Terttu Nevalainen

Historical sociolinguistics : language change in Tudor and Stuart England

Preface List of Tables List of Figures Publishers Acknowledgements 1. INTRODUCTION: ISSUES IN HISTORICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS 1.1 Sociolinguistics Backprojection? 1.2 Contemporary Perceptions of Usage 1.3 Sociohistorical Reconstruction 1.4 Research Topics 2. SOCIOLINGUISTIC PARADIGMS AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 2.1 Sociolinguistic Paradigms 2.2 Descriptions and Explanations 2.3 Theoretical Pluralism 2.4 Theory in Historical Sociolinguistics 3. PRIMARY DATA: BACKGROUND AND INFORMANTS 3.1 Data in Historical Sociolinguistics 3.2 Generic and Temporal Concerns 3.3 Tudor and Stuart England 3.4 The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) 4: REAL TIME 4.1 The S-Shaped Curve 4.2 Timing Linguistic Changes 4.3 Previous Studies 4.4 The Time Courses of Fourteen Changes 4.5 Conclusion 5: APPARENT TIME 5.1 Ongoing Change in Relation to Age 5.2 Apparent Time in Historical Research 5.3 Previous Studies 5.4 Age Cohorts and Individual Participation in Ongoing Changes 5.5 Conclusion Appendix 5.1: The informants for Figure 5.1. Subject YOU vs. YE Appendix 5.2. Informants for Figure 5.2. 3rd sg -s VS. -TH Appendix 5.3. Informants for Figure 5.3. Which Vs. the Which Chapter 6. GENDER 6.1 The Gender Paradox 6.2 Historical Reconstruction 6.3 Previous Studies 6.4 Gender and Real-Time Linguistic Change 6.5 Conclusion 7. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 7.1 Social Order in Sociolinguistics 7.2 Reconstructing Social Order 7.3 Previous Studies 7.4 Social Order in Language Change 7.5 Conclusion 8. REGIONAL VARIATION 8.1 Regional Dialects in England Today 8.2 Reconstructing Regional Differences in Tudor and Stuart England 8.3 Previous Empirical Studies 8.4 Regional Variation and Late Middle and Early Modern English 8.5 Conclusion 9. HISTORICAL PATTERNING OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION 9.1 Modelling Variability 9.2 Modelling Sociolinguistic Variation Historically 9.3 Previous Empirical Studies 9.4 VARBRUL Analyses of Five Historical Changes 9.5 Summary and Conclusions 10. CONCLUSION 10.1 The Changes in Retrospect 10.2 The Principle of Contingency 10.3 Uninterrupted Continuity of Change? Appendix I: Methodology: how to Count Occurrences Appendix II: Numerical Information Appendix III: The Letter Collections References Author Index Subject Index

History of Englishes : new methods and interpretations in historical linguistics

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LEXIS AND SEMANTICS

Introduction Overview Despite the long life and stability of core vocabulary, the rate of language change is no doubt greatest in the lexicon. Lexical words differ from phonemes and grammatical morphemes in that they can be freely added to the existing stock. As we shall see in more detail below, the Early Modern English period is marked by an unprecedented lexical growth. It is achieved both by extensive borrowing from other languages and by exploiting native resources by means of word-formation. One of the most obvious differences between Old English and Present-Day English is the increase in borrowed lexis. According to one estimate, loan words take up a mere three per cent of the recorded vocabulary in Old English, but some seventy per cent or more in Present-Day English (Scheler 1977: 74). In Early Modern English their share varies between forty per cent and fifty per cent of the new vocabulary recorded (Wermser 1976: 40). This large-scale borrowing no doubt reflects both the various foreign contacts of the period and the growing demands made on the evolving standard language. This is the period in the history of English when for the first time the vernacular extends to practically all contexts of speech and writing. Borrowed lexis supplies new names for new concepts, but also increases synonymy in the language, thus providing alternative ways of saying the same thing in different registers. The means by which words are formed are increased by a number of new productive elements that owe their existence to borrowed lexis.

Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the development and grammaticalization of English downtoners

The paper discusses the adverbialization of two roughly synonymous present-day English intensifiers, pretty and fairly. Based on electronic corpora, a quantitative analysis of their long-term history is provided using the framework of adverb functions proposed by Quirk et al. [Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J., 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London]. The results indicate that, despite some of their shared meanings, the two items underwent non-identical processes of adverbialization. These findings are set against a wider framework of grammaticalization. The question is asked whether adverb formation is regular enough to constitute an inflectional process in Modern English. The productivity of -ly suffixation is discussed as the chief argument for adverbialization being inflectional rather than derivational. The conclusion is reached, however, that too many exceptions can be found to lend credence to this generalization.

Negation in the History of English

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Negative Concord as an English “Vernacular Universal” Social History and Linguistic Typology

This article is a contribution to the study of English vernacular universals, and its aims are twofold. Its empirical aim is to give a sociolinguistic account of the use and nonuse of negative concord, or multiple negation, from Late Middle to Late Modern English between 1400 and 1800. Its second aim is theory-driven: to consider the spread of nonassertive indefinites (negative polarity items) into negative contexts in terms of linguistic typology. In particular, the discussion will connect the generalization of nonassertive forms across interrogatives, conditionals, comparatives, and negatives in the history of English using the semantic map proposed by Haspelmath (1997). The article comes to the conclusion that while this negative polarity concord affects the choice of indefinites, negative versus nonassertive, which come under the scope of negation in standard and vernacular varieties of English, it does not alter the basic typology of English verbal negation with indefinites.

Placing Middle English in context

This collection of articles reflects the present state of the art in Middle English linguistics. Internal processes of linguistic change are assessed in their context in relation to sociohistorical, sociocultural, textual, situational, as well as regional and contact-based factors causing variation in language. Many articles combine two or more approaches to analysis and tackle questions of change through the new methodological tools offered by corpora, thesauri, and atlases. A systematic use of these sources for linguistic evidence will add to our knowledge of the variable character of Middle English and enable us to revise our earlier views of the developments at this stage of the English language.

Gender Differences in the Evolution of Standard English Evidence from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence

This article focuses on a sociolinguistic issue that is for the first time evidenced on a nationwide scale in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the supralocaliza - tion of a number of regional features that in the course of time became part of the morphology of Standard English. I will argue that the social variable of gender had an important role to play in the diffusion of these supralocal features. This is of con - siderable interest, especially as overt prescriptivism and normative grammar had little or no influence on these processes before the late seventeenth century. In present-day British English, processes of supralocalization are typically wit- nessed in phonology. These ongoing processes of dialect leveling include such well-known cases as the diffusion to Norwich and the rest of East Anglia of a number of London features. A case in point is the initial fricative merger in words such as thing and thought. The merger diffused rapidly: in Trudgills (1986, 54) Norwich surveys, adolescents born in 1957 did not have it at all, whereas those born in 1967 used it extensively. Other processes of supralocalization may be slower. The loss of /h/, for instance, has been diffusing outward from London into East An- glia over the past 150 years and is now well established (Trudgill 1986, 44).

Social variation in intensifier use: constraint on -ly adverbialization in the past?

While the formation of deadjectival adjuncts by means of - ly suffixation is regular in the mainstream varieties of English today ( they sing Adj- ly ), that of intensifying word modifiers is much less so ( they sing Adj- ly /O well ). Both categories are typically more variable in many social and regional varieties, in which zero-form adverbs dominate. This article studies the extent to which grammatical and social conditioning played a role in the choice of the form of deadjectival intensifiers between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the era of normative grammar. The results indicate that some of the trends of social embedding identified in Present-day English can indeed be observed in the past, but also that the - ly suffix was clearly less grammaticalized four hundred years ago than it is today.

Significance testing of word frequencies in corpora

Finding out whether a word occurs significantly more often in one text or corpus than in another is an important question in analysing corpora. As noted by Kilgarriff (Language is never, ever, ever, random, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory , 2005; 1(2): 263–76.), the use of the χ2 and log-likelihood ratio tests is problematic in this context, as they are based on the assumption that all samples are statistically independent of each other. However, words within a text are not independent. As pointed out in Kilgarriff (Comparing corpora, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 2001; 6(1): 1–37) and Paquot and Bestgen (Distinctive words in academic writing: a comparison of three statistical tests for keyword extraction. In Jucker, A., Schreier, D., and Hundt, M. (eds), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 247–69), it is possible to represent the data differently and employ other tests, such that we assume independence at the level of texts rather than individual words. This allows us to account for the distribution of words within a corpus. In this article we compare the significance estimates of various statistical tests in a controlled resampling experiment and in a practical setting, studying differences between texts produced by male and female fiction writers in the British National Corpus. We find that the choice of the test, and hence data representation, matters. We conclude that significance testing can be used to find consequential differences between corpora, but that assuming independence between all words may lead to overestimating the significance of the observed differences, especially for poorly dispersed words. We recommend the use of the t-test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, or bootstrap test for comparing word frequencies across corpora.