Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-wxhwt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T14:24:19.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Connecting the past and the present – a response to Pentrel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

PETER PETRÉ*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Stadscampus, Prinsstraat 13 S.R.229, 2000 Antwerp, Belgiumpeter.petre@uantwerpen.be

Extract

In her article ‘Connecting the past and the present’, Meike Pentrel examines the order of main clause and adverbial clause introduced by before or after in Samuel Pepys's diary from the point of view of the cognitive literature on processing constraints. The thread that is shared by all contributions of this special issue is that of the hypothesis of uniformitarianism, which states that cognitive processes have remained constant in the documented history of humanity. Pentrel aims at corroborating this hypothesis by testing if the processing constraints found at work in this seventeenth-century ego-document examined by her are similar to those that have been observed in contemporary language.

Type
Research Article
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

Bately, Janet M. 1964. Dryden's revisions in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy: The preposition at the end of the sentence and the expression of the relative. Review of English Studies 15 (59), 268–82.Google Scholar
Bock, Kathryn & Levelt, Willem. 1994. Language production: Grammatical encoding. In Gernsbacher, Morton A. (ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, 945–84. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Mary, von Stutterheim, Christiane & Nuese, Ralf. 2004. The language and thought debate: A psycholinguistic approach. In Pechmann, Thomas & Habel, Christopher (eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to language production, 183218. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. 2016. How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation. Language Variation and Change 28, 83102.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1992. Grammatical prototypes and competing motivations in a theory of linguistic change. In Davis, Garry W. & Iverson, Gregory K., Explanations in historical linguistics, 145–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Konopka, Agnieszka E. 2012. Planning ahead: How recent experience with structures and words changes the scope of linguistic planning. Journal of Memory and Language 66 (1), 143–62.Google Scholar
Latham, Robert & Matthews (eds.), William. 1970. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A new and complete transcription, vol. 1: 1660. London: Bell & Hyman.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu, Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena & Mannila, Heikki. 2011. The diffusion of language change in real-time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change. Language Variation and Change 23, 143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter. 2016. Unidirectionality as a cycle of convention and innovation: Micro-changes in the grammaticalization of [BE going to INF]. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 30, 115–46.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
Wheeldon, Linda. 2012. Producing spoken sentences: The scope of incremental planning. In Fuchs, Susanne, Weirich, Melanie, Pape, Daniel & Perrier, Pascal (eds.), Speech planning and dynamics, 93114. Pieterlen and Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar