28.4641, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Wilcox, Chapman, Moore (2016)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4641. Mon Nov 06 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4641, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Wilcox, Chapman, Moore (2016)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2017 13:21:06
From: Víctor Parra-Guinaldo [vparraguinaldo at aus.edu]
Subject: Studies in the History of the English Language VII

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36306237


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-5177.html

EDITOR: Don  Chapman
EDITOR: Colette  Moore
EDITOR: Miranda  Wilcox
TITLE: Studies in the History of the English Language VII
SUBTITLE: Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis
SERIES TITLE: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Víctor Parra-Guinaldo, American University of Sharjah

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Studies in the History of the English Language VII, edited by Don Chapman,
Colette Moore, and Miranda Wilcox is arranged into four sections with three
papers each. These cover a variety of topics (ranging from authorship to the
lexicon) and periods (from the Old English period all the way to Present-Day
American dialects), but they all share a common purpose, that is, to explore
the divide between philological and linguistic investigative methodologies. 

The opening section, “Particularizing and generalizing for written records”,
comprises essays investigating the intersection between philological and
linguistic approaches. For example, in “A philological tour of HEL”, R.D. Fulk
discusses the relationship between philology and English linguistics and, in
doing so, demonstrates the importance of philological consideration in the
study of historical linguistics. Fulk presents some of the main
interpretations of philology through time, from a discipline that encompasses
linguistics and literary criticism in the nineteenth century to the
identification of philology with historical linguistics for Anglophone
academics from the early twentieth century onward. He then proposes his own
view, in which philology examines the relation between extralinguistic context
and linguistic data and defends the idea that philology can be highly
theoretical, albeit not being governed by a school of thought. Three case
studies follow this discussion to prove that extralinguistic context, along
with linguistic analysis, is crucial in interpreting the language of
historical texts. The author restates the significance of the philological
methods in his conclusion, not without recognizing the role of corpus
linguistics and digital analysis in historical linguistics. 

Donka Minkova’s paper, “From stop-fricative clusters to contour segments in
Old English”, discusses the development of the present-day English (PDE)
affricates and proposes a new reconstruction based on a continuing allophonic
relation between the singleton [k] and a singleton palatalized stop [c].
Minkova begins by reviewing some of the technical terminology (simple,
complex, and contour segments) necessary to understanding the process of
change from Old English to PDE and presents the consonantal inventory of Old
English. Using orthographic and metrical evidence, she tests the possible
trajectories of change and proposes a new scenario for the phonemicization of
affricates in English. 

Stefan Dollinger explores the divide between philological and linguistic
investigative methodologies within the context of historical lexicography. The
author argues for an exchange where each approach would benefit from the
other; in other words, philology could benefit from the more generalizing
methods of linguistics and linguistics in turn could utilize the more
particularizing textual analyses of philology. All three case studies
presented in this paper rest upon two modes in lexicographical research: a
literary-philological approach and a computational-linguistic approach. They
underscore the importance of “dual competencies” (64) in linguistic and
philological methods of investigation in the study of historical lexicography
in particular and linguistics in general.

“Particulars of Authorship”, the second section in this volume, explores the
dichotomy between the generalizing methods of linguistics and the
particularizing insights of philology as it pertains to authors and their
purposes. “The history of the English language and the history of English
literature” by Seth Lerer suggests that the history of English literature in
general, and literary authorship in particular, ought to be regarded not only
as evidence but as a participant in linguistic change. Lerer points out that
nineteenth-century philologists were the first ones to develop an empirical
methodology of linguistic change, and he then presents several cases where
literary authors were catalysts for linguistic innovation, thus establishing
an association between authorship and linguistic change. 

Xingzhong Li’s paper, “‘Of harmes two, the lesse is for to chese’: An
integrated OT-Maxent approach to syntactic inversions in Chaucer’s verse”,
offers an analysis of Chaucer’s metrical principles via the scrutiny of
syntactic inversions in over 1,000 sample verse lines. The author adopts an
analytical method that integrates both Optimality Theory and Maxent Grammars
to account for constraints found in the phonology, semantics, metrics, and
syntax of Chaucer’s selected verses. Although Li focuses on the language of
one particular author, his work rests on the generalizing application of
current theoretical frameworks, such as minimalist syntax when categorizing
unmarked word order.

In “The effect of representativeness and size in historical corpora: An
empirical study of changes in lexical frequency”, Mark Davies and Don Chapman 
 use three sets of corpora: the Brown family of corpora, designed to be small
but representative; COHA, both large and representative; and Google Books,
very large but not representative. They conclude that small corpora (one to
four million words) are inadequate for lexical studies, especially in studies
of a historical nature. Furthermore, they show that a large corpus such as
Google Books, which was not designed with principles of representativeness in
mind, can be as representative as a well-designed corpus such as COHA, albeit
with certain caveats.

The third of the sections in this volume, “Particulars of Communicative
Setting”, contains papers that demonstrate how data and contextual aspects,
such as communicative context, can benefit the linguistic study of
sociopragmatics. “Seeing is believing: Evidentiality and direct visual
perception verbs in Early Modern English witness depositions” by Peter J.
Grund is another example of how a particularizing study can be beneficial for
corpus research in general. Specifically, Grund demonstrates that careful
consideration of context in usage, in this case court depositions, is
essential if we are to fully understand “the dynamics of direct visual
perception verbs used evidentially”. The author uses a pragmaphilological
approach to conclude that only a relative number of direct visual perception
verbs, of which ‘see’ is the predominant one, perform evidential functions in
Early Modern English depositions. 

In her essay, Susan Fitzmaurice, traces the semasiological (semantic change)
and onomasiological (shifting lexicon) history of the term ‘politeness’.
Drawing direct evidence (metalinguistic and metadiscursive material) and
indirect evidence (linguistic performance) from Eighteenth Century Collections
Online, the author infers that several meanings “co-exist and compete in a
relationship of contingent [upon affective factors] polysemy” (198) and
therefore the differences are ephemeral and fluid. Marina Dossena investigates
in her essay, “Something to write home about: Social-network maintenance in
the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants”, pragmatic
strategies used by emigrants in their intent to relate to their relatives and
maintain social-network relations. The source used is the Corpus of
Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence, which contains mainly diaries and
memoires. This small corpus enabled the author to carry out close qualitative
analysis and conclude that these documents are invaluable for the
investigation of politeness moves, and therefore for historical pragmatic
investigation.

The last section, “Particularizing from Words”, presents a closer look at the
elements of textual composition and the role of the lexicon in language
change. Betty S. Phillips, in “Words swimming in sound change”, departs from
previous views on lexical diffusion, especially that outlined in Labov (2010),
when dealing with vowel shifts, and makes a case as to why frequency and
lexical identity are quintessential to sound change; she argues that “lexical
diffusion as a process by which a sound change spreads through the lexicon
typically exists inside of phonological conditioning” (235). 

In “Plural marking in the Old and Middle English –nd stems feond and freond”,
John G. Newman examines the process of morphological diffusion and
demonstrates how the nd-masculines feond and freond developed plural
morphology in an intermittent manner: first, an s-plural would attach to the
stems in Old English, then during the Early Middle English period, they
resisted the spread of this plural formative, and they finally adopted the
s-plural during the Late Middle English period. Newman concludes that this
morphological pattern was due to analogical modeling on other more frequent
nouns. 

Lynn D. Sims’s chapter, “From Shakespeare to Present-Day American English: The
survival of ‘get + (XP) + gone’ constructions”, traces the history of the ‘get
+ (XP) + gone’ construction. With numerous examples drawn from different
dictionaries and corpora, the author demonstrates the path of
grammaticalization this construction took, showing its changes from the early
fourteenth century as a mono-transitive verb expressing possession, to the
addition of a locative complement and that of a reflexive object a century
later, and finally the use of adverbs of motion more recently. Sims presents
evidence that demonstrates that the use of “get gone” constructions is
presently in decline in British English, but it persists in American English,
especially in the dialect regions of the South and South Midland.

EVALUATION

This collection contains papers selected from those presented at the eighth
meeting of the Studies of the History of English Language Conference (SHEL-8),
held at Brigham Young University in September of 2013. The underlying goal of
the volume continues the original designs set out by SHEL during its first
meeting in 2000 at UCLA, to advance and promote research in the area of
English historical linguistics in North America (Minkova & Stockwell, 2002).
The overall theme of the volume deals with the various and distinct approaches
to the written record scholars use to understand the nature of language
change, laying down the basis for the dichotomy between generalizing and
particularizing methodologies in historical linguistic analysis, as the
subtitle of this collection indicates. The articles featured in this volume
attest to this methodological challenge by proposing a combination of
generalizing perspectives (lexicography, corpus studies, and theoretical
linguistics) and particularizing approaches (philology, historical pragmatics,
and discourse analysis), not unlike the preceding volumes in the series. The
editors’ selection and organization of papers into four sections is to be
commended. Fulk’s essay for example, the first in the collection, serves a
twofold purpose; not only is it a study in its own right, discussing three
interesting case studies, but it eloquently contextualizes the relationship
between philology and English linguistics, setting the parameters for the
remainder of the contributions. All papers faithfully adhere to the theme
established for each section, although there is some variation as to the
internal organization of the content (Lerer’s paper, for instance, reads
uninterruptedly from beginning to end, whereas all other papers are arranged
into sections) or how explicitly the author contextualizes the essay within
the overall goal of the volume (Dollinger, Grund, and others clearly do this).
In past volumes of the series, each article is followed by a commentary and
response; although the volume here under review contains stand-alone articles,
they reflect nonetheless upon approaches and practices in undertaking
historical studies in a cohesive manner. The volume is of interest to advanced
students and scholars of the history of English, English philology, and
English historical linguistics. 

REFERENCES

Labov, W. (2010). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 3: Cognitive and
cultural factors. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Minkova, D. and R. B. Stockwell (Eds.) (2002). Studies in the history of the
English language: A millennial perspective. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin and New
York.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Víctor Parra-Guinaldo is Assistant Professor at the American University of
Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. He is recipient of a Teaching Excellence
Award and several fellowships. His scholarly interest lies in the area of
diachronic linguistics, with a special interest in morpho-syntactic changes in
the history of English. His most recent work deals with the relexification of
diminutives.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4641	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/