30.4527, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Auer, Schreier, Watts (2019)

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Subject: 30.4527, Review: Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Auer, Schreier, Watts (2019)

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Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 22:46:24
From: Md Mijanur Rahman [mrahman6 at ilstu.edu]
Subject: Letter Writing and Language Change

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1783.html

EDITOR: Anita  Auer
EDITOR: Daniel  Schreier
EDITOR: Richard J.  Watts
TITLE: Letter Writing and Language Change
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Md Mijanur Rahman, Illinois State University

SUMMARY

The book Letter writing and language change edited by Anita Auer, Daniel
Schreier, and Richard J. Watts is a collection of some historical
sociolinguistic studies, trying to provide alternative and multiple histories
of language, mainly English, from both below and above. Situated in the
context of the typical tendencies of the historical linguists to focus on the
growth and development of a language’s standard variety only, the collection
breaks the norms by choosing to focus on the writing produced by people
representing multiple socio-economic layers of different periods. Based on
mostly letters and diaries, both published and handwritten manuscripts, which
many prescriptivists might dismiss as non-standard, the chapters problematize
the standard language ideologies of an ideal and unchanging variety in
different periods of a language’s historical development, especially for
English and to some extent for German, in different parts of the world.   

In Chapter 1, “Setting the scene: letters, standards and historical
sociolinguistics”, Richard J. Watts touches base on the theoretical
perspectives and methodological considerations that guide the rest of the book
chapters. Using the deft analogy of angling a variety of fishes (varieties of
language) using multiplicities of worms, Watts identifies three basic problems
in the historical study of language, which the contributors of the volume
undertake. The first is a tendency for historical sociolinguists to focus on
individual languages rather than human language in general, which often ends
up glorifying a particular language by telling “communal stories” (p. 3). The
second is the myth of the homogenous language which denies the inherent
heterogenetic nature of human linguistic behavior and promotes a single
variety as the only acceptable one for a specific community. The third one is
the problem with data sources used to develop generalizations about the
trajectory of a language variety. Written-only sources that are often printed
(often after careful editing) rather than original manuscripts work as a
serious limitation to the linguists’ attempts to capture the originary nature
of the language. Watts also presents the practices of variation sociolinguists
to use quantitative methods and those of interactional sociolinguists to use
observation of actual interaction as less than ideal for historical
sociolinguists because of the relative paucity of data, especially spoken data
from the past. The chapter ends with a thematic summary of the different
chapters that follow. 

In Chapter 2, “Assessing variability and change in early English letters”,
Juan Manuel Harnandez-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre present a
historical sociolinguistic study of a corpus of 280 letters by the male
members of the Paston family in the 15th century England. Using both the first
order and the second order variation theories, the writers make a quantitative
analysis of the variable <th> in the letter collection to show a language
change over time. The researchers observe that overall the Paston family
members were increasingly adopting the variable <th> in place of the prevalent
variants over their life times (ultimately replacing them entirely); this can
be explained as a typical change in progress from above. Using the third order
theory of language use as a performance, the authors demonstrate how different
members of the Paston family adopted the variable differently to construct an
identity and style that parallels the family’s attempt at and success in
upward mobility along the social scale of the time. 

Stephen ElspaB in his Chapter 3, “Private letters as a source for an
alternative history of Middle New High German”, proposes and illustrates a
model of a “German language history from below” (pp. 35-37). Unlike the
exclusive preoccupation of the traditional language historiographers who, for
data, relied mostly on printed texts written by an elite minority of educated
language users to fashion the trajectory of the “standard” German language,
ElspaB focuses on the private letters (648 of them) by the lower and lower
middle class people who had limited education  and who used certain variants
described by the prescriptivists as examples of “bad language” (p. 41). In his
attempt at “the reconstruction of the grammatical norms of usage in nineteenth
century lower class writing” (p. 40), the author presents the specific
examples of nine usages that problematize the traditional presentation of the
German language history as “more or less diaglossic”, as the private letters
or what the writer called “ego documents” exhibit a pattern of language usage
that cannot be categorized as either exclusively regional or social.       

Tony Fairman in his Chapter 4, “Language in print and handwriting”, focuses on
the dichotomy of manuscripts and printed texts, relating them to the social
power dynamics of people, which creates a methodological problem for studying
language historically. This is largely due to the way literacy training and
schooling were set up systematically, privileging the upper and middle class
through grammar schools, preparing them for creative possibilities in language
while those from  society’s lower ranks were imparted literacy training so
that they could be mere copyists instead of creative authors. While the
ultimate outcome diverged in certain ways from the original social plan, the
printed texts in the late modern English period were mostly by those in the
upper class, as people in lower social order were rarely able to publish their
manuscripts. Fairman argues that the linguists who depend on published texts
only are essentially researching “the standardized language of the higher
ranks only”, a methodology that needs reconceptualization for a proper
representation of the whole range of linguistic data, which is possible only
if both printed texts and handwritten manuscripts prepared by all ranks of
people are afforded equal attention.   

In Chapter 5, “Heterogeneity vs. homogeneity”, Marianne Hundt studies some 86
letters written by some early settlers of English farmers in New Zealand and
published by the New Zealand company in 1843 in London to show how those
letters could represent some grammatical features that may have provided the
early impetus for the emergence of a standard New Zealand variety of English.
While being aware of the data set’s limitation of being edited, not being a
representative corpus, and mostly celebrating the convenience of settling in
New Zealand, Hundt analyzes the letters’ social, stylistic, regional, and
grammatical features, which she then compares with those in more or less
contemporary letters by American immigrants from Lancashire, UK. Findings show
absence of non-standard features and less grammatical variability, mostly
presenting a set of grammatical features, also noticeable in the American
letters. This is despite the fact that the American letters diverged greatly
in spelling, a factor Hundt thinks may have been edited out of the New Zealand
letters.

In Chapter 6, “Emerging standards in the colonies: variation and the Canadian
letter writer”, Stefan Dollinger presents findings from a real time study of
the variable, shall and will in first person declarative sentences indicating
future. Based on a corpus of some 154 letters  from The corpus of early
Ontario English, the study shows how at a time of Canadian Dainty when the
upper middle class people were looking to their England heritage as a
linguistic model, the people gradually shifted from the British marked
practice of using shall for first person and will for all other cases to a
local Canadian standard, a transformation illustrated through the eventual
adoption of will as a model to indicate future. Dollinger thus provides a
bottom up theoretical framework for the eventual emergence of a uniquely
Canadian variety of English distinct from American English or British English.
  

In Chapter 7, “Linguistic fingerprints of authors and scribes”, Alexander
Bergs addresses a core methodological consideration in historical
sociolinguistic studies by exploring the tricky question of whose writings the
historical sociolinguists actually read in their study of language variation
based on past corpora and how the scribes, the people who are dictated to,
actually write what is dictated by the original authors. Based on the famous
corpus of Paston letters from Late Middle English period, Bergs’ study focuses
on two variables: personal pronouns and relativization, making an attempt to
trace the uses of the conservative and innovative forms of these two
variables, especially by bringing in the gender dynamics in many Paston
letters. Bergs, however, reaches no firm conclusion as imagined scenarios,
speculation and educated guesses characterize the reporting of findings. Given
the lack of enough relevant data on the context surrounding the letter
production process, the lack of a logical firm conclusion does not seem
entirely inappropriate either; such a conclusion, Bergs argues, needs a
collaboration of linguists and social historians to achieve. 

Chapter 8, “Stylistic variation” by Anita Auer, presents a qualitative case
study of stylistic variation in letters of three women writers from the late
modern English period. Auer focuses on a pair of letters by each woman
representing three different layers of then contemporary social hierarchy: the
elite, the middle-class and the working poor,  briefly reviewing the three
theories of intra-speaker variation--attention to speech, audience design and
speaker design--and highlighting speaker strategies to promote multiple
individual identities linguistically. Situating her study in the context of
stratified educational opportunities, designs and uses, Auer chooses letter
samples from each layer. Findings show that the elite woman writer, a wife of
George VI, exhibits expert manipulation of linguistic resources to project
different and rhetorically appropriate personalities: familiar and distant, in
two different contexts. The second writer, the wife of the Poet Wordsworth,
does not show as much expertise but still manages to address two different
situations. The third woman, in a similar fashion, does not show a full
mastery of   letter writing skills but still projects different personas to
two different audiences.

Chapter 9, “English aristocratic letters”, by Susan Fitzmaurice presents a
contextually rich qualitative content analysis of three English aristocratic
letters from the early 18th century. Detailing the discursive practices of the
English aristocrats forming a community of practice around the famous London
Kit-Cat club in the first part of the chapter, Fitzmaurice uses the second
part to focus on letters of three individuals: the Earl of Dorset, the Earl of
Hifax and the Duke of Shrewsbury, analyzing them in three different levels: 1.
autograph text, showing the writers’ often idiosyncratic style of
abbreviation, spelling, and punctuation; 2. epistolary frame or letter
structure that includes the writers’ use of salutations, closings, and other
rhetorical choices; and 3. lexicogrammatical choices representing the authors’
background and style variation. Findings provide a rich description of the
sociolinguistic variation found in aristocratic letters, which shows many of
the distinctive attributes of the standard language to be codified later in
the century but are also replete with features and usages that prescriptivists
would not be happy about.

Mikko Laitinen situates Chapter 10, “Early nineteenth-century pauper letters”,
in the context of the greater focus of the historical English linguists on the
standard language of the society’s more powerful but minority population and
the relative lack of representation of the laboring poor in the large-scale
historical corpora despite their being the overwhelming majority in 19th
century England. Laitinen makes an attempt to address this gap by focusing on
the 19th century pauper letters written by often mobile people from the lower
socio-economic strata to receive pauper aid made possible by the old poor laws
of 1601. Drawing on the literature of the sociolinguistics of globalization,
Laitinen expands the framework of historical sociolinguistics in studying the
pauper letters. The chapter shows the pauper letter writers alternate and
often mix “the local and translocal” (p. 188) styles to convey language of
immediacy to locally write for pauper aid and the language and rhetoric of
distance to establish the writers’ judicial eligibility in a way that
transcends the differential senses of geographical and social hierarchy of
center and periphery.  

Barbara Allen in her Chapter 11, “A non-standard standard? Exploring the
evidence from nineteenth-century vernacular letters and diaries”,
problematizes the mainstream practice of studying of what has been called the
“invariant” and “model” standard variety of the upper class, by focusing on
the largely “non-standard” writing styles of those at the bottom rung of
socioeconomic classes in nineteenth-century Sussex. Based on some fifty-two
letters and diaries, Allen resorts to the notion of a continuum and some terms
of creolist scholars (acrolect, mesolect, and basilect) to explain the writing
styles’ degree of difference in orthography, grammar and lexis from the
standard written English of educated writers as the acrolectal writers
displayed their acquaintance with the prescriptive standard norms of the time,
the mesolectal writers showed some awareness of them while those at the
basilectal end exhibited little to no familiarity of standard rules. Findings
specially indicate, for example, how Latinate vocabulary and complex clause
structures from the acrolect end keep disappearing as single-clause sentences,
frequently misspelt and often phonetically spelled words replace them at the
other ends, mesolect and basilect, of the continuum. In the end, the writer
posits that the non-standard language of the lower class, whom she calls
schooled rather than educated, did show some consistency in their variable
language features, making the notion of a non-standard standard a possibility.

Lukas Pietsch in Chapter 12, “Archaism and dialect in Irish emigrant letters”,
focuses on “the free use of periphrastic do in unstressed assertive contexts”
(pp. 223-224) in some 1000 private letter texts written by and to Irish
emigrants in Australia and America in between the late seventeenth and the
early twentieth centuries. Pietsch explores the implications of how the
letters writers used the periphrastic do, which is a marked feature for
emphatic contexts in then contemporary standard English, rather freely without
any motivation, a feature that is not available in the writers’ Irish English
spoken dialect but a persistent one in the letter data. Findings show that the
unmotivated do featured in the emergent standard English in the seventeenth
century but later went out of use.  However, the feature gained a life of its
own through the largely conventional practices of correspondence by people who
had limited literacy skills and may have had no access to the latest version
of educated standard variety of English, and who meant these features to be
considered standard. In so doing, these writers handed down a set of
grammatical and lexical features in these letters that were once considered
standard features but later became archaic both in their Irish English dialect
and the modern educated standard English. 

Lucia Siebers situates Chapter 13, “Assessing heterogeneity”, in the context
of the controversies surrounding the origin of  African American English or
rather Englishes (AAE) in America, arguing for an “orderly heterogeneity” in
early AAE through an analysis of two letter corpora: “the Benecke Family
Papers and the letters from the Chickasawa and Choctaw freedmen” (p. 245),
also described as “semi-literate African Americans from the 1760s to 1910s”
(p. 240) based on a range of non-standard features in their writing. Focusing
on two major variables: levelling to was, and third person plural -s concord,
Siebers, first, provide a contextualized description of the African American
literacy history in America, making explicit the historical factors like
antiliteracy legislation in the South responsible for limited literacy rate
among the Black people enslaved and exploited by both the whites and some
native American tribes. Siebers then assesses how individual literacy levels,
which were often the result of fortunate circumstances, lead to heterogeneous
writing registers in both private letters and official correspondences, as
reflected in their word choices, largely phonetic spelling, lack of
punctuation, and indiscriminate capitalization. Also, through a quantitative
presentation of the two variables studied, Seibers concludes that the
variables feature significantly across the regions and reflect African
American’s contact with different groups of slave traders including Ulster
Scots and many native Americans.  

In Chapter 14, “Hypercorrection and the persistence of local dialect features
in writing”, Daniel Schreier addresses the “bad data” issue in historical
sociolinguistics by studying some ten letters written by two women in 2001 and
2002 in Tristan da Cunha, an island in South Atlantic Ocean where a distinct
local English variety developed along with the standard one. Focused on the
variable, “present be levelling”, available in the local dialect, Schreier
investigates how the letter writing practices present the local dialect
characteristics. Findings show one writer employed the variable extensively
while the other did something opposite: instead of levelling to present be,
the writer used are in similar linguistic circumstances, a phenomenon that
Schreier explains as an instance of hypercorrection generally seen in
situations of linguistic insecurity.  Schreier concludes that without enough
historical background and contextual information, data sets like those of
letters from the past could potentially lead to misleading interpretations, a
scenario that did not affect the study reported in the chapter. 

The editors, Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier, and Richard J. Watts, use the final
chapter, “Epilogue: where next?”, to make explicit the connecting links among
the foregoing chapters, detailing how and to what degree the book’s goal of
providing alternative histories of a language has been achieved, responding to
some potential objections critics of the collection might raise and showing
ways forward for future historical sociolinguistic studies.    

EVALUATION

The edited collection, Letter writing and language change, by Anita Auer,
Daniel Schreier, and Richard J. Watts provides some fascinating studies of
historical sociolinguistics as all the chapters coherently contribute to the
book’s master-narrative of tracing alternative and multiple versions of a
language’s history, especially English and in Chapter 3 German, based on a
type of data set that establishes the fact that varieties other than the
supposed uniform standard language are the norm represented in the language
practices of the overwhelming majority of people in any given period. The book
stands out among historical sociolinguistic studies in a number of ways. 

The collection strikes a unique balance of studying letter and diary corpora
representing all layers of society’s hierarchy and does not get carried away
by the focus on the writing by the laboring poor. Most of the chapters are set
up theoretically in opposition to the mainstream practice of focusing on the
growth and development of a language’s standard variety used by the elite
minority, which one can see as the dominant trend in sociolinguistics, but the
collection, while pointing out the pitfalls of traditional historical
sociolinguistics, does not actually delegitimize their practices of focusing
on the standard. Rather they empirically prove that there is more than one way
of looking at language change and variation over time, the standard language
also being one. In most chapters, the authors study data sets that are likely
to be dismissed by the prescriptivists as non-standard: some letters, diaries
and personal documents written mostly by the people from a time’s lower
socioeconomic strata. But some chapters try to strike a balance by providing
perspectives on writing by the elite and aristocratic group of people too. The
chapters by Susan Fitzmaurice on English aristocratic letters and by Anita
Auer on stylistic variation achieve this objective very nicely. 

Moreover, the edited collection does an excellent job of pointing out the
methodological conundrums involved in historical sociolinguistic studies like
those reported in the book. Given the absence of audio-recording and other
contextual information, the attempts to reconstruct a language’s alternative
history face a stiff challenge; whether it is the scribal influence on
original text dictated by the authors or the editorial impact of the printing
process, it is very difficult to know for sociolinguists whether they are
studying the actual language used by the writers, an issue most highlighted in
Chapter 7 by Alexander Bergs. To address this gap, all the authors provided a
contextually rich historical description of the circumstances surrounding the
production and distribution of the letters and diaries they studied. In so
doing, the authors not only clarify the true nature of the data set but also
construct a robust picture how literacy training and schooling were not
equally distributed to all people but based on the social hierarchy to
reproduce the prevalent social inequality.

The collection also deserves appreciation for its breadth of coverage and
focus, as one can find the historical description of a range of varieties
other than the British “standard” one. It ranges from Irish English (Chapter
12), Canadian English (Chapter 6), American English, African American English
(Chapter 13), New Zealand English (Chapter 5) to even a variety of English in
use at Tristan da Cunha island somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic
Ocean (Chapter 14), which helps the readers appreciate the depth of
intralingual diversity of English in different parts of the world. Moreover, a
chapter on German (Chapter 3) reinforces the similar perspective that the
mainstream language history is not all in other language scenarios too.  

More importantly, the chapters illustrate the affordances and limits of
letters as a data set for describing histories of a language. While many find
it closer to spoken language, it significantly deviates in many circumstances,
as the written language conventions leave an indelible mark on letters, no
matter how personal they are as writing. Moreover, as repositories of language
norms and conventions, letters often carry language features that are
available in neither the local dialect nor the standard variety of the time.
This is largely due to the fact that letters develop “a life of their own”
often unaffected by contemporary language use as letter writing norms,
formulaic phrases and conventions keep disseminating through the social and
familial practice of writing letters, especially when the writers have limited
schooling and familiarity with standard language of a given time.

That being said, the collection does have some limitations spread out in most
of the chapters. This has to do with how the writers contextualize their
studies. While a study in historical sociolinguistics does require
contextually rich description, many chapters in the collection seem to be
overtaken by the background information so much so that many readers may find
themselves lost in histories, losing focus of the goal, purposes, and findings
of a given chapter. Thus, the problem is more of a degree than kind in
providing the historical overviews. 

Overall, the edited collection makes some significant strides in uncovering
multiple histories of a given language, which should inspire similar studies
based on personal documents like letters and diaries in other languages too.
Hence, the collection can be easily used as a textbook in any advanced
sociolinguistics class or a graduate level seminar on language change over
time, especially for those interested in letter data for historical studies of
any language.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mr. Rahman is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Illinois State University, USA.
His scholarly interests are in the intersection of applied linguistics and
composition studies, especially in areas like ESP/EAP, genre theories,
language ideologies, NNEST, and translingualism. He published research
articles in platforms like Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development and presented at TESOL, AAAL, and SSLW conferences. Over the
years, he taught English courses like first-year-composition, technical and
professional writing, L2 writing, and linguistics at Illinois State
University, Millikin University, and Northern University Bangladesh. He hopes
to continue his university teaching career upon completion of his Ph.D.





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