Historical Outlines from Sound to Text

Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110523034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The volume provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. A re-evaluation of the concept of periodization is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional linguistic areas – phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics – and chapters on prosody, idioms, fixed expressions, onomastics, orthography, register, and standardization, among others.

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 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 (OED) online, while still undergoing revision, is now fully integrated with the Historical Thesaurus. The Middle English Dictionary (MED), 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 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 language 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 chapters have been updated from the 2012 edition to include more recent publications.

3Description of this volume

This volume begins with a chapter by Anne Curzan on the problematic question of “Periodization” in the history of English – a topic assumed but typically not explicitly discussed in histories of English. Reviewing schemas of periodization from the late 19th century to the present, the chapter queries the bases for the period divisions, whether they are differentiated by internal linguistic criteria (by the retention of archaic features or the development of innovative ones, or both), by extralinguistic (political/historical/cultural) criteria, or by some combination of these criteria. The chapter concludes that the historical periods are “important and useful scholarly fictions”.

Janet Grijzenhout begins her chapter on “Phonology” by describing the major processes of change within the phonological system, including the addition and loss of phonemes, the emergence of allophonic rules, and the rise of phonotactic constraints. On this basis, the chapter then traces changes from the Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English consonant systems and, more briefly, the vowel system. The chapter on “Prosody” by Donka Minkova traces word and phrasal stress through the history of English: Old English alliterative versification provides the basis for reconstructing the meter and prosody of the period; lexical borrowing from French and Latin then has a profound effect on the prosody of Middle English, while Present-day English prosody represents a hybrid system consisting of words following the Germanic Stress rules and those following the Latin Stress Rule.

Dieter Kastovsky sees a major typological restructuring at work in the development of English “Morphology”, in large part due to the loss of unstressed final syllables, from root-based to stem-based to word-based (i.e., invariant base and phonologically-conditioned inflection). Irregularities in Present-day inflections represent preservations of the earlier stem-based system, while irregular word formations are often based on non-native languages with similar stem-based systems. Beginning with Present-day inflectional and derivational and word formation systems, the chapter then traces these systems from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English and beyond. Dividing “Syntax” is “the syntactic history of English” (i.e., examination of a particular development in English, based on a set of evidence) and “English historical syntax” (i.e., comparison of change in English with change in other varieties in order to understand general principles of language change), Graeme Trousdale looks at a number of syntactic changes globally in the history of English. Using the first approach, the chapter looks at word order changes, the modal auxiliaries, and the impersonal construction; using the second approach it considers syntactic borrowing (e.g. from Celtic), reanalysis (grammaticalization), and analogy.

In “Semantics and lexicon”, Elizabeth Closs Traugott focuses on semantic change in the history of English from a cognitive perspective, including the concepts of metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and invited inferencing (i.e. the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change) as well an collocational relations between words (“semantic prosody”) and collostructional analysis. Certain types of semantic changes may predominate in certain period. Grammatical and lexical semantic changes differ in a number of respects but are often similarly motivated. The chapter concludes by discussing change in the lexicon. In the study of “Idioms and Fixed Expressions” two different questions arise, according to Gabriele Knappe, how do principles of language change affect fixed expressions and collocations and, vice versa, how do fixed expressions influence language change in a broader perspective? In addressing the first question, the chapter examines issues such as the metalinguistic sources of phraseological units, the identification of such units in older texts, the origins of such units, and their changes over time. In addressing the second question, the chapter points out, for example, how string frequency might have triggered the Great Vowel Shift or how various co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Periodization in the History of the English Language
• Chapter 3: Phonology
• Chapter 4: Prosody
• Chapter 5: Morphology
• Chapter 6: Syntax
• Chapter 7: Semantics and Lexicon
• Chapter 8: Idioms and Fixed Expressions
• Chapter 9: Pragmatics and Discourse
• Chapter 10: Onomastics
• Chapter 11: Orthography
• Chapter 12: Styles, Registers, Genres, Text Types
• Chapter 13: Standards in the History of English
• Index