Old English

Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110523058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The volume provides an in-depth account of Old English, organized by linguistic level. Individual chapters investigate the state-of-the art in the linguistics of Old English and explore key areas of debate such as dialectology, language contact, standardization, and literary language. 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.

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 (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 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 provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of Old English, covering the standard topics included in traditional histories of English (such as Old English phonology, morphology, and syntax) as well as a range of topics usually reserved for more specialized texts (such as pragmatics and discourse, standardization, and literary language).

The chapter on “Pre-Old English” by Jeannette Marsh provides crucial background for the study of Old English. Briefly surveying the history of the Germanic groups, the chapter then traces the development of the Germanic phonological system, treating the important phonological changes (e.g. gemination, breaking, palatalization, umlaut, brightening) which result in the sound system recorded in Old English. The morphological and syntactic systems of Old English are viewed in respect to their Germanic and Proto-Indo-European origins. The second chapter by Ferdinand von Mengden, “Old English: Overview”, sets the scene by discussing much of the non-linguistic history which shapes the Old English period. Starting with the bookends – the beginning and the end of the Old English period – the chapter then describes the important political and cultural events: the Anglo-Saxon migration, Christianization, Viking invasions and colonization, King Alfred’s educational reforms, and the Cluniac reform. The influence of French and loss of inflections in the transitional stage from Old to Middle English is seen as important to understanding the period.

The next four chapters cover the traditional components of linguistic study: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Robert Murray begins his chapter on Old English “Phonology” by noting the degree of scholarly consensus regarding our knowledge in this area. The chapter is divided along synchronic/diachronic lines. In the first half, the vowel and consonant systems of Old English are described, as well as stress, quantity, and phonological/orthographic correspondences. This section ends with a very helpful set of “phonological generalizations” relevant to Old English. The second half of the chapter focuses on umlaut and changes in quantity. Focusing on the system of later Old English (and perforce ignoring questions of the dialectal variation, which are taken up in a later chapter), Ferdinand von Mengden provides a systematic explication of the “Morphology” of Old English. The chapter focuses on the inflectional morphology of the noun phrase and verb phrase; the use of numerous tables along with concise descriptions results in a very clear explication of this most detailed area of the Old English language. Copious examples are used by Rafał Molencki to illustrate the complexities of Old English “Syntax”. Taking up controversies concerning word order in Old English, the chapter describes basic word order patterns before turning to the specifics of noun phrase and verb phrase syntax. The chapter ends with a discussion of the syntax of complex sentences. As Christian Kay notes, a number of new resources, most importantly The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (now incorporated with the online 3rd edition of the dictionary), offer rich opportunities for the study of Old English “Semantics and the Lexicon”. The chapter discusses the size and nature of the Old English vocabulary as well as processes for innovation, ranging from affixation and compounding to borrowing. The chapter argues that “[o]ne of the commonest, most economical (and least noticeable) ways of supplying a new word at all periods of English is to extend the meaning of an existing one”, through, for example, metonymy and metaphor, though this view raises the matter of the sometimes unclear distinction between polysemy and homonymy.

Moving beyond the standard linguistic components, the remaining chapters discuss a variety of larger topics pertaining to Old English. In “Pragmatics and discourse”, Ursula Lenker suggests that pragmatic and discourse analysis, when applied to the rich data of Old English texts, helps us to understand the “otherness” of Anglo-Saxon culture, for example, the lack of negative politeness strategies and ‘face’ work, the ritual insult practices of flyting, and ritual behavior embedded in Old English charms. The chapter considers both “form-to function” studies focused on interjections, discourse markers, and insulting epithets as well of “function-to-form” studies focused on speech acts such as directives. A topic frequently omitted in introductory Old English textbooks, with their focus on late West Saxon, is covered by the chapter on Old English “Dialects” by Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger; After introducing important people associated with different dialects (e.g. writers, clerics) as well as sketching the challenges of Old English dialect study (e.g. gaps in documentation, dialectal adaptation by scribes, mixed texts) and contemplating the or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Pre-Old English
• Chapter 3: Old English: Overview
• Chapter 4: Phonology
• Chapter 5: Morphology
• Chapter 6: Syntax
• Chapter 7: Semantics and Lexicon
• Chapter 8: Pragmatics and Discourse
• Chapter 9: Dialects
• Chapter 10: Language Contact: Latin
• Chapter 11: Language Contact: Norse
• Chapter 12: Standardization
• Chapter 13: Literary Language
• Chapter 14: Early Textual Resources
• Index