Refs 1 through 5.

Further Lexicographical Evidence from the 'Clockmaker'

TJHE COMPILERS of the historical English dictionaries have often drawn on Judge Haliburton's Clockmaker ( 836-40o)1 for quotations illustrating their lexical entries. For many of these entries, quotations from Haliburton are the earliest on record. Nevertheless, a substantial number of Sam Slick's words and expressions which might have enjoyed like distinction have escaped the attention of the lexicographers. These are of interest because they antedate the relevant dictionary quotations by as much as sixty years. The following precursors were encountered during a recent (1950) investigation of the speech of Sam Slick, carried out at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. No distinction is here made between words labeled 'slang' in the dictionaries and those not so labeled. The material is classified under four

The Eucharistic Sacrifice. A Conspectus of Modern Catholic Thought on the Essence of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. By Rev. E. F. DowdA.M., S.T.L. (The Catholic University of America.)

Book Reviewed in this Article:The Eucharistic Sacrifice. A Conspectus of Modern Catholic Thought on the Essence of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. By Rev. E. F. Dowd, A.M., S.T.L.Geschichtswissenshaft und Wahrheit nach den Schriften von Lord Acton. By Ulrich Noack.Katholizitaet und Geistesfreiheit. By Ulrich Noack.The Modern Mind. By Michael Roberts. (Faber, pp. 277; 8/6.) Men and Tendencies. By E. I. Watkin.Germany's New Religion. By Wilhelm Hauer, Karl Heim, and Karl Adam.The Church's Attitude to Peace and War.Damien the Leper. By John Villiers Farrow. Foreword by Hugh Walpole.Father Constant Lievens, S.J., The Apostle of Chota‐Nugpur.Edmund Lester, S.J. By Father Clement Tigar, S.J. Foreword by the Archbishop of Westminster.La Trappe in England. By a Religious of Holy Cross Abbey; with a Foreword by Father Dominic Devas, O.F.M.Historic English Convents of Today. ByDom Basil Whelan, O.S.B.What's the Use of Art Anyway? By A. K. Coomaraswamy and Others.Second Book of Short Organ Interludes for Liturgical Use. By Dom Gregory Murray, O.S.B., M.A., F.R.C.O.Interval Before Birth. By N. S. Leitch.De Fide—Praelectiones scholasticae in Secundam Partem D. Thomae. By P. Lumbreras, O.P.Oeuvres Principales de Kierkegaard, traduits du Danois par P.‐H. TisseuMoscow The Third Rome. By Nicholas Zernov, D.Phil.

La Trappe in England. By a Religious of Holy Cross Abbey; with a Foreword by Father Dominic DevasO.F.M. (Burns Oates; 7/6.) - Historic English Convents of To-Day. By Dom Basil WhelanO.S.B. (Bums Oates; 7/6.)

La Trappe in England. By a Religious of Holy Cross Abbey; with a Foreword by Father Dominic DevasO.F.M. (Burns Oates; 7/6.) - Historic English Convents of To-Day. By Dom Basil WhelanO.S.B. (Bums Oates; 7/6.)

Review of Book: Historic English Convents of To-Day

Review of Book: Historic English Convents of To-Day