29.4119, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Säily, Nurmi, Palander-Collin, Auer (2017)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4119. Tue Oct 23 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 29.4119, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Säily, Nurmi, Palander-Collin, Auer (2017)
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Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 16:48:33
From: Andrew Lloyd [andrew.lloyd at spc.oxfordalumni.org]
Subject: Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-336.html
EDITOR: Tanja Säily
EDITOR: Arja Nurmi
EDITOR: Minna Palander-Collin
EDITOR: Anita Auer
TITLE: Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
SERIES TITLE: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017
REVIEWER: Andrew Lloyd, University of Oxford
SUMMARY
Since the publication of Suzanne Romaine’s 1982 work on the subject,
historical sociolinguistics has progressed from a position it once held
between its redoubtable great aunt historical linguistics and its slightly
elder sister sociolinguistics to a fully-fledged discipline that is beginning
to outgrow its hand-me-down methodologies and databases. Bringing together
eleven articles from researchers working with data from numerous countries,
periods, and media, this latest volume in the “Advances in Historical
Sociolinguistics” series addresses some of the most pressing methodological
concerns for those in the field and acts as a beacon for illuminating future
pathways of research. Encompassing data ranging from private Dutch and English
correspondence to Hansard and Twitter, this volume not only demonstrates how
established sociolinguistic models can apply to big, rich, and sometimes
unlikely datasets, but also how new models and approaches are being forged in
the crucible of the discipline which could eventually be applied to
sociolinguistics more broadly.
Part I. Methodological Innovations
The first section (“Methodological Innovations”) aims to provide responses to
several questions posed by the editors in their introduction, such as which
methods of statistical and visual analysis are relevant to historical
sociolinguistics and how we approach the combination of linguistic data and
metadata. Taking as their guiding principles “layered simultaneity”
(Nevalainen 2015) and “informational maximalism” (Janda and Joseph 2003) they
have grouped together those studies which best exemplify multidisciplinarity
and a methodologically combinatorial approach to their investigations.
Chapters 1 to 4 seek to establish new methodologies for the burgeoning
discipline that is historical sociolinguistics. The editors acknowledge the
difficulties inherent in, and the reliance on, modern variationist methods
from contemporary sociolinguistics as applied to historical sociolinguistics,
as well as the paucity of contextual information surrounding the “bad” data
ultimately used. To mitigate this, various quantitative methods such as
dispersion-awareness tests and interactive visualisation tools are
increasingly being employed and this is evident from the articles included
here. Building on Biber’s (1988) multidimensional genre variation model, Säily
et al. (1991) explore the efficacy of part-of-speech (POS) annotation for
studying genre evolution and sociolinguistic variation within the “Parsed
Corpus of Early English Correspondence” (c. 1410-1681). They combine
annotations with textual data and social metadata to establish the extent to
which POS annotation assists with mapping genre evolution, in addition to any
sociolinguistic change or variation occurring above the level of singular
variables. In their Linguistic DNA project comprising a bottom-up analysis of
conceptual change, Fitzmaurice et al. (Chapter 2) look primarily at the
history of ideas and whether printed works contained within the Early English
Books Online (1473-1700) corpus include particular concepts under discussion
by historians of ideas at the time. They present the reader with three case
studies, each led by a particular research theme (social and historical
contexts of conceptual change; lexical semantics within conceptual structures;
lexicalisation pressure) and conclude with a positive prognosis for the use of
their DNA project in studying language in context though its combination of
quantitative and qualitative analysis allowing for further insights into
conceptual development in Early Modern Britain.
In Chapter 3, Baker et al. use the visualisation methods of Meaning
Fluctuation Analysis and Sparklines to analyse the varying contexts in which
“Ireland” as a word appears in the “Hansard Corpus” of parliamentary debates
between 1830 and 2004 (1.6 billion words of c. 40,000 individual speakers).
They do this with the aim of determining how the nature of broader social and
political debate has changed over time, as well as the ways in which the
discussion of something in particular can experience collocational change.
Chapter 4 is an investigation by Nevala and Sairio into instances of discord
in correspondence between members of the English gentry between 1700 and 1800
as found in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension and the
Bluestocking Corpus. They are interested in the ways those of “polite”
eighteenth century English society negotiated circumstances that challenged
societal norms, as well as how individual correspondents could construct
social identities through letter-writing. They use discourse analysis, emotion
studies, and corpora to analyse the change in social import of specific labels
according to the broader themes of discord, disgrace, and disorder, and
contribute overall to the Third Wave of Variationist Studies.
Part II. New Data for Historical Sociolinguistic Research
The second section of the volume (“New Data for Historical Sociolinguistic
Research”) looks at expanding the necessarily limited and flawed data sets
available to historical sociolinguists. It does this by asking whether we can
draw upon unexplored genres for new data, how existing data can be studied in
new ways, and how it is possible to use big and rich data while also
mitigating any challenges they might pose by virtue of their uncharted nature.
Chapter 5 (Nordlund and Pallaskallio) addresses two morphological changes in
Finnish occurring during the nineteenth century when codification of the
language was still ongoing, viz. morphological stem variation and case suffix
allomorphy. They do this in order to discover what standardisation can tell us
about language planning, conspicuous or otherwise, and how it conflicts with a
contemporaneous linguistic change. They draw upon newspapers, grammars, and
style guides containing metalinguistic commentary to determine whether there
was a disparity between changing editorial practice and rules laid out in
prescriptive grammars. They also make use of hand-written letters of rural
origin that shed light on how Finnish newspapers were edited during this
period.
Krogull et al. (Chapter 6) use the “Going Dutch” corpus of ego documents to
explore the following three themes in relation to Dutch neuter pronoun
relativization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: language planning
c. 1800 in the Netherlands, how historical prescriptivism has influenced
usage, and how genre can explain variation and change. Their compiled data set
of public and private writing allows the researchers to study variations in
register and to explore language change against the background of rising
linguistic nationalism and ideology. In Chapter 7, Kaislaniemi et al. track
the development of epistolary spelling between 1400 and 1800 in the “Corpus of
Early English Correspondence”, which is composed of c. 12,000 personal letters
by some 1,200 writers. They are most interested in private spelling practices
and their concomitant socially-determined variation in this period prior to
standardised orthography being encouraged through policy and education. The
lexemes chosen for study are “Always”, “-ful”, “Friend”, “Believe”, and
“Receive”, while their social variables are social rank, gender, and domicile,
and their results are compared to holograph letters from various smaller
manuscript corpora.
Part III. Theory: Bridging Gaps, New Challenges
In the third and final section (“Theory: Bridging Gaps, New Challenges”), the
editors wish to stress the importance of historical sociolinguistics as a
bridge between interdisciplinary gaps and those between micro and macro
phenomena, as well as the gains to be made from its use of paradigms and
approaches from other disciplines such as social and data sciences, or
economic history. In addition, this section asks how insights gleaned from
different fields might contribute to or challenge theoretical assumptions made
by historical sociolinguistics and it seeks to establish what new data sources
can tell us about language variation and change, as well as the contributions
historical sociolinguistics can make to modern sociolinguistics. In this way,
Hilpert (Chapter 8) proposes that through historical sociolinguistics we can
learn more about the form-function explanation of language knowledge termed
“Constructional Grammar” and that this in turn will inform our study of
sociolinguistic change. By viewing language as a cognitive and social system,
the gap between form and function is bridged and researchers no longer need to
deal with linguistic forms separately from their relative social meaning.
Hilpert begins by describing mutual challenges of the two approaches before
addressing their shared benefits and illustrating the advantages and drawbacks
of the combined approach through an expository schema termed the “sarcastic
much?” construction.
In Chapter 9, Jankowski and Tagliamonte report on their trend study of Ottawa
Valley English. They examined two vernacular universals, namely the gradually
dissipating verbal -s with third-person plural noun phrases and the still
prominent but age-graded preterite “come”, with samples collected between
thirty and thirty-five years apart. These samples came from the data collected
between 1975 and 1981 on the Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley led by Ian
Pringle and Enoch Padolsky, as well as the researchers’ own Modern Ottawa
Valley sample (2012-2013). Their research has clear implications for dialect
concentration and dissipation, in particular how dialects fare when exposed to
significant social change. In Chapter 10, Anderwald examines four “vernacular
universals”: multiple negation, existential “there is/there was” with plural
subjects, adverbs without -ly, and “you was”. She uses a new data set of 258
pedagogical grammar books from the UK and USA published between 1800 and 1900
to study metalinguistic discourse surrounding these four variables, namely the
development of their stigmatisation. By drawing on various negative epithets
used to describe these non-standard features, she demonstrates the different
ways in which they were stigmatised and how prescriptivism differed from one
side of the Atlantic to the other. Finally, Laitinen et al. (Chapter 11) bring
a new, big, and rich data set to the social network model by adopting a
macro-approach to the examination of Twitter posts written in non-native
English from c. 200,000 informants in the five Nordic countries; these were
collected from the Nordic Tweet Stream, a real-time monitor corpus. The
researchers’ dependent variable was language choice of Tweet and they posited
that those Tweeting in English should have more weak ties than those not, with
the spread of innovations occurring most easily in “truly” weak-tie networks,
despite those with stronger ties also being able to spread linguistic
innovations if they contain c. 100-130 people.
EVALUATION
Upon reading this collection of articles, one cannot help but be optimistic
about the future of historical sociolinguistics. As a field of study, it is
forward-looking without being complacent. It acknowledges the debt it owes to
the broader discipline of sociolinguistics and paradigms such as Bell’s (2013)
but is still conscious that new methods and approaches are needed if it is to
evolve any further. In this vein, the editors have placed great emphasis on
multidisciplinarity and collaboration between distinct yet related
disciplines. They make the reader aware of the past and future trajectories of
historical sociolinguistics, particularly with regard to the digital
humanities, and of the widespread movement from a qualitative philological
approach to a more quantitative one.
Organisationally, this volume is clearly structured into three sections
(methodology, data, and challenges) with each featuring between 3 and 4
articles of broadly equal length. Every article has its own list of
references, thereby enabling quicker checks to be made by only including those
works relevant to that article, and a comprehensive index is included at the
end of the collection. Rather helpfully for the reader, the subsections of
each article are numbered, expository footnotes are occasionally included but
kept to a minimum, and any diagrammatic figures are unobtrusive and printed in
colour. All articles are written in a lucid prose that avoids esotericism,
thereby making them accessible not only to students and researchers in
linguistics, but equally to those working in the related fields of sociology,
history, and politics of language.
The first advantage of this volume is its breadth and depth of treatment. In a
similar way to its guiding principle of informational maximalism, this volume
has drawn together what might appear at first glance several fascinating but
unrelated studies under three broad headings for the reason that they can each
shed light on the path historical sociolinguistics is currently following.
With data ranging from the fifteenth century to the present day across
countries as diverse as Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, and Britain, these
studies highlight the importance of drawing on the many and varied tools, such
as palaeography and discourse analysis, that are available to us as historical
sociolinguistics in order to reconstruct the past.
The second advantage of this collection is the hope it gives researchers
wishing to tap new data sources through the innovative use of data by many of
the studies contained within. It is accepted that historical linguists must
‘make the best of bad data’ (Labov 1994: 11), but this does not preclude them
from mining big, freely accessible data (Laitinen et al., this volume) or from
using unique combinations thereof (Jankowski and Tagliamonte, this volume).
Lastly, many of the studies in this volume have found solutions to common
methodological problems encountered in historical linguistics, such as the
inherent inconsistency of edition-based corpora (Kytö 2011; Kytö and Pahta
2012). This has been addressed by using smaller, digital editions of
meticulously transcribed texts such as those found in the Bluestocking Corpus
(Nevala and Sairio, this volume). The only criticism I would make of the work
is that it contains no study of languages before the late Middle Ages and it
would have been useful to discover the future paths, especially in relation to
data, of historical sociolinguistics in the classical languages.
For these reasons, I would have no hesitation in recommending this work to all
those interested in the rapidly growing discipline of historical
sociolinguistics.
REFERENCES
Bell, A. 2013. The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics. Malden and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Biber, D. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Janda, R. and B. Joseph. 2003. ‘On Language, Change, and Language Change – or,
Of History, Linguistics, and Historical Linguistics’. In B. Joseph and R.
Janda (eds.) The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Malden & Oxford:
Blackwell. 3-180.
Kytö, M. 2011. ‘Corpora and Historical Linguistics’. Revista Brasileira de
Linguística Aplicada 11 (2): 417-457.
Kytö, M. and P. Pahta. 2012. ‘Evidence from Historical Corpora up to the
Twentieth Century’. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 123-133.
Labov, W.1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal factors. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Nevalainen, T. 2015. ‘What are Historical Sociolinguistics?’ Journal of
Historical Sociolinguistics 1 (2): 243-269.
Nevalainen, T. and E. Traugott. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of the History of
English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Romaine, S. 1982. Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Having first completed a Masters in medieval French at the University of
Oxford, Andrew Lloyd subsequently undertook a Masters in theoretical and
applied linguistics at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne where he
specialised in historical French linguistics. From 2018 he intends to begin
his DPhil in linguistics at the University of Oxford where his thesis will
focus on the sociolinguistic implications of negative polarity items in
medieval French between 1100 and 1500.
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