29.3292, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Brinton (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3292. Tue Aug 28 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3292, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Brinton (2017)

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Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 16:39:45
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at english.su.se]
Subject: English Historical Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-3069.html

EDITOR: Laurel J.  Brinton
TITLE: English Historical Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Approaches and Perspectives
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, Stockholm University, Sweden

INTRODUCTION

Laurel Brinton, the editor of this volume, herself points to the fact that
several handbooks of historical linguistics have been published recently. It
seems that she is somewhat critical of the idea that historical linguistics
can be learned from a handbook and suggests another option. Her book covers
approaches and perspectives that one can adopt to study historical English
data. (Pp. 1–2.) Each of its eleven invited chapters covers one set of
perspectives or approaches, and Brinton herself has written the introduction
and a further chapter on Historical Pragmatic Approaches. 

A main reason why I chose to review this book is that I had already written a
plan for a course with precisely the same idea, although I have not taught
such a course yet. My plan was to teach English historical linguistics to BA
and MA students, but PhD students would certainly also profit from reading
Brinton’s volume. Even experienced scholars will appreciate this overview of
the field. 

SUMMARY

The first overview that the book offers is Raymond Hickey’s chapter on the
scope of English Historical Linguistics (pp. 12–41). It covers such
explanatory models and techniques as Structuralism and Functionalism, the
Comparative Method and Internal Reconstruction. A theoretical discussion of
these matters is followed by case studies, a conclusion and a number of
exercises. The same pattern is repeated in every consecutive chapter. Among
others, Hickey’s case studies include the famous example of the Great Vowel
Shift.

Hickey’s chapter is followed by Cynthia L. Allen’s chapter on Generative
Approaches (pp. 42–69). She captures the readers’ attention by quoting
Shakespeare and asking how his contemporaries’ language differed from ours.
The main bulk of the chapter is nevertheless dedicated to explaining the kind
of generative tools that can be used to explain changes. Only then does Allen
continue to explaining changes that have occurred since Shakespeare’s times.
She briefly tells us the story of the auxiliary “do” and how Optimality Theory
can be used to understand, for example, the “simplification of initial /kn/ in
the sixteenth century, as in ‘knight’ or ‘knee’” (p. 64). 

The first set of perspectives discussed in the book is that of
psycholinguistic perspectives, in a chapter by Martin Hilpert (pp. 70–95). Its
theoretical part covers what he calls “Psychological Processes in Language
Change”: categorization, analogy, automatization, reanalysis, metaphor,
metonymy, invited inferencing, and priming. The section on case studies is
rather brief (pp. 91–93). It discusses, among other things, nested structures
and the development of “be going to” towards a future marker. 

Chapter Five by Marianne Hundt and Anne-Christine Gardner considers
Corpus-based Approaches (pp. 96–130). It contains an overview of Historical
Corpora of English and an introduction to Corpus Methodology. These are
followed by two case studies: one on the subjunctive since the Early Modern
English period and another on the development of suffixation in Middle
English. These discussions are rather thorough and carry the weight of the
chapter (pp. 104–125, 128–130). 

The next set of approaches to be discussed are Approaches to
Grammaticalization and Lexicalization in Chapter Six, by Lieselotte Brems and
Sebastian Hoffmann (pp. 131–157). One of their main points is that
grammaticalization and lexicalization share many features and should not be
considered as completely different processes (p. 55). In their case studies
section, they discuss the expressions “while” and “methinks”, complex
prepositions and degrammaticalization. 

There is a connection between grammaticalization and the topic of the seventh
chapter, Inferential-based Approaches (pp. 158–184). Indeed, María José
López-Couso dedicates a section of her chapter to the Relation Between
(Inter)subjectification and Grammaticalization (pp. 169–170). It might not be
immediately clear to all the readers what Inferential-based Approaches are,
but they have to do with pragmatic inferencing. López-Couso’s examples
comprise the development of meanings of modal verbs, “like”-parentheticals,
clause connectives and the development of expletives. 

The book then moves on to a different topic, Discourse-based Approaches (pp.
185–217), which is introduced by Claudia Claridge. She dedicates most of the
theoretical section to discussing the Roles of Discourse in Language History
and Change (pp. 187–192) although, interestingly, she also discusses
challenges to researching historical discourse (pp. 193–195). After
introducing her set of approaches on a general level, she addresses the more
specific topics of syntactic options for information packaging, style shifts
and the genre of letters. 

The next chapter begins with an extract from courtroom discourse. The chapter
is written by Peter Grund and deals with Sociohistorical Approaches (pp.
218–244). He points out that this kind of research is often called English
historical sociolinguistics but that “different scholars define and delimit
this field in different ways” (p. 219). The gist of the matter seems to be
whether a scholar ''see[s] historical sociolinguistics as closely related to
modern sociolinguistics” or thinks that it “has and should have its own
agenda, goals, and methods” (pp. 219–220). Grund also discusses the problem of
so-called bad data (pp. 223–225). The case studies section deals with the
pronouns “thou” and “you” and with H-dropping. 

Although pragmatic inferencing was introduced already in chapter seven,
Brinton’s own chapter is titled “Historical Pragmatic Approaches” (pp.
245–275). It begins with a Chaucer quotation and continues to discussing the
scope and subfields of Historical Pragmatics, then moving on to pragmatic
units, data, methods and, lastly, before the case studies, the history of the
field. The case studies have to do with performative verbs and speech acts, on
the one hand, and comment clauses, on the other.  

The book continues with a chapter by another pioneer, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van
Ostade, who has studied the standardization of English (pp. 276–302). She
considers the history of prescriptivism and of grammar writing, and also
discusses usage guides. The line between the theoretical section and the case
studies is somewhat thin in her chapter, but it appears that the section on
the usage guides is also the case study section. It has a special focus on
Early Usage Guides in America and the tradition started by the Fowler
brothers, which Kingsley Amis continued with his book “The King’s English” in
the 1990s.

The last two chapters deal with Geographical Variation and Language Contact.
Geographical Variation is introduced by Merja Stenroos (pp. 303–331). She
begins her chapter with a thought experiment, suggesting that we could imagine
how someone could reconstruct Present-day English on the basis of fragmentary
information. She then explains various aspects of the study of geographical
variation, such as differences between different periods of the history of
English, and how one can study spoken and written language. The titles in her
case study section are: “Dealing with data: “They” and “Hy” in Kent”, “The
study of local documents” and “Studying Sound and Spelling: Wh-“. 

The chapter on language contact is written by Edgar W. Schneider (pp.
332–359). Most of the chapter contains what he calls case studies (pp.
338–357). He covers both historical and contemporary issues, for example,
early vernacular contact between (emerging) English and other languages, and
Singlish. His chapter is followed by a long list of various kinds of
references for the entire book, ranging from corpora and grammars to secondary
sources (pp. 360–392), a Glossary of Terms (pp. 393–404), and an Index (pp.
405–410).  

EVALUATION

In the previous paragraph, I modified the expression “case studies” with “what
he calls”. The aim was not to question Schneider’s expertise but to point
towards what I would like to discuss first in the evaluation. It is the
differences between the case studies presented in each of the chapters. It is
clear that different methods and approaches produce different studies. There
are, however, also other kinds of differences in the case studies. For
example, Schneider’s discussion of early vernacular contact between English
and other languages is fully based on other people’s studies, while, for
example, Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s chapter is very much based on her own and
her team’s research. Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s case studies, in their turn, may
be compared with Gardner’s study of suffixation in Middle English, which is
presented in more detail. On the other hand, Tieken-Boon van Ostade includes
some simple, concrete examples in text boxes. Schneider does the same, but
most of the authors do not. 

Similar variation can be observed in the exercises sections. Some exercises
and sets of exercises seem much easier than others. To begin with, Schneider’s
exercises include a suggestion to discuss one’s personal encounters with
various kinds of Englishes (p. 359). This is something that could be very well
done with first-year university students. López-Couso begins with an exercise
that concerns violations of Grice’s Cooperative Principle in contemporary,
everyday conversations (p. 182). However, some exercises are rather
challenging. To give an example, Hickey presents the following task (p. 40):
“Can the pronunciation of a word betray its regional origins? Give appropriate
examples illustrating northern and southern dialect words in present-day
standard English.” This is easy as long as one lists examples from his chapter
but can become rather difficult for second language learners if they are
expected to go beyond those examples.

To continue, Hickey’s chapter contains some rather technical information about
the historical aspects of pronunciation, while most of the examples in
Hilpert’s chapter represent contemporary English. The point is that a reader
of this book might be either enticed or put off by reading a random chapter in
this book, depending on the level of difficulty of the chapter itself, and on
how much s/he already knew about the topic. Therefore, it is important for
teachers using this book to choose an appropriate chapter and appropriate
exercises for their students. 

My recommendation to a professional reader is to keep on reading. After
reading only a couple of chapters, one will not yet have an overall
understanding of what the book is like. It receives a completely different
value if read as a whole. One will then have acquired an overall understanding
of the field of English Historical Linguistics that one might not have
possessed in advance. Most of the readers would be likely to acquire such a
new understanding of the field because even if they knew about the topics in
advance, they might have chosen to represent them in a different manner.
Moreover, as the book is relatively easy to read and relatively compact, such
an understanding of the field can be gained with a relatively small effort.
Not in a day, perhaps, but certainly in a week. 

The suggestion that a professional reader might choose to represent a subject
differently can be put in another way: there were some surprises in this book.
To give an example, there was no chapter on historical semantics. An entire
book on English historical semantics was recently written by Kay and Allan
(2015) but cannot be found in the list of references. However, matters that
could be seen as belonging to the field of semantics were discussed, for
example, by Hilpert and Schneider. Schneider explains what kind of words were
borrowed from French after the Norman Conquest. According to him, these were
words “for topics and domains of life where the ruling class was concerned or
actively involved”, such as military matters, pastimes and pleasures (p. 342;
cf. Kay & Allan 2015: 132–149). Hilpert in his turn discusses categorization
(Kay & Allan 2015: 25–48), metaphor and metonymy (Kay & Allan 2015: 150–169),
among other things. It is clear that the book under review does not present a
set of fixed approaches and perspectives but, rather, points of view to a
field in a state of change. 

Interestingly, Brinton herself has already edited the kind of handbook that
she criticizes in the beginning of this book (p. 1–2): “… these handbooks are
generally addressed to the scholarly researcher, not the student of English,
and often focus on the ‘state of the art’ in research rather than providing
descriptive information on methodology and approach.” The year 2012 saw the
publication of the first volume of “English Historical Linguistics: An
International Handbook” (Bergs & Brinton 2012a). However, in the same year, a
second volume was also published, with the explicit aim of “mov[ing] to a
higher level, with a focus on general underlying concepts, theories, and
methods as well as new and hitherto rather neglected approaches to the history
of English” (Bergs & Brinton 2012b: vii). 

The difference between the second volume of “English Historical Linguistics”
and the book under review can be evaluated, for example, by comparing
Williamson’s chapter on historical dialectology (2012) with Stenroos’s chapter
on geographical variation. The latter, with the thought experiment to begin
with, is even more reader-friendly, but the former also addresses someone who
is not yet very familiar with the method. For example, it includes sections
titled “What dialectologists (traditionally) do” and “What historical
dialectologists do”. The different names of the two chapters are potentially
among the most significant differences between them. According to the “Oxford
English Dictionary”, the word “dialectology” can be traced back to the
beginning of the nineteenth century. However, nineteenth-century linguists
would have been less likely to use “geographical variation” as an overall term
for what they were occupied with. Similarly, “psycholinguistics” is certainly
trendier than “semantics” which, according to the OED, was also used already
in the nineteenth century. 

It is also relevant to compare the book under review with another handbook. It
was edited by Biber and Rappen and published in 2015. It is not a handbook of
historical linguistics and may be excluded from the list of references in
Brinton’s new volume for that reason. However, the “Cambridge Handbook of
English Corpus Linguistics” contains many chapters on similar issues and many
chapters written by historical linguists. For example, it contains a chapter
on grammatical change by Martin Hilpert and Christian Mair, a chapter on
historical pragmatics by Irma Taavitsainen, and a chapter on World Englishes
by Marianne Hundt. 

In sum, it could be said that the book that Brinton has now edited is sexier
and more compact than the two volumes which she edited together with Bergs in
2012. It is a rather pleasant read. Naturally, it is also more up-to-date as
regards references, for example. However, a couple of relevant references
could be added. Moreover, some chapters and exercises are more challenging
than others. It would be misleading to claim that the book is not coherent,
but a single chapter is not yet representative of the entire book. Some
chapters might lend themselves for use with undergraduate students, while
others are suitable for more advanced readers. 

REFERENCES

Bergs, Alexander & Laurel J. Brinton (eds.). 2012a. English Historical
Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vols. 1 & 2. Berlin & Boston: Walter
de Gruyter. 

Bergs, Alexander & Laurel J. Brinton. 2012b. Preface to Historical Linguistics
of English. English Historical Linguistics Vol 1, ed. by Alexander Bergs and
Laurel J. Brinton. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. v–vii. 

Biber, Douglas & Randi Rappen (eds.). 2015. The Cambridge Handbook of English
Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Kay, Christian & Kathryn Allan. 2015. English Historical Semantics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. 
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online, the. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Accessed in April 2018 at <http://www.oed.com>

Williamson, Keith. 2012. Historical Dialectology. Historical Linguistics Vol
2, ed. by Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton. Berlin & Boston: Walter de
Gruyter. 1421–1438.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Heli Tissari now works as a senior lecturer of English at Mid Sweden
University. Her current research concerns, among other things, applying the
Natural Semantic Metalanguage to the historical study of English and to words
for emotions in Finnish.





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