28.4927, Review: English, Old; Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonetics; Phonology; Syntax: Ringe, Taylor (2017)

Sat Nov 25 18:13:45 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4927. Sat Nov 25 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4927, Review: English, Old; Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Phonetics; Phonology; Syntax: Ringe, Taylor (2017)

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: Sat, 25 Nov 2017 13:13:40
From: Christine Wallis [c.wallis at sheffield.ac.uk]
Subject: The Development of Old English

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36316037

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-1960.html

AUTHOR: Don  Ringe
AUTHOR: Ann  Taylor
TITLE: The Development of Old English
SERIES TITLE: A Linguistic History of English
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Christine Wallis, University of Sheffield

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This book, the second volume in the series ‘A Linguistic History of English’,
covers the history of the language from the evolution of Proto-Germanic into
its separate daughter languages, until its development into the Old English
(OE) attested in documents up to c.900 AD. As such its periodisation departs
from other histories of English (e.g. Campbell, 1959; Hogg, 1992a), in that it
bridges the gap between the language’s ancestors and its earliest surviving
texts, and finishes some 200 years before the end of OE as dated by more
traditional accounts. The book consists of eight chapters. After the
introduction, Chapters 2-5 give a diachronic account of the phonological and
morphological changes as Proto-Germanic develops into northern West Germanic,
while Chapters 6 and 7 deal with changes in the immediate prehistory of OE.
Chapter 8 provides a synchronic description of the syntax of OE. The volume
therefore works chronologically, from the language’s earliest reconstructed
stages, up to its attested forms at the end of the ninth century.

After a general introduction to the volume, the first chapter gives a brief
overview of early OE, including information on surface-contrastive sounds and
morphosyntactic categories. It discusses the dialects of OE, and addresses the
uneven attestation of different varieties in the earliest English written
records, before listing briefly some of the more important texts surviving in
these dialects. 

Each of the following chapters focuses on a particular stage of the language,
and most follow a similar structure, beginning with phonological changes,
before exploring morphological ones. Chapter 2 discusses Proto-Northwest
Germanic (PNWGmc) innovations as the variety diverged from Proto-Germanic (for
example, backing of *ē to *ā), alongside those partly shared with Gothic.
Ringe takes care to distinguish changes which can be attributed to a unified
PNWGmc from those which are shared between daughter languages, possibly as a
result of continued dialect contact (both phonological and morphological).
Examples from Gothic demonstrate morphological innovations in PNWGmc. Chapter
3 concentrates on the changes that distinguish Proto-West Germanic (PWGmc)
from its Northern Germanic neighbours. The large number of changes common to
PWGmc lead Ringe to suggest that ‘there was for some generations a unitary
PWGmc language’ (41), though he distinguishes between changes which affected
all PWGmc dialects and those which were less uniform in their spread (see for
example p. 45). Also considered are changes which, although postdating the
PWGmc period, are shared by many of the daughter languages (e.g. the loss of
*w following non-initial velars). The chapter concludes with a diagram of the
relative chronology of the changes discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 (104), which
is helpful in visualising the wealth of detail contained in these two
chapters.

Chapter 4 provides a welcome grammatical sketch of Proto-West Germanic
(PWGmc). This gives a snapshot of the grammar of the language at this point in
its development, before Chapter 5’s discussion of further dialect
differentiation into northern West Germanic. A description of the PWGmc
phonological system is followed by its morphology, with sections including
handy tables showing inflections of verbs, nouns, adjectives, numerals and
pronouns. A lexicon is also included, of lexemes unique to to WGmc, as well as
meanings unique to WGmc among words which are more widely attested in Germanic
languages. As Ringe notes, the list is a deliberately conservative one, given
the difficulty of dealing with the evidence, with Gothic attested
comparatively sparsely, and ON not surviving to any great degree until the
fourteenth century. Finally, derivational morphology and loanwords are also
considered. 

Northern West Germanic dialects form the basis of Chapter 5, which compares
changes common to OE and Old Frisian with those evident in Old Saxon (OS),
including morphological and lexical innovations. Ringe stresses that this
stage of the language was probably always dialectally diverse, in spite of its
status as a single language for a number of generations. The chapter thus
begins with sounds changes fully shared by ancestral dialects of OS (e.g. loss
of nasals before fricatives, raising of *e to *i before *m), before going on
to discuss changes such as nasalisation and fronting, which are not uniformly
shared by OS.

Chapters 6 and 7 deviate from the structure of previous chapters, with each
devoted solely to phonology (Chapter 6) or morphology (Chapter 7). Given that
Chapter 6 is the longest chapter of the book, due to the sheer amount of data
and the availability of attested forms demonstrating many of the changes
discussed, this division is a wise one that makes the topics more manageable.
The introduction to Chapter 6 includes a brief summary of the literature which
will be most familiar to scholars of OE (e.g. Campbell, 1959; Hogg, 1992a;
Luick, 1914-40; Brunner, 1965), before considering the origin of the OE
dialects preserved in surviving texts. The chapter covers sound changes which
will be well-known to OE scholars, such as breaking, palatalization, palatal
diphthongisation, i-umlaut, Anglian smoothing, syncope etc. A relative
chronology of the sound changes in diagram form is also provided (304).
Chapter 7 details morphological changes in the same period (e.g. changes in
strong verbs and in verb endings), and includes examples in tabular form, for
example showing equivalent forms in West-Saxon, Mercian and Northumbrian for
verbal inflections (350-1). 

Chapter 8, written by Ann Taylor, provides a synchronic syntax of OE. The
evidence for this chapter is based on the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old
English (YCOE) and is often (though not exclusively) drawn from examples in
late-OE text, such as those by Ælfric. This chapter is not intended as an
exhaustive commentary on OE syntax, but as a sketch of some of the more
important aspects of the language, and those that differ most from PDE
equivalents. The chapter contains sections on clausal syntax, verb phrases,
periphrastic verb constructions, impersonal constructions, prepositional
phrases, nominal phrases, and non-finite and finite subordinate clauses.
Numerous illustrative examples are provided from YCOE and, where appropriate,
from PDE.

The volume is completed by a substantial and up-to-date reference section, and
three main indexes (ancestor forms of English, attested forms of English, and
a separate index to Chapter 8).

EVALUATION

The biggest advantage of this book over others charting the development of OE
is the way in which Ringe marries the phonological and morphological evidence
with theories of language change such as sociolinguistics, which focus on
speaker involvement. Ringe contrasts his approach with those of Campbell
(1959) and Hogg (1992a), stating that those works ‘retain an old-fashioned
philological focus on the forms which the student encounters rather than
writing an internal history of the language’ (167). This makes the present
work of greater use to a wider range of students, and makes the material more
accessible to those with an interest in disciplines such as sociolinguistics
or language change. This approach is also demonstrated by Ringe’s focus on
whether at any particular stage the language can be demonstrated to have been
relatively uniform or more dialectally diverse (see for example his discussion
of whether pre-OE *a fronting had continental or insular origins (167-8)).

In the introduction Ringe states that ‘comparative Germanic linguistics has
been worked over so intensively by so many specialists for so long that
getting the facts is seldom a problem, though the wealth of conflicting
interpretations has to be sorted’ (2). Ringe writes in a clear engaging style,
effectively explaining features, drawing the reader’s attention to overarching
points and helping navigate the abundant examples. Relevant literature and
counter-arguments are neatly referred to in a way that does not detract from
the main point of each chapter, and unsolved questions or problematic data are
noted where they occur. For the researcher of OE, the points are well keyed
into the most used reference works in the area, such as Hogg (1992a), Hogg &
Fulk (2011), Campbell (1959), and Luick (1914-40). This enables easy
comparison of the treatment of particular features in any of these works. The
layout of examples is also clear and easy to follow, for example the
comparative lists of verb forms in the different OE dialects (350-1). The
layout of such information compares favourably, for example, with Campbell
(1959: §732-735), as it is easy to see at a glance comparable material from
several languages or dialects.

Taylor’s chapter on syntax complements the overall scope of the book, and
redresses the balance of earlier treatments of OE, in which syntax is given
only brief (or no) consideration (e.g. Campbell (1959), Lass (1994)). Another
important methodological concern is that lengthy prose works in the period up
to 900 are rare, and so Taylor uses YCOE to provide the data for a synchronic
description of OE syntax, on the grounds that differences in syntax between
early and late OE are relatively few (1). The chapter is clearly exemplified;
however Taylor’s ‘loosely generative’ (392) approach requires a level of
theoretical knowledge which, while not beyond scholars with a purely
linguistic training, may be a challenge for readers coming from a more
philological or literary background, and if searching for a syntax of OE, such
readers may find Mitchell (1985) more user-friendly (if more detailed). 

The periodisation of this volume differs from that of other works dealing with
the history of English, in that it stops short of traditional boundary dates
(around c.900, rather than c.1100). Ringe suggests that ‘the division between
OE and ME is an artificial one, imposed by external factors [...] and since
the research of our predecessors has made it increasingly feasible to
extrapolate across evidential gaps, it seems worth the attempt to adopt a
different periodization’ (3). On a practical level this has the advantage of
keeping the book to a manageable size, while on a theoretical level the
periodisation has the advantage of focusing on the stage of OE during its
earliest written phases (i.e. early West Saxon). This means that the problems
of untangling phonological and morphological change from the more complex
texts of the later OE period (involving the socio-linguistic aspects of the
proto-standard or focused variety of late West Saxon, or the fact that the
majority of eleventh-century texts are copied from earlier exemplars and so
potentially represent mixed dialectal input) are left for the next volume. It
also means that linguistic changes which are believed to have started during
the Anglo-Saxon period, but which only appear in the written record to any
degree in the post-Conquest period (for example, the demise of case and mood
marking in nouns and verbs respectively; Lass, 1994: 245; Hogg 1992b: 150) are
to be considered as a whole in the following volume.                          

Overall this is an informative and very well-written book, which will clearly
benefit advanced students of historical linguistics and readers who require a
more in-depth treatment of the history of the language’s prehistory than is
found in traditional histories and grammars. It provides a successfully
updated view of the internal history of the language, which takes into account
more recent approaches to language change, and encourages readers to make
links with neighbouring linguistic disciplines, and is a welcome addition to
existing reference works.

REFERENCES:

Brunner, Karl. 1965. Altenglische Grammatik: nach der angelsächsischen
Grammatik von Eduard Sievers. Tübungen: Niemeyer.

Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Hogg, Richard M. 1992a. A Grammar of Old English, vol. 1, Phonology. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Hogg, Richard M. 1992b. ‘Phonology and Morphology’, in The Cambridge History
of the 
English Language, vol. I., The Beginnings–1066. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Hogg, Richard M. & Robert D. Fulk. 2011. A Grammar of Old English, vol. 2,
Morphology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Luick, Karl. 1914-40. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Leipzig:
Tauchnitz.

Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a teaching associate at the University of Sheffield, where I teach the
history of English. My research interests lie in the field of Old English, in
particular literacy, education and scribal culture. I am currently working on
marginalia, corrections and drypoint additions to Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

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

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

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4927	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/