Late Modern English Period Research Articles

Linguistic prescriptivism and the language of the laboring poor: The case of will/shall

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the effect of prescriptivism on a part of society – the labouring poor – that has not received as much attention yet. As education was socially stratified during the Late Modern English period, and elementary compulsory schooling was only introduced in 1870, the labouring poor did not receive schooling or alternative training on a regular basis, if at all. It is therefore particularly interesting to find out whether those who were able to write were aware of grammatical rules. In order to shed light on the question whether the laboring poor showed awareness of grammar rules of shall and will, this article investigates the use of these two modal verbs in a corpus of Late Modern English pauper letters. The study reveals that will was used almost categorically in the second- and third-person singular and plural, while shall is used in 65.6% of instances in the first-person singular. Thus, Late Modern English paupers tend to adhere to the grammar rules found in contemporary normative texts in a similar way to writers of the upper social layers. Additionally, certain social factors, e.g. region or addressee, seem to have had some influence on the usage of shall and will.

후기 현대영어 시기(1700-1900)의 영어 규범 용법(Prescriptive Usage)의 발달에 관한 연구

후기 현대영어 시기(1700-1900)의 영어 규범 용법(Prescriptive Usage)의 발달에 관한 연구

Dialect in the Making

Within the framework of third-wave sociolinguistic research, Asif Agha’s (2003) theory of enregisterment has proved a successful approach to explore the mechanisms that lead to the indexical connection between language and identity. Beal (2009, 2020), Cooper (2013, 2020), and Ruano-García (2012, 2020, 2021), among others, have investigated this phenomenon from a diachronic perspective. They have highlighted the value of dialect writing as a window into the main features associated with particular dialects, as it draws upon authenticating practices such as the use of dialect respellings, which not only signal salient phonological features, but also link them to wider schemes of sociocultural values and identities. This paper seeks to add to this field of research by looking at literary representations of Derbyshire speech (1850–1900) through the lens of enregisterment. My aims are twofold: I attempt to (1) shed light on the main phonological features of the Derbyshire dialect, while (2) determining how this variety was enregistered in the Late Modern English period, and whether meaningful text type-dependent indexical shifts might have affected the way in which this dialect was understood and thus represented by native and non-native speakers.

Conditionals as interpersonal devices in Late Modern English women’s scientific writing

It is widely recognised that attaining best possible reception of one’s writing within the scientific community is among the main factors that contribute to the rhetorical profile of scientific prose. Authors not only have to negotiate meaning but also to persuade their peers (Allen, Qin & Lancaster, 1994; Atkinson 1996, 1999; Bazerman, 1988; Hyland, 1998, 2000). This is perhaps most remarkable when the position within the scientific community is disadvantageous, as in the case of female scientists during the Late Modern English period. (Crespo, 2012; Schiebinger, 1989, 2003).
 Conditionals present an array of functions of an interpersonal nature, these used to negotiate meaning or to achieve a better reader response. Whether they are used to state shared assumptions, to narrow the scope or mitigate the force of a claim, to show humility by rhetorically doubting one’s own wording or underlining one’s uncertainty, or to directly express politeness, conditionals can be characterised as “rhetorical device[s] for gaining acceptance for one’s claims” (Warchal, 2010, p. 141).
 The aim of this article is to analyse the use of conditionals as interpersonal, negotiating devices in the work of female scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To this end, texts written by women included in the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich, 2011) will be searched for conditional markers, and the results will be analysed from a functional point of view, highlighting the particular ways in which female scientists used these devices across disciplines and through the period.

Phonetic spellings in the Late Modern English dialect of the Isle of Wight (based on EDD Online)

AbstractPhonetic spelling was common practice in English dialect texts until the API (English: IPA), in 1893, launched its normative signs of transcription. Nevertheless, phonetic spellings have rarely been studied, the least in dialects. This paper ventures to trace some of the immanent norms and the sound functions of some phonetic spellings in the Isle of Wight during the Late Modern English period. The investigation is mainly based on data retrieved from EDD Online, which allows for sophisticated aggregate queries so that spelling practices can be quantified and mapped. The paper focuses on spellings unique to the island, such as double a, e, and o before another vowel, that is, in diphthongs, and u-spellings for schwa in posttonic syllables. The figures for non-unique features, such as voicing of fricatives, are normalized and allow for correlation to other counties. In sum, the Isle of Wight accent was marked by its typical “drawl.”

Wright about Wight: A dialect glossary of the Isle of Wight based on EDD Online

AbstractDescribing specific dialect areas in terms of their lexis is an attractive idea now that the latest version of the English Dialect Dictionary Online (EDD Online 3.0, 2019) allows for quick and easy lexical retrievals of English dialect words of the Late Modern English period. This paper uses the Isle of Wight (I.W.) as a test case for putting such an idea into practice. The 137 words uniquely attributed in the EDD to I.W. are analyzed and interpreted in relation to the 1500-odd words used on I.W. alongside other areas of the UK. The paper informs the reader of the available query modes and discusses their pros and cons, quantifying and mapping the different numbers of isolated words in use on I.W. versus those unique to other English counties. The larger number of words that the island shared with the counties of the “mainland” will likewise be considered, thus allowing for first steps towards a “dialectometrical” analysis. The findings are related to the historical background of I.W., particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The rise of a concessive “category reassessment” construction

Abstract In the Late Modern English period, several expressions arose with concessive ‘despite what might be expected’ meaning, among them anyway, nonetheless and all the same (Lenker 2010). The topic of this paper is the rise of the specialized concessive construction “but (be) X all the same”. In the full rhetorical formula of which it is a part, X is initially represented as not having properties Y but nevertheless as having sufficient other relevant properties to be classified as X, as in “…fear. It is not the eye-rolling, quaking fear seen in police states, but it is fear all the same” (1963 coha). Here the writer concedes that there is fear despite Y (see Horn [1991] on “redundant information”) and invites the addressee to reinterpret the initial X retrospectively (see Haselow [2013] on functions of “final particles”). Using data mainly from clmet3.0 and coha, I discuss the conventionalization of this construction in terms of Diachronic Construction Grammar and argue alongside, for example, Goldberg (2004); Cappelle (2017) and Finkbeiner (2019) that pragmatics should be given a larger role in construction grammar than has often been the case in the past.

Phrasal verb vs. Simplex pairs in legal-lay discourse: the Late Modern English period in focus

Abstract The present paper attempts to describe the divergences between nearly synonymous phrasal verb/simplex pairs from court trials dating back to the Late Modern English period (LModE). The intention was to evaluate the effects that each verb form might exert in discourse, interpreting the lexical choice as functionally linked to the contents of the legal-lay discourse, that is the discourse between lay people and professionals in the courtroom (Heffer 2005: xv). Research to date has highlighted how the choice of one form or another needs to be explained in terms of register and degree of expressiveness (Bolinger 1971: 172; McArthur 1989: 40; Hiltunen 1999: 161; Claridge 2000: 221). However, no studies have yet evaluated the difference between phrasal verbs and simplexes from a phraseological perspective, or reflected on how their use is functionally linked to the communicative needs in courtroom settings. The study was conducted on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a self-compiled corpus that covers the century 1750–1850 and that includes a selection of trials drawn from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court.

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.

Intensification in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing

While intensifiers are primarily associated with informal spoken registers, they serve important interpersonal functions also in more formal registers like academic prose. The use of intensifiers in scientific writing has accordingly been explored in Present-Day English, and previous studies have also investigated diachronic changes in this register in Middle and Early Modern English. However, the Late Modern English period remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that at least in medical writing it represents an important transition period both intellectually and textually. To follow up on the trends and developments established in previous work, this paper explores the patterns of intensification in eighteenth century medical writing using Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. 2019), which contains a large collection of texts representing different areas of medicine. While the intensifiers that are selected for study are ubiquitous in the data, their frequency varies considerably between individual texts, and this variation is often linked to the characteristics of individual sub-registers. At the same time, the use of intensifiers in this period is characterized by stability rather than dramatic change, despite ongoing changes in the sociocultural context of medicine. Along with providing a detailed investigation of the frequency of the main intensifiers in different categories of medical writing of the period, the analysis describes their co-selection patterns with particular adjectives.

The Diachronic Evolution of the Complementation Profile of REMEMBER from Late Modern to Present-day British English

The emergence of gerund-participial complement clauses (CCs) is considered to be one of the major developments of the Great Complement Shift (Rohdenburg 1996: 2006) and has contributed to the alleged long-term trend for the growth of non-finite CCs in the English language (Denison 1999: 256). The verb remember saw its complementation profile altered by the introduction of gerundparticipial CCs, which entered into free competition with finite declarative CCs when the meaning of the verb is ‘recall’. This envelope of variation is studied here in terms of frequency distribution and the language-internal factors that influence the choice in Present-day British English (BrE). Results are compared to Cuyckens et al. (2014) findings for the Late Modern English period. The data show that the distribution of finite and non-finite CCs stabilised in the last century: the trend in English towards growth in the proportion of nonfinite CCs is not observed in this study. As for factors conditioning CC variation, non-structural factors (e.g. CC meaning) are key variables disfavouring non-finite CCs in Present-day BrE, while structural factors appear not to influence the choice today, unlike in Late Modern English, where both structural and non-structural factors conditioned the variation observed (Cuyckens et al. 2014).

Using theEighteenth-Century English Phonology Database(ECEP) as a teaching resource

This article reports on the use of theEighteenth-Century English Phonology Database(ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.

Raisingturn outin Late Modern English

AbstractPresent-day Englishturn outis used in several constructions with mirative and evidential overtones. Among these, the raised subject construction and the impersonal construction stand out. The current paper provides a diachronic account of the changes that led to the emergence of these constructions. It examines the semantic and syntactic configuration ofturn outand the mechanisms whereby this verb developed evidential and mirative readings during the Late Modern English period. The record shows thatturn outdeveloped abruptly from a full lexical (predominantly resultative and change-of-state) control verb into a raising verb in the course of the eighteenth century. This change was triggered by a process of semantic generalization and subjectification whereby the verb acquired evidential and, most notably, mirative nuances. Analogy seems to have played an important role as well, since the evidence suggests that other constructions somewhat similar in form (syntactic structural usage) and meaning facilitated this process. The bulk of the data examined in this study were drawn from theOxford English Dictionaryand theCorpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0.

The trolley rumbled through the tunnel: On the history of the English Intransitive Motion Construction

AbstractThis article examines the history, from Old English times to the first quarter of the twentieth century, of the Intransitive Motion Construction. It compares the development of its result subschema (The trolley rumbled through the tunnel), where the verb is one of sound emission, with the development of other subschemas of the construction, in particular the manner subschema (The man walked in), where the verb denotes manner of motion. As shown by earlier research, the manner subschema and the manner of motion lexicon have greatly expanded since the Old English period, especially in Modern English. The result subschema, by contrast, although attested as far back as Old English, remains marginal until the nineteenth century, when it finally gains in importance, thus making the Intransitive Motion Construction more versatile. This expansion in the conceptual range of the construction, from predominantly coding manner of motion to describing other highly specific details of motion, such as the sound resulting from it, is linked to the addition to the English lexicon, in relatively recent times, of a great number of new sound verbs whose frequency of use has been constantly on the increase. Furthermore, the paper argues that these changes in the English sound verb inventory are also responsible for some of the developments undergone by the so-calledWay-construction (The steamer plashed its way forward) in the Late Modern English period.

‘Proper’ pro-nun-ʃha-ʃhun1 in Eighteenth-Century English: ECEP as a New Tool for the Study of Historical Phonology and Dialectology

English historical linguists have often complained about the scholarly neglect of the phonology of the Late Modern English period; yet, the value of pronouncing dictionaries as rich and reliable evidence has been demonstrated (Beal, J. C., 1999, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of the English Language (1775). Oxford: Clarendon Press; Jones, C., 2006, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). This article presents a new electronic, searchable database of ‘Eighteenth-Century English Phonology’ (ECEP) which aims to facilitate research on the social, regional, and lexical distribution of phonological variants in 18th-century English, as documented in contemporary pronouncing dictionaries. Taking Wells’ (1982, Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) lexical sets for the vowel system of present-day varieties of English as its reference, the database provides unicode IPA transcriptions for the relevant segment of each word given as an example of lexical (sub)set in his account of standard lexical sets, to which we have added some complementary consonant sets. These will be of use for comparative studies with 19th-century and present-day English. First, we describe the methodology and contents of ECEP: primary source selection, data input and annotation, the web-based interface. Second, we report on two case studies that demonstrate the value of evidence that can be systematically extracted from ECEP for the analysis of segmental and suprasegmental phonology; these are variations in the pronunciation of ‘wh’ in the set whale (/hw/∼/w/∼/h/), and the palatalization of alveolar consonants before /uː/. Thus, this article will demonstrate the viability of ECEP for historical phonology, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, and will help to promote the use of databases as key resources in historical linguistics.

Muttering Contempt and Smiling Appreciation: Disentangling the History of the Reaction Object Construction in English

ABSTRACTStructures such as “she muttered contempt” or “she smiled appreciation” have been referred to as Reaction Object Constructions (ROCs), and consist of a normally intransitive verb followed by an object that conveys an emotion, such that the whole construction can be paraphrased as “express an emotion by V-ing”. Although ROCs have been discussed recently in relation to Present Day English, from a historical perspective they have received very little attention, mentioned only in passing in historical reference grammars. This paper explores aspects of the history of ROCs, drawing on data from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0. The findings show that, similarly to other processes of transitivisation such as the way-construction, ROCs have been in use since the fifteenth century, expanding to more verbs over the course of the Late Modern English period. More specifically, the data suggests that the construction was established mainly in the nineteenth century, a period in which those verbs attested in the construction became quite fashionable in novels. Findings are also subjected to a collexeme analysis, revealing the prototypical verbs of the construction during this period.

About text frequencies in historical linguistics: Disentangling environmental and grammatical change

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the limitations of inferring grammar change from variable text frequencies in historical corpus data. We argue that fluctuating frequencies of grammatical variants in real time are a function not only of changing grammars but are also conditioned by what we call ‘environmental’ changes (for example, content changes) that affect the textual habitat. As a case study, we explore the English genitive alternation in the Late Modern English period and demonstrate that the English

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.

Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Australian English: A Corpus-based Study

Studies of grammatical change in the Late Modern English period have concentrated almost exclusively on British and American English. This paper is the first to trace grammatical changes in Australian English across the approximately two centuries from the foundation of the first British colony in Australia in 1788 to the present day, using data derived from two recently compiled corpora, ‘COOEE’ (nineteenth century) and ‘AusCorp’ (twentieth century). The focus of the investigation is on selected categories of the verb phrase that are known to have undergone diachronic change in British and American English over this period: modals and quasi-modals (specifically must, will, have to and be going to), the progressive and the present perfect. Australian English is shown, via comparisons using data from the ‘ARCHER’ corpus, to be evolving in the same general direction over the same period as the two longer-established varieties, British and American English. However, there are at the same time a sufficient number of divergences in frequency and rate of change between Australian English and the reference varieties to suggest a degree of linguistic independence for the Antipodean variety: in its milder level of support for the two rising quasi-modals, the rising progressive and the declining present perfect, and in its more extreme aversion to the two declining modals.

Quasi-modals and Modals in Australian English Fiction 1800-1999, with Comparisons across British and American English

This article seeks to extend beyond the almost exclusive concentration in studies of grammatical change over the Late Modern English period on British and American English. It traces the fortunes in Australian English of four quasi-modals that have been grammaticalizing rapidly over this period ( have to and have got to representing the domain of necessity/obligation, and want to and be going to representing volition/prediction), comparing them with semantically related modals ( must, should, ought to, will, and shall). Data are derived from two recently compiled corpora, COOEE and AusCorp, which together cover the period of approximately two centuries from the foundation of the first British colony in Australia in 1788 to the present day. Comparisons drawn with British and American English for the same period using data from the ARCHER corpus show Australian English evolving in the same general direction as the two longer-established varieties, but its endonormative independence being asserted in its users’ more extreme dispreference for the modals and their reluctance to embrace the quasi-modals as enthusiastically as users of American English.