30.63, Review: General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Pahta, Skaffari, Wright (2017)

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Subject: 30.63, Review: General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Pahta, Skaffari, Wright (2017)

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Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:16:49
From: Enrico Torre [contact at enricotorre.com]
Subject: Multilingual Practices in Language History

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36423617


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2332.html

EDITOR: Päivi  Pahta
EDITOR: Janne  Skaffari
EDITOR: Laura  Wright
TITLE: Multilingual Practices in Language History
SUBTITLE: English and Beyond
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Enrico Torre, Università degli Studi di Genova

SUMMARY

‘Multilingual practices in language history: English and beyond’, edited by
Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari and Laura Wright, is a collection of studies
arguing for the importance of taking a multilingual perspective when dealing
with the history of languages. In particular, the work focuses on language
contact in the history of English and, to a much lesser extent, other
languages spoken in the British Isles. The volume is divided into four parts:
i) introduction; ii) borderlands; iii) patterns; iv) contexts.

The first part includes two chapters. Chapter 1, entitled ‘From historical
code-switching to multilingual practices in the past’, is jointly authored by
the editors of the book. The authors state that the aim of the volume is
exploring multilingual practices (i.e, social practice, individual identities,
linguistic repertoires, use of distinct languages in texts and intersentential
code-switching) from a historical perspective, adopting a holistic approach to
language history, which focuses on the non-monolingual background of the
writer as well as the social context. The chapter also briefly overviews the
topics which will be dealt with in the rest of the book: the definition of
code-switching and the mainstream approach to its study, literal and
metaphorical ‘borderlands’, quantitative patterns identified through the
investigation of corpora and contexts of multilingual language use. 

In Chapter 2, entitled “Historical and modern studies of code-switching: A
tale of mutual enrichment”, Penelope Gardner-Chloros argues that, despite
their differences, historical linguistics and mainstream sociolinguistics
(i.e., sociolinguistics studying contemporary material) share a common
interest in the study of language variation and change. Furthermore,
Gardner-Chloros takes issue with the widespread model which posits the
existence of a “matrix” language and one or more “embedded” languages. The
author argues that this model supposes reality to be tidier than it actually
is, positing that speakers’ linguistic repertoires are not likely to coincide
with the externally defined notion of separate languages. The also author
underlines that code-switching is not a unitary phenomenon either in the
spoken or the written mode, and it varies on the basis of text and context;
moreover, code-switching may be a means of individual expression rather than a
property characterizing the linguistic habits of a community. Finally, she
proposes the adoption of conversation analysis as a method in historical
sociolinguistics, as code-switching, in a bilingual context, can represent a
contextualization cue.

The second part of the book includes five chapters. Chapter 3, written by
Herbert Schendl, is entitled ‘Code-switching in Anglo-Saxon England: A
corpus-based approach’. This contribution provides an overview of the
alternation between Latin and Old English in the Anglo-Saxon text production.
The author carried out an investigation of homilies and scientific treatises
supplemented by the use of the electronic ‘Dictionary of Old English Web
Corpus’, to reveal the features of code-switching in these text types and the
status of single Latin word forms syntactically integrated in vernacular
co-texts. This topic is tightly interconnected with the thorny issue of
distinguishing code-switching from borrowing. An analysis of the two
text-types shows that Latin phrases (e.g., ‘lunaris annus’) and clauses and
sentences (e.g., ‘post mille annos soluetur Satanas’) in vernacular contexts
can be classified as code-switching, but single Latin word-forms which are
syntactically integrated into Old English co-texts (e.g., ‘punctos/puncti’)
are more safely subsumed under the term ‘loanwords’. Subsequently, the author
applies five criteria for the classification of single Latin word-forms in
bilingual texts as possible code-switches, based on Matras (2009). Finally,
Schendl applied them to the analysis of all occurrences of five Latin lexical
items, concluding that this approach may enable the analysts to account for
less clear cases of switching.

In Chapter 4, ‘Twentieth-century Romance loans: Code-switching in the Oxford
English Dictionary?’, Rita Queiroz de Barros investigates the admission and
treatment of loanwords in the Oxford English Dictionary, calling into question
dictionary attestation as a criterion of distinguishing single-word switches
from lexical borrowings. The author argues that the widespread idea of the
Oxford English Dictionary as a “Britocentric repository of the English
vocabulary” (p. 68) does not find support in her study, which instead
witnesses a tendency to admit a large number of loanwords (e.g., ‘squadra’,
‘feijoada’). Next, Queiroz de Barros focuses on ‘foreignisms’ (i.e.
non-nativized words, e.g. ‘problématique’, ‘numéro’) originating from modern
Romance languages and first attested in English in the 20th century, observing
that code-switches can constitute dictionary entries. Therefore, she concludes
that dictionary attestation is not a fully reliable tool to distinguish
switches from borrowings and the role of the lexicon in the identification of
code-switching is necessary.

Chapter 5, contributed by Louise Sylvester, is entitled ‘A semantic field and
text-type approach to late-medieval multilingualism’. This
lexicologically-oriented study consists in the analysis of lexical items
belonging to the semantic field of ‘dress and textiles’ in four text-types
selected from Sylvester et al. (2014): wills, sumptuary laws, petitions, and
romances. Some of these items are found in more than one text type (‘kirtle’,
‘pelure’, and ‘fur’ appear in all four of them, ‘array’ and ‘garnementes’ in
petitions and romances), while many are only found in one text type. These
terms have been classified into two subdomains: ‘fur’ (e.g., ‘wylde catis’)
and ‘textiles’ (e.g., ‘kerseys’). The results of this study show that much of
the content-laden vocabulary was shared by French, Middle English, and
medieval Latin, supporting Hunt’s (2011) claim that, in medieval England, the
distinctions of language identity were rather blurred. 

In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Code-switching and contact influence in Middle English
manuscripts from the Welsh Penumbra’, Simon Meecham-Jones addresses the often
neglected topic of the contact between Middle English and medieval Welsh in
the Welsh Penumbra (i.e., medieval Wales and the Marcher Lordships). The
author points out that linguists have often failed to seriously consider the
possible influence of Welsh on English, in favor of other explanations,
possibly due to a lack of familiarity with Welsh philology (see Tolkien 1983).
The author discusses several examples, one of which is the adjective
‘gryndel’, glossed as ‘fierce, angry’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, which
also suggests a comparison with the Old Norse ‘grimd’ (‘fierceness’). Instead,
the author proposes the Welsh word ‘grym’ (‘force, vigor, power’) as an
alternative origin. According to Meecham-Jones, the context of use in a text
like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight renders the Welsh option more plausible
than the Old Norse alternative. The author argues that a rigorous study of
Middle English manuscripts may reveal a more substantial influence of Welsh on
English than is generally believed.

Chapter 7, contributed by Janne Skaffari, is entitled ‘Code-switching in the
long twelfth century’, and addresses code-switching in the period immediately
following the Norman Conquest. The aim of the chapter is to identify forms,
functions, and patterns of code-switching, mostly between English and Latin,
but French is also taken into consideration. The study is based on the
author’s investigation of 54 manuscripts containing literary material from the
period 1075-1250. Latin is the dominant language in most of the manuscripts,
and its use persists within the vernacular English texts in the field of
religion, while the presence of French is more limited. The author discusses
four levels at which code-switching can be observed in the sources:
manuscript, page, text, and clause, which basically correspond to
intertextual, visually flagged, interclausal, and intraclausal switching, as
well as the extra-sentential code-switching. However, as Skaffari remarks at
the end of the chapter, the same manuscript may contain examples of
code-switching at more than one of the previously mentioned levels. Finally,
she points out the importance of visual aspects as a “reminder of the
usefulness of consulting original manuscripts instead of simply relying on
editions or catalogues.” (p. 137)

Part III includes five chapters. Chapter 8, contributed by Jukka Tuominen, is
entitled ‘“Trifling shews of learning”? Patterns of code-switching in English
sermons 1640-1740’. Carried out within a variationist framework, the study
aims to provide an empirical description of general structural and functional
code-switching patterns in a sample of ten sermons from the Lampeter Corpus of
Early Modern English Tracts. Code-switching is explicitly defined as “the use
of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode”
(Heller 1988, p. 1). The author observes that code-switching in sermons
published between 1640 and 1740 mostly comes in prefabricated chunks (e.g.,
And as in Persons and Opinions, so in things too, ‘quo antiquius eò melius…’),
most typically Latin quotations from classical or patristic sources. Tuominen
also underlines that the sermons with the most switching and the most varied
functional types of switches seem to have been given before audiences
including well-educated members of society. 

Chapter 9 is jointly written by Arja Nurmi, Jukka Tyrkkö, Anna Petäjäniemi,
and Päivi Pahta. It is entitled ‘The social and textual embedding of
multilingual practices in Late Modern English: A corpus-based analysis’, and
presents an overview of the frequency and type of multilingual practices based
on a systematic study of a sample of data drawn from the Corpus of Late Modern
English Text 3.0. The authors point out that during the 18th century, a good
command of educated English was one of the marks of a cultured person, along
with a sufficient knowledge of foreign languages (in particular, Latin, Greek,
and French). As a result, this multilingualism took place within the community
of English speakers. The study shows that an author’s education plays a major
role in the frequency of multilingual practices, texts directly associated
with foreign countries feature the highest frequencies of foreign content,
while the scarcity of female writers and the uniformity of informants’ social
background do not allow for a reliable analysis of gender and social class.

In Chapter 10, entitled ‘Mining macaronics’, Šime Demo aims to build a
foundation for a digitally supported linguistic study of the Neo-Latin
macaronic tradition (humorous texts mixing vernacular stems and Latin endings
by adopting a two-stage approach. First, the author set up an annotated sample
corpus; second, he carried out two sample analyses of the corpus, observing
how Latin words, hybrids, and embedded language words cluster, and running a
test to check whether verse beginnings play an important role in achieving the
macaronic effect. The study shows that Germanic, Romance, and Slavic embedded
languages behave differently. Furthermore, the author points out that longer
clusters of monolingual discourse occasionally appear, but the increase in
their size corresponds with a decrease in their frequency. Finally, the verse
beginnings are not more frequently macaronic than would be expected from the
overall frequency of macaronic words in individual texts. 

Chapter 11, co-authored by Tom ter Horst and Nike Stam, is entitled ‘Visual
diamorphs: The importance of language neutrality in code-switching in medieval
Ireland’. This study addresses the interaction between Latin and Irish in a
group of homilies from the ‘An Leabhar Breac’ manuscript (15th century) and a
commentary written for the martyrology ‘Félire Óengusso’ (8th century); in
particular, the authors focus on ‘visual diamorphs’ (see Wright 2011), i.e.
“words that by their form can be assigned to both languages involved in a
bilingual situation.” (p. 223). Ter Horst and Stam classified this phenomenon
into four categories: names and borrowings (e.g., na Iudei vero, ‘the Jews,
however’), function words, (.i. uirgo de sil chonaire, ‘that is, a virgin from
the Sil Chonaire’), abbreviations (e.g., Athert vero eoin aps., ‘Then John the
Apostle said’), and emblems (e.g., c7 for ‘cet’, ‘hundred’). The authors’
computer-assisted analysis shows many similarities between the types of
diamorphs occurring in both corpora, with emblems representing the largest
group in both manuscripts. As the majority of switches in the corpora are
introduced by diamorphs (of different shapes and sizes), they argue that
diamorphs play an important role in facilitating switches. 

In Chapter 12, entitled ‘“Latin in recipes?” A corpus-based approach to
scribal abbreviations in 15th-century medical manuscripts’, Alpo Honkapohja
contrasts the use of abbreviation in Latin (e.g., ‘lb’ for ‘libra’) and Middle
English (e.g., ‘iijd’ for ‘third’), XML-encoding the relevant items in a
sample of five manuscripts which are part of the Voigts-Sloane Sibling Group
(see Voigts 1990). The main goal of the study is testing the applicability of
his methodology to the study of abbreviations. By means of his corpus-based
analysis, Honkapohja concludes that it is possible to observe a degree of
interesting variation in the patterns of abbreviation in medical manuscripts,
adding that there seems to be room for constructing scribal profiles using a
diagnostic set of graphemes for scribal identification. Finally, the XML
encoding used in this study allows the annotation of both the symbol and the
extension, creating interesting possibilities for further corpus-based
studies. 

Part iv contains four chapters. In Chapter 13, ‘Administrative multilingualism
on the page in early modern Poland: In search of a framework for written
code-switching’, Joanna Kopaczyk approaches code-switching on the written
page, focusing on the contact between Latin, Polish, and Scots in
seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania. After providing some historical
background, Kopaczyk presents the results of her case-study on different types
of code-switching on the page in manuscripts comprising municipal
administrative and legal records pertaining to Scottish immigrants to early
modern Poland-Lithuania, including instances of reported speech (often flagged
with terms like ‘vulgaritates’) and other discourse moves, morpheme boundaries
(e.g. Latin roots with Polish inflections, e.g. the first person plural
‘specificuiemy’ from ‘specificare’, ‘to specify’), and personal names (e.g.
‘Jacobus’ as a latinization of ‘Jacob’). The author argues for the importance
of considering code-switching in a written text in terms of structural
linguistic levels and the visual aspects of the handwritten or printed page.
In this way, the text is to be seen as a multimodal communicative event, which
can be seen as including different levels, which can be addressed in order,
from the most general (genre) to the most integrated with the matrix language
(orthography).

In Chapter 14, ‘Approaching the functions of historical code-switching: The
case of solidarity’, Aleksi Mäkilähde explores the function of solidarity in
historical code-switching. On the basis of Brown and Levinson’s (1987)
politeness theory, the author states that “An act has the function of
establishing solidarity iff (i) it implies a low D-value between S[peaker] and
H[earer] through shared membership in a social group, and (ii) at the same
time enhances the positive face of both S and H” (p. 308). The author then
proceeds to analyze some examples from the ‘Orationes’ manuscript, which
contains drama and speech performed by the students of the King’s School in
Canterbury between approximately 1665 and 1684, most of which contain switches
between different languages (mostly English, Latin, and Greek). Mäkilähde
observes that it would be better to consider code-switching in combination
with other discourse strategies, such as quotations because it is often the
combination, rather than code-switching alone, that establishes solidarity.

Chapter 15, contributed by Richard Ingham, is entitled ‘Medieval bilingualism
in England: On the rarity of vernacular code-switching’. The author
investigates code-switching in both religious and lay professional texts
written in English and French in the Middle Ages. On the basis of his study,
he argues that in medieval England, vernacular code-switching could be found
in certain professional contexts, but evidence of it is scanty outside
documentary record-keeping. The author also discusses a combination of French
function words and English nouns in accounts and charters. According to
Ingham, the avoidance of code-switching in written discourse may be due to a
tendency to see it as too casual a practice to put it into writing. Moreover,
the language choice factor may also have played a part: English was chosen by
authors addressing an audience who could not be expected to know French; on
the other hand, French could be useful to reach an audience who could not know
Latin; furthermore, French was not subject to regional variation in England,
unlike English. 

In Chapter 16, ‘A multilingual approach to the history of Standard English’,
Laura Wright argues that the century between the 1370s and the 1480s
constitutes the period of transition from Medieval Latin to Proto-Standard
English. Wright identifies three developmental stages which can be observed
from a multilingual perspective. Prior to the fifteenth century, Britons kept
accounts in either a Medieval Latin or French, with English employed for
linguistic elements which resisted a representation in Latin or French (e.g.,
social ranks, titles, toponyms). Then, after 1380, the ‘pre-shift generation
“show considerable toing and froing between mixed-language and monolingual
English” (p. 343), before monolingual English eventually became established.
Her multilingual perspective to the transition from Latin to monolingual
English calls into question the established textbook view of the history of
Standard English which, suffering from a monolingual bias, according to Wright
provides a less than accurate (if not downright problematic) account of the
origins of the standard language.

EVALUATION

Overall, “Multilingual practices and language history: English and beyond”
represents a valuable collection of contributions to the study of language
contact, addressing a range of topics which may appeal to a wide range of
scholars extending well beyond the field of sociolinguistics, reaching out to
English philologists, historical linguists and semioticians, and to some
extent even medieval and modern historians and literary scholars. Indeed, the
sixteen chapters which make up the book provide a variety of theoretical and
methodological approaches which may be of some interest to specialists in the
above-mentioned academic disciplines. Restricting my attention to the field of
linguistics, the editor’s choice of dividing the book into four parts
according to different – but frequently interrelated - hot topics in
historical sociolinguistics is principled, and their selection of chapters
succeeds in covering a range of issues related to the study of the history of
English and/or languages with which it has sooner or later come into contact,
either in the British Isles (as in the case of ter Horst and Stam’s study) or
in mainland Europe (as in Kopyczka’s chapter). While each chapter of the book
is able to stand as a self-contained contribution, each part of the volume
strongly coheres, and so does the book as a whole. As a result, this book can
be regarded as a valuable addition to the ‘Language Contact and Bilingualism’
de Gruyter series.

The choice to illustrate the application of a multilingual (and, more loosely,
multicultural) perspective on different aspects of language history is
felicitous, as it provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of such an
approach at work. First, and perhaps foremost, the adoption of such a
perspective enables scholars to challenge longstanding assumptions, pointing
out that although they have long been taken for granted, their accuracy is
often less than perfect. In a field like historical linguistics, which
basically relies on primary sources from a distant past, it seems appropriate
to request that all plausible hypotheses should be taken into consideration.
The different multilingual approaches adopted by contributions included in the
volume have the merit of shedding new light on issues which were often
considered as settled, bringing in new theoretical and methodological insights
which seem to have the potential to significantly enrich the academic debate
on language practices as addressed from a historical angle. Without detracting
anything from the value of other contributions, Meecham-Jones’s study (Chapter
6) on the possible influence of Medieval Welsh on Middle English is a
particularly interesting case in point, especially against the background of
the recently reignited debate on the Celtic hypothesis (e.g., Flippula and
Klemola 2009). 

On a different note, many of the chapters included in the volume
concerncomputer-assisted analyses, in some cases proposing improvements on the
existing corpus-based techniques tailored to the specific needs of the
historical sociolinguist working with a particular type of text. A case in
point is Honkapohja’s XML encoding of abbreviations in Latin and Middle
English manuscripts (Chapter 12), but valuable proposals were also contributed
by e.g., ter Schendl (Chapter 3), Queiroz de Barros (Chapter 4), Demo (Chapter
10), and Horst and Stam (Chapter 11), and Kopyczka (Chapter 13). At the same
time, valuable insights are also contributed from a more theoretical
perspective by scholars approaching their object of study from new angles.
Wright’s multilingual approach to the transition from language alternation to
the establishment of monolingual English (Chapter 16) represents a
particularly deft, serious challenge to the mainstream views of the history of
Standard English, but interesting theoretical proposals are also put forward
by e.g., Sylvester (Chapter 5), Tuominen (Chapter 8) and Mäkilähde (Chapter
14).

With regard to more formal matters, all chapters are easy to read and
understand, striking a nice balance between the need to be as informative as
possible and the necessity to be concise. Each study avoids over-relying on
examples, which are instead employed only when necessary to provide instances
of phenomena or clarify a point. Whenever quantitative evidence is provided,
tables and graphs are supplied to facilitate the reader’s understanding. All
chapters are uniform in terms of length and structure, contributing to the
general elegance and readability of the volume. 

While my overall evaluation of ‘Multilingual practices in language history’ is
clearly very positive, I will now point out a couple of minor shortcomings of
the book. First of all, the absence of a concluding chapter is, to some
extent, disappointing. While it is understandable that the editors had a
limited amount of space and thus awarded priority to the case-studies, I still
believe that the book would have benefitted from including a brief concluding
chapter, tying in with Chapter 1 and restating the goals of the book and – in
particular – the directions for future developments. Indeed, the previous
sixteen chapters provided a lot of information to the reader on many aspects
of the history of English, and a short concluding chapter could effectively
and elegantly wrap up the contents of the book. While this is no fundamental
flaw, the absence of a concluding chapter may leave the reader with a sense of
incompleteness.

A further less than ideal property of the book involves a certain ambiguity in
the use of some key terms, with particular reference to ‘code-switching’,
‘borrowing’, and ‘loanword’, which are used in virtually all chapters. While
the editors may have a point in refusing to force  a common definition on the
authors, it could have helped if each of them had a definition of these
phenomena provided at the onset. Overall, this is not a major issue and the
present reviewer does not believe it can cause a major disruption in the
reader’s understanding of the studies; however, more clarity at the
terminological level could help the audience into a smoother reading of the
book. 

Despite the two minor liabilities listed above, I believe ‘Multilingual
practices in language history’ represents a valuable contribution to the
field; it seems to have the potential to significantly contribute to the
spread of the multilingual perspective in the field of both historical and
mainstream sociolinguistics, as well as English linguistics and philology.
This may eventually enhance a more comprehensive appreciation of the
limitations of the monolingual approach, which  should not necessarily be
abandoned altogether but should be complemented by a multilingual perspective.
Indeed, the importance of language contact in explaining language development
and change can hardly be overstated. 
 
REFERENCES

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Users. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Flippula, Markku, and Klemola, Juhani. 2009. Special Issue on Re-Evaluating
the Celtic Hypothesis. English Language and Linguistics 13 (2). 155-161.

Heller, Monica. 1988. Introduction. In M. Heller (ed.), Codeswitching:
Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin, New York, and
Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-24.

Hunt, Tony. 2011. The Languages of Medieval England. In M. Baldzuhn and C.
Putzo (eds.), Mehrsprachigkeit im Mittelalter. Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter. 50-68.

Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sylvester, Louise, Chambers, Mark C., and Owe-Crocker, Gale R. (eds.). 2014.
Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook. Woodbridge:
Boydell.

Tolkien, J R. R. 1983. English and Welsh. In C. Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters
and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen. 162-197.

Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. 1990. The ‘Sloane Group’: Related Scientific and Medical
Manuscripts from the Fifteenth Century in the Sloane Collection. The British
Library Journal 16. 26-57.

Wright, Laura. 2011. On Variation in Medieval Mixed-Language Business Writing.
In H. Schendl and L. Wright (eds.), Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin
and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. 191-218.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Enrico Torre holds a PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK. His
research interests include English linguistics (both synchronic and
diachronic), theories of language, and the philosophy of linguistics. He is
currently investigating the notions of analogy, pattern, and family
resemblance in the history of linguistics. Moreover, he is exploring the
connections between contemporary linguistic theories and the structuralist
tradition. In the recent past, he has analysed the patterns of use of Italian
idioms.





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