Studies in the History of the English Language IV

Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change

Susan M. Fitzmaurice, Donka Minkova

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9783110205879
• eBook ISBN: 9783110211801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change continues the project of initiating and energizing the conversations among historians of the English language fostered by the series of conferences on studying the history of the English language (SHEL), begun in 2000 at UCLA. It follows in the footsteps of three high-profile SHEL-based collections of peer-reviewed research papers and point-counterpoint commentaries.

In the current volume, the editors invited contributors to reflect upon their approaches and practices in undertaking historical studies, focusing particularly on the methods deployed in selecting and analyzing data. The essays in this volume represent interests in the study of linguistic change in English that range across different periods, genres, and aspects of the language and show different approaches and use of evidence to deal with the subject. They also represent the current state of research in the field and the nature of the debates in which scholars and historians engage as regards the nature of the evidence adduced in the explanation of change and the robustness of heuristics.

The editors share a strong interest in examining the evidence that informs and grounds research in their fields at the same time as interrogating the heuristics employed by their colleagues for the histories they present. The contributions to the volume give expression to these interests. Contributors are: Richard Hogg (to whose memory the volume is dedicated), William Labov, Elizabeth Traugott, Rob Fulk, Thomas Cable, Jennifer Tran-Smith, Charles Li, Christina Fitzgerald, David Denison, Christopher Palmer, Don Chapman, Graeme Trousdale, Joan Beal, Connie Eble, Stefan Dollinger and Raymond Hickey.

The volume is of interest to scholars and postgraduate and research students in the history of English, English philology, and (English) historical linguistics.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of contents
• Tabula Laudatoria
• Introduction: Heuristics and evidence in studying the history of the English language
• Triggering events
• What’s new in Old English?
• Coding the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose to investigate the syntaxpragmatics interface
• Anglian dialect features in Old English anonymous homiletic literature: A survey, with preliminary findings
• The elusive progress of prosodical study
• Fidelity in versification: Modern English translations of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Response to Tom Cable’s comments
• Metrical evidence: Did Chaucer translate The Romaunt of the Rose?
• Trochees in an iambic meter: Assumptions or evidence?
• “Ubbe dubbede him to knith”: The scansion of Havelok and ME -es, -ed, and -ede
• A response to Tom Cable
• Patterns and productivity
• Borrowed derivational morphology in Late Middle English: A study of the records of the London Grocers and Goldsmiths
• Fixer-uppers and passers-by: Nominalization of verb-particle constructions
• Words and constructions in grammaticalization: The end of the English impersonal construction
• Variation in Late Modern English: Making the best use of ‘bad data’
• English/French bilingualism in nineteenth century Lousiana: A social network analysis
• Taking permissible shortcuts? Limited evidence, heuristic reasoning and the modal auxiliaries in early Canadian English
• ‘What strikes the ear’ Thomas Sheridan and regional pronunciation
• Backmatter