Roger Lass

The Cambridge history of the English language

1. Introduction Suzanne Romaine 2. Vocabulary John Algeo 3. Syntax David Denison 4. Onomastics Richard Coates 5. Phonology Michael K. C. MacMahon 6. English grammar and usage Edward Finegan 7. Literary language Sylvia Adamson Glossary of linguistic terms Bibliography Index.

Phonology and morphology

Introduction Overview and prospect The period 1476–1776 covers the end of Middle English, what is generally known as Early Modern English, and the early stages of indisputably ‘modern’, if somewhat old-fashioned, English. At the beginning, the language looks more Middle than Modern, and sounds partly both; at the end it looks and sounds quite, if not fully, modern. I illustrate with two short texts and some comment: A. Letter of Sir Thomas Wyatt to his son, 1532 I doubt not but long ere this tyme my lettres are come to you. I remember I wrate you in them that if you read them oftin it should be as tho I had written oftin to you: for al that I can not so content me but stil to cal apon you with my lettres. I wold not for al that that if any thing be wel warnid in the other, that you should leaue to remember it becaus of this new, for it is not like with aduertisements as it is with apparel that with long wering a man castith away when he hath new. Honest teching neuir were onles they were out of his remembrans that shold kepe and folow them to the shame and hurt of him self. (Muir 1960: 248ff) B. Letter of Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, 1774 I am ashamed to think that since I received your letter I have passed so many days without answering it. I think there is no great difficulty in resolving your doubts. The reasons for which you are inclined to visit London, are, I think, not of sufficient strength to answer the objections. I need not tell you what regard you owe to Mrs. Boswell’s entreaties; or how much you ought to study the happiness of her who studies yours with so much diligence, and of whose kindness you enjoy such good effects. Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions. She permitted you to ramble last year, you must permit her now to keep you at home. (Boswell’s Life , Saturday 5 March 1774)

How to Do Things with Junk : Exaptation in Language Evolution

One of the less rewarding of our common interdisciplinary pursuits is lifting theoretical concepts from subjects not our own, and using them in contexts very distant from those they were intended for. Such borrowings often turn from theoretical claims into sloppy metaphors, leading to varieties of ‘vulgar X-ism’, the resuit of overenthusiastic appropriation with insufficient sense of the subtlety or precise applicability of the originals. Spencers ‘Social Darwinism’, vulgar-Freudian or vulgar-Marxist literary analysis and sociology are nice examples. Linguistics, being less unique than linguists often think, is no exception: Praguian and neo-Praguian functionalism may be a kind of vulgar Darwinism, extending notions of ‘adaptation’ or ‘selective pressure’ to the inappropriate domain of language Systems (see Lass, 1980a). But every once in a while such transfers seem to work, like Darwins borrowings from late eighteenth-century Scottish economie theory; if not always through direct applicability, then by focusing on new ways of interpreting old data, or providing a basis for linking disparate phenomena as instances of a new (putative) natural kind.

How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution

Consider the interpretation of the sentences in (1)-(3) below. ( 1 ) (a) John sneezed. (b) John played on the beach. (2 ) (a) John sneezed freguently. (b) John often played on the beach. (3 ) (a) John sneezed for two hours/years. (b) John played on the beach for two hours / years.

REGIONAL AND SOCIAL VARIATION

The Early Modern English period was decisive for the modern definition of the status of the newly emerging standard language. A great number of social, regional and stylistic factors combine when it comes to deciding about prestige and correctness, and about the appropriateness of specific forms of language in a given situation. Modern sociolinguistic studies have shown that social variables like age, sex, religion, social status and occupation are relevant for linguistic stratification, and also for how they correlate with statistical probabilities of occurrence in individual speech communities or groups. However, it is also evident that social factors and their relative importance are subject to change, at least as much as the linguistic variables and their available variants are. Moreover, modern sociolinguistics has also shown that factors that speakers are unaware of are frequently as crucial as those that are conspicuous, and that there may be combinations of determinants that are relevant where the individual categories are not.

ORTHOGRAPHY AND PUNCTUATION

Introduction: speech and writing The relationship between the spoken and the written word is of two basic kinds; the written symbol may represent a concept directly, or it may represent the word which names the mental concept in an individual language. In the former case the symbol is called an ideograph, familiar examples of which are Arabic numerals; the numeral represents the same concept to speakers of different languages, but not the same word. The other type of relationship, in which the written form represents the spoken, is also of two kinds; one is phonemic , where each element or grapheme in the written form is intended to represent a sound, or phoneme, in the spoken (and occasionally, in Old English, an allophone). Illustrations of this relationship are common in modern English, e.g. sit, pan, lend . The second type is wholly or partially logographic (representing the word as a whole) where there may be only a partial ‘fit’ between phoneme and grapheme; the reader is expected to recognise the word as a whole even though the set of graphemes does not unequivocally indicate a specific set of phonemes. Many examples of logographs occur in Modern English, e.g. scene/seen, peal/peel, rain/reign, vale/veil . These pairs are known as homophones , words which sound alike but have different meanings and spellings. Homographs are two or more words with identical spelling but different pronunciations and meanings, e.g. wind ‘turn round’ and wind ‘movement of air’. Homonyms are sets of words with similar sounds and spellings, but different meanings, e.g. tender ‘part of a train’, tender ‘gentle’, tender ‘sore’, tender ‘offer’.

Vowel system universals and typology: prologue to theory

Considering all the work done on vowel system typology and universals in the past half-century (Trubetzkoy 1929, 1939; Hockett Sedlak 1969; Crothers 1978), my title may seem rather arrogant. There are after all theories of vocalic organisation about, or at least models and taxonomies; there are even attempts to explain why certain implicational universals seem to hold (from Jakobsons [laws of solidarity] (1968) to the more sophisticated treatments in Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972; Kim 1973; etc.).

Shape-shifting, sound-change and the genesis of prodigal writing systems

In a series of articles we have looked at individual early Middle English writing systems and explored aspects of multivocal sound/symbol and symbol/sound relationships. This article combines previous observations with new material, and provides insights into the genesis of these relations and how they may interconnect. Since many early Middle English texts survive as copies, not originals, they may give clues to the orthographic systems of their exemplars too. We investigate the ‘extensibility’ of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets. Writing systems may be economical or prodigal. The ‘ideal’ economical system would map into a broad phonetic or a phonemic transcription: that is, one ‘sound’, one symbol. In early Middle English there is no one standard written norm, so there is potentially less restraint on diversity than in standard systems. Further extensibility is built into the system. We show that much of what tends to be dismissed as ‘scribal error’ rather represents writing praxis no longer familiar to us – flexible matrices of substitution and variation.

On Explaining Language Change

Roger Lass is concerned about the nature of argumentation within linguistics and the status of its data and theoretical constructs. Through an examination of standard strategies of explanation in historical linguistics (particularly of phonological change), in the light of past approaches to scientific epistemology, Dr Lass convincingly demonstrates that attempts to model explanations of linguistic change on those of the physical sciences are failures both in practice and in principle. Linguists can neither assimilate their discipline crudely to the natural or the other human sciences nor, at the other extreme, shelter behind the notion of a private self-validating paradigm. Although Dr Lass outlines some tentative paths towards an alternative epistemology, his main concern is that linguists should confront the philosophical implications of their subject, and he raises questions which both linguists and philosophers will need to consider.

On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative

Abstract We offer a radical reinterpretation of the first step in the development of OE [h] in hēo towards PDE [ʃ] in she. This solves outstanding difficulties in accounting for the vocalism in ME [ʃe:], precursor of PDE [ʃi:]. The background is the etymology of she created for the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies, and its accompanying Corpus of Changes. The database for CoNE is The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, with 36 different spellings for she across 71 texts. First, we present the OE etymology of she, tracking the changes that gave rise to all the attested OE variants. Second, using Britton’s (1991) paper as a starting point, we give a new explanation for initial [hj], allowing a straightforward account for all three attested ME vocalisms: [e:], [o:] and [ø:]. Third, we unpack the changes underlying the complex of variants attested in LAEME.