Manfred Markus

“THE MEN PRESENT” VS “THE PRESENT CASE”: WORD ORDER RULES CONCERNING THE POSITION OF THE ENGLISH ADJECTIVE

The rules of word order within the adjectival attribute in English come from different Subsystems of the language System: from syntax and semantics, but also from sentence perspective, the (meta-) communicative implications of the adjective or its complement, and, finally, from pragmatic factors and lexicalized conventions. Some arguments, for example those concerning the syntactic behaviour of adjectives with the prefix a(like asleep\ have explanatory force only on a historical basis. Thus requiring methodological pluralism, the English adjective is somewhat typical of present-day English grammar in general, which, conditioned by the mixture of Germanic and Romance elements, has settled some chapters of grammar in a hybrid way.

The Development of Prose in Early Modern English in View of the Gender Question: Using Grammatical Idiosyncrasies of 15th and 17th Century Letters

In a paper published ten years ago, I addressed prose, in this case Middle English prose, as a text type altogether different from verse by its insistence on transparency (‘glasnost’). While verse, such as Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’ and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Pearl, are full of ‘Leerstellen’ (to put it paradoxically), Middle English prose up to the late 14th century was tediously clear and graspable. It seems that during the late Middle English and Early Modern English periods and in the wake of its general acceptance in the 15th century, English prose fundamentally changed its character by becoming more diversified, more specifically functional and more subjective. Up to Chaucer’s time, English prose had still been predominantly religious, namely homiletic, moreover, it had used the language of translations and the language of Latin rhetorics. But after this its function, particularly its secular function, widened, so that we can distinguish a flurry of prose genres

The relevance of spoken features in English as a foreign language (EFL)

An analysis of the need for attention to the spoken word and phonetics in the teaching of English world-wide. It is a truism that English is increasingly becoming a world language. Even in China a ‘craze for English’ has been, in view of the fact that over 200 million children (about 20% of all children in the world) now1 learn English in Chinese schools. McArthur has estimated that c.250 million Indians use English every day. All these speakers of English use it their own way. This localisation of English has been variously detected, for example in Hong Kong. It is also well known from versions of African English and, in fact, from most English varieties that have been attributed to the ‘Outer’ or ‘Extended. However, as early as 1983 Kachru voiced a caveat: ‘A large majority of the non-native speakers of institutionalised varieties of English use a local variety of English, but when told so, they are hesitant to accept the fact’.

Towards an analysis of pragmatic and stylistic features in 15th and 17th century English letters

A special sub-corpus of 84 letters from the Innsbruck Letter Corpus (1386 to 1688) was compiled with equal amounts of male and female correspondence of the 15th and 17th centuries, so that they could be analysed contrastively in terms of both gender and time. The purpose of the paper is twofold: (1) In terms of method, it attempts to prove that normalisation is indispensable for retrieval, at least in the case of Middle English and Early Modern English. (2) As a contribution to gender studies, the paper contrasts some pragmatic and stylistic features of the language of women and men, and of the language of the 15th and 17th century. Those analysed are deictic expressions, markers of emphasis, expressions of feeling, and metamessages, as expressed in formulaic I hope, I fear, etc., and pragmatic signals of selfexpression and of appeal. The analysis reveals a few characteristic differences between the two centuries, but its main finding is that women generally show more empathy in their letters, using the channel of communication more actively, more intuitively, and more cooperatively.

Corporal Punishment in Late Modern English Dialects (an analysis based on EDD Online ): How beating has been reflected in ‘the language of the people’

It is a sad fact that physical violence and, as a subtype, the corporal punishment of children and juveniles, practised by parents and other guardians, schools and clergy in both Europe and North America, have been part of our ‘Western’, i.e. Christian, cultural heritage, not to mention other world-cultures. I myself am old enough to remember the various common practices of physical violence used on children in the 1950s. At school in Germany, caning and face-slapping were officially tolerated and quite common, applied as a kind of educational instrument, sometimes even to 17-year-olds. In state-run schools of the United Kingdom, corporal punishment was politically banned only in 1986. Private schools followed suit from 1998 (England and Wales) to 2003 (Northern Ireland) (Country report for UK, 2015). In the United States, corporal punishment is still lawful in 19 states, in both public and private schools (Country report for USA, 2016).

The Survival of Shakespeare’s Language in English Dialects (on the Basis of EDD Online)

ABSTRACT On the occasion of Shakespeare’s death 400 years ago and given his affinity to the “common people”, the question is raised of the survival of his vocabulary in English dialect words as represented by Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD; 1898–1905), which is still the best source on the areal distribution of dialect in the UK and overseas from 1700 to 1904, with some likelihood of validity even today. With the help of software recently launched (EDD Online), this paper counts the Shakespeare words that survived in English dialects, and records their distribution across works, time and place. The results generally testify to their ubiquity in the dialects of the UK and most English-speaking overseas countries, but also reveal reliefs across historical periods and countries. As a by-effect, the paper familiarises readers with some of the fascinating research possibilities provided by the EDD Online interface.

“Sirrah, What's Thy Name?”: The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sirrah in Relation to Sir and Sire in Late Middle and Early Modern English

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeares plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheus opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

How can Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary be used as a corpus?

The paper will first provide a short introduction to EDD Online, and then illustrate the potential of its interface by topicalising interjections as a word class and compounding as a productive type of word formation in dialect. In Section 3 the theoretical question of a dictionary used as a corpus will be tackled. Section 4 is dedicated to the contents and structure of Wright’s sources, Section 5 to what he calls “citations”. Quantitatively speaking, probably more than half of Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), now available in a beta version from the Innsbruck project EDD Online, consists of citations, i.e. text passages from dialect literature, glossaries or other sources. While these citation passages are meant to illustrate particular lexical points, they are often fairly extensive, so that the idea may occur to isolate them from the rest of the entries to create an autonomous dialect corpus. My paper will investigate the feasibility of this idea, mainly analysing in close-up Wright’s citations and the sources attributed to them. Further aspects to consider will be the dates of sources, as well as the correlation of the sources with dialectal areas and formal features of word formation including compounds, derivations, and phrases. The study will give evidence that the EDD provides not just some kind of a corpus of dialect texts, but a very structured one, with time, place and source being the main parameters.

Joseph Wright’s ‘English Dialect Dictionary’ in electronic form: A critical discussion of selected lexicographic parameters and query options

The digitised version of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD, 1896–1905) promises to be a lexicographic milestone for English dialect terms and phrases of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a research project in the English Department at the University of Innsbruck, the c.5000 pages of the dictionary have been transferred into machine-readable text and parsed. Our aim is to produce an online version of the dictionary for research on the history of spoken and dialectal Late Modern English. The paper demonstrates the complexity of the entries in the EDD and focuses on the questions of dialect attribution and of the definition of words and phrases as two cases in point. Beyond that, we will provide a survey of the search interface and specifically discuss the implementation of the two issues of dialect area and definition.

EFL dictionaries, grammars and language guides from 1700 to 1850: testing a new corpus on points of spokenness

This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of ‘corpus’ which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.