Language Change: a Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Stella Neumann, Rebekah Wegener, Jennifer Fest, Paula Niemietz and Nicole Hützen (editors). Challenging Boundaries in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Perspectives. Aachen British and American Studies Series

As a text-oriented discipline, Biblical Studies has a long history of undertaking detailed textual analyses in order to describe either the structure of an ancient text or the structural potential of an ancient register. Yet these analyses have often been under-theorized and haphazard. This paper presents findings from the early stages of a project applying systemic-functional linguistic (SFL) methods and tools to the question of structure in the apostle Paul’s extant epistles. These include the notion of generic structure potential (e.g. Hasan 1978, 1985, 1996) and the multidimensional approach to text in context (including instantiation, stratification, metafunction, realization, and logogenesis) (e.g. Halliday 2003; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:20-31; Martin & White 2005:7-33). By applying these ideas and methods to Paul’s extant epistles, we hope to provide a rigorous, multi-stratal account of how Paul 'means' in his letters, which in turn will shed light on some general descriptive issues that continue to surround the genre of the ancient letter. The project itself challenges both disciplinary and textual boundaries, each of which will be touched on in this paper. Firstly, the paper challenges disciplinary boundaries between biblical studies and discourse analysis, bringing the more systematic and theorized tools of systemic functional linguistics to bear on biblical texts in a way that offers new insights into old questions. Traditionally, biblical scholars have made little use of the systematic tools of discourse analysis, although some scholars (e.g. Land 2015; Lee 2010; Reed 1993, 1997; Westfall 2006) have begun to apply systemic-functional discourse analyses to biblical epistles. We hope to further highlight for biblical scholars the usefulness of this social-semiotically oriented theory. Secondly, this paper challenges boundaries of a textual kind as it seeks new ways of describing the generic structure of Paul’s epistles. These epistles instantiate a text-type that has been studied by both classicists and biblical scholars in myriad ways (e.g. Exler 1923; Klauck 2006; Morello & Morrison 2007; Stowers 1986). A particular point of interest for biblical scholars is the ways in which Paul’s letters can be better understood when viewed in light of the letter-writing conventions of the ancient world (Porter & Adams 2010:1). A number of descriptive issues have not been fully resolved, perhaps because few explicit analyses have been performed on ancient letters. We will present the results of a preliminary analysis of clause-level features in an English translation of the original Greek text, the New American Standard Bible (NASB). The Greek text will be analysed at a later stage in the research project. A corpus of 31,087 words was compiled, comprising five letters to early churches for which there is a general consensus of Pauline authorship (i.e. Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians and Philippians). UAM Corpus Tool was then used to annotate the texts for a range of lexicogrammatical features, including clause status, primary tense, polarity, process type, and Subject selection. A feature of UAM Corpus Tool, text stream visualization, was then used to display the selection of particular features across the text. This was applied to two of the texts (1 and 2 Corinthians) as an exploratory device to identify potential clustering of features that may suggest phase boundaries. Exler, F. X. J. (1923). The form of the ancient Greek letter: A study in Greek epistolography. Washington: Catholic University of America. Halliday, M. A. K. (2003). On the architecture of human language. In J. Webster (Ed.) On language and linguistics (The Collected Works of Michael Halliday Vol.3, pp. 1-31). London & New York: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). London: Arnold. Hasan, R. (1978). Text in the systemic-functional model. In W. U. Dressler (Ed.) Current trends in textlinguistics. Berlin: de Gruyter. Hasan, R. (1985). The texture of a text. In M. A. K. Halliday & R. Hasan (Eds.), Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective (pp. 70-96). Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press. Hasan, R. (1996). The nursery tale as genre. In C. Cloran, D. Butt, and G. Williams (eds) Ways of saying, ways of meaning: Selected Papers of Ruqaiya Hasan. London & New York: Cassell. Klauck, H. J. (2006). Ancient letters and the New Testament: A guide to context and exegesis. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. Land, C. D. (2015). Is there a text in these meanings? The integrity of 2 Corinthians from a linguistic perspective. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix. Lee, J. H. (2010). Paul’s gospel in Romans: A discourse analysis of Rom 1:16-8:39. Leiden: Brill. Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Hampshire UK & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morello, R., & Morrison, A. D. (2007). Ancient letters: Classical and late antique epistolography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter & Adams (2010). Pauline epistolography: An introduction. In S. E. Porter & S. A. Adams (Eds.), Paul and the ancient letter form (pp. 1-7). Leiden & Boston: Brill. Reed, J. T. (1993). To Timothy or not? A Discourse analysis of 1 Timothy. In S. E. Porter & D. A. Carson (Eds.), Biblical Greek language and linguistics: Open questions in current research (pp. 90-118). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic. Reed, J. T. (1997). A discourse analysis of Philippians: Method and rhetoric in the debate over literary integrity. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic. Stowers, S. (1986). Letter writing in Greco-Roman antiquity. Philadelphia: Westminster. Westfall, C. L. (2006). A discourse analysis of the letter to the Hebrews: The relationship between form and meaning. London: T. & T. Clark.

京都大學文學部研究紀要, 2012

The majority of Middle English texts are anonymous, and they do not provide information as to when and where they were produced. It is, therefore, often necessary for Middle English text editors to date and localize the language by analyzing its various features. Fortunately, for late Middle English, the existence of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (see McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin 1986) is now a great help. By using the "fit-technique" of LALME, one can reach a fairly accurate localization of the language of the scribe at issue. 2 The dating of language, by contrast, is not an easy task, unless some reliable external pieces of evidence are available. In relation to medieval works in general, Damian-Grint(1996: 280) states: "Philological evidence will give a rough approximation of the period in which a work was composed but can rarely indicate a possible date of composition to within even half a century". When a particular manuscript is concerned, the nature of the script together with codicological information can suggest the approximate date of its production, but I have long wondered how linguistic analyses can make a further contribution to this area than they do now. The aim of the present study is to see if some linguistic features can function as linguistic scales to make the "chronological fit" possible. I will analyze for this purpose two different versions of a single text: MS Cotton Tiberius D. VII(MS １ This research was in part supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grantin-Aid for Scientific Research. ２ Iyeiri(forthcoming)illustrates the use of LALME by analyzing the language of the parchment section of MS Pepys 2125, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and shows that there are some caveats to be taken into consideration in LALME's "fit-technique". For details of the "fit-technique" of LALME, see Benskin(1991)among others.

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, 2012

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed. Ed. Keith Brown et al. Oxford: Elsevier. , 2005

Anglia, 2019

Analyzing Syntax through Texts discusses the history of English syntax by means of manuscript images of early English texts. It consists of five chapters: the first one offers an introduction to the topic (1-13); the second gives a general overview of the major morpho-syntactic changes from Old to Early Modern English (14-44); the third focuses specifically on Old English syntax (45-95), the fourth on the Early Middle English one (96-140), and the fifth on syntax between 1300-1600 (141-174). Van Gelderen gives convincing reasons for the dividing lines between her periods: "This division reflects an increase of analytic forms and a loss of synthetic ones in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The fourteenth century and after see a stabilization and the development of more synthetic forms due to the lexical influence of French and Latin" (xii). Each chapter offers further reading and exercises; the latter are cleverly devised and can effectually be used in class or as homework. The book concludes with three appendixes, the first summarising all the grammatical information given by van Gelderen. Overviews of Old and Middle English nominal or verbal inflections and the like come in tables throughout this book; Appendix I (175-179) sums up the most important ones of these and thus conveniently offers the history of English grammar in a nutshell. Appendix II (180-182) bears the erroneous heading "Background on the Old English [should be Early English] Texts That Are Discussed, Alphabetically", and gives extremely short introductions to the Old, Middle and Early Modern English texts that are analysed in this book; for those manuscripts that are available online the URL is given. Appendix III (183-186) supplies the reader with solutions to the exercises that leave much space for one's own ideas. Van Gelderen also includes a glossary that gives comprehensible definitions of the grammatical terms used (187-193). The bibliography (194-198) is short and therefore reader-friendly, particularly for students, and the index stood up well to random critical cross-checking (see below). All in all, this is a really recommendable book that can well be used for undergraduate courses. In the following review I will only highlight some noteworthy points and some

2021

This book is an introduction into English linguistics, aimed primarily at students who are just beginning their studies as well as those more advanced, who can use it to revise some of the more basic linguistic concepts, not only pertaining to English linguistics, but also linguistics in general. The book is divided into 14 chapters, dealing in turn with the most important topics in English linguistics: the history of linguistics, the levels of language and their description, phonetics and phonology, spelling and orthography, morphology, syntax, lexicology and lexicography, text linguistics, pragmatics, standard and varieties, history of the English language, historical (diachronic) linguistics, and, finally, the last chapter introduces the contrastive approach to language, focusing on English and German specifically. These chapters are followed by suggestions for further reading, as well as by some useful appendices and indices. After a brief introduction, the book begins with an overview of the most important figures and movements in the history of linguistics. The chapter starts in antiquity, mentioning Plato, the naturalists and conventionalists, as well as the Romans. It moves on to the Middle Ages, at which point the narrative begins to focus on Britain. The next section describes the situation in the Early Modern period, characterised by the publication of the first grammars as well as monolingual dictionaries (of the socalled "hard words"). The nineteenth century, the age of comparative and historical linguistics, is discussed next. Finally, the chapter provides a summary of the more recent movements in linguistics, i.e. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It describes the innovations brought by Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism and transformational-generative grammar in more detail, mentioning other movements and areas of linguistics only briefly. The chapter is very easy to read and is clearly meant to ease the reader into the topic. All the crucial concepts and terms are written in bold, something that is maintained throughout the rest of the book as well. Many of them appear again in later chapters and are explained in more detail there. The following chapters aim to introduce the basic areas of linguistic analysis, dedicating a chapter to each. They are more generally linguistic, though the majority of examples are provided from English. Chapter 3 explains the concept of the levels of language. The authors list phonology, orthography and morphology as the three basic levels and provide definitions of the most fundamental terms, such as the word, phoneme, morpheme and grapheme. The chapter is very short, but provides a good basis for the following three chapters, which deal with each area in turn. Chapter 4 is concerned with phonetics and phonology. It firstly provides more detailed definitions of the basic terms, and then moves on to transcription, the production of sounds, phonotactics, suprasegmental phenomena, and, finally, the English syllable. Chapter 5 tackles spelling and orthography in English, discussing the issue of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, which seems very unreliable in English. The authors, however, provide many examples which show that, frequently, that is not the case. The next chapter focuses on morphology,

2007

While archeologists and historians and all those who study material traces have known about the properties of operative images, from which principles of historical reconstruction follow, Norbert Wiener’s formalization of this category in God and Golem Inc. shows that machines can automatically reconstruct themselves by putting their part for -- if not their whole -- then for their informational “élan”, their spring without a “vital”. The operative image then, is an encoding of -- or reference to -- a “mechanical” procedure, but it is also an artifact of larger wholes, social practices and agents in cultural fields that it can “reproduce”. Given that written natural, spoken and automated languages leave many artifacts and also operatively allude to the “machine” of intersecting grammar, usage, and visual, aural, and verbal transformation, languages can be seen to propagate through operative images. The operative image then, can be used to formulate a semantics of “writing” in a generalized sense. To evaluate, analyze and synthesize a semantics of both linguistic change and the material forms of written characters over time, it is only necessary to trace how “parts” have been put for “wholes”: creating them or being created by them in a variety of recording, coding, and writing domains.

In this paper we investigate possible links between historical linguistics and cognitive science, or theory of the mind. Our primary goal is to demonstrate that historically documented processes of a certain type, i.e. those relating to semantic change and grammaticalization, form a unified theoretical bundle which gives insight into the cognitive processes at work in language organization and evolution. We reject the notion that historical phenomena are excluded from cognitive speculation on the grounds that they are untestable. Rather, we argue for an extension of Labov's uniformitarian doctrine, which states " that the same mechanisms which operated to produce the large-scale changes of the past may be observed operating in the current changes taking place around us. " (Labov, 1972:161). This principle is transferable to the current context in the following way: first, language as a system is no different today than it was millennia ago, easily as far back as diachronic speculation is likely to take us; and second, the human brain is structurally no different today from the brain of humans of up to ten thousand years ago. The cognitive-linguistic parallelism between the past and the present makes speculation possible, in this case about code-switching, even if it is not testable in the laboratory. It further allows us to make forward and backward inferences about both language change and its cognitive underpinnings. In this paper we hope to establish the parallelism between cognitive science and historical linguistics.We begin with a brief survey of the domain of historical linguistics, with illustrative examples. The purpose of this survey is to provide an outline of the usual concerns of the historical linguist, whose concentration typically falls far from that of the cognitive scientist. This intellectual distance accounts for the general absence of meaningful dialogue between language historians and cognitive scientists. We do not seek exhaustiveness in this review, either of topic areas or of bibliographical coverage. In the interest of space, our presentation has a rather telescopic character. The study of language change affords us a systematic view of the history of a language or language family, its speakers, and their cultural practices. All languages are in a constant state of change, some more accelerated than others. For example, change is rapid in a widely spread language like English, with more than a billion first-and second-language users. English has even developed a number of named varieties such as Nigerian English, Australian English, Indian English and so on since the period of

1988

Review by James C. McKusick. The Philosophy of Language in Britain: Major Theories From Hobbes to Thomas Reid. by Stephen K. Land; The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630-1800. by Andrew E. Benjamin; Geoffrey N. Cantor; John R. R. Christie. Some of the most interesting and important recent work in the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has concerned itself with the philosophy of language in relation to science and literature. This kind of work promises a fresh understanding of the linguistic and figural basis of the conceptual categories employed by major philosophers during this period. It has become increasingly clear that speculation concerning the nature and origin of language is not merely a digression or afterthought in the work of Locke, Berkeley, Adam Smith, or Thomas Reid. Two recent studies examine the various ways in which problems of language are intrinsic to the era\u27s most vital in...

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2003

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics …, 2003

Since this essay will be rather wide-ranging, despite forming part of a book concerned with essentially one text, it is advisable to start with a pair of apparent paradoxes in relation to the ways in which (socio-)historical linguists draw large-scale conclusions from relatively low level and limited evidence. The first is that It is dangerous to view language use in the English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels without considering its place synchronically and diachronically in the variation and change ongoing in English.

Language, 1966