New directions in English historical grammar

Language, 1996

Language, 1984

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. PREFACE The Third International Conference on Historical Linguistics (3rd ICHL) met from 22nd to 26th August 1977 at the University of Hamburg. In attendance were over ninety scholars from Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Europe. 3rd ICHL took place at a time of great turmoil in the political life of the German Federal Republic and of German universities in par ticular, though our conference itself came during a blessed lull. Just weeks before, the International Conference on the Future of the Uni versity had sent its German Universities Commission to investigate, and ultimately to confirm, the reports of chaos. Few 3rd ICHL parti cipants, except for those familiar with Hamburg, sensed the relevance of this and the symbolism of academic solidarity for a victim of the new totalitarians in German life in my inviting to speak on "Drei literaturwissenschaftliche Auffassungen der Wirklichkeit" my colleague in the Seminar für Englische Sprache und Kultur, Professor Dr. Johannes Kleinstück, a scholar himself of no mean linguistic accomplishments. Earlier in the Summer Term he had been "host" in his commandeered of fice to a delegation of fifteen "Reformers" wearing stocking masks. Apart from this gesture of fraternal support for a,persecuted colleague, Professor Kleinstück's paper, as linguists informed in the philosophy of science appreciated at the time, represents an issue of paramount importance to historical linguistics. As for the papers read by the regular participants in 3rd ICHL, the widely hoped for debate on recent controversial issues, such as the theoretical status of "Analogy", failed to materialize through the ab sence of principals in the debate. Indeed, partisans of both sides of vi PREFACE this controversy were jointly diappointed. My repeated dispatch of registered invitations was to no avail. The present volume could not accommodate all the papers read at 3rd ICHL, and various factors, apart from editorial selection, affecc the mix. The long delay in publication stemming from my problems of relocating home and career discouraged several colleagues, who have since published their work elsewhere. Others, for a variety of reasons, withheld theirs. Yet others who were not present at sessions of 3rd ICHL at which publication was discussed unfortunately were unaware that proceedings would be published. Still others, and we all know the agony, did not succeed in writing the definitive draft. We wish one day to see all this remedied. At midweek 3rd ICHL participants and their guests treated them selves to an epicurean buffet feast in the Provence Restaurant high above the night life of Sankt Pauli, overlooking the harbor lights of the Elbe. Our wandering scholars next day tasted the sights and sounds!, the seafood and good beer of the world of the Hansa, under the bluest skies and balmiest breezes that ever blew over the waves of the Elbe. Unser Dank gilt dem Mäzen, der Firma Pätz + Co., Hamburg. 3rd ICHL participants have on the whole been immensely considerate to the harried director, who accepted the kind offer of technical assis tance from E.F.Konrad Koerner (Ottawa) and Allan R. Bomhard (Boston), without whom no proceedings ever would have appeared. The publishers, John and Claire Benjamins have exceeded the very patience of Job in this case. At Hamburg, colleagues who helped find solutions for 3rd ICHL are Dr. Rudolf Beier, Professor Dr. Margarethe Schwerdtfeger, Pro fessor Dr. Rudolf Haas, and, above all, Dr. Hans-Jürgen Höhling, with out whom there would have been no Third International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Generous funding for 3rd ICHL came from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, through its Second Mayor and Kultursenator Biallas, together with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bonn-Bad Godesberg.

Corpus linguistics has revolutionised our way of working in historical linguistics. The painstaking job of collecting data and manually analysing them has been made less arduous with the introduction of the machine processing of corpora, which allows for quick and efficient searches. The aim of the present study is two-fold: to show how corpus linguistics has contributed to the ways in which researchers approach the study of the history of English, and to provide an overview of selected corpora available in the field. Setting aside the theoretical debate as to whether corpus linguistics should be considered merely a methodology, a branch of linguistics, or both (Taylor, 2008), it is widely acknowledged that corpus linguistics is of considerable help in any branch of linguistics, be it theoretical or applied. The use of corpora makes it possible to test hypotheses established within a specific linguistic area through the fast and reliable analysis of vast pools of material. As a result, the objective measurement of data is available to scholars, who can thus verify their hypotheses and intuitions, and can quickly amend or qualify their research claims if previous ones are seen to be falsifiable. There is, then, a continuous interaction within theory, as expressed in linguistic postulates, concepts and hypotheses, and an application and validation of these theoretical principles through the use of linguistic corpus analysis. The use of corpora is perhaps a more powerful instrument in the field of historical linguistics than in other fields, since the absence of living informants here makes judgements based on intuitions unreliable, and claims have to be empirically attested using data. This data can be extracted from systematically compiled collections of machine-readable texts, called corpora. However, in considering these undeniably advantageous working tools, some caveats should be borne in mind, as will be discussed in what follows.

1997

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to show an overview of what has been and is being done with respect to so-caBed Corpus Linguistics as far as the English language is concemed. On the other, special attention will be paid to the possibilities of using computerised textual corpora when doing historical research. The former goal will comprise a quick overview of the history of English Corpus Linguistics ( § 1) and a brief account of technical features such as the systems of incorporated annotations (§2), related software (§3), and so on. Updated lists of institutions (§4), collections of corpora (§5) and completed or in-progress projects in this field (§6) will also follow. With regard to the historical dimension, which this paper also intends to cover, section 7 shows a panorama of different products consisting of electronic English texts previous to the present-day standard. More specifically, in section 8 the authors concentrate on the Helsinki Corpus of ...

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2015

Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, 2012

LinguistList, 2019

ICAME Journal, 2014

The volume English corpus linguistics: Variation in time, space and genre is a well-balanced collection of eleven papers selected from the 32nd ICAME conference, held in honour of Stig Johansson and in Oslo in 2011. All the studies included in this book approach variation in English using corpus linguistics methodology. The contributions are divided into three sections, depending on whether their authors view variation from the perspective of time, space or genre (the last of these dimensions seems to cover register and text type alike). To begin with, Kristin Bech and Gisle Andersen provide the reader with a useful introduction commenting on the recent trends in corpus linguistics, and overviewing the contents of the book. Additionally, each paper is preceded by an abstract providing a summary of the key findings as well as the corpora and methodology used by particular authors.

Anglia, 2015

Don Ringe and Joseph Eska's Historical Linguistics is "intended for students with some prior training in linguistics" (xii), meaning the authors presuppose "an elementary knowledge of phonetics, of the principles of phonetic contrast, and of generative phonology and syntax" (1). The generative paradigm is assumed to be "the standard model of linguistic description" (1). Yet, the book also positions itself in the Neogrammarian tradition with regard to historical linguistics, and it is indebted to Labovian theories of language change in progress. The authors "have tried to adduce some of the rapidly expanding scientific research on language acquisition, since it seems increasingly clear that most language changes arise as errors in native language learning" (xii). My review will consider how successfully the authors unite these theoretical approaches and, thus, manage to reintegrate historical linguistics into an up-to-date linguistic discourse, as the book's subtitle Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration suggests (see also back cover). The book under review consists of an Introduction (1-6), whose passages on the challenges of historical linguistics and the Uniformitarian Principle are good to read, plus 11 chapters. Contrary to the authors' suggestion, the first chapter, "The nature of human language and language variation" (7-27), should not be skipped, as it is very good "background reading" (7) on the concepts of Universal Grammar and the Principles and Parameters model, and on language acquisition, to which also the second chapter is dedicated (28-44). Chapters 3 and 4 deal with different aspects of language contact in relation to language change (45-77). The next two chapters cover the field of phonetics and phonology (78-151); chapters 7 and 8 look at morphology (152-211). Chapter 9 is concerned with the field of syntactic change (212-227), chapters 10 and 11 with comparative reconstruction (228-255, 256-280). The last chapter, titled "Appendix: Recovering the pronunciation of dead languages: types of evidence" (281-290), introduces background knowledge, showing how texts of older linguistic stages can be linguistically analysed. To my mind, this so-called Appendix would have been a very suitable first chapter. The book is rounded off with a bibliography (291-308) and two helpful indexes (291-313). Out of personal interest, I first read chapter 9, "Syntactic change". Two causes for syntactic change are identified here, first, the "intergenerational syntactic change via acquisition" (213), and second, syntactic change via contact. The main focus lies on the first aspect. The tension between the generative under