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The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI: English in North
America (review)

Article  in  The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique · January 2003

DOI: 10.1353/cjl.2004.0021

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The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI: English
in North America (review)
James A. Walker

The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique,

48(1/2), March-June/mars-juin 2003, pp. 125-127 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: 10.1353/cjl.2004.0021

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cjl/summary/v048/48.1walker.html

Accessed 31 May 2013 12:45 GMT GMT

 REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 125

space, koineization, and comparative sociolinguistics. The cases of topic-author mismatch

rarely result from inappropriate author choice; rather, they seem to fall out from the nature
of the topics, many of which are by their nature not something closely associated with any
one author. This results in some very careful chapters, consisting largely of reviews of
other people’s work. The chapters in question are all more than competent, but prevent the
reader from fully benefiting from their authors’ talent and experience.
At the level of proofreading, the book contains some errors that interfere with un-
derstanding, or even create misunderstanding. For example, the material at the top of
p. 235, an apparent continuation of a table from the previous page, should probably be a
separate table, titled “6-syllable stems.” Likewise, it is clear from the table on p. 751 that
the sentence at the bottom of the previous page, “In this table non-significant factors are in
bold”, should read “In this table significant factors are in bold”. Presumably such errors
result from copy conversion associated with the publisher’s standardization of tables, and
can easily be corrected in future editions.
Such future editions would be welcome, especially given the editors’ bold decision to
assign equal weight to “the tried-and-probably-true and the potentially productive” (p. 1).
In a field as (relatively) young as variationist sociolinguistics, ideas develop quickly, and
can in many cases be empirically tested just as quickly. It is natural that the concerns of
the field should change over time, and the discipline is well served by a handbook that is
willing to stay at the leading edge of such change. It is equally true, though, that over
time certain methods and approaches will be more frequently tested than others, and will
become yet more central to work on variation and change. It is hoped that future editions
will reflect these core concerns by devoting proportionally more space to them.

John Algeo, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. VI: English in North
America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xxxii + 625. US$120.00
(hardcover).

Reviewed by James A. Walker, York University

This book is a welcome addition to the Cambridge University Press series on the history
of the English language. Some may find the title a bit misleading, since, apart from two
chapters on Canada, the contributions deal almost exclusively with varieties of English
spoken in the United States. Given this limitation, as well as others discussed below, the
volume provides a good general introduction to the study of North American English.
Roughly half of the volume deals with issues of origin, contact, development and
change. After his preface (pp. xv–xxvii), editor John Algeo provides a detailed outline of
the historical and social events of the last 400 years in Chapter 1, “External history” (pp. 1-
58). He states that the focus of his historical discussion is the experiences which have had
an impact on the language of Americans (p. 6), but the linguistic relevance is not always
apparent. Two chapters deal more specifically with connections between Britain and North
America. Chapter 2, “British and American, continuity and divergence” (pp. 59–85) by
John Hurt Fisher, examines features shared by American English (AmE) and British English
(BrE) and the extent to which they constitute separate varieties. Michael Montgomery
similarly surveys the British and Irish heritage of AmE in Chapter 3, “British and Irish
antecedents” (pp. 86–153). These two chapters contain a great deal of overlap and might
126 CJL/RCL 48(1/2), 2003

better have been combined into one. Although all of the first three chapters rely to various
degrees on the sociohistorical analyses presented in Bailyn (1986a, 1986b) and Fischer
(1989), which correlate American cultural regions with areas of Britain, Montgomery
correctly cautions against the reductionist approach of directly linking linguistic regions of
Britain with those of the U.S. (p. 151). The influence of aboriginal and other languages
on AmE is discussed in Chapter 4, “Contact with other languages” (pp. 154–183) by
Suzanne Romaine, which also documents the various contact languages that arose during
the European settlement of North America. While Romaine devotes several pages to the
lexical contributions of the major immigrant languages to AmE (pp. 177-181), a discussion
of varieties of English influenced by these languages (e.g., Chicano English) would have
made this chapter more comprehensive. In Chapter 5, “Americanisms” (pp. 184–218),
Frederic G. Cassidy U and John Houston Hall examine linguistic features (mostly lexical)
considered to be unique to or characteristic of AmE. British reactions to such Americanisms
(a coin termed as early as 1768) are discussed by Richard W. Bailey in Chapter 14,
“American English abroad” (pp. 456–496). This chapter also examines the more recent
spread of AmE as a global language.
Issues of spelling and usage are the subject of two chapters. In Chapter 10, “Spelling”
(pp. 340–357), Richard L. Venezky outlines the development of separate orthographic
practises in the U.S. and the emergence of spelling authority. Chapter 11, “Usage” (pp. 358-
421) by Edward Finegan, provides a historical overview of the study of grammar and usage
in America, from Webster and the nineteenth-century school grammars, through the debates
between the grammarians and linguists, to the “dictionary wars” of the twentieth century.
The remainder of the volume deals with varieties of and variation in North American
English. In Chapter 7, “Dialects” (pp. 253–290), Lee Pederson identifies and discusses the
four major speech areas of the United States: Northern (comprising the upper Midwest),
Midland (centred in Pennsylvania), Southern and Western, with “General American” usu-
ally identified with inland Northern (p. 265). He also notes the relation of “focal areas”
(major urban centres such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston) to these
regional patterns (p. 262). Pedersen’s discussion is detailed, but the complete absence of
maps in this chapter (and elsewhere in the volume) is a surprising omission. In addition,
most of the features Pedersen lists are lexical or phonetic, though Ronald Butters redresses
this imbalance somewhat by examining grammatical features of AmE in Chapter 9, “Gram-
matical structure” (pp. 325–339). In Chapter 8, “African-American English” (pp. 291–324),
Salikoko Mufwene discusses the variety of AmE which has received more attention than
any other. As he notes, though, the “peculiarity” of African American English may lie less
in the distinctiveness of its features than in their statistical distribution and the structural
principles producing them (pp. 295, 312).
Undoubtedly of most interest to readers of this journal are the two chapters on vari-
eties of English spoken in Canada. Chapter 13, “Newfoundland English” (pp. 441–455) by
William J. Kirwin, discusses the most salient variety of Canadian English. Distinguishing
between the “West Country” and “Anglo-Irish” varieties of Newfoundland, Kirwin docu-
ments not only the distinctive phonological and lexical features of these varieties but also
their grammatical features, such as nonstandard verbal -s (Some people haves fish-houses)
and the perfective construction with after (A lot of new ones are after coming out). In Chap-
ter 12, “Canadian English” (pp. 422–440), Laurel J. Brinton and Margery Fee deal more
generally with the “scholarly fiction” of Standard Canadian English (CE), viz. “the variety
spoken by educated middle-class urban Canadians from the eastern border of Ontario to
 REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 127

Vancouver Island” (p. 422). Despite the existence of national and regional dictionaries
and style guides, CE remains largely understudied (p. 424), which unfortunately renders
some of their generalizations questionable. A number of phonological and grammatical
features characteristic of CE are discussed, including Canadian raising, the [ V ]/[W ] merger
and discourse eh. As a result of increasing influence from French, the English spoken in
Quebec is said to be somewhat distinct from standard CE (pp. 425, 439), though more
recent empirical studies of this variety (e.g., Boberg 2002; Poplack and Walker 2002)
suggest that this claim is exaggerated. Similarly, the view that increasing multilingualism
in the major urban centres (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) is likely to promote the main-
tenance of “ESL varieties” which will change standard CE in the future (p. 426) remains
empirically untested.
Although containing a number of assertions which specialists in the field may find
misleading or controversial (e.g., the discussion of Labov’s study of New York City [p. 76]),
the volume is relatively comprehensive and should be accessible to the general educated
public. The inclusion of a list of phonetic symbols (pp. xxx–xxxii) and a glossary of
linguistic terms (pp. 497–515) will be particularly helpful to those without a training in
linguistics. Despite the abovementioned focus on American English, this volume serves
as a good introduction to the various diachronic and synchronic issues in the origins,
development and status of varieties of English spoken in North America.

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986a. The peopling of British North America: An introduction. New
York: Random House.
Bailyn, Bernard. 1986b. Voyagers to the West: A passage in the peopling of North America
on the eve of the American Revolution. New York: Random House.
Boberg, Charles. 2002. Ethnic diversity and the “authentic speaker”: The acquisition of
Canadian English in Montreal. Paper read at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 31,
Stanford University.
Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albion’s seed: Four British folkways in America. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Poplack, Shana, and James A. Walker. 2002. An English “like no other”? Language
contact and change in Quebec. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation
31, Stanford University.

Laurence R. Horn. A Natural History of Negation. In the David Hume Series on Philoso-
phy and Cognitive Science Reissues. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 2001. Pp. xlviii + 637.
US$30.00 (softcover).

Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie, Fujian Teachers University

A Natural History of Negation turned out to be an important book of far-reaching and influ-
ential significance, after its original appearance in 1989. Ever since then, “there has been
an explosion of interest in the grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics of
natural language negation” (p. xxiii). Negation has been continuously and enthusiastically

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