32.1703, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Kytö, Smitterberg (2020)

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Subject: 32.1703, Review: English; Historical Linguistics: Kytö, Smitterberg (2020)

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Date: Fri, 14 May 2021 16:37:24
From: Christine Wallis [c.wallis at sheffield.ac.uk]
Subject: Late Modern English

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1409.html

EDITOR: Merja  Kytö
EDITOR: Erik  Smitterberg
TITLE: Late Modern English
SUBTITLE: Novel encounters
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 214
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Christine Wallis, University of Manchester

SUMMARY

This volume is an edited collection of essays dealing with various aspects of
Late Modern English (LModE), most of which are based on papers given at the
6th International Conference on Late Modern English in Uppsala in 2017. The
individual papers cover a wide range of topics in current LModE research,
utilising a variety of text types and evidence, and employing both qualitative
and quantitative methods. The volume is arranged in four main sections, each
containing 2-5 chapters: 1. phonology, 2. morphosyntax, 3. orthography,
vocabulary and semantics, 4. pragmatics and discourse.

The first section contains two chapters, each dealing with different aspects
of phonology. Joan Beal’s contribution, ‘ “A received pronunciation”:
Eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries and the precursors of RP’ uses the
Eighteenth Century English Phonology database and other sources to investigate
the emergence of RP. Although a standard pronunciation had not been selected
or accepted by the middle of the eighteenth century, the subsequent rise of
pronouncing dictionaries indicates a beginning of such a codification of
English. Beal exemplifies this with a case study showing the treatment by
authors of pronouncing dictionaries of two groups of words which had varying
pronunciations during the period (words in the FACE and CHOICE lexical sets
(Wells: 1982)). In addition to recording these variants, authors also used a
range of criteria such as analogy, or the social status of speakers, to select
which variant should be fixed as the standard. She concludes that codification
in spoken language occurred later than in the written language, only coming to
fruition in the late-nineteenth century because the circumstances were right;
eighteenth-century writers lacked the institutional machinery required to
implement the standard from above, whereas efforts to promote RP in state
schools and its adoption by the BBC brought about its establishment as a
standard in early-twentieth century Britain.

Raymond Hickey’s chapter, ‘The interplay of internal and external factors in
varieties of English’ considers a variety of language changes in order to
question whether the internal/ external change dichotomy is a valid one. A
number of differences can be observed in the two types of change; internal
change often aims to establish or maintain morphological regularity, and is
most evident in the structure of the language, whereas external change is
concerned with the role of language in society (for instance changes
introduced by one group of speakers to align themselves with or distance
themselves from another group), and is most visible at the phonetic and
phonological level. Hickey surveys a range of features from the history of
English, grouping those which are primarily the result of speaker-internal
motivation (e.g. TH-fronting, grammaticalisation of verbs such as want to >
wanna or going to  > gonna, regularisation of possessive pronouns such as
hisself, theirselves) with those which are motivated by external factors (e.g.
the foot-strut split, prescriptivism, and the complicated case of mergers).
Hickey’s answer to the question posed at the beginning of his chapter is ‘it
depends’ – while on the one hand change in early childhood is ‘internal and
system-driven and free of external motivation’ (59), on the other, the
dichotomy is a valid and helpful one, especially when discussing the actuation
and propagation of changes in adolescence and adulthood: ‘social factors
determine whether variation, inherent in all languages, is carried over a
threshold after which it becomes change in the community in question’ (59).

Lieselotte Anderwald opens the second section on morphosyntax with ‘The myth
of American English gotten as a historical retention’. In this chapter
Anderwald draws on a range of evidence to investigate the origins of gotten as
a form indexing American English (AmE). In doing so she tackles the
longstanding myth of AmE as a more conservative variety preserving forms which
have subsequently fallen out of use in British English. Anderwald’s careful
analysis demonstrates that, rather than being a preserved relic of earlier
English, gotten had actually fallen out of use in AmE in the early nineteenth
century. The feature’s revival is charted not only through corpus data, but
also through an examination of the lists of irregular verb forms found in
prescriptive grammars, commentary found in glossaries of Americanisms, and
newspaper reports and letters to the editor, all reflecting fluctuating
attitudes and an uncertainty among Americans as to the status of gotten. This
wealth of information combines to paint to a picture of ‘a clear case of myth
building’ (84), which capitalised on a feature already rising in salience,
which ‘serve[d] writers in the twentieth century to revalorize American
English as a conservative, good, legitimate variety’ (85).

Julia Bacskai-Atkari’s chapter, ‘Changes affecting relative clauses in Late
Modern English’ is a corpus study of relative markers (relative
complementisers and relative pronouns) in the Early Modern English King James
Version of the Bible, as compared with the LModE of the New King James
Version. Bacskai-Atkari investigates the emergence in LModE of the standard
patterns for relative markers in areas such as reference to human/ non-human
subjects, the proportion of that-relatives, alternatives to who/ whom, and the
element as. The study reveals that the variation found in the Early Modern
version is in Present-day English confined to dialectal usage, and that the
patterns observed in Standard English have been driven by a combination of
external factors (e.g. prescriptivist and normalising pressures led to which
no longer being available for non-human subjects), and internal ones (the
complementiser as failed to grammaticalise into a proper relative
complementiser, in contrast to comparable cases in Early New High German). 

‘Diffusion of do: The acquisition of do negation by have (to)’ by Tomoharu
Hirota is a corpus study utilising the Corpus of Historical American English
(COHA) alongside a selection of British English corpora to chart the
acquisition of do negation by have to in the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries. While the corpus study confirms that do-less
negation persisted longer in BrE, and that genre also has an effect, Hirota
argues that previous accounts of the phenomenon, suggesting a link with
analogical levelling and bondedness, fail to adequately explain why do was
acquired at different rates in each variety. Instead he invokes a
constructionist approach, suggesting that both have and have to are
micro-constructions of a subschema have (to), and that do negation seizes the
entire subschema, diffusing throughout the network.

Yasuaki Ishizaki’s ‘A diachronic constructional analysis of locative
alternation in English, with particular attention to load and spray’ examines
the historical development of these two locative alternation verbs from the
perspective of diachronic construction grammar. Using data predominantly from
ARCHER and the British Library’s Historical Texts database, Ishizaki shows
their development from nouns, via past participles accompanying a with-phrase,
to verbs which can occur in at least two syntactic frames, either
location-as-object (e.g. John loaded the wagon with hay), or locatum-as-object
(e.g. John loaded hay onto the wagon). While load developed its
location-as-object variant first, followed by the less frequent
locatum-as-object, verbal senses of spray developed simultaneously but much
later, that is, not until the early twentieth century. Ishizaki argues that a
lexical rule approach, whereby locatum-as-object is derived from
location-as-object, does not fully explain the evidence; rather, the two
variants are independently motivated, with the difference in timing accounted
for by a difference in event structure for spray and load.

The third section, on orthography, vocabulary and semantics, begins with ‘In
search of “the lexicographical stamp”: George Augustus Sala, slang and Late
Modern English dictionaries’ by Rita Queiroz de Barros. This chapter uses
methods from historical lexicography to explore the influence of the writing
of the controversial journalist George Augustus Sala (1828-1895) on the study
of slang in the period. Queiroz de Barros takes as her starting point Sala’s
1853 article ‘Slang’, which appeared in Dickens’s Household Words journal, and
seeks to measure its influence in two ways; firstly, a sample of lexical items
in ‘Slang’ is compared with entries from slang dictionaries and glossaries
available at the time, in order to gauge how dependent Sala’s collection was
on pre-existing sources; secondly, a comparison of Sala’s terms with those
found in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is
undertaken, to determine what impact, if any, he had on that publication. Sala
made the case for slang terms to be included in dictionaries, pointing out
that it was a feature not only of lower-class usage, but could also be found
among in-groups in the upper echelons of society (e.g. among parliamentarians,
lawyers and members of universities). The study confirms Sala’s observational
skills, as many of his terms were recent coinings not attested in previous
collections of slang. Nevertheless, his impact on the OED was limited, which
Queiros de Barros attributes to ‘the literary bias of the dictionary, no
doubt, but also to Sala’s notoriety, thus reflecting his status as a
controversial figure in Victorian England’ (179).

In ‘ “Divided by a common language”? The treatment of Americanism(s) in Late
Modern English dictionaries and usage guides on both sides of the Atlantic’,
Ulrich Busse looks at British and American reference works from the 19th and
early 20th centuries to investigate the label Americanism. Usage guides and
dictionaries of Americanisms form the evidence-base which Busse uses to
conduct his socio-lexicographic and meta-pragmatic study, revealing that the
two types of work differ in numerous ways, including their objective,
methodology, stance and target group, and leading him to conclude that they
‘represent two different communities of practice and discourse’ (199). While
British writers of usage guides show, on the whole, a more negative stance to
Americanisms, viewing them as corruptions of proper English, data from the
dictionaries shows a gradual growth in self confidence among American writers
as these works move from glossaries and lists of terms uniquely found in
America, to more professionally-produced dictionaries representing American
language as a legitimate variety.

Nuria Calvo Cortés’s contribution, ‘Women writers in the 18th century: The
semantics of motion in their choice of perfect auxiliaries’ examines a corpus
of eight eighteenth-century novels by four women writers, Burney, Inchbald,
Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft, in order to analyse the choice of perfect
auxiliary (have or be) used with a select group of motion verbs (e.g. arrive,
become, grow). Calvo Cortés investigates whether the choice of auxiliary is
influenced by the semantics of motion situation components such as MOTION,
FIGURe, GROUND, and PATH. She concludes that ‘the more abstract a context is,
the more likely it is for the structure with have to be present’ (215),
pointing to have’s higher frequency when the FIGURE is non-human or where the
grounds are metaphorical. There also seems to be a difference as to whether
the auxiliary occurs in dialogue or narration within the same novel; be is
more frequent in dialogue, which Calvo Cortés tentatively attributes to
characterisation through varying speech/ dialect patterns on the part of the
authors. However, auxiliary use does vary between the writers she surveys, and
Wollstonecraft’s status as somewhat of an outlier is intriguing in this
respect, given her low use of be (a conservative, largely female variant at
the time).

In ‘Eighteenth-century French cuisine terms and their semantic integration in
English’, Julia Landmann examines the semantic integration of French-derived
culinary terms in English. Using data from the OED Online Landmann seeks to
answer two main questions, firstly whether ‘a particular sense a borrowing
adopts after being introduced into English has its origins in French’ (219)
and secondly, whether the change in meaning is due to internal factors in
English. Landmann shows that a substantial number of culinary terms continued
to develop their sense after their borrowing; while some of these changes are
based on shifts in the terms’ meanings in French, others indicate an
independent change of meaning in English, such as originally savoury dishes,
whose names came to be attached to desserts (e.g. casserole). A comparison of
the OED examples with more recent corpus data reveals that a number of the
borrowings have developed new senses which are yet to be updated in the OED
record.

Gerold Schneider’s ‘Spelling normalisation of Late Modern English: Comparison
and combination of VARD and character-based statistical machine translation’
is an investigation of two different approaches to spelling normalisation. As
natural language processing (NLP) tools rely on a normalised text in order to
perform tasks such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging and parsing,
spelling normalisation is an important first step. Schneider’s investigation
applied two systems, VARiant Detector2 (VARD), and a character-based
statistical machine translation approach (SMT), to the ARCHER corpus of
historical English and American texts, to see which would perform better in
standardising variant spellings. The systems are substantially different: ‘SMT
is a probabilistic, language-independent approach, whereas VARD combines
lexicon-lookup with rules and non-probabilistic though trainable weights’
(244). As predicted, each one yielded different results and was prone to
different error types. The best results were obtained by combining both
approaches in an ensemble system and using majority voting, while adding a
language sequence model using collocation strength overcame errors arising
from the fact that both approaches normalise isolated words rather than
considering the text at phrase level. Improved results were also obtained by
re-training VARD on specific time periods. Schneider concludes the chapter
with two brief case studies demonstrating the benefits of normalisation for
the retrieval of accurate historical language data.

The volume’s fourth section on pragmatics and discourse begins with Laurel J.
Brinton and Tohru Inoue’s ‘A far from simple matter revised: The ongoing
grammaticalization of far from’. The authors present a corpus-based account of
the development of the construction from its original status as an adverbial
construction to newer functions (as a downtoner, a degree modifier, and as a
pragmatic marker) through an ongoing process of grammaticalisation. The
chapter combines a synchronic analysis of the functions of far from in PDE
with a diachronic analysis charting its development, from literal and
metaphorical adverbial meanings with noun phrases in Old and Middle English,
through its appearance with a gerund complement and subsequently as a
downtoner and pragmatic marker in EModE, to uses as an adverbial modifier of
adjectival heads, prepositional phrases and verbs in LModE. Based on this data
Brinton and Inoue propose a five-stage development of far from, noting that it
does not follow the trajectory taken by several other downtoners from adjunct
to degree adjunct to degree modifier. Rather, it patterns more with sort of,
where the degree adjunct follows the degree modifier, a change consistent with
an increase in subjectivity from degree modifier to emphasiser.  

Peter J. Grund’s contribution, ‘What it means to describe speech: Pragmatic
variation and change in speech descriptors in Late Modern English’ draws on
data from A Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET3.0) to explore the
form, frequency and pragmatic function of speech descriptors (e.g. softly in
‘it matters little’, she said softly) in narrative fiction between 1710 and
1920. Speech descriptors can offer insights into how a reporter evaluates a
speech event and, in turn, how they evaluate the speaker themselves; in this
respect they are important markers of stance. There are a number of important
methodological implications in Grund’s study; firstly, he explores the
difficulties of retrieving instances of speech descriptors from larger
corpora; secondly he considers the best way of measuring the frequency of
speech descriptors, and suggests that counting tokens as a proportion of the
number of slots where they could occur gives a more accurate picture than a
normalisation according to the number of words: ‘the measurement of modified
vs. unmodified usage instead gives us a sense of where language users didn’t
but could have used a speech descriptor, that is, where they had a choice’
(303). Superficially, both methods of counting appear to indicate that across
the period in question the use of speech descriptors rose substantially;
however a more detailed examination shows that the proportion of modified uses
varies with each text that makes up the corpus, and other factors, such as
length of text, may also be at play.

‘Being Wilde: Social representation of the public image of Oscar Wilde’ by
Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi is a study of the newspaper reports of the trials
of Oscar Wilde in 1895, focussing on the positive and negative labelling
associated with these reports in the metropolitan and provincial press. The
authors use data collected from the British Library Newspapers database,
comprising reports of varying lengths covering Wilde’s trial, related events,
and gossip related to his health, dress or life in prison. The reports are
split into three cycles for analysis, one for each trial, and Nevala and Nurmi
demonstrate how Wilde’s initial positive labelling, based on his celebrity
status and social standing, gave way to more negative labelling as the trials
progressed. Alongside the kinds of labels used to describe common criminals,
connected with contamination and non-human characteristics, the analysis shows
that Wilde also received a degree of sympathy, often in the form of pity or
disdain, reflecting not only Wilde’s new lowly status as a criminal, but also
his fall from grace.

The final chapter, Matylda Włodarczyk’s ‘ “I am desired (...) to desire”:
Routines of power in the British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape
Colony (1827-1830)’, is a historical pragmatic analysis of the speech acts
found in a collection of official correspondence. Włodarczyk argues that
speech acts in historical correspondence closely resemble speech events,
interactional moves or speech actions. She focuses on macro speech acts (336),
which reveal the exercise of power between writers of higher and lower status
in routine institutional tasks such as requesting, recommending and
regulating. Dyads are analysed, for example, for similarities and differences
in their strategies, depending on whether the speech act comes from a
participant higher or lower in the institutional hierarchy, or according to
how routine the answer is. Włodarczyk’s analysis demonstrates that
institutional correspondence in the LModE period employs a wider range of
speech acts (including declarations and expressives) than hitherto realised.
The study also identifies important differences between institutional
correspondence and comparable sources of data such as contemporary familiar
correspondence or letter writing manuals.

EVALUATION

This wide-ranging volume is especially helpful in providing a window into
current research in LModE, as it covers a variety of topics and approaches to
the study of a period in the history of English which has only recently come
into its own; as the editors note in the introduction, ‘the volume of original
research on LModE has exhibited dramatic growth since 1999’ (1). Despite the
range of the chapters, care is taken by each author to introduce the approach
and contextualise the data, making this a useful volume both for students and
for specialists interested in new research. The methodologies are
well-explained, and the use of colour makes for well-presented diagrams,
meaning that individual chapters could usefully form the basis of teaching
materials for more advanced students. A number of the volume’s contributions
can be fruitfully linked. For example, Beal’s focus on standardisation in
pronunciation is nicely complemented, both by Bacskai-Atkari’s concentration
on the relationship between standard English and dialect, and also by the
questions raised by Queiroz de Barros on the value placed on slang by
nineteenth-century writers, dictionary compilers, and other linguistic
gate-keepers. On the other hand, Schneider complicates this picture by
discussing the benefits (and necessity) of normalising spelling for building a
corpus. In other links, Busse and Anderwald both concentrate on the
reification of American English, while Busse and Nevala & Nurmi share a focus
on stance and labelling. 

Throughout, the contributors demonstrate the excellent depth and range of
evidence available to researchers of LModE. Because of the short distance
between the present day and the period under scrutiny, LModE data can give the
impression that syntactic and other change ‘has more often been statistical in
nature’ (Denison, 1998: 93); as the editors note, ‘a wider time frame may be
necessary to provide sufficient context to past developments’ (2).
Nevertheless, the chapters presented here show how questions of language
variation and change can be effectively tackled through an impressive range of
methods and datasets. The introductory chapter argues that these factors
enable us to view the period as far more nuanced than it was earlier credited
for being and distinct from PDE, as researchers begin to work in ways that
redress the imbalances brought about by an over-reliance on standardised texts
for narrating the history of English. In bringing out these themes, the
editors successfully draw together the disparate topical, theoretical and
methodological threads to contextualise and unify the volume’s fifteen
chapters, and to introduce the period as a whole. 

The inclusion of a section on phonology (for a long time an overlooked area of
LModE) is welcome. For this reader, the ordering of the chapters in the first
section may have been more effective had they been reversed; while Beal’s
contribution is more straightforwardly  phonological, Hickey’s survey is
wider-ranging in its scope. Given that Hickey’s paper directly engages with
and responds to the themes of the original conference (‘Internal and External
Factors in Linguistic Stability and Language Change’) – and, implicitly, with
the main concerns of the volume --it might have perhaps functioned better as a
gateway to the book as a whole, as many of his themes are picked up on,
directly and indirectly, by the other contributors. Nevertheless these are
small quibbles regarding a book which presents interesting new advances in the
field and does a very good job of situating the contributions in relation to
current research.

REFERENCES   

A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER).
<http://www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/archer/>

British Library’s Historical Texts.
<http://www.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/home>

Davis, Mark. 2010-. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million
words, 1810-2009 (COHA). <http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/>

Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In Cambridge History of the English Language
Vol. IV: 1776-1997, Suzanne Romaine (ed.), 92-329. Cambridge: CUP.    

Eighteenth-Century English Phonology database (ECEP). Sheffield: Digital
Humanities Research Institute. <http://www.dhi.ac.uk/ecep>

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) <http://www.oed.com>

The British Library Newspapers. <http://gale.cengage.co.uk/bln>

Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: CUP


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christine Wallis is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the 'Unlocking the
Mary Hamilton Papers' project at the University of Manchester, which aims to
produce a digital edition and corpus of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
personal letters. Aside from work on Late Modern English, she also works on
Old English; in both time periods she is interested in areas such as
manuscripts and textual editing, scribal education, and linguistic norms and
standardisation.





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