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1742 results in History of the English language

Page 43 of 88

English Historical Linguistics
  • Approaches and Perspectives
  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton
  • Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017
  • Written by an international team of leading scholars, this engaging textbook on the study of English historical linguistics is uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches and perspectives. Each chapter features textboxes, case studies, suggestions for further reading and exercises, enabling students to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and guiding them on undertaking further research. The case studies and exercises guide students in approaching and manipulating empirical data, providing them with hands-on experience of conducting linguistic research. An extensive variety of approaches, from traditional to contemporary, is treated, including generative approaches, historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches, psycholinguistic perspectives, grammaticalization theory, and discourse-based approaches, as well as perspectives on standardization and language variation. Each chapter applies the concepts discussed to data from the history of English, and a glossary of key terms enables easy navigation and quick cross-referencing. An essential resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of the history of English linguistics.

  • 6 - Approaches to Grammaticalization and Lexicalization

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 131-157

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Grammaticalization has without a doubt become one of the most productive frameworks for studying diachronic change as well as synchronic variation in language, especially within functional-cognitive linguistics and a usage-based approach. As a framework it has evolved both in terms of the topics studied and its methodology. Grammaticalization has been defined in many different ways, both narrowly as ‘a process that makes lexical or less grammatical units or constructions, more grammatical,’ or more broadly as a ‘change that creates grammar’ or simply ‘grammatical change’ as such. Consequently, different characteristics have been argued to be essential for this type of change and different concrete developments have been labeled “grammaticalization.” Its relation to lexicalization is complex and has been described in various ways, reflecting the wide variety of definitions of the latter. Lexicalization in a fairly general sense refers to the process that leads to new conventionalized lexical items, phrases, or idioms. However, maybe even more so than grammaticalization, the term has been used to encompass conceptually rather disparate phenomena. It need not always involve a diachronic dimension, for instance when it pertains to how more abstract notions, such as motion, manner, and space, are lexicalized, i.e., expressed, in English for instance by such verbs as float, stumble, or swim.

    Grammaticalization and lexicalization have been described as being completely opposite types of changes, but also as being orthogonal, distinct processes that may intersect or occur in sequence. Confusion about the nature of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and their relationship to a large extent arises from the various ways in which the lexicon and grammar and their relationship have been defined.

    Because of the prolific output of research within these frameworks any introduction to either grammaticalization or lexicalization is necessarily incomplete. This chapter is hence restricted to discussing the main approaches to grammaticalization and lexicalization studies and the changes in focus that they have gone through.

    Approaches to Grammaticalization

    In this chapter we will restrict ourselves to the narrow sense of grammaticalization, which refers to a specific type of language change in which lexical material develops a more grammatical function and status, and already grammatical material develops more grammatical functions. Such an approach incorporates “unidirectionality,” predicting that grammatical constructions typically have lexical origins, whereas the opposite, lexical items having grammatical origins, is dramatically less common (see below on degrammaticalization).

  • 8 - Discourse-based Approaches

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 185-217

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Consider the following two text-initial passages:

  • a. fire nut caged a psychopath was jailed for life yesterday for killing a mother and her two kids by torching their home. (2000 Sun; Rostock Newspaper Corpus)

  • b. One of the things we celebrate as we gather forworship week by week is God's ability to bring good out of evil.We often have to do so, don't we, in the teeth ofmuch evidence to the contrary. Evidence that God has lost the plot, as it were. For, as we look around our world we see a neverending catalogue of headline-grabbing events which, again and again, spell bad news. (c. 2000 David Stone; see Claridge and Wilson 2000)

    • We recognize these texts more or less immediately for what they are, i.e., what genres they represent, and to which larger discoursal and social contexts they belong – namely, newspaper reportage and a sermon, respectively. We can do this because texts consist of features that are not only functional, but also conventional, and because we have acquired textual competence by growing up in a given culture. Even with altered layout, the news report headline (with characteristic ellipsis; cf. was/has been caged) and the following lead, referring to the major journalistic questions in a nutshell (who, when, what, why), are probably easily recognizable as typical genre features of (1a). Similarly, the sermon beginning (1b), which we recognize by the reference to the communicative situation (gather for worship) and the topic (God), contains interactive features (the pronoun we, the tag question don't we, colloquial expressions such as lost the plot) typical of face-to-face communication. Now look at beginnings of the “same” discourse of earlier times for a contrast:

  • a. Newcastle, Dec. 29. Thursday arrived here, by the London Waggon, the Arms for the Northumberland Militia. (1760 London Evening Post; Rostock Newspaper Corpus)

  • b. The eternall HappineVsse of our immortall souls is to be found only in union and communion with Iesus Christ; Religion is that which gathers and binds up the spirit to close fellowship with Him; … “ (RelA1642; Lampeter Corpus)

    • (2a) contains neither a proper headline (but a dateline instead) nor a lead. While (1a) is followed by a report that spells out the lead in more detail, the older news text continues with different information on unrelated company movements and officer deaths (not cited here).

  • 9 - Sociohistorical Approaches

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 218-244

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In a witness testimony from 1714, Ralph Coleman, a London butcher, relates the following dialogue that he overheard between the Reverend Robert Barry and Sarah Twycrosse (the here unnamed “Woman”), a hostel keeper.

    … S∼ [‘Sir’] I want to speake with you, to wch [‘which’] the sd [‘said’] Robert Barry replyed, Madam, I have nothing to say to you wherto shee replyed, Sr I have something to say to you, & shall speake it in publick to wch the said Robert Barry replyed, Yes and Welcome & thereupon the said ∧﹛Woman﹜ answeared him, Why then Sr I will. The Woman that I saw in bed with you is now with Child (ETED: London 1714–1715: F_4LD_London_003)

    We will leave aside whether Coleman accurately repeated what was originally said – we will have a closer look at the issue of textual reliability later. What is particularly interesting for us in this exchange is the way Twycrosse and Barry address each other. Twycrosse uses sir three times, and Barry responds once with madam. We can assume from modern conventions of address that this usage carried important social implications. After all, in modern contexts, the choice of address term (sir, ma'am, professor, Mr., Ms., Mrs., Ralph, Sarah, idiot, etc.) sends social signals about how we relate to (or perceive our relation to) the people we address: whether we see them as socially more or less powerful than ourselves, as socially close, etc. The selection may also reflect the particular situation we find ourselves in: whether formal or informal, or perhaps whether we feel happy or displeased with a person at a particular point. In the case of the early eighteenth-century exchange above, despite making quite a grave accusation against the clergyman, Twycrosse seems to politely acknowledge the social distance between them by using sir, a term normally used for a man of higher rank at the time. On the other hand, she may be emphasizing the distance between them (considering the behavior she is accusing him of). The repeated, insistent use of sir may even carry a hint of irony: you may be a sir, but your behavior certainly does not reflect that status (intonation patterns, which we unfortunately do not have access to, would have been helpful here).

  • 7 - Inferential-based Approaches

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 158-184

  • Summary

    Introduction

    One of the most fascinating and intriguing features of linguistic interaction is the widely recognized fact that we, as speakers, frequently use language to convey much more than what we actually utter. Put differently, not every scrap of meaning we want to convey to our interlocutors must be explicitly expressed. Consider the following made-up conversational exchange:

  • (1)A: Are you going to the beach this afternoon?

  • B: I have to work.

    • B's response to A's question does not say that B is not going to the beach, but rather that she has to work. However, just as if she had answered with a simple “No,” the implication of her response is clear: she is not going to the beach. The implied meaning is inferred correctly by speaker A, who, by not pursuing the matter further, would appear to be satisfied with B's reply. As this simple example shows, it is not possible to grasp what our interlocutors mean without knowing what they have implied in addition to what they have said.

    Starting from the premise of usage-based linguistics that language change originates in language use, it will become apparent from the contents in this chapter that “implicatures” and “inferences” play a decisive role in semantic change and that meaning shifts involved in processes such as metonymization, metaphorization, semanticization, subjectification, and intersubjectification – all of which will be discussed in the following sections – owe much to what speakers “implicate” and to what addressees infer from those implicatures in the context of speaker–hearer negotiation of meaning.

    The outline of the chapter is as follows. First, I discuss the role that pragmatic inferencing plays in semantic change, paying special attention to the most relevant inferential-based theories of change, in particular to Traugott's “Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change.” In the next section, I examine in detail the processes of subjectification and intersubjectification and their relation to grammaticalization, providing illustrative examples from different stages in the history of English.

    The final section of the chapter reviews in greater detail four selected areas where subjectification and/or intersubjectification are found to be at work: epistemic modals, like-parentheticals, adverbial clauses introduced by the subordinator while, and expletives. This small selection of examples will provide you with further insight into how (inter)subjectification operates in various domains.

  • 13 - Perspectives on Language Contact

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 332-359

  • Summary

    Introduction: “Purity” versus Contact in the History of English

    English is a Germanic language in origin: as is well known, it goes back to the settlement of the British Isles by continental Germanic tribes in 449. However, it has many properties which are quite untypical of this language family (Hawkins 2012: esp. 624–625). The examples under (1) illustrate some cases in point by juxtaposing some patterns of Modern English with their direct equivalents in Modern German, which has retained originally Germanic properties to a much stronger extent:

  • (1)a. Der Hund beisst den Mann. = Den Mann beisst der Hund. The dog bites the man. ≠ The man bites the dog.

  • b. Heute ist Maria nicht da. *Today is Mary not in. Mary is not in today.

  • c. Ich las gestern Abend einen interessanten Artikel. *I read last night an interesting article. I read an interesting article last night.

  • d. Ich kann Englisch. *I can English. I can speak English.

  • e. Kommst du? *Come you? Do you come?

  • f. Wenn man die Vorschläge des Augenarzts bedenkt, … Considering the oculist's proposals, …

    • In (1a), the inflectional endings of German (nominative der and accusative den) clearly identify syntactic functions and semantic roles, and the sequences of these constituents can thus be shuffled around rather liberally. English, in contrast, has lost the endings which it once had, and the identification of sentence functions is thus tied obligatorily to syntactic position within the firm SVO word order – so in the second example the fact that man precedes bites obligatorily implies the reading that the man performs the biting activity (however unlikely this may seem in reality). As (1b) shows, German is still a “verb-second” language, in which the constituent preceding the finite verb need not be the subject, unlike in English. Example (1c) illustrates another facet of the fixed word order of English: in German but not in English other constituents, such as a temporal adverbial, can be inserted between a verb and its direct object. In German, modal verbs still have full verb properties (of taking a direct object as in (1d), for instance); in English they have become auxiliaries which must be supplemented by a full verb. As shown in (1e), English requires an operator do in interrogatives (where full verbs cannot undergo inversion, unlike in German), and also in negatives.

  • 2 - The Scope of English Historical Linguistics

  • Edited by Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    English Historical Linguistics
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    03 July 2017, pp 12-41

  • Summary

    Introduction

    When studying linguistics as an English student one is confronted with configurations of language and processes of change which are attested both in the homeland of the English language, Britain, and in many other locations across the world where English is spoken, both as a first and as a second language. In this sense the scope of English linguistics is bounded by the structural range of today's language. However, when viewed from a historical perspective many other aspects come to light which present students with insights into language states and language change. This applies on all levels of language, but also to possible sociolinguistic scenarios which are known to have existed in the history of English. In addition, there are many more features and configurations of language, not attested in English, either today or in its history. This fact is often highlighted by non-Anglicist scholars attempting to demonstrate just how much languages can vary and how restrictive it can be to confine the primary data one considers solely to the English language. So the student of English should be aware that the history of the language tells us about certain types of change but by no means covers all.

    There are many features of pronunciation and grammar which are found in languages other than English and which are part of the possible set of features in human language. For instance, word order is a parameter of syntax which varies greatly across languages. English now only has SVO (Subject–Verb–Object) for simple declarative sentences but it used to have SOV (Subject–Object–Verb) word order as well. Other languages, like Irish,Welsh or Classical Arabic, show VSO(Verb–Subject–Object)with the verb at the beginning in normal declarative sentences. There are languages which have series of related sounds distinguished by some secondary feature, e.g., Russian has sets of palatal (those produced by raising the tongue towards the palate) and non-palatal sounds. There are languages with double consonants, like /kp/ and /gb/ (spoken together), e.g., indigenous languages of West Africa, or click sounds found in Khoisan and Nguni languages of South Africa (the latter are Bantu languages which borrowed them from the former group). Some languages have a small number of distinct sounds (phonemes), e.g., Hawaiian (a Polynesian language) with only eight consonants; others, like many Caucasian languages, have very large inventories of over 70–80 distinctive sounds, almost twice as many as English.

Page 43 of 88