Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-5g6vh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T04:00:49.172Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Connecting the present and the past: cognitive processing and the position of adverbial clauses in Samuel Pepys's Diary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

MEIKE PENTREL
MEIKE PENTREL*
Affiliation:
Institute of English and American Studies, Osnabrück University, Neuer Graben 40, 49069 Osnabrück, Germanympentrel@uni-osnabrueck.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present article studies the linear order of main and temporal adverbial clauses in the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660–1669). In the development of a framework that combines cognitive and historical data, processing principles identified for Present-day English (e.g. Prideaux 1989; Diessel 2008) are tested for this ego-document from the seventeenth century. The factors investigated are the iconic temporal order of both clauses, the length of the adverbial clause and the implied meaning of the clauses. Moreover, the discourse function of the respective clauses will be discussed. On the basis of the Uniformitarian Principle, the present study assumes that processing principles that are valid for Present-day English predict the position of the clause in past language stages to a similar extent.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Special Issue 2: Cognitive approaches to the history of English , July 2017 , pp. 263 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altenberg, Bengt. 1984. Causal linking in spoken and written English. Studia Linguistica: A Journal of General Linguistics 38 (1), 20–69.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Behagel, Otto. 1930. Von deutscher Wortstellung. Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 44, 81–9.Google Scholar
Bergs, Alexander. 2012. The Uniformitarian Principle and the risk of anachronisms in language and social history. In Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel & Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (eds.), Blackwell handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 80–99. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bergs, Alexander & Pentrel, Meike. 2014. Ælc þara þe þas min word gehierþ and þa wyrcþ. . .: Psycholinguistic perspectives on early English. In Adams, Michael, Fulk, R. D. & Brinton, Laurel J. (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language VI: Evidence and method in histories of English, 249–76. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Best, Karl-Heinz. 2005. Satzlänge. In Köhler, Reinhard, Altmann, Gabriel & Piotrowski, Rajmund G. (eds.), Quantitative Linguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch / Quantitative linguistics: An international handbook, 298–304. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bever, Thomas G. 1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, John R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language, 279–362. New York: Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2003. Cognitive processes in grammaticalization. In Tomasello, Michael (ed.), The new psychology of language, vol. 2, 145–67. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1984. How people use adverbial clauses. In Brugman, Claudia & Macaulay, Monica (eds.), Proceedings of the tenth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 437–49. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Christy, T. Craig 1983. Uniformitarianism in linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2007. Conditionals in Early Modern English texts. In Lenker, Ursula & Meurman-Solin, Anneli (eds.), Connectives in the history of English, 229–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia & Walker, Terry. 2001. Causal clauses in written and speech-related genres in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 25 (Dec), 31–63.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 1970. How young children describe events in time. In Flores d'Arcais, Giovanni B. & Levelt, Willem Johannes Maria (eds.), Advances in psycholinguistics: Research papers presented at the Bressanone conference on psycholinguistics, summer courses of the University of Padova, July 1969, 275–84. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. & Clark, Eve V.. 1977. Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2003. Typology and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 1996. Processing factors of pre- and postponed adverbial clauses. In Johnson, Jan, Juge, Matthew L. & Moxley, Jeri L. (eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-second annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 71–82. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2001. The ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses: A typological study. Language 77 (3), 433–55.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2005. Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43 (3), 449–70.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2008. Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics 19 (3), 465–90.Google Scholar
Dirven, René. 1985. Metaphor as a basic means for extending the lexicon. In Paprotté, Wolf & Driven, René (eds.), The ubiquity of metaphor in language and thought, 85–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Fabiszak, Malgorzata. 2001. The concept of ‘joy’ in Old and Middle English: A semantic analysis. Piƚa: Wyzsza Szkola Biznesu.Google Scholar
Field, Andy, Miles, Jeremy & Field, Zoë. 2012. Discovering statistics using R. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia A. 1993. Grammar in interaction: Adverbial clauses in American English conversations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia E. & Thompson, Sandra A.. 1986. Conditionals in discourse: A text-based study from English. In Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, Meulen, Alice Ter, Reilly, Judy Snitzer & Ferguson, Charles A. (eds.), On conditionals, 353–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2003. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: A study of particle placement. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2010. Statistics for linguistics with R. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Haiman, John. 1980. The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language 56 (3), 515–40.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1990. A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry 21 (2), 223–61.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. The positioning of adverbial clauses in the Paston letters. In Jucker, Andreas H., Landert, Daniela, Seiler, Annina & Studer-Joho, Nicole (eds.), Meaning in the history of English: Words and texts in context, 211–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Johnson, Helen L. 1975. The meaning of before and after for preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 19, 88–99.Google Scholar
Jou, Jerwen & Harris, Richard J.. 1990. Event order versus syntactic structure in recall of adverbial complex sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 19 (1), 21–42.Google Scholar
Koch, Peter & Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1985. Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36, 15–43.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination: A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2011. Grammaticalization and Cognitive Grammar. In Narrog, Heiko & Heine, Bernd (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 79–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1980. On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Latham, Robert & Matthews, William (eds.). 1970. The diary of Samuel Pepys: A new and complete transcription, vol. 1: 1660. London: Bell & Hyman.Google Scholar
Matthews, William. 1950. British diaries: An annotated bibliography of British diaries written between 1442 and 1942. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony & Hardie, Andrew. 2012. Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nerlich, Brigitte. 1990. Change in language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu, Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena, Keränen, Jukka, Nevala, Minna, Nurmi, Arja & Palander-Collin, Minna. 1998. CEECS = Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler. Google Scholar
Nichols, John G. (ed.). 1848. The diary of Henry Machyn, citizen and merchant-taylor of London, 1550–1563. London. Available from: British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/camden-record-soc/vol42 (accessed 7 December 2016)Google Scholar
Prideaux, Gary D. 1989. Text data as evidence for language processing principles: The grammar of ordered events. Language Sciences 11 (1), 27–42.Google Scholar
Prideaux, Gary D. & Baker, William J.. 1986. Strategies and structures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Lass, Roger (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476–1777, 187–326. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shih, Stephanie & Grafmiller, Jason. 2011. Weighing in on end weight. Paper presented at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Pittsburg, PA, 9–11 January.Google Scholar
Szmrecsányi, Benedikt M. 2004. On operationalizing syntactic complexity. In Purnelle, Gérald, Fairon, Cédrick & Dister, Anne (eds.), Le poid des mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Textual Data Statistical Analysis, 1032–9. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., Longacre, Robert E. & Hwang, Shin J. J.. 2007. Adverbial clauses. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 2nd edn, vol. II: Complex constructions, 237–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tomalin, Claire. 2003. Samuel Pepys: The unequalled self. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Dasher, Richard B.. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2004. Initial and final position for adverbial clauses in English: The constructional basis of the discourse and syntactic differences. Linguistics 4 (42), 819–53.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997a. End-weight from the speaker's perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26 (3), 347–61.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997b. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9 (1), 81–105.Google Scholar
Wheatley, H. B. 1893. Diary of Samuel Pepys, complete transcribed from the shorthand manuscript in the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College Cambridge by the Rev. Mynors Bright. Available from: Project Gutenberg, [EBook #4200], released June 2003, last updated Oct. 2012, produced by David Widger, www.gutenberg.org/files/4200/4200-h/4200-h.htm (accessed 15 June 2015)Google Scholar
Wiechmann, Daniel & Kerz, Elma. 2013. The positioning of concessive adverbial clauses in English: Assessing the importance of discourse-pragmatic and processing-based constraints. English Language and Linguistics 17 (1), 1–23.Google Scholar
Winters, Margaret E. 2010. Introduction: On the emergence of diachronic cognitive linguistics. In Winters et al. (eds.), 3–27.Google Scholar
Winters, Margaret E., Tissari, Heli & Allan, Kathryn (eds.). 2010. Historical cognitive linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Yevseyev, Vyacheslav. 2013. Motivations for non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts. Linguistics 51 (3), 555–84.Google Scholar