Early Modern English

Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110522778
• eBook ISBN: 9783110522914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English, organized by linguistic level. The volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, it also explores key questions and debates, such as do- periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs

Chapter 1:
Introduction

Laurel J. Brinton: Vancouver (Canada)

Alexander Bergs: Osnabrück (Germany)

1English Language Studies

2Description of the Series

3Description of this Volume

4References

1English Language Studies

The study of the English language has a lengthy history. The second half of the 18th century saw a phenomenal increase in the number of published grammars of the vernacular language, while the field of comparative linguistics arising in the 19th century was concerned in large part with the Germanic languages, including English. Moreover, in the field of theoretical linguistics that English has played a truly central role. While there are no reliable statistics, it seems safe to say that the majority of studies in contemporary linguistics deal at least in part with English, and are also written in English.

During the 20th century, monumental works concerned with the English language, both synchronic and diachronic, were produced, following historical/comparative and more contemporary linguistic approaches. In keeping with developments on the field of general linguistics, today it is possible to find descriptions and analyses of the history and development of English from virtually any linguistic perspective: external, internal, generative, functional, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, comparative, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic. There are numerous “Histories of English” to cater to just about every (theoretical) taste, as well as detailed descriptions of historical periods, language levels, or theoretical frameworks of English and specialized studies of individual topics in the development of the language.

Work on the history of English has culminated most recently in the a series of edited handbooks and histories of English: the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Richard M. Hogg (1992–2001), The Handbook of the History of English, edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (2006), The Oxford History of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone (2012 [2006]), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, edited by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Terttu Nevalainen (2012), the two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, edited by Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (2012), and most recently The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Päiva Pahta and Merja Kytö (2015).

While study of the history of any language begins with texts, increasingly scholars are turning to dictionaries and corpora of English that are available online or electronically. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary online, while still undergoing revision, is now fully integrated with the Historical Thesaurus. The Middle English Dictionary, completed in 2001, is freely available online along with the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The pioneer historical corpus of English, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, was first released to scholars in 1991. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, containing all Old English texts, is searchable online. ARCHER, A Representative Corpus of English Registers 1650–1900, accessible at a number of universities, provides a balanced selection of historical texts in electronic form. COHA, a 400-million-word, balanced Corpus of Historical American English 1810–2009, was launched online in 2010. Smaller corpora, such as the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, the Corpus of Late Modern English 3.0, and the newly expanded Old Bailey Corpus, have made more specialized corpora – covering more periods and more text types – available to scholars. Archives of historical newspapers online, including the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus and the Rostock Newspaper Corpus, provide another source of electronic data. Finally, syntactically annotated corpora for historical stages of English are being produced, including The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry, The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, and The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. (For information on all of the corpora listed here, see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/).

2Description of the Series

The two-volume English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook (Bergs and Brinton 2012) serves as the textual basis for the current five-volume reader series The History of English. The aim of this series is to make selected papers from this important handbook accessible and affordable for a wider audience, and in particular for younger scholars and students, and to allow their use in the classroom. Each chapter is written by a recognized specialist in the topic and includes an extensive bibliography suitable for a range of levels and interests.

While conventional histories of English (e.g., Brinton and Arnovick 2016) are almost universally organized chronologically, the six-volume Cambridge History of English (Hogg 1992–2001) is organized by linguistic level, as is the shortened version (Hogg and Denison 2006) and to a lesser extent The Handbook of the History of English (van Kemanade and Los 2006). Volumes 1 to 4 of this series likewise follow this pattern:

Volume 1: The History of English: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. The volume begins with a re-evaluation of the concept of periodization in the history of English. This is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics as well as chapters covering areas less often treated in histories of English, including prosody, idioms and fixed expressions, pragmatics and discourse, onomastics, orthography, style/ register/text types, and standardization.

Volume 2: The History of English: Old English provides an in-depth account of Old English. Individual chapters review the state of the art in phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic studies of Old English. Key areas of debate, including dialectology, language contact, standardization, and literary language, are also explored. The volume sets the scene with a chapter on pre-Old English and ends with a chapter discussing textual resources available for the study of earlier English.

Volume 3: The History of English: Middle English provides a wide-ranging account of Middle English. Not only are the traditional areas of linguistic study explored in state-of-the-art chapters on Middle English phonology morphology, syntax, and semantics, but the volume also covers less traditional areas of study, including Middle English creolization, sociolinguistics, literary language (including the language of Chaucer), pragmatics and discourse, dialectology, standardization, language contact, and multilingualism.

Volume 4: The History of English: Early Modern English provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English. In seventeen chapters, this volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

The last volume in the series turns its attention to the spread of English worldwide. Volume 5: The History of English: Varieties of English is one of the first detailed expositions of the history of different varieties of English. It explores language variation and varieties of English from an historical perspective, covering theoretical topics such as diffusion and supra-regionalization as well as concrete descriptions of the internal and external historical developments of more than a dozen varieties of English including American English, African American Vernacular English, Received Pronunciation, Estuary English, and English in Canada, Africa, India, Wales, among many others.

Taking into account the important developments in the study of English effected by the availability of electronic corpora, this series of readers on The History of English offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and theory-neutral synopsis of the field. It is meant to facilitate both research and teaching by offering up-to-date overviews of all the relevant aspects of the historical linguistics of English and by referring scholars, teachers, and students to more in-depth coverage. To that end, many articles have been updated from the 2012 edition to include more recent publications.

3Description of this volume

This volume provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of Early Modern English, covering the standard topics included in traditional histories of English (such as Early Modern English phonology, morphology, and syntax) as well as a range of topics usually reserved for more specialized texts (such as the development of do-periphrasis and pronouns, the Great Vowel Shift, standardization, and literary language).

The first chapter on “Early Modern English: Overview” by Arja Nurmi provides a general introduction to this period of the English language by discussing major social, political and cultural changes. She describes the role of the printing press and of increased mobility in the process of vernacularization and the spread of new linguistic forms.

The next four chapters cover the traditional components of linguistic study: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics/lexicon. Julia Schlüter in her chapter on Early Modern English “Phonology” points out that English saw some fundamental changes in all its phonological subsystems during the Early Modern period. After an extensive discussion of suprasegmental aspects, such as word stress and syllable reduction, she concentrates on changes in both the consonantal and vowel inventories. Her treatment of qualitative changes in the vowel system excludes the Great Vowel Shift (for which see Krug, Chapter 14), and instead focuses on monophthongization of Middle English diphthongs, the development of short vowels, and the interplay of vowels and consonants in particular environments. Claire Cowie presents the effects of the shift from synthetic Old English to analytic Modern English in her chapter on “Morphology”. She shows that, while the inflectional systems of Early Modern English are more or less those of Modern English, the derivational morphology of the period shows some radically new phenomena, including the reanalysis of Latin affixes from borrowed terms. The rate of change, however, is very variable, and one of the major aims of the chapter is to capture this dynamicity. In her chapter on “Syntax”, Elena Seoane Posse begins by stressing that abundant, heterogeneous data make the study of syntax for this period particularly interesting and rewarding, especially since sociolinguistic and stylistic factors can also be systematically included. The chapter presents six core areas of morphosyntactic change: the genitive, the loss of impersonal constructions, changes in verbal periphrases and in the complementation system as well as negation and the fixation of word order. Ian Lancashire points out that modern digital resources (such as the Online OED, Early English Books Online, or the Textbase of Early Tudor English) are radically changing the study of “Lexicon and semantics”, just as printing technology itself changed the language in the Early Modern period. English as a language seems to have grown from only 10,000 words or so to a lexically rich language during this period – even though under the early Tudors it was still often seen as a vulgar and unsophisticated tongue.

Moving beyond the standard linguistic components, the remaining chapters discuss a variety of larger topics pertaining to Early Modern English. In “Pragmatics and discourse”, Dawn Archer presents an overview of the most prominent phenomena from pragmatics and discourse, including speech acts, (im) politeness, address terms, discourse markers and discourse strategies. In particular, she suggests that researchers need to be aware of the relationship of individual, language and society when they discuss discourse or pragmatics. Early Modern English dialectology is a relatively under-researched field of study, Anneli Meurman-Solin concedes in her chapter on “Dialects”, partly because there has been a lack ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Early Modern English: Overview
• Chapter 3: Phonology
• Chapter 4: Morphology
• Chapter 5: Syntax
• Chapter 6: Lexicon and semantics
• Chapter 7: Pragmatics and discourse
• Chapter 8: Dialects
• Chapter 9: Language contact
• Chapter 10: Standardization
• Chapter 11: Sociolinguistics
• Chapter 12: Pronouns
• Chapter 13: Periphrastic DO
• Chapter 14: The Great Vowel Shift
• Chapter 15: Relativization
• Chapter 16: Literary language
• Chapter 17: The language of Shakespeare
• Index