Multilingual Practices in Language History

English and Beyond

Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari, Laura Wright, Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari, Laura Wright

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501504907
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

IIIPatterns

Jukka Tuominen

8“Trifling shews of learning”? Patterns of code-switching in English sermons 1640–1740

Acknowledgements: The research reported here has benefited at various stages from insightful comments by Terttu Nevalainen, Arja Nurmi, Richard Ingham, Jukka Tyrkkö, the editors of this volume, and two anonymous reviewers. Any errors and infelicities in the article, however, are solely attributable to the author. Financial support from the Academy of Finland-funded project “Multilingual Practices in the History of Written English” is gratefully acknowledged.

1Introduction

The impertinent Way of dividing Texts is laid aside, the needless setting out of the Originals, and the vulgar Version, is worn out. The trifling Shews of Learning in many Quotations of Passages, that very few could understand, do no more flat the Auditory. Pert Wit and luscious Eloquence have lost their Relish. (Burnet 1692: 216; emphasis original)

In A Discourse of the Pastoral Care, bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) looked back with approval at the way preaching in the Church of England had changed within his lifetime. In the past, Burnet claimed, ministers had paraded their knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Bible, and of the Latin Vulgate; contemporary pulpit oratory, by contrast, was characterized by clarity, naturalness and a return “to the plain Notions of simple and genuine Rhetorick” (1692: 216).

Burnet’s comments are not a neutral account of recent developments but an ideologically colored statement that needs to be viewed against the various rifts in his church and society. Writing soon after the accession of William and Mary in 1689, at a time of religious and political ferment in which he was intimately involved, Burnet would have had an interest in presenting the opponents of the new regime’s policies as hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the common parishioners (cf. Spurr 2006: 203–206). The words nevertheless also suggest a noticeable change in preaching. Modern scholars have followed the views of Burnet and other contemporaries and used the decline of foreign-language elements as an important characteristic of a new English sermon style in the latter half of the seventeenth century (Mitchell 1932: 310–312; Davies 1961: 65–67; Lessenich 1972: 25–27). These accounts, however, are qualitative and typically based on the works of prominent divines of the time. A corpus of sermons by lesser-known writers offers the opportunity to reassess this traditional view in broad quantitative terms and in a diachronic perspective.

Religion has been identified as a domain favoring language contact and mixing (e.g. Schendl 1996; Spolsky 2003; Pahta and Nurmi 2006), and it provides a wealth of source texts in a range of genres whose communicative settings remain relatively constant, enabling comparisons over time (Kohnen 2010). While multilingual sermons and homilies are known from England from the Old English period onwards (Iglesias-Rábade 1996; Schendl 1996; Pahta and Nurmi 2006; see also Schendl and Ingham, this volume), and especially so-called “macaronic” sermons from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have attracted scholarly attention (e.g. Wenzel 1994; Schendl 2000a, 2000b, 2013; Halmari and Regetz 2011; Fletcher 2013), the development of code-switching practices in English religious texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has largely remained unstudied. In their survey of code-switching in English writing from ca. 700 to 1710 based on the Helsinki Corpus, Päivi Pahta and Arja Nurmi (2006) find that sermons are consistently among the genres with most switches. However, the period 1640–1710 is represented in their source corpus by extracts from only three sermons, all from the 1670s (see Kytö 1996). The almost complete absence of foreign-language elements in sermons by Thomas Twining (1734–1804) at the end of the eighteenth century (Nurmi and Pahta 2010) reinforces the view of a gradual decline in code-switching in sermons over time (Pahta and Nurmi 2006). This study seeks to test and supplement the results of these earlier studies with a more extensive dataset of complete sermon texts, enabling a more detailed analysis, and to extend the research into decades which so far have not been examined. Moreover, the study addresses for the first time the differences in code-switching practices between the various religious communities represented in the material.

Specifically, the aim of this article is to provide an empirical, sociolinguistically oriented description of general structural and functional patterns of code-switching in English sermons from the period 1640–1740, using a sample of ten sermons from the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (Schmied, Claridge, and Siemund 1998; for details see Claridge 1999/2003). Code-switching is understood here as “the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode” (Heller 1988: 1), and the analysis is carried out in a variationist framework: differences in individuals’ conscious or unconscious choice to switch languages are assumed to correlate with independent language-external variables in the specific socio-cultural and linguistic context (cf. Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968; Tagliamonte 2012).

2The socio-cultural context of multilingual sermons in early modern Britain

2.1Sermons in performance and print

Thomas Kohnen (2010: 539) views sermons as “a prototypical genre of religious instruction” defined by the communicative setting where a clergyman, a “specialist” member of the community with detailed theological knowledge and ecclesiastical power, addresses a congregation of laypeople. Although this communicative setting has remained relatively constant over centuries, other genre characteristics of sermons and the linguistic forms given to them are subject to change. The production and reception of texts are both influenced by the shared genre expectations of a particular time and cultural context (Taavitsainen 2001: 140–141). These expectations condition authors’ linguistic choices, but they also guide the way contemporary and later readers, including present-day scholars, interpret a text and its specific features, such as the use or non-use of code-switching (Machan 2011: 312).

A key question for any study of early modern sermons is the relationship between the written text available to the modern scholar and what was (presumably) delivered from the pulpit. It is usually impossible to determine to what extent the written version of a sermon represents its oral performance (Kohnen 2010: 539; for divergent views on this issue see e.g. Raymond 2003: 222–224 and Green 2006: 249). The final, printed form can be seen as a layered end-result of a process of composition, where the various stages may each have left their mark. Factors affecting the outcome include the circumstances of text production, i.e. how the sermon was prepared first for oral delivery and then for publication; the conventions associated with or limitations imposed by the publication format; and, in particular, the two target audiences whose needs and expectations the sermon-writer sought to address: the specific congregation who first heard the sermon, and the potentially much wider readership of the published version.

Whether the sermon was written in full before preaching or delivered using only an outline of headings or other notes (Davies 1975: 141–142; Green 2006: 237, 248), it could be altered afterwards for publication. In practice, this usually meant adding new material (Green 2009: 28). While features particular to the oral delivery, such as gestures and prosody, were lost, the written form also had its own characteristic features, including paratextual elements such as dedications, prefaces, and marginalia (see Genette 1997; Smith and Wilson 2011). Publication also raises the question of whose linguistic choices and competence the final product represents: even in sermons – like the ones studied here – where the printed text is an authorized version, presumably prepared and approved by the author himself, influence from a typesetter or a house style cannot be ruled out (cf. Pahta 2004: 80). Like the relationship between the oral and written versions of the sermon, the extent of such influence is usually impossible to determine. Moreover, the sermons selected for publication give a skewed picture of the totality of contemporary prea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• I Introduction
• II Borderlands
• III Patterns
• IV Contexts
• Index